This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger

Author:Anna Winger [Winger, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

13

On the fourth stage of the Disneyland theater, Walter looked around the side of the curtain. The theater was packed: adults holding children on their laps; preteen girls clustered together in groups, standing in the aisles. The audience seemed to have increased exponentially every weekend since Thanksgiving.

“It’s official,” he said to Sharon when he came back behind the curtain. “Every school in the world is out for Christmas vacation. And every single family decided that this was the year to take that trip to Disneyland.”

She was applying lip gloss with one finger from a little plastic pot and he admired the shiny bow of her mouth. He liked the way her body felt in his hands. He wasn’t in love with her, but he liked her a lot.

“Work that accent, Charming,” she said. “Give the girls a little European fantasy to take home with them to Boise.”

She blew him a kiss. He had been sleeping with her since the beginning, but it was a couple of months before he’d realized that he’d stopped sleeping with anyone else. Possibly because his previous sexual experiences in America had been quick, and rarely twice with the same person, or simply because she was a dental student and noticed physical details, Sharon had been the first woman to comment directly on his foreskin. She had inspected it like a scientific specimen, tested its elasticity and asked questions as if it were, like E.T., a strange, cute animal descended on Southern California from another planet.

“It’s like the difference between a normal sweatshirt and a hooded one,” she said finally. “No more, no less.”

Walter had never seen a circumcised penis. Everyone in Germany had foreskins. That all American men were circumcised made him uncomfortable (setting him, in his nascent Americanness, even further apart) but Sharon seemed to like it. Unlike the majority of Americans he’d encountered, she seemed to think the fact that he came from Germany was interesting. A plus, not a minus. She even asked him to talk dirty to her in German sometimes, although she didn’t understand a word of it.

“I could be saying anything,” he protested. “Looks like rain on Tuesday. It just sounds dirty to you because you don’t understand it.”

“No, no. I can tell. The words have meaning. I can feel it without understanding the language.”

They were eating breakfast. He spent most nights at the house she shared with friends near work now and went back to Los Angeles only a couple times a week. She held up a piece of pineapple from her fruit salad.

“You’re saying that pineapple isn’t pineapple anymore when you call it by a different name.”

Walter laughed.

“Seriously. What do you call this in German?”

“Ananas.”

“Ananas,” Sharon repeated, eating the fruit. “It’s still pineapple, baby. I know what you like in any language.”

Walter ran his fingers through his hair and took a deep breath before the curtain went up. Normally he didn’t look directly into the audience during a performance. The lights were so bright that it was impossible to see anything beyond the first few rows.

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