by Rene Steinke
J o never had any patience for my fascination with Hanna. She was “just crazy” or “some woman” to her—anyone who had 62 / RENÉ STEINKE
abandoned her family (as Jo’s mother had) wasn’t worth her time.
Hanna last visited the month after my father died. She’d heard about it too late to come to the funeral. I was fifteen, still immature enough to believe that if she liked us, she’d keep coming back. It was during the period when my mother was keeping me home with her, and it was such a relief to have someone else there with us in that cavernous house.
She wore a black skirt with embroidered white lassos and a black chiffon scarf over her birthmark. I was so excited to see her I tripped over a chair as I led her into the living room. “Mother, look who it is.”
My mother came out of the kitchen and her mouth dropped.
“You!” For a moment I couldn’t tell if she was happy or annoyed, but then she walked over and gave Hanna a hug.
Hanna said, “Are you all right?”
My mother made an “mmmm” sound and pulled away. “It was sudden.”
“Catherine, I’m sorry.” My mother’s face was open, not the way it looked when she’d accepted other people’s condolences, smiling and gritting her teeth as if she were enduring punishment.
Hanna looked at me and didn’t say anything, maybe because she only seemed comfortable acting cheerful with me, or intimate in a theatrical way, but I thought I knew what she was thinking.
It’s awful. There’s no way around it.
She wouldn’t try to cover his death with some platitude meant to make you cry or stop crying. She understood the heaviness of things. I stared at her green eyes, her pointed chin, the hair pulled back from her face. I studied the tap dancer’s way she maneuvered between the coffee table and couch to finally sit down, crossing her legs. She was wearing black high heels.
“How can you walk in those?” said my mother.
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“They are wobbly.” Hanna extended her foot and circled her toes. She shrugged. “If I fall, at least I’ll be well dressed when I do.” Her large green eyes were strikingly clear against her aging skin. “Ella,” she said, “I saw it beginning the last time I came, but how old were you then, fourteen?”
“Thirteen.”
“You’re a young woman, my God. I forgot how quickly it happens.”
“It’s been two years, Hanna,” said my mother.
“Two years?” She looked at me, her eyes distracted. “Two years is nothing to us anymore, Catherine, is it?”
I wanted to impress her. “The year after next I’m going to college,” I said, ignoring the alarm in my mother’s face.
“College?” Hanna said, straightening her skirt. “Wonderful.
All that reading you did will pay—I wish I had gone myself now.
I would have liked to have studied astronomy or botany.”
My mother interrupted her. “I think Ella will go to the teacher’s college.”
Hanna’s face seemed to lose focus, her eyes wandering away from me to the wall, her mouth pulled down. “Here?” The truth was, I hadn’t decided where I would go, though I knew it depended on a certain amount of money my parents had saved in the bank, but in that moment, it was all decided for me, and in a way it was a relief to give up the part of myself that would have had to leave her.
From the look on Hanna’s face, I thought she would protest, but she just nodded and said, “Oh.”
My mother straightened a vase on the table and changed the subject. “The college library asked for Louis’s music compositions.
He would play there sometimes.”
Hanna put her hand on my mother’s knee and leaned forward 64 / RENÉ STEINKE
so that her shoulder touched my mother’s. It was an unfamiliar intimate gesture. My mother rubbed her eyes. I always forgot that Hanna was the older one. “You’re going to be okay,” she said softly, rubbing my mother’s knee.
Hanna talked about her job as secretary for an eye doctor, about the apartment building where she lived in Des Moines. “I noticed the Dixie Diner is gone,” she said sadly, and we talked for a while about what else had changed since she’d last seen Porter. The air in the living room suddenly seemed hot and close. I rolled up my sleeves, barely glimpsing the leaf-shaped scar as I leaned back into the chair.
“You can’t see the moraine from the road anymore either,” said my mother.
