The address is in cursive and I smile. I’ve forgotten how to write in cursive, forgotten how to write letters to anyone, the days long gone since the carefully folded notes in fourth grade, since I could keep a friend long enough to compose and fold a note. This letter doesn’t have a name, just an address. My grandmother’s address—the house she moved into as a nineteen-year-old newlywed. The house she lived in until a few short months ago, when her illness and my mother’s unwillingness to handle it justified live-in care. The return address on the back flap doesn’t have a name.
I feel no remorse, no invasion of privacy when I open it. I feel mostly blank, with just a thin layer of excitement. I have no idea what to expect, but for a split second I catch myself imagining evidence of some great fortune or royalty. I laugh, just one huff of an exhale through my nose, because it’s about as likely as anything else.
Dear Mrs. Baker,
I am writing with great regret to inform you that your young daughter’s doll, which is quite large and realistic and therefore worrisome at first, has met its demise at the mouth of my terrier. I believe it was thrown into my back yard on Thursday the 10th, as our gardens back up against a shared fence. I do not believe it is in anyone’s best interest to return the doll to you or your daughter. It is a morbid scene. There is no longer a head. Please allow me to purchase a new doll for your daughter. If you would kindly inform me of where the doll was purchased, I can rectify the situation immediately. I will not rest until an intact doll is returned to your young child, so please do not protest, and please reply immediately, either by post or a visit around the block. Otherwise I shall be required to continue sending letters or trying to reach you until I can remedy this.
Sincerely and regretfully,
Mr. Harold C. Carr
Mr. Harold C. Carr’s return address was one street over from my grandmother’s. That child was my mother. My mother’s doll. There’s some karmic injustice about this that makes me hate my mother a little less. It’s not even like she has been a monster to me, and here is a humanizing tragic toy loss. Maybe imagining her headless doll gives my pity something to hook into, sixty something years gone. I forget to wonder why this letter mandated a carefully guarded shoebox clutched against my grandmother’s sunken frame. I forget to wonder what my grandmother was going to tell me. I open the next letter and Vinnie hacks up cigarette smoke, the Tetris music still blaring.
“Vinnie,” I say.
“Yeah?” he says. He’s croaky still.
“Need anything?”
“Nah,” he says. He spits on the ground of the shared courtyard. I consider his hygiene. I eye his cigarette butt.
“Okay,” I say. “How’re things?”
I feel a little awkward as I stand there while he finishes coughing.
“Good, I s’pose. Just trying to kick this cold.”
He stands up. His white ribbed tank top is yellowed at the armpits and neckline. His sweatpants are too low on his hips and his waistline is pale and hairy. He holds out the cigarette box to me, and I decline and I want to hate him. His fingertips are weirdly stained and callused. I want to ask him what he does for a living but I’m afraid of making him say nothing.
He doesn’t return the “How’re things?” He doesn’t say anything else. The Tetris music is still playing on his phone and the shapes have long since piled up.
“Well, all right then. Just checking on you.”
I go inside. I turn off the TV. I close the windows, despite the heat, despite the thickness of the relentless October night, post-wildfire, still terribly dry though I somehow sweat instantly. I count the envelopes in the box. Three hundred and eighty-two. I start to read and by one in the morning I have to open the windows again.
At two in the morning I get another nosebleed and I quietly curse when a drop gets on one of my grandmother’s envelopes. It doesn’t feel subversive or surreptitious or thrilling like it did on Jesse Ramirez’s letter. It just feels like a mess. Like I’m ruining something.
The sky starts to brighten just after six and I’m still not done reading.
FOUR
JESSE RAMIREZ, THE UPS driver who delivered to my old job—my last semblance of stability, my last attempt at doing this, at functioning—dropped his letter, presumably accidentally, on a warm morning one October, one of many mornings I’d watched him walk away. It was the first time I touched anything of his, when I slowly approached the sidewalk after he’d gone, my eyes fixed on the dropped envelope. The letter was a little bit older than that October, so he must have been carrying it around. Maybe he wasn’t ready to send it yet. I knew I should either give it back or keep it. I knew unequivocally that I was not going to send it. It wasn’t in an envelope, no name, but clearly it was his to send, not his to receive.
I kept it folded up for three weeks before I read it. That delay is my most noble accomplishment.
There’s a line on the first page I trace over with my fingers so often that the paper has started to bunch and fray, little specs of worn-down pulp as clingy pieces of papery lint.
There’s a line on the second page that I wish I could never read again. It has no pulpy lint.
There’s a line on the third page that I’ve copied out thirty times and counting in my own handwriting in a small book: “ You and I were able to briefly be the most beautiful thing in the world, the kind of beauty that without you, I would never know existed,” I wrote. He wrote. I wondered what it was like to know something so incomprehensible. I wondered if he was making shit up.
I wondered if I’d recognize the point when you pass over into that knowledge. Was it arbitrary? Was it obvious? Is it obvious when you realize that now you know something exists that you didn’t know yesterday? And is it measured in days? Do people notice this immediately, or months later? Is it only when the letters are written, the broken-hearted letters?
