After Malcolm’s threat last night, I know the consequences of choosing Freddie over Anne, if only until I can sort out a new option. It’s a horrible choice, one I would have imagined unthinkable, but it’s not the worst one I’ve ever made. Not by a long shot.
When I come out of Freddie’s room, a quart of conditioner weighing down my hair, I’m shivering because I forgot to fetch clothes from my own closet first. I dress quickly, and out in the kitchen Freddie’s holding up last year’s Wonder Woman costume.
“Can I wear this to Oma’s house?” she says, eyes pleading with me. She is already inside the kid-sized red boots and has on those shiny arm bracelet things, which are really coated in plastic, but to Freddie they’re all-powerful. I wish they were.
Malcolm only shakes his head at the scene. “Shouldn’t she have grown out of that nonsense by now?”
“She’s nine, Malcolm,” I remind him. “Nine. And it was just Halloween, for chrissake.” Then, to Freddie: “Of course you can, but you still have to wear a coat over it.” When she comes back five minutes later, Freddie has the costume on—cape to boots.
Malcolm shakes his head again.
I leave him in the kitchen without a word and go to my closet again, swap out the purse I’ve been carrying for a Dooney & Bourke satchel I could fit most of Brazil into, and start loading it with the barest of clothing essentials. Underwear and bras go in the bottom of the bag, an extra pair of jeans and a sweater, and the crap from my other purse on top. It doesn’t look full. Not too much.
Out in the kitchen, Malcolm is making an egg white omelet with low-fat cheese, crumbled tofu, and barely cooked kale. His version of a power breakfast. I make a promise to stop at McDonald’s for a sausage and egg biscuit for me, hotcakes and hash browns for Freddie. Anything she wants.
“Where you going, El?” he says, watching me button my coat.
“What do you think? I’m taking Freddie to see my parents.”
“Why?”
Where. What. Why. Our marriage in wh- questions. “It’s what people do on the last weekend. Anyway, we’ll be back later.”
Anne comes in, grabs a handful of granola from a bag in the cupboard, and starts crunching. “Can I go?”
“You can if you sweep up those crumbs,” I say.
Malcolm, as usual, comes to the rescue. “Anne’s staying with me. And don’t nag her, Elena.”
So we’re still doing the full-name thing.
I force a smile. “See you around five, probably. Unless they ask us to stay for dinner, which they will. There’s a ton of leftover Chinese in the fridge if you want it.” I duck back into the hall. “Ready, Freddie?”
“Freddie’s ready!” she chirps, running out to the kitchen. It’s an old joke, and a silly one, but there we are.
Malcolm takes one look at my overstuffed bag and says, “Going on a trip?” Then he shakes his head, slowly. One shift to the right, back to center, one shift to the left, back to center.
Shit.
My husband is smart. More than smart. When we hooked up in high school, all I could think was, Don’t let this one get away! I didn’t. But, Christ, how I wish I did. I wish I’d unhooked him and thrown his smug, handsome self back into the pond for some other fisher-woman to catch. I wish I’d cast out a line and reeled in someone normal and nice. I knew someone normal and nice. Once.
Don’t, El. Just don’t.
“Let me get my coat,” he says, taking the omelet off the fire.
I swear I hear him chuckling.
Sixteen
There’s no arguing with Malcolm, which is why I’m now sitting in the backseat of his oversized BMW crossover SUV, minus one Egg McMuffin, with Freddie next to me, laser-killing zombies on her phone. Malcolm insisted Anne sit up front because of her car sickness, but I know better.
“Be nice to see Sandra and Gerhard after all this time,” he says, rolling up the window. “And your grandmother.”
It’s a bald lie. The animosity between Malcolm and my family is mutual, even if the active hatred scales tip toward Malcolm’s side.
I decide to call him on it. “I don’t know why you’re coming with us.”
He raises his face in the rearview mirror, the bridge of his nose and those chocolate eyes. It’s obvious he’s smiling. “Don’t want you and Freddie to go off on your own,” he says. “Not on a nasty morning like this.”
