by Ursula Hegi
She tucked her handbag under her arm and greeted me with the cautious smile of heavy women who don’t trust thin women. Her face had the natural look you can only achieve with skillful makeup.
Eddie sat down, his knees spread to accommodate his enormous thighs. “My cousin says you married a dentist.”
“That was finished a long time ago.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t. I was ready.”
“Any kids?”
“A daughter. She’s at the University of New Hampshire.”
“Good for you. Bonnie and I, we have our own pharmacy. In a mall. She handles the cosmetics and over-the-counter stuff, I get to count the pills.” He laughed. “Amazing … Remember how I used to hate math?” He leaned over to his wife, one hand across his tie to keep it from falling into my glass. “Vera let me copy her homework.”
“And you helped me in the store.”
But he didn’t hear me. He was frowning at my plate of eggplant and rice. “I think I’ll go for the buffet, Bonnie.”
“Me too.”
His enormous backside blocked out half the buffet table as he loaded up his plate. Oh, Eddie, I thought, Eddie, unable to continue my meal as I watched him eat silently, shoveling his food into his mouth at an alarming speed, giving shape to my deepest fears. To think I used to eat like that as a girl. To think I sometimes still longed to eat like that.
“How long are you staying in Albany, Eddie?” I asked, wishing he hadn’t come back at all.
“Hold that question, Vera. I’ll be right back.” His breath had taken on the rich aroma of the food. Pushing the piano bench back, he headed for the buffet.
Bonnie only kept up with him for three trips, and then she sank into her chair, tiny beads of moisture between her perfect eyebrows; but Eddie kept returning for more, and with each bite he swallowed, I felt my stomach distend, harden.
It was on Eddie’s fifth approach to the buffet that the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Fariopoulos stepped into his way. He was nearly a head shorter than Eddie, and he raised one lean hand and held it up in front of Eddie’s chest to stop him. Without lowering his voice, he informed Eddie that he had eaten enough. “More than enough,” Mr. Fariopoulos said.
His face purple-red, Eddie stood there like a boy caught stealing chocolates, and I felt his humiliation as though it were my own. Nearly everyone in the restaurant was watching him, except Bonnie, who was staring at the white tablecloth, her face rigid. Eddie opened his mouth—not to say something, but to breathe easier. He did not move—neither toward the buffet nor toward our table.
I had no idea what I was about to say when I got up and walked toward Eddie and Mr. Fariopoulos. My stomach was aching as if I’d eaten far too much, and my heart was beating as fiercely as all those times I’d waited for Eddie to appear in the door of his house.
I linked my arm through his and gave a nod to Mr. Fariopoulos. “I’m glad you’ve had a chance to meet my friend, Eddie.”
“Vera—” Mr. Fariopoulos started.
“The menu,” I asked, “what do you have printed next to the word ’buffet? Is it ’all you can eat? Or ’all we let you eat?”
“You and your friends are always welcome here.”
“All we let you eat?”
“All you can eat. You know that. But we can’t afford to keep this place open if everyone eats like him.”
“Then I’ll be glad to put it back on the market for you.”
“Vera,” Eddie said, “you don’t have to—”
“But I do,” I said, and turned to Mr. Fariopoulos. “Tell me”—now I was going—“how many of your customers stop after the first trip to the buffet? Do you give them a discount? A doggie bag?”
It ended up with Mr. Fariopoulos apologizing to Eddie and telling him there would be no bill at all. In the parking lot, Eddie was rather quiet, and his hands felt cold when I grasped them to say goodbye, but Bonnie told me to visit them if I ever got to Cleveland. What I didn’t expect was the dream I had that night, a wonderfully erotic dream about Eddie —not the way he used to look as a boy, when I’d suffered that first, glorious crush on him, but the way he was now. He drew me into his huge embrace, sheltered me against his solid chest. We were lying in the meadow behind my grandparents’ store, and spread in front of us were all the pastries and cakes I had ever denied myself. We ate together—passionately, joyfully—letting each other taste the most satisfying delicacies without remorse. Eddie’s breath was sweet as he consumed me with his hungry mouth, replenished me with his hungry mouth. My arms were long enough to reach around him. His body felt light as he enveloped me into his soft vastness, so light that he took us all the way up to the sky.
