Wrecked

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Wrecked
Charlotte Roche

The sensational new novel from Charlotte Roche, author of ‘Wetlands’Replete with a forty page descriptions of marital sex, details of worms, and even, following an abortion, ‘the best anal sex ever’, Schossgebete reannounces Charlotte Roche.We witness the sexual routine of Elizabeth Kiehl, our protagonist, in all its minutiae: her love of fellatio; her visits to prostitutes together with husband Georg in order to keep their relationship alive; and – most candidly – her preference for dressing him in old men’s clothes because of her self-diagnosed ‘father fixation’.Behind such banal titillation is great sadness. Midway through one of her weekly therapy sessions, Kiehl takes us back to a period a decade earlier, when she was eagerly anticipating her wedding in England, her birthplace. Arriving at the airport in London, Elizabeth’s father calls to tell her that her mother and three younger brothers have been involved in a high-speed pile-up on the Autobahn, the latter three left dead. It emerges that the crash was so brutal that there were no physical remains of her three siblings found.And so Elizabeth Kiehl’s past and present continue side-by-side as she heads towards psychological collapse.

WRECKED

Charlotte Roche

Translated from the German

by Tim Mohr

For Martin

Contents

Title Page (#u33069ac7-3d1e-5616-8a66-2effa8f232d8)

Dedication (#u75be612c-3b3d-57d0-9a48-f1978cb7354c)

Tuesday (#uf00633d1-8977-5947-b761-36463b99ba8b)

Wednesday (#litres_trial_promo)

Thursday (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Charlotte Roche (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Tuesday

Every time we have sex, we turn on both of the electric blankets half an hour in advance. We have extremely high-quality electric blankets, and they stretch from the head of the bed to the foot. It’s something you just have to spend a bit more on—at least, my husband had to spend a bit extra on them. Because I’ve always been terribly scared of those types of things, scared that they’ll heat up after I fall asleep and I’ll be roasted alive or die of smoke inhalation. But our electric blankets automatically switch themselves off after an hour. We lie down next to each other in the bed—heated to 105 degrees—and stare up at the ceiling. The warmth relaxes our bodies. I begin to breathe deeply, smiling on the inside with the excitement of what’s to come. Then I roll over and kiss him as I put my hand into his XL yoga pants. No zipper or anything else that could catch on hairs or foreskin. I don’t grab his cock at first. I reach down farther—to his balls. I cradle them in my hand like a pouch full of gold. At this point I’m already betraying my man-hating mother. She tried to teach me that sex was something bad. It didn’t work.

Breathe in, breathe out. This is the only moment in the day when I really breathe deeply. The rest of the time I tend to just take shallow gasps. Always wary, always on the lookout, always bracing for the worst. But my personality completely changes during sex. My therapist, Frau Drescher, says I have subconsciously split myself in two—since my feminist mother tried to raise me as an asexual being, I have to become someone else in bed to avoid feeling as if I’m betraying her. It works very effectively. I am completely free. Nothing can embarrass me. I’m lust incarnate. I feel more like an animal than a person. I forget all my responsibilities and problems. I become just my body and leave my anxious mind behind. I slowly slide down in bed until my face is in his crotch. I can smell his masculine scent. I find the male scent isn’t very different from that of the female. If he hasn’t showered right before sex—and who does when you’ve been together as long as we’ve been—a drop or two of urine has started to ferment between his foreskin and the head of his cock. It smells the way my grandmother’s kitchen used to after she’d sautéed fish on her gas stove. Eyes closed. Just get through it. The smell disgusts me a little, but that feeling of disgust also excites me.

Once I’ve given everything a good suck, it doesn’t smell anymore. Like a cow licking its calf clean. I bury my face in his balls, then rub my cheek along his outstretched shaft. He always gets stiff as soon as we first kiss. My husband, Georg, is a lot older than I am, and I’m curious how much longer his erection will function this well. I kiss the crease where his legs are attached to his body—whatever you call that spot. By now he’s moaning and asking for more. For the time being it’s all about making him happy. I carefully consider the rhythm I do everything in—I want to drive him absolutely wild. First, let’s tease him a little. I stay on the seam where his legs and body meet, holding his balls firmly in my hand. I slowly switch from kissing to licking. I make loud smacking noises so he can hear what I’m doing as well as feel it. Beneath his balls I feel the erectile tissue—the extension of his cock inside his body—that stretches to the perineum. Do you call it a perineum on a man? There’s a line there that looks like a set of labia fused together. It’s all the same, isn’t it? The way I like to approach it is to imagine he has a vagina. Just a very elongated vagina that sticks out! Way out. I hold his balls more tightly and massage the erectile tissue below.

To get myself going, I rub my vagina against his knee. If I arch my back a little, it hits just the right spot. My tongue slowly wanders from the line between his legs up his shaft. I lick it until it’s totally wet, and then I breathe on it so he can feel the chill of the moisture. From the shaft I run my tongue down to his balls. I take both of them into my mouth and play with them. I’ve learned to make sure not to twist the cords attached to the testicles. I’ve done that a few times with Georg, and it really hurt him. Farther down I massage his perineum with my tongue and let some spit dribble down for my finger on his asshole. I make my tongue stiff and pointed and run it upward from the bottom of the perineum, between his balls, and then all the way up to the acorn-shaped tip of his shaft, all while rubbing my pointer finger slowly around his asshole. I wet my lips and the tip of his cock with spit. When I start to suck on the acorn-shaped head of his cock I barely open my mouth so it feels tight to him. And I let just the very tip in and out again. In and out. In and out. In and out. I let more and more spit run out. I learned that from another man—that it hurts if it gets too dry. I start to take his cock a little more deeply into my mouth. As I go down, I wrap my lips tightly around his whole cock. When I come back up I suck. Because of the vacuum that creates, it makes a popping noise when I get to the top. I always pull the foreskin up with my mouth, up and over the acorn tip. And then I always swirl my tongue around the end. The tip bulges out of my cheeks from inside my mouth. In porn films, women always jerk the foreskin back and forth with their hands. But that—particularly the downward jerk—doesn’t do it for my husband. In fact, it hurts him. No idea why they do that in porn films. I read once in a sex book that if a woman is going to do that, it’s better if you’re right-handed to do it with your left hand. Supposedly you don’t grip it as hard and you have a nicer touch as a result.