Rather than longing to feel something so powerful myself, I mostly just wished someone felt that way about me. I didn’t feel any shame that I didn’t necessarily wish to feel that way too.
Jesse Ramirez didn’t know me at all.
“Try this,” the therapist said, ripping off a piece of paper. I read not the words but her office’s letterhead at the top of the small notepad. Her first name was Mabel and she seemed fifty years too young to be a Mabel. She seemed too young to be more educated than me. “It’s the mildest medication, given that your symptoms seem so mild. You won’t need to worry so much about side effects.”
I hated her for calling me mild. I hated how she could posit to measure feelings on a chart, in a table, with a thermometer.
That afternoon, and then the next afternoon, I dutifully took two total doses and then no others. I’d sit and read blogs about the miscellaneous afflicted taking their multitudes of pills a day, but I couldn’t bring myself to take one. Was I scared of finding out that the drugs would help and then, if they helped, that I had something that needed helping? Was I scared of finding out that the dose would help, so therefore my condition was mild? As desperate as I was to have something wrong with me, quantifying it would unhinge me.
I didn’t show up to the next appointment. Or the next.
She called me three months later. I folded Jesse’s letter smoothly, sealing the Ziploc bag properly before picking up.
“How’s it working, Sheila?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“Great! And the dosage was okay from the get-go?”
“Yeah,” I said. Fully aware that I should have been more specific with this lie. Act like you actually wanted this, I tried to tell myself. “No problem with the dosage. I feel like a different person,” I said.
My therapist is the only person I’ll ever tell what she wants to hear.
I don’t want Jesse’s letter to get mixed up with my grandmother’s letters, my new obsessions. It’s different only in size. The content is startlingly similar, like maybe Harold C. Carr had some futuristic time and space-bending skills and is now a t
hirtysomething Latino UPS driver. Jesse’s is a large, heavy sheet of printer paper. Probably not recycled. I fold it up, a perfect trifold, and put it in its dedicated Ziploc. I open my nightstand drawer, empty. It’s always empty, except for this letter. I close the drawer. Ritual.
Tonight, I open it again. I lift out the baggie. I handle it a bit, feeling the smoothness of the plastic in my hands. There’s a little air in the bag. I open it and unfold the letter. Then I put it back and quickly walk away. I leave the room, I leave the house, I leave the complex. I don’t even look at Vinnie when I walk past him smoking in the courtyard. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t have anywhere to go.
The first time my father stormed out, I hid at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping from behind the smooth oak veneer of the banister. Not that there was anything to see or hear. My parents were quiet when they fought. Their anger ran piping hot beneath the surface, lava never erupting through the planetary crust. The plates move, the earth burns, but I never even heard a boom.
I think I knew this wasn’t just my dad going out to the store or to work in the garage. Not from anything he said, because all they did was look at each other, clipped goodbyes in low voices that carried a marriage’s worth of shorthand. I could tell by the way my mother leaned against the wall in the small corridor between the kitchen and the front door. She faced away from me, the side of her forehead against the powder-blue fleur-de-lis wallpaper, her graceful shoulders slumped. I was only eight years old but I knew this was different.
He didn’t come back for two days, and when he did, their reunion was as subdued as his leaving. Quiet. Still.
Those two days, my mother filled my time to the brim. I had no space to ask about my father, about why I was feeling like the sky could open up and steal me, about why I was feeling like nothing was as fun or as tasty or as easy as before. I think that was the first time I ever felt sadness, its force and comprehensiveness, its stun.
The second time my father left, a few years later, he was even quieter and I didn’t know it was happening. By then there were no battles, no fire beneath their earth’s crust, just a marriage more war-torn than warring, crumbled concrete in an ancient city street. The second time he left, it was for good.
FIVE
THE SHOEBOX TORMENTS ME. If I squint I can almost see my grandmother’s thin hands wrapped around it, reedy finger bones pulling it close. It reminds me that I am not entirely sad about her death. It’s not like we were incredibly close. She was an old woman, after all, in a different world, a peaceful, composed life. She always seemed so detached from me and from my mother, in that mentally compromised sort of way, but now I’m thinking maybe all along she was so sad.
I wonder if she blamed my mother, the child, anchoring her to the home on the wrong side of the fence.
I wonder if she also blamed me, because I am a part of my mother in the same way that my mother was a part of her. It’s confusing, this ancestry of pain and blame.
My phone rings. My mother.
“Sheila. It’s Mom.”
“I know,” I say.
“How are you?” she asks.
“You know, fine, I guess?” I pause. She also pauses. “How are you?”
“I’m okay, all things considered.”
My mother likes to add “all things considered” at the end of her sentences in some sort of verbal martyrdom. I hate it, for the same reasons all daughters hate the harmless things their harmless mothers do. But the death of her own mother seems to be the one time it actually fits.
“Yeah.”
“Were you over here yesterday?” she asks.
Lie. I should lie.
“Yeah.” I don’t lie.
“Oh. You didn’t mention it.”
“Well, you weren’t home.”
She doesn’t respond right away. I take pleasure in the way she must be agonizing over how to bring up the shoebox.
“Okay, then. Just wondering. I thought there might have been a burglary or something.”
