Hausfrau

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  ANNA MADE THE MISTAKE of meeting Edith for a coffee after German class. It was often a mistake to meet Edith for coffee because Edith didn’t drink coffee, she drank bourbon, and drinking bourbon always agitated her. Anna met her on the south end of the Bahnhofstrasse at Café Münz, a bar and lounge near the Zürich branch of the Swiss National Bank. It was the SNB that housed the Nazis’ gold during and after World War II. For her entire first year in Switzerland, Anna was haunted by the notion that cached beneath the streets down which she strode, bankers—the alleged gnomes of Zürich—trolled the subterranean vaults grubbing the treasures of long-dead Jews. She implicated Bruno retroactively until he finally forbade her from ever bringing the subject up again.

  Anna ordered a café crème and Edith, being contrary even to herself, ordered a beer. Anna raised an eyebrow and Edith waved her off. “Niklas is teaching me beer,” she said as if beer were a school subject like algebra or civics. “I still don’t like it. But for him, I’ll try anything.” Edith winked. Anna understood that anything meant more than beer. Anna didn’t want to talk about lovers. She didn’t really want to talk at all. But there were empty hours to fill and if she wasn’t spending them with Archie or Karl, then she needed to spend them with someone, and Mary was busy that day. Take one lover, you may as well take twenty, Anna thought. They’re like salty snacks. You can’t stop at one.

  Edith yammered on with her typical self-centeredness, hopping from subject to subject like a frog leaping from one lily pad to the next. She spoke first of Niklas, then Otto, then the twins, then the trip they were planning to Ticino, then of a ball gown she recently bought. Anna hadn’t known she was going to a ball. “I’m not,” Edith said. “The dress was too gorgeous to deny myself. I’ll wear it one of these days.” Anna finished her coffee then asked for another. She had little to add and she wouldn’t even offer that until or unless she was asked.

  Edith moved from beer to wine. They weren’t alone in the café. Behind them, a couple enjoyed a late lunch. There was a tall, gaunt man in a business suit standing at the bar, smoking and drinking a beer. Sitting by the window nearest the street, a young woman with a nose ring and thick blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail was pushing the last few salad leaves around on her plate and flipping absentmindedly through a magazine.

  Anna was staring at the girl with the ponytail when Edith did something Anna wasn’t sure she’d ever done before. “All right, Anna. You’re distracted. You’re barely here. What’s going on?” Edith had never shown Anna any real concern, and Anna was thrown off guard. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

  Anna didn’t know what to say. She stared at the empty plastic pot of cream on her saucer and the small spoon next to it as if they might get up and walk around. “Edith, what does Otto do at the bank?”

  Edith blinked. “That’s what’s been bothering you?”

  Anna shrugged. “Maybe. Kind of.”

  Edith swilled her wine and blew out a hard sigh. “I don’t know. Count money? Why are you asking?”

  “I mean specifically. What does he do specifically?”

  “Do you know what Bruno does?”

  “No, I don’t.” Anna shook her head. Her voice got low and sober. “Edith, we should know what they do, I think.” In all those years, Anna had never asked Bruno to explain. He fiddled with other people’s money, that’s what he did. And that’s all that Anna knew. “We should care about our husbands enough to know what they do.” Anna took a slow, deliberate sip from the coffee cup and with an equal measure of reflection, set it back down.

  “Anna, you’ve lost a screw. I don’t see what the problem is.” Edith didn’t. The conversation flummoxed her. “The only thing we need to know is this: they bring home a paycheck.” Edith swigged her drink. “They take care of us. Does anything beyond that matter?”

  ROLAND HAD TAKEN A tangent. Someone had suggested that Schwiizerdütsch was a German dialect and not a language all of its own. Roland was vehement. Nei! Nei! Nei! he yelled, emphasizing each no! by slapping his notepad on the table. “Switzerland is not a German colony! We don’t live under the Bundesflagge! Schwiizerdütsch is ours! They did not give it to us—we built it ourselves!” Roland continued in a broad, philosophic arc. “The language a man speaks defines him. A man’s language tells the world who he is.”

