The Fires (25 page)

I’d put that day in a box and buried it, grateful to forget what it had felt like not to be a girl but a tree standing beside a girl, or a pole or a swing. Paul had pushed back the soil and dug it up.

On Oak Street, walking home, the blond-haired girl skipping toward me. Kristina. She went to the other school. I was eleven, and I knew her from Marietta’s block.

There were two other girls with her, one with raggedly cut dark hair and a smudge on her cheek, and a plump girl, whose belly showed under her sweater, and two boys also, one with a buzz cut and a yo-yo that he spun around his hand, and another with large freckles the color of pennies. “Where are you going?”

said Kristina. As they got closer, they walked toward me as if they’d been looking for me all afternoon.

“Home.”

“Not yet,” Kristina said, catching the eyes of the boy and girl on either side of her. They stood in front of me on the sidewalk, grinning. The girl with the ragged hair fanned out her skirt a little, and the boy with the yo-yo suddenly swung his head back behind him as if he’d heard someone calling him. The plump girl tugged her sweater down over her stomach, where her pants were fastened with a safety pin. “We want to see your scars,” she said.

All the organs inside me turned silver and began to chime frantically. “I’m in a hurry, please,” I said. You could hear the chiming in my voice, and why the
please
?

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“But we want to see,” said the plump girl. She was tall, too, and her arms were as big as my legs. She grabbed me and pressed her sharp fingernails through my blouse.

The boy with the buzz cut gripped my other arm, and they dragged me through the gate into the playground. In those days no one but my parents and the doctor had ever seen the scars. I shouted and tried to dig in my heels, but they scraped and stuttered along the sidewalk as they pulled me. When we stopped at the merry-go-round, I was out of breath, and they stood in a circle around me.

“How come we’ve never seen you at school?” The dark-haired girl, whose hair looked chopped by a knife, actually sounded friendly. I thought they would let me go.

“That’s because I go to Grace.”

“Not next year, though. Next year you’ll have to go to junior high,” said the boy with the buzz cut. “They put your head in the toilet if they don’t like you.”

A few of them giggled, and I thought they would let me go.

Kristina edged herself in front of the other girl. “Is it true that your mother burned you?”

“No,” I said, and turned a little in the circle and tried to read their expressions, but all of their eyes were moving, not looking at my face. I thought if they saw how afraid I was they would let me go, but they were different from the kids at Grace, louder and less fearful.

“Let’s just look,” said the plump girl, stepping close, so my eyes reached her armpit. Someone pulled back my arms so tightly my shoulder sockets hurt. Kristina pulled up my dress and held the hem around my ears, so I could just see the top half of her face, but I looked up at the sky, egg blue, framed by trees.

“Ew,” said the dark girl, rubbing her rough hand on my torso.

“It looks like when you burn the milk.”

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“Don’t touch it,” said the plump girl.

“I dare you to touch it,” said one of the boys. Someone pulled off my underwear, lifted my feet through the holes, and threw it into the grass. The wind blew against my skin, and my feet were sweating so much in my shoes that my socks felt burning and wet. I almost fell over when I tried to kick, because someone had grabbed my ankles, too. I pushed my eyes up at the sky, thinking of the hymn my father played that sounded like the army marching, with the words about shields and swords.

Someone knelt down, and I could feel hot breath on my thigh, a clammy finger poking there. “It’s melted,” he said, laughing.

A stick rubbed up along the scars.

“Monster legs,” said one of the girls, giggling. I caught Kristina’s gaze just above the green hem of my dress, but she quickly looked away. “Hurry up,” she said. “My arms are tired.”

Make them stop,
I thought. The boy stuck the stick up into me, and I screamed. The pain shot up my spine.
Stop
. He twisted it once, and I felt something run down my leg.

“You’re peeing,” said one of the boys. He yanked out the stick, and the nub scraped hard. A piece of bark stayed in me. Pain darted between my thighs and up my back, but I gathered it up and pushed it
over there
; in the sunlight on their faces I barely saw through the weave of my dress. I watched the sunlight beat against them, twist their cheeks and dissolve their eyes and rub off their mouths. Something liquid trickled down my leg again.

