Hausfrau (5 page)

Oskar Benz was a beloved pastor. By all accounts. How generous he was. How wise. Discerning. Gracious. Sage. But Anna knew nothing of him as a husband. That wasn’t a conversation she’d had with Ursula. She assumed he’d been good to her. They smiled in their photographs. Ursula still wore her
wedding band. Beyond that she didn’t know. Was he romantic? A good kisser? Kinky in bed? Violent behind closed doors?
This is none of my business,
Anna thought.
If Ursula isn’t telling, I won’t ask.

Daniela’s eyes glossed with adoration when she spoke of her father. “I loved him
so,
” she pined to Anna. “I miss him every day. A father’s the most important man in any girl’s life.” Anna’s only response was sad silence. She was twenty-one when her own parents died in a car accident two weeks after her college graduation. She’d loved her father too—both her parents—but after sixteen years the ardor had dissipated (though Anna would likely have never described her affection for them with that word to begin with). “I dunno,” she told Doktor Messerli, when the Doktor asked her to classify her relationship with her parents. “It was normal. Unremarkable.”

The Doktor pushed on Anna. “Try harder.”

Anna closed her eyes and searched her memory. “Positive. Liberal, maybe. Reserved, occasionally. Polite, always. Sufficient.” They were good. They loved her. She loved them back. Anna left this out.

“Mm.” Doktor Messerli jotted.

“What?”

Doktor Messerli suppressed a chuckle. She rarely laughed. “Interesting how our souls seek equilibrium. We search out the familiar. The familial. That which we know and have known since perhaps even before we were born. It’s inevitable.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have described your parents?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve also described the Swiss.”

Bruno rarely spoke of Oskar. They’d skied and hiked together,
camped and fished. Bruno was a good father; Anna assumed that Oskar was as well. Bruno stopped going to church long before Anna had met him and she’d never asked him what he thought about God.
Not once,
Anna thought.
Is that right? That can’t be right?
She had no idea what he believed. Asking would have embarrassed them both.

A
T SEVEN A
.
M
.
THE
bells began to ring. Those bells. Mornings they roused her, evenings they soothed her, and during the dark, marauding hours before dawn they companioned her. They rang on every hour, and twice a day they pealed for a continuous fifteen minutes. They rang on Sundays before church. They rang at weddings, funerals, and national holidays. As many people hated them as were indifferent to them. Few loved them. But Anna did. The ringing of the bells may have been her singular Swiss joy. Anna stopped herself from fully admitting this with her daughter in her arms.

Polly eventually defeated her pain with sleep and Anna tucked her into her crib once more then slipped out of the room.
She’ll be okay,
Anna told herself.
It’s the newness of the pain that brings the screaming.
A new pain that Polly hadn’t learned how to manage. For even infants understand the rotten, instinctive truth: that no pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn’t give ground. That a body remembers what hurts it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit.

“W
HAT
’
S THE PURPOSE OF
pain?” Anna asked Doktor Messerli. It was a question that had skimmed the air around her
for years like a ghost that trolls the attic of a house it is forever damned to spook.

“It’s instructive. It warns of impending events. Pain precedes change. It is a tool.” She spoke in textbook phrases. Anna was suspicious of these answers. Doktor Messerli arced a single eyebrow. “Do you not believe me?”

Anna arced an eyebrow back.
No. I don’t.

A
NNA PULLED SHUT THE
door to her daughter’s room and went downstairs to make coffee. The house on Rosenweg was, by American standards, small. The Benzes were five people residing in what amounted to just over 1,300 square feet of livable space. There were two upstairs bedrooms, each not much bigger than an oversized closet—a shared room for the boys and a room for Polly. The attic encompassed the rest of the second floor. Everything else was downstairs: the kitchen, the bathroom, the den with its tiny dining nook, Bruno’s study, and the bedroom Anna and Bruno shared. Beneath it all lay a cold concrete basement. It was cramped quarters.

Anna descended the stairs as quietly as she could. Their house was old, and the steps creaked and groaned under anyone’s weight. Anna was always conscious of the noise she made, for Bruno, when disturbed from his silences, often became intemperate and took easy offense at everyday, benign occurrences. Anna had learned to tiptoe and step slowly.

