by Lucy Ellmann
Not everything is lost in a fire. The firemen threw all our furniture out onto the front lawn and doused it with water and foam, so later we found whole drawers of intact, if damp, stuff: clothes and board games and Christmas ornaments, books, papers, schoolwork and prehistoric family heirlooms nobody wanted. I didn’t care, I just watched the firemen, whose heroism I now connected with my own. It was a thrill just to be up so late! But nobody could send me to bed: no bed!
Later, it was decided that the fire had started in the kitchen and was therefore somehow Mom’s fault—she’d recently resumed a few of her kitchen duties. Women are the bearers of fire, after all. They’re always fooling with it: ironing things and boiling things and baking things and burning things. But the actual cause didn’t matter anyway, except to the fire inspectors—the insurance company paid for a whole new house to be built. Mom insisted on the new one being exactly like the old one, right down to the tricky window catches, the one and only bathroom, the thin walls, cramped bedrooms, lack of porch, and every other inconvenient detail. The only outright changes she allowed were a few more closets, a slightly bigger fridge, and insulation in the attic so that I could have it as my teenage lair, in tribute to my bravery and strength of mind in an emergency (Bee’s bravery went wholly unrewarded).
While the new house was built, we all got to live in one room in a motel—not a log cabin this time, just a dump where we ate hot dogs every night, and Mom resented the maid service for depriving her of her usual housework routine. We slept in two big double beds, Mom and Bee in one, Dad and me in the other. For six months! No sign of Cliff now (his parents had zipped him off to a prep school, just to get him away from Bee, or so she said). Dad never spoke, just drove us over once in a while to see how things were shaping up with the charred remains of what was once 39 Cranberry Avenue.
My standing at school went up briefly, when news spread of my heroism. Until then my popularity had largely depended on the free samples of gum my father loaded me up with for “product-testing” purposes. He was trying to turn America into a nation of ruminants (I guess it worked!). I was supposed to get kids’ responses to the jingles while they ate the gum: Catch the Chattanooga chew-chew, all the way to Virtue! Or, It’s bad to be glum! Try Virtue Gum! And if you think I wasn’t regularly beaten up by kids chanting, Every monkey in the zoo knows I love Virtue! you’re nuts. Did my dad want to get me killed?
Pete and I became engrossed in firemen and especially fire engines, studying them intently, from the Button & Blake sixteen-man hand-pumper of 1857, to the “Type 7” double-tank combination engine of 1911. Also the Firecracker, an old engine with a hydraulic platform that had a telescopic upper boom capable of reaching seventy-five feet! That sort of stuff killed us. We loved every aspect of firefighting: the siphons, the stowage, the hooks and the ladders, the pumps, the hose reels, fire poles, foam, dousing techniques, tenders, the different divisions, uniforms, fire stations, and old photographs of fire crews all lined up in front of their apparatus. We even liked the “inevitable crowd of onlookers” who gather at every fire as if it’s their civic duty to gloat. (This is how Cary Grant manages to steal the pickup truck in North by Northwest—everybody’s looking the other way, staring at the exploding tanker. People can’t resist a fire!) Pete and I had a problem with the Dalmatians though: we felt they could be asked to do a bit more, at least attend fires and pull a hose or something.
Mom redecorated our new house with a whole new bunch of knickknacks to be dusted, and Bee got fat, conspicuously unheroic, wearing an old coat all day and night, smoking dope, and tearing her hair out. The manic playing of Bach partitas on the violin shook the house, and her graffiti sideline shook the town. Nobody in Virtue and Chewing Gum suspected a girl was behind all the Day-Glo BH’s all over the place, but they should have, the letters looked so much like bulbous female breasts and buttocks.
There were complaints in the local paper, the Daily Virtue, about the town being terrorized (or territorized) by this BH character, and about a million janitors scrubbed away at the emblems with ineffectual brushes and corrosives, while Bee sat in the woods, glowering. I told her it’s bad to be glum, try Virtue gum—and she swatted me like a fly for about five years.
