by lize Spit
Little Head tried to peek over my shoulder into the hall. There was no one there, just the sideboard full of junk. Big Head was carrying a collapsible whiteboard on his back that stuck out over his shoulders; it was clearly hard for him to walk without letting the three legs drag on the ground. In his breast pocket was a pack of markers.
“We’re Rob and Steven,” he said without offering any clarification with his body language as to who was who.
“Is anyone home?” asked the one who looked most like a Steven. He had elongated freckles on his face and was wearing a shirt with an oval pattern. Everything on his body seemed just a little bit stretched. He reminded me of a Play-Doh sausage that was pressed too hard while being rolled.
“I am,” I said. Just then Jolan entered the scene with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass and announced that we shouldn’t wait for him for dinner. Tessie trampled in behind him wearing boots way too big for her feet. Mom had gone out to the chicken coop for the third time to check for eggs.
I could’ve just shut the door in the men’s face. Let the neighbors listen to their sales pitch for once. There was this salesman with a fat album full of aerial house photos who came to our door every year. A few weeks ago, I let him into the hallway—not out of interest, but because it was raining. I didn’t even look at the photo of our house. If I did, he would force me to buy it, I could feel it. But out of the corner of my eye, I could tell that, even from above, our yard was nothing more than a collection of half-finished projects. The white spot in the garden wasn’t a swimming pool, it was a broken freezer. Nobody in our family even noticed it anymore, including me—except from above.
A lot of people in town had these photos hanging in their entrance hall, usually for the same reason that people kept Red Cross stickers on their windshield for years to ward off vendors at stoplights. Only Laurens’s family had their aerial photo framed and proudly displayed over the meat counter. Laurens’s dad believed that the bird’s eye view of his business instilled trust. They had nothing to hide.
“Unfortunately, we can’t sell you a picture of someone else’s property,” the man replied when I asked him how much the photo of Pim’s farm would cost. Then he stomped out of the house and tore our house photos to shreds. Right before he crossed the busy road, he ran back to pick up a little scrap he’d dropped. As if I were someone who might be able to do something with it.
This time it was the whiteboard in the stocky one’s hands that compelled me to let them in, mainly because I wanted to know what he was planning to draw and whether he was the one named Rob.
“My mom’s out back,” I said, “but she’ll be in any minute.” It sounded like a lie. And it was, but it wasn’t my lie.
We had five chickens. Everybody knew that Mom knew that chickens only lay one egg every twenty-four hours, and early in the morning. Still, she went out to check on them several times a day, and every time she came back with a fresh egg in her hand. She must have a pack of store-bought eggs hidden out there somewhere, next to her box of wine.
I opened the door a little wider. The men squeezed in sideways between the wall and the sideboard, bringing the cold in with them. They pulled their pant legs forward so the pleats wouldn’t get caught on anything.
We stood in the middle of the veranda, patiently waiting for my mom. It wasn’t really a veranda. It was just a room my dad called a veranda because my mom always wanted one.
Big Head, presumably Rob, set up the whiteboard.
From where we were standing, we had a perfect view of the path leading from the back door to the garden. Nobody installed the path, it had just been trampled into the grass over time, the shortest line between two points. Our yard extended back about a hundred meters and had the same clumsy shape as Belgium, but with four bulges instead of three. In each bulge was a different kind of fruit tree, each one planted when one of us was born. They were all about two meters tall now. The fourth bulge didn’t have a tree, but it did have a bush with berries on it.
Pretty soon, Mom would show up with an egg. I pointed to the door of the chicken coop, an asphalt-plate house of cards where we used to store our bikes until the weasels and foxes became a bigger threat than bicycle thieves.
Instead of Mom, it was Tessie who appeared at the end of my index finger. Lost in thought, she walked to the back door, stopped and turned her profile in our direction. She pushed down the handle without opening the door, and then proceeded to repeat this motion several times.
Suddenly, she spit on the handle, rubbed it dry with her sleeve and started to sing. I could just make out a few of the words through the window. It was a summary of everything she’d done that day.
Big Head cleared his throat nervously.
At that, Tessie turned around. She froze at the sight of the two men in suits standing next to me in front of the window. She ran away to the farthest corner of the garden, towards the rabbit pen.
All of a sudden, I remembered a day when something similar had happened, when I went to take a couple of dripping teabags out to the compost pile and noticed the back door handle jiggling up and down, but no one came inside. I jumped to open the door, only to find it unlocked. On the other side was Tessie, gathering spit.
“Can I get anyone a glass of water?” I asked in an attempt to distract the men from Tessie’s strange behavior. They followed me into the kitchen.
I blew the dog hairs out of two empty glasses and filled them with tap water. They wouldn’t drink it, but it would give them something to do with their hands. Steven examined the water’s quality. The shorter one glanced at the pile of shoes next to the door.
Maybe that’s why I let them in—so I could see the disapproval on their faces, the confirmation that there was something fundamentally wrong with us. Men in suits always gave the impression that they had the power to change things, that they had been sent by some higher authority. The whiteboard, the aerial photographs, they were just the necessary props.
