Hausfrau Read Online Free PDF Page A

it.
The inquiry was irrelevant. The answer to every question that day was yes.
    But they were not arduous assents. She’d said yes before.
    After class, Anna telephoned Ursula and told her there were errands she needed to run in the city and she wouldn’t be back until three. Then Anna and Archie took the number 10 tram from Sternen Oerlikon, where the streets ray out from an interior middle like a five-point star, to Central, a stop at the north end of Zürich’s Niederdorf district. From there it was a five-minute walk to Archie’s flat. What followed was an hour and a half of uninhibited sex.
    On Tuesday and again on Wednesday Anna followed Archie home after class. On Thursday and Friday, they skipped school altogether.
    A NNA TWIRLED HERSELF IN the swing, winching the chains so that they lifted her higher off the ground than she was to begin with. Then she pulled up her feet and let herself spin quickly down. She accomplished this multiple times unto dizziness.
    Eventually the church bells rang their midnight toll. A low, wormish feeling of a reckoning approached her. Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action
—all
action, past and future—comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.
    Even so, Anna was back inside the house before the chime of the twelfth bell.

3
    A NNA COULD NEVER
REALLY
LOVE A S TEVE , A B OB , A M IKE .
    She abhorred the casual apathy a diminutive implied. How a nickname more often than not announced “I am the sum of every Matt you’ve ever met, the arithmetic mean of a Chris, a Rick, a Jeff.” It wasn’t the length—names don’t get much shorter than “Anna.” She felt a person’s name should resonate with dignity and significance. It should be able to heft the weight and bear the pressures of his personality. A Steffi would never be appointed to a presidential cabinet; a Chad would never appoint her.
    Anna named her children with a seemly eye. Their names were American, but many Swiss had nonnative names; one-third of Zürich’s population is foreign, thanks to the banking industry. The Credit Suisse in which Bruno worked, for example, employed many Swiss, several Germans, some Brits, a few Americans, and an impossibly handsome Nigerian whose skin was as smooth and dark as Sprüngli chocolate. Everything’s eventually normalized by diversity. The names of Anna’s childrenwere uncommon in Switzerland, if not rare. She chose them with that in mind. She liked their names. They seemed to fit.
    A name is a fragile thing. Drop it, and it might break.
    Like Steve. The name of a man Anna could never love.
    A NNA BROUGHT AN EXTREMELY convoluted dream to her analysis. It was organized chaotically without regard to theme or circumstance, and it was unbound by the geographies of time and space. A dream of pointed symbols, archetypal images, and allegoric nuances, Anna was sure.
    There were twenty doors the Doktor could have walked through if there was one.
Let’s begin with the significance of the horse,
Doktor Messerli might have said.
What are your associations with balloons and airplanes? What do you think it means that the roller coaster only runs backward? Why, Anna, were you naked in the church?
But the Doktor didn’t ask those questions and instead posed the single one that Anna wished she hadn’t.
    “There is a Stephen in your dream. Who’s he?”
    Psychoanalysis is expensive and it is least effective when a patient lies, even by omission. But analysis isn’t pliers, and truth is not teeth: you can’t pull it out by force. A mouth stays closed as long as it wants to. Truth is told when it tells itself.
    Anna shook her head as if to say
He is no one of significance.
    A T 5:45 A . M . ON S ATURDAY Anna was jolted awake by an unnatural scream. She threw herself out of bed and raced up thestairs two at a time. It was Polly Jean. She was cutting a tooth. Ten months was late for a first tooth; Victor’s came in at five