The Second Story

We live on the fourth story. On the third story there’s a family of four who don’t make much noise and don’t have a doormat. The second story is a psychoanalysis practice. The patients go in the door on the second story, which has a doorbell and an ornate peephole. The doctors have offices on the first story. When I unlock my bike in the morning, the lights are always on in just one office, where a small bamboo plant sits in a pale blue vase on the windowsill.

On the day I first met the family I now live with, I saw our building from the streetcar. Baroque, cream colored, red accents, steep roof. I thought it was a tall-and-narrow split level home – bedrooms stacked upon bedrooms stacked upon kitchen and living room – similar to what I lived in when I was in Bonn. I never saw the top floor of that home in Bonn – I was told on the first day I lived there not to climb that final staircase, and I never did – and I had quick fantasies about sitting with this new family and playing board games or singing ballads, high above Dresden in our isolated turret.

But on the twisted black fence there is this bronze, square sign: Psychotherapiepraxis Dresden.

In my hometown, houses are separated by fences and yards and hedges, differentiated by that new aqua trim that looks terrible and can you believe they used brick?, and granted to their owners by the grace of Jesus Christ and Jonathan Locke and the Founding Fathers.

So I had this big New York City fantasy that somewhere in the world people operated pizza parlors or coin-op laundry stores and lived above them, but I had no conception that Buddhist Germans could live two floors about a psychotherapy practice praised for its fusion of old (i.e. use of electric shock therapy) and new (i.e. dream parsing, cognitive behavioral therapy, bio-feedback) techniques in a hundred year old building that is in one of the only neighborhoods not destroyed in the bombing of Dresden during World War II.

But look, here they are, standing at the top of the stairs on the day I come to meet them and they are all wearing shower caps because everyone has lice and we sit at the table and drink coffee and we’re talking about where I can put my things when the father asks if this is a done deal, says he needs a day to think about it and maybe I do too.

So they thought about it and I did too and it’s funny because the psychotherapy practice didn’t enter into my mind again for a while. It became routine as quickly as it had surprised me.

The family that lives below us is either always at home or never at home – I don’t know. But the result is the same: I never see them in the stairwell. Thus, the people that I see coming and going are either People Who Live With Me or People Who Don’t Live With Me. And the people who don’t live with me are deliverymen, doctors, and patients. And I haven’t seen a doctor in six months. Just that bamboo plant, and that pasty fluorescent light.

Whenever I come back home and there’s a patient coming down the stairs, I take out the key for the mailbox and open it up. There’s nothing in there. But now it’s apparent that I live here. I’m not here for therapy.

I’m not sure why I go out of my way to show that.

One time I was on the landing outside the second story door and someone came out. I was pre-emptively nodding to greet him at the same moment he asked “Are you going inside?” He took my nod as a yes and he held the door open for me. And then, with some kind of strange smile, I said “Nein, nein. I’m not going inside.”

I reached out for the handle, pulled the door shut, and kept going up the stairs to our apartment.

Another time I saw a teenage boy coming out of the office and I wondered if he was as curious about what is upstairs and I am about the lives of those for whom the building may as well be two stories tall.

I imagined that boy standing on the second story landing and peeking up like I did in the house in Bonn. What the hell is up there?

But in my dream he’s courageous and he walks up the stairs, passes the third story where there is no doormat and comes around the corner where our little stretch of stairwell is covered in plants and statues and things that can only be described by the grab bag term knickknacks.

He passes our door that has tattered decorations from the last three international holidays and sees our shoe rack that’s a few heads taller than me and serves the dual purpose of a functional space to store shoes suitable for the current season (bottom two rows) and a chronicle of every other pair of shoes the family has ever worn (top six rows).

And then he opens the secret door that leads to the cellar.

He sees our laundry, but he also sees the ladder that leads to the roof. He climbs up, opens the hatch, and he’s at what’s considered a “high place” in a city whose only high places are steeples. And he can see everything from up there. And he looks down.

