Hausfrau (19 page)

“It is the nicest gift I’ve ever received.”

“You like it?” Bruno’s voice was flat, but not unkind.

“I love it.”

“Very good. Happy birthday. Enjoy your breakfast.” Bruno leaned down and gave his wife a modest kiss on the lips. Anna didn’t fight the tears that came.

A
NNA HAD WRITTEN LETTERS
to Stephen she’d never sent, all but one of which she composed during the immediate weeks after his departure. She hid them in her high school scrapbook (melancholy’s most appropriate storehouse), itself at the bottom of a box, which in turn rested underneath a stack of a half dozen other boxes in a deep corner of the attic where Bruno would never find them. Anna sometimes pulled the letters out and sat on the attic floor and spent moody hours rereading them. They were maudlin and overcomposed, and she remembered where she wrote every one. In Platzspitz:
They used to call this Needle Park. Where the addicts got their drugs. I am addicted to you and I shake on the floor in your absence.
And another, written from a bench facing the river Sihl, the muddy river that feeds into the Limmat:
Brown like your eyes, brown like the hurt in my heart. Murky and silty and sad oh sad.
The day was drizzly. A man in a green hat staggered past Anna to a tree fifty yards away and took a piss. Another letter opened like this:
I write to you from the Lindenhof, the very place you searched out the day we met.
And yet another letter began at Wipkingen station:
Your station, Stephen. Do you remember?
That letter took her weeks to write. She finished it on the bank of the Zürichsee at Seefeld, in the Riesbach harbor, by the large, abstract sculptures. Anna remembered each incident, each place, most every pen stroke, the clothes she wore, the weathers, how they turned, how they stalled, how they felt against her skin.

It had been at least five months since she’d read the letters. Maybe six. The last time she read them was the first time they embarrassed her.

O
NE MORNING THE PREVIOUS
week, Anna arrived at German class with a stomachache. She felt as if she’d eaten pebbles or swallowed hourglass sand. She took her notes silently and without flourish. Roland spoke of indefinite pronouns.
Something. Someone. No one. Everybody. Whoever. All. Enough.
And:
Nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Mary knew that Anna’s birthday was approaching. During a class break, she volunteered to have a party at her house and to bake Anna a cake and what was her favorite kind, anyway?

“No, Mary. You’ll do nothing. Please. I beg you.” Mary seemed baffled, but she capitulated. She let the matter drop.

They spent the rest of the German class in pairs, pretending to telephone each other.

“D
O YOU KNOW WHAT
it’s like?” Anna spoke quickly, breathlessly. “It’s like having so much feeling in your body that you
become
the feeling. And when you become the feeling, it’s not
in
you anymore. It
is
you. And the feeling is despair. I almost can’t remember a time I didn’t live here. But even my walk gives me away as an American. I’ve forgotten how to think in dollars and yet I barely understand how to count in francs—my husband’s a goddamn banker!” Every thought Anna had, she had at once. “Am I in Hell? I must be in Hell. I don’t know what else you want me to say. I can cook and shop and read and do simple math and I can cry and I can fuck. And I can fuck up. Can I love? What does that mean? What does that matter? What do I matter? All I ever do is make mistakes.”

Doktor Messerli inched herself to the edge of her chair and urgently motioned her to keep talking. They were close to a breakthrough, she was sure.

Y
ES
, A
NNA HAD ASKED
that nothing be done for her birthday, but Mary, sweet Mary, wouldn’t hear of it so she suggested an outing in lieu of a party. Both families. A day of minimal but undeniable celebration.

“Besides,” Mary offered, “it’s something we might have done anyway.” So Anna conceded as Anna often did.

The Benzes had arranged to meet the Gilberts at a quarter past eleven at Stadelhofen. From there, it would be a half-hour train ride to Rapperswil, where the families would walk around for a while, then board a boat that would carry them back to Zürich. The trip would last the afternoon, the boat stopping many times to let people on, to let others off. Mary had packed a basket of sandwiches, beer, sodas, and snacks to enjoy on the ride. A day would be made of this travel and when they returned to Zürich, the Gilberts would come back to the Benzes’ for drinks, a simple dinner, and cake. Ursula stayed home with Polly Jean.

Rapperswil is a picturesque city on the eastern end of the lake about thirty kilometers from Zürich. Built on a Bronze Age settlement, its sinewy alleyways date to medieval times. There’s a castle there and Rapperswil is the home of Circus Knie, the largest circus in Switzerland. Anna had never visited.

The families made easy conversation on the train. Mary talked of volunteering at Max and Alexis’s school, Bruno and Tim spoke of skiing. Anna split her attention between the competing conversations. Max and Charles amused their parents
by telling silly jokes:
Why did the train choke on its food? Because it didn’t choo-choo it!
Anna smiled at her middle child. “What a clever boy you are,” she said, and Charles broke into a proud, pleased grin. Victor sat alone and played with a handheld video game. Alexis had brought a book. Anna tried to engage her in conversation with little success. She asked her about school, about Canada, whether she liked Switzerland or not, if she was enjoying her book. Alexis’s responses were polite but terse. Anna let her be. The child didn’t want to talk. A familiarity flashed before her once again and Anna’s heart reached out invisibly to Alexis’s. Anna said nothing more.

