When I entered the fishmonger with Frida on my arm, the salesman, a stout woman with a Volendam accent, who was just cutting a rectangular piece of salmon, called out: ‘That’s hard, isn’t it!’
Yes-haa, I said, well and if, and when I put the little one down to demonstrate that she can already walk a little, she started screaming, and when the fish woman with red workers’ fingers took a fish fries from a steel bowl and put it over handed the counter, Frida just looked at her suspiciously, because for the past few days she’d been moving through life differently, more angular, more exclusive. It didn’t bother the woman, she was already busy with her order, because she loves her profession and everything that has to do with it. When her colleague inquired a little later whether that child had already been given fish fries, she shouted without looking up from her cutting board that she hadn’t. And while Frida was grinding up her second fish-fry—so much for her indignation—and I looked questioningly at the fish-wife, she said with maternal uneasiness, “Ah. Because she still has to grow.’
I like inverted verbs.
They say the same thing, but there’s more emphasis on it.
“Just say what you want to say.”
Yes!
“That depends on where you need to be.”
Extra point for using the word orphans.
And now this again, because she still has to grow from it. Beautiful.
‘How are her sisters?’, the fishwife pulled me out of my thoughts.
That question was so one-two-three unanswerable, at least, if I didn’t want to get rid of it with a polite lie. After the summer break, when the oldest daughter turned 7, we had to deal with an adolescent in the house overnight, including eye rolls and tantrums and black hoodies that she pulled deep over her eyes. I had been watching it like a chicken to the storm, but soon a light had dawned that it must have had something to do with the new class, with taking positions, the school as aperitif. When we spoke to the teacher about it, it was indeed about storming and norming, a phase of group formation that came with it, you could search everywhere, the internet was full of it, nothing crazy in itself, after two weeks it usually stabilized by itself, and if not then there were teachers to lend a hand.
I had never heard of it. Neither did the fish lady, but she understood me right away. “Mine was exactly the same,” she said, hands on her hips. ‘Big waffel, there was absolutely nothing good anymore. That you think: where has my dear child gone.’
I already knew that every time you say goodbye to the child that is, from baby to toddler and from toddler to adolescent and so on, and further, until you disappear behind the horizon yourself, and I already knew that I would get a taste of her own medicine in her frisky years, 15, at most 16 and she would get on the back of a grumpy motorcyclist without a helmet and so our lives crackle, daa-haag, I’ll call, but did it have to be so early?
“Let it go,” said the fish woman, shoving the fish into a paper bag. ‘Let it go, it will blow over by itself. You’re not doing anything about it. Every child has to make his own mistakes.’
It sounded like a threat and a reassurance rolled into one.