boxes

Elisa Balau

Rob is bent over the kitchen table, chewing on pork skin. The end bit of a loaf of bread, two raw onions and a small heap of salt are spread out before him on a wooden chopping board. His hands are greased to the wrists, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A safety-bright green vest—the only proof I’ve ever seen of his job as an ambulance driver—is about to slide off his chair.

He hasn’t heard me come in, so when I close the door behind me, I do it with a little shove. The slam of the latch into place straightens Rob’s back. He turns his head to the side, though not enough to meet my eyes, and lifts his chin, not to me, but to the stove. Briefly he peers over the three unpeeled potatoes floating in the tall blue pot with the white rim. “All right?” he says, faceless, full-mouthed.

“Hey, Rob.” I’d ask him how he’s been if it didn’t feel rehearsed. I knew I wouldn’t know how to be with him, but to step so far outside the strict confines of our agreed-upon dynamic already seems like the wrong thing to do.

“How did you get in?” I place the key fob on the shelf, in the glass bowl with the missing bobby pins. My Hello Kitty keychain makes a drawn-out sound as it settles in. “You can keep it if you want,” he says.

I shake my head, lower my gaze. “It’s fine.” He doesn’t insist, although I do give him the chance, waiting the right amount of time and clearing my throat dutifully before I speak again. “So,” I croak, then cough a bit, “are they in the bedroom, then?”

“Mm,” he says, his back still turned to me. “I’ll give you a hand. Just give me a sec.”

“It’s all right,” I say. “I’ll crack on. If you don’t mind? I’m meeting a friend at ten.”

“You’re not hungry?”

“I’ve had some fries at Soro. Mum had to charge her car, so, yeah.”

He scratches the base of his neck. “There’s pickled watermelon.” I stand with my hand on my hip, glancing at the coat rack. Something tightens in my chest, a knot of guilt, I think, that isn’t mine, though whose is it? “It’s very fresh.” He’s looking at me directly now, eyes red and heavy and half-closed. I throw another glance over my shoulder before nodding and taking off my coat.

_____

When I sit down, Rob gets up, and it’s only then that the kitchen comes into focus. The narrow hall with its arched entrance and the deep-set nails hanging onto stock photography of coffee cups. This angle of the flat is the one I’m most used to taking in. My adolescence is a series of clear shots of this side of the washing machine. These fridge magnets from beachy places my mum’s friends have visited; the small white television that I can’t see but know is mounted to the wall behind me, forever on the Food Network, so that someone’s voice would fill the room. This was my seat at the table. I did my homework here too, pushing breadcrumbs aside to make space for my Geography textbooks until Ikea opened on Nucului 27, and Rob came home one evening with the spare parts of a desk and a new toolbox. I wonder now, as I did then, if he did it for me or for the thrill of not having to clean after himself again.

Four months ago, she moved out; the place looks much the same it did in 2004. The cookbook Rob gifted Mum as a joke, our first Christmas together, has kept a lick of paint from yellowing on the wall. There’s a dust print on the shelf, by the empty fruit basket, in the shape of the egg-holder I stole from my grandma’s house when I was twelve. But: “Where’s the mantel clock?” I know my mum wouldn’t have taken it. She used to gut its batteries, but the lack of ticking woke Rob up. “The chicken clock?” I call out, which is when he pops out of the pantry with a glass jar and a plastic barrel. Inside the barrel, I picture pink flesh slowly crisping and souring and for a moment, I’m so happy for Rob. 

“What did you say?” he asks.

“Did you make them?” I say.

“What?” he says. “The watermelons?”

“Mm.”

“No, no. They’re from my Ma. But I did make the cherry kompot.”

“In the finished ice cream tub?” I say with a knowing grin that goes over his head because he allows it. The stubborn mess of them—and the takeaway containers—drying out on the counter for months. It used to drive me so crazy, I’d argue about it with my mum.

“In the olive jar,” he says after a snap of silence, dropping the barrel on the table with a thud. 

I shake my head, let it go. We’ve never addressed it before, have we? And isn’t it a waste to do it now?

As he sits back down, he takes the knife from my hand, which I contest, but he clicks his tongue. “Let me,” he says and starts cutting, wet, slurpy noises every time the knife goes through. “How’s uni?” he asks. “And the acting stuff?”

“Yeah, fine,” I say. “Uni’s fine. How’s work?”

“Work’s good.”

“Good, good. Glad to know. Any crazy calls?”

