Anna waited for the tears to come. They didn’t. Five trains passed in the valley beneath her before she rose and made her way to Ursula’s.
URSULA WAS PREDICTABLY CURT when Anna finally came home that afternoon. Anna had barely said hello before Ursula pushed past her and left. Anna let it go. Ursula had a right to be annoyed.
Polly was screaming and the boys were bickering. Anna looked at her watch—she’d been on the train for three and a half hours. After the first hour she’d lost patience with introspection. She let her mind turn gray. Her pulse slowed. She relaxed her eyes and tried to focus on the spaces between things as the loll of the train rocked her like a mother would. But the house, the noise, the children, her mother-in-law, the lateness of the afternoon and that evening’s dinner plans all converged to a sharp, fine point that forced Anna to the wall of her own woe. There was nothing she could do at that moment but allow it to happen. So she let the boys squabble and left Polly Jean to cry herself out. Some tears can’t be soothed, they can only be shed.
By the time Bruno came home from the office, his sons were dressed, his wife was made up, and Polly Jean was ready to go to Ursula’s for the evening. Bruno volunteered to walk her over. Anna watched them from the living room window. Bruno was bouncing her on his hip and whistling. Polly had stopped crying before Anna finished her shower.
Roland’s last lesson that morning was on subordinating conjunctions. Falls means “in case of.” And weil means “because.” “Remember to pronounce it ‘vile,’ ” Roland said, which Anna found apropos. When Roland wrote down damit, the class chuckled. “Yes, just like the bad word. It means ‘so that’ or ‘in order to.’ ” Then he reminded them they were adults and they should stop laughing because it wasn’t that funny in the first place.
Anna stood at the window in order to watch them as they walked away, her husband and her daughter. Anna stood at the window so that she could see. She watched until they rounded the corner and disappeared from view.
Dammit, dammit, dammit, goddammit.
ANNA RAPPED GENTLY ON Ursula’s door even as she opened it. Ursula’s distaste for Anna aside, they’d long passed the formalities of first knocking, then waiting on one or the other to answer the door. Anna walked into the house and whispered hello. Ursula had fallen asleep in front of the television, her knitting in her lap. Mike Shiva, a popular psychic and tarot card reader, was taking live phone calls. His programs ran every night; there was no escape from his plate-round face and straight stringy hair held back with a woman’s headband. Anna thought he was weird and wonderful alike. A psychic seemed so un-Swiss, so unempirical.
Ursula stirred when Anna switched off the set. She woke with a start and for a moment seemed not to recognize her daughter-in-law.
“I’m here for Polly,” Anna announced, as if there would be any other reason for her to appear in Ursula’s house so late at night.
“Leave her alone,” Ursula said. “If you wake her, she’ll never go back to sleep.”
“Oh.” The tension in the car had distracted her. Anna felt stupid that she hadn’t sorted this out. Of course. It was understood. Polly was going to stay the night. “Ursula, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” She hadn’t been. But fetching Polly Jean was as good an excuse as any to get away from Bruno for a while.
Ursula rose, shook her head thoroughly as if to jostle something loose. “Not thinking is one of your worst habits.” Then she walked Anna to the door, directed her unceremoniously through it, and locked it behind her in the space of no more than fifteen seconds. Anna walked home without the baby she came for.
“GHOSTS,” DOKTOR MESSERLI CONTINUED, “aren’t always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something you’ve been or done that you cannot escape.”
6
TWO WEEKS LATER, ON A SUNDAY, THE LAST DAY OF THE MONTH, Anna, Bruno, Ursula, and the children boarded a 10:00 A.M. train. They were on their way to Mumpf, a town in Kanton Aargau near Switzerland’s north border, where Daniela, Bruno’s sister, and her partner David lived. It was Daniela’s fortieth birthday.
Taking a train often made more sense than driving. Today the choice was made by circumstance: with Ursula along they couldn’t all fit inside the car. The only inconvenience of the plan was two transfers. David would gather them at Bahnhof Mumpf when they arrived.
