How to Set Yourself on Fire

by Julia Dixon Evans

  “No,” she says. “I didn’t.”

  “Ever?”

  “No.”

  “Huh.”

  “I guess everyone has their secrets,” she says, and takes a delicate sip of Prosecco. It smells sweet. Fuck sobriety. I take the glass from her hand and finish it.

  “Yeah,” I agree. “Everyone has their secrets.”

  “I would check every year,” she says. “Right before my birthday. Like some sort of messed-up tradition.”

  “Check what?” I twirl the empty champagne flute in my hand. It’s crystal, etched and carved, with violent-looking angles and tiny triangular crevices. “Were these glasses Grandma’s?”

  “Yes, they were. I’ve had them since your father and I got married. And I mean I’d check the shoebox.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Like, to see if there were new letters?”

  “Yeah. To see if there were new letters.”

  “Wow,” I say. Processing. Processing my mother. “Well. Was there? Anything new?”

  “No,” she says. “Never. But get this,” she says, and suddenly it’s as if we’re co-conspirators. We’re in this together. It feels more right than anything I’ve ever felt with my mother. “The box had always been moved. The letters were in a different order every time.”

  I’ve only possessed the letters for a few months now, and I’ve read them in some way every day. It doesn’t surprise me that Rosamond moved the shoebox, or that she read the letters in secret, but it still makes me feel something like butterflies in my stomach, something like a chill. Until this moment, I’ve never fully put myself in my grandmother’s shoes. I’ve never wished for a love like Harold’s, or a box full of letters like Harold’s, daydreams, remnants of a sweeter life. But I can imagine being Rosamond in this sense, in the sense of possession, obsession, compulsion. I’d have to ration my time with the letters. Months would turn into sixty years. There’d be more at stake having someone walk in on me reading them. More at stake leaving one out beneath the bed. Did Rosamond ever get tired of them? Did she ever forget about them? Did she ever forget about Harold?

  “I can understand that,” I say. “Re-reading them.”

  I want to dare my mother to ask me if I’ve read them all. I just kind of want to tell her. I’m still waiting for the fallout from lying about the shoebox for so long, and for all the little lies and big lies along the way. She still believes they’re buried with my grandmother. Her wrath (or maybe it’s heartbreak) may not be inflicted today, but it will come. It’s not that I fear this, it’s more that I just don’t want to have to deal with it. My mother is the kind of person to forgive total strangers for much larger transgressions, but she will always hold a grudge for me for lying about decoupage.

  “So, uh, where is that letter now,” my mother asks. She has that forced casual tone again. She’s nervous as hell. “The one you spilled on?”

  Is this what it all comes down to for her? It’s not how much I know, it’s not what I read, it’s not what I’ve lied about (or at least, it’s not yet what I’ve lied about). It’s about discretion. It’s like when I was young and my dad left, and that same day, she asked me not to tell anyone. I think she just didn’t want me to disappear into the bedroom and gossip with my friends, but I never told them.

  “It’s at my house, Mom,” I say.

  “Take care of it,” she says.

  “Like, make sure nobody finds it? And finds out about Rosamond and Harold?” I’m dredging this up. I sound so angry.

  She stands up and picks up the crystal. She doesn’t look at me.

  “No,” she says, quiet and shy. Her voice breaks on the words. These are her losses, too, all along. “Because it’s all we have left.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  A GOOD DAUGHTER WOULD not have lied to her mother about burying the letters with a dead woman in the first place. A good daughter would not have perpetuated this tale several times already. A good daughter would understand that right then, with her mother on the edge of tears, would be the time to come clean.

  I am not a good daughter. But I know without question that my mother is a good woman.

  Driving home, it starts to rain. My windshield wipers are old and useless. One flaps off to the side with each pass. It’s that Southern California first-rain-of-the-season type of rain, not enough volume to do much except make cars filthier than they already are and fill the still-warm evening air with the fragrance of wet petroleum asphalt. My windshield is obscured for the remainder of the drive home, almost illegally so.

