The Melting

by lize Spit

  “I’m going for ice cream,” she says. “What kind do you girls want?”

  Elisa shakes her head. “We’re not hungry.”

  We watch Mimi walk over to the ice-cream cart, dodging the dried pinecones in the sand as if they were landmines.

  “One time, I came on my horse,” Elisa says after Mimi is out of earshot.

  It’s the first time she’s brought up her horse all afternoon.

  “There’s this little bulge on my saddle. It’s in just the right spot, if you know what I mean.” She articulates slowly as if she expects me to take notes. “After Twinkle died, I got rid of all her stuff. But the one thing I kept was the saddle.”

  Mimi hurries back with an ice-cream cone and two Calippo push pops. She tosses them down between us and goes back to her towel to eat her vanilla ice cream.

  If I wanted to shut Elisa up, I could just tell her the truth: it’ll be her own dumb fault when her vagina gets all gray and saggy from rubbing on the leather saddle. I unwrap one of the Calippos.

  “Want me to teach you how to ride?” she asks. I shrug.

  She takes the other push pop, places it between her thighs and rubs her hands up and down it until the frozen ice flops out of the tube. Then she wraps her lips around the top and licks the sticky syrup off with her tongue.

  Most of the boys are completely absorbed in the soccer game; only the goalkeeper sees what Elisa is doing. On the second lick, someone kicks the ball into his goal.

  By six o’clock, it’s getting chilly. The smell of burnt meat hangs in the air, though there’s not a single barbecue in sight. Elisa isn’t sucking in her stomach anymore. The boys are all gone. The sand is covered in wet-towel prints. “We’re going to leave soon,” Mimi hollers. She’s waist-deep in the pond, not far from a group of kids splashing around in the water.

  “Bet she’s peeing,” Elisa says.

  I put on my T-shirt and sit up on my towel. We look out at two little boys stuck on a pedal boat in the middle of the pond. A half-naked lifeguard swims out to save them. Even when we’re looking at the exact same thing, Elisa and I always see something different. That’s not going to change. Pretty soon, I’ll lose her again. After today, we won’t talk for a long time. She sits down on my towel so she can use hers to wipe off her feet.

  I want to give her something, a few words that can be kept between us, a secret, but I can’t tell her about what we’ve been up to this summer, about Laurens and Pim’s plans, about the scoreboard with her name at the top, her nine-and-a-half—she won’t take it as a secret but as a compliment.

  “I’ve got a riddle for you,” I say. “It’s a good one.”

  “Tell me,” Elisa says.

  I recite the riddle with chattering teeth. Elisa listens attentively. Her skin glows against mine. For a moment, I suspect she already knows the answer, that she was the one who told it to me in the first place, the one whose pauses and intonation I forgot. But she looks at me, slightly perturbed, and says, “I have no idea. Just tell me the answer, I hate guessing.”

  Without hesitation, I tell her the answer.

  “You know, once you know it, it makes perfect sense,” she says.

  She stands up, unties the strings on her bikini bottom on each side, one by one, and tightens them again. Then she loosens the fabric between her crotch, so her camel toe isn’t showing anymore.

  Fifteen minutes later, we’re back at the car, parked between the rows of evergreens. Mimi suggests we sit in the back seat together, but Elisa takes the front. She rolls down her window. Her back is nicely tanned, and as soon as we pick up speed, her ponytail starts blowing in the wind. I can still feel her skin glowing against mine.

  Encarta 97

  I NEVER REALLY asked for world peace. I didn’t ask for a rosary either, but I got one anyway from my grandpa for my First Communion. Instead of the standard donation to my new bike fund, he handed me a little leather pouch. Inside was a chain with fifty-five beads—between every ten white beads was a blue one.

  Praying the rosary was so second nature to Grandpa that he didn’t think to explain to me how to do it. Then again, he didn’t explain how not to do it either.

