Hausfrau (22 page)

It was the beginning of the end of Anna’s confidence.

A
NNA
,
ON FOUR OCCASIONS
since his departure, had taken the S8 to Wipkingen, disembarked, and walked to Stephen’s apartment on Nürenbergstrasse as if nothing had changed. The first time she did this was the day after he left. She went to the door and rang the bell and when no one answered she pretended it was because he was at the market or the laboratory. Other times, she’d stand in front of the building and feign a phone call or check her watch as if she’d told someone to meet her there. Anything to lend legitimacy to her lingering. She would walk slowly around the block. She would close her eyes and imagine that it was a month ago, eight months, a year. Yesterday. The last time she’d done this, Polly Jean was seven months old. What had provoked the trip? Anna could barely recall.
The house was noisy. Bruno was cold. Ursula had scolded me for something I’d done. I wanted to return to the scene of the crime. I wanted to return.
She left her sons with their grandmother and took Polly Jean into the city and rolled her stroller past Stephen’s apartment.
And here is where we invented you, Polly Jean.
It was an indulgence she allowed herself, this reveling in her stagnant, inalterable past.

L
UNCH WITH
M
ARY WAS
pleasant, affable. Their conversation was casual but that was all right because Anna didn’t have the heart for anything profound. Mary spoke of Rapperswil, of Anna’s party, of that day’s German class, of how pretty Anna’s ring was. They ate
Gschnätzlets mit Rösti,
a traditional Zürich dish of minced veal and hash browns. Mary had never had it before. Anna had eaten it a hundred times if once. To her it was ordinary, regular, same.

When dessert came Mary gave Anna a birthday gift. “Oh Mary, you really shouldn’t have,” Anna said. Mary’s generosity sometimes exasperated her. She never knew how to respond.

Mary replied, “We’re friends. Practically sisters. Of course I should have.” Anna opened the small, shiny box tied with an apple-red grosgrain ribbon. Inside were a dozen antique handkerchiefs embroidered with Anna’s initials. Mary had done the needlework. The handkerchief on top was baby blue. Anna traced the A with her thumb and the B with her forefinger. She sighed so deeply it sounded like a sob.

“Are you okay, Anna?”

Anna brought the handkerchief to her nose. It smelled like lavender. She closed her eyes and nodded, then sighed again. “You know, I used to do this stuff.”

“Really? You sew?” This admission amused Mary. As if Anna were teasing her, or playing a joke. “It seems like such an un-Anna thing to do.”

Anna opened her eyes. She could understand how it would seem that way. “No, it’s true. I sew. I mean, I know how to sew. I don’t do it anymore.”

Mary’s grin was self-satisfied without being smug. When
Anna called it to her attention, the grin became an outright smile.

“What?”

“I like it when I get to see a side of you you’re trying to hide.”

Anna pretended she hadn’t heard this and set the baby blue handkerchief atop the stack of the other ones and changed the subject.

“These are almost too pretty to take out of the box.”

“Nonsense!” Mary said. “What good is a useful object if it can’t be used?”

“N
ARCISSISM ISN
’
T VANITY
, A
NNA
. We’re all narcissists to a degree. A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive. You have little regard for those around you. You do what you will with a libertine’s abandon. Boredom sets in. A bored woman is a dangerous woman.”

“You’ve said that before.”

Doktor Messerli nodded.

“And?” It was an impatient “and.”

“And there are acts that cannot be unenacted. Outcomes impossible to repair. A narcissist won’t see that until it’s too late.”

“L
ET
’
S REVIEW THE TENSES
,” Roland said, and the class groaned collectively. This wasn’t the first time he’d given this lecture.
“Zu viel Fehler!”
Too many mistakes, Roland said. Anna took easy offense at this even though she knew that there was a tipping
point in mistake making when blunders stopped being instructive and became simply habitual. A cards-land-where-they-may approach to moving through language, through love, through life. Unflappable passivity in action.

But mistakes,
Anna thought.
They’re yours. All yours. Your own belong to you and no one else.
When she thought about it that way—which she had consciously made the choice to do—she felt noble. As if admitting or laying claim to a failure—even if only to the mirror, in solitude and silently—was itself an act of absolution.

So to Roland she said,
Ohne Fehler, ohne Herz.
No mistakes, no heart.
We are marked by our fuckups. We are made from our fuckups.
Anna wanted it to be true. And if she wanted it to be true badly enough, perhaps it would be.

But days came that the plain pain of memory ate through Anna’s understanding of her personal history. It was then that she pined for the hour exactly before she met Stephen Nicodemus.
How different it all would be had I just gone home.
Other days, it was such an ache that tethered her to joy. It was despair alone she owned outright. An indefensible comfort, but comfort nonetheless. The only thing she rarely felt was guilt. Love trumped guilt like rock won out over scissors.

“This is basic, class. Present tense. That which happens now. Future tense. What will occur. Simple past: what was done. Present perfect? What has been done.”

But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect?
Anna stopped listening. These were rules she didn’t trust.

