American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [127]
Erika’s mother, Minna, had been rounded up during the war and made to work in a Frankfurt munitions plant. That bit of information sprang from her lips one day as she taught me to make sauerbraten. It wasn’t clear—she couldn’t say—why the Nazis had singled her out on the street and marched her to the machines. (Was she Jewish, like the dead in the photographs? She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, nothing like Erika. But she wore crosses and kept a rosary in her purse.) As bombers climbed the air from the runways of Germany, she polished steel instruments, dancing away nights in a cabaret on the lively side of town.
Unbidden admissions would spring from her as we sat, heads down, rolling dough or pinning a pattern onto cloth. These were things she did not tell her own daughter, but she would blurt them to me, unpacking the burdens of her heart, as if I were a priest in a confessional.
Erika would be somewhere else, belting a song into a mirror or shimmying to some idiocy in the box, and Minna would pour her history into my twelve-year-old ears, doing what I longed for my mother to do. There was much about our families that was different: They had a television, whereas my parents most intentionally did not. They were willfully frivolous—in dress, entertainments, and dreams—whereas my family most assuredly was not. There was a Pentecostalist stepfather, Minna’s husband: a rangy, red-haired American who had taken in the immigrants the way a vestryman takes up a cause. He came and went, consuming his meals in silence, hardly denting a pillow, hardly touching their lives. Going to visit Erika and Minna was like flying into foreign territory. There was always something new there: When I studied my hands like a gringo, another secret would come my way.
Minna had spent a lifetime pulling her mother’s head out of an oven. It had started when she was a girl of six. One gray winter weekend, as we puttered about her sewing room, she received a telephone call from Frankfurt: The mother was at it again.
That was hardly the half of it. If Minna knew who her father was, she never said so. Her world was staunchly female, and the males—even the fathers and husbands—in it incidental. They were largely incomprehensible, sometimes irresistible, but ultimately expendable. In Minna’s life story, they came and went like brisk winds.
During the war, she had lived in a Bohemian quarter of Frankfurt. Prostitutes lived in the apartments above. Night after night, she could hear the clump of Nazi boots as officers made their bibulous way upstairs to savor the retail charms. They were twisted, those Nazis, perpetrators of the unnatural, forcing the women to treat them like animals, roaring their pleasure through walls. One day, as I carefully pinned a facing to a perfectly round collar, she told me about one of them—one of Hitler’s generals, no less—who demanded to be served his hostess’s feces in Dresden porcelain, with her urine in crystal on the side. How Minna had extracted that information from the upstairs neighbor, it did not occur to me to ask.
I staggered from those confessions into the glare of a suburban landscape, hopping the fence, into my tidy brick house. “Mareezie?” my mother called as I came in the back door. “Did you finish your sewing?” When she noted my pale face slipping past to my room, her voice would rise in alarm: “What goes on in that house anyway?”
I was afraid to tell Minna’s stories, just as I’d been afraid to tell about Antonio’s spirit world. These were tales of dark forces, best kept to myself. Minna was of another dimension,