Wrecked

To the organic vegetable broth powder with no MSG I add some water to steam the cabbage a bit. Then I add an entire container of cream, some butter, and plenty of salt and pepper. Dinner is ready.

The doorbell rings and I let Liza in. On the way to the door I think to myself, Cooking helps you stay sane, and vegetables help keep you from going crazy.

“How was school?”

“Good.”

When she comes in wearing her teenager-style jacket, skinny jeans, and heels, I can hardly believe how big she’s gotten. This is my child? Great. I guess I’ve succeeded—she’s out of the woods, as they say. She’s still alive. That’s not something we can take for granted in our family. One of my brothers died at six, another at nine, and the third at twenty-four—though there’s still a while before my daughter reaches that age. But I’ve already achieved more than my mother. My child is still alive. One hundred percent of my children have lived beyond age six. My mother had five, and three are dead. One of them was younger than my daughter is now—that is, my mother lost 20 percent of her offspring before they were eight, which is how old Liza is.

I quickly wash up the things I dirtied making dinner. I don’t have to wash away the onion smell completely because this cutting board is used exclusively for onions and garlic. What bourgeois trick will we dream up next?

“Could you please not throw your jacket on the floor every time you come in?”

“Why not?”

“Do you have a servant who cleans up after you?”

She points at me.

Then we both laugh. She picks up her jacket and hangs it up in our children’s wardrobe, which is only half my height.

“Can you please set the table?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Otherwise you’ll get no dinner.”

“Okay.”

She stomps over to the kitchen counter, hops up like a gymnast, wedges her toes in the handle of the cabinet, and gets up on the countertop.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Savoy cabbage.”

I lift the lid of the pan.

“That’s it?”

She rolls her eyes and sticks out her tongue like she’s throwing up.

“Yep, that’s it.”

I smile at her. It’s one of my old tricks—just to make a big dish of a single vegetable. She comes home from school hungry, and even if she complains about the vegetable I’ve chosen, she eats a lot of it—because there’s nothing else. It makes me very happy as a mother. Kids need proper nutrition. They need lots of vitamins in their tummies. Which is why I do it all. Because I love her.

Over the years you think of all sorts of things you can do in order to act like a good mother. And when I write “act” I mean it. What’s the best way for me to act so that I am the best I can be for my child? I want to provide an anchor for her at home as much as possible. Really, I want her everyday life to be boring and predictable—something I never had as a child. I want her to have the luxury of wanting to go out into the world because life at home is so boring.

Everything was too exciting during my own childhood—constantly moving, fathers constantly changing. There was nothing else I could do but become a homebody and shun travel and excitement. Always cook proper meals. Hardly ever go out to eat, maybe four times a year. And never, ever eat at McDonald’s. Over my dead body.

We always sit together at the table, everyone who is around. Nobody is allowed to answer the phone during a meal, nobody reads or sings. I have no idea why it is, but singing seems to be a major problem—both my daughter and my stepson seem to want to sing at the table all the time. But it’s strictly ­forbidden—otherwise no food goes into their mouths. These are the less important things that I do to act like a good mother for my child. Above them on the list are things like signaling through my behavior every second of every day that she is wanted and loved. I let her know that I am happy she was born. That I’m proud of her, just the way she is. That I’m proud of the things she does. And I tell her all the time that I love her, that she’s smart, pretty, and funny. That she can learn anything if she puts her mind to it. I try to make her understand that it’s okay with me if she does things differently than I do, that I’ll still love her regardless of whatever craziness she ends up going through in her life. My mother never did that. In fact, she impressed the opposite upon me: either you are like me or I don’t love you. That will not be passed down through the generations. I will make sure of that. Ha.

Liza gets three plates out of the cabinet, squats down, puts them on the counter, and then hops down nimbly, like a monkey. In order to set the side of the dinner table where Georg and I sit, she has to remove the picked-over remains of the two newspapers we read every day. The table sits seven. We only use one end of it, though, so we can be close together. I have her set the table because I read in a book that it’s good to have kids do things like that. My impulse would be to do everything for her—to show that I love her. But then she’d never learn anything and she’d grow up unable to do laundry or unload a dishwasher. So I have to get past that impulse and ask her to do things that she really doesn’t need to do. In the book I read about bringing up kids, by Jesper Juul, it says you have to have taught a child everything they will need to live on their own by the time they are twelve. Otherwise it’s too late to teach them. I’ve got five years left. I’ll do it quickly. Setting the table, folding clothes, tidying your room, cleaning the toilet.

Georg comes upstairs. It’s obvious that he’s just gotten out of bed. I smile at him in a way that’s meant to telegraph a message: I can’t talk right now because a child is in the room, but that was fucking hot. He smiles back. He’s wearing his loose-fitting, long white underwear with a button fly. I always tell him how good he looks in them—he looks like a cowboy on his day off, and I like it. And when I run my hand across his ass, which I often do when Liza’s not looking, the cloth feels unbelievably soft. The undies have been washed hundreds of times and are practically see-through in some spots.

