Oh my God.
I've just come home from work, and on the way home from work I stopped at the grocery store, because that is what you do if you are German, you buy groceries every freaking day and pull them home in a little wheeled cart behind you.
I do not have a little wheeled cart and so I've used two plastic bags. (In Germany, if you commit the sin of not having a little wheely cart, you have to buy bags - ten cents each at the counter.) The bags are still full, behind me, their yogurty Milchschnittey radishey contents spilling out onto our bedroom / study / living room floor, because I have to immediately write down what just happened.
Nader and I have recently realized that, far from being a mind-numbing chore, going to the grocery store can occasionally turn into an exciting game of cat-and-mouse. After finishing work on Tuesday, for instance, we went together to catch the final moments of Fasching (Fat Tuesday, Karneval, whatever) in Marienplatz. I always thought Cologne was the big city for this, but Munich did a really bang-up job celebrating; people of all ages were dressed as nuns and schoolgirls and clowns and Frank from Donnie Darko and nameless things with veils and wigs. Everyone was drunk and banging drums and throwing champagne bottles around, and it was ten times more revelryous than Halloween, and I will never again mock them for not understanding how to dress up.
It was cold, though, and everyone was too intoxicated, so we'd walked around for an hour then made our way home. But we had no milk, so we decided to stop and buy some at the supermarket.
We didn't realize that the fact that most other shoppers had been drinking all day would turn it into a battle zone.
Five minutes into shopping, we turned around to find our cart missing. That wasn't such a big deal - we only had a bottle of wine and a few apples in it - but where had it gone? In its place was one with a full backpack, a few cardboard boxes, and some sparkling water. Totally mysterious.
Nader and I searched, to no avail. It was - fruitless. We were almost laughing too hard to continue shopping, but eventually we found it. On its own, our cart had somehow made its way to the other end of the store, its contents untouched. We shrugged, picked it up, and spotted - a short time later - an shuffling young guy pushing the cart with the backpack in it.
"Hey," Nader said earnestly. Instead of turning around, the guy took a few running steps away from us, turning his face towards the milk. Nader persisted - "you took our cart!"
"Meshoum mehuusnnhm," the guy said.
Well, what do you really say in that situation?
We put it off as the inevitable result of an all-day drinking festival (through which we'd both unfortunately had to work), and that would have been the end of it, HAD IT NOT HAPPENED AGAIN.
In the cracker aisle, we turned to debate peanuts for one minute, then we heard wheels behind us. A white-haired man had seized ours competently by the handle and continued shopping. We could not explain it, and stood there openmouthed as he got at least ten feet with it.
"No," Nader said, weak, "that's ours..." and the older man's hands flew away from the handle, and his eyebrows creased in shock.
Okay. That was Tuesday.
Then today - two days later, we go through lots of groceries - I was coming out of Aldi. I'd been hit on by an Australian guy with large ears, yes, but nothing much else weird had happened, and I was preparing to chalk up the previous visit's weirdness to the whole Mardi Gras atmosphere that was in the air.
I headed towards the elevator, hands in both bags, and reached it at the same time as an elderly couple. The woman had a small pink face, bright-red lipstick, a plump body, and spun white hair under a camel-skin hat, and the man was all nose and unobtrusive khaki.
For whatever reason, I did not wait for them to press the button. Perhaps I figured their elderly arms were frail. Perhaps I wanted to be gallant, or - likeliest of all - I thought I was being funny.
I stretched out my booted toe and tapped the button.
The elderly woman initially did not know what to do with herself. Then she knew EXACTLY what to do. "If you have your arms full, then wait for us to do it," she hissed at me in vindictive Bayerisch. "It is NOW TOTALLY DRECKIG," which means filthy but sounds so much more evocative and is, like, the worst word a German can throw at you. "DRECKIG," and she pulled out a wrinkled Kleenex from her sleeve, and wiped it. Just so, you know, the next person would touch her snot, not my toe-dirt.
Then they both proceeded to GET IN THE ELEVATOR WITH ME.
This is so German. Any other culture would not tell you off and then walk obediently into a small room to exist with you for the next twenty seconds. Floored by this, I did not know what to say. I oscillated between feelings of shame and bewilderment. I considered taking the stairs, but that would have been admitting defeat; I considered pointing out that it is a train station and pretty much everything around us is filthy, but that would have been worse, and I sort of didn't want her to hear my accent and make generalizations about Americans.
So I stood in silence, bags on the filthy floor, and the woman turned her back to me like an angry horse. I swear I could see her husband laughing. When the door opened - eons later - she stomped out, feet in her tiny pumps, and hurled the Kleenex into the GARBAGE, TO SHOW ME. I hustled out of there, still not having said anything, but I couldn't take it any more; I turned and passive-aggressively coughed into my sleeve something that sounded like "Bitch!", which was the only less-than-absolutely-perfect part of the whole encounter.
I can't wait to run out of food again.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Nazis.
As my boyfriend can tell you, I have a weird thing for Nazis. Don't worry, I haven't gone crazy since I've moved here: my interest is anthropological, not worshipful. But the fact is that I find them bizarrely, grotesquely fascinating - monstrous and strange perversions of German nationalism.
Admittedly this isn't the only period of German history I'm a fan of. For instance, the Hapsburgs! Crazy King Ludwig, Builder of Castles With Secret Opera Grottoes? Magic.
Look at the crazy eyes!
He's so pedestrian, though - everyone likes Ludwig, and so Nazis continue to hold a special place in my heart. This is a sentence I should probably not be typing, especially in Munich, the city where they began - still, at least a third of what I've read in the past year has been tangentially fascist-related.
While Germans and Iranian-Germans may not understand this eagerness to constantly poke the wound of the recent still-throbbing past, other expats do. In October, I walked into The Readery, Munich's jam-packed English-language bookstore, and said that I was looking for a book to take on a plane.
The bald, bespectacled, just-so store owner (who reminds me of Stanford from Sex and the City and whose name I never actually catch but who I have had numerous strange interactions with) nodded gravely at me. "Where are you going?"
"Istanbul," I said. (Did I mention that Nader and I went to Istanbul? And that I met his family? And that I bought a suitcase for ten dollars on a street corner at midnight, and that I got kicked out of a mosque for being American? No? Well...)
"Nice town," the bookseller said. "Well, what are you into?"
"Um, I've been loving ... memoirs, lately," I said. "You know, history." I was thinking of "Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital," the book I'd picked up and been unable to put down, even in crowded U-Bahns. "You know. Early twentieth-century stuff."
"In America?" he said, peering at me over his tiny round black glasses.
"Well, more Europe," I said. "Modernism. Um. Kind of. Or post."
"Oh, well then," he said, and led me to a shelf. As it turned out, he knew exactly what I wanted without me even having to ask for it. At no time did I say "I want to read about Nazis," but I went home with an armful of tangentially-related literature.
My favorite of the books - which I would wholeheartedly recommend that the entire world read - turned out to be Diane Ackerman's "The Zookeeper's Wife", a rambling, fascinating, unclassifiable book about, among other subjects, little-known Nazi mysticism; their attempts to back-breed animals and repopulate German forests with proto-Teutonic relics of the past; and a Polish couple in Warsaw who rescued three hundred Jews by hiding them partially in animal cages. I lent it to my mother when I went home for Christmas - she read it eagerly, as it's proof that Polish people can be major badasses.
Speaking of family, the little man from the Readery also sold me Jonathan Guinness' "The House of Mitford". This book turned out to be an incredibly cost-efficient purchase, as four months later I am still reading it. I did not end up taking it on my plane to Istanbul, because it is a neat six hundred pages and because the first two hundred of those are all about the dry nineteenth-century activities of various wealthy old men. I have, however, gotten over that hump, and now I'm reading about the children of Lord and Lady Redesdale, all seven of whom (six girls, one boy) grew up to become enormously influential (famous hostesses, authors, Communists, etc) and hung out with anyone who was anyone in Britain in the early 1900s.
Maybe the most famous Mitford is Nancy, who wrote still-readable novels, but the most notorious Mitford is Unity, her sister, the one in the middle there with the long scary Mormon braids. She was a twenty-year-old exchange student in Munich in 1938, and one of her favorite activities was to leave her apartment to go hang out at the Osteria Bavaria.
The Osteria wasn't destroyed in World War II, unlike much of Munich; it's even still a restaurant, and still named the Osteria. Quite oddly, it's near the University, on Schellingstrasse, not two blocks from where I bought the book about the Mitfords.
It was, and remains, sort of a boring mid-level Italian place, a German Olive Garden. It would have no notoriety at all, were it not for the fact that it was Hitler's favorite restaurant.
Om-nom-nominous.
Unity would sit near the front of the place all afternoon, stirring a coffee and waiting for a glimpse. A few times a week, Hitler would roll up (at weird times, usually mid-afternoon) for lunch (vegetarian, no alcohol) and then spend several hours surrounded by various hangers-on (Goebbels, Wagner, etc) at a round table in the back. On days when this happened, Unity and the occasional friend would dither at her table in the front, too excited to eat, rather the way I might behave if say Keanu Reeves were munching salad right behind me.
