knows about, and he doesn't need to know how I know that.
1
"Aufrecht sitzen," my mother snaps while I browse the menu. On impulse my spine straightens obediently.
"What can I get for you?" the waitress asks, and before I can say a word, my mother orders a salad with grilled chicken and the dressing on the side for both of us.
Then it's silent at our table. Keeping a blank expression on my face, I stare longingly out the window. She browses through emails on her phone while I write verses in my head. Things I can never write down. Not so much words but images I want to commit to memory, feelings I want to assign names to.
The strange orange hue of empty pill bottles in the sun.
The sound piano keys make when you slam on them.
Things that cannot be unbroken and the way skin scars but is never truly uncut.
"Marina Vestenberg said she will see you next week for an audition."
I nod. "Okay."
"You're only twenty-nine, Hanna. Still a few years left if you don't waste them, but you have lost so much strength since you were sick. It’s such a waste. Finish your lunch and then go to the studio."
"Okay."
When our food comes, I peek up at her periodically over my bland salad. I'd murder her for a cheeseburger, and it may sound cliche or harsh, but I would literally wring her neck at this table for a basket of fries. I'm not quite sure when this happened. When I stopped making decisions for myself and I started accepting my fate as my mother’s puppet.
"You're pouting," she says flatly as I pick at my lunch.
"I'm tired."
"Get more sleep then."
"It's not that easy."
"Why not? You stay up too late, doing God knows what, and then you wake up with what, four hours of sleep. Of course, you're tired."
I don't respond because there is no arguing with her. She knows everything and is always right. She lacks the empathy to understand that at night I don't sleep because I lay awake wondering where my life went wrong. How eleven months ago I lost my spot in the ballet company—a spot I had to work twice as hard as every other girl to get. How I lost my apartment. How I ended up back under her roof, in her house, hating myself.
She likes to say I was “sick” but really, I was overworked, under-nourished, and so depressed that one day I showed up to the studio so panicked out of my mind, I blacked out in the middle of a run through. I didn’t even know someone could be hospitalized for three days for a nervous breakdown, but according to the press and my mother, it was nothing but low blood sugar.
“You don’t like your contacts?” she asks after catching me blinking my eyes, fighting against the foreign objects shoved under the lids.
“I don’t need them.” There is nothing wrong with my eyesight, but the colored contacts hide my heterochromia. My blue and brown eyes are another one of my physical traits she wants me to hide. Right along with the three shades of melanin I have on her. I am a walking reminder my mother fucked up in the nineties and could never face going back to Germany with a curly-haired, father-less baby. She’s never stopped making me pay for that.
At twenty-two, I was accepted into my first professional ballet company, and that night we celebrated. After two glasses of champagne, she confessed pushing me in ballet was her way of making the best of a bad situation. It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning did it register how I was the bad situation she was referring to.
“Why can’t we just have a nice lunch?” she asks through clenched teeth in response to my complaining about the contacts I don’t need.
Ignoring her, I focus instead on more things without names, writing meaningless poetry in my head until the waitress clears our table and hands my mother the check, even though I’ll be the one paying.
As promised, I go to the studio. It’s an empty dance space we rent from a German woman who owns the building and leases it out for sparsely attended yoga classes on the weekends. My mother will say she’s a friend, but it was a form of manipulation, weaseling the woman out of her rentable space by befriending her and only occasionally inviting her over for schaufele dinner on Sundays.