Hanna suddenly leaned over and grabbed my bicep. “My God, what did you do?” The scar whitened around the edges. I didn’t understand at first. She stared down at the scar, squinted. How could she not know what had happened so long ago? No one—not my mother, not Marietta—no one in my family had told her?
My father had a rational way of explaining things, moving his hands flatly in the air, and I might have learned that from him if he hadn’t died. It would have been useful—I never knew how to tell people what had happened and hated watching their eyes veer sideways, thinking it had hurt them just to see.
The three of us looked down at the leaf-shaped burn. It gained focus and a frame like a picture on the wall. Gently, I took Hanna’s hand off my arm. “It happened a long time ago,” I said.
“What?” said Hanna.
“The fire,” I said. My mother picked at her forehead as if she were trying to peel it off, then moved sharply to stand up and knocked a crystal dish off the table onto the floor. “Ella, please, go in the kitchen.”
I sat down at the table with my biology book, stared down at THE FIRES / 65
the scar. I’d thought it wasn’t very noticeable, and I rubbed at it hard and tried to imagine it gone. How could my mother not have told her? This new anger seesawed under me. In order to stand steadily on it, I would have to blame her, and even if it had been her fault, even if she had slapped me so hard I fell into the flames, or chased me into them, I couldn’t do that.
The pages of my biology book seemed to absorb all the light in the room. I wasn’t going to be able to do any homework now.
I took the sharp tip of my pencil and poked holes in the diagram of the frog.
Hanna’s mistake must have made her want to leave, because I heard the door slam and went to the window to watch them.
The wind blew their skirts tight against their legs, and I noticed they had the same figure—slim long legs, a small curved torso.
Soon a yellow taxi rocked down the driveway. It had to be from out of town, because Porter’s two taxis were blue. Hanna walked across the yard, the tree shade blinking over her. Just before she stepped inside the car, she reached to fix the scarf in back, and the rhinestone button at the nape of her neck caught the light. I wanted to be wearing that dress, stepping into that yellow taxi.
T he air was powdered with cold that night I drove to the corner of Willow Street, parked away from the streetlight, and walked through the damp grass, past the houses with their sly shutters. I’d been inside the shack behind my old apartment building once before, and knew it would go quickly.
Even though I lived at the hotel now, I was afraid I’d never leave it, that I’d grow old as a night clerk with a postcard collection, an award for reading the most library books, and a habit of drinking a bottle of bourbon a day. But I was also afraid that if I did leave, my mother would let herself waste away to nothing.
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She seemed so fragile and disappointed, as if she were waiting for me to do something about it.
The shack wasn’t locked. The door groaned open, and a mouse careened past my foot on the gritty floor. There was that smell of dry dirt and chemicals, and I knew it would look accidental enough for the insurance to pay. The landlord had threatened to evict me the third time he smelled smoke lingering on the stair-well, but this wasn’t about revenge. What pushed me forward was just the thought that after I saw it, the thrill would be enough to put me to sleep later, and I was so exhausted it was as if I were watching myself from the distance of an arm’s length.
I walked in, found a can of paint thinner, and tipped it over near the open window. The sharp smell whirled up to my tongue and nostrils. From the apartment building thirty yards away, the blare of a radio voice startled me: “Ladies, if you think you’ve found happiness, wait till you hear this—” Somewhere down the block, a car horn bleated. I began to tremble and sweat. As I stood up, the scars on my torso twisted and tingled like separate limbs, with their own nerves and mysterious functions. Picking my way over a lawn mower and rake, I went back outside into the clean air.
A cat with a tail like an antenna ran through the tall grass. I could see into a few of the windows in the apartment building: a lamp on a desk and an arched bedstead, the wavery blue square of a television, bras and slips hung to dry above window-ledge flowers. As I went around the corner, arrowweeds pricked my ankles; then, steadying myself on the shack’s grainy wall, I reached the open, paint-flecked window.
I struck a match, let it bud into my fingertips, and dropped it over the sill. Finally. The oily surface of the paint thinner crumpled and sighed. A white flare ribboned the darkness. I ran back, and my heel slipped in the mud as I pivoted around to look.
