I put the sunflower back on the dashboard. I don’t slam it this time. I don’t say “Fuck the tulips.” I don’t speak to my mother for the rest of the drive, and with each turn, with each stoplight, I feel more shitty about that.
The drive home from my mother’s house, my childhood home, though just fifteen minutes, is less familiar to me than the drive from my mother’s house to church. Still I feel like I could make my way anywhere from that house with my eyes closed, so I do close them, just for a few seconds, and lock my elbows at the steering wheel. I could feel my way home if I were brave enough. I open my eyes. The streets are grids of concrete and dying lawns. Old houses in patchwork: one restored to glory and the next rotting to the ground, and as I get closer to my house, there’s more rot, more dead lawns. I drive past my grandmother’s old house, stranded between my place and my mother’s. It looks tiny but pristine, like always. At home, I forget about the sunflower and leave it on the dashboard.
The next morning, when I head to the car to go to work, another temp job I’ve barely started, the sunflower is pungent and lilted. Dead. I don’t get in the car. I just go back in the house.
TEN
I DON’T SHOW UP for work. It’s Thursday. I call the temp agency. My next move depends on which agent takes my call.
Once I was naïve enough to think that I’d be assigned an agent all of my own to help me navigate the complicated and demeaning temporary employment landscape, like a grown-up high school guidance counselor. In truth they don’t write any prose in my file, any sparkling insights on their dealings with me, suggestions for my future, their hopes and dreams. And in truth, neither did any high school guidance counselor. Just lists. Jobs performed. Qualifications. Terminations. Reference phone numbers. Payments. I get whoever answers.
I hate to break it down in such a gender-biased way, but:
If a man answers:
If a woman answers:
“So, I’m really scared to say anything, and, like, I don’t want to make any formal claims…” I trail off.
“Yes?”
“Well, I just am not comfortable working for Clayton Sanders.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Sheila. Do you mean you’re trying to say you were —”
“I just feel like it’s a toxic working environment. I don’t want to go back.”
“But you don’t want to make any formal statements or press charges?”
I summon my sweetest, most clueless voice: “No, I just wish I had never worked there. I don’t want to cause any problems. I just…” I pause. I sniffle a little. It’s a good thing he cannot see the look of total apathy on my face. “Please may I have another placement? I’ll wait if I have to.”
“So, I’m afraid to say anything, but…”
“Go ahead,” she says. I can tell she’s tired of everyone who calls.
“I, um.” I pause for dramatic effect. “Have you ever heard of endometriosis?”
“Oh, honey.”
They hang up with a vague promise of work next week. I don’t care. I cherish the long weekend, and surely my rent is cheap enough to survive a little longer on unemployment.
Vinnie’s out in the courtyard already. When I get a look at his face, I feel actual fear. Because he looks terrified.
“Shit, Vinnie. You okay?”
He looks up, startled. “What?” he says.
“I said, ‘Shit, Vinnie, you okay?’”
“Oh, yeah, no.”
“I can tell.” I sit down. A part of me starts to feel less bad for him. Then I remember I didn’t exactly feel bad for him in the first place. That same part of me is going to stop asking him if he’s okay. That same part of me stops caring if he answers, and that’s what makes me feel like shit.
“Sheila?” he says.
I don’t answer. I watch him twirling the plastic ashtray. It makes little ellipses just above the table, little orbits.
“My ex, Torrey’s mom, she was in some sort of freak skydiving accident. She’s in a coma.”
Oh God, I think. And that’s what I should have said out loud. Instead, I say, “Who even skydives?”
Vinnie, God bless him, takes my question seriously.
“Well, she was on some kind of date, I guess.”
“Oh, right. I bet they both had it checked in their OK Cupid profile.”
“What? Had what checked?”
I pick a tiny scab off the boniest part of my shoulder, right on the point. There’s a white dot left behind, camouflaged on my freckled shoulder. “You know, skydiving.”
