by Lauren Oyler
The day before was hazy and hot. I woke up sweaty, biked sweatily to pick up the babies, and after an hour and a half of walking sweatily took them to a park where shade had nothing to offer us. They crawled in resolutely opposite directions as Dan Savage advised a twenty-three-year-old man to let his girlfriend of five years dump him because she had been giving him clear signs that she was trying to do so. They were young! They should fuck other people! I ate bland crackers, designed to be consumed by sucking, from a resealable container Genevieve kept in the pocket at the bottom of the stroller. Since I had teeth I didn’t have to wait for them to disintegrate in my mouth, so I failed to take advantage of one of their only benefits. I’d taken a short video of the babies on one of the first days I walked them, and I took my phone out to watch it, comparing. One of them grabbed a stick and began to swing it near his face, so I put down my phone and pried it from his sticky fingers. The other one picked up my phone, to the best of his ability. I moved back, the first one whining now, to pull the phone away, much easier to accomplish than extracting the stick because of the phone’s slick design and particular weightiness not accommodating to babies. Both started to cry. I picked them up, laid them on the ground next to each other, and hung my head over them so that my hair would brush against their faces, temporarily mesmerizing them. Then I began to swoop my face toward each of their faces in turn, touching my nose to their noses, making an inane whooshing sound and letting my breath provide a little breeze as I got close to them. Getting them to laugh was an achievement of patience: first they had to stop crying, then they had to look cutely curious, then they had to smile, maybe letting out a preliminary giggle, and then they had to laugh. It wouldn’t be long before they were better at German than I was—it was possible, who knows, that they were already better, that they had little bilingual thoughts rolling around their tiny brains, smacking into each other, grasping at intelligible speech with little marmalade hands as something large and difficult to move held them back. I changed their diapers, as perfunctorily disgusting as it always was, and strapped them whining back into their stroller, which was new because their legs had recently become too long for their old horizontal model. Genevieve had apparently forgotten about the discontinuities of my visa binder, or else she had never cared about them in the first place.
After I helped Genevieve carry the babies upstairs and said I would see her tomorrow—“doomsday!” she acknowledged cheerfully—I met Nell for coffee. She was wearing a thrift-store dress printed with giant lilies layered over a white T-shirt that had the word sex written all over it in different languages. (It’s pretty much the same in most.) The dress was short and she wore it with grubby tennis shoes, one of which had rainbow laces. Since I’d last seen her she’d had a series of feminist epiphanies. “The American government is dedicated to policing women’s bodies!” she cried. “We are under attack! I am just no longer interested in straight white men!”
I found this a little bit rich, and I responded that, well, she was a straight white man. Because of the snowball logic of such epiphanies she surely knew she couldn’t object, so she leaned back in her chair, shook her head, and chuckled like someone who had it all figured out. “You really have a unique mind,” she said. “I never thought of it that way, but I guess you’re right. You’re right.” Despite her bravado I could see I’d hurt her, so I tried to reassure her that I was not mad, or mean. Oh, I’m a straight white man, too, I said, all I meant was that it seemed inappropriate to claim equivalent hardship with people—I would not indulge the sentimentality of the dualism—who were actually policed and attacked when we were sitting here in Berlin drinking coffee in the middle of the day and had, maybe despite past experiences of mild oppression because of our gender, now emerged more or less capable of handling everything because of our various advantages—financial, educational, alliance with traditional beauty standards, etc.—and that it seemed counterintuitive to say straight white men were no longer interesting when 1) they were who we often slept with, and 2) that was like saying we ourselves were no longer interesting, which was just not true, ha ha. More importantly the declaration suggested that the only interesting experiences out there were related to demographic, which was limiting to people of all demographics. She asked if I’d ever been sexually assaulted.
