The Worst Thing I've Done (6 page)

“Hey—” Mason brought his arms around us. “Aunt Stormy? Doesn't Annie look beautiful being pregnant?”

“I'm not pregnant.”

“Even make-believe pregnant, you're beautiful.”

“Sure…”

He swung Opal into his arms. “Let's you and I go and investigate the ducks.” He went outside, into air so clear that the shadows were crisp.

“He's amazing with her,” Aunt Stormy said.

“Amazing…”

She took my face between her palms. Wiped back my tears. Our tears.

A
UNT
S
TORMY
taught my mother—and later me—how to keep from disturbing trees, even tiny ones, by letting the path wind among them. Taught us how to brace broken trunks and branches with the V-shaped joints of fallen branches. But she was merciless with briers, clipping their bright green stems so they wouldn't smother trees and bushes. Their thorns would scratch her arms and face. And she'd keep at them till she had them all. Then she'd wind them into big circles and press them into the thicket along the north edge of her land so that birds could use them for nesting.

Aunt Stormy and my mother weren't real sisters. They weren't even from the same town, but at least from the same region by the North Sea in Germany, not far from Holland: my mother from Norddeich, Aunt Stormy from Benersiel. They became sisters-by-choice, as they called it, when they met as au pairs, doing child care for two families in Southampton, on the East End of Long Island. In old photos, my mother was sturdy and tall with stiff red hair, Aunt Stormy short with a dark braid to her waist. But somehow a resemblance emerged in their faces as they grew older. Their names were Lotte and Mechthild. For the small children, Mechthild was impossible to pronounce, and they called her Stormy because she liked to dance with them outside when it was stormy. Mechthild liked her new name so much better than the name she'd inherited from a great-aunt she'd never met, that she began to think of herself as Stormy.

Alone with preschool children day after day, Lotte and Stormy didn't recognize the America they'd been promised by the au pair agency—culture and travel and education. Instead they were cocooned within expensive houses; within the vocabulary of little children; within the routine of these children.

“What kept us from going nuts,” my mother had told me, “was that their houses were side by side.”

Lotte and Stormy would have felt a thousand continents away from home, had it not been for each other, for talking in words that matched their thoughts. Though they'd both studied English in school, the leap of translation took away some of their swiftness and confidence.

Their employers were kind people who believed they were generous when they included the au pairs in family outings and family dinners; but that only added to all those hours of feeding and bathing, of jam-crusted fingers, a baby's wail and loving. And since these children knew their au pairs better than their parents, they turned to them, of course, for play and solace during family times, freeing their parents to turn to each other for grown-up talk. They praised the devotion of their au pairs—though Lotte was messy and Stormy often late—because what mattered was seeing proof that their children would be loved while the parents were at work or had appointments…even if it made them uneasy how much their children adored their au pairs.

They were inventive, Stormy and Lotte; took turns fixing meals and snacks for the children, seven of them altogether; found games that all of them could play; danced with the children to the records they'd brought from home: Edith Piaf and Hildegard Knef and Charles Aznavour.

In winter the town emptied itself, felt isolated. But summers were glorious because they were a five-minute walk from Coopers Beach, where they spent all day with pails and umbrellas and blankets and picnics, talking while they watched over the children as they chased one another through the shallow water or took their naps.

“We often talked to them in German,” Aunt Stormy had said to me. “The little ones responded the same as to English.”

My mother had agreed. “It was in the sound of the voice, Annie.”

“Where we walked from one house to the other, we wore down the grass.”

They lent each other their favorite books. Lotte's poetry collections: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke. Stormy liked novelists, especially Ilse Aichinger and Hermann Hesse. They'd both brought Pearl S. Buck's
Die Mutter
across the Atlantic. The first English-language book they finished all the way—trading off between chapters—was
Peyton Place
, more risqué than anything they'd read so far.

On their day off, Sunday, Lotte and Stormy took the train into Manhattan, walked for hours through different neighborhoods. Like all of Europe—no, the world—in one exhilarating city. They went to concerts, to protests against the Vietnam war, to the bakeries on Eighty-sixth for
Kuchen
, to Greenwich Village, to museums…

Away from their birth country, language was a stronger bond between them than it would have been at home. And yet, when people said, “Your accent…where are you from?” they learned to say, “Holland.” Lotte started it. Because if they answered “Germany,” there might be that pause…that shift from curious to watchful. “I hear the streets are very clean,” someone might say. Or: “The Germans make good beer.” Or: “Don't the trains always run on time?”

“But what if they know Dutch?” Stormy had asked Lotte.

“Very few people here speak Dutch. And if so, only a few words. It's a small country.”

“But what if—”

“We'll tell them we've made a pact to practice English by not speaking Dutch for one year.”

Much later, my mother would tell me that beneath all that was the horror at Germany's savage history and their uneasiness at being forever linked to that. They were mortified by how little they knew about the Holocaust. In Germany, their history lessons had left that out entirely, but here in America, it was part of the curriculum. To many of the Americans they met, Lotte and Stormy were representatives of Germany—punctual and obedient and rigid and clean and cruel and humorless like movie villains—making them feel more German, but in a sinister way, than if they'd stayed there.

O
CCASIONALLY MY
mother would hide things before Aunt Stormy came to visit us. “Stormy admires things away from you,” she'd say.

I grew up with my father's story of Stormy and the blue glass ball he'd bought for Lotte at a glass blower's studio when she got pregnant with me. “Because it made me think of you levitating in a sphere like that within her, Annie…all blue light.”

