On a very warm June Saturday, not long after Clelia had turned twenty, she took off her apron at the bakery and told the manager she was leaving early. Already, in 1954, workers in Jena were learning that no harm would come of leaving early; all it meant was that customers had to wait in longer lines, at worst at the cost of work time at their own jobs, where it likewise didn’t matter if they were absent. Clelia hurried home and changed into her favorite old faded lavender summer dress. Her uncle had taken her brother and sister fishing and left her mother, whom the stomach had kept awake all night, asleep in bed. Clelia made a pot of the blackberry tea that her mother claimed was calming to the stomach, although it contained tannic acid and caffeine, and took it to her bedroom with a plate of dry biscuits. She sat on the edge of her mother’s bed and stroked her hair the way she remembered her father doing. Her mother awoke and pushed her hand away.
“I brought you some tea before I go out,” Clelia said, standing up.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
Her mother’s face was still pretty when the stomach was off duty. She’d suffered for enough years to be ancient now, but she was only forty-three. For a moment, it seemed that she might be about to smile at Clelia, but then her eyes fell to Clelia’s body, and her face immediately assumed its customary contours. “Not in that dress you’re not.”
“What’s wrong with this dress? It’s a hot day.”
“If you had any sense, the last thing you’d do is call attention to your body.”
“What’s wrong with my body?”
“Its chief defect is that there’s rather a lot of it. A girl with any intelligence would seek to minimize its effect.”
“I’m very intelligent!”
“No, in fact,” her mother said, “you’re a stupid goose. And I predict with some confidence that you’ll make a present of yourself to the first stranger who says two kind words to you.”
Clelia blushed and, blushing, felt herself to be unquestionably a stupid goose: breasty and tall and absurd, with long feet and too much mouth. Goose that she was, she persisted in honking: “Two kind words is more than I ever heard in my whole life with you!”
“That’s unjust, but never mind.”
“I wish some stranger would say kind words to me. I would love to hear kind words.”
“Oh, yes, it’s very nice,” her mother said. “Every once in a long while, the stranger might even be sincere.”
“I don’t care if he’s sincere! I just want to hear kind words!”
“Listen to yourself.” Her mother felt the pot of tea and filled her cup. “You haven’t cleaned the bathroom yet. Your uncle makes a mess of the toilet. I can smell it from in here.”
“I’ll do it when I get back.”
“You’ll do it now. I don’t understand this ‘pleasure first and duty second.’ You’ll clean the bathroom and wash the kitchen floor, and then, if there’s time, you can change your clothes and go out. I don’t see how you can enjoy a pleasure when you know there’s work to do.”
“I won’t be gone long,” Clelia said.
“Why the hurry?”
“It’s such a beautiful warm day.”
“Are you going to buy something? Are you worried that the store will close?”
Annelie was good at intuiting the one question Clelia didn’t want to answer truthfully, and asking it.
“No,” Clelia said.
“Bring me your pocketbook.”
Clelia went to the parlor and came back with the pocketbook, which contained some small bills and change. She watched while her mother counted pfennigs. Although her mother hadn’t hit her since she became the family’s breadwinner, Clelia’s expression was all animal edginess, the distraction of cornered prey.
“Where is the rest of it?” her mother said.
“This is all there is. I gave you the rest of it.”
“You’re lying.”
All of a sudden, in the left cup of Clelia’s bra, six twenties and eight tens began to stir like crisp-winged insects preparing for flight. She could hear the rustle of their paper wings, which meant that her sharp-eared mother could hear them too. Their scratchy legs and hard heads dug into Clelia’s skin. She willed herself not to look down.
“It’s the dress,” her mother said. “You want to buy the dress.”
“You know I can’t afford that dress.”
“They’ll take twenty marks and let you pay installments.”
“Not for this, they won’t.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I went and asked! Because I want a nice dress!” Clelia looked down in dismay as her right hand, entirely of its own volition, rose from her side and came to rest on the guilty bra cup. She was such an open book, such a guileless and everywhere-spilling mess, that her mother simply said:
“Show me what you have there.”
Clelia took the bills from her bra and gave them to her mother. In the rear of the clothing shop on their street was a particular sundress cut Western or what passed for Western in godforsaken Jena, certainly too Western to be placed on display. Clelia brought the shop lady fresh pastries that she said were old and had to be disposed of, and the shop lady was kind to her. But Clelia was such a stupid goose that she’d described the sundress to her little sister, as an example of what could be found in the rear of stores in the socialist republic, and her mother, though no fan of the socialist republic, had taken note. She was better at surveillance than the socialist republic was. Calm in victory, she put the money in the pocket of her robe, took a sip of tea, and said, “Did you want the dress for some particular assignation? Or just for walking the streets?”
The money didn’t rightfully belong to Clelia and was, to this extent, unreal to her, and she felt that she deserved the punishment of having it taken away from her — indeed, she’d reached into her bra with a sense of penitent relief. But seeing the money disappear into her mother’s pocket made it real to her again. Six months it had taken her to save it up without being caught. Her eyes filled.
“You’re the streetwalker,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
Horrified with herself, she tried to take it back. “I meant, you like to walk in the street. I like to walk in the park.”
“But the word you just used. It was?”
“Streetwalker!”
Warm dark tea slapped Clelia full across the bodice of her lavender dress. She looked down, wide-eyed, at the destruction.
“I should have let you starve,” her mother said. “But you ate and ate and ate, and now look at how much there is of you. Was I supposed to let my children starve? I couldn’t work, and so I did the only thing I could. Because you ate and ate and ate. You have no one but yourself to blame for what I did. It was your appetite, not mine.”
It was true enough that her mother had no appetite. But she spoke with such fairy-tale cruelty, in a voice so exacting and controlled, that it was as if there were no mother there at alclass="underline" as if the person in bed were merely a flesh-and-blood dummy through which the vengeful stomach spoke. Clelia waited to see if some human remnant of her mother might reconsider what she’d said and apologize for it, or at least mitigate it; but her mother’s face distorted with a sudden writhing of the stomach. She gestured feebly toward the teapot. “I need hot tea,” she said. “This isn’t hot enough.”