Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“And Rijkaard,” Janis said.

“And Rijkaard,” he said. The anecdote was etched in his memory; he’d heard it from Sebastian at least three times, go on, tell it again, and he had retold it himself so many times he could recite it in his sleep. “So this guy,” he continued, suddenly more self-confident than he had felt until now, “was wearing black leather clogs with white socks. That’s how Venlo trailer trash goes out in public. I knew right away this guy was trouble. That sort of trash is easy to spot.” He told them that because of the balmy late-summer temperatures his passenger window was wide open. It seemed wise to raise the window: storm a-brewing. “So I hold down the button. But it goes slowly. Just before the window’s shut, the guy grabs the top edge of window with his fingers and deposits a great big green gob of spit onto the glass. He hangs there on it with his full weight. Our eyes are glued on each other as I keep my finger on the button. He screams: “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” For a second his fingers are caught, but then he pulls the window down with one long, slow tug.” Aaron demonstrated this with both hands, his face contorted into a malicious grimace. “ Snap went the little motor. The guy leans halfway into the car and grabs me by my work tie.”

“What a creep,” Tineke said, still busy loading up her plate and otherwise uninterested. Sigerius was paying close attention, that’s what mattered. “A creep?” he grinned. “But nothing happened.”

“Drop the tough-guy act, Dad,” said Janis, “you’d be peeing in your pants.”

“I’d be peeing in his pants,” her father answered. Aaron looked over at Sigerius, inwardly satisfied. He had not seen him like this all week, momentarily relieved from his irritable earnestness. He had shifted into fighter mode: don’t vacillate, take quick action — entirely atypical for a man of his age and position. Janis scornfully shook her close-cropped head.

“So then what does this guy do, he gives my tie a tight twist and winds up with his free arm,” he continued. “Now I’m going to get a fat lip, I thought. I pictured myself staggering off to the emergency room. But he doesn’t hit me. He yells something pretty vulgar and pushes off with his fist in my throat. He slides back out the window, sidles back to his car, and drives into the hospital parking lot.” He was impressed by his uninhibited word choice, he felt a million times better than ten minutes ago.

“So what did he yell at you?” Sigerius held the porcelain gravy boat in the air, five centimeters above the damask like a ghost galleon. He stared at Aaron, and traced circles with his tongue on the inside of his gray-stubbled cheeks.

“Drop it,” Joni said. “I don’t think I want to know.”

Aaron glanced at her; her face was glazed with disdain. Maybe the others figured her scowl was meant for her father. No siree. The family bitch was ashamed of him , ashamed of her other half, she was worried about the show he was planning to put on this time. In theory, a week like this was a perfect opportunity to show her parents what a refreshingly nice couple they were. Usually this was something she excelled in: play nice for Mommy and Daddy, pretend they had nothing to hide. Usually she reveled in pretense, theatre, flashy falsehoods. Not now. Now she was entrenched in the homeyness of her family, she observed him through her parents’ eyes, and what she saw was a jealous dork who prowled around her childhood home in the middle of the night.

“Go on, tell us anyway,” Sigerius said.

In a strange, hyperconscious way, Aaron knew he had landed on the right side of his fatigue: the temazepams he took last night had worn off; he felt lucid. “First he spat at me, another great big wad, this time at my ear. He yells: ‘BALD TWAT!’ at the top of his lungs. The cyclists at the stoplight turned and gawked. And then turned straight ahead again.”

“See what I mean,” said Joni. Sigerius shook his head and sniffed.

“And suddenly, with three cars honking behind me, I’m pissed . Furious. Not because of that twat, or because of that green spitwad on my head, no, not — well, yeah, that too. But mostly because of my window. That lowlife busted my window.” His lack of sleep allowed him to become Sebastian. “I pictured myself having to face De Zwart, my boss. Not the most easygoing. I can kiss my overtime goodbye, that’s De Zwart. ‘It’s coming out of your paycheck, Bever.’ De Zwart doesn’t ask if you’re OK, De Zwart withholds your salary. God damn it, I think. So I park my minivan next to that Escort and walk over to the hospital.”

Sigerius’s face breaks into a conspiratorial smile, the gravy boat makes a safe landing, finally, and with his now-free hand he strokes his deformed zero-tolerance ear. “So you go after the guy,” he says. “Way to go.”

The setting sun warmed the glass sunroom where they were eating, made their faces glow, reflected orange-red in the tableware, and Aaron described, also to himself, how in that hospital you had a long, low reception desk to the right and, to the left, a busy self-service cafeteria. “I couldn’t see the guy anywhere. Not at reception, maybe he’d walked through into the central hall. Just as I was about to ask where they’d sent the gentleman in the red training trousers, I spotted the asshole.”

“Is that what you said: red training trousers?” Sigerius asked.

“Of course not.” Joni.

Without looking at her, Aaron tut-tutted her with his left hand. “There he was in those clogs, his anabolic back to me, wedged in between the rest of the grazers, shuffling past the window displays with a tray in his hands. I walk over to him, on his plastic tray are two sweaty half-liter bottles of Heineken. Three sausage rolls hang over the edge of a too-small plate. But I smell sweat and piss. I tap him on the shoulder, he turns to me, he’s a head shorter than I am, and from down there he looks up as though he’s never laid eyes on me before. I say to him: ‘Sir, you just broke my car window. How are we going to resolve this?’ Even the blackheads on his forehead look startled. ‘Me?’ he says, ‘whatcha talkin about?’ ‘Outside, just now,’ I say, ‘you were in that red Ford Escort.’ ‘You got the wrong guy,’ he says, ‘I don’t know you, I just come from my sick mama.’ ”

“Did he say ‘sick mama’?” Sigerius’s mouth flew wide open, his brown eyes squinted into two little slits — he laughed noiselessly.

“Weren’t you scared?” Janis asked. “You could’ve just gone back to work and called the insurance company.” Which is more or less what Aaron had suggested to his brother at the time. He felt fascination, but also apprehension, a vicarious fear.

Sigerius: “He could have gone sniveling back to his minivan. He could have shouted ‘He-e-e-e-lp!’ But some people take action when action is called for.” Behind his dark, stubbly face, a face that did not suit a rector magnificus because it had nothing solemn about it, that did not suit a Fields laureate because there was no unworldly genius radiating from it, and that least of all suited a Minister of Education, a transformation took place — you saw Sigerius change into the man for whom, in some distant past, that sensual, folksy head had been intended. A man who himself was capable of impulsive, quick-tempered action, who had once recalled, with great relish, an incident that took place in the canteen of an American swimming pool where he sat waiting while Joni and Janis had their swimming lesson on the other side of the plate-glass wall. He wanted a cup of coffee and made three grown-up attempts at getting the attention of the canteen kid at the far end of the counter, who stood shooting the breeze with two swim-moms. Sigerius was a swim-dad who, in such circumstances, didn’t try a fourth time, but reached over the bar, fished a soggy yellow dishrag out of the sink and hurled it in a perfect parabola against the young layabout’s ear: coffee, please.