The Fires (10 page)

72 / RENÉ STEINKE

I
kept humming to myself the tune Paul had whistled, which sounded so much like a hymn my father had played. Was it Bach? My father had always said his name the way other men said “Lincoln” or “Robert Miller,” the local Porter man who had died a hero’s death in World War II. “Bach,” he said, his mouth and eyes serious as if I could learn something important just from the name.

I hummed the tune again. What was it? The hymns were confused in my head.
Our shelter from the stormy blast…And take they
our life, goods, fame, child, and wife, they can harm us none.

Those nights my father walked the two miles to the church alone, even in the snow, he must have heard the rhythms in his steps, in his breath, going over the music he would play in the dark, empty church.

I still couldn’t place the tune, but it sounded like that part of the hymn just before the refrain, when you could hear the return to the familiar words and the relief of this made people sing louder.

A sturdy-looking woman in sneakers and stretch pants came down the stairs then and said, “Hello there, young lady. I’m going out now, but we need some more tissues there in Room Four.”

The way she said “there” as if it were a comma or a throat-clearing let me know she was from Wisconsin.
There
and
and that
had special uses in Wisconsin.

“I’ll bring a box right up,” I said.

I went to the shelf in the back of the closet for the tissues, climbed the stairs and walked down the hall. My ears were overly sensitive to tics and slips of the tongue, from all those years listening for (and often dreading) the notes my father missed. If he made a mistake on Sunday morning, he’d ask my mother and me in the afternoon if we’d heard the missed note and didn’t seem to believe us if we said we hadn’t. If we said we had, though, he’d

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berate himself for it all day until he was too depressed to eat dinner.

I used to go to the church with him sometimes when he was practicing and sit beside him at the organ, turning the pages of his sheet music (I could read music, even though I didn’t play an instrument). The empty sanctuary below us was strange and dark, except for the small votive lights between the stained-glass windows and the overhead light shining down on the cross. I liked the church empty and secretive like this, with the pews vacant, the candles unlit. There was a kind of wise calm in its waiting to be filled.

As my father played through the following Sunday’s music, I secretly listened for the wrong notes that might slide through the smooth seams of melodies, because they gave me something to count, though I kept the numbers to myself.

I knocked on the door of Room 4, and when no one answered, put the box of tissues on the floor just in front and walked back down the hall.

Music chased the devil away,
Martin Luther had said, and I believed it when I looked up at my father, small against the panel of organ pipes, his mouth grim with concentration, his face in profile as serious as if the church were a ship he was steering through a storm. Not everyone appreciated his fervor. He favored stark harmonies, which made the people singing sound out of tune, and he liked preludes and interludes that sometimes made people stumble over the words. Most of them would have been just as happy to let their voices follow Mrs. Eckhart, one of the Sunday-school teachers, banging away on the piano.

Quietly, he composed his own music, but he only occasionally played these pieces at the college chapel, or at home for my mother and me. He wore a small defeated smile, staring down at his hands on the keys, hunched over them as if he were bowing 74 / RENÉ STEINKE

down to this exquisite, odd music like a wordless foreign tongue, and I always wondered where he’d got the ideas for these melodies, where they’d come from.

When I got back downstairs, opened the gate, and went behind the desk, the phone was ringing, each timid shriek annoying me, and I didn’t want to answer it. Upstairs I heard the regular thump and clap of someone doing jumping jacks, and the whine of water in the pipes.

A
fter the night I saw Mr. Schultz at the Paradise Lounge, I stayed away. But sometimes at work, I’d change into one of my dresses, and I’d happen to meet a man, bleary-eyed from driving or from drinking in the dining car on the train. They’d see the dress and offer some edgy, offhand invitation to watch the late movie on TV, or they’d ask me to bring up extra pillows, and when I got to the room, they’d invite me in for a drink. It became a kind of game. The dresses, like the camouflage fur of certain animals, blended me into the group of other women. When I didn’t wear one of them, nothing happened.

Once I took off the dress in the dark, a man could easily be blinded by the softness under his hands and some image of big breasts and rosy flesh he’d seen somewhere. As long as the lights were off, I could have been anyone. My skin would turn numb and smooth as a mannequin’s, and a covering like a small, warm washcloth settled between my legs.

