The Fires (16 page)

“No,” she said, as if it were a question. “She doesn’t come often.

She was here for my birthday, was it this year or last? Where is she now? I’m trying to remember. Someplace warm. I knitted her a scarf.”

Hanna and I would drink champagne in the lobby of an extravagant hotel. In the hallway, men in suits would look worriedly at their watches, expensive luggage piled high on wheeled carts.

“I’d almost given up on you,” she’d say, sipping from a fluted glass.

“When’s your birthday?” I asked Emily.

“June. She had a new hairstyle. A flip at the ends like the first lady’s. I always told her what I told you, that she might as well get started having a family, and now it’s too late.” Her eyes were alert again, pressed open.

“She got married?”

She looked doubtful, her voice high and stuttering. “Oh, no.

Oh, no. She’s too busy.” Something fluttered in my throat. “I sent 122 / RENÉ STEINKE

her a scarf to go with the jacket she was wearing.” Emily’s fist was punching the wheel of her chair in intervals of seven. She seemed impatient to go somewhere.

“Grandpa left her some money,” I said.

“Is that so? She’ll be happy to hear that.” She punched the wheel seven more times.

“She doesn’t know he’s passed away.”

“Of course not.” She lowered her eyes and looked at the pointed toe of her shoe and then, after a few minutes when I thought she’d nodded off, said, “A shame they never got along. A shame not to get along with your father.”

I leaned forward, took a sip of lukewarm tea. “Why do you think that was?”

She sighed. “I don’t know, but it made her wild.” Her words were beginning to slur, maybe from the fatigue of talking, but she also began to say things with more conviction. “I remember I could tell what was going to happen even when she was a little girl and she was twirling around in a circle asking her father questions, you know, like children ask. I remember we all laughed because she asked what color God’s bed was.” She still didn’t look up. “Children made Henry nervous; he always wanted them to be calmer, and children aren’t calm.” He used to threaten that if I didn’t quiet down, he would send me away to China, where they let children run naked in the streets. Emily wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her dress and went on. “He didn’t pay much attention to her questions, and she was twirling in a circle, asking about dying, about why so-and-so had died, and she knocked over a jar of milk, and of course it made a big mess.

Henry screamed at her to be still, grabbed her and set her down in a chair, and I could see in that little girl’s face right there that she wanted to keep twirling.” Emily looked up, and her eyes twinkled in the sun. “She wanted to knock over every damn bottle in the house.”

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I was getting close to the truth. “So you could tell what was going to happen, even before it did.”

“Yes. Goodness, there’s nothing wrong with asking questions.”

I nodded.

“And then when she was older and everyone acted like it hadn’t happened. You know, she came to live with us for a while after she started having the trouble. She stayed with Oscar and me six months.” She’d hit an untouched piece of memory and offered it. “Marietta told everyone I was sick with cancer.” This was long before anyone knew anything about my father’s, before we’d all pretend such a disease didn’t exist and it was still a good lie.

“People thought she’d gone away to nurse me when they sent her off to get her away from those boys.” For a moment I thought she’d said “bowls.”

“Boys?”

“Those miserable boys down by Lake Eliza.” She’d said it as if I knew what she was talking about, looking down at her finger, tapping at the arm of her chair. I suspected she really remembered this. “I went along with it for her sake. Oscar was worried I’d lose my wits then, so I had to stay inside most of the time anyway, or he’d have put me in the state home.” She looked out the window.

I was trying to imagine what had happened with the miserable boys—was it just that she’d started dating older boys who worked in the mills?

“Why didn’t they just let her stay home?”

“Oh, she couldn’t go to school after that, with everyone knowing. She had to stay away long enough for us to take care of her.” One of them must have got her pregnant. That was why she’d gone away for six months. But why hadn’t she married the father, or just come back afterward? And it didn’t quite make sense, because my mother had always said that after me, she couldn’t have any more children, and it was a sad thing for my grandpar-124 / RENÉ STEINKE

ents since Hanna had taken a fall as a girl that somehow made it impossible for her to bear children. Emily had the aura of conspir-acy again, and I knew if I let on that I didn’t know the details, I’d never get her to tell me them.

