Of course not. It hadn’t been terrible at all. Not always. Not everything had not always been terrible. Anna doubled her negatives, tripled them. Ten months earlier Anna had given birth to a black-haired, bisque-skinned daughter whom she named Polly Jean.
And so they were the Benz family and they lived in the town of Dietlikon, in the district of Bülach, in the canton of Zürich. The Benzes: Bruno, Victor, Charles, Polly, Anna. A plain and mostly temperate household who lived on a street called Rosenweg—Rose Way—a private road that cul-de-sacked directly in front of their house, which itself lay at the foot of a slow, sloping hill that crested a half kilometer behind their property and leveled off at the base of the Dietlikon woods.
Anna lived on a dead end, last exit road.
But the house was nice and their yard was larger than nearly all the other ones around them. There were farmhouses to their immediate south, whose properties abutted fields of corn, sunflower, and rapeseed. Eight fully mature Apfelb?ume grew in their side yard and in August when the trees were pregnant with ripe, heavy apples, fruit tumbled from the branches to the ground in a thump-tha-thump-thump rhythm that was nearly consistent with light rainfall. They had raspberry bushes and a strawberry patch and red currants and black currants both. And while the vegetable garden in the side yard was generally left untended, the Benzes enjoyed, behind a thigh-high picket fence in front of their property, a spate of rosebushes, blooms of every shade. Everything comes up roses on Rosenweg. Sometimes Anna thought this to herself.
Victor and Charles barreled through the front door. They were greeted before they passed through the boot room by a dour-faced Ursula pressing her finger to her lips. Your sister’s asleep!
Anna was grateful for Ursula—really she was. But Ursula, who was usually never blatantly unkind to Anna, still treated her as a foreign object, a means to the end of her son’s happiness (if indeed “happy” was the word for what Bruno was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn’t) and the vessel by which her grandchildren—whom she deeply loved—were carried into the world. The help that Ursula offered was for the children’s sake, not Anna’s. She had been a high school English teacher for thirty years. Her English was stilted but fluent and she conceded to speak it whenever Anna was in the room, which sometimes Bruno didn’t even do. Ursula shooed her grandsons into the kitchen for a snack.
“I’m taking a shower,” Anna said. Ursula raised an eyebrow but then lowered it as she followed Victor and Charles into the kitchen. It was no concern of hers. Anna took a towel from the linen closet and locked the bathroom door behind her.
She needed the shower. She smelled like sex.
2
“WHAT CAN’T YOU LIVE WITHOUT?”
This, Anna asked Archie as they shared, incautiously, a cigarette in bed. Anna didn’t smoke. She was wrapped in a top sheet. It was Friday.
“Whiskey and women,” Archie said. “In that order.”
Archie was a whiskey man. Literally. He stocked it, stacked it, and sold it in a shop he owned with his brother, Glenn.
He laughed in an up-for-interpretation way. Archie and Anna were new lovers, green lovers, ganz neue Geliebte. Nearly virgin to each other, they still had reason to touch. Archie was ten years older than Anna, but his brown-red curls had not yet begun to thin and his body was taut. Anna responded to his laughter with laughter of her own: the sad, empty laughter of knowing that the newness, nice as it was, wouldn’t last. Novelty’s a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate. So Anna would enjoy it prior to its tattering. Because tatter it surely would.
“IF,” DOKTOR MESSERLI ASKED, “you are miserable, then why not leave?”
Anna spoke without reflection. “I have Swiss children. They belong to their father as much as to me. We are married. I’m not really miserable.” Then she added, “He wouldn’t accept a divorce.”
“You have asked him.” This wasn’t a question.
Anna had not asked Bruno for a divorce. Not directly. She had, however, in her most affected and despondent moments, hinted around the possibility. What would you do if I went away? she’d ask. What if I went away and never came back? She would pose these questions in a hypothetical, parenthetically cheerful voice.
Bruno would smirk. I know you’ll never leave because you need me.
Anna couldn’t deny this. She absolutely needed him. It was true. And honestly Anna had no plans to leave. How would we split the children? she wondered, as if the children were a cord of wood and the divorce an axe.