* * *
At home that afternoon, when Udo asked where she’d been that morning, Adela answered that she’d had to meet with a teacher.
“Nerd.” Udo smiled, the guilt of that lie leaning on Adela’s chest.
“At least I’m not a fucker,” Adela answered, and his smile grew, winding back to the bike ride they’d gone on months before after Liesl announced the one-two punch of pregnancy and marriage. They’d biked out of Kritzhagen and onto tiny, pin-straight roads. After pedaling for close to an hour, they’d taken a break. In a nearby field, cows chewed winter grass, their tails as steady as metronomes. Adela asked if he was upset. “I don’t know,” Udo answered. Then he rested his head on her lap and grinned. Something in that grin—perhaps its rarity—was beautiful.
“I don’t want to live with them,” Udo had said. “Liesl and Heinz and the new brother or sister.”
“You won’t live with them, then,” Adela answered. As she looked at his crooked, relieved expression, Udo moving in with her family became the logical next step.
Adela and Udo had private jokes about their teachers. A whole lexicon of expressions when Michael started in on a monologue about Tobias’s witticisms or fashion sense. A few weeks after Liesl and Heinz had gotten engaged came Christmas. With Mutti working over on Christmas Eve, Michael out for the evening, Adela and Udo made a roast and exchanged presents and decorated the tree. Michael meandered in after midnight. He asked about their evening. Udo talked of watching a concert on TV, though they hadn’t watched television. This trickery felt as decadent as the meal they’d shared, and Adela wondered if this was a precursor to love, doing the math about the distance of their actual relation.
“I’m exhausted,” Michael said.
“You’re drunk,” Udo answered.
“Not mutually exclusive.”
Michael ascended the stairs with balletic ease. He came home several nights a week with red eyes, but moved down the hall following the one, two, three of a waltz.
“We didn’t watch television,” Adela said. Udo turned the television on, smiled, and pulled on her toes.
Dad called for Christmas the next day and talked of a barbecue he was going to. “With Maria,” he added. “A barbecue at her family’s. Come this summer, they’ll be my family, too. Though I’m telling only you right now.”
Adela’s stomach fell. She wore thick socks, though her feet stayed frozen. Dad had mentioned his friend Maria in a few letters. Once, as Adela read one aloud, Michael interrupted and said, “Bet you the two of them are fucking,” then walked out of the room.
Later that Christmas day, Adela told Udo the news her father had broken to her that morning. “Getting married just a few weeks after Liesl,” Adela said.
Udo slipped one of her ears between his fingers.
“That’s my ear,” she said.
“That’s my ear,” he answered. Next came his grin, carrying the sweetness of a child just up from a nap. An expression he’d kept to himself until she’d shown up, just as he told only her the things he was frightened of, what he hoped for. Downstairs, Mutti blasted Christmas music. Smells of cooking rose to the second floor. Adela felt Udo’s fingers on her ear even after he’d let go.
* * *
The day after Adela cursed out those skinheads, her teacher—young and drunk for meaningful experiences—organized a debate about the refugees. Adela spoke first. She’d read tremendous amounts in preparation, citing the Spanish Civil War and the Fascist rise to power in an airtight appeal. As she talked, she thought of Miri and the sandwiches, Miri wearing three sweaters at once, Miri calling her “the good.” Then Gerd Mögen chimed in. He stood, though that wasn’t the procedure. “Fräulein Sullivan knows a good bit of history,” he began, wild with eye contact. “Especially for an American.” Classmates giggled. “But she neglected to talk about context.” She tried to appear calm as Gerd talked about fleeing for safety versus “greedy relocation,” which, in her unasked-for rebuttal, Adela argued made no sense. A later speaker devolved into complaints about the Poles who lived down the street from her, who “never seem to do anything.”
* * *
Leaving school at the end of the day, Adela found Udo outside.
“I waited for you this morning,” he said.
She thought to lie again, but didn’t want to. “I was helping that girl,” Adela answered. “Miri.”
