by lize Spit
“Did you know that a girl’s clam tastes like salt?” Pim asks.
“How do you know that?”
“Like a mouthful of seawater. Sometimes the North Sea, sometimes the Atlantic.”
Neither Pim nor Laurens has ever swum in the Atlantic Ocean. I know that for a fact. None of us have ever been farther than the Netherlands or France. It was something we used to be proud of—since we’d never been anywhere, we were allowed to use the school computers to search for images.
In fifth grade, we had a pop quiz in geography. I couldn’t identify Belgium on a map of Europe and got a zero. I was the only one in the class who didn’t have a TV at home. The teacher decided to give me a second chance. She gave me two weeks to learn all the European countries and capitals by heart. Since I assumed that Europe was everything except America, I studied all of Africa and Asia too. The fact that I had once been so far behind means that there are certain things I know now, like that the North Sea borders the Atlantic Ocean and that it’s all the same water.
I crawl a bit closer so I can peer through the gap. Laurens and Pim are sitting side by side with their backs against the wall, across from me.
So this is what Laurens meant by “guy stuff”.
I try to be as quiet as possible, breathing softly so as not to disrupt the spectacle.
Pim looks around for a moment, then pulls a plastic bag out of a crack in the wall behind them. It’s full of magazines. One by one, he tosses them onto Laurens’s lap.
“Where did you get these?” Laurens slides his eyes down the covers and starts greedily flipping through the pages like he used to do with the toy catalogues that showed up in the mail around Christmastime.
“Does it matter? Did you bring what I told you to?”
There’s a rustling sound as Laurens digs around in the backpack beside him in the straw. He pulls out a towel and a pair of swimming trunks, a bar of chocolate and finally a small package from the butcher shop. He unwraps it carefully. Inside is a slice of dark pink pâté.
“Perfect.” Pim takes it and breaks off a piece.
“Close your eyes and open up,” he says. “Eva’ll be here at four o’clock. We have to hurry.”
“Did you really have to call her?” Laurens sighs with his eyes closed.
A knot forms in my stomach. Pim doesn’t respond.
“Open your mouth, man.”
Laurens squeezes his eyes tighter and constricts his neck, waiting for a blow. Then he opens wide. Pim places a small lump of pâté on his tongue. Then he takes the magazine on the top of the pile into his lap, flips through it until he finds the right picture, folds it in half and holds it up in front of Laurens’s face.
“What’re you doing?” Laurens mumbles with his mouth half open.
Pim presses the magazine even closer to Laurens’s lips, smothering the sound. I can’t see his face anymore.
“Let the pâté melt in your mouth, then open your eyes and move your tongue.”
Laurens does as he’s told—judging by the way he’s sitting, he’s slightly uncomfortable. He makes quiet, smacking sounds. His face is still hidden behind the magazine. The photo on the back side shows the top half of what Laurens is licking: a black woman on an orange couch.
Pim starts to laugh.
The page becomes wet and limp from all the saliva. Pim lowers it and selects a new page. Laurens pulls his tongue back in his mouth.
“Want more?”
Laurens shrugs.
“You hold it, then.” Pim drops a lump of pâté into his own mouth and chooses a page from another magazine. “So, now you know. That’s exactly how it tastes, except without the peppercorns.”
“How do you know all this?” Laurens asks.
Pim can’t quite answer the question. Probably not from his own experience.
There’s a long silence, filled with a lot of slurping and smacking. They’ve still got more than half the pâté to go, and I don’t feel like watching much more. I crawl the last few meters around the corner into the hideout. I greet the boys with the enthusiasm of someone who has just arrived.
Laurens jumps. He swallows the big chunk of pâté he’s just laid on his tongue in one gulp. He closes the magazine on his lap. Pim leaves his lying open.
“You’re early,” he says.
“Do you guys have your bathing suits on already?”
I glance at the slice of pâté. What would be less suspicious: saying something about it or ignoring it completely? I’m not sure whether the fact that they don’t feel embarrassed about it in front of me is a good sign or a bad sign. But if they really aren’t embarrassed, why hadn’t they invited me to hang out with them? I take the remaining pâté and stick it in my mouth. It tastes grainier than usual. I swallow it as fast as I can.
I pick up one of the magazines and flip through it. I stare at each photo just long enough—but not too long—though to be honest I’ve never seen anything like it up close. I get to the wet, saliva-covered page with the orange couch.
“They don’t call it a clam for nothing,” I say. “You really shouldn’t look inside though. It won’t taste so good anymore.”
Laurens is dying to rip the magazine out of my hands, but I take my time folding back the dog-eared page. Then I toss it back on the pile.
“I’m going swimming,” I announce. I crawl out of the fort and back down the ladder.
I wait by the barn doors, heart pounding, listening for them to come down after me.
I float around in the swimming pool. It’s awfully quiet around here for a dairy farm.
In the farthest stall to the right, Jan would often take a break from shoveling cow feed, one hand on the end of the shovel, the other picking at pimples on his face. I could always feel him watching me, which I liked and didn’t like at the same time, the way I feel when somebody points a camera at me. I never know what about me is worth taking a picture of, or if I should pose differently.
