Author Ingrid Anders

Tired and bleary-eyed, I finally touchdown in Berlin the next morning. My first glimpse of Germany is Tegel Airport, a flashy and modern facility, which stands in sharp contrast to the un-flashy and un-modern Newark Airport I took off from seven hours before. Fighting delirium, I plod my way through the gleaming corridors to the baggage claim area, collect my suitcases, schlep them outside to the taxi stand, and hail a cab, which is not yellow, but off-white.

“Wo gehen Sie hin?” asks the taxi driver. I hesitate before answering him. Where am I going?

“You know where I am going,” I say to my ex-boyfriend over coffee at the diner after sleeping through church. “You don’t have to keep asking.”

“Okay, you’re right. I know that you are going to spend senior year in Berlin,” he replies. “I guess the real question I’m asking is, ‘Why?’”

“What do you care?” I reply, and feel a little bit bad about my tone. I look down at the spoon I am using to stir my coffee so I don’t have to look him in the eye. “I don’t want to spend senior year in Berlin,” I explain, softening my voice, “I want to spend it in London.”

Matt actually looks pretty sexy today. I’ve always thought he was sexy; he’s a big guy with dark hair, almond eyes, and an olive complexion. For some reason, I’ve found him even sexier since he broke up with me.

“Then why are you going?”

“Because my parents are paying for it, and they say that if I insist on leaving the country for a year, then they insist I go to a place where I at least have some heritage.”

“I don’t see why you have to study abroad at all. I mean, what do they have over there that we don’t have over here? Plus, it’s your senior year. You’re going to totally miss out on it.”

“Well, I would have studied abroad my junior year, like most people, but somebody thought that would put too much strain on our relationship. Now, I’m not in that relationship anymore.”

Matt flinches at my words. “I know, I know. I’m a jerk. I’m sorry. I can’t fix what happened.”

“Right.”

“Nobody’s perfect, you know. I was perfect for five years, Kat. Cut me a little slack.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh, you poor thing! I’ve been so hard on you, getting mad at you for cheating on me and then breaking up with me. You know, I really feel bad for you.”

I don’t know why I agree to spend time with Matt. It’s totally stupid, and it’s not helping me move on.

“Look. Just because everything between us went to shit this year, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to miss you when you’re gone.”

I look out the diner window, away from Matt. “Well, at least you’ve got your new girlfriend to keep you company.”

It’s been months since Matt and I broke up, but we still hang out all the time. It doesn’t help that we grew up three miles from each other and that our families are close friends. We were together for a long time, and some habits—like breakfast at the diner after sleeping through church—are just impossible to break. I need a change.

“You know, if it’s too hard over there for you, you can always come back early.”

“It’s not a war zone, Matt. I’ll be fine. I’ll be back in May.”

“What if you don’t come back?” my best friend, Dana, asks me as we shop at the mall for an outfit for my going-away barbecue.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I answer her, flipping through a rack of sundresses.

“No, seriously, you could meet the man of your dreams over there, get whisked away to the Bavarian Alps, and we’d never see you again.”

“Dana, they don’t have twenty-four-hour diners in Germany—and they make you pump your own gas. I’d never survive more than a year there.”

“They make you pump your own gas in Pennsylvania,” Dana reminds me.

“I’m not moving to Pennsylvania, either.”

Dana knows deep down that I mean that. I’m a Jersey girl through and through. Nobody loves the Garden State more than I do. And I firmly believe that anyone who doesn’t love it, has never ventured off the Turnpike. They are the same people who write the New Jersey jokes, such as, “Why are New Yorkers so grouchy? Because the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey,” that I have painfully endured since birth.

