The Swiss guy’s texts said that he was leaving for the library, and then that he was at the library, and then he was wondering if I was going to meet him or not, because he was so hungry. I texted him back saying I guessed it wasn’t a good day. He said he’d been waiting for me. I felt kind of bad and decided it was worth the free pancakes if I only had to show up, eat them, and leave. To expedite things I told him to go ahead and order, but the food arrived quicker than I calculated, and by the time I got there he was done eating and my pancakes were cold. I ate them as fast as I could and he talked about how he really wanted to stay in New York for the conference, but if he didn’t go back to Switzerland he would lose those two weeks of unemployment pay. I couldn’t bear the sound of his voice.
Afterward I went to walk around Target for a few hours. When I got home the Swiss guy wasn’t there. I went to bed excited and anxious about the next day. The Swiss guy’s flight back to Switzerland was at eight p.m.
In the morning I stayed in my room until the Swiss guy left to get his stuff from his storage unit. He texted to say he would be back around two and had to leave for the airport at five, so I took Pearl out for a walk at one forty-five and got back at five fifteen. We had never walked so many miles in our lives. At five fifteen the Swiss guy was still there, packing. I offered to help him but he said he was almost done, so I offered to call him a cab. I saw the keys he had been using lying on the back of the couch and pocketed them. He knelt down to say good-bye to Pearl and they kissed each other. I helped the Swiss guy carry his stuff down the stairs.
When the cab came, we said good-bye.
“Thank you very much for everything.” He gave me a hug.
“No problem,” I said.
“Let’s keep in touch,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
He waved from the cab as it pulled away, and I smiled. It had probably been at least a week since he had seen me smile.
Upstairs he had left a bunch of empties, and a set of glasses from Ikea and some towels that he wanted me to give to a good home. I told him I didn’t want them, and he said, “As long as they go to someone who can use them, that’s the important thing.” I brought everything down to the garbage, and back upstairs I opened the wine product for the fruit flies that had been flying around the empties.
• • •
A few days later I forgot my phone at home and when I got back from school I had a million text messages from my brother.
“Hey.”
“What’s up?”
“How is everything?”
“Is everything okay?”
“Why are you ignoring me?”
“Write back so I know everything is okay.”
“I’m getting worried.”
“Write back or I’m calling Mom.”
“Write back or I’m calling the police.”
I called him. “I’m fine! Why are you freaking out?”
“Last I knew you had a strange man living in your apartment,” he said. “How was I supposed to know he didn’t kill you?”
“Swiss people don’t kill people,” I said. “If anybody had killed anybody, I would have killed him.”
“So he’s gone now?”
“Yeah, he’s gone. He left on Sunday. The happiest day of my life.”
“Why did you let him stay if you didn’t even like him?”
“I did like him,” I said. “Until I got to know him better.” I took off my pants and got into bed. Pearl jumped up and settled down with her body along my body, and her head on my shoulder.
“Please never do this again,” said my brother.
“I won’t,” I said. “I will never date again.”
When Pearl heard me say “bye” she thumped her tail. I snuggled into her, and she turned her head and brushed the side of my face with the tip of her tongue.
NEW GIRLS
Ernesta
When we moved to Germany, the real estate agent said there were tons of girls in the neighborhood for me to be friends with. She also said that I could take the bus to school from the bottom of the street, but it turned out that that bus stop had been out of service for years and the nearest stop was a kilometer away, which was really far at six o’clock in the morning when I was still asleep, and again after school when I was starving.
Obviously the real estate agent also lied about the girls. There were only two girls in the neighborhood, and they were hard to find. One supposedly lived across the street but I didn’t see her for all of August. Her brothers claimed she was away. In the second week of August I found the other girl. I was outside watching my mom smoke a secret cigarette and pour beer on the slugs in the garden. A girl walked up to the gate and at first I thought she was older than me, and then I thought she was younger but a giant. She was very friendly and she spoke some English. Her name was Ernesta.
She invited me to go over to her house, which was four houses down from ours. I went back to my mom.
“I don’t even know her,” I said.
“It’s okay,” said my mom.
“You don’t even know her parents,” I said. “I can’t go over to someone’s house unless you know their parents.”
“It will be okay,” said my mom. “You’ll be a few houses away. I’ll be able to hear you if you scream.”
“Mom! It’s not safe.”
“Everything in Germany is safe.”
“How do you know?”
“Come on, Steph. Just go.”
I went out to the sidewalk and Ernesta smiled. I followed her down the street. When we got to her house her mom was in the living room, ironing underwear. She smiled at me and said some German things, and Ernesta translated that she was glad to meet me. We went to Ernesta’s room and played a game called Manhattan, where we tried to build the highest skyscraper with little parts of buildings.
In the next weeks we played Manhattan many times. While we were playing we had conversations using all the English words Ernesta knew and all the German words I knew. One day Ernesta asked me about the real Manhattan and if it was true that the models lived there. Ernesta said she might become a model because she was tall, but I wouldn’t because I was so short. I tried to tell her I was going to grow more, but either she didn’t understand or she didn’t believe me. I thought I had a better chance of being a model than she did. She wasn’t really pretty and also her name was Ernesta.
