PANDORA'S BOX

I cry so rarely that I sometimes suspect I lack proper lachrymal ducts. Because no matter how miserable I feel, how low my heart sinks, or how far I am knocked sideways, I barely shed a tear. I didn’t cry when my dad was killed in a car accident when I was eight. Or when Matt, my husband of ten years, decided to leave with Alice, his best friend’s wife.

But now I realize there is nothing physically wrong with me, and I learned restraint from my grandmother, Anneliese, because crying is not for survivors like us.

“Carrying emotions on the sleeve is for the weak, kiddo," she told me at Dad’s funeral.

Anneliese is as tough as a walnut and as difficult to crack. And so am I. I’ve inherited her strength, or rather, she taught me how to hide my feelings, no matter how often life has rugby-tackled me and rubbed my nose in the mud.

My mother complained that I resembled Anneliese more than she did. I was proud because, aside from my grandmother's personality, I have her height, blue-grey eyes, and blond hair, whereas my mother is a chubby brunette with prosaically brown, not honey-colored, pupils. And while mom is a softie, Annelise is unbreakable, regardless of the circumstances.

My eyes barely water when my mother calls one June morning to say Anneliese has passed away. I somehow manage to squeeze out three paltry tears, which plop into the milk and cornflakes as I put the bowls on the counter for Jake and Tim.

"What's wrong, mom?" Jake, the older of the two by five minutes, asks.

"You are making the cereal salty," grumbles Tim.

With the back of my hand, I quickly dry my cheeks.. Cornflakes with salt must be yucky.

"Oma's gone," I reply. 

"Gone where?" Unlike Tim, who is all emotions, Jake is pragmatic. His first reaction is always curiosity.

"Back to where she came from. The old country," I say.

I promised not to fill my sons’ heads with stories of heaven and hell, angels and devils, and God and his infinite mercy. If my children choose to believe in something—a divine presence, a superior being, or whatever name they want to call it—the moment will come. At five, they are simply not old enough.

That’s another thing Anneliese and I have in common. Or should I say "had in common?" We both doubt God's existence.

Anneliese would chuckle whenever the subject came up: "Doubt, but not completely deny it, God forbid."

We will not attend the funeral. Mom said Anneliese would be buried the following day. The undertaker explained he could keep her refrigerated for a day or two, but the June storms raging over Miami were causing havoc with electricity, so he suggested a quick burial. Just in case.

Anyway, I’d have to drive seventy miles to Salem with two small kids in an old Ford Fiesta with no air conditioning, then take a seven-hour Delta flight to Miami, where mom would have to pick me up while worrying that her dead mother was spoiling in a thawing freezer. Instead, we agreed that I would travel at the weekend when everything was over.

In the meantime, I quietly mourn her here, in the comfort of my home, where my unruly twins hurl cornflakes at each other and engage in a disgusting burping competition. As always, Jake wins, leaving Tim in tears.

Looooo-seeeer," Jake sings, walking off to the lounge to watch Sponge Bob on Nickelodeon, while Tim howls and begs him to switch to Disney.

I think of Anneliese as I wade through heaps of washed socks, underwear, scruffy t-shirts, and shorts in the untidy kitchen, with the counter full of cornflakes, breadcrumbs, and spilled milk. I always think of her as Grandmother or Anneliese. On occasion, I use the German word oma. Never "grandma" or "granny." Perhaps because of her tough exterior: tall, painfully thin, her ash-blond hair pulled back into a severe bun. Even at eighty-five, she looked flawlessly put together and never wore pants, instead opting for straight black skirts, white blouses, and low-heeled pumps. No foolish aprons for Anneliese, even when she was cooking. She was the epitome of an Ice Maiden or a Valkyrie—a demi-goddess from Warnemünde on the Baltic coast, where she was born and never returned.

Oma perpetuated the perfect image not only at home but also in the hospital, where she worked as a theater nurse. Mom, who was obviously biased, claimed that she was the best nurse in Florida. And, since she never lost her nerve, all the surgeons fought to have her assist them in complex craniotomies and thoracic aortic dissection repairs, whatever the last means.

I had last seen her almost three months before she died from breast cancer, which had progressed to stage 4 and spread to her lungs.

"Terminal," she said drily.

"A few months to go, and then it’s curtains for me," she remarked, rolling the "r" in curtains, the sentence thick with the still discernible German accent, even after more than fifty years in Florida.

I sat on the edge of her bed, holding her blue-veined hand. 

"Have you brought me the underpants I asked for? Every time I go to the toilet, my bum is on display because of the open-backed hospital gown. I may be dying, but I want to go out in style. I don't want George, that handsome young nurse, to see how saggy and wrinkled my ass is!" she winked mischievously. 