Megalomaniac or not, Hitler was bound to notice the really quivery woman sitting at the front of the restaurant sooner or later. Unity got lucky: she was young and made-up and blonde, and Hitler was already going insane from syphilis and rather enjoyed being stalked. He didn't have the SS arrest her. Rather, he had the maitre'd go over and invite her for dinner. (Goebbels had allegedly been too nervous to do it.)
He'd had no idea who she was - no idea that she was English, and utterly no idea that her family was friends with Churchill. But once he found out, and once he realized how hilarious her weird Englishy German was, they were inseparable. Not in a sexy way, Jonathan Guinness insists. (Although, on a side note, did you know that before Hitler took women to bed, his version of foreplay was showing them how long he could hold his hand in a salute?)
Rather, Unity just came and oh, spoke at Nurnberg in front of thousands of people about her "wishes that Naziism would spread to England". She wrote a crazy letter to a German tabloid explaining how 'sneaky' the English Jews were, 'not like the Jews in Germany, who are much more obvious about their subversive activities'. She would wear her Nazi badge everywhere, even Prague, which was at that point preparing to be invaded by the Germans and understandably more than a little bit hostile to Hitler's blond friend showing up all swastikaed. It was love.
Until Unity started figuring out that things weren't going to be all fun and Wagner concerts forever.
All of her English friends started leaving the city. And Hitler started saying things like, "Well, Germany WANTS to be friends with England, but friendship cannot be one-sided - it must be RETURNED!" And then he went and Anschlussed Austria, and took the Suedetenland, and moved in on the Czechs, and invaded Poland - and pretty soon Unity couldn't quite mesh being English with being German, because now England had declared war on her adopted country.
I assume this was it. I mean, she was also nuts. But I think that's why, in August of 1940, she took a cute little lady handgun into the English Gardens (where? probably downtown, near Odeonsplatz) and, as soon as she thought nobody was watching, shot herself in the forehead.
That's the part of Unity's story that really gets me. She can have coffee with Hitler near the university we both studied at all she wants; she can go shopping in an older version of Marienplatz and drink beers in the Hofbräuhaus, sure; but when she shoots herself in MY English Gardens, well, then I've got to reconcile her somehow with myself and the place where I go to swim in a river and kiss my boyfriend.
That's the choice we're faced with, though, isn't it? Reconcile it, or ignore it. It's impossible to just let history be, especially when it comes up in unexpected places to strike, like a snake in the grass.
Last weekend, I was out near Sendlinger Tor, ready to head over to a friend's house, when she called. "Don't come," she said. "There's a neonazi rally."
"What the hell?" I said. "I'm almost there," and I could hear it - here I was walking down the street in my rain boots, glasses foggy, and there it was, the distant barking in a bullhorn. Nazis, shouting, real ones.
In the drizzle, I walked underneath the Sendlinger Tor (that place of bars and pizza joints and a Christmas market) and crossed the cobblestoned street - there, blocked off by forty police cars, was the Sonnenstrasse; and there were the Nazis.
In real life, it turns out that Nazis, or at least Nazis who march, are mostly pale young men. Many of them have shaven heads, it's true, but more of them have beards - big, bristly, girl-defying ones, or little painstakingly shaven ones dyed into points. All of them wear black - no exceptions, no splashes of color - and mostly that black is leather jackets or sweatshirts.
They may sound intimidating, but the fact is, most of them seemed to be hiding. True, it was raining, but not that much - nobody's sweatshirt needed to be pulled up to completely hide his face, as theirs were. And they were carrying banners, yes (no actual slogans - just an abbreviation), but they clutched them as if they were security blankets.
Contributing most to the impression that they needed protection were the hundreds of policemen surrounding them, policemen, bored and confused, in full-on riot gear and shields, facing outward around a Nazi knot. The shields were necessary: surrounding all of it, the outer ring of a tree, the rim of a target, were the counter-protesters, people who far outnumbered the Nazis or the policemen.
People who were angry. People who took up chants like "Wir wollen keine Nazi schweine", and shouted boos when the man with the loudspeaker started to bark about Auslaender taking young Germans' jobs.
"As an American," I shouted at them in English, "I'm offended. Deeply." I called Nader, who was at home, and who (loving a good protest) was deeply disappointed that he wasn't also there. "Yell at them hard for me, honey!" he said.
So I chanted with the crowd. I tried to yell some things of my own, but protesting in a foreign language is hard, and I had to admit, other people were doing a fabulous job of yelling things which seemed to make the Nazis go red in the face already. The Germans were there, and they were pissed that someone was seriously trying to do a Neo-Nazi march in the middle of Munich. Disgruntled older couples holding shopping bags were bawling at them; single men, couples, hangers-on, a group of cute young hippie teenagers and a gang of kids in sweatshirts that said something like Israeli Liberation - everyone was angry, and the Nazis just looked sheepish.
I hung around for awhile, but it seemed nothing was really being done or happening. So then I headed home, rain boots squeaking and chants echoing against my back. At the end of the day, apparently, I remain an American, and an observer; here in Munich, I'm surrounded by history that is not mine, and the best thing I can do is look sternly at it.
Admittedly this isn't the only period of German history I'm a fan of. For instance, the Hapsburgs! Crazy King Ludwig, Builder of Castles With Secret Opera Grottoes? Magic.
Look at the crazy eyes!
He's so pedestrian, though - everyone likes Ludwig, and so Nazis continue to hold a special place in my heart. This is a sentence I should probably not be typing, especially in Munich, the city where they began - still, at least a third of what I've read in the past year has been tangentially fascist-related.
While Germans and Iranian-Germans may not understand this eagerness to constantly poke the wound of the recent still-throbbing past, other expats do. In October, I walked into The Readery, Munich's jam-packed English-language bookstore, and said that I was looking for a book to take on a plane.
The bald, bespectacled, just-so store owner (who reminds me of Stanford from Sex and the City and whose name I never actually catch but who I have had numerous strange interactions with) nodded gravely at me. "Where are you going?"
"Istanbul," I said. (Did I mention that Nader and I went to Istanbul? And that I met his family? And that I bought a suitcase for ten dollars on a street corner at midnight, and that I got kicked out of a mosque for being American? No? Well...)
"Nice town," the bookseller said. "Well, what are you into?"
"Um, I've been loving ... memoirs, lately," I said. "You know, history." I was thinking of "Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital," the book I'd picked up and been unable to put down, even in crowded U-Bahns. "You know. Early twentieth-century stuff."
"In America?" he said, peering at me over his tiny round black glasses.
"Well, more Europe," I said. "Modernism. Um. Kind of. Or post."
"Oh, well then," he said, and led me to a shelf. As it turned out, he knew exactly what I wanted without me even having to ask for it. At no time did I say "I want to read about Nazis," but I went home with an armful of tangentially-related literature.
My favorite of the books - which I would wholeheartedly recommend that the entire world read - turned out to be Diane Ackerman's "The Zookeeper's Wife", a rambling, fascinating, unclassifiable book about, among other subjects, little-known Nazi mysticism; their attempts to back-breed animals and repopulate German forests with proto-Teutonic relics of the past; and a Polish couple in Warsaw who rescued three hundred Jews by hiding them partially in animal cages. I lent it to my mother when I went home for Christmas - she read it eagerly, as it's proof that Polish people can be major badasses.
Speaking of family, the little man from the Readery also sold me Jonathan Guinness' "The House of Mitford". This book turned out to be an incredibly cost-efficient purchase, as four months later I am still reading it. I did not end up taking it on my plane to Istanbul, because it is a neat six hundred pages and because the first two hundred of those are all about the dry nineteenth-century activities of various wealthy old men. I have, however, gotten over that hump, and now I'm reading about the children of Lord and Lady Redesdale, all seven of whom (six girls, one boy) grew up to become enormously influential (famous hostesses, authors, Communists, etc) and hung out with anyone who was anyone in Britain in the early 1900s.
Maybe the most famous Mitford is Nancy, who wrote still-readable novels, but the most notorious Mitford is Unity, her sister, the one in the middle there with the long scary Mormon braids. She was a twenty-year-old exchange student in Munich in 1938, and one of her favorite activities was to leave her apartment to go hang out at the Osteria Bavaria.
The Osteria wasn't destroyed in World War II, unlike much of Munich; it's even still a restaurant, and still named the Osteria. Quite oddly, it's near the University, on Schellingstrasse, not two blocks from where I bought the book about the Mitfords.
It was, and remains, sort of a boring mid-level Italian place, a German Olive Garden. It would have no notoriety at all, were it not for the fact that it was Hitler's favorite restaurant.
Om-nom-nominous.
