Wunderland(11)

“The irony,” Renate says, changing the subject, “is you didn’t even get a good look at the thing. Even after all that.”

Ilse smirks. “I saw enough of it when Herr Steinberg was waving it around like a flyswatter. It looked to me like he was French-kissing her.” She sticks out her tongue.

“Oh, Ilsi—disgusting!” Renate covers her head with a pillow.

Undaunted, Ilse crawls over on all fours. She pulls the pillow from her friend’s face. “Maybe,” she whispers, “Franz has done that to a girl. Maybe it was even him in the picture—you said you can’t see the man’s face, right? What color was his hair?” She laughs triumphantly. “You see, that’s where he could have gotten them. Straight from the source.”

There’s an added glow to her cheeks, a thrilled tremor to her voice. But if Renate notices this she doesn’t comment on it.

“You’re awful!” is all she says. Grabbing the pillow back, she swings it directly at Ilse’s hairline, though being Renate (weak and clumsy), she misses. Laughing, Ilse grabs it back. Then they are rolling together on the floor, laughing and panting and somehow fitting perfectly, like always, like interlocking parts in a two-piece puzzle.





3.


    Ava


1977

The 747 looked like a huge land-bound whale, beshimmered by midsummer heat. As it taxied toward the jet bridge, the old Bob Hope line started circling in her head: I just flew in from the West Coast, and boy, are my arms tired! When Ava first heard the joke she’d been new to America, and duly mystified: why would someone’s arms hurt from sitting in an airplane?

Now, however, it was her own arms that were aching. She’d been holding Sophie up to the window to watch landing jets and trundling baggage carts for what felt like forever, though she had just intended for it to be a few moments. Like so much else with her daughter these days, though, the exercise escalated into a battle of wills: once lifted, the toddler refused to be lowered.

“Baby,” Ava tried again, reresting Sophie against her hip. Despite the overconditioned air, perspiration dripped down her spine and soaked the waistline of her Wranglers. “Look,” she said. “You can still see it from here. And if I hold you here we can dance!” She bounced a little on the balls of her feet, singing under her breath in German (since she didn’t know any American baby songs): “Alle V?gel sind sch?n da, alle V?gel, alle…”

“Noooooooooo!” shrieked her daughter. “Uppuh! Uppuh!” A chubby palm planted itself on Ava’s cheek, hard enough that Ava’s neck twinged in pain. She suppressed the impulse to just drop the child on the floor.

“Mummy’s arms aren’t so strong,” she said instead, shuffling Sophie’s damp weight to her other hip and noting the ammonial whiff of an overdue diaper change. “I need to rest them so that you and I can give Oma a big, big hug when she comes out—right through that door. See? That’s where she’ll be.”

She pointed to the arrivals gate, where an air hostess was finally taking up position. Sophie directed a suspicious gaze at the woman, who—God bless her—obliged them with a white-gloved finger-flutter. Sophie generally distrusted strangers. But something about the stewardess—possibly the jaunty little red hat—had sparked the infant’s interest. She lifted a chubby fist in a gesture closer to the Black Power salute than a wave, but the scowl on her face softened into something closer to a smile than her mother had been able to elicit from her for hours.

Sighing, Ava turned her attention to passengers disembarking, most of whom looked overdressed for the city’s Sahara-like heat wave. Searching their wan faces, it struck her that she didn’t altogether know what she was looking for. After all, she hadn’t seen her mother for nearly a decade. What if Ilse had changed, had gained or lost twenty kilos? Dyed her hair black, or blue? What if she wasn’t even on board?

This last possibility sparked a nervous quiver that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Ava had complained frequently to friends, lovers, and therapists about the fact that since her move to the States in 1968, Ilse had not once made the trip to visit. She hadn’t come for Ava’s art school graduation, nor for her first Bowery art exhibition, nor when the death of her best friend and former lover sent Ava spiraling into a monthlong depression, one that had concerned her then-roommate Livi enough to actually call Ilse about it herself (“I don’t believe I’d be any help,” her mother had reportedly responded). Ilse hadn’t even come after Sophie was born, though she claimed to have both made reservations and secured time off at the magazine. As usual, though, something had interfered. In this case it was the sudden onset of the flu: “I certainly wouldn’t want to get you or the baby sick,” her mother said when she called with the news. “It’s hard enough to care for a healthy newborn.”

Not that you’d know, Ava had wanted to retort. But of course she did not.

So when Ilse called again shortly after Sophie’s first birthday to announce she’d paid for not only a Lufthansa ticket but a hotel room in Greenwich Village, Ava’s reaction had been decidedly mixed. Naturally, there was skepticism. But there was also a stubborn stirring of anticipation: a curling tendril of hope that maybe, at long last, Ilse was ready to be the loving, supportive, and (most important) open mother Ava had always wanted her to be.