Fools' Outing E-Book

Udo Staber

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 200

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

While Bernd is traveling with his wife through the Black Forest in Germany, he comes to realize that there are things hidden behind Ellen's mask that he should have dealt with much sooner. He had not torn the mask off her face for fear of embarrassing her in public and harming their children psychologically. He was a fool not to have unmasked her, he now says, sitting in the office of her psychiatrist and screaming his way out of his poisoned union with her.

Leseprobe

Fools’ Outing

Bernd is traveling with his wife through the Black Forest in Germany. Ellen’s psychiatrist had suggested that this trip would help both of them psychologically. He was wrong. Her erratic behavior on this outing makes Bernd realize that he will have to leave her, if he is to save himself and their two young children from the emotional terror she has been inflicting upon them. For too long he has played the role of supporting husband, careful not to tear the mask off Ellen’s face, he tells her psychiatrist, whereas she has no problem exposing him for his presumed inability to understand her.

Author

Udo Staber obtained his Ph.D. in organization science from Cornell University in the United States. He has held professorships at universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand. He has published numerous books and articles and has received a number of research and teaching awards. He currently lives with his wife in Stuttgart and Berlin.

More on the author: www.udostaber.com

UDO STABER

Fools’ Outing

A Novella

© 2019 Udo Staber

Cover, Illustration: Udo Staber

Verlag: tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44 / 22359 Hamburg

ISBN

Paperback

978-3-7497-5897-5

Hardcover

978-3-7497-5898-2

e-Book

978-3-7497-5899-9

All rights whatsoever in this work are strictly reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher and the author.

Our characters are the result of our conduct.

- Aristoteles

The Scream

You didn’t think this trip would be hell for me, did you? But could it have been anything other than hell? Think about this, if you are up to it. Did you really believe that going on this trip would open up new possibilities for her, that she would discover a new side of herself, something different from her anxiety-ridden existence, that up-and-down roller coaster of emotions? Consider her rage and those feelings of betrayal she carries around with her. There is a history to this, you know, and this history doesn’t disappear just because we are now in a different place or because conditions have changed. The past sets the premises for everything that happens today. In our case the premises are such that this trip would have to be a disaster. It was doomed from the beginning, it was doomed even before it started. Right here in your office it was doomed. Couldn’t you see that, the frustration, the panic, that foaming drama of self-pity?

Most everyone faces despair at some point in his life. Just look at those desolate cases you are dealing with. But if I may say this, in all humility, you have no idea what despair means if you never had to spend a whole three days with Ellen and there is no escape. I’m not talking about spending a holiday weekend with her family or going to a faculty and spouse retreat with her. I am talking about something that you so bravely announced would be a vacation. She should look forward to a “vacation from her problems,” you said. Well, this so-called vacation from her problems turned into a hell hole of problems for me, and this from the minute we stepped off the plane. What I went through every day, if you care to know, wasn’t just some nightmare from which you wake up and that’s the end of it. It wasn’t an illusion either. It was real, and it was irrefutable proof to me that I have been living with a lunatic all these years.

Driving on the Autobahn is a grueling experience when Ellen is sitting next to you and you have an argument with her that makes absolutely no sense. When she insists that you give her your undivided attention because she has something very important to say, you just want to scream, but you don’t because you think of yourself as an expert at self-control. What do you do when she starts one of her ridiculous arguments and you can’t run away? Turn on the radio to distract her? Focus on the road, but otherwise drift into unconsciousness? Try to remember what you said about using a different mental filter to block out what she is saying?

Well, Doctor, I have run out of mental filters, I have done all your assignments, I have read every book and article you recommended, and I have followed every piece of advice you gave me. You told me it helps not to use words like should, ought, and must, but where do you think Ellen will get the incentive from to stop complaining about everything under the sun if I touched her arm ever so gently and said in a soft voice: Ellen, dear, have you considered how much better you might feel if you turned on the radio and listened to Mozart for a while? You know what she’d say? She’d tell me to listen to her. Then she’d rattle off her complaints about some neighbor, or one of my colleagues, or me regarding something I had failed to do or hadn’t done properly. And whatever she is saying that’s so important that not even “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” can quiet her down, she’d throw at you in her usual diarrhea-like flood of accusations and denunciations.

