The Stars Are Fire

by Anita Shreve

  “No,” she says, “but my husband might.”

  She has never used this smart tone with the doctor. He knows her as intimately as anyone, she supposes. He brought her into the world.

  “You’re how old?” he asks as he manipulates her insides.

  Grace winces with the discomfort. “Twenty-three.”

  “You might think of slowing down,” he says, withdrawing his hands.

  Grace doesn’t know how to answer this. Does he mean slow down the lovemaking? She can hardly slow down something that never happens.

  “You can sit up now.”

  Grace does as asked, drawing the gown across her breasts, which he has already seen and palpated. The office smells the same each time she visits—a mix of chemicals she can’t name. When she was a child, the smells frightened her, and she had to be dragged across the threshold. Now she finds them an odd comfort.

  “You’re not happy about this, are you?” he asks as he wipes his hands. He is getting to be an older man, she sees now, his hair nearly white, his glasses not quite hiding the bags under his eyes.

  “It’s too soon.”

  “In some countries they wouldn’t say so, but they wear out their women. We don’t want to wear you out though, do we?”

  She already feels worn out. She thinks of all the extra years of diapers and bottles.

  “But you’ll be in the enviable position, five years from now, of having had your babies, and of having a close-knit, ready-made family.”

  She forms a snappy reply, but there’s no point in taking out her anger on this kind man who wants only to help.

  “The pregnancy and delivery will cost eighty dollars,” he says. “I know it’s more than Tom cost, but I had to raise my prices by five dollars this year.”

  “That’s fine,” she says.

  Abruptly he says to get dressed, and then he leaves the room. If he had something to tell her about the pregnancy, he would have. She and the baby must be all right.

  The waiting room is full of patients.

  —

  Beautiful day melds into beautiful day. The beach becomes so crowded that not a single blanket will fit after ten o’clock in the morning. Claire begs for the wading pool as soon as she wakes up. Grace dangles Tom in the tepid water. The icehouse runs low, and there are days at a time when Grace has no refrigeration in the kitchen. She and Rosie begin to shop every day at Gardiner’s so that they can eat what is fresh and not be worried about cold storage. The corn is good. The tomatoes are fleshy. Cantaloupes are as small as softballs, and watermelons enormous. At night Gene and she eat the watermelons outdoors and spit the seeds into the grass.

  —

  One evening, after the kids are asleep, Gene says, “Let’s go to bed.”

  Grace doesn’t know whether this means that he is tired or that he wants to make love.

  She has her answer in the bed, when he faces her, side by side. His penis is hard, and he makes her feel it, but when she lifts her leg and shifts so that he can enter her, his penis softens. Grace, worried because she knows she has to make this work, begins to stroke him, but she must be doing it wrong, because he stops her hand and says, “I’m sorry.”

  She says, “Don’t be.”

  After they have broken apart, Grace wonders, for the first time, if Gene is somehow just as perplexed as she is. Might he, in his own way, be trying as hard to make sense of the marriage he is in? Grace doesn’t feel a flood of love, however, but rather a sensation of pity. She doesn’t want to pity her husband.

  —

  A fine haze is on the horizon when Gene drives Grace and the children to his mother’s house, now officially Gene’s. It’s located four miles to the south of Hunts Beach and sits on a promontory with a view of rocky shore and ocean. Grace has been to her mother-in-law’s home only half a dozen times, twice memorably before the wedding when Mrs. Holland was barely able to conceal her distrust of what she called Grace’s “wiles,” the ones that got her pregnant and ensnared her son before he had completed his studies. Grace thought then, and does so now, that Merle couldn’t possibly have believed, during an intelligent moment, that her son shared none of the blame.

  The Ford climbs a winding drive to the house, a well-kept Victorian, painted green with white trim that emphasizes the intricate woodwork around the doors and windows and along the wide front porch. Mr. Holland, before he died, owned stocks and bonds, about which Grace knows nothing except that they provided Merle Holland with a comfortable income. Gene takes Tom in his arms, and Grace holds Claire’s hand as they step up onto the porch. Grace turns to take in the sweep of the coastline. Gene fiddles with a set of keys, and they are in.

