Talke Talks: American Angst | nd-aktuell.de

Howdy from Texas, dear readers,

When the Spaniard Pedro Almodóvar filmed “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” in 1988, he, the visionary, probably already had the Texas women of 2024 in mind. Because we’re collectively spinning our wheels here. My neighbor sends me outrageous messages about AI weapons that are supposed to kill people at random. My husband’s colleague remarks: “Anyone who lets their child run free on the playground knows no fear.” A well-off acquaintance tells of a hostage-taking in her wealthy neighborhood – the Latin American crew that was carrying out repair work in a neighboring house was taken by a rival mafia gang robbed of building materials and then chained and gagged in this same house. “Take your children with you to the toilet, even if they are teenagers, the kidnappers are lurking everywhere!” warns a woman in the local Facebook group; The consensus there is that our mall is the center of North Texas human trafficking.

My husband often has to travel for work reasons. I once had no problem spending a few days without him. I enjoyed the order that only I keep, the scented candles that only I like, the so-called girl dinner (oven cheese, bacon-wrapped dates, baguette) that only I like, art heist documentaries that are too boring for him, or reality shows that are too stupid for him. But after all the horror stories around me, I develop fears – or in modern German: Anxiety. What if our former renovation crew also pays us a visit? My husband wasn’t all that nice to them and waved around with his German spirit level. What if they come back, gag me and tear out the new floor?

So I get into the habit of locking everything when my husband is away. Once when I’m taking out the trash late in the evening, the door slams behind me, the lock clicks into place, and I’m locked out. I don’t have any keys with me, just my cell phone, which I use to scream hysterically at my husband. My husband, in turn, screams back through the baby monitor of our no-longer-baby child. My daughter should wake up and open the front door for me. He screams for 20 minutes, to no avail. She sleeps very soundly – a gift that I passed on to her and of which I am usually very proud.

Plan B is to get into the house through the window. The American window construction system is definitely inferior to the German one, which proves to be helpful in this case: I rattle all the windows, see an unlocked one, kick in the mosquito net with my foot and get into my own living room like a criminal. This is the first night I have trouble sleeping.

Then we get an alarm system: the front door key is now a thing of the past, you open and close the door in the app. Except that recently I couldn’t log into the app, especially when my husband was on a plane! I try to lock the house manually and accidentally set off the alarm and can’t turn it off. An unbearably loud warning noise rings through our home, but without waking my daughter.

The alarm company immediately calls – an unpleasantly relaxed woman tells me that I should unplug all alarm devices. Silence. It will beep again in a few minutes, warns the relaxed woman, and I should remove the batteries from the main noisemaker. For that I would need a screwdriver – for which I have to go to the garage: opening the door will trigger a new signal!

“Let’s try it manually,” the alarm woman, who strangely isn’t on the verge of a nervous breakdown, conjures up as an idea. As she explains to me how to unlock the alarm, I realize that I not only suffer from Anxiety but also from Stupidity: I had been pressing the wrong button the whole time! My husband probably explained the alarm system to me while I was watching an art heist documentary. As I hang up, the doorbell rings: Police! They wanted to check whether everything was OK, which is what they always did when the alarm was activated. Suddenly I am freed from all fear.

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