by lize Spit
“That’s not the expiration date, kid,” Agnes barked. “It’s the date the product was made.” After a short debate, the pasta was exchanged for a pack of permanent markers. A few hours later her sign outside read: FOR ALL YOUR DRY GOODS that still have to be made. Agnes never tried to wash it off. On the contrary. She’s become a specialist in manipulating expiration dates. With a fine-tip pen, she transforms threes into eights and nines; all it takes is a little horizontal line to turn January into July. She knows the locals will keep coming anyway: anyone who wants to be picky can drive ten minutes to the next town for a pack of flour. Principles always have their limits. Even Laurens’s cousin would still come back again for noodles.
I go in. This day got off to a good start. I still owe it some jawbreakers. A bell rings as I walk in; it’s not the same one as in the butcher shop. This one sounds more like a shriek.
The shutters are almost completely rolled down, casting a dusky light over the store. A musty coolness lingers among the shelves, like a morning kept too long. I wait, keeping an eye on the office at the back of the shop. That’s where Agnes hides out doing photocopies of crossword puzzles. Maybe she’s got a table and chair in there, a kitchen too. No one can confirm this.
I keep waiting; Agnes doesn’t like customers nosing around when she’s not there. I untie my shoelaces and fish the coins out of my socks. I didn’t really need to hide the money this morning. Mom didn’t see me leave.
“Hi, Eva,” a voice says. I finish tying my shoes and stand back up.
Agnes hurries to the counter; she walks with a slight hunch. Her back has grown crooked, like a side table. Laurens once made a joke about how many beers she could carry on her shoulder blades without spilling. Today I count eight. I have to remember this, maybe I can tell him later.
I follow Agnes between the gray shelves laden with sponges, toothpicks, sanitary pads and plastic flowers. She knows what I’m here for. The candy is in the centermost aisle.
“Where are the other two musketeers—the butcher’s boy and the farmer’s boy?” she asks. I shrug.
Ever since her husband ran off with another man, ever since the new slogan appeared on her sign, she’s stopped letting customers scoop their own candy, including me.
I politely ask for twenty satellite wafers, five sour belts and two packs of jawbreakers. She drops the candy into the cone-shaped paper bag.
“Are you hanging out with Jan’s brother today? You going to share this with him?” she asks.
I nod convincingly, though I’m not sure.
She gives me a little extra of everything.
I pedal through town with the bag swinging from my handlebars. I scan the empty streets, hoping that if I look long enough, Laurens and Pim will emerge from the collages of old memories. After an hour, the candy is gone. My mouth burns from the sourness. My stomach feels heavy. I should have stayed home. Maybe they tried to call me.
I bike past the butcher shop.
Laurens’s bike isn’t leaning against the front of the house. Maybe he’s got new friends or hobbies he hasn’t told me about, maybe he’s not home. Maybe his bike is just in the garage today or he’d rather watch TV in this heat than hang out with me.
I peer in through the big shop window. Inside, the priest is picking out cold cuts. He points to the ring bologna. Laurens’s mother swings the log onto the meat slicer. Through the open door, I can hear the slow movement of the blade. Slicing meat doesn’t make a chopping sound, it’s more like unravelling.
Laurens was right. “A cow is made up of a million threads,” he once said during lunch at school as he rolled the spongy center of his bread into little balls, divided his meat into strips and laid each strip on a separate bread ball. “Once you know this, you don’t mind cutting it up anymore.” This didn’t sound like something he thought up himself, but still, I was impressed by the fact that he’d remembered it.
Watching Laurens’s mom has a calming effect on me. I can tell by the way she’s moving her hands that she’s talking about the weather. Then she stacks cool, loose slices of salami on the scale.
Here, watching the priest nod approvingly and pay for his meat, I’m overwhelmed by a gloomy feeling that’s left me alone for a little while, a feeling that I had thought, I had hoped, was maybe gone for good.
