I never went back to church. It’s not that I blame my father. It’s not that I was unable to be faithful without my father backing me up, because he hardly ever backed me up in the first place. It’s just that I gave up on so many things that afternoon and church was the easiest. Church was the first to go. Well, the second, I suppose. First was my dad.
THIRTEEN
WHILE VINNIE’S GONE, I collect his mail for him. He’s gone for two and a half weeks and doing this job is the most important thing I’ve done in a while.
His mail fascinates me. His official first name is Vincent. I like that, and I try saying it out loud a few times. He seems to get a lot of checks, payments. There’s one returned letter with one of those invalid address stickers over the label, and, peering through the glassine, it looks like it’s some sort of invoice.
I wish he’d left a key with me. If I had a key, I’d spend one hundred percent of my time inside Vinnie’s place, scrutinizing whether the construction is completely identical to mine and looking in every tiny corner of his house, in every drawer, in every cabinet. I’d leave no stone unturned. I’d sleep there. I’d eat whatever food he left in the fridge. I’d wash my face in his sink. I’d bleed into his toilet. I’d scrub the cracks in his floors. I’d watch broadcast television in his living room. I’d bring my grandmother’s letters.
He calls ten days into it and asks me to open one of the envelopes. I’m giddy but it’s a total disappointment. Just a man’s name, a few vague line items (full: $600, base: $50), and the address to Vinnie’s place.
“Do you work out of your house?”
“Not entirely, that’d be impossible!” he says, like it’s obvious.
“Do you have an office?”
“Well, I’ve never really referred to it that way,” he says, distracted. Now is not the time to play the guessing game about his career. “Hey, I’m coming back in a few days. Torrey too.”
“Torrey?”
“Yeah,” he says. In his voice I can almost hear the way he’s sitting, slouched, fingering an ashtray. I wonder if he also has a green plastic lawn chair out there.
“She’s moving here? Like, permanently?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to stay in your place?” I ask.
Vinnie laughs. “Yeah. I’m staying in my place.”
“How is that even possible?”
“It’s a lot bigger than yours.”
Now is not the time to ask him how much he pays in rent.
I hear a voice near to him, Torrey, and she says “Dad,” and then it’s illegible, and it sounds like Vinnie muffles the mouthpiece with his hand and says, “Of course, Tor, hang on.”
“Sheila, yeah, well, we’ll be back on Saturday.”
“Okay,” I say.
It doesn’t really sink in.
I watch Antiques Roadshow with the sound off. The closed captions are malfunctioning, stuck on the local station announcements and a bunch of dashes. The Keno twins, their sandy blond hair rustling with every gesture and nod, are appraising some sort of wrought-iron lamp, or maybe it’s a plant stand. It’s so quiet. I miss Vinnie’s noise, his smoke, his stupid phone games. Maybe I just miss something to be annoyed at.
Just as I start to feel incredibly lonely, the twins share a laugh and a knowing look. Someone the next building over starts cooking onions. The oil was clearly very hot before they slid the onions off the cutting board. It’s loud and sputtery, and instantly fills the block with that pungent sweet smell, and it makes me so hungry. I want to be fed. My mother always hated cooking onions, so the smell is not nostalgic for me. It’s not a smell of home. It’s a smell of somewhere else, something else, someone else. It’s a smell of longing. It’s a smell of lacking.
I pour some cereal.
It’s value reveal time, and I watch the guest closely, a plainly dressed woman in her seventies. Her hands tremble. This is my favorite part, when they try to act like they don’t care about the money. Note the nonchalance before the number is given, and then, with few exceptions, they go to great lengths to maintain their nonchalance. Sometimes they get stupidly excited and do something embarrassing for their family watching at home, but for the most part they try to be cool. But the thing is, there’s always a slip. That moment when the number is revealed, there’s either a wash of disappointment or a wash of greed, and it absolutely delights me.
My phone rings but I don’t look away from the screen as they reveal the amount. It’s greed. It’s quiet and it’s small but it’s greed. I wonder what she has to feel greedy for, at that age. Or maybe she went her whole life banking on this one piece of folk art furniture to fund her retirement or endear her heirs.
The phone rings again.
“Hi,” I say, hoping to skip the—
“Shelia? It’s Mom.”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?” she asks.
“Hm,” I say, as if I have to think about it. “Let’s see.”
Antiques Roadshow is over now. It’s a split screen with the credits rolling and Mark Wahlberg, muted, saying probably the same thing he says every day.
“Why?” I ask. “Do you need help with something?” The last thing I want to do is tell her I’m not going to work.
“Well, do you think you could take a long lunch or something? We haven’t done that in a while.”
I laugh. Her voice is fake and nervous.
“Sure, Mom.”
“Okay, great. Shall I pick you up at work? Where’s your assignment these days?”
“It’s okay, I’ll come pick you up. I can take two hours if I want.” The lies come so easily with this woman, it’s almost troubling.
