All Over the Place

by Geraldine DeRuiter

  Munich would become my brother’s one childhood home that was his alone. In the years since, I’ve been there more than he has.

  In the spring of 2013, not long after my nephew Xander was born and the dent in my head felt mostly healed, Edward wrote to me to say that he and Val were going to Germany to introduce their son to Dad. Did we want to join them?

  I’d waited thirty years to be included in my brother’s plans. Yes, I said. Yes, we’ll be there.

  We got into town a few days before he did, and so I was there when Val walked up, carrying Xander. I saw the look on my dad’s face when he saw his grandson for the first time, the flicker of delight interrupting his scowl.

  It lasted a good three seconds, which is an eternity in my dad’s world.

  “Why the hell isn’t that kid walking on his own?” he asked.

  “Dad, he’s nine months old.”

  My father rolled his eyes. My brother had given him the greatest gift he could ask for: an entirely new generation with whom to be exasperated.

  For several days, we resided under the same roof with relatively few casualties (a rather unprecedented achievement). The village where my dad lives is incredibly small and quiet, surrounded entirely by farmlands. In the springtime, the air is heavy with the scent of fresh-cut grass and manure.

  It is one of the most boring places on earth, in a pleasant way.

  “I have something for him,” my father announced one morning, gesturing to Xander, before heading downstairs to his workshop (it’s been years since he lived in the small Munich apartment that my brother had called home, but Dad has always had a place where he builds his planes).

  He returned with a tiny pair of leather sandals and placed them on the ground in front of my nephew. Blue and strappy, the toddler equivalent of Birkenstocks. On the leather foot bed was stamped the words “West Germany.”

  My dad, the shockingly unsentimental man who disdained clutter, who kept absolutely nothing, had held on to a pair of my brother’s baby shoes for thirty-five years. I wondered if he’d found them after my mom had left for America with Edward, hidden in some drawer. How long he held on to them before he realized that his son had outgrown them. That my mother wasn’t coming back. Was it a conscious decision to keep them until some grandchild could wear them? Or was he simply unable to throw them out?

  I never got an answer. I can’t ask my dad things like that, any more than I can ask Edward why his interpretation of the role of big brother is always to be my chief tormentor. These are things that will remain forever undiscussed. The Italian side is the one that has no secrets, that leaves no thought unspoken, no grievance unscreamed. But there are conversations between my brother and father and me that will never take place, things that remain tucked away in the back of closets for thirty years. I’ve come to terms with this, embraced the idea that you need to occasionally accept things as they are.

  Munich will always feel cold; Rome will always be chaotic; Los Angeles will always wear its superficiality like a badge of honor. It’s just how it is.

  Rand and I were scheduled to go home before Edward and Val, and on our last day together, my brother and his family drove into downtown Munich with us.

  We walked through the central square—a wide promenade lined with shops and the occasional ancient church or museum. Shoppers and tourists moved through it with surprising efficiency, occasionally blocked by throngs of Italian teenagers on school trips. Looming over all of it was the Rathaus—the large, ominous city hall, lined with spires, with an enormous glockenspiel at the center.

  Edward held Xander one-armed, and it was as we walked through this bustling part of downtown that he realized his son’s diaper had leaked. My brother had a wide splotch of baby urine on the front of his shirt.

  He laughed, unconcerned. My brother, who I’d seen lose his shit over broken pencil lead, was laughing about a urine-stained shirt.

  Those of us who are childless, who have watched our siblings make that miraculous and mucusy transformation into parents, are usually taken aback by behavior like this. I’ve found the best solution is to lean in and gently take your brother’s or sister’s face in your hands. From this vantage point, it’s hard not to see the kid they were. There are crow’s feet around their eyes, but the eyes are nevertheless the same. After a few quiet moments of beautiful introspection with your face awkwardly close to theirs, yell “YOU ARE A POD PERSON” at the top of your lungs without warning. This is a really good tactic when trying to accept the fact that you can know someone for an eternity and not have the faintest clue as to who they are.

