Authors: Peter Buwalda
But I had my own thoughts on the matter. And aside from
Janis we probably all did. When I sat on my swing that Siem had hung on the leek-green veranda and thought back on the bottom half of the duplex on the Antonius Matthaeuslaan, with that weird, threatening, charged house upstairs, and what went on there, then I not only became miserable with happiness, or the other way around, but also a reverse reasoning took shape in my head: I began to believe that we hadn’t left Margriet and Wilbert and that creepy uncle of his behind in Holland, but that we had run away from them. We had to start anew. And we did that here, in this cozy little neighborhood, where Siem had a job at the university.
I also heard my parents fight in America now and then, our wooden house was a soundboard, and then I sprang out of bed and stood at the top of the stairs, my heart pounding. Sometimes I could make out that it had to do with Wilbert; Menno Wijn had phoned and their conversation would turn Siem gruff and surly for the next couple of days. After each angry outburst I was scared stiff that Wilbert would come over anyway, or, what’s worse, that Siem would have to return to Holland, that the four of us being a family just wasn’t meant to be, and that we’d all have to fly back there tomorrow and go back to living in that awful house on the Antonius Matthaeuslaan.
What could I do?
Keep the secret
. I made a solemn pledge. Now that I called Siem “Dad” and myself “Sigerius,” now that we had embarked on a new beginning in this faraway country, and I noticed that my mother could laugh again, no one would be allowed to find out the truth. We were a
regular
family. Tineke and Siem had made me together, and after that they made my sister. That’s how it was. Stick to the story.
• • •
Someone tapped against the middle pane of the bay window. I was on the concrete sidewalk, still halfway in front of the nextdoor neighbors. The lace curtain moved, a hand slid the sheer fabric aside. I looked into the eyes of Scotty’s mother, unmistakable—how in fact did memory work? She seemed to recognize me too: the overly made-up, skeletal face emanated delight and dismay at the same time, the pink-glossed lips moved, formed a word. I looked back: Boudewijn had Mike on his lap in the passenger’s seat. I walked across the neatly mown grass to the window, the wrinkled lips mouthed something. “Tineke.” The woman released the curtain, gestured for me not to leave. As I waited I realized that twenty years ago my mother was
thin
.
“Joni, dear, is that you? Good heavens … I thought for sure it was your mother. Come in, come in, what a sur
prise
.” Her left foot was stuck in a Stop & Shop bag fastened around her ankle with a rubber band, the right foot in a gray furry slipper. She led me into the living room, dragging that plastic foot. A sour smell took my breath away, a mix of old wallpaper, Brasso, cigarettes, fried bacon, the body odor of a nursing home. “Sit down, dear—God in heaven, you
are
the spitting image of your mother.” She showed me to a chair with a view of the Land Rover, Boudewijn still had Mike on his lap, his arm hung lazily out of the window. They were asleep. “Don’t mind my foot,” she said, “I broke my toe,
snap
, just like that, I stubbed it against that chest there, I was doing the floor. Infected and all. Something to drink, dear? What do you want to drink. Just say what.”
She was nervous, that’s for sure. A skittish woman, who called everything that wasn’t going to rob or murder her “dear.” Her long face twitched like an anthill that I’d poked with a stick. Her hair had thinned, was gray at the roots, but she dyed it … what shade was it? Purply red.
She disappeared into the kitchen. The living room had changed as little as she had, the flowered sofa was still there, on either side the same curly armchairs, greenish velvet, nappa leather with brass tacks. In the middle of that well-worn sitting area was the mahogany coffee table, onto which she set a glass of Coke Light with a trembling hand when she returned.
Chug this Coke and I’m out of here.
“My gosh, Joni, tell me, how are you? What brings you here? Let’s start with that. You’ve got a minute, haven’t you? Maybe you’re just passing through …”
That last comment was undoubtedly her most fervent wish: to see the back of me. What was her name again? She sat down across from me in a snot-green armchair and slid her crinkling, bagged foot under the coffee table. Her eyes shot from my hands to my flip-flops, to my knees, to the bay window, to my nose.
“We’re on vacation,” I lied.
“Oh, how wonderful. You’re having the best luck with the weather. It’s always hot as blazes here. Dear. How
mar
velous. With your parents?”
“With my boyfriend. He’s waiting in the car.”
“Wouldn’t your fiancé like to come in? Call the boy in, dear.”
