When I wake up in the morning, the sun is bright and high in the sky. Jesse must have long since left for work. I try to remember if I’ve ever seen him leave for work. I wait to feel sadness or disappointment for missing him, but nothing comes.
At home, Vinnie is in the courtyard. He’s doing something to a pair of glass eyeballs.
“Were you keeping your business a secret from me, or something?” I say.
“What?” he asks.
“I mean, I’ve lived here for two years and didn’t know you were a taxidermist. And then just days after you tell me, all of a sudden you’re painting eyeballs out in the light of day?”
He laughs. “Well, I suppose it looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“It’s a shameful profession,” I say with a smile. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Are you just now getting home?” he asks.
I don’t have to answer to him, I remind myself. I’ve never had to.
“Nah, I just had to run some stuff over to my mom’s.” The lie feels good.
“Hey,” Vinnie says. “Don’t worry about explaining anything to me.” He’s smiling.
I smile back. “Okay.”
“And,” he hesitates. He picks up the eyeball and twirls it a little, squinting to see whatever it was he was doing. The edges of his skin around his fingernails are almost all split. “Thank you.”
“Hm?”
“For last night.”
“Oh.”
“And the other night.”
“Yes. Well,” I say. I want to be inside. “Thank you.”
“Well, okay, yeah, you’re welcome,” he says.
“Please don’t ever thank me again.”
“Right.”
“Is it a real eyeball?” I ask.
“No, Sheila.”
Inside, I lock the door, but then I open the windows. It still smells like sex in here.
Dear Rosamond,
I am pleased that you are finding the time to reply to me so frequently. Your letters bring me such joy. Unfortunately, I will not be able to respond for the next eight days. I was unable to tell you sooner because my travel plans have been up in the air, but I am going on a trip to visit my brother. He and I are quite close, and his wife just this morning gave birth to their first child. Despite having lots of young nieces and nephews, it still feels strange to be an uncle, but I am looking forward to seeing my brother and his new family.
However, I daresay I will miss you. I’m afraid that come eight days from now, you’ll have a hefty stack of letters pushed through your fence, letters I wrote you while I was away.
I saw you and your daughter playing in the backyard yesterday. Do you think of me when you’re in your backyard, as I think of you when I am in mine?
Harold rambles the most in this letter. It’s one of his longest. I try to imagine him in this space between meeting her and professing his love, between the beginning and the middle. He tests the waters with affection. He tests the waters with familiarity, with anecdotes, revealing things about himself.
I want more.
I’m asleep when Torrey comes home. She knocks on my door, which is unusual for any of the now three residents of this tiny courtyard. There’s not supposed to be any sort of inquiring. We just wait in the courtyard, and someone will come out soon enough.
When I open the door, she steps forward, like she’s coming in. I remember that she is twelve. I remember that my house smells like sex with her dad. I step toward her too, so that the both of us are more outside than inside. I win.
“I want to read the letters again,” she says.
“No,” I say.
“Oh, come on.”
“No.”
“Well, just one? Please?” She looks so expectant, so pitiful, that I almost consider it.
“Maybe another day.”
“Now?”
“Torrey.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Come and sit,” I say. I feel motivated almost (almost) entirely by a desire to make this other person feel good about herself. I wonder if this is what it’s like to have a sibling. Then I wonder if this is what it’s like to have a child. Then I wonder what it means that I considered someone twenty-three years younger than me more viable as a sibling than as a child.
“How’s school?” I ask.
Torrey laughs. “Really?”
“Really what?”
“You’re doing the ‘how’s school’ thing?” she asks. She uses air quotes.
“Yes, I’m doing it. Since when do you use air quotes? Is this a new thing?”
“Nobody else I know does air quotes. It’s not a thing. I probably saw them when I was little, watching old nineties movies or something.”
“So you’re, like, retro,” I say.
“I guess I am,” Torrey says. She kicks her feet up and she’s wearing the exact same shoes I wore at her age, navy blue Converse low tops, faded enough to be mistaken for grey, and the black line along the toe is rubbed thin, some plastic shoelace aglets missing.
“You totally are retro.”
“I’ve been thinking about that one letter,” she says. She’s not even cautious. She doesn’t feel like she needs some sort of preamble. I love that about her. I love that about children.
“Oh, that one?” I poke her arm. “There are three hundred and eighty-two of them. Narrow it down a bit for me.”
“The one where he is upset.”
“He’s upset from like, number twenty onwards,” I say.
“The first one where he, you know. Where he goes a little crazy?”
Dear Rosamond,
It’s been ten days. You’ve never gone this long without writing to me. Even a few months ago, when I visited my brother, I was so pleased to come home to eight little oilcloth packages, each containing an individually wrapped letter for each day I was gone. I was filled with joy! Despite the fact that we have no expectations between us, no commitment, no rules, I am finding myself afraid as each day passes. When I am the most selfish and the least paranoid, I worry that you have tired of me. When I am the least selfish and the most paranoid, I worry that something terrible has gone wrong, that you are ill or hurt. And when I’m somewhere in the middle, both selfish and paranoid, I worry that Mr. Baker has found my letters.
