T-Mobile Representative (28:28)
Some the World There is fire in my heart. I do what I can. I sleep. Deep sleep. I sit in my bedroom window, bare feet on the roof, and scratch dry sticks across the slate. In the two months I've been living here, though, I've spent most of my time playing board games with Mr. Arnett, my mother's new husband. He seems to have an unending supply of them in his basement for from when his kids lived at home. My mother isn't around very often. She works at the makeup counter at Neiman Marcus, although she really hasn't needed to since she and Mr. Arnett were married. Mr. Arnett retired a few years ago, at 45, when he sold the windshield safety glass company he had started right out of high school for what my mother describes as a fancy sum for something that still shatters. It was right after that that she met and married him, but she works anyway, only now she calls it a hobby. It's early March, more importantly, Monday night, the night my mother pretends to be in class at community college. This semester it's poetry, but she's run the gamut. Two summers ago she thought she had me convinced she'd taken up diving. When she comes in the door a little after nine, she sets her clearly untouched poetry book on the end table, next to where I am on the couch. How was it? Mr. Arnett asks, smacking his gum and not looking up from the board. Oh my, my mother says. You wouldn't believe the things those people wrote then. Who'd you do tonight? I ask her. It's a game that I have worked up. Sometimes I suspect that Mr. Arnett is playing it as well, but other times I think he's just being duped by her. You can Never Tell with Mr. Arnett. Sometimes I imagine he has a secret life, although he rarely leaves his house. He seems the type of guy who might have boxes of Knick knacks buried all over the world for no reason. What's that? My mother asks, separating the lashes over one eye which have been caked with sweat soaked mascara. Who'd you do tonight? I put a cigarette in my mouth, wait for one of them to light it. Oh, Browning, my mother Sundays. Which one? Mr. Arnett asks. He looks up at me, not her, then takes the lighter from his shirt pocket and snaps on the flame in front of my face, so close I could reach out and swallow it. Which one? She asks. Which Browning? Mr. Arnett says. The lighter disappears back into his shirt. My mother misses a beat, then says all of them. She hovers over the Parcheesi board, feigning interest in the game, and her mink stole brushes one of my pieces to the floor. Mr. Arnett makes a disgusted sigh. Although it was him I know who bought her the thing. She likes to wear it to work, along with a lot of expensive jewelry. She does not work for her customers, she recently explained to me. She works with them. She pats my head. About your bedtime, she says, as if I am 12 and have to get up early to catch the school bus, not 18 and drugged beyond understanding anything much more difficult than Parcheesi and knowing that my mother at 40, is sneaking around in motel rooms. My parents were divorced when I was five. I've not seen my father since then, but I've been able to keep track of his moods. Even so, if my mother is irritable on Monday nights, I know that my father is considering calling everything off. If she's sad, I know that he has asked for her back. If she is her usual perky self like tonight, I know that things have gone as planned. They have met every Monday in the same motel since I was in the sixth grade and playing with lighters under my covers after bedtime, I used to find motel receipts not even torn or wadded up but just lying in the kitchen waste basket next to orange peels and soggy cigarettes with Mr. And Mrs. And then my father's name following. Still, my mother, through eight years and two more husbands, has never spoken of it to me and acts as if I could not possibly have figured it out. Thus, over the years I've been forced to make up my own story of them, passionate but incompatible My father, a dashing and successful salesman, only through town once a week, only able willing to give my mother three hours. And other times I think it's she who insists on being home each Monday by nine, she that likes doling herself out on her terms only in small doses. I imagine that they do not talk, that their clothes are strewn about the room before there is time to say anything, and back on. By the time they catch their breath, it's easier for me to think of it this way because I can't imagine what they might possibly say to each other. At Neiman Marcus, where my mother works, they found me in a dressing room last winter with a can of lighter fluid in my pocket, stuffed with old underwear and dish towels. This incident was especially distressing because everyone finally thought that after nearly eight years I'd been cured, that the fire was gone, that I was no longer a threat to society. The police led me out of the store, handcuffed, first through women's lingerie, then smack past the makeup counter where my mother was halfway pretending not to know me or to know me just well enough to be interested in what was taking place. They put me away for almost