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My scars seemed to shake and cartwheel apart from my will, stinging pleasantly like the first sense of sun. My breathing slowed as the fire’s prism colors emerged, twirled and bending. Fuchsia, green, and lavender swam up like fish and gradually disappeared again. I backed away as I watched the walls gently fold in on themselves. A sheen of blue slithered between them, and I held out my hands to feel the strokes of heat. Finally I’d got it started.
In the center, near the door, red puckered and grimaced, and the flame pierced the air, split it open like a ragged makeshift mouth.
V
T hough it was my job to inspect the rooms each week, the hotel was so old that dirt wasn’t easily detectable, but since the funeral I’d noticed more of it, mildew in the seams of the bathroom tiles and handprints on the white walls, rust marks in all the sinks. Dirt was everywhere when your job was to keep things clean. My mother was fierce in her housework. She scrubbed the corners of the kitchen with baking soda and an old toothbrush, she burned evergreen candles in all the bathrooms.
The walls, counters, tabletops, were all smooth and bright, but worn down from rubbing like the inside of a shell.
I was writing a quick note to the housekeeper, a matronly woman with cow eyes who called me “honey.” “Rug in Room 7
stained.” To every problem like this she said, “Oh, dear,” as if it were an emergency.
I looked out the window and saw a man walk by with a puppy balanced on his shoulder. A girl swinging a baton skipped up behind him. I went back to my note. “A guest found mouse droppings in the corner near the window in Room 9.”
The bells on the door tinkled, and a slant of light skidded on the ceiling. I looked up to see who it was. He stood there holding a tool box and smiling crookedly, a person I’d never seen before, 68
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who nodded and threw back his head in this “Aha” way as if he’d been looking for me. “I’m here to fix the sink?” He had a blunt, round nose like the toe of a shoe, blue eyes hooded with dark, spiky lashes, and a very red mouth as if he’d been biting it.
“You must mean the one in the cafeteria,” I said, because it often overflowed when the drain got clogged from bits of food.
He raised his eyebrows and looked around at the lobby walls.
“Mr. Linden didn’t say which one. Could it be one of the sinks in the rooms?” The plaintive lilt in his voice wasn’t American, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I wanted him to talk more so I could place it.
“Not if he didn’t give you a number,” I said. His jeans faded around the muscles in his legs, and he wore a clean white shirt with a collar. I’d known only two foreigners in my life, a Mexican woman who worked as a nurse for one of Marietta’s friends, who was an invalid, and Mr. Botticelli, my Latin teacher. I’d envied their apartness, a certain lack of history and family that made them graceful in the weightlessness pulling up any strings that had once tied them down.
“The one in the cafeteria backs up a lot—you have to go through the other door.” I pointed past the painting of the clown in the toy car.
“Right. This way,” he said, turning with a grin. He went through the cafeteria door, whistling in a minor key, something that sounded like a Bach hymn my father had played.
I folded the note to the housekeeper and tacked it to the bulletin board next to the key boxes, where she’d see it in the morning.
A teenaged girl with black hair floated down the stairs to the lobby, rubbing her eyes. She wore a pink bathing suit and rubber sandals and went to look out the window. She slumped down in the green vinyl chair, lifted up her foot, and began picking at her 70 / RENÉ STEINKE
toes. She had the most beautiful skin: pale with shadows of honey and pink in the apples of her cheeks. Just a fine blue vein stalked down her neck, no freckles or moles anywhere, no scratches or bruises or birthmarks. She had the skin of a girl who’d just been born, freakishly pure and creamy. The more I looked, the more her flawlessness seemed impossible, and I wanted to scratch it to see if it was makeup or powder. I was glad when she jumped up, snapping the elastic at the bottom of her suit and bounding out of the lobby.
Just as I was counting the money into the change box, he came back and stood sheepishly at the cafeteria door. He let the door swing closed behind him and walked purposefully up to the desk.