I was trying to lose this part of myself so I could get on with my life without it, the way humans now get along without tails and a sixth finger. I’d been thinking I could evolve. I’d been thinking what the scars really made me was a species of one, but then I realized I’d begun to hate this paper doll I became whenever a

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man touched me. This imaginary piece of skin. Unless I could work up some courage, I knew I’d only become more flimsy and numb.

There was one young businessman who was very skinny with a long, stalky neck. He nervously said he’d heard there was a good late movie on that night. When I went up to his room, I saw that he’d barely touched anything; his suitcase stood upright on the floor. Luckily, the streetlight outside the window had blown out, and the room was dark. We sat side by side on the bed watching an old western for an hour or so, and then turned it off.

He leaned into me with a dreamy and distant expression around his lips. He felt fragile, smaller than me, like another woman or a child. I don’t think he saw any of the scars, not even the ones on my arms, because he kept his eyes closed or looked at my face, his fingers furtive and light like the feet of a squirrel. He wanted me to sleep there with him and kept wrapping his arms around me every time I tried to get up. “I have this asthma,” I finally said, wheezing. “I can’t breathe in here.” He was so gentle he frightened me.

A couple of weeks later a banker with pouty lips and a vain way of pushing his hair back from his forehead invited me up to his room for champagne. “A customer of mine gave me a whole bottle,” he said, winking unevenly. “I can’t drink all of it by myself.”

After I locked up the desk and turned out the lights, I went upstairs. He filled our plastic cups so the champagne spilled over the edges and was sipping as he brought mine over to me. “Good bubbly,” he said.

I looked up at the painting over the bed, a water mill and a sorrowfully laboring horse. The streetlight was right outside the window this time, glaring under the half-drawn shade, and the lamp was on, too, on the bureau all the way across the room. I 76 / RENÉ STEINKE

started to stand up so I could turn it off, but he slung his arm across me and held my hip. “What do you need? Let me get it for you.” He was less drunk than I’d first thought.

“I was just going to get that light.”

His teeth were yellow, and so were the whites of his eyes.

“What for? It’s not too bright, is it?” He edged in close to me, and I glanced down at his stomach, pouching over a narrow black belt. I decided not to test whether or not he noticed the scars, so I yawned dramatically. I was about to tell him I had to go when his mouth slammed against mine, his tongue jabbing at my teeth.

He quickly unbuttoned my dress, hooked his fingers under the strap of my slip, and yanked it down to my waist. I wrestled away from him, covered myself as best I could, and said, “I have to go.”

“No you don’t,” he said in a gravelly voice and swallowed. He grabbed my shoulder and pushed me back on the bed. He pulled down my slip again. My skin felt hard, as if it were cracking. The red horsehead under my breasts reared up in that harsh light, and the thorny vines unfurled, very red and raised, almost as if they were growing.

He sat back on his heels and combed his fingers through his hair. “What’s this?”

He got off the bed and stood looking down with his mouth drawn into a stupid O. I pulled up my dress and shakily buttoned it.

“What happened to you?”

“I was burned.”

“You might have told me,” he said, as if I’d offended him.

“I might have,” I said, standing up. “If I hadn’t already decided to leave.” He had a heavy face full of cheap longing. Deep bags purpled under his eyes.

He stepped closer and put his clammy hand around my waist.

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“Okay, honey. Let’s turn out the lights and start all over,” he said, nudging me toward the bed.

I pushed his hand away and ran for the door, afraid he’d grab me again. “Poor girl,” I heard him say before I closed it behind me. I wanted to kill him.

Halfway down the hall, I saw Jo carrying the books; it was the end of the month, and she was working late. “I was just—” She looked down at my half-buttoned dress, the slip hanging out from one sleeve.

“Don’t worry,” I said hoarsely. I couldn’t bear to look at her fluttering eyelashes, her pink, shocked mouth. This would only make her pity me. Wiping smeared lipstick from my mouth, I said, “I left before it got out of hand.”

