The Shelf Life of Fire

by Robin Greene

  “Good dog,” I said.

  “What?” Nick asked.

  “Keep working,” I said. “Something will give.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I heard a deep sigh. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.” And we hung up.

  I sat in the half-lit, quiet living room and thought about opera, which I like, and considered finding Tosca in my CD collection and playing it. Frozen on the screen were two people, the transgender Mia and Ryan, the son she’d conceived when she was a man. I thought about penises and how I liked them, not as somebody who wanted one as part of her body, but as a woman who desired them. I am a woman, I thought, and decided to continue knitting, finish up watching the show, and get to bed early so as to have a full morning at the computer, working on my book.

  At around 10:15, I took Jake out in the backyard for a walk. He has two dog-doors—one in the kitchen’s back door, opening into the garage, the other in a garage door, opening into our fenced backyard—so he doesn’t need to be walked. But at fifteen, Jake has thick cataracts in both eyes and has gotten senile and fearful, and now insists that I accompany him outside at night.

  In bed, I read a few pages of Anna Karenina before putting the book on my nightstand, taking off my reading glasses, placing them in their case, shutting off the light, and falling asleep.

  At 4:00, however, I awakened with my heart racing, recalling a dream, which propelled me out of bed and to my laptop.

  The dream still vivid, I turned on my study light, sat, and wrote:

  Dennis and I are living together in a one room, a studio basement apartment, painted battleship gray, with no windows. There’s only a small kitchenette—stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, sink, cabinets—and in the living area, doors to a closet and a bathroom, a small kitchen table, two chairs, and two couches that fold open to become beds. We sleep parallel on opposite walls, as we did when we were young children in the Queens apartment. But every time we fall asleep, our ages change: I close my eyes, and when I open them, Dennis is twelve; we sleep, and he’s sixty. Sleep again, he’s seven. Dennis is fifty-eight; I’m fifty-four. Dennis is nineteen; I’m fifteen; Dennis is twelve; I’m eight; Dennis is seven; I’m three. And so on.

  In my dream, Dennis has cancer, no matter how old he is. He can’t eat. I prepare healthy meals in our small kitchen: vegetable soup; arugula salad with cranberries, walnuts, goat cheese; organic brown rice casserole with eggplant, zucchini, broccoli. Still Dennis can’t eat.

  I bring a bowl of food to his bed, but he won’t turn to face me.

  “Dennis, you must eat,” I say. “Please.” I sit on the edge of his bed.

  “I’m dying,” the seven-year-old Dennis says.

  Sad and disheartened, I get up and take the bowl over to my bed, where I sit and eat his food. I’m voracious and devour all of the bowl’s contents. Then, I get up, put the empty bowl into the dishwasher, go back to bed, and fall into a deep sleep—a dream within a dream.

  When I wake again, Dennis is balding, a crown of gray hair in a semi-circle around the back of his head. I have salad for him, mixed with Green Goddess dressing. “Eat,” I say.

  “I’m dying,” Dennis says again. And this pattern repeats many times—with only the food I’ve prepared and our ages changing.

  Finally, at the end of the dream, upset by his inability or unwillingness to eat, I yank Dennis’s blue winter quilt, which now covers him completely. And when I do, I discover that he’s a child of eight, naked under the blanket. This time, as he turns around and looks at me in surprise and anger, I see that he’s bleeding from the stomach; there’s a huge hole in his gut, spilling out blood and bile.

  “Oh, my God,” I say, putting the salad bowl down on the bare wood floor. “Let me help.” I find a towel, hold it to the wound, to staunch the outpouring of fluids. But I can’t. The more I try, the faster it’s all coming out, spilling and soiling the bed linens. Dennis’s face is now growing old in front of me, like time-lapse photography of a bud turning into a flower, opening quickly and dying until its petals are all lost. Yet Dennis’s body remains the body of an eight-year-old boy.

  “It’s your fault,” Dennis chokes out. “Look what you’ve done.”

  His bowels are falling out of him; fluids pour like from a faucet without a value. Then, just as Dennis is about to die, he deflates like a cartoon balloon and is sucked through the black hole of his wound until he’s a liquid pool of brown and ochre.

