“No, unfortunately not. Maybe someday.”
I would love to take revenge on the newspaper publisher who capitalized on my family’s car accident to earn dirty money selling our blood and agony to voyeuristic readers. If I didn’t have a husband and child, I would have founded a terrorist organization immediately. I’ve sworn that as soon as my child is out of
the woods, I will kill myself—which I want to do anyway—and take those responsible with me. If I get up the nerve. If the plan works and I don’t die, I’ll be put away for the murder of at least three people—as well as whoever else happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and you’ll have someone to visit in prison, my child. Maybe I won’t accompany them to the grave, because I couldn’t do that to my daughter or, to a lesser extent, my husband. But in any event I’ve already written in my will that Georg should seek out another woman immediately, that I want him to. He always seems to need absolution from me. He can even get together with a blonde woman with big breasts. It’s not like I’ll be around to see it happen. And it’ll happen sooner or later anyway.
Liza is breathing more deeply. I can make out her long eyelashes in the dark. It’s really funny the way every mother thinks her child is the most beautiful. Despite the fact that this can’t be true. Holding my breath, I pry my finger out of the vise grip of my daughter’s hand. Getting my finger out of her grasp while holding my breath is like giving birth. The child doesn’t want to come out. She stirs. Of course. That’s why fingers are constructed in such a complicated way. As an alarm system for when I try to escape.
She opens her eyes. Always the same sentence: “Mama, a little bit longer.”
“Yes, but let go of my finger, or else I will wake you up again when I leave.”
Always the same. Stuck in a loop, everything repeating itself. Not like the chaos I grew up in. I take my finger out of her hand. Then I lie down next to her again, but a little farther away, with no bodily contact. I know that she will now take
four normal breaths and then begin to breathe deeply in and out, at which point she’ll sound like an old drunk man. That’s the sign that she’s asleep. Finally. Suddenly she shudders, but I’m familiar with this. Behind her eyelids she’s either falling or running into something. Free fall or, worse still, a collision. The same thing happens to me. And my husband. Right before you enter a deep sleep, boom, you shudder because you’re having a scary dream. I need to ask Agnetha about it—what it means and why our brains do that to us. I absolutely have to ask her that before I die.
Liza is finally asleep. I can go. I’m free, free from childcare. My shoulders start to relax. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Kids look their cutest when they’re asleep, so innocent and smooth, like newborns. Why is it that people always hope to have kids and then, when you have them, you’re happy when they’re asleep or somewhere else? And this thought makes you feel guilty every time it pops into your head. Sometimes I use the opportunity to work on my stomach muscles—lying silently with my legs stretched out, I raise myself without using my upper body. I use nothing but my stomach muscles and I raise myself slowly, without lurching. If I’m sitting down, I cross my legs Indian-style and stand up directly from that position. Then creep out. Extra careful on the wood floor by her door—it creaks if you step on one of the planks. I let out a deep breath outside and then dash up the stairs.
Georg notices the tension in my face. “What’s up?”
The same question every night after I’ve put her to bed. “I can’t stand it when she won’t let me go. It’s a nice feeling to be needed, but there’s something awful about it, too. You know how it is.”
“Maaaaaamaaaaa!”
Fuck. She’s awake again. I run back down the stairs and snap at her. “What is it?”
Naturally I think she’s going to complain that I left too soon, that she hadn’t really fallen asleep. She often claims she hadn’t completely fallen asleep, despite the fact that I could hear that she was already deep asleep.
She looks at me worriedly and whispers sleepily, “The other door is open a crack. Can you close it? It scares me.” And then she adds, “My bum itches really badly.”
I’ve done it again. So short-tempered, such raw nerves—typical of me. Once again I have to apologize to my child.
“We’ll take care of your bum in the morning. How about you bathe early tomorrow before school? That should take care of it.”