On the InterRegio, Charles took the window seat facing forward and Victor, the seat turned toward the back. These were their permanent assignments when the family traveled by train, much to the vexation of Anna’s eldest. Charles had a tender stomach and was prone to motion sickness. A window seat helped his equilibrium. Sure enough, five minutes into the trip, Charles’s face took on the color of a small sour pickle. “Watch the horizon, Schatz,” Anna counseled. “Draw deep, slow breaths.” This seemed to help.
Anna sat next to Victor on the aisle, facing Bruno who, like Charles, always took a forward-facing seat. Ursula settled into the bank of seats across from them, her eyes closed lightly as if in prayer and Daniela’s birthday gift in her lap. In his own lap, Bruno held Polly Jean.
The question had never been asked. Not by Bruno, not by Ursula, not by Daniela nor Hans nor Margrith nor Edith nor Doktor Messerli nor Claudia Zwygart nor the postman nor the cashier at the grocery store nor Mary nor Archie nor anyone who knew Anna either casually or closely, acquaintances old and new. None had asked. And had they asked, Anna would have lied.
But there isn’t any reason to ask. Anna always went back to that.
Nevertheless, the facts were chiseled into the exquisite alabaster of Polly Jean’s face where anyone who wished to challenge the fiction could have and the facts were these: Polly in no way resembled Bruno.
Polly Jean was not a Benz.
“ANNA, WHO IS STEPHEN?” This was the third time Doktor Messerli had asked her.
A man I could never love, but did, Anna thought but didn’t say. Doktor Messerli didn’t ask again.
THE WEATHER PLAYED TRICKS. A cold front that had blown through Zürich the night before had left Dietlikon windy and wet. But halfway to Mumpf the skies were clear. The Benzes were outrunning the elements.
IT WAS A STORY she’d told only to herself, but had repeated so often it was rote. The only thing that ever changed was the tenor by which she told it: sometimes with a sympathetic bias, others with hysteria’s rancid theatrics, and yet other times with a harlot’s detached sangfroid. Occasionally it brought her comfort. More often than not it made her queasy, it hurt her heart (everything always hurt her heart). But whether through sorrow’s shiny tears or memory’s glazed and hazy panes of glass, Anna was resigned to a progression of unalterable facts.
“THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS, Anna. Everything correlates. Everything connects. Every detail bears a consequence. One instant begets the next. And the next. And the next.”
ANNA EYED HER HUSBAND. Bruno seemed to have let his jealousy go. The past two weeks had been spent without incident. They were getting along. They’d gone to market together, worked in the yard together, gone out to dinner as a family, and even went to a movie they’d both wanted to see. No further mention of Archie was made. But the merry, expansive man who showed himself at the Gilberts’ had been replaced by the sullen, disgruntled husband who Anna knew too well.
And why shouldn’t he be disgruntled? Anna upbraided herself. Just because he doesn’t know what I’m doing doesn’t mean I’m not doing it. During the last two weeks Anna tried to step back, to stand apart from herself, to evaluate her most recent choices and to weigh their benefits against their costs. It had been a close call. Who’s Archie? Bruno asked. A no one, Anna replied. And he was. She barely knew the man. Is this the hill I want to die on? she asked herself. No? Then don’t die on it, woman.
But was the call really that close? Were the incident drawn on a map, Bruno’s moment of suspicion would have been no nearer to the fact of the ma
tter than a suburb is to city center. When Anna thought about it that way, the damage seemed minimal, all the way around.
Like that, Anna bounced between consequence and choice.
And in the end, the ball landed on the side of no harm, no foul. I am a good wife, mostly, she self-proclaimed. Everyone’s safe, everyone’s fed.
Anna kept seeing Archie.
“When you were a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?” Doktor Messerli once asked.
Anna gave a plaintive answer. “Loved. Protected. Secure.” She knew that wasn’t what the Doktor meant.
