The Expats Read Free Page B

just because of the vinyl colors, but also because locals don’t sit around on piles of hideous luggage, clutching passports.
    This was her, not understanding what anyone was saying, the language incomprehensible. After a seven-hour flight that allowed two hours of sleep, baggy-eyed and spent and hungry and nauseated and excited and fearful.
    This was her: an immigrant, immigrating.

    SHE’D BEGUN BY reconciling herself to taking Dexter’s family name. She’d acknowledged that she no longer needed her maiden name, her professional name. So she’d marched over to the District of Columbia’s municipal office and filled out the forms and handed over the money order. She’d ordered a new driver’s license and rush-service passport.
    She’d told herself that it would be easier to navigate bureaucracies, to live in a Catholic country, if the husband and wife shared the same name. She was already giving up the rest of her identity—the web of outward appearances that veiled the more complex truths beneath—and a name was, she reasoned, merely incremental.
    So she was already someone she’d never before been: Katherine Moore. She would call herself Kate. Friendly, easygoing Kate. Instead of severe, serious Katherine. This name had a nice ring to it; Kate Moore was someone who knew how to have a good time in Europe.
    For a few days she’d auditioned Katie Moore, in her mind, but concluded that Katie Moore sounded like a children’s book character, or a cheerleader.
    Kate Moore had orchestrated the move. She had frozen or canceled or address-changed dozens of accounts. She had bought the ugly luggage. She had sorted their belongings into the requisite three categories—checked baggage, air-freight, sea-freight. She had filled out shipping forms, insurance forms, formality forms.
    And she had managed to extract herself from her job. It had not been easy, nor quick. But when the exit interviews and bureaucratic hurdles had finally been cleared, she’d endured a farewell round of drinks at her boss’s house on Capitol Hill. Although she’d never quit a job in her adult life, she’d been to a few other send-offs over the years. At first, she’d been disappointed that it hadn’t occurred at some Irish pub, witheveryone drinking excessively around a bar-sized pool table, like in the movies. But of course the people from her office couldn’t congregate in a bar, drinking. So they’d sipped bottles of beer on the ground floor of Joe’s brick town house, which Kate was partially relieved and partially disappointed to discover was not noticeably larger, nor in much better condition, than her own.
    She raised her glass with her colleagues, and two days later left the continent.
    This, she told herself again, is my chance to reinvent myself. As someone who’s not making a half-assed effort at an ill-considered career; not making an unenergetic, ad hoc stab at parenting; not living in an uncomfortably dilapidated house in a crappy, unneighborly neighborhood within a bitter, competitive city—a place she chose, for all intents and purposes, when she shipped off to her freshman year at college, and never left. She’d stayed in Washington, stayed in her career, because one thing led to another. She hadn’t made her life happen; it had happened to her.
    The German driver turned up the music, synthesizer-heavy pop from the eighties. “New Wave!” he exclaimed. “I love it!” He was drumming his fingers violently against the wheel, tapping his foot on the clutch, blinking madly, at nine A.M. Amphetamines?
    Kate turned away from this maniac and watched the pastoral German countryside roll past, gentle hills and dense forests and tight little clusters of stone houses, huddled together, as if against the cold, arranged into tiny villages surrounded by vast cow fields.
    She will reboot herself. Relaunch. She will become, at last, a woman who is not constantly lying to her husband about what she really does, and who she really