Читать книгу Wrecked - Charlotte Roche - Страница 5

Tuesday

Every time we have sex, we turn on both of the electric blankets half an hour in advance. We have extremely high-quality electric blankets, and they stretch from the head of the bed to the foot. It’s something you just have to spend a bit more on—at least, my husband had to spend a bit extra on them. Because I’ve always been terribly scared of those types of things, scared that they’ll heat up after I fall asleep and I’ll be roasted alive or die of smoke inhalation. But our electric blankets automatically switch themselves off after an hour. We lie down next to each other in the bed—heated to 105 degrees—and stare up at the ceiling. The warmth relaxes our bodies. I begin to breathe deeply, smiling on the inside with the excitement of what’s to come. Then I roll over and kiss him as I put my hand into his XL yoga pants. No zipper or anything else that could catch on hairs or foreskin. I don’t grab his cock at first. I reach down farther—to his balls. I cradle them in my hand like a pouch full of gold. At this point I’m already betraying my man-hating mother. She tried to teach me that sex was something bad. It didn’t work.

Breathe in, breathe out. This is the only moment in the day when I really breathe deeply. The rest of the time I tend to just take shallow gasps. Always wary, always on the lookout, always bracing for the worst. But my personality completely changes during sex. My therapist, Frau Drescher, says I have subconsciously split myself in two—since my feminist mother tried to raise me as an asexual being, I have to become someone else in bed to avoid feeling as if I’m betraying her. It works very effectively. I am completely free. Nothing can embarrass me. I’m lust incarnate. I feel more like an animal than a person. I forget all my responsibilities and problems. I become just my body and leave my anxious mind behind. I slowly slide down in bed until my face is in his crotch. I can smell his masculine scent. I find the male scent isn’t very different from that of the female. If he hasn’t showered right before sex—and who does when you’ve been together as long as we’ve been—a drop or two of urine has started to ferment between his foreskin and the head of his cock. It smells the way my grandmother’s kitchen used to after she’d sautéed fish on her gas stove. Eyes closed. Just get through it. The smell disgusts me a little, but that feeling of disgust also excites me.

Once I’ve given everything a good suck, it doesn’t smell anymore. Like a cow licking its calf clean. I bury my face in his balls, then rub my cheek along his outstretched shaft. He always gets stiff as soon as we first kiss. My husband, Georg, is a lot older than I am, and I’m curious how much longer his erection will function this well. I kiss the crease where his legs are attached to his body—whatever you call that spot. By now he’s moaning and asking for more. For the time being it’s all about making him happy. I carefully consider the rhythm I do everything in—I want to drive him absolutely wild. First, let’s tease him a little. I stay on the seam where his legs and body meet, holding his balls firmly in my hand. I slowly switch from kissing to licking. I make loud smacking noises so he can hear what I’m doing as well as feel it. Beneath his balls I feel the erectile tissue—the extension of his cock inside his body—that stretches to the perineum. Do you call it a perineum on a man? There’s a line there that looks like a set of labia fused together. It’s all the same, isn’t it? The way I like to approach it is to imagine he has a vagina. Just a very elongated vagina that sticks out! Way out. I hold his balls more tightly and massage the erectile tissue below.

To get myself going, I rub my vagina against his knee. If I arch my back a little, it hits just the right spot. My tongue slowly wanders from the line between his legs up his shaft. I lick it until it’s totally wet, and then I breathe on it so he can feel the chill of the moisture. From the shaft I run my tongue down to his balls. I take both of them into my mouth and play with them. I’ve learned to make sure not to twist the cords attached to the testicles. I’ve done that a few times with Georg, and it really hurt him. Farther down I massage his perineum with my tongue and let some spit dribble down for my finger on his asshole. I make my tongue stiff and pointed and run it upward from the bottom of the perineum, between his balls, and then all the way up to the acorn-shaped tip of his shaft, all while rubbing my pointer finger slowly around his asshole. I wet my lips and the tip of his cock with spit. When I start to suck on the acorn-shaped head of his cock I barely open my mouth so it feels tight to him. And I let just the very tip in and out again. In and out. In and out. In and out. I let more and more spit run out. I learned that from another man—that it hurts if it gets too dry. I start to take his cock a little more deeply into my mouth. As I go down, I wrap my lips tightly around his whole cock. When I come back up I suck. Because of the vacuum that creates, it makes a popping noise when I get to the top. I always pull the foreskin up with my mouth, up and over the acorn tip. And then I always swirl my tongue around the end. The tip bulges out of my cheeks from inside my mouth. In porn films, women always jerk the foreskin back and forth with their hands. But that—particularly the downward jerk—doesn’t do it for my husband. In fact, it hurts him. No idea why they do that in porn films. I read once in a sex book that if a woman is going to do that, it’s better if you’re right-handed to do it with your left hand. Supposedly you don’t grip it as hard and you have a nicer touch as a result.

Unfortunately I can’t do the trick the women in porn films do where they take a cock all the way into their throat without gagging. I tried a few times in the past but nearly threw up, so I quickly gave up. You don’t have to do everything the way they do it in porn films. I’ve also tried to swallow many times. But I just can’t do it. I find the taste and the consistency in the back of my throat so disgusting that I just can’t choke it down. I have a strong gag reflex, and the sound of me nearly throwing up isn’t much of a turn-on for the man, either. It takes a huge acting job to be able to manage it, and it’s just too much trouble. I could probably pull it off for a one-night stand, but I can’t fool my husband. He knows I hate it, so he doesn’t want me to do it anyway. So, instead, our deal is that he can come in my mouth but I push the shooting sperm back out with my tongue.

Sometimes my mouth and neck need a break, so I take the spit-moistened cock in my hand and carefully pull upward, always pulling the foreskin only upward over the tip. I wouldn’t have hit upon that myself. But one time when we were just getting together, I asked him to get himself off in front of me. When you’re new with someone, you do funny things like that. And I now copy a lot of things I saw him do to himself that time. I figured out that the closer I come with my hands and feet to the way he masturbates, the better it feels for him. Your own ideas are never going to counter decades of sexual habit. So my challenge is to get as close as possible to the way he satisfies himself, but with other means, of course. He can only use his hand. I have my tongue, my mouth, etc., etc., etc. If I do continue with my hands, I lift his balls toward his cock with one hand while I run my other hand upward toward the tip of his shaft. That gives him the sensation that I’ve got everything tightly gripped together.

At this point he’s lying there like a beetle on its back, surrendering himself to me completely. Legs spread, arms stretched out, eyes rolled up like he’s in a trance. I get a serious feeling of power when he’s lying there like that. I could cut his throat and he wouldn’t even notice. Now and then I step back from the role of sexual servant and observe the scene like an outsider. And when I do, I have to smirk, because from that vantage point what we’re doing is rather comical. But I quickly wipe the smirk away and continue with the requisite level of seriousness.

Most of the time we start out with one of us devoting him- or herself to the other. When we try something in a 69 position, we always find that, while it’s nice to see all the parts up close, you’re too distracted doing things to enjoy what’s being done to you. One or the other! Not that we ever actually talked about it. It was one of those tacit understandings. Our sexual accord. While I’m tending to him, I always make sure that I can rub my vagina on something—otherwise he’s miles ahead of me in terms of being turned on. As I treat my jaw muscles to a rest and put all my effort into the whole two-hands-lifting-and-tugging thing, I sit with my legs splayed and my vagina on his thigh, getting messy from all the wetness. It’s such a rush—we work ourselves into something like to a drug-induced trance. It makes me proud, all the things I can do with my husband.

Beyond the electric blankets, there are a lot of other steps that I have to take before I can have sex. I’m petrified by the thought that our neighbors might hear us. So part of our foreplay is making sure all the doors and windows are shut. It’s the only way I can be relaxed. It’s happened only rarely that I left it to my husband and he forgot to close a window. But if I do discover an open window after all our noisy sex, I turn bright red from shame. It must be terribly annoying for the neighbors, though my husband constantly makes fun of me for thinking so. Of course, if I look at it like a therapist, it’s dead easy for him to play the easygoing role, because he can always be sure that I’ll be the uptight one in our relationship—and you take on the role in the partnership that’s available. I play the parts that are panicky, obsessive, ashamed. That leaves him to be the cool one, the exhibitionist. But I make sure that nobody hears him anyway. I close the windows, doors, and curtains. Sometimes at night I’ll go outside in my bathrobe, tell him to lie in bed with the light on, and double-check that nobody can see in from outside. Because sometimes I worry that our curtains are too thin. They’re made out of the same kind of silk as a tie, with a brown paisley pattern on them.

Sometimes during the winter, the electric blankets aren’t enough, so we get the infrared lamp Georg occasionally uses for his back pain out of our basement storage space and use that as an additional source of heat. It’s a big, broad, expensive model, and we’re lit up all red by it. It’s like being in one of those window displays in Amsterdam—which makes me worry even more that the silk curtains might reveal two sweating interlocked bodies to passersby. Georg knows I’m crazy. I always have to go outside and double-check that we won’t be visible, however the lighting is set up. How many times in life have I seen that people apparently pay no attention at all to the shadows a 100-watt bulb can cast through a window. A normal person might find it pleasing to be able to watch a woman undressing that way. But all I can think is, Oh God, I hope that never happens to me—I have to make sure it never happens to me.

I continue to cater to my husband. Sometimes he’ll lie there for ages and just let it all happen. Most of the time he lies on his back because for years he’s had back pain—and because I know him so well, I feel pain in my back, too, anytime he does. He hates to appear weak in front of me. The only reason we’re together is because I invented this idea of him being ridiculously strong. If I were to ask him how his back was every day, it would be emasculating. But even so, I want to be polite. I want to show that I commiserate. It’s the kind of problem that can come up when you are together with someone who’s older. But in the end it’s not about what I do, it’s about the fact that he thinks it’s terrible to show he’s in pain when I’m around.

I think it’s new for him, too, just to lie back and enjoy. He used to be with women he had to put incredible effort into pleasing, and there was not much left for himself afterward. For that, thank the women’s movement. But that’s not the way it was supposed to be. That only women get their way and men just have to see what happens. He loves it when I play his sexual servant. I repeat everything I’ve just described, first quickly and then at a slower pace. I don’t even have to think. Everything seems to happen on its own, like when you’re high.

When we’re in the middle of having sex, I lose track of time and space. It’s the only time during the day when I can just shut everything off. I really think it has more to do with the breathing than with the sex itself, but maybe it’s a combination of both. Contrary to what my mother wanted, I’ve learned through years of therapy that I am indeed a sexual being. I’m slowly learning to be conscious of my own desires.

