The Fires (3 page)

like you probably has a boyfriend, right?” Sometimes I thought it was funny how little they knew about what they thought they saw. They noticed long brown hair and a heart-shaped face, or wide-set eyes and breasts and hips. Even as they were appraising me, they couldn’t see the horsehead scar or the one like a prickly boat, or the red cup with teeth hidden inside that dress.

“Not at the moment,” I said, smiling. I had only these ones I met at the Paradise, but my mother never asked about boyfriends, partly, I thought, because she considered dating frivolous, and partly because she didn’t want me to get my hopes up for nothing.

A few stools down, a lit match hung in the dimness between some man’s fingertips—this radiant, trembling tear. The fragment of what I suddenly wanted: to walk over and take it from him, set it to the bar’s old wood, and watch it go.

Billy glanced over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

Cupping his hand, the man lowered the tip of his cigarette, sucked, and then, as if it were filthy, swabbed the match at the air. “Nothing.”

I rubbed the taut seam at my hip. I had a system. When I’d counted seven bourbons he’d drunk and heard him slur the word
happier,
and when, after an effort to touch my arm he stumbled from the barstool, I asked him if he wanted to go somewhere.

We went to his room in the Dunes Hills motel off the highway, and he rushed in before me as if there was something he didn’t want me to see. The air didn’t smell anonymous as it did at the Linden Hotel, but particular, like someone’s old hat. There was a television with tin foil wadded around the ends of the antenna, a thick beige curtain for a bathroom door.

After I heard him flush, I sat on the lumpy bed, watching the light spill out of the lamp. I felt all over its grimy base, but couldn’t find the switch, my hand stiffened from nervousness.

He slid back the curtain and stood smiling lopsidedly. He’d THE FIRES / 15

unknotted his tie and unbuttoned the top of his shirt so you could see the T-shirt beneath it. “I like that dress,” he said, and I felt my breath catch.

It was the dream of the dresses that lured them. I’d strip in the dark and wait to see if they’d notice the scars—the marbled ruddy skin next to my navel or the pink chains swirled over my shoulders—if they’d pull back, murmuring penitently about a girlfriend or a wife, or if they’d draw in closer, curious.

He sat down next to me, rubbed his finger over a gather of fabric at my elbow. He circled my wrist with his fingers. “You’re so small. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.” I shrugged, wondering if he’d seen them. “Not corn-fed. Were you?”

“Me? I hate corn.” He put his hand on my shoulder and eased me back, the mattress yielding like warm mud. Stretching out his body next to me, he leaned up on his elbow, pulling one eye aslant. He was tall, his shoulders wide.

He put his hands on my face, murmured “All right,” and kissed me. My mouth and eyes were hot. “I don’t usually do this,” he said, pulling back. “But you’re so sweet.” He ran his hand over the curve of my waist, the sink of my belly. One stocking slipped low on my thigh.

I glanced at the shoehorn scooping up air on the nightstand, the black toiletries bag half unzipped, a lonely black comb in the opening. His hand wriggled under my bra strap to my breast, and I felt his breath, noxious with bourbon, on my cheek. His other hand pushed at the stocking at the top of my leg, and our teeth clacked together as he groped at the nape of my neck, grabbed the rhinestone, and slowly dragged down the zipper. In my knees and fingertips a current sputtered, almost an itch. He couldn’t have known how I was turning to porcelain, perfect and hard, just as his finger poked roughly inside of me.

16 / RENÉ STEINKE

When I opened my eyes and pulled away, black stubble crept across his upper lip. His eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open. “What’s wrong?”

I reached back for my zipper. “Nothing.” Staring into the paneling on the wall, I guiltily tried to decide how I’d come to this spot again on the very night of my grandfather’s funeral, and the film of dust I saw made me ashamed. “Stupid,” I murmured.

When Billy sat up straight and moved closer, his elbow bumped the lampshade, and the light spit over us. He ran his finger up and down my spine.

I stood up, pulled my dress down from where it had gathered high on my thighs. Walking backward slowly, I said, “I’ve got to go.” I unlatched the screen door, leaned my shoulder into it. When it screeched shut and I looked back, he was standing behind it, a grimy shadow. Already I’d forgotten his face. “You don’t really want to leave,” he pleaded.