When she’s like that I have always shown humanity. I have shown what you would call “strength of character.” I have carried on, hoping she’d get better someday. But do you want to know what carrying on has meant for me? Yes, I have looked out for her, I have chauffeured her from church to church, and from doctor to doctor looking for some diagnosis that explains everything. All this is living proof that I care, while I’m downplaying my own misery. But living in misery and dreaming of a life without her hanging over me is not what I want. Please don’t tell me dreaming is a good thing, that it’s the royal road to the unconscious. I don’t want to be in the unconscious, I don’t want to imagine a new life. I want to have a new life, a life on my terms for a change.

I know this sounds harsh, but when we drove from the airport to our hotel there was a moment when I imagined how I would feel if I would pull over, give her a good push out the door, and then take off, burn rubber, as they say. No, don’t worry, I would never do anything like that. I’m a civilized person, I hate violence. Even as a kid I fought with words, not with sticks. With Ellen all I do is imagine things. I imagine throwing her out of the car and I pretend feeling great when I drive off. You could say I survive on imagination. I have done this for years. One day I imagine she’ll vanish, another day I imagine she’ll get better.

But will she ever get well, Doctor? She’s like having a third child to look after. I have cancelled classes to be able to sit with her in your office, holding her hand, for Christ’s sake. If you knew how often I stay up all night, afraid she’ll have a panic attack any moment. There have been times, when I had to … Why are you grinning? I am talking about being worried sick, and you are giving me this face as if I’m a fool. Oh, it’s so clever of you to talk about strength of character, about supporting her and being patient with her, but you are not in my shoes to know what it’s like having to protect two children against a mother who abuses them and interferes in everyone’s life at home in ways that turns everything into a goddamn mess, not to mention how she interferes in my work at the university. Considering everything that has been going on, I have done pretty well, I would say, but do you think I like playing hero? You said I should take one step at a time. Well, that’s what I’ve done, for six years, lots of small steps, sometimes it had to be big steps, and look where she is now – and where it has gotten me.

In the car, when I asked myself this question, I was not the man I wanted to be, and I definitely was not a hero. I had no idea how to get out of this insanely irrational verbal fight. Some people would put a plastic bag over her head, you know. That morning, after our arrival in Germany, she wasn’t just angry, she was sheer terror. Thank you for sending a terrorist to go with me on this trip. When she is in your office and she bombards you with her grievances, you can terminate the session if it gets too much for you. But being in a car with her I am at her mercy. I can’t withdraw into anything that you so elegantly call “maintaining your personal space.” There is only the car, and she is in it, and I’m going eighty miles an hour, with cars passing us on the left and an endless line of trucks on the right. I‘m not able to shut her up, and I can’t just drop her off on the roadside, for the simple reason that there is a law in Germany that says that on the Autobahn you can’t stop to get rid of unwanted baggage.

Now, do you want to know what the argument was about? It was absurd, it was as absurd as organizing a dating club for cloistered nuns. The disagreement that started it was over something I had done in the airplane after landing, when we prepared to get off the plane. I was about to carry both our handbags down the aisle, when she yelled at me for behaving like the typical man showing off his glorious strength. She can carry her own bag, she said. I didn’t say much, she was the one talking, saying that I was insulting her, that I was taking away her dignity, and that I was offending her intelligence, as if you need intelligence to carry a ten-pound bag when you have testosterone doing the work for you. She talked loud enough for everyone around us to hear her, as if she thought these people wanted nothing more than witness a woman being abused by her husband who wants to feel “manly” by snatching her handbag.

I think it was only ten miles outside the airport when she exploded like a volcano with a million years of pressure buildup behind it. I was doing it again, she said, taking control over everything. By “everything” she meant my driving the car, that is, holding the wheel, keeping one foot on the gas pedal, and looking into the rear-view mirror every few seconds. She felt deprived of all that, the poor thing. Forgive me, Doctor, I wasn’t aware of what I had done. I should have asked her if she wanted to drive, she said. And I should have told the woman at the car rental agency, when she asked if I wanted two drivers to be registered, that she had an international driver’s license. When I retorted that she should have spoken up – sorry, I said should –, she said she had been too tired after having had to yell at me in the airplane when I took her bag.

So that is how the great fight between your hypersensitive patient and her phallic perpetrator began, and it didn’t let up until we reached Baden-Baden, the place where we spent our first night. In case you don’t know, Baden-Baden is a city where people from all over the world normally go for rest and relaxation. They take in the fresh air from all those forests surrounding that place, they stroll through the expansive city park to admire magnificent floral exhibits, and they marvel at dozens of big buildings with those impressive Belle Époque facades. Many people visit the world-renowned healing spa to indulge themselves in a whole-body massage, and afterwards they jump naked into a Roman fresco decorated pool of warm water. That’s what normal people do in Baden-Baden, but we are not normal. Ridiculous is a better word for what we are when she pulls me into an argument that makes absolutely no sense, and I end up screaming because I have run out of words.

