The Shelf Life of Fire

by Robin Greene

  Leo, a thirteen-pound breech baby, was delivered like the others, at home by midwife. But his birth almost killed my grandmother, four-foot, eleven inches tall, and not quite hundred pounds.

  A year later, my grandmother became pregnant with my mother. She was distraught, still traumatized by Leo’s birth, and she considered having an illegal abortion. She spent the first few months of her pregnancy saving money until my grandfather put his foot down, insisting that to destroy life was to go against God. So, she had the baby against her better judgment and used the money she’d saved to pay for a hospital birth.

  A siren screams outside on Ramsey Street, the nearby road that often takes me to Raleigh when I don’t want to drive the highway. I think about Uncle Leo, how he was my grandparents’ favorite, the only male child. And Dennis, certainly my mother’s favorite. I resume the backstory, holding space for the power that memory brings.

  At seven, my mom learned that she hadn’t been wanted. Why her mother told her, I can’t imagine. But, as a consequence, my mother never felt loved. She felt marked, as if a black cloud hovered over her.

  The family lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and owned a corner grocery store, above which they resided in a small apartment. The store was almost always open—weekends, holidays, evenings—and the children all took shifts working there.

  My mother grew up in that store—shelving inventory, dusting, sweeping the wooden floor, washing the plate glass windows, working the register. She watched kittens being born and caught customers trying to steal.

  The grocery store had one of the first phones, and it became the neighborhood phone. My mother would have to go out into the street, yell people’s names in the summertime when windows were open, so they could come down to receive their calls. In winter, she’d have to put on her heavy cloth coat and knitted hat, always hand-me-downs from older sisters, and knock on apartment doors to find people.

  “Phone for Gertrude…” she’d yell through a closed door. Or, “Irving needs to come down; his sister is on the line….” Or, “Mr. Goldstein, you have an important call from the bank.”

  Everyone knew everyone’s business. The grocery store was a community hub, especially during the Depression, when life was so tough that social boundaries became blurred. But the Rosenfeld family always had enough to eat, and the store kept family members together, allowing them to bond over necessity, grit, and a common goal. Family equaled responsibility, and emotions were repressed.

  Love was difficult for my mother. Difficult in her family, difficult in ours.

  I stop, pull back my chair and walk around my study and into the bedroom, pausing to remember how when I was a little girl, my mom repeatedly told me that she loved me—almost as if she needed to convince herself. But I’m not being fair.

  Returning to my computer, I hit “save,” turn off the computer, and move toward the window, where the sun is still bright on this late afternoon, and the clouds have lifted to reveal a penetrating blue sky. No one is out. Jake sleeps on the rug. I watch his lumpy chest rise and fall as he breathes.

  I know my mother loves me. She’s succeeded in communicating that.

  Deciding to go to my school office, I now feel ready to get something done. Check in with the Writing Center. Maybe go to the gym, too. I need to be around people. Make small talk. Be normal, get out of myself.

  eight

  Wednesday. I’m driving the mile to work in my cherry-red Honda Fit, bought new last year. I’ve named my car Ruby, and I’ve bonded with her.

  By the time I’ve arrived at the stop sign at the end of my block, I’ve changed from NPR to an oldies station. Aretha Franklin belts out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and I’m singing joyfully along at the top of my voice.

  Turning onto the university’s main road, I throw the car into neutral, coast, trying as I’ve done since I bought Ruby to coax the best mileage from the little engine. EPA suggests that I should get 33 MPG highway, 27 city, but I’ve gotten as much as 38.3 MPG on the interstate. Even now, though I’m down to 37.3 in the city, that isn’t bad. It’s a game I play.

  At school, I run into a professor from the history department, James, who’s organizing and cleaning his office. He’s got symphonic music on low, and he’s humming along. Stacks of books and papers crowd his desk; a small upright vacuum cleaner leans against the cement block wall. I stop to chat, welcoming conversation. Other than talking to my mom, briefly to Will, and to Nick on the phone, I haven’t spoken with anyone for days.

  “How’s summer going?” I ask, standing in the doorway.

