I remember one singular Fourth of July. It was pitch dark on the fairgrounds, in a dirt field far from the exhibition buildings and the midway. Far from anything. It was the middle of nothing and nowhere out there on a moonless night, strands of dry grass tickling my legs, bare below my shorts. There was no light at all but a flashlight in one man’s hand, no sound but the murmurs of the men talking to one another in the dark, moving heavy boxes with mumbles and grunts, laughing very quietly with easy laughs. My father was a silhouette among many, tall and black against a near-black sky. Then I saw a sparkle and heard the fuse whisper up its length and strained to see the shape of it, the distance. And I heard the whump of the shell exploding and the high whistle of its flight; and when it blew, its empyreal flower filled the sky. They flung one rocket after another, two and four at once, boom! flash! One shell blew too low and showered us with sparks, no one scared but smiling at the glowworms wiggling through the night as though the night were earth and we the sky and they were rising with the rain.
ONLY RECENTLY HAVE I seen how much more occurred, hidden beneath the surface of his life. I presumed too much, the way all children do. It wasn’t only lack of sleep that peeled my father’s face bald in a fire’s dousing. He hates fire. Hates burning mills; they last all night and the next day like balefires signaling a battle. He hated every falling beam that shot arrows of flame and the sheets of fire that curtain rooms. And bodies: I heard only snatches of stories, words drifting up the stairs in the middle of the night after a fire as he talked to my mother in the living room in the dark. Pieces of bodies stuck to bedsprings like steaks to a grill, and, once, the ruin of dynamite. When my mother died I asked about cremation, and he flung it away with a meaty hand and chose a solid, airtight coffin. He sees the stake in fire. He suffered the fear of going in.
I was visiting my father last year at Christmastime. There are always fires at Christmastime, mostly trees turning to torches and chimneys flaring like Roman candles. And sure enough, the alarm sounded early in the evening, the same bright squeal from the same radio, for a flue fire. There have been a thousand flue fires in his life. (Each one is different, he tells me.)
As it happened, this time it was our neighbor’s flue, across the street, on Christmas Eve, and I put shoes on the kids and we dashed across to watch the circus, so fortunately near. The trucks maneuvered their length in the narrow street, bouncing over curbs and closing in, and before the trucks stopped the men were off and running, each with a job, snicking open panels, slipping levers, turning valves. We crept inside the lines and knelt beside the big wheels of the pumper, unnoticed. The world was a bustle of men with terse voices, the red and blue lights spinning round, the snaking hose erect with pressure. The men were hepped up, snappy with the brisk demands. And the house—the neighbor’s house I’d seen so many times before had gone strange, a bud blooming fire, a ribbon of light, behind a dark window. Men went in, faces down.
My father doesn’t go in anymore. He’s gotten too old, and the rules have changed; young men arrive, old men watch and wait. He still drives truck. He lives for it, for the history and the books, his models, the stories, meetings, card games. But he’s like a rooster plucked; I have a girlish song for Daddy, but I sing it too far away for him to hear.
I wanted to feel the hot dry cheeks of fever and roast with the rest of them. I wanted to go in, and I kept on wanting to long after my father and the others told me I couldn’t be a fireman because I wasn’t a man. I wanted to be the defender, to have the chance to do something inarguably good, pit myself against the blaze. I wanted it long after I grew up and became something else altogether, and I want it still.
“That which has been licked by fire has a different taste in the mouths of men,” writes Bachelard. He means food, but when I read that I thought of men, firemen, and how men licked by fire have a different taste to me.
I live in a city now, and the firefighters aren’t volunteers. They’re college graduates in Fire Science, and a few are women, smaller than the men but just as tough, women who took the steps I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—take. Still, I imagine big, brawny men sitting at too-small desks in little rooms lit with fluorescent lights, earnestly taking notes. They hear lectures on the chemistry of burning insulation, exponential curves of heat expansion, the codes of blueprint. They make good notes in small handwriting on lined, white paper, the pens little in their solid hands.
