When You Are Engulfed in Flames

  “Mother here was a psychic,” she explained. “Had herself a tarot deck and a crystal ball and told people whatever stupid malarkey they wanted to hear.”

  “That I did.” Sister Sykes chuckled.

  You’d think that someone who occasionally wore a turban herself would like having a psychic as a mom, but Rosemary was over it. “If she’d forecast thirty years ago that I’d wind up having to take care of her, I would have put my head in the oven and killed myself,” she told me.

  When June rolled around, the chemistry student graduated, and his room was rented to a young man named Chaz, who worked on a road construction crew. “You know those guys that hold the flags?” he said. “Well, that’s me. That’s what I do.”

  His face, like his name, was chiseled and memorable and, after deciding that he was too handsome, I began to examine him for flaws. The split lower lip only added to his appeal, so I moved on to his hair, which had clearly been blow-dried, and to the strand of turquoise pebbles visible through his unbuttoned shirt.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked, and before I had a chance to blush he started telling me about his ex-girlfriend. They’d lived together for six months, in a little apartment behind Fowlers grocery store, but then she cheated on him with someone named Robby, an asshole who went to UNC and majored in fucking up other people’s lives. “You’re not one of those college snobs, are you?” he asked.

  I probably should have said “No” rather than “Not presently.”

  “What did you study?” he asked. “Bank robbing?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your clothes,” he said. “You and that lady downstairs look like those people from Bonnie and Clyde, not the stars, but the other ones. The ones who fuck everything up.”

  “Yes, well, we’re individuals.”

  “Individual freaks,” he said, and then he laughed, suggesting that there were no hard feelings. “Anyway, I don’t have time to stand around and jaw. A friend and me are hitting the bars.”

  He’d do this every time: start a conversation and end it abruptly, as if it had been me who was running his mouth. Before Chaz moved in, the upstairs was fairly quiet. Now I heard the sound of his radio through the wall, a rock station that made it all the harder to pretend I was living in gentler times. When he was bored, he’d knock on my door and demand that I give him a cigarette. Then he’d stand there and smoke it, complaining that my room was too clean, my sketches were too sketchy, my old-fashioned bathrobe was too old-fashioned. “Well, enough of this,” he’d say. “I have my own life to lead.” Three or four times a night this would happen.

  As Chaz changed life on the second floor, Sister Sykes changed it on the first. I went to check my mail one morning and found Rosemary dressed just like anyone else her age: no hat or costume jewelry, just a pair of slacks and a ho-hum blouse with unpadded shoulders. She wasn’t wearing makeup either and had neglected to curl her hair. “What can I tell you?” she said. “That kind of dazzle takes time, and I just don’t seem to have any lately.” The parlor, which had always been just so, had gone downhill as well. Now there were cans of iced tea mix sitting on the Victrola, and boxed pots and pans parked in the corner where the credenza used to be. There was no more listening to Jack Benny because that was Sister Sykes’s bath time. “The queen bee,” Rosemary called her.

  Later that summer, just after the Fourth of July, I came downstairs and found a pair of scuffed white suitcases beside the front door. I hoped that someone was on his way out — Chaz, specifically — but it appeared that the luggage was coming rather than going. “Meet my daughter,” Rosemary said, this with the same grudging tone she’d used to introduce her mother. The young woman — I’ll call her Ava — took a rope of hair from the side of her head and stuck it in her mouth. She was a skinny thing and very pale, dressed in jeans and a Western-style shirt. “In her own little world,” Sister Sykes observed.

  Rosemary would tell me later that her daughter had just been released from a mental institution, and though I tried to act surprised I don’t think I was very convincing. It was like she was on acid almost, the way she’d sit and examine something long after it lost its mystery: an ashtray, a dried-up moth, Chaz’s blow-dryer in the upstairs bathroom. Everything got equal attention, including my room. There were no lockable doors on the second floor. The keys had been lost years earlier, so Ava just wandered in whenever she felt like it. I’d come home after a full day of work — my clothes smelling of wet garbage, my shoes squishy with dishwater — and find her sitting on my bed or standing like a zombie behind my door.

  “You scared me,” I’d say, and she’d stare into my face until I turned away.

  The situation at Rosemary’s sank to a new low when Chaz lost his job. “I was overqualified,” he told me, but, as the days passed, his story became more elaborate, and he felt an ever-increasing urge to share it with me. He started knocking more often, not caring that it was 6:00 a.m. or well after midnight. “And another thing . . . ,” he’d say, stringing together ten separate conversations. He got into a fight that left him with a black eye. He threw his radio out the window and then scattered the broken pieces throughout the parking lot.

  Late one evening he came to my door, and when I opened it he grabbed me around the waist and lifted me off the floor. This might sound innocent, but his was not a celebratory gesture. We hadn’t won a game or been granted a stay of execution, and carefree people don’t call you a “hand puppet of the Dark Lord” when they pick you up without your consent. I knew then that there was something seriously wrong with the guy, but I couldn’t put a name to it. I guess I thought that Chaz was too good-looking to be crazy.

