The Melting

by lize Spit

Jolan looked at his watch. “It’s almost two o’clock in Russia. The missiles would’ve arrived by now.”

  Tessie stood up, walked to the corner of the room and unplugged the computer; that way it wouldn’t know the year had changed. She walked out to the backyard in front of us.

  While we waited for Jolan to start the ten-second countdown and the fireworks to start, I thought about how Tessie and I used to leave notes to each other when we were little. I’d write her a message in invisible ink on a Post-it note and stick it to our bedroom door. She’d color in the entire square with a marker to find out what it said.

  Maybe typing on the keyboard was a new, more sophisticated version of the Post-it notes? Maybe she was hoping I’d make an effort to decipher her secret code like she used to do for me?

  At one minute before midnight, the neighbors began a loud countdown and the alarm on the submerged G-Shock started beeping. As with all disasters predicted way in advance, nothing happened when the clock struck twelve. A few bottle rockets were fired, but not many.

  Behind me Mom let out her typical burps. Dad lit a cigarette.

  I stood there, arm in arm with Tessie. I could feel the warmth of her skin against mine, we didn’t have a sweater or a jacket on because a few minutes ago we were inside, warm around the electric griddle on the kitchen table.

  When the fireworks were over, Mom, then Dad, turned around and went back into the house.

  “We’re still alive,” Jolan said. “No nuclear meltdown.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s good.”

  Tessie didn’t say a word. I saw Jolan look at her, look away, then look back. I noticed his discomfort first, then I saw the reason for it: there was a tear rolling down Tessie’s cheek.

  “The computer survived,” I said.

  “I know,” Tessie replied.

  I didn’t understand why she was crying. Maybe she was right to be disappointed. We would crawl into bed, and tomorrow everything would be back to normal.

  Jolan pulled his watch out of the glass of water, dried it on his shirt, and wrapped it around Tessie’s wrist. Even on the smallest hole, the strap was still way too big. The clock read three minutes past midnight.

  “It’s not a real G-Shock. Mom bought it at Aldi and threw away the box,” Tessie said.

  1:00 p.m.

  I DIDN’T COME here for nothing. Right above my head, through the wood floor in the master bedroom, I hear someone shuffling around on my dad’s side of the bed. He’s just sat up on the edge of the mattress and is searching around for his slippers with the tips of his feet. He waits a half a minute for the morning stiffness to settle before pushing himself up on the corner of the bed.

  It’ll take him a total of six minutes to reach the kitchen table—to roll out of bed, shuffle down the stairs while leaning on the banister, sit on the toilet, wait for the dizziness to subside, squeeze out a dark yellow puddle of piss, forget to shake off the dribble, and—with drops of urine on his pants—stumble into the hallway, cough up his lungs over the bathroom sink, try to flush down the brownish clots and walk through the dining room to the workshop to smoke his first cigarette. On the way, he’ll pick up the empty beer crate so it can be refilled with fresh bottles.

  I have six minutes to make up my mind. Do I want to see him, or do I want to leave? And if I leave, should he know I stopped by or should I make it look like I was never here?

  Behind the row of Christmas trees, on the other side of the untrimmed hedge, a heavy gray cloud moves across the sky. The sun lights up the snow on the lawn. The backyard is like a blank sheet of paper.

  I used to draw here sometimes. The glass tabletop was a perfect surface, the tip of the pencil never pricked through the paper. We were only supposed to draw on scrap paper, but when no one was looking, I’d take one of the clean, white sheets of expensive printer paper, even though it wasn’t allowed.

  One time, Dad came home from work earlier than usual. He saw me sitting at the table with my pencil ready to mark on one of his fancy white sheets.

  “Draw me,” he said in a last-ditch effort to save the paper. He sat down across from me at the table.

  His request made me anxious, nauseous even. I knew—this is not a happy man. And I didn’t want to look at his unhappiness for too long; I didn’t want to have to draw it.

