by lize Spit
“The party is about to start,” the little boy says, motioning me to follow.
“You go ahead. I’ll come later,” I say.
The child leaves the sled behind, walks back into the barn, into the commotion.
I duck behind the tractor and creep around the outside of the building towards the mound of silage. I climb up the side without puncturing the plastic. It’s not easy. The cold has shortened all the muscles in my body, except the ones in the leg that was just touched.
At the top, I peek down through the wide gap between the roof and the wall of the barn, which provides ventilation for the cows. I now have a bird’s eye view of the party. The tops of people’s heads. A heat blower. A modest disco bar. A table with a tray of Melba toasts covered with spreadable cheese and bowls of chips. Somebody makes a beeline for the refreshments, then turns around. Maybe the toasts are already soggy. Next to the tray is the plastic bag Laurens was carrying. His mom isn’t talking to anyone. She’s just standing there with her arms clasped against her stretched-out waistline, like a child holding an inner tube ready to jump into the pool.
The longer I watch, the clearer it is that the party is well underway, and no one is wondering where I am. My presence wouldn’t make any difference.
I search the room until I see Pim. His face looks cheerful, though that might just be the contrast with his sober, dark-blue shirt. His shoulders aren’t broad, but narrow and sinewy. An automated farmer from head to toe.
I stretch my gaze all the way to the corner of the barn, as far as my eyes will go, to where Pim’s arm gives way to a hand that’s clutching something—the child I was with a few minutes ago. He’s falling asleep against Pim’s leg. Pim’s firm hand is the only thing keeping him on his feet.
Two heads with the same curls. How is it possible that Pim has a son, and no one, not even my dad, told me? It’s hard to guess who the mother might be.
Just then, I’m struck by the same realization I had when I saw Laurens: I’d been expecting the fourteen-year-old version, the version I had a vendetta against, not this man with sloped shoulders holding up his little boy.
I climb over the tires to the other side of the mound. From here, I have a view into the stalls. Now I see what everybody’s looking at. The photos they collected are being projected onto the wall. They roll from one to the next with the help of vintage effects, casting a warm glow over everything and everyone in the room.
Most of the photos were taken with the vacation cameras. They’d been scanned, edited and arranged in chronological order. There’s a photo from Pim’s birthday party with Pim, me, Laurens and Jan—four boys in a row, wearing red scarves with white pom-poms knotted on their heads. Then the picture splits into strips and weaves into another picture I’m not in: Jan and Pim in the garden with bathrobe sashes around their waists and washcloths over their loins—two Indians around a bedsheet teepee.
After a few seconds, this image melts into a picture of Pim’s First Communion. Jan, Laurens and I are standing beside him, wooden crosses hanging around our necks. I’m wearing a colorful outfit; they’re dressed in beige. Jan’s got his arm around me and Pim. Laurens’s mouth is open wide to reveal a carefully preserved wafer stuck to his palate. You can see the pride on our faces: we’ve just let Our Lord and Savior into our hearts. All of a sudden, I distinctly remember Jan pressing his arm into my neck.
Before I’ve finished studying the photo, it splits and zigzags into the next image: the lip-syncing show at a parish party. Jan is standing sideways on stage with his face turned towards the photographer. Legs bent, thumb tucked into his belt, a white hat—his best imitation of “Smooth Criminal”. Every year he did a song by Michael Jackson; the lip-syncing competition was the only event that he and his dad came into town for. He never won first place.
The two heads at the bottom of the picture catch my eye. Tessie and I are sitting in the audience, sharing a bag of chips. We seem more interested in the snacks than the performance. Tessie is wearing an overall dress. I’m the red, sweaty head sticking out of a turtleneck, the only person in the whole room wearing long sleeves. We both look fairly happy. Though chances are the problems were already brewing at the time these pictures were taken.
