When You Are Engulfed in Flames Read online

  At night, I read and reread the handful of books I’d taken with me when I left home, and eventually, out of boredom as much as anything else, I started to write myself. It wasn’t much, at first: character sketches, accounts of my day, parodies of articles in the alumni newsletter. Then, in time, I became more ambitious and began crafting little stories about my family. I read one of them out loud to the rat catcher, who’d never laughed at anything, but roared at the description of my mother and her puppy. “My mom was just the same,” he said. “I graduated from Brown, and two weeks later she was raising falcons on my top bunk!” The story about my dad defecating in his neighbor’s well pleased my boss so much that he asked for a copy and sent it to his own father.

  This gave me the confidence to continue, and in time I completed an entire book, which was subsequently published. I presented a first edition to my parents, who started with the story about our neighbor’s well, and then got up to close the drapes. Fifty pages later, they were boarding up the door and looking for ways to disguise themselves.

  Other people had loved my writing, but these two didn’t get it at all. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  My father adjusted his makeshift turban and sketched a mustache on my mother’s upper lip. “What’s wrong?” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong: you’re killing us.”

  “But I thought that’s what you wanted?”

  “We did,” my mother wept, “but not this way.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, but I seemed to have come full circle. What started as a dodge had inadvertently become my life’s work, an irony I never could have appreciated had my extraordinary parents not put me through Princeton.

  That’s Amore

  Beside our apartment building in New York, there was a narrow gangway, and every evening, just after dark, rats would emerge from it and flock to the trash cans lining the curb. The first time I saw them, I started and screamed, but after that I made it a point to walk on the other side of the street, pausing and squinting to take them all in. It was like moving to Alaska and seeing a congregation of bears — I knew to expect them, but still I could never quite believe my eyes. Every now and then, one of them would get flattened by a cab, and I’d bend over the body, captivated by the foulness of it. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds of reverie, and then the spell would be broken, sometimes by the traffic, but more often by my neighbor Helen, who’d shout at me from her window.

  Like the rats that spilled from the gangway, she was exactly the type of creature I’d expected to find living in New York. Arrogant, pushy, proudly, almost fascistically opinionated, she was the person you found yourself quoting at dinner parties, especially if your hosts were on the delicate side and you didn’t much care about being invited back. Helen on politics, Helen on sex, Helen on race relations: the response at the table was almost always the same. “Oh, that’s horrible. And where did you know this person from?”

  It was Hugh who first met her. This was in New York, on Thompson Street, in the fall of 1991. There was a combination butcher shop and café there, and he mentioned to the owner that he was looking to rent an apartment. While talking, he noticed a woman standing near the door, seventy at least, and no taller than a ten-year-old girl. She wore a sweat suit, tight through the stomach and hips. It wasn’t the pastel-colored, ladylike kind, but just plain gray, like a boxer’s. Her glasses were wing-shaped, and at their center, just over her nose, was a thick padding of duct tape. Helen, she said her name was. Hugh nodded hello, and as he turned to leave, she pointed to some bags lying at her feet. “Carry my groceries upstairs.” She sounded like a man, or, rather, a hit man, her voice coarse and low, like heavy footsteps on gravel.

  “Now?” Hugh asked.

  She said, “What? You got something better to do?”

  They walked into the building next door, a tenement, and were on the second floor, slowly climbing to the fifth, when she told him of a vacant apartment. The former tenant had died a month earlier, and his place would be available in a week or so. Helen was not the super or the manager. She had no official title but was friendly with the landlord, and thus had a key. “I can let you have a look, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get it.”

  As one-bedrooms went, this was on the small side, narrow too, and as low-ceilinged as a trailer. The walls were covered with cheap dark paneling, but that could be gotten rid of easily enough. What sold Hugh was the ferocity of the sunlight, that and the location. He got the address of the landlord, and before leaving to fill out an application he gave this Helen woman seventy-five dollars. “Just for showing me the place,” he told her. She stuffed the money down the front of her sweatshirt, and then she made sure we got the apartment.

  I first saw it a few days later. Hugh was in the living room taking down the paneling while I sat on a paint bucket and tried to come to terms with my disappointment. For starters, there was the kitchen floor. The tiles there were brown and tan and ocher, the colors seemingly crocheted as they would be on an afghan. Then there was the size. I was wondering how two people could possibly live in such a tight space, when there was a knock at the unlocked door, and this woman I didn’t know stepped uninvited onto the horrible tiles. Her hair was dyed the color of a new penny, and she wore it pulled back into a thumb-sized ponytail. This put the focus on her taped-up glasses, and on her lower jaw, which stuck out slightly, like a drawer that hadn’t quite been closed. “Can I help you?” I asked, and her hand went to a whistle that hung from a string around her neck.

  “Mess with me, and I’ll stick my foot so far up your ass I’ll lose my shoe.”

  Someone says this, and you naturally look down, or at least I do. The woman’s feet were tiny, no longer than hot dog buns. She had on puffy sneakers, cheap ones made of air and some sort of plastic, and, considering them, I frowned.

  “They might be small, but they’ll still do the job, don’t you worry,” she said.

