Chris (mutters): Or here.
Therapist: Chris, please. Let her continue.
Elise (folds her arms tightly across her chest, petulant): Now I’ve lost my train of thought…Right, the co-op. Rainbow Foods. I was the only one who regularly showered. I don’t even think the other workers there liked me that much. But I was so happy I didn’t notice.
Therapist: What do you think the root of this happiness was?
Elise: Being back in England.
Therapist: But didn’t you miss the United States?
Elise: Philadelphia? Those stuck-up, preppy moms looking down on you for not having the right kind of pram? See? I even say “pram,” like the British. What’s the American word for it?
Therapist shrugs.
Chris: Baby carriage.
Elise: What a horrible word. Sounds like a baby dragging a carriage behind it. Why was I so happy? I was out again! Free! Free from gossip at the playground, free from the Mississippi guilt trip. Free from trying to save everybody.
Therapist: But last session, when we were discussing your time in Philadelphia, you had already begun this journey—
Elise: Then I got pregnant. I got pregnant, Mama came to visit for a week, and then I woke up and I was the old me all over again: addicted to prayer group, checking up on Ivy and Mama with long phone calls every other day, staying at home building Play-Doh castles with Leah.
Chris: I was relieved.
Leah: Me too.
Elise: You were two years old, what did you know?
Leah (quietly): I remember.
Sophie: That’s when you had me!
Elise (sadly, overlapping): That’s when I had Sophie. I wish—
Therapist: Be careful.
Elise: I wish I hadn’t. I wish I hadn’t had all that pain.
Leah: Nice, Mom.
Sophie (to Elise): I don’t mind.
Leah (to therapist): She just said she wished Sophie had never been born.
Sophie (to Leah): No, that’s not what she said. (To Elise.) Don’t worry, Mom, I understand.
Elise (overlapping with Sophie, to Leah): That’s not what I said. You don’t understand.
Therapist (now piqued and defensive, with an air of a kindergarten teacher speaking to a misbehaving class): Look, I feel we’ve gone quite off topic. I’d like to remind each of you that I’m leading this discussion, that you came to me, after all, for assistance. Any revelations, insights, moments of forgiveness, etcetera, will be brokered by me; otherwise, they don’t count, is that clear?
The Kriegsteins (Surprised at his violent outburst, the three family members nod sheepishly and respond in a jumble of voices, Elise and Leah avoiding eye contact.) Yes. Okay. I guess so. All right. Clear.
Therapist (clears his throat): Good. Where were we before all of that? Ah yes. Elise, you say you were profoundly happy in England. So, Chris, while Elise was skipping around the co-op aisles, replacing sacks of millet and giving out free barbecued tofu samples, how were you feeling?
Chris: Fine. It was fine. I like England. Nice pubs, great history.
Therapist: Oh, come on, Chris. You can do better than that.
Chris: What do you want me to say?
Therapist: Were you satisfied?
Chris: I was hungry. And sometimes that’s a good way to be. I saw how I needed to bust my ass to get higher up the food chain. And that’s what I did. I was successful. That satisfied me.
Therapist: I’m not convinced.
Chris: Well, I’m not convinced this session is worth four hundred Sing dollars an hour.
Therapist: Interesting that you bring up money at this moment. Do you often estimate how much something is worth? How much is it worth that you’re discussing Sophie again, for example?
Chris: That’s low. Is that what they teach you in grad school? Low blows?
Therapist: What would you say to Sophie now, if she were in the room?
Sophie looks pleased at this.
Chris: What?
Therapist: Why don’t you let her know how you feel, Chris?
Sophie (to therapist): Oh, shut up. (To her father.) It’s good to see you, too, Dad. I miss you.
Chris, to everyone’s surprise, including his own, begins weeping, cannot speak. Elise puts a hand on his arm. Leah looks away. As with Leah earlier, Sophie now moves to the couch, snuggles in between her parents (there is ample room between them to do so), and puts her head on Chris’s shoulder.
Leah (softly, nearly to herself): Does that mean you loved her more? The way you’re crying now? Would you have cried like that if I had been the one that—
Therapist: Leah. I believe you know the answer to that. After all of our work together over the last two months.
