by lize Spit
The only solution was “a side class”: three extra desks in the back of the classroom. The teachers would simply adapt the day’s lessons for the three additional students, making them easier or harder depending on the level of the rest of the class.
“Your father didn’t put up much of a fight, and Laurens’s and Pim’s parents didn’t have any better ideas,” Mom told me six years later. I was eleven at the time. We were doing the dishes. The hot water on her hands always made her open up, but most of the time she just complained about all the things she’d missed out on in life, and all I could do was listen.
I could tell by the way she said “better ideas”, proud and uncertain at the same time, that she’d been intimidated by the imposing presence of Laurens’s mom and decided out of self-preservation not to get along with her.
Maybe it was something her own mother had whispered to her with her hands in the dishwater: the people you get along with are the same ones who will stab you in the back.
As for me, Pim, Laurens, we all thought the side class was a great idea. It was either that or be sent to another school and have to bike a lot farther every morning.
The lessons we got were easier than those designed for our age group. We’d hear the older kids whining about all their homework and tests, which made us feel like we’d been spared something.
Since the other kids started calling us “the three parasites”, Pim came up with the name “the three musketeers” in second grade. We didn’t know exactly what the name was supposed to mean, but the motto “all for one and one for all” that he chanted loudly as we walked onto the playground had a positive effect. We started using the name all the time—as we charged for a goal, when we got good grades, when we got bad grades, every time we popped a bottle of Kidibul sparkling grape juice—until we believed that there’d never be anything more important than our friendship. We thought the history books were based on us, not the other way around.
Together, we played soccer against the boys from the other classes, and even they didn’t seem to mind as long as I stayed in the goal and didn’t accidentally score for the wrong team: winning because your opponent scored an own goal was pretty much the same thing as losing, but not nearly as bad as losing to a girl.
It wasn’t my dribbling that set me apart from the average girl, but my competitiveness and my clothes. From first to fifth grade, I wore dark blue jeans and either Jolan’s old soccer jersey or a green Mickey Mouse sweater.
After tackling a boy who called me a cheater for being offside, I wasn’t invited to Laurens’s and Pim’s birthday parties anymore, but I did get invited to the other boys’. I kept showing up at every party until they were surprised I didn’t pee standing up with them too.
I wasn’t so easily accepted among the girls. It was always up to me to let them know I wanted to be included. Then they’d form a wall and ask me for the password, which was constantly changing. I never guessed it right, so they’d make me answer a difficult question or a riddle, and even if I actually figured it out and was allowed to play flagpole or hairdresser with them for the last two minutes of recess, I still became indebted to them, and three recesses later they could still seize my wafer cookies.
With the younger girls, I just assumed they just didn’t get me. But that didn’t explain why the older girls wouldn’t let me talk to them either.
“Being a Spice Girl” required tremendous attention to detail. They were always changing their mind about what they liked, and the differences between cool and uncool became increasingly subtle—one day your scrunchie was supposed to match your shoelaces, and the next day it wasn’t; one day Jimmy was the cutest band member in Get Ready!, and the next day he wasn’t; one day you had to have a Polly Pocket in your bookbag, and the next day you didn’t. Compared to the boys, there were a lot more hoops to jump through to become popular.
At first, I thought my friendship with Laurens came with certain benefits. But when the girls started parading around the playground arm in arm, they only let me walk behind them, never beside them. I’d see their long ponytails bouncing from shoulder to shoulder, their clean fingernails, their slim thighs under their skirts, and I knew: these girls have spent their entire lives hanging out with other girls. They’re finely sharpened knives. Not like me, I’ve got a dull tip.
10:00 a.m.
NINE YEARS AGO, when I moved to Brussels, every middle-aged Arabic man looked the same to me. Now, on the highway back to the town I grew up in, every white man behind the wheel looks like my father.
I didn’t want to live in the capital per se. I just wanted to live in a city I didn’t know. Because whenever I was in a familiar place, I had the same problem: I couldn’t stop looking down at myself from above. Shopping centers, department stores, libraries—they were all the types of places where, from a bird’s eye perspective, I could see the top of my chestnut-brown head brushing past thousands of people without touching them.
I ultimately decided to study architecture so I could use what I had long considered a weakness as a strength. I moved into an all-girls student house with a shared kitchen. The bathroom was shared too. For the first few months, things went pretty well. On Tuesdays, I made pasta for everybody. We didn’t tell each other where we were from, what high school we went to, what our parents did for a living. There was no point. All that mattered was who we were in that moment, together, sitting around a table with our mouths full of pesto.
I never skipped a class, and at the end of the day, I went straight back to my room. When my housemates went home to their parents for the weekend with all their dirty laundry, I stayed behind to study and cleaned the common areas. I got the best grades and was under the impression that, with each design and scale model, I was making something possible.
But eventually things changed. Fewer people came to the Tuesday-night dinners. No one bothered to say they weren’t coming, they just stopped showing up. People preferred to hang out with friends who were studying the same thing they were—medicine, law, communication. They went out to bars, to the Fuse. I realized that the reason why we didn’t ask about each other’s backgrounds was not because we wanted to give each other the chance for a fresh start, but because it wasn’t worth the effort. Our friendship was only ever meant to bridge a gap.
