“You’re new here, right?” he asked.
I shrugged. Speak. Time to speak.
“I’ve seen you around. I like your dress,” he said, and he turned around.
“Hello? Oh, sure. I can hold.”
Click, garble.
“Yeah, hi. I’m still here. So, I was wondering if there’s any way to find out the name of one of your delivery drivers?”
Mumbled, jaded words, hardly listened to.
“Oh, no, I understand. It’s nothing like that. We’re St. Peter’s Church. Yes, on Euclid.”
The tenor of trust, tentative.
“Mm-hm. Well, perhaps I should explain. You see, and please keep this confidential, but he mentioned some, you know, concerns? Some unfortunate health problems with his family. And everyone here loves him, you know, and the church elders have all voted to provide him with a monetary gift. It’s just a small check. We’d like to write it out to him in advance so he has no choice but to take it.” I worried I was pushing it. I thought of Mrs. Spike, her holy voice. The way kindness oozed from every word. “And of course, we would love to be able to put his name on our prayer list.”
Uncertainty. She was a secretary, probably, just like me.
“Sure. I can hold again. And again, thank you so much.”
I felt no remorse. I was a little turned on.
“Yes, hi. I’m here. Oh, that is wonderful. Hold on, let me get a pen.”
I smudged black ink on my fingers fumbling the cap.
“Okay, ready. Mmhm, Jesse, J-E-S-S-E? Yes, Ramirez? With a Z? Z, okay. Thank you so much. Oh, a mailing address? Wow, that certainly would make things easier. If you’re sure? You’re right. I’d better get his phone number as well. Thank you so much! God bless you.”
I hung up the phone and walked out the door. It was 6 p.m. I was supposed to take notes in a church meeting at seven, but I had already forgotten. I drove, my mind startlingly clear, straight to Jesse Ramirez’s house.
It only took a few days, but eventually I had his schedule down, and that freed me up to get back into a routine at work. They had been asking questions. Concerned, worried. Offering to pray. It was better for everyone that I was now able to compartmentalize my time with Jesse into manageable units.
It was in October, on the forty-third morning of watching him leave the house, that I saw him drop the letter. The air felt thick but it seemed like I was floating, full of air, but almost like I didn’t need air in the first place. I stepped, somehow, forward, toward the letter, and picked it up. I took it home. It was as if there were no other options. I had no other options, the letter had no other options, and Jesse had no other options.
SEVEN
BEING AWAKE AT DAWN means I have four hours to kill before the funeral. I look up at my bed from my spot on the dirty floor, but for today, today especially, I want to keep my grandmother’s letters neatly arranged. I wonder what it would be like to have this shoebox if my grandmother was still alive. It’s not exactly that I’m wishing for it. I don’t exactly miss her. A part of me that is both very lazy and a little generous is glad she is dead. Her life wasn’t amazing. She lived a non-life for such a long time, shushed away in a too-big room with wicker furniture and attendants who spoke like cheerful preschool teachers. And before that, a long decline into then-undefined sadness. It was tedious for my mother to be around her. It was tedious talking to my mom about her. I can’t help but recognize the relief in this for both of the women in my life.
I open the closet. It’s hard to miss it, that dress. The one I was wearing the time Jesse spoke to me.
I pull it out of the closet and run my fingers over it. I wish it were silk, something romantic, something notable, but it’s not. It’s polyester or worse. But then I remember the way silk smells. The way silk would predictably show the sweat in the crease below my breasts, the crease under my butt, and along the line of my seatbelt after driving. The sweat will be there anyway, but at least it won’t show. It’s my grandmother’s polyester dress. She gave it to me to borrow one Christmas when I was eighteen but I never returned it. “Just keep it, Sheila,” she said. “It doesn’t fit me. That’s not a dress for an old woman.”
My mom will probably clutch her chest in that prescribed way when she sees me wearing it, the way mothers are supposed to press against their hearts when they see their daughter wearing an heirloom dress on funeral day. She will react with a whispery gasp, “Oh honey,” and I will take pleasure in manipulating it out of her: the secret undermining of my mother.
