The Fires (6 page)

My grandfather had been worried about the germs. “When someone sneezes or scratches or coughs—I don’t care who they are—” he said, “take two steps back and look away. No sense exposing yourself.” He and my grandmother had stayed at the Linden the night of their wedding. There would have been no cheap paintings or trophy cases in the lobby back then, just the clean white walls and the chandelier’s teardropped pieces of glass.

It was Wednesday. The night before at the Paradise Lounge, I’d gotten so drunk with two seed salesmen that I ended up in the ladies’ room throwing up pink, sweet, whiskey-sour vomit, and that afternoon I had a bad headache.

Jo came in and sat behind the desk beside me. She pulled out the writing board and said, “You look a little peaked,” in that half-British voice of hers that she’d gleaned from old movies.

“I’m fine,” I said, putting away the change box in the drawer.

“Sure?” She fixed her eyes on me. “I have some saltines and aspirin in my purse.” She took out the adding machine and quickly punched out a tape of the week’s profits, her gaze snapping between the ledger and her dancing fingers. Her feet were aligned on the floor, her back straight, her face serious. She took an exacting pleasure in tasks like this. It must have come from so many years playing the viola, practicing scales and counting to the metronome. She sometimes had to bail her drunk father out of jail, after his arrests for disorderly conduct, and when I pictured THE FIRES / 39

her talking to the judge, it was this practical face I saw, as if she had to practice and count to make sure her eyes and mouth would work properly for her.

She was unusually quiet today, and I wondered if she’d had a fight with her fiancé, David. I watched the tape snake out from the machine, her fingers tapping, and the mechanical swallow each time she hit the plus sign.

I used to be practical, too. I’d wanted to be a teacher and had finished two semesters and begun the training before I knew I’d made a mistake. Mostly what I ended up teaching the children was how to wait. They were so well behaved. They looked up at me with wide, trusting eyes, crossed their legs and folded their hands prettily, listening for me to tell them what to do. I saw their lives stretched out in those moments of waiting—their little ears tingling, tipped forward—and I thought I’d never be able to teach them anything else, and knew that I had to quit.

Jo punched at the adding machine, pursed her lips, and let the paper ribbon out and curl. She turned to me and slapped her hand down on the blotter. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d lost your mind? When did it happen?” I supposed she must have heard through the grapevine about my last night at the Paradise.

I broke open a roll of quarters for the change box. “So I got drunk,” I said. “Big deal.”

“Stinking drunk.” Her eyes flashed furiously. “You know well and good,” she said, “that it was stupid to go there by yourself.

Why didn’t you call me?” She blinked quickly several times as if she couldn’t see. “I know you’re upset, but you can’t…”

I stared at the painting of the clown, and the red ball of his nose hurt my eyes.

“And what were you doing with those two men? You know, you’re lucky Mark saw you there. He would have taken care of you if you hadn’t left.” Mark was David’s best friend. I barely 40 / RENÉ STEINKE

remembered seeing him now, with his grasshopper eyes and green drippy tie. “How’d you get home anyway?”

“I walked.”

“You walked?”

I knew how my drinking like that disgusted her. “Look,” I told her, “I was just in a funny mood.”

She bit her bottom lip. “You know, if I had your looks, I’d—I wouldn’t go wasting them. Why won’t you go out with Mark?

He’s the best thing to hit your pavement in a long time.” Jo still thought one of the local boys could rescue me. I pictured the ruddy skin above Mark’s collar, his barrel chest and too-broad shoulders.

“I’m not interested,” I said. “As soon as things calm down, I’m going to leave anyway. I just have to decide where I want to go.”

She gave me a wan smile and sighed. “Not before David and I buy our house, I hope.” The color rose in her cheeks.

“You’re sure now?” I said. She had been wavering lately about whether or not to marry him.

“I think so,” she said, walking over to the glass trophy case on the wall, where little gold men held balls the size of buttons and there were photographs of Mr. Linden as a teenaged basketball player, his impossibly long skinny legs sticking out from his loose shorts like long clappers hanging from bells. “You’d never know this was him,” she said. “Hard to believe that penny-pincher was ever this good-looking.” She reached down to tuck her heel back into her flat shoe.

