Hausfrau (36 page)

The giant arrival board thwapped through a series of numbers as it updated itself. Anna looked at a station clock. In fifteen minutes she could catch a train to Dietlikon. Anna wasn’t ready for that. She cut through the station to the other side.

Ten minutes after that, she crossed yet another of Zürich’s seemingly endless supply of bridges and bore north.
All these goddamn bridges.
The Doktor would say they symbolized transition, a journey from one state of being into another.

Well, there it is,
she said once more to herself.
What a funny thing to have believed in, love.

But it wasn’t love. It was a version of love. They are all versions of love. Ten minutes later she was at Nürenbergstrasse.
She didn’t even toss Stephen’s house a single glance. She was cured of that.

The last of the letters that Anna wrote but didn’t send to Stephen had been short:
If it didn’t mean everything, it meant nothing. If I didn’t matter the most, I mattered the least.
She’d hoped it wasn’t true when she wrote it. But now she knew it was. Still, she was glad she’d called, glad he’d answered. And glad that now she understood.
Yes,
Anna thought.
I understand. Heart’s a muscle, not a bone. It doesn’t really break.
But muscles can tear. She missed Charles with a desperation that had no name and would for as long as she lived.
The rest of my life.
And she regretted the fact of her misshapen marriage. All for what? Anna shrugged inside herself. Somehow it didn’t matter. In the space of a day and in the shadow of the shell of the pretense of love Anna had reconciled herself to herself:
What’s been done cannot be undone.
There was peace in that.

It was near four thirty. It had taken her an hour and a half to cross the city. She’d reach Wipkingen at about the same time as the train going toward Dietlikon.

Anna and Bruno’s first fight on Swiss soil had occurred on that platform. It was a week after the move and Anna hadn’t learned the trains. Bruno had asked her to meet him at Wipkingen station, but she missed the train they’d agreed she’d take. She took the next, but when she arrived Bruno was gone. She didn’t have a phone. She didn’t know how to get back home. So she did the only thing that could be done. She sat on a bench and wept.

When Bruno arrived an hour later—he’d gone back to Dietlikon when she hadn’t shown up and returned to Wipkingen when he didn’t find her there—he was furious. She tried to explain but he huffed and grunted and grabbed her by the
arm and told her they were late—for what she could no longer remember—and led her out of the station wordlessly. How angry he was that day. How angry he was last night.

A heart doesn’t subdivide unless it has to,
she’d said glibly to Doktor Messerli once. The Doktor had no response.

What a day. Anna felt a present calm. As she neared the station she wondered how Bruno would explain her absence to Victor.
He’ll tell him I’m on a trip, and then they’ll go for pizza.
That was the most likely scenario. She began to miss Victor as dreadfully as she missed Charles. So many times she couldn’t help but love him less. And now, finally, it shamed her.
Shame’s the shadow of love,
she thought. And then she thought of Polly Jean and wondered if Stephen’s other daughter would resemble her. She hadn’t told him. She never would. Polly Jean would never know she had a sister.

It had been a day of revelations. Of missed connections. Of hurt feelings. Delusions. Despairs. Bad behaviors. Had she done anything that couldn’t be taken back?
Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes.

She thought about Switzerland. Where a smile will give you away as an American. Where what isn’t taboo is de rigueur. Cold, efficient Switzerland. Where the women are comely and the men are well groomed and everyone wears a determined face. Switzerland. The roof of Europe. Glacier carved. Most beautiful where it is most uninhabitable. Switzerland with its twenty-six shipshape cantons. Industrious Switzerland.
Novartis. Rolex. Nestlé. Swatch.
So often was Zürich ranked as one of the world’s best cities. She thought about that, then conceded that if she hadn’t been so sad the last nine years she might have seen it. She wished upon Victor an attentive Swiss
wife. She wished her daughter the freedom to leave, if she ever wanted to.

And then she thought again that failsafes sometimes fail. Unsinkable ships land on the ocean floor and rockets don’t always survive reentry. Love is not a given. No one is promised a tomorrow. She had been wrong about every man she loved or said she loved. She’d been wrong about everything. She’d entered into her life in the middle of its story. She had confused herself with the actress who portrayed her.

And she thought about predestination. How the sum of her days added up to this. The plot of her life had already been published. Everything is foreordained. All is predetermined.
The things I do, I cannot help. Everything that will happen already has.
What had she learned about verbs? In the past and future tenses, the verb came at the end. And in the present it followed the subject. Wherever she went it tailed her. She dragged it behind like a sack of stones.

