by lize Spit
Just then, the doorbell jingled, and the youth priest walked in.
“Fine,” she said quickly, “but you’ll do it here, in our backyard. After midnight it’s lights out. And don’t make too much noise, and don’t tell your father.” She gave the instructions to Laurens only. She didn’t dare to look at me and Pim.
We left the shop through the back door. The boys high-fived. I felt sick to my stomach. We hurried to the back of the yard so we could put in the stakes and tie down the lines. The thing needed to be firmly anchored before she could change her mind.
The three-person Aldi tent was just big enough for two air mattresses. Pim got to sleep in the middle. Not because it was his tent, but because he was Pim.
Before bedtime, Laurens’s mom came out to say good night. I’d never seen her in her nightgown with her hair down before. She brought us dinosaur cookies and insect repellent.
“You can always come sleep in the house if you want,” she said. “I made up the spare bed, and Eva can sleep with me since Dad’s out of town.”
She walked back through the dark garden and into the house with the empty made-up beds. Pim drew circles on her back with his flashlight. She stumbled on a loose clod of grass. I grabbed the flashlight out of his hands.
Laurens didn’t watch his mother leave. He was rustling around in the dark with the pack of cookies.
“We have to be good tonight,” he said. “No going into town, no leaving the tent. We have to make a good impression. We’ve got one night to win her over. It’s like in the shop—if a promotion catches on, she’ll leave it up on the board for months.”
For a second, I wanted to tell them the truth. That it wasn’t up to Laurens’s mom, it was his dad who decided. But then Pim started reading the safety instructions printed on the inside of the tent out loud in his best German.
After we’d had enough of watching the shadows of the dinosaur cookies mate with each other on the wall of the tent, we started smearing ourselves with insect repellent. This required more light, which attracted more mosquitoes. I didn’t dare ask Pim or Laurens to help me spread it between my shoulder blades.
The rest of the night, they talked about all the things we could do in town. The darkness offered all kinds of new possibilities. I thought about the empty beds. The spot next to Laurens’s mom. My lofted bed in Tessie’s room. I wondered if they were asleep yet. If they were thinking about me.
There were mosquitoes everywhere. I dug my shoulder blades as deep as I could into the air mattress. After an eternity, it started getting light again outside.
12:45 p.m.
I’M STILL SITTING at the kitchen table. In front of me, parallel to the hedge around the garden and almost perpendicular to my line of sight, is a row of evergreen trees. Planted from left to right, neatly arranged by size, waiting for orders to make a quarter turn and march away, out of the frozen ground and into the snowy fields.
This row is the result of our annual trip to the garden center to pick out a Christmas tree. The trees with roots were a bit more expensive than the ones on a stand, but Mom saved up. After Christmas, we’d plant it in the garden with the intention of using it again the next year. But when it came down to it, Dad would put his foot down and say it was ridiculous to uproot a healthy tree. Mom’s plan became his pretext—year after year, he bought a Christmas tree with roots.
The blue spruce on the far left has been there for twenty-five years now. By now, it wouldn’t look out of place in the center of a big shopping mall, but if what Jolan had once claimed is true, that a tree’s roots can grow as long as its trunk, there’s no way we could ever dig it up. Only the smallest one on the right would still fit into a pot; this Christmas tree hadn’t survived the return to solid ground and refused to grow an inch.
The trees were planted in their order of use, and I can still remember the holiday celebrations that went with them. It’s not that hard, really: we always ate fondue, always on the same tablecloth with the gold dots, Mom would always get up early to get the house in a perfect state—folding napkins, polishing silverware, hollowing out tomatoes, making sauces, building up expectations that we’d never be able to meet.
Around five o’clock, the sun would go down, and the neighbors would retreat into their homes to gather around their own Christmas trees, and Mom would start to sigh—she’d been hoping that somehow she wouldn’t be left alone with us. In tears, she’d put the finishing touches on dinner, fill the tomatoes with shrimp, and make one last effort to get the rest of the meal on the table in a decent state.