With the next three letters in the series, I can almost get inside Rosamond Baker’s mind during the weekend before her first meeting with Harold C. Carr. Because there are three letters. Three—one for every day my grandmother still did not respond to him. Which means my grandmother waited until the exact last moment to respond to Harold C. Carr. I can pretend, I can pretend to be her. I’d sit in a corner, somewhere in the house that allows me a tiny view of my back fence. Maybe I could even see a sliver of Harold’s roof. I’d check for movement in between the fence slats. I’d hold his letters. I’d not show them to my husband.
Dear Mrs. Baker,
Just saying hello. I hope you have a lovely Saturday. I hope you spend it busily writing out the exact manufacturer of your daughter’s doll.
Sincerely,
Harold C. Carr
Dear Mrs. Baker,
It’s a lovely Sunday morning here. How’s the weather where you are? I wonder if you get different low pressure systems around the block. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Enjoy this weather, unless it’s raining there.
Sincerely,
Harold C. Carr
Dear Mrs. Baker,
Your daughter’s crying woke me up in the night. I am not saying that to incite pity or shame or to have you worry about waking the neighbors. I just wish to let you know I am concerned about your daughter, and about your likely sleeplessness. Is she ill? Does she need a doctor? I happen to know of a moderately good and moderately handsome one who lives very near to you.
Hopefully it was just a bad dream. I remember bad dreams as a child. I remember being only willing to scream. I hope she is not terribly sad about her doll. I imagine it would have helped provide solace to a distraught dreamer. Except in its current headless condition, of course. At present, it would have made for a much darker night for you all.
That said, I hope you are well enough rested. And if you are able to, please do take care of writing back to me, or come knock on my door. Tomorrow’s the day! I daresay I am looking forward to meeting you.
Sincerely,
Harold C. Carr
FOURTEEN
“SO,” MY MOTHER SAYS.
She looks at her plate. She looks at the ceiling. With her fingertip, she draws vertical lines in the condensation on the outside of her wa
ter glass.
“You know how you asked me the day your grandma passed away…”
“Asked you what?” I say. I know without doubt what she’s getting at.
“You asked about a shoebox?” She draws horizontal lines now, a little condensation grid.
“Oh.”
“I can’t seem to find it,” she says.
“That shoebox?”
“Yeah. What did Grandma tell you about it?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“How did you know about it, then?”
I pause. This is unfair of me. I’m fully aware of it as it happens. I can guess what my mother is afraid of, of people finding out that her own mother was an almost-whore. That her own family was a sham. But if it were me, I wouldn’t give a shit. Let people find out. Let people marvel in the mystery and the drama. It’s better than a sham, a staged picture on the mantelpiece.
Or maybe she just doesn’t know how to tell me. How to bring it up in the first place. Maybe she doesn’t want to think about it at all.
Right now, my mother is so small. She’s broken down into little pieces.
Things I don’t know: whether it’d comfort her to discuss this with me, to have to reveal a secret I don’t even know if she has known her whole life; if she knew about Harold all along, or if she learned about him when she acquired the shoebox from the assisted-living facility mere weeks ago; if, at age four, she knew her neighbor, this man; whether she has read the letters; has she never, ever read the letters; if I’m the only one—just me, my grandmother, and Harold C. Carr—in on this too-late secret.
In a fit of great humanity and terrible dishonesty, I say, “Grandma told me she wanted me to have them, that she’d tell me about them the next day, but that she wanted to be buried with them. Then she died before she got the chance to tell me about them.”
My mother gasps, an exaggerated noise.
“So when I went to your house, I got the box to take care of that for her.”
“Sheila! You should have said something.”
“Well, you didn’t ask.”
She looks away.
“So I put the box in her coffin.”
“WHAT?” she shouts.
“I SAID I PUT IT IN HER COFFIN.” Everyone in the restaurant turns to look at me. God, I wish I had a cigarette. I wish I was smoking inside this fancy restaurant and the people would have that to judge too.
“Goddamn it, Sheila, be quiet.”
“Well, I did.”
“Okay,” she says, and it’s hard to tell, but there’s some relief there.
“Is that bad?” I ask. I bite at the splitting skin around my thumbnail. I feel a little bit like an asshole and a little bit like a child. I could laugh.
She sighs. Her shoulders heave. “No, honey. It’s not bad.”
I look away.
“It’s for the best,” she says. “It’s something that needed burying.”
I pretend to not have heard her.
My mother pays the check. The stuff we don’t say to each other hangs between us like bricks, a hundred bricks, hitting the ground with a smack as each minute passes and she doesn’t ask. I don’t offer. She’s the bricks and I’m the one stacking them into a wall.
She never asks me if I opened it. She never asks if I’ve read the letters.
FIFTEEN
I’M SITTING ON THE front step rereading a small selection of the letters when Vinnie and Torrey arrive in an airport taxi. It’s getting late. The sky is a mixture of orange and grey.
My instinct is to hide the letters, but it’s too late. I try to act natural. I just don’t want anyone talking to me.
“Hi, Vinnie,” I say.
Torrey looks nothing like I remember her from a year ago. It’s that age where every day she’s a new person. I remember being twelve, vividly, painfully.
“Hi,” he says. “You remember my neighbor Sheila, right, Tor?”
“Yeah,” she says.
