by Lauren Oyler
She looked puzzled. “What is this?”
“It’s a tampon. I know, it’s a little cute. For every box they sell, the company donates a box to a village in Africa.” I sounded much less cynical about this project than I knew myself to be.
“But . . . how does it work?”
Knowing Europeans mainly used tampons designed to be inserted manually, as in with one’s finger, I opened the tampon and demonstrated the applicator system.
“You throw it away? This seems very wasteful?”
I agreed.
“Do women in Africa use tampons?”
I said definitely, at least some did, but that the donations might also be pads and that I thought that if it wasn’t a question of religious/cultural norms it was a question of access, or rather that the questions of religious/cultural norms and access intersected. What’s more, menstruation stigma truncated many girls’ educations. I gave her a new tampon that had not been part of a demonstration.
“Do you buy these tampons without knowing the point of them?”
I said I had gotten them for free through work.
“Ach so.” Her eyes returned to the form. “Do you make more than forty-eight hundred your-ohs pro month?”
“Yes.”
“OK—”
“No! I’m joking.”
“Ah, OK. I thought it was a little weird. You wouldn’t need to live with me.” She wrote down every difficult-to-understand question in my notebook, numbering them as she went so I could follow along on my own later. She refused the offer of more tampons than the one she immediately needed and left.
I emailed the application to myself to print and clicked over to Twitter, thinking I’d earned some time mindlessly registering others’ impressions of the world. It was, as ever, both placating and stressful, the stakes of any comment or discussion unclear except that they were high. I replied to posts by people I knew but had never met in person and took solace in the idea that to someone else I might seem like part of a clique. I assumed they all assumed I was in New York; I had said nothing online about going to Berlin because there was no reason to say anything online about going to Berlin, and if there were no reason to mention it then it would read as bragging or out of touch. None of the people who followed me were in Berlin, or had followed me because I frequently posted commentary on Berlin, so Berlin was, coming from me, irrelevant. If I wanted to brag, there had to be plausible deniability for the boast. For example: I had posted about leaving my job because I was excited for people to stumble upon a detail of my life and have to think about it, taking a moment to resituate me in their vision of the world. But I had also done it so that people would stop “pitching” me pointless things on the behalf of corporations and cultural producers. I watched someone with sixty-four followers who was studying for an undergraduate degree in literature accuse a prominent television critic of classism and go unacknowledged. I watched someone with two thousand followers accuse someone with seventy-five hundred followers of exhibiting racism at an event that no one repeating the accusation in outrage had attended, though they would all love to see a video. @HelenofTroyWI, inspired by Twitter’s biannual widespread discussion of bagels, tweeted that having Manichaean opinions about food was a sure sign someone was bad in bed. I watched a female writer, A, say disparaging things about another female writer in generalized passive-aggressive terms; I was able to figure out the latter’s identity, B, by messaging someone who I suspected disliked A because of various comments she’d made in the past. That led me to the profile of another female writer, C, who was saying that if she possessed a collection of traits that described B and only B she would kill herself. Having met none of these women but read their writing, I was on Team B. I considered posting something underhanded to express my allegiance to the approximately twelve people who would know what I was talking about but did not, thinking about what might happen if A saw it and then one day I happened to meet her. I asked my source if A had some personal problem with B and the source replied that she had no idea, but they didn’t seem like natural allies, did they? Political urgencies dissolved into complaints about the heat wave in New York and the functioning of the subway and Why French Women Embrace Their Dark Circles and Watch a BBC Anchor Stare into Space for Four Minutes on Live TV. My spine curved. My hands were clammy on the keyboard. Into the soft underside of my forearm the cheap desk burrowed a straight groove. I heard Frieda leave the apartment, slamming the door to make it close all the way. I responded earnestly to a funny woman’s earnest request for book recommendations. I mocked a conservative commentator’s mixed metaphor. I found it hard to believe so many people felt as cynical and blasé about North Korean nuclear missile tests as their jokes about hoping for “the sweet release of death” suggested. I read more portions of articles, collected silent approvals. Occasionally I would notice my shoulders tense and hunched up close to my ears, so I would sit back, straighten my spine, grab them with my hands, and hold them down as a reminder of where they were supposed to be.
When it had gotten so dark that I couldn’t read the notes Frieda had made for me I shut my computer decisively and the room brightened around me. I was going to get a falafel. I put on my shoes and jacket and checked for my keys three times, feeling unfocused yet paranoid, like I was forgetting something important, or like I was going to look down and find myself naked in front of a crowd. Experiencing so much of the world two-dimensionally, staring at an object without being in the same scene, made walking into the twilight feel like moving through a painting or a film. Leaves were impressionistic patterns daubed on pastel apartment buildings, people on the sidewalk blurs of motion veering startlingly close to me. Casinos with papered-over windows in racecar colors and ads for cell phone companies stood out for their garishness and guided me forward. I’d recently seen a headline that claimed staring at screens too much wouldn’t cause permanent blindness, so that was good, but there was also a sense in which such reassuring articles disappointed. It was easier to think of technology as something that was happening to me rather than acknowledge I was doing something with it.