I read a theory in Geo Kompakt (which has become my new sex bible) that seemed to perfectly capture the relationship between me and my husband. It was called “the hanging bridge theory.” An attractive woman—the bait in the ­experiment—stopped random men in everyday situations and everyday places—like at the mall or on the sidewalk—and asked them a few questions, supposedly for a scientific study. The men answered gallantly, and she gave each respondent her number in case he was interested to learn the results of the study. Then she did the same thing, except she approached her subjects on a hanging bridge in a park. The bridge swayed back and forth in the wind as she again asked the questions and handed out her number. The result of the experiment: many more men from the hanging bridge called her afterward than did men from the normal situations. Meaning that people create connections more quickly when they are in more extreme conditions. On the swaying bridge, men thought, Oh, we both survived that together and, man, she was rather attractive. People seek connections to those with whom they go through a tough situation. The hanging bridge that brought me and my then new husband, Georg, together was pregnancy and birth.

We got to know each other in a totally boring way, like so many other couples—at work. He ran a gallery and I wanted to exhibit my photography. His wife was about to have a baby, and I had just given birth. We had both just started families with other partners. There was the hanging bridge. Then things went crazy. We careered toward each other like two comets. It was love at first sight—though neither of us noticed. Love took root and grew on its own somewhere in the back of our heads, undetected, like a Trojan-horse virus on a computer. All we thought was, Cool, we understand each other, we should become friends. We felt like kindred spirits, strictly platonic, of course.

So birth was our hanging bridge. He wanted to know everything about my birth process. We hardly talked about anything else. Along the way we started to work together. Much too soon—before the end of my maternity leave—I had to, or rather was permitted to, exhibit my photos in Georg’s gallery. As a result of the stress, good stress, mind you, my milk stopped flowing after just three months of nursing. At that point I could work full-time again, and my then boyfriend could finally help me feed the baby bird. When my future husband had his baby, with his wife obviously, I was more excited than for my own birth. It felt as if I was having a second child because I felt so close to the father. Our children are so close in age that I’ve never been able to shed the feeling that they’re twins. Everything seemed predestined. Yeah, yeah, I know, there’s no such thing as predestination, God, fate, fuck you—there’s only coincidence and hanging bridges. We thought we were friends. We didn’t lie about our relationship because we didn’t know any better ourselves. The moment his son was born, who did he call? Standing in front of the hospital, as men do, after the birth, he didn’t call his own mother or relatives. Nope. He called me. I was so happy for him. Everything had gone well.

I watched my then husband during our birth and thought, Hmmm, he could really do a bit better than that. And my future husband watched his wife give birth and thought, Hmmm, she could really do a bit better than that. And we both knew who could do it a bit better. Us. By the time he had his own child, there was no stopping our love. I thought he was stronger than my then husband. He thought I was stronger than his then wife. Naturally, later on those impressions turned out to be mistaken, just as almost everything you initially think about someone when you fall in love turns out to be wrong. He’s the man; naturally he had a son. I’m a woman; so obviously I had a daughter. Everything fit perfectly—if only there weren’t the previous partners. We needed to get rid of them. But how? Leaving my partner wasn’t difficult for me to imagine. I had my mother as a role model, a consummate pro at leaving people. Georg, on the other hand, had his religious and uncompromisingly loyal parents, married for more than fifty years. In his entire family, zero percent of the marriages had ever ended in divorce. How could he get out of his marriage? What’s more, his wife had picked up on the whole thing. “You’re not going to fall for her, are you?”

As far as I’m concerned, women notice that kind of thing more quickly than men. Or at least they are crazy enough to bring it up, and when that happens everything goes downhill. “Do you still love me?” “Uhhhh.” It takes a second too long to answer. Busted. What a terrible actor Georg is. Just say this, for God’s sake: “Of course I love you! What kind of a question is that?” Then we’d have had a little more time to figure things out. The way it happened, it was already over between them before there was any chance to save it.

That’s what he was going to do at first. He had pangs of Christian guilt, felt it in his genes, I guess. He wanted to save his family. “We can’t see each other anymore. I just had a child with her, and I have to give her—and our relationship—another chance. For the child.”

I had to wait. All through the painful waiting period, I was sure they would work it out. That’s the way you are when you are in love. You’re not sure of yourself and you just keep telling yourself, Sure, no problem, he’ll be back. I didn’t even tell my then husband. Either he didn’t want to notice or he actually didn’t notice anything. There wasn’t much to notice anyway.

