Hausfrau (15 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY
A
NNA
came home directly after class. She was tired and sore and wilted and she had promised Ursula that she would. Archie didn’t hide his disappointment. “Oh come on, we’ll get together later in the week,” Anna hissed at him by the coffee machine in the
Kantine.
He frowned and whimpered the way her sons did when they weren’t getting something they wanted. The waggishness grated Anna’s patience. “Jesus, Archie, get past it.” She rubbed her temples as she spoke. Archie turned away without responding, paid for his coffee, grabbed a newspaper someone had left on a counter, and took it to a table in the corner and sat down, his back to the room. Anna felt bad. She hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings. Mary sidled up to her. “What’s wrong, hon? Got a headache? I think I have some aspirin.” She began to rifle through her purse.

Anna stopped her. “I just need some coffee.”

“Well, then let’s get you some!”

On the way home Anna stopped at the Coop on Dietlikon’s Bahnhofstrasse. She’d written a list on the train.
Eier. Milch. Brot. Pfirsiche. Müsli. Die Fernsehzeitschrift. Eggs. Milk. Bread. Peaches. Cereal. A TV guide.
Anna swallowed a self-deprecating snort. This is an old lady’s shopping list. There was truth in that. Anna felt her age that day, plus fifteen, twenty years more. She shopped as quickly as she could.

Five minutes later and from behind her in the checkout line, Anna heard her name.

“
Grüezi
Frau Benz.” It was Anna’s neighbor Margrith.

“
Grüezi
Frau Tschäppät.”

Margrith volunteered an odd but not unfriendly smile. She
inquired after Bruno, the children, Ursula. Anna told her everyone was fine and then asked Margrith what sort of things she and Hans had planned for the rest of the season. It was a go-to topic of conversation. Anna never knew what to talk to strangers about. And the Swiss were always strangers. The conversation was polite and cursory, the way conversations in shopping lanes are intended to be.

Margrith continued talking even as Anna turned to pay. “Oh,” Margrith by-the-wayed as Anna inserted her bank card into the reader, “I saw you, I think, was it yesterday?” Margrith paused. “Yes. In Kloten. You were walking toward the trains.” Anna entered her PIN and didn’t look up. “I have a sister in Kloten, you know.”

Ahh, yes,
Anna responded, though she didn’t know Margrith had a sister.
How is she?

“Oh, she is getting along, thank you for asking. Do you have a friend in Kloten?” “No,” said Anna. And then, “I’m afraid, Margrith, that you are mistaken. That wasn’t me.” Anna said it firmly, calmly.
Das war nicht ich.
She left her face blank and tried to remember if Karl had walked her out of the hotel. He hadn’t.

“Oh, well,” Margrith said, laughing away the mistake she surely must have made. “It must have been your doppelgänger!” Anna bagged her groceries and smiled briefly at Margrith before the two of them bade adieu and Anna left the Coop and made the five-minute walk to Rosenweg in three.

T
HE HISTORY OF DOPPELGÄNGERS IS PHENOMENOLOGICAL
. Doppelgängers rarely appear in the same place as their genuine halves. Most commonly, the doppelgänger will appear when someone is gravely ill, or when she is in tremendous danger. It is said that a person’s spirit can will its own bilocation in times of great distress. The sighting of a doppelgänger by one’s family or friends bears ill fortune.

It is an omen of death to see one’s own self.

A
NNA WOULD TURN THIRTY
-
EIGHT
in less than two weeks.

Anna hated birthdays. They dejected her. Not once had she celebrated a birthday, the joy of which was not also accompanied by a tremendous crash of disappointment, like a sledgehammer heaved onto a glass sculpture.

It wasn’t the thought of getting older that consumed her with dread. Age is the natural consequence of being alive, Anna knew, and the alternative was grim.

But consider:
Every year you have a death day as well, only you don’t know which one it is.

Anna made Bruno promise that he wouldn’t make a fuss. This was not a difficult pledge for him to swear: he hadn’t intended to. As for Anna herself, she decided she’d deal with the day when it came and not a minute before.