Earlier, for years and years, it was just like the old cliché of marriage with us: the wife never felt like doing it and the husband did—constantly. But once the right buttons were pushed, I would always think, Why don’t I ever decide to make the first move? Why don’t I seduce him sometime instead of him always seducing me? It was humiliating for him to have to constantly ask, to get rejected—always to be the one who had to initiate things. It often led to fights. I would have been lying, though, if I said I felt like having sex. I didn’t feel like it one single time. I just went along as a favor to him—and because I knew our relationship would go down the tubes otherwise. Everyone knows that: if things aren’t working in bed anymore, it’s just a question of time before the whole relationship stops working, too. Of that much I am sure. But as soon as we’d get past the initial paralysis, I’d really get into it—every time. And every time I’d say to him, “Why don’t you just remind me how much fun I have, and then you won’t even have to ask!”

Thanks to my therapist, I initiate things myself more and more often. About twice a week I say, “Again today?” I can only be so selfless during foreplay because I know I’ll get the same treatment back afterward. No matter how much effort I put into pleasing him, I’ll never be as good as he is at oral. I ask him all the time whether he thinks what I do to him is as fundamentally good as what he does to me. It’s a dilemma. We’ll never know.

When I feel I’ve done enough as far as servicing him, I gradually stop. He always understands and then very gratefully starts to do the same for me. He spreads my legs apart and positions himself with his head between them so he can see everything. He examines me millimeter by millimeter, like a gynecologist. Do you say “playing doctor” when adults do it? That’s what it’s like. It’s best if you’ve showered that day. Because anyone who looks and smells so closely will pick up any impurity. He takes my hand and puts it on my vagina. I know exactly what to do. He wants me to get myself off for him. I never play with myself when I’m alone. My mother brought me up as a feminist. I think something went wrong during that upbringing, though, and I became some sort of sexual Catholic. I’ve never gotten myself off. The only thing I ever do that comes even remotely close to masturbating is a shameful scratch or two in my pubic hair. And in those instances, I think I’m tricking myself. First I think, Hey, something itches in my crotch, then I scratch a bit in my shortly cropped pubic hair, then I realize it turns me on, and I stop immediately. For whatever idiotic, archaic reason, I don’t continue. I mistake my own lust for some sort of uncomfortable condition because I just don’t want to admit it.

If it’s been a few days since we’ve had sex and I’ve done this secret scratching beneath the bedsheets, sometimes I get so horny it hurts. But I don’t want to admit that I’m horny, and think instead that I have a yeast infection or a bladder infection, or that I’ve contracted herpes, despite the fact that I’m totally immune to it—otherwise I’d have gotten it long ago. They say that about herpes—either you get it or you don’t. And I appear to be immune. At least I’m immune to something. These thoughts about being ill stay in my head until I have sex—when my husband initiates it, of course. Then all my ailments are pleasantly fucked away.

But when my husband wants me to, I put on the best masturbation act of all time. When he’s watching and encouraging me, I really go for it. I rub and flick and finger. He doesn’t look at my face at all. I exist only as a vagina. I am my vagina. He keeps his head between my legs and watches closely as I go through all the masturbatory techniques I’ve seen online and on DVDs. His eyes, his nose, and his mouth are just a few centimeters from the inner lips of my vagina. I rub crossways on my clitoris, push the lips open and rub between them, and once in a while I shove a finger inside and fuck myself with it. Even if I find it more amusing than stimulating, when I see how it affects him, how much it turns him on, I get turned on, too.

He can’t take it anymore, and he wants to do with his cock what I’m doing with my finger. I lie in front of him, completely naked, and spread my legs as wide as I can. He shifts forward and smacks his hard cock a few times against my vagina. I think he must have seen that move in a porn film. But I like it when he does that. Even though I can’t explain why I like it. He smacks his cock against me a few times and then in he goes. I usually come very quickly. A few thrusts will do it. And then that’s it for me. My mother—and leading feminists—brought me up to think there was no such thing as a vaginal orgasm. They sit between me and Georg and whisper in my ear: “There’s no such thing as a vaginal orgasm!” Now, at thirty-three years old, I’ve had to find out all on my own that that’s not true. I’ve always felt it during sex, but when I came I always dismissed it as a psychological effect. I figured tht it was just because I liked the idea of being fucked, that the thought—fuck, fuck, oh fuck yes, he’s inside me, filling me—was enough to make me come without touching my clit. Because I was convinced—for political reasons—that there was no other way to really come except through clitoral stimulation. No surprise that eventually I started to think I was crazy or, at the very least, had a powerful imagination. In bed, I realized that my feminist upbringing was miles away from reality. Secretly, behind my mother’s back, and behind prominent feminist activist Alice Schwarzer’s back, I began to think, They’re wrong! I come that way almost every time—there is such a thing as a vaginal orgasm. Fuck it and fuck them. And now, finally, I’ve gotten scientific confirmation, too. In Geo Kompakt magazine, number 20. It’s a science magazine—and it’s my favorite. The theme of issue number 20 was “Love and Sex.” I learned a lot from it, a lot more than from Alice Schwarzer’s journal Emma. And yet, Alice Schwarzer still sits between me and my husband during sex, whispering, whispering: “Yes, Elizabeth, you only think you’re having vaginal orgasms, you imagine that in order to subjugate yourself to your husband and his penis.” From that issue of Geo Kompakt I learned that women have two ways to have an orgasm—and can even come both ways at the same time. A vaginal orgasm is—speaking in layman’s terms—transmitted to the brain via the vagus nerve, whereas a clitoral orgasm is transmitted through nerves that run through the spine. Sometimes I come really hard, and that probably means it’s being sent to my brain both ways at the same time. I also feel I come quickest if I do it the way I need it. What I mean is that I actually do the thrusting—I grind against his cock more than he actually shoves it into me. That way I can create the perfect rhythm for me. And then it’s just a matter of seconds before I come. I’m really loud. I flip out every time. And then I’m done. He has to be careful that he doesn’t come right away, too, because it turns him on when I just take what I want. He loves the way his cock gets me off. But that’s probably just something he’s convinced himself of—in reality, I’m pretty sure I get myself off. Anyway, he has to really concentrate—or think of his Catholic mother or whatever—until I finish. So that he doesn’t come before me, in which case it’s all over. I’m really thankful that he takes it so seriously—that he makes sure I come first. I’d guess that in the seven years of our relationship, he’s come first only three times, meaning there were only three times I didn’t come with his cock. But in all of those cases, he still made good with his fingers, his tongue, and his toes. In those instances I really benefited from his bad conscience.

With the exception of those three incidents, it’s always his turn after I come. At that point, I’m his servant, like at the start. This is the only moment during sex that I say anything. I’m no good at talking dirty. Probably for the same reason I don’t masturbate. It’s all my mother’s fault. As always. I ask Georg: “How do you want to come?” There aren’t that many ways. He gets to choose from the following menu: in my hand, my mouth, my vagina—I get on top and fuck him, because of his back—or, on rare occasions, because it is always pretty painful for me, in my ass. When I get on top of him, to fuck him so he can come in my vagina, he usually wants me to sit backward. That way he can grab my ass and see everything. He pulls my cheeks apart so he can watch his cock going in and out of my vagina.

He tells me exactly what he sees. Unlike me, he can talk dirty very well. He feels bad that I can’t see the way the skin of my vagina wraps around his cock as I lift my body. He says it looks as if the skin of my vagina forms a hat for his cock—the skin clings to it and is pulled slightly downward, getting dragged along the entire length of his shaft. A few times in our seven years together he’s pulled my cheeks apart so far that it’s slightly torn the tissue around my asshole, leaving me feeling slightly wounded. I tell him the next day, after I go to the bathroom: “Please don’t pull my ass cheeks so far apart next time, you broke something, thanks.” He immediately feels bad and promises to do better next time. I guess it just happens in the heat of the moment.

I often feel as if intense sex makes you overlook injuries. It’s the same with the way he pulls apart my vagina so he can really examine it. Sometimes the sensitive skin tears a little. Up to a point, a little pain turns me on even more because I think to myself that he is so horny that he can’t control himself anymore, that he no longer knows his own strength. It sounds as if I’m talking about a man with Down syndrome. But that’s what goes through my head during sex. If I can bear it, I wait until we’re finished before complaining—in a friendly tone. Often he squeezes my hard, stimulated nipples, and that can really hurt. Very carefully, I try to let him know that he hurt me—I don’t want him to feel too bad and then be tentative the next time we have sex. I don’t want that. And I also don’t want him to feel as though he’s some kind of brute.

But now it’s time for him to come. Over the years I’ve developed a trick. I first saw it in the documentary Chicken Ranch, by Nick Broomfield. In the movie, prostitutes use the trick on drunk clients so the fuck is over more quickly and they are able to raise their hourly earnings. As soon as a client has blown his load and his hard-on is deflated, the prostitute is done. So she earns the same money in a shorter time and can move on to another client. I use the same trick on my husband at the end of our sessions. Once I’ve come, I don’t really see any reason things should go on for an eternity. Over the years I’ve developed extremely good control over my Kegel muscles. I can make myself much tighter inside than I normally am. I have no idea whether having a baby slightly widens you—my gynecologist says that it doesn’t, that everything goes back to the way it was beforehand. Anyway, it’s also perhaps less than ideal for the feeling of tightness that my body produces so much fluid during sex. During foreplay it’s great, but later, when I want to make him come by rubbing his cock with my vagina, it’s more of a hindrance. If he puts his cock in before I’m really wet, I can tell from his reaction that it turns him on—because the friction is more intense. But anyway, after I’ve already come, I don’t have any great desire to prolong things. Unless it’s Christmas or our anniversary or something—in that case I let myself get carried away and will take a long time to get him off even after I come. So now I squeeze my Kegel muscles with everything I’ve got and he comes immediately. I mean immediately. There’s just nothing he can do. It always makes me feel good—the fact that I have his cock in a vise grip inside me and can pull the trigger whenever I’m ready. Cool. He moans and groans a lot when he comes, and usually I then ask him, as a joke, “Did you come yet?”

I think that being loud increases the intensity of sexual sensations. It highlights the rush, the animalism. Earlier, at the beginning of our relationship, I was the only one who always screamed. I would scream until his ears rang. But these days he screams right back at me. It’s great fun.

I’m totally against any kind of postplay. I get really jittery from sex and always want to get up and do something afterward—like take a shower. Not because I feel dirty or anything. It’s just that I am prone to the number one female ailment: urinary tract infections. And I can never get rid of the impression that I usually get UTIs after sex. So in my mind—with no scientific basis—I can’t help thinking male bacteria are responsible. So I wash them away and leave my husband lying there at the scene of the crime. He always falls into a state of complete relaxation after sex and then falls fast asleep—sometimes for hours. How does a cliché become a cliché? I’ve read that it’s totally normal for men and women to behave completely differently after sex. Having that scientifically confirmed makes me feel much better—for years before that I had to hear how unromantic I was for hopping right up afterward and starting to clean up or whatever. In the article it said that the clichés that form the basis of the jokes everyone makes—about the hyperactivity of women after sex and the “little death” of men—are the result of different hormones. I love science because it absolves you of your bad conscience about things like that. Now that we know, I can get out of bed immediately and do something without being given the evil eye. He’s already deep asleep, and I switch off the electric blankets so he doesn’t get broiled in his sleep. I grab one of my daughter’s stuffed animals that’s lying on the floor of our room. It’s an orangutan. I hold it against my vagina so none of the sperm drips out on my way to the bathroom. You never see that in the movies after a sex scene—the soupy fluid running back out of the woman at some point. Probably wouldn’t go over so well. I smile. My head is never clouded with problems after sex. It always seems to me that I can’t possibly get more relaxed or free. And then I feel even more relaxed and free the next time. He outdoes himself. We outdo ourselves.

