Foreign Exposure Page 6

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” Mom said, reaching for her 501 German Verbs book. “If you want horrible, try reading that Woman in Berlin book I gave you. What a time they had when the Russians took over! Maybe that’ll put some of your misery in perspective.”

  “I don’t want perspective, I want salvation!”

  “Care Bear, you’re a sixteen-year-old babysitter. Forgive me if I’m having trouble feeling sorry for you, but you’re not the first, and I’m pretty sure you won’t be the last.”

  Point taken; my life could be worse. Some people have to be coal miners or spend their lives watching chicken nuggets come down a factory conveyor belt. But that didn’t make babysitting the hyperallergic twins anything approximating a dream job. The boys were not only obnoxious, but completely unappeasable as well. If I suggested a trip to the zoo, one would frown and remind me of his allergy to polar bear fur. If I suggested a walk in the park, the other would bring up his pollen allergy. I offered to take the twins to museums, puppet theaters, and the Dahlem City Farm, but they shot down every idea. They were sensitive to fluorescent lighting, felt, and hay. Of course—how could I have forgotten?

  One day, Joshua surprised me by proposing a trip to the nearby St. Annen-Kirche. “Puleeeeze?” he said. “Our parents take us there all the time.” Now, I’m no great church buff, but I agreed readily, even enthusiastically. When we got there, the twins made me wait outside while they went to the men’s room. They reappeared ten minutes later, red-faced and sniveling, and told me, through tears, that the stalls had been filthy. “We have to go home,” Nathaniel crowed. I offered to buy them ice cream, but with a cry of lactose intolerance they insisted on leaving at once.

  We spent most days in the family room of the Meyerson-Cullens’ dank little faculty apartment. Joshua and Nathaniel weren’t even normal enough to watch TV or play video games. Instead they amused themselves with Boggle and a game called Mouse that involved crawling under the couch and making high-pitched squeaking sounds. Both boys could study fractions for hours, contentedly ignoring me until I dared pick up a book or pull out my journal. If I demonstrated interest in anything other than the brothers, they’d brutally reproach me.

  “Don’t be a deadbeat babysitter,” one would say.

  “Yeah, this is supposed to be an educational social environment,” the other would put in. “How can we learn if you’re neglecting our blossoming intellects?”

  Mostly I just stared out the window, fixing my gaze on the radio tower in the distance and daydreaming about flinging myself off it. Twice Mom urged me to accompany her and Maurice to extremely unfun-sounding cultural events—a choral concert and a Bach organ recital—being held inside a bombed-out church on the Kurfurstendamm, the world-famous shopping street that I, of course, had yet to visit. I declined both invitations, anxious only to get back to the gingerbread house and lose myself in e-mail. From Maurice’s prehistoric laptop, I read about Jess’s internship, the beginning of Viv’s hiking expedition, and Pia’s and Lily’s far more satisfying European adventures. Boris wrote annoyingly impersonal and short messages about the new restaurants and cheeses he had discovered. Sam, more comfortable on e-mail than he’d been in person over the past year, even sent me a few messages.

  But no one wrote often enough, and in my loneliness, I turned to the spam messages a deposed Ugandan prince was sending me; anything to distract me from the eight-year-old terrors of Dahlem. “At least you’re earning stone cold euros,” Jess had written in one message. I didn’t tell her that not only had I not been paid; after two weeks, I still didn’t even know what my wages were.

  “Mom, I hate to sound like a broken record, but this babysitting gig isn’t really working out,” I said over our sauerkraut-accented dinner a few days after our last fruitless conversation on the subject. “Lily’s mom knows somebody at the Berlin bureau of CNN. I might talk to them about volunteering or something.”

  “Oh, Seashell, relax—you don’t want to be stuck at some desk all summer. You couldn’t possibly be bored—what about that wonderful book I lent you about Frederick the Great? You should spend the day outside in a garden just reading and relaxing—the weather’s absolutely stunning.”

  I tried to explain that I had no time to loiter in public gardens with Joshua and Nathaniel in tow, but Mom only said, “That’s exactly what you should do! What better way to learn the city than running around with a couple of natives?”

