Hausfrau

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  “Why are you here, Mami? Who was that man?”

  Anna ignored the second question. “I’m here to take you home, Schatz,” she said, then turned to Frau Kopp for corroboration. “It’s okay, yes?” Frau Kopp gave an almost imperceptible nod. By then the children’s attention had shifted from Anna and Archie to the baboon with the erection. They howled with laughter until Frau Kopp settled them down and ushered them toward the penguins. It was almost feeding time and a zookeeper had promised the children they could watch. Charles looked perplexed. “Do you want to get an Eis?” Anna’s mind tap-danced around ways to distract him from what he’d seen, and Charles loved ice cream and would eat it every day if Anna allowed it. “Green?” he asked. Anna forced a grin. “Of course!” Pistachio was his favorite. Charles hopped up and down and Anna took his left hand and led him away while with his right he waved goodbye in the direction of his classmates, who were by then entirely focused on the penguins they would soon watch being fed.

  Anna and Charles took the bus, then the tram to Stadelhofen and at a Mövenpick shop near the station she bought her son a small cup of pistachio ice cream, which he ate in the store. Anna chattered the entire time. She left no space in conversation to let Charles speak. Charles, deferential as he was, gave over to his mother’s babbling. For his meekness, Anna was grateful.

  Charles finished his ice cream and Anna suggested they go watch the trains. Charles grinned and Anna took his hand and led him from the Mövenpick to the train station, and up the stairs, to the gallery-like walkway that overlooked Stadelhofen’s open-air train tracks. From above, they watched several trains pull in and roll out, including an S5 on its way to Uster, the train Mary most often rode in and out of the city. The promenade above the tracks was supported by angular steel ribs spaced at even intervals along the entire walkway. Anna thought the effect Jonah-like. This is torture in the belly of a fish. Charles answered with a great deal of animation when Anna asked about the animals he’d seen that day. He rambled on about lions and black bears and flamingos and hippopotami for several minutes, but after a while, the imminent question resurfaced.

  “Who was that man?”

  “What man, Charles?”

  “The man you were kissing. I saw you kissing a man.”

  Anna feigned surprise, tried to tease him. “Really? How strange! I think you’re making that up, Charles. I wasn’t kissing anyone.” This wasn’t entirely a lie. It was Archie who kissed her. Anna felt like an ass, relying on the childish logic of exactitude.

  Charles had none of it. “I saw him!” He was deeply upset.

  Anna stiffened. “Charles.” Her voice was firm and stern. It was a tone she never used with him and one, therefore, he was unaccustomed to hearing. He tensed visibly. “Charles,” she repeated. “You didn’t see a thing.” Charles’s eyes dilated. He tried to look away. “Listen to me.” Anna snapped her fingers and drew his attention back to her face. “Did you hear me? I said you didn’t see anything. And you are not to tell anyone you did. Do you understand?” Charles didn’t answer. Anna took his face in both her hands and turned it straight to face her own. It was something she’d seen angry mothers do. Her voice was pinched. “Do you understand?” Charles blinked. Her words were hot and hushed. “Listen to me. I am telling you for the last time that you made a mistake. Don’t make me say it again.” Charles whimpered. “You don’t tell anyone. Not Papi or Victor or Max or Grosi. If you do I will be so angry.” Anna nodded gravely for effect. “I’ll tell them you’re lying and they’ll be angry too. I’m the mother. They’ll believe me.” Charles started to cry. Anna shook her head. “Charles, I mean it. Unless you want something bad to happen, you need to be quiet. Don’t even say you saw me at the zoo.” And then she added, “Don’t tell anyone we came to watch the trains.”

  Whatever Anna had intended, it seemed to work. Charles looked grave and terrified. He sniffed and he shook and eked out a nearly inaudible okay. Anna was satisfied. She didn’t need to elaborate. She left Charles to imagine what those really bad things might be. She knew her son. She knew he’d never say a word. She’d never been cruel like this before.

