Wrecked (11 page)

I leave my worm lab. I go back into the living room and ask, “Does your ass itch, too?”

“Yeah, sometimes, why?” He laughs.

Ha, it’s never boring with his wife. She comes up with some new crap every minute.

Breathlessly hurtling through time.

“Because if it does, that means you have worms, too.” Way to bring up the subject subtly. Typical of me.

“I don’t have worms. What do you mean by ‘also’? You have worms? How do you know? And don’t assume that I have them just because you do!”

Oh, he’s pissed off. I should talk about my worms, not his. I learned that in couples therapy. He obviously doesn’t want to have worms along with me.

“Just before she fell asleep, Liza said something. And now I’m itching like crazy. I just looked it up on Wikipedia and did the tape test.”

“I know the test from when I was a kid. We had worms all the time when we were young.”

“Us too. I thought I’d be able to keep it from happening to my own child. I mean, she’s seven already and never had them. I figured we’d never get them. It’s so disgusting. They move around the whole time—that’s why it itches so bad. Luckily Liza is already asleep, so she doesn’t notice it. There’s no way I can fall asleep and let them eat me up.”

“They won’t eat you up. Call the twenty-four-hour pharmacy and ask whether you can get something for worms without a prescription. Tell them you’ll get the prescription tomorrow and hand it in after the fact.”

Good, very good. At least there’s one clear head here. I call information to find out where the nearest twenty-four-hour pharmacy is, then call the place all worked up. I just can’t believe it’s happening to me. Fucking worms! Inside me!

“Hello there, my name is Elizabeth Kiehl. My family and I have just realized at this late hour that we have nematodes. Is it possible to get something for that tonight, without
a prescription? I could bring a prescription tomorrow after my doctor’s office is open again for the day.”

“I’m afraid I can’t dispense anything without a prescription. All too often people fail to bring a prescription after the fact.”

Just as I suspected would happen in this shitty country. In other places you can just go the gas station and pick something up. Here you have to wait an entire night for the doctor’s office to open. This can’t be happening. A prescription for antiworm medication. What would I do with that—kill myself or someone else? Party? Overdose?

“Okay, thanks anyway. Have a peaceful night.” With scores of dead and dying people lying in front of your fucking pharmacy!

I imagine myself lying awake the whole night with this itching. These creatures are moving around like crazy. They’re squirming and dancing inside me. I think of my ex-boyfriend. He might have worms, too, seeing as our child and I both have them. We were never married, although we would have tied the knot if something horrible hadn’t intervened just as we were about to. Unfortunately we are now bound together forever because of our child. Which is for the most part stressful.

It’s good that our child isn’t confronted with the strain between us. Good that she doesn’t have to anticipate her parents’ needs the way I had to as a child of divorce and as almost all children of broken relationships do—what do Mama and Papa want? Can I speak freely to Papa about Mama? Or vice versa? That puts a great strain on children. You know exactly what you can and cannot talk about, depending on who you are with at any given moment. My ex-boyfriend and I manage it well, though I still feel some aggression inside me. A perpetual wish to be rid of him forever. And rid of the buttons in
me that he pushes. It drives me nuts that we fall into the trap of behaving as if we were still together. As an outsider, my new husband always sees it. And he notices us doing it before I do. Since—because of our child—I can’t really have the complete 100 percent breakup I’d like, we often fall back into those old patterns, the patterns of our relationship. Bad, bad, bad. I’ve been fighting that tendency for seven years. We should get along well for the sake of the child, but not too well—for the sake of my new husband, sure, but also for my sake! Patchwork families are fucking complicated.

But right now I have to figure out whether my ex-boyfriend also has worms. Whether through indirect mouth contact—me kissing our child, him kissing our child—he might have been infected with any of the live worm eggs currently in my body. I have to worry about exterminating not only the worms in my daughter but also any worms in him.

Eight years ago there was a wedding planned with my ex-boyfriend—and I would have said yes, too. That’s why my ex-boyfriend is secretly my ex-husband in my head.

