Foreign Exposure Read online

  Once in my pajamas, I turned out the lights and lay down on the naked mattress. Then I took the snow globe from the shelf and held on to it, shaking it in the dark. Maybe I was too wound up to trust my own judgment. Maybe, I thought, everything would be just fine. As I put the souvenir aside and started to drift off to sleep, the opening of “Africa Unite” jingled from a speaker overhead, and Maurice’s machine-gun laughter rang out from the kitchen.

  May Contain Nuts

  I ACCEPT FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR not having spoken much to Mom in the weeks preceding my arrival in Berlin. Whenever she called to discuss summer plans, I’d keep the conversation short with an excuse about homework or a Bugle obligation. “I guess we’re playing it ‘cool teen’?” Mom would tut-tut, pronouncing the last two words with unmistakable air quotes. Then she’d tell me for the thousandth time that when she was my age, she spent summers helping out at her father’s dry-cleaning-supply office. “What I would have given to go abroad,” she’d rasp. “Back then, we weren’t nearly so jaded.”

  I never bothered denying these allegations, but I didn’t feel jaded in the least when I thought about Berlin. No, what I felt was terrified. I knew nothing about Berlin, and I was getting sick of adapting to new places all the time. I’d just survived being the new girl at Baldwin—wasn’t that enough adaptation for a year?

  And as much as Mom tried to talk up Germany, she tended to avoid specifics. Instead she’d rave about its liberal immigration policies, or its cutting-edge social programs, like the national “Get Happy” billboard campaign geared at energizing Germany’s increasingly depressed population.

  “How inspiring is that?” Mom had asked from Houston, during one of our pre-summer phone calls. She’d learned about the campaign in a recent issue of the Economist. “Around here, the only billboards we have are for malls and shooting ranges.”

  I felt anything but happy when Mom brutally woke me up exactly one hour into my postflight nap. She flipped on the light and announced it was time to discuss my summer plans.

  “I’m sleeping,” I moaned. “My brain is still stuck somewhere over Greenland. Can it wait until I’m awake?”

  “You sound perfectly awake to me,” Mom said. “Why don’t you get dressed and come downstairs? Maurice has made a fabulous German ale soup!”

  Maurice’s ale soup tasted just as disgusting as it sounds. The alcohol hadn’t yet evaporated and the orange peels bobbing up and down in the broth were tough and jagged. At least I’d already given up on the meal when Mom sprang the news on me; otherwise, I might’ve choked.

  She’d evidently taken the liberty of offering my services to one of her colleagues. As a babysitter. “They’re adorable, and so bright, too!” Mom said. “Eight-year-old twins.”

  “What?!” I’d only babysat twice in my entire life, both times for the Friedmans, two of my mom’s colleagues at Rice. The first time was an unqualified success: I spent the evening trying on Mrs. Friedman’s makeup and gossiping on the phone to my friend Rachel. On the second evening, however, the Friedmans came home early from their departmental dinner to find me passed out on their sofa while the television roared and twenty-month-old Erika waddled around the kitchen holding a blender part.

  “I’m serious,” I continued, reminding Mom of this baleful incident. “I don’t even like children. And what happened to my German classes? I thought I was going to be learning an important foreign language. What happened to that?”

  “Oh, that.” Mom shrugged. “I think it was a misjudgment. Maurice and I decided if you’re really gung ho about studying a foreign language, it should be something useful, like Chinese.”

  “Emerging markets,” Maurice said helpfully.

  “If it’s so useless,” I asked, “then why are you studying it—can you tell me that?”

  “Besides,” Mom went on, ignoring my extremely pertinent question, “this’ll be a great opportunity. It’s so much more interactive than sitting around in a sweaty classroom conjugating irregular verbs all summer!”

  “And just think,” Maurice piped in, “you’ll be earning money!”

  “Exactly!” Mom cried. “You can save up for some treat you’ve always wanted, like one of those carcinogenic cellular phones.”

  “Or a plane ticket to New York,” I mumbled.

  The next morning, Mom shook me awake for the second time in twelve hours. “Should I start getting used to this?” I asked, casting an appraising glance at today’s T-shirt of choice: a heather gray job with the words YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR. God, genetics were such an awful mystery.

