Grief lived in Michael’s body. It knotted his stomach and ached behind his eyes. Left his mouth dry and strange-smelling. Sex became its antidote, a vigorous tug-of-war between giving up and thrashing forward. And he was good at it. He loved its tastes and smells, the nonsensical things called out in the height of it, the stroke-struck faces. Even as his body began to rebel, coming taking almost an hour, the collar of his foreskin holiday-red, he pushed forward. Just as he swam twice the length he had the summer before. Just as he either abstained from smoking or lit the next cigarette before the last had been smashed into an ashtray.
* * *
Standing on the Potato Farmer’s stoop (why couldn’t Michael remember his name?), he saw more texts from his mother: I just need to tell you something … You hate surprises … Fine, Michael. Her anger felt good, a victory. He rang the bell. (The farmer had mentioned his real job, but all Michael could come up with was the dumb joke he was so fond of.) The dog barked, was quieted with a nasal command. Feet flapped across the floor. The farmer offered Michael a glass of water. Michael declined and kissed him and things began. Again they started on the too-soft sofa. The dog vied for attention and was thwarted. As they undressed, the farmer stopped. The soreness in Michael’s crotch had turned second nature. But the farmer stared at Michael’s inflamed foreskin.
“It’s been busy, is all,” Michael said.
“And maybe all that busyness…?” The farmer added.
Michael flicked his dick. It bounced to attention. It also hurt. “It’s just busy.”
“This is more than busy,” the farmer said. “Come to my office tomorrow.”
“What office?”
“I’m a nurse,” he said, his face making it clear Michael should have known this.
He handed Michael his boss’s card. Frau Doktor Dora Birnbaum. The farmer slid his underwear on, and the dog sniffed his knee.
“I’m tired,” the farmer said.
“Let’s sleep, then,” Michael answered. But the farmer shook his head. Nurse, Michael thought. A nurse with a dog. A nurse who isn’t inviting me to sleep over.
“I’ll put you on the schedule for tomorrow,” he said.
Michael wanted to ask the nurse what his name was.
* * *
After Michael found a middle-aged couple online, too jazzed about a threesome with him to say anything about his dick, after he kissed and touched each of them with a surprising hunger and fell asleep with one wedged on either side of him, Michael returned home. The sun lifted as he drove through Kritzhagen, dreaming of the spare room at Udo’s he’d claimed as his. It had stayed untouched when Udo lived there. In it, Michael felt a creative license he did not in the rest of the house. He drove and thought of spinning the blinds closed, the soft hold of his duvet. But as he pulled into the driveway, he saw a boy sitting in Mutti’s yard. The boy waved; Michael waved back. His injured dick burned. The boy crossed into Michael’s driveway.
“I know you,” he said, in English, and Michael realized who he was, along with the surprise Mutti had tried to tell him.
He looked less Asian than Michael imagined he would, with a face that would inspire people to ask where he was from. The child was kindergarten-sized, though Michael knew he was somewhere closer to seven. He held a drawing pad at his hip on which he’d sketched a house. Its chimney leaned. Trees like broccolis sat on either side.
“It’s that house,” the boy said. “My grandmother’s.”
The child’s eyes were dark and wide. Only his hair—corkscrewed with frizz—betrayed the fact that they were related.
“You’re the uncle,” the child said.
“‘Michael’ is fine.”
“Michael is fine,” the child repeated.
“Peter,” a voice, his sister’s, called from inside.
“You have any nicknames?” Michael asked.
“Peter is my name,” the boy said, as if Michael had tried to tell him a truth he wasn’t ready to hear.
Then Adela was outside, too. Her face had taken on a hard quality, her brow lined though she was only thirty. Her neck was thinner and carried a constellation of moles that Michael didn’t remember from before. The card from the doctor sat in his pocket.
“You’re back,” Adela said.
“You said you didn’t want it,” Michael answered, pointing to Udo’s house.
