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  The next day, after learning how to use and clean the coffee machine, how to write up orders, what to serve hotel guests for breakfast (bread, jam, cheese, and muesli), I walked toward the village. Not far down the road, I saw a sign, Zimmer Frei, and my heart took a little skip of hope.

  Frau Jaun was grateful to have a steady renter and pleased to succor the American mistreated by the outsiders from Zurich. She expressed her outrage, Ein kleines Zimmer für drei Frauen! Zwei-hundert Franken pro Monat! She’d eaten cookies produced by Ursula’s family factory, which she declared ausgezeichnet (outstanding). Her son studied in North Carolina. She offered me a cozy, pine-paneled corner room with a private bath directly across the hall. It cost less than the shared room at the Eigerblick.

  Frau Steffen’s large eyes narrowed in anger when she registered the fact that she would be getting two hundred francs less a month. I felt a twinge of fear like the moment after touching a hot stove, before the pain sets in.

  The first week, I confused orders or was slow in taking them. I ruined coffees by not tamping properly or by oversteaming milk, and I screeched when I made a mess at the machine. Suzanne helped me clean it up while the other waitress smirked. After breakfast service, Frau Steffen told me to come see her at the front desk. She leaned over the account book with an elegant index finger pressed to her nose. The entry smelled of disinfectant and her floral, woody perfume.

  “We didn’t know you would be so clumsy.”

  “I’m getting better,” I said, embarrassed that I had to defend myself, standing in front of the high desk like a schoolgirl.

  “I can’t use you for the busy evening shift, and thus, you are not worth the full salary.” She shook her head and returned to her bookkeeping as if the matter were closed. She knew I’d never waitressed, so I saw this as retaliation for my moving out. My stomach churned. My brain sped through my options until I remembered an ad for an association of hotel employees in the booklet Ursula had sent.

  On my first day off, pumped up with adrenaline and righteousness, I took the train to Bern to meet the association’s lawyer. How did I manage this? I’m amazed at the initiative of my twenty-two-year-old self. This was the woman who in college never spoke in class. Who accepted an erroneous grade rather than confront the professor. Who, heart pounding, stood outside a party she’d been invited to, unable to knock on the door. Who returned to her dorm room, defeated.

  Matter-of-factly, the lawyer said, “The Steffens may not reduce your pay as you have not misrepresented your lack of experience. A contract is a contract.” He sent them a letter, which in efficient Switzerland arrived the next morning.

  After this, even Herr Steffen, who had been more jovial toward me than his wife, tried to be stern and silent. He avoided his usual talk about the junk Americans eat and the huge cars they drive. About silly Jimmy Carter and his peanuts. My coworkers looked at me with—what? Not respect, not envy, and not gratitude for making more space in the bedroom. Instead, they looked through me, as if I were glass. I responded with determination—if I screwed up the coffee machine, I meticulously, silently, repaired the damage. I would show them what I was made of.

  Each evening I returned to my room with its red gingham curtains and yellow cotton-covered down comforter in a chalet that smelled like stone and pine and the summer hay piled up in the barn to feed the cows in winter. Some people feel comfort from knowing exactly where they are in relation to the landscape, as one does in a mountain valley. But without a horizon, a limitless view at which to gaze, one can also feel claustrophobic. At night, I could be Heidi, snug in her comfortable loft. But each morning I pulled on my snow boots and trudged up the hill to the hotel, closed in by the mountain range. I was Cinderella without hope of a prince.

  The list of my year and a half of romantic experiences in Europe was brief: bad sex with a casino employee on the ship from New York to Cherbourg; bad sex with a friend from college; a crush on my boss in Paris; a crush on a woman in my writing group; getting picked up by the son of a Turkish diplomat, a blue-eyed blond who smelled of stale sweat; getting picked up by a Bosnian banker in a fabulous suit and during dinner realizing from the identity card he showed me (he’d forgotten it indicated marital status) that he was married; in Madrid, a fling with a journalist twenty years my senior who said he had never slept with the love of his life, a woman taking care of her aged parents in Galicia. Once, during sex, when I let him know I wasn’t satisfied, he looked me in the eyes and said, “You want this to be like the movies.” I did, having no other template. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, not Last Tango in Paris.