  Right about then, Hugh stepped out of the living room with a scrap of paneling in his hand. “Have you met Helen?” he asked.

  The woman unfurled a few thick fingers, the way you might when working an equation: 2 young men + 1 bedroom ugly paneling = fags. “Yeah, we met.” Her voice was heavy with disdain. “We met, all right.”

  For the first few weeks that we lived in the apartment, Helen clearly preferred Hugh over me. “My boyfriend,” she called him. Then the two of them got to talking, and she switched her allegiance. I knew I’d won her favor when she invited me into her kitchen. Owing to her Sicilian blood, Helen had an innate gift for cooking. This she boasted as she jammed meatballs into a frozen store-bought pie crust. Then she drowned them in a mixture of beaten eggs and skim milk. “My Famous Italian Quiche,” she called it. Other dishes included “My Famous Eggplant Parmesan with the Veal in It,” “My Famous Tomato Gravy with Rice and Canned Peas,” and “My Famous Spaghetti and Baked Bean Casserole.” If Helen’s food was truly famous, it was so in the way of sun poisoning and growling dogs with foam on their lips: things you avoided if you knew what was good for you. If I was superstoned I might wash the sauce off a bit of veal and eat it atop a cracker, but, for the most part, her food went straight into the trash can.

  Throughout the seven years Hugh and I lived on Thompson Street, our lives followed a simple pattern. He would get up early and leave the house no later than 8:00. I was working for a housecleaning company, and though my schedule varied from day to day, I usually didn’t start until 10:00. My only real constant was Helen, who would watch Hugh leave the building, and then cross the hall to lean on our doorbell. I would wake up, and just as I was belting my robe, the ringing would be replaced by a pounding, frantic and relentless, the way you might rail against a coffin lid if you’d accidentally been buried alive.

  “All right, all right.”

  “What were you, asleep?” Helen would say as I opened the door. “I’ve been up since five.” In her hand would be an aluminum tray covered with foil, either that or a saucepan
with a lid on it.

  “Well,” I’d tell her, “I didn’t go to bed until three.”

  “I didn’t go to bed until three thirty.”

  This was how it was with her: If you got fifteen minutes of sleep, she got only ten. If you had a cold, she had a flu. If you’d dodged one bullet, she’d dodged five. Blindfolded. After my mother’s funeral, I remember her greeting me with “So what? My mother died when I was half your age.”

  “Gosh,” I said. “Think of everything she missed.”

  To Helen, a gift was not something you gave to person number one, but something you didn’t give to person number two. This was how we wound up with a Singer sewing machine, the kind built into a table. A woman on the third floor made her own clothes and, in her own quiet way, had asked if she could have it.

  “So you want my sewing machine, do you?” Helen said. “Let me think about it.” Then she picked up the phone and gave Hugh and me a call. “I got something for you,” she told us. “The only deal is that you can’t give it to nobody else, especially nobody who lives in this building on the third floor.”

  “But we don’t need a sewing machine,” I said.

  “What, are you saying you already have one?”

  “Well, no —”

  “All right then, so shut up. Everybody needs a sewing machine, especially this one — top of the line. I can’t tell you all the outfits I made over the years.”

  “Yes, but —”

  “But nothing. It’s a present from me to you.”

  As Hugh manhandled it through our door, I tried to block him. “But there’s hardly enough room for us,” I said. “Where are we supposed to put a full-sized sewing machine? I mean, really, why not just give us a tugboat? It would take up the same amount of space.”

  Hugh, though, you really have to hand it to him. He sat on the horrid little bench that came with the machine, and five minutes later he was teaching himself to sew. That’s the kind of person he is — capable of anything.

  “Can you make a body bag?” I asked.

  Every day for the next six months, Helen mentioned her gift. “So how’s that Singer? You made any pants yet? You made any jeans?”

  It was the same with the food she gave us. “So did you like the turkey meat loaf with Italian seasoning?”

  “Very much.”

  “Nobody makes it like me, you know.”

  “You won’t get any argument there.”

  The food Helen brought was presented as a slight to the couple next door. “The sons of bitches, if they knew that I was making this for you, they’d die.”

  The common areas of our building were covered in small ceramic tiles, giving the impression that you were in an empty pool. Even the slightest noises were amplified, so with very little effort, your voice could be deafening. Standing in the hallway outside my door, Helen would shout so loud that the overhead lights would dim. “All week they’ve been trying to beg food off of me. ‘What’s that that smells so delicious?’ they want to know. ‘You got any extras that need a good home? We’re practically dying of hunger over here.’”

  In real life the couple next door were pleasant and soft-spoken. At the time we moved in, the wife had already developed Alzheimer’s, and her husband, an eighty-five-year-old man named Joe, was doing his best to care for her. I never heard him whine or grovel, so that, I suspected, was just wishful thinking on Helen’s part. None of her impersonations were very good, but there was no denying her showmanship. She was a dynamic person, and even Joe, whom she was crueler to than anyone, was quick to acknowledge her weird star power. “A real pistol,” he’d call her. “A peach of a girl.”

  “Begging off of me when he’s got his railroad pension, that plus the social security. The both of them can go fuck themselves,” Helen would shout.