I now know that nothing can protect me from this feeling, even when I’m in my seat in the right class on time, wearing an outfit that everyone is used to seeing me in, even when I’m looking at meat, even when I’m not looking at meat. Suddenly, it’s as if something, everything, is missing inside me, as if I used to be more whole and a part of me still remembers how that felt.
The feeling also strikes me when I’m standing in the bathtub, washing. Suddenly, I’ll feel something on my skin. It closes me in, tightens around me, reminding me that I’m in the wrong place.
Maybe, I thought recently, it’s because I was born shortly after twins, from a womb that was all stretched out. Maybe Mom was just too loose around me in those first nine months.
Before Laurens’s mom sees me standing there watching her, I slip out of sight.
The storm hits before I make it home. The first raindrops are lukewarm. I guess it was inevitable, even the cold taps have been running hot these past few days. I look for a tree to take shelter under and end up under a pine at the edge of our yard. I watch the storm rage around me. Gusts of wind whip through the pouring rain.
We never should have given Dad tools as gifts, and definitely not hedge clippers. That thing has been hanging from the roof with its two handles towards the ground for two years now. Whenever the wind blows, it starts to sway. Maybe that’s where he got his ideas.
At first, the tree’s branches are able to keep out the rain, but after a few minutes, thick, irregular drops start leaking through. I’m getting wet, but it doesn’t matter.
Four Shadows
WE WERE THREE, but we had four shadows. Jolan, my oldest brother, would have had a healthy twin sister had his umbilical cord not been wrapped around her neck.
They were born four weeks early in ’85, and there are endless photos of their birth, all of which have been stuck into an album with double-sided tape. Under each one is a date, exact time, names of unknown uncles, notes about big dreams—attainable because they would only ever have to be partially achieved.
JOLAN DE WOLF and TES DE WOLF. There was a little cross next to the second name on the birth announcement, which saved the cost of a death announcement.
As soon as Jolan was out of the incubator—as my dad liked to exaggerate—I was born.
That was somewhere in the middle of ’88, at midnight. I was a girl. My name was Eva. I too arrived alone. Dad had just stepped out for a smoke.
Compared to Jolan, who was small and slow to develop, I was stronger from the start. Of my first year of life, there are fifty photos at most. None of them have a time written under them; no unknown uncles and aunts came to visit.
“Elephant feet”, Dad wrote under a picture of me using the potty for the first time. The other captions must have been written in hindsight because they all describe something temporary and include an evaluation of the situation. “Eva, still a little towhead.” Or: “January, when she could still smile.”
Three years later, in ’91, Tessie was born. Dad only took a handful of photos of her, none of which landed in an album. From a young age, Tessie was smaller and more fragile than we were. She had thin, veiny skin and fine blond hair.
“What did you expect? After two kids there just wasn’t enough material left over,” Dad joked after she was born, or that’s how my mom would tell it. Maybe he was proud, maybe he was overcome with emotion. But to the nurses, it must have sounded like an apology, the kind of apology women make when a recipe doesn’t turn out quite right.
“That’s something my own goddamn father would have said. And you have four kids, by the way, not three,” Mom replied. I could tell by the way she would bring it up from time to time, the way
she always included that “goddamn”, that this was where it all started. This was her ultimate grievance.
The choice of a name led to a long debate: Mom wanted Tessie, Dad wanted some other name, preferably Charlotte—Lottie, if necessary. But maybe, in an effort to make amends, he finally gave in and agreed to my mom’s choice. Tessie became an homage.
By the time she was two years old, they’d started calling her “the little runt”. In the household my mom grew up in, where she was the oldest child of a tyrannical father, Little Runt was the nickname for the youngest in a family. There was something tragic to the name—it reminded me of a guinea pig that shits on one side of its cage and sleeps on the other. We were pretty sure the nickname wasn’t given out of nostalgia, but out of regret for the name Tessie, a regret that Mom didn’t want to admit to Dad. Either way, it stuck. Language was the one thing from Mom’s childhood that she still talked about with pride.