Unfortunately I can’t do the trick the women in porn films do where they take a cock all the way into their throat without gagging. I tried a few times in the past but nearly threw up, so I quickly gave up. You don’t have to do everything the way they do it in porn films. I’ve also tried to swallow many times. But I just can’t do it. I find the taste and the consistency in the back of my throat so disgusting that I just can’t choke it down. I have a strong gag reflex, and the sound of me nearly throwing up isn’t much of a turn-on for the man, either. It takes a huge acting job to be able to manage it, and it’s just too much trouble. I could probably pull it off for a one-night stand, but I can’t fool my husband. He knows I hate it, so he doesn’t want me to do it anyway. So, instead, our deal is that he can come in my mouth but I push the shooting sperm back out with my tongue.

Sometimes my mouth and neck need a break, so I take the spit-moistened cock in my hand and carefully pull upward, always pulling the foreskin only upward over the tip. I wouldn’t have hit upon that myself. But one time when we were just getting together, I asked him to get himself off in front of me. When you’re new with someone, you do funny things like that. And I now copy a lot of things I saw him do to himself that time. I figured out that the closer I come with my hands and feet to the way he masturbates, the better it feels for him. Your own ideas are never going to counter decades of sexual habit. So my challenge is to get as close as possible to the way he satisfies himself, but with other means, of course. He can only use his hand. I have my tongue, my mouth, etc., etc., etc. If I do continue with my hands, I lift his balls toward his cock with one hand while I run my other hand upward toward the tip of his shaft. That gives him the sensation that I’ve got everything tightly gripped together.

At this point he’s lying there like a beetle on its back, surrendering himself to me completely. Legs spread, arms stretched out, eyes rolled up like he’s in a trance. I get a serious feeling of power when he’s lying there like that. I could cut his throat and he wouldn’t even notice. Now and then I step back from the role of sexual servant and observe the scene like an outsider. And when I do, I have to smirk, because from that vantage point what we’re doing is rather comical. But I quickly wipe the smirk away and continue with the requisite level of seriousness.

Most of the time we start out with one of us devoting him- or herself to the other. When we try something in a 69 position, we always find that, while it’s nice to see all the parts up close, you’re too distracted doing things to enjoy what’s being done to you. One or the other! Not that we ever actually talked about it. It was one of those tacit understandings. Our sexual accord. While I’m tending to him, I always make sure that I can rub my vagina on something—otherwise he’s miles ahead of me in terms of being turned on. As I treat my jaw muscles to a rest and put all my effort into the whole two-hands-lifting-and-tugging thing, I sit with my legs splayed and my vagina on his thigh, getting messy from all the wetness. It’s such a rush—we work ourselves into something like to a drug-induced trance. It makes me proud, all the things I can do with my husband.

Beyond the electric blankets, there are a lot of other steps that I have to take before I can have sex. I’m petrified by the thought that our neighbors might hear us. So part of our foreplay is making sure all the doors and windows are shut. It’s the only way I can be relaxed. It’s happened only rarely that I left it to my husband and he forgot to close a window. But if I do discover an open window after all our noisy sex, I turn bright red from shame. It must be terribly annoying for the neighbors, though my husband constantly makes fun of me for thinking so. Of course, if I look at it like a therapist, it’s dead easy for him to play the easygoing role, because he can always be sure that I’ll be the uptight one in our relationship—and you take on the role in the partnership that’s available. I play the parts that are panicky, obsessive, ashamed. That leaves him to be the cool one, the exhibitionist. But I make sure that nobody hears him anyway. I close the windows, doors, and curtains. Sometimes at night I’ll go outside in my bathrobe, tell him to lie in bed with the light on, and double-check that nobody can see in from outside. Because sometimes I worry that our curtains are too thin. They’re made out of the same kind of silk as a tie, with a brown paisley pattern on them.

Sometimes during the winter, the electric blankets aren’t enough, so we get the infrared lamp Georg occasionally uses for his back pain out of our basement storage space and use that as an additional source of heat. It’s a big, broad, expensive model, and we’re lit up all red by it. It’s like being in one of those window displays in Amsterdam—which makes me worry even more that the silk curtains might reveal two sweating interlocked bodies to passersby. Georg knows I’m crazy. I always have to go outside and double-check that we won’t be visible, however the lighting is set up. How many times in life have I seen that people apparently pay no attention at all to the shadows a 100-watt bulb can cast through a window. A normal person might find it pleasing to be able to watch a woman undressing that way. But all I can think is, Oh God, I hope that never happens to me—I have to make sure it never happens to me.