  Also, pod people hate that sort of thing.

  “Uh… we need a bathroom,” my pod-brother said, emitting a faint laugh as he gestured to the front of his urine-stained shirt.

  Given the ubiquity of beer in Munich, you’d assume that toilets would be easy to find. But the city’s engineers either had massive bladders or a dark sense of humor, because public bathrooms are few and far between. I’d visited the city enough times to know exactly where one was: just inside the interior courtyard of the Rathaus, on the right, you can find a small bank of toilets. For the relatively low price of half a euro (which, when you have a bladder or shirtfront that is full of urine, seems like a good deal), you can partake in using an incredibly clean and well-stocked bathroom.

  There, my brother took his son in to change his diaper.

  And it was there, just outside the bathroom, that my brother did something that caused an immediate flashback to my own childhood. He grabbed Xander’s tiny fist and gently throttled his face with it, making “pssht-pssht” noises while yelling, “STOP HITTING YOURSELF. STOP HITTING YOURSELF.”

  “Edward,” I snapped, remembering the many afternoons he’d inflicted the same misery upon me, “stop it.”

  “I’m not doing anything.” He continued faux-punching his son.

  “Edward,” I said again, my voice echoing up the walls of the Rathaus courtyard, “STOP PUNCHING YOUR BABY.”

  “He’s my baby. I can punch him if I want to.”

  “STOP IT.”

  “He likes it.”

  “HE DOES NOT.”

  “Yes, he does. Watch.”

  Edward pretended to punch Xander, making slow-motion jabs to his face and cheeks accompanied by a pssht-pssht sound.

  And, god help me, the kid loved it. He laughed, waving his arms up and down maniacally. I wondered if maybe I hadn’t spent an entire childhood unloved. If maybe the problem had simply been that I wasn’t the right audience.

  Maybe I was always asking the wrong thing of him. I wanted him to love me and look out for me. That’s not my brother. But if you need someone to criticize your haircut (“You look like an angler fish,” he once said of my asymmetrical bob) and question every single decision you’ve ever made (“That’s what you’re wearing?” he asked me on my wedding day), then my brother is your man.

  I just wasn’t playing to his strengths. I wasn’t seeing him for what he was, in the same way I didn’t see Munich for what it was. On past trips, I’d spent hours looking for shops or cafés and found the city wanting. But had I been searching for giant heart-shaped gingerbread cookies that read “ICH LIEBE DICH” (which, to my horrified delight, is how you say “I love you” in German) or a salad made entirely of sausage, I’d have been in the right place. I was just looking for the wrong thing.

  Later, I walked us to a series of cheap shops along the promenade in search of a new shirt for Edward. He didn’t end up buying one.

  “It’s just baby pee,” he said, using the kind of logic that makes sense to new parents but is somewhat horrifying to those of us who are childless.

  We led them up to a small restaurant we knew of, just around the corner from the Viktualienmarkt, less crazy than the Augustiner Bierhalle that dotted the city. It was dark and cozy and warm, smelling of beer and fresh bread. We ate schnitzel and sausage and spaetzle, all the gloriously unhealthy food groups that my brother avoided in L.A.
>
  And then, on a sidewalk in Munich, under a gray sky, we said goodbye, Edward giving me a quick half hug, as he always did. They headed back to our dad’s house. We were heading home.

  I was quiet on our drive out of the city.

  “You okay?” Rand asked.

  I shrugged.

  “We had a nice time,” he said, and it was true, but I remained disappointed.

  “It’s just… I knew exactly where a bathroom was when he needed one. I knew where he could get a new cheap shirt, and where to eat, and I feel like he barely noticed.”

  The truth was out: I’d just wanted to impress him.

  Look, I wanted to say. Look at how much I know about this city that I don’t really like that much but still love, just because it reminds me of you. Look.

  “He just doesn’t say stuff like that,” Rand said. “I think sometimes you expect too much of people.”

