Hausfrau (24 page)

Anna didn’t like the planes. The noise hurt her ears and she was terrified by how low they flew to the ground.
They’re just one sneeze away from crashing through an attic,
Anna thought. Bruno, however, was transfixed. He couldn’t tear his
eyes away. As a boy he’d been as fascinated by airplanes as Charles was by trains. After ten minutes Anna, Polly, and the boys went back into the house. Bruno stayed outside the whole half hour, wide-eyed and watching so intensely that one might think he believed that it was his vigilance alone that kept the planes in the air.

The monitor’s volume was turned almost as high as it could go. He’d waived his own excessive noise rule. The same cutthroat roar that frightened Anna earlier sliced through the office atmosphere.

“Do you believe in God?” Anna looked at Bruno’s bookshelves. The books were arranged alphabetically and by subject.

“Huh?” Bruno paused the video and turned to look at his wife. “Where’s this come from?”

Anna pointed at his monitor. “I was thinking about the planes today.” She moved her gaze to the wall where, affixed by sticky putty that, if removed, would not leave a mark, hung several drawings the boys had done. Victor liked to draw animals. Charles, of course, trains.

“I don’t understand.”

Anna wasn’t sure she did either. The correspondence had made perfect, poignant sense in her head just a moment earlier. Now, as she spoke it aloud, her words became minor and inept. She sounded deranged. “That noise they made.” She searched for the clearest explanation. “It sounded like they were cutting open the sky.” Bruno’s face was rimpled, harried. Anna let all current semblance of logic and composure go. “What do you think is on the other side of the sky?”

“The sky doesn’t have another side, Anna.”

“No, I mean … Bruno, do you believe in God?”

“Of course I do.”

“Really?” She didn’t know what she expected him to say. Any answer would have surprised her.

“Don’t you?”

Anna’s shrug told the truth.

Bruno shrugged back at her. “If there isn’t a God then what’s the point of anything? Without God, what matters?”

Anna didn’t know. She said so.

“Without God,
nothing
matters. But Anna? Things matter.” He said it in a way that was meant to school her.

“Do you believe in destiny? Salvation? Do you believe that we can save ourselves?”

Bruno shook his head as if to say
Why the fuck are we talking about this?
“My father believed that we are broken people who live in a broken world. I believe that too. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a God. It just means we aren’t him.” Bruno cleared his throat. “Is that all?”

“Yes.”

Bruno turned back to the screen. “Enjoy your walk.” He’d forgotten that Anna said she wasn’t taking one. She didn’t correct him.

“H
OUSE FIRES ARE ALMOST
always preventable,” Stephen said, though Anna already knew it. “But under certain circumstances, probable.”

“Like?” She played along with this lecture.

“Smoking in bed, of course. Cooking. The unsupervised burning of candles.”

“You sound like a fireman, not a scientist.”

Stephen shrugged. “Fire is fire.”

Yes,
Anna thought.
And it is never safe.

“A
PERSON CAN BE
fully conscious and still make terrible choices. Consciousness doesn’t come with an automatic ethic.”

They had been discussing Anna’s most recent dream. It began in the grocery store, where so much of Anna’s life took place. Her basket was full, but when she got to the checkout, she realized she didn’t have any money. She told the cashier she’d return the items to the shelf but when Anna went into the aisle with the basket she hid as much of the food as she could in her pockets. She knew it wasn’t right but didn’t care. Outside the store she stopped a man who was on his way in and told him what she’d done; she was proud of it. He was shocked and threatened to call the police. Anna said she’d give him a blowjob if he didn’t. They went behind the grocery store. Across the alleyway, the local high school. Anna knelt and gave him head while students watched from a classroom window. In order to keep them from telling anyone what they had witnessed, Anna lifted up her shirt and showed them her breasts, which, in the dream, were leaking milk. The dream ended at the bus stop. She may or may not have boarded the right bus, she couldn’t remember.

