The Melting

by lize Spit

  THE EVENING THAT Mom and I first talked about Tessie didn’t start out very well. It was in January 2002. We came home from school to find the kitchen table pushed against the wall. We wouldn’t be eating meals with the whole family anymore, that much was clear.

  It wasn’t Wednesday, but the table was set for a typical mid-week meal. There was a pot of defrosted spaghetti sauce on the stove, a can of corn, and four deep plates.

  “Look,” Mom said, as she paced across the room, “now we can walk around the table to the sliding door.” All of a sudden she was calling it a door. Until then, we’d only ever used it as a window, never as a passageway. “I’ve been craving spaghetti all day.”

  For the first time in months, she sounded happy. None of us dared to ask why, or where Dad was going to sit.

  Less than half an hour later, the pasta tongs broke. They snapped at exactly their weakest point, where the two limbs meet. This also happens to be the weakest spot on people. Jolan and I were playing with them at the time. We laid the two pieces beside each other to try to figure out who was the most responsible.

  Jolan pleaded innocent and quickly put his piece back into the strainer full of drained pasta. I did the same. We waited in silence for Mom to come back from the kitchen with the freshly grated cheese.

  When she did, she reached for the tongs, and, in a wild motion, scooped up a clump of spaghetti. The tongs fell apart in her hands. Startled, she immediately started inspecting the tool to figure out where exactly it broke. She pressed the two pieces together at least ten times. That’s what she always did: keep trying to fix things long after they’re broken so she could look back and regret that they never worked.

  The tongs kept falling apart. She slumped down in her chair.

  “I paid seven hundred and fifty francs for that thing,” she sighed. “Why does everything I touch fall apart?”

  “It was already broken before you touched it,” I say.

  Mom didn’t even ask who did it.

  “I’m taking it out of your allowance,” she barked. She looked at each one of us, then down at her watch and loosened the clasp a bit.

  “From mine too?” Tessie asked.

  “I did it,” Jolan blurted out. He pulled out his wallet. Inside, to everyone’s surprise, was a thin wad of bills. He kept it with him everywhere he went, ever since the day Mom paid the plumber with money from his savings jar. “How about we just make it an even eight hundred?”

  “No, it was me,” I say.

  There was a bicycle coming down the Bulksteeg. You could tell by the looks on our faces that all three of us were hoping it wasn’t Dad. But it couldn’t be, it was still too early.

  Jolan tried to scoop the pasta out of the strainer with his fork in the hopes of demonstrating that pasta tongs didn’t offer any added value, but the spaghetti just swirled around in one big clump.

  Mom got up, walked into the kitchen, and came back with the scissors. She started cutting the clump of spaghetti into chunks. She reminded me of the former hairdresser at Sels Hair Mode in Nedermeer who used to cut bangs and bobs unevenly on purpose so she’d get fired and be able to collect unemployment.

  The first piece Mom hacked off was slapped down on Tessie’s plate. It was a perfect cube except on one side.

  “Who else wants spaghetti?” she snarled.

  Jolan and I didn’t dare to say no, but we couldn’t conjure up any enthusiasm either, so neither of us said anything. We both got a small heap, exactly the same amount she’d plopped down on her own plate. Though her serving was only meant to be looked at.

  The pot of sauce had a perfectly usable spoon in it, so she just let it sit there while she clumsily shook the corn out of the can onto everyone’s plate.

  Dad once told me that it was just her nature—to start things and not finish them. At first, I thought he was trying to say something about Jolan’s twin sister, but he didn’t say anything more about her. After that, however, I started seeing it everywhere: her unsorted stamp collection, the long panel of Styrofoam with only three beetles pinned on it, the dozens of unopened cookbooks, the earrings she bought and never put on, the piles of fabric for new curtains, Jolan, Tessie and me sitting at the table. With us she’d had the same good intentions, the only problem was that we couldn’t be soaked or dried, folded up or stashed away—we needed clean clothes and three meals a day. We were just another collection, only in our case her failure was more noticeable.