  Anna considered that. Everyone’s born into a native language. Most of the people she knew had full command of a second (and according to the bee in Roland’s bonnet, a third): Bruno, Ursula, Daniela, Doktor Messerli. Even Anna’s own sons. To Anna they spoke English. But to each other and to their father when Anna wasn’t around (and sometimes even when she was, though she’d asked them very sternly not to) they reverted to Schwiizerdütsch. It deflated her. Even if she managed a proficient level of German, Anna would never have an indigenous Dietlikonerin’s command of Schwiizerdütsch. She would never share that spoken bond with her children. It just wasn’t going to happen.

  Anna didn’t disagree with Roland. It was entirely true—the language you’re born into (or in Anna’s case, the one you aren’t) determines your most basic identity. But Roland had stopped short. There was more. Your native speech situates you in your society. But your second language is the one that reveals your character. Look to the mistakes, Anna said to herself. The mistakes a person makes tell you everything you need to know. It made sense. Leopards don’t change their spots, after all. If a person behaves one way in situation A, then why would anyone expect him to behave differently in situation B? Karl, for example. In speech he confused primary and secondary meanings of words and synonyms. It was a habit born of carelessness. He treated words as if they were interchangeable. This one, that one—a word, a woman. One was good as the other. He meant no malice but … what did he mean? It was always so hard to unravel him. And what about Mary? Her tendency was to stumble over even the simplest of sentences. She flustered easily. She wanted so much to be correct. When she did speak, it was slowly and without flourish. Niklas’s English was always nonspecific. Anna didn’t know him well enough to say what that might mean. Edith didn’t speak German at all. What that said was she didn’t give a damn. Nancy was always trying sentences beyond her reach. If she wanted to say something, she went for it. If it came out wrong, she’d warp the syntax and speak past the impediment, as if she were driving around a concrete pylon. There was always a way to work through the problem. Archie’s German was the kind of German that men who had affairs with sad women spoke. He was terrible with possessives. It didn’t matter what belonged to whom. All was free use.

  But Anna. What were her tendencies? It was no mystery. With Anna it was all verbs. She was sloppy in her conjugations, reckless in her positioning. She confused tense with mood and relied too often on the passive voice. Anna laughed at these conclusions. How evident I am! And she was. She truly was. Evident, undeniable, sloppy, and sad.

  ANNA WAS FIVE MONTHS into the pregnancy when Polly Jean started to kick. She kicked hard, much harder than either of the boys had kicked, and she kicked constantly. There was no rest from her kicking. She drummed on the walls of the womb like a madman pounds a padded door. The entire pregnancy was difficult. Anna’s morning sickness lasted for months. Her face was by turns dry and scaly, then oiled and pimply. Misery exhausted her. On walks she faced west and spoke aloud in the direction of Boston. I love you. I hate you. I miss you. I never want to see you again. She meant every word she said. The middle way played against each end.

  This hyperbolic sadness consumed her. Except when it didn’t. Which was rarely.

  ANNA HADN’T INTENDED TO concede. It came out of nowhere. It came out of everywhere. It came out of the weather. It came from the wave that Charles turned to give her as he left the house for school, and the half wave that Victor tossed back to her as well, a concession he rarely granted. It came from Bruno’s impossibility when Anna offered him yogurt instead of quark. She’d mistaken the pots at the grocery store. It was easy enough to do. It came from U
rsula’s dourness and the rumpled skin that years of frowning had creased into her face. It came out of the German homework that Anna didn’t do the night before. It came from wondering why she still bothered with the German class. It came out of knowing that Mary would be disappointed if she dropped it and what came out of that, in turn, was a big, resigned sigh. It came from that morning’s every annoyance, the sum of which was a defeat so looming that anyone with even a teaspoon of common sense would run far and fast away from it. But Anna didn’t run away. So when it came—this particular dejection—she embraced it like she would have held a long-lost friend (which, in a way, it was) and pulled those many miseries tightly around her shoulders, wrapping herself into a familiar quilt of ineffable, inconsolable longing. By the time Karl replied to Anna’s impulsive SMS, she’d already relinquished her grip on the wheel of her will. It was Wednesday, the last day of October. Anna was on the train to Oerlikon when the message came through. It was Halloween, which most Swiss don’t celebrate, and Anna had been thinking once again about ghosts.

  She changed trains at Oerlikon and took the S7 to Kloten. She didn’t even think twice. If she had, she still would have gone.