We plan the entire wedding and want to fly everyone to England, where I’m from. It’ll take place outside London, in a pretty old hotel. Big place. The justice of the peace is coming out to the hotel just for us. The dress is being made in Germany—a huge production, actually. It’s being put together from five antique wedding dresses. The tailor is supposed to cut apart the vintage pale yellow, cream, and white lace dresses and then make a new one out of a wild combination of squares from all five old ones.
And since we’re working with the cloth of five dresses, I decided to have the tailor give the skirt a long Princess Diana–style train. As a little English girl, I thought the best wedding of all time was Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s wedding. I looked at pictures of it hundreds of times in a children’s photo book. My ring was supposed to look like Princess Diana’s, too. The train of my dress was so heavy that it needed a reinforced, corsetlike harness at the waist so it wouldn’t droop during the ceremony. I had to go try it on many times.

Everything that a bride and groom could need I buy in our neighborhood. New sets of luggage that for the first time in our lives all matched. That made me feel very grown-up. The makeup: light green eye shadow, pink lipstick, pink blush.

I can get hold of all the superstitious relics right here near us, too.
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe
. The old: in an antique jewelry store I buy a tiny gold and silver pendant—a silver acorn with a gold cap—on a long delicate chain. Since it doesn’t match the rest of the outfit, I’ll wear it under my wedding dress, hidden in my décolletage so nobody sees it. The new: the veil, which, unlike the dress, I bought new. The borrowed item I get from my mother: an ivory necklace. It’s a choker with five strands of ivory beads and, right in the middle of the throat, a big carved ivory rose that looks like a wide-open vagina. The necklace is like something a prostitute in the Wild West might wear. The blue: a classic garter. I left the strange sixpence part to my relatives. They’ll have to get something. Unless they forget. That would be a pity. I’ll stick that in my shoe for the ceremony, since I have to, but I won’t keep it in for the dancing afterward.
I think a sixpence is some sort of old English coin. And since I flip out if I have a grain of sand in my shoe, there’s no way I’ll be able to take having a coin in there for long.

Beautiful bridal underwear, too, all in cream. And in every shop, naturally, I tell them what the things are for. The salespeople seem so happy for us and wish us luck. You really need luck more for the marriage than for the wedding. The marriage lasts a lot longer—it’s supposed to last for years, while the wedding is just one day.

On the day of our departure, I drive to the tailor’s in a taxi and tell the driver to wait because I’m going to get the dress and then continue on to my mother’s in the next town over. Since the dress is so gigantic, I can’t stuff it into a suitcase for the flight. So my mother’s going to transport it by car. She decided to cancel her flight for the sake of the dress and drive to England with my three brothers, Harry, Lukas, and Paul, along with Rhea, Harry’s girlfriend. Harry is the oldest of the brothers but still a year younger than me.

I was the first! It’s important to me. The oldest of the three brothers was born right after me, though. To this day it’s still a mystery to me how my mother managed to become fertile and conceive another baby so shortly after the birth of the first, namely me. I fought with him his whole life and hoped every day that he would die. That always made me feel guilty, since you’re brought up to love your siblings. But he was so close to me in age that I always saw him as a rival. Though I have no idea what we were rivals for. Food? Achievements? The love of our parents? All three probably.

Later I found scientific writings about sibling hatred, which said that many siblings who are born so close together end up that way. Because the firstborn—me, in this case—can’t understand why suddenly he or she must share the attention of his or her parents with some completely extraneous entity that just turns up one day. It wasn’t until we were well into our teens that it stopped. After we both hit puberty it was as if the hatred just completely dissipated. We were one heart and one soul. But up until then I must have wished him dead eight thousand times. I wanted to be an only child.

A big roof-mounted container designed to carry skis was added specially to the car to carry my wedding dress. It could easily lie flat in there. Like Snow White in her glass coffin. My beloved dress in a plastic ski locker.

The taxi driver is waiting outside. He’s parked his cab on the sidewalk directly in front of the tailor’s shopwindow and is smoking a cigarette in the sun, leaning against the Mercedes star on the hood. When I saw him sitting like that I thought,
Don’t break the star
. It’ll bring bad luck. Not for me. For him. Though I’m not superstitious. I chat a bit with the tailor. She wishes me luck. Again I think,
For the marriage or the wedding?
I pay the rest of the bill for her work and we lift the huge dress together and put it into an oversize garment bag already lying open on the floor. The tailor has tears in her eyes. How kitschy of the old lady. Kitsch, I read somewhere, is the renunciation of death and all that is bad. She pays close attention as we close the bag, centimeter by centimeter, to make sure none of the lace gets caught in the zipper.