“And that’s how I got into plastic surgery,” I explained to Mimi, who by now was lying on her stomach on the window seat, looking up at me, with Bubbles nestled in the small of her back. “I started out as a burns specialist, treating kids who’d disfigured themselves with fireworks, and firemen caught in back-flashes, or girls who’d had acid thrown at them by spurned lovers, and plenty of car-crash victims. Then I moved into facial-trauma cases: beatings and knifings. From there it was but a small step to reconstructive surgery after mastectomies. But the practice just kept going upmarket, everybody trying to make their pile… and now all I get are women who want to give their husbands new tits for Christmas! Women who want to be babes, and men who want the Berlusconi makeover, so they can date babes. I know it’s all nonsense, but I don’t know what to do about it… ” But by then Mimi had dislodged Bubs and was holding my head against her soft, warm, original-edition belly.
THE IDES OF MARCH
Mimi was still asleep in my bed when Gertrude called.
“What’s the matter?” I asked gruffly. “It’s kind of early.”
“Japan.”
“What?”
“This is a major disaster, Harrison!”
“The earthquake, you mean.” It was four days since the tsunami.
“No! My dividends! Japanese shares have plunged. I invested heavily in the Far East.”
“Gertrude, the bodies are still washing up on the shore! How do you think the Japanese would feel about your money worries?”
“They’re worried about the effects on the economy too,” she answered.
“Oh yeah? Who? The people searching for their relatives, or the radioactive workers in the nuclear plant?” All I could think about were the pictures of Japanese rescue workers pausing to pray before searching debris for the bodies of strangers.
“Well, I heard that people in Tokyo are a bit nervous about aftershocks, but people south of there aren’t worried… The Japanese have no capacity for empathy, Harrison. It’s not part of their culture. They don’t care about people they don’t know.”
“No, Gertrude, you don’t care about people you don’t know. you have no capacity for empathy!” I hung up. The woman was a menace. She’d probably caused the earthquake and tsunami! I should have known, when she ruined Paris for me, turning the whole place into one big shopping mall for herself. (REASON NO. 894: Anyone who can wreck Paris can wreck the world.)
I needed a drink, or drugs! I needed to let off steam… But Mimi was still asleep, and I tried not to mention Gertrude too much anyway. Also, Mimi wasn’t really up on the News (she’d made a decision years before not to follow current events, since they were unbearable, and she had exhausted herself trying to think up solutions). She was made aware of major stuff like the earthquake in Japan by going to diners where people would talk about it, and bars that had unignorable TV screens that gave you devastating headlines in between football games.
But Bee and I had an agreement that, whenever the world was threatened by a nuclear accident, we had to talk. So I had someone to go berserk with now. I got her during her lunch—she was eating a grilled cheese sandwich (like Mom), something she’d personally introduced into England. I gave her the latest on Gertrude’s atrocities (which now seemed to me inextricably linked to those of the nuclear industry.)
“Who gave nuclear energy adherents the right to make the world uninhabitable? They should all be indicted for crimes against humanity,” I said. “And that includes Gertrude!”
“They’re all such liars, that’s what gets me,” said Bee. “The nuclear industry attracts the biggest liars in the world. It’s just about money. The BBC too! All they talk about is the Japanese economy. They’ve already forgotten the dead. It’s so… churlish!” (Ah ha! Bee h
ad been converted to the word “churlish.” That comforted me somewhat.)
“Bee, how could I have been with that creep for five years?”
She laughed. “You weren’t really with her. You were… kind of out of it for a while there, Harry.”
“Aw, shit.”
“Hey, I saved a woman’s life!” said Bee.
My sister, whom I remembered a shivering wreck in my kitchen, was now a rescuer of women! She’d been walking behind some couple in Canterbury, and heard the man haranguing the woman. So Bee walked faster, trying to get close enough to deflate the guy a bit, or at least embarrass him into silence. Then the couple stopped in a doorway, and Bee had to walk past. But when she got to the corner, she saw that the guy had pulled a knife and was shoving it in the woman’s face. So Bee ran back screaming at him and the man took off. By then the woman’s throat had been slashed, and she crumpled to the ground. Great place, Canterbury. I’d assumed England was pretty safe!