I walked onto the shoulder of the highway, the dark sky jeering down. I’d fooled him but hadn’t been able to fool myself—sometimes I could slip out of my body as if it had never belonged to me in the first place and fly through the top of my head, lose the scars to air.

As soon as I got inside my room at the Linden, I took off the dress and, in my stockings and bra, lit up the hot plate, the electric burner singing. The orange heat spiraled around and fitfully pulsed. I held up the shoulders of the dress so it mimicked the shape of a woman, let the hem dangle above the coiled light.

II

I
spent the next few days with Jo, trying to distract myself from my grandfather’s death and how we’d had to lie. Jo was the only person I knew who could tell when I was lying. She’d point the sharp planes of her face at me, her chin or cheekbones, and say, with her pale gray eyes and white skin so translucent a blue vein thorned up from one brow, “That’s not it.” But she couldn’t see this one.

We went to the movies, played records in her room, walked around the college campus. One day we went to Herstein’s department store, where we could spend hours in the bluish light and air-conditioning, wandering among the racks, altering the clothes in our minds so they’d better imitate ones we’d seen in fashion magazines.

At the first glass counter, I tried on a pair of white leather gloves with buttons at the wrists, and Jo slipped on a pair of black satin ones that reached to her elbows. “You’re supposed to wear these for evening?” she said, wiggling her fingers. “You’d think they’d make you drop your champagne glass—they’re so slippery, and you can’t feel anything.”

Pursing her lips, the plump saleswoman bent down to pull out 17

18 / RENÉ STEINKE

more pairs: dull brown mittens and driving gloves. “These are practical for fall,” she said, setting down a shallow drawer of them. But we were interested in the opposite of warmth and usefulness: whatever small gem of glamour we could find.

We thanked her and wandered over to Cosmetics, where Mrs.

Gordon, her blond hair teased and sprayed, perked up from her stool. She was lonely and didn’t care if she sold anything, as long as she had visitors. Years before, her only daughter had been at a party when she leaned too far back from a windowsill where she was sitting, fell two stories, and died.

“Ella,” she said in a throaty voice that squeaked in the middle of long
a
’s and
e
’s. “Let’s do your eyes today.”

Jo and I exchanged glances—the last time she’d “done” me, I’d walked out of the store looking sunburned. But I was willing to be distracted by anything. “All right.” I sat down on a high stool with a purple velvet cushion, and Mrs. Gordon went to work, sliding over a tray of shadows lined up in the graduated pattern of a keyboard.

“Okay, close,” she said, brushing some powder over my eyelids.

I concentrated on not fluttering my lashes, so I wouldn’t unsteady her hand. “I saw in the paper last week about your grandfather.

I’m sorry. Was it a heart attack?”

“Yes,” I said, hating how easily the lie slipped out, wanting to talk about shoes, stockings, anything else.

“You never know when you might lose someone. The older I get, the more I learn—you’ve got to savor every day. Open.” Her face was close to mine. I looked at her white, even skin, exquisite powdered wrinkles barely visible at the corners of her mouth.

But what if you couldn’t savor even one day? What if all the days choked you?

“Look up.”

THE FIRES / 19

I gazed at the fan twirling on the ceiling and the pattern of ovals rippling around it.

She pulled out a tiny brush and ran it along the rims of my eyelashes. “I never knew either of my grandfathers. You were lucky that way, being so close to him….” She let her voice trail off in her concentration on my face, her little finger smudging my eyelid. Sweeping the brush in another color, she said, “This is going to be stunning.” Somehow, I didn’t think she saw a contradiction between makeup and grief. “And when we’re done, we’ll do you,” she said, winking back at Jo.

Jo frowned and shook her head. “I look like a clown in makeup.” Her pale, bare face seemed to vex Mrs. Gordon, as if Jo were petulantly refusing her ability to charm, like a too-thin girl who wouldn’t eat.

They were both studying me intently, and I felt my jaw clench.

“Look down,” Mrs. Gordon said, brushing on mascara. “You look like Ava Gardner.”

When she’d finished, Mrs. Gordon placed two soft fingers under my chin and, staring at my eyes, gently lifted my face. Could she see it there, behind her handiwork, how much I couldn’t say?

Her mouth was two straight pink lines. She shook her head and smiled, handing me the mirror. “To be young.”