“I’m just here.”
Paper from Peter’s pad fought with the wind. Adela hugged Michael. Her smell was the same and flattened the years they were apart. Made him realize that he would never smell Udo in this way again. Michael wanted to lie down.
“You’re just here?” Michael said.
“Visiting for a while,” Adela answered.
“I need to take a shower,” Michael said. Fabric shushed against his foreskin. He couldn’t remember when it had started to look injured. “I’ll come over in a little bit.”
* * *
The last time Michael had seen Adela was a decade earlier, just after she’d graduated from college. Mutti was all set for the two of them to fly to California for the graduation when Adela wrote that she wasn’t going to the ceremony, that she had no interest in pomp and circumstance. Michael, bartending at one of the hotels then, made up a drink called Pomp and Circumstance, which failed, mostly because people couldn’t pronounce it.
But after the German Lady insisted they do something to celebrate, Adela wrote back to say that she’d never been to Boston. So they met in Boston, Adela a skinny vegetarian who made lists of museums for them to explore, restaurants where there would be more options for her than a bowl of pasta. She was exceedingly polite, as if her mother and brother were strangers, which left Michael annoyed and prone to acting out. One night, each of them in their respective hotel rooms, he went out and met a man at a gay bar who was fascinated by Michael’s English, which sounded native at one turn, foreign at another. “Like you went to some Swiss boarding school,” the man said. “Let’s go with that,” Michael answered, and spent a day and a half with him, leaving a message for his mother and sister that he’d run into a friend. When he came back, Mutti looked distressed. Michael asked what had happened. She answered that nothing had happened, only that when she’d tried to ask Adela how she’d been, or if she ever felt like she might come back to Germany, his sister told her about other places she wanted to visit. Continents where not everyone looked as they did, with food and smells and weather she had trouble imagining.
“Where is she now?” Michael asked.
“Went back to the same museum we were at two days ago. Said it was hard to go to places with other people and really look the way she wanted to look.”
“She’s an asshole,” Michael said.
Mutti looked like she might cry. Michael decided he’d head to the same gay bar that night, hopefully to find someone new to pass the time with.
Mutti’s look seemed to sense this, and she shook her head.
“She’s not an asshole,” she said, “just because she does things one way and you do them another.”
* * *
After his shower, rather than go to Mutti’s to see his sister, Michael got back into his car and drove to the doctor’s office where the Potato Farmer worked. He sat in an exam room and stared at posters on healthy eating. When the doctor came in, Michael tried to turn himself into a joke. “Your nurse wouldn’t even sleep with me,” he said. He expected her to wince at his injury, or chide him for not being safe. Wanted her to ask him what he’d been thinking. Michael would answer that not thinking was what had gotten him into all of this, though it was thinking too much that left him miserable knowing that he’d never have a break from himself.
“Let’s take a look,” the doctor said.
Michael slid his underwear down to his ankles. The doctor leaned closer. She looked at his injury as if she’d seen the same thing hundreds of times before.
15
1974
Lying in their beds after they’d shut the lights out, Beate sai
d to her roommate, “My parents pretend that Thanksgiving isn’t a thing.” She told Kate how they got mad when the grocery store was closed, the buildings at the college locked. Water turned on and off in the bathroom next door.
“Your parents sound like characters,” Kate said.
It was the Monday before Thanksgiving.
Kate asked again if Beate wanted to go home with her for the holiday. Unable to think of an excuse that didn’t sound rude, the fear of days alone in their dorm swelling in her, Beate agreed.
“Pilgrims,” Beate said.
“Indeed,” Kate answered. Indeed was one of her favorite words.
On the bus ride there, Beate began to run out of things to talk to Kate about. After several quiet minutes, Kate turned to Beate, explaining her father’s worry when she decided to go to Mount Holyoke. “Thinks I’ll become a lezzie.”
“Laura Hanft on our floor is,” Beate said.
