by lize Spit
I’m surprised they gave her a six. There’s something wrong with their new point system. Anyone who starts with the assumption that every girl has at least ten positive features, and then subtracts the ugly ones from there, could actually end up more off than someone who starts at zero and adds a point for every asset.
“Where do you live again, Melissa?” I position myself as far away from her as possible.
Laurens’s places a finger over his lips—it’s four o’clock, the game has started, time for the secretary to zip it.
“Do you sleep at Nancy’s too?” Pim asked. “Where do your parents live again?”
“Why do you want to know?” Melissa quips back.
“I don’t. But our secretary does,” Laurens replies.
“My parents have a news stand near the church in Kessel. I only come to Aunt Nancy’s for the dogs.” Melissa fishes a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket. She’s wearing sweatpants that aren’t meant to be so tight. The legs are covered in dog hair. She passes around the cigarettes. Pim takes one. She puts the pack away.
All three of us watch Pim light the cigarette. He’s clearly done this before. He inhales deeply without coughing. He breathes out the smoke so that it hangs between us, forming shapeless figures. He passes the cigarette to Laurens. He inhales deeply too, then coughs, emitting three perfect smoke rings. He acts like that was exactly what he meant to do
“How much does your aunt pay you?”
“One euro per hour per dog,” she says. “But I’d do it for free. They’re sweet pups.”
Pim cuts to the chase. “We’re giving you the chance to win two hundred euros here. That’s the equivalent of walking two hundred dogs for an hour. All you have to do is solve a riddle. For every wrong answer, you take off a piece of clothing. You in?”
“Okay, fine. But I’m not giving up the dogs.”
“We’re not asking you to. See this as a bonus.”
Pim looks at me. That’s my cue, time for my one and only contribution to the afternoon. I’d better make it quick, before Melissa changes her mind.
I recite the riddle slowly and clearly. I still don’t remember where I got it from or if it took me a long time to figure it out myself. I didn’t have to pay for guesses in clothes though—that I would remember. Maybe somebody just told me the riddle and gave me the answer for free.
“So Eva’s question for you is this,” Pim says. “What happened to the man? How did he end up like that?”
“He broke his neck,” Melissa blurts out almost immediately.
“That would make sense,” Pim says, “the guy did hang himself.” Still, he looks at me. I’m supposed to confirm this, just for good measure.
“You could still slowly choke to death without your neck breaking,” I say.
“Is she right or not, Eva?”
“It’s not wrong, but it’s not quite right.”
“Take something off, Melissa.”
Unlike Ann, Melissa starts with her shoes.
“Two shoes count for one guess,” Pim adds quickly. Without bothering to negotiate, Melissa takes off her shoes. After that, her guesses are more or less the same as Buffalo Ann’s.
“Did he wet himself?”
“Was he a swimmer?”
I shake my head without offering any further elaboration.
The sweater falls on the floor between us. Melissa starts wringing her hands. The grease on her skin from petting the dogs forms pale coiled flakes that float down to the floor, landing among the sand and other filth.
After the third guess, she lowers her pants down to her ankles. Melissa was Laurens’s choice. Pim blinks suspiciously. This wasn’t at all what he’d hoped to see.
I understand why they’re doing the lowest-scoring girls first. We weren’t raised like our parents were with the they-can’t-take-what’s-already-yours mentality. We’re saving the best for last, which means we’ve got to stomach the worst of it first, because everything tastes better when you’re hungry. That said, there are some things you just don’t want to eat, even when you’re starving.
Was he hoping that Melissa would have some kind of hidden beauty? That she’d be one of those girls that gets prettier the closer you look?
Laurens has been staring at her bare thighs for a while now, but the look on his face doesn’t seem any more excited. I don’t feel sorry for anybody, not even for the pile of clothes on the floor between us. We could’ve just gone swimming.
“Laurens?” a voice calls from the garden. It’s his dad.