a year for that one, my third time in the hospital since the first fire. The long stay was caused by pure frustration, I'm convinced, on the part of my doctors. The we'll teach her philosophy of psychology. Two months ago they let me out yet again, and I spend my days spitting on dice with her husband and asking politely for matches to light my cigarettes. Either the doctors think I'm cured or they've given in the way I have, the way I did when I was only 11, when I realized the fire was like blood, water, shelter, essential. The thing about fire is it is completely yours. For one glorious moment. You bear it. You raise it. The first time in the record store downtown, I stood over it in the bathroom trash can, thinking I would not let it grow, that I would love it only to a point and then kill it. This is the trick. Fire. For that 30 seconds, you have a choice. Spit on it, step on it, douse it with a can of Coke. But one moment too long, get caught up in its beauty and it has grown beyond your control. And it is this moment that you live for, the relinquishing. The power passes from you to it. The world opens up and takes you along. I cried in the record store when the flame rose above my head. Not from fear but from ecstasy. I sleep 16 hours a day, more if it's rainy. Another rationale. Enough xanax and I will be too tired to start fires. I'm in bed by 10 and don't get up till nearly noon. Usually I take a nap before dinner. The rest of the time it's game time. It's a murky haze, more often than not, me forgetting which color I am, what the rules are. Sometimes Mr. Arnett corrects me, other times he lets it go, and it is three turns later by the time I realize I have moved my piece the wrong way on a one way board. We're on a Parcheesi kick now, seven or eight games a day. We don't talk much. Mostly we just talk about the game, about the pieces, as if they are real people with spouses and children waiting in some tiny house for them to return from their endless road trip in a slump. You're due, Mr. Arnett will say to his men. Sometimes he whispers to the dice. I suspect this is all to entertain me because he's always checking for my reaction. Usually I smile. Twice a week Mr. Arnett drives me across town to see my psychiatrist. He reads magazines in the waiting room while I explain to the doctor that I am fine except for the fact that I take so much Xanax I feel my brain has been rewired for a task other than real life. The doctor always nods at this, raising his eyebrows as if I have given him some interesting new information that he will get right on, and then tells me that medication will eventually remedy any discomfort I might be feeling. I am used to this and have learned not to greet with great surprise the fact that no one is going to help me in any way whatsoever. It's Friday, and on the way home from the doctors we drive by a Lions Club carnival that is set up in a Park near Mr. Arnett's house. It's twilight and my mother will be waiting for us at home, but for some reason Mr. Arnett follows the waving arms of a fat clown and pulls into the carnival parking lot. What do you say? He says. He takes a piece of gum from his pocket and puts it in his mouth. I look out the window at the carnival. I don't get out much. Grocery stores are monumental at this point, and the sight of all these people milling around the rides, the games, frightens me. A Ferris wheel directly in front of me is spinning around and around, and it makes me dizzy just watching it. I'm kind of tired, I say. Mr. Arnett chews louder, manipulates the gum into actually sounding frustrated. I think it'd be good for you, he says. He's never said such a thing before, but instead of causing me to feel loved and comforted, it makes me feel nauseous. I have been told everything from shock treatments to making lanyards would be good for me in practically the same tone. I feel like crying and know that if I do he will panic and take me home, but I don't have the time. He's out of the car before I can well up any tears, and I continue to sit, my seatbelt still on, staring out the window into the gray sky. Mr. Arnett stands in front of the fender, gesturing for me to join him. The last time I was at a carnival was the freshman carnival at my high school, 5,000 years ago. I went on a Saturday night with a boy named David who took pictures for the school paper. He held my hand as we walked through the crowds of people and he was sweaty, greasy almost. He stuck his tongue in my ear in the haunted house ride and I barely noticed because they had a burning effigy of our rival school's mascot on the wall. The fire licked along the walls and I realized with absolute glee that they had set up one hell of a fire hazard. Mr. Arnett gets back into the car with a sigh, but he doesn't drive away. You need to get out more, he says, and I wonder what has changed, wonder if he had a fight with my mother or sex with my mother or some other unlikely thing. Used to take the kids here, he says, spinning his keys around his finger. I don't even know his kids names. They call occasionally, but he speaks so rarely when he's on the phone with them that I can't