As far as Anna knew Bruno had never had to answer the question either. But he answered it. Without hesitation, without hedging. “My father’s uncle. Polly Jean looks like him. Her hair. Not her nose. His nose was much bigger.” Bruno declared the size of his uncle’s nose with the timing of a comic straight man.
“Which uncle?” Anna asked. She’d never heard this.
“Rolf.” Bruno didn’t have anything else to add. Anna tried to recall if she’d ever seen a picture.
Daniela piped in, “That’s right, Rolf had the thick black hair when he was younger, jo?”
Anna couldn’t tell whether Daniela was genuinely remembering a long-dead relative or if she was trying to somehow help—and if she was trying to help, was she coming to the aid of Anna or Bruno? “He had a big bristly black mustache, too. And,” she started to laugh, “I remember that he used to curl it like a Bavarian!”
“And give you fifty rappen if you shined his boots when he came to visit,” Ursula added from the kitchen. She’d changed Polly’s clothes and set her to rest in the bedroom and was now starting on the dishes. She’s in on this too? Anna took another bite of cake, an even bigger one, that she might have a moment of composure and talk herself down from that irrational ledge. No one’s in on anything. They’re just talking. Eat your cake, Anna. You don’t have to say a word. Eat your cake. You have your cake, now eat it, too.
Bruno stood and took his empty coffee cup into the kitchen. “Yes. That’s where she gets it. Rolf. Of course.” The answer satisfied Mary, who changed the subject. Anna relaxed. But only a little.
TWO YEARS BEFORE MEETING Stephen, Anna was in the Dietlikon Coop. She’d made a list but left it at home and had spent the previous half hour struggling to recall what she’d written down. What do we have? What do we lack? She’d put salami in her basket, some rolls, a leek, a jar of stuffed pepperoncini, and five cans of tuna. She’d been inefficient, chasing the items as she recalled them, out of order and erratically. She felt like a pinball, being kicked and slung from one aisle to its counterpoint target. Tilt was only a matter of time. I live in the grocery store, Anna remembered thinking. I’m the hired help, the domestic. This was years before Anna’s analysis, so Doktor Messerli wasn’t around to challenge the authenticity of those statements and to suggest that if Anna felt repressed it was a sentiment of her own construction. This is, after all, the life you have chosen for yourself, she surely would have scolded. But Anna didn’t have Doktor Messerli then. What she had were two young sons, a cranky husband, an aloof mother-in-law, and, on that particular day, a headache. Anna remembered they were out of sugar and turned the cart around and crossed into the baking aisle to fetch the sugar that both she and Bruno took in their coffee. Anna always bought it in cubes. She liked cubes. Their uniform architecture pleased her. It’s the shape. You always know where you stand with it. She reached for the usual box but paused when her eyes fell on the one next to it. Glückszucker, the package read and instead of geometrically true squares, the portions were formed in the shapes of each of a deck of playing cards’ four suits. Lucky sugar, it meant. Happy sugar. This brightened Anna. How have I not noticed this before? She imagined they were charms or talismans. Sweet, magic beans that had the power to conjure good fortune. It was a silly promise made by a substance only good for rotting your teeth. But that was the sugar Anna wanted. She took a box and set it with ceremony befitting the supernatural in her basket. Now what? she thought and then remembered that Bruno had asked for some cheese. She pushed toward the dairy case. It has come to this? Such asinine indulgences? She supposed it had.
As an ABBA song faded away (was it “Take a Chance on Me”? Anna didn’t recall but thought that it would have been nice if it had been), the inimitable opening keyboard riff of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” began. Coop markets loop playlists of familiar, dated songs between which they insert short advertisements for specials and rebate premiums. This season’s promotion was a set of knives. Anna saved the stickers—Merkli—but rarely cashed them in. She tended to only remember them after they expired (a tendency that would play out in so many ways). These loudspeaker ads always ended with the grocery store’s slogan: Coop—für mich und dich. For me and you. For us. Like the words a priest spoke over the bread and the wine quoting Christ: This is my body given for you. But nothing is given away, Anna thought. Everything comes at a cost. Everything always came at a cost. We’re headed for Venus! the singer wailed, his voice hanging stupid and foolish in the air.