The drive to my parents’ house takes an hour. Freddie is asleep by the time we reach Baltimore, leaving me with a silent Malcolm, a sullen Anne, and thirty minutes of secondary roads stretching out ahead of us.
“Elena,” he says. “You know I’m not stupid.”
Yeah. I know. Malcolm has been informing me of that for over twenty years.
He keeps going. “Your family. They’re—what’s the word?—unpredictable.” Only he doesn’t mean this. “Unpredictable” is Malcolm-speak for “not interested in playing by the rules.”
“They just don’t like the system,” I tell him.
I can only imagine how my mother and father would have reacted to the Fitter Family Campaign or the new educational system or any of the craziness that’s run through our country like shit through a goose if they still had me back home. Knowing my dad, he would have blown up half of Washington if he thought it would do any good; I don’t think he would have cared if he ended up in pieces himself. The only reason they put up with Malcolm is because they’ve got a major crush on Anne and Freddie.
“That’s what I meant.” He lowers his voice. “And your father called me a Nazi last Thanksgiving.”
“He did not.”
“I was there, Elena.”
Freddie asks, “What’s a Nazi, Dad?”
Before Malcolm can go didactic, I take over. How to condense a decade of nasty history into a digestible sentence? “Someone who thinks he’s better than everyone else. Someone who wants to control things.”
Malcolm points at the air with his finger. “See? That’s what I’m talking about.”
The next words out of his mouth are “Freddie, shut that stupid machine off or mute it or whatever. It’s giving me a headache.”
“Okay, Dad,” she says. And whatever zombies or aliens she’s been killing off go silent.
When we pull into my parents’ driveway, Freddie and Anne clamber out of the car, run to the porch, and come within a breath of knocking my mother backward. Dad comes out, and there’s a four-way group hug that sends the porch swing rocking violently.
Today is going to be hard, I think. So much love can only bring fantastic amounts of pain. Whatever else might happen today, Freddie will be coming home with us. For all of thirty-six hours.
She knows this, and she doesn’t. Somewhere in my daughter is a filter made out of steel. Or titanium. Or Kryptonite. Reality comes and goes for her, and at this moment, the only reality for Freddie is the smile on her Oma’s face and the soft pressure of her Opa’s hand on her back and promises of ginger cookies with warm milk at the kitchen table.
“What a surprise, Liebchen,” my mother says, tousling Freddie’s hair with one hand, now wild with static from the winter hat, and caressing Anne’s cheek at the same time.
Freddie beams at her and squeaks a cheery hello. Even Anne lights up at the sight of their grandmother.
That Malcolm isn’t mentioned is absolutely no surprise to me. He exists to my family in the way a crutch exists to an accident victim—a necessary, but thoroughly unwanted, prop. When he joins us on the porch, the temperature drops a few degrees despite the smiles.
“Malcolm,” Dad says, not offering his hand.
“Gerhard.”
I can feel the mercury level plummeting further as Malcolm dispenses the obligatory greetings. It seems suddenly warmer when he walks through the door and into the hallway.
Mom presses us inside, out of the cold, and pats Freddie once on the bottom. “Cookies in the kitchen, girls.” Then she and Dad turn to me when Malcolm is out of earshot. “Why the long face?” Mom ask
s.
I tell them everything in three short sentences. Freddie failed. Freddie’s on a yellow bus. Freddie’s going away.
“Scheisse,” Mom says. “Scheisse, Scheisse, Scheisse.”
Four Germanic shits in one breath is unusual, even for my mother, but I don’t shush her up. Given the circumstances, her words fit the bill.
I shed my coat and swap my shoes for a pair of fuzzy slippers my mother keeps in the hall closet. They feel like home, which is where I want to be right now. We go into the kitchen, the heart of this house, and Mom tells me my grandmother is upstairs. “She’s not feeling well, so she probably won’t join us for lunch.”
“When has she ever?” Malcolm says to me under his breath. He’s at the kitchen island with a glass of beer. My mother, who can hear a sparrow fart during a thunderstorm, glares at him.
