The Worst Thing I've Done by Ursula Hegi Read Free Book Online Page B

photos, my mother was sturdy and tall with stiff red hair, Aunt Stormy short with a dark braid to her waist. But somehow a resemblance emerged in their faces as they grew older. Their names were Lotte and Mechthild. For the small children, Mechthild was impossible to pronounce, and they called her Stormy because she liked to dance with them outside when it was stormy. Mechthild liked her new name so much better than the name she’d inherited from a great-aunt she’d never met, that she began to think of herself as Stormy.
    Alone with preschool children day after day, Lotte and Stormy didn’t recognize the America they’d been promised by the au pair agency—culture and travel and education. Instead they were cocooned within expensive houses; within the vocabulary of little children; within the routine of these children.
    â€œWhat kept us from going nuts,” my mother had told me, “was that their houses were side by side.”
    Lotte and Stormy would have felt a thousand continents away from home, had it not been for each other, for talking in words that matched their thoughts. Though they’d both studied English in school, the leap of translation took away some of their swiftness and confidence.
    Their employers were kind people who believed they were generous when they included the au pairs in family outings and family dinners; but that only added to all those hours of feeding and bathing, of jam-crusted fingers, a baby’s wail and loving. And since these children knew their au pairs better than their parents, they turned to them, of course, for play and solace during family times, freeing their parents to turn to each other for grown-up talk. They praised the devotion of their au pairs—though Lotte was messy and Stormy often late—because what mattered was seeing proof that their children would be loved while the parents were at work or had appointments…even if it made them uneasy how much their children adored their au pairs.
    They were inventive, Stormy and Lotte; took turns fixing meals and snacks for the children, seven of them altogether; found games that all of them could play; danced with the children to the records they’d brought from home: Edith Piaf and Hildegard Knef and Charles Aznavour.
    In winter the town emptied itself, felt isolated. But summers were glorious because they were a five-minute walk from Coopers Beach, where they spent all day with pails and umbrellas and blankets and picnics, talking while they watched over the children as they chased one another through the shallow water or took their naps.
    â€œWe often talked to them in German,” Aunt Stormy had said to me. “The little ones responded the same as to English.”
    My mother had agreed. “It was in the sound of the voice, Annie.”
    â€œWhere we walked from one house to the other, we wore down the grass.”
    They lent each other their favorite books. Lotte’s poetry collections: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke. Stormy liked novelists, especially Ilse Aichinger and Hermann Hesse. They’d both brought Pearl S. Buck’s Die Mutter across the Atlantic. The first English-language book they finished all the way—trading off between chapters—was Peyton Place , more risqué than anything they’d read so far.
    On their day off, Sunday, Lotte and Stormy took the train into Manhattan, walked for hours through different neighborhoods. Like all of Europe—no, the world—in one exhilarating city. They went to concerts, to protests against the Vietnam war, to the bakeries on Eighty-sixth for Kuchen , to Greenwich Village, to museums…
    Away from their birth country, language was a stronger bond between them than it would have been at home. And yet, when people said, “Your accent…where are you from?” they learned to say, “Holland.” Lotte started it. Because if they answered