How to Set Yourself on Fire

by Julia Dixon Evans

  “They’re mostly buried with my grandmother,” I say. I don’t look at Torrey.

  Simon comes really close to me, like we were on his porch, and I realize we’re in the same formation: him crouching before me, me crumpled to my feet, and again I don’t remember crumpling. A person this close to me is so safe and so dangerous at the same time. This person with his ancestry of heartache in this house with its ancestry of heartache, of grief for my ancestry: safety, safety, danger. I want Torrey to hold my hand like that time when we talked about our mothers and the Children’s Moon, when she cried in our courtyard, because Torrey is all safety. If could find the words I could ask her right now to hold my hand again, right here in Harold’s new living room, but there are no words. Simon touches my face. I don’t know what it feels like. I can’t name this. It’s not relief, it’s not sadness, it’s nothing I’ve ever known.

  FIFTY-ONE

  I DON’T RECALL DRIVING home, walking up the steps, or saying goodbye to Torrey. I’m in my kitchen, and both sets of letters are on the countertop. One set bulging in its ragged old box. The other, tiny, in a neat bundle with a binder clip.

  “Torrey?” I say out loud.

  “Yeah?” she calls from the courtyard.

  “Did you read them?”

  “What?”

  “The Rosamond letters.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “What?” I ask, defensive. “Did you?”

  “They’ve been in your purse the whole time.”

  “Oh. Yeah, that’s right,” I say. “Well, come and see.”

  Torrey walks in. “God, I don’t know what to make of your moods, lady.”

  “I’m not moody,” I say, but then I can’t hide my smile, big and crazed. Moody feels like a compliment. “Torrey,” I start, thinking I might be able to explain myself. I take a deep breath. I can’t.

  “That’s all right,” she says. “Lemme see.”

  “Wait,” I say, stilling her arm as she reaches the bundle. “It’s a bit unsettling.”

  “How can it possibly be unsettling?”

  “Fine. Go ahead.”

  She picks a different letter than the one I read, and I’m not even curious. I know I’ll read them all. I know I’ll line them up, calls and responses with Harold’s. I know I’ll do this eventually, but my disappointment for what these letters do not hold is heavy and unrelenting right now.

  I put a glass Pyrex jug of water in the microwave. I have no patience.

  “Tea?” I offer.

  “No thanks,” Torrey mumbles without looking up.

  The microwave beeps in time with her first, “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, Harold?”

  “Yeah,” I say again. “Harold.”

  “Apparently wasn’t getting what he gave.”

  I laugh out loud.

  By the time Torrey speaks again, I’m down to just a lukewarm, honeyed drop of tea at the bottom of the cup.

  “What if she just didn’t want to get in trouble?”

  “You’re too optimistic,” I say.

  “Well, I think it would have been a good idea for her to not get in trouble.”

  The night before my grandmother died, she told me: History always repeats itself. What if she’d been obsessive, if she’d walked past Harold’s new house, if she’d crept in his new backyard at night, reciting her favorite letters under her breath? Because it had to start somewhere. What lives in me had to start generations ago. And when Torrey says “get in trouble,” it occurs to me that maybe my grandfather was the obsessive one and I have as much of his DNA in me as I do Rosamond’s. Maybe my grandfather was the freak, the manipulator, the one messed up in the head. Maybe I am linked to these letters, but not in the beautiful ways I’d imagined. I’m just the trouble, two generations old. History always repeats itself. Who fears me, I wonder, and I think about my mother. I think about my father.

  “Get in trouble,” I say. “I know.” I take a deep breath. I don’t know how to explain any of this to Torrey. I don’t even know if I properly understand it or if it’s just a cop-out. “You’re right. If she were not at all into Harold, she’d have asked him to stop with the ungentlemanly conduct in his letters, right?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Torrey says. “I’m wondering if they’re code.”

  “You’re so full of shit. There’s no code.” I laugh, but I hope she’s right. I laugh because I’m the trouble.