I look away and scan the rest of the farm in search of a good spot to set up. All the barns and stables are exactly the same. I take one last look at the photo on the wall before it switches to another one. Tessie and me. She’s just shoved a handful of chips in her mouth; I’m holding the bag. If I could, I would become two-dimensional, travel through time, crawl into this picture, slip into this moment, warn Tessie about what’s coming, say, “Get out of here!” To Jan, I’d shout, “Don’t listen to them, you’re the best Michael Jackson I know!”
Even if I could say these things, it wouldn’t change much. If twenty years ago a thirty-year-old version of myself suddenly showed up and said, “I know what’s going to happen, you’d better get out of here,” I wouldn’t have budged. Me and Tessie would’ve just sat there, not because we were happy, but because things have to happen before you can regret them—and because the bag of pickle-flavored chips wasn’t empty yet.
August 2, 2002
I WAKE UP to the sound of the neighbor’s lawnmower. Yet the first thing I think of is Laurens and Pim standing in front of the sex-filled screen squeezing their butt cheeks. Tessie’s bed is empty and hasn’t been carefully made. That’s disturbing too. I hurry downstairs. With every step the temperature drops a little.
I run into Tessie at the bottom of the stairs. She’s standing barefoot in front of the sideboard with her hands on the keyboard, wearing her favorite nightdress with the pink ruffles. It looks strange now that her long blond hair is gone. She doesn’t take her eyes off the keys.
We used to have a bald Barbie, but it only ever served as an enemy or a cancer patient.
“Don’t go sit on the toilet and listen to me again, Eva,” she says.
I really need to pee, but it can wait.
When I get to the farm, I find Pim standing next to Laurens. There’s something hidden under his T-shirt.
“What’s that?” I ask before I’ve even parked my bike.
He glances around in all directions before showing it. His dad is nowhere to be found. The farm is empty; the cows are out to pasture. He pulls out a videotape from under his clothes. “I think there’s a blowjob in this one.”
Laurens has just arrived too. He’s still clutching his handlebars. I didn’t see him biking down the Steegeinde, which might mean he took a different route than usual to get here.
I glance down at their shorts and the hair on their calves. It must have sprouted when I wasn’t looking, because I hadn’t noticed it at the start of the summer.
“I found it in Jan’s room.” Pim says the word “Jan” softer than the rest of the words in the sentence.
Pim didn’t find this tape, I did. I stumbled on it one time when I was hiding in Jan’s room while we were playing. I took a quick look at the cover and put it back exactly where I’d found it, so no one would notice I’d been in his room. I can’t tell them this now. Nor can I tell them that on the day of Jan’s funeral I saw this tape again: exactly where I’d left it two years earlier.
“Didn’t you promise your mom not to touch anything in Jan’s room?” I ask.
“Jan should thank me for destroying the evidence. My mom’ll be home in a few days. They’re going to empty out his room, box everything up. You wouldn’t want her to see this, would you? Let alone my dad.”
“Why would you do that?” I ask.
“So your mom’s coming back?” Laurens asks.
Pim doesn’t answer. He walks ahead of us, towards the farmhouse. We follow him inside, and he locks the back door behind us so his dad won’t walk in. It’s suspiciously clean for a house occupied by two men. The living room is in the back. There’s a big cabinet made of dark wood and two armchairs with wooden armrests and leather-covered cushions.
Laurens and Pim
sit down on either end of the three-seater couch. Without a word, I plop down on the smaller armchair. It’s oddly positioned in the room, not in front of the television, but diagonal to the other armchair.
Only after sitting down do I notice that the chair is facing the wall with the aerial photo of the farm. It had belonged to Pim’s mom. She used to sit here knitting socks and scarves, not because anybody would ever wear them, but because it was the perfect spot to admire her family watching television.
For some reason, I’ve never sat in this chair before. We’ve watched TV in here plenty of times, but we always fit in the three-seater.
“I’ll be this one. Which one do you want to be?” Pim asks. He shows the video cover to Laurens. On it are three men and a busty actress in sexy nurse uniform. Pim taps his finger on the actor on the left, the darkest and most muscular of the three. He takes the tape out of the box and pushes it into the VCR.