Unity would sit near the front of the place all afternoon, stirring a coffee and waiting for a glimpse. A few times a week, Hitler would roll up (at weird times, usually mid-afternoon) for lunch (vegetarian, no alcohol) and then spend several hours surrounded by various hangers-on (Goebbels, Wagner, etc) at a round table in the back. On days when this happened, Unity and the occasional friend would dither at her table in the front, too excited to eat, rather the way I might behave if say Keanu Reeves were munching salad right behind me.
Megalomaniac or not, Hitler was bound to notice the really quivery woman sitting at the front of the restaurant sooner or later. Unity got lucky: she was young and made-up and blonde, and Hitler was already going insane from syphilis and rather enjoyed being stalked. He didn't have the SS arrest her. Rather, he had the maitre'd go over and invite her for dinner. (Goebbels had allegedly been too nervous to do it.)
He'd had no idea who she was - no idea that she was English, and utterly no idea that her family was friends with Churchill. But once he found out, and once he realized how hilarious her weird Englishy German was, they were inseparable. Not in a sexy way, Jonathan Guinness insists. (Although, on a side note, did you know that before Hitler took women to bed, his version of foreplay was showing them how long he could hold his hand in a salute?)
Rather, Unity just came and oh, spoke at Nurnberg in front of thousands of people about her "wishes that Naziism would spread to England". She wrote a crazy letter to a German tabloid explaining how 'sneaky' the English Jews were, 'not like the Jews in Germany, who are much more obvious about their subversive activities'. She would wear her Nazi badge everywhere, even Prague, which was at that point preparing to be invaded by the Germans and understandably more than a little bit hostile to Hitler's blond friend showing up all swastikaed. It was love.
Until Unity started figuring out that things weren't going to be all fun and Wagner concerts forever.
All of her English friends started leaving the city. And Hitler started saying things like, "Well, Germany WANTS to be friends with England, but friendship cannot be one-sided - it must be RETURNED!" And then he went and Anschlussed Austria, and took the Suedetenland, and moved in on the Czechs, and invaded Poland - and pretty soon Unity couldn't quite mesh being English with being German, because now England had declared war on her adopted country.
I assume this was it. I mean, she was also nuts. But I think that's why, in August of 1940, she took a cute little lady handgun into the English Gardens (where? probably downtown, near Odeonsplatz) and, as soon as she thought nobody was watching, shot herself in the forehead.
That's the part of Unity's story that really gets me. She can have coffee with Hitler near the university we both studied at all she wants; she can go shopping in an older version of Marienplatz and drink beers in the Hofbräuhaus, sure; but when she shoots herself in MY English Gardens, well, then I've got to reconcile her somehow with myself and the place where I go to swim in a river and kiss my boyfriend.
That's the choice we're faced with, though, isn't it? Reconcile it, or ignore it. It's impossible to just let history be, especially when it comes up in unexpected places to strike, like a snake in the grass.
Last weekend, I was out near Sendlinger Tor, ready to head over to a friend's house, when she called. "Don't come," she said. "There's a neonazi rally."
"What the hell?" I said. "I'm almost there," and I could hear it - here I was walking down the street in my rain boots, glasses foggy, and there it was, the distant barking in a bullhorn. Nazis, shouting, real ones.
In the drizzle, I walked underneath the Sendlinger Tor (that place of bars and pizza joints and a Christmas market) and crossed the cobblestoned street - there, blocked off by forty police cars, was the Sonnenstrasse; and there were the Nazis.
In real life, it turns out that Nazis, or at least Nazis who march, are mostly pale young men. Many of them have shaven heads, it's true, but more of them have beards - big, bristly, girl-defying ones, or little painstakingly shaven ones dyed into points. All of them wear black - no exceptions, no splashes of color - and mostly that black is leather jackets or sweatshirts.
They may sound intimidating, but the fact is, most of them seemed to be hiding. True, it was raining, but not that much - nobody's sweatshirt needed to be pulled up to completely hide his face, as theirs were. And they were carrying banners, yes (no actual slogans - just an abbreviation), but they clutched them as if they were security blankets.
Contributing most to the impression that they needed protection were the hundreds of policemen surrounding them, policemen, bored and confused, in full-on riot gear and shields, facing outward around a Nazi knot. The shields were necessary: surrounding all of it, the outer ring of a tree, the rim of a target, were the counter-protesters, people who far outnumbered the Nazis or the policemen.
People who were angry. People who took up chants like "Wir wollen keine Nazi schweine", and shouted boos when the man with the loudspeaker started to bark about Auslaender taking young Germans' jobs.
"As an American," I shouted at them in English, "I'm offended. Deeply." I called Nader, who was at home, and who (loving a good protest) was deeply disappointed that he wasn't also there. "Yell at them hard for me, honey!" he said.
So I chanted with the crowd. I tried to yell some things of my own, but protesting in a foreign language is hard, and I had to admit, other people were doing a fabulous job of yelling things which seemed to make the Nazis go red in the face already. The Germans were there, and they were pissed that someone was seriously trying to do a Neo-Nazi march in the middle of Munich. Disgruntled older couples holding shopping bags were bawling at them; single men, couples, hangers-on, a group of cute young hippie teenagers and a gang of kids in sweatshirts that said something like Israeli Liberation - everyone was angry, and the Nazis just looked sheepish.
I hung around for awhile, but it seemed nothing was really being done or happening. So then I headed home, rain boots squeaking and chants echoing against my back. At the end of the day, apparently, I remain an American, and an observer; here in Munich, I'm surrounded by history that is not mine, and the best thing I can do is look sternly at it.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
The Turn of the Shoe
Now that their project is finished, now that the wall has been papered in yellow wall-paper and the dust has all been swept up, the bedroom looks noble. The morning sun, untouched by branches, is coming through the attic window, and the room is golden, safe. It’s pure again.
There’s simply nothing more to be done, so the Mother shuts the door and locks it with the brass key. Alone in the master suite, she showers, washing the dust from her hair and letting the water run hot. Once she’s dressed, she sits down at her mahogany desk and dials. After one ring, the little grey agency woman answers, and the Mother takes a breath and begins:
The last employee you sent to my home turned out to be a complete disgrace.
The Mother has had a whole lifetime of dealing with staff, and she knows how to get results. She doesn’t mince words, now or ever, really. Caustically, she explains the old nanny’s immediate abandonment of the Family, the fleeing in the night -- She left no note. It was highly unprofessional. Of course, the agency asks no questions. Instead, they apologize and grovel and clamor; they make all sorts of promises, and vow to send a new, very different, much-improved girl within the week. The Mother almost gets bored, listening to them beg for her business. Anything to make it up to you. We value you as a customer. We are so terribly sorry for the inconvenience.
The room is waiting and ready, and by Wednesday, there the new nanny is at the front gate, trying to figure out the buzzer. She’s young, with homemade clothes, stringy brown hair and scared eyes, and after getting over her initial bubbly excitement about the house’s gorgeous old wood, wow, window seats, is that a bonsai???, she is almost mechanically obedient and eager to please. In weeks to come, she will sweep the floor of her attic room and make her narrow spinster’s bed every morning. She will never take a sip of alcohol or caffeine (being some kind of strange American religion which forbids both). The Mother discovers that she thrives on kind words, so they ration these out to her sparingly. The children don’t seem to like her, exactly, but they are not overtly cruel, and the Father, true to his word, takes no notice of her at all.
Additionally, the Mother is happy to see that the new nanny, when outdoors, alternates between three pairs of sensible clogs, which she trades for house-shoes the instant she comes inside. It’s just another contrast to the old nanny, who seemed to own and wear only one pair of shoes - a perilous espadrille monstrosity in faux blue suede, with tacky ribbon straps that weaved their way drunkenly up the nanny’s white legs. They were the shoes of a 1920s prostitute, yet she wore them with every outfit, seemed never to take them off. She’d clunk up and down all three flights of stairs in them despite being told that the Family did not wear shoes in the house, despite the Mother having given her an old pair of silky house-slippers just to spare the old wood floors.
She was worst at dinner, which began precisely at six each night; ten minutes late, the nanny would clomp over and flounce into her chair. The Mother remembers dreading what would come next: the nanny would chew with her mouth open and her legs splayed. Even the five-year-old ate better, although the Father didn’t seem to notice it. Rice would fall from the old nanny’s plate; sauce would dribble onto the antique placemats. There are probably still breadcrumbs under her chair, crushed indelibly into the Persian rug.
What a blessing, then, to find that not all Americans abandon knives, push food onto their forks with their fingers, laugh with a mouth full of beans. The new nanny is a quiet, reasonable eater and a pleasant conversationalist, one who laughs quietly but does not speak unless spoken to. Moreover, after each meal, she leaps up, clears the plates away and tucks them into the dishwasher, all the while begging the Mother to go and have a rest. With a glass of wine in her hand, the Mother watches, amused, as the nanny energetically finishes up the kitchen and puts the children to bed. Then she comes back downstairs and sits, knitting an oblong brown blanket at the foot of the freshly-washed dining room table, a cup of mint tea by her side.