  When he started slipping notes under my door, I decided it was time to update my thinking. “Now I’m going to die and come back on the same day,” one of them read. It wasn’t just the messages, but the writing itself that spooked me, the letters all jittery and butting up against one another. Some of his notes included diagrams, and flames rendered in red ink. When he started leaving them for Rosemary, she called him down to the parlor and told him he had to leave. For a minute or two, he seemed to take it well, but then he thought better of it and threatened to return as a vapor.

  “Did he say ‘viper’?” Sister Sykes asked.

  Chaz’s parents came a week later and asked if any of us had seen him. “He’s schizophrenic, you see, and sometimes he goes off his medication.”

  I’d thought that Rosemary would be sympathetic, but she was sick to death of mental illness, just as she was sick of old people, and of having to take in boarders to make ends meet. “If he was screwy, you should have told me before he moved in,” she said to Chaz’s father. “I can’t have people like that running through my house. What with these antiques, it’s just not safe.” The man’s eyes wandered around the parlor, and through them I saw what he did: a dirty room full of junk. It had never been anything more than that, but for some reason — the heat, maybe, or the couple’s heavy, almost contagious sense of despair — every gouge and smudge jumped violently into focus. More depressing still was the thought that I belonged here, that I fit in.

  For years the university had been trying to buy Rosemary’s property. Representatives would come to the door, and her accounts of these meetings seemed torn from a late-night movie. “So I said to him, ‘But don’t you see? This isn’t just a house. It’s my home, sir. My home.’”

  They didn’t want the building, of course, but the land. With every passing semester, it became more valuable, and she was smart to hold out for as long as she did. I don’t know what the final offer was, but Rosemary accepted it. She signed the papers with a vintage fountain pen and was still holding it when she came to give me the news. This was in August, and I was lying on my floor, making a sweat angel. A part of me was sad that the house was being sold, but another, bigger part — the part that loved air-conditioning — was more than ready to move on. It was pretty clear that as far as the restaurant was concerned, I was nev
er going to advance beyond dishwashing. Then, too, it was hard to live in a college town and not go to college. The students I saw out my window were a constant reminder that I was just spinning my wheels, and I was beginning to imagine how I would feel in another ten years, when they started looking like kids to me.

  A few days before I left, Ava and I sat together on the front porch. It had just begun to rain when she turned, and asked, “Did I ever tell you about my daddy?”

  This was more than I’d ever heard her say, and before continuing she took off her shoes and socks and set them on the floor beside her. Then she drew a hank of hair into her mouth and told me that her father had died of a heart attack. “Said he didn’t feel well, and an hour later he just plunked over.”

  I asked a few follow-up questions and learned that he had died on November 19, 1963. Three days after that, the funeral was held, and while riding from the church to the cemetery Ava looked out the window and noticed that everyone she passed was crying. “Old people, college students, even the colored men at the gas station — the soul brothers, or whatever we’re supposed to call them now.”

  It was such an outmoded term, I just had to use it myself. “How did the soul brothers know your father?”

  “That’s just it,” she said. “No one told us until after the burial that Kennedy had been shot. It happened when we were in the church, so that’s what everyone was so upset about. The president, not my father.”

  She then put her socks back on and walked into the parlor, leaving both me and her shoes behind.

  When I’d tell people about this later, they’d say, “Oh, come on,” because it was all too much, really. An arthritic psychic, a ramshackle house, and either two or four crazy people, depending on your tolerance for hats. Harder to swallow is that each of us was such a cliché. It was as if you’d taken a Carson McCullers novel, mixed it with a Tennessee Williams play, and dumped all the sets and characters into a single box. I didn’t add that Sister Sykes used to own a squirrel monkey, as it only amounted to overkill. Even the outside world seems suspect here: the leafy college town, the restaurant with its classical music.

  I never presumed that Kennedy’s death was responsible for Ava’s breakdown. Plenty of people endure startling coincidences with no lasting aftereffects, so I imagine her troubles started years earlier. As for Chaz, I later learned that it was fairly common for schizophrenics to go off their medication. I’d think it strange that the boardinghouse attracted both him and me, but that’s what cheap places do — draw in people with no money. An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I’d found an affordable one it wouldn’t have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques. What I could never fathom, and still can’t, really, is that at one point all those things were new. The wheezing Victrola, the hulking davenport — how were they any different from the eight-track tape player or my parents’ Scandinavian dining room set? Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.

  Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?