Lisa
At the end of August the missing girl came back. She had been on a teen tour to the UK. Her name was Lisa and she was tall and skinny and very tan. She spoke better English and had a better house than Ernesta. She had a huge room filled with magazines, and I spent the last weeks of the summer vacation looking at them. The only kids’ magazines I read back in the States were Ranger Rick and some Christian magazines that my grandpa’s wife subscribed me to. These German magazines were way better. They were for teenagers and they had “Fotoromane,” which were like comics but with pictures of real people, and the people were sometimes kissing and sometimes even naked. I could hardly read any of the words but it didn’t matter.
One day Lisa and I found an ad for a contest in one of the magazines. If you sent in a picture of your legs, you could win one thousand deutsche marks and a chance to be a model for a shaving cream company. We decided that Lisa should enter because her legs were tanner and more grown-up looking. She put on some very short shorts and I took pictures of her legs with a disposable camera. I didn’t think her legs looked shiny enough, so she put lotion on them. They still didn’t look shiny enough, so I suggested she put butter on them. Then her legs were super shiny. When we were done taking the pictures she tried to wash the butter off in the bathtub, but her legs were too slippery. She told me to go get her mom. Her mom didn’t speak English, so Lisa told me what to say in German: “Frau Schneider, Lisa hat Butter auf ihren Beinen.”
Brigitta
Finally it was time to go to school. Because my parents didn’t love me or my brother, they were sending us to G
erman public school for the two years we were going to be in Germany. My brother could go to the elementary school in our town, but I had to take the bus from the faraway bus stop to a faraway city, thirty minutes away. My school was actually near the Mercedes-Benz offices where my dad was working, but he couldn’t drive me because we had to go at different times. A couple of days before school started my parents said they were going to find me a friend to go to school with on the first day. It couldn’t be Ernesta because she wasn’t going to go to the same school as me, and I hadn’t seen her much since Lisa got back anyway. It couldn’t be Lisa because she was going into ninth grade and I was going into sixth. It had to be a girl in my class who could show me around.
My dad called the school and they gave him two names, one girl in our town and one in the next town over. He spent a long time consulting the dictionary and writing out what he wanted to say, and then he called the first girl’s house. No one answered, so he left a message. The next day he called again, and on the third day he decided that they must be on vacation and he called the second girl. Her mom answered and said that her daughter would be happy to meet me and show me around. She said we could come over to their house the next day.
The next day we got lost on the way because my dad had written the directions in German, to practice. When we finally got there a pretty girl who spoke perfect English opened the door, and I felt like things were going to be okay. But she turned out to be Brigitta’s older sister, and Brigitta herself did not speak, in English or in German. Brigitta was my same height and she had thick brown hair that hung over her face. Her mom came out and introduced us, but Brigitta just smiled a big smile full of braces. I was a little bit worried about having a mute guide, but I figured that it didn’t really matter since we didn’t speak the same language anyway. Brigitta’s mom had made us a fruit tart, and she invited my dad to stay and eat. We sat at a table outside and Brigitta’s sister asked me a million questions in English about America, and then she told me all about our school. She said the school was six hundred years old but I wouldn’t notice because the buildings were very modern. She said she had the same teacher as us when she was in the sixth grade, and he was really nice. Brigitta sat and smiled. When we were done eating, the grown-ups went inside and we stayed out on the swings, and Brigitta’s sister talked and Brigitta still just smiled.
On the first day of school I went in with Brigitta, and everyone crowded around us and asked me questions in English. They wanted to know where I was from and why I moved to Germany, and they wanted to know which language I was going to take and which religion class I was going to be in. For religion there were only two choices, katholisch and evangelisch. I wondered why there were no other choices. Almost all the kids in my old school were Jewish, except for one kid who was Zoroastrian. I didn’t know what that meant and we didn’t study either of those things. I tried to tell the kids I wasn’t religious at all but they said I had to pick one. I picked evangelisch because I was sure I wasn’t katholisch. Half of the class cheered, and I didn’t know whether it was the katholisch half or the evangelisch half.
For language there were also two choices, Englisch and Latein. My mom and dad had a fight about which one I would take. My dad wanted me to take Latin, but my mom said it would be sadistic to make me take Latin when I didn’t even speak German. I told the class I was going to take English, and again half the class cheered.
I ended up loving English because it was the only class where I understood anything. The English teacher didn’t love me back, though, because she didn’t like it when I helped her. Like when she told the class there was no English word for Geschwister, I raised my hand to say actually there was, and it was “siblings.” I had learned the word Geschwister because that was one of the getting-to-know-you questions. What’s your name, how old are you, where do you live, do you have any Geschwister?
Krystal
It turned out there was a boy in my class who spent summers in the States and spoke English fluently, and who happened to look just like Jonathan Taylor Thomas, my favorite actor. His name was Benjamin. I started hanging around him as much as I could so that I didn’t have to speak German, and soon he was my boyfriend.
I hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long time. In kindergarten I had a boyfriend named Joseph, who I was going to marry and have ten children with. But after kindergarten I went to a different school and everything went downhill. The boys ignored me and the girls made fun of me. It was a small private school and it was hard to stay out of the other kids’ way. In first grade, the second-grade girls kicked me off the swings on the playground, meaning they kicked me until I got off the swings. In second grade one of the girls caught me singing songs from The Little Mermaid by myself, and they all made fun of me for that for the rest of the year. In third grade those girls said I could play hairdresser with them, and they cut off my ponytail with scissors. Fourth grade wasn’t so bad because I stayed away from them at recess, and I was safe in my classroom because I was in a special class of kids who had it as bad as I did. I thought fifth grade would be even better because the mean girls were going to middle school, but I somehow made enemies with a new girl in my class, Krystal, who told me that I didn’t wash my hair or clean the dirt out from under my nails. I didn’t know what she was talking about because I did wash my hair and my nails were too short to have dirt under them. I spent all of fifth grade begging my mom to send me to public school, so that I could at least start over. My mom said no again and again, and then when she knew about moving to Germany she started saying, “Let’s see what happens. You never know what might happen.” So now I got to go to public school, except in another country and in a language I didn’t speak.
Veronika and Viktoria
I was very happy about Benjamin being my boyfriend, until I started to understand that one of the two most popular girls in the class had had a crush on him for her whole life, and that was why the girls in the class weren’t inviting me to go out to lunch with them. I thought it was just because I was unlikable, but they were actually mad at me.
The two most popular girls were twins named Veronika and Viktoria. They were half a year older and half a head taller than the rest of the class. They were kind of chubby but that didn’t seem to matter. Everyone thought they were really cool because they smoked cigarettes and drank beer.
The twins had a sidekick named Ilona, and the three of them were the three most popular bad girls. Then there were three popular good girls, who were really smart and were in charge of stuff in the classroom. One was the other girl my dad tried to call, the one who lived in my town. I wondered if things would have been different if my dad had been able to reach her and she had been my first friend. Another one of those girls was some kind of tennis champion, and the third one was very small and the best in the class at every single subject.
Then there were three not popular but not unpopular girls. Nothing was wrong with them but they didn’t seem to be special in any way. Then there was Brigitta, who the twins were protective of, because she lived in their neighborhood and had gone to their elementary school. And there was Monika Biermann, who loosened her retainer with her tongue and spit it onto her desk every time she was about to say something in class.
I wasn’t exactly sure where I fit in, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t good. I was okay with that when I thought girls in Germany just didn’t like me, same as girls in America. But when it turned out that I had done something wrong and was being punished, I felt like I had ruined a perfectly good chance to be popular.
On the day we had afternoon classes, everyone went to one of four places. Almost no one went to the IBM cafeteria across the street. The food was actually pretty good but the cafeteria was full of adults. Then there was the Ikea down the street, and a McDonald’s a couple of bus stops away, on my bus line. But most of the kids went to a mall called Breuningerland. I didn’t know where it was or how they got there, so I couldn’t tell my parents about it to get permission to go.
Usually I went to the IBM cafeteria and read, and sometimes if Benjamin wasn’t going to lunch with the boys or Brigitta wasn’t going with the girls, one of them would go to the Ikea or the McDonald’s with me. Benjamin especially liked to go to the Ikea to push each other around in the carts, which wasn’t really what I imagined when I thought about going out to lunch with my boyfriend.
I was grateful to Brigitta for being the only girl who was nice to me, but I was starting to get tired of trying to talk to her. She technically could speak, but she didn’t like to do it, and when she did it was hard for me to understand her because she was so quiet and because I still didn’t really understand German.
I started saving the seat on the bus for Benjamin instead, who got on at the stop after Brigitta. On the weekends I mostly looked at magazines at Lisa’s house, and sometimes Benjamin and I went on dates to the movies. Those dates weren’t really what I hoped for either. I wasn’t allowed to take the bus on the weekends so my mom would drive us, and Benjamin would ride in the backseat with my brother. One time we went to see Romeo + Julia but it was almost sold out and we couldn’t get seats next to each other. Benjamin wanted to see Independence Day instead, but I thought Romeo + Julia would be more romantic. So we got seats near each other but in different rows, and I sat in front of Benjamin. I thought that would be close enough to hold hands but it wasn’t.
Benjamin and I kept breaking up and getting back together, because he didn’t want to French-kiss me because he thought it was gross, and because I purposely flirted with other boys on the bus. I sort of tried to stop doing it, but not really. No boys had ever talked to me before, and now they did, older boys from the eighth grade. I liked that and I kind of enjoyed how mad it made Benjamin. There were also smaller problems, like that for Christmas I got him a stuffed dog and he got me a nose horn. He got one for himself too. You put the nose horn up to your nose and snorted, and it played a note. I never played it but my mom did. She thought it was hilarious and she played it all the time, even though it made me mad.
Barbara the Slut and Other People Page 12