Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

  “Not really, no.”

  “Cool,” Sam said, staring over one of my shoulders. “Well, then, hasta la vista.”

  “Yeah, hasta la vista,” I echoed mockingly.

  “OK,” Boris said. “See ya.” He then crumpled his face to express—what? Regret? Heartbreak? Mild nausea? I had no way of knowing, and at this point I didn’t really care. In fact, at that moment I didn’t really care if I never saw Boris Potasnik ever again. “Right,” I murmured quietly. “See ya.”

  And that was it for our grand goodbye.

  Willkommen in Berlin!

  WE TOOK A CAB UPTOWN TO THE LINDHURST grad party, which was being held in a townhouse in the West Seventies. The apartment was filled with smoke and jazz and shy boys wearing loosely knotted ties. Framed New Yorker covers hung on the walls, just like in the bathroom of my dentist’s office.

  The Lindhurst School was a tiny all-boys school near Columbia University. Likewise, its graduation party was tiny and, with a few unthreatening exceptions, all boys. When the five of us waltzed into the room, quite a few of the guys just gawked, while the bolder ones swarmed us and offered to get us drinks.

  “All-boy parties rule!” Jess cried gleefully. “I feel like a supermodel!”

  “Enjoy it while you can,” Pia advised her. “The Orbach School girls will be coming any minute.”

  Viv took that cue to accost a horse-faced boy at the bar. Since the whole Sam debacle, her already-substantial insecurities had multiplied bigtime. She’d gone from barely eating anything to barely eating even less, and as her appetite for food diminished, her appetite for male attention increased. She was becoming needier than Jess—standing creepily close to men on the subway and throwing herself at any male with a pulse. A few weeks ago, when Pia brought us to an exhibition of Milanese dishware at the Italian embassy, I’d overheard Viv telling a married potter from a population-six-hundred Sicilian village that she found clay “intensely sensual.” Good thing the guy didn’t understand a syllable of English.

  While she and the rest of the girls reveled in the glow of male attention, I shut myself in the bathroom to fret over the Boris situation and all the smoother ways I might’ve handled myself at the grad party. Maybe if I’d followed Harriet’s advice and “laid down the law” months ago, Boris would be worshiping me by now. I stood up and looked in the mirror, examining the face that he could take or leave: the small nose, the freckles, the wide cheeks. Dad says my brown eyes are “sparkling and intelligent,” but I’d happily trade up for some baby blues. My delicate collarbone was definitely my best feature; no others sprang immediately to mind.

  I stepped back and tried to see myself as if for the first time. No, I wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, but I wasn’t ugly, either. I was certainly prettier than Sam, whose company, for some reason, Boris preferred to mine.

  “Get over it, mopey,” Lily commanded when I dragged back into the living room. “There will be plenty more Borises in Berlin.”

  How, I wondered, did Lily always read my mind so exactly?

  “But you don’t understand,” I whimpered, “when we’re alone, he’s so diff—”

  Lily wasn’t interested. She hooked her arm under mine and took me out to the provisional dance floor on the terrace. As it turned out, the Orbach girls never showed up, and we remained the party’s only supermodels. So many guys asked me to dance that, over the next three hours, I nearly forgot about my romantic misery.

  I got home around four and—because I was already packed—managed to sleep almost two hours before Dad gently shook me awake. “Three hours till takeoff,” he said somberly.

  As usual before prolonged separations, we didn’t speak much on the early-morning cab ride to JFK. I knew Dad was upset, but I was in no position to console him—at least he wasn’t spending the next three months in the world capital of anal retentiveness with only Mom and Maurice for company.

  When the taxi pulled up in front of terminal four, I slipped my hand into Dad’s. After helping me unload my luggage, he hugged me tight and then got back into the cab. As it was speeding off, Dad rolled down the window and made me promise to drink plenty of water on the flight and to call him as soon as I’d landed. “Miss you already,” I shouted back in response.