I’ve taken to sitting on the grass in the backyard, near my vegetable garden. I watch as best I can through the cracks in the fence but I can’t see much. I know I’d be better off indoors, where I can at least see that people are in the backyard. Sometimes I can see the top of your head, the sun shining on your hair. I feel like a Peeping Tom. I feel like a scoundrel. I don’t care.
My dear Rosamond, I just want to be closer to you. And that is why I sit near the fence in the afternoons after work and first thing in the morning. I feel slightly batty. I’ve considered moving my bedroom to the spare room, just so that when I sleep, I sleep one room closer to you.
Oh, my Rosamond. It would behoove me not to send this letter through the fence. I’m glad you are receiving my other ones. I worry that a growing stack would be too conspicuous. But this one in particular, well, it is not in my best interests that you be made aware that I am losing my mind over you.
Alas, sweet Rosamond, I will surely send this anyway. I seem to have a misplaced all sense of restraint when it comes to you.
Sincerely,
Harold
“So, you know, the first one where he goes mental?” Torrey asks.
I do know. “Do you have a photographic memory?”
“Not really,” she says.
“Well, there’s no not really about it. You either do or you don’t. You seem like the type to have a photographic memory, that’s all.”
“There’s a type?” she asks. She kicks back her chair so it balances on the back two legs.
“Yes. You. You’re the type.”
Vinnie’s patio furniture is so old that I worry for her safety. The chair’s back legs bulge a little as she slowl
y rocks, but they don’t give.
She rocks for a while, minuscule movements on the chair. I’m suddenly desperate to try it, too, like a contagion, like a yawn. But I don’t.
“What’s the deal with your family?” she asks.
I kick back on my chair after all.
“What do you mean?” My chair falls forward and crunches back down on all fours. I suck at doing the artful idle thing.
“I mean, where are they? Why do you have the letters? Why not her own children? Why was this a secret? I need answers! Or whatever.”
“Goddamn you.”
Torrey laughs. Vinnie comes out. He sits on my step because he only has two chairs in the courtyard, the ones Torrey and I are in. He nods at us and lights up to smoke. Torrey hands him the ashtray.
“I can’t believe you endorse his nasty habit,” I say.
Vinnie grins.
“What are you ladies doing?” Vinnie asks.
“Talking,” Torrey says. I’m not looking at her to see if she rolls her eyes but the nostalgia I feel for my own adolescence is heavy.
“Torrey asked me about my family,” I say vaguely.
Vinnie laughs.
“What?”
“I hear your phone calls with your mother. Well, I think it’s your mother,” he says.
“Yes. That’d be her.”
“Is she all you have?” Torrey asks.
“Jesus, where do you get lines like that?” I ask.
“Sorry,” she says. “But is she?”
“Yes,” I say. “She’s pretty much all I have now that my grandmother died. I don’t have any siblings. Neither did my mom.”
“So is your dad dead?” she asks. “I can ask because I have a dead mom.”
“Torrey,” Vinnie says.
“I’m ready to joke about it like that,” she says. “She’s my mom. I decide.”
“I thought it was awesome,” I say.
“Well?” she says.
“No, my dad isn’t dead,” is all I say.
Nobody speaks. Vinnie extinguishes his cigarette.
“Have you heard about Sheila’s grandma and her crazy affair?” Torrey says to her dad.
“Torrey!” I say.
“No,” Vinnie says. He watches me carefully. I watch him back. “I don’t need to hear about your girl stuff,” he says. He gets up, messes up Torrey’s hair as he walks by, and goes back in the house.
Vinnie is a good man.
The moon is high in the bright sky. “My mother always used to call it a Children’s Moon,” I say, nodding upward. “When it’s out in the afternoon.”
“So did mine,” Torrey says, and her voice is quiet and small.
It takes a minute for me to muster up the courage. I don’t even know what I’m feeling. Friendship? Maternal instinct? Sisterhood? It’s something and it’s strong and I just want Torrey to feel like she’s not alone.
I reach over between the two faded green plastic lawn chairs and pick up her hand. She flinches at first, but quickly relaxes and lets me hold her hand. She’s stubborn, and she’s tough, but the first time I squeeze her hand, she begins to cry. She’s a quiet crier. It’s so tidy and gentle.
I can’t remember the last time I cried. But I can remember the first time I definitely didn’t.
“Sheila!” my mom shouted from downstairs. I’d once loved this house for the staircase. The decor was shitty but the staircase was magical, with a banister that seemed right out of the movies. But it’s also where I sat the first time my dad left, where I sat when I felt like I was a balloon on a string, tied to the staircase, but the knot was loosening. All I could do was watch from my spot on the stairs as the stubby free end of the string slipped back through the loop. All I could do was feel myself untether.
It’d been three years since my father left us that first time, and he’d come right back. Three years of being back to normal. Three years, though, when every time I climbed up and down that staircase, I’d think of that day. I’d remember my worn-out jeans, an orange and brown striped tank top, and chipped pink toe nail polish, the cheap stuff from the drugstore down the street. I’d remember the ragged, fraying edges of my hair, bunched together at the end of a long, two-day-old braid. I’d remember the way that staircase made my stomach jump, a mixture of fear, worry, shame, sadness, and the unshakeable knowledge that I’d done something wrong. That I’d done the thing that made everyone not fit together. I felt it with each footstep on these stairs, every day for three years.
