Adrift

Abstract

Adrift Erin Miller Reid (bio) When Georgeanna first arrived in Mainz, the German students assessed her shoes. She wore a pair of Reebok sneakers she'd taken great pains to keep snow white, at times even scrubbing the soles with Comet cleaning powder. "You can always know an American by their shoes," a classmate said in accented English. "They wear sneakers everywhere, not just to do sport." His English was far better than [End Page 17] Georgeanna's German, even though she was the one spending two semesters abroad. The next day she wore her brown loafers instead, complete with a shiny copper penny wedged in the slit just over the tongue. "Those shoes look like something my Oma would wear," a female classmate said with brusque German-bred honesty that Georgeanna would eventually learn to not take personally. After class, Georgeanna took a bus downtown, its wide body weaving with hisses and sighs between timber-lined buildings that hovered along narrow streets originally intended for pushcarts and wagons, never vehicles the size of single-wide mobile homes. Georgeanna stared at the bus's floor appraising the shoes of other passengers. Indeed, the elderly ladies, their wheeled produce baskets in tow, wore loafers. Georgeanna reasoned that her own penny loafers were sleeker and daintier than the heavy-soled sort West German senior citizens wore. However, she noticed that the girls closer to her age sported heels of all types—strappy and close-toed, rounded and squared, mostly sleek black and dark brown—but all with height. At the department store, Georgeanna chose a chocolate-brown pair of lace-up, platform Oxfords. She caught her heels on cracked sidewalks at first, and her ankles ached at the end of the day, but no one commented on how American she looked anymore, or how she resembled a grandmother. That was months ago. Now Georgeanna managed the sidewalks of West Germany in heels with confidence. She expertly navigated the cobblestone streets of downtown without stumbling. She raced up the stairwell when she was late for class, and climbed the library stepladder to reach books on the top shelf. Her honed skills of heel-wearing were put to the test in one of the wooded thickets tucked in and around the [End Page 18] campus. Georgeanna admired the German penchant for nature, and these woods, as small as they were, reminded her of the tree-covered hills back home in Kentucky, where the forests were dense with pines, poplars, and an underbrush of rhododendron, creeper vine, and fallen trunks that she and her siblings, Elena and P.J. spent entire days exploring as kids. Georgeanna sat down on a cement bench in the otherwise empty grove to eat an apple and write a letter to her boyfriend Trent. She took a bite of the apple, so juicy that it dripped onto her chin, and scribbled away to Trent, assuring him that despite the good time she was having and all she was learning, she still loved him and missed him. She sunk her front teeth into another mouthful of apple. The crack of the apple's crisp flesh pierced the quiet that had settled in the crop of birch trees and alders. A pigeon scuttled from under the bench and pecked at her feet. Just as Georgeanna bit a tiny morsel of apple to toss to the bird, a completely naked man emerged from the bushes. He blinked as if his eyes were adjusting to the first sun of the day. He was bald from head to toe, no hair on his head, his chest, his arms, or legs. His penis hung unadorned by even the smallest tuft. His skin was pale, like the buttermilk Georgeanna used to dunk leftover cornbread into for an afterschool snack. The Naktbader. She'd only heard about the campus nudist from other students. She'd never seen him herself. According to student lore, he was a graduate school drop-out who camped out in the nooks and crannies of the campus, ate from the cafeteria dumpster, and bathed in the central fountain at odd hours of the night. Students debated his hairless physique, whether it was self-induced...