The Worst Thing I've Done

by Ursula Hegi

  They were inventive, Stormy and Lotte; took turns fixing meals and snacks for the children, seven of them altogether; found games that all of them could play; danced with the children to the records they’d brought from home: Edith Piaf and Hildegard Knef and Charles Aznavour.

  In winter the town emptied itself, felt isolated. But summers were glorious because they were a five-minute walk from Coopers Beach, where they spent all day with pails and umbrellas and blankets and picnics, talking while they watched over the children as they chased one another through the shallow water or took their naps.

  “We often talked to them in German,” Aunt Stormy had said to me. “The little ones responded the same as to English.”

  My mother had agreed. “It was in the sound of the voice, Annie.”

  “Where we walked from one house to the other, we wore down the grass.”

  They lent each other their favorite books. Lotte’s poetry collections: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke. Stormy liked novelists, especially Ilse Aichinger and Hermann Hesse. They’d both brought Pearl S. Buck’s Die Mutter across the Atlantic. The first English-language book they finished all the way—trading off between chapters—was Peyton Place, more risqué than anything they’d read so far.

  On their day off, Sunday, Lotte and Stormy took the train into Manhattan, walked for hours through different neighborhoods. Like all of Europe—no, the world—in one exhilarating city. They went to concerts, to protests against the Vietnam war, to the bakeries on Eighty-sixth for Kuchen, to Greenwich Village, to museums…

  Away from their birth country, language was a stronger bond between them than it would have been at home. And yet, when people said, “Your accent…where are you from?” they learned to say, “Holland.” Lotte started it. Because if they answered “Germany,” there might be that pause…that shift from curious to watchful. “I hear the streets are very clean,” someone might say. Or: “The Germans make good beer.” Or: “Don’t the trains always run on time?”

  “But what if they know Dutch?” Stormy had asked Lotte.

  “Very few people here speak Dutch. And if so, only a few words. It’s a small country.”

  “But what if—”

  “We’ll tell them we’ve made a pact to practice English by not speaking Dutch for one year.”

  Much later, my mother would tell me that beneath all that was the horror at Germany’s savage history and their uneasiness at being forever linked to that. They were mortified by how little they knew about the Holocaust. In Germany, their history lessons had left that out entirely, but here in America, it was part of the curriculum. To many of the Americans they met, Lotte and Stormy were representatives of Germany—punctual and obedient and rigid and clean and cruel and humorless like movie villains—making them feel more German, but in a sinister way, than if they’d stayed there.

  OCCASIONALLY MY mother would hide things before Aunt Stormy came to visit us. “Stormy admires things away from you,” she’d say.

  I grew up with my father’s story of Stormy and the blue glass ball he’d bought for Lotte at a glass blower’s studio when she got pregnant with me. “Because it made me think of you levitating in a sphere like that within her, Annie…all blue light.”

  The day of my birth, Stormy arrived with books and wine for my parents, a lacy white jacket she’d crocheted for me, a crate with vegetables and fruits from her favorite farm stand. For two weeks, she cooked and cleaned and shopped, bathed me, carried me to my mother, who would nurse me.

  One morning Stormy noticed the glass ball. “Such an extraordinary shade of blue.”

  “That’s what Phillip and I love about it too,” Lotte said.

  “I haven’t seen anything like it.”

  Lotte nodded. Switched me to her other breast.

  “Can’t you picture it hanging from the candle chandelier in my kitchen, Lotte?”

  Still, Lotte did not offer it, though usually, when Stormy pointed to something and said she liked it, Lotte would insist, “It’s yours, Stormy.” Because that was what Stormy would do for her.

  “I could see doing more with that blue…beads perhaps, or pegs for coats…doorknobs. It could set the tone, that blue. You wouldn’t—” Stormy shook her head. “No. I shouldn’t ask.”

  Lotte stroked my hair. Hummed to me till she felt the hum vibrate in her teeth.

  “Would you at all consider…trading it?”

  Lotte was too stunned to answer.