Doves
Francine is having a shy day, the kind of day that makes you feel sad when the elevator man says good afternoon, the kind of day that makes you want to buy two doves.
Her raincoat pulled around herself, Francine walks the twelve blocks to Portland Pet and Plant. She heads past the African violets, past the jade plants and fig trees, past the schnau-zers and poodles, past the hamsters and turtles, past the gaudy parrot in the center cage who shrieks: Oh amigo oh amigo …
What Francine wants are doves of such a smooth gray that they don’t hurt your eyes. With doves like that you don’t have to worry about being too quiet: they’ll make soft clucking sounds deep inside their throats; they’ll turn their heads toward the door when you push the key into the lock late in the afternoon; they’ll wait for you to notice them instead of clamoring for your attention.
And she finds them—doves just like that, six of them—perched in a cage near the back wall with a sign above it: Ring Neck Doves $7.99. Two are white with brownish speckles, the others a deep gray tinged with purple.
Oh amigo oh amigo … screeches the parrot.
Francine chooses the two smallest gray doves and carries them from the pet shop in cardboard boxes that look like take-out Chinese with air holes. The afternoon smells like damp newspaper, but she feels light as she walks back to her apartment. In her kitchen she sets the white boxes on her counter, opens them, and waits for the doves to fly out and roost on the plastic bar where she hangs her kitchen towels. But they crouch inside the boxes as if waiting for her to lift them out.
She switches on the radio to the station where she always keeps it, public radio, but instead of Tuesday-evening opera, a man is asking for donations. Francine has already sent in thirty-six dollars, and she doesn’t like it when the man says: None of you would think of going into a store and taking something off the shelves, but you listen to public radio without paying….
The doves move their wing feathers forward and pull their heads into their necks to shield themselves from the fund-raising voice. Francine turns the dial past rock stations and commercials. At the gaudy twang of a country-western, the doves raise their heads and peer from the boxes. Their beaks turn to one side, then to the other, completing a nearly full circle. Low velvet sounds rise from their throats. Francine has never listened to country-westerns—she’s considered them tacky—but when the husky voice of a woman sings of wanting back the lover who hurt her so, Francine tilts her head and croons along with the doves.
In the morning, before she leaves for her job at Kmart, Francine pulls the radio next to the kitchen sink and turns it on for the doves, who’ve settled themselves in the left basin of her double sink, their claws curled around folds of the yellow towel she’s spread in the basin, their eyes on the tuner that still flickers on the country-western station. When she returns after working all day in the footwear department, they swivel their heads toward her and then back to the radio, as if they’d been practicing that movement all day.
At Kmart, she finds that more and more people leave their shoes. It used to be just once or twice a week that she’d discover a worn pair of shoes pushed under the racks by someone who walked away in stolen footwear. But now she sees them almost every day—sneakers with torn insoles, pumps with imitati
on leather peeling from the high heels, work shoes with busted seams—as if a legion of shoe thieves had descended on Portland.
Francine saves the discarded shoes in the store’s lost-and-found crate, though no one has ever tried to claim them. But some are still good enough to donate to Goodwill. She murmurs to the doves about those shoe thieves while she refills their water and sprinkles birdseed into the porcelain soap dish. Coming home to them has become familiar. So have the sad songs of lost love that welcome her every evening. A few times she tried to return to public radio, but as soon as the doves grew listless, she moved the tuner back. And lately she hasn’t felt like changing it at all. She knows some of the lines now, knows how the songs end.
Francine has a subscription to the opera—a birthday present she gives herself every September. After feeding the doves, she takes a bubble bath and puts on her black dress. In back of the cab, she holds her purse with both hands in her lap. Sitting in the darkened balcony, she feels invisible as she listens to La Traviata. For the first time it comes to her that, just like the country songs, this too is about lost love.