“It’s the aura of the basketball,” I said. “Some kind of orange halo for you, isn’t it? How many of them did you date? Seven?”

“Eight,” she said, fondling a trophy. “But they were losing.

David said they needed me to boost their spirits,” she said, laughing.

She went over to the window and flipped the switch for the THE FIRES / 41

neon VACANCY sign. Usually she stayed for a chat, but she was going to meet David later at the Big Wheel Restaurant. “You’re in for a slow night, I can tell.”

“I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet,” I said.

She tilted her head and clicked her tongue sarcastically. “Right.”

A
fter my father died when I was fifteen, my mother’s eyes would tear up whenever I said I was going to Jo’s, or leaving for school, and when I came back home, she’d be sitting in a hard-backed chair near the door, mending the same plaid skirt it looked as if she’d just picked up, her eyelids puffy over her small, tense irises.

One Friday night I’d asked permission to go to a party on the lake, and I was looking forward to it because there were going to be boys from out of town there, and one in particular with rangy arms and sandy hair, whom I’d met at the bowling alley the week before. I came into the kitchen, where she stood near the stove. “There’s a party at Lake Eliza tonight,” I said.

She had her back to me and was stirring something. She turned around, holding the dripping spoon like a scepter. “Whose party?”

“Beth Hanson’s.”

“Will her parents be there?”

“Yes,” I said, though I didn’t know, because there was supposed to be a keg.

“Is Jo going?” Her voice wavered.

“Yes.”

She nodded, and her eyes faded into the dimness. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said, and turned around again, her shoulders hunched over the stove.

42 / RENÉ STEINKE

I was furious, watching her back, the spoon sadly scraping the bottom of the pot. She’d been like this ever since he’d died, wanting to keep us together in the house, the rooms arranged exactly the same way, the same seven meals on each day of the week, the time when we went to sleep and the time when we woke up the same, as if by keeping the borders of our lives exactly as they had always been, we could also contain my father’s death, even tame it.

I left the room and went upstairs to get the cigarettes Jo and I had stolen from her father and went back downstairs and out the back door to sit in the yard. It wasn’t dark yet, but the air had an autumnal, heavy stillness.

I hadn’t even liked smoking particularly when we’d tried it under the canopy in Jo’s room, the smoke trapped beneath the gauzy fabric. And the thought of doing it alone wasn’t as appeal-ing as it had first seemed. It wasn’t the taste of cigarettes, but seeing how we looked to one another smoking that had been interesting.

The cigarette was in my hand, though, so I lit it and watched my fingers holding it until the white paper shrank back to the brown filter. Somehow I got interested in the way the tobacco disappeared, the wither of the tiny crumpled brown strands, and I lit another match to the end of the cigarette stub. When the flame moved close to my fingertips, I dropped it in the dry grass, and the spark caught. An accident.

When the flame grew to the size of my hand, I stood up to stomp it out, but the fire looked so graspy and unsteady, I wondered what would happen if I let it go. It was only a thin, pallid fire, apologetic and trembling, and after a minute or two the wind blew it mostly out. I ran the sole of my shoe over the black and brittle patch it had made in the grass. It was the first fire I’d set. A hole in the bright green. Even though I wouldn’t be going to the party, I felt strangely satisfied, my disappointment burned

THE FIRES / 43

away and replaced by a small internal radiance. I didn’t think much about it, just that it was pleasant.

After the cancer was diagnosed, my father had died so quickly we hadn’t had time to fathom it. At first he wouldn’t stay in bed, and he insisted on helping with the dishes, played tunes from silent movies on the practice organ, and stayed up watching the late-late show on television, propped up on the Lazy Boy chair with a beer, so it seemed as if he weren’t really sick. Finally, he did stay in the guest room, though, his face bony and pallid, the blankets piled so we couldn’t see how thin he’d become.

My mother had gone up to bring him breakfast. She came straight to my room afterward, looked at me incredulously and said, “There’s blood on his mouth.” I think she knew he was dead, but she let me call the ambulance anyway. Maybe she couldn’t think of what else to do. Only when the paramedics came and she fell, going up the stairs again, did she cry.