As a sort of offering, or thanks, the Mother takes to carrying home a bouquet of flowers with her from the florist near her office most days. More than the flowers themselves (which are pansies, water lilies, roses or orchids), she loves the way that the new nanny coos as if she’s never seen a blossom before; the way she takes the fragile stems out of the Mother’s arms, snips their thorns away, and puts them in a cut-glass vase. Their days are a heady success, scented with peonies.
But then one morning the Mother comes down for breakfast, adjusting her pearl earrings, to find the new nanny sitting at the table, a cup of tea in her hand, a frown on her face.
Die Kleine hat nicht so gut geschlafen, says the housekeeper knowledgeably, setting fruit onto the breakfast tray. She seems to be enjoying this, and so the Mother ignores her.
What seems to be the problem, Deborah? the Mother says. Did you not sleep well?
Well, oh no. Not badly, says the new nanny, toying with her teabag. I was just a little disturbed by the noise, is all. But it’s totally cool! No problem! And she smiles an unusual, quavery smile.
What noise? says the Mother, receiving her freshly-steamed morning cappuccino from the housekeeper and sipping it, the froth rustling against her lips. She notices that it’s lovely outside.
Oh, nothing, the girl is saying. It’s just – those darn stairs are so loud! What were you working on? You kept walking up and down the stairs the whole night.
The Mother is puzzled. She slept exceedingly well, and says it. You must have been dreaming. She plucks an orange slice out, and pops it into her mouth.
I don’t think I was dreaming, the girl says, it didn’t feel like a dream. And anyway, high heels walking up and down the stairs would be sort of a boring dream, wouldn’t it? She laughs. I don’t know what it was, then. Pipes, maybe.
Don’t be ridiculous, the Mother says, meanly, of course it was a dream. I’m off to work. She abandons the coffee; she gets up, she pulls on her coat, she tugs on her pumps and drives to the office where, an hour early, she sits at her desk and tries to keep the world from shaking. It has to be the pipes.
Unbidden, she thinks: if she is going to be perfectly honest with herself, what was really the trouble wasn’t the shoes or the eating, but rather the way it kept happening, night after night. And now there it was again, the steps on the stairs.
The Mother insists that she didn’t particularly care who her husband was sleeping with (the nanny) and who he wasn’t (her). Their marriage had been past that, in a way; she’d just wanted the pair of them, the Father and the nanny, not to be so ostentatious about it, so obvious about everything. The whole thing had just been so glaringly hard on the children, was all. Her poor kids had been forced to listen to their father’s footsteps head up to the nanny’s room, to hear night after night after night of him tramping through the big old house to go to his whore. With those stairs, it was as clear as if it had been in the room with her, and she’d lain awake for all of it, most nights: the knock, the murmured greeting, the giggling. The noises. And they’d thought they were being so sneaky.
At one point, the Mother had started to whisper it as the Father crept out of their room each night. “You must not wake the children,” but still he would walk away, leaving her there, her back to the doorway. “You must not wake the children…” If he ever heard her whispering, though, he gave no sign; his steps stayed as loud as ever, a fatal ear-splitting heartbeat in the center of their home.
It’d become increasingly clear to her that she had to do something. These night-time ramblings were taking a clear effect on her two darlings, who kept coming down in the mornings with little dark rings around their eyes. They never said anything, of course - to mention it would have been gauche, a coarseness they did not have. But you could tell that they heard it, all of it, and you could tell that it was hurting them – so she chose to take care of the problem. She doesn’t regret it, not for a second – she fixed things, and they’re better now, so she really has no choice but to ignore the new nanny’s theatrics. Noises or none, the really horrible part is all over – it’s been settled, and she wouldn’t do things differently, were she to do them again. That being that, the Mother gets to work, and forgets.
But three nights later the Mother wakes up with a jolt. She stares around the darkened bedroom, the Father snoring next to her, before she realizes what she’s hearing.
Coming down the stairs, there they are: uneven American footsteps. She listens as they pass her room, thunder down to the main floor, where they stop.
For a second she considers panicking, but then she takes herself firmly in hand. Ignore it, she says. Stay here. What is wrong with you? So she falls back into an uneasy sleep, full of dreams of footsteps and something sharp; she is relieved when it is morning, and even more relieved to come down the stairs and find the new nanny asleep on the eight-thousand-euro leather couch in the living room. Of course they were her footsteps. How could the Mother have thought anything else? The girl, in plaid holiday pajamas, has pulled the decorative throw over herself, and the couch’s folds are creased on her face.
Staff, the Mother thinks, and sighs. Then, loudly, she says, What are you doing down here? ice in her voice. What is wrong with your room?
The nanny wakes up; her eyes creak open; she gazes around, disoriented. Then she focuses – she sees the Mother standing over her, and a rather satisfying sort of panic comes over the girl’s face. She sits up, jerkily, and stammers. I – I just – can’t – She begins and then aborts several sentences. Her shoulders are shaking. You can’t win them all, the Mother thinks, resigned, and she waits for whatever crazy reason the nanny is going to give.
Finally the new girl manages it, her head in her hands and her eyes filling with tears. Do you have a different room I can stay in? There’s something really wrong with that one.
What on earth do you mean? says the Mother, disdainful. We just refurbished it. It is a beautiful room. It was my room when I was a girl here. Are you cold? If you’re cold, you can bring up the space heater from the basement.
I d-don’t… and now she’s really trying not to cry, her face contorting. It’s hideous. Her voice is hoarse and she says, Look, this is going to sound crazy, but. Did you ever – hear things when you slept there?
No, said the Mother, flatly.
I do, though, says the girl. I hear a tapping. It always starts with a tapping on the inside of the far wall. I used to think it was leaky pipes, but recently someone’s been saying things, too – the tapping’s, like, to get my attention, and then I hear this voice.
I am not interested any more, says the Mother. But the nanny continues, disobedient and unable to stop.
The voice says what are you doing, get out of here, get out of this bed, get out of my bed. Things like that – just all night. It’s like she’s right there next to me, whispering in my ear. I think it’s a demon. It must be. I’ve been ignoring it, but last night I saw her; she was horrible and real, she was coming at me, saying something, and … Her voice fades, and her head sinks into her hands, and she sits there, waiting for a verdict.
You know, the Mother says casually, I think we have to get you psychiatrically evaluated.
No, and the nanny is hysterical, no – I’m so sorry – really, I’m not crazy, forget I ever said anything. Look, she says, standing up, I’m fine! I’m going upstairs!
Please keep your voice down. This house has been in my family for years, the Mother announces, and I can say with certainty that it has no demons, or ghosts, or anything of the kind. And if I hear my children talking about spirits, you will be fired. Is that understood?
Yes, croaks the new nanny, quaking with tears, and she flees up the stairs.
There are some qualities, the Mother thinks, sitting down, unsteady on the warm leather, which are simply unacceptable in a staff member. There are some things which just necessitate cutting them loose. You know, she of all people deserved it, she reminds herself. She was a greedy messy baby who needed to be punished. Against her will, the Mother remembers that final night, the night that had come after a particularly trying day, a particularly loud shoe-clomping rice-spilling Father-fucking day. The night the old nanny left.
After everyone had gone to bed, the Mother walked up the spiral wooden stairs herself. She had learned, as a little girl, to place her feet at the corners in such a way that she could travel completely silently up all three flights. She was pleased to find that it still worked – nobody would know she was coming. She travelled slowly, caressing the banister, listening to her house settle and creak; the night was gentle, somehow. It had known what needed to be done, and so did she. On the top floor, she neither knocked nor stopped, but twisted open the old metal doorknob and walked in.
The nanny, mixed in with a pile of clothes, was slung sluttishly in the moonlight upon the Mother’s childhood bed. Her sexy nightie (how the Mother had shuddered to see them drying on the laundry line downstairs, in plain sight of the children) revealed bush, too much leg. It had a lace back, and was ripped in places. Topping it off, the nanny drooled slightly, and her spiked hair was askew.
Despite everything, it was weirdly vulnerable and childlike, and the Mother stood there for a second considering – but there, in the corner, were the shoes, waiting. So she’d done it: put one hand on the nanny’s warm cheek, raised the kitchen knife and brought its sharpened edge calmly across the nanny’s throat. It had been just like slaughtering a calf, really – the smooth parting of skin, the gushing redness. Of course the nanny had woken in a panic, and of course she’d tried to speak and move and thrash, but the Mother gave her the final courtesy of holding her close, of staring into her eyes as the blackness took her. The best part was that it had all been perfectly quiet – so quiet that, as the nanny’s limbs stopped thrashing, she could hear the Father’s soft knock, and the “Meg?” that came every night.
Shocked, she’d released the pile of dead meat that had been the nanny. She hadn’t known what would come next, she remembers realizing. How dumb was that? There was no plan for afterwards. In chagrin, she stared dumbly; then she walked to the door. It was impolite not to open a door when someone knocked, so she put her hand on the doorknob, she opened it wordlessly, and she held up her red, dripping hands. Please, they said, although that hadn’t been her intention. Please. Her face, realizing the humor of it all, had worn an off-kilter smile.