The Doktor tried another approach. “What did you study at university?” Anna flushed. She didn’t want to say. “Tell me.”
“Home economics,” Anna whispered.
IT HAD HAPPENED ALMOST two years earlier. It was four days before Christmas. A Wednesday. Anna had taken the train into the city. A reluctant voyage, it was a next-to-next-to-last shopping trip, a chore in which she was only marginally invested.
The weeks that immediately precede Weihnachten in Zürich are entirely tolerable. The streets teem with shoppers whose smart, bright coats appear even smarter and brighter against the drab gray landscape of Zürich’s usually snowless Decembers. From sooty roasting drums, dark-skinned men scoop hot chestnuts into thin paper sacks. A seasonal candle-making tent stands near the Bürkliplatz Quaibrücke. And for a time, if you found yourself on the Bahnhofstrasse after sundown there was the delectation of strolling beneath the shine of champagne-colored twinkle lights and a one-kilometer stretch of seven-foot-long tubular bulbs. They pended from cables stretched taut between buildings and above the catenaries supplying power to the city’s electric trams and were controlled by software that varied the scintillation according to levels of human activity in the street underneath. The array was modern—too modern, in fact. Enough people hated them that the city eventually returned to a more traditional display. But Anna’s boys loved it. Even Victor, who was easily bored and for his age notably jaded, allowed himself the indulgence of childlike captivation, wonder, awe.
Anna had spent the day traversing Zürich’s entire downtown from west to east on foot, and the trimmings of the holiday season—lovely as they were in smaller doses—began to feel excessive, unnecessary. Still, she shopped. At Piz Buch und Berg she found Bruno’s Christmas gift, several close-scale hiking maps of cantons Graubünden and St. Gallen and a guidebook of suggested treks through the Swiss Jura. At the Manor on Bahnhofstrasse Anna fought aggressive crowds to pick out a modest twin sweater set that she thought might make a nice, thought-that-counts kind of gift for Edith.
Chagrin had begun the day. Bruno had put her in a mood that morning for a reason she’d managed to forget. But the feeling, whatever it was, gnawed on her like teeth. She hashed and simmered, an all-day stew on the stove. She was lonely and remote. Anna was lonely and remote everywhere she went.
“A LONELY WOMAN IS a dangerous woman.” Doktor Messerli spoke with grave sincerity. “A lonely woman is a bored woman. Bored women act on impulse.”
ANNA TURNED HER GAZE from Bruno to the window. Kanton Aargau was made fuzzy by the handprints on the glass and the speed of the train. Victor and Charles squabbled over an action figure Anna had carelessly forgotten to make sure they brought two of. Bruno threatened to take it away if they couldn’t settle their disagreement. Ursula fell asleep halfway to Mumpf. Her thin, wheezy snore was barely audible over the train’s natural noise. The boys laughed; Anna shushed them. Bruno rolled his eyes and said, “She sleeps too much, my mother.” Bruno was a devoted son, but he was critical on occasion, not just of Anna, but of all the women in his life, Ursula and Daniela included (though Anna most of all).
Anna scowled at him. “Don’t roll your eyes at her, she’s your mother.” Ursula couldn’t help but snore. She was an old woman.
“She’s not that old.” Anna granted Bruno this. Ursula would be sixty-seven on her next birthday. She’d been a young mother, just twenty-three at Bruno’s birth. By the time she was Anna’s age, her son was an insolent teen. Anna would be well into her fifties before all of the children were out of the house. The thought exhausted her. Mother has moods, too, Bruno had groused, but Anna only knew of one, that vinegar humor, her snappy disposition, the scowl into which she twisted her face when Anna did something she didn’t approve of, the silence she spat back when Anna said something she didn’t want to hear. Anna had given up trying to please her years ago.
“IS THERE A DIFFERENCE between destiny and fate?” Anna was jumpy, more unsettled than usual. Doktor Messerli asked if she understood the concept of synchronicity. “Not really.”