How do you teach kids to wipe their asses thoroughly? I feel that even at thirty-three I could be better at it, so how can a kid master it? I don’t want to turn into a neat freak and constantly talk about hygiene. She shouldn’t be disgusted by her own body. She should be free. More so than I am. Nobody ever talks about the art of cleaning your bum. Nobody taught me. My mother, Elli, didn’t. We’re all Elizabeths in our family, all the women anyway. Which is the only gender that counts in our family, unfortunately. Each Elizabeth tried to bring a trace of individuality to the name. Even if we all have the same name, at least each of us has her own nickname. She told us that she never crapped and never farted. That made a big impression on me as a child, and I felt disgusted with myself because I couldn’t manage to keep myself from doing those things. She told us that her waste evaporated into the ether, through her
skin, I suppose. She had learned that from her own mother, Liz, our deranged grandmother from Camden. She acts to this day as though she is the rightful queen of England. For which the name Elizabeth is perfect. She also has never taken a crap or farted. How nice for her. You can’t expect to get any help in normal human functions from those two. Just have to teach yourself.
You also can’t bother anyone else with such a nasty subject. Which means you just have to get creative and try to guess how other people do it. Earlier I would just wipe once, regardless of what came off on the toilet paper, and then pull my underwear back up. I just didn’t think about it enough. These days it goes like this: I wipe once, twice, and then I look to see what the situation is on the paper. Usually there’s still something there. So I wipe until the paper shows no sign of anything. I’m sorry, Greenpeace, but I use a lot of sheets of toilet paper that way. But at least it’s recycled paper! Which is once again about sacrifice. Everything that’s good for the environment entails sacrifice. Back when I still didn’t care about the environment, I used the thickest, softest, whitest toilet paper I could find, sometimes it was even dyed light blue. Like a typical English girl. But I made the switch and will never go back.
Once I can’t see any signs of anything on the paper with the naked eye, I do two rounds of wiping with spit. Just to be safe. Because commercial wet wipes are out of the question on both health and environmental grounds. They take a lot longer to break down than regular paper and are pumped so full of chemicals that you don’t want them near your body anyway. Better not to use them. Most of them are manufactured by the worst companies, too. I spit on a few balled-up sheets and rub
myself good and clean with the saliva. Then I repeat it to be safe. Wiping with wet toilet paper creates those horrible little clingy minirolls of paper that you have to pull off with your fingers. With my fingers and some water from the sink, I get rid of those. Then I use a paper towel to pat everything dry. Done. Shipshape. And the entire process thought up and perfected on my own. I’ve never talked about it with anyone. What a crazy world. You have to figure everything out on your own.
I should have anticipated the problem with the door to Liza’s room. I’m familiar with this fear of hers, and closing that door is part of the bedtime routine. I almost never forget. Liza has two doors in her room, and the one that connects to our room has to be shut, or else she’s afraid that someone or something will come through it. She sleeps on the floor. Her room is designed to look like an ocean, with a pirate-ship bed. She could sleep in the pirate-ship bed, of course, but she doesn’t want to. She always sleeps on an air mattress placed on the blue tiles that represent the seawater. If you lie next to her, you also have to lie on an air mattress—otherwise you’ll slip beneath the sea. And ever since I’ve had to lie there every night, I have noticed that you feel oddly helpless lying there on the floor, totally defenseless. From that vantage point, the door does look gigantic and imposing, especially when it’s slightly ajar.
I’ve often worried about all the various and ever-changing children’s fears Liza has. She’s scared that snakes live in our apartment—poisonous snakes or the ones that strangle you. She’s scared that a tiger lives in our back garden and will jump into her room through the window. She’s afraid of burglars. And of people who abduct children. She’s scared of ghosts, witches, wolves, foxes, badgers, skeletons, lizards. But only at night.
Never during the day. Frau Drescher says these are inner fears that children project outward. Children are afraid of the inner evil inside themselves. When they get upset at their parents and secretly wish the parents were dead, they immediately feel bad and project their evil thoughts instead onto evil animals that could attack them and hurt them. That way they remain innocent and can feel like victims instead of culprits.
