When You Are Engulfed in Flames Read online

  “I don’t think he can hear you,” Gretchen said, and Mrs. Peacock told her she’d had all the lip she was going to take. She’d had all the lip she was going to take from any of us, and so we were quiet as we piled into the car, Keith telling a convoluted story about him and someone named Sherwood as he sped beyond the Raleigh we knew and into a neighborhood of barking dogs and gravel driveways. The houses looked like something a child might draw, a row of shaky squares with triangles on top. Add a door, add two windows. Think of putting a tree in the front yard, and then decide against it because branches aren’t worth the trouble.

  Mrs. Peacock’s place was divided in half, her in the back, and someone named Leslie living in the front. A man named Leslie, who wore fatigues and stood by the mailbox play-wrestling with a Doberman pinscher as we drove up. I thought he would scowl at the sight of Mrs. Peacock, but instead he smiled and waved, and she waved in return. Five children wedged into the backseat, children just dying to report that they’d been abducted, but Leslie didn’t seem to notice us any more than Keith had.

  When the car stopped, Mrs. Peacock turned around in the front seat and announced that she had some work that needed doing.

  “Go ahead,” we told her. “We’ll wait here.”

  “Like fun you will,” she said.

  We started outdoors, picking up turds deposited by the Doberman, whose name turned out to be Rascal. The front yard was mined with them, but the back, which Mrs. Peacock tended, was surprisingly normal, better than normal, really. There was a small lawn and, along its border, a narrow bed of low-lying flowers — pansies, I think. There were more flowers on the patio outside her door, most of them in plastic pots and kept company by little ceramic creatures: a squirrel with its tail broken off, a smiling toad.

  I’d thought of Mrs. Peacock as a person for whom the word “cute” did not register, and so it was startling to enter her half of the house and find it filled with dolls. There must have been a hundred of them, all squeezed into a single room. There were dolls sitting on the television, dolls standing with their feet glued to the top of the electric fan, and tons more crowded onto floor-to-ceiling shelves. Strange to me was that she hadn’t segregated them according to size or quality. Here was a fashion model in a stylish dress, dwarfed by a cheap bawling baby or a little girl who’d apparently come too close to the hot plate, her hair singed off, her face disfigured into a frown.

  “First rule is that nobody touches nothing,” Mrs. Peacock said. “Not nobody and not for no reason.”

  She obviously thought that her home was something special, a children’s paradise, a land of enchantment, but to me it was just overcrowded.

  “And dark,” my sisters would later add. “And hot and smelly.”

  Mrs. Peacock had a Dixie cup dispenser mounted to the wall above her dresser. She kept her bedroom slippers beside the bathroom door, and inside each one was a little troll doll, its hair blown back as if by a fierce wind. “See,” she told us. “It’s like they’s riding in boats!”

  “Right,” we said. “That’s really something.”

  She then pointed out a miniature kitchen set displayed on one of the lower shelves. “The refrigerator broke, so I made me another one out of a matchbox. Get up close, and y’all can look at it.”

  “You made this?” we said, though of course it was obvious. The strike pad gave it away.

  Mrs. Peacock was clearly trying to be a good hostess, but I wished she would stop. My opinion of her had already been formed, was written on paper, even, and factoring in her small kindnesses would only muddy the report. Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein’s monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn’t look at him the same way again. My sisters and I didn’t want to understand Mrs. Peacock. We just wanted to hate her, and so we were relieved when she reached into her closet and withdrew another back-scratcher, the good one, apparently. It was no larger than the earlier model, but the hand was slimmer and more clearly defined, that of a lady rather than a monkey. The moment she had it, the hostess act melted away. Off came the man’s shirt she’d worn over her slip, and she took up her position on the bed, surrounded by the baby dolls she referred to as “doll babies.” Gretchen was given the first shift, and the rest of us were sent outside to pull weeds in the blistering sun.