  The last six months, in Stuttgart, had been as devoid of romance as the streets of that city were empty of people on Sundays. But the British students with whom I’d shared a large and airy apartment were wonderfully fun. I remained close to one of them until she died many years later. “Friendship,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Not having siblings, I especially cherished friends, cultivating them with letters and visits, and mourning when our paths diverged.

  Romance is even less necessary, perhaps, than friendship. And romance can verge on obsession. I knew that madness because I’d fallen in love with a student in college. I’d asked the resident adviser who introduced us, “Is Rick gay?”

  “No,” she said. “Why do you think that?” What could I say? That he was gentle and gracious, that his apartment was stylish, that he didn’t have a girlfriend despite being tall and handsome. And why did I let myself believe her? Loving him consumed my college years, but when I finally cut that ribbon of bewilderment and unrequited desire, I turned my love into a bow of friendship.

  By Christmas, I was a good, even very good, waitress. I paid attention to details: who needed water or a clean ashtray. I liked proving Frau Steffen wrong. I liked making change from my red wallet, fast, fast, fast. And friendly, friendly, with my wide American smile. That smile when approaching every table would be seen as odd, even suspicious, in a German. It was as if I opened a window in the room simply by being who I was, but I didn’t know that as much as I just felt the outside air. I thought my coworkers felt it too but didn’t recognize it as a positive thing. I was the only American worker in the village, something I learned when the Steffens told me about an Australian working in a day lodge higher in the mountains. “Perhaps you can meet her,” Frau Steffen said. And while the villagers did not ask to touch my hair, as they did of James Baldwin when he lived in Leukerbad in the early 1950s, and while I did not have dark skin, I was clearly not of this place. Why did Americans smile all the time, I wondered—perhaps it is the physical manifestation of our boundless, often misguided optimism. There’s a Russian proverb: “Laughing for no reason makes you a fool.”

  At the end of each night, we paid Frau Steffen for what we had ordered, according to the chits we filled out, and for any mistakes. One night I came up forty francs short. It was 11:30 p.m. and our legs were swollen and our backs aching. I felt the pressure to pay. Instead, I said, “I’m going to count my orders again.” My coworker rolled her eyes. Frau Steffen tapped the bar with her pen.

  I took the chits in my pile, looked at the handwriting, and recalled the guests out loud. I got to a chit for forty francs and held it up for Frau Steffen and the other waitress. “This is not my handwriting.”

  My coworker shrugged as if to say, It was worth a try. I looked at Frau Steffen, but her face was merely weary.

  A year before, in Paris, while working as an office temp, I’d shoplifted an umbrella (red matryoshka dolls on a black background and a carved walnut handle), a Caron scarf (a gift for a friend), and a bar of vetiver soap from the Galeries Lafayette. Those thefts impressed themselves in my memory: Why had I done it? Perhaps I was motivated by a sense of being neglected and undervalued. The Paris job involved answering the telephone for a man whose secretary was on vacation. Filing forms that no one would ever consult again. If I didn’t come to work, my boss wo
uld answer—or let ring—his own phone. At least at the Eigerblick we were necessary. Stuff, pretty stuff, made you feel better. Maybe taking something that belonged to someone else also made you feel better, especially if you thought that person had something she didn’t deserve. Maybe my coworker saw me as lording my lark of a winter season over her. She was working at the Eigerblick because that was all she could do, and she would be a waitress for a long time.

  I felt a protective sheath thicken around me. Local subsistence farmers, idle during the winter, often sat at a round table, a Stammtisch, drinking beer or Swiss wine or one apple brandy after another, frequently mixed with coffee. Gruezi mitenand, I learned to say. Frau Steffen gave them every fifth drink free, bantered about the weather, and batted her eyelashes, hoping they felt at home at the Eigerblick or that they at least would keep buying her alcohol. I sensed they didn’t like her. Or me. Or the Swiss girls. The farmers seemed to resent the tourist industry, as though we were ruining their village with our outsider values and our commerce. Their leisure was the result of the weather, not extra income.

