Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire (152 page)

It was like that the next day. And the day that followed. After several weeks had passed, Robert noticed something odd: by feeding Yvonne, he required less nourishment himself. Gradually, his body took on a different shape. What helped, of course, was that if he ate a large meal, he knew how to get rid of it. It was simple. Close the bathroom door and keep the water running so that no one would hear.

Yvonne stopped going anywhere alone, waiting for him to accompany her, one of his arms steadying her waist. He moved back into their bedroom, made sure she had her water and medicine before he went to sleep. Torn between keeping her home and wanting her to get better, he took her to a neurologist, an orthopedic surgeon, a chiropractor, and when they couldn’t find anything wrong, he drove her to the lingerie shop where she bought seven lacetrimmed peignoir sets as though she’d accepted that her bed had become her habitat and wanted to reside there with the appropriate wardrobe.

At least now she can’t leave me.

She began to subscribe to the local paper, became interested in charitable causes, and wrote out generous checks for a newborn needing a lifesaving operation, a family destitute after the father died from cancer. She made a planning book of decorating ideas she cut from catalogs. Items arrived by mail: clothing; towels; massage oils; records; dishes.

Whenever Robert resented their shrinking finances and his increased duties, he’d remind himself that she was not well, and he’d try to be more compassionate. He’d offer to rub her back even though her skin would release the knowledge of other men into his hands; and when she’d sigh and close her eyes, he’d feel certain she was retreating into those memories.

Emma and Caleb quickly adapted to the pattern of their mother’s illness—far more predictable than the pattern of her absences. When they came home from school, Emma would pour her mother a glass of white grape juice and tiptoe into the big bedroom where Caleb already sat on the edge of their mother’s bed. She’d drink her juice while listening to them tell her about school. Though always pleased when they came to her, she’d soon be ready for them to run upstairs to their grandmother.

While Emma found her solace within the
Wasserburg,
Caleb liked to roam, taking images of the house with him. He’d stroll through town, hike to the cemetery, or head to the Royal Theater where the matron used to chase his father and Uncle Tobias decades ago, where kids still poured soap into the lobby fountain, and where he’d sit spellbound and watch stories unfold on the screen. Later, he’d retell those stories to Emma.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Blackboard Jungle. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Sometimes the two of them would sit on the dock, taking turns with the I-am game that Caleb made up as they talked.
I am a cup, a wave, a tree.
Becoming. Being.
I am a cup: A while ago I was full of tea, warm, but now I’m half empty, cooled down, a brown ring left inside.
While sun warmed them from above.
I am a wave: I curl myself up, run onto the sand as far as I can, retreat before the sand can pull me down.
While the breeze that rose through the wooden slats cooled them.
I am moss hanging from the trees in the cemetery.…

What Emma didn’t tell her brother about was the game she played without him, the game that took her into stores where she got presents for
Opa.
The first time had been in Magill’s one day after school when she’d stepped inside from the cold rain, blinking at the lights. At least it was warm in here. Dry. A woman with a
baby stroller came toward her, and as Emma stepped aside to let her pass, her arm banged against a counter with a display of ties. One had a geometric pattern in the golden browns
Opa
liked. Testing the softness of the tie—
silk, is it silk?
—between her thumb and forefinger, Emma glanced around: an elderly couple passed through the aisle behind her; a clerk, tall with skin stretched over sharp features, was fitting a suit jacket on a customer; two women stood talking by the jewelry counter. No one looked in her direction. Breath quick and light in her throat, she slipped the tie into the pocket of her raincoat, and though she felt like running from the store, she made herself walk slowly toward the exit, even stopped in the luggage department where she opened and closed the zipper on a leather suitcase as if she were interested in buying it.
“For when I go to Germany,”
she planned to say if anyone were to ask her. As she saw herself moving toward the mirror by the door—taller somehow and older—she adjusted her ponytail and turned up her collar.

It became her game alone. Choosing the perfect moment, the perfect treat for
Opa.
Thoughts on nothing but what she was about to do, she’d walk through brightly lit aisles, prolonging the minutes before she’d take something, turning them into white-hot time that burned through all longing, all pain. One fist in her pocket around the treat, she would walk home. After sneaking the key to the roof from
Oma
’s china cabinet, she’d scale the ladder to the dusty wooden platform above the elevator, hide the treat inside
Opa’s
old wooden toolbox, and sit down on it, leaning into the hazy-warm breath of the house. And if she was patient and lucky, she’d hear
Opa’s
voice below the familiar hum and whisper-flick of bolts and wires and chains, below the wheeze of the elevator.

That winter, as Yvonne’s backache became a part of her—dull and constant—it was the awareness of it that troubled her more than the pain itself, an awareness that this pain, quite likely, would always be there and keep her home. In an odd way, the pain got between her and the urgency to burn or cut herself. She didn’t have to because her body was doing it for her, giving her the release that pain offered—and without leaving scars.

But it was obvious that the tenants didn’t think she was ill: she could tell by their questions about her health that they saw her as a spoiled woman, a useless woman. Just because her suffering did not disfigure her, they assumed she was pretending. They’d probably picked up that attitude from her mother-in-law. Not that Helene ever said anything like that—no, she was helpful, showing off her hard work just to make Yvonne feel useless.