“Right. Well, I guess something happened with the plane? They jumped when they thought they were at elevation, but something was broken? And the plane wasn’t high enough? They didn’t have enough time in the air.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“So then what happened?” I ask. I quickly cover my mouth with my hand, uncovering some fresh decency.
“Well, God, I didn’t ask all the details. They’re not going to tell me shit.”
“Oh, yeah, good point. Can’t you ask Torrey?”
Vinnie, to his credit, stares me down. He could have killed me with that look. “I’m not going to ask my twelve-year-old daughter to find out the exact details of her mother’s—”
“—Yeah, I know. I didn’t think it through. I’m just a sucker for the gore.”
“Sheila.”
“Yeah?”
“This isn’t gore. This is a woman. This is my ex-wife. Once I thought she was the finest person in the whole world, so even at this point she’s still pretty far up there on the list.”
“That’s admirable. I thought people hated their exes. Like, by default.”
“Well, believe what you want to believe. I loved her so much once upon a time. And she’s a good mother to Torrey. That’s really all I want from her.”
“Is she gonna make it?” I say, feeling like an asshole.
“It doesn’t look good.”
This is not how I expected this conversation to go. I expected to feel a little bit of glee in knowing that his tedious custody battles and long-distance Skype fatherhood would come to a close. Vinnie is a good man.
“You’re a good man.”
“Shit, Sheila. Don’t make me cry.”
“Sorry.” I am sorry. I really do not want to see Vinnie cry.
Vinnie has The Today Show on in his house. I can hear every fucking word Al Roker says about coats and fall fashion, which he is not really qualified to be explaining, and we, across the country, many microclimates away, stuck in our endless summer, are not really qualified to be listening to. I recognize Al Roker’s voice without seeing the screen and I hate myself for it.
“Will you have to go out there?”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Why? Doesn’t Torrey need you? She needs someone. She can’t, like, cook dinners or drive herself places!”
“Hey,” he says. “Calm down.”
“Okay.”
“Well,” Vinnie says. I feel like I’m about to learn so much about him. Why are your fingers so stained, Vinnie, and what is that smell in your house, Vinnie. “Sarah’s parents are there. They take care of Torrey while she works anyway.”
“That’s nice. Don’t you think she needs her dad?”
“Fuck.”
And there it is: Vinnie is actually crying. It’s horrible. I don’t want to watch. He doesn’t even look as sloppy today as he usually does, he almost looks beautiful in the strong morning light, but there’s something so terrifying about him crying. I want so badly to go inside.
“I know she needs her dad,” he says. “I’m just not welcome there. It’ll cause more problems than it’s worth. She’ll come here soon enough once…you know.”
“Once?”
Vinnie gets up and goes into his house. His movements are quiet and un-Vinnie-like. The door doesn’t even audibly click when it closes.
Oh. Once she dies.
My feelings right now are strong,
big. Mostly I’m just very glad I am not Vinnie. I am sad for him and I am afraid of his grief.
I don’t go inside. I sit out there in the warm October sun until the tops of my feet get sunburnt. I hear the Today Show credits music. The TV turns off. There’s the sound of the remote clattering on Vinnie’s coffee table. Does he even have a coffee table? I hear nothing else.
If I were Vinnie, I might be in a fetal position on the couch or maybe even the floor. I am not Vinnie, but I sit there, in the sun, in my unemployed leisure, and silently grant Vinnie permission to curl up and cry.
ELEVEN
HER HANDWRITING WAS ALWAYS tall and tidy. As a small child, I could easily read her greetings on birthday cards when other senders did not pay as much heed to a new reader’s sensibilities.
Happy birthday, my dear Sheila, she’d write. I’m sending a dollar with your mother. Buy something sweet, like you. Then she’d sign it, still tall and still tidy but also looping. A sort of easy-reader version of a signature. Love, Grandma Rosamond.
But I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think about the other things she had written in her long life.
It’s easier to think about Harold C. Carr.
