Invitation to a Bonfire

by Adrienne Celt

  I wanted to believe I’d grown since then, but was that true? Once again I found myself choosing between happiness and good, as my father had insisted I must, and choosing wrong. Vera had always had everything—me, nothing. I knew this. But it was one thing to borrow, and another to steal. One thing to run my fingers over her throat, and another to pinch them closed and squeeze. I would have preferred to absorb her instead, drinking her essence up through a straw. But I didn’t have that option. I had Lev, and he had his opinions.

  41.

  And so I became a spy. Every morning I set my alarm for a half hour earlier than I was used to, and instead of turning left at the end of my street I turned right. My new path to the Donne School campus was roundabout, but it took me past Lev and Vera’s house in a neighborhood two ticks more upscale than my own. Their street was beautifully leafy, green in the summer, then golden, then bare; now it was springtime, and the ground was pocked with the pale, bent figures of emerging crocuses. There was a particular mother who, in that period, sometimes walked the street with her infant girl at six A.M., hushing the child on her shoulder or else pointing out bluebirds in the trees; it reminded me of the walks I used to take through Maple Hill during my first winter, when everything was limned with ice. An innocence, I suppose, shared between both.

  Over time, I got good at pretending to be casual, checking my lipstick in a pocket mirror or stooping down to tie my shoe. Buying myself a minute or two to dawdle without calling attention to myself. I watched Vera carry a coffee cup—or was it tea?—through a doorway (I presumed from the kitchen) and up to the bay window in the front of the house. She rarely lingered long, but I enjoyed seeing how her hair changed from day to day. Loose waves, low chignon; visible static or perfectly smooth. In the mornings she always wore a kimono-style dressing gown of purple and white, which made her look a bit like a magician.

  After she disappeared from my view I’d walk on and arrive at the greenhouse by six forty-five, unlocking it with my black metal key and breathing deep the sweet wet mix of mineral and vegetable, oxygen pulsing from the space’s veins. Sometimes I’d stop and gag for a moment, trying to force out the sickness that settled, more and more often, in the pit of my stomach. Work was the only place I could feel normal.

  And work I did. I checked for insect infestations with a level of attention normally reserved (or so I assume) for technicians monitoring dials at the making of a bomb. I coddled my favorites. The small saguaro cactus I’d acquired at the beginning of my tenure had gone gangrenous—it was too hard to keep it dry, especially since I’d made the mistake of potting it first with a mixture of peat soil, which “absolutely invited mites” as John so helpfully put it. The bottom shriveled up like a raisin, and the top looked pale all the time, with weak spots. But instead of giving up I checked on it every day, repotting it with a great deal of sand and moving it around the greenhouse to make sure it never got sunburned or spent too long languishing in the shade. I helped Donne girls sprout pea pods, and grew a new variety of tomato for the cafeteria on Hilda’s request: a fussy plant we started from seeds her mother sent over from their home garden in Nebraska. John and I added goldfish to the lily pond, and occasionally they splashed startlingly in the quiet.

  What I wanted to know was whatever marinated in Vera’s core. The small and secret preferences. Did she like tea biscuits brought over from England? Did she sneeze when she cracked too much pepper on her food? When she saw the color yellow, did she hear bells, and when she hummed to herself were the notes blue and green and melancholic? Was there pity in her marrow? I often returned to the house at lunchtime and saw her sweeping away on foot to who knows where; Lev always took the car, although he readily admitted that she was the better driver, and wherever she went she had no interest in taxis or buses or limousines. Her purses always matched her shoes, and both were sensible but stylish: a low heel that still somehow managed to make her legs look longer, her ankles slim. She had perfected that purposeful stride which generates gyrational speed from a sexual wobble at the hips. In May she stepped on a robin’s eggshell, crushing it beneath her toe. I don’t know why I thought any of this would help me.