  The next twelve hours were a total blur. I remember nothing of JFK except the greasy egg rolls I ordered in the food court, and I remember even less of the flight across the Atlantic. Within minutes of strapping myself into the cramped seat, I passed out. When I woke up somewhere over Ireland with drool dried on my chin, I noticed for the first time that the German man in the seat next to me was wearing head-to-toe black waffle-knit long underwear. On his lap was the Oxford Encyclopedia of Animal Anatomy. I closed my eyes again.

  By the time I regained consciousness, we were on the ground, and everyone around me was checking voice mail while waiting to be let off the plane. For once, I was grateful not to have a cell phone. Mom was picking me up, and she wouldn’t have been able to hold back from leaving me a dozen psychotic messages.

  I inhaled deeply as I disembarked the plane, bracing myself for the reunion. I could just picture Mom, in her sweatsuit and red sunglasses, anxiously scanning the crowd for me. “Well, there you are,” she’d say when I walked right up and tapped her on the shoulder. “I was so worried we’d miss each other; I’ve been having this spellbinding dream series where I’m in the supermarket and I keep pushing my shopping cart past the milk aisle even though that’s what I came for . . .”

  The passport hall had about thirty glass booths, all with long lines of frazzled passengers. I took my place in one for foreigners and busied myself with filling out my landing card. When I was done, I idly flipped through my passport and admired the stamps adorning several pages. Like most Texans, I’d been to Mexico several times. I’d also gone to an island off the coast of Belize for a family “diving trip,” which soon turned into a family reading-novels-on-splintery-docks trip, since we showed up five days after a woman on her honeymoon had been almost bitten by a shark and Mom developed “safety concerns” about my planned diving lessons. When I was in third grade, we went to Paris, and then Rome when I was in middle school. But on all family trips, my older sister, Ariel, and I pretty much hid behind our parents and their guidebooks. It was only last September, when I moved back to New York, that I really learned to navigate a new place on my own. And I took my first parent-free trip over winter break, when my friends and I went to a gardening commune in the Dominican Republic.

  After finally getting my passport stamped and collecting my black suitcase from baggage claim, I passed through the “Nothing to Declare” line and out into the main concourse of the terminal, where drivers held up signs for their passengers and anxious Berliners waited for their loved ones. My own anxious Berliner, however, was nowhere evident. I stood there, right in the middle of the passageway, gazing in both directions as fellow travelers jostled me over and over. Mom was probably locked inside a bathroom stall, gathering “emergency” toilet paper for her purse.

  When at last I heard the name “MIRIAM!” crowed over the crush of people, I spun around in confusion. I knew that voice, but it wasn’t Mom’s. It belonged to Maurice Lancaster, everyone’s least favorite hypochondriac stepdad-to-be. That afternoon he had on high-waisted jeans, a Disneyland T-shirt, and a conspicuous blue bandage wrapped around his right elbow. He trundled a few steps toward me, flailing his arms with no regard for the people around him. “Guten Tag!” he shouted. “Willkommen in Berlin, Miriam!”

  I smiled thinly at him but didn’t say anything. Though I wanted to ask him what “boundary-shattering” psychology position paper had kept his darling girlfriend from picking me up herself, I held my tongue and simply nudged my seven-hundred-pound suitcase at him. But Maurice, who looked even puffier in the company of so many sleek Europeans, didn’t take the hint.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I decline to transport your Reisegepäck, Miriam,” he said jovially. “I threw out my elbow on the fli
ght over, and for all the famous efficiency of this country, I’m still searching for that perfect Berlin orthopedist.”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone throwing out an elbow before,” I murmured.

  “I know—aren’t my ailments unique?”

  I made no reply. When Maurice got started on his failing health, he zoned the rest of the world out completely. We began walking, me heaving my huge LeSportsac duffel bag on one arm and dragging my rolling mega-Samsonite with the other; Maurice carrying nothing but an empty coffee cup and a wadded-up German newspaper. At one point, he even had the audacity to complain about the weight of this, periodical. “You wouldn’t believe how they load up these Zeitungs with classifieds and supplements!” he said. “It’s a real commitment, hauling one of these babies around.”

