Fire

When my father tries to set the house on fire, I’m sitting in the back seat of our rusty Chevrolet in my Catholic school uniform, a little plaid number in a cheerless black and green. It’s a warm, bright day—almost fall—and my mother’s in the front passenger seat with a flowery kerchief tied over her dark curls, the smoke from her Tarreyton snaking up out of the open car window. She twitches involuntarily a couple of times like she does when her nerves act up; but other than that, she’s quiet, her eyes trained on our house. Beside me in the back seat, my brother sits thumbing the tires of a Hot Wheels car.

Where’s Daddy? he whines. It’s getting hot in the car, and the burnt paper smell of my mother’s cigarette is giving me a headache.

He’s coming, my mother says.

And there he is: bolting down the pinched, cracked sidewalk that runs along the side of our house. He dashes like his pants are on fire, and I’m surprised when he jumps in the car and yanks the shift into drive that no flames follow him. We take off down the quiet street, tires screeching, just like something out of a Mannix episode—and my mother’s head jerks back from the jolt of our indiscrete getaway. Mrs. Askew, our next door neighbor, puts down her newspaper and stands up from her front porch glider to see what all the commotion’s about—while my brother and I squeal from the back seat.

But he is inept even at starting fires. The rags he soaked in gasoline never sparked at the back of the house, never caught, and that sorry-looking cottage with the holes in the linoleum is still there, still lilting to one side like someone with a bum leg, when we come back a few hours later. I’ll be a sonofabitch, my father says, punching the dash, as we inch around the corner onto our street. My mother heaves a sigh, but I can’t tell if it’s a sigh of relief or disappointment. Of course my brother and I had no idea that day that our father was trying to burn down the house. Because even then, even at the tender age of six, I would have understood how futile it was to burn down a rental. The goddamn fool that he was…

A year later he gives her a toaster for Mother’s Day. We only used it a few times before the thing ignited, and my mother tugged the hot cord out of the wall socket with a startled shriek. I stood in the kitchen, wringing my hands, certain that the blaze my father couldn’t start in the back of the house would consume us now—in the form of the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster on our kitchen counter. She was relieved, happy even, when the cops came to confiscate the toaster after a bunch of donated items that were supposed to be raffled off at the radio station where my father worked came up missing. Here, she said, when the uniformed men knocked at the door. Take it. And while I didn’t like the idea of two men with guns at their hips standing sentinel-like in our kitchen, I was glad to see the toaster go. After the officers left, my mother wiped up the crumbs that had escaped the toaster and then lit a match to a Tarreyton with a trembling hand.

And it is many years later—a lifetime later—that I am on the sixth floor of Williams Street when the two planes hit. It’s another warm bright day, much like the day my father tossed his book of matches and ran. And I run, too, this day in September. But the similarities end there. He is dead a couple of years by now, the obituary landing in my inbox a few months after he was cremated. Two paragraphs, single column, summed up his second-rate life. He had no children, the obit said. And I have my first child kicking around a willing belly as I scramble over the Brooklyn Bridge, mouth agape, the taste of ash on my tongue. I do not want this child born into the world of fire, of burnt plastic and flesh; I feel the heat of fleeing souls behind me. And for months afterward I dream dreams of smoldering fires—under my desk, in the closet, under my son’s sheltered crib…

And he has seen everything lost to flames, has been awakened by fire to collect his family, like so many stones, to escape into a cold night. Just moments before the roof caved in… They watched the blaze from across the road, witnessed a history erased—and yet even that night, he said he could see beauty in the destruction... Which I cannot imagine, which I could not do. Because all that heat is a dangerous thing, a powerful thing—with a strength that is more than this faltering me, this clamoring me, with her memories of fire and flames.

***

Friday Night

It was a Friday night all those years ago that he didn’t hear no. It was summer, and the cicadas were making a racket beyond the open windows. It was hot, muggy. They lived in the basement, he and his wife and their three kids. Trying to build a new home—and the money ran out. That Friday night, like so many others, the dehumidifier brayed in the corner, over by the sliding glass doors. Nothing but darkness and the reflection of the living room beyond that smudged glass. Until… those headlights ricocheted up the drive. He was home early—his wife still lipsticked and perfumed at the party, lifting a long stemmed glass, catching a glimpse of herself in her new black dress in the mirror behind the bar. She was a pretty woman.

