Burning House (8 page)

One of the most romantic evenings I ever spent was last week, with Holly curled in my lap, her knees to the side, resting against the sloping arm of the wicker rocking chair. It would have cut into her skin if I hadn’t tucked my hand under her bony knees. Her satin nightgown came to mid-calf when she stood, but didn’t cover her knees when she curled into my lap. In the breeze, tiny curls blew against my cheek, where it rested on top of her head. Ash used to say that her fine, long hair reminded him of the way ribbon curled when you held it stretched lightly across your thumb and ran a pair of scissors along the top. The nightgown had been a present from Ash: tiny pink flowers scattered here and there among the narrow pleats, a nightgown from the 1930s. He had bought it at her favorite store, Red Dog, where he had bought her the mysterious homemade rug with a chorus line of squirrels, eating what looked like shrimp. He had also gotten her a satin jacket with “Angelo” written across the back. He cut off the “o” and had a friend add embroidered
wings. On cool nights, she’d wear it over the old-fashioned nightgown.

The night I held her on my lap, Ash had called from a pay phone in a bar in Tennessee, to say that the rattlesnake killed in his friend Michael’s garden was so big that the skin had stretched to cover Michael’s fiddle case. Those were the kind of stories she wanted to hear: stories that justified her not going to Tennessee. She had a baby, Peter, who lived with her ex-husband in Boston, and a psychiatrist in Vermont: she did not want to interrupt her therapy. She had a pottery business, with her friends Andrea and Percy Green and Roger Billington, that was just starting to make a little money, and summer was the best time for selling it in the shop they had set up in Percy Green’s big garage. I was visiting her for a month and a half. She knew I loved Vermont and thought I wouldn’t go as far as Tennessee to visit. I think I would have. I think I would have done almost anything for her. I offered her my savings to fight her fat, villainous lawyer husband for Peter; in the winter, I drove to Vermont four weeks running to sit through group-therapy sessions, because everyone was supposed to bring someone from the family, and she had no family but her brother, in Nebraska, and an aunt in an old-age home.

I’m not the kind of woman who greets other women with little bird pecks on the cheek, and unlike Holly, I’m not used to embracing people; but when she came out to the porch, so sad from hearing Ash’s voice, and shook her head and kissed me goodnight on the forehead, I put out my arms and she climbed into my lap. “He didn’t talk long,” she said. “He said he wrote me a letter that I haven’t gotten yet.” We must have rocked for hours, before the static on the kitchen radio got too much to put up with. Then some sort of embarrassment caught up with her: when she came back to the porch she was smiling an embarrassed smile. The angel jacket was zipped over her nightgown, and she said quietly: “Thanks,
Jane. Now I can go to sleep.” The lacy angel wings disappeared into the kitchen. I heard her turn on the water and knew she was doing what I’d hoped my rocking would soothe her out of, taking the nightly combination that I was convinced was deadly: two vitamin B
₆
pills, and half a pill each of Dalmane and Valium, taken one at a time, because in spite of all the medicine she had taken in her life, she still believed that she would choke to death when swallowing a pill. One thing we all liked about Ash was that he tried to talk her out of them. He tried to get her to take a long, tiring walk with him, or to smoke a joint. He’d pull her to the old carrousel mirror in the kitchen and make her look at her guilty expression as she swallowed the pills. Lamely, she told him that two vitamin B
₆
s couldn’t hurt. Some nights he’d reason with her so that she only took half a Valium. If he ever rocked her on his lap, I don’t know about it.

People often mistake us for sisters. It didn’t happen at Smith, where people had watched us make friends, but later, when we went into New York to shop or to take dance classes. We were both lonely and self-sufficient—I was an only child, and her parents died when she was ten—and once we got over our jealousy because people were always comparing our looks, we realized that we were soul mates. I curled my hair to look like hers; she began to wear long, floating skirts like mine. When she got married I made the bouquet, and she threw it to me. The morning of the wedding I had wrapped thick satin ribbon around the layers of foil that held the stems together, knowing that she was marrying the wrong person, but for once too reticent to say what I thought. Fixing the flowers, I thought of the custom of binding women’s feet in China: having any part of this was wrong.

She stayed married for nine years, all through her husband’s time in the Army and in law school, years of living in a fourth-floor walk-up in New Haven, above a restaurant. They had a big, rusty car that she was always sanding and painting.

