The Fires (20 page)

I told him about the time I went with the Turner twins behind some bushes, agreed that we’d all show one another our stomachs.

I’d unbuttoned my blouse and pulled up my undershirt, and they touched the scars gingerly as if they were still hot, the pads of their fingers cool and moist like dogs’ noses. “It doesn’t hurt or anything,” I bragged. Sonny looked envious, as if my stomach bore the marks of a sin he wished he were brave enough to com-mit, but he sounded disappointed when he said he thought the scars would be black. Later, Susan and I cracked open a golf ball with a hammer, pulled out the long rubber cord, and said it was a tapeworm we’d pulled out of her stomach.

“I was a curiosity,” I said. “I got a lot of attention for it, that’s all. People thought I was brave.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, rubbed his chin, and looked away at the trophy case.

S
ometimes a fire flies up out of nowhere, and sometimes it must be
coaxed or torn out of air. There’s a sense of it dormant and cocooned,
waiting for a spark or flint to undress it, waiting to wildly unfurl and
color. If it’s windy or damp, you have to whisper, cajole it out of hiding,
throw yourself at it so it feels wanted.

J
o needed boots, so we went to Orion’s. They sold everything—baby clothes, toasters, and tablecloths on the same crowded aisles as rifles and bags of seed. Tents and lawn mowers and stuffed animals hung from the high beamed ceiling.

We found boots she liked—knee-high black leather ones with shiny toes for professional equestrians—and she sat down in a 156 / RENÉ STEINKE

chair to try them on. “It’s obvious Paul likes you,” she said, smirking. “What do you two do all night, anyway?”

“Shut up,” I said, hitting her lightly on the arm. “We work.”

Since it was Saturday, there was a lot of commotion in the store, families with small children wheeling full carts of merchandise through the narrow aisles and high-school boys unpacking boxes and straightening the shelves. Jo zipped the boot up her shin and gave me a sideways glance. I could hardly hear her. “There’s no work after ten o’clock.”

“Well, someone has to be there,” I said. “Okay, we talk, I guess.”

“You guess? About what?” She stood up and seemed to be wiggling her toes inside the boot. “Have you told him about Hanna?”

I’d put a heavy blanket over the thought of her, like the dustcloth put on furniture to protect it when you move. “Of course not.”

She came back to her seat beside me and unzipped the boot.

“Why not?”

“It’s none of his business. I only told you. I haven’t even told my mother and grandmother about that trip.” Hanna’s vacant room meant that I didn’t have to hope for anything from them anymore, but I was still furious about their lying to me.

Jo blinked her dark lashes and put her hand on my shoulder.

“Ella, they know, remember?”

“But they don’t know—”

“They don’t know, or they’re just not asking?” She took off the boot. “They know you were looking for her, don’t they? Sooner or later you were going to find out. You’re just as bad as them, not saying anything, even now.”

My eyes stung. A little girl in black patent-leather shoes skipped screaming over the cement floor, a cowboy hat on her head and THE FIRES / 157

a toy gun in her hand. Jo was right. I’d been so angry about their secrets, and there I was dancing along with them as if I didn’t know anything.

“How are the boots?” I asked.

She tilted her head, said “Too small,” and put them back in the tissue-paper-lined box. The lights above us in their cages blotted brighter once and hummed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But think about it. They must be waiting for you to say something.”

R
ain nailed down in the window like tiny bars someone pushed from the sky. My grandfather’s room was airless and neat, the walls bare, a single blue blanket folded at the foot of the bed. It was as if he hadn’t wanted to be distracted by anything extra, any decoration that might make him careless about germs, or the roses and his house. Marietta was napping across the hall, lying daintily in her housecoat.

I’d told her I’d go through his closet and change the sheets, because she said she couldn’t set foot in there, it reminded her of him too much. She’d let six months go by already without doing anything about his things, but now she wanted to donate what she could to the church. On the nightstand there was a Bible, a coaster crocheted into a pink-edged snowflake. He didn’t save what he didn’t need, so I knew I could finish quickly. “There’s no sense in keeping things you can’t use,” he’d said. “You’ll weigh yourself down with clutter.” Clutter hadn’t bothered Hanna, though. When I finally went back to get her things, it would take two full days to sort through the records and jewelry, the paper-backs under the bed, the perfume bottles and silk scarves. I wondered what had made Hanna and him so different in this way, and if it could be as simple as not having much besides blood in common.