“G
RIEF THAT FINDS NO
relief in tears makes other organs weep,” Doktor Messerli said.

Anna wrote it in her journal.
How very many ways this is true.

I
T WAS
S
ATURDAY AND
Anna and Bruno had been invited to Edith and Otto Hammer’s home in Erlenbach for a cocktail party. Bruno walked the children to Ursula’s house while Anna dressed. Her heart wasn’t in it. She didn’t want to go, but the Hammers expected them and Bruno promised they wouldn’t be late coming home.

Anna made a habit of dressing well. She owned nice clothes and her fashion sense was irreproachable. She felt safest in her prettiest outfits, and if she couldn’t be glad all the time, at least she could feel—relatively, occasionally—impervious. She’d take it. She chose a slim-fitting black dress with cap sleeves and gold accents on the hemline. She wrapped a black wool shawl around her shoulders, piled her hair loosely atop her head, and fastened it with a rhinestone-studded claw clip. She considered herself first in the bathroom mirror, and then in the bedroom’s. Every looking glass treated her differently. In the bedroom she was thin but wan. In the bathroom she was healthy-hued but
her arms seemed thicker and her face swollen. Neither face was hers and yet they both were.
You are not my doppelgänger,
she said to each reflection. She took the sum of both and divided by two. She was presentable.

Bruno and Anna took the car. The radio was tuned to a hip-hop station. It amused Anna how much the Swiss loved black music. After school and on weekends when the weather was nice, a group of Dietlikon’s teenagers met in the church playground across the street from their house. They dressed in urban youth wear, their pants baggy, their sneakers white and wide-laced, and their baseball caps cocked hard to an idle side. They turned their radios as loud as the knobs would allow and thumped their heads against walls of air as they drank Red Bull and vodka, smoked cigarettes, and sang along to rap songs whose words they might not really understand the meaning of. Anna never talked to them. They scared her. Bruno left the radio tuned to its station and Anna tried to lose herself in the music’s pulse and throb.

W
HEN
A
NNA THOUGHT OF
Stephen anymore it was most always in passing, a transitory notion that traveled her mind from one side to its other, like a pedestrian crossing the street. Sometimes she thought of him while making love (it did not matter with whom). Sometimes it happened during her walks in the woods. Other times, it was when the train stopped at Wipkingen station or when the news reported on a forest fire or when she took the number 33 to Neumarkt or when she was combing Polly Jean’s hair. It happened on downtown trams when she smelled his soap or his cologne or heard a man speaking in the same register as he. Anna would whip around and scan every
face but Stephen’s was never among them. This didn’t happen often. But it happened enough.

“W
HAT IS THE DIFFERENCE
between love and lust?”

“You tell me,” Doktor Messerli said to Anna.

“Lust’s incurable. Love isn’t.”

“Desire isn’t a disease, Anna.”

“Isn’t it?”

E
DITH
H
AMMER RARELY THREW
understated parties. This party, while not inconspicuous, was at the very least relatively small. Fewer than twenty guests moved through the rooms of the Hammers’ Gold Coast home. It was a party of no occasion. It was no one’s birthday, no couple’s anniversary, no celebration of any sort. The party came to pass simply because Edith wanted one. Otto always indulged her:
Wife, your heart’s desire is my wish.
But despite the sheen of contentment, the Hammers weren’t entirely happy. Otto’s temper flared hotter and more often than Bruno’s. Edith was frivolous with money and often cruel in her speech. Their daughters were delinquents and lived most of the year at a boarding school in Lausanne. And the Hammers drank too much.

But together they made a handsome, finespun couple, and Edith was one of Anna’s only two friends. Snippy and pitiless though Edith usually was, Anna had little recourse but to keep her.

When Anna and Bruno walked through the door, each was swept from the other’s company into the large living room, Anna by Edith and Bruno by Otto. It was a segregated room.
The men crowded near the bar and the women by the kitchen. Switzerland is undeniably a modern country, but gender roles make occasional appearances. In some cantons women didn’t get the right to vote until the 1970s. Anna knew she’d been in Switzerland too long when this stopped appalling her.

