Hausfrau (20 page)

“Are you surprised? Are you? Did you guess? Look how surprised you are!”

Yes, yes,
Anna mollified her friend.
Big surprise.
She gave Mary a mechanical hug of thanks and then talked herself silently through the situation.
Okay, Anna, you can manage this. It’s been a good, good day. I can manage this. I can be thankful for this.

Anna scanned the room. Ursula was there as well as Daniela and David, Margrith and Hans and their daughter Suzanne and her husband Guido, neither of whom Anna knew well but who until last year had lived in the cottage behind Hans’s barn with their three little girls, who had also come to the party. Bruno and Anna’s neighbors Monika and Beat were there and Edith and Otto as well. Most of the people from Anna’s German class including Nancy and Ed and the Australian couple she rarely spoke to and the French lady who always smoked during break and the Asians who kept to themselves and who had, in fact, never once uttered a conversant word to Anna had come to the house. And Roland. And Archie. And Karl.

A
FACE SEEN OUT
of context creates confusion. And most paranoiacs have reason to be.

I
T
’
S TRUE
:
A FACE SEEN OUT OF CONTEXT CREATES CONFUSION
. A momentary blip of disorientation. Transitory befuddlement. Personal perception is called into question. Like being in a bar when a priest and a rabbi actually walk in.
Is this a joke?
you ask yourself. The answer is yes. The answer is no. The answer is both.

Is this a joke?
Anna asked herself. Nearly every person in her house that night was divorced from his or her circumstance. Anna’s bearings faltered as the floor beneath her tried to shift and she fought the onslaught of a literal swoon. Mary beamed. She was pleased with herself and still under the impression that when Anna had said
Do nothing for my birthday
what she really meant was
I want you to throw me a party.
A blush rose from Anna’s chest to her face. “I know you said you didn’t want a fuss, but really it was no trouble at all!” Mary waited for a response. Anna offered a weak, tactful smile. “And I wanted to do this! You’re my best friend!”

Mary drew Anna into the living room and put a paper crown on her head. It was pink and sparkly, made for a child.
Anna immediately removed it. Bruno shook hands with the men he knew and before long, Bruno, Guido, Otto, Beat, David, and Karl had beers in their hands and were moving toward the door. When they passed Anna, each wished her happy birthday and gave her a quick hug and the customary three-cheek kiss. When Karl came in for his Anna hissed into his ear,
Why are you here?
To which Karl responded, “She invited Daniela and David and they invited me.” Bruno led the group outside, the children following along. Edith sidled up to Anna and handed her a glass of sparkling wine.

She smirked. “This is rare, Anna.” Anna was inclined to agree. Anna downed the champagne in two quick swallows and handed the glass back to Edith with a face that read
Now go and get me a real drink.
Edith laughed her Edith laugh and slid away into the kitchen.

A moment later she returned with a Scotch. Anna sipped it. The whiskey was peaty and smooth. “Where’d this come from?” She didn’t need to ask.

“He brought it.” Edith gestured toward the other side of the room where Archie stood with Roland and Ed. Anna started to say something but thought better of it. Edith, too, opened her mouth to speak but was interrupted by the arrival of Mary. Anna introduced them. Mary and Edith were, respectively, effusive and detached. This was not unexpected, but at the moment, Anna didn’t have the heart to referee disputing personalities. She excused herself under the pretense of wanting to change out of the clothes she’d worn on the boat ride and slipped into the bedroom, closing the door behind her and leaving Mary and Edith to discover how little they had in common all on their own.

Anna found a nicer sweater and changed into it. She checked
her face—it was still flushed.
I’ll blame it on the Scotch,
Anna thought, and then, reexamining herself,
This will have to do.
A knock on the door startled her, “Who is it?”

“It’s Arch.”

“For fuck’s sake.” Anna huffed to the door, jerked it open, and yanked him inside.

“Anna—,” Archie started, but Anna held up her hand.

“Why are you here?”

“Mary invited me.” Mary was every present problem’s lynchpin. “It would have seemed odd if I hadn’t shown up.”

“Really, Archie?” Anna said. “Go tell that to my tall Swiss husband with his beefy Swiss friends getting drunk in my Swiss front yard.” Anna couldn’t stop saying the word “Swiss” but she didn’t know why. Anna was angry. She had worked very hard to keep her secret life—lives—separate. “I need to get back.” Anna opened the door and shoved past him into the hall.
Am I the only one my secrets make sense to?
Anna asked herself before remembering that she was the only one who knew the secrets in the first place.

