This is part twelve in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

Au pairing isn’t a highly paid job, and The German Man dictates earnings: a 285 euro monthly stipend and at least one day off each week. The benefits are nestled between the lines—in the room, board, and health insurance the family is required to provide—and between work days, when the rich German matriarch announces one morning that you will be accompanying the family on their vacation to Cyprus.

A four-hour flight brought us from Frankfurt International to Larnaka International, and taxis brought us to the Aldiana resort where we’d be staying. The family, Janet informed me, would be staying in a suite located on the edge of the resort. The twins and I would be sharing a room just between the main clubhouse and the beach. I was not keen on completely dissolving the work/play boundary I meticulously maintained at home, but was willing to ignore the contractual breech in exchange for an all-expense-paid island getaway.

Aldiana is the German answer to Club Med. Book a vacation at an Aldiana resort and you can relax in a walled complex far from the messy cultural details of whatever country you are visiting (an irrelevant detail!) and socialize with your compatriots in your native tongue. I suppose this is the reason that the club motto is “a vacation with friends.” (Translation: “a vacation with other rich white people.”)

The Aldiana pamphlet says: “ALDIANA Zypern is perfect for everyone—singles, young couples, young children, and teens. The resort comprises a wide variety of sports, relaxation, and entertainment, all set amidst the beautiful coastal flora and fauna of Cyprus.”

Here another translation is needed: Aldiana Cyprus is perfect for everyone with money and for everyone too worried about security and/or xenophobic to bother with the actual country and people of Cyprus. Aldiana Cyprus is also perfect for people who think they would enjoy the “beautiful coastal flora and fauna of Cyprus” but aren’t actually prepared to deal with a desert climate.

But there is little that nature can do that Aldiana (cough, civilization) can’t take care of. And so dozens of hoses snaked the resort lawn, irrigating the Aldiana palms and the sparse Aldiana grass. As for the fauna, the poisonous spiders that would otherwise be inhabiting the landscape, an employee told us, are kept at bay with regular doses of insecticide sprayed across the entire property. Coastal flora and fauna indeed.

Greek travel propaganda had led me to believe that we’d be laying on white- sand beaches, but the beaches of Cyprus are gray, unspectacular in compar- ison perhaps, but beautiful and exotic to eyes accu- stomed to Jersey shore. That first day the twins put on their swimmies, I waded into the Mediterranean for the first time, and it was as glorious as it probably sounds.

In my former life I had been vaguely aware that resorts like Aldiana existed, but I don’t think I really believed in them. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny they were just pleasant little myths that worked well on television. Real people wouldn’t actually visit them. Why would they want to? You could save yourself time and money and travel to the German coast to the same effect.

The employees—sailing and diving instructors, bartenders and babysitters—were all generically good looking and insistently pleasant. If you passed an employee on the way to the beach he or she would smile and say hello. Always friendly, always polite. Failure to do so, I imagined, earned you a flogging from the boss. And that might ruin your tan. I imagined that nights they let out steam in the employee lounge, out of sight of paying guests, Dirty Dancing style. Welcome to the Aldiana bubble: polite, friendly, safe, pleasant, plastic.

If you were tired of tanning, you could take diving and sailing lessons, if you were tired of the Mediterranean you could take a dip in the heated indoor pool, and if you got tired of taking care of your children, you could send them to the Dolphin Clubhouse—the resort’s day care service. Jens, always wanting to play good cop, had promised me that the twins would spend the entire day there, leaving me free to do what I pleased. The reality was that the twins didn’t want to go to the Dolphin Club. They wanted to spend time with their siblings and their parents, and instead they were stuck with me.

The time of the thaw has come. It is the ugliest time of the year, when all the trash emerges from beneath the snow. It is too soon to say that winter is over, but it’s not too soon to start singing my favorite end-of-winter melody.

I could talk to you of paranoia, of people watching me from the sky, and I would be telling you the truth. And I wonder, as I pee in the bushes beside my wagon and listen to hard-hatted men yelling to each other from the construction site behind our wagenplatz, if those manning the cranes watch me from their steely heights. I flip them off, just in case.

What is now frozen muddy construction was once a part of this wagenplatz. It used to be wild and green. There were blackberries and elderberries and so many snails that one resident described walking to the bathroom “like walking on cornflakes.” Once upon a much longer time, there wasn’t even a road dividing the two plots of land.