A
NNA SAW
M
ARY OFF
at the bus, telling her that by tradition, she took a solitary walk on her birthday during which she considered
the previous year and reevaluated her priorities. She would walk the Zürichberg that day, she said. Anna pointed in the direction of Dietlikon. “I may even walk home.” It was a passable lie. She always wanted to hike home from the Zürichberg but never had. If she hadn’t planned to meet Archie that day, she might have made the hike. Mary gave her a final birthday hug and blew her ridiculous kisses from the window as the bus drove away. Anna shook her head and walked back toward the zoo. She met Archie by the ticket booth. He paid both admissions. “Let’s walk around a bit,” Archie said. “I want to see the animals.” Anna replied, “Sure,” but she meant
Whatever.

They made a wistful pair, Anna knowing that it wouldn’t be long before she told Archie the fun they’d been sharing was over and Archie suspecting that was what she would be telling him. They walked without affect and moved through the exhibits and the habitats barely speaking beyond
Look over here
and
Uh-huh.
The tigers slept behind rocks and couldn’t easily be seen. The pandas were shy and didn’t come out at all. The monkeys wanted to be watched. They shrieked through their cages and shook the bars.

“Y
ES
,
YOU DO HATE
Switzerland. And,” Doktor Messerli paused for effect, “you love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don’t feel is apathy. You’re not indifferent. You’re ambivalent.”

Anna had thought about this before, when nights came during which she could do nothing but wander Dietlikon’s sleeping streets or hike the hill behind her house to sit upon the bench where most often she went to weep. She’d considered
her ambivalence many, many times, and in the end, she’d diagnosed herself with a disease that she’d also invented. Switzerland syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome.
But instead of my captors, I’m attached to the room in which I’m held captive. It’s the prison I’m bound to, not the warden.

Anna was absolutely right. It was the landscape. It was the geography. The fields, the streams, the lakes, the forests. And the mountains. On exceptionally clear days when the weather was right, if you walked south on Dietlikon’s Bahnhofstrasse you could see the crisp outlines of snowcapped Alps against a blazing blue horizon eighty kilometers away. On these certain days it was something in the magic of the atmosphere that made them tangible and moved them close. The mutability of those particular mountains reminded Anna of herself. And it wasn’t simply the natural landscape that she attached herself to emotionally. It was the cobblestone roads of Zürich’s old town and the spires of this church and the towers of that one. And the trains, the trains, the goddamn trains. She could take the train anywhere she wanted to go.

But when she asked herself,
Where to?
her only answer was impossibly illogical:
I want to go home.
Ostensibly, she was already there.

“W
HERE DOES FIRE GO
when it goes out?” Anna asked. Stephen shook his head. The answer he gave was remote. “Nowhere, Anna. It just goes away. We’ve been over this before.” They had. And Anna still didn’t like the answer.
Why does the fire ever have to go away?
She refused to concede the point. Not when he said it and not—nearly two years later—when she remembered him having said it.

A
WEEK EARLIER
N
ANCY
invited both Mary and Anna to her apartment after class for lunch. Nancy lived in Oerlikon, a short walk from the Migros Klubschule. Outside of the twenty-minute coffee breaks and a word or two during class, Anna and she had never spoken. But Mary and Nancy were friends. “Come with me, Anna,” Mary said. “Nancy’s
great.
”

Nancy was a tall, thin woman, Nordic blond, stylish, with a warm and generous demeanor whose apartment, in a way, resembled Nancy herself: modern, clean, sparse, pulled together, open. She was forty-one years old, unmarried, childless, and, currently, unemployed. When Anna asked how that was possible (Zürich is painfully expensive) Nancy said it wasn’t a problem and then, with awkward circumspection, confessed to the women that her family owned tea farms in Africa and while she had worked many years as a print journalist, she really hadn’t needed to. “Don’t mistake me for a trust fund brat,” she was fast to add, “I’ve busted my ass. I’ve always earned my keep.” So it seemed to Anna; Nancy had worked all over the continent reporting on international politics, mostly from the strange, exotic cities that Americans never think to list when they’re asked to name the capitals of Europe:
Tallinn, Sofia, Kishinev, Skopje, Vaduz.
Nancy wasn’t just a good sport; she was an adventurer. She didn’t
take
the assignments—she had
volunteered
for each of them. If it was someplace she’d never been? That’s where she wanted to go.

“So what are you doing here?” Anna hadn’t meant for the question to sound like an accusation.

“I heard it was a top city. A fine place.” Nancy shrugged. “I wanted to check into it. I had nowhere else I needed to be.”

“How long are you staying?”

“I’ve only been here four months. I have no plans to leave. I like it.”

“Really?” Anna hadn’t expected that.

“Sure. Don’t you?”

Anna didn’t answer.

Mary began to fawn in that Mary way of hers. Emptily, repetitively. “You’re so admirable, Nancy. I really admire you, Nancy. How you just pack up and go wherever you want and do what you want to do,” Mary said. “I wish I could do that. I really admire you for that.”

“What’s to admire? I’m just living my life.”

“Still.” Mary sighed. “You’re so fearless. Strange places frighten me. I get anxious just taking the bus from Schwerzenbach to Dübendorf!” Mary sighed again. It was hard for her to stray too far from her own front yard. That’s what had made the move from Canada so awful, she confessed to Anna early on.

Nancy offered Mary a consolation that fell somewhere between empathy and a reprimand. “Mary. To each her own fear. But I don’t want to watch my life unfold. I want to unfold it myself, if you will. If there’s something I want to do? I do it. If there’s something I want? I chase it. And I catch it. If I believe in something, I support it. If none of those things? Then … nothing. Then I let it go.”