He slides the chopping board across the table. A whiff of salt and vinegar rises to my nose. “Yeah, no,” he says. “Not really. Just the usual. Broken arms, twisted ankles. Heart attacks. That sort of stuff. Do you need a fork?”

I want to spare myself the pity and him the embarrassment of finding out together, in real time, that all the cutlery is in the sink, soiled in cheesecake and store-bought spaghetti sauce, so I grab a slice with my thumb and index finger and take a big bite. “Mm,” I say. “It’s still a little sweet.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s a good one.”

“I like it best when it’s only slightly pickled.”

“Mm,” he says. “I know.”

I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. This, I think, is a very normal back and forth for me and Rob. Both of us more listeners than talkers. And yet, there’s a helplessness in the way he hands me the tea towel now that I can hardly bear. I haven’t seen him since before their big fight: long sighs and spilt white wine and the awful ceiling lights on until four in the morning; him sleeping on the sofa, then him driving to his brother’s house in the thick of night; her smoking on the balcony, the cooling, clarifying sensation of her bare feet pacing the concrete. It had felt final, even to me, hearing all about it on the phone through hiccups and stuttering breaths, my legs planted firmly on the bathroom floor as if to slow her down, to punctuate her run-on sentences.

_____

Once we finish eating, I let Rob guide me to the bedroom—and it is the bedroom now, definite article instead of a possessive. I lag behind him as if I don’t know my way around, as if I haven’t had my first period here, first kiss with the neighbour’s older son who bought me energy drinks. It’s okay. It doesn’t bother me. Not until I step inside to see the baby pink covered in sad streaks of eggshell white. And is the smell still here? Or am I imagining it? The cheap vanilla candles and glitter nail polish, the years of tea tree oil-scented acne treatment I’ll never wash off my clothes.

I try but can’t envision what he’ll do with all this space. He’s one of those people, hard to ascribe to any certain pattern or fabric or colour palette. Not because he’s complicated, but because he doesn’t like many things. He doesn’t dislike them either. He’s too tired when he comes back from work to feel much towards anything. For most of their relationship, this has been his excuse for even the smallest of errors or shortcomings: not buying a dishwasher, not taking Mum to Rome on her fortieth birthday, not booking a table at the new seafood buffet that opened last year in the Old Town. He must have ordered two hundred portions of the same steak and fries with garlic mayo from Soro in the thirteen years it took my mum to sample every item off the menu.

“I’ll take the ones with the clothes,” I say. “I don’t think I can carry the books, though. And what’s in the other four?”

“I’ve got some plastic liners,” he says, then clarifies, “to sort out what you want to keep and what to throw away.”

“Oh, no. Rob, it’s fine.”

He clicks his tongue again. “It’s not a problem.”

There’s nowhere to sit and nothing to lean against. He brings two chairs from the kitchen, the same two chairs we sat on before, and we sit on them again. In the middle of the room, we face each other, our voices amplified by the lack of furniture with a faint delay. I feel like I’m in improv class, Mr. Laurent miming the shape of a door at me with one hand and closing it with the other. “Look at your scene partner. Really look at them. Separate yourself from your character.”

Rob picks up the box with a picture of the vacuum cleaner on the front and flips it upside down. My old IELTS manual lands on my shoe, and I tilt my head to read a scribble on its spine: BE/WAS/BEEN. I haven’t considered, in a long time, that the English language is something I had to acquire with a great deal of effort, and to be reminded of it now is almost pleasurable. My Winx Club magazines are spread across the floor too, out of order. I reach for the one closest to me and thumb through to the last page, where I know I’ll find the sticker sheets in mint condition, because I’ve been saving them for a special occasion. Then I look up at Rob. He’s holding a novel with a shirtless man on the cover, arched backwards in black jeans and a large pair of wings shedding feathers. 

“You can chug that,” I say. “Take it to charity. I don’t think I’ve ever finished it.”

Rob nods to himself. When he starts chewing on the inside of his cheek, I know I’ve said something to upset him. “You had a phase of reading about werewolves and fairies.”

“I’ve had many phases,” I say. “This one’s about angels, actually.”

“Right,” he says. “And that’s different.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, quite.”

He speaks in such a monotone cadence, it’s hard to tell if he’s being funny or snide. His gummy smile, in combination with his very large and lumbering stature, makes him vulnerable in a way that has always felt a little out of reach for me. I’ve learned to live with it, with him. I never did learn how to decipher his moods, though, and because of that, because of my own failure, it used to rub me the wrong way when other people noticed his quiet brand of oddity. I remember once when Andra was over—Andra Pop from drama class. She wore her hair in a blonde bob with pink ends that covered the entire surface of her face like a too-short curtain. She called her mum by her first name. 