Udo stared at his bike’s handlebars.
“Your new best friend,” he said.
“I don’t even know what she says to me.”
It was Udo who was Adela’s best friend, the person who listened to her angry worries about Michael and the German Lady, who stayed up with her to study for tests and left her in hysterics with his impression of their physical education teacher. But as she talked about Miri, he wore a look of barely concealed impatience. When she told him that people in the camp had begun to recognize her, he picked at a hangnail.
“Come,” Adela said. She put a hand on his forearm, though it felt different than Miri’s in both size and subtext. They hopped onto their bikes. Udo pedaled next to her without asking where she was taking him.
They arrived at the camp. Miri quickly appeared. She saw Udo and turned nervous. Adela smiled, took Udo’s hand, and said, “My cousin.”
Udo offered her a handshake. Miri high-fived him instead. She puffed up her chest. Moved her legs apart and plodded down the sidewalk, arms in front of her like Frankenstein’s monster. Udo stared at the ground. Miri kept up with her impression of him.
“That’s not nice,” Adela said. “Miri.”
“Dela!” the girl answered. She covered her mouth as she tried and failed to get ahold of herself.
Desperate to get out of there, to also pretend she’d had a reason to come in the first place, Adela pulled an apple from her bag, handed it to Miri, and climbed onto her bike. Miri stuck the apple into her mouth, roasted-pig-style, and kept up with her Udo walk and posture.
At home, Udo went into his room. He skipped dinner. When Adela passed his door, she heard music and smelled cigarettes and decided against knocking. It was late that night when he emerged. He asked her for help going over the Peloponnesian War. Relief left Adela ready to cry for the second time in as many days. She wondered what was wrong with her.
Adela quizzed him on the Peace of Nicias. Udo answered with information about alliances strained and shifting. He brought out a bag of caramels. From time to time, he handed her one.
Adela was in the middle of a question when Udo interrupted and said, “I didn’t realize she was our age. The way you described her, I’ve always imagined a little girl.”
* * *
Just after New Year’s, Paul had called Beate to tell her he was getting married again. The night after that call, Michael and Adela watched her.
“There’s a movie on television,” Michael said.
“An article you might like,” Adela added.
A winter rainstorm battered their windows.
It felt good to be watched, worried about. As Beate skimmed the article, as she watched the movie about a middle-aged lady, guileless with hope, Michael stared at his sister, who said, “Mutti, that article, yes?”
“Yes,” Beate answered. The possibility of her unraveling had reunited her children. She was filled with a fierce love for them, though sometimes she didn’t know what to talk to them about. “Quite an article,” she said.
As she went back to the movie, keeping herself together became a bet Beate was bent on winning. She laughed at a silly scene. Squeezed her children’s shoulders when she went up to bed. But the next day, as Beate painted Frau Garber’s toenails, she felt woozy. She went to the bathroom to kneel in front of its toilet. Nothing came. After her shift, she waited for the bus. Liesl pulled up and rolled down her window.
“I thought you’d quit,” Beate said.
A week before, Liesl had given notice at the Pflegeheim, citing her pregnancy, also her upcoming marriage to their city’s most pr
osperous electrician.
“I’m here to give you a ride,” Liesl answered.
“Udo told you?”
“He told me enough,” Liesl said, and rested her hand on top of Beate’s.
They drove home with all the windows down to keep Liesl’s pregnant nausea at bay.
Getting to the house, Liesl invited herself inside. She watched as Beate drank two glasses of wine, as she rifled through Michael’s jacket and smoked one of his cigarettes. Again, just as Beate should have fallen apart, the desire to win took over. She wanted to tell more people that her ex-husband was getting married just so she could shrug and feign being unfazed. To say something about marriage coming and going as if it were change falling into a gutter.
The doorbell rang and Beate remembered she had a third date that night with Josef Voigt, a man Liesl’s boyfriend, now fiancé, had set her up with.
“I forgot about Josef,” Beate said.