  “Yep, start living on local time straight off the bat,” she said. “It’s the only way to beat jet lag.”

  In the kitchen downstairs, I was pleasantly surprised to find a Maurice-free table that had been set with a pitcher of orange juice and a basket of powdered-sugar-dusted rolls. The pastries were delicious, each with a different filling. As I ate I watched our next-door neighbors through the window, all dressed for the day and seated around their kitchen table as if at a fancy restaurant. Mom made me take my fourth roll (apple and cinnamon) upstairs while I got ready for my first visit to the Teichen Institute. In the car on the way over, I ate my fifth roll (sweet cheese) and marveled at the suburban sinkhole I now called home. Quinn had assured me that Berlin set the standard for all things cutting edge, but he’d surely eat his words if he saw Dahlem, the characterless suburb thirty miles from the city center where Mom and Maurice had chosen to settle.

  The Teichen Institute was a forbidding concrete monolith in the Neukolln neighborhood of Berlin, on a street called Karl-Marx-Strasse. When I commented on the institute’s resemblance to a high-security prison, Mom only sighed and said, “Oh, Peanut Butter, you have so much to learn about Bauhaus.”

  She’d arranged for me to meet my new charges the morning after my arrival, without giving me a single day to acclimate. Even worse, Mom was too busy with her incomprehensible academic responsibilities to bother sticking around to introduce me to Nathaniel and Joshua Meyerson-Cullen; she left those honors to her assistant, Dagmar. After parking on the mezzanine level of the Teichen Institute’s administrative headquarters, she flitted off to do some of her monkey research. The walls in this abandoned waiting area were painted a pukey orange, compounding the feeling of queasiness I’d had since breakfast.

  Making small talk with Dagmar was no easy task. I asked him soon after we sat down, “So, do you study monkeys, too?”

  “No, I am learning from them,” he replied cryptically.

  Right then, I heard a loud, unmistakably American voice down the hallway. “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times,” a woman was saying at maximum volume, “it’s extremely difficult and expensive to obtain Lactaid out here, so BE CAREFUL—especially you, Joshua! If I find you’ve been sneaking cheese toast behind my back . . . Well, I’d better not find out!”

  I looked in the direction of the sound to see a middle-aged woman with long Fraggle Rock hair and a loose-fitting beige tunic, holding the hands of two young boys.

  The woman recognized me immediately, and as she stomped toward our tiny table, the sick feeling in my stomach moved a few inches up in my throat. I threw Dagmar a desperate glance, which he registered by whispering, inexplicably, “Tomorrow’s breakfast is today’s scrap metal.”

  Seeing no alternative, I came shakily to my feet.

  “Mimi, right?” the woman boomed, thrusting out her hand at me. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m Debbie Meyerson-Cullen, Joshua and Nathaniel’s mother.” She gestured at the boys standing obediently at her sides. They were fraternal twins, each with his own brand of unattractiveness: one pudgy, with his mother’s wild hippie hair; the other slight and stooped over, with a thin stream of mucus dripping from nose to lip.

  “I’ve heard all about you, so I know what we’re getting. And I take it your mother has filled you in on the job?”

  “Actually,” I said hesitantly, “she didn’t go into m
uch detail.” I paused to smile down at her sons, only to be met with a double blank stare. Glancing back at their mother, I continued, “If you could give me an overview of everything, that’d be -—”

  “We’re here from Newton, Mass,” Debbie said, not waiting for me to finish. “My husband, Alan, teaches at Boston University. Right now he’s working on a project on technology and violence here at the institute, which is how we met that wonderful mom of yours. I’m a philosophy professor at Northeastern, but this year I’m here purely in the capacity of hausfrau.”

  At this, Debbie snorted through her nose, overcome by her own hilarity. The woman strongly reminded me of somebody, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on who. “No, really. I’m researching Wittgenstein’s picture theory—Berlin has invaluable resources on the subject, you wouldn’t believe it. Not even Cambridge can come close!” She snorted again, and to avoid the spittle, I took a polite step backward.

