The Melting

by lize Spit

  “It’s just a vase. That’s what I had to get out of the bathtub for?” Jolan said shivering, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. Dad slapped him on the head. A few drops of water flew from his ears and splat against the wall. The white drywall that had never been painted, so the splatters turned light gray.

  “The truth always comes out,” Dad said.

  Mom didn’t do anything, she didn’t even nod. It was one of the rare moments when they didn’t try to undermine each other’s authority.

  “All three of you will stay right here until you’ve figured out who’s responsible for this,” she said. She left the room without looking back.

  “I didn’t do it, I swear,” Tessie whispered.

  “Me either,” Jolan said.

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. That was the only thing I knew for sure.

  The cat weaved between our legs, rubbing against us. Jolan started to dry. We didn’t look at each other—we were all afraid this would incite suspicion.

  Around six o’clock, we heard Nanook whining in the kitchen. Mom had started making dinner, maybe she’d thawed a piece of lamb for the occasion. A little while later, we heard the sound of knives and forks clinking on plates. We saw the dog pass in front of the doorway to the living room, greedily pushing her bowl out in front of her.

  For the first time in months, we heard Mom laugh.

  “You should break a vase more often,” Jolan said to Tessie.

  Tessie bit her fingers and showed him the teeth marks.

  “But it wasn’t me, I promise.”

  Not biting would be a confession. Jolan and I bit our fingers too.

  By eight o’clock, no one had come forward, and we were sent to bed without dinner.

  “Sleep on it. If you don’t know by tomorrow, all three of you can help mow the lawn.”

  From our bedroom, we listened to the crickets chirping in the garden.

  “It really wasn’t me,” Tessie whispered. “Really.”

  “Somebody must’ve done it,” I said.

  “So it was Jolan.”

  “Probably.”

  “It was the cat,” Jolan told us the next day, but it was too late—we’d just told Mom that he did it. We helped him mow the lawn, but we were still traitors.

  My hands are frozen from the inside out. I can’t feel my lower body anymore. I could stand, I could sit—it wouldn’t make any difference. The cold has cut through my panties and into the skin on my butt. I worry that my legs are dying without me noticing. I need to move. Not just to get out of the wind but to stop staring at Jolan. The longer I look at him, the less courage I have to take that ice block out of the car.

  I carefully climb down the silage mound, along the back side, so no one can see me, and head back to the car. The ice block has barely melted at all. The Curver container is harder to lift. One of the handles is broken. Suddenly, I remember how that happened: it was that sharp turn off the exit into town. I can just barely lift it out of the trunk; gravity helps. For a moment I think of the neighbor. Of his arms and hands.

  The other day, while I was sucking him off, he grabbed my head. He didn’t understand why I bit down on his cock until he let go.

  I carefully flip over the container next to the car and hit the bottom a few times. The block comes loose and plops to the ground.

  I gently lift off the plastic mold.

  The water runs out, over my shoes, melting the surrounding snow.

  I put the empty Curver back in the trunk and close the door. I leave the car unlocked, with the key in the ignition.

  It’s hard to move. I open the trunk again, take out a red checkered blanket and spread it out on the ground. I hoist the block onto the middle of the blanket, gather the four corners and drag it behind me like a knapsack.

  The last few meters, the block is easier to slide because there’s snow stuck to the blanket.

  When I reach the old milk house, I look back at the wide, winding trail I left behind. It could’ve just as well been made by a sick, dying animal that dragged itself through the snow.

  August 5, 2002

  RARELY HAVE I seen such a doubtful look on Pim’s face. Laurens and I press our noses against the hayloft window so we can see what he sees: two strange forms waddling up the driveway. One of them must be Heleen, an eight-and-a-half-pointer on the cemetery wall. The other one we can’t quite place.

  Pim had warned us as soon as we got there that Heleen was bringing somebody with her. He blurted it out before we’d even reached the ladder to the loft. From where I stood, I could see straight up into his nostrils. There were grains of brown dust stuck in the snot.