Leah: Still, I—
Therapist: Let it go. Let’s return to England. Leah. You were very small. But later, when you thought of London, did you and Sophie have any sense of…how should I put it? Home?
Leah: It’s hard to remember…
Sophie (overlapping): It’s hard to remember…
Therapist: Yes, I know, you were young—
Leah: …being five.
Sophie (overlapping): …being alive.
Therapist: Take your time.
Sophie: I liked going back to London. We went back there some summers, after we’d moved away, and we took those funny taxis.
Leah (to Elise): Remember the red line museum?
Sophie: Yeah!
Chris and Elise (confused): The what?
Leah: The museum, with a red line through it, that would lead you through different exhibits.
Sophie (exuberant): I remember!
Elise: The natural history museum. It was their favorite. Yes, it did have a red line to follow that you girls loved.
Sophie: The stuffed boar. The big dinosaur skeleton, right when you walked in.
Therapist: Splendid. Now. Who of you wants to go back?
Leah: You mean, hypothetically?
Therapist: I don’t think that’s important to clarify at this point.
Elise: Go back, as in, to that time? Or go back, as in, go visit?
Chris: I have a business trip there next week, actually.
Sophie: No.
Leah: Yes.
Sophie: I don’t want to go back.
Leah: I do.
Elise: In which sense?
Leah: In every sense. I want to go back and be British.
Therapist: What about you, Elise?
Elise: No, thank you. For years, yes. For years I did. But now? (Shrugs.) I think leaving Singapore would feel like leaving Sophie behind, losing her even more. (Turns to Leah.) What do you mean, you want to become British?
Therapist (irritated): That was my next question, actually.
Leah: Oh, I don’t know. You know. The way I want to be Chinese, and German, and—
Elise: Why?
Sophie: (overlapping) Why?
Leah: To fit in.
Sophie: Look, you were already kind of weird in Atlanta. I hate to break it to you—
Leah: I never knew how Sophie did it.
Sophie: How I did what?
Leah: The normalcy. The steadiness.
Sophie: I’m normal.
Elise (overlapping): She was…more normal. But that—
Therapist (exploding): Again, wildly off track. We are, so to speak, off the highway, off the county road, off the dirt path, plunging willy-nilly through woods, running over rabbits and small pines, our Navi on the blink, hoping we will wind up where we need to be. No. No. Not in my office, not on my clock.
Chris: Which is ten minutes fast, I noticed.
Therapist (ignores him): Now, Leah. If you really want to go back to London, I’m going to have to hear a believable accent.
Leah: Seriously?
No response.
Leah: Okay. Well, how about this (in passable British accent): I can’t seem to find my Wellies anywhere!
Sophie (eager, competitive, the shrill voice of a younger
sister desperate to win): How about this? Digestives! Smarties! Bobs!
(Sophie’s British accent is terrible; she is merely listing British things in an American accent.)
Therapist: Mediocre. Okay. Can I make a request? Let’s all take a deep breath together. Ready? Good. One, two, three— (Everyone inhales deeply.) That’s right. And out: three, two, one… (Everyone exhales deeply.)
Sophie (stands on the couch, shouts at the therapist, panicked): I’m running out of time!
Therapist (glances at his watch): We just have a few minutes left. But before we close, Leah, let’s return to the garden in London, since it seems like it’s such a strong memory for you.
Sophie reluctantly sits back down.
Elise (sighs): English gardens are the loveliest.
Leah (exhausted): I don’t know what else to say. It was messy, and beautiful in its disorder. That’s what English gardens are like, right, Mom?
Elise nods.
Leah: But I don’t remember the names of the flowers…
Therapist: And that feeling you mentioned, that “living in England” feeling.
Leah: The best way I can explain it is that it comes when I hear that Cat Stevens song, “Morning Has Broken.”
Elise (smiles): That’s what you sang every morning at preschool.
Therapist: And what is the feeling that comes with the song, exactly?
Leah: Belonging. No, that’s wrong. Peace? Also wrong.
Sophie begins humming the song.
Leah: Something like what I used to feel sitting with Sophie in the backseat of the Volvo—that’s the car we had in England—giggling at the passengers facing us in the cars behind us. A feeling like that, but I’m alone. But not sad.
