How to Set Yourself on Fire

by Julia Dixon Evans

  She’s quiet.

  “Sorry,” I say, five minutes later, the letter safely rewritten in my journal. “I spilled some tea.”

  It’s a showdown, a total showdown. I stare at my mother and she stares at me. Either we’re both too daring, willing the other person to risk speaking up first, or maybe neither of us has the courage to say anything at all. Maybe neither of us wants a showdown at all. Maybe we both just want it all to go away. Maybe we both just want to be friends. The saddest part is that I can’t imagine it.

  “Speaking of tea,” I say. “Want some? I’m making some.”

  “No,” my mother says. “No thanks. I just had coffee.”

  “I’m also going to scramble some eggs. Want any?”

  “No thanks,” she says.

  “What did you come here for?” I ask.

  In a way, the idea that a letter from Harold would be right out in the open between us, under our noses, excites me. It’s not like she can assume anything. She probably assumes I saved one letter for myself. She probably assumes I wasn’t lying about burying the shoebox with my grandmother, because who the fuck would lie about something like that?

  She probably assumes that asking me about the letter would be awkward. She probably assumes I would blow up at her. Or maybe I’d just make her feel like shit. I cannot deny that these things would happen. I cannot deny that my mother is possibly afraid of me.

  “Just to say hi,” she says. She glances to the right. To my bed. She’s checking for more letters.

  I crack an egg. The cast iron is hot. There’s a rush of crackling and splattering and the white cooks instantly. I decide against scrambled eggs.

  “I need to get going into work soon,” I say. I don’t have a job. “I need a shower.”

  “Oh, gosh, sorry, sweetie. I didn’t realize you worked on Saturdays!”

  Oh.

  This could go one of two ways:

  One:

  Two:

  “I don’t work on Saturdays, usually. I’m just a little behind and need to catch up.”

  She pauses. “What’s going on? Why are you behind?”

  I want to scream. Seriously?

  “Well,” I say. “The workload is intense.”

  “You’ll have to learn to handle that stuff,” she says. Her voice is overly kind, like she’s trying not to be aggressive. “It’s how business works.”

  Unbelievable, I want to say. But then I realize exactly how believable it is.

  “Well, you know. Retail.”

  “Oh, goodness! How did I not know you’re working retail?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Well, where are you working? When’s your shift? Can I come by and see you? Wouldn’t that be lovely, to come visit you at work!”

  “Well, I’m kind of behind the scenes,” I hedge.

  She pauses. “Well, where?”

  I scan the house, the kitchen, my teakettle. No inspiration. None.

  Vinnie coughs.

  “The pharmacy. At the drug store.”

  “Wow! A pharmacy!”

  “Well, I just do paperwork in the back.” She looks too proud and it annoys me.

  “And janitorial stuff,” I add. Just because she looked proud.

  “I still don’t understand why you left that perfectly good job at the Spike family’s church. It’s a far sight better than janitorial work on a Saturday.”

  Unbelievable, I want to say.

  “Well, I suppose I’d better get ready,” I say.

  “Sure,” she says. “It was good to meet your neighbors, finally. They seem nice.”

  Yeah. They do. They are.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  MY MOTHER WALKS THROUGH the courtyard. Now’s the time, I’m aware of this, to try to reconcile whatever has gone wrong between us. Now’s the time to make things a little better between us. A little more vulnerable, a little more uncertain, but a little better. Now’s the time to not widen the gap, the gap that came out of nowhere, a nearly untraceable gap, a nearly blameless gap. She’s at the gate. And she’s through it. And she’s down the steps. And she’s at her car.

  “Mom?” I shout.

  She pauses, her key fob in hand, her arm outstretched.

  “Maybe I could come by tomorrow instead. That’d work better.”

  “Okay, honey,” she says. She looks relieved, which makes me wonder what she thought I might say when I called for her from across the courtyard. “That sounds fine. Just come whenever. I’ll be home all morning.”