  Mom slapped down a scoop of tomato sauce on top of our corn. Since Jolan was the farthest away, he got splashed the most. The sauce left a spot on his new T-shirt. I could see him fighting back the tears.

  I’d recently stopped eating corn. The other day, some kids at school had used a piece of corn on the cob to demonstrate, in front of a whole circle of spectators on the playground, the best techniques for squeezing Jan’s pimples. A couple of them decided that they were going to drop a few kernels in his pockets every day at recess.

  I tried to pick up as few pieces of corn on my fork as possible. In my mouth, I sorted through each bite with my tongue. If it felt crunchy and round, I swallowed it in one gulp, and the rest I chewed very carefully. Every time a kernel popped in my mouth, I felt nauseous.

  I offered to help with the dishes. On the counter were two bottles of water, one sparkling and one flat, as usual. There was an opaque plastic cup too, but no water was ever poured into it.

  While washing the dishes, I didn’t dare to look at Mom. I just watched her reflection in the kitchen window.

  In the double glass, she had two reflections: one floating about two centimeters above the other, like a dying cartoon character whose soul was drifting out of its body.

  It was there, with her hands in the hot water, that she brought up the topic of Tessie with me for the first time.

  “You know, Eva,” she began, her back hunched awkwardly over the low sink. “You had an older sister. You knew that already, I guess. We found out I was pregnant with her seventeen years ago today. That’s why I celebrate her birthday today. I don’t like the thought of remembering her death on Jolan’s birthday.”

  I understood what she was trying to say, but I didn’t understand why. We could’ve just talked about my grades, about Laurens and Pim, about how it was possible that so many girls already had their period and I didn’t. And if death was really the only thing she wanted to talk about, we could always talk about Jan.

  “I’m only telling you this because you remind me of myself,” she said. “What we have, it’s not a gift, it’s not a talent, it’s a burden we have to bear. A radar for other people’s grief.”

  She was quiet for a moment. I looked at her. It was hard to imagine she’d ever been thirteen years old. That there was a time when she could’ve become anything she wanted.

  “It’s like an infrared camera. Except we’re not looking for people’s warmth, but for their cold, their emptiness.”

  I looked at her reflection in the window again. There, facing the sink, we looked like two perfectly normal, satisfied people. The subtle details—Mom cleaning the silverware with her eyes closed, the exact shape of my chubby arms—were all a blur.

  Outside, in the darkness, the branches of the cherry tree clawed at the wind. It had been too quiet for too long. It was my turn to say something.

  “Why didn’t you give Tessie some other name? Tessa, or something completely different?” I asked.

  “What kind of question is that?” she said.

  I shrugged.

  If Mom was right, if we really had the same radar, she’d know exactly what I meant.

  For the past few weeks, Tessie had been writing her name as “Tessa” on all her tests and in her school agenda.

  Giving a child a diminutive as a name—and the diminutive of her dead sister’s name, no less—implies that you want to keep that child small, half alive. Perhaps, unconsciously, they’d set it up that way: Tessie would always be the one who could have the rug ripped out from under her, and I’d
always be the one she could lean on.

  Mom didn’t say anything.

  “Why do you drink?” I asked suddenly. “Is it because of the radar, or because you know that you’ve burdened me with it too?”

  With that, I didn’t even dare to look at her reflection. I stared down into the sink. Mom plunged her hand into the water.

  Out of nowhere, she smacked my face with the wet rag. The water dripped over my shoulders and down my neck. Strings of spaghetti stuck to my skin and clothes. The water was neither hot nor cold. I took a few steps backwards.

  The dog looked as startled as I was. She lapped up the strings of spaghetti on the floor. Either she was actually hungry or she was trying to cover Mom’s tracks. The two of them were in league together. My throat was burning, like a sharp stone was trying to squeeze its way through the tiny opening.

  “Go,” Mom said, “I’ll dry these dishes myself.”

  I wiped my face with the kitchen towel and left it on the counter.