She won’t know that I picked it because it’s Jesse’s dress. Maybe he didn’t even really notice the dress, maybe it was a knee-jerk compliment, but I have to have something to believe in. I have nothing left of me and him, nothing except for a dress and a letter. Our relationship is entirely inside me and these objects. I’ll wear it, the dress, not because of my grandmother, but because it’s a sacrament, a host, and maybe one day it will transubstantiate into something real between me and a man who doesn’t even know me. And even if it doesn’t, I’ll take the host anyway.
By 7 a.m., I hear Vinnie come outside of his house for a smoke. I’m still naked or I would go outside and sit with him. This instinct to be around Vinnie surprises me and annoys me at the same time. I fill up a bath with the hottest the water will go. The bathroom window is closest to where Vinnie sits anyway, so I open it. It’s too high for him to see in.
“Morning, Vinnie,” I say.
“Hey,” he says.
I step into the bath and the water stings.
“Vinnie?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you do?”
“What?”
“Like, for work? A job?” I ask. As I lower my body in, the scalding heat on my cunt makes me want to exit and reenter the water over and over again.
“Oh. Well, I’m between jobs right now.”
“Like, literally?”
Vinnie doesn’t answer right away. “I’m waiting for my next order.”
“Order?”
“I’m going to go inside now.”
“Today’s my grandmother’s funeral,” I say quickly.
“Oh. Sorry, kid.”
“I’m not a kid.”
“Just sorry, then.”
It’s not like I ever know what to say when someone dies. It’s not like I can expect that out of Vinnie.
“It’s not your fault,” I say suddenly. That makes me laugh. “Unless you murdered her.”
“Jesus, Sheila.”
I sink my head all the way under the water and open my eyes. My hair, dark with wet, fans around my face, long seagrass against a steadying tide. I wonder if Vinnie is talking. The world is a wall of heavy noise. I want to take a big breath exactly as much as I want to stop breathing. Underwater it looks as if the roof is starting to cave in.
I float up and gasp for air.
EIGHT
MY MOM IS PREDICTABLE.
“Oh, honey,” she says. She only calls me honey when she’s feeling good about her motherhood. When she feels like this is how it’s supposed to go. “I love you in that dress.”
I try not to wonder where her insecurity comes from. For thirty-five years, have I made her feel like she needed to work to get to that place, how it’s supposed to go between mothers and daughters? Do I hold all the power? She’s the one being a mother, and just waiting for me to hold up my end of the bargain and be the daughter? I wonder: if the tables were turned, and I was waiting around for her to be the mother, would I cling to every motherly moment, or would I walk away? I think my mother probably has an idea. I think she assumes I would not wait around. And therein lies the power. And the shame, and the pity. I recognize my mother’s insecurity as my doing, but am powerless to stop it. With great power comes great powerlessness for me, always.
“Are you ready?” I ask. I take a deep breath, steeling, and then, a morsel of daughterhood tossed between us, a peace offering: I smile.
“Not quite,” she says. “Come in for a sec.”
A second turns out to be fifteen minutes. I stand in my childhood living room and pick at the stupid shit my mother keeps on the mantel. I close my eyes and remember the way it was when I lived here, when my parents were still married. Right in the middle, they had an eight-by-ten wedding picture in a silver frame. It was an awkward picture, totally staged, with just the two of them, a bunch of flowers, and the kind of smiles people smile after they’ve been told to smile all day. I always thought it was too big to just be propped up on the mantelpiece.