One time he said to me, “Who’d have thought you’d turn out so pretty.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Should I take a compliment from an ugly boy in overalls as an insult? What did he know about pretty?
If only I’d flashed him a smile and asked about his favorite cow.
Somebody taps me on the arm. I jump. For a second I think it’s Jan, but it’s just the nose of the inflatable dolphin floating around in the pool.
After a while, enough time to stash all the evidence in the hayloft, the boys come down the ladder. They’re laughing. They’ve got their swimming trunks on their heads. They each duck behind a different tractor to change clothes.
Maybe things aren’t so bad between us after all.
“I invented a new game,” shouts Pim. “It’s called Rodeo Dolphin.” He climbs up the ladder on the side of the pool and sticks his toes into the water. Since Laurens considers himself too old for rules, we just start playing. We take turns trying to mount the dolphin floating in the pool. It’s not so easy. The animal tips back and forth as we try to clamber on top of it, creating wild waves. Liters of water splash over the edge of the pool. I’m the last one to give it a go. When I push up off the bottom, the tip of my tampon slides out, and it immediately fills up with water. Even still, I manage to tame the dolphin—probably not because I’m any good at it, but because Laurens and Pim are already bored with the game.
“Time to go home.” Laurens’s family eats dinner earlier than mine and Pim’s. It’s always been that way. The kids in primary school were always divided into two categories. The ones who could only play from two to five, and the ones who could stay out until six.
Pim and I always had to be home by six, Laurens by five-thirty. That’s when his mom was done with work. Laurens would pick out something from the display case, and she’d cook it for dinner.
The rule was: six o’clock kids play with other six o’clock kids, that way no time was wasted. But Pim and I didn’t abandon Laurens. Most of the time we followed him home so we could spend the last
half-hour together. If we were lucky, his mom would toss a steak in the pan for us too.
Today, Pim has no intention of spending the last half-hour with Laurens, and Laurens doesn’t ask him to. I dry off and pull my clothes on over my bathing suit. Pim stays in the water. His chest hairs have lost their curl. They’re straight on his chest, as if they’ve been combed down with gel.
Laurens and I bike home side by side. You can see the outline of my wet bathing suit on my clothes.
Little drops run down my bike seat and thighs. I hope it’s water, not blood. It must be, otherwise Laurens would have given me a weird look.
“Do you remember when we used to go swimming at the Pit with Jan?” he asks.
I’m glad he’s bringing up Jan. It’s strange that Pim didn’t say a single word about his brother all day.
Of course I remember. When they built the E313 twenty years ago, they dug a deep pit, roughly two hundred meters in diameter, on the edge of town so they could raise the highway. Over time, it filled up with rainwater and the trees and ferns grew around it. It was the perfect place to cool off on a hot day.
Pim’s mom wouldn’t let Pim go swimming there by himself until he’d earned his fifteen-hundred-meter swim certificate, so she sent Jan with us.
In third grade, after all three of us had passed the two-hundred-meter test, Laurens and Pim insisted we swim across the Pit. I reminded them of what Pim’s mom said: “There might be whirlpools that will suck you down.”
But the boys were undeterred. Jan dove in after them, and I couldn’t stand to be left behind. The first hundred meters were no problem—I even pulled ahead a few times.
“Now we’re officially in the deepest part,” Laurens said when we reached the halfway point.
“If you built a four-story building on the bottom here, the roof would still be under water. No one has ever touched the bottom before.”
At that, Jan took two deep breaths and disappeared under the water. I held my breath too.
We waited, treading water. I counted the seconds, the number of strokes he had to make: the height of an attic, a bedroom, a living room, a basement.
The surface of the water was completely still, except for the pond skaters and the ripples we created. Pim’s eyes darted skittishly back and forth. In the distance, we saw something move.
“A flesh-eating turtle,” Pim said.
Laurens swam between us.
My legs started to feel heavy. Both banks were equally far away. At this point, giving up would be as hard as persevering. Suddenly two hands emerged from the water. Then, Jan’s curls, his forehead. He shot out of the water with a huge splash, clutching a fistful of sand from the bottom. His heart pounding in his fingertips.
I was so relieved that my muscles stopped aching for a moment.
“Ready for the second half?” Jan asked. The question was primarily addressed to me. I didn’t react. I had to save my strength. Jan swam ahead of us, trying to keep the handful of sand above the water. Pretty soon, the boys were way ahead of us. The faster I tried to swim, the farther away the shore seemed. Laurens and Pim were ten meters ahead of me, and Jan was between us. I focused on my breaststroke, on opening and closing my fingers at the right moment. The others were swimming farther and farther away. I couldn’t tell whether the water was cold or warm anymore. It started to feel less and less necessary to keep going.
When I was about fifty meters from the first branches hanging over the water, I lost sight of everything around me. I heard murmuring and splashing and thought about all the things at home I’d leave behind. The sandwich box that had been sitting in my backpack all summer. My seat at the kitchen table. My underwear in the laundry basket. Which of the three boys would remember to pick up my towel and clothes on the other side and take them home tonight? Water splashes into my mouth, I start choking. My ears fill with water.