I was shocked by the abruptness of the question—she was usually hemming and equivocal—and said yes. She said she was so sorry. I said it wasn’t her fault. She seemed to want me to continue, to describe the experience, but I just sat there, looking expectant. Felix had offered his followers false empowerment just as the most vocal of his peers were marching confidently into false disempowerment. Had this been part of his thought process? Had he been overpowered by annoyance but still smart enough to know he couldn’t express it as himself, an uninteresting straight white man? Nell said she was sorry again, but did I not want to prevent future young women from going through what I did, from being sexually assaulted? I said of course I wanted to prevent future young women from being sexually assaulted, and also women of all ages, and then I stopped again. I was not going to melt into profuse elaboration. She asked how could I say I was a straight white man when a straight white man would never be able to understand what I had experienced? Did I not feel oppressed by the perpetrator’s disregard for my personhood? I said well . . . I didn’t know how to say this without being offensive, and I just wanted to be clear that I wouldn’t say this in the context of a policy conversation when I was trying to convince a conservative audience of something, but I didn’t really think about it much. She looked like she didn’t believe me. I said, What? Am I supposed to lie? How does sacrificing my personality help me prove my personhood? I had to believe it was possible for straight white men to approximately understand what I had experienced. A man having sex with me when I have told him not to is not that hard to understand. The problem was not a matter of understanding but of willful denial, which was better disarmed by willful acknowledgment than by willful denial. Had she ever met a male feminist? The kind of guy who just nods and apologizes at you, who begins at the end and stays there, whose obvious belief that there’s some trauma at the center of your being makes him so preemptively sensitive to your theoretical difference that he assumes you are unfathomable? Maybe you are unfathomable, but he doesn’t even try. That, I said, the pseudo-righteous box-ticking kind of giving up, the sense that because I’m a woman I must be approached differently, makes me feel like I’m not being treated like a real person. And I didn’t think it was appropriate to equate that experience with the experiences of, for example, women who are raped while trying to seek asylum in the United States, or women who are raped and then cannot access or pay for abortions. I said all women were linked by various or potential experiences but I wasn’t going to pretend that we were the same when we weren’t. I was aware I was ranting. This was the most I’d ever said to her. She nodded. I said maybe I wasn’t making sense but it seemed that what we had was a disagreement about strategy. She said yes. I asked if she’d ever been sexually assaulted and she said no; one time she woke up in someone’s bed but she was pretty sure they hadn’t had sex. I said yeah, well, drinking, right, and she said yes, exactly. I added that I also didn’t like all these op-eds arguing that drinking is bad for women. It was like the fucking Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
After a moment of silence she said in the bright tones of someone who has just started a gluten-free diet that she had stopped reading the news.
Did my eyes widen? Did I look around to see if anyone had heard her? I don’t know. I thought of the babies, blinking on the phone, and had the strange experience of wanting to hold one right then, which I took to be an indication not of my innate yearning for children but of my innate yearning for an interaction that made immediate sense. Felix liked babies, actually; they were the easiest people in the world to treat with kindness and generosity. I asked what the final straw in Nell’s decision was. She said Grenfell. “I just didn’t want
to see that anymore,” she said. “I know it’s bad. I can imagine all the bad things happening every day. I don’t need to see them.” Though I understood why she would think these things I didn’t know what to say. There seemed to be two options for engaging with the world: desperate close reading or planned obsolescence. They were both so clearly rooted in natural impulses and so clearly wrong. I remembered a trick from a journalism class: Don’t say anything and they’ll keep talking. “I want to get back to my center, to really understand myself and my priorities,” Nell said. “I used to listen to NPR every morning, the BBC, read The New York Times. It’s so much better without it. It’s the ocean! It’s waves! It’s always there coming and going! I realized that if something really important happens, I’ll know. You can’t really escape it, but you can rise above it.” I nodded, conveying, I hoped, that I pitied her for having these sorts of futile fantasies. I was not being fair, it’s true; I never told her anything about myself or my work, so I forced her to fill our meetings with content. But she was constantly failing the tests I set for her. A man to my left shut his laptop with a sigh. If he was eavesdropping, I didn’t want him to associate me with these ideas. “But isn’t this the same attitude that got us into this?” I asked, in my nicest, most simply curious voice, appealing to false collectivity. “Conservatives refusing to acknowledge the world as it is . . . only watching horrible cable news that tells them what they want to hear . . . fear—”
Nell smiled. “Exactly. I just don’t find that fear is serving me. I have all the right opinions. I know what’s bad and what’s good. I just didn’t feel like it was making me better. Like my ex-boyfriend. Ha ha. I’ve been doing a lot of baking.”
I said I’d heard vanilla extract was hard to find here.
She said she was really focusing more on breads—banana, zucchini, even rhubarb. She said she was going to get fat.
Of course part of my resentment of Nell was jealousy. She seemed to wrestle with nothing, coming to conclusions easily and stating them directly, even if she later contradicted her stated views; shame was something external she merely had to ward off. She believed she had defined personal qualities and preferences and she used them as a foundation to think whatever she wanted, especially if what she wanted to think was whatever she was told. She had multiple passports and enjoyed baking. I did not bake, or cook, and although I knew this didn’t matter I couldn’t help but consider it a failing. Every time I saw a cake I felt bad. Why couldn’t I enjoy this simple pleasure? Why did I compulsively read Twitter instead of learning to eyeball dry ingredients? It was certainly possible that knowing what was happening produced no good—I never did anything about it—and in fact caused harm by making me feel like I was helpless and manipulated, which made me continue to do nothing because I felt, rightly or wrongly but mainly conveniently, that there was nothing I could do. Holding on tightly to the sense that at any moment the governments on whose economies I was dependent could collapse meant that the rest of my days would be lived out in cycles of paranoia and despair followed by shaky you-only-live-once justifications and self-harm. Why keep doing this? Surely someone would tell you before the draft, or the shelter-in-place, or whatever, was about to happen, especially if you were constantly bragging about the richness of a life spent not reading the news.
I said, “Doesn’t that make you a little dependent? Not baking, I mean not reading the news.”