What triggered her outburst in the car was what she saw in a car passing us. A man driving, ostensibly concentrated on the traffic around him, a woman sitting next to him half-dozing, and two children in the back seat playing games. Most people would see this as a happy family on an outing, but Ellen sees something else. “This man is driving so he can feel like a man,” she says.

“What?!” Of course I know what’s coming now.

“Oh, you know exactly what I mean.” But just to make sure there is no misunderstanding she now gives me a quick rundown on what she learned in college about the typical family constellation as it has been since the rise of domesticity. You can be in the middle of postmodern society, but the family retains the old hierarchy, she says. “It’s a fact” – you know how much she likes to speak in absolutes – “that men do the driving. You see women driving only when they are alone in the car, or with children, or with their elderly parents, but never when a man is with them.”

“Sorry, but that’s not quite true,” I say, knowing that my objection will be the start of a major quarrel. I try to distract her by pretending that I’m in a good mood. It’s August, this is the month when people go on vacation, and the weather is great, that’s the message I want to send. “But who cares? I’m just glad we have such good weather today and it’s not raining.”

“I want to discuss something important, and you want to talk about the weather? How insensitive.”

“Why? I just wanted to say that it’s much easier driving in this heavy traffic when it’s sunny and the road is dry.” Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? “Why don’t you sit back and rest. You could close your eyes and think about the nice days ahead of us.”

Notice that I don’t use words like should or must, but she is hissing at me nevertheless. “Don’t patronize me, don’t do that! I want you to take me seriously.”

Doctor, look how she talks. Nothing but directives and commands. You could think I just stuck a finger up her nose. I talk like a good friend, but she sounds like someone who works for the Mafia and the KGB at the same time. We still have some way to go, another seventy miles or so, and the battle hasn’t even taken off yet. I make her an offer: “Why don’t you let me be your chauffeur today? I don’t mind driving.”

“I don’t want to be chauffeured,” she yells. “You are making fun of women.”

“Sorry, how am I making fun of women? All I said is that you can relax, while I am driving. Close your eyes, if you want. That’s not making fun of women. Or, if you don’t want to rest, we could talk about something interesting, something more compelling than the question, who is driving, and why.”

“There you go again. I want to have a normal conversation to discuss something that’s important to me, your wife, but you know nothing better to do than make me feel like a nincompoop.”

“I’m not making you feel anything, Ellen.”

“Yes, you do. You don’t know how you come across with what you are saying. You just don’t get it.”

“What don’t I get?”

“It wouldn’t do you any harm to develop more interest in women’s issues.”

“By talking about how chauffeuring you makes you feel like a nincompoop? Sorry, but aren’t there more important things to think about when you discuss women’s issues? Gender discrimination at the workplace, for example, or violence in the family.” I mean it, Doctor. The former is a central topic in one of my courses, I could tell her about new findings. And regarding the latter I could easily come up with a few insights from sociological research on social deviance.

But there’s no stopping Ellen once she gets going. “Women not being allowed to drive is a social issue,” she says. “It’s a symptom of abuse, something that is done to women everywhere. In all central areas of life women take the backseat, when they …”

“Backseat? You are sitting in front, aren’t you?”

“Stop being sarcastic. You know exactly what I’m saying. When women are in the car, all they get to do is entertain the kids or study the roadmap.”

To this I make a comment that I know I will pay for dearly. I mean it more as a joke, not as a provocation, but maybe I do want to provoke her. She needs a little provocation every now and then. It keeps her on her toes and it gives me the feeling of having at least some control over where this argument is going. “Study the roadmap? Come on, I know that women can read, but when it comes to roadmaps, they can’t tell a highway from a railroad track.”

Geronimo is on fire now. “Oh, this is so insulting. How dare you insult me like that! You think I’m stupid? You are the stupid one in this family. Only a moron would say something like this.”

Now if you think that’s the end of it, that she said enough for me to realize that I’m a moron, because it’s true, I did say something moronic, and on purpose, you are wrong. She rants and raves for a good five minutes about the difference between knowledge and ignorance, reminding me that she had attended a women’s college, a college for intelligent women, that is. Has she ever told you that she has a degree from a college for intelligent women? Well, now you know, so you can raise the level of intelligence a notch or two when you talk to her next time.