Now, my dad is nowhere in the house. My mother left his things in their places for a year. I’d hear her at night, angry whispers into the phone, negotiations, accusations, and then fewer of those phone calls until, eventually, silence, darkness. Even the dark stopped calling. When I’d ask about him, she’d withdraw with a sullen look that unnerved me, so I learned not to ask. I never asked if they were ever officially divorced. I never asked if she ever saw him again. I never asked what happened. She never changed her last name, but almost exactly a year later, she took down the eight-by-ten wedding picture. She took down his moth-eaten Merino wool sweaters, hanging neatly in a row of beiges and greens on his side of their small closet. She packed up the shoes he didn’t take with him. She packed up his paperwork, the jars of sandwich-cut pickles she used to keep for him, the pizza cutter, his set of German beer steins, his college t-shirts. She packed it all up and I do not know what became of it because I never wanted to ask. One day, will another granddaughter receive another old box of remnants—of junk—from a life that didn’t work out? All the ways we bequeath our failures.
My father walked away from an already small family and left it even smaller. If my mother ever heard from him again, she never volunteered it. When I was younger, a teenager, I’d still smell him on strangers in the grocery store, on teachers and other dads who must have used the same deodorant or lotion, something clean and masculine, but also a little bit sweaty, the difference between sniffing a brand-new tube of deodorant and smelling it on a body after a day’s use. Now, at thirty-five, twenty something years since I last smelled my father, I don’t even know if I’d remember the scent of him. I’ve forgotten even that.
On my mother’s mantle now, there’s a picture of her as a child, with my grandparents. My long-deceased grandfather looks pissed off, which is exactly how I remember him. My grandmother isn’t looking at the camera. I always assumed that people in the old days were too poor to take lots of pictures and sink money into film and developing, so they had one take and one take only. But now I’ve read the same letters that my grandmother read. Now I wonder if she was just looking away the whole time. I wonder if that’s how she survived.
As children, my mother and I both had the same chin-length blond hair. The same long nose. The same dimples. It almost hurts how much she looked like me. I want to be as different from her as possible and she wants to be as close to me as possible.
“I love that picture,” she says, standing in the doorway.
I pick it up and hold it closer. I now look so much more like my mother than I look like my younger self.
“Ready?” she asks, like she was the one who was waiting.
“Yeah.”
In the car, she talks the whole time.
“I’m not sure if they got the music right,” she says. “I mean, we sent them her list, but they never said that they got it.”
She pauses.
“Yeah,” she says, like I had asked. “Your grandma planned it all out.”
I turn left.
“She planned it shortly after your grandfather died. She was so annoyed by the service the church put together for him.”
I stop at a red light and I watch the clock. It takes forever. Four minutes. I shake my knees and keep my elbows locked on the steering wheel.
“He died so suddenly, you know.”
I don’t even nod. He’s a blip on my radar.
“Well. So she planned everything out for herself in advance. She had a little list.” I turn right.
“The readings, the flowers. She wanted only sunflowers.”
“Sunflowers?” It’s the first thing I’ve said this whole drive.
“Yes. Isn’t that strange?” she says, but it’s her voice that’s strange. I can’t read her. “I remember we used to grow them every year when I was a little girl, against the back fence. But one year we stopped, and I swear I have never seen a sunflower in that woman’s hands since.”
I turn right again.
“I think it’s the dementia. She’d forgotten that her favorite flower was always a tulip. That’s what she had in her bridal bouquet. That’s what your grandfather used to get her for their anniversary every year.” She’s nervous. She’s something.
“Forgotten?”
“You know how these things are.”
“No,” I say. “No, I don’t.”
My mother, it seems, has maybe never read the letters in the shoebox. I feel, for the first time, what I consider might be actual, real grief at the thought that this woman, my grandmother, wanted to honor this massive piece of her heart, this secret life.
“Well, I got one arrangement with sunflowers. But everything else is mixed. I only really remember her liking other flowers, so I got some with those, too.” She pauses and leans her head on the window. I wonder if she’s leaving an oily headprint on the glass, the kind of smudge I’ll never get around to wiping clean. “I need to honor the memories of the rest of us, too.”
I almost pull over but remind myself not to overreact.
“So,” I say, forced casual. “You didn’t follow her instructions?”
“Well, she had dementia! You do the best you can, all things considered.”