  Anna knocked on the door and Karl let her in. He opened his mouth to speak but she shushed him.

  “Don’t. Don’t say a word.” Anna pushed him back and the door closed behind her.

  She shoved her face onto his face and they kissed in a reckless, pointless way. There was no mystery here. Anna shrugged out of her coat, threw her bag into a corner, and pulled her sweater roughly over her head, taking an earring with it. She shoved Karl to the bed with enough force to startle him. Anna was damp with abandon.

  “DO YOU KNOW ABOUT the Teufelsbrücke?” Anna didn’t. Doktor Messerli explained. “There’s a mountain pass in Kanton Uri—the Schöllenen Gorge. It’s tremendously steep. The walls are sheer and abrupt.” Anna nodded. She understood. These days, everywhere she turned was precipice. “There is a bridge that crosses the canyon and the river below it.”

  “The Teufelsbrücke?” Devil’s Bridge.

  “Genau.” Doktor Messerli continued. “It was built in the Middle Ages. But the landscape is so unpredictable and the bridge so fabulously made that at the time, it was believed human hands alone could never have erected such a structure. So the legend says that the Devil built it himself.”

  Doktor Messerli continued in the manner of a storyteller, adjusting her intonation and speed of speech for dramatic effect. “But the Devil does no favors. He will always demand to be paid. In this case, he ordered the soul of the first man to cross it.” That seems kind of fair, Anna thought. “No one volunteered, of course. Who would enlist to be so sacrificed?” Anna had an answer but kept it to herself. “Instead, the citizens of Uri decided to trick him and sent the Devil a goat. The Devil was furious. No! A goat would not do! He’d had it. So he picked up the largest stone he could find and started toward the gorge. He would show them. He created it, it was his to destroy.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  Doktor Messerli shook her head no. “On his way to the bridge he met an old woman carrying a cross. The Devil was so terrified by the cross that he dropped the giant rock and ran away. The people of Uri never heard from him again. They kept their bridge. They kept their souls.”

  “So goodness conquers evil is what you are saying.” Doktor Messerli shook her head. “What I’m saying is that our most sinister parts bridge the gap between consciousness and unconsciousness. That’s the dark matter’s most useful function. But hear me: you do not owe the darkness your soul.”

  “I’m not planning on giving it away.”

  “Planning has nothing to do with it. We plan. The Devil laughs at our plans.”

  ANNA WOKE FROM A muggy, fitful sleep, the only possible kind of sleep in a hotel room in the afternoon of a late October day next to a lover you care nothing about. She took a moment to stretch and adjust her eyes. She looked to the clock. It was a quarter past four. Shit, shit, shit. Karl groaned, then sat up in bed.

  “Is something immoral?” Anna guessed the word he meant to use was “wrong,” but it didn’t matter. In this case he was correct on both fronts. She dressed very quickly, put on her shoes, and grabbed her bag with every intention of leaving as she arrived, without fanfare. As she moved toward the door she pulled her cell phone out of her bag to check for messages.

  The small red light blinked hotly. She’d missed thirty-two calls.

  An unseen hand pierced her heart with an unseen sword. No. Anna let her bag fall to the floor. “Is okay?” Karl was fastening his jeans. Anna didn’t answer him. She scrolled through the list. Ursula had called. Then Bruno. Then it was Ursula, Ursula, Ursula, Bruno, Mary, Bruno, Daniela. The list of missed calls seemed endless.

  “I turned my ringer off.” Anna said it to herself. There were messages. Her hand shook. Her fingers couldn’t find the buttons. But they did. They had to. Anna listened to the last one first. It was Bruno. His voice was rabid with sobs. Anna. Come home, please. You have to come home. Now, Anna. Come home now. “I have to go.” Anna said it even as she snatched her bag and bolted through the hall and down the stairs and into the waning day. A taxicab would be quickest. She ran across the street to the Kloten station and hurled herself into the first cab she came to. Dietlikon. She was out of breath. She spoke between gasps. Dee. Et. Li. Kon. The cab driver didn’t seem to understand. Dietlikon! She yelled and kicked the back of his seat. This got his attention. He put the car into gear and pulled into the street without looking.

  november

  18

  TEARS ARE WET BUT THEY AREN’T WATER. BOTH LIQUID AND potable, it is possible to freeze them and, as is said, to drown in them. But they aren’t water. Theirs is a chemistry of fat, sugar, salt, antibodies, minerals, and at least a dozen other substances native to a living body, which, for the remainder of this digression, we will presume to be human.

