Hausfrau: A Novel

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  Stephen sniffed. “Anna. I cared about you, you know that.” He paused, not knowing what next to say. “You understand?” It was a question Anna heard as an imperative: You. Understand.

  “Oh.” Anna’s mouth had been an open vowel all day long.

  The conversation shifted. Anna willed it so. It was the quickest way out of the burning building, the least embarrassing, the one whereby she’d save the most face. She asked about his experiments, his work, what he was doing with himself. Stephen let it shift. He told her about his research. He also told her he’d gotten married and his wife was pregnant with a baby girl. It wasn’t a cruel statement. Stephen didn’t intend it to be and Anna didn’t understand it as such. Still, a door closed.

  It wasn’t me. It was never me. It will never be me.

  It hit her like a sledgehammer. The myth upon which the last two years were built. She was mistaken. As if she took the wrong bus. Or picked up someone else’s drink at a party.

  So there it was. It was there.

  Stephen returned the questions. Anna said nothing but Fine, fine, we’re all very fine. She wasn’t going to tell him about Charles. What good would that do? She absolutely wasn’t going to tell him about Polly Jean. Still, she spoke slowly in the way that she did on that first day and tried to draw the conversation out as far as it would stretch. She could hear him nodding and checking his watch over the phone. Even he knew he hadn’t told her what she wanted to hear. “Anna, I need to go. I’m late for a class.”

  Okay, Stephen. It was an entirely deferential statement.

  “But it’s good to hear from you. I’m really pleased you called.” And that was that.

  That’s that. She’d been wrong. A mistake that masqueraded as love. A self-deceit now almost two years old. It could walk and speak in full sentences. Mine! it hollered. It never learned to share. Anna had called Stephen. And now she knew. He was polite, upbeat, and genuinely glad to hear from her. But he was as removed from their affair as the Atlantic Ocean is vast and two years are long. They were good for a season. But seasons change.

  And now I know.

  She rose from the steps and smoothed her skirt and looked around before deciding where next to go. She walked through Bellevueplatz, where in summer, the city of Zürich erected a Ferris wheel and where, during the World Cup, the city would install enormous screens and bleachers so that everyone could come together and cheer on the Swiss team. Hopp Schwyz! was the cheer. Go Switzerland! Anna walked to the middle of Quaibrücke, the bridge that spanned the Limmat from Bellevueplatz to Bürkliplatz. When she reached the middle of the bridge she turned south to face the Alps. She watched them for a minute, as if they might move. Mountains, you mean nothing to me, Anna thought, though she knew that wasn’t true. They did mean something to her. But it wasn’t anything good. The Alps are the door I’m locked behind. How tired she was of feeling like a prisoner. A swan paddled in circles in the water below her. His feathers were gray and matted and he was honking and snarling at his own wave-warped reflection. Even the ugliest swan is still more beautiful than the loveliest crow on the fence, Anna thought. And then she thought: It is time to get off the fence. And then with a lack of consequential concern, she took her cell phone from her pocket and tossed it in the cold, drab water. It was an impulsive act and the exact right thing to do. Anna felt lighter than she had in months. She clapped her hands back and forth in the manner of washing them clean and said to herself, Well, that’s done.

  A hook released from its eye. A door opened. An eerie, luminal shaft of light brightened the exact spot where Anna stood.

  It was time to go.

  “A VERB’S MOST BASIC form is its infinitive,” Roland said. “It isn’t finite. Its possibilities are not yet exploited. Someone, give an example of an infinitive verb …”

  “Leben,” Nancy said. To live.

  “Versuchen,” Mary said. To try.

  “Küssen,” Archie said. To kiss.

  Every verb had a hundred likelihoods. Others were shouted out. Fragen. To ask. Nehmen. To take. Lügen. To lie. Laufen. To run. Sein. To be.

  “Anna?” Roland looked to Anna for a word. She held a dozen in her mouth but settled on one. Lieben. The infinitive form of love.

  For, Anna thought, if love is not infinite or eternal? Then I want nothing of it.