Once the salad had been mixed, everybody had a boiled potato on their plate and we’d decided who got which color fondue stick, it was up to Mom to try to keep up with Dad. It was the only way to avoid having to blame each other later—they both had to stay equally drunk the entire evening.
Mom drank from two glasses at the same time. One was next to her plate and constantly topped off by Dad; the other was in the kitchen, which she stumbled into with every empty basket and dish. She was always stingy about seconds on meat and bread.
We let it happen right under our nose. Jolan made himself the lifeguard of the simmering pot of oil—anyone who let a piece of meat drown would be on dish duty later that week. Tessie didn’t eat much. She worried about the colors of the food on her plate and the fact that it wasn’t going to be a white Christmas. They were both counting on me to take over for Mom and Dad halfway through the evening.
Between fondue and dessert, we went to midnight mass, which actually didn’t take place at midnight at all. It was at nine o’clock. The church was a safe, calming place—always the same Christmas pageant, the same reading, the same hymns, the same widows who came for the hot chocolate and mulled wine served afterwards.
Laurens’s parents always came too, mostly to receive compliments from parishioners in grease-stained shirts on the quality of their gourmet meat. After the hymns and the pageant, no matter how far away I was, whether I was dressed as an angel or a shepherd, Laurens’s mom would search for my eyes during the “peace-be-with-you”.
I check my phone. It’s almost afternoon. It’s still too early to show up at Pim’s, but I have to get out of here. I’ve given Mom and Dad enough chances to wake up.
Something stirs in the garden. A bird lands on the smallest Christmas tree, right where the star goes. I’m not surprised the tree didn’t survive. Dad waited months to plant it. It was mid-summer by the time it was returned to the earth. This little tree is all that’s left of our last real Christmas, in 2001. We set up the electric griddle on the table for the second year in a row. For every load of meat that was dumped onto it, Dad filled Mom’s glass with more wine than she should’ve been able to drink. In no time, she gained an insurmountable advantage—not just over Dad, but over all of us, over the entire room—until she was practically cutting next to her meat.
“Anyone who can’t handle a knife and fork can go eat with the dog,” Dad declared, as he moved her and her plate towards the dog bowl in a corner of the kitchen. He let go before it was on the ground, just like he did with the dog food. The porcelain clattered on the tiles. Nanook jumped out of the way.
He sat back down in his chair and threw back his glass. It was already empty. He slammed it back down on the table. A blob appeared on the surface of the homemade garlic sauce, right in the middle, as if some invisible creature had just come up for air.
“That sauce is way too runny,” he said.
Mom’s meat was burning on the griddle. We didn’t dare to take it off.
“I’m never bending over backwards for you again,” she sobbed in the corner.
“C’mon. Those aren’t tears. That’s just all the wine coming back out,” Dad scowled. His eyes were glassy too. He looked from Jolan to Tessie, but he didn’t dare to look at me.
For the first time, we crawled into bed without going to midnight mass. Christmas felt unfinished—I hadn’t been a shepherd or an angel, I hadn’t received a peace-be-with-you from Laur
ens’s mom.
Later I learned that Pim and his family hadn’t shown up at church that night either; two cows had given birth. In retrospect, I wondered whether the absences at that church service determined which families would survive and which ones wouldn’t.
After midnight, Dad appeared at the edge of my bed, groping around in the dark for something he could use to sleep in the armchair. I went and got him a sleeping bag and a bucket. It was the first and only time that I followed him down the stairs and thought: one push and he’s gone.
July 19, 2002
NO ONE’S HOME but Tessie. Dad’s at work, Jolan is out back in the fields and all that’s left of Mom is what she can’t wipe out with sleeping pills. The tops of the trees in the garden are still, but the colorful ribbons in the open doorway are rustling. Someone must have ordered them to keep dancing, wind or no wind.
