seen him this tall. Or this mad. His nostrils, at the same level as Malcolm’s eyes, flare. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the next words out of his mouth were something like “How about we take this outside?”
Mom has been icing a cake with chocolate buttercream, Freddie’s favorite, and takes the heat in the kitchen down a notch. “It isn’t misinformation, Malcolm. Where I grew up in Massachusetts, there was one of those schools not so far from Boston. They called it the Fernald School for Idiotic Children. Seriously, idiotic children? Sounds like a paradise.”
“No one’s complained so far,” Malcolm says. My father doesn’t say a word, but his fists tighten, and the muscles in his forearms stand out like cords.
“No one ever does until it happens to them,” my mother says, offering me the icing knife to lick clean. “You know the old story about boiling the frog? If you put the frog in a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump out.” She silences Malcolm with a hand and smiles. “If, on the other hand, you put the frog in a pot of cold water and turn up the heat one degree at a time, well, before long you’ll have a boiled frog. And he’ll never know what’s coming.” Then, taking my father’s hand in her own, she says, “Our parents saw the frog boil in Germany. One degree at a time.”
The back door swings open and Polly races in behind the girls, tail wagging. The conversation shifts to a lighter topic.
But the air in the kitchen still weighs heavy.
SEVENTEEN
I leave my family in the kitchen, four people I love and one I don’t, and head back to the front of the house, to the stairs leading up to my old room. Copies of diplomas hang in the same place they always have, a staggered staircase arrangement of overembellished fonts and hastily scrawled signatures of deans and registrars. Yale first, then Penn, then Johns Hopkins—my pedigree in three frames.
My feet move automatically, up the first five steps, past this testament to my accomplishments. For a few seconds, I’m in grade school again, running up these steps two at a time, latest drawing clutched in one hand, a smile as wide as the Chesapeake Bay spreading across my face. At the time, I thought, I want to be just like Oma. I thought, I will be just like her.
The noises from downstairs are familiar: my parents dancing between English and German, talking about how tall their granddaughter has grown since summer; Freddie giggling at the unfamiliar gutturals and fricatives, trying to mimic them; Anne speaking more fluently. And Malcolm’s feet pacing as he decides whether sitting down would put him at some emasculating disadvantage on the familial battlefield.
“Leni?”
The voice floats down from the top stair, at once frail and forceful. I turn toward it.
No, that’s not right. It pulls me, reeling me in on invisible lines.
“Leni?” it says again. The nickname Oma gave me forty years ago is one I’ve never liked. It reminds me too much of that old filmmaker, the one with the unpronounceable last name and the legacy of propaganda choreographed to Wagner arias. My grandmother assures me there are more than two women named Leni in the world.
When I reach the final step, Oma holds out a hand, palm up, silver rings turning all the wrong ways on fingers that have grown too lean. No. Lean is a kind way to put it. My hundred-year-old grandmother looks something like death as she leans on her cane, her free hand gripping the banister for extra support. When I reach out and she falls into me, she weighs as much as a sigh.
I say the first thing that comes to mind. “They’re taking my baby.”
“I heard.” She taps her left ear. “They gave me new ears a few weeks ago. Cost a fortune.”
Then I’m crying. We melt into a puddle of arms and legs on the top stair, this old woman cradling me like she did when I was a sick child. There’s a nasty taste rising in my mouth as I think of Freddie’s future mapped out, of a yellow bus coming to drive her along a