Too much muscle and nerve in these men and women both, these firemen; they need alarms, demands, heavy loads to carry up steep stairs. They need fires; the school desks are trembling, puny things, where they listen to men like my father, weary with the work of it, describing the secrets of going in.
Harper’s, January 1990
My father was a high school industrial arts teacher—wood shop, metal shop, welding, electronics. But when people ask me what my father did for a living, I almost always say, “He was a firefighter.” Fire was one of the most powerful sirens of my childhood, representing a world of danger, power, mystery. I thought that getting close to fire would get me close to my distant and difficult father. It didn’t work.
I disliked Harper’s title for this piece, which was “Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire.”
Gentleman Caller
OUR LIVES LIKE BOOKS, SPREAD FLAT WITH DOG-EARED disrespect. But the corners, turned down, torn, are signals of attention, too.
The phone rings. “Would you like to hear me come?” he whispers, and “Oh” is all I mumble in return. “It’s you.” He waits until the full, deep, dark of sleep to call; he waits to catch me with his hot surprise, to pull me from my moment into his, where things can’t wait. I exhale dreams; he begins to speak.
“Do you know what I have in my hand?” Questions, I think, so many questions. “Would you like to touch it, too?” I’m constrained by dark, he knows this; I’m shivering in a chilly room, and he is—nearby, so near, whispering my name with sly, blue hopes. He knows my name; he calls me by my given name in odd, close times like these. So slow and whiskered; I can still smell the dark aroma of my sheets. I wonder what I had been dreaming, why my palm on the telephone is damp. What is love, I think, but listening?
At first I played the critic. I was cool and unimpressed. I was unmoved. He seemed so obvious, so knowing. Derivative. I could count the gimmicks, even when they worked, hear the ticking of deliberate device behind his words. I was not willing. I had heard it all before.
“I want to kiss your pussy,” he says, all hissing consonants and short, dull vowels. Don’t try so hard, I think. Don’t let the reader hear your hurry; don’t be a slave to slang. All those tricks of confidence (My name! Of all things!). All those sudden shifts of plot, dramatic entrances and exits. So it went, night after night, the sharp cry of the phone and my sleepy alarm, his repetitions. And me, the gentle critic, only half-impatient.
Practice: he got better. I began to appreciate his gift. He learned to wrap the story up, the short-short type so hard to master, boom boom boom, in, out, done all at once. I was impressed. Here was the tale: coarse, suggestive breath, the thin whisper of my name coupled to his dreams, the wish for peace, for hope, for something swollen coddled within his hand so bold and rude. “Would you like to touch it, too?”
I get my robe and pull up a chair and let him play it out word for word. Then there is only silence on the line. “Go on,” I say. “Tell me more.” He tries to tell me how it feels, to struggle with these devil words. I’m bored by that. We’re all just waiting our turns, comparing stories. It’s only his story I want. Stories in the full, deep, dark which come out hard or false—and sometimes work like magic, the words filter through the air above our skin, spun sugar hanging in the air like webs. Cry out into the world, cry out chapter and verse. All the good stories have been told; it isn’t plot we worry over here, but voice. Dirty jokes and pleas for God are all the same. I sit; he calls to me for less, for this, for more.
“You want me in your mouth,” he says. “You want me in your mo
uth.” And there is a tiny query there, a catch and rise in the final word. Of course he’s right, I do, I do, but my mouth is where he is. Right here in the dark between my teeth and tongue. He can only hear my breath tumbling down the wire. I take the telephone between my legs, rub the cool receiver along my thigh, let him hear the rustle of the downy hair. In the distance I can hear him moan, the build of word on word, scene on scene, that perfect, careful construction of the story to its climax.
He talks, I’m there, his flavorful, imaginary me, his reader, he with no one to sleep beside and so many words, and all he can do is pick up the phone and make his impolitic plea, to one reader after another, and another, all night long.