  “Good. Going to Philadelphia with Linda next week. NEH conference. Thought I’d get this place cleaned up. Amazing how much junk…. How about you?” James stops as if he’s seen something in me or recognized something odd. Standing by the window, a pile of papers in hand, James stares at me—through me—I imagine.

  “Yeah, I should clean mine. Not inspired yet,” I manage. “Nick’s gone to his retreat, so I’ve been working at home.”

  “How’s he doing?” James, I see now, is wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and a black Grateful Dead tee-shirt with paint splattered on the front.

  “Good,” I say. But now I want to leave. A shadow has appeared behind James. Maybe it’s the sun behind a cloud, but a wave of something has overtaken me. “Well, see you later. Tell Linda hello for me.” I walk down the hall, turn onto another corridor, unlock my office door.

  It’s a mess inside. Stacks of papers on my desk and on the floor. Books are open on the old, defunct radiator I use as a shelf, and my telephone message light is blinking.

  Exhausted, I slump down on my chair, close the door. It’s hot, I’m hot, and I reach over to yank open two black-framed steel windows rather than turn on the air conditioning.

  I catch a glimpse of the empty courtyard outside, where there’s a concrete decorative fountain that has never worked. Its two-tiered bowls are empty. Through the courtyard there’s a walkway of octagonal stepping stones that few people use.

  Now, it all strikes me as sad, very sad. The underutilized path. The paint-stained tee-shirt, my messy office.

  I put my head down on my desk and begin to weep. Heavy gasps and tears consume me as I try to quiet the loud noises that characterize my sobs. I raise my head, look out at the courtyard. I understand. Although Dennis is alive, somehow his ghost is with me.

  I stop my crying and lean into the chair, realizing that I’m back in 1969, the last day of ninth grade, riding home on the school bus, listening to someone’s transistor radio playing “Aquarius.” Dennis’s ghost is taking me here. “Why?” I ask. But I get no answer.

  When I arrive home, humming “Aquarius,” my mom isn’t there, but Dennis is. Something’s happened, and he’s in a bad mood. We’re in the large kitchen, with its divided areas—one for work space, with stove, refrigerator, countertop, and the other for our large Early American style trestle table. Dennis fixes a sandwich, and our dog Gil intensely watches him. We’d adopted Gil during the summer after we moved to the house. He was a rescue dog, a beagle mix, and we’d driven all the way to Wantagh Point, at the tip of Long Island, to Bide-A-Wee, a no-kill shelter. He was a cute puppy but turned into a rather aggressive adult dog. We all loved him but couldn’t trust him around other dogs. His full name, Gadilla, is Yiddish for “big deal” because we all made such a fuss over him when we first got him. We call him Gil for short.

  I walk to the kitchen table, inadvertently slamming my thick loose-leaf binder, with the entire year’s notes and mimeos from all my classes, onto the table.

  “Screw you,” Dennis shouts at me from the prep area behind the cabinet divide.

  “Whacha making?” I ask but have already seen that it’s a tomato and cheese sandwich with French’s mustard. We kept a kosher house when we lived in the apartment complex, near my maternal grandparents, but when we moved to our suburban house, that restriction began to gradually change over the years, until we all were eating ham, shrimp, bacon, and mixing meat with dairy
.

  Dennis bends to look at me; I see his unhappy face above the stove but beneath the overhead cabinets. No reply, just a face. I watch as his hands plate his sandwich and pour orange juice from a carton into a jelly-jar glass with Fred Flintstone on it. Then Dennis leaves the kitchen.

  I, too, am hungry and walk to the fridge to check my options—an open cottage cheese container, bread, eggs, milk, deli ham, provolone, etc.—then close it, thinking the pantry will offer better choices.

  Here we have cookies—Oreos and chocolate chip. I grab two, one of each, head to my room, first picking up my loose-leaf binder, tucking it underneath my arm.

  Gil has followed Dennis into his room. For food, no doubt. I listen at his door. Our bedrooms are at the end of a single long hall—his to the left, mine to the right. Dennis’s door is locked shut. I stand outside, thinking that Dennis loves the dog more than he loves me.