  At around 4:15 a.m., as I write down the dream, I’m having a hot flash, and find myself sweaty, almost drenched. The room, my study, is dark, illuminated only by the screen and the streetlight coming through the closed blinds. Jake has followed me and now sleeps on the rug near my desk. I hadn’t seen him come in or sensed his presence.

  I type one last sentence after I record my dream—I am killing my brother—then turn off the computer.

  fifteen

  I’m in my study now, Saturday morning, maybe 10:00 a.m., having gone back to bed at around 5:00. Jake’s been fed, but I feel terribly upset, as if death surrounds me, encroaching on a narrow island on which I’m forced to live. A storm throws sea water across its cliffs and over the shore, as the island seems to be shrinking until there are fewer and fewer places to stand.

  I remember 1959, a critical year for our family. But perhaps “critical year” isn’t quite right because the whole of 1959 wasn’t critical, only one afternoon.

  I type out what I recall.

  It’s early afternoon, and I’ve been here since morning. My nursery school, a rather informal affair—a classroom in the cooperative apartment basement, run by a teacher hired by the cooperative members. I see the teacher’s dress but not her face. I see her hands, hair, shoes. She wears a blue cotton dress, fitted bodice and flaring skirt. The waist is belted with thin braided white leather.

  This morning we’re executing an arts-and-craft project involving crayons and cutting with plastic scissors. Barbara Goldstein, my best friend, sits next to me. We’re the only girls and wear blue plastic smocks that are slipped over our heads and tied at the sides.

  I can draw well with both my left and right hand, but I choose to draw with my left one, and the teacher tries to correct me. I won’t let her. Instead, I pick up a scissor with my right hand and begin to draw and cut at the same time.

  “You’re going to be a lefty,” the teacher warns. “And it’s a righty world.”

  Later, after we drink our small cartons of cool thick milk, eat our crackers and cheese, we are helped out of our smocks. We walk out the building’s side door—up brick steps past the laundry room, with its narrow basement windows, large metal folding tables, machines that make creepy whirring noises, past the damp dryer smells that make me feel a little nauseated—as we take the short-cut to the concrete playground.

  Here is a red whirl-a-gig, the old-school type children run beside and power with their feet. And seesaws, six in two groups of three, a couple of commercial-grade swing sets with wide wooden seats—my favorite—and a sprinkler for hot summer days, a basketball court for the older kids, two small rows of baby swings, with seats made of rubber strapping and a chain in front that clips so that babies won’t spill out.

  I run to claim my favorite swing, knowing that if I sit backward on it, I’ll feel like I’m being carried over the chain-link fence and into the “jungle.” I pretend I’m Tarzan, never Jane, swinging on rope vines along the rain forest canopy.

  Sometimes my teacher corrects me and asks that I face forward like the other children, but today she doesn’t. Instead, she sits, relaxing, on the park bench by the fence underneath the overhanging feathery leaves of a mimosa tree.

  Barbara sits on the whirl-a-gig while a couple of boys compete to see how fast they can make it spin. She sits crisscross in the center, where a rider is less likely to get dizzy. Her long mousy-brown hair flies about her face.

  I swing as high as I can, until the swing’s chains skip, buckle, and I beco
me frightened and slow down. When we play alone out here, Glenn and Teddy will jump off their swings, often in unison, and propel themselves over the fence, into the jungle. But that always feels too risky for me, so I’ve learned to drag my feet to slow the swing, then climb the fence to join them in the wooded area, behind the big boulder, where we have our club meetings.

  Today, with our teacher present, however, we don’t dare go into the jungle. We swing and play, taking turns on the equipment, shouting, running, getting messy, and finally very tired.

  After playtime, we walk noisily, our energy gradually winding down until we reach the nursery room where we take—or are supposed to take—post-play naps on bright, various-colored roll-out mats.

  Douglas, a small boy who wears glasses, teases me to take the pink one because my last name is Bloom, and he thinks pink is the color of blooming flowers. Then he calls me “Bloomy Doomy,” only because the words rhyme. I often pull his cap over his face to shut him up. But this day, I make it over to the stack of mats early and grab a yellow one, bright as the sun on a summer’s day. Bright, I think, as the yellow feathers of Happy, our pet parakeet, the only pet we’re allowed to keep in the apartment, though no one has explained to me why Nana and Pop-Pop, my maternal grandparents who lived in the cooperative’s other apartment building and are allowed to keep their dog, a terrier mix named Bobo, whom I love very much.