I continue to cater to my husband. Sometimes he’ll lie there for ages and just let it all happen. Most of the time he lies on his back because for years he’s had back pain—and because I know him so well, I feel pain in my back, too, anytime he does. He hates to appear weak in front of me. The only reason we’re together is because I invented this idea of him being ridiculously strong. If I were to ask him how his back was every day, it would be emasculating. But even so, I want to be polite. I want to show that I commiserate. It’s the kind of problem that can come up when you are together with someone who’s older. But in the end it’s not about what I do, it’s about the fact that he thinks it’s terrible to show he’s in pain when I’m around.

I think it’s new for him, too, just to lie back and enjoy. He used to be with women he had to put incredible effort into pleasing, and there was not much left for himself afterward. For that, thank the women’s movement. But that’s not the way it was supposed to be. That only women get their way and men just have to see what happens. He loves it when I play his sexual servant. I repeat everything I’ve just described, first quickly and then at a slower pace. I don’t even have to think. Everything seems to happen on its own, like when you’re high.

When we’re in the middle of having sex, I lose track of time and space. It’s the only time during the day when I can just shut everything off. I really think it has more to do with the breathing than with the sex itself, but maybe it’s a combination of both. Contrary to what my mother wanted, I’ve learned through years of therapy that I am indeed a sexual being. I’m slowly learning to be conscious of my own desires.

Earlier, for years and years, it was just like the old cliché of marriage with us: the wife never felt like doing it and the husband did—constantly. But once the right buttons were pushed, I would always think, Why don’t I ever decide to make the first move? Why don’t I seduce him sometime instead of him always seducing me? It was humiliating for him to have to constantly ask, to get rejected—always to be the one who had to initiate things. It often led to fights. I would have been lying, though, if I said I felt like having sex. I didn’t feel like it one single time. I just went along as a favor to him—and because I knew our relationship would go down the tubes otherwise. Everyone knows that: if things aren’t working in bed anymore, it’s just a question of time before the whole relationship stops working, too. Of that much I am sure. But as soon as we’d get past the initial paralysis, I’d really get into it—every time. And every time I’d say to him, “Why don’t you just remind me how much fun I have, and then you won’t even have to ask!”

Thanks to my therapist, I initiate things myself more and more often. About twice a week I say, “Again today?” I can only be so selfless during foreplay because I know I’ll get the same treatment back afterward. No matter how much effort I put into pleasing him, I’ll never be as good as he is at oral. I ask him all the time whether he thinks what I do to him is as fundamentally good as what he does to me. It’s a dilemma. We’ll never know.

When I feel I’ve done enough as far as servicing him, I gradually stop. He always understands and then very gratefully starts to do the same for me. He spreads my legs apart and positions himself with his head between them so he can see everything. He examines me millimeter by millimeter, like a gynecologist. Do you say “playing doctor” when adults do it? That’s what it’s like. It’s best if you’ve showered that day. Because anyone who looks and smells so closely will pick up any impurity. He takes my hand and puts it on my vagina. I know exactly what to do. He wants me to get myself off for him. I never play with myself when I’m alone. My mother brought me up as a feminist. I think something went wrong during that upbringing, though, and I became some sort of sexual Catholic. I’ve never gotten myself off. The only thing I ever do that comes even remotely close to masturbating is a shameful scratch or two in my pubic hair. And in those instances, I think I’m tricking myself. First I think, Hey, something itches in my crotch, then I scratch a bit in my shortly cropped pubic hair, then I realize it turns me on, and I stop immediately. For whatever idiotic, archaic reason, I don’t continue. I mistake my own lust for some sort of uncomfortable condition because I just don’t want to admit it.

If it’s been a few days since we’ve had sex and I’ve done this secret scratching beneath the bedsheets, sometimes I get so horny it hurts. But I don’t want to admit that I’m horny, and think instead that I have a yeast infection or a bladder infection, or that I’ve contracted herpes, despite the fact that I’m totally immune to it—otherwise I’d have gotten it long ago. They say that about herpes—either you get it or you don’t. And I appear to be immune. At least I’m immune to something. These thoughts about being ill stay in my head until I have sex—when my husband initiates it, of course. Then all my ailments are pleasantly fucked away.

But when my husband wants me to, I put on the best masturbation act of all time. When he’s watching and encouraging me, I really go for it. I rub and flick and finger. He doesn’t look at my face at all. I exist only as a vagina. I am my vagina. He keeps his head between my legs and watches closely as I go through all the masturbatory techniques I’ve seen online and on DVDs. His eyes, his nose, and his mouth are just a few centimeters from the inner lips of my vagina. I rub crossways on my clitoris, push the lips open and rub between them, and once in a while I shove a finger inside and fuck myself with it. Even if I find it more amusing than stimulating, when I see how it affects him, how much it turns him on, I get turned on, too.