I let the quarters slip through my fingers in twos, but he didn’t seem to notice I was counting.
“I’m Paul,” he said, holding out a hand black with grease. His white shirt with the sleeves rolled was miraculously still clean. I looked up but didn’t move. He glanced down, pulled back his hand, and wiped it, front and back, on the seat of his jeans. Even this gesture was tapered and formal as an old-fashioned suit.
“Pardon,” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
I opened the desk drawer, pried loose two old butterscotch candies that had melted into the wood, trying not to meet his eyes. Their unwavering gaze made me uneasy. “Where are you from?”
“My accent isn’t gone yet, eh?” His voice was warm and had the fullness of a man much older than he.
I sorted through a handful of pencils and pens, testing the inks on a scrap of paper.
“Poland,” he said. “Kruszwica. And you?”
I made piles of stubby pencils and pens that had gone dry.
“Porter,” I said. It looked as if his deep set eyes could see some-THE FIRES / 71
thing in me he wasn’t supposed to, and I was relieved when his glance moved to the bank calendar on the wall.
“I was hired yesterday as the security guard. We’ll be working together.”
I tore the old page from the guest registry and threw it in the trash. It wasn’t that I disliked him, but I enjoyed the long, drifty nights at work alone. “Why do we need a security guard? No one’s going to try to break in here.”
His smile cracked. I watched his lips and tongue turn his words.
“Mr. Linden has a new insurance policy.”
I got up and wheeled around to pin two bad checks to the bulletin board. I didn’t want to be rude, but the situation seemed tricky to me. I didn’t know how to take his formality, it could so easily have been sarcastic. When I turned around, he picked up his tool box from the desk and looked at me uncertainly. “I suppose I will see you again—” he said, parting his lips.
“Ella.”
“Ella.” He nodded as if to agree the name suited me, and he walked out the door, the tools in his box clanking against one another.
The sheen of his foreignness had surprisingly tarnished when I learned he’d be working at the Linden. I took the candle from the old conch on the wall and set it on the desk in front of me. It would be a tricky situation. I fished out a book of matches from my pocket and lit the candle, wat
ched the flame tremor. There was always a blue pearl in the middle, draped in a thin gloss of orange, a pale yellow cowl around that, and then the light. I licked my finger, ran it through the flame, first at the very tip and then lower. Then lower. I didn’t feel anything until the wick. The flame stuttered. When I pulled my finger away, I stared, satisfied, at the seared black tip of my nail.
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I kept humming to myself the tune Paul had whistled, which sounded so much like a hymn my father had played. Was it Bach? My father had always said his name the way other men said “Lincoln” or “Robert Miller,” the local Porter man who had died a hero’s death in World War II. “Bach,” he said, his mouth and eyes serious as if I could learn something important just from the name.
I hummed the tune again. What was it? The hymns were confused in my head. Our shelter from the stormy blast…And take they our life, goods, fame, child, and wife, they can harm us none.
Those nights my father walked the two miles to the church alone, even in the snow, he must have heard the rhythms in his steps, in his breath, going over the music he would play in the dark, empty church.
I still couldn’t place the tune, but it sounded like that part of the hymn just before the refrain, when you could hear the return to the familiar words and the relief of this made people sing louder.
A sturdy-looking woman in sneakers and stretch pants came down the stairs then and said, “Hello there, young lady. I’m going out now, but we need some more tissues there in Room Four.”
The way she said “there” as if it were a comma or a throat-clearing let me know she was from Wisconsin. There and and that had special uses in Wisconsin.
“I’ll bring a box right up,” I said.
I went to the shelf in the back of the closet for the tissues, climbed the stairs and walked down the hall. My ears were overly sensitive to tics and slips of the tongue, from all those years listening for (and often dreading) the notes my father missed. If he made a mistake on Sunday morning, he’d ask my mother and me in the afternoon if we’d heard the missed note and didn’t seem to believe us if we said we hadn’t. If we said we had, though, he’d