Doktor Messerli had harped on it to the point that the conversation was formulaic: Did not Anna worry that she perpetuated the stereotype of the fragile, subjugated woman? That excepting her manner of dress and the language she used and the Handy in her purse there was little to distinguish her from a woman who lived fifty, seventy, one hundred years earlier? They didn’t drive cars or have bank accounts either. Didn’t she understand she could be anything she wanted to be? Didn’t she think she had a responsibility to be
something
?

Anna’s response never varied.
I can see your point. You may be right.

Edith was in friendliest form that night. She moved about the room with a cheer Anna had never seen her flaunt as she handed out glasses of wine and passed around bowls of olives and peanuts and wasabi-coated peas, snacks that Anna would have sworn were too common for Edith’s tastes. Anna stood among a crowd of women she knew only by sight. These were the bankers’ wives. They nodded and smiled and widened their circle to include her, but they carried on their conversation in Schwiizerdütsch.

Anna understood maybe five percent of what she heard. It was well and good her German had vastly improved, but that was little use inside a coterie of
Schweizerin.
Anna reverted to smiles and nods as well. It was easiest that way.

Across the room she caught sight of Bruno. He was making exaggerated gestures with his arms and the men around him
were laughing as he told a story, just like the men at Daniela’s party had done. A cigarette teetered on the edge of his lips. It annoyed Anna when he smoked. But Bruno only smoked at parties and so when he did it tended to be a sign that he was having a good time.
I’ll take it, cigarette and all,
Anna conceded.

A
NNA LONGED TO CONTACT
Stephen, but she never did.
What would I say beyond hello? Would I tell him about Polly Jean? Would I admit that I miss him? Would I beg him to return?
She imagined differing scripts.
What would happen? What harm would it do?
Anna knew the answers.

The desire to reach out to him pulled at her. Anna was an expert at pushing the yearning away. Still, she stored the number to his MIT office in her Handy. She filed it under Cindy, the name of a cousin Anna had long ago lost touch with. She’d pried the number from him just before he left. With a few pathetic punches of the keypad she could reconnect herself with his intrusive, ubiquitous voice.

She never called.

T
WICE THAT WEEK THEY
’
D
made love, Anna and Archie. They had fallen into the pattern noncommittal lovers can’t avoid. Their attraction for each other was undeniable. But affection wasn’t something to discuss. They were not in love. That was off the table. Their meetings were no less intense, but they were a little less frequent.

How many times have we done it?
Anna hadn’t counted.
How many indiscretions make an affair?
It was an irrelevant question.
Fondness but not love. Not for Archie, not for Karl.
Some women collected spoons. Anna collected lovers.

R
OLAND EXPLAINED THAT IN
German, the conditional is used to show the dependency of one action or set of events upon another. It’s an if-then scenario.
“Zum Beispiel,”
Roland lectured. “If I am sick tomorrow, then I will not go to school. Or, if the weather is nice, then we will go to the park.”

Anna found little relief in this.
If I am caught … then I am fucked.

A
NNA RETURNED HER GAZE
to the bankers’ wives, who huddled into the company of one another. The women were young. Their husbands wore the jewelry of their beauty like elegant wristwatches.

Edith had set down the tray of food and returned to the group. “Anna,” she said as she motioned to a more private corner of the room. Anna dipped her chin and stepped away, literally bowing out of a conversation she wasn’t even part of.

Edith hurried her over with her hands. She was agitated. “Come here!” Anna moved more closely into her space. Anna was already as close to her as she felt like she wanted to be.

Edith, always unmistakable, was that night flushed with an immoderate sense of urgency and giddiness. “Don’t be obvious, but turn around and look—no, not yet!—to the left.” Anna shook her head at Edith’s schoolgirl antics but played along. She paused a beat then turned to look over her shoulder.