  Unlike France or Germany, where some family names retain a “de” or “von” indicating landowning nobility, Switzerland is more homogeneously bourgeois. Until the twentieth century it was a country of subsistence farmers. The men at the Stammtisch were clinging to a way of life superseded when capitalism blossomed, alongside the idea that institutions such as universities and banks, not princes, should manage people and resources.

  The hotel had depressingly ordinary furnishings, as one might expect of a rental property, but we did a decent lunch and dinner business from people who stayed at better places. Tired of Dover sole parisienne with potatoes Anna at the Hotel Regina, they came to us for the stunning view and simple Swiss food. At the Eigerblick, only breakfast was included. I overheard the Steffens arguing about whether to increase revenue by requiring guests to eat dinner there.

  “I can’t do it with Paul alone,” he said, his voice rising in anger.

  “Being busier would keep you from getting drunk,” she hissed. Then a door slammed.

  Unlike chic resorts such as St. Moritz or Gstaad, Grindelwald was a town for serious skiers. That winter, our guests included athletic and well-heeled Americans, Swiss, English, Spaniards, Italians, Japanese, and a lot of northern Germans. The Germans seemed intrigued by me: born in Munich, the child of two parents displaced by World War II, a Silesian mother and Slovenian father. I was not completely American, but neither was I European. A few guests mistook me for a Yugoslav until I opened my mouth and US-accented German came out. My family’s immigration to New York City represented the American dream—we arrived with nothing, and twenty years later our middle-class status was regained, thanks to my parents’ work, which also resulted in a college education for me. Social mobility used to be much less possible in Europe. My father and I couldn’t even attain German citizenship—not that he wanted it, having fought against the Germans in the war. Until we became US citizens, we were officially stateless.

  Historian Jürgen Kocka distinguishes between the bourgeoisie of property and that of culture: either can be a route to the middle class. The Steffens had neither. Frau Steffen had the air of someone destined for a better life and thus an aura of continual disappointment. Perhaps her parents had been confident that her unusual beauty would attract a wealthy husband and saw her marriage as an economic step down. Perhaps she had married a charming, happy-go-lucky older man in defiance and now regretted it. Frau Steffen might have finished high school, but not with good enough grades to admit her to the university. There were few options for women who didn’t do well in school. Women didn’t get the right to vote in federal elections in Switzerland until 1971.

  Through contact with guests I overcame my introversion. I asked questions, another American trait. “What part of Germany are you from?”

  “From Danzig, but we live in Bremen now,” replied the well-groomed German man. He and his wife lingered over coffee after breakfast, and I sensed they welcomed conversation with me.

  “Like Günter Grass?” I hadn’t read The Tin Drum, or anything by Günter Grass, for that matter, but I pretended to have read certain books, partly as self-inflation and partly to connect with people.

  “Yes,” said the wife, “we were refugees too.”

  “My mother was from Breslau.” We used the German names for cities that were ceded to Poland after the war. The names were code words of loss. “I’ve never been to northern Germany,” I continued.

  The husband smiled. “You must go to Bremen someday. The bombs spared the beautiful medieval center, called the schnoor because the houses appear as on a winding piece of thread.” After World War II, most German cities were rebuilt from complete ruins with numbing similarity: pedestrian market centers with crisp cobblestones, white curbs, and gleaming churches. Perhaps the German guests liked me because they, too, were irritated by Swiss superiority, Swiss confidence that everything can be managed, including the avoidance of conflict.

  I’d had plenty of jobs—cleaning houses, secretarial work, cooking—but until that winter I’d never had a job requiring me to bifurcate myself so strongly. I enjoyed my ability to charm guests and read their psyches. But the moment I left the energy of the dining room I deflated; I was a life raft with the air let out. I kept reminding myself that the winter wouldn’t last forever. American psychologist Angela Duckworth argues that “grit” gears someone for success. Her signs of grit—such as accountability and perseverance—are standard German behavior. My double consciousness resonated in other ways. The American Revolution, of course, was a bourgeois revolution, one whose progressive values I had absorbed, but in lockstep with the German value of reliability, where one does not dream of “blowing off” a responsibility or a rendezvous. Between my American optimism and my German determination, I didn’t consider quitting.