“You’re not serious about sending Freddie off to one of those schools,” my father says, slicing cold cuts. He punctuates every other word with a stab of his knife. “Monthly testing in the first grade was bad enough, but I thought we left segregation behind a while ago.”
Malcolm ignores the stabs. “All for the good, Gerhard.”
Dad stops slicing. “Giving a nine-year-old a lower—whaddaya call it, Q?—because she fails a test is supposed to be good? What are they testing them on anyway?” In a sweeter voice: “Girls, how about you go find Polly and give her a treat?” The girls disappear out the back door with Milk-Bones; Anne looks over her shoulder nervously before shutting it.
“Do you know, Malcolm”—my father starts up again—“how many children were imprisoned in this country’s so-called state schools in the twentieth century?”
Malcolm sets his glass down, a little too loudly. “No one put kids in prison, Gerhard. And don’t you dare go filling the girls’ heads with your misinformation.”
My father straightens, pulling himself up until he’s every inch of his six feet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this tall. Or this mad. His nostrils, at the same level as Malcolm’s eyes, flare. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the next words out of his mouth were something like “How about we take this outside?”
Mom has been icing a cake with chocolate buttercream, Freddie’s favorite, and takes the heat in the kitchen down a notch. “It isn’t misinformation, Malcolm. Where I grew up in Massachusetts, there was one of those schools not so far from Boston. They called it the Fernald School for Idiotic Children. Seriously, idiotic children? Sounds like a paradise.”
“No one’s complained so far,” Malcolm says. My father doesn’t say a word, but his fists tighten, and the muscles in his forearms stand out like cords.
“No one ever does until it happens to them,” my mother says, offering me the icing knife to lick clean. “You know the old story about boiling the frog? If you put the frog in a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump out.” She silences Malcolm with a hand and smiles. “If, on the other hand, you put the frog in a pot of cold water and turn up the heat one degree at a time, well, before long you’ll have a boiled frog. And he’ll never know what’s coming.” Then, taking my father’s hand in her own, she says, “Our parents saw the frog boil in Germany. One degree at a time.”
The back door swings open and Polly races in behind the girls, tail wagging. The conversation shifts to a lighter topic.
But the air in the kitchen still weighs heavy.
Seventeen
I leave my family in the kitchen, four people I love and one I don’t, and head back to the front of the house, to the stairs leading up to my old room. Copies of diplomas hang in the same place they always have, a staggered staircase arrangement of overembellished fonts and hastily scrawled signatures of deans and registrars. Yale first, then Penn, then Johns Hopkins—my pedigree in three frames.
My feet move automatically, up the first five steps, past this testament to my accomplishments. For a few seconds, I’m in grade school again, running up these steps two at a time, latest drawing clutched in one hand, a smile as wide as the Chesapeake Bay spreading across my face. At the time, I thought, I want to be just like Oma. I thought, I will be just like her.
The noises from downstairs are familiar: my parents dancing between English and German, talking about how tall their granddaughter has grown since summer; Freddie giggling at the unfamiliar gutturals and fricatives, trying to mimic them; Anne speaking more fluently. And Malcolm’s feet pacing as he decides whether sitting down would put him at some emasculating disadvantage on the familial battlefield.
“Leni?”
The voice floats down from the top stair, at once frail and forceful. I turn toward it.
No, that’s not right. It pulls me, reeling me in on invisible lines.
“Leni?” it says again. The nickname Oma gave me forty years ago is one I’ve never liked. It reminds me too much of that old filmmaker, the one with the unpronounceable last name and the legacy of propaganda choreographed to Wagner arias. My grandmother assures me there are more than two women named Leni in the world.
When I reach the final step, Oma holds out a hand, palm up, silver rings turning all the wrong ways on fingers that have grown too lean. No. Lean is a kind way to put it. My hundred-year-old grandmother looks something like death as she leans on her cane, her free hand gripping the banister for extra support. When I reach out and she falls into me, she weighs as much as a sigh.
I say the first thing that comes to mind. “They’re taking my baby.”
