Home Leave: A Novel (6 page)

In her telling of Liesel’s garden, the woman’s tone has changed, grown wistful, and her face has softened into sadness. She turns to Elise with a hungry look. “Do you want to see Frau Kriegstein’s plants?” It is an order.

Elise follows the woman to the room’s middle aisle, where about twenty potted plants—rhododendron, azaleas, begonias—bloom beautifully, on a shelf marked
Kriegstein
. “It was terrible to watch Frau Kriegstein being sick.
Krebs.
She always had the best garden, always a nice, polite customer. She came to the garden even when she was very weak. Last winter, she would visit me here, check on her flowers. But to make such a birthday party now, it is
Unsinn
.”

Looking around the room, at the quiet order of the plants, everything in its place, Elise can understand why the woman would feel terrified by the chaos of the tipsy festivities happening in the garden nearby. She remembers the same look in her father’s eyes, regarding the wild chatter of his offspring at the dinner table, the obvious relief on his face when they excused themselves, one by one, to do homework or watch TV.

The woman looks at Elise sharply. “You were a friend of Frau Kriegstein? I never knew she was speaking English.”

Caught again. Elise tries her best to shrug helplessly and smile. She lifts the letter from her pocket. “It was a mistake,” she says. “My name is Elise Kriegstein. The little boy—Frau Kriegstein’s son?—came to my house with this.”

The woman swiftly takes the envelope from her. As she unfolds the letter, shaking her head, Elise regrets having showed it to her.

“What does it say?” Elise asks, her voice unconsciously dropping to a whisper, as the woman reads silently.

“It is from Liesel’s mother,” the woman announces, and then, unnecessarily: “To Liesel. The stupid old woman, she thinks you have some way of connection to her daughter, because of the names. She saw your last name on your building’s directory.”

“But why? How?”

The woman shrugs. “She is strange. She is—how do you say it—suspicious? No: superstitious. Believing in spirits, connections. Ever since Frau Kriegstein dies, she is getting crazier, the way old people do—my aunt was the same. Talking to the plants, talking to her dead daughter, telling the little boy ghost stories. He believes her, of course. Such people should be in an
Altenheim
, not out on the street, giving letters to strangers. But she is not from around here,” she finishes, and shrugs, as though that explains everything.

The woman returns to the letter. “Ah, wait—this is beautiful.
Großartig.
Listen,” she commands, as though Elise were her student. “Liesel’s mother quotes here a poem by Rilke: ‘
Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter
Dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht—
’”

Elise is unwilling to admit that not a word of this makes sense to her, but the woman is already translating, in her pedantic tone. “It means something like ‘Be in front of all separating, as if it is already behind you.’” She pauses, searching for the English words. “Like the winter, which is leaving.”

Elise nods politely and the woman continues reading. “
Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter, daß überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.
” She frowns, struggling with the translation: “For under winter—is a winter so long lasting—that…” She sighs and gives up. “I don’t know. Too complicated. Something with winter and
überstehen
…surviving.”

“A good poem for a greenhouse,” Elise interrupts, feeling witty.

“Where are you from?” the woman asks abruptly.

“America,” Elise says.

“Ha! Hollywood!” the woman shrills.

As Elise is trying to find a subtle way out of the conversation, the woman removes scissors from her pocket and heads to a trellis smothered in honeysuckle vine, which Elise has not seen until now. The woman clips a short piece of the vine, with six pale, buttery blossoms, and hands it to Elise. “From your
Heimat
,
oder
?” she asks, smiling unnervingly. “I can smell it on you.”

“Thank you,” Elise says, frightened now, but clutching the honeysuckle (a shade lighter than the one that grows in Vidalia, in the Eberts’ backyard, close to the ravine) as though it were her plane ticket home. She holds out her other hand. “Can I have the letter to Liesel, please, so I can give it back to them?”

“Oh no,” the woman says, nonchalantly. “I keep it.”

“But—”

“It is none of your business!” the woman cries, in a sudden rage, waving the letter. “Like you said, you are a mistake!” She calms herself and looks away. “I am sorry. But I loved her too, you understand? In your country, you are quick to love,
oder
? It is easier to talk about love in English than in German.”