  I left the kitchen, wishing we were dumber, or less sensitive, like our neighbors, like Laurens’s parents. Then she would have hit me harder, with an iron ladle for example, hard enough to make me hate her, or at least to make me cry. Then we wouldn’t have to feel all this. At least we wouldn’t have the words to describe it.

  I sat down in the living room, as far away from the kitchen as possible, and flipped through a comic book. I didn’t want to go to bed until Dad was home.

  It was late when he finally walked through the door, but Mom still wasn’t finished with the dishes—she didn’t want to leave the kitchen. With her wrinkled hands and sore back, she was ready to pick a fight. She’d been building up to it all day.

  Before he even said hello, Dad lowered the aluminum shutters and reached for his beer crate. It was the same thing he always did, turn rooms into closed boxes.

  “Is that really necessary?” Mom sneered. “We’re not mice.”

  “How were things here today?” Dad asked softly.

  Mom didn’t say anything. She didn’t say a word about what happened, where it went wrong, she didn’t even mention the pasta tongs. She waited for Dad to come back from the workshop with his crate full of beer, pass through the kitchen and see the table—with his place at it pushed against the wall.

  7:30 p.m.

  THE BRAIN ISN’T all that different from the digestive system. It can process pretty much everything, but there a few things it can’t handle. These foreign objects and traumas have a way of surfacing in unexpected moments, called up by specialized doctors who were actually looking for something else. A piece of iron wire, a childhood crush, a ping-pong ball, betrayal—they can float around in a body for years.

  I didn’t expect Jan’s posthumous party to last so long. In the past, his birthday parties always ended earlier than it said on the invitation because he wanted to go help milk the cows. I also didn’t expect Laurens and his mom to stay this long. They have to go home. They have to roll up the aluminum shutters on the butcher shop, walk through the back room towards the stairs so they’ll discover what I was up to this afternoon between four and five o’clock. Then they’ll sound the alarm. Without the commotion, it could take days for somebody to come looking for me in this abandoned milk house.

  I look out the window at the yard. All that looking. It’s never brought any change.

  In the end, it takes another half-hour for Laurens to head out to the car, arm in arm with his mother. She’s had too much to drink. You can tell right away by the strange spring in her step. She climbs into the car and bumps her head. Again, Laurens takes the driver’s seat. Maybe he wanted to leave earlier but she didn’t want to have to waddle home on foot, so he just stayed.

  When they first get home, they won’t notice anything suspicious, my footsteps in the parking lot will be snowed over, as will the rectangle where I left my car for half an hour with the engine running while I was in the butcher shop.

  Laurens squeals out of the driveway despite the slippery asphalt. Their taillights disappear into the night. Now they’ll follow exactly the same road they drove here on, the road I’ve already driven three times today.

  At four o’clock, I went back to the butcher shop, of my own accord, with a bucket of slurry in the passenger seat. I found the copper bucket by the door of the milk house. I didn’t have to do much searching for the long hook to lower it down into the slurry pit, I knew where to look—in the garage. That’s where I found the pliers to cut through the iron wire that had been used to fasten the grate over the pit.

  The sounds were almost pleasant: first, the snipping of the iron, then the sloshing of the slurry in the bucket next to me on the passenger seat. I almost forgot I was alone in that car.

  Growing up, I had travelled the route from the farm to the butcher shop countless times, usually on my bike and sometimes on foot. It felt so strange to cover the short distance on four wheels, like moving a grain of rice with a forklift.

  I parked in front of the butcher shop, right on top of the bare rectangle in the snow left behind by Laurens’s BMW. I got out, opened the door on the passenger’s side and grabbed the bucket. Only then, after having been outside in the fresh air for a while, did I notice how foul the car smelled.

  The gate on the side of the house was locked. First, I lifted over the bucket, then I crawled underneath.

  All of a sudden, I found myself in the courtyard. The back entrance to the house and shop was locked, but there was a window open under the awning. If I’d been a thief, I would’ve been put off by how easy it all was. But I wasn’t deterred, I didn’t come here to steal. I came to leave something behind.