And she thought about Doktor Messerli, who, Anna was now sure, was wrong; the problem wasn’t that her bucket was empty, the problem was that it was full. So full it overbrimmed. So full and so heavy. Anna wasn’t strong enough to carry it. She’d have to pour it out.
I’ve severed the serpent, Doktor! Look what I have done!

She thought about the woods behind her house. She thought about the hill. She thought about her bench. She thought about Karl and Archie, but her consideration was cursory. She thought about Mary. It had been less than twenty-four hours since last she’d seen her, but Anna wished she were there now. She’d never before had a girlfriend she was close enough to miss. She tried to think about Edith but didn’t know
what to think. She wondered what Ursula would say to the ladies in the
Frauenverein,
if anything at all. She thought about her mother and her father. So many terrible years since her father had loved her, since her mother had listened.

She thought about Bruno. Who she had loved and didn’t love. But had loved. Who had loved her in return.
I was a good wife, mostly.

And she thought about fire.

She reached the platform at Wipkingen station three minutes before the train. The day had depleted her. She was too tired to be anxious. This was new. But there was more. She had nothing left to worry about. What autonomy. It settled her. She stood at the center point of her own spiral and it was a fixed position. Anna was calm, guileless, and even-keeled.
Let this not become me,
she had prayed. But it had.

She looked to the station clock. Then, to the tracks. Then, to the tunnel. Then, she closed her eyes.

For the rest of the afternoon and well into the night, the city trains ran late.

An ocean of appreciation to my first, best reader, Jessica Piazza, who wouldn’t let me quit this. And to my other readers: Emily Atkinson, Lisa Billington, Janna Lusk, Laureen Maartens, Neil Ellis Orts—love and thanks. And love.

Merci vielmal
to Stefan Deuchler, my chief source of all things Swiss.

Much gratitude to Gina Frangello for publishing a portion of this in
The Nervous Breakdown.

A thousand thank-yous to the dozens of others who shepherded me through the process of writing and editing: to my colleagues in the UCR Low Residency MFA program, especially Tod Goldberg, hand-holder and ledge-talker-downer extraordinaire, and Mark Haskell Smith, my fiction spirit guide and go-to for advice; to Nick Hanna, the first person to tell me to keep writing this story; to Michelle Halsall, Diplomate Jungian Analyst and counsel-giver of the highest order; to Susana Gardner and Andrea Grant, whose ex-pat friendships saved my life; to Sivert Høyem and Madrugada, whose music I wrote this book to, and whose songs have become, in my artistic consciousness, Anna’s songs; to Axel Essbaum, with whom I embarked upon the adventure of expatriation those many
years ago; to Anna Tapsak, who let me grill her endlessly one evening about Swiss provincial life; and to Jill Baumgaertner, Reb Livingston, Cheryl Schneider, Jay Schulz, Louisa Spaventa, Becca Tyler, and Andrew Winer, whose friendships and encouragement I could never have managed without. Nor would I wish to.

Unflagging appreciation to Sergei Tsimberov, who facilitated the early stages of this experience and whose eagle-eye editing is in part responsible for the book you read today.

Immeasurable gratitude to my agent, Kathleen Anderson. There is no song that’s fervent enough to sing out how treasured she is to me.

Colossal thanks as well to the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of this book was written under funding of a literature fellowship. The financial support was a godsend. The creative endorsement was a grace.

Thanks of all thanks to my editor, David Ebershoff, who kept me on task and encouraged me despite my occasional frustrations and now-and-again moments of heavyheartedness. Thanks also to Denise Cronin and her entire, wonderful rights team. And to Caitlin McKenna for her comfort and assistance and to Beth Pearson for her wealth of patience. Thanks, in the end, to Random House. Everyone. How welcome you all have made me and Anna feel.

To the city of Dietlikon, which let me live inside of it for a little while—how lovely you are.

And to my husband, Alvin Peng. Who is my favorite everything.

And finally: I am not a psychoanalyst and therefore you mustn’t take the words of Doktor Messerli as anything other than what they are intended to be: fiction. If you ever feel as terrible as Anna, please—I beg of you—seek help.

J
ILL
A
LEXANDER
E
SSBAUM
is the author of several collections of poetry, including
Harlot, Necropolis,
and
The Devastation.
Her work has twice appeared in
The Best American Poetry,
as well as its sister anthology,
The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present.
A winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize and recipient of two NEA literature fellowships, Essbaum is a member of the core faculty of the Low Residency MFA at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches poetry. She lives and writes in Austin, Texas. This is her first novel.

HausfrauBook.com

@JAEssbaum