  I nodded.

  A few hours later, we received an email from my brother. The last line was this:

  “Good seeing you guys. Miss you already.”

  I stared at it, knowing that I would hang on to it for far too long. Like the memory of the hug from the summer I broke my arm. Like the tiny pair of leather shoes in my father’s home, the ones that their owner had long since outgrown.

  If I were to venture into my brother’s creative realm and write the screenplay of my life, I have to acknowledge two things. The first is that there would be scenes shot in Munich, a city that I don’t necessarily like but am inexorably tied to.

  The second is that the part of Edward would be essential to the story; it’d be impossible to leave him on the cutting room floor. Obnoxious and loud, brash and brilliantly funny. My vulnerable villain, the antagonizer I can’t live without. It’s a role my brother was born to play.

  I’d cast Zach Braff in the part.

  16

  WHERE THERE’S A FIAT, THERE’S A WAY

  BELIEVE IT OR NOT, I didn’t realize that my journeys over the past seven years were going to lead to all this introspection about and understanding of the people closest to me. At the start, my plan was to eat a lot of cake and do my best not to cause any international incidents. The weaving together of disparate places and people into a wonderful tapestry of memories large enough to cover the planet was just a delightful side effect.

  Rand kept true to his promise of trying to find a work-life balance, and I kept true to my promise of eating frosting for dinner at least once a month. And almost everything in my life seemed to fit together.

  But there were some pieces that remained separate, as much as I tried. The love of my life, Rand, and the loves of my childhood, my nonno and nonna, had missed meeting one another by a span of a few months. I could travel the world again and again, and I’d never be able to change this immutable fact. That every boy who ever broke my heart had the privilege of meeting them, of being the subject of countless stories I told my grandmother while sitting next to her on the couch as she intently listened. Every single one, right up until the one that really mattered, got to know them.

  I adored my grandparents, which, in hindsight, is kind of a terrible idea.

  It’s like buying an eight-year-old a hamster, which we, as a society, universally do. I think there’s some sort of national register for it: you turn eight and someone hands you a hamster.

  And then you get really attached to the hamster and make long-term plans about taking the hamster to college, and all of it is just awful because—and my sincerest apologies if this is news—your lives are going to overlap for a year or two at most.

  But it happens anyway, and I suppose it’s wonderful that it does, because cedar shavings and odd-smelling food pellets and those cute furry cheeks stuffed with sunflower seeds teach you about life and death.

  While my love for my grandparents far exceeded any affection I felt for my hamster (Anastasia Elizabeth Cottonball DeRuiter, RIP), there was something similarly tragic and wonderful about loving them. These were people who were already old before I was even born.

  Had I had any sense in my tiny head, I’d have looked at my grandparents and said, “Look, you guys are just great, but I can tell that this isn’t going to be a long-term thing, and you’re just going to break my heart.” And then I’d have nobly walked back into my playroom, promptly destroying any gravitas I may have earned by harvesting and ingesting my own boogers.

  But like most children, I was illogical and not really forward-thinking, and so I delighted in my grandparents. In nearly every photo from my childhood, I’m clinging to one or the other of them. When they died toward the end of my junior year of college, I was ill-prepared for their deaths.

  My grandmother passed away in the spring of 2001, and my grandfather was gone not long after. A few days after his funeral, I was unceremoniously dumped by a boyfriend who told me that it wasn’t all that fun to date someone who was “sad all the time.” When I learned that I couldn’t lure him back with hysterical crying, I went to Italy for a month, because it’s always a good idea to spread your drunken grief across two continents, if you can. What few memories I do have from that period are tinged pink from a 2000 Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, of which, based on conservative estimates, I drank approximately forty-three gallons (I think, anyway. Most of it was in liters).