Therapist: You know, it was originally a hymn. Cat Stevens didn’t write it.
Leah: Okay.
Therapist: You loved singing that hymn.
Leah: What are you getting at?
Therapist: I don’t know… (Suddenly cheered.) But I think you are all doing well.
Chris: That’s the first thing he’s said that makes any sense.
Elise: Should I write that down? Can you please repeat that? I just need to find my pen…(Shuffles through her purse.)
Sophie: He’s not incorrect, exactly…
Leah (in a perfect British accent): England is the only place abroad where I spoke like everyone around me.
Therapist: Leah, we have to wrap this up.
Leah (stubbornly): I went to a British preschool, I wore Wellies…
Sophie suddenly vanishes. At her departure, the other family members and even the therapist suddenly slump; the brief optimism from a second ago seems to have departed with Sophie.
Therapist (struggling to keep his voice buoyant): Wonderful to see you again, Elise, and you, too, Chris. Leah, I’ll see you next week, Tuesday at eleven.
Silence.
Elise: I felt so close to her, just a second ago—
Chris: I know.
Leah: And whenever we went back to London we would eat hot buttered toast for hours.
Chris and Elise gather their things.
Elise (turns to Leah): Ready?
Leah: I think I’ll just walk home. You guys go ahead.
Elise nods, trying to hide the hurt. Chris wraps an arm around her and the two exit.
Therapist (takes his notebook and stands, goes to the door): Take your time, Leah.
He turns off the lamp on his way out. The room falls into shadow. The door closes with a soft click. Leah sits in the darkened room for a second, eyes closed as though trying to summon a word or a specific memory. She can’t. It’s gone. Outside, it begins to rain, gathering the strength of the tropical thunderstorms that characterize late afternoons in Singapore.
The Good Years
Atlanta, Georgia, 1987–1992
What is there to say about the Kriegsteins’ good years in Atlanta, aside from their goodness? Had Chris and Elise earned the breather, the blossoming spring, the soft-pillowed sofa, after their respective adolescent struggles in Indiana and Mississippi, all those hours spent yearning for broader, more flattering horizons? After the bumps in Hamburg, the roaring pain of childbirth, the wandering through the wilderness of early marriage, of turning from each other in dismay? Had so many homes in so many years—London for two, Hamburg for one and a half, Philadelphia for four, London again for one—forged a bond such that now, back in Georgia, where Chris and Elise had first met, they were able to stand unquavering and go about building a quietly faithful middle-class existence? With Palm Sundays at First Presbyterian (a compromise between Elise’s post-London liberal theology and Chris’s homegrown Lutheran habits) and brunch at Houlihan’s, the restaurant across the street from the church, complete with crayons and kids’ menus and Bloody Marys?
* * *
Elise had hit her stride, working as a science teacher in a public middle school, away from the expat wives, back with southern women, some of whom were tough single moms. These were females she admired and feared, with their set jaws and their tight schedules and their brittle smiles; when they came in for parent conferences, she wanted to ask them what had happened, how they had survived, but instead she stuck to the script and solemnly presented the naked woman Evan had drawn on his photosynthesis worksheet or repeated the cruel rumor Jean had spread about the new girl from Vietnam.
* * *
Did it help that Chris had quit his job? That he was casting around for what to do, shooting baskets in the driveway while the girls and Elise were in school, calling up old college friends and attending UGA alumni events, hoping to make connections? Did it help that he “cooked dinner” sometimes, Chris’s euphemism for ordering pizza, encouraged Elise to have a girls’ night out with her fellow female teachers? Did it help that their bank account had shrunk, that they now drank frozen orange juice from cans and that the girls, who had worn Laura Ashley in London, now wore Kmart? If not for the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chris might have fallen into a significant depression. But perestroika had perked his ears, he had a few ex-colleagues who were talking about expanding energy markets, and Chris spent days at the kitchen table sketching elaborate plans for joint ventures across Siberia.
