Hausfrau (9 page)

In their most recent analysis Doktor Messerli pressed Anna to consider the source of her passivity. What did Anna think lay at the root of the problem? Did Anna know? Had she ever thought about it? Anna had tried to lie.
Of course I’ve thought about it.
But she hadn’t. Not really. It was just something she knew about herself. That was it. What more was there? The Doktor called her out, told her no, she hadn’t thought about it, neither deeply nor superficially. For, if she had she’d see what the Doctor saw.

“Passivity isn’t the malady. It’s the symptom. Complicity is but one of your many well-honed skills. When it pleases you, you are quite practiced at defiance.” Anna took the statement as an affront and, as if to diffuse the truth of the Doktor’s conclusion, accepted it without rebuttal. Childish, she knew,
but gratifying in the moment. By the time Anna’s train reached Wetzikon she realized that was exactly the kind of manipulating Doktor Messerli was accusing her of. It wasn’t passivity at all. It was an iridescent scheming, a mannequin made up to resemble a timid, yielding woman. “Where did this come from, Anna? What might have caused this?” Anna said that she was afraid she didn’t know.

“That’s exactly right. You are afraid,” the Doktor said, and then she said no more.

I
T WAS AN ALTOGETHER
enjoyable evening at Tim and Mary Gilbert’s house in Uster.

Until.

Mary left the table, then returned carrying dessert. Tim asked Anna how she was finding the German class. Anna said, “It’s fine, it’s good, it’s helpful, I’m learning.”

Mary took her seat. “Anna is Roland’s A-plus number one student, Bruno. Everyone listens when she talks. Some everyones more than others, wink, wink.” Mary looked at Anna and winked on her own cue. It grated Anna how Mary spoke aloud the words “wink, wink.”

“What’s this?” Bruno asked.

“Have you not told him, Anna?”

Anna shook her head and said to Mary that she didn’t know what Mary was talking about. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mary.” Anna employed a steady, breezy voice.

“Don’t be so modest.” Mary spoke to Bruno in the manner of an aside. “Anna has an admirer.”

No, Mary,
Anna thought.

“Ah, is that right?” Bruno asked. His voice glinted briefly of suspicion. Anna was the only one who noticed it. “So who is it then that admires my Anna?”

His Anna.
Anna told him that she still didn’t know what Mary meant.

Mary tee-heed in a way that, given other circumstances, might have been considered dainty. In the moment, Anna found it hollow and babyish. “His name is Archie and it’s
adorable
how he follows her, sits next to her in class. He even waits for her and walks her to the tram every day after school.”

“The tram?” Bruno had a question in his voice. Trams don’t run to Dietlikon. There would be no reason for Anna to take a daily tram.

Anna interjected. “Train. She means train.”

“Oh anyway. The man is smitten, Bruno. If I were you, I’d watch out!” Mary wasn’t being garrulous. She was playing.

No, Mary. No, no, no, no.
But it was too late.

Mary continued. “Oh, and ha, ha, he’s good-looking as well, isn’t he, Anna?”

Anna’s heartbeat splintered and in that instant of an instant, Anna panicked and was terrified that the entire evening was a setup intended to out her as a liar, a cheat, a whore.

Anna reddened. Tim interceded on her behalf. “Mary, you’re embarrassing our guest.”

Mary punctuated her joshing with an earnest smile. Bruno’s own smile was blithe. Anna didn’t trust it. “So,” Mary asked. “Who’s ready for a piece of cake?” The children (Alexis included) chimed in unison a ravenous “Me!” and the adults
mm-hmmm
-ed. Mary sliced into an iced lemon pound cake and served a thick piece to each of them.

“Merci vielmal,”
Bruno thanked her, and everyone began to eat. “Mmm,” Bruno savored.
“Sehr gut!”

And so the evening unfolded, the laughter continued, and the banter went on. Bruno gave more banking advice and in thankful return, Tim invited Bruno and the boys to a ZSC Lions game. Bruno waved his hand—Tim needn’t do that—but in the end he accepted the invitation with grace. Mary poured coffee and the children were dismissed and asked once again to play upstairs. By anyone’s measure the dinner party ended as successfully as it had begun.

