Hausfrau

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  And so they moved to Dietlikon. It was close enough to Zürich to be serviced by two city trains. It was near a large shopping center. Its roads were safe and its houses were well kept and the town’s motto held great promise. It was printed on the website and on pamphlets. It was posted on the sign in front of the Gemeinde, and noted on the first page of the Kurier, Dietlikon’s small weekly newspaper: Menschlich, offen, modern. Personal. Open. Modern. Anna poured all optimism into those three words.

  Dietlikon was also Bruno’s hometown. His Heimatort. The place to which the prodigal returned. Anna was twenty-eight. Bruno at thirty-four strode effortlessly back into his native space. Easy enough to do—Ursula lived just a short walk away on Klotenerstrasse in the house in which she raised Bruno and his sister Daniela. Oskar, Bruno’s father, was over a decade dead.

  Bruno argued a good case. Living in Dietlikon would merit their children (We’re having more? Are you sure? They hadn’t even really deliberated the first) a wholesome, unbounded childhood, safe and stable. Once she settled into the idea of it (and after Bruno swore that all future children would be discussed prior to their conception), Anna was able to concede the move’s virtues. So when it did happen, rarely in those first months, that she grew lonesome or wistful for people, things, or places she never dreamed she would miss, she consoled herself by imagining the baby’s face. Will I have a ruddish-cheeked Heinz to call me Mueti? A Heidi of my own with blond and braided hair? And Bruno and Anna were, more or less, in love.

  THE QUALIFICATION “MORE OR less” troubled Doktor Messerli.

  Anna explained. “Is that not always the case? Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less. Right?”

  AT EIGHT, VICTOR WAS Anna’s eldest child. Charles was six. They were indeed the ruddish-toned, milk-fed children Anna had imagined. They were ash blond and hazel eyed. They were all boy, rowdy, absolutely brothers, and without a doubt the sons of the man Anna had married.

  “BUT YOU HAD MORE children, yes? It must not have been entirely terrible.”

  Of course not. It hadn’t been terrible at all. Not always. Not everything had not always been terrible. Anna doubled her negatives, tripled them. Ten months earlier Anna had given birth to a black-haired, bisque-skinned daughter whom she named Polly Jean.

  And so they were the Benz family and they lived in the town of Dietlikon, in the district of Bülach, in the canton of Zürich. The Benzes: Bruno, Victor, Charles, Polly, Anna. A plain and mostly temperate household who lived on a street called Rosenweg—Rose Way—a private road that cul-de-sacked directly in front of their house, which itself lay at the foot of a slow, sloping hill that crested a half kilometer behind their property and leveled off at the base of the Dietlikon woods.

  Anna lived on a dead end, last exit road.

  But the house was nice and their yard was larger than nearly all the other ones around them. There were farmhouses to their immediate south, whose properties abutted fields of corn, sunflower, and rapeseed. Eight fully mature Apfelbäume grew in their side yard and in August when the trees were pregnant with ripe, heavy apples, fruit tumbled from the branches to the ground in a thump-tha-thump-thump rhythm that was nearly consistent with light rainfall. They had raspberry bushes and a strawberry patch and red currants and black currants both. And while the vegetable garden in the side yard was generally left untended, the Benzes enjoyed, behind a thigh-high picket fence in front of their property, a spate of rosebushes, blooms of every shade. Everything comes up roses on Rosenweg. Sometimes Anna thought this to herself.

  Victor and Charles barreled through the front door. They were greeted before they passed through the boot room by a dour-faced Ursula pressing her finger to her lips. Your sister’s asleep!

  Anna was grateful for Ursula—really she was. But Ursula, who was usually never blatantly unkind to Anna, still treated her as a foreign object, a means to the end of her son’s happiness (if indeed “happy” was the word for what Bruno was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn’t) and the vessel by which her grandchildren—whom she deeply loved—were carried into the world. The help that Ursula offered was for the children’s sake, not Anna’s. She had been a high school English teacher for thirty years. Her English was stilted but fluent and she conceded to speak it whenever Anna was in the room, which sometimes Bruno didn’t even do. Ursula shooed her grandsons into the kitchen for a snack.

