The Fires Read online

  Drinking from the flask, I walked down a row of white shingles, each a slight variation with a different name: Granite, Shell, Bone.

  I stopped in front of one near the end. Where the paint had worn away, the plank showed strands of dull gray wood. Not durable enough. I stood there and looked out at the dozens of shingles on wooden legs like chairbacks in an empty theater, whites, yellows, greens, browns. I straightened up, took a deep breath, and in a steady, clear voice, said, “He poisoned himself.”

  Pulling the flask from my pocket, I unscrewed the cap and took a mouthful of schnapps. A sharp sensation cut along my teeth. I didn’t particularly like it, but that was part of its appeal, along with the numbness I first felt along the bridge of my nose.

  I was getting pleasantly drunk and didn’t look at my hand pull the matchbook from my pocket, feel along the cover to pluck one out, hold the two sides together as I pulled the head against the sandpaper strip until it snapped and flared. At the funeral I’d felt all those eyes expecting me to come apart, the truth about what happened pulled from my skin like straw out of a stuffed animal.

  But I’d kept our secret crinkled next to the flask in my skirt pocket.

  With the heat pulsing in my fingertips, I carefully set the match on the flat rotten edge of the gray-white shingle and stood close enough to protect the little paw burning at my waist. It was thin at first. I was afraid it would go out. I cupped my hands around it, and my palms lit up, pale and wrinkled, as the flame swelled THE FIRES / 11

  toward them. When I pulled away, it leaped along the top of the board.

  The yellow flames muscled and flinched. The wood blackened.

  I wished I could have asked him what it felt like to drink arsenic, if it was tasteless or somehow sweet, if it numbed you slowly like alcohol, finger by finger, or if it suddenly stopped your heart like a bullet. I felt a press behind my eyes then, not because I couldn’t ask but because—despite the habitual affection between us—if he’d lived, I wouldn’t have had the courage. I could count on one hand the things he and I could talk about.

  When the first Buddhist set himself on fire in Cambodia, my grandfather, rustling his newspaper, had said, “It’s a sad thing, isn’t it, how they believe burning themselves alive is a good religion.” I tossed the envelope with his scrawled marks into the flame, watched it crumple and wither in the blue center. I didn’t think we’d ever know what he’d meant to write, and the thought of how much we’d misunderstood him, how little he’d let us see, put a soreness in my throat I couldn’t swallow.

  The fire hurried higher in the air. He’d usually kept his hands fisted, whether leaning back in a chair or walking into the next room, and he’d often stood at the kitchen sink, ferociously scrubbing them ten or twenty times a day, sometimes until they bled. One hand viciously grabbed the other, slid away, and the other, released, did the same, the water coming out so hard from the faucet that it splattered up in the sink and we all had to raise our voices to cover up the clamor.

  The yellow light circled around me in the gathering darkness.

  The flames jabbed at the air and chewed through the board, fell off the legs and rolled in the dirt. I stepped back, crossed my arms on my chest, and rubbed the lumps of my shoulder bones, my face prickling in the heat.

  12 / RENÉ STEINKE

  It was usually the only relief, this hot, upside-down waterfall and its salty light. It ebbed first beneath my eyelids and then under my tongue, soaked through my muscles and veins and gently wore at them until I lost strength in my legs and could barely stand.

  Under my blouse, I touched the silky part of my stomach, then moved my hand under my damp breast to the braided scar, a core of old pain to hang on to. The wind quickened and shrieked.

  The fire bent over and flicked sparks into the dry weeds.

  W hen I walked back to town, I went to Jo’s apartment, thinking I would tell her, but when I got there, and we were sitting among her girlhood pink-and-gold bedroom set, the canopy bed shifting above us, I couldn’t. She had been exercising, and a calm, pious female voice on the tape recorder kept giving instructions and counting. Jo tried to comfort me, but I couldn’t hear her. It kept pricking at my skull: He killed himself. He killed himself.

  I left Jo’s and went back to the hotel and changed. The dress was red and fit so tightly you could see the tilt of my hipbones in the sheen of the silk. Glass beads cuffed the sleeves and ringed the hem in black circles, and a rhinestone hung on the catch to the zipper in back. I’d found it that summer at a yard sale, crumpled under a set of chipped dishes.

  At eleven that night I went to the Paradise Lounge to get drunk so that maybe I could sleep. It was so late I hadn’t planned on meeting anyone, but this Billy sat down on the stool next to me.

  He was from Appleton, Wisconsin, and said he worked for an insurance company, though with his wide purple mouth and honey-colored skin, he looked awkward and too young in a suit.

  When he ordered his drink, he turned to me and asked if I knew any good places to eat. He stared at my breasts and then at my THE FIRES / 13

  eyes. He took out a little notebook and wrote down what I said, pushing out his puffy bottom lip and squinting at his pen.

  Somehow, the diner on Willow Street led to our talking about basketball. He told me about his high-school team and then about his sister, who was fat and a good card player—but pensively, as if he were eighty years old and these things were already lost to him. In his hunched shoulders, I recognized a choked sadness that reminded me of my grandfather.

  To change the subject I said I wanted to go to Paris and asked if he knew any French. “La Porte—that’s a French name, isn’t it?”

  He pushed his glass to the edge of the bar. Even as it shunned strangers, Indiana hoarded exotic names—La Porte, Valparaiso, Vincennes—as if it could contain all the world and obliterate the need to travel.

  “Doorway to the Midwest,” said the bartender, pouring.

  “No. You? Polly whatever?” He turned back with a new drink and a little bounce. His lips were shiny with booze, and I could tell he was nervous. It made it easier.

  “A little,” I said, laughing. I glanced down at his fingers wrapped around the glass and saw his thumb cock back.

  “Say something.” Gulping his drink, he leaned toward me. He had nice hazel eyes.

  “Est-ce que la douche est chaude?” I said.

  He stirred the ice in his glass with his finger. “Say something else.”

  “I could say anything, and you wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “I know.” He nodded. “Say anything. It sounds nice.”

  “Voulez-vous aller à la plage?” I said. “Comment allez-vous?” I could only remember the questions from the phrase book. Tearing his napkin contemplatively into little squares, he said, with the false sincerity of a drunk, “I have a feeling you’ll go there sometime.” He leaned in close to me and spoke softly, “A pretty girl 14 / RENÉ STEINKE

  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.