Hausfrau (6 page)

They were in the produce aisle. Ursula was vetting nectarines. She inspected nearly twenty before settling on the four pieces of fruit she decided to carry home. Anna was considering the mushrooms when she felt a buzzing in the pocket of her jacket. It was her Handy, her cell phone. She reached for it, flipped open its clamshell, and answered without looking to see who had called. “Hello?”

It was Archie. He didn’t want to wait the weekend to talk to her.
Come into town, Anna,
he said.
Come over.
Ursula glanced at her daughter-in-law but returned her attention just as quickly to the nectarines. Anna was silent.
Are you there? Hello?

“Edith, glad you called.” Anna spoke flatly. She didn’t miss a beat. Ursula returned and set her sack of nectarines in the cart.
Edith Hammer,
Anna mouthed. Ursula shrugged and turned away, pushing Polly’s stroller off toward the celery and the leeks.

“You aren’t alone?”

Anna continued. “We’ll talk Monday, yes?” Anna was flattered. Anna was annoyed. Ursula lifted a bag of green beans in her left hand and motioned Anna to follow her into the spice aisle with her right. Anna clapped closed her phone without saying goodbye.

Twenty minutes later they paid for their groceries and left. It was just after noon.

“B
UT
WHO
IS
S
TEPHEN
, Anna?”

T
HE FOLLOWING
M
ONDAY
,
EVERY STUDENT ENROLLED IN THE
Deutschkurs Intensiv turned out for class—Anna and Archie included. Archie had arrived on time and was, when Anna showed up fifteen minutes late, quietly filling in a worksheet with everyone else. The door’s hinges squealed when Anna entered and the entire class looked up to watch her cower into the room. Anna undertoned an
I’m sorry
and endeavored what she hoped was nonchalance as she took the only open seat available, the empty chair between Roland and Mary, the Canadian woman. But Anna was often as clumsy as she was passive, and as she rummaged through her book bag with one hand, she seemed to have forgotten that her other hand was wrapped around a flimsy paper cup of hot coffee. She spilled the entire cup—on herself, on the table, and on Mary.

Anna and Mary made simultaneous exclamations. Mary yelped
Oh gosh!
And Anna barked out a splenetic
Mother of Christ!
which, even to her own accustomed ears, sounded coarse. Roland pulled an agitated face. The coffee went down the front of Anna’s sweater; it caught Mary on the cuff and on
the thigh. Her worksheet was ruined. Anna whispered a feeble apology and rose and left the room. Mary followed after her. Archie’s eyes remained locked on his paper.

In the bathroom, Anna blotted and dabbed and swiped at the stain on her sweater. Nothing helped. The cashmere was ruined. It was one of the nicest things she owned and Anna, fond of baubles and adornments, owned many nice things. A Christmas present from Bruno, she knew better than to have worn it to class. But she talked herself into it that morning by imagining the limp, silky pleasure she’d experience later in the afternoon when she would be talked so easily out of it, how Archie would tuck his hands beneath the sweater’s bottom banding, slide them up the sides of her waist, skate them across the inner side of her upraised arms, how he would lift it over her head and off her body, how he would then impel her to his bed and vandalize her for at least the next two hours.

A
NNA LOVED AND DIDN
’
T
love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted.

The longing for diversion was a recent development; her pining to be hungered for was decades old. But both rose from a lassitude born of small-scale grudges and trifling, trivial injuries, the last ten years of which she blamed on Bruno. From that rose boredom and from boredom particular habits were born. This she could not blame on Bruno. Like the ability to flash that sincere-seeming smile, Anna had taught it to herself by settling down, by settling
on.

The affair with Archie was and wasn’t about sex. Anna was weak and she knew it. But she was still young enough to be pretty in certain lights and to the tastes of specific men.

“What do you think makes a person’s life successful?” Doktor Messerli asked.

“Do you mean accomplished?” They’d been talking of something unrelated to success.

Doktor Messerli closed her eyes as she searched for the right words. “The kind of success I mean comes from living a life that satisfies a woman in such a way that when, in her old age, she looks back upon her years in contemplation, she is able to announce with certainty, ‘I have led a conscious, useful life, whole and complete, and I filled it with as many worthy things as it could possibly hold.’ That’s what I mean. Do you understand? Is that something you want?”

“I don’t know.” Anna didn’t.

“I don’t know whether you want it either,” Doktor Messerli agreed.

M
ARY
’
S SHIRT WAS WEARABLE
, but her jeans were soaked through to her thighs. She blotted herself with a pad of paper towels as she spoke.

“Missed you in class last week.” Anna listened for an accusation but there was none. Mary’s tone was sunny, though it perplexed Anna how someone she hardly knew would take even a passing notice of her absence. They’d only been in school a few days.

“I’m sorry I spilled coffee on you.”

Mary gestured
never mind
as she stepped toward the bathroom door to leave. “Say, Anna …” Anna looked up from her
sweater to Mary reflected in the mirror. Mary’s face was round and she wore her curly sand-colored hair in a prudent bob. She was short and fleshy. Not fat, but large-breasted, generous of hip, maternal, and, despite her thickset frame, undeniably pretty. Anna looked from Mary’s reflection to her own and weighed the disparities. “My husband and I wondered if you and your husband and children wouldn’t like to come to the house for dinner sometime this week? You have boys? Are they hockey fans? Is your husband?” Anna paused long enough to defeat her. “Or,” Mary stammered, “next week. Or not, you know. Whatever you like.” There was apology in her voice. Anna had disappointed.

