The Melting

by lize Spit

  I really didn’t plan on telling anyone, but as soon as we were on our way home, the lock on my mouth broke open. Finally, I had something to tell Pim.

  “You guys wanna know something?” Jolan said a few days later when we were all seated at the table. He waited for Dad to respond.

  No one was that interested. We all expected him to say something about the difference between single- and double-lobed plants.

  “I do,” I said. He gave me a faint smile.

  “Miss Emma is a lesbian. Somebody saw it with their own eyes,” he said. I felt like I’d been stung by a wasp. The burn spread across my entire chest.

  Dad didn’t react. I bent over my plate like he did and fished out the little pink bacon bits between the slimy macaroni.

  Jolan wasn’t the type of person who was privy to this kind of gossip, unless someone was trying to coax him into helping them with their math or physics homework. The fact that even he knew about Miss Emma was proof that Pim had spread the news all over town.

  “A lesbian. Crazy, huh?” Jolan repeated. “Rumor has it they were fooling around in the broom closet.” He looked up at Dad again to see if he cared.

  “Why don’t you just focus on finishing your plate, Jolan,” Mom declared.

  Jolan stopped talking and ate.

  It took everything in me not to react, not to reveal that what he said mattered to me, that it was true. But for the first time I wasn’t able to offer any support.

  The story about Miss Emma in the broom closet spread like wildfire. Within a few days, it had reached the school board. Parents were demanding an explanation.

  The news of Miss Emma’s resignation came two weeks later. They made up some other reason for it.

  Throughout the fall of 2000, I stood in this exact spot, behind the linden tree where I’m now parking my car. From here I could see Miss Emma’s house without her being able to see me. She wasn’t my conscience anymore. There’d been a changing of the guard.

  I watched her trim her hedge, how she clumsily tried to balance the shopping bags on her handlebars in front of her house, how every time the handles got caught on the bell. Once she snarled at them and rang her bell three times in a row. I was the only one who heard it. It sounded like a question that no one wanted to answer.

  Even though it cost me my hiding spot, I rang my bike bell three times back, at exactly the same intervals.

  Miss Emma whipped around, looked at me sternly, marched into the house with the heavy shopping bags and slammed the door behind her.

  That year, before the winter settled in, her house went up for sale.

  She only returned to Bovenmeer twice: once in 2001, for Jan’s funeral, and once in 2004, to become the first lesbian to get married in our town. Word had it that only those who had openly supported their relationship would be invited to the ceremony. But anybody could come out to throw rice afterwards.

  I checked the mailbox seven days in a row. Pim was the only musketeer who got an invitation. Jan’s death brought him endless privileges.

  In the end, he didn’t go. That didn’t surprise me. When I first told him her secret, he replied, “She doesn’t have some other orientation, she’s just disoriented.”

  At first, I wasn’t planning to watch people throw rice either. The summer of 2002 had already happened, Tessie didn’t live at home anymore, I made as few plans as possible and did everything I could to avoid Laurens and Pim.

  When the day came, I went anyway and watched from afar. A lot of people showed up out of curiosity. They all wanted to see if it actually worked: two white dresses promising to love and cherish each other forever.

  I mostly wanted to see if Miss Emma looked happy. If quitting her job at the school had changed her life for the better. If it had made her even more remarkable.

  No turtle doves or balloons were released.

  Miss Emma wore a white skirt suit with a plunging neckline and her hair in a tight dot. Her brand-new wife wore a beige linen suit with straight legs and a purple breast pocket. They strolled out through the wide gates of the town hall. There were a few people, including Laurens’s mom—who hadn’t even bothered to take off her apron—who made sure to hurl the coarsest type of rice right in their faces.

  July 24, 2002

  I SHOW UP at Laurens’s house the old-fashioned way, without calling first, hoping to convince him to stop “the sampling”. I’m ready with a short speech and just enough money in my sock for a few slices of ringwurst, so I won’t have to go home empty-handed if Laurens refuses to listen to my plea.