  “I’m taking a shower,” Anna said. Ursula raised an eyebrow but then lowered it as she followed Victor and Charles into the kitchen. It was no concern of hers. Anna took a towel from the linen closet and locked the bathroom door behind her.

  She needed the shower. She smelled like sex.

  2

  “WHAT CAN’T YOU LIVE WITHOUT?”

  This, Anna asked Archie as they shared, incautiously, a cigarette in bed. Anna didn’t smoke. She was wrapped in a top sheet. It was Friday.

  “Whiskey and women,” Archie said. “In that order.”

  Archie was a whiskey man. Literally. He stocked it, stacked it, and sold it in a shop he owned with his brother, Glenn.

  He laughed in an up-for-interpretation way. Archie and Anna were new lovers, green lovers, ganz neue Geliebte. Nearly virgin to each other, they still had reason to touch. Archie was ten years older than Anna, but his brown-red curls had not yet begun to thin and his body was taut. Anna responded to his laughter with laughter of her own: the sad, empty laughter of knowing that the newness, nice as it was, wouldn’t last. Novelty’s a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate. So Anna would enjoy it prior to its tattering. Because tatter it surely would.

  “IF,” DOKTOR MESSERLI ASKED, “you are miserable, then why not leave?”

  Anna spoke without reflection. “I have Swiss children. They belong to their father as much as to me. We are married. I’m not really miserable.” Then she added, “He wouldn’t accept a divorce.”

  “You have asked him.” This wasn’t a question.

  Anna had not asked Bruno for a divorce. Not directly. She had, however, in her most affected and despondent moments, hinted around the possibility. What would you do if I went away? she’d ask. What if I went away and never came back? She would pose these questions in a hypothetical, parenthetically cheerful voice.

  Bruno would smirk. I know you’ll never leave because you need me.

  Anna couldn’t deny this. She absolutely needed him. It was true. And honestly Anna had no plans to leave. How would we split the children? she wondered, as if the children were a cord of wood and the divorce an axe.

  “Anna,” Doktor Messerli asked, “is there someone else? Has there ever been anyone else?”

  The lunch hour folded into early afternoon. Archie and Anna shared a plate of cheese, some greengage plums, a bottle of mineral water. Then they set everything aside and fucked again. Archie came in her mouth. It tasted like school paste, starchy and thick. This is a good thing I am doing, Anna said inside herself, though “good” was hardly the right word. Anna knew this. What she meant was expedient. What she meant was convenient. What she meant was wrong in nearly every way but justifiable as it makes me feel better, and for so very long I have felt so very, very bad. Most accurately it was a shuffled combination of all those meanings trussed into one unsayable something that gave Anna an illicit though undeniable hope.

  But all things move toward an end.

  That night, after she had put the children to bed and washed the dinner plates and scoured the sink to the unimpeachable shine that Bruno demanded (Doktor Messerli asked “Is he truly that much an ogre?” to which Anna responded no, which translated as sometimes), Anna spread her notebooks on the table and began her German exercises. She’d fallen behind. Bruno was locked in his office. Separate solitudes were not an unusual arrangement between them, and Bruno retreated to his office most nights. Left alone, Anna would either read or watch television or put on a jacket and take an evening walk up the hill behind the house.

  The house, when Anna was alone i
nside it, often assumed a pall of unbearable, catatonic stillness. Has it always been like this? Anna would be lying if she’d said it had. They’d shared good times, Bruno and she. It would be unfair to deny it. And even if he barely tolerated what he called her “melancholic huffs” or her “sullen temperaments,” Bruno too, if pressed, would have admitted a love and fondness for Anna that, while often displaced by frustration, held an irrefutable honor in his heart.

  IT WAS JUST THE previous Monday that Anna steeled and sent herself to school for the first time since college. The class at the Migros Klubschule was called German for Advanced Beginners. This was the course intended for anyone pre-equipped with a minor to moderate knowledge of the language but who lacked a rigorous understanding of grammar and a nuanced usage of syntax.