  She drives away and by the time I’m back in the courtyard, Vinnie and Torrey are somehow already back outside the house, relaxing like nothing has happened. Torrey is painting her toenails and I wonder if they heard me lie about my job.

  Vinnie goes inside and opens his fridge. I can hear the flump of the sealed rubber strips pulling away from each other. I can hear him slide a glass jar off to one side of the tempered glass shelf. Glass on glass, much lower in pitch than I’d imagine. I hear the soft pop of the jar lid. Maybe he’s opening pickles. Maybe he’s opening strawberry jam. Maybe it’s kombucha and I’ll never understand this man. But either way, I can hear a jar open from well inside their house, so I know, with certainty, that Vinnie and Torrey heard me lying about my job.

  My darling, my Rosamond,

  I never imagined that you would reply to my last letter in such a way. I never imagined it in a thousand years. Or not even an entire year, which often surprises me, that just one year is all I have known you. It almost feels as if I knew you before I knew myself. It almost feels as if all of the things that happened to me before I met you, before Ripper lived up to his namesake and ripped a certain head off a certain doll—it’s as if all of those things happened to someone else. I didn’t hear my father wail upstairs when my mother finally stopped breathing in childbirth. I didn’t see the horrors of the war. I didn’t kill a man. I didn’t kill more than one man. I didn’t spend a night in the trenches, freezing, motionless, full of agony and misery, waiting for dawn. I didn’t spend many nights like that. I feel new. I am not naïve enough to think this happens to everyone who meets a new friend. I am not naïve enough to think of you as just a friend. I am not naïve enough to think that we are commonplace neighbors.

  I know that this is special. We must guard it close to our hearts for many reasons. First, I do not particularly want to share you. And second, I fear for you. I understand how tumultuous your life would become if your husband knew of our growing friendship.

  Meet me in the park this afternoon, please. Rather, walk past me. I will smile at you, and I will delight in your smile.

  Sincerely,

  Your Harold

  Technically, I’m a better person than Harold. I haven’t wished to break up anyone’s marriage. Technically, I’m standing on more solid karmic footing. That doesn’t stop his letters from making me feel like a degenerate in comparison. He may be an adulterer, or at least a hopeful adulterer, but he is so pure in heart. He isn’t the one hanging by the thread.

  I imagine being Rosamond. I imagine being the same mess I am now, but all vintage, nineteen fifties style. I imagine hanging by a thread, fifties style.

  I don’t have a Harold. Jesse Ramirez is a scam. He doesn’t even know me; he just knew my dress once, for thirty seconds. Not knowing who Jesse is, or who the letter was for, is comforting. The mystery, the fantasy. Having an answer would devastate me.

  At the worst of it, the thick of my obsession with Jesse, I stopped answering my mother and grandmother’s calls for two weeks. My mother drove by my house repeatedly, panicking at the constant lack of my car out front. My car was parked outside Jesse’s house. My phone was off.

  “I told your grandma that you had mono,” my mother said, when it was over, when I went home, when I snapped out of whatever I had snapped into, sitting in her living room with my eyes fixed on the coffee table. “So she wouldn’t know you just disappeared.”

  She wrote me a check. “Early birthday money,�
�� she said. Neither of us wanted to admit it wasn’t birthday money.

  I used every cell in my body to thank her, to stop thinking about the loss of something that was never mine.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said.

  “I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong” is how she said goodbye to me that day.

  Even now, somewhere in the dark places of my mind, the cold places, Jesse is steadfast and committed to me. Somewhere in those sick and sinister reaches, he has been steadfast and committed to me all along. He met me once. He wrote me a letter—surely he was thinking of me. He dropped it for me to find. And the rest of me? The rest of me is still sickened by longing and hope.

  In the bathroom, I notice that there’s only one thing in the laundry basket, a pair of my dirty underwear. One inanimate thing, that is. Hundreds of ants swarm from an invisible crack in the baseboard, into the basket, directly to the panties, directly to the crotch, and then they turn around and head back. They are feasting on the remnants of vaginal lubrication in my underwear. It’s the first time they’ve ever come inside the house. I don’t know whether I should throw the underwear out or what, but I toss the whole plastic laundry basket in the bathtub and turn the water on. The swarm turns into tiny black curled specs, floating in a sporadic layer on the surface of the water. Some of them struggle. Some of them are trapped in the lace edges of the underwear. I leave the drain open and the water running.