  I wonder if my mother started crying or snapped out of it when I left. I wonder if it was all manipulation. I realize something: it doesn’t matter. She’s an island. I’m an island. This fragile earth, our island home.

  My dear Rosamond,

  I eagerly looked forward to seeing you today. It was such a pleasure. To touch your hand from across my kitchen table, it made me feel at home. It might be fair to say that my life has become bookended between anxiously awaiting our appointments, our rendezvous, and immediately following those appointments with incessantly asking, “When can I see you again?” It’s a cycle I do not find unwelcome. Everything about you is enticing, even when you’re not around.

  But especially when you are around. I become such an animal. I mean that in so many ways. Of course, the obvious, the flesh. I desire you in such tangible ways, and it tends to be my first thought when we are together. Perhaps also when we’re not together. But I also feel animalistic in the very sense of our human nature. Sex, loyalty, protection, devotion.

  Today, as you sat across from me, I was entranced by your opinions on development, on politics, on health, and on our postwar Zeitgeist. You are an exquisitely intelligent person. But all the while, I watched your lips move, your brow furrow, the delicate edge of your jaw flex and move, and your fingers lift and gesture. I wanted nothing more than to run my lips across all of it. Your lips, your forehead, your jaw, your fingertips. Do not mistake me: I did not want you to stop dispensing your ideas. I wanted you to keep talking. I wanted to feel your jaw move against my lips. I wanted to listen to you and touch you at the same time. I want a reality, a universe, in which that is possible all the time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  It has been so long since I have had a sweetheart, and I have never lived with one or had the kind of time and space to get to this point, but I wonder: is there a point in time when one would tire of that kind of freedom, the freedom to talk and kiss and touch at all times, without hindrance? I suppose you would be a perfect candidate to ask this question, but I cannot bear to think of you and your husband in this intimate way. I do not wish to consider whether he has recently touched his lips to your cheek or the soft part of your neck beneath your jaw, or, worse, your fingertips.

  I suppose I am rambling. My point of this letter: I am now free from the “eagerly awaiting your visit” frame of mind, and am now squarely back to “when can I see you again?” So, pray tell, when can I see you again?

  Sincerely,

  Your Harold

  There’s something about the idea of someone putting their mouth on jaws and fingertips that makes me want sex, badly. It’s complicated, the way my dead grandmother’s ex-lover turns me on. It’s conflicting that before I started fucking Vinnie I never wanted sex with another person. I’d just deal with it alone, the television on, my mind nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I’m beginning to lose track of whether I want sex or whether I want Vinnie. I’m beginning to forget that I do not want someone to have sent me a letter detailing how they’d run their mouth across my jaw.

  I no longer have Jesse Ramirez’s purloined letter in my nightstand, but that doesn’t stop me from opening the drawer to check. The empty Ziploc bag is still in there.

  Torrey is still awake; I can hear her talking to Vinnie. They’re discussing after-school tennis. Tonight I momentarily forget how much I like having Torrey around. Tonight I wish for that freedom (the freedom I never took advantage of
when I had it) to march the few steps across the courtyard and bring Vinnie back to my place without any consequence.

  Instead, I hatch a plan. I open my journal to what I think of as the Jesse Ramirez Pages. The pages are softer from frequent use, they’re dirtier, and they’re obvious from the outside of the book. They make me think of the Sunday Pages, the Dirty Pages, in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, the ones the parishioners open to every single Sunday, oils and filth thickening and yellowing the pages with each use. The church has dirty pages of ritual and tradition, of rite and faith, but I have dirty pages of stolen devotion, of freakish obsession. The entire text of Jesse’s letter is in here, piecemeal. With a small piece of writing paper, I begin to recreate the letter. The letter that I honorably returned to its rightful owner. I feel proud about being honorable and it lessens the blow of all the other times when I haven’t been. It lessens the blow of what I’m doing now.