· · ·
“THE NEIGHBORHOOD DIDN’T USED TO BE LIKE THIS,” GENEVIEVE was saying as she loaded sippy cups into the basket beneath the stroller. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true. When we moved here, it was just Turkish families. Quiet. If you wanted to go to a bar with other, you know, young people you had to go to Kreuzberg”—Kreuzberg being a five-minute walk away, almost literally across the street—“or you had to go to the German bars where they hated you and pretended not to understand your accent. My husband’s”—she always called Holger “my husband” even though I’d met him at least four times—“parents lived in West Berlin in the eighties and when we told them we were moving to this neighborhood they were scandalized. It was dangerous. There used to be dog shit everywhere.” I was about to say there was still dog shit everywhere, imagining vividly the large pile of orange-flecked excrement I’d seen a woman bike through while trying to maneuver around construction on Weserstrasse, but she cut me off. “No. You have no idea. It was everywhere.” Finally, she got to her point, to recount the distressing events of the night before: “Last night the bar downstairs—which is run by this just awful woman—was hosting some kind of trivia night or something and it was so crowded that, like, twenty people were just hanging out on the sidewalk at midnight. On a Tuesday! We’ve had to call the police three times already, and last night we didn’t because it always falls on me and I just didn’t want to, I couldn’t stand the idea of having to talk to her little wobbly head with her giant earrings. Once she saw my husband in the street and stopped him and said, ‘Your wife is a little high-strung, hm?’” I expressed surprise at the audacity. “Yes! I’m serious! The fucking nerve! They always open the side door to air out the smoke because they have that stupid fucking ledge thing, or whatever, so the entire place is just entirely smoke, and the smell just wafts all the way up the stairs. Even Uwe, a really nice old man,
who’s lived on the fifth floor for three decades, smells it, and you can also hear just basically everything people say down there, like clear, full sentences. And always in English. So, anyway, the boys were up all night, so sorry if they’re a little grumpy. Isn’t that right, boys?” She touched each of their noses.
The cocktail bar she was referring to, directly under her balcony, was owned by an American couple, and it was always crowded, loud, and full of smoke, which caused them to open their side door onto the apartment building’s ground floor and make the entire stairway stink, loudly. The drinks cost more than at similar bars around the corner, but that didn’t matter, because this bar had a little lofted space in the back, accessible by ladder and about ten feet long by four feet wide by four feet tall, where it was even hotter and darker and smokier than the rest of the place. You could fit about six hunched-over people up there, seated in a single-file row, which as everyone knows makes for optimum conversation. I’d been on a date there, and because I was seated next to the ladder I heard the childlike wonder expressed by each new person who climbed it when they reached the top. There had been neighborhood meetings and building meetings, and the residents had tried to be understanding, but the bar owners were stubborn and vindictive, rolling their eyes in stained jeans and looking at each other meaningfully to convey the absurd tedium of what they were being put through. “If you want quiet nights, don’t live in Neukölln!” the woman had said, angering the tenants who had, in buying cheap apartments in the area when it was quiet, perhaps not realized they had made this happen. Poor Uwe. A few months before, the bar had had a fire, and the renovation period was the most peaceful time of Genevieve’s life, except for the dread she’d felt about the idea of the bar one day reopening. Hoping to distance myself from the patrons of the bar, to whom I was demographically identical, I said its popularity was ridiculous anyway because the cocktail bar around the corner was cheaper, bigger, and decorated like a jungle. “A jungle!” I said again, to the babies, who laughed at my wide eyes and jazz hands.
A few days before, panicked and trapped in bed, I’d been toying with the idea of paying someone to accompany me to apply for my visa when I admitted to myself that I interacted every day and on shaky power-relationship terms with the perfect person to help. Genevieve spoke fluent German, had no professional obligations at any specific time, was used to waking up and functioning at early hours of the morning, and owed me a cosmic and practical debt for underpaying me to care for her children, the two things most precious to her in the entire world. She had also surely been to the immigration office and probably resented German bureaucracy for one reason or another; she would commiserate as well as consider this an opportunity to avenge whatever wrongs the country had in her nearly twenty years of residence committed against her. I decided to ask her when I brought the babies back. I set off with surprising optimism toward the bourgeois market hall near Görlitzer Bahnhof, which was empty in the mornings and so a good place to wait out the weather; that day it was grotesquely humid. Unfamiliar bugs had begun to appear in my room, long, skinny ant-like things with wings that looked like tiny translucent ball gowns, but they didn’t seem to fly. The babies slept immediately and anytime they began to murmur I would do a lap or two around the market, past the dormant stalls offering veggie burgers, tapas, Southern barbecue, Peruvian empanadas, Korean fusion bowls, expensive bread. Janitors or maintenance men occasionally looked at me curiously, but they never seemed to mind me being there.