“You do nothing in this dream that isn’t the commission of some sort of crime—theft, adultery, exhibition …”

Anna interrupted. “You can’t seriously judge someone against what she does in her sleep. I can’t help what I dream.”

“That’s not entirely true, Anna. What we dream, we are.”

Anna frowned. There was nothing of this conversation she liked.

Doktor Messerli didn’t pull her punch. “You recognize each consequence. You do the damage anyway. The dream is emphatic: you’re spinning out of control.”

E
VERY FEW WEEKS AND SOMETIMES MORE OFTEN THAN THAT
, the Benzes would receive in the postbox affixed to the wall outside their front door a notice printed on a half-size sheet of white paper, bordered in a bold black line. They were death announcements.
Ein Bestattungsanzeige.
The postman delivered them along with the mail whenever a Dietlikon resident died. It was a small-town courtesy, not a typical Swiss practice. The notices began with the decedent’s name and then below that, his or her birth and death dates. They ended with information about the funeral.

Anna saved every death notice they received. She kept them in a shoebox in her
Kleiderschrank.
She had collected at least three hundred of them over the span of nine years. When Bruno found the shoebox, he threatened to throw it away. “You have an unhealthy fixation on death,” he said.

Anna was emphatic in a way she usually wasn’t. “Don’t you dare. I keep these because someone has to. The worst thing that can happen to a person is to be forgotten.”

“That’s not the worst thing, Anna.”

“Don’t touch this box. I’m telling you.”

A
NNA AVOIDED
G
ERMAN CLASS
for two days. She dreaded looking Archie in the eye.

As angry as she was with herself, she was equally furious with him. She knew her indignation was unreasonable (
Was it? It was Archie who swooped in and kissed her when she wasn’t asking for it, Archie who showed up at the party, Archie who propositioned her in the first place
) but the haughtiness was serving the purpose of keeping Anna focused on the present task of behaving herself. Resentment was her arsenal’s secret weapon. When Mary called Tuesday afternoon, Anna gave an excuse that resembled the truth: that the exhaustion of the party caught up with her a day late and she needed rest. Mary volunteered to drop over with notes but Anna told her not to bother. So Anna stayed home and played house with her daughter. Anna baked for the first time in over a year and cooked Bruno’s favorite meal for dinner. It was a stab at atonement. The smallest of stabs.

S
OMETIME DURING THE WANING
hours of her second day in a row at home, Anna began to feel restless, bored, and lonely.
Jesus, Anna, really?
She scrambled to find avenues of acquittal. She blamed it first on the sunset and then on flaws fundamental to her personhood. The brokenness she was trying to mend. It wasn’t, after all, just about the sex.

This, she knew, was mostly true.

She couldn’t really call it missing them. She didn’t miss them at all (
Who were they anyway to miss?
). Anna had read that it takes far longer to break a habit than to make one. In the case of heroin, addiction can occur in the span of three days.
Am I addicted?
She didn’t want to use that word. These men were simply the embodiment of urges she no longer wished to deny herself.
It’s just a handshake, really. A casual greeting made with alternate body parts.
She could live without the favors of these specific men. The affair with Archie wasn’t even two months old and her relationship with Karl barely constituted a dalliance. But the nature of habits is this: they are habitual. They die very hard, those that die at all.

Anna fought her agitation by doing laundry.

O
N
T
HURSDAY
A
NNA RETURNED
to German class. She’d paid for it, after all, and up until Monday, she’d mostly enjoyed it. So Ursula came over and Anna went to Oerlikon. She summoned the backbone to face Archie but was relieved when he didn’t show up for class.

Roland gave a lesson on comparatives.
This
is more whatever than
that. That
is less something than
this. This
and
that
are precisely equal to
that
and
this.

They ran out of time before Roland could introduce superlatives, the proclamation of what is
most of all.

Like so much else, this was a concept Anna already understood.