On New Year’s Eve, I stood on that same spot and watched as a sea of fireworks took over the sky. In every direction there were joyful screams, raucous whomps, and brilliant gleaming fading falling stars. Who could dream of dying? Who could dream of never having lived?

I went downstairs early on a Saturday morning to talk a walk along the Elbe.

The door to the second story office was open. Someone was vacuuming. I walked slowly and I heard the vacuum dragging across the floor, staples banging around inside the metal tube.

I remembered being home alone when I was younger, when every sound made me fear someone was coming in to the house to kill me. For some reason, my first thought was always how can I get to the kitchen to grab a knife? and my second thought was I wonder if I should keep a knife in my room for situations like this. But there was no one there. And there was no fire when I’d get up in the middle of night and smell phantom smoke and check every room in the house and see my parents sleeping.

Inside the office is a desk and next to the desk is a rack of brochures. I don’t know all of the German words for mental illness, but I know I’ve read those brochures in English, with comforting American idioms and bullet-pointed platitudes.

While I’m staring inside the door, the woman who is cleaning sees me and turns off the vacuum.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Sorry,” she says.

“Sorry?” I say. I don’t know why she’s sorry.

“The office is closed on Saturday.”

I don’t want to say that I’m not there for an appointment.

“Oh,” I say, “I’ll come back later.”

“Good luck,” she says.

And she turns the vacuum back on, smiles.

The Last Slice of Hawaii

Did I mention? Every Friday night we all sit down together and eat pizza and watch a movie. That’s the family tradition and was the family tradition way before I moved in four months ago.

We make the pizza ourselves and then bring some furniture to the living room to complement the small sofa that the two kids garrison with blankets and pillows and a baby doll named Nora, who eats and pees and poops and vomits, authenticity overriding affability in the current fashion of playthings.

I sit on a wicker chair by the bookshelf, Clemens leans back on a rolly desk chair on the other side of the sofa, and Julia sometimes sits on the floor by the coffee table, sometimes sits straight-backed against the child-sized barstool, whose short seat and questionable construction forces its user to contort herself into an awfully healthy – which is to say uncomfortable – posture.

Everyone gets their own uniquely deficient view of the small television set. The one working speaker mumbles the dubbed German dialogue and sighs some pale, orchestral refrain that begs us to laugh, laugh, laugh! at the lighthearted shopping montage.

The first Friday night I was living with the family, the parents had to work. They made two big pizzas and set them on the table along with three glasses, a bottle of sparking water, and a big roll of paper towels.

“Last one in the room closes the door,” Liv said. She looked over at me.

I got up and closed it, and I sat back down.

“And turns off the light,” she said.

I did that, too.

“And we also need plates.”

Stand up, lights on, door open, grab some plates, come back, close the door, turn off the light, hand out the plates, sit down.

So then it was just me, Liv, Lennart, and Willi und die Wunder dieser Welt, a playful travel documentary for kids. Willi’s main goal is to take some of his friend’s ashes to her favorite dune in the Sahara Desert, but he doesn’t let that required story arc get in the way of swimming with crocodiles in the rainforest or sumo wrestling in Japan.

But I was having a really hard time hearing the television, so I whispered to Liv: “Can you turn up the volume?” Lennart then hit me in the head and told me to be quiet.

A few minutes later, Lennart asked me to cut him a slice of pizza. I wondered if lightly hitting him on the head and telling him to be quiet would teach him a valuable lesson. I figured it would just mean I had to leave my new room four days after I moved in to it, so I let the total unfairness of the apparent pediarchy go.

So, Lennart asked for the slice.

“Give me a slice of Hawaii,” he said.

“Hawaii?” I asked. After all, Hawaii is a noun, an island. And its slices were already claimed by the United States in 1959.

“Just give it,” he demanded. I gave him the slice of Hawaiian pizza and as we watched the film the kids quoted the funny lines immediately after they occurred and I said nothing at all.

The first few weeks I felt like an intruder, and the kids helped support that feeling.

Lennart, whose hunger is insatiable, was always concerned that I was eating his food.

