Jumping Over Shadows by Annette Gendler

Author:Annette Gendler [Gendler, Annette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2017-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

FAIT ACCOMPLI II

HARRY AND I WERE NEVER FORMALLY ENGAGED, partly because engagements were not a big deal in our circles. People did not waste time getting engaged—they got married, if they did at all. Harry also never asked me to marry him, unless you want to count our talk about marriage while skidding on an icy road as a proposal. He didn’t need to. It was clear to both of us that that would be the course of events.

Along with going through the exams for my master’s degree during the winter of 1987, I had taken the GRE at the US McGraw military base early one Saturday morning. I had run to and from registrars’ offices to produce American-style transcripts of all my university certificates; I’d had professors write recommendations. I applied to five graduate programs in international relations in the United States. Rejections started landing in my mother’s mailbox (still my official address) in March, to the point that my mother started getting worried about me. I had no plan B. America had to work out. And then the one acceptance arrived from the University of Chicago, along with a half-tuition scholarship. The decision was made. Chicago it would be.

I had to confirm by March 15. A day or two after I had sent the confirmation letter, Harry and I went for dinner in a Yugoslavian restaurant, a favorite neighborhood place two blocks from our apartment in Prinzregentenstraße. This was 1988, a few years before the Bosnian War. There still was a Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavian restaurants. One did not have to differentiate between Serbian and Bosnian. Yugoslav restaurants were a staple in Germany, along with Greek and Italian ones. People said, “Let’s go to the Greek,” or, “Let’s go to the Yugoslav.”

So there we sat, at the Yugoslav, planning our move to Chicago, the immigration formalities, and the fact that we would now have to get married for all this to happen.

“You’re sure you want to leave all this behind you?” I asked. We had discussed this before, of course. That he needed to get away from his father, do his own thing. Most days his frustration at being kept on a short leash, at having to fight for every little innovation he wanted to try, was at a boiling point by the time he came home from work. I usually had a bath running for him and would send him straight to the tub to relax and wash off some of that anger before our evening together. But I still had to ask because he was going to leave behind a nice nest.

“What do you mean?” he shot back. “I have no choice. We can’t make it here as a couple. And my dad will never let me run the store.”

“I’m just asking to make sure you won’t have any regrets.”

“I won’t have any regrets.”

So we went on planning and spread out the University of Chicago campus map to decide which married-student housing building might suit us.

At some

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