Lemon Twist
My mother had already gone to work. When my father walked out the door, he left me alone with my nanny.
"Stand on the chair," she told me.
She was a short, strongly-built woman. It's hard to look severe in a floral dress but she managed. She was a very serious person. When she pointed, it was with her fist. Her stubby finger at the end was merely an ornament to provide emphasis. I knew what to do when she indicated the dining room chair she had pulled away from the table. Minutes earlier, as my nanny placed it at the corner of the kitchen tiles next to the adjoining room, I expected the order to come. Now I climbed up onto the padded seat. I rose with one hand on the wall, the other on the back of the chair.
She started to vacuum. Her motions were brusque and efficient. She did her chores with strength. With narrow-eyed disdain, she dumped grey powder and flakes from the ashtray into the garbage. She moved plates into the sink and scrubbed them. She finished her washing in thirty seconds. She strode to the chairs and carried them back into the living room, two at a time, except for the one I was in.
She gave me a calculated glance. She was too far away to slap me, but her expression put me on alert.
"How would you like to go on a train ride?" she asked.
I rose on my tiptoes. It was all I could do not to jump off the chair. I started vibrating up and down. Trains were fun. I loved them and the noises they made, the rushes of air, the sights out the windows, the bustle of the people, and everything else about them. Better, I knew it was unusual for my nanny to take me anywhere. I couldn't be silent enough or hold still long enough for her tastes. Sometimes, though, she allowed these fun trips to happen.
"Well, if you want to go with me," she said. She pointed a finger in my direction. "You must do as I say. You must be quiet. And very polite."
I nodded and kept nodding.
"You must go use the bathroom now. And you must not wet yourself where we go. I won't bring diapers, understand?"
I nodded more deeply. For a moment, I started to climb down from the chair. But I remembered. I looked for her nod of approval. After a moment of consideration, she gave it. We started on our mission.
Our preparations passed in a blur. I didn’t understand a lot of them. We stopped at the market, I remember, and my nanny picked up a couple bags of items, mostly meat and fruit. The shopping was tedious. My legs started to hurt. I wanted to whine about it, as I might do with my mother, but I glanced at my nanny's face. She glared me a warning. I took a deep breath.
One of the butchers offered her a couple of sausage samples. She handed me one under the benevolent smile of the stall manager.
Finally my legs grew so hot and tired, I started to stumble.
"My arms are full!“ she warned. I knew that tone. I tried to stand up straighter. "I won’t pick you up.“
”How much farther?” I whispered.
“We are close,” she conceded. “We are almost to the train station.”
At the station, the cashier tried to sell her a ticket for me and she refused. She shouted at him for a minute or two, then she got her ticket. A few minutes later, she turned and showed me off to her fellow passengers waiting for the train. She did the same with the ticket taker when we got on, too. She produced only one ticket and her eyes dared the man to demand one for the child with her. He declined the confrontation and sent us down the aisle.
The train had berths. At least, that's how I remember the longest portion of our travel. Sure, at least one or two cars held rows of benches. My nanny led me through one. But other train cars had a corridor wide enough for two grown people to pass. Alongside the corridor were rooms where passengers could lounge in relative comfort. They sat on padded benches, as with the more crowded arrangement. In the berths, the passengers had privacy of a sort. Only a few people at a time could sit facing one another.
I accepted our seat in the higher-class booths as a normal mode of transport even though it wasn’t how my parents usually traveled. Most things adults did were inscrutable. How they decided on seats was a mystery. I didn’t question it. In retrospect, I wonder if my nanny, so possessed of her sense of place in her society and so saturated with her determination, simply seized the opportunity to upgrade. She had already coerced the ticket booth man and the conductor. Maybe it was how she operated.
On the train, I stopped with my face against a window to see as much as I could. The sight of buildings passing by thrilled me with the speed and the largeness of the world. After a while, I talked with the other passengers. Some of them were women my mother's age. Some were businessmen. There weren't many children. People came and went. I can't remember most of them although my nanny explained to some of them that I didn't know German because my parents were Americans. At the time, I knew enough German to get a general sense of what she was saying about me.
When she talked with other adults about adult topics, I had no idea what was going on. I have no visceral recollections of those spans of time.
I do know we kept occupying the same booth. Other people on shorter trips came and went. We stayed. Our ride lasted long enough for me to get hungry. That's when I discovered my nanny had brought us no snacks. I was young enough to feel the physical discomfort in a self-absorbed way. Once I felt hunger pains, tears welled up in my eyes. My nanny seemed to sense the impending outburst. She reached into one of her bags and pulled out a lemon. I grabbed it with a smile.
Lemons were sweet fruits I knew from the drinks in my parents house. How I encountered them was through our house guests. My mother would make her friends sweet tea with squeezed lemon. She served drinks on a tray. Couples would hang around the coffee table and talk. When the guests were done, the group would usually head to another room. I would stay and toddle from glass to glass. My stubby fingers could muddle around in the ice to find the fruit. Then, one by one, I would suck on each sweet lemon. The pieces were mostly devoid of their natural juice but they were filled with droplets of syrupy tea and heavy sugar.
The circumstances of my eating the lemons may have misled me as a toddler. When I bit into the half-peeled lemon on the train, I shivered. Involuntarily, I put out my arms to keep my balance. I shivered again. My eyes widened. The fruit had tasted so sweet but so tart, it made me befuddled.