  Yet again: no response necessary. I remained silent even after Maurice showed me to his ridiculous little midlife-crisis sportscar and took us down the Autobahn toward our new home—or, as Maurice repeatedly called it, our Zuhause. When I rolled down the passenger-side window, Maurice reminded me of his extreme sensitivity to air pollution.

  Way to pick a place to move. So far, what I’d seen of Berlin made smoggy Houston look like a pristine paradise. The city was gray and overcast, with construction cranes hanging over most intersections.

  From the car floor I picked up the Evian bottle that had been banging into my foot and asked if I could have a sip. “Have the whole thing,” Maurice too readily offered. “Planes are real germ incubators, and I can’t afford to contract anything.”

  I was too tired to reply, too tired to do anything but sip the water and lean my head against the windowpane. I must’ve dozed off at some point, because when I next opened my eyes, the car had stopped in front of a miniaturized redbrick house that looked almost edible.

  I heard my mother’s voice through the window: “Up and at ’em, Miriam—your welcome wagon has arrived!”

  She was standing on the curb, decked out as unfashionably as ever in tan leggings and a bright orange ASK ME ABOUT MY LOBOTOMY T-shirt. She was also as exuberant as ever, yanking me out of the car and hugging me and blabbing a mile a minute. “Go on, Dagmar,” she said to the lanky guy lurking behind her. His hair was dark except for a long, heavily sculpted blond clump at the center of his forehead that made him look like a unicorn. “You can take everything up to the kids’ room, that’d be great, danke, danke, danke very much!”

  Dagmar did as told, and before he was out of earshot, Mom cried, “Isn’t he just the most fabulous thing you’ve ever laid eyes on? He’s my lab assistant and muse!”

  I thought of Quinn with a pang while Mom continued talking. “He grew up in East Berlin, on the other side of the wall, and oh, Bubble Bath, you wouldn’t believe how troubled he is! He doesn’t talk much yet, but when he does, he uses the most compelling expressions. Just yesterday, he said, oh, now what was it?” She brought her hand to her forehead; I shielded my eyes from her fluorescent T-shirt. “Oh, yes! He told me that meteors aren’t the same thing as seltzer water—isn’t that absolutely phenomenal? Not that I have any idea what it means, har! You two will get along great, I’m sure. You both have such highly developed verbal skills.”

  Through heavy lids I watched the tall unicorn boy hump my luggage up the front steps of the house. He was wearing a black leather jacket with about a million zippers and—even better—white jeans with orange stitching. His profile revealed multiple earrings in his left ear, plus a bull nose ring at the center of his face. For another sad instant, Quinn’s image floated into my head. If only, if only. Life was completely unfair.

  I turned to Mom, who seemed to have changed very little since I’d last seen her three months ago. As always after long absences, I tried to determine if the woman whose womb had once housed me was attractive; her ridiculously frumpy clothes made it difficult to tell. She was five-four, with disproportionately short and stumpy legs but an otherwise narrow frame. She had brown eyes, a ski-jump nose, and thin, perpetually un-made-up lips that never stopped moving. And for as long as I could remember, she’d worn her sandy brown hair in a monkish bowl cut that fell just below her ears.

  She was still yammering on when she brought me inside and offered to make me dinner. Not having eaten on the plane, I nodded gratefully and collapsed at the kitchen table. “We’re so happy to have you in our little household,” Mom said, her back turned as she rummaged through the refrigerator. Maybe, just maybe, she was planning to make me an apple and cheese sandwich—my favorite as a kid. Occasionally, Mom emerged from her manic self-absorption long enough to make such meaningful little gestures.

  “Interesting décor you got here,” I said, indicating a wall that displayed approximately fifty digital clocks. On the windowsill above the sink were clown figurines and a jar of dirty water with half-dried roses poking out. A few petals had fallen and dispersed around the bottom of the container.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Mom nodded absently, chopping something on the speckled linoleum counter. She switched on a German learning tape as she cooked. “Ich möchte gerne ein Elektriker sein,” she repeated several times, followed by the English translation, “I would like to be an electrician.”

  Lulled by her repetitive practice, I rested my face on the table and was beginning to relax when a digital version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” came booming out of a speaker on the clock wall. I jerked up to see Mom switching off her tape and grinning at me.