Besides the Turnpike, I have determined that Newark Airport is also to blame for the animosity that the rest of the country feels toward my state. Imagine you’re flying into New York City for the first time in your life, and you don’t know that Newark Airport is actually in New Jersey. You exit the plane and find yourself a little farther west than expected. If it’s nighttime, the shock is minimal; but I pity those poor individuals who arrive in broad daylight, press their noses against the taxi window to catch their first glimpse of the Big Apple, and don’t see Broadway or Park Avenue, but the simmering swamp some cruel satirist decided to name, “the Meadowlands.”

You have to laugh at the name Meadowlands. It’s an industrial marsh, neither meadow, nor land, and the only things that flourish there are chain hotels, strip malls, and oil refineries. It’s so embarrassing that even the football team—whose home stadium is in the Meadowlands—insists on calling itself the New York Giants, as if people wouldn’t figure out where it really plays.

I’ve always thought it was too bad New Jersey has such a bum rap, because it really does have everything a person needs in life. There’s good hiking at the Appalachian Trail and the Delaware Water Gap. There are good beaches at the shore. You can gamble in Atlantic City, and Jersey tomatoes are the juiciest I’ve ever tasted. Nevertheless, we’re known around the country as the “armpit of America,” and there isn’t anything I, Jon Bon Jovi, Jack Nicholson, Frank Sinatra, John Travolta, nor the E Street Band, can do about it. I’m going to miss New Jersey when I’m gone.

“Your father and I burned you six Springsteen CDs to play at your going-away barbecue today,” my mom informs me as we set up tables in the backyard.

“Awesome,” I give her the thumbs-up. “You can never have enough Springsteen.”

One thing I am especially going to miss when I am in Germany is my family barbecues. My family lives on a nice property with woods and a small in-ground pool. Though technically it is a suburb of New York, my neighborhood feels more rural than anything. You can barely see the other houses through the trees surrounding the house, and you can’t get anywhere without a car.

For the party today, we are expecting a small gathering of family and friends, some already starting to arrive. The last minute preparations are being made, my mom is laying out drinks and condiments, and my dad is firing up the grill. As soon as enough guests arrive, my mom kicks off the festivities by grabbing a hot dog and a packet of rolls, and sauntering up to my dad at the grill. “Wanna roast my weenie and toast my buns?” she teases him, winking at her guests.

My dad clenches his jaw and tries to ignore the crudeness of his wife, while everyone else enjoys a silent chuckle. My mom has been making that joke at family barbecues since I can remember, and it never ceases to catch my father off guard, which only adds to his embarrassment, which, of course, only adds to my mom’s amusement. I normally derive great pleasure from watching this exchange, but today, I have other things on my mind.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I announce to my mom as we are clearing the tables between dinner and dessert. “I’m not going to Germany.”

“Don’t be silly, dear,” my mother says. “You will love Germany.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Just try to focus on the positive—like the good German beer that will be available all around you.”

“I can get good beer in London,” I whine.

My mom looks at me as if I have just cursed the Pope. Being German, my mom holds certain things to be self-evident, and the superiority of German beer is one of them.

It’s hard for me to put my finger on why I’m so nervous about spending senior year in Berlin. I try to help my mother understand. “Do people over there speak English, or am I going to have to speak German all the time?”

My mom shakes her head. “You’re going to Germany, Kat. Even if people there can speak English, you should take advantage of this opportunity to practice your German. You speak it very well already.”

“Isn’t it enough that I’m majoring in German? Why do I have to actually go there?”

An unsettling grin appears on my mom’s face. “You’re right, dear. Majoring in German is enough. You’ve read a bunch of books about Germany, written a few papers. You know everything already. You don’t have to go.”

I know that there’s a punch line coming, so I wait for my mom to continue.

“By the way, I borrowed your Kama Sutra from your bottom drawer.”

“What?”

“Now, since you’ve read all about sex, you don’t ever have to bother doing it. You’re father will be ecstatic to hear you’ve chosen a life of celibacy.”

“Mom,” I roll my eyes. “I’m being serious here.”