  The ghost takes me back further. Now, I’m four again; Dennis and I are in our bedroom, the one we shared in our Queens apartment. It’s winter, and our father is coming home after 10:00 because it’s his night to keep the store open. The room is dark, but for a streetlight from the playground outside. We should be sleeping, but we’re not.

  “You should pray,” Dennis commands.

  “I’ve already said my prayers,” I reply.

  “But God didn’t hear you,” Dennis says. “You have to speak louder.”

  “The man at the shul told me that I should pray quietly, to myself.”

  “You believed him? Are you stupid, or what?”

  “But he said…”

  “Are they quiet in synagogue, Rae? Is that what happens there? Yeah, they’re all silently praying. Right.” Dennis’s voice is full of disgust. It’s his older-brother voice, the one that’s always right, burdened with contempt and suppressed rage.

  I stop for a moment. In the background, I hear the TV on in the living room. There’s a slice of light beneath our bedroom door. Dennis’s bed squeaks, and although I can’t see him, I know he is sitting up. I sit up, too.

  “Dennis, teach me the prayer again. The whole thing.”

  “Not ready. You’re not ready.” Dennis’s whisper is loud, thick, throaty. A warning.

  “I’ll just say what I know, okay?” On some level, I understand that this is a control thing. Dennis must be in charge. He’s the one who must have power. I must remain vulnerable, at his mercy. This is our natural order. I must submit. Yet, I also understand that something is wrong. Very wrong. And perhaps that’s why I must submit. The fabric of our lives will come unraveled if one family member pulls the wrong thread.

  “Sha’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.” I repeat softly from my bed. “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one.”

  “Louder,” Dennis insists. “God can’t hear you.”

  “But He’s everywhere. He hears everything.”

  “You have to be deserving first,” Dennis’s voice is smoke, thicker than air. It lingers in the darkness; it swirls around my head; it smells like my mother’s cigarettes. I close my eyes, repeat the partial prayer out loud again. With conviction, with love. But now, suddenly, I’m ashamed. Of Dennis and of myself.

  k

  It’s rather late when I arrive home from school, and I realize that the air conditioning needs to be lowered. Although it’s evening, it’s still ninety-something outside, way too hot inside. I turn the thermometer down to 72 degrees and call to Jake, who doesn’t respond.

  Upstairs now, I find him asleep on the bathroom floor, his eyes sunk so deeply that they roll backward when I try to rouse him. He thumps his tail, as I think ahead to his dying, hoping that we won’t have to put him down like we did all our other dogs. I stroke his matted fur, kiss his head, listen to his labored breath.

  Sitting on the bathroom’s white tiled floor, I see outside the large window to the darkened sky. Not quite sundown yet, the gray sky is cloudy, looking like it might rain. It’s been the rainiest summer on record. I sigh, too unmotivated to move.

  I see the houses in our planned neighborhood. A deserted street, no one out. The world is shadowless, transparent, blank, generic-looking, as if this gray evening might be a film set that could be reused for a variety of movies.

  I’m crying again. For my father, my brother, for Jake—the thought of death hitting me like a hammer blow. “Dennis,” I say aloud. “I’m sorry.”

  For the briefest moment his ghost appears, whispers, “You should be,” then disappears.

  Jake opens his eyes, wags his tail, a measure of his doggy compassion. I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever sympathy I can get.

  nine

  My friend Elizabeth once told me that she sees her life as divided into discernible stages—places she lived while growing up (hers was a military family), her college years, her years teaching school, doing odd jobs, acting in improvisational theater, graduate school, living in New York City, her first college teaching job. Her sixty years blocked out in shifts—places, time, direction.

  The philosopher Schopenhauer once said that we finally see our life’s big patterns when we’re close to death. Before that, our lives appear random, often senseless. Possibly true, I think, but aren’t we able to understand some of life’s logic, divisions, meaning?

  I think these thoughts at my computer now, Thursday morning, working on my autobiographical book and borrowing from Elizabeth’s idea, now seeing my life in stages.