“He can wait,” Liesl answered. “Go upstairs and change and wash your face.” Her cousin saw face washing as the cure for many maladies.
Beate couldn’t remember Josef’s face. They’d gone to dinner; seen a movie. But after he dropped her off, she held on to nothing about him. There was a condition Adela had talked about once where people couldn’t recognize faces. But at work, Beate never mistook one old woman for another. She knew the difference between the twins who lived down the street. But Josef remained a mystery.
At the end of their date that night, she invited him in and they fooled around. She took out his penis, felt its warm weight in her hand. The next day, Josef sent her flowers at work. Old people leaned toward them with trembling sniffs. Coworkers teased her or commented on the colors the florist had chosen. To Beate, the flowers felt like a branding. For the next week, her interest in him waned and returned and left her exhausted. Then they went out on a Saturday and he made her laugh hard. They went back to his house and had sex. And balding, hefty Josef was good at it. For an hour after, her interest in him turned complete. But as she got home, as she heard Michael slip up the back stairs, Beate realized that Josef was maybe just part of her game of getting better.
* * *
Spring brought final preparations for Liesl’s wedding. “Just a little party,” she kept saying, though her growing guest list and need for a band suggested otherwise. That Paul was getting married ten days after her was Michael’s favorite thing. One morning, he and Beate drinking coffee in their backyard, he said, “Sometimes I like to pretend that Liesl and the California Father are getting married instead.”
Two days before Liesl’s wedding, Josef came to help set up. He and Heinz erected the tent and raked detritus from the lawn. When Heinz left to pick up plates, Beate told Josef that there was a better rake in the toolshed. He followed her inside. She kissed his neck and unbuttoned his shirt.
“You make me very happy,” he said, and Beate was floored by certainty, though an hour before the grunts he let out while lifting things had bothered her.
Once Josef had gone home, the table a sea of blooms, Beate turned restless. Adela and Udo had fallen asleep. Michael’s door was closed, though she stopped believing this meant anything. He woke up in time for school and did well enough to continue. And though Adela was organized and good in all the ways he was derelict, Beate saw Michael living in a way her daughter did not. Adela scoured the newspaper. She spewed out information about Bosnia and Sudan and women sold into sex slavery. Michael told stories about his art teacher who opened the windows in winter to remind them that suffering was part of art. “I know what suffering is really a part of,” he said. “Suffering.” When Adela alluded to him going out at night, what Beate saw in Michael was expansion. When he woke up red-eyed on a Sunday afternoon, she made him coffee. Michael mumbled something about the coffee’s perfection, his voice an octave deeper than normal. There were nights, too, when she woke up and knew he wasn’t home, and it hit her that she’d let him reach too far, too wildly. Her thoughts caught on the police, on young men felled by AIDS. The neos on the bus who’d stood when she did. It turned every sadness about Paul to nothing. She sometimes reminded Michael to “be safe.” He’d kiss her forehead or ask a question about the Pflegeheim’s residents, whom he called “the olds.”
That night, the house as prepped for the wedding as she could make it, Beate was stuck awake. She took a shower, only to feel more rattled. She passed Michael’s door and heard nothing. Safe, she thought, and felt stupid. Beate stepped outside and started to walk. Nervously at first, imagining neos in alleys. She followed a route she could have traveled with her eyes closed.
She stopped outside the bar and watched Willy through its window, his hair still a marvel. The crowd looked less elderly, though as mouse-chewed as before. The chalkboard where men had saved haircut spots still hung on its back wall. It had been almost two years, yet it carried the quality of being both distant and right there, as Paul had when she’d heard his voice for the first time in months and he said, “I am to be married,” and she felt hit by a gale, also grateful he’d said it so stupidly. Beate wanted to go into the bar, but she’d have fifty-eight people in her house in two days’ time. And she wanted to see if Michael had come home.