158 / RENÉ STEINKE

Though it was the middle of the afternoon, the room went dim.

The suits in the closet still smelled of his limy soap and hair oil.

I took them off their hangers and folded all three over my arm, gray, black, blue. They would sell them at the church rummage sale this spring. The dress shoes on the floor were worn down at the heels, the leather smelling of sulfur, wrinkled at the toes. I laid these over the suits in a cardboard box and set it by the door.

I opened the middle drawer of the bureau, filled with mothballs and dark wool socks rolled and tucked into knots. I tossed them into a paper bag and went on to the next drawer, where bleached T-shirts and boxer shorts lay tightly folded in rows. These would become rags, or we’d just throw them out, but they seemed too personal to touch. He was such a private person, someone who held himself in, it felt wrong to be going through his underwear, even if he was gone.

I heard the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, my cobbled footsteps as I dragged bags and boxes near the door. The house felt hugely empty, yawning, and the metallic smell of rain blew in from the window.

In the top drawer of the bureau, I found four ties, a tin of loose change, and a useless thing I was surprised he’d kept, a glass paperweight with a moth inside of it, wings frozen in an icy light.

I tried to see the insect face, but it was smashed.

As I swept the floor, I thought again of Hanna and how he’d hidden his love for her, every single time she tried to come back.

He must have had some rationale for it. She was like the blackspot he had to regularly spray off his roses. He wouldn’t forgive her until she asked for forgiveness (and for what?). Or he’d forgiven her, but only as one has to forgive another human being, all of us sinners. I could see him holding that frame of an argument in his heart, propping it up like the trellis that held up his one Lys-THE FIRES / 159

istrata rosebush, and then when he heard Hanna had died, it must have collapsed.

I didn’t know if my mother had always been her father’s favorite, or if that had only come later, after Hanna left, but all my mother’s attention couldn’t have made up for Hanna’s absence.

How had he come to the point where he loved her absence more than her?

She’d said to me once, when we were in Marietta’s kitchen, rinsing the dishes, “When I was your age I was so bored, I felt like a weed, just stuck here growing, and growing ugly. You’ll do better than that.”

I took my time rubbing the rag over the spindly legs of the nightstand and the knobs of the bureau, the plain handles of modest furniture, grotesque only when you looked at a piece and forgot the rest of the structure, this squat mushroom knob, this oddly bulbous leg, objects you didn’t notice unless you stared too long at them, things that had dumbly surrounded him as he poured the arsenic into his cup.

Standing up, I dropped the rag on the bureau and glanced at myself in the mirror above it. My father’s old flannel shirt gaped open near the tail of a pink scar, a line like a piece of barbed wire.

I moved closer. If I looked hard enough, there was a way to dismiss the longing, like studying a picture or a rock that had nothing to do with me. This mark was as definite as paint or ink, fake-looking. It stung as I stepped back, then throbbed as if all the blood I had were rushing into it.

I went down the hall to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water from the tap. The water, cool in my throat, traced a blue mark down to my stomach. I turned on the faucet, filled the glass again, and drank, as lightning sheeted over the kitchen. It was so pleasant to be leaning against the sink, drinking water in that flash of light, I thought I should feel more and try to see less. The rain

160 / RENÉ STEINKE

suddenly quickened to a sound like gravel nervously pouring onto the roof, and I went away from the sink. I struck a match on my jeans and felt the ecstatic heat brush my fingertips before I threw it out the screen door into the rain.

I went back to my grandfather’s bedroom. The last thing to do was to change the sheets on the bed, and I’d be finished. I pulled the pillows from their cases and peeled off the blanket and sheets, uncovering an old ticking mattress. A pink scrap of paper hung out from the corner of it. I ripped it off, and in my fingers held a pearly arm. It must have been the work of the children Marietta sometimes baby-sat for, I thought. Lifting the edge of the mattress, I found the rest of the body, a fleshy girl eating grapes, a paper doll without her clothes.

