The Shelf Life of Fire

by Robin Greene

  I don’t know how long I stay in this state. I feel on the brink of a comfortable death, on some edge of consciousness, drifting in a place touched by sadness, softness, deep acceptance.

  When the student comes into the room, he says, “Time’s up. I’m coming in, about to lift the lid. I have your towel.”

  “Not ready,” I manage, finding my voice.

  “Time’s up. Got to get you out.” As he lifts the lid, I see dark light. He extends a towel, which I take from him, wrapping it around my torso, stepping from the tank.

  By the doorway, he hands me the clipboard, asks that I sign my name on the log by the time slot, where he’s written the exact times I entered and exited the tank.

  In the locker room, Nick asks, “Well, how was it?” I can’t answer. No words come out of my mouth. I simply nod.

  “You okay?” he asks. I nod again, begin to dress.

  k

  On the couch, the experience strikes me as perfect therapy—healing, oneness with self. Far better than the talking and cognitive therapies I’ve tried.

  I hold myself back from tears. Triggered by my memory of the tank or just generalized weepiness? Maybe it’s that Nick hasn’t called. Or my isolation. Am I falling apart?

  I’m in the kitchen now, preparing my new dinner favorite: two grilled cheese sandwiches and a salad. Jake, who’s been sleeping on the front rug, trots into the kitchen to check his blue ceramic dog bowl that I see needs to be washed. I scour it with hot, soapy water, dry it with a paper towel, then remind Jake that he’s eaten. Regardless, he expects something, so I crumble some bread, settle his bowl down, and he begins to eat. I start on my grilled cheese sandwiches with the same bread that Jake’s having for dinner.

  It’s quiet now in the house, too quiet. I turn on the kitchen radio, catch a snippet of a news report—a woman has been raped and murdered by a gang of ordinary young men on a public bus. I miss where she’s from, but only hear that she was a university student. A female lawyer for the victim’s family explains that violence against women is common and underreported. She calls for immediate action, and an NPR interviewer asks how this issue has impacted public awareness. But now, I turn the radio off. Not good company for my black mood.

  Silence again as I make my sandwiches, pan frying them in a combination of olive oil and butter. I use organic cheddar cheese, and as the sandwiches sizzle, I make a small salad.

  I’m out in the sunroom with Jake, eating my dinner and reading my novel. At the end of Anna Karenina, Anna goes crazy. Not crazy-crazy, but she loses perspective, becomes paranoid. In this frame of mind, Anna kills herself. Attentive readers already know where the story is going; in the book’s beginning, Anna witnesses a man commit suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. The foreshadowing might seem a little too obvious, but most readers have forgotten that scene because it occurs so early in a very long book.

  Like so many of my favorite books, I’ve read Anna Karenina probably a half-dozen times. Rereading a beloved book is like sitting down to eat comfort food—it delivers the satisfying tastes, textures I expect and love. Yet there are surprises as well—while the recipe is the same, each time it cooks up differently so that the experience yields something new.

  I’m on the last hundred pages; I’ve been taking my time, savoring, paying close attention to the narrative’s pace, the sense of inevitability.

  Tolstoy, with his great omniscience, drills deep into his characters’ hearts. I understand how Anna gets crazy, why Vronsky can’t see Anna’s desperation and instead feels trapped by her needs. But has Tolstoy shortchanged his female protagonist? Perhaps Anna would be more sympathetic, especially to the contemporary reader, had she left her passionless marriage as an assertion of her independence, a refusal to conform to social norms. But she leaves Karenin and her son, Seryozha, whom she loves, for a romance with a man who doesn’t know himself.

  Of course, Anna doesn’t know herself either and when she begins to suspect that Vronksy has found another woman, she decides to punish him by taking her own life. This is a version of the adolescent who attempts suicide to punish the inattentive parent. But perhaps most suicides involve desire for punishment. In a flash, I’m brought back to my own suicide attempt, my own inattentive parents, my need for self-punishment. “Anna,” I say aloud, “I’m with you.”

  twenty-four

  It’s the next evening; I’ve taken Jake for his walk, fed him, and eaten some spicy garlic broccoli from the Chinese take-out place near Food Lion. Nick tried calling me yesterday, but I missed him. I was in the shower, didn’t hear the phone, and couldn’t call him back. Frustrating.