  “Maybe trade it for my bowl from Hong Kong? The one you’ve always liked?” Stormy had gone to Hong Kong with her au pair family for three months and returned with hand-painted bowls, stories of the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, distressed souls who didn’t have a proper burial. She had plans to have her own burning of a Hungry Ghost on the beach, make offerings to send him away happy.

  “You don’t have to give me that bowl. You don’t have to give me anything in return,” Lotte said, figuring that would stop her.

  But Stormy took the blue glass into her hands, holding it with reverence. “Thank you, Lotte. Aren’t we all custodians of belongings that pass through our hands?”

  That night in bed—with me sleeping between them—Lotte asked Phillip, “Do you think being generous only means giving away something you want to keep for yourself?”

  “That doesn’t feel natural.”

  “Stormy comes from a poor family. They never had much. Maybe that’s why—”

  “Are you being a reverse snob?”

  “I’m trying to understand why she’s doing this, Phillip.”

  “It’s only a gift if it is freely given.”

  “How did you get so wise?”

  “From being with you.”

  “I think Stormy believes it’s freely given.”

  “The way you pretend with her, I can see why.”

  “It’s impossible to deny her anything…considering how generous she is.”

  The courage it must have taken Lotte to ask for that glass ball back! In the morning, she took Stormy’s hand, sat down with her. Heart racing, she told her she wanted to keep her blue glass ball.

  “But of course,” Stormy said right away. “I’ll get it for you.” When she returned, she set the blue ball next to the toaster, where its reflection doubled into two glass balls, one for each of them.

  “I’m sorry,” Lotte said.

  “It’s all right. Really.”

  “You’re not disappointed?”

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  Lotte felt stingy. Selfish. Still—not to have asked for it would have meant letting herself down. “Stormy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please, pick something else of mine that you like…please?”

  “Being here with you and Phillip and Annie is all I want.”

  But the day after Stormy returned to North Sea, Lotte couldn’t find her blue glass ball, and though she searched throughout her rooms, she knew it was no longer there; and she wasn’t surprised when, on her next visit to North Sea, she found it dangling from Stormy’s candle chandelier. Still, Lotte was furious, and she fantasized stealing it back. Feeling wicked and justified, she fantasized uncoupling it from the chandelier while Stormy was outside and, without saying a word, hiding it inside my diaper bag to take home with her. Later, she would tell me that she didn’t know what kept her from stealing it, that perhaps it was enough to see it floating above her, attracting blue light from the candles and windows.

  “LET’S GET Opal some food for the ducks.” Aunt Stormy opened the lid of a metal trash can she’d secured with a bungee cord to keep the raccoons out. It was filled with cracked corn, and she scooped some into a little pail.

  We walked down her path, through stands of phragmites, along the boardwalk, flat across the wetlands. Where it arched over the tidal inlet, Mason had propped Opal on the railing. His arms around her, they were looking down into the water.

  “Here, Vögelchen,” Aunt Stormy called out.

 
; “Duck…,” Opal sang.

  “Vögelchen means birds…ducks and chickens too. All kinds of birds.” Aunt Stormy ran her bare instep up her other calf to clear off twigs.

  Wind seized us, shook us, and Opal laughed aloud. Two great white herons flew in from the bay, swerved, and landed in the crown of BigC’s black cherry tree. BigC meant Big Calla. Big Calla Holland. Not because she was big but because her house was much bigger than Aunt Stormy expected. A red clay roof sat like a lid on the pink stucco mansion. Nightmare in pink, the neighbors called it.

  In the late sixties, Aunt Stormy had bought her cottage in North Sea because the name evoked the German North Sea for her. It was affordable on a teacher’s salary; but when the taxes got too high for her, she sold half an acre to BigC, a commercial artist who had an apartment in New York, where she painted murals for restaurants. Every other weekend BigC came to North Sea, but when she had tenants, she stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in Southampton.

  “DUCK…,” Opal sang.

  Mason joined her. “Duck.”

  When Aunt Stormy rattled her pail, ducks scurried down the inlet as if they’d been waiting for her. “Open your hands, Opal. I got something for you and the Vögelchen.” She dribbled corn into Opal’s hands.