  “Is that good news or bad news?” I asked. Nobody answered.

  Pim had wanted to meet in the hayloft again today, which went against our rotation system. He hadn’t given any specific reason, but I suspected that if we met at his place today, there’d be no reason not to meet at my place next time, where the walls didn’t have eyes—better for Elisa.

  We watch the girls enter the barn and climb up the ladder, which isn’t easy because they’re wearing so many clothes. We can’t tell whether Heleen’s friend has a good body or not—at least it’s not another mongoloid.

  “This’ll never work,” she says, with both hands gripping the bottom of the ladder.

  “Try harder,” says Pim. “Come on, you’ve got plenty of padding. It’s not like you’re not going to break something if you fall.”

  They must have heard what they were in for. Who knows, maybe Melissa or Ann—the four girls hang out together a lot—told them to wear lots of clothes, that this was the only way to solve the riddle. Apparently, the previous contestants hadn’t heard that the rules had changed.

  “Can’t you just come down here?” the other girl asks.

  “This is April, by the way,” Heleen says.

  I look at Pim. He shakes his head—a clear no. “Okay, April,” I say. “We’re coming down.”

  Grudgingly, Pim leads us across the yard, past the cesspit, to the area behind the milk house, a tiny barn where they store sawdust for the calves under a sheet of black roofing. Heleen stumbles in her five pairs of pants. It’s three times hotter down here than up in the loft. Pim explains the new rules very slowly.

  “I hate to tell you this, but you girls are out of luck,” he says. “Eight questions, that’s all you get.”

  “Then you guys are out of luck, ’cause we’re not playing.” Heleen turns to leave.

  “Yeah, why would we even want to?” April says.

  “Because if you win, we have to do whatever you say,” says Laurens.

  “So I could make you piss in the milk tank?” Heleen asks Pim.

  “Yep,” he says.

  “Or make you give us free meat every time we come to the butcher shop?” she asks Laurens. “For a whole year?”

  “Yep,” he says.

  “One guess per piece of clothing, take it or leave it,” April says, crossing her arms in front of her chest, which doesn’t really work with all the layers of sleeves.

  Pim and Laurens exchange nods.

  “Okay,” Pim declares.

  Heleen quickly pulls a pair of mittens out of her pockets and puts them on too.

  They start out with a couple of decent guesses, but it’s so hot that all the clothes end up working against them. In the sweltering heat, all they want to do is shed their layers. Their guesses become sloppy and less tactical. At one point, they even guess the same thing twice.

  Heleen removes the beanie on her head. The long curls that had won her extra points are now stuck to her forehead in wet strands. Pearls of sweat are forming on April’s temples. If they had come in bathing suits and flip-flops and only had two guesses each, they might have given the riddle more thought.

  By the time they’re stripped down to their underwear, they seem more relieved than ashamed. Between us are two big piles of clothes lying in the sawdust.

  For a second, I worry that this is just a
diversion tactic. Who knows, maybe wearing a lot of clothes wasn’t the only tip they got from Melissa and Ann, maybe they gave them the answer to the riddle, maybe they looked it up at the library or on the internet. What if April happens to be friends with Elisa, and Elisa told her the answer and now they’re just messing with us?

  Heleen and April exchange looks.

  “That’s it. We quit,” April declares. “This riddle is unsolvable.”

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  “Of course it’s solvable,” Laurens says, “and you can’t just quit. That would be like ordering a steak, eating half of it before paying and then trying to give it back. Right, Eva?” He looks at me.

  “I’ve never eaten a steak before paying for it,” I say.

  “Who are you, by the way?” April asks.

  Nobody responds, so I don’t either.

  “What do you think we should do, Eva?” Pim asks.

  Then he turns to the girls and says, “Eva always calls the shots. She’ll decide what we’re going to do with you.”

  “Okay, so it’s going to be Duck-Duck-Goose, then,” Heleen retorts, pointing to the teddy bear on my sweater.

