by lize Spit
Another long pause.
“And then?” Tessie asked.
“What do you mean, and then?”
“What happened to the big bunny?”
“That’s it.”
“Are you sure?” I could tell by Tessie’s tone that there were tears welling up in her eyes.
“Yep,” I said. “That’s the end.”
“The very very end?”
She asked twice, just to be sure.
“Yeah, Tes. That’s the very very end.”
“But maybe there was a really hungry buzzard that swooped down and yanked the big bunny free and accidentally dropped him somewhere the tidal wave couldn’t get him?” she asked. “Couldn’t that have happened, Eva?” Suddenly she sounded more like a six-year-old than a nine-year-old.
“Come on, Tessie, that’s not possible.”
“What about the hunter, where was he? Couldn’t he have freed the bunny and carried him off in a burlap sack?” The more unlikely her ideas were, the more irritated I became.
“No,” I said. “Think about it. The hunter wouldn’t have been able to escape in time either.”
“The little one could’ve just bitten the foot off though, right, Eva? Isn’t a gnawed-off foot bad enough?”
“No,” I snap. “A gnawed-off foot isn’t enough.”
She didn’t say anything else. It took more than an hour for her to fall asleep. Little by little, the lump in my throat disappeared.
After that night, Tessie stopped negotiating for stories. Every so often, she’d ask for one “with a happy ending”, but I’d tell her I couldn’t promise that anymore, for her own good. I thought I was toughening her up a bit, preparing her for something.
It was around that time that, in the absence of fairy tales, the goodnight ritual became more elaborate, and my name was bumped to the end of the list, after God.
At the end of 2001, the night after Laurens’s mom came out to the backyard to tell us the bad news about Jan, neither me nor Tessie could sleep. My head felt fuzzy. I couldn’t get a single thought to take shape.
“You want to know something about Jan?” she asked.
6:30 p.m.
IT MUST BE as cold in the milk house as it is outside. Under the heat of the lamp, the ice block is finally starting to melt. The soles of my feet create imprints on the surface, two little dips, like the top of a mattress slept in by the same two people for a very long time.
It won’t be long now. The water is seeping into the grout and moving down the uneven floor. The little streams run into the wide, deep gutter at the side of the room, where the spilt milk used to collect, along with the cats and flies.
I check the clock again. I have no idea how many minutes have gone by. If only the thing would spring back to life, if the hands could at least let me believe I’m not alone, if Mickey Mouse could stop cheering and lower his arms. Now all this is happening outside of time. Eighteen songs have played in the barn since I’ve been out here. If each song was three minutes on average, I’ve been here about fifty-four minutes.
I could have been back in Brussels by now. I probably would have gone down to my neighbor’s apartment, knocked on the door and asked him if he wanted to spend New Year’s together.
“At my place or your place?” he’d ask.
“I don’t care,” I’d say, although I would prefer to celebrate in his apartment, because there’s nothing there to remind me of myself, not even a toothbrush.
We could smash the block of ice with a hammer, store the ice chips in his giant freezer and use them to chill our drinks for years.
At least the local paper will write a story about me. I’ll become an anecdote, the subject of local rumors.
A rumor because it will become yet another a story about someone who’s had something happen to them. Rumors are just stories about acquaintances that people around here like to spread because they feel like they set them apart, allowing them to belong to the group of people who escaped something.
Anecdotes are different. They’re the non-time-sensitive gossip. The stories you have no problem passing along because you don’t know the subject in question personally. Stories like the one about the drunk guy who was pushing his wheelbarrow down the street when he accidentally bumped into two cops who made him blow into a tube and suspended his driver’s license for ten days.
If I had the choice, I’d want to be both.
One thing’s for sure, the snow’s not going to melt tonight. Which means there’s always the chance that tomorrow morning, at the crack of dawn, someone will bend down to inspect the meandering trail I left in the yard.
If Pim’s little boy is as curious as Jolan was at that age, he’ll want to know what kind of animal made those tracks. He’ll follow the trail, in the wrong direction at first, down through the yard, until it ends at my car a little further down the street. Then he’ll turn around and go the other way. He’ll end up in front of the milk house, push open the door, see the water.
After that, they’ll start piecing it together: the car that was parked in front of the butcher shop for a long time with the headlights on and later abandoned on the street with the key in the ignition, the neighbor who helped freeze the block of ice, the shoebox full of envelopes under my bed.
People will wonder exactly what happened, how it came to this.
And then Laurens’s mom will finally talk, because she won’t be able to stand the thought of spreading a false rumor a second time.
I’m sure she’s wondered how I’ve been getting on since the summer of 2002. One time, she accidentally liked one of my photos on Facebook and immediately unliked it, but I had already received the notification.
She even stopped by Jolan’s place one time to ask him how I was doing, how Tessie was doing. He told me that two years ago, at Christmas.
What happened at the end of the summer never became the subject of a rumor or an anecdote, and that’s only because she didn’t spread it. It took me too long to figure that out, that she was the linchpin in the entire gossip mill, that all the stories in this town, all the rumors about Tessie, about Jan—they all came from her. She determined what the reality, and ultimately the memory, would become.