But Anna had seen it when it happened. How the air between her and Bruno had tightened when Mary spoke aloud the words “smitten,” “good-looking,” “admirer,” “tram.”

I will pay for this,
Anna thought.

When it was time for the Benzes to leave, hands were shaken and unspecified plans made for a “next time.”

“See you at the game next week,” Tim called to Bruno and the boys.

“See you in class on Monday,” Mary sang out to Anna.

Max waved to Charles, who waved back. Victor and Alexis parted without ceremony, and the Benzes traveled home. The boys nodded off during the drive.

The air was strangled. Anna attempted conversation. “That was nice, wasn’t it?”

Bruno grunted. “Who’s Archie?”

Anna spoke carefully. “Oh. No one. A man in our class. He’s fond of me I guess. Mary says, anyway. I hadn’t noticed.”

“I see.”

It was a shorter ride returning than going, and soon the Benzes were home. It was nearly ten when Bruno turned onto
Rosenweg, swerved sharply into the driveway, and snapped off the engine.
“Wacht auf,”
he barked over his shoulder as he got out of the car. The boys were sleepy and they dragged their feet. Bruno shut the car door firmly. Anna noted with small relief it wasn’t a slam.

Anna called after him as he unlocked the house: “We forgot Polly.” Bruno motioned the boys inside and pointed them up the stairs, to bed. Anna closed the car door and chased him up the front steps.

“Bruno?”

Bruno mumbled something that Anna understood to mean
Walk over and get her yourself.

The direct walk from their front door to Ursula’s was two minutes long, if that. Anna had no incentive to hurry. She took a winding, oblique route that led her in the opposite direction up the hill behind her house. It was a path she often traipsed; she knew it well. During the day it was clogged with Nordic walkers and people exercising their dogs. At night, it was empty and the open fields seemed haunted. The feeling was cryptic. On the hill Anna felt disconsolate, isolated, and renounced.
I am blanched by the moonlight,
she thought.
A revenant in a pauper’s graveyard.

“D
O YOU BELIEVE IN
ghosts?” Anna asked Doktor Messerli.

“It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you.”

A
NNA FOLLOWED THE PATH
until she reached a bench at the crest of the hill. This hill, this bench, the middle of many, many
nights—Anna couldn’t say how many times she’d wandered up the path just to sit. In the rain, in the snow. On weekends or in the middle of the week. During nights of abject despair. On nights when the air was crass or unemotional. When the horrible ache of loneliness bit her on the neck. When the landscape and its hurt heart had its way with her. This was her bench. The bench she came to sit and cry upon. A yellow
Wanderweg
sign pointed in the direction of the woods. Behind the bench, a fenced-off acre that penned a farmer’s cattle. That night, the cows were in the barn and Anna was entirely alone. Every several minutes and from just over a kilometer away, Anna heard a night train juddering down the tracks.
Where is it going? Who’s inside? Is she asleep? Is she sad?
It always surprised her how clear and close the trains sounded even from the top of the hill.
I can feel it. A woman on that train is sad.

Anna waited for the tears to come. They didn’t. Five trains passed in the valley beneath her before she rose and made her way to Ursula’s.

U
RSULA WAS PREDICTABLY CURT
when Anna finally came home that afternoon. Anna had barely said hello before Ursula pushed past her and left. Anna let it go. Ursula had a right to be annoyed.

Polly was screaming and the boys were bickering. Anna looked at her watch—she’d been on the train for three and a half hours. After the first hour she’d lost patience with introspection. She let her mind turn gray. Her pulse slowed. She relaxed her eyes and tried to focus on the spaces between things as the loll of the train rocked her like a mother would. But the house, the noise, the children, her mother-in-law, the lateness
of the afternoon and that evening’s dinner plans all converged to a sharp, fine point that forced Anna to the wall of her own woe. There was nothing she could do at that moment but allow it to happen. So she let the boys squabble and left Polly Jean to cry herself out. Some tears can’t be soothed, they can only be shed.