Their kitchen was small, narrow, and tucked up. There was hardly room for a countertop, much less a microwave, and their refrigerator was only slightly larger than ones found in college dormitories. Anna made the rounds of marketing twice a week at least. That was Anna’s Saturday afternoon plan. All
week she had been occupied and let the shopping slip. Their pantries were almost entirely bare.

“A
MODERN WOMAN NEEDN
’
T
live a life so circumscribed. A modern woman needn’t be so unhappy. You should go more places and do more things.” Doktor Messerli’s voice didn’t hide its impatience.

Anna felt scolded but didn’t offer a retort.

S
HE CARRIED HER COFFEE
into the den. Her German books and all of her notes from the previous night were still scattered on the dining table like clothes cast off and tossed across a bed. The window in the den opened to face the barn of their neighbors, Hans and Margrith Tschäppät. An elderly couple, Hans and Margrith had lived in Dietlikon their entire lives. Hans was a kind and jolly farmer who would wave at Anna from his tractor when they passed each other going up or down the hill behind Anna and Bruno’s house. Hans would give Anna jars of
Honig
cultivated by his own bees and twice a year he pruned their apple trees. Margrith, too, was nice. But she was also extremely perceptive, and Anna couldn’t help but feel she always knew more about her than Anna would like her to. Anna had never caught her staring through their open windows or peeking into the Benzes’ trash bin. It was something instead in the questions she asked, and the keen-eyed way she asked them, neighborly though they might seem:
Wohin gehen Sie, Frau Benz? Woher kommen Sie?
The past Wednesday afternoon, in fact, Margrith caught Anna as she was coming off the train, fresh from Archie’s bed. Anna’s hair was in snarls
and her makeup lost to perspiration.
Grüezi, Frau Benz; woher kommen Sie?
she asked.

Just coming back from my German lesson, Frau Tschäppät,
Anna replied, and then each continued on in the direction she was headed before they spoke. This early in the morning Margrith and Hans’s windows were still dark. The Saturday sun had not yet risen.

P
OLLY
J
EAN WOKE FOR
good around seven thirty. Bruno and the boys were up by eight. The weather was gracious; it was a generous, sunny day. Two well-slept boys rattled the walls of the house with the energy they had stored up overnight, like a pair of batteries, recharged. Anna sent them outside to play in the yard. Charles trotted out the door without a word of backtalk. Victor flopped on the couch and pretended he hadn’t heard a thing. When Anna told Victor once more to go outside the pouting began. He wanted to ride his bike to a friend’s house. He wanted to watch cartoons on the television. He wanted to go upstairs. He wanted Anna to leave him alone. This is when Bruno intervened.
Go.
That’s all it took for Victor to relent. A firm, terse word from Bruno’s no-nonsense lips.

Charles was Anna’s easiest child. He was pleasant, quick to help, and slow to anger. He minded his manners and was rarely perturbed. He was a happy boy. Victor, by contrast, was rarely purely happy. A good son in his own way, Victor was funny, smart, charming, and occasionally perceptive beyond his years (
Mami,
he once said to Anna,
I will always love you, even if Papi doesn’t
). But Victor was also self-indulgent. He tended toward pettiness and he didn’t like to share. He was
rigid and could not easily accommodate the plans or needs of others. And when he felt slighted, Victor became petulant and ill-tempered. At those times Anna found it impossible to like him very much.

Victor was his father’s son.

Of Charles, Anna said to Doktor Messerli, “He has absolutely no guile.”

“What about Polly Jean?”

“I don’t know her yet.” Doktor Messerli thought she knew what Anna meant.

“And Victor?”

“Victor, I do know.” She was willing to admit nothing aloud but if pressed (and only if pressed very hard) she would have to say that of her two sons, Charles was her dearest. “Of course I love Victor.”

Anna was sorry in a hundred ways.

D
OKTOR
M
ESSERLI DREW A
diagram. It was a picture of a circle inside of a circle inside of another one. It reminded Anna of Russian matryoshka dolls, or her set of nesting Pyrex mixing bowls.