The rain began to stop, and the musty smell from the closet mixed with the scent of clean linens. I heaved the mattress back, then pushed it off the box spring.

A crushed pile of paper bodies lay tangled there. I knelt down to look closer. They were all naked women, their limbs bent back, arms, legs, and heads crinkled together. One with her inner organs diagrammed, a mermaid with teacup breasts, a Venus cut from her shell. I got dizzy when I saw how many there were and picked up a picture of a woman in red high heels and an apron, her breasts like frog eyes. A creased one of a brunette wearing stockings and a garter belt, a gun held at her thigh.

I saw the shapely holes in the library’s medical and art books, the
National Geographics
and photography magazines, my grandfather lurking nervously in the stacks, one hand stuffing the paper figure into his pocket. He’d spent a lot of time alone in his room, and he’d washed his hands sometimes until they bled.

He must not have known what to do about the lust in himself any more than he’d known what to do about Hanna. Something like a thick oil formed on my skin. No one should have seen this.

No one.

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One round paper breast had withered from moisture. I thought of those silences he tunneled into, and Marietta’s careful lipstick.

My eyes teared up, and all the skin blurred and gleamed on the paper like sweat. He’d cut each one out so carefully, the tips of long fingers, the complicated hairdos, never a trace of the original background—part of me wanted to save them. They were flat, paper women, just flimsy, shiny pictures and low voices spun out in his head. I got up, swept the whole pile into a box, and pressed the lid down over legs, arms, stomachs, all those breasts, all those pretty faces.

Why hadn’t he thrown them out? Maybe he wanted Marietta to find them, to punish her for her vanity, her withholding of sex.

It seemed more likely, though, that he’d forgotten about the paper women, the way something you’ve never told anyone eventually loses its realness, and you’re grateful.

I carried the box out the back door and dropped it on the wet ground near the garbage. It would have been too easy to blame the church for this.
If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
It was deeper than any kind of righteousness or shame, whatever it was that had made paper less troubling than flesh.
Something
bit him
, my father once said, about his silences.
I don’t know what
it was, but a long time ago, he got bit.
A kind of poison, maybe, had made it unbearable for him to touch another’s skin.

The sky was gray and the air still damp. His rosebushes were brown and scraggly. A single gray bird tapped its beak at the water in the feeder.

He must have been lonely. When you had a secret life, you wanted it discovered just as much as you feared its being found out. It made me sick to my stomach to think about his collection, and I knew I’d try to forget this just as he must have each time he pushed one of the paper women under the mattress, just as I tried to forget that I had been one of those paper women, lying 162 / RENÉ STEINKE

in the dark with a man, my skin slick and flawless, not feeling anything, not even knowing who touched me.

My hands were cold. I took the matches from my pocket and lit one. I held it there a moment before dropping it. The smoke was chalky black, like a rinse of coal, and smelled of cinnamon.

I thought of us all burning in that box, breasts, hands, feet, thighs, burning up for him, all our bodies ghosted up in the smoke.

W
hat lies inside a cage of flames? The truth, the heart, but burned
up before you can see it. Only traces remain in the ashes, a pattern you guess at or invent, an intangible thing that might leave a mark,
but could just as easily blow away.

I
couldn’t lie still, even when I tried to think of the mild smell of daisies or the rub of fleece. I threw off the sheets and blankets and sat up, holding my chest. I felt a combination of infinite tiredness and the desire to get up and run. My legs felt disjointed and loose, my stomach hot. Hanna’s face and my grandfather’s clenched hands kept appearing in my head, and I was obsessed with trying to remember everything I could about them, things they’d done, the exact tone of their complexions, the gestures they made when they asked questions, but this only magnified the fact that my grandfather and Hanna, inside their skins, inside their heads, were enigmas. One day I’d be at home in a place like Mar-rakesh or Singapore, a place people here wouldn’t be able to find on the map, because foreigners like them felt so familiar. And their pull on me had only strengthened since their deaths. Was it love, or was that just the word I reached for because there wasn’t another word for it?