  It takes a while for us to settle down, as a few of the children get to their mats late because they need a bathroom break. When they return, they’re fidgety, still struggling to buckle a belt, tuck in a shirt, wipe a drippy nose with a sleeve.

  By 4:30, our day is over, and when Barbara’s mom arrives, I’m told that she will take me home. I hold one of Mrs. Goldstein’s hands and Barbara holds the other as we walk around to the Middle Entrance to take the main elevator in my wing of the building up to the fourth floor. Mrs. Goldstein has blonde hair that she wears in a ponytail, and she has on blue jeans with a simple white shirt and flat slip-on shoes. She looks very unlike my own mother, but she is always nice when I come over to Barbara’s apartment, where jazz and classical music often play in the background. They don’t even own a TV.

  On the way up to the apartment, Mrs. Goldstein tells me that my mom is home and that we have visitors. I should be a good girl and listen carefully to what my mom needs me to do. Also, there’s a chance that I’ll be coming over to their apartment later today for cookies and milk if my mom is too busy to look after me.

  I half-listen, although what she says is odd and should focus my attention. When we arrive home, the front door is ajar. Inside, my mom sits at the dining room table with two policemen dressed in dark blue uniforms. Dennis sits in the living room with another man, official-looking, but dressed in a dark business suit. I scan the apartment: some kitchen cabinet drawers are open, and the big silver samovar on top of the sideboard is missing.

  My mom rises to greet us.

  “Edna, would you like Rachel to stay with us for a few hours? It would be no trouble.” Mrs. Goldstein bends toward my mom, gives her a polite hug, then holds her gently by the shoulders.

  “No, Gail, not necessary. She’ll be fine. Thanks so much for picking her up.”

  “Anything more I can do?” Mrs. Goldstein asks.

  “No, really, you’ve helped tremendously. I’ll call if I need you, though.”

  “Yes, please do. Don’t hesitate.” Mrs. Goldstein bends down and gives me a rather strong hug. It is only then that I notice Barbara, standing too quietly outside the apartment.

  “Be a good girl,” Mrs. Goldstein admonishes. “A good girl for your mommy.”

  I’m only home for ten minutes before my Aunt Em—who lives in the apartment directly beneath ours, with my Uncle Leo and my two cousins, Sheryl and Ellen—comes to get me. Aunt Em is my favorite aunt. She has bright red hair, teased high so that light shines through it. She also has a cartoon face, highlighted by cat-eye, rhinestone eyeglasses that glitter when she moves her head. Her head is always in motion. And her thick Brooklyn accent flattens her words so that I love to hear her speak. I also love her hugs, tight and intimate.

  Before I leave with Aunt Em, my mom tells me that we have been robbed, that Dennis was home, and that a bad man had tied him up with daddy’s work ties, put a pillowcase over his head so that he couldn’t witness the robbery. Dennis is fine, but I’m not supposed to mention the robbery to anyone.

  Mom takes me in her arms. “Not to anyone,” she whispers in my ear.

  sixteen

  I’ve been writing. Furiously. Visiting that time, seeing the apartment, with its flocked green wallpaper, remembering its smells of stale cigarettes and coffee—we had an electric pot that often would stay plugged in the entire day. Then, the playground, nursery school. I rise to stretch for a moment, shake off the past; Jake lifts his head and lays it down. I hear his sigh and think that years ending in “9” are somehow powerful, pulling their decades along, numbers with curved, lingering tails.

  I sit down, and it’s summer 1969—the dude ranch camp again. It’s early evening, after dinner, and I’m alone in the rec room, where we’re having our first summer social, to include the cowboys, a couple of whom will be leaving tomorrow.

  I’m early for the party, but happy to be alone, sitting by the large window, looking out at a group of horses nibbling a bale of hay in the fenced upper pasture. Some campers are resting in their bunks, others finishing up their tooled leather pieces in the craft room. Already there are plates of cookies, paper Dixie-Cups, and pitchers of bug-juice on the wooden tables.

  The big juke box by the stone wall doesn’t need coins. It’s fixed so that campers can select three tunes at a time—by number and by letter—and the selected forty-fives will play. The machine is large and holds over three hundred records—mostly rock-and-roll and country.