He froze. He stood.
And then he knelt. Without hesitating, her husband took the antique key out of the door – without aplomb, he locked her in. She heard his footsteps go down the stairs, all forty-two of them.
So that was it. He would go downstairs, now, to do whatever it was witnesses did – and she would stay here, with her bloodied hands, and wait, helpless, for the police to come. It had been worth it; seizing her last few moments of freedom she went and sat on the bed, the dead nanny companionable now that she was silent. The view out the windows was still the same view it’d been when she was a girl. Sitting here on this bed, one could imagine flying out and over the treetops; conversely, one could open the sash and, in one dirt-smackingly-harsh second, end it all. How close one was, in this room, to flying or death.
She didn’t hear the key turn in the lock but she did hear the footsteps. She turned around slowly, ready for it all to be over, and found that it was just him, her husband. Holding another knife, and gloves, and a garbage bag, and a tarp, all he said was: I’m sorry. I didn’t think you cared.
Quite suddenly, it was all different.
Working together, flashing knives quick in the night, they’d hacked her up like a cow. Neither of them flinched; they turned her into cutlets, ribs, steaks, breast, a pile of meat on a tarp, although the Mother surprised herself by needing to cover the sightless head as they worked. They stopped at dawn, and locked the door; the key rested in the Father’s pocket, and the children didn’t ask questions.
In nights to come, they remodeled extensively. Together, using hand-saws, they removed a section of the wall, and they put the tarp-covered nanny meat inside. The Father experienced a moment of weakness and wanted to keep the blue suede shoes, but when the Mother shot him a glance that said you are endangering this family, he tossed them behind the wall too.
It’s over, she reminds herself now. It is all walled up. The matter has been taken care of, and the wallpaper has been put on, no matter what the new girl is seeing or feeling. We can just – we can remove her, if necessary. We can fix it. We’ve fixed one, we can fix anything. We can do it together. She tells this to her husband, that night in their bed. They are holding hands, like witches, for it’s a pact that they’ve made, and for this she’s got to be grateful. She’s got to tell him everything.
I think the new nanny’s seeing the old nanny, she says, the words ridiculous but necessary. I think we have a – staff problem. She doesn’t say ghost problem.
He just nods.
What? Fix it, she demands, enraged. Her voice whines. We’ve got to. We’ve got to try.
I thought this might happen, he says somberly. I thought we might have had it coming. But I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it.
There always is! You can always fix things! she insists. You can’t just give up!
We can’t undo what’s been done, he says, looking at her. The knowledge that he’s disappointed and hurt and hiding it breaks her heart as, from far above, she hears it: a terrible noise like a thousand birds smacking a single windowpane. It’s a thudding and a tearing, a cracking and a breaking; ice in spring. As one, they freeze. They look at each other to see if either of them is imagining it.
By this, they know it’s real, what’s happening above them.The wall is breaking down, and things are coming out.
I can’t, said the Father. I can’t go. He looks, helpless, at her. I’ve done too much already. I’m sorry.
You coward, the Mother hisses. She is throwing on her bathrobe, the knife in the pocket clanging against her leg. You are hopeless! she yells behind herself and runs out of the room. And she loses herself in this anger once again, because anger is better than being hopeless, anything is, really, and she takes the stairs two at a time, screaming, Stop it! Stop it! You’re waking the chil –
But then there are loud footsteps above her, coming towards her. Fate is running down the spiral staircase.
The new nanny is naked. Her hands are bloody, and the fingernails are worn down to stubs; her wraithlike arms and face and chest are covered in dust and something else, something horrible that smells of rotted cheese and damp wood. It takes the Mother a second to realize that she is more than a few inches taller. On her feet, the laces inexpertly tied and swimming around her ankles, are a certain pair of blue shoes, back to wreak havoc. On her face, there is not fear nor wrath; she’s past those. Instead, the new nanny wears condescension.
The Mother suddenly notices that the children, standing in the door of their room, have seen it all, know it all, and so the knife is helpless in the Mother’s bathrobe pocket as the nanny walks past her and heads down the stairs, feet clomping, to call the police and do whatever it is witnesses do.
There’s simply nothing more to be done, so the Mother shuts the door and locks it with the brass key. Alone in the master suite, she showers, washing the dust from her hair and letting the water run hot. Once she’s dressed, she sits down at her mahogany desk and dials. After one ring, the little grey agency woman answers, and the Mother takes a breath and begins:
The last employee you sent to my home turned out to be a complete disgrace.
The Mother has had a whole lifetime of dealing with staff, and she knows how to get results. She doesn’t mince words, now or ever, really. Caustically, she explains the old nanny’s immediate abandonment of the Family, the fleeing in the night -- She left no note. It was highly unprofessional. Of course, the agency asks no questions. Instead, they apologize and grovel and clamor; they make all sorts of promises, and vow to send a new, very different, much-improved girl within the week. The Mother almost gets bored, listening to them beg for her business. Anything to make it up to you. We value you as a customer. We are so terribly sorry for the inconvenience.
The room is waiting and ready, and by Wednesday, there the new nanny is at the front gate, trying to figure out the buzzer. She’s young, with homemade clothes, stringy brown hair and scared eyes, and after getting over her initial bubbly excitement about the house’s gorgeous old wood, wow, window seats, is that a bonsai???, she is almost mechanically obedient and eager to please. In weeks to come, she will sweep the floor of her attic room and make her narrow spinster’s bed every morning. She will never take a sip of alcohol or caffeine (being some kind of strange American religion which forbids both). The Mother discovers that she thrives on kind words, so they ration these out to her sparingly. The children don’t seem to like her, exactly, but they are not overtly cruel, and the Father, true to his word, takes no notice of her at all.
Additionally, the Mother is happy to see that the new nanny, when outdoors, alternates between three pairs of sensible clogs, which she trades for house-shoes the instant she comes inside. It’s just another contrast to the old nanny, who seemed to own and wear only one pair of shoes - a perilous espadrille monstrosity in faux blue suede, with tacky ribbon straps that weaved their way drunkenly up the nanny’s white legs. They were the shoes of a 1920s prostitute, yet she wore them with every outfit, seemed never to take them off. She’d clunk up and down all three flights of stairs in them despite being told that the Family did not wear shoes in the house, despite the Mother having given her an old pair of silky house-slippers just to spare the old wood floors.
She was worst at dinner, which began precisely at six each night; ten minutes late, the nanny would clomp over and flounce into her chair. The Mother remembers dreading what would come next: the nanny would chew with her mouth open and her legs splayed. Even the five-year-old ate better, although the Father didn’t seem to notice it. Rice would fall from the old nanny’s plate; sauce would dribble onto the antique placemats. There are probably still breadcrumbs under her chair, crushed indelibly into the Persian rug.
What a blessing, then, to find that not all Americans abandon knives, push food onto their forks with their fingers, laugh with a mouth full of beans. The new nanny is a quiet, reasonable eater and a pleasant conversationalist, one who laughs quietly but does not speak unless spoken to. Moreover, after each meal, she leaps up, clears the plates away and tucks them into the dishwasher, all the while begging the Mother to go and have a rest. With a glass of wine in her hand, the Mother watches, amused, as the nanny energetically finishes up the kitchen and puts the children to bed. Then she comes back downstairs and sits, knitting an oblong brown blanket at the foot of the freshly-washed dining room table, a cup of mint tea by her side.
As a sort of offering, or thanks, the Mother takes to carrying home a bouquet of flowers with her from the florist near her office most days. More than the flowers themselves (which are pansies, water lilies, roses or orchids), she loves the way that the new nanny coos as if she’s never seen a blossom before; the way she takes the fragile stems out of the Mother’s arms, snips their thorns away, and puts them in a cut-glass vase. Their days are a heady success, scented with peonies.
But then one morning the Mother comes down for breakfast, adjusting her pearl earrings, to find the new nanny sitting at the table, a cup of tea in her hand, a frown on her face.
Die Kleine hat nicht so gut geschlafen, says the housekeeper knowledgeably, setting fruit onto the breakfast tray. She seems to be enjoying this, and so the Mother ignores her.
What seems to be the problem, Deborah? the Mother says. Did you not sleep well?
Well, oh no. Not badly, says the new nanny, toying with her teabag. I was just a little disturbed by the noise, is all. But it’s totally cool! No problem! And she smiles an unusual, quavery smile.
What noise? says the Mother, receiving her freshly-steamed morning cappuccino from the housekeeper and sipping it, the froth rustling against her lips. She notices that it’s lovely outside.
Oh, nothing, the girl is saying. It’s just – those darn stairs are so loud! What were you working on? You kept walking up and down the stairs the whole night.
The Mother is puzzled. She slept exceedingly well, and says it. You must have been dreaming. She plucks an orange slice out, and pops it into her mouth.