  I know it’s wrong. I know it’s creepy. That doesn’t stop me. And when it’s done, I wave it in the air slowly, blowing cool breath toward the drying ink, then fold, a perfect trifold, place it in the Ziploc bag, expel the air against my stomach, seal, and put it away in the nightstand drawer.

  Future generations, I fantasize, might one day discover this well-preserved letter in my handwriting and wonder: Who was she writing to? Who was Sheila’s love, her one and only? The deception is exciting. I close the drawer.

  FORTY-SIX

  I’M READING A BLOG about fibromyalgia. All of these conditions are so much more desirable nowadays, with the pretty banner graphics and endearing stories and perfect fonts. Twenty-five years ago, when I first started wanting diabetes, all I had to go off was a character in The Baby-Sitters Club. Soon thereafter, I met a girl with childhood arthritis, someone with celiac disease, and someone with lupus. I never told any of these people that I was jealous. I didn’t really comprehend it myself. I just wanted to feel special, unique, and have problems that other people would never understand.

  When I first discovered fibromyalgia, it was little more than a word on a pamphlet in a student health clinic, but this blog is written by a hip twentysomething with an eye for design. She dresses well, quirky enough to be unique but not alarming, as if to say, Hey, I am living well despite my condition, look at my boots.

  As an adult, I can acknowledge the desire to have some concrete pain to fill the spaces where my twisted mind expects it, but even that feels shitty. Like I’m objectifying people less fortunate than me, but this girl seems a hundred times more fortunate than me or anyone else I know. She has her shit together. She has purpose. She blogs. Sure, she takes dozens of pills a day with dire consequences if she misses one, and sometimes she can’t get out of bed, but I have felt that way for far less clinical reasons. I have felt that way for no reason. No reason but that the insides of me are unbearable.

  There’s nothing wrong with me. This has been medically proven, once. My former insurance company stopped honoring my requests for more diagnostics and labs. A therapist gave me medicine but I didn’t take it because she didn’t even run tests. She based her diagnosis on my answers, on the things I told her, and I bullshitted so much I couldn’t even remember which parts were genuine. How could I take a pill based on that? And what if it worked? What if my bullshit was the right-sized hole for a pill-shaped fix? I felt helpless in the face of someone helping me.

  The blogger, her doctor gave her medicine, twenty-five drugs, each with a little slot in a twenty-five-pill sorter she keeps on her vintage vanity in her breezy bedroom, and each of those was linked to a result on a printout on a clipboard. A result that someone found when looking at a drop of her blood beneath a microscope. What if they took the way I felt and put it beneath a microscope, a slice of this untetheredness, smashed between a glass slide and the little plastic cover, glowing beneath a tiny golden light, and what if they saw absolutely nothing there?

  I go outside. Vinnie’s standing by the gate with a cigarette. Perhaps the presence of his daughter has made him more self-conscious of the plumes of secondhand smoke his lungs express into the shared courtyard. I watch him. He’s stopped wearing so many stained tank tops and T-shirts. It could be the weather cooling off, or it could be Torrey. Or, I acknowledge without spending too much time on the thought: it could be our casual sex arrangement. Maybe he’s motivated to not be undesirable all the time. Well, Vinnie, I want to say, obviously you were desirable in the first place. He was at least more desirable than undesirable. I watch him, the way he leans against the fence, the strength in his back, and I can’t seem to remember ever thinking ill of him.

  Torrey is seated at the green plastic patio table. She’s working on some homework, a large textbook spread open and some math problems in her three-ring binder, but she also has a phone out, and it keeps buzzing. This is new. She picks it up periodically and punches something out quickly before setting it down. She is indifferent.

  “Is someone texting you?” I ask. I realize as the words come out that I sound betrayed. “Cute,” I add.

  “Shut up,” she says.

  “Cute,” I say again, in a singsongy voice. “Aren’t you way too young for a phone?”

  “You’re just jealous that I have friends and you don’t,” she says.

  “Vinnie, I thought you said everybody liked Torrey.”

  “Usually,” he says.

  “And anyway, I have friends,” I say.