But Robert understood. Yvonne was sure because she could feel it in his hands when he massaged her back. Now, that pain had freed her from excuses for not having sex with him, she felt eased by his caresses and could be tender without worrying that he might want more of her.

Robert found that once she had something to look forward to—holidays and family vacations—her back would get stronger for a while. The summer the children were thirteen and eleven, he suggested renting a cabin in Rye Beach where he and Yvonne had spent their honeymoon.

“I’ll be glad to come along to take care of the children and the cooking,” his mother offered.

“That would be wonderful,” he said.

Yvonne was too angry to say anything until she was alone with him. “I’m tired of German cooking. Tired of that old German woman running my life.” And yet, even as she was saying this, she was thinking how her children were half German, and how she always felt she had to protect them because of that very Germanness, and how odd it felt that they had come from her body, though she wasn’t German while part of them was.

Robert looked dazed. “But my mother’s been helping us so much.”

“That’s just it.”

“The children, they liked the idea too. And without her—I don’t know how we’d manage.”

“It’s hard enough that we have to accept her help the rest of the year, but our vacation is so short that I want to enjoy it with my own family.”

“She
is
our family.”

“I’m talking about my husband. My son. My daughter.”

By now, Yvonne was feeling so ashamed that she refused to talk about it anymore. But it took her till the following evening to admit to Robert that she was sorry for what she’d said about his mother. “She’s so generous with her help. And I do appreciate her. You know that. And if it’s important to you that she comes along, it’s all right with me too.”

“I already said no to her.”

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

“So am I.” He told her he’d phoned his mother from the clinic because he didn’t know how to look at her face once he told her. “Of course,” his mother had said, “families belong together.” And when he’d apologized, she’d interrupted him. “Do you have any idea how many times I used to wish it were just you and me and your father? I never got that.” He’d felt a sudden and deeper comprehension of her distance from Greta and Tobias, and how—by loving him better—she had kept them separate from herself. From him too. More than once, while sitting on her knees, he’d sensed Tobias’ jealousy, Greta’s sadness, but above all, his mother’s resentment of those two. “I wish I’d had Yvonne’s courage back then,” she’d said to him. “Enjoy being with your family. That’s how it should be.”

Though Robert ended up with the cooking and laundry, the vacation was the best he’d had with Yvonne and his children. Their cottage was right on the beach. The first day, his children gathered pocketfuls of shells, and when Yvonne suggested they keep only the perfect ones, Emma still hoarded everything she collected, while Caleb only held on to eleven shells that he lined up on the windowsills in the cottage. The others he threw back into the ocean, picturing the waves carrying them ashore further down the beach where a girl would find them.
A girl with long, bare legs. And as she touches them, she knows they’re mine and comes searching for me.
While Caleb waited for this girl, he returned his best shells to the sea for her. Emma cried when he tossed his largest shell into the waters. Its outside was crusted, while inside it shimmered pink and white like a mother-of-pearl hairbrush.

Mornings their mother would sun herself on the beach, her yellow swimsuit like sun against her skin, while their father kept himself covered up with baggy shorts and a T-shirt to hide his white belly, even when he went swimming. Caleb liked to swim with him because, in the water, his father was fast and agile; but he didn’t like going for walks with him. It was embarrassing, the way his father’s body jiggled. And it was even more embarrassing to hear him cough after dinner in the bathroom. On Caleb’s last birthday, when he’d been about to go searching for his father after they’d eaten cake, Pearl Bloom had taken him by the arm. “It’s best to leave your father alone right now,” she’d whispered.

The last day in Rye Beach, Caleb got up at dawn to swim before the beach became crowded. When the sun was half above the line that split water from sky, his mother walked from the cabin and brought him the green kite they’d built together. She held the flat piece of wood with the string wound around it, letting it out as Caleb walked with the kite toward the jetty, where the rocks were smooth and sunbaked beneath his bare feet.

“Now!” she shouted when he reached the largest boulder.

He tossed the kite up, and she ran along the beach, hair flying around her shoulders as she glanced back toward the kite. Jerkily, it rose, then straightened, and she let out more line till it soared, a green diamond in the sun. She handed the string to Caleb, and he walked backwards with it, eyes on the kite. When the line slackened, he ran, pulling it tighter. A wave snagged his mother’s feet, and as she laughed, Caleb wished she could be like that every day. While the kite wavered, she hurried toward where it was about to topple down. Caleb wound up the string, and she held the kite until he was done. Then she tossed it into the air, and he ran with the kite until, once again, it stood high above them, tail fluttering in the wind.

When Robert stepped from the cottage and saw his wife’s body moving with an ease it hadn’t shown in years, he was seized by the dread that, once again, she would leave him behind, and all at once he wondered if she’d ever really had lovers. What if she’d told him her fantasies as if they were real? After all, she liked to flirt, not
have sex.
No.
Those other men had been real, so real he’d felt them in bed with him and Yvonne. Still, he wished she would tell him it had never come to anything, that she had merely traveled with someone for a week, say, or a few days.