On her walk back she saw a bus squeaking to a stop and climbed on. The bus passed a crew of neos sitting on the hood of a car. She worried that they’d flag it down, though they did not. At the next stop, a bicycle passed them: Michael. A cigarette glowed in his mouth. He pedaled past them and uphill. Beate willed the bus to move faster, but a man at the next stop spoke to the driver as he disembarked. The bus started up and passed Michael. At the next stop he returned the favor. Flashes of Michael emerged in a streetlamp’s circle. Dark hair. Hunched shoulders. But as they got closer to the house, she didn’t see him again. Neos sat on cars. Sickness ended boys just as they became men. Paul was marrying a woman named Maria, who Michael said sounded like she’d “sucked down a whole bucket of helium.”
At home she found Michael in the kitchen, chugging a glass of water.
“Out cutting hair?” he asked.
“Don’t be mean,” she answered.
His eyes were red. His goatee impressive. She wanted to thank him for being home, though in doing so she’d have to admit that she’d been afraid. And she loved the version of her son ruled by interest instead of fear. She took a sip of his water.
“You weren’t cutting hair, either, I imagine,” she said. He smiled and kissed her cheek.
His goatee scratched. He must have loved the way that, at almost sixteen, he could turn his otherwise small self into a man. Michael had pedaled past the bus. The bus passed him back. Perhaps the driver—who drank coffee from a thermos and talked to everyone getting off and on—liked the game of Michael passing and falling behind. Perhaps he looked for Michael each night, happy when this boy-man grew large in his rearview mirror. Perhaps he watched out for her son, or at least noticed when he wasn’t there.
* * *
Mutti folded programs. She wore scrubs from work, her hair in the braid she always kept it in now. The few times Adela had seen it out, she was startled by its blond expanse, Mutti transformed to a time when people read by candlelight and were accused of witchcraft. Michael said once that the braid made her look Mormon. “Amish,” Adela corrected; he’d answered back with nonsense about churning butter.
The house smelled of vacuuming. Stacks of folding chairs leaned against a wall. Liesl, the soon-to-be bride, stood in the middle of the living room, palming her belly.
“Just in time,” Liesl said.
“For what?” Adela asked.
“I have a list!” she answered. “I thought you or your brother could work on it. But you keep disappearing. Bea, your children like to disappear.”
Mutti made another fold.
Adela moved into the kitchen. The counter she’d made sandwiches on was packed with plates. In the fridge, where her bread and cheese had lived, champagne bottles were crowded in steerage. Adela searched t
he kitchen for that bread. For the cheese so heavy she’d had to take breaks when carrying it home from the store. She called Liesl’s name.
“No need to shout,” Liesl said. Mutti stood behind her, holding a vase.
“Where are my things?” Adela asked.
“Dear,” Liesl said. “So many things.”
“Six loaves of bread. A block of cheese!” Adela opened the fridge, where a platter of cured meat was pinned down by plastic wrap.
“There’s a wedding in two days,” Liesl answered. Mutti said nothing.
As Adela imagined pulling her mother’s braid, Liesl announced she’d moved the bread and cheese into the shed behind the orchard. “It’s cool in there,” Liesl said.
“That’s why the mice like it,” Adela answered.
“Tra-la-la.”
Stepping outside, Adela found Udo sitting behind a tree. “I’m hiding from my mother,” he said with a smile. Adela walked into the shed, found her loaves flattened, cheese softened to putty.
“Your mother,” she said to Udo, who’d followed her.
He hefted the bread and cheese onto his back. They got on their bikes and rode through a part of the city where buildings were the color of tooth decay, to the apartment he and Liesl had lived in for years.
“We have this place for another month,” Udo said, letting Adela inside.
He put her food in the fridge, came back with beer and two glasses. He poured carefully, keeping his largeness at bay.
“Let’s sit,” he said.
“Where?”
“The sofa.”
Indents in the carpet showed where the sofa had been. They sat there. Adela placed her hand on an imagined armrest. The beer was cold and bitter.
“Addo,” Adela said. She’d been helping him to study for the exams he needed to pass so that he could make his Abitur. They’d gone over Greek and Latin roots so many times she’d memorized the information.
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