How to Set Yourself on Fire

by Julia Dixon Evans

  In a way, it makes me think, yeah, maybe having children wouldn’t be so goddamned terrible.

  I get up to make some popcorn. I just saw a thing on News Hour about microwaveable popcorn. It was pleasantly surprising that all they warned against was feeding a child microwaveable popcorn and pumping their immune system full of PFCs the day before they get a vaccine. I was expecting much worse. I press the popcorn button and lean down to watch it spin. My mother always used to tell me to stand back from a microwave.

  “Don’t irradiate yourself,” she’d say.

  “I don’t think they sell things at Sears that leak radiation, Ellen,” my father would say, and even I felt like he’d properly made her seem like an idiot.

  The pops space out. I count: one, two, pop. One, pop. One, two, pop. One, two, three, and I press stop. There’s a minute thirty-eight left on the popcorn cycle and I wonder what kind of sturdy popcorn brand takes up the entire time.

  I consider my childhood immunization schedule. I consider all the fucking popcorn I ate as a child. It was the wave of the future. I wonder if I’m truly protected against smallpox.

  “Sheila,” Torrey says. “Come and see.”

  She hands me a letter. I hand her the popcorn bag. Then I think better of it and take it back.

  “Don’t get my bed all buttery,” I say. “Butter flavor-y.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s this one that first made me think it. You have to read slowly. I almost missed it the second time,” she says.

  “You’re a regular Harold C. Carr scholar, aren’t you?”

  “Just read it.”

  Torrey takes the popcorn and hoists herself up onto my kitchen countertop, her gangly legs swinging and banging on the cabinet door. I read. And then:

  “Oh. Oh shit,” I say. “You’re right.”

  FORTY-THREE

  My sweet Rosamond,

  “This is taking too long,” Torrey says. “Skip to the middle of the second page.”

  Well, I do not mean to get so poetic and flowery on you, but sometimes I cannot help myself. Sometimes the devilish mixture of torture and exquisite pleasure renders me incapable of speaking like a man.

  “I love that. That 1950s crap,” she says.

  But, my dear, the world must forgive me. The world does not know the torment of having you so near to me but at arm’s length. The world does not know the torment of knowing what your skin feels like against my fingertips but not being able to chase that sensation at will.

  “Yeah,” she says, through a mouthful of popcorn. “That.”

  “Possibly, but he could just be talking about shaking hands or whatever.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend, Sheila?” Torrey asks. She’s put the popcorn down.

  “What? No.”

  Silence with Torrey is usually a beautiful thing. In contrast to time spent with my mother, where quiet is judgment, imagined or real, it’s nice to know someone exists with whom I can be quiet, no expectations. Except for right now. The space between us is awkward. The silence is annoying. I realize that I always want Torrey to leave the room when things get difficult, and I realize this is a shallow, weak response to conflict. I couldn’t even say whether I’m just worried she’ll name my loneliness, or whether she’ll ask me if I’m boning her dad, or whether she’ll somehow know that I once parked my car in front of a man’s house, a man I didn’t know, for two weeks straight. I’m about to ask her to leave when:

  “I think I have a boyfriend,” she says.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Don’t tell my dad.”

  “It’s not like he can’t hear us.”

  “I’m trying to talk quietly!” she says. Her face is flushed.

  “And, you’re, like, going to girl talk with me about it or something?” I say. I’m painfully aware that the panic in my voice comes through loud and clear.

  “Um, no,” she says. She laughs. “I’m not going to girl talk. I don’t even know what girl talk is.”

  “Me neither,” I say.

  “Your phone is buzzing,” Torrey says, nodding toward the edge of the counter where my phone is plugged in. “It says Mom.”

  “Ah shit,” I say. “I need to take this. I’ve missed a few calls.”

  I pick up the phone and look at her, but she doesn’t move. It’s a face-off. Torrey is not leaving. It’s the fourth ring now. I have to answer.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say.

  “Sheila?” she asks, predictably. “It’s Mom.”

  “Uh huh,” I say, because I don’t trust myself to say anything nice.

  “You didn’t have a chance to come by on Sunday?” she asks.

  “Oh, sorry, I couldn’t make it,” I say. “I was feeling sick. I only worked a half day today, too.”

  There’s victory in the sense that I’m not lying.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. Are you feeling better?”

  I contemplate. I could go for maximum pity, tell her I still feel pretty sick, but that might mean she’d step up her mothering into the “feeling needed” category and I really do not want that.

  “I’m feeling better,” I say.

  I’m about to make a tedious gesture to Torrey, but when I look up, she’s watching me, expressionless. It’s the face of a girl who has lost her mother. A girl who has lost her mother listening to a mother and daughter treat each other poorly, listening to a mother and daughter perpetuate the cycle of manipulation, of dysfunction. She may not even be aware of what she’s hearing. She may not even be aware of what she’s missing. But I am. And that’s enough. It’s not even that I’m worried Torrey will think I’m callous, it’s just that I’m suddenly struck by this need to keep Torrey safe. I’m suddenly struck by how I’m remembering how to feel things.

