How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  “Practice. So you know how to keep the next set alive.”

  Zooey insisted that Colin read her “Rumpelstiltskin” as a bedtime story. Colin changed the ending and didn’t let Rumpelstiltskin split himself in two in a fit of rage. Instead, he saw the error of his ways.

  “Daddy, you changed it.”

  “There’s always more than one ending, Zooey.”

  From the window Colin watched Kate tend to the fire, letting the embers burn to their final death. Then she poured a bucket of water over them and returned to the house.

  Colin and Kate sat on the couch in the living room in front of the gas fireplace. Colin picked up the remote control and pressed the On button. Flames burst out of rocks, casting shadows around the room. He flicked the fireplace off and on again, for effect. “You can, however, roast them over the gas stove and eat them in front of a gas fireplace.”

  “You want everything to be easy,” Kate said, getting to her feet.

  She kicked his legs, which were resting on the coffee table, blocking her exit.

  Colin took her hand and said, “Not everything.”

  Colin understood very little about Kate, but he knew to tread cautiously. When Colin reached for Kate, she’d felt her skin flush and wanted to believe it was a delayed reaction to various fires. Colin tugged on the bottom of Kate’s shirt, pulling her toward him, waiting to see how she’d respond.

  Kate straddled him on the couch and kissed him, tasting marshmallows again. She admonished herself by repeating this refrain: This means nothing to him. She pulled her shirt over her head and struggled out of it, wrestling with the shirt in a childish manner. Colin thought, This means nothing to her. They continued to disrobe, misreading each other’s minds.

  2013

  Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

  George and Anna threw off their clothes by the watering hole. Kate couldn’t help but stare at George’s natural breasts, which sagged slightly from the weight of time and the loss of silicone.

  Anna had noticed that the implants had been removed when she met George at the airport, but she didn’t say anything until they were laid bare for observation.

  “Hey, your fake boobs are gone,” Kate said enthusiastically.

  “Edgar prefers things natural.”

  “Huh,” Kate said, the enthusiasm entirely drained from her voice. “What do you do if you find a guy who likes big tits again? Can’t be healthy going back and forth like that.”

  “I’m getting married, Kate. There isn’t going to be another guy.”

  Anna jumped into the water to signal the end of the conversation.

  “How did you find this place?” George asked Kate. George, Anna, and Kate, after months of planning, had found a pocket of time in June to gather for a medium-dry bachelorette weekend before George and Edgar’s August nuptials. George chose Yellowstone Park and Kate remained mum about her previous visit, although she couldn’t resist urging them toward that one private hot spring she’d found eight years earlier.

  Kate guided her friends by faking a sense of the geography. She said, “Let’s go this way. I have a good feeling about this way.” And the hot spring miraculously appeared.

  The trio swam for an hour and then gathered their belongings and climbed up to the road to watch the sun set in a cloudy tangle of purple and yellow. Kate ranked the sunset against a few others and it came up short, but sunsets were like pizza, she thought; they were all pretty good. (Except the kind in the frozen-food section and one that she’d had in Kansas.) George wished her boys were with her. Then she remembered Edgar. Engaged now for three months, she worried that she had to remind herself to remember him. For a brief moment, Anna thought how nice it would feel to have a cold beer in her hands. The women returned to the car and drove to the campsite.

  Kate held the flashlight and timed George as she pitched their tent in the dark. Three minutes and fifty-five seconds. Each step so rote, she could have been loading a dishwasher. Before George could take on the coveted job of fire starter, Kate had collected kindling and lit a match.

  Just twenty minutes after they landed at the site, the three women were warming their hands by the fire. George uncorked a bottle of wine and drank straight from the bottle. She offered it to Kate, who declined. No matter how many times Anna had told her she was fine with people drinking in her company, Kate never partook when Anna was around.

  George took another swig. She had had a proper boozy bachelorette party the weekend before with girlfriends from Chicago and Boise and a few wives of Edgar’s colleagues, whom she was encouraged to befriend. All of the women, without exception, were desperate to get away from their husbands and children and have a weekend of sheer debauchery in Las Vegas.

  There was a wild disparity in the manners in which George’s new friends indulged in their brief freedom. Amanda played blackjack for twelve hours straight. Whitney insisted on going to a male strip show. She had a hundred singles in her pocket and stayed for the second performance. Rebecca drank mojito after mojito and ordered two desserts. They all flirted whenever possible. Loretta let herself be groped by a banker with a greasy head of Jersey-thug hair, and Shelley, the clear winner of the trophy-wife award, disappeared with a twenty-three-year-old first-year law student at his own bachelor party. All of them slept until noon and played nickel slots for hours so they could drink for free. There was a shopping excursion and a few glittery shows. One involved an illusionist whose entire act, it seemed to George, consisted of disappearing in a ruffled shirt and reappearing bare-chested. George wished Kate were there just so she could hear her say something like I wonder where all the shirts go. Do you think he gives them to Goodwill?

  As the weekend wore on, there were several moments in which the antics of the women seemed not only tasteless but dull. It was then that George longed for the old Anna, the Anna who elevated reckless behavior beyond the vulgar or mundane. If she could have had the old Anna for just one day and then return her safe and sound, like a prison release, she would have done it. Because, once again, she wanted a professional guide into complete oblivion.