"What?!” She glared at the elderly patient in the bed beside her, who seemed to have overheard our conversation and was stunned.

“I can still have some fun before I take the last walk towards the light," she threw at her neighbor, who turned her back to us despite finding it challenging to accommodate the drip.

I burst out laughing. Just like Anneliese!

"Yes, Oma. Three pairs, elasticated, white, no frills. They will hold up your ass, all right," I smiled and handed her the packet.

Plastic rustled as she unwrapped the undies and spread them on the bed.

"Jesus wept, Frances. These things are for a toothless granny ready for the grave, not for a tough cookie like me. There is still some fight left in me, for heaven's sake!" she scolded.

“With these butt-huggers on, I’ll never make George fall for me," she giggled, holding up one pair like a celebratory flag and waving it at the neighbor trying to untangle the drip tube from the bed sheets.

Nothing about Anneliese has ever struck me as particularly grandmotherly. When Dad died and Mom and I moved in with her, she promised to take turns dropping me off and picking me up from school, to help financially and do the occasional babysitting. But nothing else. She had a life and a job she liked, and she wasn't your typical German oma who cooked ginger lebkuchen for Christmas and knitted jumpers with reindeer. Yes, she was delighted to have us, but we all had to toughen up and assume our responsibilities. 

"Frances is old enough to be on her own after school, and you, Tilly, must get a job," she said, and we obeyed. Because she never asked, she just told us what to do.

I frequently wondered how a toughie like Anneliese could have given birth to a weakling like my mother. Tilly is her mother's polar opposite in every way, not just physically, with her plumpness and perpetual concern about calories and how they will settle around her waist. She cries at the drop of a hat, is terrified of thunder and darkness, and nothing makes her happier than preparing krapfen, or doughnuts in German, for Jake and Tim. And if she could knit, I'm sure my kids' closets would be stuffed with sweaters with snowflakes and reindeer.

When I was a kid, there was little hugging and much of what Anneliese termed "toughening up.

"There is no such thing as bad weather, Liebchen, only unsuitable clothing," she quoted a German saying. True to her word, rain or sunshine, she chucked me out to play in the garden, ride my bike, or skip the rope.

"A healthy mind in a healthy body, Frances," she repeated another of her favorite aphorisms.

"I failed with Tilly. She’s been a wimp her whole life, even as an adult," she added, "but I’m not going to make the same mistake with you. You, Frances, are a trooper. Like me!"

I beamed at the praise.

She was right, of course. She was anything but gentle. She wasn't the kind of grandmother who kissed bruised knees and egos better.

I was seventeen when Dave Carlson dumped me before prom night. When I told her I would most likely die from a broken heart, she said, "Nonsense, hearts are muscles. They don’t break."

She made me wash my face, put makeup on, and go to the prom as if nothing had happened.

I felt our closeness the most when she took out her antique teak box containing her "mementos."

"The only thing left from the old country," she explained.

"Real handcraft made of proper materials, not like the plastic crap they now make in Taiwan. My mother bought it in Mandalay, Burma. It’s called Myanmar nowadays."

She never passed up an opportunity to teach me something.

"My grandfather was a tea merchant and used to take us there on vacation," she added.

The word Mandalay conjured up images of oranges and white jasmine. Of vanilla and musk. I imagined a country full of tiny, fragile, dark-complexioned girls with almond eyes who smelled of bergamot and carried boxes like Anneliese’s in their delicate hands.

Finely carved from ebony and with mother-of-pearl inlays, the box was the size of a typical case, perfect for holding a set of cutlery for six. Oma kept the key to it on a long silver chain passed down from her own Oma.

When she opened it, it felt like venturing into an exotic and faraway land, similar to Narnia. Apart from some old papers tied with a red ribbon, which she told me were her birth certificate and nursing diploma, the box contained just a few things, but they were so wonderful for a child!

A pair of girandole earrings (she said it was pronounced "jeer-an-dou-lee") with three green stones suspended at the bottom, with the centerpiece slightly lower than the other two. Oma explained they were emeralds set in gold and let me hold them to my earlobes. But I couldn’t wear them because my ears were not pierced. 

There was also an exquisite Karl Moritz Grossmann nurse’s fob watch, which clips onto the pocket of uniforms or scrubs with the dial turned upside down, allowing the wearer to tell the time. It no longer worked, but Anneliese kept it as a keepsake from a doctor she admired when she was young.

"He was smart and dedicated to his work. Nowadays, doctors work just for money, but he..."

Her voice trailed into silence.

"He worked for the sake of medicine. Of science!"