  I started in the morning in the bathroom, on my bare knees. I ran the beads through my fingers like I’d seen him do. On every white bead, I repeated the same wish—to win the annual interschool field-day race. On the blue ones, which were a little heavier and felt like they shouldn’t be used for selfish purposes, I asked for world peace.

  I didn’t know what world peace meant in practical terms, but I assumed it was a big job and hoped that God, either out of laziness or pure compassion, would go for the easiest, most profitable option: victory in a national field-day race.

  In fourth grade, I stopped praying the rosary. Four interschool field days had come and gone, and I hadn’t won any races—my legs weren’t going to get any longer.

  That winter, we didn’t get a TV, but we did find Encarta 97 under the Christmas tree.

  “First-aid for school projects,” Jolan called it. He got a microscope for his birthday that year and was still in the phase where he’d only accept information that he’d observed firsthand. While he was out digging up insects in the garden so he could squish them between two glass plates and examine them under the microscope, Tessie and I pulled up an extra chair at the computer and inserted the educational CD-ROM. We scrolled through dozens of articles, took a quiz where you had to match pictures of strange-looking musical instruments to their sounds and cultures of origin and watched video clips. The one we watched the most was a clip about the earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Not only did it show a two-mile bridge falling to the ground, it also explained what to do in the event of a landslide: steady yourself in a doorway or crawl under a sturdy desk.

  Finally, I was able to form a clearer image of the world that I hadn’t wished peace for in years. A gold medal for the eight-hundred-meter dash had never seemed so trivial.

  Instead of praying the rosary that night, I opened the bedroom window all the way and lay down on my back on top of my duvet with my arms and legs spread out wide. I tried to take in as much of the cold air as possible so I could feel what people in other countries must feel, people in areas devastated by earthquakes, children who didn’t have their own recorder and had to make do with a hollowed-out tree branch.

  My first act of solidarity lasted five minutes. The only parts of my body that were affected by the cold were the extremities: the ends of my toes and the tip of my nose.

  Soon Tessie joined in too. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen. She kicked off her thick duvet and copied my position.

  Since we were now sharing the misery between the two of us, I extended the duration of our solidarity acts to ten minutes. Tessie didn’t have a clock radio. She depended on me to keep track of the time and wouldn’t pull her duvet back up until I said it was okay.

  There was a trick: lie on top of the duvet instead of tossing it over the foot of the bed—because the body, like a cat sleeping next to you on the bed, warms the blankets underneath. After half an hour, you can crawl back into a warm bed.

  But I didn’t say anything. I already knew that Tessie would rather keep the duvet completely off the bed to make it as grueling as possible.

  Cold suffering became a biweekly ritual, practiced on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We’d always decide beforehand which culture we were doing it for, which picture or video clip our solidarity was intended for.

  “Has it been ten minutes yet?” Tessie would ask after five. She was closer to the open window and skinnier than I was. Most likely, she didn’t just feel the cold in her extremities, but deep down in her bones too.

  There were many times when I lied. Just because I could. Not just because I liked being able to punish both of us, but because I wanted to know what it was like to manipulate time, to hold it back.

  Sometimes we lay shivering on top of our sheets for more than half an hour. Tessie always chattered harder than I did. I thi
nk she knew I was adding minutes, but still she obeyed—she probably thought we deserved this.

  When I looked at her pale, bony butt and the purple varicose veins all over her body, that’s when I knew: I was destroying her.

  By the time I told her we should stop, it was already too late. That was a few months before the air salesmen showed up on our doorstep. Tessie had already started performing her own acts of solidarity.

  Much to the annoyance of everyone, but especially of Jolan—who liked being able to calculate exactly how long it was until his birthday—she started flipping the calendar in the bathroom back to February every time she used the toilet.

  The calendars were Mom’s project. She bought one every year to support an international charity organization. They were expensive but contained colorful, high-quality photos from developing countries. Each year, she hung them in different places around the house so they could just stay there, if only for the faces: people who, despite their hardship, still looked happy.

