Lilfa

It’s not like I was expecting a ticker-taped parade upon my return home from Munich. Not a parade at all, really. Just my family, encircling me with their arms and questions about my trip. Maybe someone would think to devil some eggs. Something.

The boys were out on their bikes, which was fine. A gift in and of itself, actually. This is what boys should do.

But to find my wife in the middle of it, in the kitchen, no less, Tupperware vessels strewn about, the lids higgledy piggledy, she herself knee-deep in what had been neatly (or at least neatly enough) hidden from view in our lower cabinets!

“I know it doesn’t look like I’ve been working on this, but I promise you, I have,” she said instead of “hello.”

Is that a greeting, where she comes from?

It just seemed so banal, so American. Fresh from five days in Europe, I could see it all so clearly now. My wife, whom in our culture was supposed to serve as a kind of soulmate, appeared plain. As if she was from the plains, certainly not the Alps or even the Bavarian Alps, which, only two days before, I’d been surveying from a dangling gondola, surrounded by creatives and worldly types.

She handed me a midsized plastic container. “Could you please find the lid to this, how was your trip,” she said, as if the two were somehow linked. “I’m going out of my mind.”

“What?” I replied. “Did you ask about my trip? Well, thanks! It was great!”

“No need to take that tone.”

“There is no tone.”

“Hmmm.”

Already sizing me up. Assuming she knew everything that was going on in my now-expanded mind.

“Munchen is a fine city,” I said.

“Munchen. You mean Munich?”

“Munich is just the Americanized term. If you said it that way there, they’d…”

“Throw you into the ovens?”

“Right. They’re all a bunch of Nazis.”

“Well, I guess I shouldn’t go there then.”

No, she shouldn’t, I thought. They’d see her immediately for what she is. And schun her.

“You should go there,” I said, insincerely.

“I don’t have time to go on a five-day beer binge.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, not quite as insincerely.

“You didn’t drink beer?”

As if the essence of the trip could be summed up in such crude terminology. She was clueless, this maiden of Tupperwares, this drab figure whom, not so far back in our history, might be referred to as a fishwife.

“I drank beer. It was Octoberfest. An important cultural event in that region.”

“You could have accomplished the same thing by going to Schtufelweiss. For a lot less.”

“‘Schtufelweiss!” I spat, careful to correct her pronunciation. “That hellish facsimile? Drinking the piss they call pilsner there?”

I was offended. Schtufelweiss is a town fifty miles north of where we lived that fancied itself some kind of Deutsch Haven of the American South, of all places. People there, even the residents, god help them, said “Germany” instead of “Deutschland.” Bunch of Bunsly-bergers.

“Well, I guess once you’ve spent five days in Munchland you’re too good for Schtufelweiss.” So much venom in her voice. An uncultured viper.

“Okay,” I said, and went to pull from the car the gifts I’d bought everyone im dem Deutschland. The boys loved their hats. My wife didn’t even try on her Dirndl. Probably worried her boobs, previously sagging and morose, would jut so far out of her neckline I’d want to have intimacies with her. I should have spent extra and gotten the drawstring.

Dirk, my older boy, had to be scolded three times for marching around in his red fedora, doing a kind of Nazi salute while goosestepping and growling, “Sig heil! Sig heil!” It really was kind of funny, so I left the reprimanding to Sandy. It can damage a child to spank while laughing.

I sure wanted to spank Lilfa, who knew how to wear a Dirndl, that’s for sure, and seemed to welcome any consequence. Lilfa had first been spied by me in the English Garden, a wooded park where anyone, even kids, could just wander in and purchase beers from all over the world, and sip them at picnic tables like civilized adults. She dirndled around as if floating. Drunken Bergers parted in her presence, all craning for better looks. I stood on a picnic table — which I’m not proud of, but I’d had quite a few by then.

When I later discovered she worked as a barmaid in the Bitburger tent on Oktoberfest grounds, I urged my mates, as I was calling them by then, to stay with me there, just so I could ogle.