In the flood of bodies that swells from the opera house, Francine walks into the mild November night, leaving behind the waiting cabs, the restaurants, the stores. From a small tavern, a couple saunters hand in hand, steeped in amber light and the sad lyrics of a slow-moving song for just that one instant before the door will close once again. But Francine won’t let it. Francine curves her fingers around the doorknob, pulls at it, and steps into the smoky bar as if she were a woman with red boots who had someone waiting for her. Below the Michelob clock, on a platform, two men are playing guitars and singing of betrayed love.
On the bar stool, Francine’s black dress rides up to her knees. She tugs at her hem, draws her shoulders around herself, and orders a fuzzy navel. It’s a drink she remembers from a late-night movie, and it tastes just the way she imagined it would — of summer and apricots and oranges —soothing her limbs, opening her shoulders.
A lean-hipped man asks her to dance, and as she sways in his arms on the floor that’s spun of sawdust and boot prints, she becomes the woman in every song that the men on the platform sing: the woman who leaves them; the woman who keeps breaking their hearts.
Freitod
Sabine Dönstetter sits in the warm sand above the high-water mark, looking out over the conflicting currents, which are so strong here at the end of the Baja that you can count on being swept out to sea. Waves leave tongues of foam on the beach as the water retreats; an intricate pattern of tiny craters remains in the sand, and through them bubbles surge up to fill the hollows.
A tangled piece of seaweed lies crusted next to Sabine’s bare feet. Old-woman feet, she thinks, and brushes specks of sand from her ankles. Her first day in Mexico, her legs were bitten by sand fleas. It seems only moments ago that these same legs belonged to the girl who ran along the island beaches of Rügen, kicking up sprays of salty water. Sabine pictures her son, Horst, arriving from Berlin at the Los Cabos airport in his business suit, riding one of the vans to the hotel in Cabo San Lucas, and standing on the terrace of the restaurant with Armando, the stocky waiter with the melodious voice, who serves Sabine papaya juice every morning.
Armando will point across the waves of the Pacific. “Laseñora, su madre” he says to Horst, “she looked at the waves for many hours. We spoke about la señora”
Armando enjoys teasing Sabine about buying her watch from her—a parody of the barter between tourists and the vendors who sell jewelry, blankets, and pottery in the market near the ferry landing. “How much you want for your watch?” Armando will ask Sabine, and when she tells him she doesn’t want to sell it, he smiles and insists, “I’ll give you good price…. Almost new … Cheap, I buy it cheap.”
She doubts that Armando will engage Horst in his banter. They’re both serious as they stand on the terrace where palm trees grow, their nuts nestled where the trunk meets the leafy branches, pulled in like testicles on a freezing man. One of the slight amber cats that swarm around the hotel brushes past Horst’s legs, almost touching. A fishing boat moves fast and parallel to shore. Warm air carries the scent of the hibiscus blossoms that grow between the hotel and the sand-colored rocks. Those rocks have rounded holes in them like Picasso sculptures, and they turn pink at sunset. On the way to his room, Horst runs one hand across a rock and finds a shell wedged into one of the smooth crevices.
Sabine feels the wind on her neck, a strong wind that moves across the ocean, making it look like a river; yet the waves keep crashing in. Where the sky meets the sea, it is hazy but fans into brilliant blue toward the December sun. A streak of water shoots up as though something had been dropped from a great height, and the arched body of a whale surfaces for an instant—black against the gray of the ocean.
Sabine has been planning this day of her death, much in the way as she planned the day of her wedding forty-eight years ago—with the kind of momentum that makes it impossible to stop. Then, she began sewing her wedding dress the day Werner proposed to her. Six months ago, on her way home from the doctor’s office, she stopped at a travel agency where she booked this trip to what she calls the end of Mexico because she knew she didn’t want to walk into the freezing Ostsee, knew she wanted that last submersion to be kind. At a department store she chose a swimsuit that matched the vibrant colors in the travel brochures.