When I returned to the apartment I took a moment outside to compile my story, each detail a twig in my nest of harmless lies: While we were out walking, I’d gotten a call from the friend who was supposed to go with me to translate for my visa application interview early next week. She was sorry but she just couldn’t go—some “presentation” at work. I considered saying the friend had had a “family emergency” but I didn’t want to accidentally curse anyone. No, presentation at work, simple, straightforward, a nuisance for me, a minor injustice for me, not too many details. It was possibly slightly New York–seeming—I was under the impression that most young people in Berlin would never have to wake up at 7 a.m. to prepare for a presentation—but it was also my impression that young people in Berlin tended to prioritize their own interests over those of others, which means the imaginary friend could have been making up an excuse to get out of taking me to the visa office. Or it could be that the presentation was moved to 9 a.m. and she wanted to make sure she wasn’t late. I could pretend I had no idea what the presentation was and that the excuse seemed suspect to me as well but suggest that she wasn’t a good enough friend to ask about it. I rang the doorbell, which was my custom, since I didn’t have a set of keys. The door buzzed.
“What’s wrong?” Genevieve asked as I rolled the stroller into its parking spot in the entryway wearing a look of mild distress. “Were they really awful?” I told her no, they slept pretty much the whole time—they must have been tired!—but that etc. I knew I should have worked harder on my German so that I could do it myself, but it was too late now. Woe, me, tormented not only by my situation but by the guilt that comes from its being of my own making. I wasn’t on top of everything, I had procrastinated on certain requirements, but deep down I was good, and shouldn’t I be allowed to choose to live for a year or two in a foreign country if I wanted, for the hell of it?
“Oh my gosh,” she said. We each unbuckled a baby and started up the stairs. “What time is it? What day?”
I was careful not to answer too quickly. “It’s so early. The thing is that . . .” I explained and looked around nervously.
When I finished she looked relieved. “Oh, 7 a.m. is great,” she said. “It’ll go much faster. I’ll go with you.” We had reached the apartment and she was getting her keys out of her pocket. “I’ll be up anyway! Holger can stay and watch the babies till we’re done! Girls’ morning out!”
While she was unlocking the door she turned back to me with an expression of light bemusement on her face. “Can you get a visa to be an accountant here? Don’t you have to get a certification or something? Germans love certifications.”
Coruscating worries about what would happen when someone figured me out had come and gone, come and gone, but I’d always assumed that that someone would be one of the dates I didn’t care about. I imagined one guy might tell a friend about his recent bizarre date with an American who wore x kind of glasses and was y tall and had z dental quirk, to which the friend would reply something like, “That sounds like an American I went on a date with! Was her name Cassandra?” to which the first date would reply, “Oh, no—her name was Audrey, she recently composed a concerto,” to which the second date would reply, “Ach so,” and they would begin to talk about something else, assuming they had been on dates with different women, until I happened to walk into the same bar about ten minutes later to simultaneous shouts of “That’s her, Cassandra!” and “That’s her, Audrey!” and I would have to spin on my heel and flee, never getting the chance to introduce myself as Sophie to the third date who was there waiting for me. Imagine if you were on a date with a woman, younger than you but not too much younger, pretty but not the most beautiful woman you had ever seen, interesting but a little reserved, funny but not as funny as people who are funny professionally, and fifteen minutes after she told you her name was Jane and that she was a librarian, a man, taller than you, better-looking than you, more confident than you, came up to her and said, “Hey, Melissa. How’s it going?” You would be very confused, and probably affronted for reasons you could sort of understand but wouldn’t want to. Of course, instead of a slapstick moment involving actors of little consequence, I had set myself up for an awkward confrontation and loss of income by telling the worst, most unbelievable lie to the person I saw every business day. You’re not going to believe me when I say this but I’m actually not very good at lying. If I’d been better at it I could have easily come up with an explanation—there was a visa for people learning German, which could
have worked for me—though it would have been harder to justify later when I had my big binder of contradictory visa application materials clutched to my chest outside the immigration office. I was trapped in an ill-conceived narrative.
I stammered as the baby on my hip tangled its fingers in my hair. I flushed with discomfort. Genevieve went inside and while she began to unwrap the other baby to assess his diaper I imagined her looking at me the way a mother on a television show looks at her daughter’s rascally boyfriend, the one she likes and really believes in despite his being from the wrong side of the tracks. She was going to take me in and reform me, encourage me to get a haircut, buy me some suitable clothes for job interviews. That would be a terrible approach to take toward a compulsive liar who cares for your children. I said, “Oh, I’m applying as a writer. I make most of my money doing accounting, but that’s not what I’m applying for—I’m sure there are like five certification tests you have to take, ha ha, plus it would help to speak German. I’ll keep doing taxes for a couple friends from here, remotely, but yeah, I’m applying as a writer.” She looked up from the poop. “Oh,” she said, a pleasant epiphany on her face, maybe a tiny bit of betrayal. “I didn’t know you were a writer. What do you write? Can I read any of it online?”