pick up very much information. I imagine them jabbering away somewhere about work and weather and the price of ground round while he sits on the kitchen stool, picking his fingernails and nodding into the phone. I'm not exactly a kid, I say. You don't like carnivals? I just don't feel like it. If she doesn't feel like it, then she doesn't feel like it, he says, as if there's someone else in the car, another part of him maybe, who he's arguing with. We continue our drive home in silence. When we stop at a red light, he says, why do you take all that shit if it makes you feel so bad? I laugh at him. It is a question so logical that it pegs him for a fool, and I can't believe I'm really sitting here with him. It's not quite that simple, I say. He shrugs, gives it up, continues the drive home. He's not a fighter. He's not a radical. Once I came upon him in my bedroom, looking through a photo album of people he never met. I stood in the doorway and watched him for nearly 10 minutes as he smiled slightly, turning the pages, and I imagined him making up lives for the people in my life. He is that way, content to not get the whole picture. I'm standing in the bathroom, trying to stir up enough nerve to just dump them, the whole bottle. My mother taps slightly on the door. I spend more than two minutes in the bathroom and she gets edgy. Honey, just a second, I say. I'm holding them in my hand, all of them. It looks like a million pills, enough to confuse me until I hit menopause. Are you sick? I close my hand around the pills and open the door just far enough for her to get her foot in it. Mother, I say. I'm fine. I'm just putting on a little makeup. This gets her physically, sends her back a step. She wants to believe it so much that I can see her talking herself into it. But it's almost time for bed, she says. Just to see how it looks, I say, giving her a big smile through the crack and inching the door closed again, I hear Mr. Arnett's heavy footsteps come tromping up the stairs. What's the fuss? He asks. She's putting on makeup, my mother says in a stage whisper. Maybe she's trying to look cute for you. That takes care of my clenched hand. It opens on its own, in my mother's words, and the pills sink to the bottom of the toilet, falling to pieces as they go. I think she's just really feeling up to it, starting to feel better, I hear my mother say. It's a new tone for her, and this time it's really a whisper, really some sentiment she doesn't want me to hear. I put my ear against the door. I want her so much to be happy, she says. It makes my chest hurt. It means so much. Sunday has come and my eyes can't stay open wide enough. I feel as if I have gotten glasses and a hearing aid over the weekend. Colors are brighter and words sharper, no echoes. Words stop when mouths stop. My mother looks at me suspiciously when she comes into the kitchen early in the morning and finds me cooking bacon. What's gotten into you? She asks, pleasantly enough, but with a flicker of panic in her face. Me around the oven means bad news for her, but the heat rising from the burners is only making me warm, and the smell of bacon is so good that I can't think of much else. Just feeling awake, I say. She smiles, nods, then studies me. I'm fine, I tell her. Mr. Arnett drags into the kitchen, his hair must and his robe worn. I've never seen him in the morning. Well, look who's up, he says. He winks at me. Why don't I finish up and you two go in and start a game? My mother says brightly. Mr. Arnett sits down at the table and opens the newspaper. I don't feel like it, I say. Why don't we do something today? We have to go to a party later, my mother says, glancing at Mr. Arnett for support. I don't think you'd have very much fun there. I set a plate of eggs and bacon in front of Mr. Arnett. Where's mine? My mother asks. You hate eggs, I say. We don't have to go to the party, Mr. Arnett says. My mother frowns, looks from him to me. Well, I do, she says. And I think it would be right for you to come with me. She can take care of herself. I see my mother now like she's been stripped down, out of her clothes and her skin and even her bones. Her soul is steamed over and dripping fat droplets. You all go on, I say. I don't mind. I spend the day with my father. I sit out on the porch with the photo album. The pictures make sense now, fit into an order I have never seen before. My father, as a young man, raises a tennis racket over his head. He's swinging at something, a butterfly or a bug, though not a ball. In another, he stares away into the distance while my mother pulls his arm, trying to get him to look at the camera. They're so clear now, my father and his bird nose. In one picture he holds me on his lap. I'm crying, screaming, and my father is looking at me, perplexed. He's barely 20, I know, and cannot believe that I am his. My mother and Mr. Arnett do not come home until later. I've lost all track of time, still sitting with the photo album, when the headlights swim into the driveway. They get out of the car and my mother takes Mr. Arnett's hand, swings wildly around. Oh, darling. My mother exclaims. I'm not sure if it's to me or