  Before coming to camp this summer, I cut my hair. A sort of post-Twiggy style, with a dramatic side part, side bangs that cover one eye, and short, almost shaved up the back. I’ve also taken to wearing makeup, just for summer camp. Rachel Rosenfeld, my inspiration and mentor, has lent me black eye liner, deep blue eye shadow, and pale white-ice shimmering lipstick. In fact, I’m now all made up and wearing my tightest jeans, cowboy boots, snap-front red plaid cowboy shirt, and last year’s tooled Western belt with an enormous silver-plated oval buckle embossed with a brass-colored horse in a dead run.

  Now, it’s 7:50; our social begins at 8:00. I lean over the jukebox and play “Light my Fire” by the Doors. The smooth but loud sound fills the room, and I sink into its rolling music—velvety, sexy, penetrating, moody—until I inhabit it. I’m no longer me; I’ve become elemental, my particles charged, transforming me from girl into heat, sensation, a separation of parts, the song carrying me like the horse I’ve chosen for the summer, and named today Queen Mab, from Romeo and Juliet.

  Campers drift in. So do cowboys. My favorite cowboy, who spots me standing by the far wall, saunters toward me, boots clanking on the pine wood floor as “Light my Fire” plays for the second time—someone, appreciating my choice, has selected it again.

  “Howdy,” Johnny says.

  “Howdy yourself,” I say.

  “Saw the mare you picked out. Nice gal but sort of frisky.” Johnny wears a woven straw cowboy hat, and as he removes it, he lifts his other hand and smooths out his wet-looking, dirty-blonde hat hair.

  “Think I can handle her?” Leaning against the wall near the juke box, I lift one foot against it, leaving my knee bent toward Johnny.

  “Haven’t seen you ride.”

  “You will.” And as I say this, I understand that we’re no longer talking about horses.

  “Me and the boys was wondering how old you are. I guess sixteen.”

  I give Johnny a small, tight grin as if the subject of my age is to remain a mystery, as if the old adage, never ask a woman her age, will save me from a direct answer. I like the idea of being sixteen. It isn’t eighteen, the age of consent, but it
sounds a lot better than fifteen.

  Johnny leans in to kiss me, and I kick off from the wall with my boot. I feel Johnny watch me as I sashay across the rec room, over to my bunkmates sitting at one of the tables. A pitcher of red bug juice and a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies are on the table. I pour juice into a blue swirly Dixie-Cup, remove a cookie from the plate, and sit on a bench built into the wall by the table.

  Pamela, a girl from Co-op City in the Bronx, sits by me. She has long blonde hair and cried a lot during the van trip up to camp. She also has a puffy, pink, plastic-covered diary in which she writes every evening after dinner and locks every night with a tiny metal key.

  “That your boyfriend?” Pamela asks me.

  “Not yet,” I reply, though I hate my flippant response. I get up, lean back against the rough wall, take a bite of my cookie and a slug of the juice, which tastes awful, a kind of watered down, over-sweetened Kool-Aid-like drink, dyed with red food coloring.

  “Angel of the Morning” plays now on the juke box. Johnny still stands across the room, joined by a friend, but he glances my way, smiling at me every so often. He’s placed his hat back on his head—and with his hat, his slender body, Western-style shirt, slim jeans, and tall boots, he creates a kind of romantic cowboy image, fitting, I think, for Bonanza, a show that my brother sometimes insists we watch. I hate TV Westerns, but I love the real thing, right in front of me now.

  There’ll be no strings to bind your hands

  Not if my love can’t bind your heart

  And there’s no need to take a stand

  For it was I who choose to start

  I see no need to take me home

  I’m old enough to face the dawn

  Just call me angel of the morning, angel

  Just touch my cheek before you leave me…

  I take a good, long look at Johnny and stare hard. He returns my gaze, nods, and tips his hat ever so slightly. Then he walks down the rear stairs that lead outside.

  “Excuse me,” I tell Pamela, walk toward the front stairs, and look down the dark well from the narrow alcove that empties into it. Here the music is muted, and the song plays its final soft melody, carrying it to its inevitable end. I find the banister and walk slowly down the stairs to find Johnny.