I take a deep breath. It sounds like frustration. It sounds like a sigh.
“Listen, do not judge anything here. You don’t even know the half of it,” she says, and her voice is thick with warning and something like panic.
I remind myself that my mother does not know that I have the shoebox. My mother does not know that I know about the letters. That I know about Harold C. Carr.
As much as I want to stick it to her right then, I hold back. I turn left into the church, my grandmother’s church, and for the first time I wonder if Harold C. Carr is still alive. Does he know she died? Would he have come? I glance to my mother as I park the car. She looks uneasy: eyes closed, jaw tight. Maybe she has read the letters after all. Maybe she knows everything. Maybe she knows exactly what she’s doing.
NINE
THE SERVICE IS SHORT. I spend the time staring at the lone sunflower. At least it’s in front, in the arrangement that sits on a fake Grecian pillar. The column is small and probably made of painted styrofoam. I imagine the old church ladies picking it up with one arm.
I close my eyes during the eulogy and don’t really recognize my mother. She uses kind words. She sounds peaceful and nostalgic. She speaks of my grandmother’s marriage to my grandfather, a man I don’t really remember. She speaks of a strong love. When she says, “They’re together again now, after so many years apart,” I open my eyes. I feel oppressed by my grandmother’s marriage on her behalf, two generations later.
I think of Vinnie. I think of Torrey. I try to imagine my mother as a twelve-year-old girl, being raised in two homes, her parents arguing over summer camps. This was not the life she had, and this is possibly why she guards this secret. She wants the picture of happiness for her family. Or maybe she just wants the picture of happiness for herself.
She’s still talking but I stop listening. I know I’m obvious when I swivel my entire body around and scan the crowd behind me. I look around like I would recognize Harold C. Carr from the pain and injustice on his face. But most everyone looks bored. Some old ladies have hankies to their eyes. More people are looking at me than at my mother.
“And, this is why, to me, today is not so much a day of mourning as it is a celebration,” my mother says, such a cliché. “A celebration of a wonderfu
l, happy life.”
This time I laugh out loud.
After the service, as my mother gets into the car, I abruptly turn around. I walk straight back into the church, past the priest, past the milling guests. I go right up to that fake pillar and pluck the single sunflower out of the hideous vase. A woman approaches me, perhaps to protest, but I have never moved with such purpose in my life and I like to think I am intimidating.
I return to the car. I get in and slam the sunflower on the daswhboard.
“Fuck the tulips,” I say.
As I drive away, the full-color reflection of the sunflower obscures my safe view of the road. My mother looks out the side window.
“Fuck the tulips,” I say again.
I hear a sniff. I do not grant her the courtesy of looking in her direction.
At the burial site, I lean against the car the whole time. I do not follow the crowd across the grass to the portable shade tent. I do not stand next to my mother above my grandmother’s grave. I wish I still smoked. Now would be a perfect time to smoke. Instead, I clutch a cut sunflower, wearing an old dress, and I must look so angry, so detached. I feel outside of myself. This was never a moment I envisioned as a child. Nobody plans out the dress they wear or the flowers they’ll hold at their grandmother’s funeral. Nobody plans how mournful they’ll appear to outsiders: Will I be riddled with grief? Will I look over it? This is not an occasion I practiced or held any expectations for. I wonder if instead of thinking I look angry and detached, the other people here just think I’m very, very sad.
The car is dusty because it hasn’t rained since May—nearly six months—and I realize I’m probably dirtying up my dress. These relentless summers: we cannot light campfires and we cannot water our lawns and we cannot lean angrily against our cars. I focus on the act of keeping still, of not rubbing more car dirt on me. It’s easier than thinking.
As the burial ends, I plan to take the sunflower over to the grave. Other people toss flowers down into the grave. It seems like the right thing to do. But my drive for the dramatic gesture has waned. I just want to get the fuck home. I just want to get away from my mother. I just want to take off this dress.
How to Set Yourself on Fire Page 3