Hausfrau

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  LUNCH WITH MARY WAS pleasant, affable. Their conversation was casual but that was all right because Anna didn’t have the heart for anything profound. Mary spoke of Rapperswil, of Anna’s party, of that day’s German class, of how pretty Anna’s ring was. They ate Gschnätzlets mit Rösti, a traditional Zürich dish of minced veal and hash browns. Mary had never had it before. Anna had eaten it a hundred times if once. To her it was ordinary, regular, same.

  When dessert came Mary gave Anna a birthday gift. “Oh Mary, you really shouldn’t have,” Anna said. Mary’s generosity sometimes exasperated her. She never knew how to respond.

  Mary replied, “We’re friends. Practically sisters. Of course I should have.” Anna opened the small, shiny box tied with an apple-red grosgrain ribbon. Inside were a dozen antique handkerchiefs embroidered with Anna’s initials. Mary had done the needlework. The handkerchief on top was baby blue. Anna traced the A with her thumb and the B with her forefinger. She sighed so deeply it sounded like a sob.

  “Are you okay, Anna?”

  Anna brought the handkerchief to her nose. It smelled like lavender. She closed her eyes and nodded, then sighed again. “You know, I used to do this stuff.”

  “Really? You sew?” This admission amused Mary. As if Anna were teasing her, or playing a joke. “It seems like such an un-Anna thing to do.”

  Anna opened her eyes. She could understand how it would seem that way. “No, it’s true. I sew. I mean, I know how to sew. I don’t do it anymore.”

  Mary’s grin was self-satisfied without being smug. When Anna called it to her attention, the grin became an outright smile.

  “What?”

  “I like it when I get to see a side of you you’re trying to hide.”

  Anna pretended she hadn’t heard this and set the baby blue handkerchief atop the stack of the other ones and changed the subject.

  “These are almost too pretty to take out of the box.”

  “Nonsense!” Mary said. “What good is a useful object if it can’t be used?”

  “NARCISSISM ISN’T VANITY, ANNA. We’re all narcissists to a degree. A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive. You have little regard for those around you. You do what you will with a libertine’s abandon. Boredom sets in. A bored woman is a dangerous woman.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  Doktor Messerli nodded.

  “And?” It was an impatient “and.”

  “And there are acts that cannot be unenacted. Outcomes impossible to repair. A narcissist won’t see that until it’s too late.”

  “LET’S REVIEW THE TENSES,” Roland said, and the class groaned collectively. This wasn’t the first time he’d given this lecture. “Zu viel Fehler!” Too many mistakes, Roland said. Anna took easy offense at this even though she knew that there was a tipping point in mistake making when blunders stopped being instructive and became simply habitual. A cards-land-where-they-may approach to moving through language, through love, through life. Unflappable passivity in action.

  But mistakes, Anna thought. They’re yours. All yours. Your own belong to you and no one else. When she thought about it that way—which she had consciously made the choice to do—she felt noble. As if admitting or laying claim to a failure—even if only to the mirror, in solitude and silently—was itself an act of absolution.

  So to Roland she said, Ohne Fehler, ohne Herz. No mistakes, no heart. We are marked by our fuckups. We are made from our fuckups. Anna wanted it to be true. And if she wanted it to be true badly enough, perhaps it would be.

  But days came that the plain pain of memory ate through Anna’s understanding of her personal history. It was then that she pined for the hour exactly before she met Stephen Nicodemus. How different it all would be had I just gone home. Other days, it was such an ache that tethered her to joy. It was despair alone she owned outright. An indefensible comfort, but comfort nonetheless. The only thing she rarely felt was guilt. Love trumped guilt like rock won out over scissors.

  “This is basic, class. Present tense. That which happens now. Future tense. What will occur. Simple past: what was done. Present perfect? What has been done.”

  But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect? Anna stopped listening. These were rules she didn’t trust.

  ANNA SAW MARY OFF at the bus, telling her that by tradition, she took a solitary walk on her birthday during which she considered the previous year and reevaluated her priorities. She would walk the Zürichberg that day, she said. Anna pointed in the direction of Dietlikon. “I may even walk home.” It was a passable lie. She always wanted to hike home from the Zürichberg but never had. If she hadn’t planned to meet Archie that day, she might have made the hike. Mary gave her a final birthday hug and blew her ridiculous kisses from the window as the bus drove away. Anna shook her head and walked back toward the zoo. She met Archie by the ticket booth. He paid both admissions. “Let’s walk around a bit,” Archie said. “I want to see the animals.” Anna replied, “Sure,” but she meant Whatever.

  They made a wistful pair, Anna knowing that it wouldn’t be long before she told Archie the fun they’d been sharing was over and Archie suspecting that was what she would be telling him. They walked without affect and moved through the exhibits and the habitats barely speaking beyond Look over here and Uh-huh. The tigers slept behind rocks and couldn’t easily be seen. The pandas were shy and didn’t come out at all. The monkeys wanted to be watched. They shrieked through their cages and shook the bars.

  “YES, YOU DO HATE Switzerland. And,” Doktor Messerli paused for effect, “you love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don’t feel is apathy. You’re not indifferent. You’re ambivalent.”