For a moment, in the wake of this awkward outburst, both women are silent, and then Elise clears her throat, preparing to go. But the woman speaks first, in a low tone, almost to herself. “Frau Kriegstein, before she falls sick, has the same hair like you.
Locken.
” And suddenly, as quick as a garden snake, the woman’s hand is reaching out towards Elise’s face, fingering one of her curls. Despite the heat of the greenhouse, the woman’s dirty gardening glove, which glances Elise’s cheek, is cold, and Elise shivers before startling to movement, drawing back violently. Unperturbed, the woman smiles, a bullying grin that Elise remembers from the older girls in high school, taunting her in the cafeteria. Her cheeks hot, Elise snatches the envelope from the woman’s grasp. The second it leaves her fingers, the woman cries out but does not protest further. They stare at each other for a second, and then the woman lets out a bitter cackle.

“You Americans. Always having to win, always hungry for the happy ending. The liberators.”

“The letter was delivered to me,” Elise says evenly.

“
Ein Fehler.
It does not belong to you. But that has not stopped you before.”

Elise is both bored and irritated by this thinly veiled political critique, and moves towards her coat. “I should get going.”

“Of course!” the woman begins moving to another aisle, where she picks up a spade and, with a manic energy, starts digging around the roots of a rhododendron bush. “Get going, get going! I am also busy! I have fifty gardens to keep alive! What do you have to do,
Hausfrau
?” she spits. “Who do you have to keep alive?”

Elise, holding her stomach protectively, as though to protect the unborn from such venom, hurries away, as repulsed now by the gaudy blossoms as she was enchanted when she first entered the greenhouse. She considers tossing away the honeysuckle at the gate to the other garden but thrusts it in her pocket instead, next to Liesel’s letter.

Back in the first garden, the picnickers are gone, and only the boy, the grandmother, and a few cake crumbs remain. The boy is asleep in the old woman’s lap. The grandmother gathers Elise in one look and then shakes the boy, who moans. “
Los,
” she says. The boy opens his eyes and looks at Elise, full of longing. Elise opens her arms to him and he burrows into her, nestles against her neck.

“
Es ist kalt,
” the grandmother states, as pragmatic as ever, and begins marching off, jerking her head, indicating that the two follow her.

The sky is pinkish. Elise feels more tired than she can ever remember feeling. She wants to lay her head down on the picnic table, but the grandmother looks back at her and shakes her head no. Elise recalls what the woman in the greenhouse said about the grandmother’s dementia. She was wrong, Elise thinks. I trust this old woman more than I trust myself. Elise feels for the letter in her pocket. I will translate the letter, Elise thinks. I’ll spend the next week at home with the dictionary, skipping German class, poring over the looping letters. I will read it aloud to Liesel. It is an unhinged idea, Elise knows, but to live so far from home, in Germany, is just as unhinged. That’s what being foreign is: being lonely enough to follow a small boy through a city, unbalanced enough to believe you can help a dead woman receive her mother’s letter. Ironic, Elise thinks, that the visions she craved so badly back in Vidalia as a child, thinking if she prayed hard enough, she could glimpse what others sometimes claimed they witnessed—a holy light, the voice of Christ—never came. It is only now, in Hamburg, where she feels herself so lost, that the uncanny unfurls, godlessly, in spring’s saturated colors, throbbing with secular love.

The grandmother and the boy lead Elise back down the series of gardens slowly, as though she is a recovering invalid. They walk back through the darkened streets, gone dim and busy with the work crowd and dinner preparations, turning corners until they are back at Elise and Chris’s apartment. Elise can see the lights on in their apartment; Chris must be home.

“
Tschüß, meine Liebe,
” the grandmother says (or does she say “Liesel”?), and pinches Elise’s cheek. The boy looks up forlornly at Elise and grudgingly accepts a hug; he is angry that she is leaving. Elise is also afraid to go, until the grandmother gives her a tough little shove and turns away with the boy. Elise considers following them, but the baby does not want to and kicks roughly. It is Elise’s first intuition of her child’s stubborn will, opposed to hers. It shocks her into movement. Elise walks to the door, rings the bell, and slowly climbs the stairs to her glowing foreign home.

