Home Leave: A Novel (20 page)

Between the singing group and my various video game avatars, I started to go a little bit batty. It was around this time that I began losing Mom, or maybe she began losing me, over the phone. “Losing” isn’t the right word, exactly. It was more that we weren’t connecting in the way that we had for the last couple of years. Her voice sounded distant to me when I filled her in on my day; her responses on a particularly challenging video game scene, in which I’d played a Scottish elf princess, struck me as hurtfully halfhearted. But then again, that’s how most things had begun to feel: the sun could be out, shining full blast, and it would seem as paltry to me as weak winter light; the laughter of strangers on the street sounded sarcastic and cruel; and German grammar felt like an elaborate practical joke on my tongue.

I was two years in, and the honeymoon phase with Berlin was over. I realized how wildly alone I was. I’d seen other young expats suffer this epiphany, and show up to dinner parties with shy, secretive looks, as though they were about to announce a pregnancy. “I’m going back home,” they’d say, when we were all drunk enough. “I’ve had it.” But which home would I return to? Singapore—to do what? Teach at the American school? Atlanta? What did I know about Atlanta, aside from where the best hiding spots were in my old backyard? My happiness in Berlin thus far, I realized, had involved turning it into a kind of cocoon. Swaddled in foreign anonymity, surrounded by acquaintances but no real friends; the memories from my former homes—ballroom dancing with Sophie in Shanghai, petals falling in a London park—were as present as the Soviet architecture lining Karl-Marx-Allee, or the bakery down the block. The calls with Mom were a kind of life support, keeping all the old places close, as she and I summoned Sophie in each other. It was safe. It worked, until it didn’t work anymore. I was growing increasingly sullen on the phone, and when I spoke, my voice trembled, to my horror. I sounded like a pouty four-year-old, self-absorbed and incoherent. And poor Mom—bewildered, exhausted—would ask, again, what was wrong. At my inevitable “I don’t know,” she would sigh and ask if it was okay if she put me on speakerphone; Dad had just come home.

Back when we lived in Atlanta, when we would drive up and visit Grandma and Grandpa in Indiana, Sophie and I had two favorite games, both of which involved recording our voices. The first was taping ourselves on a Fisher-Price recorder and then dying laughing when we played it back out loud. The other game required one person to sing along to a Walkman with earphones on, while the other rated her. This game was genius because it was equally enjoyable for both participants: it was really fun to sing, as though you were Bonnie Raitt, and hilarious to hear the other person sing as though they were good at it, when they sounded awful. At the end of the song, the one who had listened would give the other a score (our games were rarely without some kind of competition) and we would switch.

Mom’s voice: warm, with a tinge of southern, concerned, always ready to laugh, to empathize, to analyze. Her voice was my connection to home, a combination of notes, a nearly internalized timbre. Before the friction arrived, the dissonance, our Skype calls would be one, two, three hours long. The delight of your own echo, a few notes higher, harmonizing.

I loved the singing group for many reasons. It was an unapologetically nostalgic, cheesy connection to America: half the songs we sang, selected from enormous binders on the whims of the participants, were American songs I had despised growing up, the kind of thing you hear when you’re eating a burger at Wendy’s: “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” and “Bridge over Troubled Water.” I adored these songs now, walked around Kreuzberg humming them, and got choked up when I sang them with the group.

It was also an intimate way to hang out with Germans without speaking German. To sing next to someone can be more communicative than speaking to them, letting your voices blend and rise together. I began loving the German songs we sang there, too: “
Abends will ich schlafen gehen
,” “
Koffer in Berlin
,” or the lovely Yiddish hit, “
Bay mir
bist du sheyn
.” It calmed me down, kept me in the present tense.

I had always been a little embarrassed of my voice growing up, compared to Mom’s; she was so clearly talented. But here, my voice felt strong, sure, and steady. In a country where I was constantly whispering, unsure of the German declination in a sentence, or the proper article, I sang loud.

