by lize Spit
My breasts aren’t round and heavy like the other girls’. They’re pointy and stick out straight. How can I let them know they’re welcome to stay?
I wrangle the tank top back into place and lie in bed until ten-thirty. I hear lawnmowers, church bells, the neighbors coming home from shopping, an airplane, a scrap-metal collector so wrapped up in roaring unintelligible announcements into an overpowered megaphone that he doesn’t even notice the riches flying overhead.
As I glance over at Tessie’s bed, at her thin bedsheet folded symmetrically in the shape of an open envelope, I feel indecisive and shapeless.
Before I walk into the kitchen, I can already tell Dad’s in there. The smell of tobacco follows him wherever he goes.
Recently, I read that the amount of money a smoker spends on cigarettes each year is enough to pay for an entire vacation. No one had researched whether some people smoke so as not to have to take the family on vacation.
The remnants of breakfast are still on the table. Bread, chocolate spread, syrup.
“Your mother went to the Farmers’ Union to get dog food. Jolan left early to go bird-watching,” Dad says without looking up. He’s sitting at the table reading the newspaper with a ballpoint pen. There’s nothing worth underlining today.
I can choose not to have breakfast, but it won’t make any difference; Dad won’t mention what happened the other day, he’s not one to bring up the past the next morning. He always needs a little push.
I pull up a chair. He doesn’t even look up. Beside him on the table is a neon-green lice comb and an open tissue covered in brownish red spots—little squished bodies and a couple of wiry hairs with nits on them.
“Where’s Tessie?” I ask.
Dad clicks his dentures in and out of his mouth. “Somewhere,” he mutters, but without his front teeth, it sounds more like “nowhere”. I take a slice of bread and slather it with syrup. Still, Dad doesn’t ask what I’m having: “Bread with syrup or syrup with bread?”
He stops fiddling with his teeth and looks at my hair and neck. I lay down my knife and pick up the bread; the soft center sags under the weight of the syrup. His eyes sink down lower and rest on my arms. The longer he looks, the heavier they get.
Even on the hottest days, I still wear long sleeves. The only people who never say anything about it are Laurens and Pim. I haven’t worn short sleeves in three years. The last time I did, I didn’t feel light and free—I just felt naked.
Dad’s eyes sink even lower, to my midsection, then climb back up to his newspaper. He takes a sip of lukewarm tea.
“That sweater shows off those little titties you’re getting,” he says.
I fold the bread in half. The next bite sticks to the top of my mouth. It doesn’t taste like pear syrup anymore. I don’t dare to swallow it until the phone rings.
I can tell by the three-second delay that it’s Pim. Those three seconds have always been there, giving me just enough time to feel ashamed of everything I’ve ever told him about myself. Three seconds is long enough to remember anything you want. Though it’s probably just the amount of time it takes for the sound to travel through the long, thin telephone cables connecting our houses.
“Hi, Pim,” I say, before he can get a word out.
“Me and Laurens are going to go check out the old school today,” he says. His voice sounds hoarse. I don’t know if that’s because it’s changing or because there’s a lump in his throat. “It was Laurens’s idea, but you can come if you want.”
“When?” I ask.
“Right now,” he says.
“Want me to stop by your house on the way?” I ask. “Oh and Laurens said you got a Honda? Is that true?”
Pim doesn’t answer for a moment.
“The Honda’s not running,” he says finally. “Come by if you want, whatever.”
I head to the primary school, following the same route I used to take two years ago, with the little detour along the farm. Pim lives on the edge of town like me, but on the other side. If you were to draw a line between our houses, you’d see that it actually runs perpendicular to the axis between Laurens’s butcher shop and the school, but I don’t mind the detour. It makes more sense for me than it does for Pim.
When I was younger, I had to fill up a whole water bottle just to bike these two kilometers. Now that I have to pedal twenty-four kilometers a day to and from my new high school, our town seems laughably small and the primary school ridiculously close by.