C
hris likes to travel. Likes every last detail of it, from tenderly laying his ironed oxford shirts in his suitcase; to the sudden tilt backwards when the plane lifts—which body memory greets with anticipatory joy, from a jerky Chariton county fair roller coaster, August 1969—to the quiet melancholy of opening the hotel room door; to Chris’s pounding heart, greeting a conference room full of foreign customers the next day, hoping the words come out right.

What he likes best of all, though he would never admit this, is exiting the airport’s baggage claim in a foreign city and seeing his name on a handwritten sign—typically black marker, all caps—held high by the chauffeur. A curt nod from Chris, and the driver assumes his heavy luggage, leads him to lush leather seats. Chris relaxes, savoring the city humming silently by, the feeling of easy power, even if it leaks away as soon as he exits the car. That first glimpse of his own name seems to confirm everything, the same way seeing his mother’s handwriting on his T-shirt tags at 4-H camp, in her cramped cursive, gave Chris a safe assurance of return. Those signs the drivers hold now remind him he is heading somewhere big, somewhere inevitable.

There is a certain kind of luck that Chris has learned, over the years, to hone. An instinct in his gut, the kind you can’t overthink, because it might dissolve. Chris played basketball from middle school all the way up through college, and that’s where he first learned about the luck and how to milk it. When you walk onto a court with that light certainty in your insides, your hands shaky with eagerness to palm the leather, the one thing you cannot, you must not, do is meet the eyes of this luck. The trick is not to question it and not to believe too strongly in it. It’s like a shy dog or a pretty girl: let them know you’re interested, and you can forget it. Instead, focus on grabbing rebounds and making sharp passes, get back quick on defense, and soon enough the luck will wind its way into your jump shot. Then you hold your follow-through, hear the swish, feel how scoring makes your calves go weightless. Luck paid Chris’s tuition at the University of Georgia, gave him an engineering degree and a bad knee.

Chris realizes he’s had a lot of luck so far. Getting out of Chariton, Indiana, for one. Not waking up at four a.m. every day like his father, not breaking his back trying to coax fertility out of the stubborn, cold ground, or rain out of sullen skies. Meeting Elise—stroke of luck number two—on the night of November 17, 1977, at a party after a basketball game. Elise was primly sipping 7UP, while everyone around her did keg stands and took generous bong hits. Chris, still elated from the night’s victory against their rivals, Georgia Tech, floating on a three-beer buzz, had sauntered up to Elise and struck up a conversation, all casual confidence. He was shocked by her delta drawl; she’d looked so alone and vulnerable, leaning against the wall, that Chris had assumed she was a foreign exchange student or at least a fellow midwesterner. Her sweetly sassy attitude (it turned out she was a Georgia Tech fan and lived in Atlanta; she’d been dragged along to this party by a girlfriend) combined with her unabashed beauty (he’d noticed plenty of other guys checking her out, taking gulps of whatever they were drinking, trying to summon courage for the kill) and the irresistible innocence she exuded, sucking her straw like a ten-year-old, culminated in what Chris’s coach would have called a “triple threat,” against which Chris, who had just played one of the best defensive games of his life (four blocks, five steals, fifteen rebounds), was utterly helpless.

To Chris’s astonishment, their talk that night led to a date a week later, which led to more dates, in Atlanta and Athens, which led to writing letters every day when Chris left to study abroad in Stuttgart, which led to Elise visiting Chris, Chris proposing, and everything that has unfolded since: marriage, a tiny row house in London, a chilly apartment in Hamburg, a baby girl, a small brick house in Philadelphia. Chris is still unsure why Elise chose to be with him, aside from his aforementioned luck. Elise doesn’t know the only girlfriends Chris had before, back in Indiana, were Tanya White, with buckteeth, and June Schiller, whose only distinguishing feature was her body’s uncanny square shape.