“Your stepdad is kind of weird,” Andra said, sniffing. She had a perpetually runny nose. “He makes me think of a friendly giant, though he’s not very friendly.”

“He’s not my stepdad,” I said. 

“He’s married to your mum, no?”

“They’re not married,” I said. 

“Right,” she said, like she didn’t believe me. 

“If my mum is seeing some dude, it doesn’t make him my dad, does it. I have a dad. He just doesn’t live here.”

“Right, okay. Well, what is he to you then?” She was chewing gum at the speed of a starving rabbit. Chewing and sniffing, sniffing and chewing and sniffing. I thought, at any point, she might run out of breath and die. “If he’s not your stepdad, then what is he to you, then?”

“I don’t know, Andra. He’s just Rob.”

“What if they have kids, though? Is that not gonna be your brother? Or sister?”

“They’re not gonna have kids,” I said.

“But what if they do?”

“He’s not my fucking dad, Andra. What’s your fucking problem?”

_____

We get through every reading age with relative ease. We agree to save the old PlayStation box for the notebooks I wrote in Year 10. It was an especially confessional year for me because that’s when my dad stopped picking up the phone, so I had a lot to get off my chest. My clothes, I insist on sorting out on my own later. I’m mortified at the prospect of Rob’s unusually squared paws nuzzling my prom dress, my zebra-print two-piece swimsuit that no longer fits. 

One by one, the boxes pile up by the Welcome Home doormat, and I start to get ahead of myself. I can still make it on time, I think, if I get a taxi. I don’t have to cancel on my friend. Then it dawns on me, with a sour, isolating sort of sadness, that there is no friend, and I have nowhere better to be tonight. I just didn’t want to be here longer than either of us could tolerate. 

“What do we do with all this stuff?” Rob asks, pointing at the four remaining boxes. He peels back one cardboard flap, enough for me to see a tangle of cables, a capless lipstick, a broken pair of headphones.

For a brief and incomplete moment, I hear a ringing in my left ear. The heater is cranked up high, the dry air tightening the skin around my face. My fingers gather into a fist, and I rub at my eyes with them until I see luminous shapes, wild colours that don’t actually exist. I want to ask Rob something, but I’m sure it’ll come out wrong. “So,” I croak, then cough a bit. “Wait—where have you been?”

“Where?” he says, puzzled. “I was packing up your watermelon. I think I’ve boiled the potatoes too long. They’re crumbling.”

I’m looking at him directly now. I know I’ll see him again. He shops at Carrefour because they only sell the milk he drinks there, and that’s my and my mum’s supermarket. And if we changed it, I’d have to learn a whole new sequence of aisles and where they store the canned corn. I know I’ll see him again in his safety-bright green vest with a bag at his chest and his back a little hunched. I’ll wave at him from across the car park. And he’ll wave back at me. And that’ll be that. There will be no one there with me and still, I’ll imagine someone loading the boot and asking, “Who’s that?” And what will I say? “My mum’s ex.” Is that all he is to me?

“Hey, Rob?” I say. “I think I’ll have to come back tomorrow for the rest of them if that’s all right? There’s just too many—”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he snaps, lurching at the chair and picking it up for no reason. Then standing there, with the chair in hand, “I’ll help you take this one downstairs.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“How is she, by the way?”

There’s a new stretch of silence. The longest one today. “Yeah, fine,” I say. “She’s fine.”

“How’s the new—what’s his name?”

“He’s fine. He’s all right. I don’t know. I don’t live with her anymore. It’s hard to get to know someone on holidays.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But he’s nice to you?”

“Yeah. I mean, I think so. He has one of those faces like he’s always about to laugh, you know. But, like, burst out laughing. Do you know what I mean? Like what’s so fucking funny?”

A glimpse of his gummy smile. “As long as he’s nice to you. And your mum.”

“Yeah. He’s all right. Great lover of seafood, I hear. And how have you been, Rob?”

He shrugs. “What’s the time? You’re not late seeing your friend, are you? Do you want me to drive you?”

Elisa Báláu is a Romanian-British writer and translator. She holds a PhD in English and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. She studies exophony, the practice of writing creatively in a language other than one's mother tongue. Her work has been longlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and published in the Breakwater Review. She's working on a novel.