by Ursula Hegi
Dancing would get weight off him. Walking too. Simply moving around. He saw it with horses and dogs: they stored weight when inactive, shed it once they were exercised regularly. To think that he’d known all along. If he could do it for animals, he could do it for himself. Fortified by his conviction, he showered and dressed. During his noon break, he ate his two slices of rye and went for a walk around the block, past the shoe factory where Miss Garland had worked many years before he was born. Moments like this he loved her fiercely. More than he’d dared love his father whose example had felt so unattainable. Who’d usually seemed disappointed in him. While Miss Garland had accepted him as he was. As she would even now at this size. While he’d come to think of her as a nuisance. As a child he’d worshiped her, but she’d been far more loyal in her affection.
Three times he walked around the block.
Three times he passed the shoe factory, his stomach light with hunger.
Definitely on its way to becoming flat.
Yet, after spending the day famished, he could think of nothing but food. Couldn’t wait to get back home where, alone in his kitchen, he ate. And ate. Standing by the open refrigerator with tears on his face.
She came back that night. The instant before she switched on her bedside lamp, he awoke, and what he felt—rather than relief at her return—was dread at listening once again to her unburden herself of whatever man she had been with. She seemed to need those confessions before she could be close to him. Through half-closed lids he watched as she took one of her long-sleeved nightgowns from a drawer. Her body felt warm as she lay down next to him and tried to slip her arm beneath his neck as if this were an ordinary night, as if she had not been away. Reluctantly he raised his head. Let her pull him close.
“Tired?” As she kissed his forehead, he could feel her readying herself for her latest confession. “Robert?”
To stop her, he slipped her nightgown from her shoulders, closed his lips around one nipple the way she liked him to.
“Wait—Robert?”
He rubbed his thumb across her other nipple. When it stiffened, he ran his hand over the bunched up material of her nightgown—always keeps it on while making love—across the skin below her breasts where her ribs rose and fell. Her breath came faster as he stroked the slight rise of her belly where her nightgown had slipped up, where she was smooth and—Hands. Other men’s hands. Here. Touching her pale belly. Her thighs. Wide joints or slender fingers. Touching her. Here. Smooth hands or hands with hair curling up from the wrists—
“Why did you stop?” she whispered. “Robert?”
He wanted to break the hands of those men, snap them apart.
“What’s wrong?”
“I— I can’t fall asleep with you here.”
She pulled her nightgown down. Pushed her hair from her cheeks. Her skin was flushed. “Would you like me to get you a glass of water?”
“No.” He felt something rise in his chest that, he was sure, would make him dangerous if he let it, and he was suddenly afraid of what he was capable of.
“Please? What’s wrong, Robert?”
“I’m just… restless.” He didn’t have any idea what he was doing, only that he had to get away from her. Now. He got up, slipped his bathrobe over his pajamas. “I’ll sleep in the guest room.” For a moment he stood outside the door of the bedroom, listening for what he didn’t know, but he couldn’t hear anything beyond the rushing of his blood.
In the guest room, he pulled back the green bedspread. The sheets felt cold. Turning on his side, he drew his knees against his belly. Through the open curtains the full moon cast a whitish square on his floor. It filled the room with a frozen glow that made him shiver. He wished he could fall asleep, but when he finally did, he was awake soon after, heart beating too fast, and it took him a moment to remember where he was. The patch of moonlight had narrowed and shifted to a different section of the floor. When he woke up again, he heard the thumping of the percolator, the refrigerator door closing.
His tongue felt dry as he walked down the hallway in his bathrobe.
“Good morning.” Yvonne smiled at him from the stove and held out one arm to pull him in for a hug. The smell of coffee was everywhere as the black liquid shot against the glass bubble of the lid.
“Good morning.” His voice sounded hoarse.
“No kiss?”
He didn’t know what to do with his hands. Kept them along his sides. Large. Clumsy.
