One möment you are höngry, and the next you refuse to eat?
I told her that chewing gum only made me hungrier. It made my stomach practically ache with hunger. She put the packet back in her purse and closed it with a snap. Suit yourself.
We never drove directly home from school. Though we’d gone shopping the day before, there was always something new to buy. Sometimes she asked us: Where do you want to go? and it was understood that we had three options to choose from: supermarkets, department stores, and malls.
Carissa was more than just the head of the siblings, she was also her mother’s favorite, her companion and confidant, and when we drove, it was almost always Carissa who sat in the front seat. The air conditioning was turned up high, and so was the radio, which was set to one of the channels that played only music, rock and pop without any talk, and off we flowed into traffic. On the rare occasion that someone slowed down to let her in, she would note who it was and say: A woman, of course, and when there was a song on the radio she liked, she said: Oh, I love this song, and turned up the volume, and we would all sing along.
Just as children raised in the arctic have an intimate relationship to snow, we recognized vast differences between the places we spent our afternoons. If we went into the large department store downtown, Famous-Barr, or in one of the big malls on the outskirts of the city, Galleria or Dillard’s, we were allowed to move around on our own on the condition that we’d meet an hour later at the bottom of an escalator or in front of a particular tropical tree in a planter, and when we met an hour later, we were granted another hour, and then finally another half hour until she was done shopping. We wandered around by ourselves, the three youngest rode the escalator to the toy department, and Carissa and I drifted about, casually looking at clothes.
In the supermarkets, Kroger’s or Schnucks, we were immediately swallowed up by the cool aisles and fanned out across the entire store. The aisles were enormous, but they felt just as familiar as when you visit a close relative, we knew every square inch as well as or better than the house we lived in. I looked at my sister’s calves as she paced ahead of me, how her muscles churned and made her legs shapely, not thin or flat like mine. That’s because I’m always walking on tiptoes, she said, and she did, always in a great haste, leaning forward as if she were battling a strong wind, and with her gaze focused on an indeterminate point a few feet ahead. One arm clutched a handbag just like her mother, and the other arm swung back and forth as if it were an oar she used to drag herself forward. She wanted to go to the aisle with combs, hair clips, and other hair accessories. I want these bangles, she said.
What are bangles? I asked.
Another word for bracelets.
I want. That expression again. For Christmas I want X, for my birthday I want Y. Americans didn’t wish for something, I noted, they wanted. All the words I learned from my sister, bangles, bangs, spearmint, etc., I wrote down in a little notebook. The list was a map of the gradual expansion that occurred during the summer, the odds and ends and other phenomena brought down from the top shelf and within reach.
If I were to choose one word to take home with me that summed up America, one single word to give a sense of what the country was all about, it would be flavor. Everything over here had a flavor, it tasted of something else. Jellybeans and chewing gum with cherry or cinnamon flavor, soda with plum flavor or this indefinable thing called root beer. Sometimes our dad took us to Baskin Robbins, 32 Flavors, so called because you could get ice cream in thirty-two different flavors. He’d take two or three of us along on one of his errands, and at the ice cream parlor we were each allowed to choose two scoops that were round and large as snowballs and piled in a stack. The maximum number of scoops you could get was seven, and on the wall was a photograph of an ice cream with scoops balancing a foot and a half tall, so tall that it would be impossible to grow an arm long enough to eat it.
When we weren’t searching for bangles or hair accessories, we wandered the cereal aisle. I was the one interested in cereal, row after row of colorful cardboard boxes with images of pastel-colored rings or fantastic creatures that apparently were edible, because in the image they were drenched in splashing milk.
No matter what, we would end up in the office supply aisle looking at stickers and markers and erasers and crayons arranged in order of color, and we’d end up in the greeting card aisle. We trudged back and forth reading all the Hallmark cards. My sister’s sandals clapped and flopped when she walked on her toes. We tried to guess which card our dad would choose for various occasions. Carissa was convinced that our dad’s special talent consisted of choosing greeting cards.
He always picks the perfect card, she said.
You have to recognize people for the talents they have.
In the meantime, their mother pushed the shopping cart around the cold counters. We always had a vague, radarlike sense of where she was and how far she’d managed to get, the shopping cart as the home-base, driftwood on a riotous sea. She took her time, studying products, chatting with other customers, weighing offers, and if she found something good, a large basket of flip-flops at a reduced price, for example, she shouted to one of the children, Eugene! Cöme ofer here! And Eugene would come galloping from one of the center aisles in his slightly too-short or slightly too-long wooden clogs with open or closed heels, whatever had been lying atop the stack of shoes in the cabinet when we’d hustled out the door. Do you need shoes? Eugene didn’t know, he was a reindeer. What size do you vear? He didn’t know and started to sing the song about the reindeer. Give me your fut, she said.
He lifted his foot and balanced on one leg, and she clutched it with her strong, wiry hand and measured the sole of the flip-flop against the sole of his clogs, and if there was an approximate match, she would toss the shoes into her cart. Later, when we got home, they’d be added willy-nilly to the knee-high pile in the cabinet, children’s shoes of every shape and size.