Laurens points to one of the other characters on the cover. “I’ll be this one.”
Pim sits back down. They give each other a high-five.
No one asks me anything.
It’s Penny’s turn today, but she won’t be here until later. Laurens heard she had to go to the dentist, and it’ll take at least another hour with teeth like hers.
Penny used to be in Jolan and Jan’s class, but then she got held back in fifth grade and ended up in the class we’d been tagged on to. She’s the youngest daughter of a woodworker and has six older brothers. People used to say that her parents had six sons and just kept on going—one more wouldn’t make much difference. They assumed it would be their seventh son in a row and, as per Belgian tradition, King Albert II would be named the child’s godfather and the queen would present them with a monogrammed silver bowl.
They weren’t disappointed when it was a girl. Nevertheless, they always dressed her in boys’ clothes—it’s not clear whether this was meant as a punishment or if it was just easy. Penny had a delicate face and reddish curls, which usually hung down on her shoulders like a ball of yarn that some cat got into.
Penelope was an unusual name for someone from Bovenmeer, and even though everyone called her Penny—which stuck, probably because of her copper-colored hair—she was still the girl whose name nobody could remember, who always faded into the background.
This came to an end when, at some kid’s birthday party, where she hadn’t said a single word, she laid down her fork and knife, stood up on her chair and shouted at the top of her lungs: “I gotta go dump a darkie!” The cake had just been cut, the aunts and grandparents were all there, there was an uncle with a camera. Sure enough, the moment was captured: in the foreground the shocked hostess almost cutting into her own hand, and in the background a blurry ten-year-old with curly red hair, standing on her chair with her hand over her belly.
After Penny had finished her business and washed her hands in the kitchen sink, she quietly returned to the table and ate her cake in frugal little bites.
“Dump a darkie” became slang for a big turd, one you really had to work hard for. The expression even caught on among kids from surrounding towns. They all claimed that one of the shy girls in their town came up with it, that it was first shouted at one of their birthday parties. We let them think that, but we knew better.
Suddenly, Penny was popular. She got invited to all kinds of things; everyone hoped she’d shout it again, or rather that she would come up with some other obnoxious statement that might become a fixed expression and make the party more memorable. But she never did anything like that again. She just nibbled on the cake that was served to her. She didn’t let anyone in on the depth of her thoughts. But thanks to that one outburst, all the boys wanted her. Suddenly they saw her for the girl she’d always been, how pretty those red curls were.
Laurens and Pim turn on the movie, and I watch them from my single-seater chair. Pim feels around for the remote control and cranks up the volume; all the smacking drowns out the sounds of the farm and Laurens’s heavy breathing.
I can tell by the looks on their faces what’s happening. In the whites of their eyes, I see the reflection of bodies flickering on the screen; the movement of their pupils suggests the direction things are going. I can see the tension in their bodies when it’s their chosen character’s turn.
The end of the sampling is finally in sight; we’ve already tested more than half the girls. After Penny there are only two left—and we’re not even halfway through the summer vacation yet. At the end of the summer, there will still be some time left for the three of us, like before.
Outside, the dog and the geese sound the alarm. Trapped, Pim lowers the volume.
“Is your dad back already?” Laurens asks.
“I don’t know.” Pim takes advantage of the chaos to pat down his crotch for a moment. “Go look, Eva.”
I get up, turn the keys in the back door and check to see who’s walking up.
It’s Penny. She’s early. She’s wandering along the empty stalls, looking around tentatively.
I could go out to her, tell her to leave, that there’s nothing to see here. I could warn her, ask her if she wants to go swimming at the Pit, or even somewhere farther away, in another town.
Just as I’m willing my feet into motion, I see her stepping up on the ladder of a tractor to check her appearance in the rear-view mirror. She straightens her hair.
This goes against Pim’s theory. He claims that the prettiest girls don’t know they’re pretty, which makes them shy about taking off their clothes, which makes them even prettier.