Right in front of the bathroom is our rattan laundry basket. We like old, dark brown things—prepares us for our eventual death. I toss the orangutan into the basket and head into the bathroom. If my daughter finds the stuffed animal in there, the sperm will have dried. And anyway, a child would probably just think it was snot. Definitely. I sit backward on the bidet and wash myself—the way I saw it done in The Tin Drum as a kid. My mother often showed us movies with adult-only ratings. She was of the opinion that art films couldn’t be rated that way. But ever since, that image has stuck in my head: the working girl from The Tin Drum, played by Katharina Thalbach, trying to perform retroactive contraception by washing out the sperm of her client. I don’t think that image will ever leave my head. After washing myself first with soap, I rinse again with clear water.

I grab a towel—which, for the sake of the environment, is air dried, and as a result is brittle and scratchy—and dry myself off a little too roughly. I want to finish quickly. My daughter will be home from school any minute, and then we’ll want to have dinner. I haven’t prepared anything.

I look at myself in the mirror, nude. I always look best after sex because my facial features are so relaxed. My breasts are slightly larger because they’re engrossed with blood, the nipples are hard, the pupils of my eyes are dilated as if I’m high, my clitoris and the inner lips of my vagina are thick and swollen from the stimulation and friction and hang out of my outer lips. On my throat and chest I have the telltale red flecks I always get when I come. You can’t fake those. My husband is always happy when he sees those red flecks on my white skin. He’s always worried that I might be faking it. But I don’t—and I don’t have to. I brush my hair so I don’t look too deranged when Liza gets home. With makeup remover and Q-tips I clean up the smearing beneath my eyes that could be a giveaway. And I fold two squares of toilet paper into my underwear before I pull them on. But no more than two. I teach my daughter not to waste paper when she goes to the bathroom, too—for the sake of the environment.

As quietly as possible, I slip into the walk-in closet off our bedroom and rummage around for some comfortable clothes to wear for the rest of the evening. Before dinner, I have to briefly stop by to see my therapist, Frau Drescher. I can wear anything to her office. That’s the beauty of it. I can go there regardless of how I look, how I smell. I can go there in any state. Isn’t that what religious nuts say about their gods? Maybe so, but they aren’t so confident that they don’t wash up for him—just in case he’s not quite as magnanimous as they pretend.

Frau Drescher even wants me to go to the bathroom at her place—number two, no less. But so far I haven’t been able to get up the nerve. We’re working on it.

Once I’m dressed, I go upstairs to the kitchen. I close all the doors along the way so I can make as much noise as I want with my daughter without waking up Georg. I know he’ll sleep for at least an hour. I like to tell myself that I’ve worn him out. That makes it easier for me to let him sleep—because I’m proud of myself. During the hour I have while he’s asleep, I’ll cook something healthy and, by breathing deeply, get rid of the red flecks on my throat. Don’t want my daughter to see those. Kids don’t want to know that adults have sex. From our stack of cutting boards I pull out the one with the words garlic and onions branded onto it. And from the magnetic strip that holds our knives I grab the knife I’ve written garlic on with a Sharpie. Ever since I quit smoking, my senses of taste and smell are so sensitive that when I eat a piece of fruit I can taste whatever was cut with the same knife beforehand—and if it’s onions or garlic it nearly makes me puke. When things that are supposed to be sweet taste somehow savory, it drives me crazy. It’s something that has started to bother me only as I’ve gotten older. When I was younger, I was more easygoing. A lot more easygoing!

Onions live in a wooden box under the sink. That’s what my grandmother used to always say: “Now, where do the onions live?” The mother of my ex-husband taught me a good trick for chopping onions. When I sauté them in a pan, as the beginning of almost every dish I make, I like them so finely chopped that they nearly disintegrate. I skin them, cut off the ends, and then stick out my tongue—just the tip. The acidity that emanates from the onion seeks out the closest moisture. If your mouth is closed, that ends up being your eyes, and the onions make you cry. I hate crying. For me it’s best not to start, because I can never stop. But with this trick, your tongue attracts all the acidity before it gets to your eyes. Your eyes don’t burn, and you never cry. I turn the onion so the top is facing me, and cut it horizontally and then vertically, and then cut it into tiny pieces. I throw the onion slices into a pan with organic olive oil and sauté them until they turn transparent. I get a head of savoy cabbage out of the fridge—it’s just the most beautiful vegetable. With a big sharp knife I cut it in half and pause to look at the coloration inside. It goes from dark green to light green, with each layer toward the middle slightly lighter. I make two cuts and remove the hard part around the stem and throw it into the compost container under the sink. Then I cut the head of cabbage into small strips. I always think it’s going to be way too much, but as soon as it’s in the pan it cooks down dramatically. Next I throw in a handful of my special ingredient: organic vegetable broth with no yeast extract. It’s very hard to find. Even in most organic markets they have only vegetable broth with yeast extract—which is just a new “green” euphemism for monosodium glutamate. As a good mother, I can’t allow that in our kitchen.

When we still had meat at our place—that is, before the Jonathan Safran Foer era began—I conducted an experiment several times: I made chicken broth from scratch, using an entire chicken carcass. It went over okay. The next day I would serve chicken soup made with a prepared broth I bought at the organic market. Everybody loved it. The only difference was the flavor enhancer, either glutamate or yeast extract—which sounds so harmless. But if my family were to get used to that stuff, they’d only like the enhanced flavors and they’d lose their taste for the real thing. So I avoid the stuff.

To the organic vegetable broth powder with no MSG I add some water to steam the cabbage a bit. Then I add an entire container of cream, some butter, and plenty of salt and pepper. Dinner is ready.

The doorbell rings and I let Liza in. On the way to the door I think to myself, Cooking helps you stay sane, and vegetables help keep you from going crazy.

“How was school?”

“Good.”

When she comes in wearing her teenager-style jacket, skinny jeans, and heels, I can hardly believe how big she’s gotten. This is my child? Great. I guess I’ve succeeded—she’s out of the woods, as they say. She’s still alive. That’s not something we can take for granted in our family. One of my brothers died at six, another at nine, and the third at twenty-four—though there’s still a while before my daughter reaches that age. But I’ve already achieved more than my mother. My child is still alive. One hundred percent of my children have lived beyond age six. My mother had five, and three are dead. One of them was younger than my daughter is now—that is, my mother lost 20 percent of her offspring before they were eight, which is how old Liza is.

I quickly wash up the things I dirtied making dinner. I don’t have to wash away the onion smell completely because this cutting board is used exclusively for onions and garlic. What bourgeois trick will we dream up next?

“Could you please not throw your jacket on the floor every time you come in?”

“Why 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 I had a daughter. Everything fit perfectly—if only there weren’t the previous partners. We needed to get rid of them. But how? Leaving my partner wasn’t difficult for me to imagine. I had my mother as a role model, a consummate pro at leaving people. Georg, on the other hand, had his religious and uncompromisingly loyal parents, married for more than fifty years. In his entire family, zero percent of the marriages had ever ended in divorce. How could he get out of his marriage? What’s more, his wife had picked up on the whole thing. “You’re not going to fall for her, are you?”

As far as I’m concerned, women notice that kind of thing more quickly than men. Or at least they are crazy enough to bring it up, and when that happens everything goes downhill. “Do you still love me?” “Uhhhh.” It takes a second too long to answer. Busted. What a terrible actor Georg is. Just say this, for God’s sake: “Of course I love you! What kind of a question is that?” Then we’d have had a little more time to figure things out. The way it happened, it was already over between them before there was any chance to save it.

That’s what he was going to do at first. He had pangs of Christian guilt, felt it in his genes, I guess. He wanted to save his family. “We can’t see each other anymore. I just had a child with her, and I have to give her—and our relationship—another chance. For the child.”

I had to wait. All through the painful waiting period, I was sure they would work it out. That’s the way you are when you are in love. You’re not sure of yourself and you just keep telling yourself, Sure, no problem, he’ll be back. I didn’t even tell my then husband. Either he didn’t want to notice or he actually didn’t notice anything. There wasn’t much to notice anyway.

We hadn’t even had sex one time before we left our partners. That’s why it’s always amazed me how well that aspect of our relationship functions. In fact, it’s always getting better. I’ve never experienced what it’s like to have sex with the same person for such a long time. Thanks, Mother!

I’m convinced that people come together only because of sex—even if it’s just because they think you will be a good fit in bed. Because of genetics—you can smell it. And then it does turn out to be a fit as good as a couple of trapeze artists. If you have a good sense of smell and don’t ruin it by smoking, you’ll find the best genetic match—someone with whom you can perform sexual acrobatics. I’m totally convinced of that. I must have smelled it. Everything. His sexuality. His ability as a provider. We never talked about money or sex. Our love was just there, and everything made sense in retrospect. Though nothing did at the start. I read a quote somewhere—I think it was from Goethe, though it could just as easily have been from Yoda—that went something like this: Love is just a romantic philosophical superstructure that permits us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we just want to get into someone’s pants. He put it somewhat more eloquently, but I can’t find the exact quote. Maybe I just dreamed that I read it. But I believe the sentiment nonetheless. It’s the key to all the craziness that happens between fully grown adults.

My husband isn’t physically attractive at all. Obviously love has nothing to do with looks. Fuck all of you with your my-dream-man-should-look-like-this-or-that bullshit, your star signs and height and hair color requirements. That’s not the way love works. The first thing I noticed about him—and that stood out in a negative, though interesting, way—was his fucked-up elbow. The first time I met him he was wearing short sleeves. Strong white arms with hair on them, and then a strange crippled elbow—there was some sort of cyst or tumor sticking out, covered with scars. The Phantom of the Opera, except only at the elbow!

I asked very directly what it was. I always do that in the heat of the moment because I’m worried the person has already noticed I’m staring. It turned out to be an affliction from childhood. He broke his arm once, and all winter long he had to take the bus alone to the clinic where he was doing his physical therapy. And one time after an ice storm he got off the bus and slipped and fell on the newly healed elbow. It had to be operated on several times after that because he’d shattered all the bones. They never managed to reconstruct it properly, and that’s why there’s a piece of bone that sticks out like a shark fin. That made an impression on me straightaway.