Back then, after the road and before the current construction, it looked like this:

Today, it looks like this:

(In favor of my point is the fact that the first picture was taken in spring, while the second was taken in winter. However, I doubt that the construction site would look much different either way. There would be more brown and less white, is all.)

They’re not building on the land where our wagons once stood—where the guest wagon where I spent my first night in Mainz used to look out across a grassy field at the chemistry building—but on the land next to it. They needed the other bit of land, they told us, to park their bulldozers and metal container offices.

So we moved wagons and the university “gave” us (read: sold us) another piece of land a kilometer away for the displaced wagons. Is it an improvement? A defeat? It’s hard to say for sure. I can only hope that one day they are finished and that the land they destroyed for a temporary construction parking lot, for another steel-and-glass borg-ship architectural atrocity, can be taken back.

This is part eleven in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

October, and two months in Germany when a high school friend emailed to tell me that he would be in Frankfurt for the night. My mother would be arriving in a few weeks, but this would be my first visitor since moving.

We met at the train station and headed to a pub. I don’t remember where we went or what we drank, but I will never forget how, between drinks and pubs, we came past the Cole’s house. “Let’s go in for a second,” I suggested, excited at the chance to show someone from back home around the set of my strange new life. “I’ll give you a quick tour and we can use the bathroom.”

I showed him the stainless-steel kitchen and the pink-chaired dining room. “Can you believe these chairs?” I asked pointing at the plastic-backed, pink-velor upholstered seats surrounding the long wooden table. “Janet had them specially made.” Lodged in the (plexi?) glass chair backs were fake pink feathers. I had never seen such ugly chairs in my life, and it hurt my head when I thought about how much Janet had probably paid to have them custom made. They seemed to scream “I want you to find me be avant gaurd and edgy,” but the execution was sloppy and tasteless, just like the stainless steel faux antlers she’d commissioned for the stairwell we were now walking up.

On the second floor we met Janet and Jens. In bathrobes. Lurking. Angry. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Who is that?” Jens yelled. “No strangers in the house!”

“What?” I shook my head no. This was news to me.

“NO STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE.” The yell had become a threatening bellow.

“You never told me that before. Besides, this is an old friend of mine. I’ve know him for seven or eight years. I just wanted to show him where I live, he’s not staying, we just wanted to use the bathroom…”

“NO STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE.”

Eyes wide, we turned and scuttled back down the stairs and out the door.

“What the hell was that about?”

“Apparently I”m not allowed to bring friends over.” So much for the affectionate monologues Janet held when she was in a good mood about me being “part of the family.”

The next morning Jens found me in the kitchen. He wanted to talk. “It’s very important that you don’t bring anyone into the house.”

“Ok, that’s fine,” I conceded, “But it would have been nice if someone had told me that before embarrassing me in front of an old friend. I’ve known him for years. He wasn’t just some guy that I picked up at the disco. And he speaks German. You didn’t exactly make him feel welcome.”

“Well, maybe I should tell you a story. I used to be in banking. A few years ago I was hired to run this bank, and, well, once I had a look through the books it seemed clear that something fishy was going on. I called the police. Twelve people went to jail, and I get worried sometimes…”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up the speed dial directory to show me the first number. “That’s why I have the police on my first speed dial. For a while we were worried that someone would try to kidnap the children. I’m sure you don’t know what it’s like to walk down a dark street and fear for your life every time you see another person coming in the distance, but that’s how I feel every night.”

Sure, Jens. No woman has ever felt that before. I nodded, wondering why a man with so much to lose would hire a complete stranger to drive his Porsche and take his 4-year-old twins to the park. Maybe I had been hired to kidnap them, Mr. Jens, ever thought of that? And even if I hadn’t been, what was one apathetic, underpaid au pair going to do to stop someone who did?

“Now I can’t get a job in the banking world anymore,” he admitted sadly. “I’ve been working for Janet’s father ever since.”

Later I Googled the case in search of more details. I had Googled the family name before coming to work for them, but without banking-specific keywords I hadn’t found anything about the Cole’s dirty little secret. There wasn’t much to find, but there were a few articles about a sketchy court case involving suspected embezzling, a tattling CEO, and some leniently interpreted Swiss banking laws.

After that, the drama of daily life in the Cole house started to seem absurd, hilarious. A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, live-action afternoon soap broadcast right to my living room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen.

