Lauren Fox - Send for Me

Klara, electrified with fury, shook her daughter awake. “What is the matter with you?” she barked. “Get up! Get up! ” She was wild, murderous. She shook Annelise’s shoulders harder than necessary, allowed her fingers the momentary pleasure of digging roughly into her daughter’s flesh.

“Mama!” Annelise’s voice was high and choked. She had been ripped from a lovely, dozy dream: she was performing a cello recital, every note perfection. For the briefest moment her mother’s scolding overlapped with Tchaikovsky’s Nocturne. Annelise blinked, registered the bite of Klara’s fingers into her shoulders, her mother’s blotchy-pink, enraged face hovering above hers. Her eyes watered. “I’m sorry,” she squeaked. “I fell asleep.”

“Obviously,” Klara hissed. “Clean up this mess right now!” She turned on her heels and headed into the kitchen to begin her next shift. From the living room, Annelise’s sobs were tiny, gulping chirps. A second ago, Klara had been so mad she’d been quaking. But just as suddenly as it had combusted, the flame was doused. A liquid embarrassment seeped through her edges now. She was still wearing her shoes, her cloth coat, but she couldn’t go back into the living room to put them away. She blinked back her own tears as she attacked the potatoes with the sharp peeling knife.

She was training Annelise to function without her. That’s what she was doing. One doesn’t always remember it in the busy slog of the day, but that is the project. A mother teaches her daughter to perpetuate the tedious rituals of her own imperfect life. And by instilling in her child the virtues of order, she shows her how to keep the chaos at bay. It’s not always pleasant. But what else is there?

But in a dark house, at night, next to her sleeping husband, she aches for the moments she didn’t touch Annelise as she passed, the times she didn’t praise her beautiful cello playing; how easy it would be to whisper to her what she is, my treasure, to kiss her dark head. Regret is a low, constant throb.

Klara shrugged off her coat, draped it over a kitchen chair, and began stripping the potatoes with an expert fwip-fwip. The kitchen grew dim as evening settled. She peeled and peeled. Potatoes accumulated in the pot like white stones in cold water. The apartment was quiet, and, after a long time, she was calm.

Now I have several questions to ask you, Annelise. I went through some of your things yesterday and I saw that your curtains were here. You’ll need these right away. Shall I put them aside? What about the rose-colored dress with the matching coat and the black coat? Red sweater? Black dress that we bought in Frankfurt? Answer all of these questions, please.

Annelise trudges into the bakery with her parents every morning before sunrise, bleary and taciturn. The predawn darkness is so deeply at odds with her body’s clock that she sometimes feels as if she’s sleepwalking, still mid-dream. As her parents bicker about who forgot to order more white sugar or sweep the front step, she twists her hair into a bun and ties her white apron around her waist. The black coffee she drank before she left the house will spark her senses soon. On her mother’s strict orders, she’ll put on her cheeriest face for the customers. Mohnkuchen? Pfeffernüsse? Streuselkuchen? This is her job, although of course she doesn’t get paid. It’s the family business, so it’s her duty, her burden, and, she has no reason to doubt, her inheritance.

She finished school at the Gymnasium in the spring, just three months ago, and although she was never a brilliant student, she feels the loss of that part of her life acutely now, sharp as a pencil tip. She misses the daily chats with Emmi and Sofie, the pleasure of mastering her subjects, the smell of chalk and polished floors, the forward motion. Now, it’s Bäckerei Adler that gives shape to her hours, and the only way out is marriage and children—and even then, she’ll likely be pressed back into service sooner rather than later, when her theoretical children are old enough to go to school. She’ll untie this white apron and exchange it for a different one, and then, in a few years, she’ll knot herself back into this one. Her life unfurls before her, apron after apron.

She pulls the rag bucket from under the sink and takes out a clean cloth (a scrap of an old apron, as a matter of fact), soaks it in vinegar and water, and begins to scrub down the counter. Her parents are in the back, beginning the day’s baking, companionable now in their predictable rhythms. The smell of yeast hits her nostrils first; then, depending on the day, next will be cinnamon or ginger or, her favorite, anise, bright and slightly bitter.

What is it that she wants? A different burden of responsibilities? A passion she can’t define? Simple escape? She loves to read, she likes to draw, she is a reasonably accomplished cellist. But so what? She blows a stray wisp of hair out of her eyes, attacks a smudge on the glass with excessive vigor. She just knows: not this. Her discontent is undefined, undefinable, and so the bakery has become its focus. She hates the relentless, dull routine, the heat, the dirty utensils forever needing to be washed. She despises it with a contempt that will, after everything that comes later, reconfigure itself into a hot and stunning shame.

Outside, she hears the first clanks and clatters of Feldenheim rattling to life. The sun is coming up now, dim glow edging through the storefront window. Midday, it will be so bright and hot in here that Annelise will have to crank the awning, but for now, this light is gentle and perfect.

There are some tolerable things about the bakery, if she’s honest with herself. For example, she is no great beauty—she knows this. She’s short, a little too curvy. Her eyes are as brown as a mud puddle, and her hair is impossible. But behind the glass bakery counter, she is in her element, a sea creature, an exotic, dark-haired mermaid swimming in a sea of crusty breads and sugar-dusted pastries. The scent of rising yeast lingers in the air, intoxicating. Young men on their way to class place their orders, brötchen, a slice of apfelkuchen or streusel, and smile at her hungrily. On occasional, quiet moments throughout the long day, she imagines herself irresistible.

Max Eisenberg, student of art history, friend of her youth, stops in nearly every day for pflaumenkuchen, which her mother bakes especially for him. When it’s still warm, Annelise will cut a generous slice, arrange it on a plate, and set it aside for him. These days, she mitigates the tedium by thinking ahead to his visit, how he will walk in at some point during the lull between the 8:30 rush and the 12:00 chaos, grinning at her, waiting patiently if there are people ahead of him.

She imagines his familiar smile and the new thrill of it. She and Max grew up together, their families neighbors in adjoining apartments. His mother and hers were as close as sisters, and Max and Annelise were born only a few weeks apart—Annelise first, in the middle of dreary February, and then Max, during the first soft lick of spring. They had been raised, until they were ten, as if their mothers were interchangeable. When they were very young, Klara and Dora fed them together, bathed them together, and often, after the children had played for hours, tucked them into the same bed. Annelise knew Max—the sharp jut of his elbows, the little gap between his front teeth, the grassy smell of his skin; the way he stood at the edge of a crowd, too shy to participate until she dragged him in; how, the winter they turned nine, he taught himself to speak in burps and wished her a happy birthday in loud, musical belches.

In the summer of 1922, the year they were ten, Max’s father, Karl, who drank too much and sometimes hit Dora, left.