  The campfire burst with satisfying crackles, and the smell of burned wood was better than any perfume George could think of. She took another swig of wine.

  “You might want to slow down,” Anna said. “I think that’s the only bottle.” Sober for years, Anna still had the software of a drunk in her system, always aware of the amount of booze and planning accordingly.

  “I got another in the car,” George said. “I have to use the bathroom anyway. I’ll get it on the way back.” George corked the bottle and tucked it into a groove in the dirt. She clicked on the flashlight and headed down the trail.

  When the sound of George’s footsteps had faded under the chorus of crickets, Anna spoke.

  “Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said.

  “Edgar isn’t like the others,” Anna said. “Let’s wait and see. Just casually bring up the topic and go from there. Could just be wedding jitters.”

  “You’re right,” said Kate. “Edgar isn’t like the others.”

  “Whatever happened between you and Edgar?” Anna asked.

  “I thought you didn’t even remember him.”

  “I remembered when I saw the pictures,” Anna said. “I thought his name was Ernest. He used to visit you all the time. I figured something had happened between you two, because one day he stopped coming around.”

  “He wasn’t visiting me.”

  “But you liked him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. But he liked George.”

  “Huh. Were they together back then? I don’t remember that.”

  “She slept with him once,” Kate said. “Regretted it. That’s why he suddenly dropped off the radar.”

  “Did she know you liked him?”

  “I never told her.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t have changed how he felt,” Kate said.

  “You sure kno
w how to lock it down when you need to.”

  As George trudged back to the campsite, Kate mumbled to Anna, “We don’t mention this again. Capisce?”

  “Yes, Godfather,” Anna said.

  George settled next to the fire and leaned back against an ice chest covered with an ancient wool blanket.

  “I hate camping when I have my period,” George said. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”

  “When I was in Girl Scouts,” Kate said, “the counselors used to freak us out and tell us that grizzly bears were prone to attack women who were on their period. In fact, I think they used to have us sign a waiver or something.”

  “It’s bullshit,” George said. “The only kind of bear known to be attracted to menstrual blood is the polar bear, and we’re not likely to run into any here.”

  “My grandmother told me that you shouldn’t wash your hair when you have your period,” Anna said.

  George choked on her wine. “I’ve never heard that one. Is there a premise behind it?”

  “I don’t remember. She also thought you could get rid of warts if you got someone to buy ’em off you,” Anna said, shaking her head in disbelief.

  As Anna watched the fire crackle, another recollection took hold and she began chuckling to herself.

  “Something on your mind?” George asked.

  As Anna’s new memory took shape, she felt like she was watching an old movie of herself.

  “When I was sixteen or so, visiting Colin at college, I woke up on the floor of his dorm room and I was bleeding through my underwear. I raced to the bathroom. It was a coed dorm, and I thought I could catch a woman alone. It was empty and I was too embarrassed to say anything. So I used a wad of toilet paper as a stopgap measure and returned to the room and reluctantly told Colin of my predicament. He promptly started roaming the corridor, knocking on women’s doors and shouting, ‘My sister has her period. Anybody got any tampons to spare?’ I swear, he was shouting it at the top of his lungs. I was beet red and begging him to stop. Finally, Malcolm told him to shut the fuck up and give me a break. He got some tampons from a friend of his.

  “Later we had to go to the drugstore so I could get a full supply, and he kept shouting the same thing in the store. ‘Where are the tampons? My sister has her period.’ He was so evil.”

  Kate said, “At least he got you tampons. My deda would buy me those horrible giant pads. I was teased relentlessly in PE until a teacher took pity on me. I had to use my allowance money to buy tampons because I couldn’t talk about it with my deda.”

  “My dad always cooked me steak,” George said wistfully. “I don’t know how he knew, but he always knew.”

  “Because you’re a crazy bitch for the week before,” Kate said.

  “So that’s how he knew. Anyway, I always got steak.”

  “Typical,” Anna said. “We endure emotionally scarring humiliation and you get steak.”

  “So, will you be serving a choice of steak or seafood at the wedding?” Kate asked.

  Anna turned to Kate. “That might have been one of the worst conversational transitions in the history of man,” she said.

  “Doubt it,” Kate said. “So, steak or seafood, or will there be a vegetarian option?”

  George drained the first bottle and uncorked the second. Anna bit the inside of her lip. Kate took the open bottle from George’s grip and took a swig for the sole purpose of lessening the amount of alcohol that George could consume.

  “We will have three options. Steak, salmon, and pasta. We even have a gluten-free cake alternative for dessert. But with three hundred guests, there will still be a few who will leave unsatisfied.”

  “Have you picked out a dress?” Anna asked.

  “Yes. It’s white. Shut up.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Anna.

  “You didn’t wear white at your second wedding,” Kate said.

  “I know. But this is Edgar’s first wedding. So he wanted the whole shebang. Or perhaps it was his mother. I can’t really tell.”

  “You were happier before your other weddings,” Kate casually commented.