Stupid and foolish, Anna thought. Like forcing meaning into sugar cubes. Anna stood before a row of cheeses and butters and individually packaged desserts and juices that needed refrigeration and listened as the song screeched on. I’m sure that we’ll all miss her so!
If I went away would I be missed? Anna looked into her basket. Each package was printed in three different languages, only one of which she understood and that was just barely. Lucky sugar. Her throat snapped closed. Fuck. It hit her. This is where I’m spending the rest of my life. I’ll never live anywhere else. Anna held a block of Gruyère in one hand and a wedge of Appenzeller in the other. Fuck. It hit again. This is where I’m gonna die.
The song ended, another followed after it. A man in the orange jumpsuit of a Swiss rail worker passed in front of her without saying a word.
“COMBUSTION WON’T HAPPEN WITHOUT oxygen,” Stephen said. “A fire is a living thing and it must breathe.”
“Does fire have a soul?” Anna asked.
“I’m leaving in a week,” Stephen replied.
DANIELA LEFT JUST BEFORE seven. Anna hadn’t expected her to come and realized only as she was seeing her to the door how grateful she was that Daniela had made the effort. It’s a convoluted trip and she’d only stayed a couple of hours. I wouldn’t have done it, Anna thought, but then remembered that two months earlier, she had. That was two months ago? The thought caught her off guard. That was just two months ago. But Anna tried not to fixate on the past. Instead, she willed herself back into the present moment and forced herself into a suit of thankfulness. People are being so kind to me. Have they always been this kind? I don’t know why they are being so kind. She did know why, of course. What she meant was People are being so kind and I do not deserve it.
Ursula brought a second carafe of coffee to the table then returned to the kitchen. Anna didn’t have a read on this. Ursula’s kindnesses were never overt and her friendliness and politesse were always tempered by her immediate situation, which in this case was the task of cleaning up. There was gratitude here, too, Anna supposed. She would try to thank her later. Tomorrow, maybe. Anna wasn’t sure how. Mary made a move to help her but Bruno assured her that his mother could handle the dishes alone so Mary stayed put. Mary was picking at cake with her fingers and making light conversation with Bruno when Anna returned from seeing Daniela out.
Mary was trying out German sentences on him. She suffered through several. Bruno gently corrected her mistakes and coaxed her through the structures that were still confounding her. “Shoot! I can’t!” But Bruno insisted she could and so they bumbled through perhaps a paragraph of painful niceties. Anna noticed that even with the extra month of classes, Mary’s German was still less feasible than her own. And then Anna noted that it was shallow of her to notice that.
The chatter remained mostly superficial. Bruno praised Mary’s progress and then, in a faux scold, forbade her from speaking English in his presence from that point forward. From now on, German only! Nur Deutsch! This made Mary blush. She waved him off and gave in and cut another slice of cake for herself. “I really shouldn’t,” she said, “but it tastes so good!” Anna hadn’t eaten any cake beyond those bites she shoveled into her mouth in order to avoid having to answer Mary’s questions. She wasn’t sure she could stomach a whole piece. But Mary was right, it did taste good. Mary saw her eyeing the cake. “You want me to cut you a piece?” Anna didn’t answer. “Okay, I’ll cut you a piece.” Mary put a slice on a plate and pushed it over t
o Anna. “Lots of icing because the icing is the best part!” Mary winked. Anna picked up a fork and took a hesitant taste. She took another. She’d never been someone who self-medicated with food. No, that’s what the sex was about. If food were her drug of choice, she’d be the size of a house. I need a lot of soothing. In the moment, though, she could see the draw. The icing was the best part. You can hide a lot of sadness inside a pink sugar rosette.
