Anna descended the stairs as quietly as she could. Their house was old, and the steps creaked and groaned under anyone’s weight. Anna was always conscious of the noise she made, for Bruno, when disturbed from his silences, often became intemperate and took easy offense at everyday, benign occurrences. Anna had learned to tiptoe and step slowly.
Their kitchen was small, narrow, and tucked up. There was hardly room for a countertop, much less a microwave, and their refrigerator was only slightly larger than ones found in college dormitories. Anna made the rounds of marketing twice a week at least. That was Anna’s Saturday afternoon plan. All week she had been occupied and let the shopping slip. Their pantries were almost entirely bare.
“A MODERN WOMAN NEEDN’T live a life so circumscribed. A modern woman needn’t be so unhappy. You should go more places and do more things.” Doktor Messerli’s voice didn’t hide its impatience.
Anna felt scolded but didn’t offer a retort.
SHE CARRIED HER COFFEE into the den. Her German books and all of her notes from the previous night were still scattered on the dining table like clothes cast off and tossed across a bed. The window in the den opened to face the barn of their neighbors, Hans and Margrith Tschäppät. An elderly couple, Hans and Margrith had lived in Dietlikon their entire lives. Hans was a kind and jolly farmer who would wave at Anna from his tractor when they passed each other going up or down the hill behind Anna and Bruno’s house. Hans would give Anna jars of Honig cultivated by his own bees and twice a year he pruned their apple trees. Margrith, too, was nice. But she was also extremely perceptive, and Anna couldn’t help but feel she always knew more about her than Anna would like her to. Anna had never caught her staring through their open windows or peeking into the Benzes’ trash bin. It was something instead in the questions she asked, and the keen-eyed way she asked them, neighborly though they might seem: Wohin gehen Sie, Frau Benz? Woher kommen Sie? The past Wednesday afternoon, in fact, Margrith caught Anna as she was coming off the train, fresh from Archie’s bed. Anna’s hair was in snarls and her makeup lost to perspiration. Grüezi, Frau Benz; woher kommen Sie? she asked.
Just coming back from my German lesson, Frau Tschäppät, Anna replied, and then each continued on in the direction she was headed before they spoke. This early in the morning Margrith and Hans’s windows were still dark. The Saturday sun had not yet risen.
POLLY JEAN WOKE FOR good around seven thirty. Bruno and the boys were up by eight. The weather was gracious; it was a generous, sunny day. Two well-slept boys rattled the walls of the house with the energy they had stored up overnight, like a pair of batteries, recharged. Anna sent them outside to play in the yard. Charles trotted out the door without a word of backtalk. Victor flopped on the couch and pretended he hadn’t heard a thing. When Anna told Victor once more to go outside the pouting began. He wanted to ride his bike to a friend’s house. He wanted to watch cartoons on the television. He wanted to go upstairs. He wanted Anna to leave him alone. This is when Bruno intervened. Go. That’s all it took for Victor to relent. A firm, terse word from Bruno’s no-nonsense lips.
Charles was Anna’s easiest child. He was pleasant, quick to help, and slow to anger. He minded his manners and was rarely perturbed. He was a happy boy. Victor, by contrast, was rarely purely happy. A good son in his own way, Victor was funny, smart, charming, and occasionally perceptive beyond his years (Mami, he once said to Anna, I will always love you, even if Papi doesn’t). But Victor was also self-indulgent. He tended toward pettiness and he didn’t like to share. He was rigid and could not easily accommodate the plans or needs of others. And when he felt slighted, Victor became petulant and ill-tempered. At those times Anna found it impossible to like him very much.
Victor was his father’s son.
Of Charles, Anna said to Doktor Messerli, “He has absolutely no guile.”
“What about Polly Jean?”
“I don’t know her yet.” Doktor Messerli thought she knew what Anna meant.
“And Victor?”
“Victor, I do know.” She was willing to admit nothing aloud but if pressed (and only if pressed very hard) she would have to say that of her two sons, Charles was her dearest. “Of course I love Victor.”
Anna was sorry in a hundred ways.
