by Robin Greene
title page
Durham, NC
copyright
Copyright © 2019 Robin Greene
The Shelf Life of Fire
Robin Greene
lightmessages.com/robin-greene
[email protected]
Published 2019, by Light Messages
www.lightmessages.com
Durham, NC 27713 USA
SAN: 920-9298
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61153-261-6
E-book ISBN: 978-1-61153-260-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935787
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 International Copyright Act, without the prior written permission except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Table of Contents
title page
copyright
contents
dedication
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty-one
twenty-two
twenty-three
twenty-four
twenty-five
twenty-six
twenty-seven
twenty-eight
twenty-nine
thirty
thirty-one
thirty-two
thirty-three
acknowledgments
the author
you might also enjoy
dedication
To Michael
one
“He doesn’t want you to know,” my mother says. Then she pauses. She’s calling from Florida.
I sit in my sunroom in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It’s a Friday afternoon in early summer, and she’s been telling me about my brother Dennis’s colon cancer.
My brother and I stopped talking about a decade ago, after I’d discovered he’d forged checks and had stolen thousands from our mom’s bank account.
I had threatened to tell our mother if he didn’t confess, something he refused to do.
“Screw you,” he’d replied—and these were his last words to me.
Now, street traffic intrudes through the phone line, and I imagine my mother standing on the narrow balcony of the apartment where she lives with my brother and his family.
“Dennis never forgave you for telling me about the checks,” she says. “He wants nothing to do with you.”
“I get it,” I say to her.
Late afternoon sunlight floods the sunroom, and the heat is intense. My husband and I have agreed that next year when we upgrade the HVAC system, we’ll install air conditioning in this room.
“He’s going for chemo and radiation,” my mother says. “Next week.”
“What about surgery?”
“Only if they can shrink the cancer. The prognosis isn’t good.”
I rise from the couch, notice a squirrel eating at our backyard bird-feeder.
“I don’t know, Rae,” my mother says. “He’s got an appointment with a new surgeon on Monday. We’ll see what he says.”
“Keep me posted,” I say. The squirrel is gone; the bird-feeder shakes. “Got to go, Mom. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
I walk back into the air-conditioned house, chilly but pleasant. I pet Jake, our old golden retriever, who thumps his tail, and go into the kitchen to begin a salad. For five years, my mother and I didn’t speak—having had a falling-out over money—so talking to her now, telling her I love you, still doesn’t feel right. I turn on our kitchen radio, NPR, and pull salad ingredients from the fridge.
I’m chopping a tomato, watching the sharp knife slice through the skin. The tomato is ripe, and my fingers are wet with juice as I listen to an All Things Considered segment about Jimi Hendricks. I don’t hear the beginning, but I’m carried back to late April 1969, when I’d come down with mononucleosis right after my fifteenth birthday, at the end of a turbulent year. I stop for a moment, remembering how I’d recovered just in time to finish up the last two weeks of school, to take my state Regents exams before summer break.
The previous fall I’d had an intellectual awakening. I’d read Walden, Eros and Civilization, and The Second Sex, and I’d met a new group of older, more intellectual kids who became my friends. I finish chopping the tomato, pick up half an onion, and begin to chop that. I turn off the radio so I can concentrate; I want to give this memory attention.
1969—the year I’d also decided to quit modeling, quit shaving my legs, using makeup. I’d stopped accompanying my family on Sunday visits to my grandparents in Brooklyn, joined a student protest movement, and dated “Strike,” a college guy I’d met on the Long Island Railroad during my ride home from a Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden.
In October, I’d co-led the Lawrence Junior High walkout with Eugene, friend and Black Power leader. We’d planned our walk-out to coincide with other student protests in the New York area, as five-hundred seventh, eighth, and ninth graders had left their classrooms in the middle of fourth period in an anti-war protest held on the school’s football field. Somehow, I’d secured a megaphone, and standing on a table in the cafeteria, I directed my fellow students to leave the building—not out the back door but rather out the front so that they could parade past the principal’s office, out the Greco-Roman entryway, down the wide front steps.
That summer—after my year of political protest and illness—would be the wildest of my life. Stuff happened. Stuff that changed, defined me.
The kitchen is full of late afternoon shadows. On the counter, I see that I’ve chopped tomato, onion, green pepper, walnuts, apple, and have tossed them over our home-grown arugula leaves in a hand-blown glass bowl—a gift from our glass artist son, Will, from when he was still in college. It has deep blue swirls and is, as Will calls it, a “low bowl,” a shape more challenging to blow.
Tonight, we’ll have warmed-over homemade pizza and fresh salad. Tomorrow, my husband, Nick, leaves for his month-long writing retreat in upstate New York, where he has a fellowship that will allow him to spend a month at Blue Mountain, a retreat center in the Adirondacks for writers and artists. All year he has looked forward to this time. He hasn’t been able to write much during the academic year, and although I have written a surprising amount, it’s all rough drafts, unfinished stuff that no longer calls to me. But I need the publications, so at some point, I’ll have to revise, edit, send this work out.