She came toward him. Kissed him on the lips. “You’re a grouch this morning, aren’t you?” She took a copper pan from a hook above the stove. “Let me make you some eggs.”
“No, thank you.”
“How about a bacon omelet?”
He stared at her. At best, she was a reluctant cook. Whenever she fixed anything at all, it was low in fat and starch and sugar and taste. And now she was offering him bacon? He almost said yes, just to watch her do it. “I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat something.” This from the woman who usually tried to stop him from eating.
“Cereal then.”
While she took the milk from the refrigerator, he filled a bowl with corn flakes. She sat down close to him, and he made himself lower his spoon, raise it to his mouth. Though he longed to hide his face against her neck and hear her say that she would not leave him again, he sat stiffly. Silently.
All day at the clinic he was distracted. Several times, he found people waiting for his answer to a question he hadn’t listened to. When he got home, Yvonne was playing dominos with Emma and Caleb. The three of them had baked cookies. Flown kites. It seemed so much easier for the children to let her back in. But he couldn’t bear the thought of being in bed with her. While she took her bath, he changed into the silk pajamas she’d given him for Christmas. Newspaper in his hands, he sat on the bed in the guest room, flipping pages without absorbing a word.
“Ready to go to sleep?” She stood by the open door, towel wrapped around her, shoulders still damp.
“I— I’m still reading.”
“Come on.” She extended one hand while the other clasped the towel in a knot above her breasts. “It’s getting late.”
In their bedroom he tried not to look as she took off the towel; yet, he couldn’t help seeing. Quickly he slipped into bed and lay on his side facing away from her. The beige and white stripes of the wallpaper seemed to narrow toward the base molding, but he knew that wasn’t so, that they ran in equally wide stripes from the ceiling to the floor.
The mattress shifted as Yvonne lay down and curved her body around his back. “Sleep tight.”
“You too,” he mumbled without changing his position. When her arm came around him and her hand rested on his chest, he drew in his belly, ashamed she’d notice how much bigger it was getting.
“Robert?” Her lips touched his neck.
He pressed his eyes shut.
“Robert?”
Though his body strained for her, he didn’t dare take on the risk of pleasing her. As her hand burned against his chest, he tried to pretend it was something else, a stone baked by the sun, a frying pan left on the stove, but it was still her skin against his, and even after her arm twitched and became heavier, he lay awake, afraid of her confession, afraid of how much he wanted her touch.
For weeks he worried about doing something that would make her leave again. Some nights he would have preferred to sleep in the guest room so he wouldn’t have to be so careful. Early one morning, while she still lay asleep next to him, lips open, breath light and even, it occurred to him that it had to do with power—her power to go away, his powerlessness to keep her home. Although their bodies didn’t touch, her warmth filled the gap between them, draped itself around his body, and for one moment—the briefest of moments—he wished that she would leave again.
He took to sleeping in the guest room whenever she was away. Less complicated, to lie in a bed made for one. He resolved to spend more time with his children, brought them home with
him after they’d eaten dinner upstairs with his mother, sent them to sleep in their own rooms, got up early to make breakfast for them. But then there’d be an evening when he’d arrive home to find Yvonne fixing chicken or pot roast or tuna, while the children watched, delighted with whatever treasures she’d brought them from this trip. There’d be a tie with seashells for Robert. A box made from seashells. A scarf with seashells for his mother who would be called down for dinner. A rarity, that invitation. Equally rare a dinner that wasn’t too dry. Chicken with lemon. Tuna with capers. A bit tangy. Like the sea? And his mother watching him across the table as if waiting for him to ban his wife from the house forever.
What he did instead was take Yvonne’s power away. Reverse it the evening of Emma’s tenth birthday after both children were asleep. While Yvonne was still reading in the living room, he undressed in the guest room and got into bed, pulling the blanket to his chest. When he heard her steps, he grabbed a book. Opened it. Tried to hold it steady.
Her steps paused outside his closed door. “Robert?” She knocked.
“Come in.”
