by lize Spit
“Was he a frog that transformed into a person and landed in the room?” That was Leslie’s eighth guess.
“No, wrong,” I say.
“Now what?” she asks.
Outside it’s starting to rain. Fat drops plop down on the corrugated metal roof. I stand up and look out in the yard. One half is still dry. In the other, it’s pouring.
“Check this out,” I holler. By the time the others have gathered at the door, the clouds have shifted, and it’s raining in the whole yard.
“What?” Laurens asks.
Pim sticks his hand outside and flings rainwater on Leslie. She screams, nearly tripping over her heels.
“Now you have to do us a favor,” says Pim.
“Who gets to pick the favor?” Leslie asks. With this weather, she won’t be leaving any time soon.
“Who do you want?”
Leslie looks at each of us, one by one.
“I want Eva to choose.”
“All right then, Eva,” says Pim.
I think about it. I have to come up with something that’ll make Pim and Laurens happy, but I also have to do that thing girls do, meet each other halfway.
“Laurens and Pim each get to touch you for three seconds,” I say.
“Okay,” she sighs. It’s hard to say whether she’s relieved or disappointed. She mostly looks drunk. I hope my face doesn’t look as numb as hers does.
Laurens gets to go first. He stands in front of Leslie and gingerly places his hands on her sweater, where he assumes her breasts must be. He squeezes with his fingers, but he’s standing just a little too far away, making the motion clumsy and cautious at the same time. It reminds me of how Tessie tests fruit to see if it’s ripe.
I count three long seconds.
“Okay, enough,” says Pim. Laurens steps aside, and Pim takes position. First, he looks at Leslie from head to toe, sizing her up.
I count.
In a smooth, quick motion he whips up her skirt and pushes the elastic band of her underpants to the side. He raises the middle finger on his other hand, holds it up to the light like a doctor with a syringe and wets it with saliva. Then he lowers it to her crotch and pushes it in, slanting it upwards with the line of her lower body. Leslie spreads her legs wider apart and loses balance. I can tell by looking at Pim’s forearm that he’s holding her upright, his wrist muscles contract. She is now pinned on his finger, which is inside her as deep as it will go.
“The three seconds starts now,” Pim says. “Now that I’m really touching her.”
Laurens is watching in awe. He’s sorry he didn’t think of this himself.
I count three quick seconds.
On three, Pim moves his middle finger in and out three times. When he withdraws his hand, the elastic on Leslie’s panties jumps back between her labia. She pulls them back into place. Pim smells his finger and sticks it in Laurens’s face.
“Come on. Better than any pâté from your shop. You can taste it if you want.”
Laurens hesitates, then clumsily licks Pim’s finger, mostly because Leslie’s watching.
After she’s left in the rain, Pim declares: “That, boys, is what they call middle-fingering.” She must still be within earshot. We haven’t heard the sound of her spoke beads riding away yet.
He cracks his knuckles and passes around the bag of wine again. The grin on his face seems wider than usual.
At what point did he start believing he was good at this, and was that before or after he got good at it?
An hour later, the whole family’s gathered for dinner. Mom is the last to join. She accidentally slams the cast-iron pot down in the middle of the table, having miscalculated the distance. Jolan checks if there are cracks in the tabletop.
My skin and muscles are burning. I don’t think the wine has left my system yet. I carry out each motion deliberately. I pass the potatoes, lift the fork from my plate to my mouth.
The contours of my body don’t feel sharp, but blurry, like the skin of a shadow. My movements stick to my body, my arms feel like sponges. Mom sits down beside me but doesn’t notice a thing. We’re two people drawn into the twilight, blurred photographs.
But Tessie does notice. She follows the movement of my fork closely. Unfortunately, we’re having peas.
The Treatment
MAYONNAISE. MOM HEARD it helped get rid of lice. She wanted to wait until the start of Easter vacation so Tessie wouldn’t have to go to school with greasy hair.