  But Opal latched her fingers around the kernels and brought her fists to her mouth.

  “Not girl food.” Mason stopped her. “No, no…”

  Opal shrieked. Sucked at her fist.

  “No no…It’s food for the…” He grinned at Aunt Stormy. “Wiggeltchen?”

  “Vögelchen, Mason.”

  “That’s what I said.” He uncurled Opal’s fingers. Flung the corn to the ducks. “See? Like this.”

  Aunt Stormy handed him the pail. “Are you going back to school in the fall, Annie?”

  I nodded. “Mason and Jake and I are scheduling our classes so that one of us will always be with Opal.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Mason was letting Opal reach into the pail and feed the ducks. A few times her hands would instinctively go to her mouth, but he’d distract her, weave his hands between hers and detour them till she laughed and gave up the corn to the ducks.

  “They’re your ducks from now on, Opal,” Aunt Stormy said.

  “Wait a minute.” I pretended to be confused. “That’s what you used to tell me.”

  “They were yours.” Aunt Stormy nodded. “Until a new child came along.”

  “You have to share, Annabelle.” Mason tilted his face to me, light on his cheeks, his lips.

  EVERY AUGUST, on the night before the full moon, Aunt Stormy celebrated her own Feast of the Hungry Ghosts. My parents and I would stay with her. Most years we’d bring Mason and Jake along. On the way we’d stop in Chinatown, buy lots of Chinese spirit money for the ghost; tinsel and crepe and streamers; yards of flimsy red and purple tissue paper.

  Every year, the ghost would be different, and the one I still liked best was the ghost with two heads. We were seven when we helped Aunt Stormy and my parents build the skeleton from bamboo poles that Pete cut from behind his garage. We filled in the ghost’s body with newspaper and papier-mâché. Taped the Chinese spirit money and golden streamers to the ghost’s purple robe, which spread out like a tent. To the long bamboo arms, we fastened big bamboo rake hands.

  My mother and Aunt Stormy were laughing and talking in German, that familiar singsong below their voices that wasn’t there when they spoke English. When my mother ran up the steps to the guest room and returned with her oldest swimsuit, the two of them got giddy.

  “Double D!”

  “Triple D!”

  They cut one big bra cup from the suit and squeezed it into a nose for the woman-head of the ghost. It had a red licorice mouth, red streamers for hair, and a long neck that positioned it a bit higher than the man-face with its paper-towel-tube nose and a forehead made from a horseshoe crab.

  “More creature than human,” my father said.

  “Horseshoe crabs were around over a million years before dinosaurs started,” Aunt Stormy told me.

  The Hungry Ghost was twice as tall as my father, and when we hauled it to the beach, we walked in single file on the boardwalk: Jake and I carried the heads of the statue, my parents and Aunt Stormy the middle, Pete and Mason the ghost’s feet.

  By the edge of the water, Aunt Stormy’s guests were already waiting for us: some of her neighbors and favorite clients; friends from Amnesty International who met every month for letter-writing campaigns; teachers from the elementary school where she used to teach until she opened her first business, taking care of summer homes. She tucked the houses in for the off-season, opened them for the holidays, scheduled contractors and various services to maintain them, and checked in while their owners were away.

  All her guests had brought beach chairs and umbrellas, tables covered with Indian bedspreads, amazing food. They took photos of the ghost and of each other with the ghost, toasted the ghost with wine or juice. After we’d eaten, we slipped offerings beneath the ghost’s robe to send along in the fire: bad dreams and consumerism and guns and sadness and corrupt politicians and entitlement and lies and summer traffic…

  What we want the Hungry Ghost to take away.

  Aunt Stormy knelt down, her trousers the color of sand, her caftan a brilliant blue, her dark braid dividing her back. Soon, the moon would rise, not full yet, not until tomorrow, when we would take out the kayaks for the second day of the ritual, witness the sun go down and the moon rise in its August fullness.

  Lighter fluid in her hand, Aunt Stormy squirted beneath the figure and across the robe. My father squatted next to her, his long thighs parallel to the ground.

  “Not so close,” my mother called out, cautious only near fire.

