This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger Read Free Book Online Page A

told Bodo about Disneyland during a drunken late night long ago he was stuck with it, like a stubborn stain on a favorite shirt.
    “What story?”
    “About the family who were led out the back by mistake and saw the actor playing Goofy with his head off, smoking a cigarette. You told me they sued Disneyland for emotional distress because their kids were so upset to learn that Goofy wasn’t real.”
    “What about it?”
    Bodo held the filter of his cigarette like a joint. He took a last toke before putting it out.
    “They won, didn’t they?” He exhaled. “Not to be harsh, buddy, but in this situation, you’re the guy in the Goofy suit. Nobody wants to know where that voice is really coming from.”

4
    Hope looked down at the schnitzel laid out before her by a middle-aged waiter who didn’t even crack a smile. On the plate with it were a soggy cucumber salad and roasted potatoes.
    “Besides the English,” Dave was saying, “Germans were the biggest immigrant group to the United States. It’s funny, because people so rarely refer to themselves as German-American. I think they gave that up during the First World War. But if you look around us here, we’d blend right in.”
    She looked around the dimly lit restaurant. Twenty empty white-draped tables spread out from where they sat in the center. The only other people in the room were an old couple who had not said a word to each other in twenty minutes, which meant that they could not possibly be Americans, she thought. Americans talked throughout the meal, non-stop, as if the whole point of going out to eat was not nourishment but conversation, as if silence were dangerous, or at least an admission of failure.
    “If you want to see the German roots of American culture,” she said, “just look at this food.”
    “What about it?”
    “Chicken patties and french fries.”
    “This is veal.”
    “I’m telling you, we ate more or less exactly this once a week when I was growing up in Missouri.”
    Dave groaned in protest.
    “Everything else we ate too,” she insisted. “Now that I think about it. Frankfurters, hamburgers. Even their names are German.”
    “The greatest legacy of the massive German immigration is the hot dog?”
    “It is our national dish.”
    He leaned forward, so that his nose was very close to her face.
    “This is a nice restaurant, Hope. I just wanted to take you somewhere nice.”
    The winter after their wedding, they had spent one week in the British Virgin Islands on a belated honeymoon, a gift from his parents who, once they got over the initial shock of the marriage, tried to make amends. The native islanders and other tourists there had been completely exotic to both Hope and Dave, so that the usual black and white differences in their own backgrounds, often the subject of tension and dismay, were reduced to inconsequential shades of gray. They had entered into a kind of cozy bubble, as she remembered it now, in which their only point of reference, their only reality, was each other. It had been an awfully nice way to experience a foreign country. The young, tanned couple in the Virgin Islands would have snuggled up against the strangeness of it all in Berlin: the unfriendly waiter, the cultural history of the hot dog, the soggy cucumber salad. As it was, what might have been grounds for reconciliation was having the opposite effect. She wondered if the problem with Germany was the very fact that they could blend right in here. She wondered if it was the inevitable fate of a childless couple to grow apart.
    The waiter returned to refill their wine. Hope watched the neighborhood out the window for signs of life. Earlier, she thought she’d recognized a man walking by as the neighbor who had walked through their argument at the beginning of the week, but his short, thick frame was hunched over his pockets and she didn’t see his face. He had disappeared into another restaurant across the street. Not another person had walked by