“If this doesn’t help, I’ll have to use the clipper,” she said. She banged on the bottom of the 1100ml jar of Devos & Lemmens lemon-flavored mayonnaise, in an effort to loosen the lid. Jolan and I were setting up the Mastermind game on a nearby table so we could keep an eye on the kitchen. The mayonnaise hair treatment didn’t seem like a good idea to us. But we didn’t have any better ideas, so we kept our mouths shut.
Tessie stood reluctantly in the middle of the room. She was wearing her favorite frilly pink Barbie nightdress, which she had long outgrown. The ruffled seam ran straight across her nipples. I had the same one—an aunt had given them to us along with a matching mini-version for our dolls. Only Tessie still believed that as long as she made Barbie look like her, she looked like Barbie.
Mom draped an old bath towel over Tessie’s shoulders, pulled the hair-tie out of her silky hair and ran a comb through it.
We felt nervous and knew we shouldn’t laugh—both me and Jolan understood that.
All three of us had had head lice, but the Little Runt was the only one who couldn’t get rid of them, because everything she contracted was worse and lasted longer.
“I don’t want Jolan to watch,” Tessie said. Her head bobbed back and forth from the strokes of the comb like a snowflake in the wind.
“You heard her, Jolan. Turn around,” Mom said.
Fortunately, I was on the right side of the table, so I didn’t have to turn my head to see what was going on. Still, I looked away.
The walnut tree on the patio was covered in buds. Some of the other trees were blossoming already, and one small shrub had tiny sour berries on it. Even the rhubarb was full of leaves. A bird landed on the swing in the back of the yard. Jolan fetched his binoculars from the counter.
“Erithacus rubecula. A robin.” He was picking up new Latin words every day.
“Even if you were making it up, we wouldn’t know,” Tessie said.
We watched the robin pick a few seeds off the suet ball in the birdhouse and listened to Mom stirring the mayonnaise in the jar. It made the same squelching sound as the wallpaper glue she’d once made.
She carefully rubbed the goo into Tessie’s roots and spread it down to the ends. Once a section of hair had been fully smothered, she pushed it over to the other side of Tessie’s head and patted it down with the rest of the strands plastered to her skull.
When two thirds of Tessie’s head had been thoroughly greased, Mom paused to pluck a stray louse from her shoulder. Tessie had been standing there for a while by then. She lifted one foot off the ground, twisted her ankle, and lost her balance for a second.
“They’re falling off your head. That’s a good sign. They’re surrendering,” Mom declared. She squished the louse in the open handkerchief on the table with palpable irritation.
Jolan examined the black dot with his binoculars.
Mom took the red spoon with the long handle and plopped another glob of Devos & Lemmens on Tessie’s head. She spread it out with the rounded side of the spoon.
Blobs of mayonnaise dripped down Tessie’s head and onto her shoulders. She wanted to wipe it away. Her fingers fiddled with the corner of the towel around her shoulders.
“Don’t touch it,” Mom said. “That’s their struggle you’re feeling. These are the final convulsions.”
By six o’clock, there was enough mayonnaise on Tessie’s head for a school-wide hamburger party. The shadows in the backyard had disappeared. For a spring evening, that only meant one thing: dinner time. Jolan packed up the Mas
termind game. He didn’t even ask me what the winning color combination was.
“What now?” he asked, turning on the light in the kitchen.
Tessie was squirming, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She was tired. Mom read the label on the mayonnaise jar. There was no answer on it, only the ingredients.
“It needs time to sink in. She’ll have to sleep in it.”
“How am I supposed to sleep like this?” Tessie moaned, pressing her hands between her knees.
“Standing up. Like the cows,” said Dad, who’d just walked in and was waiting for someone to start setting the table.
He decided to intervene. He took a roll of cling wrap out of the cupboard and started wrapping it around Tessie’s head. Then he pulled it down under her chin and secured it on the other side of her head so it wouldn’t slide off. Only thing left uncovered was her face.
“Not too tight! I can’t breathe,” Tessie wailed. She jammed her fingers under the plastic so Dad would have to leave more room.