After the arm business, I noticed a big scar across his cheekbone. The second thing I asked him was where he got that scar. And that one was from cancer. Shortly before we met he’d had skin cancer. Nothing serious. It was discovered early enough that they were able to remove the entire melanoma before it spread, and that was that. Well, except for the fact that in the back of his head he would always remember how death had come knocking. After my very first conversation with him I knew that we belonged together and also that I would end up burying him. I’m going to be a grieving cancer widow. He told me that he comes from a family with a history of cancer. Members of his family either died of cancer or managed to beat various forms of it to earn a brief reprieve. I knew what the story was and what this great love of mine was bringing with him—even if perhaps I understood only subconsciously.

At the front of my consciousness I thought to myself that we would end up working together. What a great gallery owner! What a great guy! But what an odd set of icebreakers. First, childhood injuries. Second, cancer in the family. It pretty much says everything about our relationship. He also asked me about the car accident in which my three brothers died. Death was intertwined with our love right from the start. One of the first things we did as a couple was to fill out organ donor cards and write and sign living wills and actual wills. For us, that was the height of romance.

Georg sits down at his laptop in the kitchen and scans Spiegel Online to see if anything has changed in the world in the last few minutes. Liza wanders around grumbling. She’s bored.

“What should I do now, Mama? I’m bored.”

“See if anything is missing. Drinks, perhaps?”

“Oh yeah, what do you want to drink?”

The same answer we give every day comes from Georg and me in perfect harmony: “Tap water.”

We never drink alcohol in front of the kids—for the sake of setting a good example. And sugary drinks are strictly forbidden at our place—both for the usual anti-American reasons and because of the fact that they are totally unhealthy. Why would you drink something that amounts to candy when you’re thirsty? Sweets exacerbate your thirst. It’s like a form of torture. How can anyone pay good money for drinks that actually make you more thirsty? It’s like giving Jesus vinegar and gall to drink when he was thirsty on the cross. Torture upon torture.

She climbs up onto the counter again to get glasses out of the cabinet. She jumps back down, fills the glasses too full, and carries them to the table while trying to keep them from spilling. I have to stop myself from saying something. Bad, bad to be a mother and want to comment on everything a kid does. You feel it coming on and then the impulse hits you. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

“Can you please put a trivet on the table, too, my child?”

Now that my husband is fully awake, I leave my daughter in his care. I say good-bye. They know the drill. They’re free to do what they wish until I’m back. I’ll be there and back quickly; it’s not far. I turn off the burner under the pan as I walk out—don’t want the two of them to go up in flames in the apartment while I’m unable to keep an eye on them. Gas stoves are dangerous. I won’t let fire take any more of my relatives.

“See you soon, you nut jobs.”

Neither of them answers. That’s the way it is when the routine is so well rehearsed.

I drive to my therapist’s office in another section of town. I go three times a week for an hour-long session—though an hour to a therapist is fifty minutes in normal human time, no more, no less. I go there to work out my everyday life, and I think I’d have died many times over without my therapist. She has often saved my life—psychologically speaking. In my daughter Liza’s mind, it’s just Mama going to see her weird doctor. She’s not interested in what I do there. I hope she waits a long time to ask, too, because the older she is the better I’ll be able to explain to her what it is. “Mama goes there so she doesn’t get on your nerves, my child, and so she doesn’t weigh you down with her own issues. That way you can live more freely.”

The drive is usually a pain. But my therapist, Frau Drescher, says that’s part of the therapy, too. I complain to myself about a therapy that includes such an array of annoyances even before you get there. Because I know the car accident plays a big role in her mind, I feel as if I don’t even have to go to her office: hey, I’m doing great—what’s the point? I think up all sorts of reasons why I shouldn’t drive, and once I’m in the car I convince myself that Frau Drescher is a bad therapist—that she overestimates the value of her couch and psychoanalysis. What the hell is analysis anyway? I do it, but I still have no idea what it’s about. Will I get some kind of certificate at the end? Like the report you get after a blood test? A psychological report? That would be useful—I could give it to my husband as a sort of instruction manual, and later my daughter could read it, too. It would make all of our lives easier. I’ll ask Frau Drescher. She thinks that my assessments and criticisms of her as I drive to her office are also part of the therapy. Great, that really puts me at ease. I feel better already.

I try to follow every rule of the road—I have to avoid an accident at any cost. Not necessarily because I don’t want to die—in fact sometimes I feel like an old woman who thinks it would be nice to have peace and quiet, the ultimate peace and quiet—but because I have a child. That gives me added worth. I can’t do that to my daughter. Cannot get killed or injured. Which is why I’m such a careful driver. I let everyone in, but especially women. It’s a chance to contradict any accusations of cattiness, even in traffic. I drive very defensively and leave plenty of space between me and the car in front of me. I avoid all mistakes and keep all the things I learned in driving school at age eighteen in the front of my mind—all in order to survive and to avoid killing anyone else. Because of my past, even just driving across town to my therapy session is a life-and-death scenario.

I get out of the car in the parking lot. I take all my valuables with me because, oddly enough, my therapist has her office in a bad part of town. And her office is on the eleventh floor. Which for me is a catastrophe. I’ve told her a million times that I don’t like it. She needs to get a new ground-floor office somewhere else. That would be much nicer. She laughs at me and says, “You’ll have to get over it, Frau Kiehl, because the practice is staying put.”

And then she wants to sit peacefully and discuss my fear of heights and of elevators, my fear of fire and smoke. I’m also afraid that such a tall building might collapse while I’m in it. When I walk into the high-rise I talk to myself. “I can’t believe I have to get on this elevator because of Frau Drescher. I just can’t believe it.” I usually smell smoke or gas in the lobby. That’s a funny old habit of mine—it’s because my mother found her own mother in front of the oven with the gas on. She had taken sleeping tablets and also drugged her young son, whom she wanted to take with her. But not my mother, who was also just a kid at the time. Who knows why? That was the big drama in our family—at least until the car accident overwhelmed everything else. So I sniff my way around the lobby like an animal, searching for the source of the dangerous odor. For most other people, hearing is the sense that most frequently sets off their alarm bells. In my case, it’s my sense of smell. Because I just know that my family will be snuffed out by fire, smoke, or gas. That’s probably also the reason I avoid smokers like the plague. They trigger a flight instinct in me. Whenever I smell a lit cigarette I think something is on fire and cringe with fear. Just for a second, of course, but it’s still enough to make my heart jump and cause a jolt of adrenaline. Very unpleasant.

When I step into the elevator to go up to my therapist’s office, it really does smell like smoke. Some nicotine-addicted asshole must have lit up on the way down for a cigarette break. Most smokers just can’t wait. I stand there and think something’s on fire. And before I realize it’s just the remains of cigarette smoke I get so scared that I feel like I’ve aged several years. That’s why I hate all smokers—they spread the smell of death. It clings to their hair and their clothes and hangs in the air wherever they go.

When I look at the digital number panel in the elevator, I can see what floor it’s come down from. It sends another shiver of fear down my spine. The building is that high? The eleventh floor is not even the top floor. Often the elevator has come from much higher up than that. And I wonder, Do I really want to do this to myself? All the things that can happen on the way up. It could get stuck and catch on fire, and I’d be trapped, burning up in this tin can. The floor would get too hot to stand on, so I’d sit down; but the skin and flesh of my ass would burn, so I’d stand up again and that’s when I’d see the smoke snaking into the elevator carriage. I scream for as long as I can still get air, the smoke stings my throat, burns my vocal chords. I’m coughing and my voice gets thinner. I push the emergency button over and over. Nothing happens. In a mortal panic, I climb onto the top of the elevator carriage to try to get some air—but everything is shrouded in dark smoke. I’m in a smokehouse, unable to escape. Nobody is going to save me, and I can’t even scream any longer. I cry, and then lay myself down to die atop the glowing elevator. I think of my daughter and don’t want to die. Then I black out.

That’s the way it plays out in my head every time I have to ride up those eleven floors to see my fucking therapist, who insists on having her practice all the way up there. And I stare the whole time at the sign in the elevator that represents all my fears: in case of fire, do not use elevator. I can definitely agree to that. But what happens if a fire breaks out when I’m already using the elevator? Didn’t anybody think of that? Of course not. When I reach the eleventh floor and, miracle of miracles, the doors open normally, I march out like a survivor. A passerby might think from my demeanor that I’m relaxed and happy. But then comes the next problem. Someone on her floor smokes in his apartment. We’re eleven floors above the earth and he’s playing with our lives! The building seems to sway. I tell my therapist all the time that the foundations aren’t solid. You can tell when it’s windy. When it’s windy I can feel the way we’re all swaying inside the building.

Once in a while I encounter someone in the hallway on the eleventh floor. When that happens I’m immediately diverted from the frightening images swirling in my head. Because I suddenly think, So that’s what my therapist’s patients look like? Though of course there’s no guarantee that the person has come from her office. I get upset that she even has other patients. I read in a biography of Brian Wilson that he had his therapist live with him. What a good idea! That would be my dream—to have Frau Drescher at home, all to myself!

I’m totally convinced that I simply couldn’t live without her. But I want to be her only patient. I know only monotheism—from my mother, of course. She never taught me anything else. It’s always mother’s fault. I’m sure someday my child will think I’m to blame for everything, too. That’s just the way it works.

I try to glean as much information as possible in the few seconds during which I can actually see my therapist. She shrouds herself in a mysterious cloud of noninformation. She says I should know as little as possible about her. All I know about her is what I can see. And what little she divulges. Which is next to fucking nothing. Particularly in comparison to what I divulge about myself. It’s not fair. But I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be with therapy. I’m not meant to understand—I don’t have a degree in it, after all.

My soon-to-be-former best friend also briefly went to a therapist—though naturally she didn’t do it very intensively or for very long because otherwise she would actually have had to do some soul-searching. But she went to a therapist that every one of her friends—except me—also went to. What a sick idea. My therapist thinks so, too. You can’t talk openly in a situation like that. What if you had a problem with one of your friends? The whole idea behind therapy is that the therapist doesn’t know the people you are talking about. That way the therapist can’t have an opinion about them independent of yours—her information is limited to what the patient says. If you’re insanely jealous about all your therapist’s other patients, just imagine what it would be like if you constantly ran into your friends coming out of her office. “Oh, hi, I was just talking to your therapist about your abortion! Oh, sorry, you hadn’t told her yet? That explains a lot!”

Aha, I think to myself in the hallway, looking at a person who must be another patient, she takes on boring-looking patients, too, eh? She does it with any old person! Hopefully that person’s psychological issues are more interesting than his clothes! The patient doesn’t make eye contact with me. How uncool. Hey, we’re all fucked in the head, don’t worry about it. But you’ve got to be able to meet my gaze when I say a friendly hello.