Zyzzyva, Fall 1991
I did receive a number of what you could call obscene calls for a while. At first, I was alarmed, but one evening I suddenly understood them as story itself—as an attempt to explain something that words can only partly say. It took all the fear away and made my caller human again, and I felt a surprising sympathy for his struggle to articulate.
The Weight
I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH I WEIGH THESE DAYS, THOUGH I can make a good guess. For years I’d known that number, sometimes within a quarter pound, known how it changed from day to day and hour to hour. I want to weigh myself now; I lean toward the scale in the next room, imagine standing there, lining up the balance. But I don’t do it. Going this long, starting to break the scale’s spell—it’s like waking up suddenly sober.
By the time I was sixteen years old I had reached my adult height of five feet six inches and weighed 164 pounds. I weighed 164 pounds before and after a healthy pregnancy. I assume I weigh about the same now; nothing significant seems to have happened to my body, this same old body I’ve had all these years. I usually wear a size 14, a common clothing size for American women. On bad days I think my body looks lumpy and misshapen. On my good days, which are more frequent lately, I think I look plush and strong; I think I look like a lot of women whose bodies and lives I admire.
I’m not sure when the word fat first sounded pejorative to me, or when I first applied it to myself. My grandmother was a petite woman, the only one in my family. She stole food from other people’s plates, and hid the debris of her own meals so that no one would know how much she ate. My mother was a size 14, like me, all her adult life; we shared clothes. She fretted endlessly over food scales, calorie counters, and diet books. She didn’t want to quit smoking because she was afraid she would gain weight, and she worried about her weight until she died of cancer five years ago. Dieting was always in my mother’s way, always there in the conversations above my head, the dialogue of stocky women. But I was strong and healthy and didn’t pay too much attention to my weight until I was grown.
It probably wouldn’t have been possible for me to escape forever. It doesn’t matter that whole human epochs have celebrated big men and women, because the brief period in which I live does not; since I was born, even the voluptuous calendar girl has gone. Today’s models, the women whose pictures I see constantly, unavoidably, grow more minimal by the day. When I berate myself for not looking like—whomever I think I should look like that day, I don’t really care that no one looks like that. I don’t care that Michelle Pfeiffer doesn’t look like the photographs I see of Michelle Pfeiffer. I want to look—think I should look—like the photographs. I want her little miracles: the makeup artists, photographers, and computer imagers who can add a mole, remove a scar, lift the breasts, widen the eyes, narrow the hips, flatten the curves. The final product is what I see, have seen my whole adult life. And I’ve seen this: even when big people become celebrities, their weight is constantly remarked upon and scrutinized; their successes seem always to be in spite of their weight. I thought my successes must be, too.
I feel myself expand and diminish from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. If I tell someone my weight, I change in their eyes: I become bigger or smaller, better or worse, depending on what that number, my weight, means to them. I know many men and women, young and old, gay and straight, who look fine, whom I love to see and whose faces and forms I cherish, who despise themselves for their weight. For their ordinary, human bodies. They and I are simply bigger than we think we should be. We always talk about weight in terms of gains and losses, and don’t wonder at the strangeness of the words. In trying always to lose weight, we’ve lost hope of simply being seen for ourselves.
My weight has never actually affected anything—it’s never seemed to mean anything one way or the other to how I lived. Yet for the last ten years I’ve felt quite bad about it. After a time, the number on the scale became my totem, more important than my experience—it was layered, metaphorical, metaphysical, and it had bewitching power. I thought if I could change that number I could change my life.
In my mid-twenties I started secretly taking diet pills. They made me feel strange, half-crazed, vaguely nauseated. I lost about twenty-five pounds, dropped two sizes, and bought new clothes. I developed rituals and taboos around food, ate very little, and continued to lose weight. For a long time afterward I thought it only coincidental that with every passing week I also grew more depressed and irritable.