The singing group is where I eventually met Matthias, a shy documentary filmmaker who sang along with the enthusiasm of a thirteen-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert. I didn’t really pay much attention to him until we sat next to each other one day. There was a gentleness to the way he held the sheet music to “Born to Be Wild,” his hands shaking ever so slightly, and how he didn’t wipe away my spit when it landed on the paper accidentally. How he toasted me with the inexpensive red wine the singing group drank together, as we looked each other in the eyes, true to German tradition. He had grown up in East Germany and was utterly unenamored of the US. I liked that. He had a dog he called Martin Luther in a ground-floor apartment in West Berlin, in a quiet corner of Schöneberg, and a year after we first kissed, on the U-Bahn ride home from the singing group, I moved in with him. He often worked late in his shared studio space downtown, and I had the dog and the apartment to myself, where I watched the linden tree in the courtyard turn yellow, petted Martin Luther, and practiced my lines.

Matthias had a quiet air of loss about him, even though none of his friends or family had passed away, except his grandma on his mother’s side. He was an unabashed Romantic who shot films about the lives of rural farmers in Romania and about disappearing languages and crumbling churches. We had our first fight about American farming: I somehow found myself defending large-scale industrial farming, something I was normally against. His naive insistence that it would be possible to go one hundred percent organic by 2030 and his insinuation that it was the American hunger for profit that prevented it had me channeling my grandfather, defending the use of insecticides and corn subsidies.

But most of the time we drew the line at gentle teasing and concentrated our wrath on shared enemies: the architectural nightmare of Potsdamer Platz, the hipsters taking over Neukölln, and the predictable rich-people babble of seventy-year-olds in Charlottenburg over
Kaffee und Kuchen
. Martin Luther, with his dark eyes and honeyed fur, kept us from being too negative, whining for a walk on beautiful fall days, coaxing us to Tiergarten and Schlachtensee, making us stare and be silent.

When Matthias asked me to marry him, my fourth year in Berlin, I realized how hollow my easy declarations of permanence in Berlin had been. A large part of me had never bargained on actually settling. Berlin had been somewhere to recover from the bruises of Shanghai, and the city’s cosmopolitanism had soothed my craving for other wanderers like me. It was similar to how I pictured the different levels in Lavender’s video games: I would earn enough points through my language skills and my voice-over gigs to pass the Berlin level and move onto the next one, who knows where. It was horrifying and delicious to truly imagine staying, to become an immigrant instead of an expatriate. On the one hand, I felt like I had finally arrived; on the other, I worried that telling myself I had found home in a foreign country was pure denial, a way of constantly reopening the wounds of homelessness.

On the nights it felt like the apartment wouldn’t get warm enough, when Matthias was shooting a documentary in some forgotten Hungarian village, and when I couldn’t get “The Sound of Silence” (which Alex, from our singing group, always insisted on singing) out of my head, I would get Martin Luther up onto the sofa with me and try to ascertain what Sophie would say about the whole situation.

Now that I wasn’t talking to Mom as much, I really wished I had Sophie around; sometimes I felt like I missed her now more than I ever had before. Not to do wedding-prep stuff with me, or be my maid of honor; I didn’t care about any of that. But to help me find home again. To know whether or not it was okay to settle, to leave our family, our country of four, to start a new family, with Matthias, in Germany. And of course I knew, somewhere in my bones, that she would have been happy for me, as the tired old cliché went. But I needed to hear her say it out loud.

F
or the past three days, Elise has walked around with the taste of blood in her mouth. Literally. On Tuesday, at the age of fifty-seven, she was summoned to the dentist for a thirteen-year-old’s surgery: a wisdom tooth extraction. Her father had performed them on many of her friends, the richer ones, when she was a teenager. She’d envied their convalescence: the days in bed, the ice cream, the attention. She had begged him to take hers out, too, but he’d insisted that her teeth were growing in perfectly and there was no reason to fuss with nature.