  I wonder if an ant colony could survive only on my dirty underwear. I wonder if it could survive only on the crust of my cells.

  I turn off the water, hoping that everyone is drowned and dead by now, but I just leave it all in the bathtub. It’s time to get this out of the way. It’s time to take Jesse out for a test drive.

  THIRTY-NINE

  PARKED OUTSIDE OF HIS house, I read the Jesse letter again. It’s so startlingly similar to Harold’s letters. His longing, his sensitivity, but above all, his broken-heartedness. The penmanship and the language is far too modern for it to be some sort of mysterious missing piece of Harold’s correspondence. But whomever this letter was meant for was victorious over my grandmother. This woman seemed to have a chance to say goodbye. Because he opened, he started with, “By now you must be gone.” She was the one who left. She left him. Poor Rosamond never had that luxury. Poor Rosamond never said goodbye.

  As far as I know.

  I take a deep breath. The dress is wrinkled and does not smell very fresh. I try to smooth my hands over it.

  I have one memory of my grandmother wearing it. I’m very small, maybe six years old. My mother drives to pick Grandma up for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and Rosamond stands in the middle of the living room in a floral bathrobe, smoothing the iron over the fabric. “Just one more pass, sweet girl,” she says to me. My mother waits in the car. Or maybe I’m wrong and she wears this dress every time she dresses up, all those memories stitched into it. Rosamond disappears into the bathroom and emerges with the dress on, red lipstick painted tidily across her aged lips, lips that I can never remember smiling, and her fragrance follows: rose oil, sandalwood, something orange.

  My grandmother never kept anything around for long, especially after my grandfather died. She constantly purged her clothing, the objects in her life. Except, I realize now, for these letters.

  I have only her dress and her letters, but I’ll never forget the way she smelled. I wish I had that perfume. I wish I had something that beautiful.

  I fold the letter and hold it close to my heart as I walk up the steps to Jesse Ramirez’s house. It’s a shame I have to do this. It’s a shame I had to follow him for so long. I am shameful, this is shameful, he is shameful. No, I alone am shameful. I know this and I do not stop.

  I knock. He answers.

  “Hi…” he says. I don’t wait for him to guess.

  “I’m Sheila. I have your letter.”

  “Letter?”

  “You dropped it. Here,” I say, offering the folded pages.

  He doesn’t take his eyes from mine as he takes the letter, and even unfolds it from its perfect trifold before he glances down at the paper. He gasps. It’s a scared gasp, it’s fear.

  “What the fuck is this?” He’s angry, he’s confused.

  I close my eyes. I can be somewhere else if I close my eyes. I’m the one he wants. I’m the one he can’t have. I’m the one who left him. Keep your eyes closed. Keep them closed and it might come true.

  “What the fuck is this,” he says again. “This is three fucking years old! Three years old!” I hear the pages shuffling over and over again, but there are only three of them and I wonder if he knows that stain on the first page is my blood. I have all three pages memorized.

  “Stop it!” he shouts. “Stop that,” he says again, and his voice is low and disturbed and I realize I’m reading the letter out loud, verbatim, from memory, a whisper, a ghost, with my eyes closed. I am halfway through the first page. It’s wild, this combination of Jesse’s presence and the deeply internal forces that bring these words to my lips. I am beyond my own control. I don’t stop.

  “I could be in a room of a thousand people…”

  “Stop it,” he says. “Now.”

  “…I could be the loneliest soul on the planet.”

  “You are a fucking psycho,” he says.

  “…I wouldn’t have you.”

  “Don’t ever come here again. Don’t ever call me. Don’t even think about me again,” he says. He slams the door hard, the air lifting my hair and my skirt.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to the closed door. “I’m sorry I kept it for so long.”