I could recite the details, but they’re remarkable only for being so common. I lost more weight until I was rather thin, and then I gained it all back. It came back slowly, pound by pound, in spite of erratic and melancholy and sometimes frantic dieting, dieting I clung to even though being thin had changed nothing, had meant nothing to my life except that I was thin. Looking back I remember blinding moments of shame and lightning-bright moments of clearheadedness, which inevitably gave way to rage at the time I’d wasted—rage that eventually would become, once again, self-disgust and the urge to lose weight. So it went, until I weighed exactly what I’d weighed when I began.
I USED TO be attracted to the sharp angles of the chronic dieter—the caffeine-wild, chain-smoking, skinny women I see sometimes. I considered them a pinnacle not of beauty but of will. Even after I gained back my weight, I wanted to be like that, controlled and persevering, live that underfed life so unlike my own rather sensual and disorderly existence. I felt I should always be dieting, for the dieting of it; dieting had become a rule, a given, a constant. Every ordinary value is distorted in this lens. I felt guilty for not being completely absorbed in my diet, for getting distracted, for not caring enough all the time. The fat person’s character flaw is a lack of narcissism. She’s let herself go.
So I would begin again—and at first it would all seem so … easy. Simple arithmetic. After all, 3,500 calories equal one pound of fat—so the books and articles by the thousands say. I would calculate how long it would take to achieve the magic number on the scale, to succeed, to win. All past failures were suppressed. If 3,500 calories equal one pound, all I needed to do was cut 3,500 calories out of my intake every week. The first few days of a new diet would be colored with a sense of control—organization and planning, power over the self. Then the basic futile misery took over.
I would weigh myself with foreboding, and my weight would determine how went the rest of my day, my week, my life. When 3,500 calories didn’t equal one pound lost after all, I figured it was my body that was flawed, not the theory. One friend, who had tried for years to lose weight following prescribed diets, made what she called “an amazing discovery.” The real secret to a diet, she said, was that you had to be willing to be hungry all the time. You had to eat even less than the diet allowed.
I believed that being thin would make me happy. Such a pernicious, enduring belief. I lost weight and wasn’t happy and saw that elusive happiness disappear in a vanishing point, requiring more—more self-disgust, more of the misery of dieting. Knowing all that I know now about the biology and anthropology of weight, knowing that people naturally come in many shapes and sizes, knowing that diets are bad for me and won’t make me thin—sometimes none of this matters. I look in the mirror and think: Who am I kidding? I’ve got to do something about myself. Only then will
this vague discontent disappear. Then I’ll be loved.
FOR AGES HUMANS believed that the body helped create the personality, from the humors of Galen to W. H. Sheldon’s somatotypes. Sheldon distinguished between three templates—endomorph, mesomorph, and ectomorph—and combined them into hundreds of variations with physical, emotional, and psychological characteristics. When I read about weight now, I see the potent shift in the last few decades: the modern culture of dieting is based on the idea that the personality creates the body. Our size must be in some way voluntary, or else it wouldn’t be subject to change. A lot of my misery over my weight wasn’t about how I looked at all. I was miserable because I believed I was bad, not my body. I felt truly reduced then, reduced to being just a body and nothing more.
Fat is perceived as an act rather than a thing. It is antisocial, and curable through the application of social controls. Even the feminist revisions of dieting, so powerful in themselves, pick up the theme: the hungry, empty heart; the woman seeking release from sexual assault, or the man from the loss of the mother, through food and fat. Fat is now a symbol not of the personality but of the soul—the cluttered, neurotic, immature soul.
Fat people eat for “mere gratification,” I read, as though no one else does. Their weight is intentioned, they simply eat “too much,” their flesh is lazy flesh. Whenever I went on a diet, eating became cheating. One pretzel was cheating. Two apples instead of one was cheating—a large potato instead of a small, carrots instead of broccoli. It didn’t matter which diet I was on; diets have failure built in, failure is in the definition. Every substitution—even carrots for broccoli—was a triumph of desire over will. When I dieted, I didn’t feel pious just for sticking to the rules. I felt condemned for the act of eating itself, as though my hunger were never normal. My penance was to not eat at all.
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