The party’s chatter had picked up. People drank and ate and while the party retained a strained, dull ambiance, conversation loosened and people began to relax. Anna lagged back for a second, exhaled deeply, and then steeled in herself a will to interact. She bumped into Edith as she rounded the corner into the den.

“Everything all right, Anna?” She spoke disingenuously.

“Everything’s swell,” Anna said simply.

“You know”—Edith leaned in—“I’ve been surveying the livestock.” Anna made a face. “I’ll bet there’s at least one man we could hook you up with.”

“Edith. Really.” Anna reminded her she had a husband.

“Yes. I suppose you do.” Edith kept on. “What about that fellow Roland?” Anna threw her a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “All right, then. What about the Scotsman? Didn’t I just see him coming out of your bedroom?” There was a dance of light in Edith’s eyes.

“Enough, Edith.” Anna had flint in her voice.

“God, Anna. Lighten up. That Mary’s done her prudish number on you.”

“It’s not prudery,” Anna said. “It’s decorum.”

“Ha, ha!” Edith’s laugh was scattershot. “Trust me, Anna. I know the score.” Anna looked at her and decided that she probably did.

Edith returned Anna’s stare. “Mary, on the other hand …” She trailed off affectedly. Whatever she was going to say, she didn’t need to finish it.

“Be nice to her, Edith.”

“God, Anna. You bore me.”

“Edith, I have guests.”

Edith smirked. “Fine, whatever.” Edith brushed past Anna into the hall, pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, and began to text Niklas, Anna assumed.

“W
HAT
’
S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
an obsession and a compulsion?”

As a child Anna had been prone to counting things. Rocks in her path. Telephone trills. Words in sentences. Sentences in paragraphs. Every action had to be ordered. Every thought both metered and meted out. It was painstaking. She was always on call. It was a fair enough compromise. The counting,
sorting, and classifying helped Anna manage her panics. The psychiatrist decided that it, like Anna’s depression, was a phase. It was. It didn’t persist. She moved past the habit by picking up other habits.

“An obsession is a defense against feeling out of control. A compulsion is the failure of that defense.”

A
T THE END OF
a recent class, Anna asked Roland to translate some graffiti she’d seen scratched onto the back of a train seat. Graffiti in Swiss trains is rare. Anna had copied it onto the back of her German notebook. “ ‘
Was fuer ae huere Schweinerei …
’ What does that mean?”

Roland frowned, shuffled his papers, and started for the door. “It means something not very nice.” Anna stood there waiting for a response. Roland sighed and relented. “It means ‘what a fucking mess.’ ”

E
VERYONE HAS A TELL
. In poker, the underpinning rule for assessing them is this: a weak hand means strong action and a strong hand means weak. Does he shake? Does he glance too furtively at his stack of chips? Does he stare too intently at his cards? Does he throw down his bet like a chef drops a hot potato? Does he or does he not look other players in the eye?

Of course, there are other tells. Your son says
Tell me a story, Mami,
and you settle down next to him and begin:
Es war einmal eine Prinzessin
 … There is show-and-tell, where for perhaps the first time in your life you publicize an inner aspect of yourself, not yet aware of exposure’s possible consequence.
Once, in second grade, Anna brought her favorite doll to class. A bisque-head doll, her hands and feet were also made of porcelain and her hair was human, black and perfect. Anna named her Frieda and while she did not love her in the way that other girls loved their own baby dolls, rocking them and pretending to feed them and scolding them when they were naughty, Anna felt something lovelike. She was fascinated with the curves of Frieda’s face, the softness of her hair, and the lacy pink dress she wore. It was a detached, scientific interest, but a deeply enthralling one nonetheless. And when on the playground that day she dropped her by accident and a boy named Walter—also by accident—stepped on Frieda’s right hand and crushed it to irreparable bits, Anna felt the sort of loss that little girls do when their dolls break and she spent the rest of the day in tears. At home, Anna returned Frieda to her shelf and never played with or examined her again. She’d loved her more than she’d realized.

And then there is Wilhelm Tell, the Swiss national hero who, having refused to bow to the overlord, was forced to shoot an apple off his young son’s head. With a single bolt of his crossbow, he split the apple into perfect halves. If there was a moral to that story, Anna couldn’t say what it was.

H
E NEVER TOLD HER
he did not love her.