  I’ve taken Anna Karenina out to the sunroom again. Anna is fighting with Vronsky, who’s doing his best to minimize the argument. Convinced that Vronsky is being unfaithful, Anna suffers. Vronsky, disappointed that Anna’s husband won’t give her the divorce that will allow him to marry Anna, just wants to leave the house, to do something pleasant, like play cards with his soldier friends. Anna’s position as a mistress preys more on Vronsky than it does on her. Anna insists that marriage is not, and should not be, important, while Vronsky believes that normalizing their union through marriage will help his career and their relationship. But her status as a marginalized woman impacts Anna’s mental health more than she knows.

  I turn pages, lying on the couch, ceiling fan whirring above, Jake panting on the floor, trying to nap in the evening heat. As much as I don’t like Anna for mistaking her thoughts and feelings for reality, I continue to empathize with her.

  Sleepy now, I rest the heavy book, spine open, across my belly, allowing Anna mystical and direct access to me. I drift off.

  k

  I’m walking a muddy trail in my dream, near the summer camp dude ranch I attended so many years ago. I’m barefoot and slipping constantly. I grab a branch for balance, and as I pull myself up a particularly steep incline, the branch comes alive—transforming into a human hand. A bright sun radiates through the woods, blinding me; I can’t see who’s helping me.

  The moment, perhaps, takes fifteen seconds, but my dreamtime is playing in slow mo, perhaps 120 frames per second. My right foot slips downward, sinking into soft mud while my left foot, my lead foot, catches on a large rock embedded into the ground. The woman’s hand I’m holding so tightly—for the branch is clearly a woman’s hand now—is sweaty, slippery, so the dream is characterized by losing ground, grip, clarity.

  Slowly, the hand pulls me up, and I feel like I weigh three-hundred pounds or that I’m carrying a backpack filled with bricks, inhibiting my climb upward. “Help,” I whisper, sensing that I’m both on the sunroom couch speaking these words while in the dream speaking them. I think: This is my life. I can’t lift myself; something is weighing me, holding me down; I’m stuck.

  I exist in two realms, on two planes—one involves my younger self, the other involves my current self, and they’re both exerting equal pressure, occupying the same space-time continuum. The woman’s hand loosens for a second, then re-grips, now more strongly connected to my hand. Her strength pulls me forward, upward. My right foot lands next to my left on the boulder; I’m no longer floundering. And the sun has moved so that I see a mountain top, where there’s a flat plateau and a trail that continues.

  I hear horses, as if people are waiting for me. Then I hear a loud whistle and the sound of a long train rattling across tracks.

  Suddenly, I’m not sure if I should trust the hand I’m gripping. The train whistle frightens me. I think of Anna. I don’t want to climb the up to the trail. But I can’t relinquish the woman’s hand because I’ll fall.

  The sun shifts position again; I look up to see my mother’s face to realize that it’s her hand I hold. Yet, her face looks so much like my own that I wonder if I’ve become my mother.

  After one strong yank, I stand on the rock, balanced, my muddy feet firm, and because I actually do have on a heavy backpack, I take it off, releasing my mother’s hand. She lets go reluctantly
. The heavy pack rests on the rock beside me, and my mother has climbed up on a clump of birch trees, similar to the clump located in the yard of our South Shelburne home.

  “Rae,” she says in an authoritative voice, “Come with me. Now.” My mother is in her late thirties, with raven-black hair, red lips; she wears a brown polyester pants suit from the seventies, with matching four-inch heels. How she got up there in those shoes, I think, is a miracle.

  “I can’t, Mom. I just can’t come. I need to get down to the valley, to camp. The horses need to be broken.” I look into the stand of birch trees, the white parchment-like bark creating a rural Russian forest, one that Anna might recognize.