And now those teeth, or the holes where they used to be, ache like hell.
See, Daddy?
she thinks. You could have saved me all this pain. Which is ridiculous, of course; it would have just come earlier, and at his hands. She feels a surge of missing for her mother, wishes Ada were still around to comfort her, the way she always pampered her children when they got the flu or a strong cold. Ada had never second-guessed their ailments, even when it was obvious they were trying to skip a geography test or avoid seeing an awkward date in the cafeteria. A familiar chill settles over Elise, as this cherished vision of her mother is corrected and clouded by the one time that Ada didn’t believe in what was ailing her daughter. “You shouldn’t tell such tales, Elise.” Elise hates this reckoning, especially since Ada’s death two years ago.
You’re still dragging that
around?
Ada murmurs in Elise’s mind, her mellifluous southern drawl sharpening to a bark:
Well, get over it!

Elise lifts a hand to her throbbing jaw. She imagines this is what men must endure, at least a couple of times in their lives: getting punched in the face. Has Chris ever been in such a fight? She couldn’t say. Surely an elbow thrown in a basketball game would have done similar damage. Without the routine physical violence of being assailed by cramps and blood every month, she thinks, men have to take it out on each other.

Her own bleeding stopped four years ago. Elise had mourned and celebrated menopause as a rite of passage. Or at least that was how her friend Laura, who always wears turquoise and knows how to phrase things like that, had put it. Laura made menopause sound like you were Aphrodite in ancient Greece, lying in a pomegranate grove, relishing your own ripening (also Laura’s phrasing), and not yourself, stuck in traffic on the Beltline during an NPR donor drive, frantically turning up the air-conditioning. For Elise, menopause simply felt like a dull recognition of age, the way that her current diet of soup and smoothies seems like a cruel foreshadowing.

God, she feels out of it. The dentist forbade her coffee for three days, and without her seven a.m. cup, nothing comes into focus. She’s also been abstinent from yoga, a morning class she’s been militant about attending three times a week for the past two years. Plus the fact that summer still hasn’t come to Madison, after all the winter they endured, snows up through mid-April. On cool June days like this, overclouded, fallish, her body longs for Mississippi sweat.

In addition to healing from her surgery, Elise is planning a wedding, and she sits at the dining room table now, bridal magazines strewn across the knotted pine surface. Not her own, though when she attended her lesbian friend Paulina’s wedding last year, at the arboretum, it had looked like a lot more fun to throw a wedding after fifty, to just hang out and get drunk and talk to whomever you wanted to talk to, and to not have all kinds of crap in your hair. To wear sandals, not high heels. Or maybe that was just a perk of being lesbian.

Elise is planning Leah’s wedding, or at least helping her plan it, although Leah hasn’t been returning her phone calls or emails about caterers and flowers and music. Which is fine with Elise, as she has decided to interpret Leah’s silence as carte blanche and is going for everything she would have had at her own wedding in Mississippi thirty-three years ago, if Charles Ebert hadn’t been counting every penny. Hence flowers from the Kriegsteins’ former homes—h
oneysuckl
e and tiger lilies to evoke Atlanta, bougainvillea and orchids, flown up from Florida, to suggest Singapore. A soloist and a string quartet
and
a classical guitarist at the reception. A live band
and
a DJ. Elise is taking care to inflect it with what Leah loves too, of course: a couple of W. H. Auden readings during the service, and a regional, all-organic buffet.

And even though she knows she shouldn’t—but her teeth hurt and isn’t she allowed a little bit of wiggle room on such a day?—she wonders what it would be like if she were planning Sophie’s wedding. (
Not instead of yours,
she tells Leah, in her head.
Don’t accuse me of that.
) Who would Sophie be marrying? Someone gallant, someone all-American, someone who said “ma’am” at the end of his sentences. Which would make you dismiss him, Elise reminds herself. But she had always pictured someone like that for Sophie: someone traditional, strong, someone who could stand up to Sophie’s stubbornness and her glory.