Sundays quickly became bike days, days for exploring streets I hadn’t noticed before, discovering playgrounds, empty buildings, useful trash. Dresden is full of beautiful, crumbling secrets.

Outside of Dresden, if you manage to pedal out of the valley, are others. On the bike ride to Radeberg, all up hill, all cool forest and empty Sunday roads, a familiarly eerie feeling came over me.

The German landscape looks like home to me. Maples, birches, sections of pine forest, ferns, nettles—so many of the plants I remember from walks in the woods as a child, here too. There are train rides when, looking out the window, a strange feeling comes over me. As if there has been a dimensional shift. As if I have gone back in time.

Where the hell am I? I ask myself. Am I in Pennsylvania? Upstate New York? Have I slept? Was it all a dream? Then the conductor announces the next stop over the loudspeaker, and I remember. On the road to Radeberg, I pulled to the side of the empty road and took a picture, a nostalgic tourist, home.

Dresden’s valley dissuades the fearful bicyclist from leaving. It rewards the daring with pairs of bulky calves. I had picked the destination at random. I had been dumpster diving the night before, and I had never been to Radeberg, though I drank its beer often.

The brewery itself turned out to be sterile and awful, a geometric insect balancing on sharp square columned legs and fronted by two gigantic copper breasts meant to invoke images of brewing equipment. Before Radeberg were ruins where I had stopped to rest. There were no signs to tell me what the building once had been, but the light was magical. Though my camera was not I took a few pictures to remind me. Close your eyes and fill them with late-afternoon twilight and you might catch a glimpse of it too.

wood

Today I sawed the last of our hoarded wood and stacked it in neat rows in our small shed. Two rows of wood and two large boxes brimming with the pieces already small enough to fit through the wood stove’s small door. When it is gone, winter will be gone. I hope.

At the bottom of the wood pile (meter-long split logs, once stacked on pallets behind the kitchen) was a thin twisted bough—perhaps an overgrown, hardened vine. As it slid through the circle saw it smelled sweet, like spring blossoms. Like elderberries. Not a vine, but a piece of the elderberry tree they trimmed last year. I stood with a short stump beneath my nose inhaling and exhaling the intoxicating scent for several minutes. All of spring, just inside that hardened shell. It won’t be long now, a month and a half perhaps.

boots

Several months ago I had a shoemaker replace the zipper on my left boot. They did a shitty job (friends: avoid Schuh Hansa in Mainz), but it was still cheaper than new boots, and better than the safety-pinned-closed method I’d used for several months before that. (There was always something more important to spend the 25 euro repair fee on.)

Today the zipper on the right boot broke—just as I finished sawing—and I cursed loud and long. At the shoddy plastic zipper for breaking, at the shoemaker for doing a hack job on the left boot (not sewn, but glued, un-even and already falling away from the leather in some places), and at myself for not having simply gotten some leather-sturdy needles and repaired them myself, like Lark suggested. This is what I get for paying a middle man to do work I could have taken care of myself.

Well the time has come; I can put it off no longer. I bow my head in silent prayer to the gods of the trash—send an old leather coat for me to cut up and use to create a pretty flap to covered the gaping hole no longer keeping my leg warm! Send a new pair in my size to the local free box! I swear to never buy another pair of zipper boots again.

Whoa! Holy clicks Batman. On Saturday 101 people looked at this blog. 101! That’s the most clicking I’ve gotten in one day to date. I average about 50 views a day, which is probably peanuts in the blog world, but which boggles my mind on a daily basis.

Who are you people? And what is going on with the sudden jump in views? Did someone send out some email referral love? (My stat counter shows no new referring websites…) I demand that you reveal yourselves so that I can shower you with rose petals and kisses.

But seriously folks, you know so much about me, and me, I know so little about you. You read my drafts and your comments make me smile. I’ve seen a few other bloggers do this, and I think it’d be fun to give it a try. Tell us who you are in the comments of this post. Not like your name and address who you are, but a little something something to quench my (and perhaps other readers’) curiosity about the company we are keeping together in this virtual place. Do you write things too? Do you like chocolate cupcakes? Are you a submarine captain? Is your favorite color purple? Do you live in a sweet little shack? Do you sing when you’re cooking? Can you play the singing saw?