  When I was young, around five, I would tell people, “I’m a girl now, but I was a boy before I was born.” I remember getting into the apartment building elevator with my mother and making this pronouncement to others as we rode from our fourth-floor apartment down to the lobby.

  My mother would tug my hand as a rebuke. But she’d say nothing, and I’d add nothing by way of explanation. I’d spoken my piece. The moment etched in my mind: down we go, and I make my pronouncement. With utter certainty. Out loud and in public.

  Perhaps it’s the same impulse here. It’s not so important to know why I need to say something, but very important to say it. Leave understanding to the psychologists and literary critics.

  But sometimes I still feel boyish, as if my female body were imprinted on a male template. I don’t believe in past lives, and I’m certainly female and heterosexual, but yet, there’s something different about me, my gender identity, my sense of my gendered self.

  Typing furiously, I’m now ten, in fifth grade, and I’ve been selected to serve as a safety monitor at Number Six school. It’s lunch time; I’m asked to monitor the side door so that when the kids pour out onto the playground, they don’t run or get hurt while exiting. I push open the heavy steel door. Outside, it’s spring, there’s a blue sky above, and the sweet smell of nearby honeysuckle growing by the chain link fence that borders a residential property. On the stone steps, I breathe deeply, stretch out my arms. My thin body is flat and strong. I’ve been modeling in the city for the past year; I’m a straight-A student. I have friends, and people tell me I’m pretty, though I don’t understand that. I run my hands up and down my torso. I am a girl, and I am a boy, I think. I have the strength of both genders pulsing within. It’s electric; I’m alive with it. This energy defines me. I never want to be only male or female. I was a boy before I was born, I tell myself again.

  In five minutes, a horde of schoolchildren pour into the corridor, make their way out of the building from the side exit I’m tasked to watch. I have the door jamb in place and yell out, “Slow down. Safety monitor on duty. Slow down, please!” The rush of bodies and noise floods the hallway, the nearby staircase, cascading into the playground. I am losing myself and becoming them—the pulse, the beat, the energetic throb of noise and impulse. Again, I’m no longer me, myself, nor anyone.

  The phone rings and startles me. I grab my cell phone from my bathrobe pocket and find that it’s the secretary from Arts and Humanities. She wants to know if I’ll be in today; I need to sign some paperwork connected to an inv
oice, an interdepartmental transfer of funds.

  “Yes,” I say, immediately regretting the commitment. I’m feeling sad again and want to stay in my world of memory, continue to write. The more solitary I am, the more solitude I seem to need.

  But when I look over what I’ve written only a few moments ago, I feel disconnected to it and to myself. Maybe being out in the world would be good—offer my attention, my focus to an external locus.

  There’s a Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day,” that I like, in which the speaker connects with a grasshopper, very particularly, as she enjoys a summer day. But by the poem’s end, Oliver challenges the reader to judge her day not as a waste of time but as a perfect employment of her time; her attention to the grasshopper encourages readers by proxy to give their attention to the smallest matters, that in such attention lies the fullness of life.

  Before I end my writing, I type out Oliver’s lines from memory:

  Tell me, what else should I have done?

  Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do

  with your one wild and precious life?

  I save my book—if I can call it that—or document—though the word “document” sounds like something that should be notarized—and turn off my machine. Writing for the day is done.

  Summer school is in session, so there are plenty of students and faculty around. I meet Jill, a social work professor, whose office is a few doors down from mine.

  “How’s it going?” Jill asks. She’s petite and has become very thin since her husband left her for another woman last fall. If I remember correctly, he teaches in the math department at a community college in Raleigh. They have two young kids, and Jill is the custodial parent.

  “Okay,” I answer. But I know Jill really wants to talk about herself. So I ask, “How about you? Teaching this summer?”

  Jill sighs, sweeping her blonde hair away from her face. “Yeah, I’ve picked up an Intro to Social Work course, but after that I’m taking the kids to my folks’ farm in Iowa. Horses. Goats. Chickens. Good for them. You know?” Jill has been looking down at her armload of papers, but now she’s turned her gaze on me. There are tears in her eyes.