DOKTOR MESSERLI DREW A diagram. It was a picture of a circle inside of a circle inside of another one. It reminded Anna of Russian matryoshka dolls, or her set of nesting Pyrex mixing bowls.
“These circles? They’re you. The outside circle is the ego. The ego is the suit that your psyche wears. How you are viewed by the world. It is the first part of you that anyone sees.” The Doktor leaned forward and tapped the middle circle with her fountain pen. It left a small but spreading blotch of ink. “This is where your problems lie.” Doktor Messerli traced the circle again, giving it a messy, jagged seam.
“How so?”
“Chaos bars the ego from the serenity, the solidity, and the solidarity of the self.” Anna wondered if she’d practiced this speech; it sounded lofty and rehearsed.
“What’s the answer?”
Doktor Messerli leaned back into her chair. “There is no fit-all answer.”
“What’s the difference between the self and the soul?”
“Anna, our time is up.”
WHORES, ANNA ONCE READ, make the very best wives. They are accustomed to the varying moods of men, they keep their broken hearts to themselves, and easy women always ease through grief.
This thought occurred to Anna unbidden when, in front of the Coop on Industriestrasse, she slipped a two-franc piece into a coin slot, releasing the top shopping cart from its line of brothers. It was a thought called forward by the simple action of shoving a thing into the hole it’s meant for.
Ursula had offered Anna a ride to the supermarket. This was a gesture of clemency on Ursula’s part, which Anna graciously accepted. She told Bruno she’d be glad to take Polly Jean with her if he’d watch the boys. Yes, yes, Bruno said, waving her off and telling her to bring back six large bottles of water, several pots of quark, and three or four dark chocolate bars. In this way Bruno was exceptionally Swiss; Bruno loved candy. Anna took note.
Ursula pushed the stroller. Anna maneuvered the basket. Polly was fussy and still troubled by her tooth. Anna looked at her daughter and wished she’d just stop crying.
Dietlikon doesn’t lack for shopping. On the south side of the railroad tracks, a comprehensive—and for a town whose population barely hit seven thousand residents, obscene—selection of eateries, shops, and services: an electronics store, an IKEA, a very large home improvement store. There is a Toys “R” Us, an Athleticum, a few shoe stores, a fish market, and a nail salon. There is a multiplex cinema with stadium seating, a Qualipet, a bowling alley, a store that specializes in horse tack, a car wash, a pizzeria, a shop for baby furniture, a low-end department store, and a Mexican restaurant. There are several trendy teen fashion boutiques, a gas station, a pharmacy, an adult movie store, a health food store, and in addition to the Coop on Industriestrasse, there’s a Coop City one block over where, along with groceries, you can find household accoutrements, clothes, health and beauty products, toys and games. Everything a body could desire positioned to fit inside a few convenient blocks of commerce girdled by a bus route. It is a close, closed circle of small needs and petty wants.
A circle inside of a circle inside of another one. Anna couldn’t imagine what looking beyond the tightly circumscribed world in which she lived might entail.
Anna and Ursula shared a complicated relationship. Ursula was a weave of consistent inconsistencies. At times she was devout, open to interaction, easygoing, generous, and helpful. Other instances found her apathetic, impossible to impress, aggressively punctual, blank-faced, and angry. Those were the instances she shared most frequently with Anna.
Mother has moods, too, Bruno said.
“WHEN A PERSON’S MOOD is out of balance, psyche will always attempt to bring it back into equilibrium. An uncon
scious opposite will emerge. Tensions seek slackening. Sadness clings to any elevated state it can find. Boredom searches for activity. There is a correlation between the severity of a person’s moods and a lack of self-knowledge. Notwithstanding,” Doktor Messerli added, “a clinical diagnosis of a mood disorder.”
Had Anna ever been more talkative or spoken faster than usual? Had she ranged from great doubt to overconfidence? Had there been times when she felt both elated and depressed at once? Doktor Messerli asked the questions too quickly for Anna to absorb them, so she replied simply, “Sometimes I feel sad. Sometimes I feel anxious.” Doktor Messerli responded by writing her a prescription for a mild tranquilizer.