  How could it not have struck me instantly—she was my mother’s long-lost twin. I’d barely said a word, but Debbie Meyerson-Cullen just kept right on talking. One of the boys removed a small box from her bag and proceeded to work on a jigsaw puzzle on the lounge carpet. “You can probably fill in the remainder of the narrative yourself,” Debbie told me. “While Alan’s in the lab and I’m in the library, we need a responsible party to look out for our boys. Now, they’re extremely precocious and the most adept eight-year-old conversationalists I’ve ever had the pleasure of raising, but there are a few rules and regs I’ll need to brief you on nevertheless.”

  From her gigantic canvas tote bag Debbie whipped out a clear plastic clipboard and took a stapled-together stack of papers off the top, which she passed over to me. AVOIDANCES AND ALLERGIES, the paper read, and was divided into two columns, one headed “Joshua” and the other “Nathaniel.” Page two of the handout was a German glossary for words like “pistachio,” “garlic,” “gluten,” and “triglycerides.”

  In her frenzy, Debbie still hadn’t pointed out which child was which, but no doubt I’d learn the difference soon enough. “It all boils down to a few simple rules,” she was saying. “Both boys are highly lacto-sensitive, and Nathaniel is allergic to dust, felines, wax, apples, processed sugar, laundry detergent, and a variety of beans—lentils and cannellini in particular, but pintos will go down just fine. Joshua’s the one you really need to keep an eye on, because he has a severe nut allergy. Sure, you say, sounds pretty straightforward—you’re thinking, ‘Just say no to nuts’! But let me tell you, you’d be flabbergasted by the number of foods that contain nut traces these days. Even a bag of potato chips can be lethal if it’s been manufactured in the wrong factory! Not that the boys are allowed to eat chips. What’s the point, when the world contains so many foods with nutritional . . .”

  By this stage in the monologue, Debbie had abandoned all pretense of actually speaking to me. I veered backward again, toward the chair, as jet lag washed over me, along with maybe even some residual hangover from the grad party two nights before. Suddenly, the room took on a spinning, hallucinogenic quality, and all the while Debbie kept on talking. Like a self-help guru filling airtime on daytime television, I offered myself encouragement and advice. This could be a character-building experience, perhaps a starred item on my college application. At the very least, I’d have some unbeatable e-mail material.

  “You’ll see I keep a vocabulary list on the refrigerator,” Debbie was saying as she dug through her shoulder bag. “That’s where I jot down the boys’ notable words. Joshua said ‘gadfly’ the other day. I don’t know where in Berlin he picked that one up, but that kid’s like a sponge—a bona fide wordsmith dynamo.” I assured her I was impressed.

  “Oh! Here you go,” she said, extracting an ancient cell phone from the sleeve of a sweatshirt. I took the proffered phone, which had buttons with German commands on them. “I’m programmed as Felix,” Debbie said. “It’s secondhand and I can’t figure out how to change the dang names in the directory, so if anything comes up, just call Felix and I’ll come a-runnin’.”

  Debbie then handed me a bag with keys to the Meyerson-Cullen home, a notebook with recommended meal plans, an Urban-Kinder: Berlin guidebook, and a safety fanny pack with a compass, a whistle, and a flashlight. I asked her what she was thinking in terms of hours. “Well, something like nine to five,” she replied. “But it being the summer and all, let’s take things loosey-goosey, OK? That’s not interfering with any plans, is it?”

  Before I could think better of it, I admitted that, having just arrived in Berlin, I didn’t have much of a life here yet.

  “Super!” Debbie exclaimed. “We don’t like our babysitters to have lives.” She cackled kookily, then promptly resumed issuing instructions and commands and safety warnings. A chill passed over me as I realized I’d be working for a madwoman. Why oh why would my mother do this to me?

  “And now I’m off to do some reading at the library,” she said. “I trust you can see my little wizards safely to the house? It’s right down the street, and they have the route memorized!”

  Gritting my teeth, I waved goodbye to Debbie and allowed Joshua and Nathaniel to march me outside the institute. They each gripped one of my hands and tugged me along like an unruly Doberman. “How long have you guys lived here?” I asked. Not the most brilliant question, I’ll admit, but I needed a conversation-starter.

  “A year,” one said in a colorless voice.