Both fictional and non-fictional responses encouraged. My stammering curiosity awaits fodder. And as always thanks for reading and commenting and filling my writing life with more than a computer screen. Click click click clack!

It happened in a round-about way. This morning we woke up early. “I can’t sleep.” “Me neither. Let’s go to the flea market.” It would have been the first time I had been there before ten. Prime time. But today there was no flea market. The cold has finally driven even the hardcore boothers away.

We walked on, to the grocery store. Even though I’m really excited to try out what I just learned from Hobo Stripper about making a toothbrush out of a small stick, we needed new toothbrushes and bread. The usual Saturday morning errands, preparations for Everything’s Closed Sunday. At the store I eyed the marked down fruits and vegetables and holiday chocolate. “If we get our asses out of bed tonight, we know what will be waiting for us…”

We walk this path often. Maybe four, five times a week. Maybe ten. It’s the way to the grocery stores, to the dumpsters, and to the post office. The sidewalk fringes rows of unpleasant-looking stucco houses. Quick post-war rebuilds, I imagine without knowing for sure.

Every time I walk this path I imagine the houses empty—apocalypse, emergency, plague—windows broken, ivy slowly stretching up the walls. I imagine that one or two of the houses are inhabited, and that the rest have been marked for plundering the building supplies needed elsewhere.

In a small black trash can next to the sidewalk was a wooden cassette rack, filled with cassettes. I walked into the driveway, lifted the lid and pulled it out. Out of habit. Below it was a bag with what I thought was an enormous candle, and some LPs. “There’s a lady looking at you from the window.” Oh. I took the cassette rack and the bag and let the lid fall closed behind me.

There were five Bruce Springsteen cassettes, a Madonna album that I’ll give away, and a Ghost Busters radio play. The rest I could record over. I looked in the bag. Nope, not a candle, but a huge pot-shaped mass of fat. “Sweet! Now I can try out candle making.” I think of the homemakers I’ve been reading about, making soap and candles from fat scrapped from pans and cut from meat. Had this bit been saved out of habit, because that’s what mom and grandma always did, but tossed for lack of an idea of what to do next?

“Did you see the lady’s face?”

“No, just her head.” I wondered how she had felt, seeing me in her driveway, in her trashcan. Perhaps she had felt annoyed, possessive. Maybe she was kicking herself for not getting that table at the flea market after all.

Later, I walked across the street to use the toilet. (The water in our bathroom wagon has been turned off for over a month. At first because several pipes froze and exploded, now because we don’t want them to explode again. “Little business” as the Germans euphemize peeing happens outside and “big business” across the street.) On the way back I cut through the trash collection corral. Holy shit. There was a big pile of blankets, witty little shirts in my size, unprinted shirts that I will screen print and sell, two fitted sheets (for the longest time we only had one and now we are teetering on exuberance), a fall jacket, and a sweet black velor jacket that has The Mad Scientist’s name written all over it. All piled dejected on the pavement. I boxed them up and took them home.

Last week someone threw out another kitchen, spices still full, leftovers from the previous night’s dinner still clinging to pan bottoms. I had just written a grocery list for the three-course dinner I made on Saturday night. I wasn’t sure where I was going to find algae flakes, but there was the obvious answer: in the dumpster across the street is where you’ll find them (as well as two bags of beans, rice paper, baking powder, and pudding mix).

But the winner of this week’s most curious find was the bag of dried lilies. What do you even do with dried lilies? Usually I complain when I find flowers in the trash. (Although they came in handy for the bridal bouquet.) “You can’t eat flowers!” I bitterly tell anyone who tries to tell me that at least they’re pretty. And now dried lily petals among the remnants of someone’s kitchen cabinets. I guess you can eat flowers after all.

In the morning I wake to the sound of the chickens outside of my bedroom window. The rooster doesn’t crow at dawn, not our rooster. He crows around 10 or 11 pm, and at 3 or 4 am, and we joke that he’s just dimmed the lights and poured the drinks and is cawing “Paaa-rty!”

Outside of my bedroom window (my wagon window? my bed window? the window in my wagon next to my bed?) the chickens are pecking at an old block of Styrofoam. Little white balls litter the ground around it, and every morning their tracks in the snow run straight from the compost heap behind the house to the Styrofoam block. Dessert?