Suddenly, something pulls me down. For a second, the force works against me, but then it propels me forward a few meters. At first, I thought I was caught in a whirlpool or had been bitten by a flesh-eating turtle. Where was Jan? I sputtered and flailed until two big hands grabbed me by the ankles and a wave of calm came over me.
Jan was swimming behind me, pushing me along. His skin was warmer than the water. I didn’t resist.
Laurens and Pim were way ahead of us, going for the final sprint. When they reached the shore, Jan let go of me and swam ahead. But Laurens and Pim didn’t look back. I ended in last place but hadn’t lost anything.
Clam
CONTRARY TO EVERYONE’S expectations, the side class worked out pretty well for four years. Teachers found ways to teach two grade levels at the same time. Usually they’d go over the material and put the rest of the class to work and then come over to me, Laurens and Pim to explain what we needed to know and what we had to do extra, which was usually some kind of additional reading sheet with adapted assignments and questions.
We spent a lot of time waiting around for instructions, but we never complained because it gave us time to chat. It was me who turned it into a kind of motto: “down time at school is more time together”. But this one never caught on like “one for all”.
It was on a Friday afternoon in fourth grade that the side class became a problem for the first time. On our way back from the playground, we sauntered back into class. The room looked like it always did after recess, like a bomb had gone off but no one had been hurt. Pens, crayons, open bookbags, cookie wrappers, piles of notebooks, sloppily folded paper planes. But on this particular day, the chalkboard at the front of the classroom next to the map of Belgium was smaller than usual. It had been folded shut and standing beside it with his back against the white wall was Mr. Rudy, his face bright red. It didn’t take long for the class to start whispering.
Mr. Rudy ordered everyone to have a seat, and contrary to habit, he turned to us, the side class, first. He sent us over to the reading corner, behind the bookcase, and told us to sit down and keep quiet. We were each given a book and a set of headphones.
All the other students waited around bored until Mr. Rudy was done explaining our assignment. For the first time, the order of operations was reversed. Thus, when Mr. Rudy tried to explain the difference between not needing to absorb something and not being supposed to absorb something, we pretended not to understand. As the noise in the classroom increased, he repeated the instructions three times.
“Listen to the story, then complete the crossword puzzle. This will be graded.”
“How many points?” Pim asked.
Rudy glanced at the worksheet he had just given us.
“Thirty. It won’t count on your report card.”
“What does it count for, then?” Laurens asked.
“Just complete the assignment the best you can and hand it in by the end of the day.” Rudy returned to the front of the class, urging the rest of the students to quiet down. We put on the headphones, pressed play, and hunched over our worksheets—but kept our eyes glued to the chalkboard.
Back at the front of the class, Rudy nonchalantly unfolded the side panels. Inside was a drawing of a diagram shaped like a half-open clam.
Behind the voice reading into our ears, we heard the class grow quiet. Laurens and Pim stopped taking notes and exchanged looks.
“Who knows where the urethra is located? That’s where your pee comes out. Who can circle it here on the board?” Rudy handed the chalk to the first girl who dared to look up. Pim and Laurens turned the volume on their headphones all the way down.
That afternoon, on our way home from school, they rattled on in high, excited voices.
“Just because we’re a year younger doesn’t mean we don’t know how things work!”
“What does that Miss Rudy think? That we don’t know what a pee hole is for?” Laurens exclaimed.
“Come on, you’ve eaten clams before.” After a prudish childhood out on the farm, Pim had only recently discovered that women didn’t have udders.
The rest of t
he way home, they laughed about how when Rudy asked the class who had ever used a tampon to light a campfire, he was the only one to raise his hand.
I biked alongside them, following their conversation, but had nothing to add. The lesson about the male reproductive organs wasn’t until next week.
I felt dirty. Mr. Rudy had touched the thing I’d kept hidden all those years at least twenty times with his chalk.
10:30 a.m.
THE EXIT TO Bovenmeer consists of a dangerously sharp hairpin turn, marked with blinking red arrows. Before they installed these arrows in ’98, there were all kinds of accidents here. They happened so often that the people who lived behind the curve, a couple who raised pigeons, would come out on icy days with their folding chairs and a thermos full of coffee in the hopes of becoming the first people since World War II to witness something truly tragic.
As I turn off the exit ramp, the Curver slides to one side. The handle breaks off, catapulting a shard of plastic against my windshield. I can’t lose control of the car now, not today. I’d end up the subject of some sensational headline in the Antwerp Gazette. “Young Bovenmeer woman crashes with block of ice in trunk.”
That would be a real head-scratcher for the people waiting in line at the supermarket. They’d then proceed to fill in the story with half-truths. I can picture them, those people, their faces, I can just hear the self-satisfaction in their voices.
“Eva had been living in Brussels for years, but she was always one of us.” “Her sister wasn’t all there either.” “Her brother sent her money every month that she never did anything with, y’know, she should’ve spent it on winter tires.” “Nine years, that’s how long it’d been since she last visited her parents, and then, right before the family was reunited—bam!” And: “The ice hit the back of her head so hard that they needed a passport to identify the person in the vehicle.”