The expression on my face made my caretaker burst out with a guffaw. She bent over at the waist.
"Nanny?" It was such a strange thing to hear her laugh that I turned to stare. I was still wobbling, a little. She kept laughing.
After she wheezed to a halt, I turned away. I noticed the lemon in my hand. I pulled it close to my face and took another bite. Startled, I gave a yelp. She laughed again. The memory of my own surprise remains so clear. The pulp was so bitter, so tart, and yet sugary enough to pull me back to it. I kept going. I got determined like it was my sweet, sweet enemy. I got down to the rind.
My nanny’s hand appeared. She took the soggy rind away.
"No more for now," she said. She wiped her hand on her skirts. "Why don't you sleep?"
It was not quite an order. But there would be consequences if I didn't try. So I tried. I closed my eyes and held still. I must have napped at least a little because my next memory comes as I'm out of the train, walking. From my sense of balance and my plodding legs, I must have been stumbling at first and waking as we got nearer to our destination.
Our first destination was a wide expanse of concrete, a bit like a town square or a trolley car crossing. The pale sunlight turned bright, here. My nanny appeared to be talking to a pair of guards in uniform. One of them was taller and bolder than the other. I knew what guards were. We had them at the base where my parents taught and where I went to nursery school. They never paid attention to me. To guards, I was invisible. But to my surprise, the tall one now spared me a glance. It was because of something my nanny said. Both of the men motioned toward me. They said something in German. My nanny chuckled. They chuckled. Finally, the guards motioned my nanny through.
"Schnell," she said. She grabbed my hand and marched. I sprinted to keep up. We didn't maintain the brisk pace for long, though. My nanny met someone. We slowed to a stop. The two women looming above me exchanged severe nods at first, then made friendlier sounding noises. Then, for a moment, they embraced. I had never seen anything like this from my nanny. Even when the women backed away from each other by a step, they held hands.
My nanny turned her head and glanced down to me. Her hair had grey in it. The other woman's hair was brown although she kept it in a severe haircut, the way some did.
"This is my sister," announced my nanny.
As a group, we started to walk. The conversation switched back to German. We may have taken a trolley or maybe we hiked all the way in the pale sunshine but, wherever we went, it didn't seem to take long. We arrived at a pale, yellowish brick building. At the door, my nanny shook me by my arm to catch my attention.
"We are going to visit," she said. "Behave."
For a long time, as the two women sat down in one of the apartments, I concentrated on behaving. I moved from place to place as silently as I could. I didn't ask questions. The adults spoke only German. I spent my time studying my surroundings. I looked at walls. I gazed out a window. When I had explored the small apartment, I found a footstool near the women and sat.
They talked and talked. It took so long and happened so much in German, I couldn't understand any of it. I tried my best to behave. I'm not sure what I did wrong but something in the way I got up and strolled around the room grabbed my nanny's attention. I put my hands behind my back. She didn't like me to fidget. But I had been playing with my fingers.
She leaned close and asked her sister something, maybe about food. The women studied me. Her sister shook her head. If it was about food, she didn't have anything. On an apparent impulse, my nanny reached into one of the bags she had deposited in her sister's apartment. She pulled out a lemon.
Her sister gasped. She said something to object.
Despite her sister's outrage, my nanny gave me another lemon. After I fumbled as I tried to bite into it - this one had a tougher rind than the one on the train - she even helped me by peeling it. I think her sister protested the whole time. Still, the two women started to laugh as I bit in. I ate the peeled fruit with fury, anger, hunger, determination, and with clearer-minded expectations of the bitter and the sweet of it. I could hear myself struggle. A noise poured out of me as I ate.
I think the shock of the two lemons, the one on the train and the one in the apartment, are the key to me having memories of this. Everything ends here, with the second lemon. I have no clear images of coming back to my home. Even now, after several rememberings, the explosion of the luscious, almost candy-coated and tongue-curdling sourness makes me shiver. Everything else is a mental slideshow of sorts, a set of brief but connected vignettes, images, smells, distant sounds and words. But the taste of lemon - it's clear. It rings my body like a bell.
Our family lived in Frankfurt, Bitburg, and Hamburg while my parents taught at army bases. I'm guessing this occurred while we lived in Hamburg.
#
Years later, I told a shortened version of the lemon story to my parents. My father gave me a narrow-eyed look, like I was a liar. I couldn't figure out what I'd said that was wrong. I thought the story was about sour fruit and a mean nanny (or, more accurately, a strict one). The incident seemed amusing to me in retrospect. I had anticipated chuckles about it from my parents. At the least, my reaction as a three year old to the taste of the lemons should have been amusing to my father.
It was my mother who turned to me and said, "No, you must be mistaken."
"But I'm not not." The recollection had been utterly clear and based on the taste of those lemons.
"No, that one had a sister in East Germany. She wouldn't have taken you there."
There was a long pause as we all thought about the possibility. I remembered the guards and the laughter about me. Had I crossed the border in Berlin? Later, I looked it up on a map. It would have been a long trip from our home to the big city. I can see my parents' point. Still, this is what I remember.
"Anyway," my father said, still shaking his head. "You liked that nanny."
I'm pretty sure I trembled in fear around that nanny. I did and said everything she wanted, probably including telling my parents whatever she wanted them to hear. But they would have presented a different viewpoint, of course.
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