◊
I didn’t know what the Fourth of July was, but my siblings talked about it for weeks. It was the high point of summer, and all conversation revolved around seeing the fireworks. I noted in my little book: the fireworks.
Every year somebody gets lost, said my sister, who was also the authority on the Fourth of July. Last year it was Eugene and Sabrina, the year before it was Jessica. When the day finally arrived, my dad pinned nametags on our shirts indicating our name, address, and telephone number, and for good measure he made us memorize the telephone number before we drove into the city and sat on the blanket from which we observed the chaos around and above us.
For the rest of the summer, the light and colors remained etched on our retinas, the fireworks that had unfolded against the dark evening sky into enormous, brilliant flowers, the parade that passed the stretch right underneath the Gateway Arch, the music and costumes and helium balloons and the silvery red-white-blue confetti that wafted through the air, and above all else: The Budweiser Clydesdales’ powerful, honey-colored hoofs hauling past us a wagon of dancing women in swimsuits. I was looking forward to seeing them again, the hoofs, to hear their majestic clops against the asphalt and imagine myself stroking and combing and braiding their long golden fur, whose tips curled so delicately in the heat.
As we were leaving the house, for some reason, the two youngest siblings weren’t allowed to come. They cried and carried on, especially my little brother howled and screeched. Sabrina, as always, was calmer. My dad stayed home with them, and their mother took Jessica, Carissa, and me downtown. At a parking garage not far from the parade we met my dad’s colleague and good friend Fred Ristig, who was here for the summer with his wife and tall teenage daughter to work on a project with my dad. Where is John? he asked. He stayed at home with the little önes, said my siblings’ mother.
We walked on the lawn in front of the Arch with our nametags on, through the throng of people, my eyes roamed between flags and glitter and the buzzing of those seated on blankets, scanning for a bare patch of
grass for a place to sit, as we’d done last year, but the party led by my siblings’ mother circled back to where we’d parked the car only a short time before.
I thought I sensed a question mark form above Fred Ristig and his family’s heads, just as it did over mine. He was European, a German, and my dad’s best friend, and there was the same aura around him as when I made sandwiches with my dad. We’d visited a Japanese garden with him and his family, my dad and me, and I’d watched him cautiously maneuver across the stones that lay in the water like a dotted line. Somehow, I associated him with the Japanese garden and the way he had moved, carefully, without getting his feet wet. Now he stood next to the car with us after this short walk, mystified. We all looked at my dad’s wife.
What do you want to do now? she asked.
Fred Ristig said something I couldn’t hear over my screaming siblings: They wanted to go back, they wanted to see the parade, they wanted to see the fireworks.
But we just saw everything, she said, there is nöthing else to see, jöst a whole lot of people. There’s nöthing fun about that. She suggested that we drive to Ted Drewes instead, where she could get her favorite ice cream, and we divided up into two cars, Fred Ristig in ours, his wife and teenage daughter in the car behind us.
We didn’t drive out there very often, it was too far away, in an industrial area outside the city, and on the long drive she talked about my dad with the same intensity as when we were alone. Even from the backseat of the car I could sense the German maneuver across the stones, his gentle, reserved distance, his friendly irony.
After we’d eaten our ice cream, the others drove back to campus, and once again we were alone in the car. What a nice man, she said about Ristig, how civilized and kind he is, nöthing like your father. At. All. When something was especially important, she had a particular way of emphasizing every single word. She imagined that he was a nice husband, and no doubt also a nice father. She asked the car, addressing us all: Wouldn’t you like to have a father like that?
Jessica wasn’t really listening, Carissa was about to say something, but I spoke first: We have such a sweet dad, I said, and Jessica, who was always a bit faster or slower than the rest of us, turned to me and said: Do you have a dad? She hadn’t heard what I’d said, her gaze was inquisitive, lacking any sign of malice or gloating, but her mother interpreted it as a well-played jab. Do you have a dad! Nice answer! Do you have a dad! That’s nice, Jess, really clever. Do you have a dad! She laughed loudly.
She was right. In one way none of us had a dad, least of all me. When we returned home, the blue Ford was gone. Maybe he’d taken the little ones down to see the fireworks after all? I mumbled peevishly. Oh, no, she said, he would never do that. On the way across the asphalted square toward the back door she turned to me and said: I know him better than you do.
I didn’t reply. We reached the door.
Maybe you should have stayed at home, she said.
I told her that maybe I should have.
That’s how it is, she said. When you are greedy, you always end öp getting the least.
◊
Occasionally she found something for me in the shopping centers. One summer it was bedding in a smudged pattern, lavender, gray and salmon-colored, adult bedding. You like this pattern? I didn’t, but I still said yes. I think this is fery pretty, no? Very, I said. You think your möther will like this? I nodded. I’ll get this for your möther then, she said, placing it in the basket, you can bring it back to her as a gift from me.