  Anna had thought about this before, when nights came during which she could do nothing but wander Dietlikon’s sleeping streets or hike the hill behind her house to sit upon the bench where most often she went to weep. She’d considered her ambivalence many, many times, and in the end, she’d diagnosed herself with a disease that she’d also invented. Switzerland syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome. But instead of my captors, I’m attached to the room in which I’m held captive. It’s the prison I’m bound to, not the warden.

  Anna was absolutely right. It was the landscape. It was the geography. The fields, the streams, the lakes, the forests. And the mountains. On exceptionally clear days when the weather was right, if you walked south on Dietlikon’s Bahnhofstrasse you could see the crisp outlines of snowcapped Alps against a blazing blue horizon eighty kilometers away. On these certain days it was something in the magic of the atmosphere that made them tangible and moved them close. The mutability of those particular mountains reminded Anna of herself. And it wasn’t simply the natural landscape that she attached herself to emotionally. It was the cobblestone roads of Zürich’s old town and the spires of this church and the towers of that one. And the trains, the trains, the goddamn trains. She could take the train anywhere she wanted to go.

  But when she asked herself, Where to? her only answer was impossibly illogical: I want to go home. Ostensibly, she was already there.

  “WHERE DOES FIRE GO when it goes out?” Anna asked. Stephen shook his head. The answer he gave was remote. “Nowhere, Anna. It just goes away. We’ve been over this before.” They had. And Anna still didn’t like the answer. Why does the fire ever have to go away? She refused to concede the point. Not when he said it and not—nearly two years later—when she remembered him having said it.

  A WEEK EARLIER NANCY invited both Mary and Anna to her apartment after class for lunch. Nancy lived in Oerlikon, a short walk from the Migros Klubschule. Outside of the twenty-minute coffee breaks and a word or two during class, Anna and she had never spoken. But Mary and Nancy were friends. “Come with me, Anna,” Mary said. “Nancy’s great.”

  Nancy was a tall, thin woman, Nordic blond, stylish, with a warm and generous demeanor whose apartment, in a way, r
esembled Nancy herself: modern, clean, sparse, pulled together, open. She was forty-one years old, unmarried, childless, and, currently, unemployed. When Anna asked how that was possible (Zürich is painfully expensive) Nancy said it wasn’t a problem and then, with awkward circumspection, confessed to the women that her family owned tea farms in Africa and while she had worked many years as a print journalist, she really hadn’t needed to. “Don’t mistake me for a trust fund brat,” she was fast to add, “I’ve busted my ass. I’ve always earned my keep.” So it seemed to Anna; Nancy had worked all over the continent reporting on international politics, mostly from the strange, exotic cities that Americans never think to list when they’re asked to name the capitals of Europe: Tallinn, Sofia, Kishinev, Skopje, Vaduz. Nancy wasn’t just a good sport; she was an adventurer. She didn’t take the assignments—she had volunteered for each of them. If it was someplace she’d never been? That’s where she wanted to go.

  “So what are you doing here?” Anna hadn’t meant for the question to sound like an accusation.

  “I heard it was a top city. A fine place.” Nancy shrugged. “I wanted to check into it. I had nowhere else I needed to be.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “I’ve only been here four months. I have no plans to leave. I like it.”

  “Really?” Anna hadn’t expected that.

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  Anna didn’t answer.

  Mary began to fawn in that Mary way of hers. Emptily, repetitively. “You’re so admirable, Nancy. I really admire you, Nancy. How you just pack up and go wherever you want and do what you want to do,” Mary said. “I wish I could do that. I really admire you for that.”

  “What’s to admire? I’m just living my life.”

  “Still.” Mary sighed. “You’re so fearless. Strange places frighten me. I get anxious just taking the bus from Schwerzenbach to Dübendorf!” Mary sighed again. It was hard for her to stray too far from her own front yard. That’s what had made the move from Canada so awful, she confessed to Anna early on.

  Nancy offered Mary a consolation that fell somewhere between empathy and a reprimand. “Mary. To each her own fear. But I don’t want to watch my life unfold. I want to unfold it myself, if you will. If there’s something I want to do? I do it. If there’s something I want? I chase it. And I catch it. If I believe in something, I support it. If none of those things? Then … nothing. Then I let it go.”

  “Is that why you never married?” Mary asked.

  “Sure,” she said in a throwaway tone as she rose and gathered the women’s empty plates. Anna and Mary were silent. Nancy shook her head. “Really, I want to be clear. My life is no more commendable than either of your lives.” Mary twisted her face into a question mark. Anna looked blankly at Nancy and waited for her to continue. “We’re modern women in a modern world. Our needs are met and many of our wants.” Mary nodded. Nancy continued. “We have rights and the means to exercise them. Each of our lives is our own and as far as I know we get one apiece and no more. We should do something with them. If we can. If we’re able to. It’s a travesty when a woman wastes herself. That’s all.”

  A travesty to waste one’s self. It was a truth Anna couldn’t refute.

  Nancy took the plates into the kitchen and returned with coffee and biscuits. Dessert was spent gossiping about people in the German class.

  “I still think Archie has a crush on you, Anna,” Mary giggled.