“Sorry,” I say, trying not to sound too apologetic, “if you think the range of driving opportunities for women is an indication of their position in society, who can take you seriously?” I suggest we have a look at the next ten cars passing us, and without waiting for an answer I count how many of them have a woman in the driver seat. It’s like the educational game I used to play as a four-year-old to learn simple math, except now it’s serious, like getting everything right in one’s last confession before execution. I count three cars with women drivers. “Three cars out of ten isn’t much, but it’s significantly greater than zero. So what does that say about women’s position in society? Nothing!”

No trace of giving up. “I didn’t say that women never drive,” she barks back. “I only said that women never drive when there is a man sitting beside them.”

“But in two of those three cars a man was in the passenger seat.”

“Yes, and I bet that these men are going to take over the wheel as soon as they get a chance.”

This conversation, if you can call it that, is grotesque, I know. I decide to treat her concern as something like a research question. This might be my only chance to get to the end of it in one piece. “You bet, but you don’t know. You can’t know what these men are thinking because you only see the outcome of a decision they made. They may have had well-thought-out reasons for not driving themselves, and maybe they made their decision after they discussed it with these women.”

“I’m not going to waste my time arguing with you,” she shouts.

“But you brought this up. You said that women not being allowed to drive a car is a symptom of a social malaise, something that women experience everywhere in this world. And you want me to take you seriously. Well, I do, so let’s look at your suggestion that these two men are going to take over as soon as they get a chance. There is a lot we need to know before we can arrive at this conclusion. We need to study the actual process of making a decision, the articulation of preferences, the negotiation of competencies, the weighing of potential consequences, and much more. And most of the steps that make up a decision process are things that you cannot observe directly, so you end up speculating.”

Ellen’s logic in her answer is straightforward. “I don’t need to observe anything,” she says. “Everyone knows that men have big problems with women wanting to drive. It’s the same with my father and with Bobby.”

You should know that her mother has no particular desire to drive when her husband is with her. That’s what she told me. And her brother is a special case in just about everything. Ellen knows that, but she draws the wrong inferences from it. “You cannot infer anything from just two cases,” I say to her, “and you certainly cannot extrapolate from your family to the whole population.” I briefly explain the small-sample problem. It’s one of the dangers in sampling, when, for example, chance events are taken as typical and people arrive at distorted conclusions.

“I am not talking about some small sample. Just ask all those women who are married. If there is distortion, it’s you who is distorting things. I am talking about a fact. It’s a fact that men keep women from driving, which is what you are doing to me.”

“Oh, I see, a fact, like the fact that your mother had a jolly good time playing pretty little bunny for your father and his priest friend.”

“I am not answering this.”

“Fine, so let’s get back to the intricacies of a decision process. In those two cars, could it not be that there is something special about these men? They could be outliers, perhaps they are not real men. Real men have a problem with women. That’s what you are saying, right? A real man would never let a woman drive when he is in the car.”

Normally I’d feel ashamed for making a stupid remark like this, and for saying something I don’t believe in. But these are not normal circumstances. For a moment she is quiet, then she says: “Maybe they are not their husbands, maybe they are a friend who treats them as a human being. Husbands would never do that, but friends would. Friends are always nice, that’s why we call them friends.”

Oh, these absolutes! Always, never. Do you see what I’m up against? All those facts I have to debunk. “But a minute ago you said that these men would be taking over the wheel.”

“That was before I thought of the possibility that they are friends and not their husbands.”

“And as soon as this friend becomes her husband he shows his true face and grabs the wheel. Is that it?”

She hesitates, then says without any trace of kindness: “That’s what you would do, yes.”

“Or maybe this man is ill and that’s the reason why she is driving. She is nice to him, and he is grateful to her for that. A happy couple enjoying the warmth of the stronger one helping the weaker one.”

“He is still a man. Wait till he feels well again, then he’ll take control of the car because he …”

“Because he is a real man, right? He doesn’t want to end up in an accident, so he takes over as soon as he can. We should forgive him for this, he can’t help it, he is mentally handicapped.”

Although my eyes are fixed on the traffic ahead of us, I can sense that she is looking at me like a rattlesnake on attack, when she says: “Oh, you think you’re so clever. To you this is all just a big joke.”

“No, I’m serious. Do you really think a man who thinks this way lets his wife embarrass him in front of his male friends who most likely are just like him? Do you think he wants to be seen as some weakling who needs a woman to drive him around?”

Now you think this is ridiculous, two adult people, one with a Ph.D., the other one with a degree from a college for intelligent women, spending their vacation in a cockfight like six-year-olds arguing over who has the bigger marbles. And of course, it is ridiculous.