By the time Bruno came home from the office, his sons were dressed, his wife was made up, and Polly Jean was ready to go to Ursula’s for the evening. Bruno volunteered to walk her over. Anna watched them from the living room window. Bruno was bouncing her on his hip and whistling. Polly had stopped crying before Anna finished her shower.

Roland’s last lesson that morning was on subordinating conjunctions.
Falls
means “in case of.” And
weil
means “because.” “Remember to pronounce it ‘vile,’ ” Roland said, which Anna found apropos. When Roland wrote down
damit,
the class chuckled. “Yes, just like the bad word. It means ‘so that’ or ‘in order to.’ ” Then he reminded them they were adults and they should stop laughing because it wasn’t that funny in the first place.

Anna stood at the window in order to watch them as they walked away, her husband and her daughter. Anna stood at the window so that she could see. She watched until they rounded the corner and disappeared from view.

Dammit, dammit, dammit, goddammit.

A
NNA RAPPED GENTLY ON
Ursula’s door even as she opened it. Ursula’s distaste for Anna aside, they’d long passed the formalities of first knocking, then waiting on one or the other to
answer the door. Anna walked into the house and whispered hello. Ursula had fallen asleep in front of the television, her knitting in her lap. Mike Shiva, a popular psychic and tarot card reader, was taking live phone calls. His programs ran every night; there was no escape from his plate-round face and straight stringy hair held back with a woman’s headband. Anna thought he was weird and wonderful alike. A psychic seemed so un-Swiss, so unempirical.

Ursula stirred when Anna switched off the set. She woke with a start and for a moment seemed not to recognize her daughter-in-law.

“I’m here for Polly,” Anna announced, as if there would be any other reason for her to appear in Ursula’s house so late at night.

“Leave her alone,” Ursula said. “If you wake her, she’ll never go back to sleep.”

“Oh.” The tension in the car had distracted her. Anna felt stupid that she hadn’t sorted this out. Of course. It was understood. Polly was going to stay the night. “Ursula, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” She hadn’t been. But fetching Polly Jean was as good an excuse as any to get away from Bruno for a while.

Ursula rose, shook her head thoroughly as if to jostle something loose. “Not thinking is one of your worst habits.” Then she walked Anna to the door, directed her unceremoniously through it, and locked it behind her in the space of no more than fifteen seconds. Anna walked home without the baby she came for.

“G
HOSTS
,” D
OKTOR
M
ESSERLI CONTINUED
, “aren’t always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something you’ve been or done that you cannot escape.”

T
WO WEEKS LATER
,
ON A
S
UNDAY
,
THE LAST DAY OF THE MONTH
, Anna, Bruno, Ursula, and the children boarded a 10:00
A
.
M
. train. They were on their way to Mumpf, a town in Kanton Aargau near Switzerland’s north border, where Daniela, Bruno’s sister, and her partner David lived. It was Daniela’s fortieth birthday.

Taking a train often made more sense than driving. Today the choice was made by circumstance: with Ursula along they couldn’t all fit inside the car. The only inconvenience of the plan was two transfers. David would gather them at Bahnhof Mumpf when they arrived.

On the InterRegio, Charles took the window seat facing forward and Victor, the seat turned toward the back. These were their permanent assignments when the family traveled by train, much to the vexation of Anna’s eldest. Charles had a tender stomach and was prone to motion sickness. A window seat helped his equilibrium. Sure enough, five minutes into the trip, Charles’s face took on the color of a small sour pickle.
“Watch the horizon,
Schatz
,” Anna counseled. “Draw deep, slow breaths.” This seemed to help.

Anna sat next to Victor on the aisle, facing Bruno who, like Charles, always took a forward-facing seat. Ursula settled into the bank of seats across from them, her eyes closed lightly as if in prayer and Daniela’s birthday gift in her lap. In his own lap, Bruno held Polly Jean.