The Fires (11 page)

On the walls of the room, the moon cast a filmy green light.

80 / RENÉ STEINKE

Under the weight of my head, my arm had grown numb. I let the stiff hand drop off the bed, and slowly the blood prickled back to it. Somewhere down the street, a car horn blared. I squinted to see the hands of the clock in the dark: 5:10. In three hours I would get up and dress. Dark pants and a red sweater, comfortable shoes.

Each time I thought of the fire, the picture was new, pieces of other memories constellating around the things I was sure of, rearranging themselves and then shaken up and scattered again like the designs in the end of a kaleidoscope. I wanted to remember so my mother could forget. It was unseasonably cold, the sunlight brittle. A thin frost on the water spigot. I tried to turn it on, but the metal handle stung my fingers. My mother moved hurriedly because she wasn’t wearing a coat. She was taking the shirts down from the clothesline, the sleeves frozen into odd, grand gestures, and she piled them in a basket beside her.

There was that musky smell of dead leaves, and the frost made the grass blades crumble like glass. I was pretending to fly. Running as fast as I could, I leaped into the air and threw up my hands, so that I felt temporarily weightless (that feeling I had in elevators, swimming pools). As I came down, the grass splintered under my feet. When my mother called, I looked back and laughed. I kept running until the air looked watery, as if the light had melted, and I was coughing and suddenly warm and falling.

When I couldn’t sleep, it was as if my body had to call me back to it, arms and legs tensed up and sore from the effort. In the morning the sheets would be kicked to the bottom of the bed and tangled around my ankles.

P
aul started work in November. Each hour he made the rounds of the hotel, checking the locks and windows, often stopping THE FIRES / 81

at the desk to ask me a question. “What’s the word in English,”

he asked, “for a point like this in a building?” He drew a roof in the air with his finger, curved tendrils on each side.

“Alcove.”

He nodded. “There’s an alcove over the soda machine outside.

It would be easy for someone to climb up on it to reach a window.” His accent was rich and polished like a piece of antique furniture. “I’ll check that on my next round.”

I wasn’t worried. “Fine.”

His heavy, careful footsteps and the strict click of the locks as he checked them made me feel watched, studied, and what I liked most about working at the Linden Hotel was that I could often lose myself in the anonymity of strangers. Many times, I would have to go into their rooms to deliver towels or check on a com-plaint, and if no one was there, I’d sometimes go in and study the suits and dresses hung on the hangers in the bare closet, the scatter of pills and coins on the dresser, the rumpled look of the bed, and the scents caught in the curtains and sheets, and I could enter another life for a while in those vacant rooms. But now that Paul was there, of course, it was impossible.

“The door’s ajar in Room Nine,” he said. “Is there a guest there?”

I explained that it was a signal to the housekeeper that this should be the first room she cleaned in the morning.

“It’s not safe,” Paul said, straightening his collar. “Anybody could walk in. Why not put a note up for her?” There was something so earnest about him, as if he were trying hard to make up for something he’d lost—money? a girl?

He put a stick of gum into his mouth, and despite the desk between us, I could smell the spearmint caught in the white of his teeth. I wanted to tell him to relax, that it was nice of him to 82 / RENÉ STEINKE

try so hard, but he didn’t need to prove himself to me, and we didn’t really need a security guard anyway. “What did you do before?” I asked.

“In Poland? I was a messenger. I delivered things on a bicycle.”

He was used to worrying about being on time, doing exactly what someone told him to do. That was the problem—he wasn’t used to walking up to a door and finding no one behind it, he was used to urgency. But I wanted him to stop asking me so many questions.

When he left the lobby to check the grounds outside, I took out my plastic-covered library book, a biography of a schoolteacher in Africa, but couldn’t concentrate on the black lines floating in the yellowed pool of the page. It happened sometimes that the very act of looking at a page abstracted me, took me someplace else. I started thinking about Hanna, how she had a habit of drumming her fingers on her lips as if to make sure her mouth was still there. She’d once come back home with a geisha doll for me from San Francisco, a bald white girl with a set of ten black, complicated wigs, each one as exotic as a hothouse flower. “In Japan,” she told me, “men pay women just to look beautiful and converse.” Because she wasn’t meant to look anything like me, the doll, with delicate painted features and a body of sticks and a cushion, didn’t seem as sinister as most dolls, and I liked playing with the wigs. Another time when I was small Hanna brought me red sequined slippers with heels like Dorothy’s in
The Wizard
of Oz.
After she left, my mother looked strangely hurt when she said, “Those aren’t for little girls.”