Is it healthy to think of Sophie as often as she does? Since moving back to Madison with Chris after their second stint in Singapore, Elise, after years of teaching at American schools, has reinvented herself as an interior designer, one of the most sought after in Madison, according to the
Wisconsin Monthly
: “thanks to her natural artistic streak, her years abroad in Asia, and her southern eccentricities.” The last bit had sounded like a backhanded compliment to Elise, which she gets a lot of up here. The smile, the smooth compliment, which hurts you in the gut only later, as you’re driving home. Midwesterners are afraid of southerners, she knows. Afraid of southern whites, for being the presumably racist descendants of slave owners, and afraid of southern blacks, for being black.

What does that have to do with Sophie? Ah yes, Elise’s mind snags on the connection: interior design. Her new career has often offered Elise a fresh insight into grief: its awkward untidiness, its stuttering expressions of lost love. The room at the back of the house, the one her clients inevitably show last: the son who committed suicide, his 1996 Nirvana posters peeling off the walls. Or the closet full of a dead wife’s Neiman Marcus dresses; the unfinished baby room before a miscarriage, half-painted. Elise takes special pride and even, to some degree, pleasure in assisting her clients with these rooms, these secret aches. The magazine profile of Elise didn’t mention it, but this is her truest talent: guessing at the people who live, or lived, in the rooms she’s remaking, intuiting their desires, their shames, who they want to look like, who they want to forget, and who they are. Elise always tries to steer the design back to who they are.

She’s also partial to the couples who’ve just moved to the city, the ones who will relocate again in another three years. She walks through the rooms with the wives, discussing where they can fit all the antiques from their former homes in Zimbabwe, Rio, and Bangkok. Sometime she surprises herself, however, by being short with these women, usually when they start talking about how thrilled they are about this latest move, about how much they love traveling, and, more than anything, how great it is for their husbands’ careers. Liars, Elise thinks, and gives them a list of local therapists’ phone numbers before she leaves.

Laura doesn’t think that Elise thinks about Sophie too much. Last week, after yoga, she had reached out and grabbed Elise’s hand while they were having bran muffins and Top of the Morning energy shakes at the local health food store.

“You’re still her mother,” Laura said. “Of course you think of her.”

“But fifteen years later—”

“That’s right, Elise,” Laura says firmly, and slightly bossily. “Sophie is twenty-eight now. Not ‘would be’ twenty-eight. She is. And you still have to tend to her, inside.”

Elise always wavers between being comforted by Laura’s convictions and dismissing them as well-meaning bullshit. Laura hasn’t ever lost anyone; she’s just read a lot of self-help books.

Another wave of pain hits Elise in the pit of her mouth. She needs a matinee and some ice cream, she decides, even if it is forty-five degrees outside. Elise gathers her purse and keys and kisses her two yellow Labs on their heads; they thump their tails, as if they want to go for a walk. They don’t. At sixteen and fourteen, they have quite outlived themselves, especially Robo, or, as they now simply call him, the Elder.

That night, Elise opens an email reply from Leah, which reads, “Sounds great, thanks Mom!” Sent from her iPhone. Elise’s email was full of questions; how is “sounds great” an answer to any of those? Elise reads the email out loud to Chris, who is sipping a generous glass of merlot and reading the paper. “Teenagers,” he says, and they laugh. It’s their little joke, that Leah is embarking on an adolescent rebellion now that she avoided at fifteen. Or maybe she was just too wrapped up with Sophie’s death… Elise is making excuses for her again, she knows: Laura’s warned her against it. “She’s acting like a cunt, Elise. Don’t fall for it.” Laura loves to swear; it’s all over the poetry she writes, which is why they won’t print it in their church poetry anthology, even though they attend the most liberal church in Madison. Laura calls it censorship, every year.

Elise wishes, like she does about her wisdom teeth, that the pain of separation with Leah had come earlier, when it was supposed to come. She’s already lost one daughter, and for the last few years, she’s had to deal with a second one drifting off, too, at thirty. But at least they’re having the wedding here, she thinks. Leah and Matthias could have eloped, or been ridiculously European and not gotten married at all. And Elise likes Matthias, who is kind, forthcoming, funny, charming. He has a clipped German accent that reminds Elise of her days in Hamburg, a time she remembers rosily, when she and Chris were deeply in love, in love with their love, and Elise’s pregnancy.