Tessie’s arrival made me the middle child. This meant that whenever sides were being taken, I got to pick which one I wanted to be on, depending on whether I wanted to form a coalition or an opposition.
Before Jolan was born, Mom and Dad moved from a larger town nearby to the three-bedroom house in Bovenmeer.
Bovenmeer was the type of place where, in order to keep the balance between supply and demand, there had to be either one or none of everything: one store, one hair salon, one bakery, one butcher, no bike shop, one library (whose entire collection could be read in a single sitting) and one primary school.
For years, we would refer to every place in town as the something, as if it all belonged to us, as if we could pinch it between our thumb and forefinger. It was if, after a long war with the big cities and surrounding towns, we had won the prototypes of a store and a butcher shop and firmly anchored them around the church and parish hall, within walking distance of pretty much everything and in reach of everyone.
The shop owners took advantage of this; whether it was out of laziness or arrogance, they didn’t bother to come up with more original names for their businesses than “the Corner Store” or “the Butcher Shop”, except for a few cases where the owner’s last name was tagged on like a kind of subtitle.
Bovenmeer had a few exceptions, though. There were two bars, for example. Men were known to stumble out of the Night, steady themselves against the doorframe, and head over to the Welcome, where they served beer until the early hours of the morning.
Certain names were given over and over again: Tim, Jan, Ann. Both Pim and Laurens had a brother named Jan, but from the winter of 2001 onwards, they each had one in a different way. Laurens still had a brother; Pim used to have one.
There was also an empty henhouse between the Welcome and the parish hall called Kosovo. An Albanian refugee family had lived in it for months, and after they were deported, various local clubs started using it to store their junk.
I had no idea what Mom and Dad had hoped to find in Bovenmeer. Whether they had ever thought about how they would survive in a town with an annual parish festival, where no one thinks it’s strange to send someone to Kosovo for a pack of napkins.
9:30 a.m.
SIX DAYS AGO, two weeks after the invitation arrived, I took a plastic Curver tub over to my neighbor’s and asked if I could fill it up with water and stick it in his freezer. He lives one floor below me, so I guess he’s more of a downstairs neighbor than a neighbor-neighbor. He’s twelve years older than I am. We both happen to be teachers: he teaches geography and biology at a French-speaking middle school, and I teach art at a Dutch-speaking one.
We lived in the same building for four years without ever saying a word to each other. The first time we spoke was about a year ago; he was carrying a clear plastic bag full of large hunks of raw meat—a heart, a sirloin steak, tenderloin, tongue, spareribs, beef tips. I was carrying a few collages left behind by my students. I’d given them a bunch of old atlases to cut up and told them to use the pieces to assemble their ideal world. The razor blades and Styrofoam were barely touched; most of the students were content with ripping up the atlases and slapping a few scraps on a sheet of paper. Most of them hadn’t even bothered to pick up their work at the end of the school year.
The neighbor felt the need to address me about this. He said I’d be better off teaching my students to value facts and respect history.
I pretended not to understand French. The smell coming from his bag was making me nauseous.
Since it would have taken him far too much effort to reprimand me in Dutch, he started explaining how he acquired such a large amount of raw flesh: every year, his mother had an entire cow butchered at an organic farm and shared the meat with her three sons. They could each pick out the pieces they wanted. This was the only time the family got together all year.
As I turned towards the stairs, he said that my heels made a lot of noise on the wood floor in my apartment, but he didn’t mind because I seemed like the type of person who knew what she wanted.
This led me to two conclusions: this guy has a very large freezer and very little understanding of people, especially women.
Half a year later, he wanted me to indulge him in more than just small talk. I wouldn’t say I considered this a plus, but it didn’t bother me as long as he washed up beforehand and let me keep my clothes on.
