In Germany, when we arrived in a new town, the boys would choose a house and go in and tell the people to vacate, and just like that the place would be ours. In Zietz I stood outside a house next to Kay with my bedroll at my feet and my hands in my pockets and stared at the sky while I waited for the owners to leave, thinking, Hurry the hell up, not much caring, when they finally came out, that they glared at us as they went by. The man kept showing everybody a letter that said he was a member of the Christian Science Church in Boston. He said, “You’re in a Christian home.”
Don’t steal my stuff seemed to be his point, or anyway that’s what I thought at the time. Whatever his point, it was a strange thing to say, although I guess there’s no appropriate etiquette for addressing the people who turn you out of your home so they can sleep there. Kay and I moved into a dining room with a balcony. When I got up in the morning Kay was gone, and I went out on the balcony and spotted her wandering the garden, touching the flowers like she’d never seen one before. As I watched she glanced around like the owner might have spies, picked a flower, and then put it in her hair.
“Not exactly standard issue,” I called down, and she jumped, looked up at me, laughed.
“Everything’s in bloom,” she said. “Come see.”
I went downstairs and out the door and let her lead me around the garden and tell me the flowers’ names. At that time I didn’t know much about gardening, so when she told me what the flowers were called, I said, “Red one, purple one, blue one,” and she laughed again.
“Red would suit you,” she said, looking around as though we were in a hat store. She put a finger to her mouth, considered me. “Yes, red.” She reached beside me and plucked a large red flower, one that had bloomed long enough to look as though it had flung itself open, one right at the moment when beauty is heightened by the knowledge that it’s about to fade. I was wearing my hair in two braids at that point, pinned at the back, and she tucked the stem of the flower under one of them. “Beautiful. You’re beautiful,” she said.
As you might imagine, Jennifer, I saw a lot of bad things in Germany. But I wish you could see—not against all that, but existing at the same time, cupped in the palm of my hand—a German garden in the spring, and Marilyn Kay with a flower in her hair, her face open as a rose and shining in the light.
The Lonely Woods
Megan wears a smile of conspiratorial delight, in her hands plates bearing an array of sweet things: pie, cookies, chocolate torte. She approaches the table by the window where Jennifer waits, and the sunlight coming in plays peekaboo with her face, now you see her, now you don’t. “Can you believe all this?” Megan asks, clattering the plates onto the table. “The girl gave me the wrong things, and when I told her said just keep it, and gave me the right things, too.” She slides into her chair. “It’s like that Monopoly card. Bank mistake in your favor. Wasn’t that it?”
“I think so,” Jennifer says, though she remembers it being bank error.
“Bakery mistake in your favor,” Megan says. “We should wait until after the food.” But then she picks up a fork and takes a bite of the torte anyway. “Oh my God this is good,” she says, on her face an expression of such sensual delight that Jennifer feels the moment might be too private to witness. “I never get to eat dessert,” Megan says. “But I have such a sweet tooth.”
Don’t think about it, Jennifer tells herself. Don’t ask what she means when she says she never gets to eat it. Don’t assume it means Sebastian tells her to watch her weight. Don’t suspect everyone is secretly unhappy. Don’t be sad.
After her morning with Margaret, Jennifer went home and cried. It’s so exhausting to be with her: the relentless niceness in the face of Margaret’s prickly need, the struggle not to react to Margaret’s efforts to provoke. Perhaps Margaret doesn’t really exist. That house in the woods, only Jennifer can see it. It’s a dream she’s wandered into, a spell sent to punish her. She can almost believe this. Except Sue the librarian, a solidly real person, is the one who first told Jennifer Margaret’s name. Margaret watches her too fiercely. Margaret pays too much attention to everything she says. Margaret talks, and somehow Jennifer feels as if she’s the one being exposed.