  “My neighbor’s kid, Torrey, is over,” I say. “Well, technically she’s my neighbor too. And she’s not really a kid. She’s smarter than I am,” I add, with a smile and a wink to Torrey. She rolls her eyes. Success.

  “Oh, that’s nice. She seemed very lovely,” my mother says. “What are you guys doing?”

  “Nothing much,” I say, snatching a letter out of Torrey’s butter-flavored fingers. “Just eating some popcorn and hanging out.”

  “Is her father out somewhere? Are you babysitting?” she asks. I want to respond harshly, but it’s best that Torrey not know about this question.

  “Vinnie’s fine, too,” I say. “I think he’s working from home tonight.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  Neither of us say anything. The silence is laced with judgment. Decades-old, recurrent judgment alongside fresh, minutes-old stuff. The space between us, radio waves and wires and data parcels, swirls with uncertainty and mistrust, with fear of intimacy and affection, with thick, thick resentment. I’m not above any of it. I’m not better than this. If Torrey weren’t watching me, I think I’d hang up.

  “Well, I’m sorry about Sunday,” she says, and I hate that I was about to say those exact same words. It occurs to me that my mother would love that. She always thrived on that stuff, clinging to whatever she could that proved we were mother and daughter. Really, she raised me well enough, even when she was alone. I was well fed. I was loved, if only a little smothered. I was clothed. I was never hurt. When nobody explicitly makes a wrong move, how do we end up off track anyway?

  It occurs to me that getting out of this silent resentment is only as difficult as I make it. I don’t feel very good about this revelation.

  I force a laugh. “I was just about to say that exact same thing.”

  “Oh, honey,” she says. Her voice is light. It was the right move. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “All right, I’d better get back to my guest,” I say. Torrey smiles and takes the popcorn to the couch. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Sheila,” my mom says, and her voice is slow and tentative and I worry.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that thing you were writing when I was last over.�
�

  “What thing?” I say, and then it hits me. Harold’s letter.

  “Some sort of letter. You had spilled your drink on it. You were copying it down in your little book.”

  I look to Torrey, who has no idea what’s taking place on the other side of the phone. She’s lying on her side on the couch, supine. She licks the popcorn grease off her fingertips and then picks up a letter from the floor. I know her fingers weren’t dry or even completely clean before she picked it up. Torrey does not respond to my telepathic plea for advice.

  “I can’t even remember,” I say. I need her to talk more. I need to gauge her tone. I need to know how much she knows.

  “It was just the other day,” she says. Her tone is blank.

  “Oh,” I say. “That. It was something I’m working on. For, like, a craft project. I’m making decoupage.”

  I want to accuse her of being stupid. Like, if I were hiding something from her, why would I have it out, actively working on it in plain sight? I never take the time to ask the same question of myself.

  “Well, then,” she says. “That’s interesting.”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking of taking a class,” I say. I’ve never really been capable of a non-elaborate lie.

  “I’ll let you get back to your guest,” she says.

  “All right, Mom. I’ll talk to you later,” I say.

  The phone is barely on the counter before I say, “Fuck, Torrey. I think she knows.”

  “Knows?”

  “About the letters.”

  “Oh,” she says. “That could suck.”

  “At least one of them. The one I spilled tea on. It’s my own fucking fault.”

  Torrey doesn’t answer. She’s reading.

  “Tell me again,” she says. “Why are you hiding this from her?”

  For as much as I know the exact answer to this, I really have no idea how to answer that. It started as an instinctual lie. It snowballed.

  “It’s too late now,” I say.

  “No, it’s not,” Torrey replies quickly.

  “Yes, it is. She’d be so pissed.”

  “What if it were your daughter? And this happened? You’d want to know. I mean, even if you were pissed at first, you’d respect your daughter for confiding in you, right?”

  “That argument is invalid because I do not have a daughter and never will and this is precisely why.”

  Torrey nods to the doorway, and I turn around to see Vinnie standing there, leaning against the frame. His T-shirt has a smattering of tiny holes near the collar.

  “Tell your mother,” Vinnie says. His certainty is stunning.

  Nobody speaks until Torrey jumps up from the couch.

  “I finished all your popcorn. Sorry,” she says. She skips to the door and squeezes past Vinnie.

  “Tell your mother,” he says again, but he’s grinning.

  FORTY-FOUR

  WHEN I GET IN the car, I mean to drive to my mother’s house and tell her everything. But somehow I’m standing in front of 3012 Juniper. It’s not the house Harold moved to, but the old lady said it’s just a few houses away. There’s a café down the street, still in view of the houses, so I buy coffee and a scone and sit outside, at a small wooden table on the sidewalk, and watch.

  It’s one of those evenings where the sunset barely shows up at all. The sky turns from bright grey-blue to grey to darker grey with little ceremony. The sun is gone and the houses are dark. Nobody is home.

  What would I do if I saw him? What would I do if Harold came home and shuffled up one of the short paths on a walker or with a cane? I don’t know what I would do, and the thought terrifies me. As does the chance that I could find out Harold is long dead.