  “Mom,” I groaned, “they’re not natives. They’re from Newton, Massachusetts! And besides, they’re convinced the sun, moon, stars, and clouds are going to harm them, so we never go outside. I’m completely losing my—”

  “It’ll get better,” Mom said placidly, then switched on one of her E-Z German tapes.

  “You always tell me you want me to be more communicative, Mom,” I went on desperately. “How much more communicative can I be? Here’s what I’m trying to say: I’m having the worst summer of my life. I haven’t met a single person, or gone anywhere except under the Meyerson-Cullens’ couch, where I’m supposed to pretend to be a squeaky rodent on the loose.”

  “Mimi, I hear what you’re saying, and I can identify with your frustrations. But a little change of routine will be good for you after New York, I promise . . .”

  As she spoke, the man on the E-Z German tape said, “Es ist viertel nach zwei. It’s a quarter past two.” Mom, raising her index fingers to her temples and shutting her eyes, repeated the sentence: “Es ist viertel nach zwei. It’s a quarter past two.”

  “Can you not shut your eyes when we’re in the middle of a conversation?”

  “Sorry,” Mom said, her eyes still closed. “I read that it aids memory retention.”

  “Good God,” I said as my forehead sank onto my map of Europe placemat.

  Mom repeated a few more time expressions before pausing the tape. “So are we done with the Joan of Arc act?” she asked. “Because I’ve been meaning to tell you—Dagmar asked if you were available tomorrow night.”

  “Why?” I lifted my head off the placemat. “Does he need a white slave, too?”

  “Can it, Mimi. His friend has a gallery opening, and you’re invited.”

  I was immediately suspicious. “Really? Why didn’t he ask me himself, then?”

  “Well, if you’re going to get technical, I was the one who suggested it. But he didn’t object.”

  “He didn’t object? What kind of invitation is that?”

  Mom dropped a slip of paper with Dagmar’s number onto the table, and I swiped it away. But when her back was turned, I stuck it in my pocket. For the rest of the day, I found myself wondering about Dagmar’s life away from the rhesus monkeys, and in bed that night, I pictured the two of us dancing on top of a white baby grand at a cabaret lounge while le tout Berlin clapped admiringly. I decided to accept the invitation, and by the next morning, I was off-the-charts excited and showed up for work already in party costume—a jean miniskirt, blue fishnets, and a rainbow-striped tube top. I’d thrown one of Decibel’s huge sweatshirts over it to avoid provoking Debbie’s disapproval.

  Of course, she barely looked at me. Even if I’d been wearing nothing but a bicycle chain, she probably wouldn’t have noticed anything irregular. Even more typically, when I started to explain that I had plans that evening and needed to leave by seven-thirty, Debbie talked over my request—the first I’d made in two weeks. Luckily, her husband, Alan, was also in the room at the time, and Alan had taken an inexplicable liking to me. I liked him, too, mainly because I felt sorry for him, with his huge frameless eyeglasses and insanely controlling wife.

  “I put a box of gentle Ziploc baggies on the kitchen table,” Debbie announced on her way to the door. “Use only those for Nathaniel, because he’s sensitive to the regular ones. For Joshua, the regular ones are fine. The special ones cost an arm and a leg, so don’t waste ’em!”

  “Can you be back by seven-thirty?” I asked again.

  While Debbie conveniently ignored me, Alan went out of
his way to reassure me. “Don’t you worry, Mimi,” he said. “We’ll get you out of here in no time.”

  Now, I don’t think Alan was intentionally lying, but he should’ve known he was in no position to be making promises like that. He had about as much sway over his wife as King Arthur had over Lady Bird Johnson.

  They didn’t come home at seven-thirty. Or eight-thirty. Or even nine-thirty. No, they came home at ten. Though by this point I was frantic and seething, Debbie still made me follow her into the kitchen and estimate how many ounces of chicken salad each of the boys had eaten for dinner. Too ashamed to make eye contact, Alan sat down and pretended to read Everything Pasta Macrobiotic!

  Luckily, when I called Dagmar for the tenth time that night, he was still at home gelling up his unicorn horn and told me, “We are never partying before crack of midnight.” We arranged to meet at the local McDonald’s and walk to the Dahlem-Dorf U-Bahn station together. Strange as it sounds, after two weeks in Berlin, I’d yet to ride the subway.