He can’t take it anymore, and he wants to do with his cock what I’m doing with my finger. I lie in front of him, completely naked, and spread my legs as wide as I can. He shifts forward and smacks his hard cock a few times against my vagina. I think he must have seen that move in a porn film. But I like it when he does that. Even though I can’t explain why I like it. He smacks his cock against me a few times and then in he goes. I usually come very quickly. A few thrusts will do it. And then that’s it for me. My mother—and leading feminists—brought me up to think there was no such thing as a vaginal orgasm. They sit between me and Georg and whisper in my ear: “There’s no such thing as a vaginal orgasm!” Now, at thirty-three years old, I’ve had to find out all on my own that that’s not true. I’ve always felt it during sex, but when I came I always dismissed it as a psychological effect. I figured tht it was just because I liked the idea of being fucked, that the thought—fuck, fuck, oh fuck yes, he’s inside me, filling me—was enough to make me come without touching my clit. Because I was convinced—for political reasons—that there was no other way to really come except through clitoral stimulation. No surprise that eventually I started to think I was crazy or, at the very least, had a powerful imagination. In bed, I realized that my feminist upbringing was miles away from reality. Secretly, behind my mother’s back, and behind prominent feminist activist Alice Schwarzer’s back, I began to think, They’re wrong! I come that way almost every time—there is such a thing as a vaginal orgasm. Fuck it and fuck them. And now, finally, I’ve gotten scientific confirmation, too. In Geo Kompakt magazine, number 20. It’s a science magazine—and it’s my favorite. The theme of issue number 20 was “Love and Sex.” I learned a lot from it, a lot more than from Alice Schwarzer’s journal Emma. And yet, Alice Schwarzer still sits between me and my husband during sex, whispering, whispering: “Yes, Elizabeth, you only think you’re having vaginal orgasms, you imagine that in order to subjugate yourself to your husband and his penis.” From that issue of Geo Kompakt I learned that women have two ways to have an orgasm—and can even come both ways at the same time. A vaginal orgasm is—speaking in layman’s terms—transmitted to the brain via the vagus nerve, whereas a clitoral orgasm is transmitted through nerves that run through the spine. Sometimes I come really hard, and that probably means it’s being sent to my brain both ways at the same time. I also feel I come quickest if I do it the way I need it. What I mean is that I actually do the thrusting—I grind against his cock more than he actually shoves it into me. That way I can create the perfect rhythm for me. And then it’s just a matter of seconds before I come. I’m really loud. I flip out every time. And then I’m done. He has to be careful that he doesn’t come right away, too, because it turns him on when I just take what I want. He loves the way his cock gets me off. But that’s probably just something he’s convinced himself of—in reality, I’m pretty sure I get myself off. Anyway, he has to really concentrate—or think of his Catholic mother or whatever—until I finish. So that he doesn’t come before me, in which case it’s all over. I’m really thankful that he takes it so seriously—that he makes sure I come first. I’d guess that in the seven years of our relationship, he’s come first only three times, meaning there were only three times I didn’t come with his cock. But in all of those cases, he still made good with his fingers, his tongue, and his toes. In those instances I really benefited from his bad conscience.

With the exception of those three incidents, it’s always his turn after I come. At that point, I’m his servant, like at the start. This is the only moment during sex that I say anything. I’m no good at talking dirty. Probably for the same reason I don’t masturbate. It’s all my mother’s fault. As always. I ask Georg: “How do you want to come?” There aren’t that many ways. He gets to choose from the following menu: in my hand, my mouth, my vagina—I get on top and fuck him, because of his back—or, on rare occasions, because it is always pretty painful for me, in my ass. When I get on top of him, to fuck him so he can come in my vagina, he usually wants me to sit backward. That way he can grab my ass and see everything. He pulls my cheeks apart so he can watch his cock going in and out of my vagina.

He tells me exactly what he sees. Unlike me, he can talk dirty very well. He feels bad that I can’t see the way the skin of my vagina wraps around his cock as I lift my body. He says it looks as if the skin of my vagina forms a hat for his cock—the skin clings to it and is pulled slightly downward, getting dragged along the entire length of his shaft. A few times in our seven years together he’s pulled my cheeks apart so far that it’s slightly torn the tissue around my asshole, leaving me feeling slightly wounded. I tell him the next day, after I go to the bathroom: “Please don’t pull my ass cheeks so far apart next time, you broke something, thanks.” He immediately feels bad and promises to do better next time. I guess it just happens in the heat of the moment.

I often feel as if intense sex makes you overlook injuries. It’s the same with the way he pulls apart my vagina so he can really examine it. Sometimes the sensitive skin tears a little. Up to a point, a little pain turns me on even more because I think to myself that he is so horny that he can’t control himself anymore, that he no longer knows his own strength. It sounds as if I’m talking about a man with Down syndrome. But that’s what goes through my head during sex. If I can bear it, I wait until we’re finished before complaining—in a friendly tone. Often he squeezes my hard, stimulated nipples, and that can really hurt. Very carefully, I try to let him know that he hurt me—I don’t want him to feel too bad and then be tentative the next time we have sex. I don’t want that. And I also don’t want him to feel as though he’s some kind of brute.

But now it’s time for him to come. Over the years I’ve developed a trick. I first saw it in the documentary Chicken Ranch, by Nick Broomfield. In the movie, prostitutes use the trick on drunk clients so the fuck is over more quickly and they are able to raise their hourly earnings. As soon as a client has blown his load and his hard-on is deflated, the prostitute is done. So she earns the same money in a shorter time and can move on to another client. I use the same trick on my husband at the end of our sessions. Once I’ve come, I don’t really see any reason things should go on for an eternity. Over the years I’ve developed extremely good control over my Kegel muscles. I can make myself much tighter inside than I normally am. I have no idea whether having a baby slightly widens you—my gynecologist says that it doesn’t, that everything goes back to the way it was beforehand. Anyway, it’s also perhaps less than ideal for the feeling of tightness that my body produces so much fluid during sex. During foreplay it’s great, but later, when I want to make him come by rubbing his cock with my vagina, it’s more of a hindrance. If he puts his cock in before I’m really wet, I can tell from his reaction that it turns him on—because the friction is more intense. But anyway, after I’ve already come, I don’t have any great desire to prolong things. Unless it’s Christmas or our anniversary or something—in that case I let myself get carried away and will take a long time to get him off even after I come. So now I squeeze my Kegel muscles with everything I’ve got and he comes immediately. I mean immediately. There’s just nothing he can do. It always makes me feel good—the fact that I have his cock in a vise grip inside me and can pull the trigger whenever I’m ready. Cool. He moans and groans a lot when he comes, and usually I then ask him, as a joke, “Did you come yet?”