  “But you’ll miss the train. And your brother is dying.” My mother hops down from the birch trees, brushes off her clothing, smoothing her suit jacket like she’s ready to leave. “You’re going to regret not seeing him, and your brother is going to be disappointed.” She shakes her head, admonishing me. “You never listen.”

  “But Mom,” I insist. “Anna is about to kill herself.”

  “I know, Rae. But we all have to die.”

  I shoot awake with bullet-like force. Jake breathes heavily, asleep by me. I’m sweating, dripping, and as I sit up, the novel slips from my belly to the floor. The room is dark, so it’s got to be past 9:00.

  I get up. Jake comes with me. In the kitchen, I check my phone for missed calls. Nothing.

  The a/c feels great, and I think I’ll change into my nightgown, bathrobe, watch another episode of Hit and Miss, though I don’t have many left.

  Upstairs now, I feel inclined to write, even though it’s late. Yes, the book. I’m writing two to five pages every day. What began as an exercise—to write organically, without a plot, specific characters, conflict—has become a novel.

  For a couple of hours I sit, typing away—Jake on the futon near me. I write about a childhood memory of spilling my milk all over the wobbly Queen’s apartment kitchen table.

  The story is painful: I get blamed for intentionally spilling my milk, for making a mess on purpose.

  “Accident,” I insist. I’m two, maybe three years old, in my pajamas, barefoot at the table. My mother yells, threatening to hit me.

  “Clumsy!” she yells, grabbing a sponge, wiping the spill.

  The memory moves to my dad. I awoke from my late afternoon nap with thoughts of him just beneath consciousness. I switch from writing about the spilled milk to writing about him, remembering that before he died last year, I wanted very much to see him, to say goodbye. My mom agreed that I should come down to Florida, to the residential hospice facility where he was placed after he could no longer live at home and his doctors couldn’t do anything for him. I hadn’t seen him for years, and I wanted to touch him, see his face, tell him that I loved him.

  I bought a round-trip ticket to Fort Lauderdale, booked a hotel near the hospice, rented a car. I was supposed to leave from the Raleigh airport on a Friday, when I had no classes, return on that Sunday afternoon. It was mid-April; my dad died in early June. He was still conscious most of the time, although with his dementia, he wasn’t always coherent. I agreed to take my chances. This visit was for me as much as for him; I needed closure; I wanted to say goodbye.

  Then, less than a week before I was supposed to leave, I received a snail-mail letter from my mom, telling me not to come. My visit would be “too difficult for the family during this tension-filled time.”

  My mom went on to write, “I have to ask that you don’t come. I can’t explain myself right now, but I hope that you’ll understand and trust me.”

  I never went. Instead, I canceled all my reservations.

  I still have the letter, written in my mom’s distinctive hand, its regular, even script with large upper and lower loops, very pleasing to the eye. I loved my mother’s handwriting. When I was a young girl, I would trace it by taping a sheet of blank paper over it, then taping both sheets to a window, where the light made her letters distinct through the top paper. Her hand suggested control, strength, regularity. No matter what happened in our lives, my mom’s handwriting was always the same.

  On one occasion, I took an absence note she had written to excuse me from school after a brief illness, traced her note completely and handed in my forgery, keeping her original note. My forgery was never detected.

  Her letter to me was also well-written—as all her documents are. My mom’s grammar, sentence structure, paragraphing, organization, transitional language are as lovely as her penmanship.

  I think about my mom, her handwriting, and realize how much I’m digressing. No worries, I tell myself, life is all digression. I write.

  At some point, I discovered her high school yearbook in her night-table drawer. I sneaked it out of her bedroom and put it between my mattress and box-spring, an illicit book with photos of my mom taken before I was born. In her senior portrait, her young brilliant face is caught in its frame, alphabetized in a neat row along with other black and white faces. So many lives.

  I’d take that book out at night sometimes and would dream about my mother. Not night dreams, but fantasies in which I might bump into her in the hallway of her old Brooklyn high school. Or I might watch her as she found her seat in English class. Or I might hear her laugh with her girlfriends in the school yard or open the girls’ bathroom door as she brushed her hair.