“Don’t touch it! A person doesn’t suffocate that quickly,” Dad said. He yanked it even tighter. I could see the skin on her neck wrinkling under the pressure of the plastic.
I looked away so Tessie wouldn’t be able to see on my face how bad this looked.
We ate a baguette that had been warmed up on top of the radiator, but the thermostat had recently switched to summer mode so the crust wasn’t very crispy.
After Dad had finished his first sandwich, he went to get the mayonnaise that Jolan had deliberately forgotten to set on the table. He plopped it onto his bread in the same motion he uses to drip Maggi seasoning into his soup—three flicks of the wrist. Tessie’s plastic hat rustled every time she turned her head.
Dad opened his mouth and took a giant, greedy bite. The mayonnaise squished out on the other side of the bread. His second bite was slower, more emphatic, because now everybody was watching. He dabbed up the drips on his plate with his finger. All of a sudden, he started coughing.
“See, Tessie, that mayonnaise is pure poison!” Jolan said. “It’ll knock out those lice for sure.” He gave Dad a nod—he could stop now, the point had been made. But Dad jumped up, his face red, his arms flailing. He wasn’t joking. I smacked his back until the bread came flying out of his windpipe.
I went to bed early with Tessie. Mom handed us four cut-open garbage bags to protect Tessie’s mattress.
“Are you asleep?” Tessie asked in the middle of the night. The sweet, lemony smell had permeated the room.
“Yeah, I’m asleep.” Normally, this would have made her laugh, but she didn’t make a sound. “Hey Tessie, should we just go wash it out? I think that stuff’s been on long enough.”
“It’s on there now, we might as well let it soak in,” she said.
Because of the friction against the garbage bag, the cling-wrap turban had sagged to one side, pulling her mouth crooked.
“You want to try sleeping in my bed?” I ask. “It’s cozy up here under the slanted ceiling.”
“No, that’s not necessary,” Tessie said.
But a few minutes later, she brought it up again.
“Maybe I would be able to sleep better up there.”
We switched. Her bed consisted of four low cupboards pushed together with a mattress on top. Due to the lack of ventilation in our room, there was mold seeping out under the edges of the mattress. “I can do it,” she said, as I tried to help her up the ladder.
From the lower bed, I watched Tessie climb up into my bed with her head wrapped in plastic, dragging the garbage bags behind her. She carefully spread them out on top of my mattress, even more carefully than she’d done on her own bed. Then she lay down on top of them. The plastic crinkled with every move she made.
“You can start saying goodnight now,” she said. She whispered the names of everyone we needed to say goodnight to, one by one.
“Goodnight, God, goodnight, Tes,” I ended.
“Goodnight, Eva,” she said.
I woke up before dawn feeling nauseous. The mayonnaise had curdled during the hot night. Tessie was still asleep. Her body was covered in oil and thick, greasy clumps of hair stuck out of her hat. There was melted mayonnaise everywhere, in her ears, on my pillow, dripping down her neck. The plastic-wrap turban had loosened in the night. She was lying on top of the garbage bags, stiff and motionless.
I woke her up and took her into the bathroom. I told her to lean over the edge of the tub, so I could rinse the stuff out of her hair. Pearls of grease formed on the surface of the water. I washed her hair twice with shampoo. Tessie gave me specific instructions. Both sides of her head had to be massaged exactly the same way. Afterwards she shampooed herself one more time, to wash off me washing her.
Two days later it was Easter. There was a noticeable increase in the number of chocolate eggs from the Easter Bunny that year. Tessie’s hair still hung down in heavy strings beside her head. When you tried to run a comb through it, the greasy spikes just shifted position. The short strands, which always broke off before they were long enough to put in a ponytail, left a shine on her forehead. Between them you could see her scalp—and the little black bugs wriggling around on her head.
When Easter break was over, she returned to school with the side pockets of her bookbag full of Easter eggs to hand out on the playground. She wore one of Dad’s old caps to cover her bald head.