  ANNA WALKED AT A casual, intentional pace. It’s time to think about the future, she thought. It is time to think about thinking about the future. Anna entered the Hauptbahnhof at the concourse. On Wednesdays it became the site of an enormous farmers’ market. Over fifty vendors set up stalls. Local growers, wineries, artisan cheesemakers, sausage sellers, crêpe makers, bakers—the list of merchants was long and varied. Anna tried to go every week. She bought organic olive oil and summer sausage made from highland cattle and as a usual treat she’d buy a cone of candied almonds or a Schoggibanane. At Christmastime, the hall was packed even more tightly with booths and stalls of seasonal foods and crafts all crushed around an enormous Christmas tree. That day the hall was empty and the stalls were gone. Everything echoed. A wind blew through. It made her cold.

  And yet Anna lingered in the open emptiness comforted by the clipped, hollow complaint of her footfalls on the floor of the great, vacant room as she crossed it. She paused beneath the station’s guardian angel, that strange one-ton sculpture made from god knows what that pended from the ceiling beams. Christ, she’s ugly, Anna thought. It was installed ten years ago. Anna and the angel had lived in Switzerland for almost the same amount of time. She was pinheaded and faceless and clothed in a painted-on pushup bra and minidress. Her wings had holes in them. Her patterns were mismatched. And she was fat. Anna had read that the artist intended the angel’s lusty, robust form to evoke an equally full-bodied femininity, an attitude native to women who don’t give damns what others think. Modern art for modern women. Little wonder Anna couldn’t stand her. Nor did she care for the installation on the other side of the room: twenty-five thousand tiny lights arranged in a tight, three-dimensional square and hanging from the ceiling. They pulsed in shifting patterns of color, design, and depth. The tiny lights dimmed, then beamed, then stalled, then strobed. The effect was hypnotic and omniscient. The way light sometimes was.

  As in the night before. How the kitchen had never seemed starker underneath the overhead fluorescent bulbs. No room had ever been so bright as that, Anna decided. Nothing stayed in shadow. It was awful. The Doktor had warned this was the most usual side effect of coming into consciousness, and the Doktor had been right.

  Anna watched the luminous box above her. It pinkened. It yellowed. It blanched. Oh, Anna. A single lifetime and yet so many lies. The lights turned blue. I wonder which one’s the worst? Anna had never asked herself. But the answer was easy.

  I’ve never been nearly as alone as I always say I am.

  The truth was, there were people Anna could call. People she might reach out to. Her cousin Cindy, for example. As children they’d been as inseparable as sisters. Anna might have swapped her number for Stephen’s in her Handy’s contact list, but she didn’t throw it away. It was at the house somewhere. She could find it. Nevertheless, Anna hadn’t phoned her in years. And there was an aunt on the other side of the family with whom Anna had kept in moderate touch. Two years ago she passed through Zürich on a European tour and spent a weekend with the Benzes. Anna had almost forgotten that. How did I almost forget that? And the girls from the old neighborhood. They’d not spoken in almost two decades, but they grew up with one another and their families had been friends. An unexpected phone call to one of them would barely merit a blink. Even perhaps Anna’s favorite teacher, the high school librarian who one day found Anna hiding in the stacks, Anna’s rotten inner dejection attempting to consume her. She blotted Anna’s tears and bought her a soda and said (Anna remembered this perfectly), Honey, you don’t ever need to feel as terrible as this, which, in that moment, was enough. Anna had kept in touch with her through college. She came to Anna’s p
arents’ funeral. She attended Anna’s wedding. It had been over a decade but she could call her, couldn’t she? Of course she could. Anna could call any of these women.

  But Anna’s phone was at the bottom of the lake. Calling, in any case, is hardly the same as confiding in. In most ways it was easier for Anna to bear her own burden than to share it. The effort she’d need to explain it was greater than the weight of the woe she’d be confessing, she told herself. Walling herself off circumvented the risk of real closeness between two people and the eventual, unavoidable loss that always accompanies love. Liberating herself from the concern of others served a sinister purpose as well. There were fewer people to whom Anna was accountable. It’s the easiest way to lie and not get caught: make yourself matter to no one.

  The lights pulsed pink again, then white, whiter, whitest. Anna really was alone. She’d orchestrated it herself. But the lie of all lies was that her solitude had been inevitable. Obligatory. Foreordained. All other falsehoods were just arms of that same starfish.