I think that being loud increases the intensity of sexual sensations. It highlights the rush, the animalism. Earlier, at the beginning of our relationship, I was the only one who always screamed. I would scream until his ears rang. But these days he screams right back at me. It’s great fun.

I’m totally against any kind of postplay. I get really jittery from sex and always want to get up and do something afterward—like take a shower. Not because I feel dirty or anything. It’s just that I am prone to the number one female ailment: urinary tract infections. And I can never get rid of the impression that I usually get UTIs after sex. So in my mind—with no scientific basis—I can’t help thinking male bacteria are responsible. So I wash them away and leave my husband lying there at the scene of the crime. He always falls into a state of complete relaxation after sex and then falls fast asleep—sometimes for hours. How does a cliché become a cliché? I’ve read that it’s totally normal for men and women to behave completely differently after sex. Having that scientifically confirmed makes me feel much better—for years before that I had to hear how unromantic I was for hopping right up afterward and starting to clean up or whatever. In the article it said that the clichés that form the basis of the jokes everyone makes—about the hyperactivity of women after sex and the “little death” of men—are the result of different hormones. I love science because it absolves you of your bad conscience about things like that. Now that we know, I can get out of bed immediately and do something without being given the evil eye. He’s already deep asleep, and I switch off the electric blankets so he doesn’t get broiled in his sleep. I grab one of my daughter’s stuffed animals that’s lying on the floor of our room. It’s an orangutan. I hold it against my vagina so none of the sperm drips out on my way to the bathroom. You never see that in the movies after a sex scene—the soupy fluid running back out of the woman at some point. Probably wouldn’t go over so well. I smile. My head is never clouded with problems after sex. It always seems to me that I can’t possibly get more relaxed or free. And then I feel even more relaxed and free the next time. He outdoes himself. We outdo ourselves.

Right in front of the bathroom is our rattan laundry basket. We like old, dark brown things—prepares us for our eventual death. I toss the orangutan into the basket and head into the bathroom. If my daughter finds the stuffed animal in there, the sperm will have dried. And anyway, a child would probably just think it was snot. Definitely. I sit backward on the bidet and wash myself—the way I saw it done in The Tin Drum as a kid. My mother often showed us movies with adult-only ratings. She was of the opinion that art films couldn’t be rated that way. But ever since, that image has stuck in my head: the working girl from The Tin Drum, played by Katharina Thalbach, trying to perform retroactive contraception by washing out the sperm of her client. I don’t think that image will ever leave my head. After washing myself first with soap, I rinse again with clear water.

I grab a towel—which, for the sake of the environment, is air dried, and as a result is brittle and scratchy—and dry myself off a little too roughly. I want to finish quickly. My daughter will be home from school any minute, and then we’ll want to have dinner. I haven’t prepared anything.

I look at myself in the mirror, nude. I always look best after sex because my facial features are so relaxed. My breasts are slightly larger because they’re engrossed with blood, the nipples are hard, the pupils of my eyes are dilated as if I’m high, my clitoris and the inner lips of my vagina are thick and swollen from the stimulation and friction and hang out of my outer lips. On my throat and chest I have the telltale red flecks I always get when I come. You can’t fake those. My husband is always happy when he sees those red flecks on my white skin. He’s always worried that I might be faking it. But I don’t—and I don’t have to. I brush my hair so I don’t look too deranged when Liza gets home. With makeup remover and Q-tips I clean up the smearing beneath my eyes that could be a giveaway. And I fold two squares of toilet paper into my underwear before I pull them on. But no more than two. I teach my daughter not to waste paper when she goes to the bathroom, too—for the sake of the environment.

As quietly as possible, I slip into the walk-in closet off our bedroom and rummage around for some comfortable clothes to wear for the rest of the evening. Before dinner, I have to briefly stop by to see my therapist, Frau Drescher. I can wear anything to her office. That’s the beauty of it. I can go there regardless of how I look, how I smell. I can go there in any state. Isn’t that what religious nuts say about their gods? Maybe so, but they aren’t so confident that they don’t wash up for him—just in case he’s not quite as magnanimous as they pretend.

Frau Drescher even wants me to go to the bathroom at her place—number two, no less. But so far I haven’t been able to get up the nerve. We’re working on it.

Once I’m dressed, I go upstairs to the kitchen. I close all the doors along the way so I can make as much noise as I want with my daughter without waking up Georg. I know he’ll sleep for at least an hour. I like to tell myself that I’ve worn him out. That makes it easier for me to let him sleep—because I’m proud of myself. During the hour I have while he’s asleep, I’ll cook something healthy and, by breathing deeply, get rid of the red flecks on my throat. Don’t want my daughter to see those. Kids don’t want to know that adults have sex. From our stack of cutting boards I pull out the one with the words garlic and onions branded onto it. And from the magnetic strip that holds our knives I grab the knife I’ve written garlic on with a Sharpie. Ever since I quit smoking, my senses of taste and smell are so sensitive that when I eat a piece of fruit I can taste whatever was cut with the same knife beforehand—and if it’s onions or garlic it nearly makes me puke. When things that are supposed to be sweet taste somehow savory, it drives me crazy. It’s something that has started to bother me only as I’ve gotten older. When I was younger, I was more easygoing. A lot more easygoing!