“How many people live here?” Big Head asked, though it was a question I would have expected from Steven, who, given his height, was probably more used to being in charge.
“Five,” I replied.
“Do you have other brothers or sisters?”
“Yeah, I have a brother.”
“How old are you guys?”
“Fourteen, eleven and eight.”
The man nodded. It seemed like he wanted to write it down but was too polite to pull the little notebook out of his pocket.
“What are you selling, by the way?” I asked.
The room got quiet. The two men looked at each other.
“Are you sure your mother’s home?” the Steven-looking one asked.
I nodded.
Until the age of nine, I believed there was a hatch in the backyard where Mom kept her second family. I wondered what she said when she left that other family to come back to us, if she told them she was going to check on the eggs too. Would she tell them bad stuff about our family? Did she try harder with them? Did she dread coming back to us?
The back door opened. All three of us looked up. Tessie had finally come inside. She placed her boots neatly under the radiator. At first the right one was on the left, but she quickly noticed and corrected it immediately.
“Catch any rare bugs?” I asked.
“Jolan wouldn’t let me get close, the sound of my boots was scaring them away,” she said.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She’s coming,” Tessie replied.
“What time is it, by the way?” Little Head asked Big Head.
“Quarter past four.” I nodded at the digital clock on the microwave right in front of him.
“It’s four-fourteen,” Big Head said. He held up his shiny watch in front of Steven’s face. I could tell by the way he let his sleeve fall down over the hands of the watch that they weren’t here to help us. All door-to-door salesmen wore watches—the clock was always ticking, time was money.
Mom walked in at four-
sixteen, her hair full of cleavers.
“Hello, madam, can we ask you a few questions?”
Big Head reached out his hand. Mom tried to shake it, but an egg slipped out from under her arm and splattered on the floor. Egg white went all over the place, but the yolk remained intact, landing a few inches away from the shell and slime. We all just stared at it, an orange dot on the black tiles.
“Leave it,” Mom said when I jumped to clean it up. Tessie tried to fish the cleavers out of her hair, but Mom swatted her hand away.
“Why don’t you girls go play,” said Little Head.
We only obeyed because we didn’t know him and retreated into the hall. But being told to “go play” was like that beautiful drop of the egg, it couldn’t be executed on command.
We listened to their voices. Their shapes were distorted in the textured glass in the veranda door, but we could still make out their strange proportions. The little one pulled the whiteboard closer while the big one began his pitch, making all kinds of drawings as he talked. Whenever door-to-door salesmen work in pairs—even nowadays—there’s always one who speaks firmly while the other nods his head and occasionally repeats things in a gentler tone.
No cars passed by outside. I gathered up my courage and asked Tessie what she was doing when she came in.
“That’s between me and the back door,” she said.
After fifteen minutes, the shadows behind the glass packed up the whiteboard. It got quiet. The door opened and Big Head stepped out into the hallway first. One after the other, they squeezed past the sideboard full of junk.
“I always remember how I got myself in, that way I’ll know how to get myself out,” Steven said with a wink. He forgot to pull back the legs of his pants this time, but the nails sticking out didn’t get caught on his shiny tailored suit.
“What did you guys come here to sell anyway?” I asked.
“Air.”
I could tell by the way they walked away that Mom had promised to buy something just to get rid of them.
Me and Tessie stood in the doorway and watched them stop in front of the next house, wipe the board with a handkerchief, punch each other in the shoulder and walk up to the door. We watched until the need to switch the heads from their bodies, just for good measure, disappeared. Tessie let the heavy front door slam into the lock. No help was ever sent.
11:15 a.m.
I TIPTOE THROUGH the empty house, inspecting the rooms one by one as I used to do on mornings when I woke up early—the first cop to show up at a crime scene.
I pass through the hallway full of shoes, the kitchen, the veranda.
Nobody. My parents are probably still in bed, which comes as no surprise. You have to have something to get up for in the morning. Clearly, they weren’t invited to Jan’s posthumous party, otherwise the invitation would be tacked up on the bulletin board like a trophy.
Scattered on the side tables are the remains of any given evening: an empty bag of peanuts, opened beer bottles, a box of wine under a kitchen towel on the windowsill.
The hallway in the middle of the house is dark. The only way for light to enter is through the front door, but the winter rays are too weak to penetrate the dirty window. I feel around for the light switch, the entrance to the basement, the handle on the bathroom door.
I knock on the wood panels with my knuckles. No answer. I count to three before opening the door.
I try to imagine, just like I used to, the worst thing I could possibly find, so whatever I actually do find won’t seem as bad. My mom doubled over on a chair, empty pill strips on the floor around her, an empty can of disinfectant, a half-drunk bottle of nail-polish remover, her head between her knees, foam on her lips, blood dripping from her nose, the effervescent tablets she greedily tried to swallow still fizzing in her open mouth. My dad lying in cold bathwater, a thin layer of coagulated blood on the surface like a pot of old black tea, his crotch a desert island sticking out of the water, brown and filthy. Beside him, on the edge of the tub, the manicure set. His forearm torn open down to his wrist, the scissors stabbed straight into the artery.