  “Thank God,” I said to Lisa. “I was worried for a minute there that we’d have to feel sorry for her.”

  As children we suspected that Mrs. Peacock was crazy, a catchall term we used for anyone who did not recognize our charms. As adults, though, we narrow it down and wonder if she wasn’t clinically depressed. The drastic mood swings, the hours of sleep, a gloom so heavy she was unable to get dressed or wash herself — thus the slip, thus the hair that grew greasier and greasier as the week progressed and left a permanent stain on our parents’ gold bedspread.

  “I wonder if she’d been institutionalized,” Lisa will say. “Maybe she had shock treatments, which is what they did back then, the poor thing.”

  We’d like to have been that compassionate as children, but we already had our list, and it was unthinkable to disregard it on account of a lousy matchbox. Our parents returned from their vacation, and before they even stepped out of the car we were upon them, a mob, all of us talking at the same time. “She made us go to her shack and pick up turds.” “She sent us to bed one night without supper.” “She said the master bathroom was ugly, and that you were stupid to have air-conditioning.”

  “All right,” our mother said. “Jesus, calm down.”

  “She made us scratch her back until our arms almost fell off.” “She cooked sloppy joe every night, and when we ran out of buns she told us to eat it on crackers.”

  We were still at it when Mrs. Peacock stepped from the breakfast nook and out into the carport. She was dressed, for once, and even had shoes on, but it was too late to play normal. In the presence of my mother, who was tanned and pretty, she looked all the more unhealthy, sinister almost, her mouth twisted into a freaky smile.

  “She spent the whole week in bed and didn’t do laundry until last night.”

  I guess I expected a violent showdown. How else to explain my disappointment when, instead of slapping Mrs. Peacock across the face, my mother looked her in the eye, and said, “Oh, come on. I don’t believe that for a minute.” It was the phrase she used when she believed every word of it but was too tired to care.

  “But she abducted us.”

  “Well, good for her.” Our mother led Mrs. Peacock into the house and left my sisters and me standing in the carport. “Aren’t they just horrible?” she said. “Honest to God, I don’t know how you put up with them for an entire week.”

  “You don’t know how she put up with us?”

  Slam! went the door, right in our faces, and then our mom sat her guest down in the breakfast nook and offered her a drink.

  Framed through the window, they looked like figures on a stage, two characters who seem like opposites and then discover they have a lot in common: a similarly hard upbringing, a fondness for the jugged Burgundies of California, and a mutual disregard for the rowdy matinee audience, pitching their catcalls from beyond the parted curtain.

  This Old House

  When it came to decorating her home, my mother was nothing if not practical. She learned early on that children will destroy whatever you put in front of them, so for most of my youth our furniture was chosen for its durability rather than for its beauty. The one exception was the dining room set my parents bought shortly after they were married. Should a guest eye the buffet for longer than a second, my mother would jump in to prompt a compliment. “You like it?” she’d ask. “It’s from Scandinavia!” This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.

  The buffe
t, like the table, was an exercise in elegant simplicity. The set was made of teak and had been finished with tung oil. This brought out the character of the wood, allowing it, at certain times of day, to practically glow. Nothing was more beautiful than our dining room, especially after my father covered the walls with cork. It wasn’t the kind you use on bulletin boards, but something coarse and dark, the color of damp pine mulch. Light the candles beneath the chafing dish, lay the table with the charcoal textured dinnerware we hardly ever used, and you had yourself a real picture.

  This dining room, I liked to think, was what my family was all about. Throughout my childhood it brought me great pleasure, but then I turned sixteen and decided that I didn’t like it anymore. What changed my mind was a television show, a weekly drama about a close-knit family in Depression-era Virginia. This family didn’t have a blender or a country club membership, but they did have one another — that and a really great house, an old one, built in the twenties or something. All of their bedrooms had slanted clapboard walls and oil lamps that bathed everything in fragile golden light. I wouldn’t have used the word “romantic,” but that’s how I thought of it.