  I carefully studied his face, all the details I hadn’t studied for a long time: his crewneck T-shirt, the stiff, wiry hairs in his eyebrows, the white hair that he made the same joke about at least once a week—that someone had forgotten to color him in.

  After half a minute, I didn’t see the facial features anymore, only the stories, the things people said about him in town: that he walked his bike home from the bus stop after work to put off coming home. When I heard that one, I decided to check and see if it was true. And there he was, off in the distance, rolling his bike down the bridge, his white head bent over as if he were walking into a strong headwind. There, from a distance, I wished with all my heart that he was the one who had a secret trapdoor in the backyard with a second family behind it, that there was more to his life than the things I knew about.

  My pencil remained frozen on the paper. All that was left was pity, an oval whose lines didn’t merge at the top. I handed Dad the portrait. He took it, looked at it, and said nothing.

  A few minutes later, I heard him open the printer and put the sheet back in the paper tray.

  It’s now three minutes past one. Above the fruit bowl is one of the sketches I made of this very same fruit bowl, tacked up next to the two drawings of the house. The bowl contains almost exactly the same fruit as in the drawing—a pear supported by two soft apples, a discolored banana, a couple of tangerines. Over time, the drawing has come to serve as a guideline.

  It’s four after one. Everything in this room has remained intact, even the appliances have stood the test of time. The colon between the hours and minutes on the digital clock on the microwave blinks every two seconds. Thirty blinks, then the minute changes. The dots used to remind me of eyes. As long as they were watching, everything remained the same. But as soon as they blinked, as soon as time closed its eyes for a split second, that’s when we got older, that’s when it hit us.

  July 21, 2002

  IT’S BEEN TWO hours, and Pim and Laurens still haven’t called. Not to check whether they’re still welcome in our chicken coop, not to ask where I am. I offer to help Jolan turn over the garden. As long as I’m doing something useful, it’ll seem like the radio silence was my choice.

  “Fine, but don’t whine if you get blood blisters,” Jolan says.

  His eyes rest briefly on my ribs. He’s noticed the difference—this morning I put on two padded bras to make my breasts look bigger. I had to do it today, so I’d have time to get used to having the two bumps with me everywhere I go, at the lower edge of my field of vision. Soon I’ll have to face Laurens and Pim again, and I didn’t want them to notice that I still don’t entirely believe in those bumps yet myself.

  “Give me a job too,” says Tessie, who has just come outside. She doesn’t notice my new cup size, but that doesn’t mean anything—she doesn’t know to look for it yet.

  “We’ve only got two tools,” Jolan says. He’s got the heavy digger in one hand, and in the other, what Dad calls the “truffle” or the “shuffle”, a collapsible spade with a wooden handle and an iron blade that he bought at the American army surplus store. There must have been someone behind the counter who couldn’t pronounce the English word “shovel”.

  Jolan pushes it into my hands.

  “Tes, you’re on earthworm duty. If they’re still intact, you can save them for the compost pile. They help keep it aerated.”

  “And if they’re not alive anymore?”

  “Then throw them back.”

  Tessie nods. She pulls out a saucer from under a flowerpot with a wilted plant in it and sits down cross-legged in the dirt.

  These kinds of activities are good for her. The last time we turne
d over the garden was five years ago, back when her behavior was still normal, and she hasn’t had the opportunity to develop any bizarre, compulsive sequences around collecting earthworms since then.

  In the last few months, she hasn’t created any new rituals, but she’s been carrying out the existing ones more regularly.

  I’ve walked in on her typing on the keyboard of the Windows 95 more often lately. Jolan spilled a glass of lemonade on it last year and it was transferred to the sideboard in the hall. For days, the keys didn’t work at all, but eventually they all came back to life except for the A. Nobody except the Little Runt considered it worthwhile to buy a new keyboard for such an outdated system, so Dad bought a second-hand laptop with Windows 98 on it from a company that assembles computers from donated parts so we could throw out the 95. But Tessie wouldn’t have it. She insisted that we give the old dinosaur a decent resting place, that we first “retire” it for a few months before tossing it out with the trash.