Perhaps he’s more ashamed than I am that he has to go to therapy? That’s annoying, too. Once he’s walked away, I can ring the doorbell. There’s a sort of agreement among all the patients that there should never be more than one in the office at a time. Not like at a normal doctor’s office, where all the patients sit in a waiting room together. When I’m in her office, I can be sure that the only other person there is Frau Drescher.

She’s furnished the place oddly. I hope it doesn’t reflect her true taste. I hope she’s furnished the place this way just to meet patients’ expectations and make them comfortable opening up. If not—if this is how she actually wants it to look—it would be really tragic.

I ring the bell now that the other lunatic is gone. A buzzer lets me in. As usual, she is hiding in her office, a room I’ve never seen. Through the frosted glass I can see only that she’s sitting at a desk in there. It’s very fuzzy, but there’s a large desk, and I can make out the shape of a person dressed in pastel clothing. She likes to wear pastel-colored sweaters, often cable-knit. I can also vaguely make out her blonde head of hair. She looks very feminine and friendly. She’s got a 1970s kind of sexiness to her. Sometimes I worry that she’s a lesbian, but I’ll never find out. I wouldn’t like it if she were a lesbian. I want her to have all the same difficulties in life that I have: husband, child, the whole shebang.

I have to wait until she’s ready. She always needs ten minutes between patients to clear her head and cleanse her soul—which, of course, does not exist. I have no idea what she does for those ten minutes. I suspect she looks over her notes, because it doesn’t seem possible that she could remember all the mothers-in-law and ex-husbands and children’s and pets’ names that people jabber on about all day. In eight years with her, she’s never made a single mistake about things like that with me. I keep waiting for her to refer to my husband as Oliver or whatever. Or to say “your son” instead of “your daughter.” That’s why I think she hoards notes about all of us loons behind that frosted glass—notes she quickly updates after each hour with the various new names that have come up. I imagine her partner—hopefully a man—quizzing her about all the names of her patients’ family members.

I have my choice of sitting on a chair in the hall or going into the room where she hosts group sessions. There are probably a dozen chairs in that room. It’s where the group marriage counseling takes place. Back when we went to marriage counseling to save our relationship, my husband and I chose to do it privately, just us two, rather than with a group. My husband is very much opposed to groups—whether it’s tai chi, therapy, or whatever. Only when it comes to sex is he not opposed to groups.

There are pictures on the walls that I think Frau Drescher painted herself. They depict naked people in the Garden of Eden. Snakes are wrapped around the bodies. There are brightly colored flowers all over the place. The people aren’t fully visible—they’re more like silhouettes. In the group room is a well-stocked bookcase, which I find reassuring. It’s proof that she did study the stuff she uses to fiddle around with my head. It shows she’s clever, and if she doesn’t manage to make progress on something she can consult her books. When I arrive much too early, I grab a random book off the shelf, open it to a random page, and try to understand what’s written. But it never works. It’s insanely complicated stuff.

At the top of the hour she quietly emerges from her office and comes to look for me. I hear her footsteps, always following the same route: first she looks in the hall, then she comes down to the group room. She stands in the doorway and says, “Right.” She smiles encouragingly.

I stand up, go confidently toward her, look her in the eyes—as my parents taught me to do—shake her hand, and say, “Guten Tag.”

I find it uncomfortable making physical contact with her. But it’s part of being a member of society. Still, I’d rather not touch her. Not because I find her disgusting, but because I feel as if we should have a strictly mental connection, and physical contact of any kind disturbs that. Disturbs me, anyway. I’ve never talked about it with her. Maybe I should sometime. Then perhaps we could forgo the handshake. A lot of what I think I want to talk about vanishes from my mind once I’ve had to use the elevator or see Frau Drescher. Things usually go in a completely different direction than I anticipated.

“Guten Tag,” she replies, and we release each other’s hands from the handshake. It’s all rather embarrassing.

She’s usually wearing a pantsuit. Or a masculine blouse with a V-neck sweater over it. She likes pastel colors. Pink, lilac, salmon, light blue, mint green. She has long blonde hair. And breasts. Big ones. A nice body—not too thin, not too chunky. She looks very healthy. Thank goodness—I want her to live a long time. Did I mention her breasts? She has breasts. And breasts are a major theme of my therapy. My breast complex runs my life. I complain to her regularly about women with big breasts and blonde hair. And she has big breasts—at least from my perspective, as a tadpole in the breast department—and platinum blonde hair. Sometimes I feel funny saying what I want to about it. I ask her if I’m not going too far for her. But she’s totally supportive. It’s not about her feelings or sensitivities. She’s a doctor. She stays above the fray. I have to be able to say anything in therapy without thinking about how she will feel about my breast comments.

She’s also a lot bigger than I am, which I like. She wears a lot of mascara, jet-black, and light blue eye shadow. It works perfectly with her dark blue eyes. Her whole face reminds me of Agnetha from ABBA. She always smiles at me so knowingly and kindly. She’s on my side. It’s nice. That’s the way it works with therapy—the therapist is on the patient’s side. She puts a lot of effort into understanding me.

She lets me enter the sacred space of the consultation room ahead of her. There’s the couch where I’ve already spent so many hours. The room has been nicely aired out so it doesn’t smell like another patient. We wouldn’t want that. The idea is to pretend that other patients do not exist. But I don’t let myself be fooled. Not even by Frau Drescher. She closes the window, and I wrap myself in the fleece blanket with the strange pattern on it—to protect myself from all the forces of nature about to be released upon me. Then I lie down. She always puts a freshly washed light blue cloth on the pillow where I put my head. Sometimes, when I show up with freshly washed hair, I get it all wet. She says it’s no big deal—that each patient gets a new one anyway. A thin piece of cotton prevents any direct contact between the oils of the various patients’ hair. Where Frau Drescher stores these cloths is still a riddle to me. At the foot end of the black leather couch is the type of mat you would usually place just outside the door of your apartment. It has hard bristles. Frau Drescher knows that it scratches me and she’s said I can remove it from the couch. But I never do. I want to get right down to business. So for the entire hour I just hide the fact that the mat bugs me. Especially in summer, when my legs are bare.

Once I’m lying there, I wait for her to close the door and sit down behind me. The door is soundproofed, which, being paranoid, I like. I lie there in my usual funereal position, with my arms outside the fleece blanket—don’t want anyone to think I’m secretly playing with myself. I put my hands together and interlock my fingers the way people do when they’re praying. Despite the fact that I’m totally against prayer. I look up at the ceiling: white wood chip. And at the wall to my left: white wood chip.

When I look past my feet, there is a huge painting leaning against the wall. No idea why it’s propped against the wall instead of hanging from it. What is Agnetha—as I like to think of her—trying to signal to me with that? I always think she’s trying to tell me something. But in the case of the painting, I have no idea what. Maybe it’s something like, Hey, check it out, dear patient, I’m human, too, and don’t always follow through on everything.

The poorly painted image is of a colossal devil figure. He’s a naked man, and he’s squatting on the ground. I keep looking at his crotch, but his balls aren’t hanging down. A bunch of kitschy little birds are flying around his head. As I’m talking about my latest problems, I keep racking my brain for a reason she might have for putting this image right at the feet of her patients. She’s probably crazy herself. Anyway, I’ve stared at that painting for hours upon hours. I’ve seen it blurry, at times when I’ve been crying. And I’ve seen it shaking, when I’ve had a panic attack. I’ve had to look at that image of the devil with little birds flying around his head in every imaginable emotional state. What is she trying to tell me?

If I were to look to the right—which I never do—I’d see a room stuffed full of tasteless objects. Two fake trees, a black vase out of the 1980s that must be three feet tall, on top of which she’s put a huge polished purple stone. The entire windowsill is crammed with useless stuff. A steel turtle sculpture with evil eyes, some sort of ashtray filled with black sand, a beanbag gecko. I guess Agnetha came of age style-wise in the 1980s. In fact I’m sure of it. But what do I know? Funny thing. I’ve never thought about how old she is. She’s definitely older than I am. Definitely. I read somewhere that psychologists and psychiatrists—what’s the difference between them again?—try to trick their patients by decorating their offices completely differently from their homes. The patient should have something to get annoyed with. The decor in Frau Drescher’s office functions extremely effectively that way for me. When she moves or takes down a painting, I’m thrown into crisis. I walk in, immediately notice the change, and ask her, completely dumbfounded, what the story is. Why do people always have to change things around? Where’s the painting gone? When is it coming back? The way she looks at me, I can tell that five other patients have already reacted exactly the same way. So much for my wonderful individuality.

Then we begin.

“First I need to apologize to you, Frau Drescher, just in case you can smell anything. It’s best if I just tell you directly, rather than spend the entire hour wondering whether you’ve noticed anything.”

“That’s right, Frau Kiehl, it’s better just to say it. You don’t want anything to distract you or weigh you down here. Let’s just get everything out in the open right from the start. What is it that I might have noticed?”

“I just had—shortly before I came here—sex. So there you go, now it’s out. And I only washed up quickly afterward. You always say I don’t need to be perfect when I come to see you.”

“Nice. With whom?”

“Haha. Are you making fun of me? With whom? With Georg, of course.”

“Yes, of course. I was just asking because of the sexual fantasies you’ve talked about recently.”

“I know, I know.”

“Do you feel good as a result?”

“Ha, of course! What do you think? I always feel good after having sex with Georg. I’m kind of amazed that we still have sex, since we’ve been together for so long. In previous relationships, I lost any interest in sex after about three years. This time it’s still going after seven years. Pretty amazing. But I worry that it will end soon. You know how it is: once the sex is gone it’s just a question of time before the love withers and dies, too.”

“Really? You think that’s how it works?”

“Yes, I do. That’s what happened in every single one of my relationships since I was thirteen. That’s exactly how it works. I keep trying to figure out why it’s stayed so good with Georg for this long. And I’ll tell you this, Frau Drescher: I think I’m letting myself be fucked by his money. That’s what I think. The reason it’s worked for so long is because he’s the first guy I’ve been with who’s had more money than me—as a result I still find him sexy. I don’t mean sexy in the sense that he looks so good, but in the sense that I want to fuck him. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason.”

“You’ve told me this theory of yours before. Aren’t you underestimating the love you feel for your husband? You reduce it all to money and sex. I would posit that you’re doing this as a defense mechanism—to shield yourself from your deeper feelings in case things do eventually go bad, or he dies.”

“And I’ve heard that theory from you before, too. We’re not going to get anywhere talking about this topic. Today in town, I thought for a second that I saw my father.”

“What did you do?”

“I just kept walking. I wouldn’t say hello to him. You know that I hope I never see him again. So I couldn’t just say hi to him on the street. The same shit would just start right back up again with his fucking wife—my evil stepmother. You put it so well last time. What was it you said again? That I’d let myself remain passively at the mercy of my parents for long enough and that now I had decided to be proactive, to actively break away from them, even if it was difficult to do so. But that way they could no longer hurt me. That’s it. Exactly. And you said, ‘You can only put physical distance between you and your parents; inside they will always remain with you, because they are your parents.’ Horrible.”