  “You think those prewar years were cozy?” my father once asked. “Try getting up at five a.m. to sell newspapers on the snow-covered streets. That’s what I did, and it stunk to high heaven.”

  “Well,” I told him, “I’m just sorry that you weren’t able to appreciate it.”

  Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn’t live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at. And the history! Wasn’t it crushing to live in a house no older than our cat?

  “No,” my father said. “Not at all.”

  My mother felt the same: “Boxed in by neighbors, having to walk through my parents’ bedroom in order to reach the kitchen. If you think that was fun, you never saw your grandfather with his teeth out.”

  They were more than willing to leave their pasts behind them and reacted strongly when my sister Gretchen and I began dragging it home. “The Andrews Sisters?” My father groaned. “What the hell do you want to listen to them for?”

  When I started buying clothes from Goodwill, he really went off, and for good reason, probably. The suspenders and knickers were bad enough, but when I added a top hat, he planted himself in the doorway and physically prevented me from leaving the house. “It doesn’t make sense,” I remember him saying. “That hat with those pants, worn with the damn platform shoes . . .” His speech temporarily left him, and he found himself waving his hands, no doubt wishing that they held magic wands. “You’re just . . . a mess is what you are.”

  The way I saw it, the problem wasn’t my outfit, but my context. Sure I looked out of place beside a Scandinavian buffet, but put me in the proper environment, and I’d undoubtedly fit right in.

  “The environment you’re looking for is called a psychiatric hospital,” my father said. “Now give me the damn hat before I burn it off.”

  I longed for a home where history was respected, and four years later I finally found one. This was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’d gone there to visit an old friend from high school, and because I was between jobs and had no real obligations I decided to stay for a while, and maybe look for some dishwashing work. The restaurant that hired me was a local institution, all dark wood and windowpanes the size of playing cards. The food was OK, but what the place was really known for was the classical music that the owner, a man named Byron, pumped into the dining room. Anyone else might have thrown in a compilation tape, but he took his responsibilities very seriously and planned each meal as if it were an evening at Tanglewood. I hoped that dishwashing might lead to a job in the dining room, busing tables and eventually waiting on them, but I kept these aspirations to myself. Dressed as I was, in jodhpurs and a smoking jacket, I should have been grateful that I was hired at all.

  After getting my first paycheck, I scouted out a place to live. My two requirements were that it be cheap and close to where I worked, and on both counts I succeeded. I couldn’t have dreamt that it would also be old and untouched, an actual boardinghouse. The owner was adjusting her Room for Rent sign as I passed, and our eyes locked in an expression that said, Hark, stranger, you are one of me! Both of us looked like figures from a scratchy newsreel, me the unemployed factory worker in tortoiseshell safety glasses and a tweed overcoat two sizes too large, and she, the feisty widow lady, taking in boarders in order to make ends meet. “Excuse me,” I called, “but is that hat from the forties?”

  The woman put her hands to her head and adjusted what looked like a fistful of cherries spilling from a velveteen saucer. “Why, yes it is,” she said. “How canny of you to notice.” I’ll say her name was Rosemary Dowd, and as she introduced herself I tried to guess her age. What foxed me was her makeup, which was on the heavy side and involved a great deal of peach-colored powder. From a distance, her hair looked white, but now I could see that it was streaked with yellow, almost randomly, like snow that had been peed on. If she seemed somewhat mannish, it was the fault of her clothing rather than her features. Both her jacket and her blouse were kitted out with shoulder pads, and when worn together she could barely fit through the door. This might be a problem for others, but Rosemary didn’t get out much. And why would she want to?