I’ve also plotted a new novel—a literary romance set in Fayetteville, NC, my adopted home, where Nick and I, both English professors, have lived for over twenty years. My first novel was a historical novel, based on a woman who had been a slave in Fayetteville. It took me years to research and write, so I’m ready to write something fun, light, and breezy.
The idea makes complete sense. When Nick is on retreat, I’ll have the time and the solitude to write. I’ve already mapped all the major plot points.
Nick and I eat in the sunroom, still hot but now bearable. We have dinner plates on our laps, with extra pizza slices and salad bowl on the coffee table. Jake is with us, begging food, a bad habit, but he’s an old dog, easy to forgive.
Packed a
nd serviced, Nick’s old Ford pick-up truck waits in the driveway. Nick plans to leave in the early morning, around 5:30. He’ll be driving north to upstate New York, but the plan is for him to go west to Asheville first, where he and Will plan to go hiking and camping overnight.
“I’ll set the alarm,” I tell him.
“You don’t have to get up with me. You can go back to sleep.”
“I’ll get up,” I say.
“A month,” Nick says, his voice soft, regretful.
“I’ll be okay,” I assure him as we finish the pizza.
k
Later, Nick calls out, “Come to bed.” I’m on my laptop in my study.
After looking over the notes for my novel, I hit save. “Yes,” I call back to Nick, turning off the computer. Nick is waiting for me, and the lights are out. We embrace, but too tired for romance, turn over and go to sleep.
Saturday morning—and at 8:42 a.m., it’s already hot outside. By now, I think, Nick is halfway to Asheville. In darkness, I’d watched Nick back his old Ranger from our driveway to begin his trip.
Already I miss him. The light in my study is still on, as I’ve been trying to work. But instead of fiddling with my novel, I’m thinking of yesterday’s conversation with my mom about my brother’s cancer. I sip tepid coffee and decide to free-write about Dennis, about my half-formed memories of him—my only and difficult sibling.
I take another sip, and as I remember my conversation with my mother, I hear her tentative voice telling me about Dennis’s cancer and how he doesn’t want me to know. Secrets have defined our family. It was only last summer, after my dad died from Parkinson’s—an incomplete diagnosis, for his death was complicated by dementia and other medical issues—that my mother and I reconnected. Not reconciled exactly but got back in touch.
I begin typing, but instead of writing sentences, I find myself typing the words secret and regret over and over until they almost fill the entire screen. Something inside me wants out. But even after years of therapy and healing, I’m not sure I can find the words to write about my family, especially about my brother and how his actions affected our lives.
I want to discuss this with Nick. On a normal summer morning, he’d be downstairs sipping coffee, working on his laptop in the kitchen. I have a strong urge to see if he’s there. But he’s not. And I’ve learned that it’s better simply to sit with, not act on, my discomforts. I take a few deep breaths and delete the words on the screen. I close my eyes, breathe, then open them. Haltingly, I write.
two
It’s spring, 1959, I begin. Glenn Murmelstein has a large worm in a Dixie cup. I stand near him at the “middle entrance”—a chained-off circle of grass in a sea of parking lot asphalt. We’re in front of the cooperative apartment complex where I lived for the first six-and-a-half years of my life—and as Glenn removes his hand, I see a pale, pink earthworm, its thick body squirming. Frightened, my heart races; I gasp, then run from the grassy circle across the parking lot. Upstairs, hanging out the second-floor window, the crazy lady is laughing again. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”—loud slapping sounds that smack the air as I run to the fort at the other end of the complex. My heart hurts. I find my place behind the boulder, the part of the fort my friends and I have dubbed “Freedom Rock.” Only when my back is against its cold stone face can I relax. No worm. No Glenn. Branches above shake in light wind; the ground is soft, damp. I fight back tears. I am Rachel, I tell myself, digging my fingers into the soil. I am a girl; soon I will be six years old, and “six” sounds like “sick.”
k
I stop writing, lift my head from the computer and realize that this early memory is connected to Dennis and that memories of him began to haunt me about ten years ago—the same time that my niece Hannah was hospitalized for anal bleeding, and my mom and I had a big fight.
At first, the memories were wordless, shadow-like specters that followed me both day and night. When the specters became most threatening, I’d often be upstairs, making love to Nick, husband of thirty-something years by then. He’d touched my mouth, outlining the shape of it with his hand. Round and round his finger circled. My eyes would be closed. I’d feel the suggestion of how he wanted me and turn away from him, his large hand resting on my naked hip. He’d move his face to my neck, his warm breath, a whisper. I’d turn toward him; we’d kiss, our arms around each other. I am not me, I’d think. And only then could I relax, feel desire open me.
How can I tell this story? Complicated by gaps of memory, half-remembered images, years of denial, secrets, regrets, I can’t piece it together, stitch across the holes.