  ON VACATION UNTIL NEXT WEDNESDAY reads the sign in the shop window. The display case is completely empty, except for a garland of dry sausages. Under a kitchen towel are a few jars of preserves that couldn’t possibly go bad in seven days.

  Laurens’s dad, who is almost unrecognizable in sunglasses and without his butcher’s apron on, is out in the open garage trying to squeeze the last few things into the car.

  This happens every year. First, they don’t have any holiday plans, then they rush off in a big hurry. They always go to the same campground in the South of France with two beaches: one sandy, the other for nudists.

  Laurens is already in the car reading a comic book with one hand in the giant candy jar meant for on the road. He rolls down the window.

  “Indira will have to wait a week for your riddle,” he says hastily, even though they’re not ready to hit the road yet. His mom is leisurely watering the plants on the windowsills. He passes me a sour fizz ball through the open window and fishes out a milder piece of candy for himself.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll save Indira for when you get back,” I say.

  He rolls the window back up.

  Five minutes later, his mother locks the front door.

  Ever since the shadow-puppet incident in the summer of 2000, she hasn’t trusted me with the spare house key. Before that, the same three people had access to the butcher shop during the holidays: Laurens’s dad’s brother, Laurens’s mom’s friend and me. I always accepted the key gratefully, without knowing what I might need it for. There were no live animals in the house, they had a fire alarm and I had no idea how to operate the power generator next to the fridge. I never carried the key in my pocket, I kept it in the sock box in my closet instead. Not only because I was afraid of losing it, but because, with every move I made, the metal reminded me of the hours leading up to their departure, and of how much I’d hoped they’d ask me to come along.

  I sit on the cemetery wall with a sour, tingling tongue and wait for them to drive out of town in their packed car.

  Laurens knows I won’t meet up with Pim without him. The overloaded blue BMW passes by the church. Even though I’ve already made up my mind not to draw any more attention to the fact that I’m the one staying behind, I start waving wildly. Because Laurens doesn’t see what I see—that, surrounded by all the heavy camping gear in the back seat, his head looks smaller and clumsier than usual. It’s hard not to feel sorry for him.

  I try to imagine what kind of vacations go with all that camping gear. For most items, it’s easy enough to picture. The three coolers, for example, contain leftover meat that they’ll throw on the grill tonight and then give away for free—that way they’ll be able to borrow other people’s equipment for the rest of the holiday without feeling guilty about it. The water tank will have to be refilled regularly, and they’ll spend much of the day lugging it around the campground. The Nordic walking poles will prove to be nothing more than a good intention.

  I’m able to picture almost everything perfectly, even the board games and air mattress, but there’s one thing I can’t imagine: Laurens’s mom lying naked on the beach. Here in town she’s the most reassuring person I know. At any given moment during the day, I know where she is, what she’s doing and how she’s doing it, which knives she’s using, which meat she’s cutting.

  The fact that she always covers her body for us but dares to expose it on some beach in France isn’t just r
emarkable, it hurts. Apparently, she can be more herself with strangers. This town, the familiarity of it, is somehow failing her.

  The car disappears. I stop waving and look up at the church tower. The clock doesn’t have a second hand, and that’s a good thing. It’s not even noon yet.

  It’s been nearly two weeks since the carnival trailers left town. By now, they’ve been gone longer than they were here, yet their absence is still noticeable. All the grandparents who urged their grandchildren on the merry-go-round to catch the flosh and win a free ride. The operator who dangled the tassel just out of reach of their grabby little hands. The one kid who, without resorting to any drastic measures, actually caught the thing—and not because anyone complained that the kids didn’t stand a chance, but because he had brothers, sisters and cousins who’d all want to join him on his free ride and have to buy another ticket.