But if Hanna didn’t always know what was appropriate, that was part of her appeal. When I was only eleven, she’d sent me a bottle of expensive perfume, Joie de Paris, and a pair of dangling rhinestone earrings that I hid under my mattress as soon as I unwrapped them.

THE FIRES / 83

The dull-faced clock on the wall clicked, and the hands shifted as I looked up, surprised at the time. Absently, I’d slipped off my shoes, unpinned my hair. This homely lobby, with its clown painting and trophy case and worn gold carpet, was as familiar to me by then as my bedroom in my mother’s house, and sometimes, if I hadn’t slept the night before, I could even put my head down on the desk and doze off.

Paul came back and sat in one of the fat vinyl chairs against the wall. He tapped the heel of his boot against the floor and looked up at the glass trophy case. “Mr. Linden must have been good. My soccer team, we never won.” I imagined Paul running in shorts and knee socks on an impossibly green field, a cardboard-looking castle in the background.

“He made the basket that won the state championship,” I said.

“All the way from the other side of the court. People still talk about it, and if you look behind the trophies, you’ll see the newspaper articles.” Paul’s busy feet and eyes reminded me of a landscape passing through a train window, his features rushing and changing, and I couldn’t quite look at him. “He spends most of his time at the golf course now,” I said. “Once in a while he checks on us.” It was true. There were long hours when I had nothing to do, and sometimes I finished a book in a night, or spent an hour talking on the phone to Jo. “The only reason he keeps the place open, I think, is because it belonged to his family.”

Paul raised one eyebrow as if he didn’t believe me. Almost no one could tell when I was lying, but sometimes people thought I was lying when I was really telling the truth—when my guard was down, some of the falseness must have seeped out.

“Is it always this quiet?” he asked.

I leaned forward over the desk and finally looked straight at his face. His eyes were dark blue and clear, defined as an actor’s 84 / RENÉ STEINKE

in a silent film. He stopped chewing his gum. “Sometimes even quieter,” I said.

S
etting a fire was like making a summer from childhood, the way
the sun winked at you in the trees, scattered sequins on the surface
of the lake, and made its rays walk over to you and back in the water.

All that wind and shine—that feeling of leaning toward something.

Sometimes I thought I could travel through fire if I was careless
enough. I could walk straight through it and feel its silk, its nervous
light on my dress, until I got to the other side: Paris, China.

J
o lost her usual precision when Paul was around, dropping pencils, fiddling with the ends of her cropped hair. He told her that Polish women cut their hair short only when someone had died or when they’d given up on love, but he liked hers. “It stays out of my way at least,” she said, uncomfortably shifting her feet.

The only rule he broke was taking milk from the refrigerator in the hotel’s small cafeteria. After it closed, no one was allowed inside, but he had a key. I imagined him alone in the dark there, steering past the chrome table and grill to the refrigerator, where he’d rummage for a bottle, his face and fingers numb with cold.

As he walked back out toward the door, only a little guilty, potato peels and bread crumbs would stick to the soles of his shoes. The first sip would taste chalky and sweet, and as he walked through the door to the lobby, it would loosen his tongue.

His hands were long and tapered, and he moved them in the air when he talked like a professor or a magician. His features were an odd mix of the fine and the coarse, dark-blue eyes, wide round nose, thin light-brown hair, lips that looked painted. The THE FIRES / 85

two sides fought with one another, and it made his face hard to pin down.