  The giant arrival board thwapped through a series of numbers as it updated itself. Anna looked at a station clock. In fifteen minutes she could catch a train to Dietlikon. Anna wasn’t ready for that. She cut through the station to the other side.

  Ten minutes after that, she crossed yet another of Zürich’s seemingly endless supply of bridges and bore north. All these goddamn bridges. The Doktor would say they symbolized transition, a journey from one state of being into another.

  Well, there it is, she said once more to herself. What a funny thing to have believed in, love.

  But it wasn’t love. It was a version of love. They are all versions of love. Ten minutes later she was at Nürenbergstrasse. She didn’t even toss Stephen’s house a single glance. She was cured of that.

  The last of the letters that Anna wrote but didn’t send to Stephen had been short: If it didn’t mean everything, it meant nothing. If I didn’t matter the most, I mattered the least. She’d hoped it wasn’t true when she wrote it. But now she knew it was. Still, she was glad she’d called, glad he’d answered. And glad that now she understood. Yes, Anna thought. I understand. Heart’s a muscle, not a bone. It doesn’t really break. But muscles can tear. She missed Charles with a desperation that had no name and would for as long as she lived. The rest of my life. And she regretted the fact of her misshapen marriage. All for what? Anna shrugged inside herself. Somehow it didn’t matter. In the space of a day and in the shadow of the shell of the pretense of love Anna had reconciled herself to herself: What’s been done cannot be undone. There was peace in that.

  It was near four thirty. It had taken her an hour and a half to cross the city. She’d reach Wipkingen at about the same time as the train going toward Dietlikon.

  Anna and Bruno’s first fight on Swiss soil had occurred on that platform. It was a week after the move and Anna hadn’t learned the trains. Bruno had asked her to meet him at Wipkingen station, but she missed the train they’d agreed she’d take. She took the next, but when she arrived Bruno was gone. She didn’t have a phone. She didn’t know how to get back home. So she did the only thing that could be done. She sat on a bench and wept.

  When Bruno arrived an hour later—he’d gone back to Dietlikon when she hadn’t shown up and returned to Wipkingen when he didn’t find her there—he was furious. She tried to explain but he huffed and grunted and grabbed her by the arm and told her they were late—for what she could no longer remember—and led her out of the station wordlessly. How angry he was that day. How angry he was last night.

  A heart doesn’t subdivide unless it has to, she’d said glibly to Doktor Messerli once. The Doktor had no response.

  What a day. Anna felt a present calm. As she neared the station she wondered how Bruno would explain her absence to Victor. He’ll tell him I’m on a trip, and then they’ll go for pizza. That was the most likely scenario. She began to miss Victor as dreadfully as she missed Charles. So many times she couldn’t help but love him less. And now, finally, it shamed her. Shame’s the shadow of love, she thought. And then she thought of Polly Jean and wondered if Stephen’s other daughter would resemble her. She hadn’t told him. She never would. Polly Jean would never know she had a sister.

  It had been a day of revelations. Of missed connections. Of hurt feelings. Delusions. Despairs. Bad behaviors. Had she done anything that couldn’t be taken back? Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes.

  She thought about Switzerland. Where a smile will give you away as an American. Where what isn’t taboo is de rigueur. Cold, efficient Switzerland. Where the women are comely and the men are well groomed and everyone wears a determined face. Switzerland. The roof of Europe. Glacier carved. Most beautiful where it is most uninhabitable. Switzerland with its twenty-six shipshape cantons. Industrious Switzerland. Novartis. Rolex. Nestlé. Swatch. So often was Zürich ranked as one of the world’s best cities. She thought about that, then conceded that if she hadn’t been so sad the last nine years she might have seen it. She wished upon Victor an attentive Swiss wife. She wished her daughter the freedom to leave, if she ever wanted to.

  And then she thought again that failsafes sometimes fail. Unsinkable ships land on the ocean floor and rockets don’t always survive reentry. Love is not a given. No one is promised a tomorrow. She had been wrong about every man she loved or said she loved. She’d been wrong about everything. She’d entered into her life in the middle of its story. She had confused herself with the actress who portrayed her.