Mary and Bruno talked about Tim. Bruno asked if Tim and Max had any interest in going to the transport museum in Lucerne. Bruno had promised Victor he would take him. As ambivalent as Bruno had always been toward Anna, he’d never been anything but attentive and paternal to his children. His children, Anna thought. In the last month Bruno had done what any good father might and channeled his every spare effort into figuring out what would best distract Victor from his grief. No one wants to see his child suffer. But Bruno and Anna alike knew that there was nothing that could be done to prevent Victor’s pain. At best, they could assuage it or mitigate it or curb it for a time. So going out for pizza and kicking the soccer ball around and visiting the train museum and attending every ZSC Lions game on the schedule and promising winter trips to Zermatt for skiing and planning summer vacations to the Bodensee for swimming and boating served only to take the boy’s despair and put it on hold. But pain is an impatient customer. It wouldn’t be long before it demanded attention.
“Oh, Max would love that. Are there trains or just airplanes or—what’s there exactly?” Mary blathered. Either it was the extra piece of cake or the second cup of coffee or something else entirely, Anna didn’t know. But she was rambling, and among the many things that made Anna nervous (in general and in that specific moment), Mary’s jabber was one. Bruno affirmed that yes, the museum had trains in its collection. “Wonderful. Yes, I’m sure they’d want to go. You know Max. He loves the trains! Just like Charles.” As soon as she said it, Mary wondered if she shouldn’t have. Mary looked at Anna for affirmation. Was it really okay to talk about Charles? In the present tense?
“It’s okay, Mary.” Anna bowed her head and looked at her cake as if from it she could draw resolve and strength. “No, really. It is.” She raised her head and nodded. “You’re right. Wherever he is, I’m sure he still loves trains.” The table observed a solemn moment of remembrance and then moved on to other talk.
Mary took charge of the conversation. She kept it breezy, so bright it felt frivolous. Five minutes passed and Bruno and Mary had moved from Max and Victor to Tim and the team to the Gilberts’ plans to spend Christmas in Uster. “It’s the first time we’ve spent it away from home!” Mary pined. Bruno took her to a slight but firm task.
“Where your family is. That’s home.” Mary accepted this minor dressing-down with a nod of understanding.
IT WAS THE NIGHT before Polly Jean’s birthday and Anna lay awake in bed. She had been begging sleep to steal her for three hard hours. It hadn’t. The slats on the shutters were open but the windows closed. There wasn’t a moon. Clouds blocked out all starlight. The air was ominous.
Every day since Charles’s death had ended with Anna in tears. She had learned to swallow them, awful as they were. They burned her throat. Nausea always ensued. She hadn’t seen Charles dead on the ground, but that didn’t stop her from imagining the scene. Every vision she had was worse than the previous. She saw the blood. She saw his hip, broken and skewed in an impossible direction. She saw a hole in the back of his head. She saw his vertebrae, she saw his brain. She shoved these images away but they came back harder, and the details of the scene grew more aggressive. She saw him in the oven that cremated him. She watched his skin turn black and burn away. She saw his dust.
Bruno? She nudged her husband, who’d been asleep since before Anna had come to bed herself. Bruno? He stirred but just as quickly settled. Bruno, wake up. Put your hands on me. I want your hands. She jostled him again. This time he didn’t move at all. Wake up, wake up. Anna slid her hand under the blanket and up his arm, then down his chest, past his stomach to the waistband of his pajama bottoms. She ran her finger under the elastic. Bruno purred but didn’t wake up. Anna let her hand travel on. She pulled his pajamas away from him, then down, then she drew back the comforter and lay her head between his legs and put her lips around his cock. It was soft. She sucked it like a baby does a nipple, a child his thumb. Wake up, Bruno. Make love to me. His cock grew marginally stiff, then stopped. It wasn’t going to happen. She pulled his pants back up and fell back to her own side of the bed. When she closed her eyes she saw Charles close his own eyes that final time. She saw his very last breath.
She got up and threw on pants, a sweatshirt, shoes, and ran out of the house without locking the door. My hill, my bench. It was close to 2:00 A.M.
She was full-on bawling. I’ve lost so much! So much! Earlier that day she’d gone into the boys’ room. Charles’s clothes were still in the closet. She went in to grab the shirt he’d worn the day before he died (no one had washed it yet; Anna wouldn’t let them). She brought it to her face, but the scent of him had faded. It was almost gone. She rifled through the rest of the closet, the dresser. Nothing smelled like him. It was like losing him once more. She would never see her boy again.