There’s a knock on the shed door. A shadow appears behind the blinds. Melissa scrambles back into her clothes.
Pim puts out the cigarette. Laurens snatches her sweater off the ground and waves it around, but the smoke doesn’t go anywhere.
Only after Melissa has her T-shirt back on does he open the door a crack. His dad walks in. He’s wearing a white apron caked in dried blood and a hairnet on his head. He looks at us one by one.
Laurens’s dad is the spitting image of what Laurens will look like later on in life.
“What are you guys up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Have you been smoking?”
“No,” Pim says.
“I think it’s time for your friends to go home,” Laurens’s dad says in his usual polite way.
Laurens nods apologetically in our direction.
When he tries to slip out of the shed behind us, his dad grabs him by the earlobe. None of us says a word. We don’t even dare to look at each other. Melissa’s sweater is on inside out.
Right before leaving the courtyard, I turn around. Laurens’s dad is still holding his son by the ear, dragging him through the yard, probably to his mother.
Ears are more firmly attached to the head than you might think.
Camping
I KNEW BEFORE the summer was even over that these months would stay with me for a long time. There was more sunlight on everything we did, allowing the memories to develop more sharply.
In ’98, there was a new trend in town—especially popular among the older boys—of camping out in each other’s backyards and sneaking out to commit minor acts of vandalism in the night. Stuff like knocking letters off of gravestones to make dirty words, graffitiing the sidewalks, covering people’s stoops and facades with chalk, pissing in free-standing mailboxes, getting the school nuns all riled up.
Laurens’s parents wouldn’t let him camp out at anybody’s house.
“Our Laurens snores. He’ll keep you up all night,” his mom said when we first came to her with the idea.
In her opinion, her son already spent enough time with us between the hours of two and five. As long as there wasn’t a blizzard or a war, Laurens had to be home well before dark.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going to pee in any mailboxes,” Pim pressed.
“If your parents are okay with this whole camping thing, then you two are more than welcome to set up a tent in our backyard,” she replied.
Of course, she didn’t get it. If she said no to something her son wanted, Pim’s parents would say no too. Musketeers are only as adventurous as their weakest link.
We spent the longest, hottest summer afternoon of ’98 brainstorming how to get Laurens’s parents to let us go camping. Pim didn’t have to help out on the farm, and Laurens was relieved of his duties in the shop because the weatherman, Frank Deboosere, had warned of a heightened risk of dehydration. We sat on Laurens’s swing set in the shade of the neighbor’s big oak trees.
From the top of the swing set, Pim threw pebbles at a pigeon that was trying to steal our shade. Laurens picked his nose, fished out a few boogers and wiped them on the trapeze ropes while swinging back and forth. I sat cross-legged in the grass, occasionally taking a sip from the two-liter bottle of water that Laurens’s mom had insisted we drink empty.
Laurens was in charge. They were, after all, his parents.
“We can’t ask three times. That’ll make them mad, I can already fe
el it.” Every time he shoved his index finger up his nose, his voice sounded nasal.
After a lot of discussion, I was sent in to try and convince Laurens’s mom “woman to woman”. In all our deliberations, it never became clear to me what women would actually say in such situations.
The shop was closed from twelve to two, but it was open again now. There were no customers inside. According to Laurens, nobody ever came in until six or so, until you’d just started running a bucket of water to soak the knives, tongs and spoons. Filling the bucket around three o’clock so people might come earlier didn’t work, he said.
Laurens’s mom was standing with her back to the lowered window shades, sideways to me. Her swollen belly swallowed up half the counter she was working at. She carried out quick, routine movements. She arranged the green, oval-shaped papers between chunks of freshly chopped meat, which she then pushed into a machine with a big handle and started cranking. She arranged the freshly ground lumps into two stacks on black plastic trays. There was still an entire bowl of meatballs waiting on the counter; a bunch of hamburgers had already been made.