Aside from Elise, the only other woman Chris has slept with—a
nother
fact he has kept to himself—was the only one who might have vied for Elise’s beauty: Twyla Lincoln, the little sister of his teammate Ben. After Chris and Twyla’s one-night stand, which began with a party on the edge of campus that got kind of wild and ended in Chris’s dorm room, Twyla never spoke to Chris again. Chris wasn’t sure if it was because he wasn’t cool enough or because he was white. Perhaps they were one and the same. Until Twyla, he hadn’t been aware that racism could work the other way, too. And though he’d felt disappointed and hurt when he saw her with Dontelle, another teammate, at the next party, he’d also felt a little relieved: his parents had never forgiven his younger sister, Beth, for attending school dances with John Young in high school, and he was just Catholic.

Chris counts his career now as his third major slice of luck. The fact that he flies first-class and he’s under thirty-five. The trust his boss puts in him, how quickly Chris has risen in the ranks at Logan since he started six years ago. Of course, Chris knows it can go downhill just as quickly as it got good. That’s what happened at UGA: the team improved but Chris got worse, or maybe just stayed the same, until he was benching games as a senior that he would have played twenty-six minutes of as a freshman. And that was before the knee injury.

But at least things with Elise feel steady, Chris tells himself, especially now, with their little girl, Leah. Chris loves the glint of his wedding ring; it calms him when he’s far away and gives him a noble, if not primal, feeling of protectiveness, as if traveling to meet customers in India were akin to hauling a boar back to the cave for his family’s sustenance. When he pictures Elise, he sees her rocking Leah in silvery moonlight, even though Leah, at fourteen months, is nearly too big to be rocked like that. Even back in Hamburg, when Leah was a newborn, Chris rarely saw Elise holding Leah at night, since they always went to her in shifts. He slept like a stone during Elise’s turns to comfort the crying. On his own shifts, too tall for the rocking chair, Chris’s sprawling, near-seven-foot body had felt feminine holding the baby, humming off-key. After the initial agony of waking, once Leah had drifted off to sleep, Chris had enjoyed those unearthly moments with his baby daughter. Sometimes, he had wished he could stay home with Leah the next day and send Elise to the office in his stead, urges he always dismissed with embarrassment in the morning light.

These days, Chris wishes that Elise would display a little more gratitude for his breadwinning, or at least make some show of missing him when he has to travel for work. More like his mother, who heaves tragic, disapproving sighs over the phone whenever Chris announces an international trip, and who was horror-struck when he went south for college. Instead, Elise cheerfully waves good-bye, doesn’t even offer to pack his suitcase. It’s a recent development: in Hamburg she wept whenever he had to take overnight trips to the London office. But that was probably just pregnancy hormones, and it’s good that she’s independent, he chides himself, as the plane bounces onto the tarmac in Bombay; he’s lucky it’s not the other way around.

It’s true: Elise loves it when Chris travels. She knows this is a strange reaction; the other mothers in Leah’s playgroup always give Elise pitying looks when she says Chris is out of town. But Elise feels something in herself shake loose when he departs. She is relieved to be back in America; the loneliness that was a constant whisper to their ten months in Hamburg reasserts itself less frequently now and seems to strike when Chris is in town, rather than when he’s gone.

Part of it has to do with accountability: when Chris is around, Elise feels observed. Before, this struck her as one of the most beautiful things about marriage, this daily witnessing. Now it feels intrusive. Elise’s repatriation was accompanied by a new sense of recklessness. In Germany, she had been so careful: cautious not to offend, not to mispronounce, not to leave a bad impression. Here the stakes are much lower: in Wynnside, a small suburb of Philadelphia, Elise feels deliciously anonymous.

Elise tried to explain this new feeling to Chris, hoping he would relate. It came up over a discussion about finding a babysitter for Leah. Elise was going to need some hours each day away from Leah, which Chris didn’t understand. She hadn’t craved this in Hamburg, he pointed out. But now she did, she responded. Why? She tried to describe the new feeling, the new urges, the new apathy towards mothering that reminded her of the clarinet when she was twelve. For three years Elise had devoted herself to the instrument, and then one day she simply couldn’t summon the desire to practice. She never missed it afterwards, either.

Elise omitted mentioning this final comparison to Chris, sensing it would not go over well. In truth, this inclination towards both overachievement and abandonment frightens her: you can’t just drop a child the way you drop band class. She still loves Leah deeply, of course. But she just can’t give from the same place that she used to.