A pulse beat between the fine bones at the base of her neck. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m getting used to this mattress.” He bent a page and closed the book, then wished he’d kept it open so he’d have something to look at. “Maybe I should,” he said, “you know … sleep in here from now on.”
She stood silently, neck taut, a frown between her eyebrows.
A corner of the book binding jabbed into his palm, and he grasped it tighter. “My clothes are in here anyhow, and it would be easier.”
She raised one hand as if to stop him, but instead she pushed it into the pocket of her bathrobe and started for the door. “Sleep tight, Robert.”
“Wait—”
She turned.
What he wanted to say was, “Wait, I’m coming with you.” But instead, he forced himself to say, “Don’t forget to close the door.”
In the dark, he lay with his arms crossed beneath his head, listening to the bath water running, to her body lowering itself into the tub. He could picture her in the water, hair piled on top of her head so it won’t get wet, a few black strands clinging to her neck, shoulders submerged, hands soaping her arms, around her breasts, between her legs—
But this time he’d been the one to send her away.
1957–1968
As long as he feared her disappearances, she returned to him as if drawn by his fear; but when he finally knew to expect the pattern of her returns, she didn’t come back for two entire months. And four days.
While he was left with dreams in which she walked toward him.
Dreams in which he was slender with hair so full it covered his forehead.
Every morning he drove to his clinic with fantasies of her return: it would happen when he didn’t expect it, of that he was sure. He’s vaccinating Mrs. West’s basset hound while his receptionist whispers to him that Yvonne is in the waiting room…. He comes home to find her on the front steps of the Wasserburg, wearing a flared dress he’s never seen on her before….
But this absence of hers, the longest of them all, was to be the last because the day after her return, she felt an ache in her lower back, at first just a flutter not unlike the first time she’d felt her babies stir inside her womb, a flutter certainly not troublesome enough to lie down for, as Robert suggested. But she humored him and stretched out on her pale sofa while he applied compresses, alternating between ice packs and damp heat the way he would treat a horse, and she turned herself over to these knowing hands as if indeed she were an animal, all instinct, all body.
By the following morning a stiffness had settled in her back that made it uncomfortable to stand or sit. When it seeped into other parts of her body, Robert postponed his appointments and stayed with her until Caleb and Emma got home from school and could look after her. His mother brought dinner, four bowls wrapped into dishtowels that she’d knotted on top so that she was able to carry those bundles at once. Colorless, Yvonne thought when she saw the chicken and potatoes, the peas and string beans with all the green boiled out of them. But it moved her, made her feel grateful how Robert and the children and even his mother sat around her bed to eat dinner. Family. That feeling of gratitude seized her once more in the morning when Robert prepared her breakfast before leaving for the clinic.
It was like that the next day. And the day that followed. After several weeks had passed, Robert noticed something odd: by feeding Yvonne, he required less nourishment himself. Gradually, his body took on a different shape. What helped, of course, was that if he ate a large meal, he knew how to get rid of it. It was simple. Close the bathroom door and keep the water running so that no one would hear.
Yvonne stopped going anywhere alone, waiting for him to accompany her, one of his arms steadying her waist. He moved back into their bedroom, made sure she had her water and medicine before he went to sleep. Torn between keeping her home and wanting her to get better, he took her to a neurologist, an orthopedic surgeon, a chiropractor, and when they couldn’t find anything wrong, he drove her to the lingerie shop where she bought seven lacetrimmed peignoir sets as though she’d accepted that her bed had become her habitat and wanted to reside there with the appropriate wardrobe.
At least now she can’t leave me.
She began to subscribe to the local paper, became interested in charitable causes, and wrote out generous checks for a newborn needing a lifesaving operation, a family destitute after the father died from cancer. She made a planning book of decorating ideas she cut from catalogs. Items arrived by mail: clothing; towels; massage oils; records; dishes.