“But you understand that now, don’t you, Frau Kiehl? That you can only get away from them physically, right?”

“Of course. But I still think it’s best to try to cut them off once and for all, forever. I know you don’t like the word ‘forever,’ but I’m allowed to use it because I mean it—even if you don’t like my saying it, and even if you think I can never get rid of them on the inside, like a fucking virus. One that doesn’t just go away. AIDS in parent form. And even if I do still suffer inside, I think cutting them out of my life is the right thing to do. Because I’m doing something, taking action. I’m sick of being a fucking adult and still wondering every year on my birthday whether or not my father has remembered it. He still manages to mess up my birthdays, and I still think about how he always forgot me when I was a child. Okay, sure, he didn’t forget me—like you always say, he only forgot my birthday. Sure, sure, but when you’re a child that feels as if he has completely forgotten about you.”

“Don’t you associate anything good with him?”

“I’d rather not.”

“I’m sure something good will occur to you.”

“Yeah, well, if it’s mandatory. He taught me and my dead brother to make pancakes. The whole process. One egg per person, a little seltzer in the batter to make them fluffy, how to flip them up in the air—though a lot of the time they never landed back in the frying pan. We would sit at the counter and watch him in amazement. They were our favorite thing to eat, his pancakes. Typical kids of divorce. The parent who isn’t there is a wonder, while the parent you end up living with you take for granted. Our favorite foods were the few things our father made—pancakes and curries—instead of any of the thousands of dishes our mother made. She was a much, much better cook. And the curries were really something he showed us for later in life. We wouldn’t eat just pancakes for our entire lives, he said. So he taught us how to make curry from scratch, using whole spices—not just some mix out of a jar. No, we measured out turmeric and coriander, made garam masala mixtures, everything. It was way too spicy for kids. He wanted to show us what a hard-ass he was. Although it occurs to me now how crazy that was. Showing kids he was tough—by eating spicy food! Ridiculous!”

“Still, I’m pleased you were able to say something positive. When people decide to shut someone out of their lives, they tend to limit themselves to seeing the negative aspects of that person. Like you and your best friend. It’s as if you feel bad for thinking you should quit the friendship, so you convince yourself, in retrospect, that there wasn’t a good side to it. But it couldn’t have been all bad, or else you wouldn’t have been friends in the first place.”

“I still only see the negatives.”

“That’s the way you rationalize ending the friendship. You are afraid of the vengeance of the person who is being abandoned. Because you’re actually afraid to leave anyone, no matter who.”

“Right. That’s why I have you. You help me get away from the people in my life who are bad for me.”

“If you say so. But it’s interesting nonetheless that you need help to leave people.”

“That’s the way it is. Without you I wouldn’t have left my parents, and I wouldn’t be about ready to finally get rid of my best friend.”

“I would like to point out that I did not encourage you to take such steps.”

“I know. You say that every time. I know. I know. I’m here with you but I come up with the ideas myself. Obviously you never say, ‘Do this or that.’ Tomorrow is another push-Elizabeth-to-the-limits day, by the way.”

“You’re going to a brothel with your husband again? You already know what I think of that.”

“Yes, I know. But it helps me get further away from my mother and closer to my husband. It’s proven, Frau Drescher, an empirical fact, and you can’t change my mind about it. Maybe most of your patients don’t pursue a healthy marriage that way, but I remain convinced these brothel visits are good for us. The same way that every time I make pancakes for the kids, I can feel my father sitting on my shoulder and watching. Everything has to be perfect, for Papa, so he’ll love his daughter. Everything takes effort. And just like when my mother sits on my other shoulder when I’m giving my husband a blowjob. She hates men. She hates cocks. When I was a child, she constantly told me that men were only good for procreation and that sex was never the slightest bit enjoyable for her. Unfortunately that lesson didn’t take. From that perspective, I’m definitely cheating if I go to the brothel with Georg tomorrow. And just thinking about it gives me diarrhea.”

“Would you like to go here? I’m happy to wait.”

“No, thanks. You know the story. I can’t go number two anywhere but at home.”

“We need to work on that some more, Frau Kiehl. You must obviously know there’s nothing wrong with using the toilet here. It’s human to leave odors behind.”

“Yeah, well, then I guess I don’t want to be human. Let’s not talk about it anymore—it’ll just make the situation worse. And no matter how bad it gets, I’m not going to use the toilet here. Except to pee. Anything else is out of the question.”

“How long have you been with me? Eight years. And still so little trust in the surroundings. The other patients go here.”

“That’s great, but the last thing I want to hear about is the toilet habits of your other patients. Yuck. It’s disgusting of you to even bring it up. Seriously, I’m going to be sick just thinking about it.”

“All I can do is invite you to use the facilities here and reiterate that you are very welcome to do so.”

My intestines make a horrible noise.

“That’s your fault, for talking about this. Let’s change the topic. You and your strange invitations. So, where were we? The important things!”

My intestines make more ugly noises. I attempt the ­impossible—to ignore them.

“Ah, yes, right, we were talking about the fact that I think it’s good to do a favor for my husband and in the process to betray my mother. I always feel free, relaxed, and happy when I do the opposite of what I was brought up to do. She was completely off the mark with her hatred for men. And as a result, I had to come see you for eight years before I realized that men weren’t the enemy. Or at least definitely not the only enemy. In my case, unfortunately, Mother is the enemy. My husband is a much bigger feminist than my mother.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.”

She laughs. I sometimes think that’s my job—to get my therapist to laugh. Even the most awful things I try to express in a funny way—that way she has fun working with me. I want so badly to be unique and to stand out from the other patients. The smartest, the funniest, the bravest, the favorite. I want to be the patient who lets my therapist in the fastest and furthest so she can have the most success with me. With me! I push myself hard, too. I reveal to her all the most disgusting parts of my personality—the bad, the evil, everything has to be aired so she has plenty to work with. In therapy, protecting yourself is completely wrongheaded. She’s on my side and only wants to help. So, everything out. I don’t bother hemming and hawing and vacillating. I don’t think, Should I tell her this or that? Get it out, speed up the healing process. And learn as much as possible from her about the process, so I can take over and always be a good wife for my husband and a good mother for Liza.

During this hour we talk for the hundredth time about the connection between sex and parents. How you have to do everything well so your parents love you and how upset I still am about all the crap my parents planted in my head. I tell her about the outing planned for tomorrow and how proud I am that I can suck cock better than any hooker. I explain to Frau Drescher how we choose our prostitutes. Georg and I are actually too polite for the red-light district. We’ve often slept with unattractive women because we can’t bring ourselves to say, No, she’s not for us. We’re too gentle for that. We’d rather sleep with an ugly woman and pay her a ton of money—about three hundred and fifty an hour, because she has to service two clients at the same time—than to tell her she doesn’t appeal to us. I’m tougher than my husband. He gets disgusted afterward and spends ages in the shower trying to wash the images of the fat woman from his mind. I always have to laugh, thinking what a couple of idiots we are for being too shy to just say what we want, like every other customer.

Over time we’ve developed a signal to use if one of us finds the woman or her body repulsive. We say, “Wow, it’s warm in here.” Because I don’t think we are particularly attractive, it doesn’t really bother me if someone isn’t good-looking. In the book of life—where I mentally record all the extraordinary experiences I have—it’s good to have slept with a fat woman or, accidentally, with one with huge fake silicone breasts. But Georg can’t roll with the punches as well as I can.

We also never pick young prostitutes. They are too insecure. And so twitchy with their hands. The women we choose for threesomes need to be at least twenty-eight or so. But we’re happy if they are a lot older than that. Up to fifty works for us. A lot of customers seek out extra-young women to fuck. They think the youth will rub off on their cocks. It doesn’t.

Does it make me a lesbian if I’m always messing around with women? Even if it’s my husband’s wish rather than mine? It’s not always easy to unravel the difference when people are in love and together. Drawing a line between what he wants and what I want is difficult. But in any event, my husband doesn’t want to touch another man, which is a shame, because then we could change our sexual adventures around. A woman here, a man there, and always me and my husband in bed with them. But if I ever do something in bed with a male prostitute—if we could ever find one who didn’t look too gay—Georg would never participate. He might watch, but I find that idea strange.

I also talk to Frau Drescher for the hundredth time about how proud I am to send my husband to the brothel alone sometimes, and how it absolutely sparks my desire for him. It’s crazy the effect it can have. Sending your husband off to another woman. I’m always trying to be less of a control freak, trying to get beyond my normal urge to be like that, which is strong. And when I loosen up enough to send him off to a brothel alone, it makes me feel so good. My husband is still afraid of the fits of jealousy I used to have—or, let’s be honest, had until recently—because of my fear of losing him. Million-dollar question: I wonder how long Frau Drescher thinks it will take—how long must I behave well before he’s no longer afraid of me? How long—how many years do I have to spend proving to him that, with her help, I’ve cut out many of the evil, aggressive, ugly parts of my personality—before the good outweighs the bad in his eyes?

Every once in a while I ask whether we still have time. She answers, “Yes, we have a few more minutes.”

Then I start on another topic. I ask her how long it will be before I stop thinking about my mother while giving blowjobs, how long it will be before I stop hearing her whisper that I’m debasing myself. Which isn’t true. He goes down on me just as often as I go down on him.

And then at some point Frau Drescher answers my question about the remaining time with “Now the time is up.”

I lift myself and sit upright, take a deep breath, then start to fold up the blanket. Frau Drescher always says, “You can leave that, I’ll take care of it.”

That’s part of the ritual she has for preparing for her next patient. Folding the blanket and putting it over the chair as if I had never been there. Hopefully she likes me the way I like her.

I say good-bye, survive the elevator ride down, as always, and then listen to loud music in the car on the way back home to Liza and Georg. I’m a good mother and wife. I try to clean up my messy psyche for the sake of a healthy future together, as a family and as a couple.