“Penny’s here!” I shout, and ring the bell hanging by the back door to bring everyone to attention, like a referee signaling the next round in a fight.
I walk out to meet her.
She greets me with a kiss on the cheek. She smells sterile, like toothpaste.
“The guys are coming,” I say.
She looks sharper than she did in the last class photo. She’s got a turned-up nose and eyes that bulge out of her head.
Together we watch Laurens and Pim walk up. They’ve both got these strange walks, not the ones I’m used to seeing. Pim holds his arms away from his body as if somebody’s pumped too much air into him.
The rest of the afternoon is like a movie playing in the background—no one’s really watching it because we all know how it will end.
Laurens and Pim are more efficient, but also more uptight than usual. It goes fast. Penny agrees to the eight guesses; I recite my riddle. Penny does her best. She doesn’t solve it.
“Time for your punishment,” Pim declares, cracking his fingers. “Take off your clothes.”
“I have my period,” she says. “I’m not taking off my clothes for anybody.”
“And we’re supposed to believe that?”
“Fine, let Eva check,” she says.
“Eva, go check.” Laurens doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. His porn character would be fiddling with his moustache about now, but he doesn’t have any facial hair yet.
“Okay, but not here. Somewhere private.”
Penny and I disappear around the corner, so as not to spoil their appetite. Penny doesn’t show me anything. She just smiles sweetly, like girls do with each other. There’s a spot of toothpaste on her upper lip. I immediately believe her.
When we come back, Laurens and Pim have thought up an alternative, I can tell by the way they’re standing.
Pim is all puffed up again. “Even girls on their period have their uses. Look at porn stars. You’re not telling me those women take a whole week off every month, are you?”
“Not a whole week, but four days at least,” I say.
Penny shoots me a quizzical look and brushes her red curls out of her face. I don’t understand what the boys are getting at.
“So you want a blowjob,” she says. “Fine. I’ll do it.” She kneels down in the straw.
“No more than ten seconds each,” I say.
Laurens wants to go second this time, probabl
y so he can watch Pim first and avoid looking stupid again. He stands there fiddling with his balls until it’s his turn.
I count, not too fast, not too slow.
Pim drops his pants, pulls his foreskin back three times, like a cowboy loading a pistol. As soon as the skin is all the way back, he pushes the tip between Penny’s teeth.
She sucks in a couple times, making her delicate face get even narrower.
“Ten. Why do they even call it a blowjob?” I ask. “You don’t really want her to blow, do you?”
Now it’s Laurens’s turn. He doesn’t answer my question.
His dick refuses to get all the way hard. It reminds me of one of those cheap sausages from the butcher shop that are mostly just fat, so they flop over when you hold them up straight. They don’t really look like something you’re supposed to eat, but they’re good for smacking people with, so they do get sold. Penny makes the best of it for ten seconds.
“Time’s up,” I say just as Laurens is becoming aroused. “That’s ten.”
“I won’t tell my brothers about this,” Penny says.
She gives me another kiss on the cheek, the same kind she gave me when she walked in. The boys let her go without protest. I can smell the sour scent of their penises.
“What’s the answer to the riddle, by the way?” she asks.
“She can’t tell,” Pim says immediately. “We’ve still got a few more girls coming. After they get their chance, we’ll give out the prize.”
He’s tucked his dick back in his pants; the foreskin is caught under the elastic band and the crumpled tip is peeking out. There’s a sticky trail hanging from it, like the silvery slime left behind by snails in the garden.
For a split second, I want to whack it, like Pim’s dad does to moles—he lures them out of their holes and pounds them on the head with a spade.
I leave with Penny. The boys stay behind in the hayloft.
She says very little, and when we reach the edge of the property, she immediately turns the other way. She could have biked with me a lot longer, but I get it—I didn’t even give her the answer to the riddle. That’s the least I could have done. Her curls flap behind her in the wind.