  Her husband’s face tightens as he enters the dark house with its long hallway to the back, its enclosed sitting room to the right, and the turret room to the left. Grace wonders if her husband is sad or horrified. He opens the French doors to the sitting room. Grace wants to open every window. She rolls a fringed shade to let light in, and Gene scowls as if she shouldn’t have done that.

  “The view is great,” she says.

  “The sun will let in the heat,” Gene announces, as if parroting an oft-repeated statement of Merle’s.

  “Do you think the furniture will mind?”

  “Don’t touch anything,” Gene says to Claire, but the warning, Grace knows, is for her.

  Ignoring him, she raises the shade.

  In the scrutiny of the bright sun, the house shows its age. The wallpaper, a maroon pattern, reveals white plaster where it’s peeling. All the woodwork has been stained a dark mahogany. Claire clings to Grace’s leg, but Grace has no need to cling to anyone.

  —

  Did the lack of light twist the plant that grew here? Moving quickly, she passes through a dining room with a table no child has ever been allowed to eat at and into the kitchen with its back windows overlooking the garden. The room, painted pale yellow and white, is a haven. Claire, feeling it, runs along the linoleum, and Grace finds her wooden utensils to play with.

  “This I like,” Grace says.

  Gene, not looking at her, nods, as if his mother were right. The kitchen is the place for the help. Grace doubts Merle ever visited her kitchen because she had Clodagh to cook and clean for her. When Gene visited with the children, it was Clodagh who had cookies for Claire and a perfectly warmed bottle for Tom. Clodagh, to whom Gene has given her last pay packet. What will happen to the woman?

  Outside, the gardens are withering from lack of rain. Grace remembers them as glorious, the result of Merle’s expertise and Joe-the-gardener’s efforts.

  —

  Gene coaxes them out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the second floor, given over entirely to Mrs. Holland’s bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, and a piano in the turret. Grace marvels at so much space for one woman, a space much larger, she is certain, than her own home. She touches fabric and silver, writing paper and pens. She fingers necklaces hanging from an ornate mirror, a challenge that Gene doesn’t rise to.

  He wants me to like it here, she thinks.

  He doesn’t announce their future until they are on the third floor, inspecting the guest rooms, all of which share a bathroom with wooden fixtures and a chain pull for the toilet. Gene invites her to glance out a window in the bedroom that used to be his. The view is majestic. “You can see ships traveling from Boston to Portland from here,” he says.

  Grace catches Claire by a foot before she crawls beneath a bed.

  “So what do you think?” Gene asks.

  “Of the house? It’s enormous.”

  “About moving here.”

  She has known, ever since the second floor, that Gene would ask this, and though she wants to scream an immediate no, she understands she has to tread carefully.

  “It’s grand,” she says, “but it’s isolated. I don’t know who the children would play with. They can’t get off the property unless they cross the coast road and only then to rocks and sea. How will they walk to school whe
n the time comes?”

  “There’s a bus,” Gene says. “That’s how I got to school.”

  “I do love the kitchen, but the house is too much for us. I’d be working day and night.”

  “You already work day and night.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Well, this has to be easier in some ways,” he points out. “More room to store things.”

  This seems to Grace a weak argument. What things? “Is it your idea that we would sleep downstairs and the kids would sleep up here?”

  “Well, we’d have the baby with us for the first several months.”

  “And Tom and Claire upstairs where we couldn’t hear them?”

  Gene sniffs. Grace thinks of Rosie. Who would be her neighbor here? “Aren’t the taxes high?”

  “There’s no mortgage.”

  “We wouldn’t get much for the bungalow,” she says of a house that is heavily mortgaged.

  “We wouldn’t need it if we lived here.”