I drive along the ugly street toward home. There’s a patch of grass and a few trees at one point along the way, and I always look for a rabbit or squirrel. Sometimes there are a few there. At night I’ve even spotted a fox. The happiest moments of my life are when I catch a glimpse of a wild animal. In my case, it’s usually normal woodland creatures because I never go very far away. I’m against traveling to distant places. When I see a squirrel I’m even happier than after I have sex with Georg. I don’t know why we don’t live out in the country somewhere, near some woods where I’d have the chance to see more wildlife. The feeling I get when I see a deer or squirrel is overwhelming. I’m no longer myself, and that feels great to me. Time stands still. I hold my breath and smile. Like a hunter, I’ve developed a good eye. I notice every movement in the bushes. On the highway I keep one eye on the road, to preserve my family’s life, but the other one is on the fields and woods along the side of the road. I always see the most deer. Then, for an instant, my life has purpose. I try to convey my enthusiasm to our kids, but it just doesn’t work. “Yeah, yeah, Mama, a deer, great.” I can’t explain why I don’t try to create more of these moments of happiness by going for walks in the woods or even training to become a forester. I’m a big believer in happiness through scarcity. It’s precisely because you see wild animals so rarely that it makes you so happy. I’ve noticed that it seems to be the same way with other adults. I know a lot of adults who are happy to report that they’ve seen a squirrel in their backyard. And if it comes back often, they convince themselves it wants to be near them.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to see today in the strip of green grass. Too bad. Maybe next time. Happy moments really are rare in my life. But before I can let my mind wander too far down this depressing path, I’m home.

I turn the stove back on. As soon as it begins to sizzle, I take the pan off the burner and put it on the trivet on the table.

“Dinner is ready.”

I always have to say it three times before my husband gets up from his computer and comes to the table. My daughter and I are already sitting at the table. Nobody can start before all of us are seated. Everything is strictly regimented at our place. Manners, manners, manners. Perhaps they’ll come in handy one day.

“Guten Appetit.”

Liza goes first. Lately she also wants to serve us. That means that a lot of food gets dropped on the table. But it also means she learns a new skill, which is one of my goals as a good mother.

My husband and I discuss the plans for tomorrow, and my daughter complains that nobody is talking to her. That’s her latest thing, complaining that nobody is talking to her. I’ve learned over the last few years that everything comes and goes in phases. Whenever children start to do something incredibly annoying or terribly worrisome, they grow out of it—and it’s replaced with the next annoying or worrisome thing. Nothing lasts. Something new always comes along and displaces the old.

“Okay, how was your day at school?” my husband asks his stepdaughter.

“Great. Today we voted to decide what new clubs will be funded at school.”

“Oh yeah? What did you vote for—nose-picking and farting clubs?”

My daughter cracks up.

Anytime he makes her laugh, I feel happier than I was at my own wedding. I think it’s because he’s not even her father. I don’t laugh with them, though. It’s childish humor, and only children get it. I telegraph my feelings with a put-on frown. It makes it even funnier for the child when the mother distances herself from that type of humor.

All three of us eat very quickly. Too quickly. I’ve read that you should chew your food thirty times before swallowing. But when I’ve tried it, I find it disgusting. The food turns into a thin mush that no longer bears any relationship to whatever it was I originally shoveled into my mouth. So far nobody in our family has had any stomach trouble, despite us all wolfing our food down. I’ve tried a few times to teach the kids to chew their food thoroughly, but when I don’t do it myself there’s really no point. So I don’t bother anymore. I can’t do everything perfectly. Just nearly everything.

We hop up immediately after dinner and put everything in the dishwasher. I think it’s bad for the environment that we use it daily. But my husband and others have told me that even though the dishwasher uses electricity and water and pumps out soap, it’s actually better for the environment than washing dishes by hand. I just can’t get that through my head. But I go along with it anyway, even though I don’t believe it for a second.

Protecting the environment drives me insane. A lot of the things you’re supposed to do seem illogical. I’d really like to have everything explained in detail sometime, so I’d know how I—and how we—should act at home going forward. I definitely don’t want to be one of those people who does nothing just because nobody else is doing anything. And I don’t want to fool myself, either. There’s a tendency to convince yourself of all the things you’re doing for the environment when in reality—with the things that count—you’re making things worse. This thought is unbearable. For the most part, ways to help the environment are about limiting yourself, sacrificing—you just stop doing things that other people don’t think for a minute about doing. The point is not to take yourself or your luxurious lifestyle so seriously; instead you live more simply in some areas. But making these sacrifices takes an iron will, because nobody checks up on you. Unfortunately there’s no such thing as an environmental inspector who can come into your apartment and take the dryer away because it’s both pointless and terrible for the environment. Nope. Our dryer is sitting right there. We just can’t use it. Laundry has to be hung to dry or else we are wasting energy.

The dishwasher is loaded. After each item was placed in the dishwasher, Liza said, “Okay, finished.”

And we said, “No, you’re not finished. There’s this still, and that . . .”

With kids, there’s somehow never one big task that needs to be taken care of. Any big task is divided into lots of small tasks, and after each small task is accomplished they’re ready to call it quits. Parents have to keep pushing children so that later in life, when they have their own place, they won’t live like pigs.

My parents didn’t manage to make it stick with me. My own parents fucked up royally when it came to the most important things parents need to instill in their kids—understanding money and maintaining a clean home. I wonder how they would justify that now. I doubt they’d ever accept the blame for it. Of course, I can’t ask them at this point because I’ve cut them out of my life. I’ve decided my parents don’t deserve to have children. I’m thirty-three now, and I said good-bye to them at twenty-nine. I don’t mean literally. I never said, “Good-bye, I’m cutting you out of my life now.” I just broke off contact. Forever. That means I don’t go to see them on their birthdays, I don’t send cards. I won’t be at their funerals and I won’t visit if one of them gets testicular cancer. (I think my mother has balls, too.) I won’t visit their graves. I simply no longer have parents.

Even to me it seems like something of a taboo. I’m constantly plagued by feelings of guilt. We’re all brought up in a society where even hard-core atheists are taught that you should honor your parents and so on and so forth. But why should you honor your parents when everything they did to you was bad? I constantly try to convince myself that life without my parents is better and that they don’t deserve me as a daughter. At Christmas it’s just unbearable. Even as anti-Christian as I am, I get painfully sentimental and feel in my bones how bad it is to celebrate Christmas as though I have no larger family unit—that is, without the older generation. It seems so wrong that I often break into tears, but it’s still no reason to change anything. My decision is final: I will live without my parents. It’s my right. Anyone is allowed to leave anyone else if they find out that person is bad for them. I have to keep telling myself that to calm myself down. I learned it from my therapist. Otherwise I sit around thinking what I’m doing is monstrous. Especially when I think further and imagine the same thing happening between my daughter and me. Awful.

Frau Drescher has convinced me, however, that I can’t take my daughter’s grandparents away. Despite the fact that I’ve decided they were bad parents to me, they could still be good grandparents to her. I doubt it, but fine, if she says so. Family! I have only one, so I’m by no means an expert. So I listen to her. Against my will, I arrange meetings between my daughter and her grandparents, my ex-parents. Other people have to help with the exchange, because in my pigheadedness I’ve decided I never want to see them again until they die. And not even then.

They pick my daughter up at her father’s place. I won’t take her to her grandparents. Yeah, yeah, Frau Drescher. I get it. Life is tough.

At Christmastime I have to hide from my little family the fact that I really miss my parents. Not necessarily those parents, but parents in general. The parents of one of my friends always say to her, “Whoa, you got fat!” when she comes home for Christmas. I told her just to stop going, but she still heads home for her annual dose of humiliation. I can’t understand it. But it’s possible that in her case it has something to do with an inheritance. If my husband hadn’t popped into my life and made any inheritance unnecessary, I’d probably still see my parents regularly, too. I definitely think money keeps a lot of screwed-up families together, forcing children to humiliate themselves.

I was heavily indebted to my previous husband. The first thing my new husband did was pay off all my debts, and I’ve never been able to completely cast off the feeling that he bought me from my ex-husband like an old camel. I think it’s true, I let myself be bought—because I badly needed security. I was such a mess mentally from my trauma that I couldn’t have dealt with a life weighed down by debt. Georg was able not only to fill the financial role of the father but to fill the mental role of both parents. Naturally Frau Drescher thinks this is too much pressure to put on my new husband, and she’s probably right again. But I’m still working through that with her.

I get my daughter ready for bed. For seven years it’s been the same routine, like in prison: bathe, brush your teeth, go to the bathroom. For me, brushing your teeth is a matter of life and death. I think that only low-class scumbags ever have kids with bad teeth. Especially bad baby teeth. That’s just not acceptable. You have to drastically reduce their intake of sweets. And you have to make sure they brush their teeth at least once a day. For a good long time. I’ve developed some nasty tricks to ensure proper oral hygiene despite the natural opposition of my daughter. I use the same trick that people typically use to impose moral behavior—they invent a god and say that he sees everything, so you’d better be good.

When she was still little, I talked to my daughter constantly about the tooth trolls named Cavity and Bacteria. They are children’s book characters invented by the German government or something in order to get kids to stick to a good oral hygiene regimen. It’s pure scare tactics. The book explains that the tooth trolls feed on bits of food left in your mouth and that their excretions burn holes in your teeth. I told Liza over and over, “If you don’t brush, Cavity and Bacteria will come with their hammer and sickle and bludgeon holes in your teeth—and those holes will hurt, which will mean you’ll have to go to the dentist, who will have to drill into your teeth before he can fill in the holes.”

The comparison to God is not so apt, though, since Cavity and Bacteria are real, basically, and there are real consequences if you don’t brush. With God there are never any consequences. God doesn’t see everything or punish anything—because there is no such thing as God. Liza has so thoroughly internalized the importance of brushing her teeth that sometimes, when it’s really late and I am inclined to lay her sleeping body in bed fully clothed, she wakes with a start and goes to brush her teeth because in her paranoia she thinks she’ll wake up with loads of holes in her teeth. All the better. She’ll thank me one day—or probably not. When friends of ours with kids the same age tell us that their children have cavities, I act as if it’s totally normal. But in reality I’m thinking, Oh, God, what a terrible mother she is! I get off on the fact that my child has no cavities. All because of me and me alone! Ha!

Then we go into her room and I lie down next to her and read. Right now we’re reading Gulliver’s Travels.

She asks, “Mama, why are you whispering?”

No idea. I have to think about it myself. Why indeed? “Um, to make it more suspenseful?”

“Stop it.”

I continue reading, without whispering. Then I stop at an awkward point and allow myself to be persuaded to read a little further. I learned that from Jan-Uwe Rogge. You should be hard and follow through on things, but once in a while you should also show children that they can convince their parents to change their minds, using charm and a good argument. They should learn to convince people, to change their minds. Liza learns that from me.

After reading, I sing the two songs that I’ve sung to her since she was nursing. Just so she has constants in her life—something I never had. The first song is “Sleep, Children, Sleep,” and the second is an English children’s song called “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” which is about a sheep that takes its own wool to various customers’ homes. No idea what lesson it’s supposed to be teaching.

Finally I lie next to her in bed until she falls asleep. Our apartment is like a dungeon. There are only a few windows onto the street. The previous owners did all kinds of renovations in the building, almost certainly illegally. There’s just no way they would have gotten permits for all the things they did. Long, narrow hallways, miniature rooms without windows. Because some rooms are in the basement, it’s like a cold rabbit hole. People always get lost, even Liza sometimes. It’s a very intestinal apartment—as if the rooms and hallways are part of a giant, subterranean colon.