Bee tied something around the woman’s neck and tried to phone for an ambulance but got put through to Liverpool for some reason, hundreds of miles away. Then some other woman who’d seen what happened offered to take them to a hospital in Ashford, only about fifteen miles away (the Canterbury hospital had no real ER). They finally got the injured woman there and she’d been stitched up and was going to be all right.
“But I was scared the whole way that she’d hemorrhage or something,” Bee told me. “I wished you were there! What good’s a doctor in the family, if he’s miles away in an emergency?”
“Bee, can’t you just stay in your studio and make your Coziness Sculptures?”
“Oh, I’m not doing them at the moment. I got sick of all the quibbling about money. I’ve started something new. I’m out on my bike most days, doing research.”
“What are you researching? Daffodils? Thatched roofs? Knife crime?”
“Heartache. I’m collecting inscriptions from tombstones, mostly war graves. There were so many people killed in England in war after war, you’d think there’d be nothing left of this little country. There isn’t much, actually. The weird thing is, they always mention the guy’s role in the Army, as if the real tragedy isn’t that he died, but that they lost a sapper, whatever that is, or a gunner, or a pilot.”
“I think it’s a guy who digs trenches.”
To get to these graves, Bee cycled. She would cycle to the train station in Canterbury, the one called the West Station, although it was further east than the East Station (“as if the whole town revolved on its axis at some point,” she said), cycle straight onto the train, sit there for a few short stops, then cycle off at some country station, riding right along the platform, out the gate, and onto the road, never getting off her bike for a moment. It was usually a short spin from the station to the churchyard, which she could see from the train by checking for a steeple. (Bee seemed innocently proud of the simplicity of these little journeys of hers.) And there in some old graveyard she’d note down inscriptions like:
WE ARE PARTED ERIC DEAR
FOR JUST A LITTLE WHILE.
AGED TWENTY.
Or,
A NOBLE BRAVE BOY AND SON.
GREATLY BELOVED.
AGED SEVENTEEN.
“Seventeen!” Bee said to me. “It’s unbearable.”
“Just don’t get yourself killed, Bee, on that bike of yours. I don’t want to have to come over and bury you in one of those graveyards: ‘SADLY MISSED. DOPE GOT HERSELF RUN OVER. AGED FIFTY-THREE.’ ”
The memorial that bugged Bee the most though was right around the corner from her house. It wasn’t a war grave but an ugly obelisk commemorating a whole load of Christian martyrs who’d been burned at the stake on that very spot in about 1550. Their Canterbury martyrdom must remind Bee of her own, I suggested. But it wasn’t so much the way they died, or why, that irked Bee—it was the way they were commemorated on the monument. Most of the martyrs were named in full, but two were referred to only as “Bradbridge’s widow” and “Wilson’s wife.”
“It’s so… patronizing,” Bee said. “You go to all the trouble of getting yourself burned at the stake, and they can’t even bother to remember your name?”
“Bit of a wasted effort, you feel?”
“It reminds me of Dad! Of course I wore that old coat all the time! Because he made me feel like crap.”
“I don’t really see the connection—”
“Men patronizing women, that’s the connection!… Always making me feel like I wasn’t the daughter he wanted… But I was the daughter he made me,” she said, starting to sound tearful. She was right about him: to me he’d voiced his revulsion, not just for her coat, but for her retreat to Maine to live on a commune with a bunch of hippies and wild dogs, a lifestyle choice designed to drive him bananas. Also, her decision to go to art school, which he refused to pay for—while I compliantly took his dough, got the fancy education, and became a doctor not handy in an emergency.
“Bee.”
“You’re not going to defend him, are you?” she said.
