The Fires Page 9

  Paul came back and sat in one of the fat vinyl chairs against the wall. He tapped the heel of his boot against the floor and looked up at the glass trophy case. “Mr. Linden must have been good. My soccer team, we never won.” I imagined Paul running in shorts and knee socks on an impossibly green field, a cardboard-looking castle in the background.

  “He made the basket that won the state championship,” I said.

  “All the way from the other side of the court. People still talk about it, and if you look behind the trophies, you’ll see the newspaper articles.” Paul’s busy feet and eyes reminded me of a landscape passing through a train window, his features rushing and changing, and I couldn’t quite look at him. “He spends most of his time at the golf course now,” I said. “Once in a while he checks on us.” It was true. There were long hours when I had nothing to do, and sometimes I finished a book in a night, or spent an hour talking on the phone to Jo. “The only reason he keeps the place open, I think, is because it belonged to his family.”

  Paul raised one eyebrow as if he didn’t believe me. Almost no one could tell when I was lying, but sometimes people thought I was lying when I was really telling the truth—when my guard was down, some of the falseness must have seeped out.

  “Is it always this quiet?” he asked.

  I leaned forward over the desk and finally looked straight at his face. His eyes were dark blue and clear, defined as an actor’s 84 / RENÉ STEINKE

  in a silent film. He stopped chewing his gum. “Sometimes even quieter,” I said.

  S etting a fire was like making a summer from childhood, the way the sun winked at you in the trees, scattered sequins on the surface of the lake, and made its rays walk over to you and back in the water.

  All that wind and shine—that feeling of leaning toward something.

  Sometimes I thought I could travel through fire if I was careless enough. I could walk straight through it and feel its silk, its nervous light on my dress, until I got to the other side: Paris, China.

  J o lost her usual precision when Paul was around, dropping pencils, fiddling with the ends of her cropped hair. He told her that Polish women cut their hair short only when someone had died or when they’d given up on love, but he liked hers. “It stays out of my way at least,” she said, uncomfortably shifting her feet.

  The only rule he broke was taking milk from the refrigerator in the hotel’s small cafeteria. After it closed, no one was allowed inside, but he had a key. I imagined him alone in the dark there, steering past the chrome table and grill to the refrigerator, where he’d rummage for a bottle, his face and fingers numb with cold.

  As he walked back out toward the door, only a little guilty, potato peels and bread crumbs would stick to the soles of his shoes. The first sip would taste chalky and sweet, and as he walked through the door to the lobby, it would loosen his tongue.

  His hands were long and tapered, and he moved them in the air when he talked like a professor or a magician. His features were an odd mix of the fine and the coarse, dark-blue eyes, wide round nose, thin light-brown hair, lips that looked painted. The THE FIRES / 85

  two sides fought with one another, and it made his face hard to pin down.

  On his breaks, he’d bring a glass of milk to the lobby and sit down in one of the vinyl chairs, red or forest green. I was usually reading by that time, and though we set up fragile pieces of small talk, the conversations didn’t stand up. In the silences between us, we’d hear fragments of talk from the rooms upstairs. The voices wafted down to us, faint and blurry as sounds dropped out of a dream. After a few nights, Paul tried to catch my eye when this happened, but I ignored it. I didn’t want to be his work buddy. I wanted our familiarity to remain utilitarian and slight, nothing to worry about. Still, he insisted on stopping by the desk every two hours, as if I were one of the things he was supposed to check on.

  I was five or six when my father explained it to me. “You don’t remember. I was at work.” He bent down until his face was even with mine, and as he spoke, his voice held each word like a broken bone. “Your mother was in the yard with you. Next door someone was burning leaves. You were always curious and wanted to see things up close.” He wasn’t looking at me but at the laces wrapped several times around the ankles of his boots.

  “It was an accident. If anyone asks you why your skin looks this way, you just tell them that.”