I’m also slowly beginning to worry whether the apartment makes us happy or not. When we moved in, newly in love, we didn’t care about the apartment’s backstory. Now that the honeymoon phase of our relationship is over, the story of the previous owners bothers me more and more. When you’re first in love, you think you are immune to anything bad in the world. Once daily life has begun to encroach on that feeling, you notice you’re not so unique, as you so arrogantly thought at the beginning. And then the things that happen to others suddenly make you think, too. In the case of the previous owners, she had money—she was in banking—and he was an ordinary worker. She started to waste away. He did, too, for a while. Then he got a liver transplant and was suddenly healthy and lively again. Then he left because he couldn’t stand her anymore.

And we moved into their apartment without even thinking about it for a second. If it were a movie you’d think, Oh, boy, there’s definitely trouble in store if you move in there. Or maybe you’d move into a place like that if you didn’t know about the history. But never with all the information at hand.

Liza lies down and acts as if she is ready to go to sleep. As a good example, I’ve closed my eyes and am breathing deeply, in and out. I learned to breathe that way from a masseuse—it’s a way to stave off panic attacks. You fall asleep better that way, too. It makes you feel as if you have your life under control. Crazy. It also shows how poorly you breathe otherwise, during the rest of the day. I listen closely to her breathing, to see whether it’s changed from the way it is when you are falling asleep to the way it is when you are deep asleep. But suddenly she speaks in the darkness.

“Mama, is Hitler still around?”

“What would make you think of that?”

Oh, man, please fall asleep. This is bad.

“At school, one of the kids said to another when they were fighting, ‘You’re as bad as Hitler.’”

“No, don’t worry. He killed himself a long, long time ago.”

“Oh, good. In that case I can fall asleep. If he hadn’t have killed himself, would he have gone to prison?”

“Of course he would have been put in prison. He killed so many people.”

“Mama, do we know anyone who has been in prison?”

“Why?”

“I’d like to visit someone in prison sometime. I want to see what it looks like in there.”

“No, unfortunately not. Maybe someday.”

I would love to take revenge on the newspaper publisher who capitalized on my family’s car accident to earn dirty money selling our blood and agony to voyeuristic readers. If I didn’t have a husband and child, I would have founded a terrorist organization immediately. I’ve sworn that as soon as my child is out of the woods, I will kill myself—which I want to do anyway—and take those responsible with me. If I get up the nerve. If the plan works and I don’t die, I’ll be put away for the murder of at least three people—as well as whoever else happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and you’ll have someone to visit in prison, my child. Maybe I won’t accompany them to the grave, because I couldn’t do that to my daughter or, to a lesser extent, my husband. But in any event I’ve already written in my will that Georg should seek out another woman immediately, that I want him to. He always seems to need absolution from me. He can even get together with a blonde woman with big breasts. It’s not like I’ll be around to see it happen. And it’ll happen sooner or later anyway.

Liza is breathing more deeply. I can make out her long eyelashes in the dark. It’s really funny the way every mother thinks her child is the most beautiful. Despite the fact that this can’t be true. Holding my breath, I pry my finger out of the vise grip of my daughter’s hand. Getting my finger out of her grasp while holding my breath is like giving birth. The child doesn’t want to come out. She stirs. Of course. That’s why fingers are constructed in such a complicated way. As an alarm system for when I try to escape.

She opens her eyes. Always the same sentence: “Mama, a little bit longer.”

“Yes, but let go of my finger, or else I will wake you up again when I leave.”

Always the same. Stuck in a loop, everything repeating itself. Not like the chaos I grew up in. I take my finger out of her hand. Then I lie down next to her again, but a little farther away, with no bodily contact. I know that she will now take four normal breaths and then begin to breathe deeply in and out, at which point she’ll sound like an old drunk man. That’s the sign that she’s asleep. Finally. Suddenly she shudders, but I’m familiar with this. Behind her eyelids she’s either falling or running into something. Free fall or, worse still, a collision. The same thing happens to me. And my husband. Right before you enter a deep sleep, boom, you shudder because you’re having a scary dream. I need to ask Agnetha about it—what it means and why our brains do that to us. I absolutely have to ask her that before I die.

Liza is finally asleep. I can go. I’m free, free from childcare. My shoulders start to relax. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Kids look their cutest when they’re asleep, so innocent and smooth, like newborns. Why is it that people always hope to have kids and then, when you have them, you’re happy when they’re asleep or somewhere else? And this thought makes you feel guilty every time it pops into your head. Sometimes I use the opportunity to work on my stomach muscles—lying silently with my legs stretched out, I raise myself without using my upper body. I use nothing but my stomach muscles and I raise myself slowly, without lurching. If I’m sitting down, I cross my legs Indian-style and stand up directly from that position. Then creep out. Extra careful on the wood floor by her door—it creaks if you step on one of the planks. I let out a deep breath outside and then dash up the stairs.

Georg notices the tension in my face. “What’s up?”

The same question every night after I’ve put her to bed. “I can’t stand it when she won’t let me go. It’s a nice feeling to be needed, but there’s something awful about it, too. You know how it is.”

“Maaaaaamaaaaa!”

Fuck. She’s awake again. I run back down the stairs and snap at her. “What is it?”

Naturally I think she’s going to complain that I left too soon, that she hadn’t really fallen asleep. She often claims she hadn’t completely fallen asleep, despite the fact that I could hear that she was already deep asleep.

She looks at me worriedly and whispers sleepily, “The other door is open a crack. Can you close it? It scares me.” And then she adds, “My bum itches really badly.”

I’ve done it again. So short-tempered, such raw nerves—typical of me. Once again I have to apologize to my child.

“We’ll take care of your bum in the morning. How about you bathe early tomorrow before school? That should take care of it.”

How do you teach kids to wipe their asses thoroughly? I feel that even at thirty-three I could be better at it, so how can a kid master it? I don’t want to turn into a neat freak and constantly talk about hygiene. She shouldn’t be disgusted by her own body. She should be free. More so than I am. Nobody ever talks about the art of cleaning your bum. Nobody taught me. My mother, Elli, didn’t. We’re all Elizabeths in our family, all the women anyway. Which is the only gender that counts in our family, unfortunately. Each Elizabeth tried to bring a trace of individuality to the name. Even if we all have the same name, at least each of us has her own nickname. She told us that she never crapped and never farted. That made a big impression on me as a child, and I felt disgusted with myself because I couldn’t manage to keep myself from doing those things. She told us that her waste evaporated into the ether, through her skin, I suppose. She had learned that from her own mother, Liz, our deranged grandmother from Camden. She acts to this day as though she is the rightful queen of England. For which the name Elizabeth is perfect. She also has never taken a crap or farted. How nice for her. You can’t expect to get any help in normal human functions from those two. Just have to teach yourself.

You also can’t bother anyone else with such a nasty subject. Which means you just have to get creative and try to guess how other people do it. Earlier I would just wipe once, regardless of what came off on the toilet paper, and then pull my underwear back up. I just didn’t think about it enough. These days it goes like this: I wipe once, twice, and then I look to see what the situation is on the paper. Usually there’s still something there. So I wipe until the paper shows no sign of anything. I’m sorry, Greenpeace, but I use a lot of sheets of toilet paper that way. But at least it’s recycled paper! Which is once again about sacrifice. Everything that’s good for the environment entails sacrifice. Back when I still didn’t care about the environment, I used the thickest, softest, whitest toilet paper I could find, sometimes it was even dyed light blue. Like a typical English girl. But I made the switch and will never go back.

Once I can’t see any signs of anything on the paper with the naked eye, I do two rounds of wiping with spit. Just to be safe. Because commercial wet wipes are out of the question on both health and environmental grounds. They take a lot longer to break down than regular paper and are pumped so full of chemicals that you don’t want them near your body anyway. Better not to use them. Most of them are manufactured by the worst companies, too. I spit on a few balled-up sheets and rub myself good and clean with the saliva. Then I repeat it to be safe. Wiping with wet toilet paper creates those horrible little clingy minirolls of paper that you have to pull off with your fingers. With my fingers and some water from the sink, I get rid of those. Then I use a paper towel to pat everything dry. Done. Shipshape. And the entire process thought up and perfected on my own. I’ve never talked about it with anyone. What a crazy world. You have to figure everything out on your own.

I should have anticipated the problem with the door to Liza’s room. I’m familiar with this fear of hers, and closing that door is part of the bedtime routine. I almost never forget. Liza has two doors in her room, and the one that connects to our room has to be shut, or else she’s afraid that someone or something will come through it. She sleeps on the floor. Her room is designed to look like an ocean, with a pirate-ship bed. She could sleep in the pirate-ship bed, of course, but she doesn’t want to. She always sleeps on an air mattress placed on the blue tiles that represent the seawater. If you lie next to her, you also have to lie on an air mattress—otherwise you’ll slip beneath the sea. And ever since I’ve had to lie there every night, I have noticed that you feel oddly helpless lying there on the floor, totally defenseless. From that vantage point, the door does look gigantic and imposing, especially when it’s slightly ajar.

I’ve often worried about all the various and ever-changing children’s fears Liza has. She’s scared that snakes live in our apartment—poisonous snakes or the ones that strangle you. She’s scared that a tiger lives in our back garden and will jump into her room through the window. She’s afraid of burglars. And of people who abduct children. She’s scared of ghosts, witches, wolves, foxes, badgers, skeletons, lizards. But only at night. Never during the day. Frau Drescher says these are inner fears that children project outward. Children are afraid of the inner evil inside themselves. When they get upset at their parents and secretly wish the parents were dead, they immediately feel bad and project their evil thoughts instead onto evil animals that could attack them and hurt them. That way they remain innocent and can feel like victims instead of culprits.

My initial impulse when she first started to express all these fears was to tell her that all the business about animals in the house and garden was ridiculous. There are no ghosts, my child. Not a single person in the entire world has ever seen a ghost—at least not a person with all their marbles. But my therapist told me that is the completely wrong approach. If all I do is to constantly tell the child that all her fears are absurd—to tackle the whole thing with arguments based in reason—she’ll just stop telling me her fears at some stage. But she’ll still be just as afraid. She’ll just carry her fears around with her silently; after all, the fears are ridiculous and she won’t want to make a fool of herself. So she’ll have to get over her fears all on her own, even as they become greater and less easy to control. As a good mother, I took this to heart and immediately changed my approach. Which is to say, now I take her fears seriously. By the way, it’s something that I’ve noticed in the relationship with my husband as well as in the raising of my daughter: that the most obvious solution—even one rooted in good intentions—is usually wrong and just makes everything worse. When I look deep inside myself for a solution, I find that I’m completely off base when I go to reassure myself with advice from professionals. That’s why I think everyone with a child or a husband or a wife should go to therapy. And if you can’t afford it, at least read a handbook.