“That’s right, I guess.”

“We got to be real close. She was moody, but we had fun. I remember we baked a lot of cookies and she wanted to hear all about the windows.” She drummed her fingers against her lips as if she was sorry for telling me so much, and we sat there quietly for a while. She tucked her chin into her neck and looked away, shrugging. More fell out in a steady stream. “I made Oscar wait for me, and he never forgave me for it. By the time I was your age I had two children. Most of the girls I knew had four or five.

For two years I didn’t want him to touch me. And I was afraid of my food. It seemed like if I swallowed too much, it would eat me. And then after the children came, I had my spell. Did you hear about that?”

“I’ve heard stories,” I said. “I’ve seen the pictures.”

She smiled and settled her hands in her lap. “I was famous.”

She nodded to the pictures on one wall, the same newspaper clippings Marietta had saved: A younger Emily with a hoe slung over her shoulder. A barbershop’s window shattered into a web.

Emily, with her curls piled high on her head, holding up empty hands. Emily in a button-shaped hat being handcuffed by police-men. A jagged hole in the window of a department store, a knocked-over mannequin in a wedding dress, broken glass caught in the veil.

“Why did you do it?” I asked.

She smoothed the lace scarf around her neck and fiddled with the ends. “Because glass will shatter. Air won’t.” I knew what she meant, that stillness can choke you. She wheeled herself a little closer to me. Her eyes fixed on me. “I couldn’t take that quiet.” She said it so emphatically I had the feeling that when she’d told

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this to people before, they hadn’t believed her. “I remember being at the Eau Claire train station, sitting up all night on one of those benches, and in the morning, when I realized I didn’t have any money, I went up to the counter and I demanded that they send me to Bloomington. I knew I had to go there next. He hemmed and hawed, and when I could tell he wasn’t going to give it to me, I took my shovel and went right up to the depot’s window.

He came running over and said, ‘Whatever you want, whatever you want.’ That was a good feeling, before they arrested me.

Suddenly everyone was listening.”

I reached to pat her hand. “No one holds it against you now.”

She arched one eyebrow. “But they did then. You betcha.” She wiped a cookie crumb from her lower lip. “It got to be expensive.”

Later, the nurse came in and said it was four o’clock.

“Sue, bring me my book,” Emily said. “I’ve got Hanna’s address in there somewhere.”

When the nurse came back with it, Emily opened it up for me.

“Oh, yes, here.” She pointed. “Right there, honey,” she said. There were three written in Emily’s spindly writing: one in Sunnyside, California with a pencil mark over it that looked unintentional, but it was hard to tell, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Indianapolis.

“Which one is it?”

She looked bewildered as she studied the crowded page and pointed again. “Right there.”

“There’s three, Emily,” said the nurse. “Three addresses.”

“Oh, really?” she said, shaking her head, “I didn’t realize.”

“That’s okay, I’ll try them all,” I said.

When Emily lay down for her nap, I got ready to leave. As I was putting on my jacket, the nurse said, “Tell her to come visit more. And you, too. Don’t be a stranger.” Her voice was eerily 126 / RENÉ STEINKE

intimate. I looked at this wiry woman in her uniform, the moles starring the hollow of her neck and her chin, someone’s daughter, someone’s niece.

W
atching Marietta in front of the mirror, I got the idea. She was
fixing her curls, and the hair spray smelled like wet, bottled
smoke. I sprayed it around the electrical outlets, or near exposed wires,
so the fire looked accidental, the result of some malfunction.

And there was a kind of glue I’d sometimes sniff first. It gave me an
airy headache, made my body move one step ahead of the directions I
gave it. I’d dab the glue onto some old wood. I wrote words:
PARIS, LOOSE,
and lit the glue so the words blazed up for a minute like a
marquee.

And there were more ways to look accidental than I’d used—a candle
near a curtain, a piece of fat in the oven, a mouse and a peanut-butter-coated electrical cord. I could harness chance and stay as unseen as
something forgotten, something misplaced.

W
e were sitting in Marietta’s living room. “They saw the smoke, thank goodness,” said Erma. “We might have lost the entire house, all the clocks, the piano, the boys’ pictures.”