  Not long after the car is gone, something else appears in its place: Elisa’s Mimi on her way to the bread-vending machine in the parish square. As she comes into focus—glasses, clogs, capri pants over her bathing suit—I notice her hesitation when she sees me. First, she buys her loaf of bread and then she walks towards me with the paper bag clamped under her arm. She’s looking more and more like a grandmother.

  “Elisa’s in town this summer,” she says.

  She looks me straight in the eyes. I don’t dare to smile.

  “I saw her riding her horse the other day,” I say.

  “I think she’s bored,” Mimi says. She breaks off a piece of crust and gives it to me. Back when I used to have lunch at her house, I always ate the crusts because she said they made your breasts grow, and by the looks of Elisa, I had no reason not to believe her.

  “How is she?” I ask, chewing the bread.

  “Why don’t you come with us to Lille Mountain today? You can ask her yourself,” she says. “Or do you have other plans?”

  I crawl on my knees under the barbed wire and stand at the edge of the field, watching Elisa ride her new horse in circles, how she moves dramatically up and down in the saddle.

  When she came to town the weekend of the carnival, I didn’t dare to speak to her, because I didn’t have any reason to. Now that Mimi has asked me to try to convince her to come with us to Lille Mountain, it’s different. This time I’m here on assignment.

  I just went home to put on my swimsuit. It took me a while to find a system that would allow me to keep my breasts. In front of the bathroom mirror, I put on one of the padded bras and tucked the straps under the swimsuit. The round forms weren’t as big as Elisa’s, but at least they were something.

  It takes a few minutes for Elisa to notice me. She stops rocking back and forth on the saddle, grips the sides of the horse’s neck and pushes herself up straighter. With loud clicks of her tongue, she steers the animal in my direction. This stallion is bigger than Twinkle was, and he’s got a white patch around his left eye.

  If he were a cow, he’d be one of those black ones with the white head. Those were Jan’s favorites—he told me once.

  Elisa climbs down from the horse. She’s a head taller than I am. The first thing I notice are her eyebrows. Two perfectly shaped arches. I don’t think she tweezed them herself. There’s probably a beauty salon in Hoogstraten where they can do it for you.

  The horse snorts impatiently. Elisa clicks her tongue again and walks in front of me to the water trough outside the barn.

  “Mimi wanted me to ask you if you’ll come with her to Lille Mountain,” I say. “She asked me to come too.”

  Elisa frowns with her sharp eyebrows.

  “If I say no, will the two of you go together?”

  She leads the horse into the barn. Inside, she hoists the saddle off his back. She takes her time, performing every step emphatically.

  The sight of Elisa’s back irritates me. As long as I’m looking at her back, I’m not being seen by her. With most other people, Dad, for example, I feel the opposite. His back is the only part of his body I dare to look at, that I don’t hold against him—it’s his blind spot.

  It takes her an hour to get ready to go. I don’t really believe she’s coming until she’s sitting beside me in the back seat of the car showing off the neon yellow bikini under her clothes.

  “Sorry it took so long,” Mimi says.

  “No worries,” I say—at least we’ve killed some time.

  I try to relax. Now that Laurens is on his way to that sandy beach in the South of France, where he’ll suck in his belly every time a group of Dutch girls walks by, I don’t constantly have to wonder whether he and Pim are off having more fun without me.

  A half-hour later, we arrive at Lille Mountain.

  For a recreation area in a small Belgian town like Lille, it’s a pretty strategic name. Every year, at least a hundred lost tourists show up at the swimming hole with hiking boots or a map of France wondering how on earth they ended up here. Most of the time these are the people who rent the jet skis, so at least they can say they didn’t come all this way for nothing.

  We find a spot away from Mimi and spread out our towels in the opposite direction of hers, that way the boys up ahead won’t think she’s with us.

  “You didn’t get so fat after all,” is the first thing Elisa says as we take off our clothes to reveal our swimwear. She squirts twice as much sunscreen into my hand as the amount she claims to need for her own body.