  I was sitting in the tire swing and put my hands into the darkness of the tire until I couldn’t see them anymore, and imagined what it would be like not to have them. I leaned forward to look at the dirty ribbon of white paint around the rim of the tire, circling me in a way that made me feel chosen. “If anyone asks,” I said, “I’ll tell them once I flew up to the sun and got burned.”

  86 / RENÉ STEINKE

  He kissed me on the cheek, stood up, and walked away toward the house. It was hard for him to tell me things. I pulled up my blouse to examine my stomach, touched the silky, finned ridges of the scars.

  M y father was right, the children would ask. Even though my parents sent me to Grace Lutheran, the school adjacent to our church where my father taught music. “What’s that melting on your arm?” And it wasn’t usually enough to tell them it was an accident. To avoid the questions I didn’t say much to anyone, and this made me seem strange. On top of this, I had an exagger-ated way of walking, with my head raised to look above the heads of other children, dragging my feet in long slow strides. It was the way I’d imagined Cleopatra or Mary Magdalene would have walked. I also had a habit of pretending to be different characters from the comics and would sometimes refuse to say anything I couldn’t imagine inside one of those clouds over their heads. This rule often excused me from talking, but made the other children think I was even weirder.

  In grade school I had one friend, another outsider, a skinny black girl with red hair named Anita. Her family lived in Gary, but her mother drove her to Porter each day so she could attend a good Christian school. She was hoping to protect Anita, as my parents hoped to protect me, from the cruelty of children who didn’t know they should act like Jesus. And though we probably weren’t teased as much as we would have been at the public school, we weren’t well liked or included either: Those children were afraid of us. In the end, our parents’ efforts only allowed us to put off for a little while the inevitable, and when it came to me at least, I resented not being better prepared.

  Anita and I spent all our time together: We pretended we were THE FIRES / 87

  refugees escaping a war and hid under the clamoring gym bleachers; we pretended we were peasant girls and knew how to make poisons or potions with dandelions from the playground; we pretended we were missionaries in India feeding the poor and starving (squirrels). When Anita moved to Michigan in the sixth grade, I begged my mother to let me come home for lunch so I wouldn’t have to eat at a table alone, but she wouldn’t let me. “You’ll make another friend,” she said. Every day I wore the green ribbon Anita had given me tied around my neck.

  One afternoon I sat at a desk in an empty classroom reading when Scott came in. He was a boy with an elfin nose and bright eyes who already, at ten, walked holding his arms away from his body, so his biceps would look big. “What are you doing in here?”

  he said, poking his head in the door.

  “Nothing.” My father was in a meeting, and he’d asked me to wait for him.

  Scott grinned with small even teeth. In the bathroom there were hearts drawn around his name in the stalls. “You’re a brain,” he said.

  I closed the book and put it in my satchel, trying to be friendly.

  He came inside the classroom and grabbed a piece of chalk from the tray under the board. “Let’s see,” he said, as he began writing on the board. “Ella sucks…” He turned around. “Who do you like?”

  No one. I like no one. A lump swelled in my throat.

  “Barker?” He was a large, slow boy nicknamed “Injun” because of his size and olive skin. “He likes you,
I hear.” He wrote in Barker’s name, then slowly erased it. Late-afternoon light razored against the window. Ouside, a ball bounced against pavement.

  “What’s this?” My father was at the door. Scott threw down the chalk and quickly erased the board. “Get out of here,” my father said in a voice so low you could barely hear it, his knees 88 / RENÉ STEINKE

  popping in and out, his hands pressed flat in his armpits as if to keep them from flailing out.

  It wasn’t that I resented him for coming into the room and seeing that—what I regretted was that I couldn’t have scared Scott away myself.

  My father was especially worried about me that year. I was at the age he’d been when his own parents had died in the car accident, “smashed into a tree in the rain” was always how he put it, specifically, as if he still had to rehearse the details to himself.