I looked it up and according to People On the Internet this is normal chicken behavior, and it doesn’t hurt them. I hope that chickens are one of those species of animals that could evolve to digest all the horrible things we (humans) are leaving behind. All the same I wish the stuff didn’t exist, that I wasn’t insulating my wagon with it (the red wagon is insulated with expensive organic flax that I wish I could afford for the green wagon), and that the chickens weren’t slowly pecking it into smaller and smaller pieces.

Since the “congratulations, you’re allergic to soy!” bomb dropped and I gave up soy milk, I’ve been craving cheese. I woke up thinking about cheese. Not once, not twice, but for an entire week. So, since I always give my body whatever it tells me that it needs, I have spent the last two days gorging on dairy and wondering how the hell I will be able to afford the beautiful, delicious, local farmer’s market products that I would like to limit my gorging to. But I look at the chickens and think, perhaps their eggs are the answer. However, the last time I checked, eggs made my stomach wax volcanic. Oh glorious omlette, send me a sign!

This is part ten in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

Eight months had passed before a question started to form in her mind, becoming more and more urgent as she met each of my parents in turn and, while playing at the role of kindly host mother, started learning more about my life. And the question was this: what the hell is this woman doing working for me?

One afternoon in the kitchen she asked, delicately avoiding the fact that this was really a question about class, about privilege. It was a question she never would have asked Maria— who she knew would have been fucked without her job cleaning Janet’s toilets—or Anna—who had spent her entire working life raising Janet’s children.

Anna and Maria might have fit neatly into Janet’s idea of “hired help” because neither had been to college or had any “professional” work experience. But I came from middle-class privilege, she knew now, and had a college degree from a fancy schmancy college. This meant that I had the qualifications and the connections to be working at what she would have called “a real job”—and yet I was playing hide-and-go-seek and wiping four-year-old ass. Neither did my story mirror the stories of her previous au pairs or those of her friends, many of whom had taken the job in hopes of finding a permanent way out of a bad situation at home.

But me? I was, as far as she could tell, doing this for fun, and this must have been confusing: after all, these were her children, and she wasn’t even raising them “for fun.”

“So why is it you wanted this job anyway?” She was wiping down the stainless steel counter tops when she asked, and I was picking at the leftovers from lunch.

“I’m a writer,” I told her, a little surprised at the question, sure we’d discussed this during both of my interviews. “I wanted to get into travel writing and improve my foreign language skills, and in order to do that I needed to travel. I thought this job would be an interesting way to get to know a new country. I know a lot of people who got their fix studying abroad, but I think you experience a lot more of a culture’s nuances when you live with a family.” (Admission: there is no way that this is what I actually said because I still have no clue how to say the word “nuance” in German, and my German now is a trillion times better than it was then. But I said something like it.) Never mind my political and philosophical reasons for abandoning corporate life. That wasn’t a conversation I felt Janet and I’s relationship was ready for.

She nodded slowly, absorbing the words. Writer. Writer? “Have you been published?” She sounded like she was trying to sound nonchalant, but something like fear was creeping into her eyes.

“Yeah I have actually. I co-authored a little guide book about the college I went to, did some newspaper articles, a few things on the internet.” She stopped wiping and looked at me. Recognition flashed in her eyes, and for the first time since we’d met it felt like she was actually looking at me. It had never occurred to me that someone might feel unnerved by my profession. But writing is about communication, and maintaining one face for private use and one for public use is about keeping secrets.

“But you’d never write about us would you?” Suddenly she was slathering every syllable in the syrupy, artificial tone she used for socializing, for her public face. Suddenly she was remembering ever soap-operatic family story she’d ever told me.

But I have a syrupy “social” voice of my own, and I lied right to her face, just as she had when she’d told me that of course I would be paid for overtime. “Of course not. Never.” Liar, liar pants on fire.

I have a few words of advice for you, dear readers, and heed them or be damned: never trust a writer who you’ve just spent eight months treating, well, let’s just say “not as an equal.” Then again, maybe I didn’t lie, but just avoided the question with a shrug, and left the room. Memory changes details. There is no such thing as non-fiction.

Today, thinking back on that conversation, I wondered what Janet would think if she were to read the things I write about my year working for her (extremely pissed off). And for the good times, because there were a few of them and it could always be worse, I’ve changed enough names and details to keep them anonymous. Perhaps they wouldn’t even recognize themselves. Because Janet could be so many people, really, and my story is one of thousands just like it.