She said, “Huh. I don’t really think about it that way, but I guess I could see that.”
I said, “I hate being dependent on people. It’s so stressful. It also feels a little selfish?”
She said, nodding with her eyes closed, “I could see that. What’s going on with your visa now?”
Although I was almost positive I hated her, relief that someone cared enough to ask drove my needlessly detailed explanation: I described the early-morning trip to the immigration office, a place Nell had never been: its ominous surroundings, the brusque friendliness of the bureaucrat, the fact that I’d brought Genevieve with me and she hadn’t been allowed in the interview, the present limbo. I said I kind of enjoyed the purgatorial certainty of my situation now, of having to wait. She asked, “Are you going to learn German?” and I said I didn’t know—if I wasn’t going to live there for a long time, it felt kind of pointless. She said, “Surely a year is a long time?” I said, “Oh really? I don’t think so.” She said, “Huh. Wait. I don’t think you ever told me why you came here.”
I looked away and laughed like a weary woman scorned. Maybe it wasn’t sympathy but contempt that would bring out the truth? I could see that. It was kind of funny, actually, I said. Absurd, but funny. Well, sad, also, sorry, I don’t want to sound like an asshole, because I was really sad about it. I was only just now getting over it. I took a deep breath.
I’d been dating this guy, Frank, for, like, five years, I said, since the end of college basically, or, like, just after, and all of a sudden he proposed. It was really out of nowhere, which I know sounds wrong. I mean, if you’ve been together for five years, it can’t be out of nowhere, but it felt out of nowhere. Usually you talk about it, right? That’s what people usually do, unless you live in, like, the Midwest or something. Anyway, I told him no, I said, and he said then he didn’t want to be together anymore, and I said OK, I respected that decision, and he said OK, and we cried and then I felt like I needed to leave the country, so here I was. I’d been to Berlin a couple of years before and really loved it—it was summer, so you know—so I just decided to move.
Nell liked this story. “Oh my God, wow,” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t know that. It’s pretty brave of you. How did he propose?”
I thought she was going to ask why I said no. I chuckled knowingly, as if to myself, for a pause. “Well, that’s the funny part,” I said. “He came over to my apartment one night when we were supposed to be watching TV and was like, ‘I got you a present.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what?’ I love presents. But then he pulled a bright pink Furby out of his tote bag.” Nell looked delightfully confused. “I know. I was like, ‘Ooooh, wow, my mom waited in line for one of those in 1998!’ Pretend-impressed voice, you know. It was funny. I thought he was trying to be thoughtful. I couldn’t remember ever talking to him about Furbies, but I was like, you know, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that I had. Anyway, then he was like, ‘Here’s the batteries for it.’ And I was laughing, saying, awesome, let’s fire it up! Then I opened the battery thing in the bottom—” pause for drama “—and a ring fell out.”
Nell’s speechlessness manifested in a hand over her mouth and theatrically wide eyes. Then she cackled. “You’re kidding. No. You can’t be kidding. No one could make that up. Wow. What a story. Don’t you feel lucky to have that story?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it would be too embarrassing for him if I ever wrote it. I thought it was really funny, so I laughed, but then it was so awkward, because I didn’t know what to say and I had to make something up, but if you’re not saying yes immediately in that situation everyone knows you’re going to say no. He was a really funny guy. I just didn’t want to marry him. Or anybody. I’m too young, besides. I’ve been going on a lot of OkCupid dates, and I know it’s, like, gauche, but I really like it?”
Nell fluffed her bangs with her fingers while making noises of assent. “I’m thinking of trying to date women,” she said.
Riding my bicycle, on the way home, I went through the park and while trying to pass a pair of elderly women walking in the middle of the path I brushed up against a bush of stinging nettles and my right calf erupted. I’d never heard of stinging nettles, so I thought I was going to die. I stopped my bike in the middle of the path between two men selling weed and looked at my leg, a thing I wanted to disown and abandon in the park. A splotchy red was already blooming atop the cluster of purple spider veins I occasionally, under nonrash circumstances, looked down at for a jolt of panic. I’d been a fool; I should have appreciated the spider
veins when I had the chance. I touched the rash with two fingers and then, worried I was going to spread it to my hand, instinctively tried to wipe them off on my shirt. Now the rash was, I imagined, on my shirt, making its way through cheap cotton to my abdomen. The weed dealers were laughing, probably not at me but I imagined at me, and I wanted to sit on the pavement and cry, to scream at the old ladies who had still not made it to this spot, who were still escorting each other on their carefree European waddle, so far away they couldn’t even see the distress they’d caused. Why did no one in this town have a sense of urgency? Why was there a fucking poisonous leaf in a public park? A public park with a petting zoo in it? What if an animal ate this leaf? It was so easy to think of others when one needed to. One of the weed dealers muttered promotionally in my direction and I glared. As if I would want to buy marijuana at a time like this! When I was back on my bike I started to cry, and the tears streamed sideways across my face as I sped toward home, my calf still burning.