She gripped something like ten steins with each fist, something causing me some tightness you-know-where upon first view, then sent me into vivid dream scenarios, each of which ended triumphantly for me. Dreams were all they amounted to, alas, and I contented myself with schunkeling with my Bitburger mates. But I did detect, on at least one occasion, Lilfa eyeing me from behind the steins.

If my wife tried to carry so many steins, especially while wearing the Dirndl, she’d wobble like Joe Frazier in Manila, boxing trunks drenched with sweat and gore, finally sitting dejectedly in a corner and admitting defeat. In other words, Lilfa she ain’t!

Or wasn’t. Soon after my trip, perhaps after hearing me extol Lilfa’s strength and brilliance to a friend on the phone, she began doing workouts so early in the morning she’d return, sweaty and proud, before I’d had my first cup of Dallmayr. Five days a week she’d attend classes at Squinch, lifting, squatting and even boxing her middle-aged classmates.

She talked nonstop about it. She regaled me with more tales about that stupid class than I did my trip to Munchen. “I boxed my teacher today,” she’d gush.

“Did you hit her with uppercuts?” I’d ask, cutting her down to size, and then she’d come back, Frazier-like, with some counterpunches.

“Such a man comment.”

But, like Ali, I’d pepper her with jabs. “Doing your squats?” I’d call through her bathroom door. She’d sigh that disdainful sigh I’d come to cherish.

Discontent with my now-mundane life in the States, my thoughts turned to Deutschland and the Frau I’d left behind.

In hindsight, I see I shouldn’t have tried to contact Lilfa. But a man in a bad marriage will do many things he’s later not proud of. I knew a guy who, one time, got caught having sex with a married woman in a cemetery.

He was middle-aged. And homeless, now.

Another guy I knew — I like to think I don’t know him now — got pulled over while having relations in his car while driving. Yes, it was a dirt road. Which must have been quite stimulating, now that I really think about it. To experience such a thing with the likes of Lilfa — well, that would be etwas.

I contacted Bitburger and was able to talk to someone who told me she couldn’t divulge the names of employees at their tent at Oktoberfest. Fair enough, I said. One time, she said, an American learned the name of a barmaid at a Bitburger tent and, once home, sent her a Facebook request, and then a series of photos that got him arrested by Interpol. In one of them he made use of shards of a shattered stein to make him look like…well, I should stop there.

Wow, I said. I would never do that.

I know, mein Barchen, she said. Off corsenheimer.

Before we hung up, she did give me the number of someone who could help me, that of her best friend whom Bitburger fired because of her refusal to wear the Dirnl. I thanked her, saying it was fine, not such a big deal that I’d have to resort to that.

But then Sandy was snarky to me for an entire weekend, and I figured, what the hell. I called the best friend, got Lifla’s phone number, and drunk, called late one night.

A man answered. I asked for Lifla. “Daffen schlugen bonkerdorf?” asked a man.

“Perhaps,” I replied. It depended on a few things.

“Lochen zee forstrudenkoccher blitzen!”

I hung up. I didn’t have to take that kind of abuse.

It turned out that even Germans these days have caller ID. I wish I hadn’t called from our land line. I thought I was being sneaky.

When the irate kraut called back, it was, as you’ve probably figured out, Sandy who answered. Even with her child’s grasp of the language she was able to decipher his nonsensical Hitlerian ranting. She divined I was likely after some German Hintern. Which I had been.

I would have expected the usual demeaning comments about my unsuitability as a suitor, a barrage of insults intended to emasculate and render impotent. Instead, I got an actual barrage, jabs and right crosses to my face, and then an uppercut to my midsection that knocked the wind clear from me.

Turns out she was a combination of Ali and Frazier! I guess no one is just one thing.

Doubled over, I saw the beer stein on the counter, the commemorative one I brought home from Munchen. I clocked her with it, right in that empty head. I did not expect her to go down so quickly. In a heap, as they say.

You’re a good cellmate, and I know you won’t go blabbing this around. My case is still being bandied about by lawyers and judges, maybe even some magistrates. My boys are staying with their aunt and most likely going crazy by this time. They need my steady guidance and wisdom. Don’t make me regret spilling this to you.