Love, If That’s What It Is by Marijke Schermer

Author:Marijke Schermer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Editions
Published: 2021-03-22T08:31:29+00:00

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Fuck you

She scoops the fries into a serving dish, divides the meat and beets among the four plates, pours water into glasses, mixes mayonnaise and yogurt in a bowl, opens the jar of fruit compote. She’s done her best. She could have made the compote herself but didn’t deem it necessary. She lights a candle. David comes in and looks at the food. At her. He’s traded his work clothes for white shorts and a faded T-shirt. He takes a beer from the fridge and pours it into a glass. He says it looks delicious. Terri calls upstairs. Ally and Krista sit down at their places. Krista is wearing eye makeup.

They eat. Ally quizzes her parents on the Greek gods, David is pleased with himself because he got more answers right than Terri, but tells himself he wouldn’t be so pleased if she didn’t so very clearly think herself intellectually superior. She may think he’s stagnating, but his reservoir of knowledge is enormous. That’s just the way it is. Krista pokes at her food, gazing around the table with a sullen expression, which Terri is the only one to comment on. David looks at his wife. What’s changed, he wonders; the question is like an itch. What’s changed, what makes this meal different from the thousands of times they’ve sat around this table just like this? Maybe it’s the terrifying loneliness he’s feeling, the realization there’s something that’s there only as long as you don’t stop believing in it. That as soon as you stop believing in it, all you are is a collection of individual lives and secret thoughts that once cohered only by dint of some force that’s now been squashed.

“Greek gods—that means you’re interested in taking Latin and Greek, doesn’t it?”

“I just like them.”

“You used to like them when you were little too.”

Krista glares at her. It’s puberty, Terri thinks, it’s puberty and not a total personal rejection of me, because she hates me, because she thinks I’m an idiot, she’s only a child but she’s forgotten that.

Tomorrow is her mother’s birthday, they’re all going to visit her. Terri is sleeping here tonight, David too, they’re driving up to Wassenaar as a family, and for the sake of some kind of harmony, that family has to start pulling itself together now. Her parents don’t know yet. Should she tell the kids to keep it under their hats? Should she call her parents tonight? Each option is as unthinkable as the next. Her mother will start to cry, and her father will think it’s David’s fault; there will be other guests there tomorrow, there won’t be time to talk, it will ruin her mother’s afternoon. It would be simplest if the children just didn’t come, but she won’t let Krista off the hook that easily, and since the start of the crisis Ally’s been clinging to the idea of family like a banded mongoose. Thursday or Friday, or whenever it was, Terri caught her leafing through their

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