  “I knew you’d get a kick out of this,” she said. “They have an internal clock wired up to a sound system so that every hour, on the hour, there’ll be a different musical treat.”

  “So, Miriam, what do you think?” Maurice asked as he bounded into the kitchen. “Your mom told you yet about her plans to sell you into the slave trade?”

  At first I thought Maurice was making some weird Bob Marley reference, but then Mom spun around and shot her boyfriend a threatening look. “Not now, Maurice,” she said. “We’ll discuss it after her nap.”

  “Discuss what?” I asked, now fully awake.

  “Oh, nothing,” Mom answered breezily. “Don’t pay the joker any attention. This summer is going to be so much fun. Tell me what you think,” she said, placing a bowl before me. “Just a little something I threw together.”

  My eyes bulged at the mishmash of unidentifiable white foam, black seeds, cubed tomatoes, and chunks of hard-boiled egg.

  “Hold that bite!” Maurice shrieked, though I’d made no move toward the messy concoction. He opened the refrigerator and removed a yellow notepad from the butter shelf. “The eggs were purchased last Saturday, boiled three days ago,” he read. Without asking, he stuck his head over my bowl and took a good, long sniff. “All right, then,” he said, seemingly satisfied. “These should be safe.”

  Maurice applauded the results of this risk-free meal, but my appetite was long gone. I took a few tiny bites, thanked Mom, and trudged upstairs to the room that Ariel and I would be sharing when she got back from Spain. Or perhaps I should say if she got back from Spain—my nineteen-year-old sister kept postponing her return, and after fifteen minutes in Berlin, I could easily understand why. Ariel’s white rapper boyfriend, Decibel, had been paid so much money to DJ a family friend’s wedding in Ibiza over Memorial Day that he’d rented a room in a pensione for the rest of the month. After three days in Berlin, Ariel had joined her boyfriend on the party island, justifying her defection to my mother as a “totally necessary added-value business move.” This past spring, she and Decibel had founded an independent record company in the garage apartment of his parents’ Austin home, whereupon Ariel promptly shifted her collegiate obsession from sororities to upstart rap acts.

  Our room was furnished sparsely, with two bureaus and unmade twin-size beds. Ariel had marked her territory with a University of Texas pillowcase and Leafy, the green teddy bear she’s had since she was a baby. Ariel’s silver Nike visor sat on the bureau, perched atop a neat stack of the hot pink terry-cloth sweatsuits she wore everywhe
re. On the wall, taped at knee height, were two ripped-out pages detailing an “Abs of Granite” crunch program, and on the bedside table an unopened bag of fat-free gummy bears. For as long as I could remember, Ariel had been obsessed with having a perfect body.

  I threw my bags down, sat at the edge of the mattress, and kicked off my shoes. Then I settled back to stare up at the ceiling and let the events of the last two hours replay in my head. But I was still too tired, and my thoughts too jumbled.

  The latch on my suitcase was jammed, and I couldn’t unclasp it until my fourth attempt. The contents sprayed up in the air and poured out onto the floor. So this is what happens when you let Pia pack your bags for you. As I rummaged through the heap, my hand came upon an unfamiliar object. Its surface felt cool and round, like a Magic 8-Ball. I pulled it out from under a tank top to see that it was a snow globe with a piece of folded-up paper taped across it. I peeled off the note, which was in a jagged caveman-like handwriting I recognized all too well.

  M,

  I came to say goodbye, but you’re still out partying. I want you to know how sorry I am that our last night had to be this way. Sam will chill out soon and everything can be normal again. In the meantime, I hope you know this: every time I see you, I want to jump up and down.

  B

  P.S. If you don’t believe me, shake the stupid thingie. Go on.

  I shook the snow globe and saw that the white snowflakes weren’t the only objects floating. There was also a little black-and-white drawing encased in clear waterproof coating. It showed Boris with his arms outstretched and a red heart scribbled on his chest. I squinted and brought the snow globe up to my face. It almost looked like he was waving at me. This was one of the nicest things anybody had done for me, ever. Why did he insist on being so hard to hate?