“I’m so alone,” I said, bursting into tears with my mom for the first time in my adult life. We’d never discussed my isolation from the family or my fears about ending up alone. My plan had been to have Dr. Rosen fix me so I could present myself as the daughter who wasn’t fucked up after all. But we’d both be dead at the rate I was going.
“Honey, I felt the same way.”
I sat up on the couch and wiped my nose on my sleeve. As far as I knew, my parents met at a volleyball party and the rest—three kids and a redbrick ranch house on 6644 Thackeray—was history. It was impossible to picture my mother—with her late-1960s bob and postcollege job as a bank teller in Dallas—curled under a blanket, worried she would die alone.
“I was just like you. All my friends were married and had babies on the way, and I never thought it would happen for me. I was still single at twenty-six, which in 1970 was pretty ancient. It felt like nobody wanted me.”
This was genetic? I felt strangely exhilarated—maybe this wasn’t all my fault. Maybe it wasn’t a failure of imagination or feminism or will. This state of believing that something was wrong with me around relationships was something I shared with my mother like brown eyes and a mortal fear of dental procedures. Maybe I could stop trying to outrun it. Maybe I didn’t have to hide my grief and confusion from her anymore. I wasn’t ready to tell her I was back in therapy to the tune of three group sessions a week, but it was a relief to share some emotional truth.
“Do you want me to come to Chicago?”
Her offer made me cry harder. I needed her mothering, but I couldn’t stomach her flying all the way Chicago. It was enough that she asked and that I no longer had to hide my greatest fears from her.
I never saw the Autobahn. Or a German courtroom. What I saw day after day in Germany was a giant, un-air-conditioned room in a nondescript four-story office building in the middle of a field outside Augsburg. The low sound of cows’ mooing greeted me in moments of unexpected silence. The sharp smell of dung also made its way into the second-story work space, where lawyers and paralegals from Germany, Chicago, and Atlanta worked elbow to elbow on long tables. The office was stingy with toilet paper, so you had to go before three in the afternoon if you wanted to wipe.
The high point of the day was lunch in the staff cafeteria, where the main food group was brown gravy. It appeared on absolutely everything: main dishes, side dishes, salads. Brown, viscous, fatty, and flavorless.
I hated Germany. I hated my work. I hated my life.
I was grateful to be busy, but in the downtime between tasks, I’d stare at the clock and compute the time back in Chicago. One Tuesday afternoon, I used the office phone to call Rory’s cell while she was in group. She didn’t pick up.
That night, alone in my German hotel, I collapsed on the bed. I’d been expecting fancy four-star digs, but instead, we stayed at the German version of a La Quinta, minus the friendly staff and Denny’s next door. In the shower, the temperature hovered at lukewarm. I missed home, where at least the water was scalding hot.
The only thing on TV was the brewing destruction of Hurricane Katrina—startling images of surging brown water and displaced people crammed into the Superdome in New Orleans—and violent German porn. Room service was my last hope. The “pizza” I ordered arrived as a hunk of semimelted white cheese on a plain pita swimming atop a smear of ketchup. I crawled under the covers, still shivering from my tepid shower. Sleep mercifully delivered me from consciousness.
The clinking of glasses and muffled laughter woke me less than an hour later. I lifted the window shade and saw that directly below me was the pool, an open bar, and a dozen people eating appetizers and having drinks, buck naked. My room was just above the Schwaben Quellen, which apparently means “eating schnitzels and drinking Heineken in your birthday suit.”
I dialed the international operator and gave her Dr. Rosen’s number. Across the Atlantic, Dr. Rosen sat in his final group of the day and would check his office voice mail soon.
Beep.
“There are naked people cocktailing outside my room. I can’t do this. Please call me. Please.” I left the number where he could reach me.
At two in the morning German time—seven back home in Chicago—I accepted the truth: Dr. Rosen wasn’t going to call me. I rolled myself up in the scratchy comforter and closed my eyes. How dare he abandon me. I unrolled myself and asked the international operator to connect me again.
Beep.
“Show me the goddamned JAMA article that says doctors can’t help patients across international lines! How could you possibly withhold five minutes of your time to assure me that you’re still there? I would have paid you back for the charges, you know. Asshole!” I slammed the phone down. Fuck him. After all the money, time, and trust I’d willingly given him—he had nothing for me?
On Friday, in the Augsburg conference room, Jack asked for a show of hands: Who wants to go home? Those who flew home would brief the team back in Chicago and return the following week. Most associates wanted to stay for weekend jaunts to beer gardens and the Black Forest. Oktoberfest was days away. My hand shot up, high and tall. Send me home.
I arrived at the airport three hours early, but the Augsburg-to-Frankfurt leg of my flight was canceled. An officious woman at the United counter offered me a flight the following day. I shook my head. No. I bought a