  I wolf down the scone but the coffee is awful. I’ve never liked coffee. It’s time to leave.

  “Mom?” I say, against the door as I knock. “It’s me.”

  No lights are on. The house is dark, though her car is parked out front. I press my face to the small window in the door, straining to see any slivers of light, a blue flicker of a television.

  “Mom!” I say, louder now, and I try the doorbell. I have no plan. I don’t know why the fuck I’m trying so hard to get her to answer. It’s survivalist guilt. It’s something.

  “I’m coming!” she shouts. It’s faint, from upstairs. I check my phone but it’s only eight o’clock.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” she asks, all frantic as she opens the door. And then, as if it’s her prescribed right and privilege as a parent, she adds, “Do you need something?”

  “Can I come in?” I say. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  Yet, I want to add.

  I sit in the living room. It’s the same as it’s always been, but I notice two new picture frames with my grandmother in them. Mom never used to have pictures of my grandmother up while she was still alive. I consider pointing this out.

  “What’s the matter, then?” she asks.

  “You know you asked me about the thing I was writing?”

  “Yes,” she says. She looks at her knees.

  “Well, it was from Grandma’s shoebox,” I say.

  She has this horrifying mixture of tight-lipped calm and pre-explosion. She might explode. She looks like she is about to shout.

  “I kept one. I saved it, as a memento,” I say. It’s so easy how the little lies stack up again. I’m here to come clean, but five minutes into the visit and brand-new untruths bubble to the surface, slick like oils.

  She stands up. “I see.”

  “It’s kind of ruined now, from my tea. Almost illegible,” I say, too fast.

  “So, you read it?”

  “Yes, of course I did.”

  She hasn’t really been looking at me this whole time, but now she stares. She’s waiting for something. She’s waiting for my statement. I cling to this expectation because right now, I am surrendering my power to this woman. I’m not only dishing out a major confession, but I’m also opening myself up to a lengthy discussion about Rosamond and her probably-lover. In this small moment, though, I’m in control. I control the silence. The most she can do is to cut in and say “And?”

  She does. “And?”

  “And what?” I want to laugh. It’s absurd. I’m absurd.

  “Well, what do you think of it all?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. And as much as it’s an avoidance tactic, as much as I want to deflect her question, I am telling the absolute truth. I do not know what I think of it all.

  She sits down again, but this time on the raised edge of the fireplace. She’s always looked so young, my mother. Her skin is smooth, kind of glowing. Her hair is nice, not too long, not too short. The honeyed color is not startling or noticeable. She seems timeless, like a generically aged grown-up.

  “Have you read them?” I ask. And with that it’s out there, in the space between us. The letters. They exist. I’ve read them. I know about them. I want to know if she’s read them. It’s almost like trust. It’s almost like sharing. It’s almost good enough. It is probably good enough.

  “Yeah,” she says, with a big, theatrical sigh. “A long time ago.”

  “A long time ago?” I repeat. “How long ago?”

  “I found them when I was a teenager. Thirteen, I think, just before my fourteenth birthday,” she says. “I was snooping around in my mother’s closet when they were out. Looking for birthday presents.”

  I think about Torrey, having her world turn upside down. I think about the incredible presence of mind and capacity for intellectual grief she has. I think about myself, about my eleven-year-old Confirmation ceremony, the day my father left. I was already strikingly aware of human pain and suffering. Of relationships. Of fear, of failure, of disappointment. This awareness only got stronger as a teenager. I retreated into it, a gulf, a force of nature, warm and dangerous and it feels like only right now is it all crashing down around me. It feels like only right now am I trying to emerge.

  I pity my mother. I pity her unearthing this
secret at thirteen. I always default to being annoyed by my mother, but when I think about her like I think about Torrey, it’s different. Despite my obsession with the shoebox, I’ve managed to stay detached from the reality of the situation. Not just the reality that someone in my family kept an intense secret for so long, because that charms me. That excites me. That makes me want more secrets in my life. The reality that this made my own mother question her family, how she understood her life—that’s what I am having trouble processing. That’s what I pity. My mother, the human. My mother, the girl. My mother, the me.

  Torrey is better at this stuff. I wish she were here.

  “Honey!” my mother says, completely alarmed. “You’re scratching your elbow raw! It’s bleeding!”

  I didn’t realize.

  “Did you, um, ever tell Grandma?” I ask.

  She leans back, restless, unsettled by the blood.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asks. “I have some Prosecco.”

  “No,” I say. “I quit.”

  “Oh, really?” she says, all offended. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

  “I just decided right now.”

  My mother gets up and walks to the kitchen. She’s dressed like someone out of a fancy old lady J. Jill type of catalog. She always dressed this way, even when she was twenty years younger than all the models. She moves slowly. I try to remember how old she is. When she returns with her wine, I ask again.

  “Well? Did you tell Grandma?” My inclination to refer to her as Rosamond makes me smile.

  “This isn’t funny, Sheila,” she says.

  “No, it’s not that. But did you tell her?”

  She sighs. I know the answer already. For as distant as my mother feels, I can usually read her every action, her every tone, her every sigh. I’m cut from her cloth.