  Driving me to school in his truck, he would offer me a lot of advice out of the blue. He’d be listening to the crackly news on the radio and suddenly say, “If you smile and look people in the eye when you talk to them, they will always like you.” Or he’d be quizzing me on history dates or spelling words and interrupt to say, “As long as you’re honest, people will listen.” I think he didn’t have a clue how to help me.

  What had saved him, he believed, from a life as a meatpacker or farmhand, was the library, and he began to take me with him more often to the one in Porter.

  There had been a library down the street from the orphanage in Munster. He’d gone there almost every day after school for seven years, and when he graduated, won a scholarship to IU in Bloomington, where he’d studied music. “Without that library,”

  he used to say, “I would have just shrunken up.” Every year he donated money to the Porter Library, and because of this, his name was engraved on a copper plaque near the entrance.

  “It’s for the invisible part,” he would say, pointing at his head, when we stood at the circulation desk. The part no one can see. The place that’s not scarred. Wilma Kohl, thumping the date-due stamp on our cards, would smile with her little red mouth. She wore bifocals on a string of bright Indian beads and had a mole on her neck like a pendant. My father would lean toward her THE FIRES / 89

  with a snappy word about the weather or the popcorn festival, and she would say something like, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  He had to keep renewing all the lengthy books on philosophy and history he liked, because he could absorb only a few pages at a time. He would hold a book open with one hand and peer into it, one hip elegantly jutted to the side, the brick-colored spines accordioned past him on the shelf. Even when boys ran and slid on the slick floor, or a mother scolded her girl for ripping out a page, he didn’t look up.

  My favorite books that year were romances, and except for the ones in the “Classics” section, they were kept on stacks behind a curtain in a section marked “Adult.” If my father was preoccu-pied, I could sneak behind the curtain, read as much as I could, sweating in the close air, then mark the page where I’d left off with a bobby pin. If he’d caught me, he probably wouldn’t have minded, but I didn’t want him to know I thought about those things and would have been mortified.

  I remember one book about a beauty with a port-wine stain on her forehead. A handsome doctor fell in love with her and discovered a way to remove birthmarks, but after he removed hers, she fell in love with a race-car driver, an arrogant man, whom, in the beginning, she hadn’t liked at all. Almost all of the heroines, in fact, fell in love with the very men they’d loathed in the beginning. This happened so often I began to think this was the way love worked, and wondered if my mother had begun by disliking my father when they’d met at that picnic, and if I would end up with Russ, the bully who called me “Chicken Skin.”

  Coming out from behind the curtain I’d see my father in the aisle stooped over a book, his small shoulders shadowed, and when I came closer, his frown of concern.

  VI

  S adly fiddling with the button of her blouse, as loose on her now as the white choir robe she used to wear, my mother had asked me to go to church with them that Sunday and to lunch afterward at the Housemans.

  We sat near the front, behind the Zeitlers with their six combed and curled children, each holding a small toy. Pastor Beck looked surprised when he saw me from the pulpit. He closed his eyes and prayed for a moment, then rose up on his toes and blossomed, as if God had made him taller and brighter. I’d always liked him because he’d denied ever hearing my father miss a note, knowing, I thought, how much it upset him.

  While Pastor Beck preached, a horn of light blasted through the high, square windows near the ceiling. I looked over at the stained-glass window with the Holy Spirit dove arrowed down at the apostles with serrated flames on their tongues. Finding it hard to listen, I thought about the time a man stood up in the front pew, though the directions in the bulletin clearly said

  “Congregation remain seated.” All around him, people whispered.

  Pastor Beck had made an odd motion with his hand, pushing it down as if a little dog were jumping on his leg and he were slapping its head. A few people, unsure who was right, stood up with him,

  90

  THE FIRES / 91

  then sat down again, like children playing musical chairs. The man stood there, stiff as the prow of a boat, one tail of his suit jacket stuck to his waist with static, and my father chuckled so loudly from up in the balcony that people turned around and looked up.

