Mireille lives in a house on one of those legs. Right now, she’s probably sitting in front of the TV.
Gita’s parents lived for many years on the highest floor of an old building on the next leg, until the block was torn down and renovated and the prices went sky-high. Atop the new building on the site where she was raised, there’s now a penthouse that seems unoccupied, since no light ever burns in its windows.
The caterpillar’s head is a square, the Mosplein, and Gita knows that, at this moment in the Café Mosplein, Sjors and Maya are lowering the metal shutters across the plateglass window that looks out on the square. She wonders if she can make out her own building from here. Yes, there, the street just south of the square, that must be it.
What would happen if she went there now? Climb the stairs, slip her key into the lock, and then immediately the scream, the uproar that only she can understand. She left the heat on but turned out all the lights — had she been hoping for burglars? The longer she stares at her building in the distance, the more clearly she can hear the screams.
She turns away and sees Femke’s complex, those buildings there on the right. Femke pointed it out to her once, from the ferry: “That one, there, with the big windows!”
Earlier this evening, Gita checked all the mailboxes and buzzers in the lobby, but she couldn’t find Femke’s name. She’d actually grabbed a complete stranger by the arm and said, “Sir, you don’t happen to know Femke de Waal, do you?” The man shook his head and scowled at her suitcase. “Airbnb’s not allowed in this building,” he said severely, pulling a ring of keys from his jacket, and Gita had turned away and left but not gone home. Instead, she’d wandered aimlessly through the warren of streets until she found herself at the foot of the A’DAM Tower, the tallest building on the waterfront.
Gita fishes her cell phone from her pocket. No new messages — nothing from Femke. Without thinking, she scrolls up, past dozens of texts, maybe hundreds, until she comes to the very first one in the chain: Red leather gloves!
Johnny hadn’t wanted to wear his rain jacket that day. It had rained all week, fat drops pelting the windows, the bed of Johnny’s plastic dump truck filling with water — Gita hadn’t had the energy to bring it in from the backyard. Johnny shook his head angrily when she held the jacket up for him. He made a face like he’d swallowed something gross and growled what sounded like a no. It was only a few steps from the front door to the curb, where the school bus would stop, and, if he wanted, his teachers would let him stay indoors all day. Strictly speaking, he didn’t need the jacket, but Gita had just bought it and wanted to convince herself that the money hadn’t been wasted — it had cost more than she could really afford.
Their argument unfolded like most of their arguments. First Johnny began to scream, his eyes already tearing, his cheeks flushed, and then he started kicking. His flailing arms struck her in the face, but Gita knew he didn’t mean to hurt her. Finally, he broke out in uncontrollable sobs.
She was reminded of a video that had been going around on Facebook for weeks. A man tells his three-year-old daughter that steak comes from cows and the girl bursts out in tears. “Poor cows,” she whispers to the camera.
Every time Gita saw that clip, she felt a mixture of anger and jealousy. She was jealous of the parents, who had a healthy, beautiful little girl with two pigtails, a child who felt empathy for other living creatures. But she was mad at them too, for bragging so shamelessly about their blessings. Why would anyone be interested in the private happiness of strangers?
The bus stood outside her door for ten minutes that morning, two wheels up on the curb. When she couldn’t calm Johnny down, she bribed him with a prepackaged pancake. It was much too early for a treat — she could see Johnny’s nutritionist shake a finger — but what choice did she have? The bus was waiting, with other children aboard. Thank god Johnny stopped screaming the moment he heard the crinkle of the plastic wrapper.
“Sorry,” she told the frowning driver, when Johnny finally clambered up into the bus.
Later that day, she regretted the humbleness of her apology. She did what she could, damn it, and who was a school-bus driver to judge her? She wished she’d told him so, right to his face. But at the same time she felt guilty about the way she’d treated Johnny. She shouldn’t have insisted on the rain jacket. He was tired, he’d had a bad night, his day hadn’t even begun, and she was already nagging him. When she brought him home from Mireille’s that evening, she decided, she’d give him another pancake, just because.
Had she noticed Femke come into the café that morning?
Probably not. She can barely recall taking her order — the only reason she knows now that it had been an open-faced egg sandwich was that she remembers Femke saying, “You should leave off the dill,” when she paid for it. A typical remark, she would come to learn: Femke always spoke her mind, whether or not anyone had asked for her opinion. At first, Gita saw the trait as arrogance, until she realized that in a way it came from a desire to be helpful. Femke simply knew better than most other people, and with each observation about the things she ate and saw and did, Gita’s admiration for Femke’s knowledge and insight and pure bravado grew.
After the comment about the egg sandwich, though, Gita had merely nodded. She’s not from around here, she thought. She could tell from the woman’s long, formfitting raincoat, nothing like the shapeless things worn by the café’s usual customers. Before heading back out into the rain, Femke had tightened her belt, but Gita didn’t notice how slim she was until later that day, when the woman returned. Her raincoat was dry then, and so elegant that Gita wondered if it really was a raincoat, after all.
“I think I left my gloves here,” Femke said.
Now that they were standing face-to-face, Gita realized that the woman was beautiful. Maybe it was her makeup, she thought at the time. But four or five weeks later, Femke gave her an eyeliner pencil, the same kind she used herself, and it didn’t make Gita’s eyes any bigger or more attractive.
“I don’t think we found a pair of gloves,” said Gita, and she glanced at Sjors, who stood in the doorway to the kitchen, shaking his head.
Femke shrugged. “Might as well have a drink, since I’m here. Do you carry Macallan?”
She spent the rest of the afternoon at the bar, reading the newspaper, playing with her phone, asking questions whenever Gita had a free moment. About the café — “You didn’t have to close when they renovated the square?” — but personal things too: “Do you live in the neighborhood?”
Gita remembers finding their on-and-off conversation odd, but not unwelcome. When customers talked to her, they were mostly older gentlemen who did little more than order another drink. Femke was young — probably ten years younger than Gita — a member of a more interested generation. So when she suggested that Gita pour one for herself, Gita did something she’d never done before. She set a shot glass on the bar beside the register and filled it to the rim with whiskey.
She hadn’t had much to eat that afternoon. The guilty residue from the morning’s scene with Johnny stuck to her ribs like chewing gum, but the whiskey burned some of it away and gave her the courage to speak honestly for once. “Actually,” she heard herself say, “I don’t like the neighborhood as much as I used to. They promised us a whole new clientele after the renovation. But most of our regulars moved away, and we’re not good enough for the new residents. They like the trendy spots in the Van der Pekstraat, little bistros that serve soup, where the whole menu is soup and nothing but soup, you know what I mean? Can you believe anyone would come all the way up here to eat soup?”