After I received the invitation, I cooked us a piece of organic beef from his freezer every night for two weeks. Once there was enough room, I brought over the empty Curver and filled it up with water from the sink. It just barely fit in the freezer.
The neighbor allowed it and didn’t ask any questions. He just cleaned his dick with the water sprayer, using his thumb and forefinger, as if screwing off a lid. After I’d sucked him off—he with his bare butt on the corner of the tub, me with my knees on the bathmat—we sat in silence, sipping fresh mint tea. I put a lot of sugar in mine, as usual.
An hour ago he helped me carry the heavy block of ice from his freezer to my car. It was still dark out. Just as we were about to load it into the trunk, he paused and asked in broken Dutch where I was planning to go. He ran his eyes over my legs, which looked more bronzed and attractive than they actually were in the pantyhose I was wearing, over my hair that I’d tied back in a bun, over the mascara on my lashes. I could sense that he found me prettier than usual but had no idea if that was because I’d done my best or because I was about to drive away with a big block of ice in my trunk without specifying where I was going.
“To my parents,” I said.
“Your parents,” he repeated, as if it had just dawned on him that I wasn’t born in a cabbage patch.
“How long do you think a block of ice like this’ll last?” I asked.
“Depends which is the temperature of the car and for what you need it,” he said.
I let the grammar errors slide so as to avoid discussing the matter any further.
“Will you come over again tonight for tea?” he asked, as he heaved the block of ice into the trunk in one swift motion.
“Sure,” I said.
I watched him walk back to the building, his skinny legs, his back. I stood there watching until long after he was gone.
Before I started the car, I called Tessie but hung up before the call went through so it wouldn’t show up on her phone. I double-checked the event’s Facebook page. Pim had set it up a few days after the invitation arrived—a sure sign that he, and not his parents, was behind the whole thing. The information on Facebook was different than that on the card: the event description said that we were welcome any time from three o’clock onwards, but the card said the party started at three o’clock. That was typical Pim. By encouraging people not to show up on time, he was already creating an excuse for the empty chip bowls.
The cover photo was the same baby picture as on the invitation. Most people marked themselves “Going” right away. After a few days, I changed my status to “Maybe.”
At first, there was a surge of activity on the page. Friends posted
all kinds of anecdotes and photos. I followed every post. Jan had never had a Facebook profile himself—he was dead before he ever had a place to make himself look better than he was. So now other people were doing it for him. Only attractive, happy photos of Jan appeared on the page—photos I didn’t even know existed.
I think everyone turned off the notifications early on. Once the event was off the ground, the page died out within a few days. All the good photos had been shared.
“Hello, my name is Karin Peters. I’m 39 years old and from Belgium. The reason I’m telling you all this is that I have a product I think you might be intristed in. Just the thing you need!!!! Pay now. Send me your contact info and I’ll send pics!!” That was the last post—right there at the top of the page. Last night, I thought about flagging it as offensive, but in the end I didn’t because I wasn’t sure what was so bad about it.
I’m now halfway to my destination. The traffic is slowly easing up. I keep checking on the block of ice in the rear-view mirror. The frozen mass has lowered the temperature in the car considerably. I don’t drive too fast and keep the heating off so as not to speed up the melting process.
The Facebook page is still open on my phone. Forty-five people are going. Jolan was invited, Tessie too, but neither has said they’re coming.
I’m still the only “Maybe”.
July 6, 2002
I CHECK UNDER the covers to see if they’re still there. My two breasts could have just packed up and left in the middle of the night while no one was watching and gone off in search of a better, more credible body. My tank top got twisted up in my sleep, and now my nipples are peeping out of the armpit holes.
These breasts make me think of Uncle Raf, my dad’s brother, who, whenever he arrives somewhere, always remains standing, even after someone has pulled up a chair for him. When he finally does sit down, he never rests his weight on the back of the chair. That way he can disappear halfway through the family gathering without saying goodbye.