I have it in my power to disappear and make this less awkward. I feel like a good person for this. “Well, I need to get inside,” I say. I try some sort of concluding stretch move with my arms as I stand up, which I probably learned from television. “Nice seeing you again, Torrey.”
Nonetheless I listen to them through the open window. I feel restless, so I clean the edge of where the floor meets the skirting board with an old toothbrush. Being on my hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water reminds me of my grandmother on my father’s side. I never saw Grandma Rosamond, my mother’s mother, cleaning. Her house was always immaculate anyway. My father’s mother, though, was always cleaning and never getting ahead of it. I’d help, when my family would take trips up the coast to visit them, when I was younger, when my dad was still a part of our family, when a dad was a thing I had. My mother would get angry about bleach spots on my clothes. I learned to love the smell of bleach. I’d take deep breaths until I felt a chill inside my ribcage. Maybe that was when I learned how best to spite my mother.
“Here’s your room, Torrey,” I hear Vinnie say. “Sorry it’s nothing much.”
“It’s fine, Dad,” she says, though her voice is quiet and hard to decipher. “I like it.”
I don’t even have a bedroom. Vinnie must have two!
“We can go get stuff for you if you want. I don’t know what you like. Posters?”
I laugh, and then I quickly cover my mouth with my hand. I taste Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap.
“No, Dad, no posters. This is fine.”
“I want you to make yourself at home,” he says.
“I will. I don’t need posters to be at home.”
By the time it’s dark and silent outside, I have scrubbed every corner of my little shack. My fingertips are red and starting to blister. My cuticles will smell like peppermint soap for three days.
The clocks change tonight. I crave the longer night, the feeling of the day closing sooner, the way I believe those things happen without anything really changing. Time doesn’t change, the night doesn’t really change. Just the clocks, but I devour this shift anyway.
There’s movement outside. It’s quiet movement, not the oafy elephantine movement of Vinnie. I’m feeling brave. I’m feeling like a woman with very clean floors. I feel like if there is ever a time to hang out with a twelve-year-old girl, it’s now.
“Oh, hi,” I say as I push through the screen door. “I didn’t know you were out here.”
“Do you, like, smoke or something?” she asks.
“No. Not anymore. Do you?”
She laughs. “God, are you clueless?”
“What? I’m trying to treat you like a person. It’s a natural progression of the conversation.”
“No, I don’t smoke,” she says. “I’m a kid?”
“Very well, then. That’s a good choice. It’s a filthy habit. You should tell your dad that.”
“My dad is sad. He’s not going to stop smoking anytime soon.”
“Sad?”
“Sad dad,” she says in a mocking voice. “I need to write that down.”
“Are you some sort of teenaged poet?”
“I’m not quite teenaged.”
“So just a poet?”
She lifts a single shoulder in some sort of extra-effortless shrug.
I smile. How precious, I want to think. There’s something not precious about her. Something that tells me if she isn’t just being a jerk, I’d actually want to read her poetry. It wouldn’t suck.
“So, your dad is sad?”
“Duh. My mom died.” She picks up a piece of the gravel landscaping and rolls it between her finger and thumb.
“What makes you think he’s sad?”
“Dude. It’s Sheila, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Sheila, he’s mopey.”
“He’s always mopey.”
“Well, you’re probably right. But my mom left him a few years ago. I don’t think he was exactly fine with it.”
“That’s s
o Parent Trap of you. Every kid thinks their parents are better off together.”
“I don’t think they were better off together, lady.”
“Well, in your defense, he did tell me he still loved her in a certain way.”
“Really? When was that? You and my dad have deep conversations or something?” She looks rightfully incredulous.
“Just the once. It was actually a really remarkable thing he said. I was surprised.”
“What did he say?” she asks.
“He’s probably listening.”
“Well, tell me anyway,” she says. I love the smile on her face as much as I’m a little afraid of it. She seems so much smarter than me.
“He said something about how he once thought she was the finest person in the entire world.”
Torrey closes her eyes and presses her mouth shut, her lips two thin lines.
“Then,” I continue, “he said that sort of thing doesn’t change much. She’s still up there on the list. Or whatever.”
I’m almost ready to go inside, to give her some space, to escape the heaviness myself, when she finally speaks again.
“What’s the deal with you and my dad, anyway?” she asks.
“There’s no deal.”
“Why do you get along so well? You don’t seem like you’d get along well with anyone.”
“I actually don’t know. That’s a good question,” I say.
Torrey smiles and leans forward. “He’s really great, though. He’s weirdly great.”
“Weirdly great,” I repeat just to hear how it sounds.
“But you don’t know any more about how he’s doing?”
“No,” I say. “We don’t talk much. We just…exist well. In vicinity.”
I sit there for twenty minutes, a grieving twelve-year-old by my side in what is the most comfortable silence of my entire life. I don’t ever remember being so happy to have someone nearby, and that makes me incredibly sad.
SIXTEEN
I’M SMALL. MY MOTHER’S age when Harold knew my grandmother. One Saturday, early spring, we sat in our backyard, overwhelmed with weeds because California had already endured a dozen mini springs since fall.
How to Set Yourself on Fire Page 5