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Authors: Brittani Sonnenberg
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before.”
Elise is both bored and irritated by this thinly veiled political critique, and moves towards her coat. “I should get going.”
“Of course!” the woman begins moving to another aisle, where she picks up a spade and, with a manic energy, starts digging around the roots of a rhododendron bush. “Get going, get going! I am also busy! I have fifty gardens to keep alive! What do you have to do, Hausfrau ?” she spits. “Who do you have to keep alive?”
Elise, holding her stomach protectively, as though to protect the unborn from such venom, hurries away, as repulsed now by the gaudy blossoms as she was enchanted when she first entered the greenhouse. She considers tossing away the honeysuckle at the gate to the other garden but thrusts it in her pocket instead, next to Liesel’s letter.
* * *
Back in the first garden, the picnickers are gone, and only the boy, the grandmother, and a few cake crumbs remain. The boy is asleep in the old woman’s lap. The grandmother gathers Elise in one look and then shakes the boy, who moans. “ Los, ” she says. The boy opens his eyes and looks at Elise, full of longing. Elise opens her arms to him and he burrows into her, nestles against her neck.
“ Es ist kalt, ” the grandmother states, as pragmatic as ever, and begins marching off, jerking her head, indicating that the two follow her.
The sky is pinkish. Elise feels more tired than she can ever remember feeling. She wants to lay her head down on the picnic table, but the grandmother looks back at her and shakes her head no. Elise recalls what the woman in the greenhouse said about the grandmother’s dementia. She was wrong, Elise thinks. I trust this old woman more than I trust myself. Elise feels for the letter in her pocket. I will translate the letter, Elise thinks. I’ll spend the next week at home with the dictionary, skipping German class, poring over the looping letters. I will read it aloud to Liesel. It is an unhinged idea, Elise knows, but to live so far from home, in Germany, is just as unhinged. That’s what being foreign is: being lonely enough to follow a small boy through a city, unbalanced enough to believe you can help a dead woman receive her mother’s letter. Ironic, Elise thinks, that the visions she craved so badly back in Vidalia as a child, thinking if she prayed hard enough, she could glimpse what others sometimes claimed they witnessed—a holy light, the voice of Christ—never came. It is only now, in Hamburg, where she feels herself so lost, that the uncanny unfurls, godlessly, in spring’s saturated colors, throbbing with secular love.
The grandmother and the boy lead Elise back down the series of gardens slowly, as though she is a recovering invalid. They walk back through the darkened streets, gone dim and busy with the work crowd and dinner preparations, turning corners until they are back at Elise and Chris’s apartment. Elise can see the lights on in their apartment; Chris must be home.
“ Tschüß, meine Liebe, ” the grandmother says (or does she say “Liesel”?), and pinches Elise’s cheek. The boy looks up forlornly at Elise and grudgingly accepts a hug; he is angry that she is leaving. Elise is also afraid to go, until the grandmother gives her a tough little shove and turns away with the boy. Elise considers following them, but the baby does not want to and kicks roughly. It is Elise’s first intuition of her child’s stubborn will, opposed to hers. It shocks her into movement. Elise walks to the door, rings the bell, and slowly climbs the stairs to her glowing foreign home.
Good Luck
Bombay, India; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1982
C hris likes to travel. Likes every last detail of it, from tenderly laying his ironed oxford shirts in his suitcase; to the sudden tilt backwards when the plane lifts—which body memory greets with anticipatory joy, from a jerky Chariton county fair roller coaster, August 1969—to the quiet melancholy of opening
Elise is both bored and irritated by this thinly veiled political critique, and moves towards her coat. “I should get going.”
“Of course!” the woman begins moving to another aisle, where she picks up a spade and, with a manic energy, starts digging around the roots of a rhododendron bush. “Get going, get going! I am also busy! I have fifty gardens to keep alive! What do you have to do, Hausfrau ?” she spits. “Who do you have to keep alive?”
Elise, holding her stomach protectively, as though to protect the unborn from such venom, hurries away, as repulsed now by the gaudy blossoms as she was enchanted when she first entered the greenhouse. She considers tossing away the honeysuckle at the gate to the other garden but thrusts it in her pocket instead, next to Liesel’s letter.
* * *
Back in the first garden, the picnickers are gone, and only the boy, the grandmother, and a few cake crumbs remain. The boy is asleep in the old woman’s lap. The grandmother gathers Elise in one look and then shakes the boy, who moans. “ Los, ” she says. The boy opens his eyes and looks at Elise, full of longing. Elise opens her arms to him and he burrows into her, nestles against her neck.
“ Es ist kalt, ” the grandmother states, as pragmatic as ever, and begins marching off, jerking her head, indicating that the two follow her.
The sky is pinkish. Elise feels more tired than she can ever remember feeling. She wants to lay her head down on the picnic table, but the grandmother looks back at her and shakes her head no. Elise recalls what the woman in the greenhouse said about the grandmother’s dementia. She was wrong, Elise thinks. I trust this old woman more than I trust myself. Elise feels for the letter in her pocket. I will translate the letter, Elise thinks. I’ll spend the next week at home with the dictionary, skipping German class, poring over the looping letters. I will read it aloud to Liesel. It is an unhinged idea, Elise knows, but to live so far from home, in Germany, is just as unhinged. That’s what being foreign is: being lonely enough to follow a small boy through a city, unbalanced enough to believe you can help a dead woman receive her mother’s letter. Ironic, Elise thinks, that the visions she craved so badly back in Vidalia as a child, thinking if she prayed hard enough, she could glimpse what others sometimes claimed they witnessed—a holy light, the voice of Christ—never came. It is only now, in Hamburg, where she feels herself so lost, that the uncanny unfurls, godlessly, in spring’s saturated colors, throbbing with secular love.
The grandmother and the boy lead Elise back down the series of gardens slowly, as though she is a recovering invalid. They walk back through the darkened streets, gone dim and busy with the work crowd and dinner preparations, turning corners until they are back at Elise and Chris’s apartment. Elise can see the lights on in their apartment; Chris must be home.
“ Tschüß, meine Liebe, ” the grandmother says (or does she say “Liesel”?), and pinches Elise’s cheek. The boy looks up forlornly at Elise and grudgingly accepts a hug; he is angry that she is leaving. Elise is also afraid to go, until the grandmother gives her a tough little shove and turns away with the boy. Elise considers following them, but the baby does not want to and kicks roughly. It is Elise’s first intuition of her child’s stubborn will, opposed to hers. It shocks her into movement. Elise walks to the door, rings the bell, and slowly climbs the stairs to her glowing foreign home.
Good Luck
Bombay, India; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1982
C hris likes to travel. Likes every last detail of it, from tenderly laying his ironed oxford shirts in his suitcase; to the sudden tilt backwards when the plane lifts—which body memory greets with anticipatory joy, from a jerky Chariton county fair roller coaster, August 1969—to the quiet melancholy of opening
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