  Hugh is the type who’d hear this sort of thing, and say, “Oh, come on, now. That’s no way to talk about your neighbors.”

  This was why Helen waited until he left for work every morning — he was a downer. “Living with someone like that, I’d go crazy,” she’d say. “Jesus Christ, I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  Before moving to New York I spent six years in Chicago. During most of that time, I lived with my then boyfriend and, between the two of us, we seemed to know a fair number of people. There were wild dinners, wild parties — always something fun and druggy going on. Never again would I have so many friends, and such good ones, though I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps I’ve grown less likable over the years, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how to meet people. The initial introduction — the shaking-hands part — I can still manage. It’s the follow-up that throws me. Who calls whom, and how often? What if you decide after the second or third meeting that you don’t really like this person? Up to what point are you allowed to back out? I used to know these things, but now they’re a mystery.

  Had I met Helen when I was in my twenties, we wouldn’t have spent nearly so much time together. I’d have been off with people my own age, either taking drugs or looking for them, this as opposed to drinking instant coffee and listening to someone talk about her colitis. When Helen said “oil,” it sounded like “earl.” Subsequently, “toilet” came out as “terlet,” as in “I was up and back to the fucking terlet six times last night. Shit so hard I think I sprained my asshole.”

  That we both found this fascinating was, I suppose, proof that we had at least one thing in common. Another thing we could always agree on was a soap opera called One Life to Live. It aired in the early afternoon, and, often, when I wasn’t working, I’d go across the hall and watch it at her place.

  Helen had lived in the same apartment for close to fifty years, though you’d never know to look at it. I had stuff everywhere — the sewing machine, for example — but her living room, much like her kitchen, was spartan. On one wall was a framed photograph of herself, but no pictures of her daughters, or any of her seven grandchildren. There were no chairs, either, just a sofa and a coffee table. These faced the room’s only extravagance: a tower of three televisions stacked one atop another. I don’t know why she kept them. The black-and-white model on the bottom had died years earlier, and the one above it had no volume control. This left the TV at the top of the pile. It blathered away, all but ignored in favor of the window, which afforded a view of the entire block and was Helen’s preferred source of entertainment. When in the living room, she usually sat on the radiator, her lower half indoors and her head and shoulders as far out as they could go. The waitress on the second floor coming home at 2:00 a.m., the shopkeeper across the street accepting a package from the UPS man, a woman in a convertible applying lipstick: nothing escaped her attention.

  During the years I knew her, I’d guess that Helen spent a good ten hours a day at her window. Midmornings you could find her in the kitchen, but at 11:00, when the soap operas began, she’d switch off the radio and return to her perch. It hurt her neck to turn from the street to the screen, so most programs were listened to rather than watched. Exceptions were made for Friday episodes of One Life to Live, and, occasionally, for Oprah, who was one of the few black people Helen had any regard for. Perhaps in the past she had been more open-minded, but getting mugged in the foyer of our building convinced her that they were all crooks and sex maniacs. “Even the light-skinned ones.”

  Talk show hosts were scumbags as well, but Oprah; anyone could see that she was different. While the rest of the pack accentuated the negative, she encouraged people to feel good about themselves, be they single mothers — a group that had included Helen — or horribly disfigured children. “I never would have thought about it, but I guess that girl does have a pretty eye,” she once said, referring to the young Cyclops fidgeting on the screen.

  One afternoon Oprah interviewed a group of women who had overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Susan fell overboard while sailing and managed to survive for six days by clinging to a cooler. Colleen taught herself to read and got a job as an executive secretary. T
he third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw. The poet and I had met and spoken on several occasions. Now here she was on Oprah, and nothing would do until I ran across the hall to tell Helen. She’d been half watching from her spot on the radiator and didn’t seem terribly impressed with my news.

  “You don’t get it,” I said, and I pointed to the screen. “I know that person. She’s my friend.” It was too strong a word for what was, at best, a nodding relationship, but Helen didn’t need to know that.

  “So what?” she said.

  “So I have a friend on Oprah.”

  “Big deal. You think that makes you special?”

  If Helen had known someone who’d appeared on Oprah, she’d have had T-shirts made up, but of course that was different. She was allowed to brag and name-drop, but no one else was. Announce an accomplishment — signing a book contract, getting your play reviewed in the Times — and her hackles would go up. “You think your shit smells better than mine? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “But you’re old,” I once told her. “Your job is to be happy for me.”

  “Stick it up your ass,” she said. “I’m not your goddamn mother.”

  With the exception of my immediate family, no one could provoke me quite like Helen could. One perfectly aimed word, and within an instant I was eight years old and unable to control my temper. I often left her apartment swearing I’d never return. Once I slammed her door so hard, her clock fell off the wall, but still I went back — “crawled back,” she would say — and apologized. It seemed wrong to yell at a grandmother, but more than that I found that I missed her, or at least missed someone I could so easily drop in on. The beauty of Helen was that she was always there, practically begging to be disturbed. Was that a friend, or had I chosen the wrong word? What was the name for this thing we had?

  When I told Hugh about the Oprah business, he said, “Well, of course she acted that way. You were being pretentious.”