Outside on the green plastic garden table Tessie is playing Monopoly. Two of the five chairs are pushed halfway under the table, the rest are tilted on two legs so rain can slide off. She’s got the bank set up in the lid of the cardboard box. The properties are lined up on either side of the table. The bills are stacked small to large, their corners tucked under the edge of the game board. It’s an old version of the game, still with Belgian francs.
Tessie doesn’t see me watching. She gets up, switches places and sets two thousand francs in the middle of the table. Then she changes seats again to collect the money on behalf of the other player.
If anyone can play Monopoly against themselves, it’s Tessie. She recently told me she counts her steps on certain routes.
“One of my feet shouldn’t get more exercise than the other,” she said.
I tried it once. On my way to the Corner Store, I counted the steps on each foot separately. I didn’t have enough brain halves to keep track and ended up tripping. But Tessie apparently finds it calming.
She still hasn’t noticed my presence. She rolls the dice, moves the piece the right number of squares and draws a Community Chest card. She reads it in silence.
In our bedroom, Tessie’s bed is closest to the door. When we were little and got wound up at night because we couldn’t or wouldn’t go to sleep, Dad would storm in, rip off Tessie’s bedsheet, jerk up her nightgown, pull down her underwear and spank her bare behind with the palm of his hand. After he’d turned off the hallway light and was walking down the stairs, Tessie would switch on the nightlight and check her backside to see how long it took for the bright red hand with five outstretched fingers to fade. We both knew that even if my bed had been closer to the door than Tessie’s, Dad would have taken those few extra steps to be able to hit her.
I move closer to the sliding window to get a better look at Tessie’s strategy, to see if she favors one of the two players. The conquered streets are neatly arranged by color on either side of the board. Apparently, she doesn’t make the game easy for herself: each player has bought up the exact streets the other player needed. The left player has bet on the railroads, the electric company, the water works and the cheap streets; the right player has gone after the grand boulevards in Ghent and Brussels.
Her hair is about three inches long now. Under the short spikes, her scalp is red and flaky from all the washing.
Jolan looked up why her hair grows so slowly. It could be because she eats so little; on most days she eats only green foods and has to chew every bite a fixed number of times. Sixteen, to be exact. I think I’m the only one who ever counts along with her.
I can tell by the look on her face that the next card she draws is bad news. She counts her houses and pays what’s owed to the bank then switches places. She still doesn’t see me. She rolls the dice, balls her fist and triumphantly moves her piece to Station Zuid. She buys it. Four thousand francs, four gray notes in the pot.
“The money for railroads and property taxes goes to the bank,” I say.
Tessie jumps at the sound of my voice. Even the dog is startled. She hoists herself up and shuffles across the patio, but her chain is too short. Since she can’t reach me, she lies back down under the plastic patio table, pressing her wet snout against Tessie’s calf bones.
“Wanna play?” she asks. “We can start over.”
“I’ve already got plans with the musketeers.”
“What are you guys going to do?”
I don’t know what to tell her. Laurens called this morning and said that we were meeting at Pim’s hayloft, not the vacuum shed. I can’t tell Tessie what we’re going to do there. I don’t exactly know myself, and I don’t want to give her the feeling that somewhere, outside this Monopoly game, outside our backyard, there’s something better or more fun going on, because she’s definitely going to be stuck here for the rest of the afternoon.
“Just hang out at Pim’s,” I say with a shrug.
“Are you going swimming in the Pit? Or are you gonna play in the hayloft?”
“No.”
“Then stay home and play Monopoly with me,” she says.
I don’t say no right away. She latches onto the silence.
“Can’t Laurens and Pim come here?”
I shake my head.
“Or we can play some other game. That works too.”
“Tonight, I promise.” I better go now, otherwise I’ll have no choice but to stay. My throat is tight. Every time I leave Tessie at home alone, I regret not having said a more proper goodbye, because by the time I get home she might be gone. Her spiky hair, her skeletal frame, the constant washing. She is slowly scrubbing herself away, like a stain on the counter: you soak it, then scrape it off.
