Hausfrau Read Free

website and on pamphlets. It was posted on the sign in front of the
Gemeinde,
and noted on the first page of the
Kurier,
Dietlikon’s small weekly newspaper:
Menschlich, offen, modern.
Personal. Open. Modern. Anna poured all optimism into those three words.
    Dietlikon was also Bruno’s hometown. His
Heimatort.
The place to which the prodigal returned. Anna was twenty-eight. Bruno at thirty-four strode effortlessly back into his native space. Easy enough to do—Ursula lived just a short walk away on Klotenerstrasse in the house in which she raised Bruno and his sister Daniela. Oskar, Bruno’s father, was over a decade dead.
    Bruno argued a good case. Living in Dietlikon would merit their children (
We’re having more? Are you sure?
They hadn’t even really deliberated the first) a wholesome, unbounded childhood, safe and stable. Once she settled into the idea of it (and after Bruno swore that all future children would be discussed prior to their conception), Anna was able to concede the move’s virtues. So when it did happen, rarely in those first months, that she grew lonesome or wistful for people, things, or places she never dreamed she would miss, she consoled herself by imagining the baby’s face.
Will I have a ruddish-cheeked Heinz to call me Mueti? A Heidi of my own with blond and braided hair?
And Bruno and Anna were, more or less, in love.
    T HE QUALIFICATION “ MORE OR less” troubled Doktor Messerli.
    Anna explained. “Is that not always the case? Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less. Right?”

    A T EIGHT , V ICTOR WAS Anna’s eldest child. Charles was six. They were indeed the ruddish-toned, milk-fed children Anna had imagined. They were ash blond and hazel eyed. They were all boy, rowdy, absolutely brothers, and without a doubt the sons of the man Anna had married.
    “B UT YOU HAD MORE children, yes? It must not have been entirely terrible.”
    Of course not. It hadn’t been terrible at all. Not always. Not everything had not always been terrible.
Anna doubled her negatives, tripled them. Ten months earlier Anna had given birth to a black-haired, bisque-skinned daughter whom she named Polly Jean.
    And so they were the Benz family and they lived in the town of Dietlikon, in the district of Bülach, in the canton of Zürich. The Benzes:
Bruno, Victor, Charles, Polly, Anna.
A plain and mostly temperate household who lived on a street called Rosenweg—Rose Way—a private road that cul-de-sacked directly in front of their house, which itself lay at the foot of a slow, sloping hill that crested a half kilometer behind their property and leveled off at the base of the Dietlikon woods.
    Anna lived on a dead end, last exit road.
    But the house was nice and their yard was larger than nearly all the other ones around them. There were farmhouses to their immediate south, whose properties abutted fields of corn, sunflower, and rapeseed. Eight fully mature
Apfelbäume
grew in their side yard and in August when the trees were pregnant with ripe, heavy apples, fruit tumbled from the branchesto the ground in a
thump-tha-thump-thump
rhythm that was nearly consistent with light rainfall. They had raspberry bushes and a strawberry patch and red currants and black currants both. And while the vegetable garden in the side yard was generally left untended, the Benzes enjoyed, behind a thigh-high picket fence in front of their property, a spate of rosebushes, blooms of every shade.
Everything comes up roses on Rosenweg.
Sometimes Anna thought this to herself.
    Victor and Charles barreled through the front door. They were greeted before they passed through the boot room by a dour-faced Ursula pressing her finger to her lips.
Your sister’s asleep!
    Anna was grateful for Ursula—really she was. But Ursula, who was usually never blatantly unkind to Anna, still treated her as a foreign object, a means to the end of her son’s happiness (if indeed “happy” was the word for