“You’re not going to tell anyone you showed us your scars, are you,” said the freckled boy. “Because we could tell them all about it.”

“Stand there,” said the plump girl. “Just stand there until we say when.” I caught Kristina’s eye again, but she didn’t look away, and her mouth curved in apology. I could see the rest of them only through the cotton of my dress, but I heard their shoes beat 198 / RENÉ STEINKE

against the hard mud when they ran. Then Kristina dropped the hem of my dress, and I watched the S of her thin, pale-blue back as she scurried through the trees. Up the street, a door slammed.

I smoothed down the pleats of my dress. Stood there. I couldn’t move. I was that tree there. That swing. The mesh of the fence. I was definitely not a girl. A pain flew into me like a bat with sharp claws, but I looked at the sky, and it went away. I wasn’t a girl, but jaunty green grass, a four-leaf clover, and I stood there until it began to get dark.

It was painful when I walked, the splayed steps I took so small it took me a long time to walk three blocks home. When I came inside the door, my mother stood in the entryway. “Where were you?” Her mouth opened and shut and trembled when she saw me. There was a little dried blood still on my leg that I’d thought I’d wiped off.

“Some kids—” was all I could say, and it came out in a squeak.

“What did they do?” She put her hands on my shoulders and bent down. She had a panicked look, but I couldn’t reassure her.

“What did they do? Tell me.”

My knees went limp, but I didn’t want to fall down, so I leaned into her. She smelled of coffee. She led me gingerly into the living room. “You’re not yourself, I can tell. Why don’t you lie down and tell me about it?” But I didn’t want to lie down, because they’d taken my underwear. I shook my head.

My father came in, and my mother said, “Some kids did something to her.”

“Not from Grace?”

I shook my head. “She looks hurt,” he said. “Are you cut? Did they hit you? Do you want to see the doctor?”

“No,” I said in a voice so minuscule I was surprised he heard it. They knew how I hated going to the doctor, and what could he do now? “It’s okay,” I said.

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“Did they tease you?” asked my father.

I looked down at the ripples of woven rags in our carpet, feeling more and more like a girl, and it was excruciating. “Yes.”

He went on quickly. “Just ignore them. They’re ignorant. It’s the worst thing you can do to a person, pretend that they don’t exist. Anyone who teases you deserves that.”

“It’s okay,” I said. The panic flew off their faces.

“Do you want me to talk to them?”

“No.” I was terrified that they would confess, and everyone would know what had happened. About the stick. I only wanted to hide in my room. “I want to go upstairs, okay?” I’d thrown the flaring sunlight into their faces, and I was exhausted and sore.

“If you’re sure you’re all right,” said my mother, smoothing my hair.

When I went up to my room, I thought if only I had gone to the other school, I would have known how to stop a thing like that from happening. My parents had been wrong to try to protect me, and I wasn’t going to get caught like that ever again. I could never tell them what had been done to me. Impossible. The house would split open and crash in on us, and none of us would ever be able to speak again.

A
year later when I got my period, it took me two days to work up the courage to say to my mother in the kitchen while she was busy chopping celery, “I’m bleeding…you know.”

She pressed once more into the celery and ran her gaze from my feet to my head and said, “Well!” I hated her then for being someone I couldn’t tell and knew it was only the beginning of a long string of secrets I’d have to protect her from.

Later, she put a box of sanitary napkins on my bed next to a book with a pink cover and gilt-edged pages. On the inside of the

200 / RENÉ STEINKE

front cover Hanna’s name was written in a rounder script than she used now, and there was a silver chocolate wrapper tucked inside to mark the place, with the initials H.K. and R.S. scratched into it. The book kept saying I was a woman now, but I felt like a freak.

When my mother called me down to dinner, I paused twice dizzily on the stairs, and when I got to the dining-room table my mother said, “Ella isn’t feeling well.” The bowls and plates were laid out in the center of the table like a small city, the silverware evenly lined up, and I thought of the way I learned the positions when I was first old enough to set the table: The knife was the father, the spoon the mother, the fork the wild-haired son.