  When I showed up at McDonald’s, Dagmar was already there, dipping the last of his fries in an unfamiliar yellow sauce. He stood up, brushed the crumbs off his all-black ensemble, and kissed me on both cheeks. I complimented him on his spunky pink rubber backpack. He told me I looked “equally jubilating.”

  Our U-Bahn journey from the southwest to the eastern extreme of the city took over an hour, but the time passed quickly with Dagmar, who turned out to be an extremely engaging companion. I felt loose, and ended up telling him about my plan to meet Boris at the airport the following day. “You say he visits you tomorrow?” He raised his eyebrows curiously. “This seems to me most excellent.”

  “Not visiting, exactly. I’m seeing him for his layover. He’s going to Moscow to stay at his grandparents’ dacha, where all they do is plant vegetables and drink vodka.”

  “Ah, wodka!” Dagmar said. “Wodka is very harmful for the monogamy.”

  I asked Dagmar about the neighborhood where we were heading. Friedrichshain, he told me, was formerly part of East Germany and now was the city’s hottest clubbing area. “The new spot changes always,” he said. “The parties commence in abandoned warehouses and disappear one month later. The most excellent are the de Zegunde parties. They are thrown by the two most major DJs from Hamburg, who play the music of beautiful violins.”

  “Violins, really?” I hadn’t figured Dagmar for a classical music lover.

  “No, no, violence.” He karate-chopped the air until I understood. “Beautiful violence.”

  The train finally pulled into our station, and we stepped out into Ostbahnhof, a succession of brightly lit streets thrumming with elegant couples and teenage girls in short, expensive-looking dresses. On every street corner, men stood behind little carts, peddling aromatic pretzels. Though Mom and the Meyerson-Cullens were still in the same city, or at least one of its unprepossessing suburbs, right then I felt very far away from them, delightfully so.

  The scenery grew dingier as we neared Friedrichshain, where nineteenth-century limestone buildings gave way to tan apartment complexes and shabby minimarkets. We passed a few places that seemed cool, including the Lee Harvey Oswald Bar, which was painted red and white and filled with monitors playing a loop of Kennedy’s assassination. “That’s where all the Americans conspire,” Dagmar said with a note of disgust.

  A few blocks later, I flipped for the Astro-Bar, a little hole in the wall with ancient computers hanging from the ceiling. “Look!” I said, peering inside. “This is so geeky—I love it! Can we go in?”

  “No way,” Dagmar said. “If we miss Fred’s show, he will make fritters of us.”

  Minutes later, we came to a large warehouse marked only by a tiny red light over the door. For an underground art party in Berlin’s most avant-garde district, the atmosphere inside was surprisingly friendly. I’d expected pale skin and sullen expressions, but everyone was smiling or laughing, or everyone except Dagmar’s close friend Werner.

  “Hallo, Mimi,” Werner said flatly when we were introduced. His huge yellow teeth and black leather newsboy cap called to mind an extra in a George Michael video—not, as he soon revealed, a pediatric orthodontist who spoke decent English. “How do you know Fred?” he asked me. “He is my very proximate friend.”

  “Fred’s the painter, right?” I said. “I’ve never met him, actually—I came here with Dagmar.”

  “Oh, ja? And how do you know the Dag?” Werner pursued.

  “Through my mother.”

  “Your mother introduced you to the Dag?” At Werner’s shocked expression, I quickly explained that Dagmar was my mother’s assistant. “Oh, ja,” Werner said excitedly, “she is the lady studying monkeys? I hear some funny mentions of this woman.”

  By this point, Dagmar had detached from us, leaving Werner and me to stroll around the space and look at the paintings, a striking series of landscapes in thick oils.

  “These are great,” I told Werner, and asked if he’d introduce me to Fred. “I want to congratulate him.”

  “No, this is hardly possible,” Werner snapped. “Fred wishes not to discuss his art. It reduces him into the pothole of low emotions.”

  While most pictures, he went on to explain, were of the Black Forest, a few were imaginative renderings of Wyoming, complete with jagged mountains and emerald bushes. “It is very devastating,” Werner said. “All Fred has ever wanted is to travel to the state of Wyoming, but he is unable because of his hang-up.”