Onions live in a wooden box under the sink. That’s what my grandmother used to always say: “Now, where do the onions live?” The mother of my ex-husband taught me a good trick for chopping onions. When I sauté them in a pan, as the beginning of almost every dish I make, I like them so finely chopped that they nearly disintegrate. I skin them, cut off the ends, and then stick out my tongue—just the tip. The acidity that emanates from the onion seeks out the closest moisture. If your mouth is closed, that ends up being your eyes, and the onions make you cry. I hate crying. For me it’s best not to start, because I can never stop. But with this trick, your tongue attracts all the acidity before it gets to your eyes. Your eyes don’t burn, and you never cry. I turn the onion so the top is facing me, and cut it horizontally and then vertically, and then cut it into tiny pieces. I throw the onion slices into a pan with organic olive oil and sauté them until they turn transparent. I get a head of savoy cabbage out of the fridge—it’s just the most beautiful vegetable. With a big sharp knife I cut it in half and pause to look at the coloration inside. It goes from dark green to light green, with each layer toward the middle slightly lighter. I make two cuts and remove the hard part around the stem and throw it into the compost container under the sink. Then I cut the head of cabbage into small strips. I always think it’s going to be way too much, but as soon as it’s in the pan it cooks down dramatically. Next I throw in a handful of my special ingredient: organic vegetable broth with no yeast extract. It’s very hard to find. Even in most organic markets they have only vegetable broth with yeast extract—which is just a new “green” euphemism for monosodium glutamate. As a good mother, I can’t allow that in our kitchen.

When we still had meat at our place—that is, before the Jonathan Safran Foer era began—I conducted an experiment several times: I made chicken broth from scratch, using an entire chicken carcass. It went over okay. The next day I would serve chicken soup made with a prepared broth I bought at the organic market. Everybody loved it. The only difference was the flavor enhancer, either glutamate or yeast extract—which sounds so harmless. But if my family were to get used to that stuff, they’d only like the enhanced flavors and they’d lose their taste for the real thing. So I avoid the stuff.

To the organic vegetable broth powder with no MSG I add some water to steam the cabbage a bit. Then I add an entire container of cream, some butter, and plenty of salt and pepper. Dinner is ready.

The doorbell rings and I let Liza in. On the way to the door I think to myself, Cooking helps you stay sane, and vegetables help keep you from going crazy.

“How was school?”

“Good.”

When she comes in wearing her teenager-style jacket, skinny jeans, and heels, I can hardly believe how big she’s gotten. This is my child? Great. I guess I’ve succeeded—she’s out of the woods, as they say. She’s still alive. That’s not something we can take for granted in our family. One of my brothers died at six, another at nine, and the third at twenty-four—though there’s still a while before my daughter reaches that age. But I’ve already achieved more than my mother. My child is still alive. One hundred percent of my children have lived beyond age six. My mother had five, and three are dead. One of them was younger than my daughter is now—that is, my mother lost 20 percent of her offspring before they were eight, which is how old Liza is.

I quickly wash up the things I dirtied making dinner. I don’t have to wash away the onion smell completely because this cutting board is used exclusively for onions and garlic. What bourgeois trick will we dream up next?

“Could you please not throw your jacket on the floor every time you come in?”

“Why not?”

“Do you have a servant who cleans up after you?”

She points at me.

Then we both laugh. She picks up her jacket and hangs it up in our children’s wardrobe, which is only half my height.

“Can you please set the table?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Otherwise you’ll get no dinner.”

“Okay.”

She stomps over to the kitchen counter, hops up like a gymnast, wedges her toes in the handle of the cabinet, and gets up on the countertop.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Savoy cabbage.”

I lift the lid of the pan.

“That’s it?”

She rolls her eyes and sticks out her tongue like she’s throwing up.

“Yep, that’s it.”

I smile at her. It’s one of my old tricks—just to make a big dish of a single vegetable. She comes home from school hungry, and even if she complains about the vegetable I’ve chosen, she eats a lot of it—because there’s nothing else. It makes me very happy as a mother. Kids need proper nutrition. They need lots of vitamins in their tummies. Which is why I do it all. Because I love her.

Over the years you think of all sorts of things you can do in order to act like a good mother. And when I write “act” I mean it. What’s the best way for me to act so that I am the best I can be for my child? I want to provide an anchor for her at home as much as possible. Really, I want her everyday life to be boring and predictable—something I never had as a child. I want her to have the luxury of wanting to go out into the world because life at home is so boring.

Everything was too exciting during my own childhood—constantly moving, fathers constantly changing. There was nothing else I could do but become a homebody and shun travel and excitement. Always cook proper meals. Hardly ever go out to eat, maybe four times a year. And never, ever eat at McDonald’s. Over my dead body.

We always sit together at the table, everyone who is around. Nobody is allowed to answer the phone during a meal, nobody reads or sings. I have no idea why it is, but singing seems to be a major problem—both my daughter and my stepson seem to want to sing at the table all the time. But it’s strictly ­forbidden—otherwise no food goes into their mouths. These are the less important things that I do to act like a good mother for my child. Above them on the list are things like signaling through my behavior every second of every day that she is wanted and loved. I let her know that I am happy she was born. That I’m proud of her, just the way she is. That I’m proud of the things she does. And I tell her all the time that I love her, that she’s smart, pretty, and funny. That she can learn anything if she puts her mind to it. I try to make her understand that it’s okay with me if she does things differently than I do, that I’ll still love her regardless of whatever craziness she ends up going through in her life. My mother never did that. In fact, she impressed the opposite upon me: either you are like me or I don’t love you. That will not be passed down through the generations. I will make sure of that. Ha.