  “C’mon. Let’s go home.” Anna stood up, slung her bag over her shoulder, and brushed her hands on the top of her thighs. Charles turned back toward her and she put her arm around him and squeezed him against her hip in a protective, loving way. This seemed to comfort him and together they crossed the bridge that would lead them down the stairs to the platform.

  They’d just passed the midway point when Anna startled herself with a memory. “Wait, come here.” Anna stopped, knelt, grabbed Charles’s hands and turned her son to face her. “Do you remember the first time we went to Tante Mary’s house? The first time you met Max?” Charles hesitated. Was this a trick? Was this, like the kiss he did not see, a memory he didn’t recall? “No, it’s okay. Tell me. Do you remember?” Charles gave a cautious nod. “Do you remember when you came downstairs and Max told everyone you’d told him a secret?” Once more, Charles nodded, then let his gaze fall to the floor of the walkway. “Good boy. Now tell me what the secret was.” It was a paranoiac’s question. She was afraid that his secret was one of her own. “Tell me.”

  Charles shuffled slowly foot to foot. “I told Max that I thought Marlies Zwygart was pretty.” His whole body flushed with embarrassment. Anna’s ring tightened on her finger. She’d never felt so awful in her life.

  THE FIVE MOST FREQUENTLY used German verbs are all irregular. Their conjugations don’t follow a pattern: To have. To have to. To want. To go. To be. Possession. Obligation. Yearning. Flight. Existence. Concepts all. And irregular. These verbs are the culmination of insufficiency. Life is loss. Frequent, usual loss. Loss doesn’t follow a pattern either. You survive it only by memorizing how.

  ANNA WATCHED CHARLES VERY closely that night. And the next night. And the one after that. She kept a vigilant eye on him until she was sure that he hadn’t and he wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened at the zoo. By the third night she started to relax. He’d never once disobeyed her—why would this time be any different? There was no cause to believe that it would.

  What else could I have done? Anna rationalized.

  That night after the children were in bed she knocked on Bruno’s office door.

  “Are you going for a walk?” he asked. He didn’t look away from the computer screen.

  “No.” It was a fair-enough assumption. Most usually that was what Anna came to his office to tell him at this late hour. It sank her heart a little, Bruno thinking that’s the only reason Anna would ever knock upon his door. It sank a little more, she conceding that it most often was.

  “Did you need something?”

  She had interrupted him watching online videos of the Schweizer Luftwaffe, the Swiss Air Force. Earlier in the afternoon, the Benzes had heard from inside the house the matchless sound of supersonic jets slicing through the sky. An air show? Flying practice? General maneuvers? Unclear. The noise was tremendous. The whole family went outside to watch. Polly Jean didn’t like it one bit. Anna held her tightly against her body and covered her ears. Victor and Charles were captivated, then alarmed. How fast they flew! How close they came to each other! Charles reached for Anna’s hand, and when one of the planes executed a barrel roll right above the house, Victor threw his arms around his mother’s legs. That was unforeseen. In light of the week’s troubles Anna welcomed any request for consolation.

  Anna didn’t like the planes. The noise hurt her ears and she was terrified by how low they flew to the ground. They’re just one sneeze away from crashing through an attic, Anna thought. Bruno, however, was transfixed. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. As a boy he’d been as fascinated by airplanes as Charles was by trains. After ten minutes Anna, Polly, and the boys went back into the house. Bruno stayed outside the whole half hour, wide-eyed and watching so intensely that one might think he believed that it was his vigilance alone that kept the planes in the air.

  The monitor’s volume
was turned almost as high as it could go. He’d waived his own excessive noise rule. The same cutthroat roar that frightened Anna earlier sliced through the office atmosphere.

  “Do you believe in God?” Anna looked at Bruno’s bookshelves. The books were arranged alphabetically and by subject.

  “Huh?” Bruno paused the video and turned to look at his wife. “Where’s this come from?”

  Anna pointed at his monitor. “I was thinking about the planes today.” She moved her gaze to the wall where, affixed by sticky putty that, if removed, would not leave a mark, hung several drawings the boys had done. Victor liked to draw animals. Charles, of course, trains.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Anna wasn’t sure she did either. The correspondence had made perfect, poignant sense in her head just a moment earlier. Now, as she spoke it aloud, her words became minor and inept. She sounded deranged. “That noise they made.” She searched for the clearest explanation. “It sounded like they were cutting open the sky.” Bruno’s face was rimpled, harried. Anna let all current semblance of logic and composure go. “What do you think is on the other side of the sky?”