  The oldest calendar, the one from ’98, was hanging in the bathroom across from the toilet, which meant that every time you sat down to pee you were less than fifteen centimeters from a third-world country.

  Tessie started using that bathroom more often. So often that one day Mom started listing the symptoms of bladder infections and asked me if I thought Tessie might have one.

  Sometimes I heard Tessie whispering on the toilet, but I could never make out what she was saying.

  “Were you talking to yourself?” I asked her when she was finished.

  “No I wasn’t.” She sounded hurt. I understood the defensiveness in her tone. It was an insulting question. Mom talked to herself sometimes, too.

  It wasn’t until she came out of the bathroom, and I saw that the calendar had been flipped again, that I knew for sure. The month of February had a photo of a black woman with flies on her lips sitting on a giant tub with a clump of steamed rice in her dark hand.

  “You were talking to the calendar,” I said.

  I stood in the doorway and put my hands on either doorpost, so she couldn’t pass. She just stood there.

  Carefully, Tessie explained how it had come to this. The month of January had a picture of an ox in a wide-open landscape and a man scowling into the camera. She had to sit on the toilet sideways for a whole month so the man wouldn’t be able to see her privates.

  Finally, February came. The rice-eating lady in the picture came as a huge relief. Tessie didn’t feel embarrassed in front of her. She started telling the woman things about herself. It was a good month. They became friends.

  But then came March. Somebody flipped the calendar, the lady disappeared and Tessie missed her—there was no one to watch her anymore, to listen to her.

  “It would be like if someone covered all our windows in cardboard until it was our turn to look outside again,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to spend eleven months in the dark either, now would we?”

  I understood Tessie better than she knew. I could have told her about the face of my conscience. I tore out the month of February for her. We hung the picture in our bedroom, over the foot of her bed.

  2:15 p.m.

  IN SEARCH OF a driveway to turn my car around in, I drive a bit further and turn down Vlierstraat. There are two kinds of houses on this street too: horizontal and vertical.

  I grew up in a vertical one; our house was one step up from workers’ housing. Pim’s white farmhouse, on the other hand, was horizontal, curled up beside the barn like a cat by a noisy furnace. Laurens’s butcher shop, with its wide panoramic windows on both floors, looked as if it wanted to stretch out and make itself comfortable too.

  Ever since I made the distinction, I can’t help but notice that most village houses are horizontal, and most city houses are vertical, so the saying “a city that never sleeps” doesn’t really tell us much about its inhabitants.

  Miss Emma’s old house is vertical. Next to it is “the forest of the forest”, and behind that are Pim’s parents’ fields, and beyond that a vast nature reserve.

  The forest got its name because there were two forests in town, thus we needed two names. There was our forest, the one by the Pit, with benches and trash cans and sagging docks built by locals, and then there was this forest located on private property that we didn’t discover until much later because of the wide, boggy creek around it. Here, no nails had been pounded into the trees to hang hammocks; no treehouses had been built in the boughs; nettles and hogweed grew wild up around the trunks. This forest belonged to no one but itself.

  In the winter after Jan’s death, I often walked along the creek with the dog. This wasn’t just because there were no cars and hardly any people, but also because Pim’s parents’ fields were on the other side. I came to inspect the pastures, to judge how the family was doing by looking at the cows. The animals received very little care. No one brought them in at night or bothered to brush them. They spent the entire winter out in that field, first in snow, then in rain, huddled together, with nothing but frozen or otherwise green water in their trough.

  Every time I walked by, they lumbered over to greet me, with their sunken bellies and matted fur. But like everyone else in town, I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t look them in the eye.

  It wasn’t until the end of March 2002 that someone lodged an animal cruelty complaint with the municipal authorities. It came from a bird-watcher who’d been out with his binoculars in the nature reserve behind the fields—he was from out of town and didn’t know anything about the farm. Pim’s dad was still grieving, and even the city council could understand that. The complaint was dismissed.

