He still spotted dead things right away. Dead grass looked the same here. He plucked the blade. In his fingers, the brown grass turned green. The taste of peppermint filled his mouth. He swallowed the sweetness down, pinched the blade of grass to the wind, and let it go. He almost expected the chlorophyll to stain his hand green as punishment. Shame washed through him. He thought of Nils in his coffin. Cold dead body, cold stretched skin. No, he told himself, smoothing the front of his khakis with his palms. He formed a fist with his entire body and clenched it tight. He wouldn’t do that here.
MAX’S HOUSE STOOD AGAINST THE back edge of the neighborhood. A highway bent close to it, hidden by sight, but not sound. Max couldn’t picture where the cars went, but he wanted to know. They might lead to parties with American boys. To 24-hour diners. To anywhere he didn’t know yet. All night Max turned and twisted to the sounds of engines, the occasional hot shriek of a horn, the skid of tires over black pavement. He stared at the plaster ceiling. In Germany, their street had been quiet. He had heard his father cough down the hall, the squeak of his mother’s feet on the stairs, nothing more. He had heard neighbor voices, Nils’s mother, moving through their open windows into his.
On his first morning in Alabama, birds cried in the trees outside Max’s window. Their song was neither happy nor sad. He ran his hand along the sheets. They smelled like eucalyptus, like a detergent called Sunshine. He tried to miss something about Germany.
He walked downstairs, through the cool, open living room. The house seemed breakable, almost flimsy in its construction. Nothing like the solid brick home his family had in Hamburg. Their new rental had come furnished, but the house looked somehow familiar to him in the daylight. It was every house he’d ever seen in an American movie. The words Sweet Home Alabama had been cross-stitched in crimson and hung above a fireplace made from river rock tiles. He touched the birch of the frame and thought home. But it sounded more like home? in his head. The couch held large pillows upholstered in blue stripes. He imagined the nap he would take on it later. He rubbed his temples. The ache was back. Claws gripped the corners of his eyes. He held up his hand to study its subtle tremor. Still there.
The couch faced a flat-screen television. The walls around him had been painted daffodil. Cheery like outside. An antique bowl sat on the coffee table. Grapes spilled over its sides. Max pinched one grape and watched it ooze. He thought of an eyeball plucked from a face. He picked another grape and placed it inside his mouth. Sweet burst of green on the tongue. A distraction in the body. He craved sugar again. All it took was one blade of grass and the symptoms rose up in him. He almost missed the comedowns, the hollow of exhaustion that overtook him, the headaches that sent him to sleep. No amount of sugar or exercise or afternoons spent in dreams could serve as enough balm to distract him from his most base desire. Max sunk his bare toes into the thick carpet. Carpet. The tacky, bandage-colored material covered all the floors.
Max walked out of the front door, which was two doors and not one. A wooden door then a screen one. He squinted into the brightness and inhaled the smell of dug soil. He felt eyes press into his back. Someone was watching him. He turned to see a neighbor woman in her garden.
Y’all must be the new Germans, the neighbor woman said.
She stood with her hip cocked to the side, grinning temple to temple. Her voice had a drowsy quality that Max wanted to curl up against.
We wondered when y’all would show up. The old Germans said new Germans would be coming soon. Never could say their names right so I just called them the Germans. Hope you don’t take offense to that.
Nine a.m. and the neighbor woman held a diet cola. She walked over to Max and extended five fingers tipped in red talons. Max shook her leathered hand, which went limp at his touch.
Honey, look at you already sweating.
She laughed but not at him.
How to say it, he said. It’s very, what is the word, wet.
Humid! she said. Honey, don’t I know that.
She had slathered her face in makeup and wore flip-flops bejeweled with rhinestones. Her hair hung in loose, self-imposed curls. Most bizarre to Max was that she wore an oversized red football jersey. The rest of her outfit seemed to call for another kind of shirt, a blouse of some sort, anything besides a sports uniform. Max liked her right away. He hardly understood a thing she said but her eyes sizzled and cracked with life. They seemed to say FUN. Max’s mouth twitched, as if he had no choice but to smile, too. Her name, she said, was Miss Jean.
Y’all better come over one Saturday to watch a game. Too much excitement to miss. The season’s not too far off now. So y’all mark it on your calendars, you hear?
Please? Max said. Can you say it one more time?
The word y’all confused him. The phrase you hear.
Miss Jean didn’t answer. Something else sat in her mind.
Saddest thing. That’s Tammy’s house. Was Tammy’s house. See it?
She pointed toward the cul-de-sac where a police car nested in front of another brick house. Max squinted.
I don’t mean to gossip with you, she said. Her voice dipped into conspiratorial tones. But what kind of neighbor would I be if I didn’t say something? Aneurysm killed her in the middle of the night.
What? Max said.
Killed?
Now tell me how in the Sam Hill does someone as healthy as Tammy fall down dead out of nowhere? I can’t pretend to understand it.
It sounded sad but Miss Jean recounted it in a singsong voice.
Someone died? asked Max. On Sam’s Hill?
I wouldn’t worry about it, hon, I’m just telling you to keep saying your prayers each night. Keep on praying. We never know what God has in store, now do we?
Max did not mention that he didn’t pray, had never once in his life thought to pray.
The screen door hit its hinges.
Max’s mother called to him from the porch.
Max, will you to introduce me to your new friend?
It was strange to hear his mother’s English, but he guessed he’d get used to it here. She walked up to their neighbor to say hello, and Max marveled again at her command of the language. Her confidence with the American words in her mouth. His mother looked odd beside Miss Jean. Her cropped black hair and swooping bangs did not flatter her in the morning light. Next to Miss Jean’s coin-colored face, smeared in bronze blush and golden eyeshadow, his mother was plain and underdone. Her lips looked sucked of color.
You speak such good English! You sound like you’re from Australia. Not Germany!
His mother had studied painting in London for graduate school, and her English arrived in a British accent. His parents had met in an expat bar in North London and lived there for many years before moving to a small studio in Paris’s Twelfth Arrondissement, where they would have continued their international life with their international friends if his mother had not gotten pregnant and his father had not taken a practical job offer in his hometown in Germany to support a new family.
I don’t know about Australia, his mother said. But thank you.
The old Germans did not speak English this good is all I’m saying.
Miss Jean recommended breakfast at the Touchdown, and that’s where they went. Eating out for breakfast! A rare occasion to mark a rare day.
A WAITRESS with a meringue of yellow hair wearing what appeared to be a cheerleading uniform led Max and his family to a table set with jars of sugar and hot sauce. Photographs of the college football team were tacked from ceiling to floor. Grainy images from the early 1920s showed players in leather helmets and wool sweaters. In more recent pictures, sleek uniforms stuck in sweaty patches to the curves and divots of the players’ shoulders and stomachs. Their arms were raised in V’s for victory. They had won, won, won. It appeared that they were always winning. Even their grins were winning.