  “What hang-up?” I asked.

  “Me, I am not a psychiatrist, I do not know the name. But Fred has bought tickets to Wyoming three times and yet he never has gone there.”

  “So he’s afraid of flying?”

  “No, no, not of flying. His girlfriend lives in Turkey and he is making two visits to her every month. He is afraid, I am thinking, of Wyoming.”

  As Werner spoke, Dagmar came up with his arm around a woman who had a skunk dye job similar to his own. Before Dagmar could introduce us, the girl said something in German and, within seconds, we were all heading out to the street and piling into a tiny green car. Werner hooked up his iPod to the car’s stereo, and put on a song for us at brain-piercing volume. The music sounded like your standard techno melody, but fringed with drilling dentistry noises. “Do you like?” Werner shouted into my eardrum.

  “It’s interesting!” I shouted back.

  My enthusiastic response pleased Werner, who settled back into his seat and resumed head-dancing.

  Ships at Night

  MY NIGHT OUT WITH DAGMAR belongs on some all-time top-five list. After the art opening, we went to a club, where I danced until I nearly collapsed, and then I kept dancing until I did collapse. As the sun started to rise, I rested on a barstool, chatting with Werner, while Dagmar and the two-tone woman continued to grind on the dance floor.

  When I got out of the cab and entered the house, around six the next morning, Mom and Maurice were fast asleep. Once upstairs, I crawled into bed and fondly reviewed memories of my night on the town. Though still no Quinn, Dagmar was pretty cool in his insane Germanic way. I couldn’t wait until Ariel and Decibel returned to party with us.

  I’d just fallen asleep when the phone rang. It rang and rang and rang and when at last it stopped ringing my mom began knocking on my bedroom door: “Mimi! Phone!” she cried, crashing into the room and catapulting herself onto my bed. “That was Debbie. She’s frantic. It’s nine-fifteen—why aren’t you over there already?”

  “What do mean—why aren’t I where?” I asked, still barely conscious. “I’m not working today. It’s Saturday. I’m meeting Boris at the airport, remember?”

  Mom pursed her lips primly. “Well, I’m afraid Debbie is under quite another impression. She says you were supposed to be there at nine and was very confused when you didn’t show! But don’t worry, they’re on their way over right now, to save time.”

  “But Mom, I told her a million times that I was busy today. She almost ruined my plans with Dagmar last ni
ght—I refuse to let her ruin today, too! Boris will only be here for three hours, and I won’t see him again all summer!” I was whining, but I didn’t care.

  My mom had never met Boris before, but she displayed no interest in the implication that I had a boyfriend. Instead, she just said, “Mimi, I’m glad you’ve made new friends so fast, but maybe it’s time you refocused on personal responsibility.”

  “But Mom, it’s the weekend! And since when was looking after two of the creepiest boys ever to walk the earth an act of personal responsibility? Don’t I owe it to myself to be happy?”

  “Mimi, I understand it might be hard when all your charmed New York friends have such fancy summer plans, but I’m afraid this is what life’s like for ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the population.”

  I regarded my mother with pure loathing, the depths of which I’d never really experienced before, even in the months after she left my dad. So this was it, then—she really was the pettiest tyrant of them all. Her whole out-of-it, professorial, head-in-the-clouds routine was that and only that: a routine. Deep down, Mom was a power-obsessed control freak who wouldn’t rest until she dominated me every second of every day for the rest of my life.

  At the time, the night before had seemed like a much-needed reprieve from the unpleasantness of my summer, but now, in the aftermath, I felt more cooped up than ever. This couldn’t go on. I had to figure out a way to get out of here, and fast. I threw on a comfortable tank dress that Boris had once complimented me on and went downstairs to eat my regular breakfast of orange juice and birdseed muesli.

  I must have blocked out the sound of the phone ringing, because while I was rinsing out my dish, Mom hollered down to let me know that Alan had called to say they’d be five minutes late. “I love you, Alan,” I mumbled, and lunged toward Maurice’s huge laptop, waiting out the slow Internet connection in a last-ditch effort to contact Boris before his plane took off. It was late, but he might still get my desperate message in time.