  And she thought about predestination. How the sum of her days added up to this. The plot of her life had already been published. Everything is foreordained. All is predetermined. The things I do, I cannot help. Everything that will happen already has. What had she learned about verbs? In the past and future tenses, the verb came at the end. And in the present it followed the subject. Wherever she went it tailed her. She dragged it behind like a sack of stones.

  And she thought about Doktor Messerli, who, Anna was now sure, was wrong; the problem wasn’t that her bucket was empty, the problem was that it was full. So full it overbrimmed. So full and so heavy. Anna wasn’t strong enough to carry it. She’d have to pour it out. I’ve severed the serpent, Doktor! Look what I have done!

  She thought about the woods behind her house. She thought about the hill. She thought about her bench. She thought about Karl and Archie, but her consideration was cursory. She thought about Mary. It had been less than twenty-four hours since last she’d seen her, but Anna wished she were there now. She’d never before had a girlfriend she was close enough to miss. She tried to think about Edith but didn’t know what to think. She wondered what Ursula would say to the ladies in the Frauenverein, if anything at all. She thought about her mother and her father. So many terrible years since her father had loved her, since her mother had listened.

  She thought about Bruno. Who she had loved and didn’t love. But had loved. Who had loved her in return. I was a good wife, mostly.

  And she thought about fire.

  She reached the platform at Wipkingen station three minutes before the train. The day had depleted her. She was too tired to be anxious. This was new. But there was more. She had nothing left to worry about. What autonomy. It settled her. She stood at the center point of her own spiral and it was a fixed position. Anna was calm, guileless, and even-keeled. Let this not become me, she had prayed. But it had.

  She looked to the station clock. Then, to the tracks. Then, to the tunnel. Then, she closed her eyes.

  For the rest of the afternoon and well into the night, the city trains ran late.

  for my father, Jim Schulz

  1942–1999

  acknowledgments

  An ocean of appreciation to my first, best reader, Jessica Piazza, who wouldn’t let me quit this. And to my other readers: Emily Atkinson, Lisa Billington, Janna Lusk, Laureen Maartens, Neil Ellis Orts—love and thanks. And love.

  Merci vielmal to Stefan Deuchler, my chief source of all things Swiss.

  Much grati
tude to Gina Frangello for publishing a portion of this in The Nervous Breakdown.

  A thousand thank-yous to the dozens of others who shepherded me through the process of writing and editing: to my colleagues in the UCR Low Residency MFA program, especially Tod Goldberg, hand-holder and ledge-talker-downer extraordinaire, and Mark Haskell Smith, my fiction spirit guide and go-to for advice; to Nick Hanna, the first person to tell me to keep writing this story; to Michelle Halsall, Diplomate Jungian Analyst and counsel-giver of the highest order; to Susana Gardner and Andrea Grant, whose ex-pat friendships saved my life; to Sivert Høyem and Madrugada, whose music I wrote this book to, and whose songs have become, in my artistic consciousness, Anna’s songs; to Axel Essbaum, with whom I embarked upon the adventure of expatriation those many years ago; to Anna Tapsak, who let me grill her endlessly one evening about Swiss provincial life; and to Jill Baumgaertner, Reb Livingston, Cheryl Schneider, Jay Schulz, Louisa Spaventa, Becca Tyler, and Andrew Winer, whose friendships and encouragement I could never have managed without. Nor would I wish to.

  Unflagging appreciation to Sergei Tsimberov, who facilitated the early stages of this experience and whose eagle-eye editing is in part responsible for the book you read today.

  Immeasurable gratitude to my agent, Kathleen Anderson. There is no song that’s fervent enough to sing out how treasured she is to me.

  Colossal thanks as well to the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of this book was written under funding of a literature fellowship. The financial support was a godsend. The creative endorsement was a grace.

  Thanks of all thanks to my editor, David Ebershoff, who kept me on task and encouraged me despite my occasional frustrations and now-and-again moments of heavyheartedness. Thanks also to Denise Cronin and her entire, wonderful rights team. And to Caitlin McKenna for her comfort and assistance and to Beth Pearson for her wealth of patience. Thanks, in the end, to Random House. Everyone. How welcome you all have made me and Anna feel.