  Migros is the name of the largest chain of supermarkets in Switzerland and Switzerland’s biggest employer. More people work for Migros than any Swiss bank worldwide. But Migros is bigger than supermarkets alone. There are Migros-owned bookshops, Migros-owned gas stations, Migros-owned electronics outlets, sports stores, furniture dealers, menswear shops, public golf courses, and currency exchanges. Migros also governs a franchise of adult education centers. There isn’t a Swiss city of significant population where at least one Migros Klubschule doesn’t exist. And it’s not just language classes they offer. You can study most anything at the Migros Klubschule: cooking, sewing, knitting, drawing, singing. You can learn to play an instrument or how to read the future with tarot cards. You can even learn how to interpret dreams.

  DOKTOR MESSERLI, AT THE onset of Anna’s analysis, asked Anna to pay attention to her dreams. “Write them down,” the Doktor instructed. “I want you to write them down and bring them to our meetings and we will discuss them.”

  Anna protested. “I don’t dream.”

  The Doktor was undeterred. “Nonsense. Everyone dreams. Even you.”

  Anna brought a dream to her next appointment: I am sick. I beg Bruno for help but he won’t give it. Someone films a movie in another room. I am not in it. A dozen teenage girls kill themselves for the camera. I don’t know what to do so I do nothing.

  Doktor Messerli arrived at an immediate interpretation. “It’s a sign of stagnancy. The movie’s being made and you’re not in it. This is why the girls do not survive. The girls are you. You are the girls. You do not survive. You are ill with inaction, a patron sitting passively in a dark theater.”

  Anna’s passivity. The hub from which the greater part of her psychology radiated. Everything came down to a nod, an acquiescence, a Yes, dear. Anna was aware of this. It was a trait she’d never bothered to question or revise, which, through the lens of a certain desiccated poignancy, seemed to be its proof. Anna was a swinging door, a body gone limp in the arms of another body carrying it. An oarless ocean rowboat. Am I as assailable as that? Yes, it sometimes seemed. I have no knack for volition. My backbone’s in a brace. It’s the story of my life. And it was. The very view from her kitchen window looked out upon it. Triangulated by the street and the apple trees and the path that led up the hill an invisible marquee flashed over a secret door that led into that same dark theater she dreamed of. Anna didn’t need to see it to know it was there. The titles changed but the films were all of a sort. One week it was You Could Speak Up, Have Your Say!, the next it was You’re No Victim, You’re an Accomplice. And Not Choosing Is Still a Choice was held over for years.

  Then there were the children. Anna hadn’t longed to be a mother. She didn’t yearn for it that way other women do. It terrified her. I’m to be responsible for another person? A tiny, helpless, needy person? Still, Anna got pregnant. And then again and then again. It seemed to just happen. She never said Let’s do this and she never said Let’s not. Anna didn’t say anything at all. (Nor in this case, did Bruno. That discussion regarding future progeny? It never happened.)

  But it wasn’t as terrible as she’d feared and for the most part and for most of the time, Anna was glad to be someone’s mother. Anna loved her children. She loved all her children. Those beautiful Swiss children that a firmer-footed Anna would never have known. So Anna’s passivity had merit. It was useful. It made for relative peace at the house on Rosenweg. Allowing Bruno to make decisions on her behalf absolved her of responsibility. She didn’t need to think. She followed along. She rode a bus that someone else drove. And Bruno liked driving it. Order upon order. Rule upon rule. Where the wind blew, she went. This was Anna’s natural inclination. And like playing tennis or dancing a foxtrot, or speaking a foreign language, it grew even easier with practice. If Anna suspected there was more to her pathology, then that was a secret she kept very close.

  “WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN passivity and neutrality?”

  “Passivity is deference. To be passive is to relinquish your will. Neutrality is nonpartisan. The Swiss are neutral, not passive. We do not choose a side. We are scales in perfect balance.” Doktor Messerli spoke with something that might have been pride in her voice.

  “Not choosing. Is that still a choice?”

  Doktor Messerli opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind.