  After nearly half a kilometer I still haven’t found a driveway to turn around in. I know who lives in each and every one of these houses, or at least who lived in them nine years ago. I know which households recycled, how often they drove off their grass, how they received their wafer at Communion, whether they used to be teachers. In some houses, I even recognize the Christmas decorations.

  I don’t want any of them to know that I’m here. I don’t want their dogs to start barking and them to peek out from behind the curtains suspiciously because they weren’t expecting any visitors today and see me. I don’t want them to come out for a chat and, after testing the water with a few remarks about the bad weather, to ask me how Tessie is doing, to look curiously at the contents of my trunk.

  I just keep driving straight. After about a kilometer, I’ll come out on the gravel road again and turn left. I resign myself to the fact that I’ll have to pass by the butcher shop after all.

  I steer the car down a slight curve.

  In the distance, I see it—the building the shop’s in. The facade has been plastered dark orange. That’s new.

  I drive up to get a closer look in the shop, but the aluminum shutters have been rolled down. There’s a sign on the door with something written on it. I pull up as close as possible so I can read it. WE WILL BE CLOSED ON DEC. 30, 2015. ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED BY PHONE. 03 475 64 32. The message is in large handwritten letters across two sheets of paper.

  In the front yard is a big new sign on high poles. Two spotlights shine lost light up on it. Under a simple cartoon of three smiling piglets are the words THREE LITTLE PIGS BUTCHER SHOP.

  I already knew that the butcher shop had a new name. It was changed in 2004, while I was still living at home, right after a brothel opened nearby on the other side of the canal. It was owned by a Dutch guy with a white Mercedes. He decided not to name his business the Whorehouse (even though there were no other brothels in town so there’d be no chance of confusion). Instead, he named it the Lucky—to fit in with the Welcome and the Night, hoping that his establishment might become equally legendary in town. Neither of the two bars were very happy about this, and nor were the Bakery, the Butcher Shop, the Corner Store and all the other family businesses in Bovenmeer. But since none of them wanted to go door to door with a “NO to the whorehouse” or “NO to the Lucky” petiti
on, they just followed the example and came up with more original names for their businesses, Laurens’s parents included.

  I’d heard through the grapevine that there’d been a lot of discussion about the new name at Laurens’s house. Three Little Pigs must have been Laurens’s idea, because his mom could have come up with something better than that. Even the Pit got a new, big sign: THE FISHING HOLE.

  Maybe they did it for all the dads who needed a place to say they were going to—“I’ll run by the Three Little Pigs” or “I’m off to the Fishing Hole”—something less ambiguous than “going out for ground beef” or “a quick dip at the Pit”.

  In the spotlights shining up on the new sign, I can see it’s started snowing again. I drive as close to the parking lot as possible, so I can get a better look at the scribbly handwriting on the sign—it’s Laurens’s.

  I can picture exactly what’s going on inside, the flurry of activity as they rush around filling orders. Me and Pim helped Laurens’s parents prepare the tinfoil platters many times. They’d be neatly spread out all over the ground floor, on every free surface—on the cupboards, the counter, the chairs, the windowsills, everywhere except the toilet seat.

  Laurens’s dad would pass us the trays of freshly cut meat, one by one. Then we’d walk around the shop, dividing them evenly across the platters—the good customers got an extra lamb chop, less good ones got fatty pieces of chicken.

  Laurens’s mom would make the first round to cover each platter with a layer of lettuce and the last round to check the overall presentation, adding a sprig of parsley or a handful of chopped onion here and there. Then, we all watched from the sidelines as Laurens’s dad made one last round to add the finishing touch: toothpicks with little Belgian flags on top.

  The whole evening was imbued with a sense of elation that I’d never seen in my own house, an efficiency that would have never occurred to my parents.

  Once, at the end of the work day, Laurens’s dad held up his meat-smeared hand in front of me, and even though it wasn’t clear to me that he was trying to give me a high-five, the way he wrapped his big fingers around my cold hand and pressed it into a fist made me feel like he wouldn’t have minded if I were his daughter.