  I tried to follow her once when she left the house, but without turning around or even—to my knowledge—realizing I was there, she took evasive maneuvers involving a flower garden and a row of parked mail trucks, each identical. She always did have a habit of disappearing at the trickier moments. Nonetheless, there is no level, I found, of cruelty or savvy in a victim that makes you feel better about contemplating her murder. Not better, no, but perhaps more accustomed. I wondered if maybe she was unhappy in her marriage, if anyone had ever felt sorry for her, in all her life. I wondered if she was doing wicked things to Lev’s manuscripts, remembering that word she’d scrawled: askew. The longer I spent around Vera and my plants, the more the tenor and tone of the projects bled into one another. If Lev was right, and she and I were like two roses from one bush, then we were just dead-heading old flowers to allow for new growth. In this case: her head, my growth. A fairly painless and ordinary process for most gardeners that grew more and more difficult for me, until I found myself sobbing down the front of my shirt, staring at the pruning shears in my hand like an absolute imbecile.

  42.

  Point of interest: when you prune a plant, a certain number of them actually bleed. Take the rubber plant, or ficus, common to office desks and dusty shelves. If you cut a bit away with a knife—making sure to cut towards your thumb, to maintain control and avoid slicing open your hand; there are tendons in there that can roll back all the way to the elbow—a thick white syrup will pour out down the stem. Eventually the wound will callus and the plant will heal, not only growing in a more attractive or convenient direction but often sprouting two to four new stems, getting bushier and bushier for all you cut away. Which sounds, from a certain angle, like a threat: it hemorrhages as you plunge in the knife, but after that gets stronger and fitter, shedding limbs like so many shirts and stockings, lingerie dangled off the end of a finger before dropping, drifting to the ground.

  An Oral History of Vera Orlov, née Volkov, cont’d

  Recorded by the Maple Hill Police Department

  ROBERT HORNE, PUBLISHER OF HORNE BOOKS

  “Yes, it’s absolutely uncommon for one of my authors to have a wife so involved in the process. Most of them keep their family life well out of it—distracts from the artistic method, you see. Not easy to dip into the well of inspiration when there’s a toddler running around your feet, or a woman asking for pocket money so she can pick up milk at the corner store. But Vera’s not that type of woman.

  “Yes, of course I call her Vera. We’re on excellent terms. She was the one who initially contacted me and said they were interested in bringing Lev’s books to American audiences. Of course I was excited as soon as I saw the first translated manuscript for Knife, Knave. His French editor’s a friend of mine, so I’d been hearing good things, but you see, gossip is no substitute for the feeling of holding a bit of genius in your hands, and responding to it in your own individual way. That’s something people don’t understand about the editorial process, I think: how much of it’s intuitive, almost mystical. Sometimes you can tell, intellectually, that you’re reading a great piece of writing, and still not want to come near it with a ten-foot pole.

  “Anyway, no, I haven’t spoken to her in several months. Lev had a big plan that he’d sworn me to secrecy on—exciting, but really hush-hush, you know writers. They always think someone’s going to steal their ideas. It’s not uncommon for the pair of them to go dark when he’s working on something. When she has something to say, she’ll say it. And of course, I’ll let you know, if that would be helpful.”

  [Notes indicate Mr. Horne was polite overall, but spoke in a rather tart manner and hurried the officers out after making his statement, claiming business obligations. Officers were then stopped by an associate of Mr. Horne’s down the hall, one James Tipton.]

  JAME
S TIPTON, PUBLICIST, HORNE BOOKS

  “I’m not supposed to say this, but I really despise her. Nothing is ever good enough for that woman. And my god, can she not take a compliment.”

  OCTOBER REDFORD, EDITOR, STORIES OF ASTOUNDING WONDER MAGAZINE

  “She tried to up-sell me on the price for a story in my own magazine. [chuckles] Called me up and said, ‘I know you pay twenty-five dollars for an ordinary piece of fiction, but wouldn’t you pay more if someone could guarantee you were buying an early work of brilliance?’ Gave her husband forty, just on moxie. Can’t say she was wrong, either—we still get notices about that story. It has shades of Felice in it, like an artist’s sketch before they make a painting, see? That’s really the only time I ever talked to her, though. What exactly are you looking for?”