On the count of three, I push open the door. The tub is empty. The bathroom is deserted. The bottle of nail-polish remover is right there at eye level on the shelf next to the nail polish. My father’s shirt is hanging on the back of the chair shrugging its shoulders. On the white wall above it is a giant black mildew stain that Jolan once said was the shape of the European Union. Both the Union and the stain have expanded since then.
I push the door open further. It bounces back.
This could be my dad too, behind the door, in the corner of the bathroom, dangling from the sash of his bathrobe. Heart pounding, I peek around the door. The obstruction turns out to be a bunch of unwashed pajamas and bathrobes divided over two coat racks. The smell of sleep hangs over the entire ground floor, except in the spots where the stench of old, wet dog has seeped into the fabric.
The more I made these rounds around my own house, the more I felt at home at other people’s. Laurens’s butcher shop was full of sharp knives, intestines and dead bodies hanging from the ceiling, but at least there I didn’t have to walk around in fear. Even if something bad were to happen there, it wouldn’t be my fault because it wouldn’t have been my job to prevent it.
The fact that my parents aren’t up yet is probably best for all of us. Now that I survey everything that hasn’t changed, each piece of furniture, I realize I’ve got nothing to say to them, nothing to forgive.
I walk over to the window and roll up the aluminum shutters. There are little perforations between the slats that oblige the faint winter light to dance around the bathroom, on the laundry basket, on the sloppy brick wall with two toothbrushes standing like soldiers in the holes, on the towel cabinet in the corner of the room.
In my earliest memory of my mother, I’m lying on this cabinet. I was sick, and she launched a “poop rocket” up my butt. She laid her cold hand on my backside to block the light from entering my butthole so the bullet-shaped suppository wouldn’t find its way out.
For a long time, we all used the cabinet to display the contents of our toiletry bags. Stuff that didn’t fit in the drawers anymore that we didn’t want anybody else to use. Even as a kid, the sight of all those bags gave me a gloomy feeling: everyone had their own bar of soap, their own toothpaste, their own toothbrush. As if we were all slowly packing to leave, each of us dreaming of a different destination.
I need to hear Tessie’s voice. One hand fishes my phone out of my pocket, the other puts it back.
I open the drawer that used to be mine. Inside is a shoebox full of stuff I wanted to keep forever. A plastic container containing years-old lemon juice I used to rub on my face every night to prevent pimples. Two folded notes from Elisa I would read over and over again at night: “Kisses, Elisa” and “HAHAHA”, both replies to notes I’d passed to her. I saved them because she so rarely laughed at my jokes in real life. A piece of straw from Pim’s hayloft. A couple of screws from Laurens’s bike rack. A pile of bras with big and small cups that I used to wear one on top of the other. A Chance card: GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT 4,000 FRANCS.
Behind the shoebox I find a pair of crumpled, unwashed pajamas that have retained the shape of my former body. A splotch of cereal is caked on the collar. I don’t dare to touch them; I’m afraid I’ll wake up something. Whatever I wake up, I won’t be able to leave behind.
I head to the back of the house, to the kitchen. There, I sit down at the glass table overlooking the garden, which is now covered in a blanket of snow. The house is still freezing even though the heating’s on.
I fill a glass with water to wash out my mouth and then take a few sips. I have to stay for few minutes at least, so my parents can’t say I came to town without stopping by. Now it’s up to them to wake up.
On the blue wall above the table are two drawings of the house and garden. The one on the right is mine; the one on the left is Tessie’
s. The day we made these drawings started out sunny. I had received a big box of colored pencils for my birthday and finally caved in and told Tessie she could draw with me. We dragged the patio table out to a shady spot in the back of the yard, where we had a good view of the entire house. I flipped open the brand-new box, put two pencils—tent poles—in the corners to hold up the lid, and set to work. I held up my ruler to the roof and the doghouse and did my best to capture the right proportions. I pressed down hard on the pencils to bring out every detail. Tessie wanted to use all the same colors I did; she snatched up every pencil I set down but wasn’t finished with yet and carefully sharpened the dull tips to perfection. In an effort to preserve as much of the pencils as possible, she barely pressed down on the paper. Her sky looked like a veil; her roof was far from watertight. Only after we were all done and our drawings were lying side by side on the table did I notice how different they were. In her picture, the electric wires, the birds, the flowerpots next to the front door, the door handle and the dog were all missing—not because she hadn’t noticed them but because she hadn’t had time to work them in. She didn’t mind though. All she’d wanted was to be with me.
When we showed the drawings to our parents, Dad didn’t try very hard to hide the fact that mine was better. The only reason Tessie’s picture ended up on the wall next to mine was because Mom had handed him eight thumbtacks instead of four.
From then on, the drawings hung over our heads at every meal, and every time I looked up at them, I wished I hadn’t tried so hard.
July 17, 2002
IT’S NOT THE song that kicked off the carnival last weekend that’s running through my head but the riddle I have to deliver to Laurens and Pim. They made such a big deal about it that now I’m afraid I’m going to forget it, and without a riddle they won’t let me into the barn.