Whenever Robert resented their shrinking finances and his increased duties, he’d remind himself that she was not well, and he’d try to be more compassionate. He’d offer to rub her back even though her skin would release the knowledge of other men into his hands; and when she’d sigh and close her eyes, he’d feel certain she was retreating into those memories.
Emma and Caleb quickly adapted to the pattern of their mother’s illness—far more predictable than the pattern of her absences. When they came home from school, Emma would pour her mother a glass of white grape juice and tiptoe into the big bedroom where Caleb already sat on the edge of their mother’s bed. She’d drink her juice while listening to them tell her about school. Though always pleased when they came to her, she’d soon be ready for them to run upstairs to their grandmother.
While Emma found her solace within the Wasserburg, Caleb liked to roam, taking images of the house with him. He’d stroll through town, hike to the cemetery, or head to the Royal Theater where the matron used to chase his father and Uncle Tobias decades ago, where kids still poured soap into the lobby fountain, and where he’d sit spellbound and watch stories unfold on the screen. Later, he’d retell those stories to Emma. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Blackboard Jungle. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Sometimes the two of them would sit on the dock, taking turns with the I-am game that Caleb made up as they talked. I am a cup, a wave, a tree. Becoming. Being. I am a cup: A while ago I was full of tea, warm, but now I’m half empty, cooled down, a brown ring left inside. While sun warmed them from above. I am a wave: I curl myself up, run onto the sand as far as I can, retreat before the sand can pull me down. While the breeze that rose through the wooden slats cooled them. I am moss hanging from the trees in the cemetery.…
What Emma didn’t tell her brother about was the game she played without him, the game that took her into stores where she got presents for Opa. The first time had been in Magill’s one day after school when she’d stepped inside from the cold rain, blinking at the lights. At least it was warm in here. Dry. A woman with a baby stroller came toward her, and as Emma stepped aside to let her pass, her arm banged against a counter with a display of ties. One had a geometric pattern in the golden browns Opa liked. Testing the softness of the tie—silk, is it silk?—between her thumb and forefinger, Emma glanced around: an elderly
couple passed through the aisle behind her; a clerk, tall with skin stretched over sharp features, was fitting a suit jacket on a customer; two women stood talking by the jewelry counter. No one looked in her direction. Breath quick and light in her throat, she slipped the tie into the pocket of her raincoat, and though she felt like running from the store, she made herself walk slowly toward the exit, even stopped in the luggage department where she opened and closed the zipper on a leather suitcase as if she were interested in buying it. “For when I go to Germany,” she planned to say if anyone were to ask her. As she saw herself moving toward the mirror by the door—taller somehow and older—she adjusted her ponytail and turned up her collar.
It became her game alone. Choosing the perfect moment, the perfect treat for Opa. Thoughts on nothing but what she was about to do, she’d walk through brightly lit aisles, prolonging the minutes before she’d take something, turning them into white-hot time that burned through all longing, all pain. One fist in her pocket around the treat, she would walk home. After sneaking the key to the roof from Oma’s china cabinet, she’d scale the ladder to the dusty wooden platform above the elevator, hide the treat inside Opa’s old wooden toolbox, and sit down on it, leaning into the hazy-warm breath of the house. And if she was patient and lucky, she’d hear Opa’s voice below the familiar hum and whisper-flick of bolts and wires and chains, below the wheeze of the elevator.
That winter, as Yvonne’s backache became a part of her—dull and constant—it was the awareness of it that troubled her more than the pain itself, an awareness that this pain, quite likely, would always be there and keep her home. In an odd way, the pain got between her and the urgency to burn or cut herself. She didn’t have to because her body was doing it for her, giving her the release that pain offered—and without leaving scars.
But it was obvious that the tenants didn’t think she was ill: she could tell by their questions about her health that they saw her as a spoiled woman, a useless woman. Just because her suffering did not disfigure her, they assumed she was pretending. They’d probably picked up that attitude from her mother-in-law. Not that Helene ever said anything like that—no, she was helpful, showing off her hard work just to make Yvonne feel useless.