“Me too, dear. I think you’ll find that convents these days are a lot more comfortable than they used to be. They probably even have wireless Internet access.”

I look at my mom in frustration. “What if Germany’s not what I expect?”

“So what?”

“What if it’s … lonely?”

“Dear,” my mom puts down the stack of plates that she is about to carry into the house. “I know why you don’t want to leave. It’s the same reason you decided to go in the first place. Believe me, you’ve made the right decision. It’s time you put some space between you and Matt, you know, went to a place that has nothing to do with him. You two have been together for so long that you don’t know where one of you stops and the other one begins. This experience will give you a chance to start learning who you are, without him.”

My mother’s wisdom surprises and discomforts me. After all, this is the woman who bore and raised me. What does she know about life?

“Besides,” my mom continues, “maybe, just maybe, you’ll find Otto over there.”

I raise an eyebrow at my mom. She turns away to avoid looking me in the eye. “Mom? Uncle Otto is—”

“Dead? I know. I know.”

“Even if he’s not, he was how old when he disappeared?”

“Three.”

“How would I recognize him?”

“You wouldn’t, dear,” my mom sighs. “You’d just have to rely on your instincts, I guess.”

I give my mother a troubled look.

“Never mind, dear. Forget I said anything. Put on a smile and enjoy the party. By the way, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

My mom is always full of surprises. This one is in the form of a going-away cake. Recently, the local Shop Rite has developed the technology to scan pictures of customers’ choosing and digitally reproduce them on cakes. My mom’s choosing turns out to be an endearing picture from my infancy, picked specifically to test the thickness of my skin, while at the same time, exposing as much of it as possible. It is of me on the day I had snuck into the bathroom, naked and unsupervised, seized the end of the toilet paper roll, and unraveled it around myself with uninhibited zeal. Of course, the angle of the photograph leaves none of the important parts concealed. Leave it to my mother to take that tender moment and portray it twenty-one years later at my going-away party in exquisite, colored frosting atop two inches of rich, moist, vanilla cake. Though I am mortified, I have to admit, I look delicious.

I hear an “Awwwww!” from the crowd when my mother reveals the cake.

I hear a “Gasp!” from my father, who must have been expecting the picture that he had picked out of me, fully clothed in a tasteful sundress on the day of my first Holy Communion. Unbeknownst to him, but knownst to my mother, she had switched the pictures without telling him.

Just when he is about to express his disapproval, my mother produces a large knife and begins to cut the cake. The guests line up enthusiastically for my various body parts, wrapped and unwrapped, and my mother dishes them out with relish. Cries of, “Who wants a thigh?” and, “Save me a cheek!” can be heard throughout the crowd. Soon, there is nothing left to dish out except for my infant pelvic region, which no one will touch. I feel rejection rising up inside me.

“It’s just cake, for God’s sake,” I implore my guests. “Doesn’t anybody want the last piece?”

Not a chance. In the end, my entire groin area goes to waste. I have the distinct impression that this is going to have psychological consequences for me in the future, including feelings of repression and guilt regarding sex. Those hotshots at Shop Rite will never understand the full impact of their big idea, scanning pictures on cakes.

Once my guests and I have recovered from the excitement of my edible dismemberment, the party continues. The sun tucks itself away behind the rolling Jersey horizon. Fireflies begin twinkling around our heads. Parents and relatives start to head home, and friends linger around the pool, talking and enjoying the last of the wine and beer. We have already decided that we’re not going to sleep tonight, with the idea that I’ll have plenty of time to sleep tomorrow on the plane.

I look around at my friends. We are all feeling pretty emotional at this point, and Dana looks at me like she’s never going to see me again.

“I’ll only be gone ten months,” I try to reassure her, but it doesn’t work. My saying it out loud has the opposite effect that I intend. Ten months suddenly seems like an infinite amount of time in my just-turned-twenty-one-year-old brain. I am infinitely sad and infinitely amazed that I will be gone for that long.

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