O
N
F
RIDAY
A
NNA WOKE
well before dawn. The clock blinked 4:13
A
.
M
. She looked to her right. Bruno was asleep. Of course.
She rose and dressed and tiptoed out of the bedroom and left the house as quietly as possible. She was practiced at this. She needed to be.

The pre-sunrise October chill had bite. Anna turned up the collar of her coat, put her hands in her pockets, and leaned into the oncoming wind as all around her Dietlikon slept unperturbedly at ease. She had no intentional destination; Anna followed her feet where they led her: first south toward the church, then down Riedenerstrasse past the traffic circle to the town cemetery.

Anna didn’t routinely visit the cemetery, especially in insomnia’s dark, horrible hours; that morning’s walk was unpremeditated. But there are times to talk to the dead, times when the dead want to talk. In these rare instances, the dead will draw you to them; your volition is irrelevant. Anna couldn’t tell if this was one of those times, but she was at the cemetery, so all signs pointed to yes. The gate was locked but Anna cut through a sparse hedge. She didn’t plan on staying long.
I am not a ghost, I am a guest.

She passed slowly through the rows of graves. She attempted a measure of somberness but settled on worry and fatigue, which, when coupled, passed for solemnity. This would have to do. Things for Anna always had to do.

Opposite the cemetery gate lay a separate section for the graves of the town’s children. In the daylight, there was simply no way to pass these graves without breaking down. In the darkness, however, to stand in their presence was to enjoy a bearable, almost beautiful experience.
They are babies asleep in their cribs,
Anna imagined.
Just sleeping.
Earlier that year, the granddaughter of a friend of Ursula’s had drowned in Dietlikon’s community pool. Her name was Gaby and she was
buried here. It was too dark for Anna to read the names; she didn’t know which grave was hers.

A
NNA MADE THE MISTAKE
of meeting Edith for a coffee after German class. It was often a mistake to meet Edith for coffee because Edith didn’t drink coffee, she drank bourbon, and drinking bourbon always agitated her. Anna met her on the south end of the Bahnhofstrasse at Café Münz, a bar and lounge near the Zürich branch of the Swiss National Bank. It was the SNB that housed the Nazis’ gold during and after World War II. For her entire first year in Switzerland, Anna was haunted by the notion that cached beneath the streets down which she strode, bankers—the alleged gnomes of Zürich—trolled the subterranean vaults grubbing the treasures of long-dead Jews. She implicated Bruno retroactively until he finally forbade her from ever bringing the subject up again.

Anna ordered a café crème and Edith, being contrary even to herself, ordered a beer. Anna raised an eyebrow and Edith waved her off. “Niklas is teaching me beer,” she said as if beer were a school subject like algebra or civics. “I still don’t like it. But for him, I’ll try anything.” Edith winked. Anna understood that anything meant more than beer. Anna didn’t want to talk about lovers. She didn’t really want to talk at all. But there were empty hours to fill and if she wasn’t spending them with Archie or Karl, then she needed to spend them with someone, and Mary was busy that day.
Take one lover, you may as well take twenty,
Anna thought.
They’re like salty snacks. You can’t stop at one.

Edith yammered on with her typical self-centeredness, hopping from subject to subject like a frog leaping from one lily
pad to the next. She spoke first of Niklas, then Otto, then the twins, then the trip they were planning to Ticino, then of a ball gown she recently bought. Anna hadn’t known she was going to a ball. “I’m not,” Edith said. “The dress was too gorgeous to deny myself. I’ll wear it one of these days.” Anna finished her coffee then asked for another. She had little to add and she wouldn’t even offer that until or unless she was asked.

Edith moved from beer to wine. They weren’t alone in the café. Behind them, a couple enjoyed a late lunch. There was a tall, gaunt man in a business suit standing at the bar, smoking and drinking a beer. Sitting by the window nearest the street, a young woman with a nose ring and thick blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail was pushing the last few salad leaves around on her plate and flipping absentmindedly through a magazine.