I kept on cutting cardboard, working out plans, studying materials, but I couldn’t see what I was making possible anymore. All I could see was what I was making impossible by trying to give it physical form. By the end of the school year, the only thing I still enjoyed was searching the internet for tiny figurines to use in my models. I looked for silhouettes in various positions: walking, sitting, swimming, jumping, chatting, bending, cycling. Trees, airplanes, bicycles, staircases, chairs, umbrellas, Christmas trees. They weren’t cheap; I ended up spending a significant portion of my student loan on them. Some of the figurines reminded me of Tessie or Jolan. I didn’t use those ones in my models; I set them on my nightstand instead.
When my models were displayed in the auditorium with all the other ones, they were easy to spot because of the copious amounts of tiny people.
It wasn’t until my second year, when I overheard a teacher make a comment about it to another teacher, that I saw what they meant, why I would never be invited to the Fuse.
It took a few more weeks before I stopped cleaning the common areas, and another three months before I finally moved out of the house.
It wasn’t as cold in Brussels as it is here. There, the raindrops were feathery and delicate, the kind of rain that stops a few centimeters above the ground and forms a thick, low-hanging mist. Here, there’s no mist to cover the wide-open landscape, and it’s almost below freezing.
I don’t have any anecdotes about Jan to share, and I didn’t send Pim a photo or post something on the Facebook page, even though I probably knew Jan better than all the others put together. They’ll all come with the same clichés: that he was born just a little too late to be a Christmas baby, that he was left-
handed, that he was extremely shy and good with the cows.
Back when Jan was still alive, he and Pim would get a disposable camera from their mom every summer. At the start of the fall, they’d have the film developed and printed in doubles. Then came our ritual, the claiming of memories: Pim would spread all the photos out on the kitchen table, we’d pour the River Cola and divvy up the sour belts. Pim’s mom paid for everything, so her son always got a copy of every picture; Laurens and I had to share the doubles. We took turns taking our pick. There were never very many photos of all three of us—the few there were must’ve been taken by somebody in town or Pim’s parents.
In the early days, we used to fight over the group photos, but as we got older, we only wanted the ones that we looked good in ourselves. Once, when I claimed one of the good photos of Laurens, I could tell by the way he shrugged his shoulders that he didn’t appreciate it.
There were always a few photos that me and Laurens weren’t in, taken on days when we weren’t out at the farm—Jan with a brush or a pitchfork in his hand or a bad shot of Pim and Jan together holding the camera out in front of them, or Pim, Jan and their mom on a rare trip to the zoo.
Me and Laurens never claimed these photos. Laurens didn’t want them, and I was afraid I didn’t have a right to them.
After Jan’s accident, Pim’s mom didn’t buy the disposable cameras anymore. I could see it in her eyes—she expected Jan to come back at any moment, to walk across the farm and start sweeping the stalls. That’s why no memories could be captured until he returned. Otherwise the pictures, the representation of the brief period when he was dead, wouldn’t make sense.
At the end of the first summer I spent alone in the empty student house in Brussels, I was mostly sorry that there weren’t any photos to spread out on the table anymore. I understood that, once you’re out on your own, there are fewer photo-worthy moments.
July 8, 2002
“ARE YOU GOING to ask if we can set up the pool?” Tessie asks. “There’s a bigger chance they’ll say yes if you want it too.” She’s got a scar around her lips. Actually, her whole mouth is a scar. On a warm summer evening, when she was three years old, she tried to catch up to me and Jolan on her tricycle. She went tearing down the Bulksteeg behind us in her bathing suit. A pebble got caught in her front wheel and jammed it. She flew over the handlebars and landed on her face. Her lips served as brake pads. They were left hanging on her face by a thread.
As always after these kinds of things happened—as if there were ever a better time for such an accident—Mom and Dad claimed that they were just about ready to go out that night. They were even wearing new clothes. Anne, the babysitter, wasn’t there yet. The neighbor, Anne’s dad, brought Tessie home with a necktie tied around her chin to hold everything in place.
Tessie’s mouth was sewn back on in the ER. The plastic surgeon was trying to make it to a party herself—or that’s what Mom said—she was in a hurry and ended up sewing the lower lip on crooked. The kind of crooked you’d only notice if you knew to look for it.
Tessie sits up straight, shakes the snow globe on her nightstand, lies back down and waits for all the glitter to fall to the bottom.
The snow globe is her snooze button. Every morning she wakes up with a fixed number of blizzards.
I’ve been waiting in the kitchen for an hour, in the chair Mom usually sits in. Out of the corner of my right eye, in the back of the yard, I see Jolan starting to dig up the old turtle. It’s overcast but still oppressively hot. I can tell by the pearls of sweat on his back. He’s wearing the black jeans that he keeps in a separate pile in the closet for the weekends, just like Dad does. The big neon work gloves make him look particularly pale.
Dad buried the turtle out there three years ago in the winter under the cherry tree, between the bike shed and the chicken coop. He claimed that it would decompose into a beautiful skeleton, a real “collector’s item” as he called it. He marked the spot with one of the hollow bricks from the bathroom wall. “Now you have to wait six years to dig it up again. The more often you ask about it, the longer it’ll take.”