We hadn’t even had sex one time before we left our partners. That’s why it’s always amazed me how well that aspect of our relationship functions. In fact, it’s always getting better. I’ve never experienced what it’s like to have sex with the same person for such a long time. Thanks, Mother!

I’m convinced that people come together only because of sex—even if it’s just because they think you will be a good fit in bed. Because of genetics—you can smell it. And then it does turn out to be a fit as good as a couple of trapeze artists. If you have a good sense of smell and don’t ruin it by smoking, you’ll find the best genetic match—someone with whom you can perform sexual acrobatics. I’m totally convinced of that. I must have smelled it. Everything. His sexuality. His ability as a provider. We never talked about money or sex. Our love was just there, and everything made sense in retrospect. Though nothing did at the start. I read a quote somewhere—I think it was from Goethe, though it could just as easily have been from Yoda—that went something like this: Love is just a romantic philosophical superstructure that permits us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we just want to get into someone’s pants. He put it somewhat more eloquently, but I can’t find the exact quote. Maybe I just dreamed that I read it. But I believe the sentiment nonetheless. It’s the key to all the craziness that happens between fully grown adults.

My husband isn’t physically attractive at all. Obviously love has nothing to do with looks. Fuck all of you with your my-dream-man-should-look-like-this-or-that bullshit, your star signs and height and hair color requirements. That’s not the way love works. The first thing I noticed about him—and that stood out in a negative, though interesting, way—was his fucked-up elbow. The first time I met him he was wearing short sleeves. Strong white arms with hair on them, and then a strange crippled elbow—there was some sort of cyst or tumor sticking out, covered with scars. The Phantom of the Opera, except only at the elbow!

I asked very directly what it was. I always do that in the heat of the moment because I’m worried the person has already noticed I’m staring. It turned out to be an affliction from childhood. He broke his arm once, and all winter long he had to take the bus alone to the clinic where he was doing his physical therapy. And one time after an ice storm he got off the bus and slipped and fell on the newly healed elbow. It had to be operated on several times after that because he’d shattered all the bones. They never managed to reconstruct it properly, and that’s why there’s a piece of bone that sticks out like a shark fin. That made an impression on me straightaway.

After the arm business, I noticed a big scar across his cheekbone. The second thing I asked him was where he got that scar. And that one was from cancer. Shortly before we met he’d had skin cancer. Nothing serious. It was discovered early enough that they were able to remove the entire melanoma before it spread, and that was that. Well, except for the fact that in the back of his head he would always remember how death had come knocking. After my very first conversation with him I knew that we belonged together and also that I would end up burying him. I’m going to be a grieving cancer widow. He told me that he comes from a family with a history of cancer. Members of his family either died of cancer or managed to beat various forms of it to earn a brief reprieve. I knew what the story was and what this great love of mine was bringing with him—even if perhaps I understood only subconsciously.

At the front of my consciousness I thought to myself that we would end up working together. What a great gallery owner! What a great guy! But what an odd set of icebreakers. First, childhood injuries. Second, cancer in the family. It pretty much says everything about our relationship. He also asked me about the car accident in which my three brothers died. Death was intertwined with our love right from the start. One of the first things we did as a couple was to fill out organ donor cards and write and sign living wills and actual wills. For us, that was the height of romance.

Georg sits down at his laptop in the kitchen and scans Spiegel Online to see if anything has changed in the world in the last few minutes. Liza wanders around grumbling. She’s bored.

“What should I do now, Mama? I’m bored.”

“See if anything is missing. Drinks, perhaps?”

“Oh yeah, what do you want to drink?”

The same answer we give every day comes from Georg and me in perfect harmony: “Tap water.”

We never drink alcohol in front of the kids—for the sake of setting a good example. And sugary drinks are strictly forbidden at our place—both for the usual anti-American reasons and because of the fact that they are totally unhealthy. Why would you drink something that amounts to candy when you’re thirsty? Sweets exacerbate your thirst. It’s like a form of torture. How can anyone pay good money for drinks that actually make you more thirsty? It’s like giving Jesus vinegar and gall to drink when he was thirsty on the cross. Torture upon torture.

She climbs up onto the counter again to get glasses out of the cabinet. She jumps back down, fills the glasses too full, and carries them to the table while trying to keep them from spilling. I have to stop myself from saying something. Bad, bad to be a mother and want to comment on everything a kid does. You feel it coming on and then the impulse hits you. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

“Can you please put a trivet on the table, too, my child?”

Now that my husband is fully awake, I leave my daughter in his care. I say good-bye. They know the drill. They’re free to do what they wish until I’m back. I’ll be there and back quickly; it’s not far. I turn off the burner under the pan as I walk out—don’t want the two of them to go up in flames in the apartment while I’m unable to keep an eye on them. Gas stoves are dangerous. I won’t let fire take any more of my relatives.