XIII

W
hat is fire made of? Not dust, breath, the devil, despondency,
stars, typhoons, or rank plasma, not eglantine, lip fern, kelp,
narcissus, or pepper, not from the bellies of reptiles or pig snouts, not
from sluts, tomcats, or seductions, inflammation or soreness, thirst, or
spasm, not moon blindness or binoculars, not hydrophobia, par-ousiamania, ignorance, spit, or bells, not prophecy, luck, gorgeous
breasts, mirrors, Sanskrit, baptism, aphasia, trickery, or hope, or cicatrix.

F
or the spring, Marietta told me, she’d put special seeds in her bird feeder to attract the bird she was looking for—a kind of lark—and spent most of her time sitting on the little stone wall she’d built around it. Even when she was inside the house, she could watch from the hole she’d scraped in the purple paint on the window in the kitchen.

“Kingfishers are like milkmen,” she said that cold spring afternoon. “They come regularly, and they like being efficient.”

“I haven’t seen too many robins yet,” she said. “You know, they only come around if it’s an early Easter.”

“Easter’s late this year,” I said.

201

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“That’s what I mean. The robins know it.”

I’d brought her a bouquet of the first blossoms I’d picked from the hotel’s rosebushes and wrapped in a wet paper towel. I put it on the table near her hand, and she looked down at the pink roses, frowning. “Still seeing the same old jays I saw before.”

“Mother says hello.”

She nodded, staring at the roses. She was wearing orange lipstick that made her complexion chalky and gray. “There’s a kind of bird called a yellow sword. That’s really the one I want to spot sometime before I die.” She gazed into the flowers as if she were trying to see something between the petals, the stems.

“You should do something with your feather collection,” I said.

“I bet there’s a museum that would want it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t part with them,” she said. “They’re all I have to show for myself. This is the season for them, though,” she said.

“When all the birds cross paths, and you can get feathers you’ve never seen before.”

I laid my hand on her arm. Before she went off with her birds again, I would make her tell me. “What’s wrong?”

She wrapped her fingers around the throat of a blossom.

“What’s wrong is I haven’t seen any new birds yet.”

“Grandma, tell me,” I said, rubbing the papery skin near her elbow.

“Roses.” Her fingernails around the stem were yellow and ridged, clipped unusually short, and she trembled. She was giving up. A ring of sunlight through the hole in the paint hung on the Formica expectantly. She stared at the roses as if they might bite her.

“I shouldn’t have picked them, I know, but there were so many on the bushes I didn’t think it would matter,” I said.

“Roses,” she said in a disgusted voice.

“I thought you liked them.”

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“Like them? I couldn’t ever get him away from them.” They suddenly looked pink and grotesque, like bellies stripped from mice or a bouquet of ears.

“He was pruning the bushes that night. Said he couldn’t understand why they hadn’t bloomed more. And he wouldn’t come in for dinner. He kept looking for that blackspot.” She slid her eyes away from the flowers. Red tears streaked through her pale powdered cheeks. She got up and paced the room, put her shaky hand over her mouth. She knocked a bowl from the counter, and it crashed on the floor, blueberries bouncing under the table. She swayed near the wall, and the spice rack fell, a plate shattered.

She hugged the sides of her torso, trying to hold her body together in one piece.

The room was uncomfortably hot, and I began to perspire under my blouse. “He wouldn’t,” I said.

Marietta stood up, went over to the sink, and rested against it, her hunched back shaking. Something crackled in her throat. She turned quickly and glared. Her grief clawed out at me. “Don’t make me talk about that.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, walking toward her.

She leaned back away from me.

“When Hanna died, you didn’t know what he was going to do.”

She gasped and covered her face, took one step onto the broken glass and crockery, her shoulders heaving and the broken sun from the window playing on her hair. When she pulled her hands away finally, it looked as if she was smiling hard, but with her lips pressed together tightly, her chin trembling. I put my hand on her bony shoulder. Something shattered in her throat again, and she said in a quavery high voice, “I can’t help it.” She sobbed as if there wasn’t any oxygen, rubbing her arms up and down her side. Slowly, she crouched over the broken pottery all around her