  “All our savings would go to taxes and upkeep,” she argues.

  “I’ll get a raise soon.”

  She sneezes. Then she sneezes again. She apologizes and sneezes a third time.

  “It’s dusty up here,” Gene says. “Nothing a good clean won’t help.”

  Grace had no idea she could fake a sneeze so well.

  —

  “I can’t do it,” she says. She hates the house—the Victorian dark, the fringed lampshades, the heavy mahogany furniture. The weight of the dwelling makes her hungry for air.

  “I think this is my decision to make, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Grace, for God’s sake be quiet!”

  Claire looks from one parent to the other. Somewhere, far away, someone is smashing a sand castle.

  —

  At her own mother’s house, after the iced tea and the peek at the layette Marjorie is knitting, her mother asks, “How are you and Gene?”

  “Times are a little tough right now,” Grace says.

  “Financially?”

  “No.”

  “Is it the stress of the new baby coming?”

  “I could say yes,” Grace confesses, “but that wouldn’t be accurate.”

  Her mother wets Tom’s cheek with the icy side of her glass, and he pulls away, giggling. He comes back for more. “What’s good in your life?” her mother asks.

  Grace, surprised, needs to think. “I have two beautiful children.”

  “And?”

  “I have a house I like, a friend next door, and a washing machine.”

  “And?”

  “We’re all healthy.”

  “And?”

  Grace short-stops her mother because she knows where this is going. “And I have a husband who provides for us, who is good with the children, and who is handsome.”

  She does not add that she thinks Gene is deeply troubled.

  —

  Dry turns into drought. The word is on everyone’s tongue and is spoken at least once a day. Underfoot, the grass crunches. Men digging at the side of the highway to put in a rest stop report that the top six inches of soil is dust. On the roads of Hunts Beach, vehicles kick up smothering plumes behind them and women begin again to keep the wet wash in the house for fear that tiny particles of dirt will stick to the laundry. Grace isn’t certain when the days of sunshine turn from beneficial to unnatural, but she thinks it happens near the end of September, after everyone has returned to school and many of the summer people are gone. The niggling sense of something wrong slowly turns to mild alarm. The mums and roses have withered at the edges of her yard. Grace expects the nights to be cooler, but they aren’t. For the first time in over a year, she prays for rain.

  Spark

  By the beginning of October, inland farmers have to haul water for livestock because the wells have gone dry. Brooks are still, lake levels drop. Dust and woodsmoke lay at the horizon.

  The best summer in years, someone says at the store.

  —

  The state issues a directive warning its citizens to put out cigarettes and matches in water jugs. During an idle moment, Grace drops a lit cigarette onto the ground just to see what will happen. The grass catches fire and spreads faster than she ever imagined. With her jar of water, she douses the fire before it reaches a pile of dry brush Gene raked to one side. Tendrils of flames, however, have slipped behind her and race toward the house. She stomps and stomps, then runs into the kitchen, stops the washer, and flips the lever to allow the soapy water to fall onto the grass. Catching it in her jar, she soaks the fire until it is well and truly out. Winded, she sits on the porch steps and bows her head, ashamed of her stupid experiment.

  She is awed by the wiles of the fire.

  —

  Hunters report on opening day that leaf drop and pine needles disintegrate upon touch. There’s a great deal of talk about whether or not it’s safe to shoot a gun.

  —

  The colored leaves crumple in the hand before hues can be appreciated. When Grace was a child, she would find the brightest reds, and her mother would iron them in waxed paper so that they could be preserved. Grace remembers satisfying packets of color on the kitchen table. She’s sad that she can’t do this for Claire, who would love to touch the waxed leaves.

  —

  Gene reports that a crew working on the Turnpike set a fire to clear land. Firemen put it out only to discover the next day that it had gone underground and had popped up at the roots of several trees. Again the fires were put out. The next day they broke out in more spots.

  “The fire runs underground?” Grace asks.