Mr. Arnett. They're both drunk. My mother stumbles going through the door, and Mr. Arnett catches her, leads her inside. Then he comes back out and sits with a grunt on the porch step. What have you been doing all night? He asks, looking through this, I say, holding up the album. He's quiet for a moment. Then he says, you ever see your father? He says it almost as an afterthought to something that wasn't ever said. He says it like we've been on the porch together all night, discussing my father for hours, like he was really one of the family. Just in here, I say. Think he's still a good looking guy? Dashing, I imagine, I say. He snorts out a laugh. Why did you marry her? I hear myself ask. He leans back, rests his head on the wood, inches from my feet. Company, he says. He yawns and I can see him now, too, safety glass that shatters. He begins to snore. Mr. Arnett? I say. I reach down and just barely touch the top of his head. He doesn't move. I go into the house and up the stairs. Their bedroom door is closed and I imagine my mother is in about the same shape he is, but that they will sleep it off in different places, with dreams of different people's arms. When I open my door my mother is standing in my room, the empty bottle of Xanax in one hand, the other hand palm up, as if she were questioning someone before I arrived. Wait a minute, I say. Just wait. I knew it, she says. I knew there was something wrong. Nothing's wrong, I say. What are you doing in my room? You scared me, standing there like that. Her mouth opens. I scared you? I don't think I need those anymore, I say. Forgive me if I find it difficult to trust your judgment, she says. I want a cigarette bad. I had to go all night without them. I go to my dresser and take one from the pack. A light, I say. Do you have a light? Not on your life, she says. I'm fine, I say. I accidentally break the cigarette between my two fingers and reach for another one. She sits down on the bed. You hurt people, she says quietly. Not just me. You think you take those pills because I don't want you to hurt me? I never hurt anybody, I say. You are so lucky, she says. You could have killed both of us five times over in that dressing room. Did you ever think about the woman in the next one? I wasn't trying to hurt anybody, I say. You don't understand. You're right about that, she says. She sets the empty bottle on the bed and stands up. I'm sorry, she says. I can only live with this for so long. She leaves. I hear her bedroom door close. The house is silent below me. Mr. Arnett sleeps on the porch. I sit down on the bed. I am crazy, all right. I have always been crazy. I see my mother standing on the front porch as I get out of my first police car, only 14 braces, squeezing my teeth. She stares at me in disbelief when the police tell her that I have caused over $1,000 in damage at the record store. $1,000 with one match. It is then that she begins to look at me like a stranger. It's Monday again and she's in her bedroom preparing. Mr. Arnett sits in the rocking chair watching a basketball game. I'm on the couch, cheers from the crowd. She wants you to go back to the hospital, he says. He doesn't look at me. He moves his glasses from hand to hand. I know, I say. It's okay. Not so bad there. Anybody play Parcheesi? A man on the court has lost his contact lens. Players are on their knees. Hunting cards mostly, I say. Lots of jigsaw puzzles. He nods. You take those drugs today? No, I say. Soon enough. It's funny being able to see so well. But not great so much. My mother comes into the room and picks up her purse. Have a good game, she Sundays. She kisses Mr. Arnett on the top of the head, presses her lips into his hair for a long time until he moves away. What was that for? He asks. He really wants to know, I can tell. Doesn't have to be for anything, does it? She says. She smiles at me for a moment, lingers as if she has something to say, then leaves without another word. Mr. Arnett swings the rocking chair around and faces me. You don't have to go, he says. Imagine me here all by myself. You'll do okay, I say. Come visit. He nods, picks up the poetry book from the coffee table, absently flips through it. She didn't even think to take it along this time, he says. She doesn't try so hard anymore, I say. To fool anybody. He stops on a page, squints at it, puts on his glasses. Here's one you'd like, he says, smiling. Some say the world will end in fire, others in ice. He pauses, looks up at me, raises his eyebrows. I'd like to see them, I say. I hear my mother's car start up in the driveway. Just one time, see them together. Be a fly on the wall. He closes the book. Let's both be flies, he says. It's not a long drive, only a few miles. Much too close, as far as I'm concerned. For something that seems like it must be another world. Mr. Arnett stays a few cars behind her, then drives past the motel. After she pulls into the lot. He drives around the block twice, then three times. What are you waiting for? I ask him. A reason not to do this, he says. He presses down the accelerator and we speed past the motel again. We drive around the city, looking at closed down stores, empty