“Half of our floor is,” Kate answered, her barking laugh too loud for the bus they were on. They were headed to Kate’s small upstate New York town, a place she made jokes about. “We’re such hicks, we don’t even know how to say it. Green-witch.”
“How are you meant to say it?”
“You’re hilarious, B.”
Beate wished she’d stayed at school. She would have kept her door locked, fear her entertainment. She might have befriended an international student stuck there, too. The bus stopped in Albany before continuing.
“My mother is dead. I think I told you,” Kate said. “Cancer. Roller-coaster fast.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Indeed,” Kate answered.
Gray trees reached toward the sky. They moved past houses just off the highway. Beate imagined living next to it might feel bothersome at first, but that the traffic eventually turned to background noise, the rushing of a river. They passed a mall. Cars clustered in front of it as if huddling for protection.
* * *
Kate’s father had a walrus mustache. When he saw his daughter, he hugged her for a long time. Beate was moved and embarrassed, then embarrassed that she was embarrassed, certain she’d inherited Mutti’s easy public shame. She smiled as if she were comfortable, even as the clock’s second hand wound through most of a rotation.
They drove through flat, grand Saratoga, then out of it and uphill. Greenwich was small, battalioned with farms. The house they pulled up to was one story, its garage as large as the house. “Here we are, B,” Kate said.
“Yes, B,” her dad added. “Home, sweet home.”
Kate’s dad—Mr. Sullivan—ordered pizza. Somewhere in the back of the house, a door clicked closed.
“I told you I have a brother,” Kate said.
“You told me a story about how he was always naked. As a child.”
“Indeed,” Kate said, and turned on the television.
Beate was relieved for its distraction. Her parents were likely on their sofa, Vati reading, Mutti listening to the radio. Mutti listened to it for hours. Sometimes her mother got up to make tea or eat half a sleeve of crackers. Sometimes she wrote lists of English words, checking the dictionary to see if she’d spelled them correctly. Beate thought next of her dorm, quiet except for the lights’ hum, each shift of wind throttling her. Fear felt preferable to this strange house or to the quiet of Winona, and she remembered her excitement in heading east for college, switching buses in Chicago, knowing she could get out there and no one would know.
“What’s that?” Beate asked, after Kate said something she didn’t catch.
“I know,” Kate answered.
Kate’s dad returned with the pizza. They ate at the dining room table, which was crowded with mail. The overhead light glared, and grease dripped onto plates. Kate’s brother walked in wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
“My son runs all the time,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And I ask him what he’s running from.” A smile shifted his mustache. The son stared blankly, then said hello to his sister and Beate. He was small, with olive skin and dark hair. His leg tapped under the table.
“You liking America, Beate?” the father asked, pronouncing her name as if it were a root vegetable.
“Beate,” the brother corrected. He scowled, his annoyance on her behalf funny. Beate looked down at a pile of catalogs but couldn’t keep her laughter in. The father looked ashamed. This quieted Beate. “I wasn’t laughing at that,” she said. “Sometimes I remember things.”
Crumbs clung to the father’s mustache. The brother darted back to his room.
* * *
Beate was given the couch in the den. She brushed her teeth and changed into her nightgown, which Kate called prairie garb. She had no idea how she would sleep on this tiny couch, remembering the one in Cologne with buttons that woke her whenever she shifted. The brother stopped at the door.
“You know it’s a pullout,” he said, walking in and removing the cushions. The sofa morphed into a bed with a bread slice of a mattress. He slid a sheet across it. His legs brimmed with hair.
“You really defected?” he asked.
She nodded. “I didn’t know.”
“Kate didn’t tell you, I can see,” he said, and slid pillows into cases.
“I mean about defecting.”