My favorite was a sepia photo with serrated edges, taken in Steinhöring in 1938, a year before the Second World War started. It was where she had done her apprenticeship alongside ten other sixteen-year-olds from the nursing school in Berlin. The girls posed in front of a gray, three-story structure with large windows.

"A maternity and recovery ward for young German mothers," Anneliese explained.

The nurses wore black uniforms with white smocks and black caps to keep their hair in place at the back of their heads. They formed a row, with Anneliese, the slimmest and tallest of the ten, in the center.

“It was wonderful to be young and pretty," she smiled at me wistfully.

"Those were exciting times, Liebchen. Meaningful times." 

When I finally make it to Miami, the storms are still wreaking havoc on the power grid. Jake and Tim are grumpy after the long flight, refusing to go to bed because they napped on the plane.

"Don't worry," Tilly says as they settle in her kitchen with a chocolate ice cream each, their hair still damp from the shower.

"I’ll keep them busy. You go up to her room. I thought you’d like to have her teak box. She asked for it in the hospital, but she was unconscious when I finally took it with me. I’m sure she’d love you to have it."

I tell the boys to behave, warning them that I will keep my ears open in case they fight. And no burping competitions today, I instruct. Before I reach the landing, I hear one long, disgusting belch and peals of laughter from the kids and their grandmother.

The box is on Anneliese’s dressing table; the key is in the lock, the chain swinging like a silver serpent. As I lift the lid, I am overcome with the same sensation I had as a child: I am entering an exotic and slightly prohibited realm.

I take the box to the bed and start taking things out one at a time. Age has tattered the edges of the folded yellow paper. The fob watch is silent, without a heart-like tick-tock. The earrings disappoint me today; the gold is covered with a patina of time, and the emeralds don’t sparkle. Their essence has vanished, along with the soul of the person who wore them.

I tip the box over, and the rest of the contents spill onto the black and blue cotton coverlet. There is the sepia photo of Annelise and her nursing colleagues. In fact, there are two other photos I didn't see before, both printed on stiff paper in hues ranging from soft caramels to deep, rich browns.

One portrays a tall, stylish man smiling a gap-toothed smile at the camera. He is hauntingly charismatic, proud of his well-tailored uniform—embodying authority and instilling a bit of fear. Two lightning bolts shine on the collar patches. He has a peaked cap, with a spread-winged eagle casually tilted on his head.

The other image shows the same man and Annelise standing next to each other. He's wearing a white doctor's coat. She is dressed in the same nurse's uniform she wore as an apprentice in Steinhöring. He reminds me of Nibelung from Wagner’s opera. She, as always, is an elfin Valkyrie. Both impossibly beautiful. Both incredibly Arian.

I can tell the photo was not taken in the maternity ward since Anneliese is older and has more careworn features. I turn the picture over. The date written at the bottom says January 1, 1945. Below, in smaller letters, Auschwitz-Lager Zwillinge Programm, which I know means the Auschwitz Camp Twins Program. I recall the man's name, or rather, what people called him after the war, from a documentary I saw a few years ago: Todesengel—the Angel of Death. A medical doctor, he used his position in the concentration camp as an opportunity to continue his research into heredity, particularly in identical twins. Another frame from the documentary comes to mind. Two little girls in striped pajamas, scarves covering their heads. They expose their thin arms with 6-digit tattooed numbers. 

The man and Annelise smile, smug in their belief that, as my grandmother once said, they were working for the sake of science, not for money.

I feel my stomach do a virtual somersault, making it difficult to hold down my dinner. I want to escape, but there is nowhere to run to. I cannot go downstairs, where Mom is sitting with my boys. My darling twins, or meine lieblinge zwillinge, as Annelise used to call them. But I don’t want to stay here either, in the room of the woman I thought I knew. Whom I know I love.

I cannot stay a moment longer in the presence of the box that holds Anneliese’s secret. Like Pandora, who opened a jar containing sickness, death, and fear, I have opened a box full of unspecified evil. And, as in Pandora's case, it’s no longer watertight. The truth is out, however ugly it may be. 

I finally gather crumbs of courage, stuff the papers, the photos, and the rest of Anneliese’s "mementos" back into the box, and lock it with the key, which I put in my pocket together with the chain.

As I walk down, my steps are heavy, and my shoulders slump under the weight of a secret I'll never reveal.

The kitchen is full of laughter. Tilly is chasing the boys, and whenever she catches one of them, she tickles him till he bursts into laughter. They look happy. Innocent in their ignorance.

When she looks up at me, my mother's gaze penetrates the fabric of my soul.

"Is everything all right, darling?" she inquires, her dark, round face filled with concern.

I remain silent, rush towards her, put my arms around her, and sob, drenching her chest with tears.