“Really?” Mary asked as if she’d never heard such a thing in her life. “Why’s that?”
Anna capitulated. “I don’t have much call for it.”
“No Facebook? Myspace?”
“No.” This was a bit of a fib. Of course Anna had an email address. Everyone had an email address. Of course Anna used it. It’s where the boys’ school sent their announcements. It’s how Anna confirmed her dentist appointments. Without it, she’d never be able to shop online. But she didn’t use it when she didn’t have to. Who would she email that she didn’t already regularly see? Who would she connect or reconnect with? All those distant relatives with whom she didn’t keep in touch? Her school pals and ex-lovers? There was no one Anna was eager or able to contact. And no one looked to get in touch with her. All told, there was less humiliation in the lie.
“Well anyway, let’s not forget to swap numbers, okay? Now,” Mary breathed deeply, “time to get back! See you in there? We’ll talk more during break?”
“Sure.” Anna was as stiff as she could be without appearing rude. She was in a bad mood and being unfair. She self-corrected with an “absolutely” and Mary left.
Once more she looked at her sweater. I’ve destroyed a beautiful thing, Anna thought. I have nothing to change into.
IN A MOMENT OF bald yearning, Anna whined to Doktor Messerli, “I wish I were better looking.”
“You think there is something wrong with how you look?”
Anna shrugged. “Wrong” was the wrong word. “I’m neither plain nor pretty. I’m irrevocably average.”
“Jung said that beautiful women were sources of terror. That as a general rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”
Anna dismissed her with a backhand wave.
Then Doktor Messerli asked, “When will you trust me enough to tell me everything?”
ANNA EXAMINED HERSELF IN the mirror. She was neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor too thin. Her hair fell in easy but shaggy shoulder-length waves. It was the color of top dirt and it was graying around her forehead (she dyed it). What do they see in me, men? She wasn’t being modest. She truly didn’t know.
She stared herself farther down in the bathroom mirror for a full minute more before returning to class.
In the classroom, Roland was explaining the declension of adjectives. Anna took notes and tried to follow along. Declining adjectives. As if they were cups of tea. No thank you, I’ve had enough. She ticked through all relevant descriptives. Lonely. Mediocre. Yielding. Easy. Frightened. No, no, I have plenty already of each.
But declension, as Roland explained it, was about clarity. Constructing a sentence in a way that the function of every word is unambiguous, impossible to be misunderstood. To classify units of language by their purpose, to pin all words to their syntax by a constant, final syllable like a butterfly tacked to a board. Here is a masculine subject, there is its feminine object. Anna smirked. It was a word’s grammatical uniform. The policeman’s badge. The crown of a king.
A wife’s gold ring.
Roland droned. “Ich fahre ein blaues Auto.” Anna took absent notes; she doodled arrows and crosses and sadly drawn faces of sad-eyed women in the margins of her workbook. There was no reason for this day to be so intractable.
Roland continued. “Ich fahre ein blaues Auto. ABER—ich fahre das blaue Auto. You hear the difference?”
Anna did. It was the difference between “a” and “the.”
The disconnect between “general” and “specific.”
The vast, vapid chasm that divides “this particular one” from “some of them.”
The discrepancy that separates any two “him”s. She did not need this pointed out to her.
No, no. I have plenty. Thank you. That’s enough.
Later in the Kantine Anna sat with Archie, Mary, Nancy from South Africa, and Ed, who came from London. The English speakers huddled together. Same seeks same; we search out the familiar, just as the Doktor said. The Asians sat behind them, setting themselves apart as well. And the Australian couple, the French woman, and the lady from Moscow broke away from the group for their own reason—to go out to the patio and smoke. Underneath their table, Archie slid a hand up and down the side of Anna’s leg. She drank her coffee without blinking or shifting in her seat. Ed had Archie’s ear discussing politics, while Mary quizzed Anna about her children. Nancy bounced between both conversations, alternating interest.
ANNA BROUGHT A DREAM to Doktor Messerli.