I minimize the screen, opening another file, one with the notes for my pre-plotted novel. I read them over and try to engage. Do I really want to write this novel? I get up from my desk, decide to take a shower, dress, see what the day brings.
By noon, though, I still haven’t left the house. Dressed and ready, I’ve had nowhere to go. I decide to have some coffee and try to work again. I walk to the kitchen, rinse a cup, and pour the last coffee from the Chemex, our glass, low-tech pot, purchased last year. I wash the pot and turn it upside down in the drainboard.
But instead of going upstairs to my computer, I sit down with my coffee at the kitchen table to gather my thoughts.
Grocery shopping—yes, I could go to Food Lion. We need milk and bread. No, not we, I. But maybe I should go to the campus gym. Or to my school office to answer emails and fill book orders for Cape Fear Editions, the small literary press Nick and I run.
Or I could check in with Amanda, my assistant director at the university Writing Center—where I serve as director—and although I don’t officially work during the summer, I often check in, see how the center is doing. But then I remember it’s Saturday. Amanda won’t be in, and the Writing Center is closed. Maybe I’ll just do some press stuff and clean my office, purging it of the year’s accumulations.
But for now, I sip the coffee, cold and bitter but satisfying. Then a wave of something washes over me—sadness, vulnerability, and I feel six again. No, younger—three or four.
This feeling connects now—as it always does—to a specific scene: the bedroom I shared with my brother in Dunhurst, Queens. I stand up from the kitchen table, refuse the memory. “No, thank you,” I say, but then sit back down. The memory insists.
I’m there again. In Queens. In my apartment, in bed. I pull my pink winter quilt with its fresh white duvet cover up to my chin, then over my head, where it’s dark and warm. The quilt smells of mothballs, and the duvet cover smells of lemon-scented detergent. The smells mingle as I breathe now, inhaling the odors in my Fayetteville kitchen.
My bed is in one corner of the room, and my brother’s bed is in the other so that they’re parallel. Parallel. It’s a word I’d just learned. I like it. I understand how two lines could travel near each other but never touch. When I’d asked my mother to spell it for me, I was thrilled to learn that the word all is hidden inside.
I hear my brother toss and turn. This is his signal to me that he’s awake. When I lift my face from beneath the covers, the room is dark, but I can see shadows. My face is cool in the air and unprotected.
Dennis, I can feel, is looking at me, seeing what’s available, and calculating. He’s seven, smart, a sophisticated planner. I’m a dreamer; I take what comes. Dennis is swift; I’m slow. He schemes; I contemplate. Dennis has motives; I trust. He’s complicated; I’m naïve.
When Dennis stands over my bed, he cradles my face with his hands. “Sleep,” he whispers.
k
Back from memory now, I’m still in the kitchen, sitting on one of the two padded swivel office chairs that flank the table. We bought them so that Nick and I could correct papers at the large table. Jake, who has come to keep me company, naps on the cool floor tiles as I remember an adolescent poem I wrote during the year I had mono. My fever had spiked, and I’d awakened around 3:00 in the morning. I walked from my bedroom—we had moved from our Queens apartment to our suburban home in
South Shelburne, Long Island—to the kitchen, where the bay window overlooked Meadowbrook Pond, a small man-made lake that served to drain the area swampland. Wetlands, it’s now called, and the creation of a lake like this one would not be permitted.
Looking into the pond, I felt ashamed. I remember how the waters reflected a bright half-moon, how some of the houses had outdoor lights on, how they formed a necklace of star-points rimming the shoreline.
Shame. Why? I’d felt my shame as a piercing needle, a sharp singular stab, making me wince. Sometimes I feel this now, when I make small mistakes in class, misplace my cell phone, or lose door keys. A piercing, self-inflicted stab.
Shame. When I had gotten sick after leading the junior high school walkout, I wasn’t there to see that the reforms we’d insisted on were implemented. “Demands,” we called them. After the walkout, Eugene and I were invited to the principal’s office every day for lunch and a discussion. Eugene wanted Martin Luther King’s portrait hung in the library, on the wall above the checkout desk. I wanted girls to be allowed to wear pants to school. We were required to wear skirts, and in the New York winters, we froze in our stylish mini-skirts and knee socks. Also, I wanted students to be permitted to talk as they made their way down the hallways between classes. No more silence in the halls or cafeteria.
But after I became sick, I fell out of the loop, and felt guilty for not being there. And it wasn’t until I returned to school for those last few weeks that I learned that the principal had met all our demands. Girls I’d never known—now wearing their jeans and bellbottoms—would stop me in the cafeteria or between classes to thank me. I’d become a hero.
But during my time at home, sick with mono, I’d felt ashamed. I berated myself for falling ill, for trying to lead, for having the audacity to think that I could accomplish something. I’d felt like my body had found me out, betrayed me.
That morning, in darkness, when I’d been looking out across Meadowbrook Pond, a poem had come—words tumbling forward, insistent. Back then, I didn’t revise. Poems, words, ideas came to me like gifts, and I thought they should be written as they had arrived.