  ANNA SAT AT THE dining table for almost a half hour fumbling through homework before Bruno emerged from his office like a marmot from a burrow. He came to the table, yawned, and rubbed his eyes. Anna saw their sons in that gesture. “How’s the class?” Bruno asked. Anna couldn’t recall the last time Bruno asked after her. She surged with a momentary affection for him and reached around his waist with her arms and tried to draw him closer into her. But Bruno—impervious or obstinate—did not respond in kind. He reached down and rifled through her papers. Anna dropped her arms.

  Bruno picked up a page of exercises and gleaned it for accuracy. “Du hast hier einen Fehler,” he said in a voice he intended to be helpful, but one that Anna interpreted as condescending. She had made a mistake. “This verb goes at the end,” Bruno said. He was right. In both the future and the past tense, the action comes at the end. It is only in the present tense that the verb is joined to the noun that enacts it. Bruno returned her work absently. “I’m going to bed.” He didn’t bend to kiss her. Bruno shut the bedroom door behind him and went to sleep.

  Anna lost all interest in her exercises.

  She checked the wall clock. It was after eleven but she wasn’t tired.

  “A DREAM IS A psychic statement,” Doktor Messerli explained. “The more frightening the dream, the more pressing the need to look at that part of yourself. Its purpose is not to destroy you. It simply fulfills its compulsory task in a highly unpleasant manner.” And then she added, “The less attention you pay, the more terrifying the nightmares become.”

  “And if you ignore them?”

  Doktor Messerli’s face took on a cast of gravity. “Psyche will be heard. She demands it. And there are other, more threatening ways of capturing your attention.”

  Anna didn’t ask what those were.

  THAT LATE IN THE evening, most of the houses on Rosenweg were entirely dark, their inhabitants already asleep. It took years for Anna to become habituated to this, how Switzerland, machine that it is, powered down at night. Shops closed. People slept when they were meant to. In the States if you couldn’t or didn’t want to sleep, you could always shop at a twenty-four-hour supermarket, wash clothes at a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, eat pie and drink coffee at a twenty-four-hour diner. The television networks ran viewable programming the entire night. So much never shut off. Lights always burned somewhere. It was an insomniac’s solace.

  DOKTOR MESSERLI ASKED ABOUT Anna’s insomnia. How long had she suffered, how it presented. How she curbed it. Anna had no real answer and instead replied, “Sleep won’t solve my situation.” Even to Anna’s ears it sounded canned.

  WHEN ANNA STEPPED OUTSIDE, the porch lamp, sensitive to motion, flickered on. The front steps led to the driveway. The driveway opened up to the street. The playground in the yard of the Kirchgemeindehaus was across the way. Anna crossed the street and stepped
over a small wooden fence and took a seat on a wooden swing intended for very young children. She was uneasy and perturbed and the night air was just damp enough to be cruel.

  Even Anna would admit she prowled Dietlikon’s streets too often in the dark hours. In her second month in the country, Bruno woke in the middle of the night and Anna was gone. She wasn’t in the house or the attic or the yard. He ran outside and called for her. When she didn’t answer, he called the Polizei. My wife is gone! My wife is pregnant! The officers came to the house and asked insinuating questions and swapped readable looks. Had they fought recently? Did she take anything with her? What was their marriage like? Did he know if she’d been seeing anyone? Bruno screwed his face into a question mark and forced his fists into his pockets. She is pregnant and it’s two A.M.! By the time he steered them from that line of questioning Anna had come home. She’d barely crossed the threshold when Bruno threw himself around her as if she were a soldier back from battle. One policeman said something low and curt in Schwiizerdütsch that Anna didn’t understand. Bruno answered with a grunt. The officers left.

  When they were alone and out of earshot, Bruno dug his fingers into Anna’s shoulders and shook her. Who are you fucking? Who were you with? She’d embarrassed him in front of the policemen. No one, Bruno—never! I swear! Bruno cursed at her and called her a whore and a cunt. Who did you suck off? Whose cock was in your mouth? Nobody’s, Bruno, I swear! That was the truth. Anna and Bruno were in a version of love and Anna had gone for a walk because she couldn’t sleep. It was just a walk! That’s it! And whose cock would it have been, in any case? This she thought but did not say. It took almost an hour, but Bruno finally came to believe her. Or said he did.