Sabine doesn’t regret leaving life. Only that she has to disguise it as an accident. Because of the laws, for one—you can get yourself locked up if you fail. And then, of course, her children. She thought the hardest part would be making the choice, but it isn’t. Even in her dying she is worried about her children. She doesn’t want them to feel responsible, doesn’t want to encumber them with her body to take home and abandon to the craft of the undertakers. In Germany, there are two words for what she is about to do: Freitod— free death, and Selbstmord—murder of the self. And what she is choosing is Freitod.
“A terrible accident,” Armando will tell Horst, “such a misfortune.”
Horst will stay for the night. At breakfast he sits at the table where Sabine used to eat, near the retired insurance man from America and his wife who come here for three weeks every winter. The husband orders a fruit plate for his wife, oatmeal for himself. Instead of stirring the oatmeal, he draws up his spoon to eye level and lets the gray, lumpy matter dribble back down. His wife—lips pressed together—watches, looking unhappy in her pink sun dress. When her husband finally eats, he opens his mouth long before the spoon gets there; his tongue darts out, the spoon trembles, and then he traps the spoon inside his wide mouth.
When the insurance man offers his condolences to Horst, he tells him that people dont swim on the Pacific side; they swim in the Sea of Cortés. And Horst returns to Berlin reassured that it was an accident—that his mother was careless, perhaps even stubborn to attempt swimming in the rough Pacific, where the waves dont flatten themselves against the shore but slam from a great height before they get sucked out to sea as if by greater force.
He tells his sister, Inge, about the doctor from Holland who came here to fish for marlin and broke three ribs when the waves slammed him against the sand. Armando had to haul him in a wheelbarrow across the vast beach and through the lobby to the circular drive, where the ambulance picked him up. Horst tells Inge about the signs along the beach that warn swimmers of the riptide—water agitated by conflicting tides or currents—and they grieve as children grieve for their parents, not nearly as deeply as a parent will grieve for a child.
Because that is the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and —in that love, and in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love—you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.
A pattern of tire tracks stretches along the length of beach. Last night Sabine heard one of the fat-wheeled, motorized tricycles pass her hotel and return an
hour later. The sand is pale where she sits but looks darker, heavier the closer it gets to the ocean. She has been in Cabo San Lucas for one week. She has tasted the most fabulous cheese pie sold by local women at the ferry landing; has slept deeply without anything between her skin and the night air; has walked beneath the beauty of the vultures and the stars; has watched sleek surfers in glistening rubber suits return from the sea.
She has felt embarrassed by three German tourists she overheard while on an excursion boat, complaining loudly—as though no one else could possibly understand their language—about the Mexican food. “At least we still have some good German booze,” one of them said, startled as Sabine turned around and reminded them in German that they were guests in this country.
It has been a week of colors, a week to test her choice and let herself return to Berlin if that is what she decides. Ever since that afternoon in the doctor’s office, when he wanted to schedule her for surgery, Sabine has felt as if everything around her has snapped into focus, the colors brighter, the shapes clearer. It makes her regret not always having seen like this. And even the pain—which keeps growing heavier, as though a sharp-fanged animal were trying to gouge its way from her belly—has not been able to take from her that sense of everything happening for the first time.
Sabine has always known when to end what doesn’t work before it becomes unbearable. Like her marriage when she was forty-two. It could have gone on in the same way, becoming increasingly silent until the only sound would have been that of her breath while she lay next to Werner, unable to sleep.
She has friends who waited beyond the time when they could have chosen to leave life. The day before she left Berlin, she said goodbye to her friend Ulrike Heuss—two years younger than she—who has periods of forgetfulness and cries with shame whenever she wets her bed in the nursing home, where an activity director and a nutritionist make decisions for her. Sabine doesn’t know which is worse: the trained staff of a nursing home or the concern of her children.