And it is a Friday night more than thirty years later when I see him again. I have no idea tonight that I will look down and find him there, like a UPS package on the front step that I didn’t sign for and don’t recall ordering. I’m up in that snowy town in a red dress, high heels; it’s winter and I am happy. There are specials written in white chalk on a board, the pungent smell of garlic, of olives cured in virgin oil. I sit in the corner with a man, and we have been revealing our own diluted histories, driving several hours in the car to get here tonight. We sip wine and watch while we wait. The Gypsy Kings play from hidden speakers, and in this room tonight, we are all beautiful, feted people haloed in candlelight. And then she says to me, You’ll never guess who’s here…

The headlights snap off and I hear the thud of a single car door over the din of the dehumidifier. The TV is on, the volume turned low. Blueish-white images bounce along the moist concrete wall and there is the lonely sound of muted canned laughter. He steps inside, scraping the sliding glass door along the rusty track until it shuts with a click behind him. When he sees me he grins, and I stand up—the couch cushions hot and itchy against my bare legs. I tug at my shorts and wonder how I will get home when he is the only one here. He puts his hand against a chair to steady himself and then comes over and leans in close. The hair on his arms prickles my own new skin and I hope he doesn’t notice when I pull back. He's not much taller than me, but his muscles strain against the thin cotton t-shirts he wears when he picks me up on his blood-red Harley. My parents wave and go back to their lawn work as I mount the back of his bike, lifting a newly-shapen leg up over the seat and settle behind him, my hands at his waist, just above his belt. That night, he breathes heavily, stinking of too many drinks, as he struggles to unleash a plastic baggie from his front jeans pocket, his thick, short fingers working to wedge themselves into such a tight crevice… Finally he holds up the baggie, and smiles as if he has unveiled some rare precious stones. Do I want to smoke? Down a short, damp hallway, his three kids dream their muddy dreams…

And so tonight I follow her over to the banquette where six strangers are gathered. They manipulate silverware, lift stemware to their quiet mouths, chew, laugh. Cathy, she says to the gray-haired stranger, you remember my daughter Rachel. And the worn-out woman and I search each other’s faces to find what might be coaxed into memory. I remember the pretty woman in the black dress, the woman who sniffed at the moist air that night when she finally came home—but I do not recognize this old woman in the gray hair, the glasses. She smiles at me. Rachel, she says warmly, extending a thin, corrugated hand that settles in mine for a moment, and then retreats. Two of her three kids are there beside her, but I do not see memory in either face, or the faces of their spouses. It’s good to see you, I say. They tell their stories, and I smile at the strangers collected here—and then I ask the woman if they ever finished building their house. And she says, Oh God yes. Many years ago. And when we have exhausted all that, I ask if her husband is here—and she seems surprised and points to the man opposite her, his back to me, his head at my breasts as I stand there. Slowly, a withered man with white hair and the blue eyes that I remember turns around and looks up at me... He lifts an unsteady hand, which I grasp, and then I move on.

We both cough that night while we smoke—and there is danger everywhere on this summer night. It suspends itself from the ceiling, drips along each wall, wafts through the thick, moist air. Beyond the sliding glass doors our image is reflected back at me in a murky, dreamlike way. He turns the joint around and blows smoke into my open mouth, this nearly middle-aged man, and me with my new breasts, my freshly bloomed hips pressing with a certain urgency against the pockets of my shorts. He smiles a wanton smile, a demanding smile, his blue eyes trained on me… And then there’s the rough pattern of the couch cushions against my legs, my back, and the weight of him—and the sound of no, no, no like a siren that he doesn't hear…

And tonight I return to the corner where he is waiting, and sit down beside him. Lift my wine to parched lips with a steady hand. See that man over there? I ask. And he nods. From across the room, I can see the man’s back. Can see the weight of that night settled along his slumped shoulders, roosted in the folds of his neck. That pitiful old man and his memories. Hungry, biting memories…

***