“No. I was going to commend you, for saving that woman’s life. I think they should make you Queen Bee.”
“I’d rather be a dame.”
“Well, you are abroad.”
An old joke, but she fell for it, which was a relief: there’s nothing worse than hearing your sister cry three thousand miles away.
“Bee, I, uh, I told Mimi about the fire.” Bee was surprised, since we never usually mentioned it to anybody. “I still have one question though. Where was Dad that night? What was he doing outside? I never figured that out—”
“Harry… ” she said in an odd tone.
“What?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Dad started the fire.”
“Dad… ? Oh, come off it!”
“No. Harry. He tried to kill us that night. Tried to kill us all! The guy was a maniac! Mom protected him, she took the blame. But that’s why she was never the same after the fire. She wasn’t just mourning the house, she was regretting the whole marriage!”
“She should have left him,” I mumbled.
“Mom believed you stick with your husband, Harry, even if he turns out to be a gargoyle drooling rainwater off the Chrysler Building.”
After we hung up, I headed into the sunny dining room where Mimi (awake at last!) was holding a jar of Cheryl’s please-date-me marmalade up to the light, marveling at it as if it was Roman glass or something! I couldn’t stand the stuff. It might look pretty, but it came at a price: Cheryl kept loading me up with preserves in the expectation of romantic results. I can’t be bought that easily!
“How can you not want this marmalade?” Mimi asked.
“Mmmh?”
“Just look at the sun coming through it,” she said, as she turned the jar this way and that, admiring its amber color and the bits of orange rind floating in the clear jelly, which, to me, looked like tadpoles suffocating in swamp water.
“Jams are seriously undervalued,” Mimi went on. “Just like quilts, and cooking. Because women did them.”
“Hmnh.” I looked around vaguely for the New York Times.
“When in fact they’re some of the best things in the world!” she said happily, putting the marmalade down among its fellows, in order to wrestle a coffee capsule into Gertrude’s high-tech coffee machine.
“What?” I really couldn’t remember what she’d been talking about.
“Jam, Harrison.”
“Ham?!”
“Jam! I’m talking homemade jam here, women’s work. Part of a whole world of unpaid work women do… Probably a remnant of matriarchy and prehistoric, nonmonetary work, when people just chipped in and did what was needed… Hey, you’re not listening!”
“Yes I am.”
“You didn’t hear a thing!” she said, and suddenly took up a boxing pose, as if she was going to give me the ol’ one-two. I went over to her and took her hands, her strong hand
s that I loved.
“It’s just… something Bee just told me over the phone.”
“Bee?! Well… what?”
I sighed. “That the fire… wasn’t accidental. It was my dad.”
“He started it?” She didn’t sound too surprised.
“Yeah.”
She lifted her hand to my cheek, and kissed me on the neck.
“Did you already guess?!” I asked her, astounded.
“Well, it did sound a bit fishy,” she said.
We sat at the table in silence for a while, surrounded by frog spawn.
“I still don’t know why though,” I mumbled.
“Because he lost his job maybe? The pension and everything. You think he was worried about money?”
“Aw, he didn’t lose his job. That was a big lie. He was just in a bad mood. No, he stuck with that dumb gum job till the day he left town for good. Bee thinks he was sick of having a sick wife… A pubescent daughter too. He hated Bee as she got older… Fathers are the worst!” I said, thinking of the pole-dancer’s dad.
THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING
It was spring at last, the sky a creamy blue, tweety-birds a-tweeting, lords and ladies leaping. In Central Park anyway, on every bench, against every tree, couples were frantically entwined. It was like Watteau in there! One sunny day, and out come the flirtatious looks and the mandolins.
“What a cliché,” Mimi witheringly observed. “Just because it’s spring doesn’t mean you have to mate!”
I was about to concur, the first impulse of the lover, when I remembered that all of my own romances, the more major ones at least, had begun in the spring (including this one)—how biological can you get? And yet we soon we succumbed to some canoodling of our own, along with everybody else.