  “Yep.”

  She imagines secret fires tunneling beneath the house. “But how? There’s no oxygen.”

  “There’s oxygen in peat and dead vegetation,” Gene explains. The fires move slowly beneath the surface, he adds, burning enough to bring more oxygen into the soil. They can burn, undetected, for months, for years. A fire that goes underground in late fall can pop up in spring.

  The idea fascinates Grace. If she were to go out in bare feet and walk in the fields, would she come upon the sensation of heat underfoot?

  She finds it difficult not to assign menacing characteristics to the underground fires, just as she once attached them to the sea.

  —

  Fall planting isn’t possible because dry soil can’t be laid over the furrows. Ponds are lower than they’ve been in thirty years. In one arid pond, a farmer finds what appears to be the remains of an old road. Fire, and not drought, is the word on everyone’s tongue.

  —

  When Grace is in her fifth month, she climbs into the attic to find her woolens because she still has winter maternity clothes. But as she opens the box and fingers the heaviness of the fabrics, she knows it’s too soon. The temperatures haven’t been below eighty degrees in two weeks; all the women are still wearing cotton. In ancient times, the natives would have made much of the unnatural season, which seems to have no name. It can’t rightly be called Indian summer, because there hasn’t yet been a frost. The elders of the tribe would have come together to puzzle out what the summer-into-summer could possibly mean. Had they offended their ancestors? Would it remain summer for months? For years? Would they fear to die? Fear that the planet would die? What was the remedy for such a thing?

  —

  Dust enters the house and coats every object. When Grace scrubs her face at night, she can feel a fine grit under the washcloth.

  —

  Grace has a birthday party for Claire in the backyard and stands ready with a pitcher of lemonade over the two candles on the cake. The girl stands on her chair and blows out the candles with a flourish and is pleased with herself. Rosie, cigarette in hand, takes a long drag and then flips it onto the ground. Grace races around the table and pours lemonade over the butt, splashing Rosie’s shoes.

  “What are you doing?” Rosie squawks, jumping back.

  “I dropped a butt on the
lawn the other day, and the fire spread like…”

  “Wildfire?” Rosie offers, smiling. She pulls another cigarette and the lighter from her purse, but then thinks better of the idea and replaces them.

  —

  Grace wakes every morning to see if the world has sorted itself out. The fine grit that she felt on her face seems to have entered her eyes and nose and head, for there are particles in her brain where there weren’t before. If Gene is taciturn, Grace is sharp, as if she had broken glass on her skin. She tries hard not to snap at the children, but can’t help herself with Gene.

  “I thought you were going to clean the screens,” she announces the minute Gene walks in the door.

  “You’ve got to find me some ice,” she insists the following day.

  “How would I know?” she answers when Gene asks, “When’s dinner?”

  She wants to be a better person, but she can’t when there’s grit in her teeth.

  —

  One morning, Grace takes the children to the beach, where other townspeople stand. There’s no chatter, no fond hellos, only the sight of fog close to shore. The east light shines through the mist, revealing a lobster boat at work. This is the closest that moisture has come to Hunts Beach in weeks. It seems a promise. Grace and the children wait for the fog to move closer still, as if, were they to wade into the ocean, it would envelop them and put water droplets on their skin and lips. The desire for moisture becomes nearly overwhelming, and she notes that several people, men and women, walk into the ocean. Will they try to make it all the way to the mist, or will the fog peel back as they do so, only a tease?

  One by one, the townspeople return to their homes. Rosie and Grace angle toward one another.

  “What a colossal disappointment.” Rosie sighs.

  —

  Grace begins to long for an embrace, a kiss. She begins to associate bright sunny days with marital trouble. She thinks that maybe her marriage has gone underground.

  —

  “Have you considered speaking with Reverend Phillips?” Grace’s mother asks.

  “What?” asks a startled Grace.

  “Your minister. You know he went to Harvard Divinity School.”