Liza gets three plates out of the cabinet, squats down, puts them on the counter, and then hops down nimbly, like a monkey. In order to set the side of the dinner table where Georg and I sit, she has to remove the picked-over remains of the two newspapers we read every day. The table sits seven. We only use one end of it, though, so we can be close together. I have her set the table because I read in a book that it’s good to have kids do things like that. My impulse would be to do everything for her—to show that I love her. But then she’d never learn anything and she’d grow up unable to do laundry or unload a dishwasher. So I have to get past that impulse and ask her to do things that she really doesn’t need to do. In the book I read about bringing up kids, by Jesper Juul, it says you have to have taught a child everything they will need to live on their own by the time they are twelve. Otherwise it’s too late to teach them. I’ve got five years left. I’ll do it quickly. Setting the table, folding clothes, tidying your room, cleaning the toilet.

Georg comes upstairs. It’s obvious that he’s just gotten out of bed. I smile at him in a way that’s meant to telegraph a message: I can’t talk right now because a child is in the room, but that was fucking hot. He smiles back. He’s wearing his loose-fitting, long white underwear with a button fly. I always tell him how good he looks in them—he looks like a cowboy on his day off, and I like it. And when I run my hand across his ass, which I often do when Liza’s not looking, the cloth feels unbelievably soft. The undies have been washed hundreds of times and are practically see-through in some spots.

I read a theory in Geo Kompakt (which has become my new sex bible) that seemed to perfectly capture the relationship between me and my husband. It was called “the hanging bridge theory.” An attractive woman—the bait in the ­experiment—stopped random men in everyday situations and everyday places—like at the mall or on the sidewalk—and asked them a few questions, supposedly for a scientific study. The men answered gallantly, and she gave each respondent her number in case he was interested to learn the results of the study. Then she did the same thing, except she approached her subjects on a hanging bridge in a park. The bridge swayed back and forth in the wind as she again asked the questions and handed out her number. The result of the experiment: many more men from the hanging bridge called her afterward than did men from the normal situations. Meaning that people create connections more quickly when they are in more extreme conditions. On the swaying bridge, men thought, Oh, we both survived that together and, man, she was rather attractive. People seek connections to those with whom they go through a tough situation. The hanging bridge that brought me and my then new husband, Georg, together was pregnancy and birth.

We got to know each other in a totally boring way, like so many other couples—at work. He ran a gallery and I wanted to exhibit my photography. His wife was about to have a baby, and I had just given birth. We had both just started families with other partners. There was the hanging bridge. Then things went crazy. We careered toward each other like two comets. It was love at first sight—though neither of us noticed. Love took root and grew on its own somewhere in the back of our heads, undetected, like a Trojan-horse virus on a computer. All we thought was, Cool, we understand each other, we should become friends. We felt like kindred spirits, strictly platonic, of course.

So birth was our hanging bridge. He wanted to know everything about my birth process. We hardly talked about anything else. Along the way we started to work together. Much too soon—before the end of my maternity leave—I had to, or rather was permitted to, exhibit my photos in Georg’s gallery. As a result of the stress, good stress, mind you, my milk stopped flowing after just three months of nursing. At that point I could work full-time again, and my then boyfriend could finally help me feed the baby bird. When my future husband had his baby, with his wife obviously, I was more excited than for my own birth. It felt as if I was having a second child because I felt so close to the father. Our children are so close in age that I’ve never been able to shed the feeling that they’re twins. Everything seemed predestined. Yeah, yeah, I know, there’s no such thing as predestination, God, fate, fuck you—there’s only coincidence and hanging bridges. We thought we were friends. We didn’t lie about our relationship because we didn’t know any better ourselves. The moment his son was born, who did he call? Standing in front of the hospital, as men do, after the birth, he didn’t call his own mother or relatives. Nope. He called me. I was so happy for him. Everything had gone well.

I watched my then husband during our birth and thought, Hmmm, he could really do a bit better than that. And my future husband watched his wife give birth and thought, Hmmm, she could really do a bit better than that. And we both knew who could do it a bit better. Us. By the time he had his own child, there was no stopping our love. I thought he was stronger than my then husband. He thought I was stronger than his then wife. Naturally, later on those impressions turned out to be mistaken, just as almost everything you initially think about someone when you fall in love turns out to be wrong. He’s the man; naturally he had a son. I’m a woman; so obviously I had a daughter. Everything fit perfectly—if only there weren’t the previous partners. We needed to get rid of them. But how? Leaving my partner wasn’t difficult for me to imagine. I had my mother as a role model, a consummate pro at leaving people. Georg, on the other hand, had his religious and uncompromisingly loyal parents, married for more than fifty years. In his entire family, zero percent of the marriages had ever ended in divorce. How could he get out of his marriage? What’s more, his wife had picked up on the whole thing. “You’re not going to fall for her, are you?”

As far as I’m concerned, women notice that kind of thing more quickly than men. Or at least they are crazy enough to bring it up, and when that happens everything goes downhill. “Do you still love me?” “Uhhhh.” It takes a second too long to answer. Busted. What a terrible actor Georg is. Just say this, for God’s sake: “Of course I love you! What kind of a question is that?” Then we’d have had a little more time to figure things out. The way it happened, it was already over between them before there was any chance to save it.

