Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“I didn’t know Janis was an aunt,” Timo said to break the silence.

“I didn’t know Mike had an uncle,” I answered.

After a taciturn lunch at the Japanese Tea House, which Timo paid for with an edgy snicker, we walked in pairs through Golden Gate Park, Janis and I side by side, Boudewijn pushing the stroller and conversing with the pasty-white “commie,” as he called Janis’s boyfriend in the blissful privacy of our own car. I could tell that Boudewijn stepped up their tempo to give Janis and me some time to ourselves. As the men turned into little dolls, Timo a squaw with that braid of his, my sister and I sauntered through the decor of blossoming willows and ancient oaks. It was hot and humid, and sweat beaded up under Janis’s cropped henna-hair. Our parents used to bring us here when we lived in Berkeley, twenty eons ago; we would pile into the pickup and drive from Bonita Avenue over the Bay Bridge, Janis and me on the sticky front seat, wedged between my parents, my father at the wheel. I asked her if she remembered that.

“I hardly remember anything about California.”

The path sloped slightly. Our footsteps crunched precisely in time. How old was Janis back in 1982: five?

“Tineke used to fill that red wicker basket with food,” I said to refresh her memory, “you know, the one out on the front porch of the farmhouse in Enschede.”

“You’re calling your mother by her first name? What’s the deal?”

I took a deep breath and said: “Janis — why do you think Siem killed himself?”

Her pace faltered for a moment. She took her sunglasses off her spiked hair and set them on her nose, which by now had taken on the color of a grilled sausage.

“Do you and … Mom think I had anything to do with it?”

She stopped and placed a sweaty hand on my shoulder. “There’s something in my shoe,” she said, wobbling, as she wriggled a swollen foot out of her All Star. Someone, maybe Pocahontas over there, had drawn a peace sign on the green canvas with a blue ballpoint pen. She shook a pebble out of the sneaker and got down on one knee to put it back on. “Joni,” she said to my thigh, “Mom and I haven’t heard from you in three years. You weren’t at the funeral. We don’t think about you much. And if we do think about you, we’re more inclined to think you have nothing to do with anything at all.”

After we had put Mike to bed, with those two almost palpably killing time in the living room, Bo installed himself in the open kitchen as a man who is out to impress his twenty-years-younger in-laws and whipped up some pasta with fresh Bay crab. I sat upright on the sofa across from Timo and Janis and listened to a peevish account of their tours of those “ludicrously commercial” Hollywood film studios and endured a report of the financial details concerning their recently acquired row house in Deventer. There was some to-do about a permit regarding a tree in their neighbor’s yard, or maybe the tree was in their own yard, and the tree needed to be chopped down or not chopped down, and Timo was taking or not taking legal action. He was clearly a good match for my sister; I could tell he detested me on ideological grounds. I was too rich, I was too pretty, I had a despicable boyfriend, McKinsey was despicable. The deliberate way he nodded when I said anything, or just sat there fiddling with his black cuffs, indifferently picking at a loose cuticle — his entire demeanor announced how pleased he was with the 9,000 kilometers between San Francisco and Deventer.

The evening sun nudged our shadows across the floor tiles; below us, the illuminated houses of the Marina twinkled like a thousand tea lights. We talked awkwardly about nothing. I was already longing for my bed when Janis suddenly launched into an account of the terrible ordeal our mother had been through, the heartbreaking sale of the farmhouse six months after Siem’s death, and how she phoned her every day in her rental flat in Hengelo, for a chat, but in fact to make sure she was still alive.

“She hates me because I left my mother in the lurch,” I said to Boudewijn later in bed. “And because I didn’t tell them about Mike.” Now that those two were downstairs soiling our sheets, I felt the anger well up.

“Sisters don’t think that kind of thing,” Boudewijn said from his half. “This just takes some getting used to. She didn’t just show up for no reason. You’re obsessing. I didn’t think it was so bad. Tomorrow, after breakfast, we’ll take a walk through Chinatown, let Timo loose among the comrades. They’ll thaw, you’ll see.”

My irritation had subsided by the time I got up at 4 a.m. to soothe a crying Mike. As I calmed the little guy down I realized that Bo was right: Janis was the one who’d taken the first step, not me, even though that step hadn’t really amounted to much yet. Even in the old days, when we were just starting to think for ourselves, we argued about fundamental issues, had furious arguments about nuclear weapons, about money, about music, capitalism — anything, as long as it was principled and painful — in each other’s face like a pair of bickering fishwives, after which, as if by magic, a contrite peace came over us, probably thanks to the fact that we were in the same genetic boat.

Come morning, I fetched Mike and laid him in bed next to Boudewijn while I padded downstairs in a cotton dress. I had a strange urge to really splash out, flaunt our bourgeois American Dream. So on Friday, just after Janis’s phone call, I had left Silicone Valley, throbbing migraine and all, and interrupted an already long drive home to stock up at Safeway and even went all the way to a Holland Deli in Palo Alto, a ridiculous little shop with a ridiculously oversized wooden clog as big as a small car at the front entrance. I bought Gouda cheese, Dutch gingerbread, currant buns, and speculaas . Already at the checkout counter I hated myself for going the whole hog, but now I was glad I did. Whatever Janis reported about me back in that chickenshit country, it wasn’t going to be my fault.

The morning sun warmed the varnished hardwood floor and mint-green cabinets, sparkled on the espresso machine and the dish racks. The potted basil, marjoram, and bay plants on the windowsill above the counter sucked in the light. I laid my favorite tablecloth on the recycled wood table, was of two minds about which dishes — modern or traditional — and opted for Boudewijn’s grandmother’s German porcelain. It was almost nine o’clock. I pre-warmed the oven for the ciabattas and bagels, beat some eggs for the French toast, arranged blueberry and pear-honey muffins on an oval platter. Fresh fruit, salami, three kinds of ham wrapped in cellophane, little dishes of marmalade, cereal and muesli, milk, yogurt, honey. I constructed a little Dutch island on a side table, with the currant buns, cheese, and packets of chocolate sprinkles and flakes. I squatted down next to the stereo, but reconsidered: I wanted to be able to hear the downstairs shower. I poached four eggs and made an espresso, for myself as well as for the aroma. She could take her pick.

Boudewijn came downstairs with Mike just before nine-thirty. I could just gobble them up, they looked so cozy and too, too domestic: Mike, already dressed, laughing and jabbering on his play rug, Bo squatting down alongside him, aglow from his shave, his wavy gray hair combed back with gel. He was wearing his felt Church slippers with the “BS” monogram on the toe, which usually irritated me. Things hadn’t been so great between us, but he now was scoring points big-time. “And? The guests of honor up yet?” he asked with a smile.

Janis, I recalled, was a late sleeper who didn’t do well with short nights, so we drank tea and thumbed through the San Francisco Chronicle as a matter of form. Just after ten Boudewijn gave me a wink. “Why don’t you go wake them up,” he said. “They’ll appreciate that. I never like oversleeping at friends’.”