  I wish I could cry. I don’t know if Jesse Ramirez is an asshole or if I’m just out of my mind. That’s really all I wanted to know, I realize.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, a little louder. “I’m so sorry.”

  I walk away slowly, down the front steps. They’re red, but must have been painted years ago. Now they’re a chipped pink. I hear the door unlatch and open a little, but no other movement. Jesse is watching me from the front door.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper without turning around. I didn’t even realize how much I wanted to tell him about Harold and Rosamond until the opportunity had already passed.

  “I could be the loneliest soul on the planet,” I say. “The loneliest.”

  FORTY

  THE SKY IS NOT yet fully dark, but the stars are already out. They’re so bright tonight; they seem closer than usual. On my concrete front step, I lean my head back against the closed screen door, and I slowly lift my hand, wrist first, my fingers dangling. I feel like a ballerina, feline, as I straighten out a fingertip. I touch each one, each distant star. There’s hope, I realize. On this planet I’m alone. On this planet I’m disconnected, I can’t make sense of anything. Maybe the stars have my answers. Maybe the stars will help, an anchor at my fingertips and unfathomably far away.

  “Connecting the dots?” Vinnie says as he sits down in his faded green plastic chair.

  I close my eyes and lower my hand. “Something like that,” I say.

  “They’re old news.”

  “Hm?”

  “The stars,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “They’re no good to us. Billions of years old and trillions of miles away.”

  “I’m not even looking at the sky, then,” I say. “I’m looking at the past.”

  “Tell me about the letters,” he says. Casually. No big deal.

  “What about the letters?”

  I assume he has to know something. Sound carries. He’s heard Torrey and I talk and even read the letters together. He has talked to Torrey about them.

  “They’re your grandmother’s?”

  “Yeah. Well, not her writing. Letters written to her.”

  “That’s lovely,” he says, like it’s the first time he’s ever said the word lovely.

  I imagine a Vinnie years ago, a happy, amazed man with his new bride. I imagine him finding her lovely. I imagine him the day she tells him she’s pregnant. I i
magine him the day Torrey is born, all pink and wrinkly and shuddering lungs. Lovely. He’d find it all lovely. Would he cry? Would he cry the first time he laid eyes upon his baby girl, his only child, the only thing he has left? Did he cry?

  “It’s heartbreaking.”

  “I don’t need to read them or anything,” he says. “Don’t worry. It’s just, this old man is feeling left out. I was starting to get a bit of a complex.”

  “You’re not very old.”

  “Figure of speech. But if you ever need any help with anything, let me know.”

  “Thanks, Vinnie.”

  I watch him as he smokes. He has a nice mouth and a nice jaw. He is a good man. I think about how I judged him. I thought he was the lowlife. But here he is, a good man. A good father. A hard worker.

  It’s me. I’m the lowlife.

  “I need a job,” I say. “I think I’m going to go check with the temp agency tomorrow.”

  “Oh yeah?” he says. He’s smiling and I hate not knowing why.

  I go inside and make some tea and toast. I consider vegetables. There’s a carrot in the fridge, so I slice it into little sticks, and then halfway through, think better of it and make circles instead. My mother used to call them carrot coins. I wonder if she noticed that I didn’t visit her today.

  “Hey, Vinnie,” I call out through the screen. “You want some tea?”

  It seems dangerous, more dangerous than sleeping together. We coexist in this space without sharing much except the courtyard. I regret asking. I don’t even know where the fuck that came from. I eagerly dread his reply.

  “Sure, Sheila,” he says. “I like tea.”

  I bring some teacups out, and a kettle and tea bags. My grandmother would use a teapot but it seems so unnecessary these days. I only have three teacups left. They’re old china, nothing heirloom, nothing inherited. I bought them at a thrift shop when I was twenty and I’ve carried them with me for a decade and a half. I wonder if anyone else carried them for that long. Maybe someone held onto them for half a century. The broken one, my favorite, had a small crack in the handle and a chip in the edge, through the gold rim and into the china. I loved the rough of it against my lips.