On his breaks, he’d bring a glass of milk to the lobby and sit down in one of the vinyl chairs, red or forest green. I was usually reading by that time, and though we set up fragile pieces of small talk, the conversations didn’t stand up. In the silences between us, we’d hear fragments of talk from the rooms upstairs. The voices wafted down to us, faint and blurry as sounds dropped out of a dream. After a few nights, Paul tried to catch my eye when this happened, but I ignored it. I didn’t want to be his work buddy. I wanted our familiarity to remain utilitarian and slight, nothing to worry about. Still, he insisted on stopping by the desk every two hours, as if I were one of the things he was supposed to check on.

I
was five or six when my father explained it to me. “You don’t remember. I was at work.” He bent down until his face was even with mine, and as he spoke, his voice held each word like a broken bone. “Your mother was in the yard with you. Next door someone was burning leaves. You were always curious and wanted to see things up close.” He wasn’t looking at me but at the laces wrapped several times around the ankles of his boots.

“It was an accident. If anyone asks you why your skin looks this way, you just tell them that.”

I was sitting in the tire swing and put my hands into the darkness of the tire until I couldn’t see them anymore, and imagined what it would be like not to have them. I leaned forward to look at the dirty ribbon of white paint around the rim of the tire, circling me in a way that made me feel chosen. “If anyone asks,” I said, “I’ll tell them once I flew up to the sun and got burned.”

86 / RENÉ STEINKE

He kissed me on the cheek, stood up, and walked away toward the house. It was hard for him to tell me things. I pulled up my blouse to examine my stomach, touched the silky, finned ridges of the scars.

M
y father was right, the children would ask. Even though my parents sent me to Grace Lutheran, the school adjacent to our church where my father taught music. “What’s that melting on your arm?” And it wasn’t usually enough to tell them it was an accident. To avoid the questions I didn’t say much to anyone, and this made me seem strange. On top of this, I had an exagger-ated way of walking, with my head raised to look above the heads of other children, dragging my feet in long slow strides. It was the way I’d imagined Cleopatra or Mary Magdalene would have walked. I also had a habit of pretending to be different characters from the comics and would sometimes refuse to say anything I couldn’t imagine inside one of those clouds over their heads. This rule often excused me from talking, but made the other children think I was even weirder.

In grade school I had one friend, another outsider, a skinny black girl with red hair named Anita. Her family lived in Gary, but her mother drove her to Porter each day so she could attend a good Christian school. She was hoping to protect Anita, as my parents hoped to protect me, from the cruelty of children who didn’t know they should act like Jesus. And though we probably weren’t teased as much as we would have been at the public school, we weren’t well liked or included either: Those children were afraid of us. In the end, our parents’ efforts only allowed us to put off for a little while the inevitable, and when it came to me at least, I resented not being better prepared.

Anita and I spent all our time together: We pretended we were THE FIRES / 87

refugees escaping a war and hid under the clamoring gym bleachers; we pretended we were peasant girls and knew how to make poisons or potions with dandelions from the playground; we pretended we were missionaries in India feeding the poor and starving (squirrels). When Anita moved to Michigan in the sixth grade, I begged my mother to let me come home for lunch so I wouldn’t have to eat at a table alone, but she wouldn’t let me. “You’ll make another friend,” she said. Every day I wore the green ribbon Anita had given me tied around my neck.

One afternoon I sat at a desk in an empty classroom reading when Scott came in. He was a boy with an elfin nose and bright eyes who already, at ten, walked holding his arms away from his body, so his biceps would look big. “What are you doing in here?”

he said, poking his head in the door.

“Nothing.” My father was in a meeting, and he’d asked me to wait for him.

Scott grinned with small even teeth. In the bathroom there were hearts drawn around his name in the stalls. “You’re a brain,” he said.

I closed the book and put it in my satchel, trying to be friendly.

He came inside the classroom and grabbed a piece of chalk from the tray under the board. “Let’s see,” he said, as he began writing on the board. “Ella sucks…” He turned around. “Who do you like?”

No one. I like no one.
A lump swelled in my throat.

“Barker?” He was a large, slow boy nicknamed “Injun” because of his size and olive skin. “He likes you, I hear.” He wrote in Barker’s name, then slowly erased it. Late-afternoon light razored against the window. Ouside, a ball bounced against pavement.