It’s 4 a.m. but I’m out of bed. It’s hot in the room. I don’t want to read the letter that unsettles me, the one I’ve read forty times already in the last twenty days. The one with his answers. Answers to questions that my grandmother had to ask. The one that makes me imagine a matching stack of letters somewhere else, inked out in my grandmother’s hand, with my grandmother’s questions.
I go back to near the beginning instead.
Dear Mrs. Baker,
Things are getting desperate. I am also most regretful that I left the aforementioned mangled doll in my garden. I should have removed it. However, I fantasized that you would come to visit me, or peek over the fence, and we would talk about it. Perhaps we’d laugh about it! I would show you the exact crime scene. I wanted to keep the scene intact, just in case. But I learned my lesson, and now there is barely a shred of evidence. The next time this sort of thing happens, I will be sure to keep my meddling dog away from the crime scene. Terriers have no respect for these kinds of things.
I’m afraid this will be my last written correspondence before I’ll have to knock on your door. You have left me with no other options. I will buy you and your daughter another doll, so help me God.
Since today is Friday, and I will see to it that this letter is personally delivered in your mailbox by lunchtime, I will give you until Tuesday to respond, either by dropping a letter in my mailbox or poking it through a hole in the fence. Perhaps you’d even prefer to use the United States Postal Service? I believe Tuesday will be plenty of time for either option. And on Tuesday, after the post has been delivered to our neighborhood, I’ll pour myself a cup of strong coffee, sit in my kitchen and drink it, perhaps with a biscuit or a piece of banana bread from Zucker-mann’s market on 33rd, and then I will walk around the block to your front door.
I just need to know where to buy a replacement doll. And I just need to apologize in person. It is quite a dreadful thing, the guilt of a decapitated doll on one’s conscience.
Sincerely,
Harold C. Carr
Postscript: After three straight days of letters to you, I daresay I am not looking forward to this four-day silence. I’m not entirely sure I will obey. Perhaps you ought to expect reminders.
This is the letter that makes me root for Harold. I imagine my grandmother as a young woman, and the smile on her face as she’d read this. I forget to notice if it makes me smile, too.
I have a headache. It’s been two days straight. The headache is right behind my eyes and at the base of my skull. My sinuses hurt. I’m relieved that it’s all symmetrical and even because tumors wouldn’t be. I’m relieved because when there’s no pain I can pinpoint, I don’t understand why I’m in pain anyway. I’m relieved because a headache means something real. I feel wetness on my face. A nosebleed. I feel neutral about this. Neutral to good. I think of that therapist, telling me my symptoms are mild, and I wonder if maybe the nosebleeds and the headache make up for that. I think: I would absolutely trade the way I feel all the time for nosebleeds all the time. It’s been weeks since my last nosebleed, since before the funeral. Instead of pinching my nose or finding a tissue, I bring my right hand to my nose and form a cup. The blood moves slowly, though it feels like it’s thinner than normal blood, mucous-laden watery blood.
Five minutes pass and the nosebleed seems to stop on its own. My hand isn’t very full, but I pour it into a chipped porcelain teacup that’s been sitting on my nightstand for two days now. The blood covers a sticky layer of evaporated old tea and honey.
Across the room, my one-room studio, there’s a small stack of papers on the countertop. A picture of my mother and me from over thirty years ago. I’m four, maybe five, and my hair is atrocious, golden but scraggly, thick and all over the place. My mother is very pretty, and I can see it on her face that she knows this. She’s poised. She’s always poised. That kind of confidence is usually admirable in a woman. But with my mother, I just want to see right through her.
I bring the picture to the bed and pick up the chipped teacup. The ornate handle is shaped like an ear, but otherwise the cup is completely plain. I touch the bottom corner of the photograph to the blood and goopy tea left in the teacup. Nothing happens at first. But then, after a few seconds, the picture starts to change. It darkens in tiny increments from the corner upward and outward. It doesn’t get red or bloody yet. It just gets a single layer darker, fuzzier. The photograph thickens, the paper fibers separating slightly at the edge. And then the color starts to change. By the time the fluid reaches the edges of our photographed heads, the teacup is drained and our matching hair is half orange-pink, half yellow.