“I heard.” She taps her left ear. “They gave me new ears a few weeks ago. Cost a fortune.”
Then I’m crying. We melt into a puddle of arms and legs on the top stair, this old woman cradling me like she did when I was a sick child. There’s a nasty taste rising in my mouth as I think of Freddie’s future mapped out, of a yellow bus coming to drive her along a path that’s anything but a yellow brick road, of my daughter about to be lost to a system I helped create—one stuck-up bitchy comment and one shiny gold privilege card at a time.
Oma waits until I’ve stopped heaving, then speaks. “Tell me about these yellow buses. Where do they go?”
“Kansas.” The voice that says this word isn’t my own. Malcolm has stopped his absent pacing and parked himself halfway up the staircase. “Hello, Maria,” he says. The words might sound kind from anyone else’s lips. “You look well.”
“I look like death,” she says. “There’s no need to lie.”
His eyes seem to agree with her, and he cringes. Not much, but enough for me to catch the distaste in his eyes. Still, I’m thankful he hasn’t used one of his more colorful words: old, feeble, burden on your children. My foot, a few easy inches from his gabardine-encased groin, might just find its way to an unpleasant target. The thought makes me smile.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll let you two catch up.”
“You do that, Malcolm,” I say.
And he leaves, returning to ignore my parents and his younger daughter.
“Still the happy married couple,” Oma says. It’s somewhere between a statement and a question, and I don’t miss the sarcasm in her voice.
“Not really. What happened to you? You look like you haven’t eaten in a month.” I take one of her hands in mine, examine the brittle, ragged nails, the cracked skin stretched taut over knucklebones. Oma’s hair has changed, too, since I last saw her, and when I brush a lock from her unshadowed, unlined eyes, a few strands come away in my fingers before settling on the stair runner.
She’s shedding, I think. Like a malnourished stray.
“I’ve lived too long, Liebchen,” she says.
“Nonsense.”
“It’s the truth. I’ve lived too long, and I’ve seen too much. Now help me up, Liebchen. I want to show you something while we’re alone.”
Oma and I walk down the upstairs hall to her room, a room that used to be mine, with windows overlooking the back garden and, farther past it, the endless rows of new houses. With my help, she arranges herself in a chintz wing chair, and asks me to bri
ng over the ottoman for her legs. Her ankles have disappeared altogether, they’re so swollen.
So this is what old age looks like.
“Oh, Oma,” I say.
She waves a hand in the air, a delicate gesture but dismissive all the same. “Enough of that. Go open the cedar chest in the corner and bring me the blue box—no, not that one. The bigger one, nearer to the bottom.”
I do as I’m told, resting the box in her lap. It’s tied loosely with fraying twine, and she tugs at one of the ends until the bow is nothing more than a pile of curled string. The loops make me think of fat Qs, their tails tentacles.
“You lift the lid for me,” she says, her hands falling limply to her sides as if they have had enough work for one day.
And so I do.
Inside the box are neatly pressed and folded layers of material, blue wool and white cotton. A black necktie lies coiled at one side, its edges worried by dry rot. I can’t imagine why Oma wants me to see her old uniform, not after all these years.
“This was your school uniform?” I say, fingering the coarse blue wool of the skirt.
“It was a uniform,” she says. “But not for school.” Oma still pronounces the soft sh at the beginning of the word. “Take it out if you like. The shoes are in a bigger box in the chest.”
I unfold the items one by one, first the white poplin blouse, which against the bedspread reveals itself to be not white but an aged yellow. I lay the skirt with its center pleat over the blouse’s tails and uncoil the necktie. It’s brittle, and fine black powder rains down on my hands.
“Now the shoes, Liebchen. The marching Schuhe.”
“Oma? Are you okay?”
“The SCHUHE, girl! Get them.” She strikes the floor once with her cane, hard.
From the heavy second box I take a pair of stiff black lace-ups. When I set them down on the hardwood, the sound gives away their secret—on the heel and toe each is a horseshoe-shaped metal plate, like a tap.
“You see now, Leni?” Oma says.
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