“Sheila,” she shouted again. “We’re going to be late.”
I didn’t hurry. I knew that as soon as I got downstairs she’d find something else she had to do and then I’d be the one waiting.
In the mirror, my dress looked so much worse on me than it did on the hanger. A bit too short. A bit too puffy in the shoulders. Too much going on in the floral design. In The Gap, it looked perfect next to the two different yet coordinating patterns and colors. I wished I could somehow include those other dresses in my look. My legs were too hairy because my mom had yet to let me shave them. I had a patch of eczema on my right knee, and when I noticed it in the reflection, I automatically reached to scratch the coordinating patch beneath my left elbow.
I decided, quickly, that I looked good enough for Jesus Christ. I wriggled my feet into the bridal white satin shoes my mother gave me, because “Confirmands always wore all white when I was a kid. You can wear whatever dress you want, but at least borrow my old shoes,” she’d said, and it seemed important, that she had gone through this too. My parents supported me in this church stuff. My mother drove me to youth group events, to Sunday services, but she mostly just dropped me off, turned around, and went home. I clammed up every time the priest talked about family bible study or family prayer or all the lines in scripture about eternal life, because if my parents died, they wouldn’t go to Heaven with me. And then I’d try to imagine it, the afterlife; with or without my parents, it all seemed so out of reach. Were we still human? Did we have bodies? What was the point, then, in dying, other than clearing out all the people who didn’t think like us? What if someone you hated also went to Heaven? What if someone you were afraid of was there? What good is it to keep on keeping on if it’s no better than this?
Downstairs, I asked her, “Where’s Dad?”
Her face looked extra wrinkly and sallow. She wasn’t old enough to look this old. Her eyelids were red. She closed them for just a beat longer than a normal blink.
“He’s probably not going to make it to church,” she said in a voice I’d never really heard before.
That night, when it was dark and my teeth were brushed and my skin was properly buffed with St. Ives Apricot Scrub, I asked her again. “Where’s Dad?”
She didn’t answer right away. I stood in the doorway of our upstairs bathroom, and she sat at the top of the stairs, on the top step, her head against the wall, her back to me. The staircase I hadn’t forgiven yet.
“Well, Sheila,” she said. “He left.”
She didn’t move. I was afraid she would cry. Nobody had taught me how to take care of a mother who cried. She didn’t cry, though. Maybe she was done crying. Maybe she hadn’t started yet. I stood in the bathroom doorway and stretched my arms up high, rolling up onto my toes, my fingertips grasping uselessly for the lintel. I thought about one day being taller, I thought about how small I still was.
“Don’t say anything to anyone,” my mother said, her cheek pressed against the wallpaper at the top of the stairs, her words slightly slurred. “Not yet.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t cry.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“SHEILA?” MY MOTHER SOUNDS confused when she answers the phone. Possibly because I never call her. She always calls me.
“Hi, Mom. Yes, it’s me.”
“What’s going on? Is something wrong?”
Yes. She is doing this on purpose. She is not making this any easier on me. I want to hang up. I feel strongly that I should hang up.
&n
bsp; “Not much. I lost my job,” I say. I actually wasn’t planning on saying this. I wasn’t planning on self-sabotaging the phone call so soon. I was just going to say hello and talk. I don’t know when I last called someone and said hello, talked, and felt great about it. I wanted to see if just saying hello and talking is possible.
Answer: no. It’s not possible.
“Oh, Sheila. God. What happened now?” Her tone is indistinct. She is a master at this. Judgment, pity, panic, motherly support, all wrapped up together.
“Nothing happened, really,” I say.
This could go one of two ways:
I could push it:
I could lie:
“Nothing happened, really,” I say. “Well, I just called them and told them I wasn’t coming in anymore.”
“Oh, honey. What on earth did you do that for?”
“Well, I didn’t feel like going in anymore.”
“Nobody feels like going to work, Sheila.”
“That’s not true,” I say. “Some people love their jobs.”
“Name one,” she says.
Vinnie, I don’t say. Vinnie loves his job.
“People who do different things than you or I do,” I say.
“You don’t even do anything!” she says, and it’s the meanest thing she’s let slip in a long time. I cherish it, in a way. It’s good to have something to pinpoint.
She pauses. Her breathing right at the mouthpiece is annoying.
“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean it like that. But surely you’re making contacts or at least learning about different careers with all of this temping?”
“I guess.”
“When did this happen?” she finally asks.
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“A couple of weeks?!”
“Nothing happened, really,” I say. “The temp position ended and since it was just a project rather than regular staffing, they didn’t need me anymore.”
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry,” she says. I can feel that she is pleased by this. Her daughter working on a project, even a vague and unnamed project, is the best thing she’s had to say about me in years. She’s looking forward to it, to telling people about The Project.
How to Set Yourself on Fire Page 9