I repeated one of Pim’s arguments from our brainstorming session. My voice sounded shakier than I would’ve liked.
“Camping out with friends is a basic right that no child should be denied.”
Without stopping the grinder, Laurens’s mom looked me straight in the eyes. She was at least impressed.
“What is so interesting that you can’t do it during the daytime?” she asked. “You’re going to have to explain that one to me, Eva.”
The longer she looked at me, the bigger the lump in my throat got. After a while she stopped the routine motions. All the meat had been run through the machine. But the two piles of ground beef weren’t the same height. It looked funny. Apparently, she didn’t like it either. She took some meat off one pile and transferred it to the other, but that just shifted the problem.
“Have you ever made hamburger patties before?” Her voice sounded less severe than her face suggested.
She made room for me at the counter. I stood between her and the meat grinder, shaping the balls of fresh meat she handed to me into perfect oval hamburgers. I kept going until I thought she wasn’t mad at me anymore. We barely said a word as we carried out the task, but we understood each other again.
I made forty-three hamburgers. Laurens’s mom arranged them on the tray. Sometimes I heard her apron rubbing against me, and I’d lean back ever so slightly so I could feel her giant body through the fabric. Within fifteen minutes, we’d worked our way through the second load of ground beef, but the stacks were still uneven. Laurens’s mother sighed, peeled a patty off the top and tossed it in the trash. Then she placed the tray in the display case and wiped the counter with a damp rag. All of a sudden, she stopped, looked at me, and said, “You know Eva, if there’s ever anything going on at home, you’re welcome here, day and night. Tessie too. But camping? Laurens’s father comes from a strict Catholic family. He’s not going to like the idea of two boys and a girl sharing a tent. And I can’t stand the thought of Laurens and Pim camping without you. That just wouldn’t be right.”
She walked over to the sign on the front door and checked to make sure the “Closed” side was facing out. It’d been hanging the right way all along. She opened the door wide.
“It’s still too hot to even think about barbecuing,” I said. “People won’t come until after they’ve had their siesta.”
That made her smile.
I washed my hands in the back room and headed out to the swing set. Laurens and Pim were exactly where I’d left them, only the pigeon had disappeared. Their enthusiastic gestures were a clear indication that they’d already started making plans for the camping trip they assumed was now on.
I made sure they saw me shaking my head from afar, that their disappointment would have already subsided by the time I reached the swing set. That way they wouldn’t ask too many questions and figure out that camping without me could have been an option.
While I was still a few meters away from them, I threw my empty hands in the air—that’s what I’d seen soccer players do when they wanted to deny having done anything wrong and avoid getting a yellow card. I had a right to keep Laurens’s mom’s words to myself. I kept shaking my head until I was standing right in front of them.
“Stop shaking your head. We get it, she said no,” Laurens said.
“What did she say exactly?” Pim asked.
“Not much,” I replied.
“I told you guys,” Laurens sighed.
“If she didn’t have much to say, then what took you so long?” Pim picked up a pebble and threw it with a slight curve so that it whizzed right over my head.
“She put you to work, didn’t she? What did you have to do—make patties or split eggs?” Laurens asked.
I shrugged.
“We’re all going to go home and pack a knapsack,” declares Pim. “In a half-hour, we’ll meet at the church. From there, we’ll head to the Pit.”
“Fine with me. Who’s bringing the gas burner and who’s bringing the food?” asks Laurens.
“You bring the food. Eva brings the burner,” Pim delegated. The way he said it, it sounded binding, full of promise.
We nodded.
“And if they come looking for us, we won’t give away our position. Even if they start combing the woods with dogs. Do we need anything besides the burner and food?”
“Knives, rope and a tarp,” I said. “And a shovel.”
“A shovel?” Laurens asks.
“We have to make camp, don’t we?” I say. “And dig a hole for our you-know-what.”
“Anybody got a tent?” Laurens asks.
