LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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

Скачать книгу