  There are three kinds of tears.

  Tears that serve only to moisten the eye are called basal tears and they lubricate the lids like oil on a hinge. The tears known as reflex tears erupt when irritants like dust or onion vapors aggravate the eye. And while they may also flow when a person yawns or coughs, the particular function of reflex tears is to wash and clean. Their purpose is ablution.

  The tears that come from pain are psychic tears and these need not be analyzed.

  There are three kinds of grief.

  The first is anticipatory. This is hospice grief. Prognostic grief. This is the grief that comes when you drive your dog to the vet for the very last time. This is the death row inmate’s family’s grief. See that pain in the distance? It’s on its way. This is the grief that it is somewhat possible to prepare for. You finish all business. You come to terms. Goodbyes are said and said again. Anguish stalks the chambers of your heart and you steel yourself for the impending presence of an everlasting absence. This grief is an instrument of torture. It squeezes and pulls and presses down.

  Grief that follows an immediate loss comes on like a stab wound. This is the second kind of grief. It is a cutting pain and it is always a surprise. You never see it coming. It is a grief that can’t be bandaged. The wound is mortal and yet you do not die. That is its own impossible agony.

  But grief is not simple sadness. Sadness is a feeling that wants nothing more than to be sat with, held, and heard. Grief is a journey. It must be moved through. With a rucksack full of rocks, you hike through a black, pathless forest, brambles about your legs and wolf packs at your heels.

  The grief that never moves is called complicated grief. It doesn’t subside, you do not accept it, and it never—it never—goes to sleep. This is possessive grief. This is delusional grief. This is hysterical grief. Run if you will, this grief is faster. This is the grief that will chase you and beat you.

  This is the grief that will eat you.

  HE HADN’T BEEN PAYING attention.

  He hadn’t been paying attention and he ran into the street. />
  What had they been playing, Charles and Victor? Was it cops and robbers? Tag? Red light, green light? Anna didn’t think children played those games anymore. Maybe they had just been chasing each other around in happy circles. The brothers played well together almost half of the time. Maybe this was one of those halves, Anna thought. As if knowing that made much difference, if any at all.

  It didn’t.

  He hadn’t been paying attention.

  By everyone’s account it was an accident. Terrible and unfathomable? Yes. But also entirely accidental. Ursula and Margrith saw the whole calamity unfold. They’d been standing in front of Hans’s tractor shed, just twenty feet away. Margrith was holding Polly Jean. Ursula had just gathered the last late vegetables from her garden and had brought them over to share with Margrith. A basket of turnips and potatoes was hooked in the crook of her arm. It happened in a startling instant. Charles ran into the street and almost immediately the car made contact. His little body hit the ground. He ran in front of the car! He just ran in front of the car! The driver was a man in his early thirties. He ran in front of me! I couldn’t stop! Jesses Gott! Jesus Christ!

  Victor, too, saw the accident. For the rest of his life, he would remember, in perfect, immutable detail, the shriek of the tires as they seized to a radical stop, the incomparable panic of disbelief that glazed the driver’s eyes, and the absurdity of the single red potato that fell from his grandmother’s basket and rolled close enough to Charles’s head that it had to be kicked away.

  It was an accident. The driver—his name was Peter Oesch—had not been drinking, he had been paying attention, and he was not speeding. Charles ran into the road. He just ran out in front of me! I wasn’t going fast! This was true. Peter hadn’t been. But it wasn’t the impact that killed him. As quickly as Charles ran into the road, Peter hammered the brake and swerved sharply enough that he didn’t hit him head-on. He clipped him. It broke his leg and his hip. That’s it. This alone, Charles would have survived. But when Charles fell, he cracked his skull. While improbable, the fracture was not impossible. His little head hit the ground at the exact right angle and with just enough force and velocity to split it apart. A betting man would have never taken the wager. A thousand to one chance against its occurrence. But it occurred. It was an open fracture, a lacerated artery. Paramedics couldn’t stop the blood. Charles died quickly, though not instantly.