  “What! There could totally be a code,” she says. “I just need to reread them all.”

  “My grandmother,” I say, but I can’t say it, I don’t know what to say. “My grandmother—” I stand up and carry the teacup back to the kitchenette.

  “What about her?” Torrey asks. “You don’t think she was capable of carrying out some coded top-secret business?”

  I sigh and lean over, my elbows on the counter, my fingertips against my temples.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t know what anyone is capable of.”

  “See?”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” I say. I push up and walk toward the door. I hold it open for Torrey but she doesn’t move. “It doesn’t matter because they’re both dead. Even if they held a candle for each other their entire lives, what do we accomplish, digging into it? Nothing. We just get sadder for them. Is that worth it?” I’m talking fast and my voice is shaky but I’m trying not to shout.

  “I don’t know,” Torrey says quietly.

  “I don’t think it’s worth it. Do you someday want someone to honor your life in a way that makes everyone sadder?” I nod toward the door.

  “Remember when you told me what my dad said about my mom?” she says. She walks toward me, and we’re both standing in the doorway. I’m fully aware that Vinnie can probably hear us from his house.

  “What about your mom?”

  “That once upon a time he was, like, madly in love with her, and that doesn’t just go away? That she would always be special to him?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I loved that.”

  “Well, it made me sad.”

  “You seemed to like hearing it,” I said.

  “I did! But I had this special thing to think now, about my mom, and it ultimately made me sadder, thinking about my dad and her, thinking about how my dad feels. And I still think it’s a good thing. I’m glad you told me.”

  Torrey walks out. She’s made her point.

  I have no sense of time, or how long we spent at Simon’s. I turn on the TV and PBS has a kids’ show blaring, so it must still be early evening. The voices and the sound effects are gratingly loud, and not like old-fashioned cartoons, with boing noises and full-orchestra soundtracks. It’s just loud and constant, voices at full-sass, full-tilt. I turn it off.

  Outside, it’s cold and empty. Nobody is out there. I relish the feeling of being cold, as nowadays it’s the only sign of the season we get in California. Cold evenings and mornings for a few months, then back to hot all the time for the rest of the year. I do not relish the emptiness of the courtyard. I want Vinnie and Torrey to be out here. I want us all out here like some terrible competition of awkward and nosy people.

  I sit on the step outside until night falls, and when it happens, I’m surprised by it. After over an hour of the darkening sky going easy on me, doing it gradually, then suddenly, I blink. When I open my eyes, I’m alarmed by the darkness, just for a second.

  “Evening,” Vinnie says, and sits down in one of his green plastic chairs. The legs widen slightly and scratch across the cement. “How are you doing?”

  “Hi Vinnie,” I say.

  We stay like that, wordless, as the moon rises and takes its place in the sky. I don’t know how much time has passed but I always used to wonder how long it took the moon to make its arc across the sky. Finally, I stand up. I nod goodbye to Vinnie and go into my house. I close the door. It must be nearly twenty degrees warmer inside, the chill outside not yet seeped through the thin walls. It amaze
s me because my insulation is so useless. I know I’ll be cold in the middle of the night, but for now, I open a window and speed up the process.

  “Too hot for you?” Vinnie says through the window.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Won’t be long before you’re freezing, unless your shitty place is somehow better insulated than ours,” he says.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Where’d you and Torrey go today?”

  “Vinnie, you’re not the type of dad to let his kid go off all day and not know where she is.”

  “Yeah, I guess I’m not. But you don’t count. It’s not like she’s gonna get in any trouble with you. Let me guess. The records floor in the library? Some old woman’s lover’s house?”

  “Hey, I’ve taken her other places.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Well, we went to see a man,” I say, not intending it to sound as pointed as it did. “Harold’s nephew.”

  “Wow,” he says, after a moment. “So, any news about Harold?”

  “Seriously, Vinnie?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t pretend like Torrey didn’t come home and gush about this to you.”