I could throw her a lifeline. I could ask if anything was missing, give her a way of bringing up the shoebox.
“Nope, just me.”
“Okay,” she says. A pause. “Well, are you coming tomorrow?”
“God, Mom. Of course.”
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry,” and she seems flustered. It isn’t often I see her like this, tripping over her words. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s okay. I’ll be there. Want me to pick you up?”
“That’d be nice. I suppose we have to ride to the graveyard in the hearse.”
It occurs to me that we are my grandmother’s only living relatives. This, this is the thing that makes me sad. This is what sets my grief on its rightful course. I grieve not for the lack of this woman in my life, but for her shitty legacy. One daughter. One granddaughter. Worse, it’s me. The awareness of this, the comedy of it, the misguided pressure, causes a noise to escape my throat that sounds like a wail, a choked-back sob.
“Oh, honey,” my mother says.
I want to laugh, but I think it will be better for my mother to imagine her daughter grieving like a normal person.
“I’m okay, Mom. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hang up first. I kick the shoebox under the bed. And then I grab it and open it again. I spread the first year of letters out across my bed. Some of them are undated. One day I swear I will know these letters so well that I can line them up based only on their contents, but for now I leave the undated ones in their own small pile.
“Hey, Torrey.” I hear Vinnie’s “inside voice” across the courtyard.
I’d get up to close the window but, for one thing, I enjoy listening to Vinnie’s Skyping, and for another, I have Harold C. Carr’s letters spread out across my knees and shins.
“Hi, Dad,” his daughter says. Her apathetic quiet is no match for the way sound carries between Vinnie’s house and mine.
“How’s school going?”
“Ugh, fine, Dad.”
The silence is long and followed by mumbled, mostly indecipherable conversation. I start to read the next letter.
Dear Mrs. Baker,
I implore you, please let me know the exact make and model and place of purchase for the child’s doll my terrier so frighteningly decapitated. I am committed to writing to you each day until this matter is resolved. I hope you either respond quickly, or that you enjoy receiving daily letters from a desperate man.
Sincerely,
Harold C. Carr
Postscript: Your sunflowers look lovely. They have just this week poked their heads above the fence line. I can see them from my writing desk right now, as it looks out over my own backyard.
“Torrey,” Vinnie says, and though I hear him clearly, his voice is so quiet. “I miss you so much,” he says. I wish I’d been listening better.
I slither out from under my blanket of letters, taking care to rearrange them in their rows and columns. I manage to push closed the window above my bed. I take off all of my clothes and lie down on the floor, on the small rug right next to my bed. I put my cheek down on the ground, against the little bits and pieces of lint and brittle, stray long hairs and crusty stuff. I wish I had vacuumed. I wish I took better vitamins and had better hair. I fall asleep even though it’s early evening, and I sleep, eyes crusted shut, mouth foul from not brushing or flossing, until dawn. The dawn smells so different when it’s woken to, than when it’s reached after a night spent sleepless. It seems cleaner, colder like this. It’s been forever since I woke this early, since I slept so well.
SIX
IT WAS LATE SUMMER. It was three years ago but it’s supposed to be over by now. It’s not supposed to have been three years since I held a regular job. I’d left the job thinking I just needed to try something different, because church work, even secretarial church work, is not for the weak, and I am the weak. Temp jobs are for the weak—jobs I can leave when things don’t work out. It’s not supposed to
have taken me a matter of days to get used to the idea of never working a steady job again. It’s not supposed to have been three years of living in a rundown, pre-gentrification corner of a neighborhood on the wrong side of downtown, in this tiny shack with a tiny concrete courtyard, ants and green plastic patio furniture the only decor, because I can only afford California slum rent on my spotty income. It’s not supposed to have been three years of asking my mother for money. It’s not supposed to have been even one day of asking my mother for money, but the worst habits, once forged, are the hardest ones to kick.
It’s not supposed to have been three years since I was happy. I almost don’t remember it. I almost don’t believe I ever was.
That day, three years ago, I wore an old black dress, borrowed from my grandmother years prior. Late summer is always the worst heat and the dress clung to my sweaty thighs when I stood up from my desk. But I stood up, just in case he decided to do more than drop off the mail.
“Oh, thank you,” I said. Next time, I cursed myself, next time say something smarter.
“You’re welcome. How are you today?” he asked. He showed his teeth in a wide smile, white even right up to the upper back edges of the canines, along the gum line.
“I’m okay,” I said, my heart racing. Ask him how he is. Ask him. Maybe just say “And you?” But I didn’t.
“Well, it’s a lovely day. Let’s see. We have a few things here.”
I was a church secretary. It was the best job I’d ever had, the best job I’d ever given up on, all thanks to my mom’s neighbors, the Reverend and Mrs. Spike.
It was the stuff out of a soda commercial, secretaries and hunky deliverymen. He wasn’t even that hunky and I certainly wasn’t much of a secretary. But he had very white teeth and a crooked smile. He always looked a day behind in shaving and it made me wonder if he was hairy all over. Sometimes I thought about him naked while I sat in the blue-walled office building adjacent to the sanctuary. I could see a Jesus from my desk, many Jesuses.
How to Set Yourself on Fire Page 2