How to Be Alone : Essays

Erika Imports

For three years, when I was in high school, I was the packing boy for a German émigré couple, Erika and Armin Geyer, who operated a small business, Erika Imports, in the basement of their gloomy house in suburban St. Louis. Several afternoons a week I left behind a pleasant-smelling world of liberty and sanity and climbed the stairs to the Geyers’ dark front porch and peered into a living room where Erika and Armin and their overfed schnauzer were typically sprawled, snoring, on old wooden-ankled German chairs and sofas. The air inside was heavy with schnitzel grease and combusted cigarette. On the dining-room table were ruins of Mittagessen: plates flecked with butter and parsley, a partially trashed whipped-cream cake, an empty Moselle bottle. Erika, in a quilted housecoat that gaped to reveal an Old World bra or girdle, continued to snore while Armin roused himself and led me to my work station in the basement.

Erika Imports had exclusive contracts with workshops in Communist East Germany that produced handmade giftwares — enameled Easter Bunny and Santa figurines, cunningly painted wooden eggs, deluxe carved crèche sets, hardwood tangram puzzles, candle-propelled Christmas carousels in sizes up to three feet tall — that gift shops throughout the central tier of states were forever mad to buy. Erika could therefore be high-handed with her customers. She sent out broken merchandise or merchandise reglued, by Armin, with insulting carelessness. She wrote her invoices in a German cursive illegible to Americans. She slashed the orders of customers who’d fallen out of favor; she said, “They want twenty — ach! I send them three.”

My job in the basement consisted of assembling cardboard cartons, filling them with smaller boxes and excelsior, checking the invoices to be sure the orders were complete, and sealing the cartons with paper tape that I wetted with a sea sponge. Since I was paid better than the minimum wage, and since I enjoyed topological packing puzzles, and since the Geyers liked me and praised my German-language skills and gave me lots of cake, it was remarkable how fiercely I hated the job — how I envied even those friends of mine who manned the deep-fry station at Long John Silver’s or cleaned the oil traps at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I hated, in part, the arbitrary infringements of autonomy: the Saturday afternoons torpedoed by Erika’s sudden barking, on the telephone, “Ja, komm immediately!” I hated the extravagant molds that grew on the sea sponge in its pan of scummy water. There was also the schnauzer and everything relating to the schnauzer. There was Armin’s disinclination to perform any manual task without first licking his fingers; there was his stertorous breathing while he pecked out UPS slips on a manual Olivetti. There was Erika’s powerful body odor and the powerful perfumes with which she failed to mask it. And there was the kitschy, high-volume side of her business, the seasonal flood of Styrofoam bells and sentimental snowmen and cheap plastic toys that caused me to imagine all too vividly the aesthetic wasteland of heartland hospital gift shops.

The main reason I envied my friends in the fast-food kitchens, though, was that their work seemed to me so wonderfully impersonal. They never had to see their supervisor’s blue-veined stomach falling out of her housecoat, a toppled glass of cheap champagne soaking into the rug by her feet. Hamburger fragments and parsleyed potatoes weren’t decaying in a dog’s bowl at their job sites. Most important, their mothers did not feel sorry for their bosses.

My own mother was always after me, in the years following high school, to stop in at the Geyers’ and “visit” with them when I came home from college, or to greet them after a church service and ease their social isolation for a moment, or to send them postcards when I went to Europe. My mother herself, in a spirit of Christian charity and masochism, sometimes invited the Geyers to dinner and a game of bridge during which Erika, at escalating volumes and with a diminishing ratio of English to German, abused Armin for his sins of bidding and his crimes of cardplay, and Armin went crimson in the face and began to bray in self-defense. Although my mother fervently believed in personal responsibility, she resorted to the most transparent ruses if I was in the house when Erika called. She handed me the phone (“Jonathan wants to say hello to you!”) and then, when I tried to return the phone, she made me tell Erika that she would call her back “next week.” Poor Erika and Arinin, with their blood clots, their broken bones, their abrupt hospitalizations! Each step of their downward progress was faithfully reported by my mother in her letters to me. Now everyone is dead, and I wonder: Is there no escaping the personal? In twenty-five years I have yet to find a work situation that isn’t somehow about family, or loyalty, or sex, or guilt, or all four. I’m beginning to think I never will.

[2001]