“You do. What else would you sleep in when you go camping in the South of France?” Pim asks.
“No way we’re using ours.”
We had a tent at home too. Actually it was Jolan’s. But now that there was a rip in it, it belonged to everybody. A ripped tent was better than no tent. But I didn’t mention it. Offering up our tent would mean falling out of favor with Laurens’s mom. That would be a dumb trade-off.
Nobody said a word.
“No tent then. That’s real camping,” Pim declared. The plan was already sounding less promising.
By five o’clock Laurens had listed all the delicious one-pan meals we could make over a gas burner, but it still wasn’t clear who was bringing the tarp and who was bringing the shovel. We started getting hungry.
“Should we just have dinner here?” Laurens asked.
“Did we not just spend the whole afternoon brainstorming?” Pim stood up to leave—apparently, mom’s cooking was still the best.
“Eva, are you coming or staying here?”
I went with them and made a detour to Pim’s house. I thought about asking him if he and I could camp out in my backyard in the ripped tent—as long as we didn’t involve Laurens, I could stay in his mom’s good graces.
The closer we got to the farm, the shabbier the little tent became in my memory and the more ridiculous the idea sounded. Still, right before he turned up his driveway, I asked. Not very loud.
“Macaroni with ham and cheese—you smell that?” Pim replied. He stuck his nose in the air and climbed off his bike. I tried to convince myself that he hadn’t heard my question, but I didn’t smell any macaroni. All I smelled was cow dung.
It wasn’t until we were in fifth grade, in ’99, that both circumstances and Aldi finally decided to cooperate: Laurens’s dad was away for the weekend at a trade show to buy a new machine for the shop, and all of a sudden these cheap three-person tents appeared in the flyers of the German supermarket chain. Pim and Jan got one from their parents at the beginning of the summer as a reward for a variety of things: they had helped a cow give birth with their own hands, they made hay bales for a whole week without complaining, Jan’s end-of-the-year report card was good and Pim’s wasn’t so bad either.
Pim came biking over with the tent on his hand
lebars. On the package was a picture of a dome with a point on top set up in the middle of a lawn not much bigger than Laurens’s backyard next to a barbecue, with a child playing football, a camping chair and a happy couple around it.
Aldi cornflakes always looked worse on the box than they actually were. If this was true for the tent, then it was a pretty promising acquisition.
Now that our camping plans felt within reach, our strategies for convincing Laurens’s mom became increasingly bold. We spouted off ideas as we set up the tent in Laurens’s backyard, well out of her line of sight. The outer shell had a camo print, just like in the picture. Once it was pitched, we plopped down inside of it. It smelled like new. And kind of like sausage, but that was probably because the door of the vacuum shed was open.
“I think I got it,” Laurens said suddenly. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you this before!”
Pim and I turned towards him.
“My mom hates her knees. If you stare at her lower half while whining for something, she’s more likely to say yes.”
We walked into the butcher shop and stood behind the display case, at the back of the line. We waited our turn, hoping she’d have as much patience for us as for the customers.
“Sir, madam, how may I help you?” Laurens’s mom said, banging open a new roll of coins on the edge of the display case. She distributed the contents into the little slots in the cash register.
“Look, Mom.” Laurens took the empty tent bag and waved it in the air. His mom stepped out from behind the counter to inspect it. She was wearing a white shirt with the shop logo on it and a pair of flowery shorts. Exactly what we needed.
“Pim got this tent. It would be such a pity if we weren’t allowed to use it.”
“I don’t see any tent,” she replied, “all I see is an empty bag.”
Her eyes moved from the bag to us, then to the window and out at the gray clouds forming in the distance. All three of us fixed our eyes on her pale, clumsy knees. They were covered in mosquito bites.
“Bugs in the bedroom?” Pim asked without batting an eye.
It was the first time I’d ever seen Laurens’s mom shrink. It made her look even chubbier.