She half got up, her wrinkled, ringed hands resting on scrawny thighs covered by a dark-blue skirt. For a minute I thought it would be fun to invite a fifty-year-old guy inside, just for the effect. How old would she be now? Early sixties? She wore a pearl necklace with a gold medallion, and matching clips on her sagging earlobes. Once, Scott and I were playing up in their attic and there was this steamer trunk full of fur coats, necklaces, bracelets, boots, shoes. I could tell him what to put on. I’ll bet the jewelry hanging on her wrinkled neck, on her wispy wrist, came from that trunk.
“No, please don’t bother. He’ll wait for a bit. We’re in San
Francisco for a couple of days. I thought, let’s go check out the old neighborhood. It hasn’t changed much.”
“So you still live in Amsterdam … You were such a nice, spontaneous family. You so enjoyed doing your own thing.”
She was lying. We were a thorn in her side. She confused the Netherlands with Amsterdam, of course she did, Sodom or Gomorrah, what difference did it make.
“And how are things here?” I asked. “Your husband? Is he still such a keen sailor?” Scott’s diminutive father. A hard worker with a droopy blond mustache who cheerfully climbed into his convertible every morning wearing steel-toed shoes and drove off somewhere, a factory or shipyard or God knows where, but come weekends he made a distant, irritable impression in that little showroom of theirs. One Sunday morning Scott and I gave his walrusy father a hand. A little elbow grease, he said, will earn you both five dollars. With the top down, so that we had difficulty hearing each other and it wasn’t so obvious that Scott’s father was a walrus of few words, we drove to the bay, past a marina and a container company, and stopped in front of a dented shed made of corrugated metal that turned out to be stacked to the rafters with long iron strips. Alongside the storeroom, the skeleton of a ship’s hull rested on wooden blocks, so rusty and pathetic that even my nine-year-old eyes welled up with tears. Was he trying to build a boat himself? The obvious failure of this enterprise sent blood rushing to my cheeks. Without further explanation he disappeared into the shed and, cursing under his breath, worked several strips free and slid them outside. Scott and I took turns dragging his father’s heavy, dangling metal slats to the other end of the hull. The sharp iron cut into the palms of my hands. Scott let go of one, the rusty edge scraped off his skin as it swished over his left knee. “Aaaaaah,” he screamed, and started to
cry, guilt-ridden and afraid, a red apple leaking juice. “Who’s the little girl here?” Scott’s father asked. “Well?”
“Malcolm,” said the woman. Her jittery gray-blue eyes suddenly came to rest, at least they stopped flitting. “Mal died six years ago. I’ve been alone since 1996. He was forty-nine.”
“I’m sorry …”
“His heart. Never ate a vegetable, only mayonnaise. He even scraped the tomato sauce off his pizza. But what am I nattering on about?”
We both stared at the glossy tabletop, as if to reflect on this brief in memoriam. The coffee table was improbably small and low. Hard to imagine that we sat at it that afternoon, all seven or eight of us. And still everything fitted, including little dessert plates and soda glasses, and in the middle, where a brass fruit bowl with bruised apples and spotty bananas now stood, a half-eaten birthday cake. Scotty’s birthday party. We knelt around the little table. Seven or eight suntanned playmates—half of them I didn’t know, because Scott went to an Evangelical school just outside Berkeley. And in two of these bordello chairs sat his father and his mother. Malcolm and …
Betty
. That’s her name. I knew for sure that Betty was also thinking back on that afternoon.
“But I have a lot of support from Scotty and Jennifer, they’re such sweet children.” She tried to smile, but her painted lips went through one position after another.
“What’s Scott up to these days?”
“Just a second.” She got up, smoothed out her skirt and dragged her Stop & Shop foot over to a chest of drawers in the front room. “Scott’s an appliance repairman,” she shrieked. I heard a spraying sound. A cap on a bottle. “Dryers, dishwashers. Everything. That boy is so good with his hands.”
“Married?”
“Scotty? No. No, not Scott. Jennifer is. Jennifer’s a mother of two. Two little boys.”