  On page fifty-two, my mom had a short essay on “rain,” with another student’s artwork adorning the margins around the piece. I’d read and reread that piece, paying close attention to every word, how her sentences were put together, how tightly she paragraphed them. Her vocabulary, her word choice struck me as superb. I’d speak the piece out loud sometimes, trying various inflections so that I could bring her essay fully to life, to thereby better understand my mother.

  After I’d slipped the book back in the drawer, one day I followed my mom into her bedroom as she was making the big king bed in which she and my dad slept. I sat on the floor by her closet, near the nightstand, opened up the drawer, pretended to find the yearbook for the first time.

  “Oh, what’s this, Mom?” I asked, quickly leafing through the volume to find her piece.

  “Nothing. Really. Just my old high school yearbook.”

  “Look, Mom. You have a piece in here. Can I read it? Wow.” Without waiting for an answer, I stood up, began to read the piece aloud in my best practiced way. She wore a pink gingham duster with snaps down the front. Her hair, always teased and set, formed a little hair helmet around her face. I seldom saw that face without makeup, but this morning it was washed clean. I had the piece almost memorized, and my inflection, I thought, was just about perfect. It began:

  Rain. I have seen the rain fall all my life. I have heard raindrops beat against my windowpane, in a fury, as they spoke to me—about today and tomorrow, the unwritten future for which I long…

  I don’t remember more. But there was a descriptive part when she sits down near the fire escape, opening her window to listen to the rain. As she does, she thinks about escaping her own life, until she climbs out of the window, sits on the metal grill, allowing herself to get soaked. She’s alone in the scene. As she gets soaked, she reflects that this is what life is about—being part of it, getting wet, angry, happy, or disappointed. Always saturated with life.

  I’m sure I fail here to do the piece justice. And yet if I read it today, I’m sure I wouldn’t be quite as impressed as I was then. But I was about twelve years old and felt incredibly honored to stand in front of her, to speak her words aloud. I had fallen in love with those words and I stood in the bedroom—window shades halfway drawn as they always were, day or night—offering my mom a gift: my best dramatic reading of her essay.

  The last word in the piece was “rain,” capitalized and punctuated as a sentence. An intentional, effective use of a fragment and a repeat of the fragment with which the piece began. Cohesive, coherent, so smart. Yes, I was full of admiration.

  “What do you think, Mom?” I a
sked, the book still open like a hymnal in my hands.

  “What do you think, Rae?” she retorted, never looking up at me or stopping her bed-making, pillow fluffing.

  “I think it’s beautiful. Perfect. You never told me that you liked to write.”

  “I wrote it for senior English, and my teacher, Mrs. Shapiro, wanted to put it in the yearbook. I didn’t like it then and still don’t.” She hesitated, the bed with its blue duvet and matching pillow shams had been made so firmly that the bed was completely tight, smooth. My mother’s touch always so exacting.

  “I love it. I wish I could write like that.”

  “No, you don’t. Put it away. I ought to throw it out. That and everything else in the drawer. It’s all clutter. Old junk. Really, Rae.” My mom forced a smile, then retreated to her walk-in closet.

  I tucked the book back in the stuffed drawer, realizing that there might be other things there that would be equally as interesting, things that I should definitely look at before my mom makes good on her threat.

  Soon, my mom emerged from the dark closet with a pair of slacks and a sweater in her hands. “I need to get dressed now,” she said. So, I left, closing the bedroom door respectfully behind me.

  My mother’s letter to me, written in that lovely regular hand, so careful, with so much attention to how she weighed her language—what she said and didn’t say—left me with admiration similar to that which I had felt so long ago for her piece on rain. Here, her grammatically perfect sentences, with intentional fragments for emphasis, read like a song, a painful song: “…too difficult during this tension-filled time”—all the lovely hard consonant sounds, conspiring against me. The song of done, don’t do, don’t come, don’t be.

  With that, I’m done writing. I’ll watch TV, those last episodes of Hit and Miss. Try not to think about my mom, dad, brother…who I am, or the stuff the transgender protagonist brings up for me. Instead, as I watch, I’ll turn to my knitting, the rhythmic knotting of yarn.