THE COOP ON INDUSTRIESTRASSE was, as Anna had known it would be, heaving with people. Ursula and Anna each had a list. Polly Jean was herself preoccupied in eyeing, with an infant’s appropriate misgiving, the conflux of shoppers who made the wide rounds of the store.
They were in the produce aisle. Ursula was vetting nectarines. She inspected nearly twenty before settling on the four pieces of fruit she decided to carry home. Anna was considering the mushrooms when she felt a buzzing in the pocket of her jacket. It was her Handy, her cell phone. She reached for it, flipped open its clamshell, and answered without looking to see who had called. “Hello?”
It was Archie. He didn’t want to wait the weekend to talk to her. Come into town, Anna, he said. Come over. Ursula glanced at her daughter-in-law but returned her attention just as quickly to the nectarines. Anna was silent. Are you there? Hello?
“Edith, glad you called.” Anna spoke flatly. She didn’t miss a beat. Ursula returned and set her sack of nectarines in the cart. Edith Hammer, Anna mouthed. Ursula shrugged and turned away, pushing Polly’s stroller off toward the celery and the leeks.
“You aren’t alone?”
Anna continued. “We’ll talk Monday, yes?” Anna was flattered. Anna was annoyed. Ursula lifted a bag of green beans in her left hand and motioned Anna to follow her into the spice aisle with her right. Anna clapped closed her phone without saying goodbye.
Twenty minutes later they paid for their groceries and left. It was just after noon.
“BUT WHO IS STEPHEN, Anna?”
4
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, EVERY STUDENT ENROLLED IN THE Deutschkurs Intensiv turned out for class—Anna and Archie included. Archie had arrived on time and was, when Anna showed up fifteen minutes late, quietly filling in a worksheet with everyone else. The door’s hinges squealed when Anna entered and the entire class looked up to watch her cower into the room. Anna undertoned an I’m sorry and endeavored what she hoped was nonchalance as she took the only open seat available, the empty chair between Roland and Mary, the Canadian woman. But Anna was often as clumsy as she was passive, and as she rummaged through her book bag with one hand, she seemed to have forgotten that her other hand was wrapped around a flimsy paper cup of hot coffee. She spilled the entire cup—on herself, on the table, and on Mary.
Anna and Mary made simultaneous exclamations. Mary yelped Oh gosh! And Anna barked out a splenetic Mother of Christ! which, even to her own accustomed ears, sounded coarse. Roland pulled an agitated face. The coffee went down the front of Anna’s sweater; it caught Mary on the cuff and on the thigh. Her worksheet was ruined. Anna whispered a feeble apology and rose and left the room. Mary followed after her. Archie’s eyes remained locked on his paper.
In the bathroom, Anna blotted and dabbed and swiped at the stain on her sweater. Nothing helped. The cashmere was ruined. It was one of the nicest things she owned and Anna, fond of baubles and adornments, owned many nice things. A Christmas present from Bruno, she knew better than to have worn it to class. But she talked herself into it that morning by imagining the limp, silky pleasure she’d experience later in the afternoon when she would be talked so easily out of it, how Archie would tuck his hands beneath the sweater’s bottom banding, slide them up the sides of her waist, skate them across the inner side of her upraised arms, how he would lift it over her head and off her body, how he would then impel her to his bed and vandalize her for at least the next two hours.
ANNA LOVED AND DIDN’T love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted.
The longing for diversion was a recent development; her pining to be hungered for was decades old. But both rose from a lassitude born of small-scale grudges and trifling, trivial injuries, the last ten years of which she blamed on Bruno. From that rose boredom and from boredom particular habits were born. This she could not blame on Bruno. Like the ability to flash that sincere-seeming smile, Anna had taught it to herself by settling down, by settling on.
The affair with Archie was and wasn’t about sex. Anna was weak and she knew it. But she was still young enough to be pretty in certain lights and to the tastes of specific men.
“What do you think makes a person’s life successful?” Doktor Messerli asked.
“Do you mean accomplished?” They’d been talking of something unrelated to success.