“Did you eat an apple yesterday?” Lennart asked.

“Yes, and I told Clemens so he’d know to buy more,” I said.

“Dad, I found the thief!”

And Liv, the ten-year-old domestic wunderkind, fretted about cleaning supplies.

“Are you allowed to use our laundry soap?” she would ask.

It was not possible to declare that I was now a part of we simply because I’d handed over some cash – you can’t buy acceptance (except in cults, hotel casinos, and fraternities).

So the kids would turn on the stereo and climb up on my bed and throw pillows at me and yell, “You only rented the room, not all the furniture. This is ours!”

But I sat around on that furniture that wasn’t mine for a long time and it started to smell like me and little by little we just get used to the things that are around us – though it’s always hard to believe that things were once different and may change again (Was I ever not alive? I can’t remember.) – and last week Liv snuck up on me while I was writing (she always does that) and she was crying and she grabbed my ankle and whimpered: “Please don’t go back to California.”

I love the kids. I love the fleeting seriousness of their problems: missing hair accessories, stupid jackets, dumb lunchboxes, mealy-tasting yogurt, wiggly teeth, too many toys, pajamas, bedtime, he-poked-me-but-she-hit-me-first-but-he-tried-to-show-me-his-willy.

I love that Lennart sings all of his thoughts at dinner each night: “I don’t know what I should eat!/I’m going to spread some butter on this roll!/Maybe salami, maybe fish, maybe poo-poo!/I don’t know what to eat!” Or how he wants to become mayor and occasionally dresses up in a suit and practices speeches in front of the big mirror by the front door.

I love that Liv corrects me about everything, like when I use u (yoo) instead of ü (ew), or when I accidentally roll my r’s when I say an English word because I practice so much to improve my German accent, or when I tap my foot at the dinner table (“Our neighbor’s baby is trying to sleep!”) – and then she explodes because Lennart ate the last tomato and suddenly she’s on the floor screaming and crying and hurling her enormous hair in every direction like some horrifying prototype for an anthropomorphic Swiffer Wet Jet.

And kids really do say the darndest things.

A few weeks ago, we were cleaning the house to get ready for the holidays. Liv started to iron a tablecloth while Lennart and I were sweeping the stairs outside the front door. We come back inside and Lennart is furious.

“I wanted to iron!” he yells and rolls on the floor in the position that supposedly helps if you’re on fire.

“Don’t worry,” Julia says, “I’ll give you a very special job.”

“Make sure it’s more special than Liv’s job!” Lennart insists.

“I don’t even want a special job,” Liv says, “I just want to iron.”

A few days later, on Christmas, Lennart answers the phone and it’s a distant family member. Julia mumbles to me that she doesn’t really feel like chatting.

So Lennart says: “Sorry, mommy doesn’t feel like talking to you today.” And he hangs up.

After Christmas, Lennart wants to play the board game that I got him, Forbidden Island. I explain the rules to him and I notice he seems a little anxious.

“Is it too complicated?” I ask him.

“No,” he says, “it’s just… why are we going to the island if it’s forbidden?”

Yesterday Liv came into my room and sat down next to me on the sofa. She watched me read for a few minutes before she put her hand over the book, looked at me gravely, and asked: “Are you happy you’re a grown-up?”

“Yeah,” I say, “yeah.”

She nods.

“Do you want to grow up?” I ask her.

“I haven’t decided yet,” she says.

Last Friday I missed pizza night. I was on my way back from a short trip to Hamburg, where I saw things as diverse as the Reeperbahn and Miniatur Wunderland.

When I came in the whole apartment was dark, so I set my bag down in my room and went to check if anyone else was home. I found the kids in the living room, near the end of watching the final Harry Potter film for the sixth or seventh time.

Lennart ran to the kitchen and came back with a glass, which Liv then filled with water. Liv made some place for me on the sofa and I sit down, but Lennart stayed standing up and said, “Sorry, we don’t have much left, but do you want the last slice of Hawaii?”