She said nothing about the dreary apartment but that the fan of stained glass above the front door was beautiful. When he became a lawyer, the house in the suburbs they moved to wasn’t her taste, either, but she planted nicotiana plants that bloom at night—the most wonderful-smelling flowers I have ever known.

Peter was a breech birth, delivered, finally, by Caesarean. I sat in the waiting room with her husband, thinking: things aren’t working out, and they won’t even let us hear her crying. I had been spending a weekend in the country with my lover when Holly called to say she was going to the hospital. It was almost a month early—they were visiting friends in New York. I remember sitting in the waiting room, smelling of turpentine. Jason, the man I was in love with, had taken me to his house in East Hampton. A few hours before Holly called, I had been asleep in the sun, at the end of his dock, and because he thought it would be funny, because he couldn’t resist, he had dipped into the bucket of gray paint—he was painting the dock—and stroked the wide brush full of cold, smooth paint over both knees as I slept. It didn’t wash off in the water, and I had to use turpentine, wiping it again and again across my knees with his wife’s torn blouse, more amused than I let on that he had done it, wondering how I could love a man who had a wife whose discarded blouses were from Saks. When the phone rang, a few hours before we were going to drive back to the city, Holly said: “I’m going to Lenox Hill. I’m saving myself some time.” Then all at once Jason was dabbing at my knees with turpentine, telling me that I did too have time to dive off the dock, that it didn’t matter if my hair was wet, that if I swam, I wouldn’t have to shower. “Take it easy,” he said. “You’re not having the baby.” No—time would pass, and then I wouldn’t even have Jason. He’d reconcile with his wife, and her mysterious arthritis would disappear, and she’d be back playing the violin. But that day it seemed impossible. It was easy enough to sleep in
the sun when back in the city I didn’t even sleep late at night, in my dark apartment. Jason had been enough in love to pull pranks. In his house, I pulled on my jeans, no underwear underneath, borrowed a T-shirt from him, rushed out of the house never suspecting that it was one of the last times I’d ever see it. The very last time would be in winter, when I sat in the car and he went in to see that a pipe that had frozen had been repaired correctly. He was going back to his wife. I didn’t want to see the presents I’d given him that were still inside: the moose cookie jar, the poster of a brigade of roaches: “
Con más poder de atrapar para matar bien muertas las cucarachas fuertes
.” Percy Green’s drawing of a foot with a hugely elongated big toe, captioned “Stretching the Mind.”

The day Holly went into labor we had taken a fast ride back to the city, the top down on his big, white Ford, wet hair flapping against my head like dog’s ears. No: I wasn’t having this baby. The next spring, I would have an abortion. I would go to a restaurant with a surreally beautiful garden, and Jason would sit next to me, under the umbrella, before I went to the hospital. Pink flowers would fall into our hair, our laps, our food. I couldn’t eat anything. I couldn’t even tell him why. I dropped raw shrimp under the table, praying for the cat that didn’t exist. Sipped a mimosa and spit the liquor back into the glass. My hand on top of his, his other hand sliding up my leg, under the big napkin—a ghastly foreshadowing of the white sheet they’d spread across me an hour later. “Eat,” Jason said. “You have to eat something.” Smiling. Touching. Hiding my food like a child, letting the pink flowers cover what they could.

Later that year, when Holly left her husband and moved to Vermont, she said to me: “Men are never going to be our salvation.” We both believed it, enough to prick fingers and touch blood bubble to blood bubble, but of course children did that, not adults, and it was something men did, anyway. Then Holly met Ash, and for a while she was happy. It didn’t
last, though. I knew that there was trouble the day I went with Ash to pick berries from the scraggly blackberry bushes that grew around the crumbling foundation of what was once an old mansion. He was dropping them in his khaki cap, not caring that it would be stained forever.

“Why is Holly pulling away from me?” he said.

“Because of Peter,” I told him. “Because her husband’s going to win, and she knows she’s losing Peter.”

“Holly and I could have a baby. She sees him. Her ex-husband isn’t trying to turn Peter against her, is he? I never noticed that.”

“Ash,” I said. “She doesn’t have Peter.”

He stopped picking berries. “You know what the two of you do? You condescend to me when you talk. I understand facts. Did it ever occur to either of you that there are other facts besides your facts?”