But he never told her he did.

A
RCHIE
, M
ARY
, N
ANCY
, R
OLAND
, and Ed congregated near the snacks. Archie had turned his back to Anna, granting her
the wish of extreme discretion. Outside, Bruno and his friends stood in the street looking at Guido’s new car. Bruno balanced Polly on his hip. Daniela leaned in and tickled her. Polly Jean was a dozen smiles and giggles.

The party continued dully. As was the case with Edith’s party, Anna’s had split into halves—though here it was geography and not gender that divided the room: the native friends of Bruno’s stayed outside, and Anna and her foreign acquaintances remained indoors.
How emblematic,
Anna thought.
They’re free to move in open air through their own world. We are locked in a box of otherness. There’s a line of demarcation. They tolerate our presence but will never welcome it.

Mary announced she’d brought board games. Edith groaned from the station she’d assumed on the couch, and Anna shot her a stare she didn’t look up from her cell phone to see. Nancy’s position was sympathetic and she said she’d be up for playing, if other people were. Mary arranged the choices on the coffee table.
Life. Risk. Trivial Pursuit. Sorry.
Even the board games pointed a finger at Anna. She caught Archie’s eye and mouthed
Please leave.
Archie blinked against her request and in turn mouthed
In a bit.
Anna responded by retreating into the kitchen.

A minute later, Mary joined her. “There you are! You’re missing all the fun! If I didn’t know better I’d say you were trying to avoid your own party.”

“Mary,” Anna spoke with exasperation. “I told you I didn’t want a party.”

Anna opened the refrigerator. Inside, a layer cake so large that the refrigerator’s upper shelves and everything that rested upon them had been removed so the cake could fit.
Where’s my
salad dressing? Where’s my mustard? I want to know where my mustard is.
Anna shoved the door closed. The fridge made a dramatic rattle.

“Are you mad, Anna?” There was a tremor in Mary’s voice. Anna didn’t want to hurt Mary’s feelings. She had little choice but to inhale the whole affront. “No, Mary. Not at all. It’s a good surprise. Thank you.”

“W
HAT ARE YOU GOOD
at?” the Doktor asked one afternoon.

Anna scanned her memory, attempting to recall the last time she’d been asked, if ever. She gave a catechumenal answer, born of repetition and praxis.

“I don’t know,” Anna replied, and both women understood this to mean
I’d prefer to not talk about it.

The Doktor pressed. “I’m not letting you off this hook,” she said, then crossed her legs and arms and leaned back in her chair as she settled in for the protracted wait that prefigured any conversation with Anna that required initial coaxing. The windows were closed and the room was damp and clammy. The Doktor redirected. “Okay. Let’s try this one. What is it you
like
to do? Whether you’re good at it I don’t care.”

I like to fuck,
was Anna’s on-the-spot response, though she kept it to herself. Instead she squinted and bit her lip and tried to think past the fucking as the Doktor waited for her to answer.

“When I was
younger
”—Anna drew a pause, emphasizing “younger” as if it were key that a
then
and
now
distinction be understood—“I liked to sew.”

The Doktor clapped her hands together once. “Finally! An
admission!” The levity came off as inconsiderate. “Now. Were you good at it?”

Anna hadn’t sewn in years. The last time she pulled out her machine—
Where was it now, anyway? The attic? The basement?
—Victor was an infant and she still had the determination necessary to cultivate a certain kind of home life. Anna told this to the Doktor.

“And why did you stop?”

Anna mumbled a response along the lines of a lack of time and energy.

“And what’s keeping you from sewing now?”

The answer remained intact. “Time. Energy.” She was empty of both. She offered freely to her men all her free hours. She stored up no stamina for herself.

(Anna had never considered the correlation, but as they sifted through this part of Anna’s past the parallels were evident and the correspondence clear:
I’ve traded sewing hems for sowing hims.
Anna grinned on the inside. There was comedy here. Clarity, too.
Bias. Pattern. Seam.
She could have simply told the Doktor that she was good at word games, and that would have been true, too. But that confession would have wrung out another one: that her wittiest moments were her slyest and most often they served her in the way the ink serves the octopus. Smoke screens, she hid behind them.
Dart. Edge. Bolt.
These days,
needle
had become
need.
A
pleat
was now a
plea.
But Anna startled herself as she thought through this. In this case, these weren’t clever comebacks or coincidences. There were the bad, bald facts, and they aligned exactly.)