  “Name one,” Torrey says. Her phone buzzes and she ignores it, staring at me, arms folded across her chest and a mischievous smirk on her face.

  “Vinnie?” I say. “Vinnie’s my homeboy.”

  “Fine,” Torrey says, rolling her eyes.

  “Torrey’s made friends with another kid who also just moved here at the start of the school year.”

  “Oh, how handy,” I say. “Sorry, that sounds shitty but I actually meant it, like, genuinely.”

  “I know,” Torrey says. “It’s okay. I feel the same way.”

  “Circumstantial friendships are underrated,” I say, acting like some expert on friendships. Once upon a time I had friends. Once upon a time I had friends and lovers and once upon a time I could never be who I imagined they wanted me to be. Once upon a time I sabotaged every intimacy before it even really started. Now I have Vinnie and Torrey, my neighbors. I have a mother, the ultimate circumstantial friendship. “They’re no different than anyone else’s friendships. All those people who have been friends forever, well, at the beginning of that forever, they were circumstantial friends first.”

  Torrey’s phone buzzes. She picks it up almost instantly, fusses her fingers and thumbs over the screen for barely a few seconds, and puts it down.

  “I know,” she says. “I don’t mind. He’s nice.”

  He.

  My eyes lock with Vinnie’s. I grin. He doesn’t.

  My darling Rosamond,

  Your written reassurances make my heart sing. I do understand that sometimes it takes more than a day to write back. You have more demanded of you than I, living alone. And also, I can write with abandon, out in full view. You, I understand, cannot. You must not only find time to steal away with your own thoughts, but you also have to find the time to steal away without anybody watching you.

  And in that sense, I appreciate your correspondence all the more. I acknowledge the great lengths to which you go to communicate with me and to continue our unexpected friendship. I appreciate you so much.

  But also I beg the same of you, the appreciation and the acknowledgment. I hope that you acknowledge my childish impatience when it comes to you. I hope you acknowledge my torment as I wait for days to receive a message from you, a signal, a lifeline. I am not angry. I am just making a statement. I am just declaring my state of mind.

  My state of mind, in case you have not figured this out yet, is that I am in love. I am deeply in love. With you, my dear Rosamond. With you.

  Sincerely, lovingly,

  Your Harold

  Without even thi
nking of the love, I want to show this to Torrey with all of her instant gratification, instant communication with her new friend, her new boy friend. But I know she remembers it perfectly anyway, just from the one read-through weeks ago. And this is the first time I’ve seen Torrey act her age. She should have a pass to be a preteen girl, for once. Torrey cleaned up my mess, my late-night broken teacup. Torrey has taken me to visit the old woman who lives in Harold’s old house. Torrey has taken me to the goddamn library. All of that is too much responsibility for a twelve-year-old.

  A tiny, quiet part of me wishes I was not the type of person who mandates help from anyone. That I was not the type of person who left messes to clean up. That I was not the type of person who was so much of a mess herself. I’m aware that I’m too selfish to stop. To stop being a mess seems unfathomable.

  It’s a cool night, crisp with a clear sky. There’s a bright star close to the moon. My mother always knew when the planets were visible. If she were sitting next to me on the step right now, she’d point and say, “Look, Sheila, Venus is out.” And I’d be disappointed that it just looked like another star, instead of a moon-sized ball in the corresponding mustard yellow of all the textbook illustrations.

  I watch Vinnie. He’s playing Tetris again.

  “Turn that down,” I say.

  “I actually don’t know how.”

  “Then turn it off. Just for a minute.”

  He complies so easily, but leans back on the wobbly legs of his green plastic chair and watches me. He even puts his hands behind his head, elbows splayed.

  I pull my phone out. I realize that Vinnie also probably knows everything there is to know about astronomy and constellations. Vinnie seems to know everything about everything and has all of that everything filed in perfectly accessible pockets in his brain. Like father, like daughter.

  “Hello?” the voice in the phone says.

  “Hi Mom,” I say.

  “Sheila?” she predictably says. I am her only child. I am the only person who calls her Mom.