“These circles? They’re
you.
The outside circle is the ego. The ego is the suit that your psyche wears. How you are viewed by the world. It is the first part of you that anyone sees.” The Doktor leaned forward and tapped the middle circle with her fountain pen. It left a small but spreading blotch of ink. “This is where your problems lie.” Doktor Messerli traced the circle again, giving it a messy, jagged seam.

“How so?”

“Chaos bars the ego from the serenity, the solidity, and the
solidarity
of the self.” Anna wondered if she’d practiced this speech; it sounded lofty and rehearsed.

“What’s the answer?”

Doktor Messerli leaned back into her chair. “There is no fit-all answer.”

“What’s the difference between the self and the soul?”

“Anna, our time is up.”

W
HORES
,
A
NNA ONCE READ
,
make the very best wives.
They are accustomed to the varying moods of men, they keep their broken hearts to themselves, and easy women always ease through grief.

This thought occurred to Anna unbidden when, in front of the Coop on Industriestrasse, she slipped a two-franc piece into a coin slot, releasing the top shopping cart from its line of brothers. It was a thought called forward by the simple action of shoving a thing into the hole it’s meant for.

Ursula had offered Anna a ride to the supermarket. This was a gesture of clemency on Ursula’s part, which Anna graciously accepted. She told Bruno she’d be glad to take Polly Jean with her if he’d watch the boys.
Yes, yes,
Bruno said, waving her off and telling her to bring back six large bottles of water, several pots of quark, and three or four dark chocolate bars. In this way Bruno was exceptionally Swiss; Bruno loved candy. Anna took note.

Ursula pushed the stroller. Anna maneuvered the basket. Polly was fussy and still troubled by her tooth. Anna looked at her daughter and wished she’d just stop crying.

Dietlikon doesn’t lack for shopping. On the south side of
the railroad tracks, a comprehensive—and for a town whose population barely hit seven thousand residents, obscene—selection of eateries, shops, and services: an electronics store, an IKEA, a very large home improvement store. There is a Toys “R” Us, an Athleticum, a few shoe stores, a fish market, and a nail salon. There is a multiplex cinema with stadium seating, a Qualipet, a bowling alley, a store that specializes in horse tack, a car wash, a pizzeria, a shop for baby furniture, a low-end department store, and a Mexican restaurant. There are several trendy teen fashion boutiques, a gas station, a pharmacy, an adult movie store, a health food store, and in addition to the Coop on Industriestrasse, there’s a Coop City one block over where, along with groceries, you can find household accoutrements, clothes, health and beauty products, toys and games. Everything a body could desire positioned to fit inside a few convenient blocks of commerce girdled by a bus route. It is a close, closed circle of small needs and petty wants.

A circle inside of a circle inside of another one.
Anna couldn’t imagine what looking beyond the tightly circumscribed world in which she lived might entail.

Anna and Ursula shared a complicated relationship. Ursula was a weave of consistent inconsistencies. At times she was devout, open to interaction, easygoing, generous, and helpful. Other instances found her apathetic, impossible to impress, aggressively punctual, blank-faced, and angry. Those were the instances she shared most frequently with Anna.

Mother has moods, too,
Bruno said.

“W
HEN A PERSON
’
S MOOD
is out of balance, psyche will always attempt to bring it back into equilibrium. An unconscious opposite
will emerge. Tensions seek slackening. Sadness clings to any elevated state it can find. Boredom searches for activity. There is a correlation between the severity of a person’s moods and a lack of self-knowledge. Notwithstanding,” Doktor Messerli added, “a clinical diagnosis of a mood disorder.”

Had Anna ever been more talkative or spoken faster than usual? Had she ranged from great doubt to overconfidence? Had there been times when she felt both elated and depressed at once? Doktor Messerli asked the questions too quickly for Anna to absorb them, so she replied simply, “Sometimes I feel sad. Sometimes I feel anxious.” Doktor Messerli responded by writing her a prescription for a mild tranquilizer.

T
HE
C
OOP ON
I
NDUSTRIESTRASSE
was, as Anna had known it would be, heaving with people. Ursula and Anna each had a list. Polly Jean was herself preoccupied in eyeing, with an infant’s appropriate misgiving, the conflux of shoppers who made the wide rounds of the store.