I don’t think I was dreaming, the girl says, it didn’t feel like a dream. And anyway, high heels walking up and down the stairs would be sort of a boring dream, wouldn’t it? She laughs. I don’t know what it was, then. Pipes, maybe.
Don’t be ridiculous, the Mother says, meanly, of course it was a dream. I’m off to work. She abandons the coffee; she gets up, she pulls on her coat, she tugs on her pumps and drives to the office where, an hour early, she sits at her desk and tries to keep the world from shaking. It has to be the pipes.
Unbidden, she thinks: if she is going to be perfectly honest with herself, what was really the trouble wasn’t the shoes or the eating, but rather the way it kept happening, night after night. And now there it was again, the steps on the stairs.
The Mother insists that she didn’t particularly care who her husband was sleeping with (the nanny) and who he wasn’t (her). Their marriage had been past that, in a way; she’d just wanted the pair of them, the Father and the nanny, not to be so ostentatious about it, so obvious about everything. The whole thing had just been so glaringly hard on the children, was all. Her poor kids had been forced to listen to their father’s footsteps head up to the nanny’s room, to hear night after night after night of him tramping through the big old house to go to his whore. With those stairs, it was as clear as if it had been in the room with her, and she’d lain awake for all of it, most nights: the knock, the murmured greeting, the giggling. The noises. And they’d thought they were being so sneaky.
At one point, the Mother had started to whisper it as the Father crept out of their room each night. “You must not wake the children,” but still he would walk away, leaving her there, her back to the doorway. “You must not wake the children…” If he ever heard her whispering, though, he gave no sign; his steps stayed as loud as ever, a fatal ear-splitting heartbeat in the center of their home.
It’d become increasingly clear to her that she had to do something. These night-time ramblings were taking a clear effect on her two darlings, who kept coming down in the mornings with little dark rings around their eyes. They never said anything, of course - to mention it would have been gauche, a coarseness they did not have. But you could tell that they heard it, all of it, and you could tell that it was hurting them – so she chose to take care of the problem. She doesn’t regret it, not for a second – she fixed things, and they’re better now, so she really has no choice but to ignore the new nanny’s theatrics. Noises or none, the really horrible part is all over – it’s been settled, and she wouldn’t do things differently, were she to do them again. That being that, the Mother gets to work, and forgets.
But three nights later the Mother wakes up with a jolt. She stares around the darkened bedroom, the Father snoring next to her, before she realizes what she’s hearing.
Coming down the stairs, there they are: uneven American footsteps. She listens as they pass her room, thunder down to the main floor, where they stop.
For a second she considers panicking, but then she takes herself firmly in hand. Ignore it, she says. Stay here. What is wrong with you? So she falls back into an uneasy sleep, full of dreams of footsteps and something sharp; she is relieved when it is morning, and even more relieved to come down the stairs and find the new nanny asleep on the eight-thousand-euro leather couch in the living room. Of course they were her footsteps. How could the Mother have thought anything else? The girl, in plaid holiday pajamas, has pulled the decorative throw over herself, and the couch’s folds are creased on her face.
Staff, the Mother thinks, and sighs. Then, loudly, she says, What are you doing down here? ice in her voice. What is wrong with your room?
The nanny wakes up; her eyes creak open; she gazes around, disoriented. Then she focuses – she sees the Mother standing over her, and a rather satisfying sort of panic comes over the girl’s face. She sits up, jerkily, and stammers. I – I just – can’t – She begins and then aborts several sentences. Her shoulders are shaking. You can’t win them all, the Mother thinks, resigned, and she waits for whatever crazy reason the nanny is going to give.
Finally the new girl manages it, her head in her hands and her eyes filling with tears. Do you have a different room I can stay in? There’s something really wrong with that one.
What on earth do you mean? says the Mother, disdainful. We just refurbished it. It is a beautiful room. It was my room when I was a girl here. Are you cold? If you’re cold, you can bring up the space heater from the basement.
I d-don’t… and now she’s really trying not to cry, her face contorting. It’s hideous. Her voice is hoarse and she says, Look, this is going to sound crazy, but. Did you ever – hear things when you slept there?
No, said the Mother, flatly.
I do, though, says the girl. I hear a tapping. It always starts with a tapping on the inside of the far wall. I used to think it was leaky pipes, but recently someone’s been saying things, too – the tapping’s, like, to get my attention, and then I hear this voice.
I am not interested any more, says the Mother. But the nanny continues, disobedient and unable to stop.
The voice says what are you doing, get out of here, get out of this bed, get out of my bed. Things like that – just all night. It’s like she’s right there next to me, whispering in my ear. I think it’s a demon. It must be. I’ve been ignoring it, but last night I saw her; she was horrible and real, she was coming at me, saying something, and … Her voice fades, and her head sinks into her hands, and she sits there, waiting for a verdict.
You know, the Mother says casually, I think we have to get you psychiatrically evaluated.
No, and the nanny is hysterical, no – I’m so sorry – really, I’m not crazy, forget I ever said anything. Look, she says, standing up, I’m fine! I’m going upstairs!
Please keep your voice down. This house has been in my family for years, the Mother announces, and I can say with certainty that it has no demons, or ghosts, or anything of the kind. And if I hear my children talking about spirits, you will be fired. Is that understood?
Yes, croaks the new nanny, quaking with tears, and she flees up the stairs.
There are some qualities, the Mother thinks, sitting down, unsteady on the warm leather, which are simply unacceptable in a staff member. There are some things which just necessitate cutting them loose. You know, she of all people deserved it, she reminds herself. She was a greedy messy baby who needed to be punished. Against her will, the Mother remembers that final night, the night that had come after a particularly trying day, a particularly loud shoe-clomping rice-spilling Father-fucking day. The night the old nanny left.
After everyone had gone to bed, the Mother walked up the spiral wooden stairs herself. She had learned, as a little girl, to place her feet at the corners in such a way that she could travel completely silently up all three flights. She was pleased to find that it still worked – nobody would know she was coming. She travelled slowly, caressing the banister, listening to her house settle and creak; the night was gentle, somehow. It had known what needed to be done, and so did she. On the top floor, she neither knocked nor stopped, but twisted open the old metal doorknob and walked in.
The nanny, mixed in with a pile of clothes, was slung sluttishly in the moonlight upon the Mother’s childhood bed. Her sexy nightie (how the Mother had shuddered to see them drying on the laundry line downstairs, in plain sight of the children) revealed bush, too much leg. It had a lace back, and was ripped in places. Topping it off, the nanny drooled slightly, and her spiked hair was askew.
Despite everything, it was weirdly vulnerable and childlike, and the Mother stood there for a second considering – but there, in the corner, were the shoes, waiting. So she’d done it: put one hand on the nanny’s warm cheek, raised the kitchen knife and brought its sharpened edge calmly across the nanny’s throat. It had been just like slaughtering a calf, really – the smooth parting of skin, the gushing redness. Of course the nanny had woken in a panic, and of course she’d tried to speak and move and thrash, but the Mother gave her the final courtesy of holding her close, of staring into her eyes as the blackness took her. The best part was that it had all been perfectly quiet – so quiet that, as the nanny’s limbs stopped thrashing, she could hear the Father’s soft knock, and the “Meg?” that came every night.
Shocked, she’d released the pile of dead meat that had been the nanny. She hadn’t known what would come next, she remembers realizing. How dumb was that? There was no plan for afterwards. In chagrin, she stared dumbly; then she walked to the door. It was impolite not to open a door when someone knocked, so she put her hand on the doorknob, she opened it wordlessly, and she held up her red, dripping hands. Please, they said, although that hadn’t been her intention. Please. Her face, realizing the humor of it all, had worn an off-kilter smile.
He froze. He stood.
And then he knelt. Without hesitating, her husband took the antique key out of the door – without aplomb, he locked her in. She heard his footsteps go down the stairs, all forty-two of them.
So that was it. He would go downstairs, now, to do whatever it was witnesses did – and she would stay here, with her bloodied hands, and wait, helpless, for the police to come. It had been worth it; seizing her last few moments of freedom she went and sat on the bed, the dead nanny companionable now that she was silent. The view out the windows was still the same view it’d been when she was a girl. Sitting here on this bed, one could imagine flying out and over the treetops; conversely, one could open the sash and, in one dirt-smackingly-harsh second, end it all. How close one was, in this room, to flying or death.
She didn’t hear the key turn in the lock but she did hear the footsteps. She turned around slowly, ready for it all to be over, and found that it was just him, her husband. Holding another knife, and gloves, and a garbage bag, and a tarp, all he said was: I’m sorry. I didn’t think you cared.
Quite suddenly, it was all different.
Working together, flashing knives quick in the night, they’d hacked her up like a cow. Neither of them flinched; they turned her into cutlets, ribs, steaks, breast, a pile of meat on a tarp, although the Mother surprised herself by needing to cover the sightless head as they worked. They stopped at dawn, and locked the door; the key rested in the Father’s pocket, and the children didn’t ask questions.