  “I know he does,” Nancy added. Anna asked them to drop it. Yes, they were pals. But nothing more.

  “Oh, god no, Anna!” Mary almost choked on her water. “That’s not what I meant! I’d never suggest such a thing!” Of course you wouldn’t, Anna thought. It was wistful thinking. Mary’s goodness made Anna’s badness worse. Anna’s shameless self felt shame. It was a strange, recursive feeling.

  “What’s his story, anyway?” Nancy asked. Both Nancy and Mary turned to Anna for the answer. If anyone knew it would be she.

  Anna scanned her thoughts for something to tell them but she couldn’t come up with any details that weren’t sexual. He likes it when I’m on top. He’s into biting, dirty talk. He likes to smell me—should I tell them that? He puts his face between my legs and inhales me like I’m a goddamn bowl of potpourri. But when was his birthday? What did he study in school? Did he go to school? Had he ever been married? Any children? Are his parents alive? Any known allergies? She knew he had no visible scars. Was this all she knew of him? Think, Anna. This can’t be all.

  “He’s got a brother.” That was the best she could do.

  ARCHIE TRIED TO HOLD Anna’s hand. He’d never done that before and the awkwardness of the attempt startled Anna, and so she let him hold it, albeit limply. Barely a minute passed before she wrangled it free. It had felt wrong and his palms were damp.

  They walked around the zoo for a quarter of an hour and said nothing to each other.

  In the rainforest reserve they stared at lizards sleeping in trees and dodged the birds that hopped freely down the paths. Anna looked at all the placards but recognized neither the German nor the English names for these exotic animals. At the South African habitat they leaned against a rail and watched a mountain goat preside over a congregation of baboons on jagged, beige rocks. The largest of the baboons, a male, stood on his legs, turned to face Anna and Archie directly, and presented his red, erect penis as he hissed and sneered. “Okay, Archie,” Anna said. “It’s time to talk.”

  Anna couldn’t remember the last time she’d broken up with anyone. Is ending an affair the same as breaking up? Anna decided it was close enough and told him as much: “Archie, I am breaking up with you.”

  Archie stared past the baboons. “So that’s how it is.” She hadn’t expected him to be devastated and he didn’t seem to be. “Yes,” Anna said. “This is how it is.” He didn’t ask why, though Anna would have told him if he had. “I need to go, Archie.” Anna hiked her book bag back up her shoulder. She’d been carrying it around the whole time. She looked once more into his eyes and turned to leave.

  Archie grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back toward him. “Not without a goodbye kiss,” he said as he laid his lips to hers and held her tight against her own protestations. Anna struggled briefly against his mouth and his arms but then relented, for there was no real harm in a goodbye kiss and she was too emotionally weak to fight him. So in the middle of the Zürich Zoo and on her thirty-eighth birthday, Anna let the Scotsman search her mouth with his tongue and her breasts with his hands for what would be the last, passive time.

  Public displays of affection always draw attention; Archie and Anna made an obvious pair. They were the only adults in the entire zoo unaccompanied by toddlers in strollers or schoolchildren on a class trip, like the group who walked up to the South African habitat in the middle of the pair’s final kiss. Children around the world are all alike. At a certain age, the sight of two people kissing will invariably invoke giggles and “ewwwww”s and “oooohhh”s and every available finger will point in the couple’s direction. This is what happened to Archie and Anna. And yet, they kissed through it. It was a moment. Anna let the moment have its gravity. A last kiss, she thought, is an occasion.

  The kiss was on its downslope. Anna was ending it. She drew a breath, then licked her lips then made one, two motions to pull away before finally wrenching her mouth loose from his. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s it.”

  But it wasn’t.

  A singular thin, tinny voice rose above the chorus of whooping children. “Mami?”

  Anna whipped around to look. It was Charles.

  She had forgotten. It had been planned for weeks. Anna had been so wrapped up in her private, secret life that she’d forgotten.

  Charles’s class had taken a field trip to the zoo.

  Anna had been caught.

  16

  “IT’S QUITE COMMON FOR THE SUBCONSCIOUS TO CREATE INTENTIONAL scenarios that force you to face something you’ve been ignor
ing. Your dreams might get louder and more violent. You may become forgetful or accident-prone. Psyche will do anything to get your attention. She will sabotage your consciousness if she must.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think of an abscess. Untreated, the wound swells and causes pain and eventually ruptures.”

  “That’s revolting.”

  “It is. Infections are. This is an infection. Of the soul.”

  ANNA DID NOT IMMEDIATELY know what to do and so she did nothing. That was a crucial moment of composure. She didn’t look back at Archie but she didn’t have to. “Get lost,” she said through the smile she’d put on in order to face Charles. Anna stepped toward her son.

  “Hey, Schatz, my love!” Anna’s voice oscillated as she bent down and wrapped her arms around Charles and drew him into her so that her body blocked his line of vision and he couldn’t see Archie as he slipped away. Charles’s teacher seemed to understand what the class had just interrupted. Frau Kopp was young and savvy and European and she knew the difference between Herr Benz and the man Anna had just been kissing. Her eyes were sympathetic, continental.