  When I crawled into the shop through the open window, an automatic light switched on. I jumped—that light wasn’t there before. For a second, I thought I might run into Laurens’s father, but that was impossible, of course.

  Every inch of space was covered with disposable trays, each one piled with meat and wrapped in foil. A sea of aluminum flickering in the bright light. Each one had a customer’s name and phone number on it. If the name was too common, there was a nickname too. Nancy was still “Soap”. Next to the name was a toothpick with a Flemish flag on it, a black lion against a yellow background.

  I saw the names of primary school teachers, the priest, Pim’s parents. Pim and his wife had their own tray now; apparently, he too celebrated New Year’s Eve alone with his immediate family.

  The window had been left open for a reason: to keep the meat trays cool. It was ice cold inside.

  I could just picture it—Laurens and his mother at the party, looking forward to coming home and admiring the fruits of their labor, to going through the books one last time to see who still owed them money, just like they used to. Then they would happily crawl under the covers, ready for the busiest, most social day of the year, the day when people didn’t just come in to pick up their tray but also to gossip. Everybody wanted a juicy Christmas story to take the edge off their own suffering.

  Thanks to me, there’d be no shortage of gossip tomorrow, though there would be a shortage of meat.

  I set the bucket on the windowsill and weaved my way through the aluminum trays until I reached the swinging door on the other side. It had a round window in it. I stood on my tiptoes and looked out into the butcher shop. There it was, just as I’d hoped and feared: the display case, with every salad lined up in the same order as always. Only the cash register was different. I saw myself for the first time today in the reflection, a grown woman with long hair, more angular, less fleshy, yet still only suitable for men with moderate standards, for guys who wanted to aim higher but were held back by their own limitations. These included a pockmarked twenty-something in the university toilets, a model with a cleft lip from my drawing class and a balding French-speaking history teacher.

  Why even bother to fix my hair? Still, I did it anyway.

  I didn’t know exactly how much time I had. The party at Pim’s might not last very long or Laurens’s mother
could have forgotten something and decided to turn around.

  I pulled out the Flemish flags one by one and peeled back the foil. Then I scooped a generous portion of slurry onto the exposed meat and carefully rubbed it in with the round end of the spoon. The yellow-brown liquid seeped its way between the pork chops, fillets and thighs. Whenever I recognized the name, I tried to picture the person’s reaction when they found out tomorrow that there’d be no meat for their electric griddle on New Year’s Eve.

  Even the people I didn’t know got a scoop. If only they hadn’t ordered their meat from Laurens.

  After a dozen or so trays, I didn’t have to think about it so much. Spoon in the bucket, foil up, splat on top, preferably on the best piece of meat, and rub it all in with the bottom of the spoon. I had to make sure it couldn’t be rinsed off, that there were enough chunks of sawdust and undigested cattle feed to go around.

  I didn’t stop the routine until I came to “De Wolf”, with my mom’s cell-phone number on top. I stood there for a moment, holding the spoon above the meat. It would look suspicious if I spared my own family, if I didn’t tarnish my own name. I couldn’t skip Mom and Dad’s tray. That would just make it look like they were in on it. After thoroughly rubbing the marinade into their meat like everybody else’s, I dropped the bucket and hurried outside. Through the open window, I looked out over the shiny sea of aluminum trays now bathing in the overpowering stench of cow shit. I sealed the room to make sure that none of the smell was lost. That was the most important step in any marinade: cover the bowl tight.

  I jumped into the car and skidded out of the driveway. It wasn’t until I was behind the wheel that I noticed how much my hands were shaking. I could’ve gone home, but I didn’t. The slurry was only the start of the plan.

  Pretty soon, Pim will get a furious phone call from Laurens—the copper bucket, the slurry, it must be from his cows, there’s no other farmer in town. Pim will instantly sober up, throw down the phone and go looking for the missing bucket.

  August 10, 2002 (3)