  The only time he had sat next to me was the service when one of the steward’s sisters-in-law was in town and wanted to play the organ. He was so upset at her mistakes, he tore his bulletin into little squares that he let snow on the floor below us.

  Even now the lack of him made it hard for me to concentrate, and the high-school girl’s pedantic jag through the first hymns had annoyed me. Halfway through the sermon, I stood up, wriggled past knees and dress shoes to the side aisle, and walked out to the narthex. Staring at the cluttered bulletin board, I waited for Marietta and my mother to come out.

  When we arrived at the Housemans’, my mother leaned her crutch against the wall and sat down in a rocking chair near the table. No one had said anything about how thin she was, though I’d noticed the shock in Marietta’s face when she’d got into the car, her red dress hanging from her bony limbs like a deflated balloon. Erma Houseman must have assumed it would be rude to notice a woman’s thinness when her father had just died.

  None of the Housemans’ clocks was set to the right hour, and whenever I was there, I felt time getting heavier, this humid thickening in the air. Erma had hair dyed the color of molasses and an aggrieved voice, as if life was simply too hard for her. She said I should go say hello to Fred Houseman and Russel Frye, and as I walked into the living room, I heard Marietta and Erma begin to argue about how long the pie would take.

  Fred was standing at the fireplace, and Russel Frye sat in a chair. The tiny cottage of a cuckoo clock perched on the mantel.

  Against the wall stood a grandfather clock with a stern face that I’d always

  92 / RENÉ STEINKE

  thought of as Fred’s twin brother. He had a tall, square body, his eyes and mouth thin, even lines. Russel and Fred were talking about the tornado that had touched down the week before. Russel Frye pushed his glasses to the bridge of his pink nose. “We were lucky that time,” he said. “No one was hurt.”

  “I can hear it when a twister gets close,” Fred said, jiggling the change in his pockets. “I’d know it just from the sound—that high-pitched whistle—whether or not to go down. And that one was at least five miles off.”

  I told him I’d stayed at the front desk, even when I’d seen the hail balls, that I hadn’t taken shelter in the basement with the guests. Russel’s ruddy face looked stricken. He was a pharmacist and valued caution the way an athlete values strength or speed.

  I traced a leaf pattern on the couch.

  “The problem is, you don’t have enough respect for
the weather,” said Fred Houseman. “You have to know it. When you’re out in the fields and you see a storm blow toward you or when a drought turns everything to stone, then you see how small we all are, how insignificant.” His son had died in Vietnam, and he always seemed sorry that he himself hadn’t yet collided into a danger big enough for him.

  Russel turned to me. “Henry taught you better than that.” He clicked his tongue and crossed his legs so that his pants hitched up to expose the white patch of skin over his black sock. I wondered if he’d meant more than what he said, if he’d heard about my trips to the Paradise Lounge.

  I started to agree and shake my head at my own carelessness, but something stopped me. “My grandfather worried too much,”

  I said. “He had too much on his mind all the time.”

  “You’ll see,” Russel said. “The older you get, the harder it is to avoid.” Erma called us into the dining room. He uncrossed his legs and heaved himself up from the chair.

  THE FIRES / 93

  Erma had made German food, as always, heavy dishes the color and texture of rocks. We sat down around the steaming platters and bowls. “Shall we pray?” said Fred. We bowed our heads as he recited the prayer in an even voice with an undertone of anger, his awkward imitation of authority. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest…”

  He served the beef roladen from a large silver tureen, and we passed around the potatoes and sauerkraut, the buttered green beans, and the small, heel-shaped rolls. “You look pale, Catherine,” said Russel. “You’d better take seconds today,” said Fred, chuckling as he spooned meat onto her plate.

  It’s not a joke, I thought. She’s starving. At first, the polite clattering of yellow silverware on china plates muffled any conversation.