Do you miss teaching? Chris asked. Elise nearly said yes out of wanting this to be the case. But she doesn’t miss teaching, at least not yet. She believes it will all come back: her relentless sense of obligation and responsibility, her tireless caretaking, her real
self
, in other words. But for now the absence of all these duties feels wonderful—when Chris is gone, that is. When he is there, the new, irresponsible impulses feel embarrassing, like growing breasts at eleven: a private development made public. Then Elise feels ashamed by her new habits: Since when is she someone who leaves a fourteen-month-old with a sitter to have lunch, alone, at an expensive restaurant downtown? But her craving for these clandestine indulgences—she only glancingly mentions them to Chris—overwhelms her hesitation.

Elise discovered masturbation when she was fourteen. She shared a room with Ivy, who was seven. It was the year she tried to tell her mother about Paps. It was the year Elise masked herself with religion the way other girls in her grade masked themselves with makeup, the year Elise burned all her Beatles records at the summer revival. But even as she was desperately trying to give her soul to Jesus, Elise discovered that when she pressed down hard on one part, sucked her muscles in, and put a finger inside, elation happened, which Paps’s wandering grip had never wrought. Glorious. When Ivy was asleep, Elise would explore. When Ivy was awake, Elise’s impatience made her feel rackingly guilty. Something similar feels like it is happening with Chris now. The only place that Elise feels natural with him lately is in the bedroom. She is wilder, hungrier. He is both excited and baffled by it, she can tell. Yet she cannot bring this ease or abandon to breakfast the next morning—she sits as stiffly through cereal as though their sex the night before were a one-night stand.

Elise has begun traveling, too, when Chris travels. Since her father suddenly passed away, she has some money and a private account. Given Charles Ebert’s extreme thriftiness, it is not a small sum, yet it feels sinful to spend it on beach cottages on the New Jersey shore, or a night in New York City. This sinfulness is one of Elise’s greatest pleasures. Sometimes she brings Leah along; more often she leaves her with the babysitter, Becky. So far, Chris hasn’t caught on: Elise has trained Becky to say, if Chris calls, that Elise is out shopping or with a girlfriend. If he calls at night, Becky is not to pick up the phone. Elise knows it’s a game of Russian roulette, that her dalliance is bound to be discovered. What a pitiful thrill, she occasionally thinks. I’m not even having an affair. But she loves the feeling of hurtling misbehavior, of irrational rebellion, even if she can’t quite pin down what or whom she’s rebelling against. And so, when Chris announces a business trip, Elise’s first response is a slow-spreading smile, imagining where she will wind up, picturing starched sand dunes in midmorning light.

For the past two days, and for an indulgent two more, Elise is staying in a small bed-and-breakfast in the Poconos. She wakes to a fresh pine breeze and saunters over to the main house for breakfast. The only other guests are a fidgety old couple celebrating their golden anniversary, according to Elise’s eavesdropping. Over French toast, Elise slowly reads the
New York Times
, thoughtfully left on each table by their perfectly invisible hosts.

After all those months surrounded by German, Elise is still thrilled by the English language surrounding her, even though they’ve been back in the States for more than a year. Since repatriating, she has taken to reading in an entirely new fashion. Growing up in Mississippi, brains were the equivalent of crooked teeth, and about the time Elise got braces she also picked up a laugh that put people at ease, reassured them they never had to feel intimidated in her presence. There were smart girls in her class, but their fates at school dances were a clear enough warning, and the last time Elise was back in Vidalia, she’d run into Macy Lane Cargill, who’d won every spelling bee, working in the local library. So that was where intelligence got you below the Mason-Dixon Line: shelving cookbooks and shushing teenagers.

But here in the Northeast it is different. The women read, have fierce opinions about politics, and cancel their husbands out at the polls. Elise has to admit she likes the lifestyle section of the paper better than the front page, but she has begun to feel an unprecedented hunger for the news. Part of it, perhaps, is simply being back in
her
country, reading about
her
president, feeling permission to feel invested again.

It is a relief, too, to be away from the German criticism of everything American: the pettiness of Hollywood, the rampant consumerism, Reaganomics, the Iran-Contra affair—even the American habit of smiling, as Elise had learned over one particularly painful dinner with Chris’s boss and his wife, back in Hamburg.