  When my older sister and I were young, our mother used to pick out our school clothes and hang them on our doorknobs before we went to bed. “How’s that?” she’d ask, and we’d marvel at these stain-free, empty versions of ourselves. There’s no denying that children were better dressed back then: no cutoffs, no T-shirts, and velveteen for everybody. The boys looked like effeminate homosexuals, and the girls like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It was only at Halloween that we were allowed to choose our own outfits. One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I was always a hobo. It’s a word you don’t often hear anymore. Along with “tramp,” it’s been replaced by “homeless person,” which isn’t the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something much less threatening, a figure of merriment, almost.

  None of this had anything to do with my choice of Halloween costume. I went as a hobo because it was easy: a charcoal beard smudged on the cheeks, pants with holes in them, a hat, an oversized shirt, and a sport coat stained with food and cigarette ash. Take away the hat, and it’s exactly how I’ve dressed since 1978. Throughout the eighties, the look had a certain wayfarer appeal, but now, accented by amber teeth and nicotine-stained fingers, the word I most often hear is “gnarly.” If Hugh is asked directions to the nearest Citibank, I am asked directions to the nearest plasma bank.

  This is not to say that I have no standards. The year I turned forty, I threw out all my denim, so instead of crummy jeans I walk around in crummy slacks. I don’t own a pair of sunglasses, or anything with writing on it, and I wear shorts only in Normandy, which is basically West Virginia without the possums. It’s not that I haven’t bought nice clothes — it’s just that I’m afraid to put them on, certain they’ll get burned or stained.

  The only expensive thing I actually wear is a navy blue cashmere sweater. It cost four hundred dollars and looks like it was wrestled from the mouth of a tiger. “What a shame,” the dry cleaner said the first time I brought it in. The sweater had been folded into a loaf-sized bundle, and she stroked it, the way you might a freshly dead rabbit. “It’s so soft,” she whispered.

  I didn’t dare tell her that the damage was intentional. The lengthy run across the left shoulder, the dozens of holes in the arms and torso; each was specifically placed by the design team. Ordinarily I avoid things that have been distressed, but this sweater had been taken a step further and ruined. Having been destroyed, it is now indestructible, meaning I can wear it without worry. For half this price, I could have bought an intact sweater, thrown it to a tiger, and wrenched it back myself, but after a certain age, who has that kind of time?

  My second most expensive purchase was a pair of shoes that look like they belong to a clown. They have what my sister Amy calls “a negative heel,” meaning, I think, that I’m actually taller with just my socks on. While not the ideal choice for someone my size, they’re the only shoes I have that don’t leave me hobbling. My feet are completely flat, but for most of my life they were still shaped like feet. Now, thanks to bunions, they’re shaped more like states, wide boring ones that nobody wants to drive through.

  My only regret is that I didn’t buy more clown shoes — a dozen pairs, two dozen, enough to last me for the rest of my life. The thought of the same footwear day after day might bother some people, but if I have one fashion rule, it’s this: never change. That said, things change. I like to think I’m beyond the reach of trends, but my recent infatuation with the man-purse suggests otherwise. It seems I’m still susceptible to embarrassing, rashlike phases, and though I try my best to beat them down, I don’t always succeed. In hopes of avoiding future humiliation, I’ve arranged some of my more glaring mistakes into short lessons I try to review whenever buying anything new. They are as follows:

  Guys Look Like Asses in Euro-style Glasses

  High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: don’t wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than six feet away I’ll just deal with it when I get there. It might have been different in the eighteenth century when people wore nearly identical wire rims, but today’s wide selection means that in choosing a pair of frames you’re forced to declare yourself a certain type of person, or, in my case, a certain type of insect.

  In 1976 my glasses were so big I could clean the lenses with a squeegee. Not only were they huge, they were also green with Playboy emblems embossed on the stems. Today these frames sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish. Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the who
le problem with fashion. Though design may reach an apex, it never settles back and calls it quits. Rather, it just keeps reaching, attempting to satisfy our insatiable need to buy new stuff. Squinting is timeless, but so, unfortunately, are the blinding headaches that often accompany it.

  In the late 1990s, when I could no longer see my feet, I made an appointment with a Paris eye doctor who ran some tests and sent me off to buy some glasses. I’d like to blame my choice of frames on the fact that I couldn’t see them clearly. I’d like to say they were forced upon me, but neither excuse is true. I made the selection of my own free will and chose them because I thought they made me look smart and international. The frames were made of dark plastic, with rectangular lenses not much larger than my eyes. There was something vaguely familiar about them, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. After picking them up I spent a great deal of time in front of the mirror, pretending to share intelligent comments regarding the state of Europe. “Discount our neighbors to the east, and I think you’ll find we’ve got a sleeping giant on our hands,” I’d say.

  I’d been wearing the glasses for close to a year when I finally realized who they rightfully belonged to. This person was not spotted on the cover of Le Point or Foreign Affairs — in fact, it wasn’t even a real person. I was in New York, passing through a toy booth at the Chelsea flea market when I recognized my frames on the smug plastic face of Mrs. Beasley, a middle-aged doll featured on the 1960s television program Family Affair. This was the talking version, original, and in her box.