Something about this young man erasing her stupidity made her feel the need to repay him with the story of the soldiers and the train, the dead woman’s apartment. “She had all this jewelry that I thought was worth a fortune. I planned to steal a piece in hopes that we could buy a small house somewhere,” Beate said, though she’d never thought the jewelry was real. The brother grinned at her invented detail. In his smile, something softened. He smelled of soap. They piled blankets on the bed.
“My parents wanted to keep going after Minnesota, but got tired,” she said.
“Otherwise you’d be in Borneo now.”
“Or west of that.”
“You want to watch something?” he asked.
He turned on the television. They watched late-night talk shows, laughing as Steve Martin played the banjo with an arrow through his head.
“I don’t know why this is funny,” she said. His shoulder was warm next to hers. He was dressed for summer, though the house was cool. A few times his hand touched her leg, staying there until she looked at it. Beate worked to stare instead at the television, or the bookshelf with gardening tomes and paperback mysteries with cracked spines.
* * *
The next morning, Kate prepared Thanksgiving dinner, moving through the kitchen like an expert. She wore her mother’s apron and followed recipes written by the dead woman’s hand. At dinner, Kate’s father toasted his wife. By the toast’s end, Paul—the brother—was crying.
As Beate and Kate cleaned up, coffee gurgling in the machine, Kate apologized.
“For what?” Beate asked.
“My brother likes to show the world how sensitive he is.”
“He wasn’t sad?”
“We’re all sad.”
A roaring in the next room from a game on television.
When Beate asked if she liked her brother, Kate answered, “You’re an only child, right?”
Beate pushed into the pot and scrubbed. Her parents were probably in bed already.
“I am,” she said.
“No one likes their siblings,” Kate answered. “At least not normal people.”
Beate wondered if her parents had finally stopped treating Thanksgiving as a surprise, if Vati still showed up to his closed office building. If Mutti listened to the radio because she couldn’t think of what else to do in an apartment with carpet that bunched like old skin and neighbors who played loud music though her parents had written notes asking them to turn it down, calling Beate first to see if they’d used proper sentence structure.
* * *
Paul came into the den again the next night. On television, they watched a comedian who tried too hard to be funny, then Stevie Wonder. His head traced figure eights. Toward the program’s end, she put her
hand on Paul’s leg. It was warm. Stevie Wonder—his hat floppy and bright—pounded piano keys, and backup singers shook tambourines. He put his hand on top of hers and voices rose. Beate’s tongue traced the inside of her mouth. She wondered why she didn’t always notice her tongue and teeth negotiating one another. Then Paul kissed her.
* * *
The last night, they took off each other’s clothes. Paul had chest hair, like a man. It tickled as he pressed against her. She wanted to laugh but bit her lip, then his, and Paul flicked his underwear off with his feet. When they finished, Paul told her about Kate taking care of their dying mother. “She slept in the room with her when it got too sad for our father.” He loved his sister with a largeness that was perhaps smothering.
“She thinks I’m an asshole sometimes,” Paul said. “When my dad made that toast. When I cried. I think she’s angry because she’s even sadder but pretends she’s not.”
He kissed Beate’s mouth and throat, moved his fingers across her breasts. Beate’s appetite for him was so blazing that when he went back to his room, she missed him and felt ashamed. She wanted to lie on top of him again, mistook each sound for his feet on the floor, thinking of how she’d once asked her boyfriend in Edinburgh to move into her and stay for a while. He is inside of me, she’d thought, and it felt like they were breaking an impossible barrier. She wanted to ask Paul the same thing.
The sun showed up. Beate turned the bed back into a couch and tried to read Germaine Greer. Dogs outside barked in a call-and-response. She heard a door open and watched her own door, as if staring hard enough would bring her what she wanted. Paul was still in high school. He was an inch shorter than her. The front door clicked open and she saw him outside, beginning his run. “He wants to get a running scholarship,” Kate had sneered when they were washing dishes. “Because there’s a future in running.” Beate thought of Paul’s feet on the pavement, of her hand on his chest as he breathed in his sleep.
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