Elise was proud of him for quitting and for sleeping in until eleven. She’d known Chris only as ambitious and eager to please, and his refusal, one foggy November morning in London, to put up with his boss’s insults anymore had been touching, like watching Sophie speak her first words. It was Elise who had hatched the plan to return to Atlanta, found herself a teaching job through her old college roommate, and spotted the white brick house as they were driving through Little Five Points. They still had a little bit saved, and Chris’s parents, relieved their son was back in the States, offered to help with the down payment. Elise relaxed back into her southern accent, visited her mother and Ivy once a month in Mississippi, dropped in on her brothers now and then in Little Rock, where the two had opened a hardware business together, and could hardly remember being anywhere or anyone else.
* * *
For five years, the four of them were inarguably American. The girls lost their British accents over a two-week trip to visit their grandparents on the Kriegstein farm, where they ate sugar snap peas from the vine and jumped in hay. What is there to say about a state of normalcy, other than its wondrous comforts? After they moved to China, the Kriegsteins would privately meditate on each of these unnoticed luxuries in Atlanta, like the opposite of a Buddhist exercise, pinpointing and sharpening their desires for back then, back there.
Over their five years in Atlanta, the following pleasures were freely available and routinely taken for granted: Fat bagels with slick white cream cheese. Car trips up to Athens, for basketball games at UGA. Braves baseball games. Front lawns. Laughter. Chilled white wine on plastic chairs in the driveway with the neighbors. Driving alone. English. Anonymity. Sunday school. The neighborhood gang. Four square. The dogwood tree in the front yard, on the strip of grass between the
sidewalk and the street, just right for climbing. The shady, overgrown, ramshackle alleyway. Hiding places. The honeysuckle vine, bending over the driveway, fragrant, offering a faint, near-imaginary nectar when you sucked on the blossom’s stem. Unpolluted air. Chocolate chip cookie dough milk shakes. Family members in the same time zone. Large libraries, full of English books. Buttercups in the backyard. Citizenship. Country stations. Oldies stations. The greatest hits of the seventies, eighties, and today.
* * *
Over the five years in Atlanta, the girls grew, became people. Elise stared at them each morning, astonished. At Leah’s furrowed brow over a book, at Sophie’s white-blond curls, clipped back with red barrettes. The screaming fury that had characterized Leah’s first eight months in Hamburg had subsided into a quiet watchfulness that occasionally broke out into a private fit of giggles with Sophie. At seven, then eight, then nine, then ten, Leah was every inch the older daughter, tall like Chris, conscientious, hesitant to join games or other children until she felt secure. The girls’ respective complexions spoke to their personalities. Leah had delicate, pale skin, and straw hair. She burned easily, with freckles that spread over her face at the first hint of sun in early spring. Sophie had olive skin, dark eyebrows. When they went to Florida, to the beach house that Ada rented each summer, Sophie wriggled out of her mother’s sunscreening grasp and turned a gingerbread gold. Leah, pouting her disapproval, was made to wear a T-shirt over her bathing suit and still got feverish at night, as Elise rubbed aloe on the spots she’d missed. Leah, having no older sister, needed more protection. Sophie was less shy and wanted badly to win, coaxed Leah into races down the street, her taut tan body coiled and desperate to overtake.
* * *
Five years in Atlanta: 1987: Leah in the backyard, frowning with concentration, weaving purple clover chains. 1988: Sophie sprinting after a fading neighborhood friend in the early dusk, letting out a sharp laugh of triumph when her finger reaches his shoulder blade: “You’re it!” 1989: Leah gathering piles of books in the delicious cool of the air-conditioned library: Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, the Boxcar Children: careful not to pick any books with a copyright date later than 1960, because they were more likely to have sad endings. 1990: Sophie building a fort in the backyard with her best friend, Ana, dragging ferns over the stick frame and sweeping pine needles off the floor. 1991: Leah watching Look Who’s Talking at her best friend’s house and asking Elise the next day how babies are made. 1987–1992: The sisters’ twenty-two-month distance, their opposite natures, bind them to each other like sun and shade. This pleases Elise, who always wanted a sister closer to her own age. Since she was a child, the seven years separating Elise and Ivy have felt like a gulf she couldn’t quite bridge, like the ravine the Ebert kids used to fling themselves across on a rope swing, holding on for dear life to the fraying twine.
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