Doktor Messerli closed her eyes as she searched for the right words. “The kind of success I mean comes from living a life that satisfies a woman in such a way that when, in her old age, she looks back upon her years in contemplation, she is able to announce with certainty, ‘I have led a conscious, useful life, whole and complete, and I filled it with as many worthy things as it could possibly hold.’ That’s what I mean. Do you understand? Is that something you want?”
“I don’t know.” Anna didn’t.
“I don’t know whether you want it either,” Doktor Messerli agreed.
MARY’S SHIRT WAS WEARABLE, but her jeans were soaked through to her thighs. She blotted herself with a pad of paper towels as she spoke.
“Missed you in class last week.” Anna listened for an accusation but there was none. Mary’s tone was sunny, though it perplexed Anna how someone she hardly knew would take even a passing notice of her absence. They’d only been in school a few days.
“I’m sorry I spilled coffee on you.”
Mary gestured never mind as she stepped toward the bathroom door to leave. “Say, Anna …” Anna looked up from her sweater to Mary reflected in the mirror. Mary’s face was round and she wore her curly sand-colored hair in a prudent bob. She was short and fleshy. Not fat, but large-breasted, generous of hip, maternal, and, despite her thickset frame, undeniably pretty. Anna looked from Mary’s reflection to her own and weighed the disparities. “My husband and I wondered if you and your husband and children wouldn’t like to come to the house for dinner sometime this week? You have boys? Are they hockey fans? Is your husband?” Anna paused long enough to defeat her. “Or,” Mary stammered, “next week. Or not, you know. Whatever you like.” There was apology in her voice. Anna had disappointed.
“Oh, no,” Anna hedged. “I’m distracted, is all.” She pointed to her sweater. “Of course … we’d love to come. I’m sure the boys … they’d love it.” She stuttered as she poured as much kindness into the words “of course” as they would hold. This woman wants a friend. Anna recognized that want. It made her wince. Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.
But in the bathroom and at that moment Anna felt trapped. Obligated to oblige. “I’ll have to check with Bruno. His schedule, I mean.”
Mary brightened. “That’s it, Bruno,” she said as she remembered a name she’d never been told. “Be sure and give me your email. We can make plans.”
“I don’t use email all that much.”
“Really?” Mary asked as if she’d never heard such a thing in her life. “Why’s that?”
Anna capitulated. “I don’t have much call for it.”
“No Facebook? Myspace?”
“No.” This was a bit of a fib. Of course Anna had an email address. Everyone had an email address. Of course Anna used it. It’s whe
re the boys’ school sent their announcements. It’s how Anna confirmed her dentist appointments. Without it, she’d never be able to shop online. But she didn’t use it when she didn’t have to. Who would she email that she didn’t already regularly see? Who would she connect or reconnect with? All those distant relatives with whom she didn’t keep in touch? Her school pals and ex-lovers? There was no one Anna was eager or able to contact. And no one looked to get in touch with her. All told, there was less humiliation in the lie.
“Well anyway, let’s not forget to swap numbers, okay? Now,” Mary breathed deeply, “time to get back! See you in there? We’ll talk more during break?”
“Sure.” Anna was as stiff as she could be without appearing rude. She was in a bad mood and being unfair. She self-corrected with an “absolutely” and Mary left.
Once more she looked at her sweater. I’ve destroyed a beautiful thing, Anna thought. I have nothing to change into.
IN A MOMENT OF bald yearning, Anna whined to Doktor Messerli, “I wish I were better looking.”
“You think there is something wrong with how you look?”
Anna shrugged. “Wrong” was the wrong word. “I’m neither plain nor pretty. I’m irrevocably average.”
“Jung said that beautiful women were sources of terror. That as a general rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”
Anna dismissed her with a backhand wave.
Then Doktor Messerli asked, “When will you trust me enough to tell me everything?”
ANNA EXAMINED HERSELF IN the mirror. She was neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor too thin. Her hair fell in easy but shaggy shoulder-length waves. It was the color of top dirt and it was graying around her forehead (she dyed it). What do they see in me, men? She wasn’t being modest. She truly didn’t know.
Hausfrau: A Novel Page 4