  Zoya

  43.

  John came into the greenhouse one morning in spring, holding a coffee for me.

  “Knock, knock.” He rapped his knuckles on my head and handed me the cup.

  “Well, look at you,” I said. “Almost polite. So close.”

  He shrugged, but couldn’t mask his pleasure at the compliment. We’d seen less of one another lately, and I knew John worried he’d done something wrong. But what could I say to ease his mind? Every afternoon I raced home and waited for Lev in the kitchen with a pot of tea, shedding clothes on the way to the table. Or else found a note in my satchel that named just a time and a place—the town library, the local park, by the rhododendrons—where I was to arrive alone, and wait. Sometimes I waited for close to an hour, until the loneliness was overwhelming, the quiet screaming in my ears and telling me to Get out, get out. But before I could, I’d feel a hand on my shoulder, pressing me gently to some half-secret place and then reaching up under my skirt, pulling aside my underwear. The rule being, I must never look around.

  For years, John had been bothering me to make more friends, saying there were better things for a young lady to do than spend her Friday nights playing board games with a middle-aged man and his wife. A fine sentiment, certainly. But now that I was occupied, he didn’t seem to like it. I suppose he thought I’d meet some girls in town, or bother Nadine into the occasional movie. Something we could talk about after. (Dear John, I realize I’ve been out of touch, but a man’s been investigating my hip bones with his teeth.)

  “There’s a flower show happening, you know.” He was examining the banana tree, pinching a still-green fruit between thumb and forefinger. “Couple of towns over. We should go and see if there’s anything worth picking up.”

  “Alright,” I said. “That sounds fun.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. I’ll make a thermos of hot chocolate.”

  John laughed. “It’s seventy degrees outside.”

  “At home, my grandmother always said you should drink hot things when it’s hot and cold things when it’s cold, so your inside temperature doesn’t get confused and conflict with the air.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded, and knocked his hand away from the tree. I wasn’t thinking, really. It was a nice day, the warm air after the final cold snap that turns people cheerful and goofy. Anyway, she did say that.

  “That might be the first time you ever mentioned your family to me,” John said. I froze for a moment, but managed to make it look like I was just inspecting the bruise he’d left on the banana leaf.

  “Well, I only knew her when I was really young.”

  “What about your parents? I mean, I know the story: orphan boat.” He winced. “But you must’ve had some time together with them.”

  My parents, who protected me and ferried me between country and town. They were poor, but hard workers. Isn’t that what people said? Papa, with his dark beard, mamochka with her hair tied back. The last time I saw my mother, she was begging me to stay with her, even though we could hear the boots of agents walking door to door, looking for dissidents. She held me back by the arm, by my dress, by my hair, telling me to be quiet and save us. But I still believed in the revolution, then.

  “Maybe,” I said, “there’s a reason I don’t talk about it.”

  John held up his hands in surrender.

  “I’ll pull around the truck,” he said.

  44.

  My mother used to take me to the market to pretend we were looking for dressmaking cloth, though in fact we got all of my clothes second-hand, and she wasn’t adept enough to take in sewing work; her fingers, thick and callused from digging, made it hard for her to stitch with any precision. Still, for some reason we both enjoyed walking past the stands of pickled cabbage and the large cages full of watermelon, ending up among the rolls of fabric that hung from wagons and got propped up in stalls. Many old babushki lay out crocheting there, which I was not allowed to touch. Lacework, wool work. My mother was on a perpetual hunt for cloth the deepest shade of blue.

  “Probably have to look at silks,” she’d say. “Because of the way the cloth takes the color. Looks too black on cotton. What we want is the night sky before it’s really night, see?” Together we stretched out bolt after bolt, sometimes asking for a tiny swatch to take home and “think about,” which we usually received, even though the shopkeepers knew we’d never buy. My mother kept these swatches sewn together in a tiny booklet, and if you flipped through you could start to see the blue she was imagining, with elements of darkness and elements of flash and glow.

