Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

We took our leave and left. It was very warm, the sun shone down from above, through the crack between my glasses and my forehead and onto my eyelids; my feet bounced along the asphalt, and I realized to my surprise that Tammy had been right. I felt a lightness of heart that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Claudia said I didn’t need a black suit. Tammy claimed the opposite.

“You’d look so sweet,” she said, ignoring Claudia’s scolding look. “How often does your father die?”

“He is still a boy.” Claudia sounded like a worn-out general who just wanted to win one last battle before collapsing. “He doesn’t need some silly suit. He can wear black jeans.”

“He’s a man.” Tammy tussled my hair. “Ferdi is a man, too. He’s also getting a suit.”

Claudia sighed. Now she was acting the way you expect an ex-wife to act around her successor. She was annoyed. She rolled her eyes. I figured she was out of energy. That she hadn’t been like this up to now was an act of self-restraint for which she wasn’t getting as much credit as she deserved.

“It’ll be over soon,” she said and leaned back with her eyes closed after Tammy rushed out to the garage and started furiously sorting some garbage bags or other as if there was nothing more important in the world to do. “Things will be better after the funeral.”

“Why?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “It always is.”

“It’s no problem for me to wear a suit. I don’t have any black jeans.”

We went shopping, Claudia and I, the two of us, as if I were Ferdi’s age. There weren’t a lot of options. The shop at the southern end of the market square sold only plus sizes, the one on the northern side everything from toothpicks to underpants, but no trousers. In the last possibility, a boutique catering to Eastern Europeans, I tried on a suit. “We could drive to Frankfurt,” Claudia had suggested, but I just waved the idea aside.

“Claudia,” I said quietly when I came out of the changing room. She was waiting with her eyes closed, sitting on a stool and leaning against the wall. I said her name again but she didn’t react. At first I thought she’d had a stroke but she had just fallen asleep.

I exhaled and ran my hand across my face. Claudia opened her eyes and smiled.

“You look good,” she said.

“Thanks. Fits well, too.”

“No, really, everything together looks great. Look at yourself.” She pointed to a tall mirror and looked me in the eyes.

“No, thanks,” I said.

Her face winced as if I had stepped with my full weight on her foot.

“Sorry, Claudia, but I’m not going to do it,” I said. “I never want to see myself again. Do you understand — never. You shouldn’t bother asking. I’m fine with it. I’m living a fulfilled life, I’m burying my father, buying myself a suit, I even keep finding girls who are willing to try to be with me despite my face. I am a fundamentally happy person, so now please stop trying to remind me of my glorious past. It’s over. It bothers you more than me.”

She nodded and looked down at her hands.

I went back into the changing room and pulled my phone out of the pocket of my pants. I looked at it hundreds of times per day. Janne hadn’t called. By now I knew she wasn’t going to, but I was waiting for it all the same.

My mama is coming,” said Tammy when we got back to the house, me with my shopping bag in my hand and Claudia with a fan she’d bought at the ninety-nine cent shop on the market square. She was fanning herself and breathing hard even though it wasn’t very hot. I was worried about her blood pressure.

“She’s coming to the funeral.” Tammy kept talking even when neither Claudia nor I paid her announcement sufficient attention. “She’s arriving tonight.”

“Good that you told us,” said Claudia flatly. “Is she coming on her own?”

“What do you think? The flights are expensive, you know.”

“That’s very nice of her to come,” I said cautiously.

Tammy looked at me as if I had said something incredibly moronic.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s her son-in-law, you know.”

“Had she ever met him?”

“No.”

“Don’t get bent out of shape,” said Claudia. “Of course Tammy is paying for the plane ticket, but it doesn’t affect your inheritance.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it’s got nothing to do with that.”

“Then what is it?”

I couldn’t explain it. Somehow, in a highly roundabout way, everything had to do to Janne in the end. But I wouldn’t have said that even under threat of execution.

“I don’t need any more people gaping at me,” I said.

Claudia shrugged. “Funerals, birthdays, and weddings have been public events since the dawn of time. There’s no point in fighting it. Get yourself together.”

I had no idea she could be so harsh.

My father’s Ukrainian mother-in-law was supposed to land just after midnight.

“You have a driver’s license?” I asked Tamara incredulously when she started looking for the car keys while continuously checking the flight information on her phone. Then I recalled that a week ago Tamara had probably been totally capable of dealing with life. It was unlikely that my father had led her around by the hand and taken care of everything for her. Even if she was his beloved little girl with the big breasts. Somebody still had to defend the murderers and rapists and earn the money for new garden sculptures.

“Unlike you,” she said haughtily. “Will you get your license when you turn seventeen?”

“Go to the airport with her, Marek,” ordered Claudia in a voice that permitted no objections.

“And what if I say no?”

“Just do it, Marek,” said Tammy. “If I drive into a tree Claudia will be rid of us both.”

I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Why the atmosphere had taken such a nosedive and we were no longer a happy grieving family like we had been when I arrived. Why Tammy and Claudia suddenly had to attack each other. An hour earlier they’d been at each other’s throats about the funeral arrangements. Tammy rejected Claudia’s classical music playlist on the grounds that it was old men’s music. She waved two strange-looking CDs and had another one tucked under her arm.

“He was an old man!” said Claudia, using every ounce of her strength to control herself. “He was an old man, and there will be a lot of other old men at his funeral. Colleagues, clients, the mayor for god’s sake.”

“So? It’s not their funeral.”

Claudia groaned.

In the end she won out on the music front. But that meant Tamara got her way with the reception.

“We’re going to invite everyone here.” She spread her arms out as if she was trying to hug the whole house. “There’s plenty of room here.” And this is my fiefdom and I am in charge here, that’s what it said across her nearly flawless forehead, blemished only by a barely visible worry-crease.

“And the coffee cake? And the coffee?” Claudia looked away as if it was more than she could handle to have to look Tammy in the eye. “Who will you put in charge of that?”

“Nobody,” said Tammy. “I’ll make it all myself. With Mama.”

“For two hundred people?”

“For a thousand for all I care.”

“Why are you guys fighting so much?” I asked in the car. I noticed that Tammy had painted her nails black today. She drove like a crazy person and I double-checked several times to make sure I had my seat belt on. I still had my whole life ahead of me. “I mean, up to now it’s been all peace and love and pancakes between you. You were so nice to each other.”

“What?” She hadn’t been listening to me.

“Don’t give my mother such a hard time, Tammy, she’s at the end of her rope,” I said a bit louder.