A
NNA SOMETIMES WONDERED IF
Stephen ever thought of her.
Has he forgotten me entirely? Do I ever invade his thoughts? Like a song he can’t shake from his head?
This line of questioning never did her any good. She avoided it most of the time.

But when she couldn’t, she settled on believing that months ago he realized he’d made a terrible mistake but was too timid, too embarrassed, or too frightened to come back to her.
It’s possible,
Anna reasoned. She understood that insurmountable feeling of being penned in, captured and unable to act. Anna had lived in the house of her own inevitability for years. Maybe Stephen had as well. Anna made a choice to believe that this was the reason he’d never called or written.

She knew better, of course. But there were times when she forgot that she knew better and she forgot that she was pretending.

“W
HAT
’
S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
a delusion and a hallucination?”

Doktor Messerli made a noise that relayed her frustration. And that’s what it sounded like, the click of a relay switch closing a circuit. “Hallucinations are sensory. A person sees or hears or smells things that do not exist apart from his own experience. A delusion, per contra, is a false belief. A conviction that someone adamantly holds despite strong evidence to the contrary.” Anna gave herself the rundown. She’d never heard the voice of God or smelled a vase of ghost roses. “A hypochondriac will convince himself he’s dying though every test proves he’s perfectly healthy. Someone else will swear that the government pursues him. Another person might be steadfast in his belief that the object of his most zealous love returns his deep affection even though she does not.”

“I see.” This hit a little nearer to the nail.

“Are you having hallucinations, Anna?”

“No.”

This time, it was the Doktor who answered with
I see.

T
HE SUN SHONE LIKE
a song. The boat skated over silver, glinting water. Anna wore layers but there was a wind and despite the sunshine, she was cold enough to shiver. Bruno saw this and drew her close into him. This was the Bruno she had fallen into a version of love with. Being with the Gilberts brought this out in him. A wonderful, comfortable ease that they could never seem to find when they were alone. Anna was glad in a way she had forgotten how to be. Happiness moved through her body from her head to her mouth to her throat to her chest,
down through her belly to the deadbolt room of her pelvis, where she tended to file her grievances with the world.

Anna took the day for what it was: a gift. A present. In the present. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so glad. On the boat, no one sulked. Alexis set her book to the side when Victor gave her a turn on his game. Both were being kind to their younger brothers. Charles and Max darted around the boat pretending they were pirates. The children drank sodas and the grown-ups had beer and everyone snacked on bags of paprika-flavored potato chips. Bruno stole one kiss, then another. Anna let him. She let him again. Everyone laughed and smiled. Everyone enjoyed the lake.
It is unfair of me to feel so happy. I do not deserve this. This is a mercy I don’t merit.
Anna had a flash of understanding.
This is what they mean when they talk about grace.
She thanked aloud the god she wasn’t sure she believed in. Anna caught Mary checking her watch four times in the span of thirty minutes.
The boat ride lasts two hours,
Anna said and Mary replied,
Oh.

At every
Schiffstation,
a few people boarded and a few others disembarked. The Benzes and the Gilberts made a game of guessing who they were. They decided the young, tall man with the shaved head and his female companion with the black-blue hair were on their fifth date and that an older couple on the ship’s port side were British tourists celebrating a fortieth anniversary, and that the thirtysomething woman smoking a cigarette near the prow nursed a broken heart with solitude and sea spray. Or at least that was the conclusion Anna came to.

At the end of the boat trip, their faces sunburned and stung by lake wind, the families took the tram from Bürkliplatz to the Hauptbahnhof and rode the train back to the Dietlikon station,
all eight of them. It was near six and growing dark. There was cake and champagne waiting at the house.

Anna couldn’t believe how enjoyable, how perfectly pleasant the day had been. She hadn’t expected it to be. She had forgotten that was possible, if ever she had really known.

She was still engaged in the experience of the day’s supple joy when they came up the hill on Hintergasse past the town square and rounded the corner to Rosenweg. On their right, the church parking lot was filled with cars. If Anna noticed this—which she didn’t—she would have assumed that the church was holding evening services. They passed the little playground, walked toward the house, mounted the steps, and opened the door.

The house was dark. Bruno threw the light switch and, after a half-second pause, almost two dozen people yelled the word “Surprise!”

Christ,
Anna thought.
They threw me a fucking party.

The architect of this surprise was obvious. Before she could take stock of the guests, before Anna could rightly register the faces of the people who had come into the house without her personal invitation, Mary leapt into Anna’s line of vision. She jumped around and clapped in the manner of a jack springing from his box when the handle’s been cranked.