Lauren Fox - Send for Me

Four months ago, on Emmi’s birthday, a perfect, warm Sunday in October, the girls packed a picnic and spent the afternoon in the park. Even Sofie managed to get away for an hour. Emmi showed off the beautiful green and blue silk scarf her boyfriend had given her, and they munched on thick slices of buttered bread, boiled eggs, and squares of chocolate, until Sofie stood up, brushed crumbs off of her skirt, and declared, “Oh, girls, if I don’t get home and start dinner now, Martin will starve!”

She was halfway across the park, still waving, when Emmi grabbed Annelise’s arm. “Oh, no!” she said, her eyebrows furrowed.

“What is it?”

“It’s just…” Emmi looked at Annelise, then down at the picnic blanket. “I’m afraid Martin will starve !”

Annelise fell back onto the blanket, giggling. “No, not dear Martin!”

Now Emmi is engaged to be married, and Annelise is sitting at the kitchen table, cradling a cup of tea still too hot to drink at 4:15 a.m. on her (most likely forgotten!) birthday, pulsing with the exquisite pain of being ripe and unpicked.

She thinks, briefly, fleetingly, about Max, as she blows on her tea and watches the steam rise. His birthday and hers were linked for so many years. For months after Max ended things, she thought she saw him everywhere: on the street, on her usual route home from the bakery, choosing fruit at the market, strolling through the park, hand in hand with a tall, reddish-haired woman. But it was never Max (knowing him, he had adopted entirely new routes), and eventually her heart stopped ramming against her rib cage every time she mistook someone else for him, and then, in time, she stopped conjuring him. But she still thinks about him, or, more accurately, she thinks about his absence, the holes in her life where he used to be.

Her parents emerge from their bedroom. Her father pulls out a chair, and her mother veers around the kitchen table and heads straight for the stove, just like always, cracking eggs and frying last night’s potatoes in a pan before Annelise has swallowed two sips of her tea.

Her father looks her in the eye, smiles. Finally!

She looks back at him, expectant.

“Annelise.”

She nods.

“You forgot to buy coffee yesterday. Would you pick some up this afternoon?”

She is nineteen years old, an adult. Her eyes fill with tears. “Of course,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

“Julius!” her mother says, and her father laughs.

“Happy birthday, my dear,” he says, and he passes a package across the table to her.

“Oh!” she says. It’s very small, irregularly shaped, wrapped in brown paper. “What is it?”

Her mother sets a plate of eggs in front of her. “Come, let’s move along,” she says. “It’s almost time to go.” Then, the unexpected warmth of her mother’s body behind her as she leans down and kisses Annelise on the head.

Annelise tucks her finger underneath the folded paper and feels the sharp poke of a small object as it slides out into her palm—a starfish brooch, silver, filigreed, with two little turquoise eyes in the middle. Its five starfish arms are plump and curved and lively, almost as if they are waving; they taper into small bejeweled tips. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She runs her fingertip over its delicate surface and has the strange urge to put it in her mouth, to suck on it; she can almost taste the cold, metallic tang.

“Thank you!” she says over the clink of dishes, the scraping of the heavy cast-iron pan. “It’s beautiful.”

“Your mother chose it,” Julius says, and Annelise nods, but she doesn’t believe him. He is the one with the eye for beauty. He’s the kindest man she’ll ever know, Annelise thinks. She turns to thank her mother, but she’s already somewhere else. The kitchen is spotless.

—

Klara is hurrying through the apartment, heart thrumming with early-morning disquiet—if they don’t leave in the next five minutes, their entire day at the bakery will be a rush to catch up. She’s putting books away, straightening cushions, eyes on the messes that nobody else seems to notice. She bustles into Annelise’s bedroom and pulls her rumpled sheets up, runs her hand over the duvet to smooth out the wrinkles. She feels the last of the remaining warmth from her daughter’s sleeping body caught in the covers—the echo of her peaceful slumber, her heat.

There was something buoyant about that starfish brooch that Julius picked out for Annelise, some bright essence of their daughter. Klara recognized it immediately when he showed it to her. “It’s perfect,” she said to her husband. He, of course, already knew.

What love she feels for this girl, trapped in the details of this hurried, predictable, dark February morning.

In spite of everything I would not wish that you were here.

Annelise, on her bicycle, hair blowing behind her like a sail.

Or in the kitchen, alone, on a Saturday night, sipping honeyed tea, the stillness warm around her shoulders.

Or at the bakery, in the quiet after the first early-morning rush and just before she notices that she’s hungry: her father hands her a warm brötchen on a plain white plate. It’s not one of the half-ruined rolls they set aside for the family—too pale or too dense, or slightly burnt or misshapen. This one is perfect, the crust golden and hard like a shell, the bread open and airy, steam whispering away from it. And her father is smiling at her, as he hands her the warm plate, as if she is just as perfect.

Or, of course, playing a piece she knows by heart, Bach’s Prelude No. 1 or the Brahms Sonata in E Minor: the music dark and low in the body of the cello, the bow an extension of her arm, her thoughts floating above her.

These are the secrets of her body, some winnowed essence of the life she is living: these fleeting moments when she is exactly where she belongs, exactly the girl she is supposed to be. Where does it come from, this brief collision of breath and astonishment? Is elation exponential, does it multiply and circle and alight on everyone, sooner or later? Is it possible that she is not the only one? Does everyone else, on occasion, take flight?

I have sold the sofa and the wardrobe in your room. Please write to me and tell me what else I should sell and what I should keep. Earlier I could buy and sell things the way I wanted to. Now I can’t. Now my hand gets slapped.

If everything goes on the way it is now in Stuttgart we will still be here two years from now.

You have no idea how much I worry.

Julius knows he is tenderhearted. He comes from a long line of tenderhearted men: fathers who cry when they hold their babies for the first time, who tiptoe into darkened bedrooms just to touch the soft cheeks of their sleeping children; husbands who, at times, are filled with so much lighthearted gratitude and affection for their tired and faithful wives that they will, without suppression or regret, pull those surprised wives into their arms and hold them for a moment. Sternness is not in his nature, discipline is not his forte. He has never tried to be something he is not.

But a man keeps his own counsel. Klara long ago gave up on her youthful attempts to draw him out, and he is immeasurably grateful for this kindness, for her patient affection—but he will never tell her that! Instead, he will work in the bakery from morning until night without complaint, bearing the physical labor, the financial worries, all of the worries.

Morning coffee, black. Two fried eggs and a brötchen for breakfast. Lunch at 10:00 a.m., when possible. Meat, whatever is left over from last night’s dinner. Maybe a piece of fruit. And bread, of course. The bread he could make in his sleep, and maybe sometimes he does. Occasionally he looks up from his work and it’s hours later than he thought it was, and he has been baking—sifting, measuring, sprinkling, salting, kneading—as if in a dream.