  “A month,” intoned the other.

  “Ten years.”

  “Ten billion years.”

  “Infinity years.”

  “Google-cubed decades!”

  Oh, brother. If I’d had a free arm, I surely would’ve gripped my forehead right about now. The Meyerson-Cullen twins were as bad as their mother—worse, if possible. “You guys should go on Saturday Night Live,” I told them, not altogether kindly.

  “I like Tuesday Night Live better!”

  “No, I like Wednesday Afternoon Live!”

  “What about Sunday Morning Live?”

  They kept up this hilarious routine until we reached the drab apartment block where they lived. I was inserting the key in the lock when a voice behind me bellowed: “Surprise! You’re on Candid Camera!”

  “What’s that?” I asked the boys, then turned to see Debbie Meyerson-Cullen a few yards behind us, crouched beside a bushy tree. “Just wanted to see if you’d find your way,” she said happily. “You’ve done an A-plus job. I knew I could have faith. This is going to be a top-notch summer!”

  “Mom! You’re back—hip-hip, hooray!” The frizzy-haired twin released his sweaty palm from my grip and loped toward her.

  Still at my side, the runny-nosed one observed, “Mother, you’re behaving kind of stalkerishly right now.”

  “Stalkerishly.” Debbie shook her head in wonderment. “Magnificent word choice! See how lucky you are, Mimi? Please don’t forget to add that one to the vocab list on the fridge.”

  With those final instructions, Debbie waved and skipped off down the street.

  From: “Vrock2000”

  To: “Mimicita86”

  Date: June 16, 4:32 p.m.

  Subject: Miss u already

  Hey babes, greetings from the sweaty big apple. Just wanted to reach out and let u know we miss you. The left behind girls (lily, jess & i) went bathing suit shopping at Century 21 and guess who we ran into? That’s right, Yuri Knutz, everyone’s favorite Russian Dissident Fiction/ Indigenous Crafts teacher. He was there looking at padded bikinis—by himself! He must have an exciting summer ahead of him. Oh, yeah, and I’m attaching a pic of us modeling our new swimwear on Long Beach. See the lifeguard in the background? Fast asleep the whole time. But kind of a hottie, no?

  Vivian

  To: “HWYates”

  From: “Mimicita86”

  Date: June 19, 10:08 p.m.

  Subject: none

  Hi, Harriet,

  I just wanted to send you a very jet-lagged thank-you for having me at your eng
agement (!) party. Not to repeat myself, but I’m REALLY happy for you and Ed. It’s inspiring that you’ve waited so long for Mr. Right. Maybe there’s hope for me after all! I’ve been in Germany for a little under a week, and all I can say is: so far, so bad. I got roped into babysitting for these eight-year-old robot kids from Massachusetts. Don’t want to say anything too mean, but I’m hoping their personalities are still in the development stage. Their mom is insanely demanding and gives me very little time to myself. Mom’s manic as usual, and her boyfriend, Maurice, is driving me crazy with his imagined health problems. He’s spent the last few days convinced he’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, but every time I ask him for an example of something he can’t remember, he says he forgets and starts freaking out again. Anyway, fingers crossed the fun quotient increases soon . . . Hope you didn’t have too big a mess to clean up, and write when you can.

  XXOX Mimi

  Wyomophobia

  ONLY A WEEK INTO MY POST CHEZ Meyerson-Cullen, and I was already fantasizing about getting into a freak accident. Nothing deadly, obviously, just something tragic enough to keep me strapped to a hospital bed until school started. I’d already tried about eight hundred times to tell Mom how dire my situation was, but she was usually too busy Repeating, “Habt Ihr ein Schwimmbad? Is there a swimming pool?” to heed my complaints.

  One morning at breakfast, I caught her before she’d switched on her E-Z German tape. “Oh, Mimi,” she said, “if you don’t watch it, you’re going to end up like your sister—completely checked out from reality. Next you’ll tell me you’d rather be disco-dancing in Ibiza!”

  “Yes,” I cried, “as a matter of fact, I would! I’d give my first-born child to science if I could be doing anything in Ibiza! My job is beyond horrible, Mom. I really hate it.”