We carry the dress out together to the taxi—like a body wrapped in a carpet—and lay it carefully on the backseat. I lift up the bits that are hanging out as we close the car door. It’s nearly shut with my arm still in it, then I pull my arm quickly out and slam the door. We did it.

The driver and I get in and as we drive off the tailor waves after us, now openly sobbing. I have the feeling that I’ve taken her only dress. She worked so long on it and earned so much doing it that she doesn’t want to let it go. But it’s mine now. Mine, mine, mine. I’m the only one it fits, since it’s a custom job. I talk about nothing but the wedding with the taxi driver for the next eighty kilometers. By the time we arrive, he knows everything. How the cake will look. How many people are coming. How many alcoholics there are on the English side of my family. That I pray there will be a fistfight. Because that’s part of a successful wedding. That all my brothers are going to wear matching Hawaiian shirts—perfect for a summer wedding—that I picked out and bought for them (in different sizes, obviously). That we’ve ordered little baby’s breath bouquets for all the guests to pin on themselves. Which Adriano Celentano song will play after we’ve said “I do.” That the bride and groom have each made mixtapes for the party afterward. Between us we’ve put together nine hours of music to dance to.

The sun shines into the taxi. As we drive up to the back entrance of my mother’s house, the entire family comes running out to greet me. We park behind my mother’s car, already fully packed for the trip. All the doors are open and things are falling out of it. Inside are sleeping bags for all the kids, nice clothes for the wedding, gifts for us, the couple, as well as books and toys to keep the children amused for the four days
we’ll be in England celebrating. They’ll all be staying either at the wedding hotel or a nearby bed-and-breakfast. The most important thing is that they can all reach their beds on foot, drunk, on the wedding day. Tomorrow, that is. Today everyone is traveling.

I have to go back to my hometown now, in the same taxi, to catch my flight together with my future husband and his twelve family members. I see that the roof rack has already been fastened to the top of my mother’s car. My brothers try to persuade me to quickly try on the dress. They want to see me in it. I should say no and be firm. But I can’t—I want to show them, too. I don’t want to be superstitious and old-fashioned, believe in all that crap about nobody seeing the dress before the wedding. I just can’t manage to stay firm. So my mother, the taxi driver, and I lay the garment bag out on the lawn behind my mother’s house. It’s very warm outside, and I undress down to my underwear. It’s actually embarrassing in front of the taxi driver. But I don’t want to be some kind of bourgeois prude and ask him to look away. Fortunately he does it without being asked. My brothers laugh but don’t turn away. My mother helps me first to climb into the heavy skirt and to close the hook-and-eye closure in the back. Then she puts on the satin corsage, which covers the thick waistband of the skirt so the outfit looks like a one-piece dress. To be funny, my mother pulls the veil out of the bag and puts it on my head crooked and backward, with the long part over my face. And there stands the bride in her complete getup. Everyone is happy and says how nice it looks, the taxi driver allows himself to look again, and we all clap. Then I slip back out of the heavy thing. The weight of it really tugs at the waist. Luckily I don’t have to wear it for long—I
bought something short and light for dancing in the evening after the ceremony.

Once I have my pants and blouse on again, we hoist the repacked dress into the roof container and lock it.

“When are you leaving?” I ask.

“In a few minutes.”

“Okay, I’ll see all you idiots in England,” I say, laughing, adding an obligatory, “Beat you there!” I’ve said that as long as I can remember when people are heading to the same place by different means of transport.

Now quickly back the whole way with the taxi driver. I’m pretty stressed in the lead-up to the wedding. I keep thinking,
I’ve forgotten something important
. But no, I haven’t. I keep going through a mental checklist of things I’m responsible for, and I have indeed taken care of it all. Weeks of work, a wedding like this—doing and planning everything yourself.