  “The sky doesn’t have another side, Anna.”

  “No, I mean … Bruno, do you believe in God?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Really?” She didn’t know what she expected him to say. Any answer would have surprised her.

  “Don’t you?”

  Anna’s shrug told the truth.

  Bruno shrugged back at her. “If there isn’t a God then what’s the point of anything? Without God, what matters?”

  Anna didn’t know. She said so.

  “Without God, nothing matters. But Anna? Things matter.” He said it in a way that was meant to school her.

  “Do you believe in destiny? Salvation? Do you believe that we can save ourselves?”

  Bruno shook his head as if to say Why the fuck are we talking about this? “My father believed that we are broken people who live in a broken world. I believe that too. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a God. It just means we aren’t him.” Bruno cleared his throat. “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  Bruno turned back to the screen. “Enjoy your walk.” He’d forgotten that Anna said she wasn’t taking one. She didn’t correct him.

  “HOUSE FIRES ARE ALMOST always preventable,” Stephen said, though Anna already knew it. “But under certain circumstances, probable.”

  “Like?” She played along with this lecture.

  “Smoking in bed, of course. Cooking. The unsupervised burning of candles.”

  “You sound like a fireman, not a scientist.”

  Stephen shrugged. “Fire is fire.”

  Yes, Anna thought. And it is never safe.

  “A PERSON CAN BE fully conscious and still make terrible choices. Consciousness doesn’t come with an automatic ethic.”

  They had been discussing Anna’s most recent dream. It began in the grocery store, where so much of Anna’s life took place. Her basket was full, but when she got to the checkout, she realized she didn’t have any money. She told the cashier she’d return the items to the shelf but when Anna went into the aisle with the basket she hid as much of the food as she could in her pockets. She knew it wasn’t right but didn’t care. Outside the store she stopped a man who was on his way in and told him what she’d done; she was proud of it. He was shocked and threatened to call the police. Anna said she’d give him a blowjob if he didn’t. They went behind the grocery store. Across the alleyway, the local high school. Anna knelt and gave him head while students watched from a classroom window. In order to keep them from telling anyone what they had witnessed, Anna lifted up her shirt and showed them her breasts, which, in the dream, were leaking milk. The dream ended at the bus stop. She may or may not have boarded the right bus, she couldn’t remember.

  “You do nothing in this dream that isn’t the commission of some sort of crime—theft, adultery, exhibition …”

  Anna interrupted. “You can’t seriously judge someone against what she does in her sleep. I can’t help what I dream.”

  “That’s not entirely true, Anna. What we dream, we are.”

  Anna frowned. There was nothing of this conversation she liked.

  Doktor Messerli didn’t pull her punch. “You recognize each consequence. You do the damage anyway. The dream is emphatic: you’re spinning out of control.”

  17

  EVERY FEW WEEKS AND SOMETIMES MORE OFTEN THAN THAT, the Benzes would receive in the postbox affixed to the wall outside their front door a notice printed on a half-size sheet of white paper, bordered in a bold black line. They were death announcements. Ein Bestattungsanzeige. The postman delivered them along with the mail whenever a Dietlikon resident died. It was a small-town courtesy, not a typical Swiss practice. The notices began with the decedent’s name and then below that, his or her birth and death dates. They ended with information about the funeral.

  Anna saved every death notice they received. She kept them in a shoebox in her Kleiderschrank. She had collected at least three hundred of them over the span of nine years. When Bruno found the shoebox, he threatened to throw it away. “You have an unhealthy fixation on death,” he said.

  Anna was emphatic in a way she usually wasn’t. “Don’t you dare. I keep these because someone has to. The worst thing that can happen to a person is to be forgotten.”

  “That’s not the worst thing, Anna.”

  “Don’t touch this box. I’m telling you.”