  There was no talking her out of it. She threatened to sleep out in the garden next to the computer and refused to eat anything.

  “Just for a little while.” Mom gave in. Tessie was already way too skinny.

  Against our better judgment, Jolan and I moved the heavy computer from the table in the living room to the sideboard at the bottom of the stairs. Over the years, the old piece of furniture had become nothing more than a storage chest, a place for decorative gifts from old people who would have to die before we could get rid of the stuff.

  What we were afraid would happen did. Tessie’s room-entering rituals didn’t go away. She simply moved the little iron swing figurine from the sideboard to the table where the computer used to be. Since the hallway connected practically every room on the ground floor, I caught her hunched over the keyboard several times a day. When she saw me, she would stiffen like a nocturnal animal in headlights and act like she hadn’t been typing at all, like she was just looking for something.

  A few days ago, I was determined to talk to her about it. On the way to the bathroom, I found her in the hallway in her usual position. At first, I just ignored her. I slipped into the bathroom, quietly closed the toilet lid, sat down on top of it and listened to her punch the keys. She typed at lightning speed, using only her thumb, pointer and middle finger—that was how she’d taught herself to do it.

  Was she making some kind of confession? And if so, to who? Who did she need forgiveness from? How many sentences did she type over all those months that never reached anyone? Typing on a disconnected keyboard is as bad as telling a joke that nobody bothers to listen to.

  “Tes?”

  She immediately stopped typing. The time had come. I had to say something. We couldn’t go on pretending that nothing was going on.

  “Yeah?” she said. Her voice was suddenly coming from the other end of the hall; she’d tried to distance herself from the computer. In all likelihood, she’d have to pay penance for this interruption later on, perform the ritual over and over again, typing even longer sentences even faster.

  “What are you typing?” I tore off a few squares of toilet paper and wrapped them around my finger. I could tell by the stubbornness of her silence that she’d heard me.

  “Tes?” I asked again. “What are you writing? Are you working on a story?”

  Again, no response.

  “I’m gonna stay here until you tell me.”

  “You better be careful,” she said. “There are old people in nursing homes who have to wait so long for the nurse to come wipe their butts that they poop out their intestines.”

  “I’m not pooping,” I said. “I’m sitting on the lid.”

  At that, she was gone.

  Jolan draws lines in the dry, sandy soil with his shovel, dividing the patch at the foot of the cherry tree into smaller squares. Ten by ten.

  “If we dig at the same speed, we’ll meet right in the middle. Fifty squares each.”

  We start shoveling at opposite ends of the garden, silently digging towards each other.

  Every time I bend my knees and bear down on the little shovel, I think of my two friends, about what they’re doing right now, whether they’ve decided to meet in the hayloft or in the vacuum shed.

  I wonder if they’re doing something more fun, if they’re still mad about the money, if ignoring me bothers them as much as it hurts me.

  Today, it’s Amber’s turn. She’s one of the few girls at Pim’s school, and the only one who can operate the laser cutter, which according to Pim “increased her market value to a nine” during the school year.

  “But,” he added recently, “the summer’s different. In July and August, girls have to do more than work a laser cutter, which is why she’s only a seven and a half now.”

  Pim was right. The girls with the highest scores weren’t necessarily the prettiest. They were the hardest to get. Buffalo Ann, for example, is really no uglier than the average eight, but she used to have a crush on Pim, which made her too easy.

  It was Laurens’s mother who once explained to me how it worked. “If you put the whole log of apple pâté in the display case, nobody wants it. Customers aren’t interested until there are just a few slices left, too small to look unpopular, but too big to be seen as unappetizing leftovers.”

  After half an hour of digging in silence, stabbing our shovels into the ground, we’ve each turned over about thirty squares. Jolan picks at a large purple blister in the palm of his hand and wipes the ooze on his pants. He waves to show me the flapping piece of skin. I don’t have any blood blisters, but all of a sudden, I feel my second period coming on. All the blood my body can spare starts seeping into my panties. At first, it’s warm and liquidy, but the more I move, the stickier it gets. As it dries, it starts chafing my inner thighs.