As I’m leaving the Bulksteeg, I pass a sign Dad made that reads NO PUBLIC URINATION PROHIBITED.
Of course, they know it’s not right, that the NO cancels out the PROHIBITED. They aren’t stupid, I know that, but every time I bike by it, I hope that the neighbors will give them the same benefit of the doubt.
When my parents bought this house, the Bulksteeg was nothing but a dirt road along the edge of three backyards that also happened to connect the highway exit to the town. The path runs right between our hedged garden and the neighbors’ field. Not long ago, when they were repaving the main roads, the city workers started dumping the leftover tar here. Meter by meter, the path became hard and permanent, good enough for cut-through traffic. Even though there are three perfectly good backyards along the road, people still prefer to piss in our hedge.
Once I’ve reached the end of the Bulksteeg, I have to bike down the busiest road in town. The speed limit is seventy kilometers an hour, but hardly anyone sticks to it. By now I can guess how fast the cars are going from my bed. When school’s out, people tend to drive slower.
Beside me, on the surface of the road, is my shadow, a ghost that never leaves my side and is slowly taking on a different shape. I already started noticing it last school year. Certain clothes were getting too tight, my tops didn’t fit anymore, pants were getting harder and harder to button. For a while, my nipples were red and hot. Hard disks emerged beneath them. Eventually they let go of my ribs to make room for something to grow in between, something softer. I could feel things changing from one day to the next and didn’t know what order it was happening in: was it that they suddenly showed up or that I was suddenly aware of them? Now, thanks to Dad’s comment, they’re not just mine anymore; they symbolize a major, lasting change.
I’ve almost reached Pim’s house. The farm is set back from the street. The driveway is about twenty meters long and leads to the main barn, which is big enough for the heavy machinery, combines, horse carts, and herds of cows.
Nearly lost in the wide strip of asphalt is a doormat. The word “Welcome” is almost completely worn away. Maybe I can still read it because this house used to be like a second home to me.
I’ve barely spoken to Pim since Jan’s funeral. He hasn’t come to any of the parish parties, and no one has birthday parties anymore. I’ve walked past the farm a few times with our dog, but I never dared to ring the doorbell. I’d always end up walking away, telling myself that the silence between us didn’t have to mean anything. We couldn’t talk about an end until at least the summer was over.
I gaze down the long driveway looking for a sign of life.
For the first time, the path doesn’t bridge a distance but an emptiness. Pim isn’t waiting with his bike in the front yard like he used to, when I’d come get him for school. I don’t dare to just walk up to the back door, so I follow the stone path to the front door, which, until last summer, I’d always assumed was purely ornamental, a door that was never meant to be opened and had thus been installed without hinges. The front yard is overgrown with those purplish white flowers that smell like pee. I could already smell them three houses away. The paving stones from the street to the front door were laid so haphazardly that the path might as well have been created by nature itself.
Just as I ring the doorbell, Pim appears in the driveway. First his front wheel, then his head.
“The doorbell doesn’t work,” he shouts. “You should know that by now.”
He stands up on his pedals and bikes slowly until I
’m back on my bike. Before I can catch up with him, he puts all his weight into the pedals and shoots off ahead of me onto the street.
The distance is exactly one kilometer. We knew that because one of our primary school teachers, Miss Ria, had demonstrated it once in a geography lesson. She marched us all out to the playground with a meterstick, and, after a thousand spins of the stick, we ended up at the farm. This left a deep impression on me. After that, for every distance I travelled, I’d count how many meterstick spins would fit into it, and after every kilometer I thought, I could have been at the farm by now.
Bike rides are always faster with Pim. He stays right in front of me, and whenever I try to catch up, he pulls ahead again.
His thick blond curls flutter in the wind. Pim has the kind of hair that everyone wants. Whether that’s because people always want someone else’s hair or because it’s actually handsome is hard to say.