  ANNA AVOIDED GERMAN CLASS for two days. She dreaded looking Archie in the eye.

  As angry as she was with herself, she was equally furious with him. She knew her indignation was unreasonable (Was it? It was Archie who swooped in and kissed her when she wasn’t asking for it, Archie who showed up at the party, Archie who propositioned her in the first place) but the haughtiness was serving the purpose of keeping Anna focused on the present task of behaving herself. Resentment was her arsenal’s secret weapon. When Mary called Tuesday afternoon, Anna gave an excuse that resembled the truth: that the exhaustion of the party caught up with her a day late and she needed rest. Mary volunteered to drop over with notes but Anna told her not to bother. So Anna stayed home and played house with her daughter. Anna baked for the first time in over a year and cooked Bruno’s favorite meal for dinner. It was a stab at atonement. The smallest of stabs.

  SOMETIME DURING THE WANING hours of her second day in a row at home, Anna began to feel restless, bored, and lonely. Jesus, Anna, really? She scrambled to find avenues of acquittal. She blamed it first on the sunset and then on flaws fundamental to her personhood. The brokenness she was trying to mend. It wasn’t, after all, just about the sex.

  This, she knew, was mostly true.

  She couldn’t really call it missing them. She didn’t miss them at all (Who were they anyway to miss?). Anna had read that it takes far longer to break a habit than to make one. In the case of heroin, addiction can occur in the span of three days. Am I addicted? She didn’t want to use that word. These men were simply the embodiment of urges she no longer wished to deny herself. It’s just a handshake, really. A casual greeting made with alternate body parts. She could live without the favors of these specific men. The affair with Archie wasn’t even two months old and her relationship with Karl barely constituted a dalliance. But the nature of habits is this: they are habitual. They die very hard, those that die at all.

  Anna fought her agitation by doing laundry.

  ON THURSDAY ANNA RETURNED to German class. She’d paid for it, after all, and up until Monday, she’d mostly enjoyed it. So Ursula came over and Anna went to Oerlikon. She summoned the backbone to face Archie but was relieved when he didn’t show up for class.

  Roland gave a lesson on comparatives. This is more whatever than that. That is less something than this. This and that are precisely equal to that and this.

  They ran out of time before Roland could introduce superlatives, the proclamation of wha
t is most of all.

  Like so much else, this was a concept Anna already understood.

  ON FRIDAY ANNA WOKE well before dawn. The clock blinked 4:13 A.M. She looked to her right. Bruno was asleep. Of course. She rose and dressed and tiptoed out of the bedroom and left the house as quietly as possible. She was practiced at this. She needed to be.

  The pre-sunrise October chill had bite. Anna turned up the collar of her coat, put her hands in her pockets, and leaned into the oncoming wind as all around her Dietlikon slept unperturbedly at ease. She had no intentional destination; Anna followed her feet where they led her: first south toward the church, then down Riedenerstrasse past the traffic circle to the town cemetery.

  Anna didn’t routinely visit the cemetery, especially in insomnia’s dark, horrible hours; that morning’s walk was unpremeditated. But there are times to talk to the dead, times when the dead want to talk. In these rare instances, the dead will draw you to them; your volition is irrelevant. Anna couldn’t tell if this was one of those times, but she was at the cemetery, so all signs pointed to yes. The gate was locked but Anna cut through a sparse hedge. She didn’t plan on staying long. I am not a ghost, I am a guest.

  She passed slowly through the rows of graves. She attempted a measure of somberness but settled on worry and fatigue, which, when coupled, passed for solemnity. This would have to do. Things for Anna always had to do.

  Opposite the cemetery gate lay a separate section for the graves of the town’s children. In the daylight, there was simply no way to pass these graves without breaking down. In the darkness, however, to stand in their presence was to enjoy a bearable, almost beautiful experience. They are babies asleep in their cribs, Anna imagined. Just sleeping. Earlier that year, the granddaughter of a friend of Ursula’s had drowned in Dietlikon’s community pool. Her name was Gaby and she was buried here. It was too dark for Anna to read the names; she didn’t know which grave was hers.