  Years later an American friend of mine would marry a wealthy man, so wealthy he’d never shopped for his own clothes—wardrobes were brought to his parents’ New York apartment for him to choose from. For the first time, being married to my middle-class friend, he was obliged to carry money. Each night, he threw his change into the trash. This appalled me, and I jokingly offered to come pick it out, but my friend said that when her husband wasn’t looking, she did exactly this. Their marriage, containing such different values, was doomed.

  Perhaps those who have to face real conditions of life—to use Marx’s criterion for the bourgeoisie—are happier. Where does one’s sense of self come from, if not from something one has made or done or earned? Eventually one must realize, Emerson writes, that “no kernel of nourishing corn can come to [a person] but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.” The statement applies to people who can and want to toil. Others happily consume corn without toiling. I hadn’t yet identified my plot of ground, but I did toil, good practice for the future.

  Frau Steffen economized by hiring three seasonal waitresses instead of four. I saw that this could increase my tips. Most people rounded up the bill, leaving twenty francs for a bill of nineteen. Each night in my pine-paneled room, I stacked the small half-franc silver coins pressed with garlands and the word Helvetia and a statue that reminded me of Liberty. I admired the hundred-franc note with Borromini on it. He was born in Ticino, but his most famous buildings were in Rome, the city Ursula and I decided to visit after my season’s work. The self-taught Borromini created buildings that convey spontaneous emotion, in part via trompe l’oeil, making apparently moving façades or corridors that looked longer than they were. I’d studied and visited Borromini’s buildings: Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the church of the University of Rome, with its oval chapel, and San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, a tiny jewel of a church with a serpentine façade. On my first visit to San Carlino, the octogenarian caretaker led my friend and me to the cloister, stopping to pick two blood oranges from courtyard trees. It was the first time I’d ever eaten an orange straight from
a tree, and the red interior, only hinted at by the ruddy skin, was another surprise. In Italy the exterior does not have to match the interior, a variation on la bella figura. The appearance is the reality. Every time a hundred-franc note passed through my fingers, I imagined myself drinking blood orange juice in the Piazza Navona, wearing short sleeves in the sun in a city where work is less important than art.

  In his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen writes, “Higher learning remained in some sense a by-product or by-occupation of the priestly classes.” My art history reading was not economically useful, but I’d been indoctrinated into a religion of style. Ironically, much of the art I’d studied was commissioned because of religious fervor. My parsimony had a higher purpose, I told myself, as I served food that I knew to be mediocre.

  The Eigerblick house specialty was Geschnetzeltes (“chopped up”) Hong Kong, sautéed pork bits with canned fruit cocktail and a curried cream sauce, served with rice and garnished with a Chinese paper umbrella. I felt ashamed to serve it, the heavy cream, the curry powder, the canned maraschino cherries in the cocktail, a mishmash of Indian and Chinese and Swiss. Herr Steffen’s cooking was untrained and unrefined. But the cheese fondue, made with Fribourger vacherin and gruyère, was heavenly, a treat we were permitted only on Christmas Eve, when the dining room was closed. Walking into a cheese store and smelling a whiff of that raw, wholesome, yet slightly putrid smell brings it all back.

  The Swiss probably drink more milk and eat more gooey melted cheese—including in raclette, where melted cheese is scraped onto boiled potatoes—than other Europeans. There’s even Rivella, a sparkling soft drink made from whey. Dairy products contain casomorphins that some people say act like opiates. Rather than being drugged into complacency, however, the Swiss are hypervigilant. Every man between the ages of twenty and forty is a soldier, required to retrain annually. There are enough nuclear fallout shelters for each inhabitant and tons of stockpiled explosives. Were the country to be invaded at any of its three thousand points of entry—bridges or roads or tunnels—those points could be blasted to smithereens by a centralized command.