Pim isn’t carrying a backpack. Neither am I. He’s the type of person who makes sure that other people bring whatever he needs. He was already like that in primary school, always asking me for sheets of graph paper and borrowing Laurens’s markers. I watch his wiry ankles crank up and down on either side of his chain guard. Suddenly, I notice he’s wearing his socks inside out; the print is an indiscernible tangle of threads. It’s possible he’s been wearing them for a few days now, that he’s turned them inside out to avoid having to wash them.
The back of Pim’s head doesn’t betray his thoughts or feelings. He just keeps pedaling. Perhaps with a bit too much determination for someone who just lost his brother six months ago.
After a few minutes, I stop trying to keep up with him.
It would take a while to catch up anyway. Maybe it doesn’t matter. We’ve still got the whole summer ahead of us. Off in the distance, I see Laurens, the savior and spoilsport. He’s waiting in the butcher shop parking lot with his bike next to a sign that says, “Summer deal—all BBQ meat buy 2 get 1 free!”
Laurens is easy to spot from afar: broad shoulders, big nose, a prime filet. He moves clumsily. There’s a certain sloppiness about him, like a kid stuck with a tedious chore who tries to do it as badly as possible in the hope that his mother will eventually just take over.
“Hey guys,” he says. He’s wearing socks with the days of the week embroidered on the cuffs. On the right foot it’s only Monday, and on the left foot it’s already Friday. He shifts his gears, searching for the slowest, heaviest gear possible.
Pim doesn’t slow down, so Laurens pedals at top speed until he catches up to us. In the meantime, I’ve caught up to Pim as well, but when Laurens gets there our formation changes. We no longer fit on the narrow bike path with all the low-hanging branches. We’re an odd number, so somebody’s got to fall back. Pim doesn’t care who he bikes with, he’d rather bike alone. We can see that—he was that way before too, which is why he’d always end up in the middle, as long as the road was wide enough. He accelerates once again so he can pass us. Laurens chases after him. I follow behind.
On the left, Pim pedals in the lowest gear; on the right, Laurens, in the highest. It’s almost as if they’re communicating, even without words.
Every time Laurens turns his head to look at Pim, I can see the cut under his nose where the bungee cord around the rear rack of his bike smacked him in the face the day I left him behind at school last week. It seems to be healing up nicely. The scab has come off on one side. It’s almost perpendicular on his face, like a misplaced wing.
Pim slaloms out ahead of us across the playground; the loose paving stones clatter under his tires. He tries not to touch the lines on the hopscotch grids. I maneuver around the sewer that used to serve as a two-dimensional jail.
Pim manages to stop without hitting the brakes by running his front wheel into the red brick wall under the awning.
Without any kids, the school is nothing more than a building. One of the wings is home to two nuns, who, as the school’s original founders, are allowed to keep living on the premises. Other than watering the purple flowers on the playground, they don’t serve much purpose anymore.
Back when we went to school here, there was a third, over-zealous nun living on the property. She used to make sandwiches for the kids who forgot their lunch, so we would all forget our lunch on purpose just to keep her busy—even Laurens, who was extremely attached to the bag lunches his mother prepared for him. His mom always packed cookies in threes, probably thinking that Laurens would share them with me and Pim, but he never did.
Laurens and I do more or less the same tricks as Pim and then pull up on either side of him on our bikes, right in front of the big front window. Through the frosted glass we can make out our empty sixth-grade classroom.
The furniture has been sorted: desks pushed to the left, chairs stacked on the right. I recognize my old desk, with its battered top, a little lighter than the other ones, safely tucked away beside Miss Emma’s dark, heavy teacher’s desk, leg to leg.
The classroom looks just like it did on our last day of school. Someone had tried their best to transform it into a dance floor. It pains me to see it because I can’t help but think of how Miss Emma presented the goodbye party to us—“a one-time privilege for three musketeers she was really going to miss”—and how I subsequently managed to ruin her life.
Pim quickly discovers that the gym door is unlocked, which isn’t that unusual—in Bovenmeer burglars are scared off with hospitality. We walk right into the building, without sneaking through any windows, without scaling any walls, without really knowing what we’re doing here.