“Events don’t always obey rules of time and space. Sometimes the mere thought of a certain friend will cause her to telephone after months of no communication. Or perhaps a man wonders whether he should leave his wife and in the next instant he turns on the radio and hears a notice for apartments. No coincidence is chance. Synchronicity is the external manifestation of an inner reality.”
Anna quizzed her with her eyes.
HAD ANNA FORGONE A single stop that day, or had any of her exchanges in shops or on the street endured a short minute longer or a long half-minute less, then what happened wouldn’t have. Anna was close to giving up and going home. She was hungry. She was cold. The shopping was almost done. All she’d left to buy was Ursula’s gift. Ursula was a knitter; Anna planned to give her skeins of wool. She crossed the Limmat at the Rathausbrücke and made her way to the Hand-Art shop on Neumarkt.
THE BENZES WERE QUIET on the train to Mumpf, each locked in the closet of his or her own thoughts. Anna flipped through a German-language women’s magazine she’d bought from a kiosk at the Oerlikon train station. She scanned her monthly horoscope. Born October 22, Anna was a Libra and in less than a month she would be thirty-eight years old. Forest, danger, fire, trial. Most of the horoscope’s words she knew. She got the gist. It ended with a warning: Gib acht.
Be careful.
BEFORE DOKTOR MESSERLI SUGGESTED the German classes, she recommended that Anna begin a journal. “You needn’t bring it to analysis and I don’t ask you to share it with me if that isn’t your wish. Consider it a private, internal conversation. But be absolutely honest. To yourself, you must admit everything.” Anna liked this idea and she took Doktor Messerli’s advice and immediately after analysis that day she went to an upscale stationery story near the Doktor’s office and bought a flat-spine unruled journal with a green cloth cover. It was almost too pretty to write in.
She wrote the first entry on the train ride home. Admit it all, Anna. Do not hedge. Her sentences were scattered, disconnected: Everything I run from catches up to me. My prayers don’t have purchase. I carry them on my back. I cannot set them down. I have lost a year of sleep to insomnia. The utter sameness just drags on. I have a face like a key to a diary. There’s something it should open. I lack most kinds of stamina. I am beholden to my own peculiar irony: to survive I self-destruct. But the heart’s logic follows its own rules. I miss him simply because I do.
Anna read what she’d written and grimaced. She’d try this again, she was sure. Probably. Maybe. In the meantime, she took her pen and crossed out the entire page with an aggressive X.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT from this, Archie?” It was the Wednesday after the dinner party in Uster. Anna lay on her back in Archie’s bed with the blanket pulled all the way to her chin. It was time to go home but the room was cold and she was naked and getting out of bed would mean facing both those facts.
“What do you mean?”
Anna didn’t think it was a complicated question. “I mean this isn’t a relationship.”
“But we just had relations.” He winked.
Anna was undeterred. “What kind of man has an affair with a married woman?” It wasn’t an indictment. She wanted to know.
“Not relevant.” Anna blinked. She rebutted. He shook his head. “More people have affairs than don’t.”
Anna scowled. “That can
’t be true.”
He spun her question on its axis. “What about a married woman? Why does she do it? What kind of woman’s she?”
“A lonely woman. A bored woman.” Anna spoke with authority.
Archie shook his head. “No, that’s not it.”
“How would you know?” Anna wondered whether Archie had done this before.
“Bored women join clubs and volunteer. Sad women have affairs.”
That’s the statement of a reductionist, Anna thought, but didn’t feel like arguing the point. “You think I’m sad?”
“Knew it the moment I saw you.” Anna asked how that was possible. “A man can smell a woman’s sadness.”
“And you smelled mine.” Anna was offended by the word “smell.” As if sadness could be covered up with roses. As if despair might be washed off with soap.
“Yes.”
“And took advantage of it.” Anna was perturbed and fascinated and something else, though she couldn’t pin it down. Guilty? Found out? Caught in the red-handed act? Something like that.
Hausfrau: A Novel Page 7