After the summer of 2002, Laurens didn’t go out much. He spent most of his time in the shop, taking refuge at his mother’s side. When a customer would ask how he got the deep cut above his eye, she’d say: “He bumped into the edge of the counter while cleaning the display case.” Then she’d point to the sharpest corner in the shop, and people would nod silently.
She even told the story to Jolan when I sent him into the shop to buy meat—he hadn’t even asked. The discount she gave him was proof that she was lying, that she knew exactly what her son was capable of.
August 10, 2002
YOU CAN TELL it’s boiling outside from the way Nanook is acting. Without batting an eye, she watches a bird take a leisurely bath in her water bowl. Tessie and Mom are out. They both have an appointment with the same doctor, a specialist in varicose veins.
I sit at the kitchen table going over my notes. I’ve been studying them for a long time but still don’t know what I’m looking for. Without a pencil or a marker in my hand, it feels like I’ve given up trying to understand Tessie. My eyes keep coming back to the many tally marks by my own name.
Eva. It starts and ends with the same letters as Elisa. I take a pencil from the jar on the counter and write her name next to mine. “Elisa” is a lot more work, almost twice as many letters. Mine is just an abbreviation, an answer to a problem. A word that was never finished.
There’s a smack on the kitchen window behind me. I hide the papers and turn around. It wasn’t a bird smashing into the window, it was Laurens. He’s trying to get my attention. The plastic bag dangling from his wrist hits the window, making the smacking sound I just heard.
I stuff the notes into my pocket. The back door is only two steps further away, but I prop open the window instead. Pim’s there too.
“Can we c
ome in?” Laurens pushes his face into the opening.
“If you wanted to come in, you should’ve knocked on the door,” I say. It’s still early, the sun is low. The light is shining in my eyes.
“Hey, Evie, sorry about last week.” Pim steps closer to the window.
It’s the first time in my life he’s called me Evie. Only my dad calls me that.
“Sorry for what?” I ask. I want to know if we’re thinking about the same thing.
“Listen, Eva—it’s Elisa’s turn today,” Laurens says.
“And she’s coming here,” says Pim.
“She’s coming to solve your riddle. She said she’d only come if we did it at your house.”
“She’s the last one on our list.” The sun dips behind Pim’s head for a moment, only to blind me again the next.
“I mean the first on the list, not the last, you know what I mean. Our top scorer.”
“We have to finish this together, Eva.”
“C’mon, you get that.”
They stop talking and wait for me to respond. Beads of sweat are pearling on their heads. They biked over here together, which means they rehearsed all this beforehand. In the plastic bag around Laurens’s wrist are a couple of cans of soda. Cokes. Not two, but three.
I pull the window shut and slip on a pair of my mom’s clogs, so I won’t have to walk barefoot over the cherry pits in the garden.
Laurens and Pim lead the way out to the chicken coop. When we reach the cherry tree, they stop and look out into Elisa’s field. The horse is grazing. There are braids in his mane and tail. Elisa is nowhere in sight. This could mean she’s already on her way.
The cans in Laurens’s bag swing back and forth now that he’s stopped. His fly is open, his underwear is sticking out. A small white bulge. I don’t tell him.
It’s pretty hot outside, but I’m still startled by the heat coming out of the shed. The small wooden structure is right in the sun and has a flat black corrugated metal roof. It’s so hot inside that the air has weight. The longer you stand still the heavier it gets.
Laurens and Pim sit down on either side of the hay bale. In the corner is a brooding chicken.
“That egg is gonna come out hardboiled,” says Laurens as he opens the first can of Coke. The foam fizzes all over his hands. Startled, he drops the can. It lands in the straw.
“Way to go,” Pim says.
“Bring your own drink next time,” says Laurens.
He lets the other two cans settle for a while.
Pim’s wearing cut-off jeans. I think I saw Jan wearing them once. Or maybe I imagined it. All three of us sit with our knees the same distance apart. Our own body heat is too much to bear.
Pim pulls the bottom of his T-shirt up through the neckline and ties the fabric in a knot, exposing his abdomen. Laurens does the same.
I sit across from them on a log. Laurens’s fat rolls, the pearly sweat in Pim’s navel—they suddenly seem easier to talk to again. I already feel sorry about what they’ve got coming.
In this heat, it takes more effort to stay silent than to talk.
Laurens opens another can of soda, hands it to Pim and keeps the other one for himself. Between gulps, they press the cool sides against their foreheads. Every time I want a sip, I have to ask. Before long both cans are empty.
“Diet Coke is gross.” Pim offers me the last sip of lukewarm cola without me having to hold out my hand for it. “It tastes like Coke that somebody drank and spit back out.”
“Mom’s on a diet again. She won’t let regular Coke in the house,” says Laurens. “Everything with sugar costs points. She keeps track of every meal in a little book. But every night she eats a can of fruit and drinks the syrup because fruit doesn’t count.” He puffs up his cheeks.
“What kind of diet is that?” I ask. “Weight Watchers?” I can picture her standing in the kitchen drinking out of a can of fruit cocktail.
“No idea.”
“It all comes down to the same thing—the better it tastes, the more points it’s worth,” Pim grins.