Laurens skips sideways around the room, pulling his knees up one after the other in sharp movements, like we used to do in Mr. Joris’s gym class. Mr. Joris was this demanding old man in a tracksuit who no one believed could actually do the exercises he assigned, so we never bothered to perform them to the expected level of perfection.
Pim breaks into a run and hurls himself into the thick mats propped up sideways against the wall. They fall to the floor with a loud smack, first the soft middle, then the edges with a few seconds’ delay, like the corners of a mouth after flashing a fake smile.
We set up a game using the most dangerous equipment we can find, the stuff Mr. Joris never let us use. We run and jump on the springboard, over the leather pommel horse, onto one trampoline, onto another trampoline, finishing with a flip onto the soft, thick mat.
“Cool, an obstacle course,” I say.
“No, this is way cooler than an obstacle course,” Pim says.
All of a sudden, the bell rings. Long and shrill, scaring us to death. If this were a school day, this would be the start of a fifteen-minute recess. Today we could hang out in the halls forever; no one, not even a nun, would catch us.
Pim flops onto the mat and stays there. I launch a failed cartwheel and land next to him. He plucks his sweaty T-shirt with his thumb and forefinger, releasing a breeze as the cotton falls to his chest. I love the sour smell of his sweat. This is what Jan’s must have smelled like too.
I lie on my back, my T-shirt clinging to my body as well. I see Pim eyeing the bulges under my shirt, which doesn’t really bother me, but then I remember how Dad described them this morning—as “titties” not “breasts”—and in Pim’s eyes, I suddenly realize what he meant: I don’t actually have breasts yet. These are just half-breasts, putting me somewhere between having and not having.
“What do you guys wanna do?” I ask. I glance at Laurens, but I’m not hoping for an answer from him.
“I gotta go home,” Pim says. “I’m going to Lier.”
“What are you going do in Lier?” Laurens asks.
“Visit my mom at my aunt’s.”
“How is your mom?” I ask.
“Bad.”
Even Laurens shuts up after that.
Pim gets up without a word and heads outside to his bike. He speeds off across the playground. Laurens and I watch him until he reaches the old monastery and the back of his head shrinks to a dot
and disappears.
“You can’t tell by looking at him,” Laurens says.
“No,” I reply. “What did you expect to see?”
“Just . . . you know.”
The set-up in the gym that had seemed so dangerous a half-hour ago now looks like a pile of junk.
For a split second, but just long enough, I’m able to get a good look at the cut on Laurens’s face. From a certain angle, I can see what’s under the scab. I take a quick, cautious look, like when you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be.
The healed skin is pink and shiny.
We push the pommel horse against the wall and put all the other stuff back where it belongs.
“I’m gonna head home too,” Laurens says.
I lean against a wooden bench propped up on the wall bars like a slide and watch him shuffle across the playground, throw his leg over his bike, and pedal away. I stay there until he too has shrunk to a dot—only because I’d feel bad if he somehow found out that I’d watched Pim and not him.
After Laurens is finally gone, I wander around the room. Everything has been returned to its place, as if this afternoon never happened. The sky above the playground drifts by angrily. The clock on the wall in the gym ticks tirelessly on. The bell rings again. I don’t know whether it’s announcing the beginning or the end of something.
Three Musketeers
IN THE SUMMER of 1993, right before Laurens, Pim and I finished pre-school and started kindergarten, a letter was sent around to all of the teachers at the primary school and our six parents: a meeting had been planned, and their presence was required.
In the meeting, Beatrice, the school principal, got right to the point: How was it possible that only three babies were born in 1988? Was it the cold winter, the hot summer, the black Monday the previous October that made couples take it easy in the bedroom for a while? Why were so few children born that year? Her school was the smallest in the region, with an average class size of ten (one of its greatest assets in her opinion), but—and perhaps she pushed her glasses up her nose to show there was no point fighting it—no one was going to lift a finger for so few children.