  “Well—” he starts.

  “I didn’t even overhear it. I’m just guessing.”

  “She told me a little.”

  “Did she tell you about Simon?”

  “Oh, he has a name, does he?” Vinnie asks, and the way his words twist I can tell he’s smiling.

  I lie down in my bed. I place the shoebox and Rosamond’s bundle of letters at my hips. I’m still not ready.

  “Are you in bed?” Vinnie asks.

  “Just lying down.”

  “It’d be a bit early for you to go to sleep, not even morning yet.”

  “Real cute,” I say. “Mock the insomniac.”

  “You’re not an insomniac,” Vinnie says, and I hate him for being right. “I’ve seen you fall asleep on concrete steps.”

  “Simon is nice, and he had these letters,” I say, feeling sleepy. “And it’s all kind of weird.”

  “Have you read them yet?”

  “No, just one. Torrey read them all.”

  “I heard.”

  “So what did she say?” I ask. I pick up the bundle and turn it around in my hands. It falls onto my chest, then tumbles to the floor with a quiet thud.

  “Nothing much,” he says. “I didn’t pry.”

  We don’t speak for a little while. I hear him unsheathe a cigarette, flick the lighter, and the smell of the smoke sneaks in the open window. A man walks by across the street, shouting nonsense and obscenities, tweaking out. Eventually, I hear Vinnie stand up, the plastic chair scraping against the concrete again. And then I hear the creak of his door and the click of his lock.

  “Goodnight, Vinnie,” I whisper.

  FIFTY-TWO

  IT’S NOT EVEN FIVE seconds after I settle down on my bed with both stacks of letters and a cup of tea that the lights turn off. It’s silent, no satisfying click or shutdown noise like on TV. I check my phone, and it’s half-charged, so I turn on the flashlight app and search for circuit breakers.

  They’re all fine. I test every light. Every appliance. Nothing.

  I call the electric company. This could go one of two ways:

  If it’s an unscheduled outage:

  If it’s my fault:

  “Hi, my power just went out?” I’d say, uptalk and girly curiosity turned on full throttle.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” they’d say, paying no heed to my uptalk and calling me ma’am anyway. “There seems to be some trouble in your area. We have crews on the ground right now trying to determine the scope.”

  “So…” I say.

  “Ma’am, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “When will we get power back?”

  “Our system says, let’s see, possibly by 6 a.m. in your area.”

  “What time is it now?” I’d ask.

  “It’s midnight, honey.”

  “So it’s not my fault?”

  “No, but it is showing that your bill is past due. Do you want to pay that over the phone?”

  I hang up.

  “Hi, my power just went out?” I’d say. I don’t really nail the up-talk.

  “Ma’am, we’re showing your account is in delinquency,” they’d say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you haven’t paid your bill in over two months.”

  “What time is it?” I’d ask.

  “It’s just after midnight, ma’am.”

  “Isn’t that kind of fucked up? Shutting off my power in the middle of the night? What if I had an alarm set to get me to work?”

  “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am,” they’d say. “Do you want to take care of paying the bill over the phone?”

  “I can’t fucking see anything,” I’d say. “How can I pay anything if I can’t see?”

  “Ma’am, you have had plenty of notices. Do you have any flashlights or candles you can light?”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Ma’am, your last notice was supposed to be forty-eight hours ago. Did you get a notice on Tuesday?”

  “Yes,” I’d say. “Probably. I’ve been preoccupied.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we cannot restore your service until you pay your past-due amount. Do you need payment assistance?”

  “No. I have enough money. I just forgot. And I can’t see.”

  I hang up.

  I hate that the stupid phone call drained my battery down to 45%. I shine the flashlight under the sink until I find candles and matches, and then I shut my phone off completely.

  I light a match and hold it in front of me. I watch the flame elongate suddenly, then shrink back down, and then my fingers are hot and I have to shake the match out before I have a chance to light the candle.