  The market, chaotic and jumbled as the best of them are, was also a good place to find back-alley action if you knew where to look. You might see, for instance, people trading secrets, people handing off illegal goods or evading tariffs, a whispered conversation followed by a man reaching into a pile of potatoes and pulling out a bottle of scotch. Illicit texts sewn into the spines of Party histories, photographic proof of murders tucked into the pocket of a tailored coat. American cigarettes and chocolate bars hidden beneath piles of beads. Often, old women stood on top of their quarry and spread their skirts out to protect it from prying eyes. The secret police knew about this, of course, but mostly let things be. They had to get candy for their sweethearts too, after all.

  Sometimes, though, the air changed. We’d walk up for a closer look at a pile of apples and see a man shoulder through the crowd pushing a clip into his gun. My mother would grab me by the back of my shirt and pull me close, out of danger; she had a way of disappearing into the background of a scene that I’ve never been able to replicate. Once we saw a whole building come down, the wall in front of us crumbling to its knees and catching a girl who’d been about to offer us a mouthful of cider. I swear in an instant my mother turned us both to smoke, that we floated above the rubble and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t cry, as men kicked through the market’s husk and shot survivors in the face so no one would be left to remember. Some of these men we’d seen before, laughing, ruffling the same girl’s hair. But this was also my mother’s wisdom: she knew that even the nicest person could turn a nastier cheek.

  My father had disappeared the year before, and we would never know where. Though we could guess. (A memory: One day I came home from school and he was missing, his absence somehow a presence in the rooms. My mother sat at the kitchen table with a lock of hair between her lips, which she wouldn’t move to brush aside. She sucked on her hair and I crept to the bed I made each evening on our sofa to hide myself beneath the blanket.) Our house became more cramped in his absence, and watchful, though I would still not admit that the Party had done or could do wrong. So, I thought, she must be the one who was.

  Before the agents reached our door I sprinted out to meet them, closing my mother in behind me. What happened to her when the men kicked their way into our home? I don’t know. I didn’t see. I imagine her flickering between forms, now the wooden grain of a chair, now the filament in a bulb. I imagine the agents hauling her up by the arms as she disappeared into the fabric of her dress, so it fell empty in their fingers. Perhaps she became the waxed thread in a cross-stitch, or the brass button on my father’
s shirt, which she’d kept and worn like a sweater. The stain on the rug from when I had the flu as a child and threw up before she could get me to the sink. My birthing blood. Any putrid element, mouse shit or exposed wire, which the men might overlook or drop with disgust. Maybe she escaped somehow, melting into that deep and glorious blue, which I hadn’t known before was the color of despair at its most unutterable.

  But even if she did manage to transform—into an elixir, a miracle—I know the men would’ve just barged in and soaked my mother up in sponges, then wrung her out on the floor of a prison so cold she froze. Into a puddle of ice. Into the purple body of a woman left for dead. Later I saw pictures of such bodies, printed in newspapers as evidence of the horrors of war. But who was I to judge people, to judge war, when I had run into the arms of my captors with a grateful cry at being rescued by the Party faithful? Later letting myself be smuggled out of the home for girls and onto a boat when I realized there was no fidelity except to life. No creed of truth, no heart that’s home.

  I’m beginning to change my mind about this, but it’s taken an awfully long time.

  45.

  The flower show was held in a big pavilion—a series of tents connected by muslin walkways, which was also used for state fair exhibitions and smelled of pigs and hay. John and I enjoyed the birds of paradise, each shaped like a Technicolor blade, and picked one up that was orange and magenta just to make the Donne girls squeal with glee. The local plants were mostly mundane, but several farmers had lugged in prize gourds from the previous fall, dried out and hollow but still impressive. When you held your ear up to the larger ones, they made a sound like the ocean, akin to a seashell. We ate popcorn cooked in a kettle and drank the chocolate I insisted on dragging around; too warm, perhaps, but delicious all the same.