I mostly looked
awake,
I thought, with a fairy-dust frost under the arch of each brow. I thanked Mrs. Gordon and told her I’d buy the eye shadow. She went around the counter to put it in a bag for me.

“Someday you should let her,” I said to Jo. “Just to see.”

We went up the staircase in back, which wound beside a gilded banister with floral flourishes as if for a lady’s grand entrance, but the red carpet had brown stains and bald patches.

Upstairs, Jo and I circled the racks, pulled out the clothes we 20 / RENÉ STEINKE

liked, and draped them over our arms. The saleswoman, a girl with a sharp nose whom we’d hated in high school, gossiped on the phone at the register and left us alone. My mother had always sewn practical clothes for me, so at Herstein’s I was drawn to velvets and satins, even if they looked cheap, and sophisticated cuts, even if they didn’t fit me.

Jo and I didn’t share a dressing room as we tried on clothes. I pushed aside the green curtain and came out to study the shiny red dress on my figure. Jo had put on a black turtleneck and black skirt and with her hands on her hips squinted at herself in the mirror. Her muscular legs curved out under the hem. “I was thinking Audrey Hepburn.” She widened her eyes and made a teacup flourish with her small hand. She frowned. “Too somber.”

She looked at my red dress and made a flatulent sound between her lips. “You can’t wear that.”

“Why not?” I was teasing her, partly choosing the gaudy dress just to see what she would say. It had a low neckline shaped like the top of a heart, and the bottom hem pressed together my knees.

She smiled with her mouth closed and quickly shook her head.

“It’s too tight on you.”

We both broke out laughing as I slid aside the curtain. In Herstein’s dressing room, I knew Jo would tell me exactly what she saw, good or bad, and among all the white lit mirrors, and the lingering smells of hair spray and perfume, for once, we wanted the same things.

I zipped up the next dress, a silk as dark as blue can be before it’s called black, with a slim skirt and a boat neck, sleeves fitted with cuffs at the elbows. The silk felt airy and cool against my skin, and fit me exactly.

When I went out and stood before the mirror, I couldn’t believe how different I looked: like a woman who had spent her childhood in Hong Kong, her college years at Vassar, a woman who THE FIRES / 21

wouldn’t flinch at ordering eel because she actually liked it. I turned to look at the back. The zipper was invisible. A woman who kept it a mystery how she got into her clothes.

Jo pushed aside the curtain, muttering, “Couldn’t even button it.” She tossed her head back. “That’s gorgeous.”

The color made my eyes darker and cast a warm tone on my face, the snaky sheen of the silk echoing curves of shine in my long hair. When I let myself think of falling in love, the man was always taller than I was, with slender hands, and now I added to the fantasy that dress. Looking at my reflection, I wanted to kiss him in the rain.

“How much is it?” said Jo, touching the sleeve.

I pulled the price tag out of the neck and looked down. It was more than three of my paychecks. “Too much.”

“Why don’t we split the money my dad gave me?” She fumbled in her change purse. She’d told me that he’d called in sick to work three days the week before, and I knew how much they needed whatever he’d given her.

“That’s all right,” I said, casting one last look at the three-sided mirror. The sad part about going to Herstein’s was that it made you wish so hard you were someone else, some untouchable woman trailed by admirers and luck.

I went back into the dressing room, undid the zipper, and when the sleeves and bodice fell away in the harsh light, the scars lashed up at me. Closing my eyes, I quickly changed back into my skirt and sweater.

As I came out, I slid the blue silk onto the hanger and said, “It’s just a dress.”

Jo slowly nodded. “It’s too bad.” Going back downstairs to the first floor, we tried on charm bracelets and pearls, sprayed perfumes on our wrists and arms, and went out again to the street, to that gray Indiana light.

22 / RENÉ STEINKE

W
hen I was a girl and Hanna would still visit, her presence was like an X-ray machine, suddenly exposing the skeleton and muscle of my surroundings: the worn keys of my father’s practice organ, our mended furniture, the fat-cheeked Hummels frenetic on the shelf, the sinking corner of flecked linoleum.
“You
could leave,”
she told me, but I didn’t believe her then.

When I’d first seen the picture of her in the family photograph tucked into their Bible, my grandfather had pointed to her and said in a cottony voice, “That’s your mother’s older sister. She doesn’t live here anymore,” and though the knot of his face frightened me, I wanted to meet her.