“Ella,” she said softly, shaking her head. “What are you doing?”

The ice machine clattered and hummed. I couldn’t think of any way to answer this, so I slipped past her against the wall, went down the hall to my room, and locked the door.

I
f I could remember the fire, I wouldn’t need to test the men anymore, and if I could remember, I could help my mother forget, help her lose that guilt, and maybe leave Porter without worrying about her. I couldn’t remember the fire any more than I could remember being born, but I wanted to believe the memory lay buried somewhere at the bottom of a box filled with tangled jewelry, that if I searched long and hard, I would find it.

When I closed my eyes, there were flames against the skin-dark of my lids. It happened when I was four. What was fire to me then? Not dangerous, but bright and watery as a reflection; vulnerable and nervous as a cat; amorphous, half hidden, a brilliance rising up out of sleep.

Maybe early on, something had told me there was a way to go 78 / RENÉ STEINKE

through fire, a way to not let it touch me. There was a stained-glass window I must have seen, held in my mother’s lap in the front pew—three bearded men standing calmly in a furnace, the flames at their feet and heads like a frame of poinsettias. Or maybe, as my father read aloud, I’d seen a picture in the
National
Geographic
of the Indian men who walked serenely through burning coals, their mouths and brows drawn back as if facing a strong wind.

I rolled over on my side to look out the window near my bed.

A bright streetlight turned the dust on the glass white, shadowed the stiff, dead moth between the windowpane and screen. Insomnia was always easier than sleep, but tomorrow I’d dread the guests asking for glasses and soap, the ones who’d have to be turned away, and the tedious job of counting the money.

I pasted details onto the facts I was sure of. We still lived in the white house with the trellis. It was fall. A day when yellow leaves lay thick in halos around tree trunks, and the shivering leaves still on the branches made a sound like falling water. Behind the house, there was a wooden duck whose wings spun frantically in the wind. The wheelbarrow and rake would have looked heavy and immovable the way objects do on overcast, empty days. There was a garden inside a scalloped wire fence. When my mother bent down to pull up a weed, I saw the arched wires bend in against her ankles.

I wasn’t sure what was invention or dream, but a few things always came back to me: the breeze under my dress, the way I’d turned out my ankle and stood on the side of my foot, the veined crest at the back of my mother’s knee.

Then there were speculations. My mother might have been reaching for a soft, overripe tomato, her face hidden in the plants.

She might not have heard me walk away, because of a freight truck that clattered by or someone blaring their radio. I ran toward what

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must have looked to me then like bright birds rising into the trees, that lacy flutter of shiny feathers, and when my mother saw me fall into the neighbor’s burning leaf pile, the flames were struggling and had almost gone out. I always stopped there.

I pulled the blanket around my body, drew up my knees, and curled around them, cocooned the scars as if they might unfurl into something else by the morning: strands of pearls, scarves.

Sometimes this was how I tricked myself into sleeping. A dog was barking somewhere down the street, and the small ring swayed at the end of the shade pull. I thought of that banker again, his wheedling voice,
poor girl,
his eyes shallow and dull as old nickels,
she’ll never get anyone.

I tossed to the edge of the bed. The bedsprings squeaked, and the mattress sank in beneath me. I heard a scratching noise in the next room. It was an old hotel; there were mice and spiders, small, thick ones that looked like metal rivets.

As I burrowed under the covers, the scene assembled again in my mind, though the structure never held; it would fall in on itself in a second. Maybe: At breakfast, my parents had argued. My mother had that tight half smile as my father screamed at her.

Her hand would shake as she poured the coffee, and when it spilled, he’d get up to leave for school. After lunch, we would have gone outside. Strolling the yard, she picked up dead leaves and crumbled them in her hand, letting the pieces fly behind her.

The grass scratched at my ankles. My mother had become a stranger with a hard mouth and a stiff walk. As I moved into the neighbor’s yard, I would look back to see if the stranger was still there, if it was she or my mother. Surely my mother would have noticed by now how far I’d gone. But it was the stranger with her head bent toward the ground, her lips moving slightly. Her hair flagged in the breeze, and then I lost her in the smoke.