I bike off in a hurry. I’ll talk to Mom or Jolan about it tonight. Or am I just feeling brave because from here I can cover the house with the tip of my little finger?
When I get to the farm, I see Laurens’s and Pim’s bikes already there. I park mine in between, as close to Pim’s as possible. For a moment, I linger outside the barn. I can’t remember the last time I saw the doors closed.
I make a lot of noise sliding them open, just like Pim’s dad does, pushing them back as carelessly as possible in the hope that Laurens and Pim will be startled and stop whatever it is they’re doing because they think I’m him.
I climb the ladder up to the hayloft and find them sitting at the entrance to our fort with their hands on their knees, waiting for me. No cigarettes. No pâté mustaches. No dirty magazines. Laurens is wearing blue pants, a blue shirt and matching shoes. Had they not put so much thought into their outfits, they could almost be the boys I used to know.
“You got the money?” Pim asks before I’ve even reached the landing.
“Of course.”
“Sorry, but we really couldn’t meet at my house this time,” Laurens says, styling his shoelaces. “We need a system where we take turns at each other’s houses, so we don’t get caught. You guys don’t know my dad. My earlobes are still burning.”
I don’t mention that I could feel his earlobes burning last night too.
Pim shakes his head defiantly. “My dad’s keeping an eye on us too.”
“You’ve got more hideouts around here than anybody, Pim. Be happy we don’t always do it here,” Laurens says.
“Eva’s got a shed too, you know,” Pim says.
“It’s not a shed, it’s just a chicken coop,” I say.
“You’re not getting off the hook just because you have chickens,” Laurens says. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’ll take turns, follow the hands of the clock.”
“The hands of the clock?” Pim asks.
“My house is twelve. We started with me. Your house is five, Eva’s is nine, so we’re headed in the right direction. Next time we’re at Eva’s.”
“Who says your house is twelve?” Pim sticks up his finger to check the direction of the wind. “It’s not at the top of town.”
“Yeah it is. Depends how you look at it.”
“Who’s coming today, anyway?” I ask, even though I know perfectly well who’s coming. I know
who it’ll be next time when we’re at my house in the chicken coop—I know the list on the cemetery wall like the two times table.
“Evelien,” Pim says. “One of my girls.”
“One of your girls?” Laurens retorts.
“Melissa was one of yours, wasn’t she?” Pim says.
Laurens turns up his nose. Pim slaps him on the knee. I watch his fingerprints fade from Laurens’s skin.
“So what’s her score?” I ask.
“Seven,” Pim says at lightning speed. “We’re done with all the six-pointers now, thank god. Those were just warm-ups. We weren’t expecting much. But now it’s on. From here on out, it only gets better.”
“Melissa was not my girl,” Laurens insists.
“Okay, whatever. You can still look at Evelien’s tits,” Pim grins.
“I vote we go swimming,” I say.
Pim gives me a dead look.
“Good idea, Eva,” he says loudly and jumps to his feet. “I’m in.”
Laurens hesitates, but then slowly clambers to his feet.
I turn around and start climbing down the ladder. Halfway down, I realize they’re not following me. Still, I keep going until my feet are on solid ground. Laurens peers over the edge of the platform.
“If you’re going home, you’re gonna have to give us our money back,” he calls.
“And the answer to the riddle,” I hear Pim whisper.
“And the riddle!” Laurens echoes.
I march out of the barn. The lump in my throat returns. No matter how much distance I put between us, everyone will still think they left me.
I stand at the edge of the pool and run my hand through the murky green water. The filtration system has stopped working. I’m not even wearing a bathing suit. Next to my feet, on dry land, is the grinning inflatable dolphin.
I could go home to Tessie, play a board game with her. Instead I walk back to the barn and grab a pitchfork. I press it into the belly of the inflatable animal. The plastic goes in but with my weight evenly distributed across the three prongs, it doesn’t pop. What am I waiting for? I’ve seen Jan and Pim’s dad stab tools into mice plenty of times. In a few seconds, all the life drains out.