My initial impulse when she first started to express all these fears was to tell her that all the business about animals in the house and garden was ridiculous. There are no ghosts, my child. Not a single person in the entire world has ever seen a ghost—at least not a person with all their marbles. But my therapist told me that is the completely wrong approach. If all I do is to constantly tell the child that all her fears are absurd—to tackle the whole thing with arguments based in reason—she’ll just stop telling me her fears at some stage. But she’ll still be just as afraid. She’ll just carry her fears around with her silently; after all, the fears are ridiculous and she won’t want to make a fool of herself. So she’ll have to get over her fears all on her own, even as they become greater and less easy to control. As a good mother, I took this to heart and immediately changed my approach. Which is to say, now I take her fears seriously. By the way, it’s something that I’ve noticed in the relationship with my husband as well as in the raising of my daughter: that the most obvious solution—even one rooted in good intentions—is usually wrong and just makes everything worse. When I look deep inside myself for a solution, I find that I’m completely off base when I go to reassure myself with advice from professionals. That’s why I think everyone with a child or a husband or a wife should go to therapy. And if you can’t afford it, at least read a handbook.
Ever since I’ve been properly instructed, I talk with Liza about things like what the witch who lives under the dresser looks like. Sometimes I peek under the dresser to have a look at her myself. She’s about the size of a rat. We tell her that to her face—witches can take it. Liza and I wonder whether she’s evil at all. Up to now she hasn’t done anything bad despite the fact that she lives here full-time. Just like most terrorists. Some nights when the witch is particularly intrusive, I ask Liza if I should just throw her out the window. My child says okay, so I open the window and—accompanied by lots of laughter—start to feel around under the dresser. I act as if my fingers have been bitten a few times, then I get my hands around the witch’s neck and back so she can’t get me with her teeth anymore, wrestle her to the window, and finally toss her into the garden, telling her to stay out all night. “Tomorrow we’ll let you back in, you naughty little monster.” My daughter laughs and looks at me gratefully. Because now she can sleep. And I’m endlessly grateful to my therapist, because that’s the kind of shit I would never have come up with on my own.
I close the door in Liza’s room that leads to our bedroom. The door to the rest of the apartment has to stay open. I switch personalities from mother to whore. Until tomorrow morning when my daughter gets up and I have to be a mother again, I’ll be switching between wife and whore. Although I’m really a mother again while I sleep. After all, when I sleep my ears are always vigilant, set in a sort of alarm mode for anything amiss with the child. For seven years now. Nobody mentioned that before I had a child. But for now, whore. Once the child is finally asleep and grown-up time begins, my husband and I have a date.
We’re going to plan tomorrow’s brothel visit. Originally, years ago, going there was my husband’s idea. He wanted to sleep with another person. I had to think about it for a long time. It seemed perverse to me at first, and my initial thought sounded like something my mother would say: “Are you nuts, you chauvinist pig? That’s just what a man would want!”
But as the wife of my husband, what I actually said was, “Sure, we can try that.” I want to be the coolest wife my husband can possibly imagine. I want him to have that because he’s given me so much. Everything he has, he shares with me. Money, time, his apartment. Everything. He would let me wear all his clothes, too, but they don’t fit me. So I try to do everything I can for him as well, including making sacrifices. And I’ll try to always be that way. I hope I manage it. That’s the plan, anyway. But he should never notice that I consider anything a sacrifice—that wouldn’t be sexy. I act as if going to a brothel with him is no big deal to me. I’m a good actor. But I get scared, too. When I say I’m going to do something, I’ll do it. And that’s why I get scared, because I have to do it once I’ve agreed.
The first time we talked about it, I immediately got diarrhea. Any kind of anxiety goes straight to my guts. My husband is familiar with this phenomenon. I just run out of the room without a word, laughing, embarrassed, and lock myself in the guest bathroom. That’s probably how tonight’s discussion will end, too—I know what I’m like. We both kneel on our big designer sofa. It’s really huge. When I sit with my legs stretched out and my back up against the back of the sofa, my legs don’t even reach the front edge. It’s from his first marriage. Not only do we have a patchwork family, we have patchwork furniture. We sit there and look at each other. He knows it’s hard for me to
talk about these things because I alternate between my mother and my husband.