For days the whole house seemed filmed with a foggy light, and once in a while my mother’s voice or the smell of shaving lotion would clear the air, and I’d see the lilt of a bowl, the tines of a fork, and they were unbearably sharp and precise.

“What are we supposed to do?” my mother would say whenever she ventured out of her room. Weeks later she began to clean and cook again, but her voice had turned low and scratchy, as if it were coming from a radio not properly tuned, and she began finding ways to keep me with her in the house.

I set more small fires in my room, or in the field behind our backyard. I felt so unlike myself without my father that the fires, held in a bucket or a hole, with water nearby to put them out, didn’t seem nearly as drastic as the changes I felt in myself.

It was a few years later, after I’d quit college and it had became harder for me to sleep through the night, that I moved the fires out of their safe containers. These were some of the things I’d 44 / RENÉ STEINKE

burned: the X of the street sign at Oak and Jefferson, an old rag rug someone had hung out on a line, two wigs in the garbage behind Dora’s Beauty Salon, a thrown-out tinseled Christmas tree, a rusted washing machine and dryer, a swing set on a playground, a wooden dwarf. I’d come close to getting caught that time. A little girl on a tricycle wheeled up beside me just as I’d lit a match to the sneering lawn dwarf in one of the neighbors’

yards. I didn’t want her to get burned, so I pushed the tricycle back toward the curb.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

The dwarf’s pointed hat and head were on fire. I told her that he had been so jealous of all the people who could move, all the people who walked by him every day, that his head had exploded.

“Poor dwarf,” she said.

Trembling, I took off my jacket and ran over to slap at the flame.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and someone should have seen me. The dwarf ended up headless, at least, not sneering, his walking stick still plugged into the too-green grass. I walked the little girl back to her house and let her tell me the story of Cinderella, which she’d memorized and made up a song about.

I hoped I hadn’t scared her. When I was a girl, one of the neighbor bullies, Roy, set fire to a pile of twigs in a hole he’d dug up in an empty lot. His older sister screamed that he was a pyromaniac. “It’s my lantern,” he whined, probably knowing he was going to get into trouble. “When you’re camping, you need a lantern.” I was watching them from my bicycle on the street and practiced the word.
Pyromaniac. Pyro
sounded like a toy, a plastic thing that shook or spun, but
maniac
scared me—someone’s crazy hair pulling their wits out of them like the picture of Medusa I’d seen in
The Golden Book of Greek Mythology.
There was a slow torture in her head that made her mean.

I wasn’t unafraid when I set these first fires. I knew they were THE FIRES / 45

dangerous. I would tell myself “no more” and quit for six months, but there was something inside me that I had to stop, and it would only get worse and worse the longer I went without touching matches: There were these happily chattering mouths, but their sharp teeth caught at my stomach and heart, and their voices were grating and childlike, and I’d go along with it for a while, but then the futility of the nothingness they said got to me—because what it came down to was a cheerful, nonsensical nothingness that taunted me. When I set fire to something, the mouths and voices trickled away out of the flames, and it was such a relief.

O
n a sunny day, just beginning to get cool again, the leaves yellow and red, I wore a secondhand sheer black dress with long velvet sleeves, much too formal, but with cigarette burns and a brown stain in the bodice, a dress someone must have worn to a party that got out of hand.

It was still too early at the Paradise for the after-work drinkers.

“Not many gals care for this place,” said the bartender, mixing my whiskey sour in a bullet-shaped metal shaker. I noticed he had a slight lisp, which softened his heavy, stubbled face. Before it seemed he’d watched me sarcastically, and I’d been wary, but now his cracked, razor lips seemed friendlier.

“I like that it’s dark in here, even in broad daylight,” I said.

Against the mirror, the faces on the liquor labels reminded me of cameo brooches, the wine and creme de menthe the exact red and green of stones on Marietta’s rings.

“Yeah.” He chuckled, a gold tooth glinting as he slid the glass in front of me, floated an orange slice and cherry in the ice. “Don’t get many orders for whiskey sours.”

“But you make good ones,” I said, sipping from the short glass.

“Not too sweet.”

46 / RENÉ STEINKE