  Once I’ve got it all rubbed in, I lie down on my belly and turn my head away from her. Elisa takes a magazine out of her bag and starts flipping through it. I should’ve brought a comic book.

  The last time Elisa and I read a book together was in the fourth grade, the night before a language arts test. I was the best sentence dissector in the class, but I needed a good excuse to knock on Mimi’s door so late in the evening. I said I forgot how to identify a direct object.

  “First you have know what the subject is, then you can find the direct object,” Elisa explained in a teacherly tone. “For example, in the sentence, ‘Elisa explains sentence analysis to Eva’, who is performing the action? Elisa. She’s explaining something. She’s the subject. Who is Elisa explaining something to? To Eva. So Eva is the direct object.”

  Based on her explanation, I concluded that she hadn’t understood very much of the grammar lesson, but I didn’t correct her. On the contrary—I let her get the answer wrong on the test the next day, because either way she still understood the basic relationship: as long as she and I were in the same sentence, she was always the subject.

  Finally, around three-thirty, when the sun is no longer high in the sky, Elisa decides it’s time for a dip. She stands up from her towel and jumps around in the sand to loosen her muscles. The line from her neck to her tailbone is covered with pointy vertebrae. It reminds me of how sloppy kids draw dinosaurs. The weight of her breasts is supported by a tiny yellow string tied behind her neck. We have about the same amount of fat on our bodies, hers just hangs in the right places.

  Her belly is flat with one deep wrinkle just below her navel, like pants with a crease. When she sits down, it rolls only there, nowhere else.

  It was something I’d already noticed on that field trip to the swimming pool. Even back then, I already knew that the things I admired about her were the same things I would later come to hate. Now I think the prettiest thing on her body is her mole, especially how she artfully manages to keep it tucked under her top. She must have had to try on a lot of bikinis before she found one that would cover it.

  “I don’t feel like swimming,” I say. When Elisa doesn’t respond, I stand up and follow her down to the water, taking cautious baby steps.

  “Okay, fine,” I say. “But I’m not going in past my waist.” Otherwise, the padding in my bra will fill up with water. Everybody knows that wet circles under a dry bathing suit are an easy way to tell which girls are cheating.

  Elisa ducks under the water. A few seconds later she grabs me by the ankles, pulling me off balance. I fall forward into the shal
low pond.

  With my nose full of water, and even afterwards—while we’re plodding through the sand back to our towels—I can’t remember why I ever liked her, why I even came. It must have been the same for the sand: there was a time when all the grains were fused together in a single rock that had no intention of ever crumbling, but over time, the water decided otherwise.

  We plop back down on our towels. Elisa keeps turning over so each side will dry evenly. I stay on my belly so she won’t see the two wet spots on my chest.

  Elisa’s bikini bottom is one of those ones with little strings on the sides. She catches the attention of a couple of guys behind us by sucking in her stomach and tilting her pelvis so her hipbones stick out and the fabric floats from one bone to the other like a bridge. Even I can see right down to her crotch. Her pubic hair is in one big, uncompromising wet curl.

  Only after the boys have turned over on their stomachs one by one to conceal their excitement from each other does she lower her pelvis again.

  “Are you still a virgin?” she asks, just loud enough for the boys to hear.

  “Are you?” I ask. That’s exactly what she wants—the opportunity to answer her own question.

  “Of course not,” she says. “But you don’t know the guy. He’s from Hoogstraten. He was pretty sweet, actually, it didn’t hurt at all. Did it hurt for you?”

  “No, it didn’t hurt for me either,” I say.

  We lie there in silence for a little while. The boys get up to play soccer. As they walk by, they grope Elisa from head to toe with their eyes.

  I think about Tessie. About how I left her at home earlier. She’d already put on her bathing suit under her clothes when she got up this morning, hoping to convince someone to go swimming with her. I could’ve taken her to the Pit. I could’ve finally set the pool up in the backyard so Dad could stop using the promise of it to get her do all kinds of chores.

  Mimi shows up between our towels.