That’s what he was going to do at first. He had pangs of Christian guilt, felt it in his genes, I guess. He wanted to save his family. “We can’t see each other anymore. I just had a child with her, and I have to give her—and our relationship—another chance. For the child.”

I had to wait. All through the painful waiting period, I was sure they would work it out. That’s the way you are when you are in love. You’re not sure of yourself and you just keep telling yourself, Sure, no problem, he’ll be back. I didn’t even tell my then husband. Either he didn’t want to notice or he actually didn’t notice anything. There wasn’t much to notice anyway.

We hadn’t even had sex one time before we left our partners. That’s why it’s always amazed me how well that aspect of our relationship functions. In fact, it’s always getting better. I’ve never experienced what it’s like to have sex with the same person for such a long time. Thanks, Mother!

I’m convinced that people come together only because of sex—even if it’s just because they think you will be a good fit in bed. Because of genetics—you can smell it. And then it does turn out to be a fit as good as a couple of trapeze artists. If you have a good sense of smell and don’t ruin it by smoking, you’ll find the best genetic match—someone with whom you can perform sexual acrobatics. I’m totally convinced of that. I must have smelled it. Everything. His sexuality. His ability as a provider. We never talked about money or sex. Our love was just there, and everything made sense in retrospect. Though nothing did at the start. I read a quote somewhere—I think it was from Goethe, though it could just as easily have been from Yoda—that went something like this: Love is just a romantic philosophical superstructure that permits us to avoid admitting to ourselves that we just want to get into someone’s pants. He put it somewhat more eloquently, but I can’t find the exact quote. Maybe I just dreamed that I read it. But I believe the sentiment nonetheless. It’s the key to all the craziness that happens between fully grown adults.

My husband isn’t physically attractive at all. Obviously love has nothing to do with looks. Fuck all of you with your my-dream-man-should-look-like-this-or-that bullshit, your star signs and height and hair color requirements. That’s not the way love works. The first thing I noticed about him—and that stood out in a negative, though interesting, way—was his fucked-up elbow. The first time I met him he was wearing short sleeves. Strong white arms with hair on them, and then a strange crippled elbow—there was some sort of cyst or tumor sticking out, covered with scars. The Phantom of the Opera, except only at the elbow!

I asked very directly what it was. I always do that in the heat of the moment because I’m worried the person has already noticed I’m staring. It turned out to be an affliction from childhood. He broke his arm once, and all winter long he had to take the bus alone to the clinic where he was doing his physical therapy. And one time after an ice storm he got off the bus and slipped and fell on the newly healed elbow. It had to be operated on several times after that because he’d shattered all the bones. They never managed to reconstruct it properly, and that’s why there’s a piece of bone that sticks out like a shark fin. That made an impression on me straightaway.

After the arm business, I noticed a big scar across his cheekbone. The second thing I asked him was where he got that scar. And that one was from cancer. Shortly before we met he’d had skin cancer. Nothing serious. It was discovered early enough that they were able to remove the entire melanoma before it spread, and that was that. Well, except for the fact that in the back of his head he would always remember how death had come knocking. After my very first conversation with him I knew that we belonged together and also that I would end up burying him. I’m going to be a grieving cancer widow. He told me that he comes from a family with a history of cancer. Members of his family either died of cancer or managed to beat various forms of it to earn a brief reprieve. I knew what the story was and what this great love of mine was bringing with him—even if perhaps I understood only subconsciously.

At the front of my consciousness I thought to myself that we would end up working together. What a great gallery owner! What a great guy! But what an odd set of icebreakers. First, childhood injuries. Second, cancer in the family. It pretty much says everything about our relationship. He also asked me about the car accident in which my three brothers died. Death was intertwined with our love right from the start. One of the first things we did as a couple was to fill out organ donor cards and write and sign living wills and actual wills. For us, that was the height of romance.

Georg sits down at his laptop in the kitchen and scans Spiegel Online to see if anything has changed in the world in the last few minutes. Liza wanders around grumbling. She’s bored.

“What should I do now, Mama? I’m bored.”

“See if anything is missing. Drinks, perhaps?”

“Oh yeah, what do you want to drink?”

The same answer we give every day comes from Georg and me in perfect harmony: “Tap water.”

We never drink alcohol in front of the kids—for the sake of setting a good example. And sugary drinks are strictly forbidden at our place—both for the usual anti-American reasons and because of the fact that they are totally unhealthy. Why would you drink something that amounts to candy when you’re thirsty? Sweets exacerbate your thirst. It’s like a form of torture. How can anyone pay good money for drinks that actually make you more thirsty? It’s like giving Jesus vinegar and gall to drink when he was thirsty on the cross. Torture upon torture.

She climbs up onto the counter again to get glasses out of the cabinet. She jumps back down, fills the glasses too full, and carries them to the table while trying to keep them from spilling. I have to stop myself from saying something. Bad, bad to be a mother and want to comment on everything a kid does. You feel it coming on and then the impulse hits you. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

“Can you please put a trivet on the table, too, my child?”

Now that my husband is fully awake, I leave my daughter in his care. I say good-bye. They know the drill. They’re free to do what they wish until I’m back. I’ll be there and back quickly; it’s not far. I turn off the burner under the pan as I walk out—don’t want the two of them to go up in flames in the apartment while I’m unable to keep an eye on them. Gas stoves are dangerous. I won’t let fire take any more of my relatives.