In nights to come, they remodeled extensively. Together, using hand-saws, they removed a section of the wall, and they put the tarp-covered nanny meat inside. The Father experienced a moment of weakness and wanted to keep the blue suede shoes, but when the Mother shot him a glance that said you are endangering this family, he tossed them behind the wall too.
It’s over, she reminds herself now. It is all walled up. The matter has been taken care of, and the wallpaper has been put on, no matter what the new girl is seeing or feeling. We can just – we can remove her, if necessary. We can fix it. We’ve fixed one, we can fix anything. We can do it together. She tells this to her husband, that night in their bed. They are holding hands, like witches, for it’s a pact that they’ve made, and for this she’s got to be grateful. She’s got to tell him everything.
I think the new nanny’s seeing the old nanny, she says, the words ridiculous but necessary. I think we have a – staff problem. She doesn’t say ghost problem.
He just nods.
What? Fix it, she demands, enraged. Her voice whines. We’ve got to. We’ve got to try.
I thought this might happen, he says somberly. I thought we might have had it coming. But I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it.
There always is! You can always fix things! she insists. You can’t just give up!
We can’t undo what’s been done, he says, looking at her. The knowledge that he’s disappointed and hurt and hiding it breaks her heart as, from far above, she hears it: a terrible noise like a thousand birds smacking a single windowpane. It’s a thudding and a tearing, a cracking and a breaking; ice in spring. As one, they freeze. They look at each other to see if either of them is imagining it.
By this, they know it’s real, what’s happening above them.The wall is breaking down, and things are coming out.
I can’t, said the Father. I can’t go. He looks, helpless, at her. I’ve done too much already. I’m sorry.
You coward, the Mother hisses. She is throwing on her bathrobe, the knife in the pocket clanging against her leg. You are hopeless! she yells behind herself and runs out of the room. And she loses herself in this anger once again, because anger is better than being hopeless, anything is, really, and she takes the stairs two at a time, screaming, Stop it! Stop it! You’re waking the chil –
But then there are loud footsteps above her, coming towards her. Fate is running down the spiral staircase.
The new nanny is naked. Her hands are bloody, and the fingernails are worn down to stubs; her wraithlike arms and face and chest are covered in dust and something else, something horrible that smells of rotted cheese and damp wood. It takes the Mother a second to realize that she is more than a few inches taller. On her feet, the laces inexpertly tied and swimming around her ankles, are a certain pair of blue shoes, back to wreak havoc. On her face, there is not fear nor wrath; she’s past those. Instead, the new nanny wears condescension.
The Mother suddenly notices that the children, standing in the door of their room, have seen it all, know it all, and so the knife is helpless in the Mother’s bathrobe pocket as the nanny walks past her and heads down the stairs, feet clomping, to call the police and do whatever it is witnesses do.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Stories.
In the past 24 hours, two friends of mine here have shared particularly awesome stories with me. I am now shamelessly repurposing them for my own use here on this blog.
1. My one friend is from the Northwest - well, Colorado, but she went to college in Seattle. About four years ago, one of her teachers in the German department passed around a card, and said to sign it.
"What's it for?" my friend asked.
"Oh, a student from our college just went to prison." Her professor didn't mention for what, or where, or why, and so, confused, Danielle signed.
And that's how she wound up writing on the sympathy card sent to Amanda Knox, one of her professor's favorite students.
"What did you write?" I asked.
Danielle thought for a moment, and then said, "Um, hope you get out soon? :)"
2. My other friend is from Israel. He and his girlfriend are hoity-toity research scientists here in Munich, but there is nothing snooty about them; they're on Munich's first English-speaking improv troupe with me and five other people. Last night, 5/8 of the troupe somehow didn't make it to practice, so the three of us canceled and went to the restaurant on the corner instead.
There, he regaled us with the tale of how, on one trip to the United States, he found himself at the Burning Man Festival in the middle of the Nevada desert at dusk, trying to tell the state troopers who'd surrounded him and his friends with their jeeps that the thing in his hand wasn't a joint, but a simple tobacco cigarette.
He was successful, somehow, but what is really remarkable about this story is that, at the time he was talking his way out of deportation, he was nearly naked - wearing only a flame-colored thong - and painted blue, with a third eye on his forehead, the visual image of which - if you know him - makes his story pretty much impossible to top.
That's all.
1. My one friend is from the Northwest - well, Colorado, but she went to college in Seattle. About four years ago, one of her teachers in the German department passed around a card, and said to sign it.
"What's it for?" my friend asked.
"Oh, a student from our college just went to prison." Her professor didn't mention for what, or where, or why, and so, confused, Danielle signed.
And that's how she wound up writing on the sympathy card sent to Amanda Knox, one of her professor's favorite students.
"What did you write?" I asked.
Danielle thought for a moment, and then said, "Um, hope you get out soon? :)"
2. My other friend is from Israel. He and his girlfriend are hoity-toity research scientists here in Munich, but there is nothing snooty about them; they're on Munich's first English-speaking improv troupe with me and five other people. Last night, 5/8 of the troupe somehow didn't make it to practice, so the three of us canceled and went to the restaurant on the corner instead.
There, he regaled us with the tale of how, on one trip to the United States, he found himself at the Burning Man Festival in the middle of the Nevada desert at dusk, trying to tell the state troopers who'd surrounded him and his friends with their jeeps that the thing in his hand wasn't a joint, but a simple tobacco cigarette.
He was successful, somehow, but what is really remarkable about this story is that, at the time he was talking his way out of deportation, he was nearly naked - wearing only a flame-colored thong - and painted blue, with a third eye on his forehead, the visual image of which - if you know him - makes his story pretty much impossible to top.
That's all.
Friday, September 2, 2011
The next day.
So here is the down point:
All signs point to my job vanishing in two months. I'm great at writing emails to people, but chances are high that the entirety of the English-speaking department will be moved over to England in November, and I can probably either go with them and have a job or stay here and have no job. Again. And it's not like going with them is an option, because hello, England? Boyfriend?
The Irish girl I work with says that she is used to this by now. She has had multiple odd jobs here in the past three years - she's been a nanny too, of course - and is sort of lassez-faire about the whole thing. Both she and the other expatriate I work with (he's a Canadian former airline pilot who came to Germany because hello, it's Germany, and now he can't find a job and is therefore working in marketing, writing emails with a 22-year-old) are experts at this.
They stay because, well, things aren't any better in the US and Ireland right now. But the constant rotation of jobs seems to have hardened them into people who shrug and take what they can get, and it scares me.
Two days ago, a woman approached me on the street and gave me her phone number. She said, in swift German, that she owns a customer-service firm and is always looking for new representatives, and that if I wanted a job I should call her. I had no idea why... I think it was because I was wearing a bright red dress and looking very conspicuous. I halfway think she's a madam, and I halfway think she's terrifying, and I halfway am considering calling her, just because I have no clue what else exactly I am supposed to be doing here.
All signs point to my job vanishing in two months. I'm great at writing emails to people, but chances are high that the entirety of the English-speaking department will be moved over to England in November, and I can probably either go with them and have a job or stay here and have no job. Again. And it's not like going with them is an option, because hello, England? Boyfriend?
The Irish girl I work with says that she is used to this by now. She has had multiple odd jobs here in the past three years - she's been a nanny too, of course - and is sort of lassez-faire about the whole thing. Both she and the other expatriate I work with (he's a Canadian former airline pilot who came to Germany because hello, it's Germany, and now he can't find a job and is therefore working in marketing, writing emails with a 22-year-old) are experts at this.
They stay because, well, things aren't any better in the US and Ireland right now. But the constant rotation of jobs seems to have hardened them into people who shrug and take what they can get, and it scares me.
Two days ago, a woman approached me on the street and gave me her phone number. She said, in swift German, that she owns a customer-service firm and is always looking for new representatives, and that if I wanted a job I should call her. I had no idea why... I think it was because I was wearing a bright red dress and looking very conspicuous. I halfway think she's a madam, and I halfway think she's terrifying, and I halfway am considering calling her, just because I have no clue what else exactly I am supposed to be doing here.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
I forgot August!
Aw damn!
I looked at the list of my blog posts in the corner today to discover that I have updated precisely once a month for oh the past five months. And now I've gone and blown it by forgetting August - I am a once-every-two-months blogger instead of a once-a-month blogger now. Tarnation!
Oh well - I hope you'll cut me some slack, maybe-dear reader, since it is only the first of September. Also, a hell of a lot happened in August, especially considering that I initially thought it would be kind of a nothing month.
I initially thought this because the month began with me getting fired. Not fired, insists Nader, laid off - which is technically true. I didn't do anything wrong, really, not that I know of... it was more that the family I was nannying for decided I was not very necessary now that half of their children (read: one) were heading off to boarding school, and that the housekeeper could more-than-capably perform my job. Hats off to them, I thought as I pedaled away from their house for what I hadn't that morning known would be the last time... I'd realized this fact about a month ago, and had naively thought that it wasn't nearly as apparent to my bosses. I had apparently been mistaken.