  Pim bursts into laughter.

  “Do you want to keep guessing? You’ve still got a few chances left,” I say with a glance at their bra and underwear.

  “Just tell us what we have to do, Eva. We’ll keep our underwear on, thanks. It’s not like we’re going to solve that stupid riddle of yours anyway.”

  “All right then, you have to jerk them off, each of you, two times in a row,” I blurt out. Heleen whips around to face me.

  “Excuse me? What do you mean?”

  “Two times each.” My hope is that the girls get sloppy the second time around, and it’ll start to hurt. “You need me to demonstrate?” I ask.

  It gets quiet. Laurens and Pim stare at me in amazement.

  “Fine. Who goes with who?” Heleen pulls down her padded bra so it pushes her breasts up even higher. “Who do I get?

  “You guys can fight it out amongst yourselves,” I say. Her areola is peeking out over the edge of her bra.

  No one says a word. They exchange glances, sizing each other up, trying to figure out who belongs with who. Eights don’t go with sixes—that was always the boys’ rule. But no one dares to say this out loud now.

  “Okay, Laurens. I think Heleen and Pim should go together. You’re better off with April,” I say.

  Laurens looks as if he’s just been punched in the face. He turns to Pim and Heleen for help, but they’re smiling at each other with satisfaction. Then he looks back and forth from April to me.

  “How about I start with April, and then we switch?” he says.

  Pim shakes his head vigorously behind Laurens’s back.

  “No, no switching,” I say.

  Head down, Laurens kicks at the pile of clothes on the floor.

  “You’re one to talk, Eva de Wolf. You know, it’s not for nothing that you were always the fastest wheelbarrow,” he says.

  With his foot, Pim sweeps the scattered clothes back into a pile so the girls will have some padding under their knees.

  I don’t stick around to watch. I hurry off to my bike and head home.

  I knew what Laurens was getting at about wheelbarrow. Back in primary school, we used to do wheelbarrow races in gym class. The girls automatically dropped to their knees and wriggled across the floor like question marks. The boys would rush to grab the nicest pair of calves they could get their hands on and push them around the gym.

  Pim always grabbed my calves immediately, otherwise he’d have to push Laurens, who weighed twice as much as I did. He didn’t put me down until we’d gone back and forth across the gym. We won every time.

  At first, I attributed our victories to Pim’s muscular strength and my ability to move my arms quickly and keep my body as stiff as a board. Until I realized what it was really about: wheelbarrow races were the perfect opportunity for the other boys to peek into the loose legs of the girls’ gym shorts and catch a glimpse of their underwear.

  Pim had always preferred to keep his eyes on the prize.

  “It smells like sweat in here,” Dad says. “Can you pass the croquettes?”

  He must have decided to bike home from the bus stop for a change; it’s the first time he’s been home on time in a while.

  “Maybe it’s you,” Mom says.

  He sticks his nose in his armpit as he reaches for the croquettes. I hold the bowl up to his nose.

  “I think it’s Eva,” he says to Mom. “That’s what you get with those elephant feet.”

  It takes a lot of effort to keep the bowl in the air while he selects his croquettes, but I do it because it’s Jolan’s birthday. The bowl is lined with a sheet of baking paper. If I were a mom, I would’ve chosen a more festive color.

  Tessie leaves the table to fetch another knife. She cuts open her croquettes lengthwise one by one, scoops out the filling with the tip of the knife and pushes it to the edge of her plate. She does the same thing with the excess butter that needs to be returned to the butter dish.

  She lines up the six hollowed-out shells on her plate. She orders the peas to send three men to every ship and adds a teaspoon of gravy to each vessel.

  No one asks her to eat her artwork after she’s done.

  That night I can’t sleep. It takes an hour for Tessie to decide that the room is finally ready for bed. She stands next to her mattress the entire time, shifting things a few millimeters, flattening the sheet at the crease. Every night her bed is a different wild animal whose trust has to be earned.