2:00 p.m.
WINDSHIELD WIPERS SOMETIMES move like arms and sometimes like legs. I have no idea what this depends on: the type of car, how fast they’re moving back and forth or the state of mind I’m in when I crawl behind the wheel.
For a long time, heavy rain reminded me of Jan, the way the wipers sputtered and struggled, no match for all the water. I wondered whether Pim ever thought about Jan when he was in his car or on the tractor in the same rain. Whether he ever pulled over to the side of the road like I did just so he could turn them off.
I look down at the invitation on the passenger seat for the thousandth time. The party still starts at three o’clock.
I could just drive back to Brussels, make myself a cheese sandwich, finish a drawing, listen to the kids next door playing on the other side of the wall. With every noise in the hallway, I’d hope it was the downstairs neighbor. Eventually, he’d come knock on the door—not because he’s reliable, just predictable. Tomorrow there would be yet another envelope from Jolan. I’d drop it in the shoebox with all the other ones I’ve received. At some point it would become too much money to keep in the house, and I’d have to decide what to do with it: keep it or not.
I shouldn’t have left so early this morning. The farm is only a three-minute drive from here, five at the most in the snow. Even if I took the longest detour in town at ten kilometers per hour, zigzagged up and down all the main streets and parked backwards in every free spot I find along the way, I would still arrive well before the party starts. Only people who are worried about the nuts running out—people like Laurens—show up early to parties.
Waiting in front of my parents’ house isn’t an option. I turn my car down the most obvious street, the one leading to the church. I’ve taken this route countless times. I don’t think there’s a route in Brussels I’ve taken as frequently as I’ve taken this one, not to the school where I teach, not from my front door to the nearest supermarket, not to the gym on Rossinistraat where I row for an hour every morning, not to the school where I took the figure-drawing class, not even the twenty meters to my neighbor’s door. As long as this town is the place where I’ve spent most of my life, I’m more at home here more than I’ll ever be in Brussels.
There must be exact numbers—how many times I’ve biked past the church, how many times I stood in front of Laurens’s house watching his mom in the shop, how many slices of meat she passed me over the counter because she thought I looked pale, how many times I pedaled away with the taste of cheap sausage in my mouth wishing everything around me would freeze, everything except the kids, and we’
d all have to rotate, without protest, to the next house on the right, because families are nothing more than systems to be passed through.
Life is no more than a sum of numbers, but few people manage to keep track of them, to start counting in time. Those who try end up making themselves sick or crazy. They start calculating in advance how many chews it should take to grind down a certain piece of food and then subtract each jaw movement from there. Their life is not a sum but a difference, and eventually they bring themselves to zero.
I slowly steer the car through the center of town. I let the places I don’t want to go determine the roads I take. I don’t want to go to Miss Emma’s house, but I have to. I owe it to her. Ever since that goodbye party at school, I owe her everything.
The party was on a rainy day. It wasn’t the last day of the school year, but it was the only day that we, the side class, could take over the classroom: the fifth-graders were sent out with the fourth-graders. We pushed all the benches and chairs to the side. Miss Emma had invited her sister to work the dance floor. She was well known around the school. With her stocky build, short curly hair and negligible breasts, she was always asked to play Black Pete at the Sinterklaas party in December.
Halfway through the festivities I went to the broom closet in search of extra chalk and an eraser because the dancing had degenerated into drawing rebus puzzles on the blackboard. When I turned on the light, I found Miss Emma and her sister, tangled up in each other’s arms. Miss Emma was startled, but she didn’t let go of her sister.
“Eva,” she said. “This isn’t my sister. This is my fiancée.” She placed her right hand on my back and her left hand on the back of the woman about whom all certainty had been lost in the space of a few seconds. “This has to stay between us. Promise?” she said.
Her hands were warm. I couldn’t feel her fingertips, all I felt was the one that was missing. I nodded and did that thing Black Pete always does to silence a gym full of ecstatic toddlers: I zipped my lips and swallowed the imaginary key.