It was too much. At the top of the hill she yelled, she shook out her hands, she stomped her feet. Goddammit! She fell to her knees. She curled to a ball on the cold, rocky path. Fix this! Fucking make it stop! It was a prayer, maybe to fucking itself. Wake up, Bruno, she cried as if he could hear. I need you to put your hands on me!
Anna writhed and clutched at her skin through her sweatshirt, the ground was a pillow of stone. Hands, I need hands. In the moment, Bruno was useless. Archie and Karl were unreasonable possibilities. And Stephen was gone, gone for good. Anna slid her hands beneath her shirt and up to her chest. She grabbed her breasts hard enough to bruise them. She pinched her nipples. That’s it, Anna. Yes. Yes. She had no one to rely on but herself. She put her right hand down the front of her jeans. She’d made herself wet. That’s it. That’s it. She slipped her middle finger in and rested her thumb on her clit. Yes, yes. In the shameless dark she tried to get herself off.
It was dire and wrong and even in the middle of a cloudy, starless night she felt one thousand eyes upon her. From God no secrets are hid, she thought. He knows it all already.
A dog barked. Anna bolted upright. Oh, shit. She scrambled to her feet and spun in all directions but she saw nothing. The dog barked again. I have to get out of here. Anna ran down the hill, yelling the entire way. Fuck you, God. Fuck you, universe. I need hands! Hands!
At home she could not bear the bedroom. I have nowhere to go but down. So she did. Down the basement stairs and around the corner to the root cellar. The floors were dirt and the walls smelled like rotten apples. She shrank into a corner and fell asleep on the ground. It was the farthest away she could get from the awful Eye of God.
FROM URSULA’S BEDROOM, POLLY Jean began to cry. Anna moved to stand but Ursula, queen of intervening that night, told everyone once more to stay put and came out from the kitchen and passed through the dining room on her way to get the baby. Bruno and Anna nodded in concert as she passed, an irrelevant display of marital unity. When Ursula returned just a moment later she carried a sniffling Polly in her arms. Again, in unison, both Anna and Bruno held out their arms to receive her. Bruno was closest. Ursula gave Polly Jean to him. Bruno sat the baby on his lap and turned her toward the table. The sniffling stopped when Polly saw the cake. She reached for it but Bruno said no and pushed it out of grabbing distance. Polly Jean whined and tried for it once more before giving up. She was too tired to fuss, even for cake. Bruno drew the baby closer to his body. Polly Jean yawned and sighed, then closed her eyes.
“I think she just wanted to be with the rest of us,” Mary said. “She didn’t want to be all by herself locked in that dumb old room!”
Anna watched her husband and her daughter. Her heart shattered. She hadn’t wanted to be a mother. But
she was a mother. A version of a mother. And Bruno was a father. But he wasn’t Polly Jean’s. But he was. Bruno kissed her head. Look how much he loves her. Had she noticed that before? Anna wasn’t sure that she ever thought to notice. Nobody wants to be locked up alone in a room. But Anna did. She’d arranged her life in just that way. A secret serves no purpose but to isolate, Doktor Messerli had said. At the time Anna disagreed. But the Doktor was right.
Alone, alone.
Anna ate more cake and tried to swerve herself back to a center.
But every time the conversation shifted, so did Anna’s equilibrium. And she had run out of cake on her plate when they came back around to the subject Anna had thought they’d dropped an hour earlier.
“You know, I honestly can’t get over how unlike either of you Polly Jean looks. Did you bring the wrong baby home from the hospital?” Mary teased. She intended no ill will.
She smiled when she spoke. Mary almost always smiled when she spoke. She couldn’t be cruel if she tried—she wouldn’t know where to begin. Still, Anna’s gut soured. The more Mary talked, the queasier Anna became. Bruno winced, but only Anna noticed it. “She’s absolutely gorgeous, of course. Made of porcelain—and that raven hair!” Bruno drummed the table with his thumb. “What funny tricks genetics play!” Anna smiled weakly. Bruno didn’t smile at all. But Bruno rarely smiles, Anna reasoned. There was no sense in reading into it now.
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