  “I think you’d better stop shoveling,” Tessie says. The saucer is already full of worms: the squirming ones on the left, the dead ones on the right. “That dirt is full of tree roots. They need those roots to suck up water, you know, and now you’re chopping them up.” The tears are already welling up in her eyes.

  “A tree’s roots grow as long as its trunk. That’s why you have to plant them so far apart, and far away from houses. Chances are these roots aren’t from our cherry tree. They’re probably from one of the neighbors’,” Jolan says.

  “So? The neighbors’ trees are living things too, aren’t they?” Tessie says. She keeps on sorting the worms. In the meantime, some of them have crawled to the wrong side of the dish.

  I look down at the dirt I’ve just shoveled. It’s full of half-rotten cherry pits and thousands of tiny roots, as thin as veins.

  “Are they searching for each other underground?” Tessie asks, pulling two loose roots out of the dirt and pushing their ends together.

  “Okay, we’ll stop. Enough digging,” Jolan concludes, even though he’s halfway through his last row. He’s at fifty-five squares, I’m at thirty-seven. In the middle of the garden patch is an island of solid ground covered with tufts of grass. On top of it is the bowl of worms. “We can start planting now.”

  “Tessie, why don’t you go get the seeds?” he asks, holding up his dirty hands. “They’re in the laundry room.”

  “I’m not done with these worms yet,” she says. She holds the saucer out in front of her and carries it to the compost pile on the other side of the yard.

  I look at Jolan. He doesn’t get the message right away: as long as we’re watching her, Tessie can’t go in through the back door.

  I wipe my hands on the grass and head to the laundry room to get the seeds. Before going back out to the yard, I duck into the workshop, quickly, without looking up at the rafters, in search of new equipment. I return to the yard with a small rake and a pointy steel tool for making deep, narrow holes.

  Jolan coordinates the planting operation. He stretches out a string over the ground to align our holes. He reads the instructions on the package to find out exactly how far apart the seeds should be planted and measures the d
istance with the soles of his shoes.

  “We’ll plant a little bit of everything,” he says.

  Tessie gets the pointy steel tool because she was the only one who had a name for it: “the hole poker”. She punctures the earth where Jolan tells her to, and I drop in the seeds. Sunflowers, radishes, carrots, leeks. There’s amazing strength in her skinny wrists. I can barely keep up with her. Jolan scoops potting soil over each hole. In a small notebook, he sketches a map of the garden and makes a note of where we planted what and when to harvest what.

  Mom’s awake by now, standing at the porch window watching us and talking on the phone. She keeps the receiver pressed against her ear and sticks her free hand nonchalantly in her pocket. I can tell by the way she’s standing that she’s on the phone with Grandma, that they’re speaking West Flemish.

  Mom can switch effortlessly between standard Dutch and dialect. She rarely speaks to us in her mother tongue. It always reveals a part of her character that we’re not allowed to talk about, a certain strength, a rare optimism.

  She’s not on the phone for very long but remains on her feet for the entire conversation, smiling—a daughter no mother could regret having. As soon as she hangs up, she slumps her shoulders, pulls her hand out of her pocket and goes back to being the regretful mother.

  That night, I go to bed on time so the day will be over faster. I’ve dug too much, thought too much. My body hurts down to the tiniest muscles, my thoughts are ringing in my head, I’m nothing more than holes. It feels like that time in primary school when we were playing hide-and-seek, and I hid behind the trash cans next to the bike racks only to realize later that the other kids had gone off to play football—no one came looking for me.

  What riddle did Pim and Laurens use today? Did they just keep using mine, assuming no one would get the right answer, or did they flip through magazines in search of a worthy replacement? I wonder if my name was ever mentioned, if they even thought of me today, if they decided who would call me tomorrow, what they’d say to make up for what happened.