  I ask her if she wants to come up in my lofted bed.

  “Do you want to switch beds again? Or do you want to share your bed?” she asks.

  “Whatever you want.”

  Tessie does the unexpected. She climbs up the ladder and lies down beside me, leaving just enough room between us so we don’t touch. She starts her list of goodnights, the words occasionally distorted by the lump in her throat.

  “Goodnight, Tes,” I say. I want to do something, say something sweet, ask her a question, curl up closer to her, but I don’t want to break the silence and force her to start all over again.

  She doesn’t fall asleep right away, but at least she’s lying down. That’s a start.

  The next morning it’s clear that we both fell asleep at some point. For the first time in months, I wake up before she does. I carefully slide out of bed without touching her. She’s lying on her back with her hands at her sides on top of the sheet, just like the dad in the Don’t Wake Daddy! game who can pop up at any moment, his nightcap flying off his head, and force all the players back to start.

  I head downstairs, the rest of the house is still asleep. The hallway is chilly, damp, not the kind of place you’d want to hang out in for very long. The monitor and keyboard are on the sideboard. The air smells like mildew and sleep.

  No one but Tessie stays in this hallway longer than necessary. And, strictly speaking, neither does she—for her the typing is necessary.

  Instead of going straight to the bathroom, I stop in front of the sideboard and place my hands on the keyboard. I press a few random keys, then I type “Hey Tessie! What’s up?” It feels silly because anything I type will be lost on the spot, no one will answer. All of a sudden, without having to mull it over for months, I come up with a fully-fledged plan.

  I cautiously slide the heavy sideboard away from the wall. Its small, pointy legs screech on the tile floor. I wait a moment, listening to make sure no one’s woken up. All is quiet.

  In the back of the cabinet are round holes. Dad cut them out before we were born, back when putting the finishing touches on things still mattered, so the stereo cables could slip discreetly out the back.

  The old computer tower has been inside the cabinet on the top shelf ever since it was retired. There wasn’t enough room behind the doors for the monitor and keyboard. I wriggle the power cord through the hole, insert the plug i
nto the socket so you can barely see it, and push the sideboard back against the wall. I turn on the computer. It boots up reluctantly but with the devotion of an old dog who still gets up when he hears his name.

  The huffing and puffing of the machine can still be heard through the cabinet doors, and eventually it will start giving off heat, so I cover it with a towel. This dampens the blowing sound, so you’d really only hear it if you knew to listen for it.

  I close the cabinet doors. Slowly but surely, the old monitor comes to life.

  The desktop is empty. We deleted everything, all the programs, folders and documents, everything except an old version of Word, a few games and the folder called “fun stuff”.

  I tinker around with the computer’s settings, turn off the screen saver and deactivate sleep mode. Then I open an empty Word file and save it under the name “TES.doc”. The cursor flickers on the blank white document. I switch the monitor off again. At the top of the stairs I look back one last time: it looks exactly like it did before. Only the fluorescent light bulb reveals how long I was there; its bright, cold light is now completely swallowed up by the first summer sun.

  Lying Fallow

  IT WAS SUPPOSED to start at ten. I’d never been to a funeral before, but I still recognized all the clichés. Rows of people stayed outside the church, even though there were plenty of empty chairs inside. Most of them were parents who preferred not to sit down at a funeral for a teenager, people from other towns who’d heard the rumors, or people who just happened to be walking by and considered themselves too underdressed to go in. The crowd was parted by the arrival of a black car—a cross between some kind of wartime vehicle and a giant beetle crawling down the street. Behind it were Pim and his parents, walking not quite slow enough. They kept having to stop and let the car carrying the coffin get ahead. Pim’s mother had her hand on the shoulder of her remaining son—it was hard to say whether she was clinging to him or trying to slow him down.

  Tessie came with me to the funeral. We shuffled into the church. I told Mom and Dad that Laurens’s parents weren’t going to be here either, and they didn’t have any trouble accepting this as an excuse not to come.