  Nearly all the people I’ve ever known who have lost someone close to them have told me that there are certain spots in the world where they’ve always expected to bump into them. That they couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d find them in the corner of a favorite bar or sitting on a bench in the park, or that they might walk through the front door of their house any minute. It’s not that we don’t realize the people we care about are gone—it’s just a weird little trick that our brains play on us that causes us to tie people to places on Earth long after they’ve left it. Even the terminology that we use tends to support this crazed notion. “We lost her last year” implies that if we look hard enough, we’ll find her. She isn’t gone. She’s just been temporarily misplaced.

  During that messy summer after they died, I visited my grandparents’ village for the first time. And though my head knew that the effort was fruitless, my heart kept expecting to turn a corner to find the two of them sitting down, playing cards or eating pasta or having espresso. In my impossible daydream they were not as they’d been in their final years, but younger and healthier, the vibrant grandparents I remembered from when I was small, when America was new to them and the world was new to me.

  They weren’t there, of course. Instead, I just walked the tiny village streets where they once had, and, if such a thing was possible, felt their absence even more acutely.

  In early September 2001, I went back home. Three months after that messy summer ended, I caught a bus in the middle of the night on my way back from a concert. The love of my life happened to be on it. And so the three most important people in my life missed meeting each other by a matter of months.

  I couldn’t take Rand to meet my grandparents. But I could take him to their village, on a mountaintop not far from Naples. It took me forever to get there. It always does.

  In the spring of 2014, a year after we’d met my brother in Munich, Rand’s work called him back to that city again. A week later he had a conference in Boston, and Rand suggested we spend the days in between in Italy. We flew into Naples, thrown from the order and cleanliness of Germany into the vibrant chaos of southern Italy. Lines of laundry left outside to dry fluttered in the wind, the unofficial flag of the south. In just a few short hours, I went from a city that belonged to my brother to one that belonged to my grandparents. I hadn’t been there since my trip with Kati.

  The sun was setting as we picked up our rental car—a lumbering beast of a Peugeot—the only automatic car in the entire fleet. We stared at it, disbelieving. It was mid-sized by American standards and positively massive by Italian ones. The roads in this part of the world felt like carnival rides: unstable and hastily thrown together, lea
ving you with the feeling that you were at any moment going to totter off some edge, head first. We were plowing down them in what felt like a parade float.

  We drove, the sun casting Naples in a yellow-orange glow, Vesuvius looming large in the background, already turning indigo in the receding light.

  I wasn’t worried about Rand navigating southern Italian roads, even in the dark—he could make sense of the madness. It was one of the reasons why our relationship worked and why my family loved him so much. Throw Rand in the middle of crazy, and he will coast through it.

  The GPS on his phone led us from the highway to the hills on the horizon. We passed a sign that pointed to a dusty road off to the right.

  “Guardia dei Lombardi”—the village where my grandmother was from. I excitedly pointed it out to Rand, but it was already far behind us, and he was too busy trying to follow the prompts of Google Maps to take note.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “Did you need me to turn back there?”

  “No, no,” I said. “Just pointing it out.”

  When I was little, I had no frame of reference for what this part of the world looked like. My grandfather would occasionally head back to Italy, and I’d stand on tiptoe and peek inside his luggage as he packed. It was always fascinating to me—his wildly printed ties, his bright shirts, all neatly folded inside a green, hard-sided suitcase bearing the misnomer “American Tourister.”

  “Nonno, dove vai?” I’d ask. Where are you going?

  “In Campania,” he’d reply. He was referring to the name of the region that could be found just below Italy’s shin where my grandparents were from. But as a child, I didn’t know that Campania, and confused it with the similar-sounding word campagna, which means “countryside.” And so I had a misguided vision of my grandfather trekking across fields and streams in his suit and tie.

  Which, looking at the landscape, wasn’t that far off. The reality was even rockier and dustier than I had envisioned, the villages seeming to come straight from the earth, carved from the surrounding rocks. The stone houses were laid in rows, one next to the other, each sharing a wall with its neighbor. The flat façades formed long corridors that cut through the village like a maze.