I put the teacup back on the nightstand. I prop the photograph against it to dry.
TWELVE
“TORREY’S COMING OUT,” VINNIE says. He’s sitting on his hideous faded green lawn furniture, nestled in our shared concrete not-lawn.
“Oh, for a visit?”
He lights a cigarette. “No.”
“Oh,” I say. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“When did it happen?”
“Last night.”
I didn’t hear any phone calls, I feel like saying, but I don’t. I don’t say anything.
“The fucking boyfriend sent me a goddamn email,” he eventually says.
“Oh, shit.”
I wonder, though, if I would’ve done it differently than the fucking boyfriend. The more I think about it, I realize I’d probably make someone else contact Vinnie. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I kind of like it, this idea that I’d hold a great tragedy in my hands, a little responsible and not responsible at the same time. I’d probably send an email.
We stare at each other for an indeterminate, awkward time. This is a good time for someone to offer condolences, grief, support, anything. But all I can do is coexist with him between our houses.
“The funeral’s on Tuesday,” he says when his cigarette burns all the way out.
“When do you leave?”
Vinnie laughs and it feels a little cruel. “I’m not going,” he says.
This isn’t my business. “You should go.”
“I’ve told you, I’m not welcome there.”
“I don’t care about any of them,” I say.
“I don’t need it. I can deal with this on my own,” he says. “I’ll say a goddamned prayer or something here.”
“Vinnie, I’m talking about Torrey.”
Vinnie picks up the cigarette and a tube of ash falls off the end. If he actually tries to smoke that, there’s a good chance he’ll singe his lips off.
“If I were Torrey,” I say, looking away, out through the fichus trees, out to the street, “I’d always hate you for not going.”
“I’m sure she has a long list of things to hate me f
or,” he says.
“Don’t add to the list just because the list is there,” I say, and I feel too wise and it’s unsettling. I don’t like understanding this; I don’t like knowing what it means for a dad to be gone. “That’s an asshole move.”
Vinnie shrugs. He doesn’t understand people, this goes without saying. He certainly doesn’t understand twelve-year-old girls.
“Listen, my dad sucked when I was twelve. Well, when I was every age.”
I can feel the nicotine addiction deep in my bones, crawling beneath my fingernails. I want to pick up Vinnie’s stubbed-out cigarette and rub it over my lips and breathe in deeply until I choke on it, hacking up ash and blood and snot. This is the way my father still ruins me.
“But the times when he pulled through? I remember those just as strongly as the times he sucked.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll never forgive him for lots of things. But for some of the time, those times he came through for me, I’ll never, ever forget those. Fly out there for the funeral and just be whatever Torrey needs.”
Vinnie starts peeling the filter off of the finished cigarette. I feel something like hate for him, or maybe it’s respect. His fingertips are stained a pale purplish brown. It’s not nicotine; it’s not from smoking. One day I’ll ask him.
“What’s your dad’s deal?” he asks. “Where is he?”
“My dad is nowhere,” I say.
The morning of my confirmation, the bishop removed his tall hat and handed that, then his staff, to Reverend Jenny, then turned to me and asked Do you reaffirm your renunciation of evil? And I said I do, and then he said Do you renew your commitment to Jesus Christ? And I, the bride, said I do, and I forgot my next line so the bishop had to feed it to me. I glanced back at the pews, my mother sitting there alone. No dad. I checked the back to see if he was standing awkwardly in the door. …And with God’s grace…? the bishop prompted. And with God’s grace I will follow him as my Savior and Lord. And then when I went home, freshly minted as an eleven-year-old mature member of the church, my father still wasn’t home, and he never came home again.
How to Set Yourself on Fire Page 4