  I manage to get three small votive candles burning before the next match burns down. Another match, another three candles. A fourth match, three more. Suddenly my house is glowing, and it seems somehow larger. I carry a few big pillar candles to my nightstand and prop myself up until I have enough light to read.

  By the time I’m done, which doesn’t take long, I notice that one of the smaller votives has already burned out. I want to spread out the letters and line them up by date, but there isn’t enough space away from the dozens of open flames, and there isn’t enough motivating content in Rosamond’s tight-lipped replies.

  But maybe Torrey is onto something. Maybe there’s a code. Maybe she’s just making sure she won’t look bad if she gets caught. Maybe her own sense of self-preservation is stronger than how much she cares for Harold.

  It’s well after midnight in a room aglow with candlelight and I feel old. Not old, but from another time. In the back of my mind, I feel a desperation and this is the perfect storm of things I want, badly, to believe in.

  I’ve never had as much at stake as Rosamond did, in her maybe-romance and in her family, but it occurs to me that I identify with her selfishness on a base level.

  In the kitchen drawer, I have a clothesline and a box of wooden clothespins. The line is basically just a thin rope, not the plastic clothesline they sell at hardware stores now. I step carefully over the floor to get them, winding a serpentine path around the candles, and climb up on my countertop, careful not to step on any candles there, either. I tie the clothesline around the pendant light on the kitchen ceiling. I remember my dad showing me knots, but not in a helpful way. He’d tell me how to do something, then make me watch him repeatedly tie the particular knot, and then he’d just hand me the rope and walk off. He’d never wait around while I tried it myself.

  I try to remember a knot, any knot, but end up just tying five or six regular knots all in a row, a little appendage of stiff knots sticking out from the lamp. I climb down and tiptoe back toward my bed, letting the cord hang slack enough so I can reach it from the ground. I loop it around a few bunched-up aluminum horizontal blinds in the wind
ow above my bed, and then back toward the kitchen, to an upper cabinet knob. The rope zigzags across the small room.

  And then, I fill the room. I get to work.

  Letters dangle from every inch of the line. I’m incensed, focused, almost athletic about it. I love the determination mixed with the physical effort of navigating the candle obstacle course. I hang all of Rosamond’s letters, and leave spaces for two of Harold’s on either side of each of my grandmother’s. Matching two of his for one of hers will still only use up a fraction of the stack of Harold’s letters, but it’s the best I can do given my small house and given Rosamond’s unequivocal lack. Given: we might not have them all (given: that is an optimistic take). “When I can, I find the Harold letter that I think might precede any specific Rosamond letter and peg it before that one. Then I find which letter I think he composed when Rosamond’s lackluster, arms-length prose is still the most fresh in his mind, and peg it immediately afterward.

  When I’m done, I sit on my bed and lie back. It’s beautiful in here. It smells like hot candles and old books. It smells like church. The dim light makes each tired page glow. Some of them are translucent, like mica, like stained glass.

  Rosamond. My grandmother. A sweet woman, kind, pensive. The most pensive person I ever met. She always seemed different from people who were just quiet. But the way Harold described her in his letters makes her seem warm, even chatty, and perhaps the last time she was that chatty was a morning visit to Harold’s house, free of her daughter, free of her husband, free of that other life she’d never escape. When I’m troubled, I act. When I’m in a bad place, I do something—maybe not a good something, but a something. Rosamond seemed to do nothing except burrow inside herself. It frustrates me, even angers me a little. I suppose I even admire it.

  Despite the dozens of miniature flames, it’s cold now, a California November seeping in. I sit up a little and pull my knees up, beneath the skirt, letting my skin warm itself.

  I want to sit back, to see all of this from afar, like glowing prayer flags for a sad remembrance. I don’t want to study the letters right now, but I’m compelled to. I know Torrey is asleep, Vinnie too, and I want to do this on my own. I want to be alone, as alone as I was when I first read Harold’s letters. It seems like an entire lifetime ago.