The sun was beating down on the berries, on his sad face, the stained fingers—it looked as though he had been involved in something violent, when all he had been doing was carefully picking berries. The violence was all inside his head. He was going to Tennessee, to give her time to think. Time to think about whether she could concentrate on him again, spend less time brooding about Peter, have another baby—the baby he wanted. He was staring down, dejected. A black ant ran through the berries. Many ants. He tried to flick them out, but they were quick, and went to the bottom. “It’s so beautiful here in the summer, and she sits in the house—”

“Ash,” I said to him. “What really matters to her is having Peter.”

I always wondered if what I said made him decide for sure to go to Tennessee.

Her brother, Todd, came for the last two weeks in August. He had always been suspicious of the men his sister loved, and he was suspicious of Ash. “He’s one of those smiling Southern boys you outgrow. They wear the same belts all their lives,” he
said. But he loved Holly, and he tried to give impartial advice.

“I know it’s sick,” Holly said to Todd, rocking with him on the back porch, “but our father’s dead and I’ve made you into the permission-giver, and I guess what I’m hoping is that you’ll tell me to go to Tennessee.”

“You wouldn’t leave Peter if I told you to.”

“What if I made a success of myself, and I could fly back to Boston all the time?”

“It’s not what you want to hear,” he said, “but I remember when he was just learning to walk, and somebody took a picture of him with a flash, and he turned to you and he was blind. He was blind the way people get snowblind. I remember how the two of you felt your way toward each other—how you were both just arms and legs. You’re his mother.”

“And I go to a shrink in Montpelier and everybody thinks I’m very fragile, don’t they?”

“Ash sat with me on this porch and told me he wanted at least three children. Kids aren’t going to distract you from Peter. They’re just going to remind you of him. Don’t you remember when Georgia exploded that flash cube in his face and he turned around from the birthday cake like it had been a land mine? Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam.”

He went into the house for iced tea, which he brought back to us on a heavy silver tray, one of those family heirlooms you can’t imagine owning but can’t imagine getting rid of. While he was gone, I said to Holly: “It’s twelve years later, and almost every day, he gets the war into the conversation. He went to Nebraska to keep punishing himself.”

When we finished drinking our tea, Todd and I decided to go swimming. Holly was a little angry at Todd, and she stayed behind to throw pots with Percy Green. Percy Green was stoned, so he didn’t realize what he’d walked in on. “I pick up on something,” he said. “That marvelous creative energy.” He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with men in gondolas
rowing across his chest. His chest was large and well developed from lifting weights. His legs—and he was all leg, under the white shorts—were solid as trees. The only looseness in him anywhere was in his speech—a slight slur from being stoned. The necklace of tiny shells he had gotten in the Philippines, back in the days when he was a black belt in karate who repaired cameras for a living, dangled like a noose under one of the gondoliers’ heads. He and Holly had been lovers once for a couple of weeks.

That afternoon Todd and I floated far from shore in the state park, in a rented rowboat “She had a breech birth and a Caesarean and she’s seeing a shrink twice a week and she still has a problem with drugs,” he said. “Permission. Is she kidding? What could I stop her from doing, anyway?” The boat bobbed over a ripple of water. “Permission,” he said. “Has she ever heard of the women’s movement?”

When our boat drifted near the shoreline, I saw a tree branch curving into the lake—the split branch of a dogwood among pointed firs. Looking down into the water, I was sure that I could follow the slant of the shadow to the bottom, but I had dived into this water—I had mistaken eighteen or twenty feet for only six. The breeze was blowing, making the surface of the water ripple like patterns of lace.

“If she really needs my help,” Todd said, “I could give her some advice on marketing pottery. When our aunt dies, she’ll come into some inheritance money. I’ve been looking into debentures,” he said.

Before I left for Vermont, I bought an answering machine. My friend Linda goes over to the apartment every four or five days to water the plants and listen to the tape, to see if there are any important messages. Last week she called and said that there was one she ought to play for me. She put the machine on playback and held the telephone to the microphone. It was Jason, the first message in so many months that I’d lost count: “Hello, machine. This is the voice you wanted
to hear. It’s calling to ask if you want to meet me for dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. I’m backing up, as you can tell. Doesn’t this thing ever run out of tape? It’s eleven o’clock Sunday morning, and I’m at the Empire Diner.” A pause. Quietly: “I miss you.”