She and Chris pore over potential wedding reception venues: the Mill, a renovated factory downtown; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; Highlands Golf Course, which Elise instinctually dismisses, knowing Leah; Sugarland Acres, a working farm, which Chris vetoes, pointing out the potential for a distracting cow manure odor. They settle, finally, on Quivey’s Grove, a quaint historical estate in the countryside. The photos online boast large, shady elms and a sweet white picket fence, a tiny detail that obscurely sells Elise on the place. How strange, Elise thinks, to be choosing all this for Leah, the way she would lay out the girls’ clothes for the next day in London. She hopes that this passivity on Leah’s part does not extend to her relationship with Matthias. But Leah closed the door on such inquiries with her new
I need some distance
edict, last year.

You’ve got the goddamn Atlantic Ocean,
Elise had wanted to scream.
That’s not distance enough?
How dare Leah say she needed distance? If anyone, Elise was the one who needed distance, from all of the motherly overtime she’d put in: the late-night calls, the empathizing, the tolerating of Leah’s weeping, a sound Elise had grown to find extremely irritating (shuddering sighs, snotty intakes of breath, self-indulgent crying, crying, crying); but that never meant Elise had ever considered distance something you could simply ask for, like a Christmas present.

This is the worst part of being a mother, having to live in the thrall of your child’s tyrant. Women are so fickle, Elise thinks. So kind to men and so willing to sacrifice their relationships with one another. But Elise had never treated Ada that badly, even if she’d deserved it.

Chris looks at her inquisitively. “Enough,” he says. “Let’s get you to bed.”

The next morning, the sun is out, blinding and beautiful. Zack, Robo’s much dumber son, has his chin on the bed, staring at her. His father is curled on the floor, his blond fur whitened in the sunspot. Elise grimaces as the pain comes back, swallows a pill by her bedside, and stares at the room, blinking, trying to bring herself to the day. She’s canceled all her meetings with clients because of her wisdom teeth, which imbues the morning with a summer vacation feel. Elise had lived for summers in Vidalia as a child: days spent at the country club pool, burning your feet on the hot concrete, shrieking in the water, throwing glances at the boys on the lounge chairs opposite, heading home in the quiet, cooler dusk, urging Ivy to come on, we’re almost there.

Elise’s mind alights, briefly, on Ivy. Funny that after all those years of drama—Who’s Ivy dating now? Where’s the band touring? Is Ivy
on
anything? Or is Ivy’s wide smile, her fast talking, her piercing gaze, just Ivy being Ivy?—her little sister’s life has become relatively calm. Ivy has settled in Monticello, a small town not far from Vidalia. She’ll call Elise every few weeks just to chat, not to ask for money or confess her sins, as in the old days. Now she and Elise exchange laughs about their dogs, or Vidalia, or Ada. But one month ago, Ivy had called sounding worked up. In the past, that tone had signaled a downward spiral, but this time it turned out that Ivy had good news.

“Some kids want to make a documentary about Choked by Kudzu,” she said. “They’re raising money on something called Kickstarter to get us back on a reunion tour. They might call you and ask some questions; I don’t know.”

“Is there anything you want me to keep quiet?”

Ivy laughed, her scraping, gravelly laugh, like a car pulling out of a driveway. “Just make me sound glamorous,” she said.

Elise thought, for days, about what she would tell them. Would she mention Ivy’s wild years? The biker boyfriends? She would have the cameras set up in the living room, she decided, and she would sit on Ada’s (reupholstered) couch, one leg tucked demurely underneath her. She would wear her pale lavender cashmere sweater. She would be compassionate, concerned: the responsible older sister surrounded by Asian antiques. Probably the interview would get sidelined by that; they would inevitably want to hear about Singapore and China. She would grant them a tour of the apartment, she decided, if they asked.