A finger of sunlight shot through the window. I took one of the peacock feathers from the tall vase beside me, separated the wet-looking strands, and spread them in my palm. Because I was afraid they might find out some other way, I’d told them that I’d been the one to show the counter girl where the fire was.

“Why didn’t you say that before? You weren’t working that night?” said Marietta.

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“It was just before my shift,” I said. “And I’d gone for a walk.

I thought I told you.”

Marietta sucked in her breath and shook her head, an embarrassed pull at the corner of her mouth.

Erma smoothed the arm of her chair as if she were petting a dog. “It was so unlike Fred to leave the saw plugged in like that, but his mind hasn’t been on work lately, you know, since Henry’s been gone. He doesn’t talk about it, but he misses him.” Her mouth twitched.

Marietta clicked the back of her house slipper against her heel, still smiling slightly as if she hadn’t noticed the mention of his death.

“We miss him, too,” I said, thinking of the powder lacing the saucer’s rim, his stiff clenched hand, the torn envelope with his hastily erased note. I understood better now why he needed to escape. “I keep thinking about his stories. What was that one about the man in the burlap suit?” The walls seemed to tilt in slightly, distorting my voice as if I were talking into a tunnel. It was a shaggy-dog story about a man who couldn’t hold on to anything, not even the clothes on his back, but it was funny and had a happy ending.

“I sure don’t remember.” Erma laughed, but her smile lingered a little too long with her gaze.

Marietta shrugged. “He had a lot of those.”

Erma was still smiling. She leaned forward, fiddling with her clip earring. “All those good speakers used to come to our meet-ings, remember, Marietta?”

Marietta faked a laugh. “Oh, not that old stuff again. Don’t start with that.”

Erma went on. “I still never thought I’d see the day we’d have a Catholic president, did you? If they would’ve known that was 128 / RENÉ STEINKE

coming, it would have made the best story in the world. Forget what they said about the Pope.”

Marietta pointed her toes and slapped her slipper against her heel. “It never made sense to me. In the beginning, all we had were the Catholics. Now, Fred would be glad if we just had them.”

“Well,” said Erma, “that was before they moved a black family in here in a makeshift house on a street that didn’t even have a curb.”

“Erma, those were church people,” said Marietta. “It was Christian charity to get them out of that slum in the city.”

Like sharp rocks crowding up against me, their talk trapped me in a place I couldn’t stand. “How could you belong to the church and also the Klan?” I said, my heart pounding. “Wasn’t there a rule against that?”

Erma was shaking her head and pressing her lips together. My grandmother moved to the edge of her seat. “Why, no. See, we didn’t work back then. There wasn’t any Ladies’ Guild.” For Marietta, a club was a necessity.

“We had a lot of oomph for a bunch of women, though,” said Erma. “And—”

Marietta interrupted her. “It wasn’t anything serious. That was for the men. We just got dressed up, had baptisms, showers, gossip. We needed a reason to get together.” It was the cheerful-ness of the group that was its measure, even if that meant spreading hatred for people you didn’t know here and there, even if that cheeriness was a cover for a violence only the men were allowed.

Marietta had to keep telling herself that it was only a club, only play, not real enough to hurt anything. That stunned fear on her face in the photograph and the one burning cross I’d seen kept fusing in my mind like a holograph card. Were the fires I’d set some kind of legacy, some fear passed down in the genes?

“Grandma, how could you?”

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Acid raked up in my throat. Marietta and Erma sat woodenly, each staring at the space between her feet on the floor. Erma started shuffling her clunky orthopedic shoes, and Marietta’s long fingers fluffed at her hair. Their faces turned worn and yellow, as if they’d suddenly become ill, and I realized that was exactly what I’d wanted. The clock that played “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” on the hour clicked into its tune.

Erma raised her head to the ceiling. “Pfish. You talk some sense into her. Those hippie professors did it to her. You can’t send girls to college anymore, or they come back like this.” And she marched out of the living room, slamming the kitchen door behind her.

Marietta gave me this weird, compromised frog smile. “Honey, we only had our mothers and fathers to teach us. Erma’s own father believed the Klan was called for in the Bible. We did what we were taught.”