So there I was, fired. I did not cry. Instead, I went shopping, and then Nader and I toasted my unemployment by going out for Indian food.
That was denial.
When Monday came, however, I felt the beginnings of crushing despair - the same kind of despair that had gripped me in March, back when I realized that my visa was only good for another twenty days. How would I survive? What other kind of work could I DO?
I spent another couple of days wallowing and making various declarations. "I will not work again," I said. "I will live off my savings!" (Yeah, right.) "I will become a novelist!" "I should probably just go back to nannying, it's all I'm really good at." "I shall learn to play the ukulele!"
And then, on Wednesday, my friend Alexa sent me a link to a job opening.
And then I applied for it, after much foot-dragging and ukulele-purchasing.
And then I went for an interview.
And then I got the job.
And then I applied for a visa, and they pushed the start date back a few weeks. And then I waited to see if the German government would allow me to work.
And then Nader finished one of his exams, and he was like "Hey why don't we go to Prague?" and so we went to Prague, which is (like Paris) absolutely as beautiful as everyone says it is. More so. And it is seedy, but in a sort of pleasant way, a way that makes you think you can get stuff for cheap, even though that is only due to the fact that their money has a deceptive exchange rate with the euro (24 krone to one euro? Who the hell can convert that quickly? I sure can't, and wound up buying a seventeen-euro salt and pepper shaker set because of it).
And then we took a bus back from Prague.
And then on the next day Maggie visited!
Maggie, my best friend from high school, is a wholesome person who enjoys hearty things, and so together we visited farmer's markets, went on ten-mile bike trips, hiked a mountain, and cut a bouquet of mums to adorn our tiny apartment's little black table, the one that tends to leap out of nowhere and stab people in the knee.
And then I put her on a train to Florence, where she would be studying abroad for the next four months. And then I, jealous as the train pulled away and already missing her quiet presence in my hammock, vowed to visit her as soon as possible.
And then I went to four improv workshops (okay, this was throughout the month, but for dramatic purposes we'll say it happened all at once)... and this group of dramatically-enthusiastic young people from places like Israel and British Columbia and okay America was asking me to be on their secret improv troupe, and I was saying yes, and I start practice next week. And we'll see how Germanprov goes but I am highly optimistic.
And then - we're caught up - it was today, and suddenly I was starting my new job, which is a marketing job at a hip firm that operates by sending people free stuff and seeing what they say about it. And my job is answering people's emails in a polite and mildly witty manner, and I think I will be okay at it, and moreover there is a FREE COFFEE MACHINE.
So there. Now I can write all the stupid non-updatey posts I want, because I have told you EVERYTHING and you are probably satisfied. Right? Hopefully? Right?
Kisses!
I looked at the list of my blog posts in the corner today to discover that I have updated precisely once a month for oh the past five months. And now I've gone and blown it by forgetting August - I am a once-every-two-months blogger instead of a once-a-month blogger now. Tarnation!
Oh well - I hope you'll cut me some slack, maybe-dear reader, since it is only the first of September. Also, a hell of a lot happened in August, especially considering that I initially thought it would be kind of a nothing month.
I initially thought this because the month began with me getting fired. Not fired, insists Nader, laid off - which is technically true. I didn't do anything wrong, really, not that I know of... it was more that the family I was nannying for decided I was not very necessary now that half of their children (read: one) were heading off to boarding school, and that the housekeeper could more-than-capably perform my job. Hats off to them, I thought as I pedaled away from their house for what I hadn't that morning known would be the last time... I'd realized this fact about a month ago, and had naively thought that it wasn't nearly as apparent to my bosses. I had apparently been mistaken.
So there I was, fired. I did not cry. Instead, I went shopping, and then Nader and I toasted my unemployment by going out for Indian food.
That was denial.
When Monday came, however, I felt the beginnings of crushing despair - the same kind of despair that had gripped me in March, back when I realized that my visa was only good for another twenty days. How would I survive? What other kind of work could I DO?
I spent another couple of days wallowing and making various declarations. "I will not work again," I said. "I will live off my savings!" (Yeah, right.) "I will become a novelist!" "I should probably just go back to nannying, it's all I'm really good at." "I shall learn to play the ukulele!"
And then, on Wednesday, my friend Alexa sent me a link to a job opening.
And then I applied for it, after much foot-dragging and ukulele-purchasing.
And then I went for an interview.
And then I got the job.
And then I applied for a visa, and they pushed the start date back a few weeks. And then I waited to see if the German government would allow me to work.
And then Nader finished one of his exams, and he was like "Hey why don't we go to Prague?" and so we went to Prague, which is (like Paris) absolutely as beautiful as everyone says it is. More so. And it is seedy, but in a sort of pleasant way, a way that makes you think you can get stuff for cheap, even though that is only due to the fact that their money has a deceptive exchange rate with the euro (24 krone to one euro? Who the hell can convert that quickly? I sure can't, and wound up buying a seventeen-euro salt and pepper shaker set because of it).
And then we took a bus back from Prague.
And then on the next day Maggie visited!
Maggie, my best friend from high school, is a wholesome person who enjoys hearty things, and so together we visited farmer's markets, went on ten-mile bike trips, hiked a mountain, and cut a bouquet of mums to adorn our tiny apartment's little black table, the one that tends to leap out of nowhere and stab people in the knee.
And then I put her on a train to Florence, where she would be studying abroad for the next four months. And then I, jealous as the train pulled away and already missing her quiet presence in my hammock, vowed to visit her as soon as possible.
And then I went to four improv workshops (okay, this was throughout the month, but for dramatic purposes we'll say it happened all at once)... and this group of dramatically-enthusiastic young people from places like Israel and British Columbia and okay America was asking me to be on their secret improv troupe, and I was saying yes, and I start practice next week. And we'll see how Germanprov goes but I am highly optimistic.
And then - we're caught up - it was today, and suddenly I was starting my new job, which is a marketing job at a hip firm that operates by sending people free stuff and seeing what they say about it. And my job is answering people's emails in a polite and mildly witty manner, and I think I will be okay at it, and moreover there is a FREE COFFEE MACHINE.
So there. Now I can write all the stupid non-updatey posts I want, because I have told you EVERYTHING and you are probably satisfied. Right? Hopefully? Right?
Kisses!
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Drawings
I realize I've been rather quiet, lately, on the blogging front. I'm sorry! It isn't intentional, really, more just neglect. Which is even less of an excuse, I know, but here is an entry so that the three people reading will forgive me.
I've been writing, sort of. I'm fixing up the terrible novel I wrote in a month and a half. We must wait, however, to see if it's completely horrific or not.
It hasn't helped that the girl I'm watching bought me colored pencils for my birthday. Nice ones, German ones. Germany's Schreibwaren (writing merchandise?) is awesome - all pens are efficient, successful, fluid, and all pencils are triangle-shaped, so as not to roll off your desk or coffee table or whatever. These pencils are no exception. They are awesome.
So I figured "What the hell", and bought myself a Moleskine. At the time of this writing, it is 1/4 full of failed drawings of tigers, 1/2 full of scrawled cursive writing, and 1/4 full of pencil art. A la Aaron King, I am now going to post said art on the Internet, just because I'm sad that there's nothing else in my blog recently.
Here's the first one. These are two girls I saw shopping together at H and M.
It seems strange to me that they were friends - strange and sort of beautiful. One of them was very Germanic, complete with short shorts, and the other, well...
Munich has a huge population of women in full-body black veils right now, because Saudi Arabia has come over to shop at Gucci with oil money and escape the heat. I don't like to admit it, but these women make me more uncomfortable than the whorehouses on Hansestrasse do. So it was nice to see one of them with a friend, instead of with a fashionably-dressed husband and a massive stroller...
Then here are some people I miss, drawn from memory.
It is Lisa's gift that she is really, really easy and fun to draw.
Meg is less so. I don't think this looks like her, but I do think it looks okay.
I keep trying to draw Nader, but it's hard because he moves a lot. And so I have to rely on memory, and because my memory is occasionally strange and addled by caffeine, they generally wind up not looking a lot like him. My self-portrait looks a bit like me, but only because I was not moving.
There are lots of other self-portraits in here. I am a willing subject, I guess.
This is me in the house where I nanny. It is much nicer than the drawing allows. Here is the garden, if you replaced the seaside behind it with a much more boring, much more hard-to-draw hedge:
And then there are my fictional character drawings. I don't know.
Jadis of Charn! The best witch ever! You know, the White Witch, but before she was White. But not before she was super-strong and could throw lamp-posts at people. I wrote a shitty sonnet about her on the page facing her.
And here's Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House. I wrote all over the back of her, and didn't realize I'd kind of ruined her until it was too late.
There are more, but they're kind of weird, as are many things I do. So they're not going on the Internet. But here: a blog! Hooray...
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