For a while, we waited in silence for the worms and insects to finish their God-given task. Eventually the grass grew back over the hole. Every time we passed the cherry tree, we’d pause to inspect the brick and imagine the turtle carcass being gnawed away bit by bit.
But the longer we waited, the more patient we became. It’s been months since I’ve thought once about how the turtle was faring underground. Maybe Jolan hadn’t thought about it much either, until this morning, that is. I had no idea where all this brute force was coming from. He already had Dad’s gloves on and a shovel in hand when I woke up that morning.
“You coming, Eva?” he asked excitedly. “It’s the perfect day for an excavation!”
He ran into the kitchen with the shovel in hand and started fixing himself a piece of toast. He couldn’t spread the butter with the work gloves on, so he asked Tessie for help. He marched back out to the garden, leaving a trail of sand through the house. Tessie hurried off behind him with the toast. She desperately wanted to help in my place, but Jolan shooed her away.
“Excavation isn’t for girls!” he shouted.
“Eva’s a girl, isn’t she?”
Jolan stuffed the entire piece of bread into his mouth to avoid answering the question. So Tessie started digging random holes on the other side of the yard. That way, at the very least, Jolan would have to share his tools with her.
I watch them closely. They both dig at top speed. Sand starts piling up next to Jolan’s hole. The handle of Tessie’s shovel is thicker than the cross-section of her wrists. She keeps starting new holes in different spots, leaving little mole hills all over the garden.
I could stand up, walk out into the yard and help Jolan with the excavation or help Tessie catch up to him. There’s no one stopping me. But it would be a waste to dig up a carcass without Laurens and Pim, the waste of an adventure.
I get up, fill a glass of water and sit back down.
This is the most profound boredom I’ve ever felt. I no longer exist as one body, but as an entire group of people who’ve all run off in different directions. And the table doesn’t help. It’s not just for sitting, like this chair, it calls for some higher purpose.
I could scoot back a little, into the middle of the room, so it won’t feel like I have to make a decision anymore. But sitting in a chair in the middle of the room is something you only do on your birthday so people can sing to you. If only it was somebody’s birthday. I lay my arms out in front of me on the table.
There are sighs coming from the living room. I don’t need to go in there to see what’s going on. Mom is sitting in the armchair with the pear-shaped kitchen timer we got her for her fortieth birthday on the coffee table.
When she unwrapped it, she held it up and said resentfully, “These types of presents are the reason they invented Mother’s Day.”
The timer is used solely by her. She sets it to the maximum of fifty-five minutes and leans back in the armchair. If she has to get up for some reason in the meantime, to go to the bathroom or something, she turns it back to the max. The only minutes that count are those filled with uninterrupted sleep.
In front of me on the patio is our husky, Nanook. She’s sleeping too. Mom tied the end of her leash to one of the table legs. Now, she’s so tangled up she can barely move. She’s just lying there with her head on her front paws. Every once in a while, she lets out a sigh that sends the sand around her nose into the air.
Ever since Jolan came home from school with a terrarium full of walking sticks, we’ve had pets that are allowed to sleep in the house at night too. We put the terrarium in the corner of the living room. At first the insects didn’t do very well, but once we took the electric bug zapper out of the room, they perked up a bit.
Somehow, those walking sticks reminded me of Mom.
No one cried when they finally croaked. The confirmation of death was spread o
ut over the course of a few days. It was more of a process of elimination, really. We ruled out every possible sign of life until only the opposite remained. When walking sticks die, they dry out. Their bodies transform into these yellow-brown rolled-up leaves. As long as fall is around the corner, no one makes a big deal out of it.
I head out into the garden. With every step, it’s as if two knitting needles are digging into my lower back. I sit down on an overturned bucket near Jolan’s archaeological site, far enough away so that I can’t see down into the hole. Judging by the giant pile of dug-up sand, it’s pretty deep by now.
“Eva, when I reach the skeleton, I’m going to brush away the sand with a paintbrush. Otherwise it might break.”
Tessie sits down beside me. The sky overhead is getting darker. The landscape is parched and dry. I watch how the storm rolls in. It starts with rumbling in the distance, until the clouds merge like a bruise forming in reverse: first light gray, then dark blue with patches of purple. We’re winding up for the blow; there’s a knockout coming.
There’s a sticky feeling in my underwear. I need to go to the bathroom. Maybe that’s it. I stand up to go inside.
“Can you bring me a plastic bag?” Jolan asks without looking up. “And a raincoat, one that can get dirty.” He tosses the shovel aside and takes up the paintbrush.
Although there are no windows in the bathroom, I can still tell when it starts to rain. Even windowless rooms get darker, the mood changes. The thunder rolls in from far away and ripples through the entire house, into the tiniest corners.
I look down at the blood. It’s everywhere, in my underwear, between my open thighs, on the toilet seat.
My vagina is no longer a hole that leads to nowhere, like a stitched-shut pocket that turns out to be fake after purchase. I have a uterus. I’m no different from the other girls. Elisa was right.