Laurens lets out a forced laugh.
“Man, Eva, it stinks in here. Like fried chicken shit,” he says.
“Who called Elisa?” I ask.
Pim raises his finger. “She said she was coming.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” Pim sticks up his nose, then lifts his shoulders, leans back and closes his eyes.
I can tell he’s having second thoughts. I see it, because I know what it looks like. I invited Elisa over here plenty of times before. She never came once.
The chicken looks nervously back and forth from her nest, her eyes shifting from the hay bale Laurens and Pim are sitting on, to me. Her head almost makes a complete circle. It takes her a moment to figure out which way to turn it back.
“Can’t we wait outside?” I ask.
“No,” says Pim.
He looks at his watch and keeps trying different poses, not sure how he wants to look when Elisa walks in.
Whenever he finds the perfect pose, he can’t hold it for more than two minutes before having to wipe the sweat from his brow.
“So this is it then, the end.” Laurens leans back so his belly has one less roll of fat. “What are we going to do tomorrow?”
Pim thinks about it for a moment and opens his mouth to speak.
I’m curious to hear what he has to say, but just as he’s about to say something, there are three knocks on the door of the coop. I can tell by the way it sounds—resolute, commanding—that it’s Elisa and that she has been out riding all morning.
Only the lower half of the split door swings open. It slams against the chicken-feed bin with a loud bang. We stare out into the blinding sunlight.
Slowly my eyes adjust. Elisa is still wearing her riding clothes. They accentuate her curves. The lines of her inner thighs make a sudden curve inwards just below her groin. Even when she stands up straight with her legs pressed together, there’s a gap under her crotch wide enough for an entire fist. She’s wearing her tight black riding pants with the shiny piping down the sides. Her labia are packed in tightly, revealing none of their secrets. Framed by the sunlight, her lower body alone is worth the full nine and a half points.
Elisa opens the upper half of the door. Only now can I see her face. Her long hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail, so tight that it almost corrects her eyelids. Her eyebrows seem even sharper than they were last week. Her firm, muscular breasts are high on her chest.
Laurens licks his lips.
“Ew, it stinks in here,” Elisa says.
“That’s what I said too.” Pim quickly unties the knot in his T-shirt.
“Can’t we do it in some other shed?”
I want to say there is no other shed, but Elisa has already turned around and is heading for the workshop. Pim and Laurens follow her. I collect the empty soda cans and put them in the plastic bag. Right before I shut the door behind me, I see the chicken, winking at no one.
“Your dad is ridiculously well equipped,” Elisa says when I walk in behind them. She looks up in amazement at the tangle of tools hanging from the rafters. It’s damper and cooler in here.
“Yeah. Thanks,” I say, though I’m not sure it was a compliment.
The noose is dangling just over Laurens’s head. If you don’t know what it’s for, you might think it’s just for hanging tools. Dad’s had the whole summer to carry out his plan. In the meantime, the limp rope has gone from shocking to annoying. Yet another unfinished project.
“Okay, let’s hear it. What am I doing here?” Elisa spins the blades on the grass trimmer hanging on the wall. Pim is standing behind her, eyeing the gold piping running down her thighs. He makes maneuvering gestures—if these were the lines of a parking lot, he’d have no trouble parking.
Laurens and Pim exchange a few excited glances to decide who’ll do the talking. They try to catch Elisa’s eye, but she’s looking only at me.
This is what Laurens and Pim have be
en working towards all summer. They think that when this is all over, they’ll be real men, that they’ll be able to bike home, triumphantly parading through the streets. I already can see the victory dripping from their faces—they’re about to score a nine-pointer.
The sun shines down on the crown of my head through the broken window.
Pim explains the rules of the game, which have changed again. They’ve gone back to one item of clothing per guess. That’s what’s proven most effective.
“For every wrong guess, you have to take something off. When you’re naked, you lose. Then you have to do something for us. If you solve the riddle, we have to do something for you. Whatever you want.”
“What if I don’t want anything from you two?”
“C’mon, there must be something.” Laurens rubs his thumb and index finger over his upper lip and sniffs his own sweat.
“So you guys would clean my horse’s stall for the rest of the summer?”
“Of course!” Laurens and Pim answer in unison.
“What’s the riddle, then?”
“We’ll only tell you if you agree to play.”
“That’s not really fair.”
“We could just tell her,” I say.
Pim hesitates, weighing the pros and cons.
I take advantage of his indecisiveness to tell the riddle. Then I know Elisa will stay.
I try to repeat it exactly as I told it to her at Lille Mountain.
“A man is found in a room with a noose around his neck, hanging over a puddle of water, dead. There’s nothing in the room but him, the rope and the water. No windows, no furniture. So the question is, what happened? How exactly did the man die?”
No one says a word.
The hanging man isn’t just some random image anymore. I see him in front of me, suspended fifty centimeters above a puddle of water, his two legs dangling, his jeans bulging at the knees.
“That’s the riddle?” Elisa asks. She looks at me.
“Yep,” I say.
Elisa lets out a deep sigh. She’s putting on a show. There’s not the slightest sign of relief on her face.
“No way I can figure this out.”