  I hadn’t even crossed the threshold when I agreed to take the room. What sold me was the look of the place. Some might have found it shabby — “a dump,” my father would eventually call it — but, unless you ate them, a few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone. The same could be said for the groaning front porch and the occasional missing shingle. It was easy to imagine that the house, set as it was on the lip of a university parking lot, had dropped from the sky, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, but with a second story. Then there was the inside, which was even better. The front door opened onto a living room, or, as Rosemary called it, the “parlor.” The word was old-fashioned but fitting. Velvet curtains framed the windows. The walls were papered in a faint, floral pattern, and doilies were everywhere, laid flat on tabletops and sagging like cobwebs from the backs of overstuffed chairs. My eyes moved from one thing to another, and, like my mother with her dining room set, Rosemary took note of where they landed. “I see you like my davenport,” she said, and “You don’t find lamps like that anymore. It’s a genuine Stephanie.”

  It came as no surprise that she bought and sold antiques, or “dabbled” in them, as she said. Every available surface was crowded with objects: green glass candy dishes, framed photographs of movie stars, cigarette boxes with monogrammed lids. An umbrella leaned against an open steamer trunk, and, when I observed that its handle was Bakelite, my new landlady unpinned her saucer of cherries and predicted that the two of us were going to get along famously.

  And for many months, we did. Rosemary lived on the ground floor, in a set of closed-off rooms she referred to as her “chambers.” The door that led to them opened onto the parlor, and when I stood outside I could sometimes hear her television. This seemed to me a kind of betrayal, like putting a pool table inside the Great Pyramid, but she assured me that the set was an old one — “My ‘Model Tee Vee,’” she called it.

  My room was upstairs, and in a letter home I described it as “hunky-dory.” How else to capture my peeling, buckled wallpaper and the way that it brought everything together. The bed, the desk, the brass-plated floor lamp: it was all there waiting for me, and though certain pieces had seen better days — the guest chair, for instance, was missing its seat — at least everything was uniformly old. From my window I could see the parking lot, and beyond that the busy road leading to the restaurant. It pleased Rosemary that I worked in such a venerable place. “It suits you,” she said. “And don’t feel bad about washing dishes. I think even Gable did it for a while.”

  “Did he?”

  I felt so clever, catching all her refe
rences. The other boarder didn’t even know who Charlie Chan was, and the guy was half Korean! I’d see him in the hall from time to time — a chemistry major, I think he was. There was a third room as well, but because of some water damage Rosemary was having a hard time renting it. “Not that I care so much,” she told me. “In my business, it’s more about quality than quantity.”

  I moved in at the beginning of January, and through-out that winter my life felt like a beautiful dream. I’d come home at the end of the day and Rosemary would be sitting in the parlor, both of us fully costumed. “Aha!” she’d say. “Just the young man I was looking for.” Then she’d pull out some new treasure she’d bought at an estate sale and explain what made it so valuable. “On most of the later Fire King loaf pans, the trademark helmet is etched rather than embossed.”

  The idea was that we were different, not like the rest of America, with its Fuzzbusters and shopping malls and rotating showerheads. “If it’s not new and shiny, they don’t want anything to do with it,” Rosemary would complain. “Give them the Liberty Bell, and they’d bitch about the crack. That’s how folks are nowadays. I’ve seen it.”

  There was a radio station in Raleigh that broadcast old programs, and sometimes at night, when the reception was good, we’d sit on the davenport and listen to Jack Benny or Fibber McGee and Molly. Rosemary might mend a worn WAC uniform with her old-timey sewing kit, while I’d stare into the fireplace and wish that it still worked. Maybe we’d leaf through some old Look magazines. Maybe the wind would rattle the windows, and we’d draw a quilt over our laps and savor the heady scent of mothballs.

  I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis. One afternoon in early April, I returned from work to find a lost-looking, white-haired woman sitting in the parlor. Her fingers were stiff and gnarled, so rather than shake hands I offered a little salute. “Sister Sykes” was how she introduced herself. I thought that was maybe what they called her in church, but then Rosemary walked out of her chambers and told me through gritted teeth that this was a professional name.