“Oh, no,” Anna hedged. “I’m distracted, is all.” She pointed to her sweater. “Of course … we’d love to come. I’m sure the boys … they’d love it.” She stuttered as she poured as much kindness into the words “of course” as they would hold.
This woman wants a friend.
Anna recognized that want. It made her wince. Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.

But in the bathroom and at that moment Anna felt trapped. Obligated to oblige. “I’ll have to check with Bruno. His schedule, I mean.”

Mary brightened. “That’s it,
Bruno,
” she said as she remembered a name she’d never been told. “Be sure and give me your email. We can make plans.”

“I don’t use email all that much.”

“Really?” Mary asked as if she’d never heard such a thing in her life. “Why’s that?”

Anna capitulated. “I don’t have much call for it.”

“No Facebook? Myspace?”

“No.” This was a bit of a fib. Of course Anna had an
email address. Everyone had an email address. Of course Anna used it. It’s where the boys’ school sent their announcements. It’s how Anna confirmed her dentist appointments. Without it, she’d never be able to shop online. But she didn’t use it when she didn’t have to. Who would she email that she didn’t already regularly see? Who would she connect or reconnect with? All those distant relatives with whom she didn’t keep in touch? Her school pals and ex-lovers? There was no one Anna was eager or able to contact. And no one looked to get in touch with her. All told, there was less humiliation in the lie.

“Well anyway, let’s not forget to swap numbers, okay? Now,” Mary breathed deeply, “time to get back! See you in there? We’ll talk more during break?”

“Sure.” Anna was as stiff as she could be without appearing rude. She was in a bad mood and being unfair. She self-corrected with an “absolutely” and Mary left.

Once more she looked at her sweater.
I’ve destroyed a beautiful thing,
Anna thought.
I have nothing to change into.

I
N A MOMENT OF
bald yearning, Anna whined to Doktor Messerli, “I wish I were better looking.”

“You think there is something wrong with how you look?”

Anna shrugged. “Wrong” was the wrong word. “I’m neither plain nor pretty. I’m irrevocably average.”

“Jung said that beautiful women were sources of terror. That as a general rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”

Anna dismissed her with a backhand wave.

Then Doktor Messerli asked, “When will you trust me enough to tell me everything?”

A
NNA EXAMINED HERSELF IN
the mirror. She was neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor too thin. Her hair fell in easy but shaggy shoulder-length waves. It was the color of top dirt and it was graying around her forehead (she dyed it).
What do they see in me, men?
She wasn’t being modest. She truly didn’t know.

She stared herself farther down in the bathroom mirror for a full minute more before returning to class.

In the classroom, Roland was explaining the declension of adjectives. Anna took notes and tried to follow along.
Declining adjectives. As if they were cups of tea. No thank you, I’ve had enough.
She ticked through all relevant descriptives. Lonely. Mediocre. Yielding. Easy. Frightened.
No, no, I have plenty already of each.

But declension, as Roland explained it, was about clarity. Constructing a sentence in a way that the function of every word is unambiguous, impossible to be misunderstood. To classify units of language by their purpose, to pin all words to their syntax by a constant, final syllable like a butterfly tacked to a board.
Here is a masculine subject, there is its feminine object.
Anna smirked. It was a word’s grammatical uniform.
The policeman’s badge. The crown of a king.

A wife’s gold ring.

Roland droned.
“Ich fahre ein blaues Auto.”
Anna took absent notes; she doodled arrows and crosses and sadly drawn faces of sad-eyed women in the margins of her workbook. There was no reason for this day to be so intractable.

Roland continued. “
Ich fahre ein blaues Auto. ABER—ich fahre das blaue Auto.
You hear the difference?”

Anna did. It was the difference between “a” and “the.”

The disconnect between “general” and “specific.”

The vast, vapid chasm that divides “this particular one” from “some of them.”

The discrepancy that separates any two “him”s. She did not need this pointed out to her.

No, no. I have plenty. Thank you. That’s enough.

Later in the
Kantine
Anna sat with Archie, Mary, Nancy from South Africa, and Ed, who came from London. The English speakers huddled together.
Same seeks same; we search out the familiar, just as the Doktor said.
The Asians sat behind them, setting themselves apart as well. And the Australian couple, the French woman, and the lady from Moscow broke away from the group for their own reason—to go out to the patio and smoke. Underneath their table, Archie slid a hand up and down the side of Anna’s leg. She drank her coffee without blinking or shifting in her seat. Ed had Archie’s ear discussing politics, while Mary quizzed Anna about her children. Nancy bounced between both conversations, alternating interest.

A
NNA BROUGHT A DREAM
to Doktor Messerli.

A photographer wants to take my picture. His studio is made of sandstone. There are no windows. The room is a closed box. He asks to see my ID. I only have my Ausweis. I show it to him, but for some reason it’s not good enough.

Doctor Messerli began with sweeping generalities. “There are no authoritative rules in dream interpretation. I cannot tell you point by point the significance of each symbol. The message of the dream will depend on the dreamer’s associations. But there are guidelines. The dreamer only ever dreams about
herself. Every person in a dream is a manifestation of an aspect of her psyche. Every character a reflection of her own subconscious nature.”