streets. We don't talk, act as if we really have nowhere else to go. He finally makes his way back to the motel and this time he pulls into the lot. We park at the far end and walk along the row of empty spaces toward my mother's car. The motel is nearly empty, but the room next to her car is occupied. The shade on the window is up a couple of inches. Mr. Arnett squats down, then reaches for me. I close one eye and look inside. The bathroom light is on, the door open, and I can see my mother gingerly applying her eye shadow in front of the mirror. There is a man on the bed, sitting up, yawning. He stretches his skinny arms. He's nearly bald but has a small mustache under his pointed nose. It's a stranger, no one I've ever seen before. He looks a lot different than the pictures, Mr. Arnett whispers. It's not him, I say, but as soon as I say this I know that it is him. Mr. Arnett looks at me. Sweetheart, he says. My mother shuts off the bathroom light and I can see her silhouette move to the edge of the bed. She sits down and touches the man on the chest, running her finger from his throat to his waist. He takes her hand and puts the finger in his mouth. It's like watching shadows. She says something I cannot make out. Is it about me? Of course it isn't. I shiver in the cold. Mr. Arnett takes off his sweater and sets it around my shoulders. The man begins to put his clothes on slowly next to me. I hear Mr. Arnett's breath catch. What is it? I whisper. I wonder if he can be jealous, if he cares that much. He only shakes his head, chilling. He whispers. What? I say. What happens to people? They're holding hands on the bed. My mother fumbles for her purse, takes out a pack of cigarettes, gives one to my father and takes one for herself. She lights them both. Where will we go? Mr. Arnett whispers. What? I say. They're holding hands on the bed. The shadow of smoke drifts above them, the tiny circles of fire, all that lights the room. Where will we go? He says again. I lean in against him. He's warm inside the room. It is quiet together the man and the woman raise the cigarettes to their mouths for a moment, the faces of my parents aglow in the flames. Then Mr. Arnett takes me by the arm and actually lifts me up off the ground. Wait, I say. Wait. But I don't fight him. I want him to take me away. Finally, I have seen enough. We're three blocks from the motel before he remembers to turn on his headlights. Slow down, I say. You're gonna kill us both. I take out a cigarette and push the car lighter in. Jesus Christ, he says. What would she do? Then for a moment he is insane. So much more than I ever could have hoped to be. There are lights up ahead, Music. It's the carnival. It's the last night in full swing. The car wildly spits up gravel as Mr. Arnett rumbles across the lot. He jumps out of the car, dashes forward a few feet, then turns and slams his fist into the hood. Then he is perfectly still. He looks straight at me and I am afraid to move. The cigarette lighter clicks out. A father rushes his children into the back of the station wagon next to us, where they look at us through a big back window, mouths open. I pull the lighter out, touch my fingers close enough to the middle to feel the raw heat. Then I light my cigarette and blow smoke into the windshield. Mr. Arnett watches me. I know now that he will never go back to my mother, will probably never lay eyes on her again. Something about seeing them, even though he knew something about seeing them. He turns and starts walking toward the ticket booth. I get out of the car and follow him, stand behind him, smoking while he buys two tickets. Ferris wheel, he says, turning to me. He smiles slightly. None of those puke rides. Slow, slow rides tonight. We get into a car that I am sure is broken. It swings different than the others, crooked somehow. I start to say something, but a girl with yellow teeth and matching hair closes the bar over us and we are suddenly moving in a great lurch forward. Hey, hey, Mr. Arnett says, squeezing the bar and looking down into the park. These things are dangerous, I say. Bullshit, he says. We're safer up here than anywhere else in the world. We screech to a halt near the top for the loading of passengers into to the cars below us. We swing crookedly over the game booths and I can see us crashing down into the middle of the ring toss. So many ways to buy it, so few to stay alive. I've always liked the looks of Canada, Mr. Arnett says. He's smiling pleasantly, innocent as the dawn. We start moving again. The motion is hypnotizing, and I no longer feel sick, but only strange, detached. Nice night for driving, I hear myself say. He doesn't answer. He's looking at my hands, which are open, palms up on my lap, as if I am waiting for something on this ride. He reaches into his sweater pocket and takes out a pack of gum. He sets it in my hand and my fingers close around it. We swing around again. Below me I see a circle of teenagers standing around a small bonfire, warming their hands. Sparks pop around them and die in the grass as the flame reaches higher. The Ferris wheel whips us toward it and then again up into the night.