Another summer it was a synthetic sweater in Famous-Barr. Do you want this? I didn’t, but I still said yes, she didn’t always take well to the word no. Into the basket it went, it would cause the hair to rise compliantly on my head, and in the dark you could see it crackle and give off nearly as many sparks as the night sky on the Fourth of July, but when she turned her attention toward you, it was easiest just to say yes.
I heard them arguing about me down in the kitchen, or rather I heard one half of the argument, her voice loudly and clearly reporting my doings. In the gaps, I had to imagine my dad’s replies, the way he grumbled something, sometimes angrily, when he’d been driven to exhaustion. She’d bought me a pair of shoes, clown shoes they looked like to me, a pair of badly glued Chuck Taylor knockoffs two sizes too large and with rubber toes that were supposed to look like the ones I wanted. She thought they looked like them, only they were cheaper, one of those discount offers you find in big wire baskets in a strip mall, a going-out-of-business sale. Do you want these? She asked. I hesitated. I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say yes, either. I said: I think they’re too big. You’ll grow into them, she said, and carried them to the register.
Not until we were driving home did I discover that she’d spent my grandmother’s birthday money. Now I could hear her interpretation of the episode down in the kitchen. This child is jöst impossible to satisfy, she told my dad, I was only trying to make her happy! Perfectly good shoes! She is söch a spoilt and ungrateful child!
My mom was right that he would have been better served with a housekeeper than with all those wives and children. The monologue spun around in a carousel, but he didn’t really have a flair for those kinds of intrigues, nor the patience. There were no gaps, no exits, no places where he could hop off. It was as if he didn’t really belong, in the house, in the family, as if he wasn’t really a part of the daily dramas, hers and the children’s (or for that matter, at a long distance, mine and my mom’s). I compared my dad to my siblings’ dad and found that mine was better than theirs. To them, he alternated between being a nonperson, a hostile intruder, and a comic figure, something separate from the symbiosis of the womb the house seemed to be. And the dad, their dad, was the one who drove us to school in the morning, and furthermore, he was, like mine, someone who allowed himself to be pieced together from our mothers’ words. My dad was almost completely static, an eternal figure, as good as gold, he would emerge out of the darkness with his carry-on suitcase, and theirs constantly shifted shape, he was a verbal voodoo doll you could poke needles into, yell at, laugh at, or take under oath, depending on whatever emotions the lava flow of the moment dragged along with it.
The house was so big that it was impossible to hear his steps.
There was no one who cried, Daddy’s home.
You couldn’t even hear the door open.
the atlantic ocean exists. one hemisphere is in light, the other is in darkness. When it’s four o’clock in the afternoon in St. Louis, it’s eleven o’clock at night in Denmark. An entire summer in America is a long time, my mother thinks. She writes letters every day. They arrive in clusters, two or three envelopes at a time in various sizes and colors, red, dark-turquoise blue, yellow, black. Every third or fourth day she calls me at the house, it’s expensive, so the conversations are short. The line crackles. It takes time for the words to travel across the Atlantic. I stand with the receiver in my hand, and what I hear in my ear is the sound of myself, as if from a great distance. As if through a tunnel in space.
Hello?
Hello!
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes …
I tried to call yesterday, my mother says.
Yesterday yesterday?
Yes, yesterday afternoon. Did you get my message?
No? No? But I was home home?
The letters, the phone calls. I think my siblings’ mother thought mine was overprotective. She didn’t mind having my mother’s yellow painting hanging on the wall, but she minded her phone calls. She doesn’t always fetch me. She tells my mother she doesn’t know where in the house I am. She is not on this floor, she says. But maybe you could call for her? my mother suggests. No, I can’t. She hangs up without saying goodbye.
One day she initiated me in her views on childrearing. My mother had phoned, and she went along and agreed to call for me. When I got up there, she was waiting at the backstairs on the first floor. She led me into one of
the rooms I’d never been in, a rectangular space with cabinets and an ironing board where she’d been ironing a skirt when the telephone rang. The receiver was on a shelf, she pointed at it, then remained there watching me talk with my mother. The iron stood upright on the board, I sensed her gaze on me but was calmed by the fact that the conversation was in Danish. After I’d hung up, she said: I önderstood most of it.
Because she knew German and Dutch, she’d pieced the meaning together. She began to ask questions about my mother, and I tried to find a balance in my replies. She treated me like an equal conversation partner, as if we were clearing up an important matter, but she cast her line with hooks. The trick was not to return them empty, at the same time taking care not to deliver to her anything fleshy and substantial. If she got the sense that something was sacred to you, that you had something precious you’d rather keep to yourself, my mother, for example, she took it as a personal affront.
She had a theory, she said, about how you raised independent children, did I wish to hear it? Yes, I would. It was simple. You left them to their own devices. She compared it with a swimming pool. If you wanted your children to be independent, to teach them how to take care of themselves, you had to throw them into the deep end. A cigarette burned in the ash tray as, standing tall and calm, she told me that a mother had to have the nerve to allow her children to sink to the bottom.
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