With a sharp perfume now wafting off her, Betty pushed an oval picture frame into my hands. In front of a caramel-brown photographer’s backdrop sat two adults, a seated woman and, half behind her, with a long, slender hand on her shoulder, a man. Jenny and Scott. The tall, slim fellow that Scott had become—his apple-ish roundness was apparently a sleight of hand, the Malcolm genes had lost the battle—so dominated my attention that Jennifer was no more than a blotch, a woman so ordinary that cones and rods just don’t react to her. Scott wore a leather singlet, a black metal hole had been punched in each of his large ears. If his mother talked Scott’s ears off, at least she could hang them up neatly on the coat rack. Despite the bourgeois photo studio, the conventional pose of the children, it was plain as day that Scotty was gay. I set the frame on the coffee table, alongside my glass of prematurely deceased Coke.
“Nice,” I said.
At first all the kids at that birthday party were shy, at least that’s the way I remembered it. This house was so tidy that it left you speechless. How the birthday boy came up with it was unclear, but even before we each had a slice of birthday cake on our plates, he said it. We were sitting across this eye-shaped table from one another, each on a pointy bit. He didn’t really come up with it, he just said it, for no reason. “Joni, Siem’s not your real father.” A triumphant, judgmental expression formed on his round face.
“They’re wonderful children,” Scott’s mother said. She sat down, but got right up again, as though an electric current were running through her chair. She picked up the frame and brought it back into the front room. “And dear, how are your parents? Your mother was so happy here. I was so sorry when you left.”
“We were too,” I said.
“Joni,” Scott said, “Siem is your stepfather.” Maybe because everyone else froze and didn’t say anything, he added: “Why do you always lie?” I opened my eyes as far as they would go, and they slowly filled with tears. “He is too my real father,” I stammered. The other children looked at me, and I could see that they were on Scott’s side.
“Is not,” he said.
“Is too!” They started flowing, slow, heavy tears. My voice sounded strange, canned.
Betty tilted her head like a bird and asked: “And your father? Still a professor, Joni? What a clever one, isn’t he, dear. A remarkable man. A genius—Mal and I said so all the time. Scotty once told us that just after you left your father had won the …” she hesitated for a moment, like she was embarrassed about something, “the Nobel Prize. We only found out
years
after you’d moved away. The … Nobel Prize for mathematics, wasn’t it?”
“Something like that, yeah. That’s right.”
“How is your father, dear?”
Dead, that’s how.
He hanged himself
. The genius pulled the plug. Not angry, just disappointed.
“Fine. He’s emeritus now … professor-in-retirement. He and my mother live in the Dordogne.”
“Italy … how
lovely
.”
“They run a bed-and-breakfast. Siem has started taking saxophone lessons.”
“My goodness, yes …” Betty said, purring contentedly, “I remember your father was always listening to jazz. Nervous music. According to Malcolm.”
There was a sadistic expression on Scotty’s rosy face. “Siem is your
step
father,” he said. “Your mother said so to my mother.”
They must have been tears of rage, blood of vengeance flowing through my muscles, because I leapt onto the table, on my knees. It was over this very coffee table that I crawled toward that rotten kid, straight through the marzipan birthday cake, knocking over soda glasses, and jumped on him with all my weight. My whipped-cream knees on his fat shoulders, Scotty fell over backward, I was on top of him, clawing and beating him, and screamed, half in English, half in Dutch: “He is
too
my father! Take it back, you stinking pig! He is
too
my father. You’re just jealous! You
wish
you had a father like him!”
Ten seconds, it didn’t take her longer than that, Scott’s mother, this woman, this timid Betty, to intervene, and with a vengeance. She dragged me off her son by my ear.
“God damn it, have you gone crazy?” she screamed, “hateful little brat,” and in front of all those children she dragged me in one tug through to the kitchen, unlatched the back door, and shoved me down the steps, onto the grass.
“Out of my yard,” she said, “and fast. Go tell your parents what you’ve done. Little witch.”
After Tineke had run out of the room behind her elder daughter, up to the bedrooms, and he and Janis had scooped up the cooled-off potato croquettes and Sigerius, tight-lipped, had swept the shards of porcelain into a dustpan, loaded the dishwasher, and drawn all the curtains, after the only human sounds to be heard were their footsteps, their occasional sniffs, the awkward little coughs when they got in each other’s way, and when the sunroom was once again the sunroom and Sigerius had settled into a recliner, headphones over his ears and a whiskey in his hand, and he shuffled upstairs, miserable and suddenly dead tired, when he had undressed in the guest room, swallowed his temazepams in the bathroom at the end of the landing and finally crawled into the wooden three-quarter bed behind the curled-up Joni, the long night of May 20, 2000 began.