The day of my birth, Stormy arrived with books and wine for my parents, a lacy white jacket she'd crocheted for me, a crate with vegetables and fruits from her favorite farm stand. For two weeks, she cooked and cleaned and shopped, bathed me, carried me to my mother, who would nurse me.

One morning Stormy noticed the glass ball. “Such an extraordinary shade of blue.”

“That's what Phillip and I love about it too,” Lotte said.

“I haven't seen anything like it.”

Lotte nodded. Switched me to her other breast.

“Can't you picture it hanging from the candle chandelier in my kitchen, Lotte?”

Still, Lotte did not offer it, though usually, when Stormy pointed to something and said she liked it, Lotte would insist, “It's yours, Stormy.” Because that was what Stormy would do for her.

“I could see doing more with that blue…beads perhaps, or pegs for coats…doorknobs. It could set the tone, that blue. You wouldn't—” Stormy shook her head. “No. I shouldn't ask.”

Lotte stroked my hair. Hummed to me till she felt the hum vibrate in her teeth.

“Would you at all consider…trading it?”

Lotte was too stunned to answer.

“Maybe trade it for my bowl from Hong Kong? The one you've always liked?” Stormy had gone to Hong Kong with her au pair family for three months and returned with hand-painted bowls, stories of the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, distressed souls who didn't have a proper burial. She had plans to have her own burning of a Hungry Ghost on the beach, make offerings to send him away happy.

“You don't have to give me that bowl. You don't have to give me anything in return,” Lotte said, figuring that would stop her.

But Stormy took the blue glass into her hands, holding it with reverence. “Thank you, Lotte. Aren't we all custodians of belongings that pass through our hands?”

That night in bed—with me sleeping between them—Lotte asked Phillip, “Do you think being generous only means giving away something you want to keep for yourself?”

“That doesn't feel natural.”

“Stormy comes from a poor family. They never had much. Maybe that's why—”

“Are you being a reverse snob?”

“I'm trying to understand why she's doing this, Phillip.”

“It's only a gift if it is freely given.”

“How did you get so wise?”

“From being with you.”

“I think Stormy believes it's freely given.”

“The way you pretend with her, I can see why.”

“It's impossible to deny her anything…considering how generous she is.”

The courage it must have taken Lotte to ask for that glass ball back! In the morning, she took Stormy's hand, sat down with her. Heart racing, she told her she wanted to keep her blue glass ball.

“But of course,” Stormy said right away. “I'll get it for you.” When she returned, she set the blue ball next to the toaster, where its reflection doubled into two glass balls, one for each of them.

“I'm sorry,” Lotte said.

“It's all right. Really.”

“You're not disappointed?”

“I'm glad you told me.”

Lotte felt stingy. Selfish. Still—not to have asked for it would have meant letting herself down. “Stormy?”

“Yes?”

“Please, pick something else of mine that you like…please?”

“Being here with you and Phillip and Annie is all I want.”

But the day after Stormy returned to North Sea, Lotte couldn't find her blue glass ball, and though she searched throughout her rooms, she knew it was no longer there; and she wasn't surprised when, on her next visit to North Sea, she found it dangling from Stormy's candle chandelier. Still, Lotte was furious, and she fantasized stealing it back. Feeling wicked and justified, she fantasized uncoupling it from the chandelier while Stormy was outside and, without saying a word, hiding it inside my diaper bag to take home with her. Later, she would tell me that she didn't know what kept her from stealing it, that perhaps it was enough to see it floating above her, attracting blue light from the candles and windows.

“L
ET'S GET
Opal some food for the ducks.” Aunt Stormy opened the lid of a metal trash can she'd secured with a bungee cord to keep the raccoons out. It was filled with cracked corn, and she scooped some into a little pail.

We walked down her path, through stands of phragmites, along the boardwalk, flat across the wetlands. Where it arched over the tidal inlet, Mason had propped Opal on the railing. His arms around her, they were looking down into the water.

“Here,
Vögelchen,
” Aunt Stormy called out.

“Duck…,” Opal sang.

“
Vögelchen
means birds…ducks and chickens too. All kinds of birds.” Aunt Stormy ran her bare instep up her other calf to clear off twigs.

Wind seized us, shook us, and Opal laughed aloud. Two great white herons flew in from the bay, swerved, and landed in the crown of BigC's black cherry tree. BigC meant Big Calla. Big Calla Holland. Not because she was big but because her house was much bigger than Aunt Stormy expected. A red clay roof sat like a lid on the pink stucco mansion. Nightmare in pink, the neighbors called it.

In the late sixties, Aunt Stormy had bought her cottage in North Sea because the name evoked the German North Sea for her. It was affordable on a teacher's salary; but when the taxes got too high for her, she sold half an acre to BigC, a commercial artist who had an apartment in New York, where she painted murals for restaurants. Every other weekend BigC came to North Sea, but when she had tenants, she stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in Southampton.

“D
UCK
…,” Opal sang.

Mason joined her. “Duck.”

When Aunt Stormy rattled her pail, ducks scurried down the inlet as if they'd been waiting for her. “Open your hands, Opal. I got something for you and the
Vögelchen.
” She dribbled corn into Opal's hands.

But Opal latched her fingers around the kernels and brought her fists to her mouth.

“Not girl food.” Mason stopped her. “No, no…”

Opal shrieked. Sucked at her fist.