  When the first flames curled up around a newspaper photo, clearing a circle in the photo, brown margins, orange flames, my father came to stand behind my mother, who leaned against him as he folded her into his arms, while she folded her arms around me, the three of us facing the ghost. Ablaze, the figure was in motion—standing still, but in motion—the streamers rippling in the flames, the arms already gone. And when the figure leaned into the flame, into itself, it became the flame, a flutter of red and yellow.

  “I’VE MADE a picnic,” Aunt Stormy told Opal. “For your birthday dinner, sweet one. We’ll take it to the ocean. We just have to stop at a client’s house to make sure the furnace has been repaired.”

  On Noyack Road, a police cruiser was pulling up behind a beige dented car, lights flashing.

  “If this were not a Latino driver,” Aunt Stormy said, “the cop wouldn’t bother. Makes me want to stop and remind him that all of us are immigrants in this country—except for the Native Americans, of course. It’s always the most recent wave that gets it. That cop should go after tailgaters instead.”

  “I always notice tailgating more out here,” Mason said.

  “Because they’re used to driving in the city. Right on your tail.” Aunt Stormy glanced at Opal and lowered her voice. “Guess that’s where assholes belong. I used to give them the finger, the entire arm, but then I started hearing about road rage, and now I slow down. Makes them nuts.”

  A block from Sagg Main Beach, she pulled in to the driveway of a yellow house with covered porches. “Two sisters live here,” she said, “both in their eighties. Never been apart. Grew up in Westchester and moved out here when they retired.”

  “Living together their entire lives…,” Mason said, “sounds so peaceful.”

  Aunt Stormy laughed. “You wouldn’t say that if you met the harpies.”

  “Why harpies?”

  “They’re always fighting, talking smut with their sharp little voices, trying to impress me with all the famous people they supposedly know. I’ll show you.”

  In the living room, hundred of snapshots crowded the walls. In each frame two old women—lots of hair and makeup, smiling hard—hovered over one or two people at a table, different people in each snapshot, yet wit
h the same bewildered expression.

  “That’s what’s they do, the harpies…walk up to famous people in restaurants and get a waiter to snap a picture before their victims can say no.”

  “So that’s why the deer-in-the-headlights look,” Mason said.

  WHEN WE got to Sagg Main, the lifeguard was blowing the final whistle, motioning swimmers in for the day. As soon as the lifeguard chair was empty, kids swarmed up the ladders like locusts. Jumped down into the mountain of sand the lifeguards had shoveled in front of the tall chair. Then up again.

  “I used to do that,” I said and spread out an old bedsheet, while Aunt Stormy unpacked our dinner.

  A man and a woman, both heavy with masculine features, arrived with towels and shovels. He was about thirty, she twice his age. When he lay on the sand, facing the water, a towel under his head, she began to cover him with sand until he became this mountain of sand, only his head and neck visible. Walking into the water, she rinsed the sand from her hands, did a few deep knee bends, boosting herself up with her fists against her knees, and ambled to her mountain of sand.

  “Help me with the umbrella.” Aunt Stormy poked the sharp end of the pole into the sand.

  “Let me,” Mason said.

  “We’ll need some shadow,” Aunt Stormy said.

  I smiled but didn’t correct her. My mother too had confused shade and shadow. In German, both words were the same: Schatten.

  Opal half-walked, half-crawled to the edge of the sea, and I followed her, knelt down, and pulled her into the curve of my arms so that we faced the waves and felt their power…as I had at her age, naked and scuttling toward those white and curling waves that were so much taller than I was, and my father, strong and summer-brown and running, sliding himself on the sand between me and the water, a people-wave stopping the water-wave from getting me. Then, stepping behind me, my father pulled me up by my hands, and the instant the wave was about to knock me over, he let me fly across it—bird…fish…bird-fish—and I flew above the wave till he landed me on the sand, my father, shy on land but a hero in the water. He raised me up again so I could fly across the next wave too, each bigger and faster. Not one knocked me over. Because I could fly. And when he landed me for the last time, he turned me toward my mother and Aunt Stormy. I squatted and grasped fists of sand for them.