  “And look how those turned out.”

  George took the bottle of wine from Kate. She could tell other women the truth, but not them: She enjoyed the luxuries and the ease Edgar provided. She liked that her children had taken to him, and he to them. That she felt loved and respected and safe. She would never tell Kate and Anna that she believed this might be her last chance to find a decent man, and that she now mistrusted her instincts so thoroughly that she defied them completely.

  As her wedding ticked closer, she began to think of other men in her past and the sick, desperate feeling their intimacies had evoked. She wondered what it would be like to live the rest of her life without that feeling. Sometimes, as in that moment, drunk on cheap red wine and with people who reminded her only of the past, she thought that maybe she couldn’t.

  Anna and Kate exchanged glances, a veritable conversation of eyebrow lifts, while George dug patterns into the dirt with a stick.

  “That’s a hell of a ring,” Anna said, noting the seven-carat diamond on George’s finger and comparing it to Kate’s simple silver band.

  “I didn’t ask for it,” George said.

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” Anna said, noting the edge in George’s voice.

  “If you ever get mugged, promise me you’ll hand over the ring,” Kate said.

  “Of course.”

  “Are you sure about this one?” Anna casually asked.

  “I’m not sure about anything,” George said. “I don’t know that I ever have been.”

  2006

  Bismarck, North Dakota

  “Room for one,” Kate would say. She’d said it now more times than she could count.

  “Is this business or pleasure?” the motel clerk would ask.

  Business.

  Her ritual was always the same. She’d enter the room, try to decipher the layers of odors from previous guests. A scent that had been years in the making, like the bouquet of a fine wine. Only it smelled bad, typically an amalgamation of cigarettes, pets, the ghost of perfumes past, mildew, cheap shampoos, burned dust from the heating vent or dander rising from the blast of air conditioning.

  Kate would check the drawers and the closets, first for people, then for forgotten items—most of which were worthy of immediate disposal. In six months the only real treasure she’d found was a stack of postcards left in the nightstand drawer with a Gideon Bible. Housekeeping must have missed it. But these postcards, unlike the others left behind, were not blank. They were drafts of the same note, which presumably the author had finally perfected.

  Dear Mona,

  I fucked up, okay? People fuck up, don’t they?

  If God can forgive, why can’t you? You can’t blame the whole thing on me. [Line scratched out.]

  I want to come home. I promise it’ll be different this time.

  Is there any way we can forget?

  Love,

  Barney

  Dear Mona,

  I had a danish this morning and thought of you. I want to come home. Will you take me?

  I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t take me back.

  We’re soulmates. You said it yourself thirty years ago when we got married.

  One mistake can’t change that.

  Love,

  Barney

  Dear Mona,

  I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. You won’t answer my calls, and the letters return unopened. But a postcard, you don’t have to open that. Now the mailman will know our business.

  I’ll do whatever you want. We can be happy again. I know it.

  On the last card, Barney didn’t even bother signing his name. Kate was hopeful that he’d sent off the perfect note and that Mona took him back. He certainly wasn’t staying in this hotel room anymore. Maybe Mona didn’t take him back, and Barney had to find a dingy apartment with a shag
carpet that had seen as much traffic as the motel’s.

  The postcards reminded Kate of Anna and the six letters she’d received from her in the course of her travels. If Mona could forgive Barney, Kate certainly thought she should forgive Anna. Kate was surprised to see this motel had its own stationery, and then she noticed it was from a competing motel chain. Kate tried three ballpoint pens before she found one that worked.

  Anna,

  I got your letters. And thanks. I was livid for a while, but I’m over it now. I know it’s part of your recovery to revisit the past. But do we need to stay there? I hope you’re doing okay. And that living with your folks isn’t fucking up your recovery. It would fuck with mine. Seems like there has to be another way. Let me know how you’re doing. How you fill your days.

  Have you heard about the demotion of the planet Pluto? I, for one, am incensed. How do you go your whole life being a planet and then, suddenly, you’re not a planet anymore. Correction: dwarf planet. What does that even mean? I see an idiom taking shape. Five, ten years from now, when someone gets dissed or demoted or loses his or her job, people will say, “He was plutoed.” “Are you plutoing me?” someone will say when witnessing a snub. “That was some pluto, wasn’t it?” Hmm, I’m not sure about the syntax of the last one, but I think you get the gist.

  Do you think I should write NASA?

  I’ve been hearing things about the Montana sky and I’ve been thinking I should see that, just so I can be that person who tells you one sky isn’t so different from the next. I might stay put and seek employment. I’ll write more soon.

  Kate

  The librarian had had her hip replaced last year, and now her knee was acting up. She couldn’t shelve books anymore. She could stamp the due date on the atavistic index cards and that was it. Kate was strolling through the town of Prairie Basin, looking for a coffee shop, angling for a job in her area of expertise. But then she saw the sign in the library window. Part-time help wanted: assistant to librarian.

  Mrs. Popovsky wore tweed skirts and starched shirts with just the top button undone and sweaters and stockings in muted colors and sensible shoes. She even had those glasses that dangled around her neck from a chain. She explained the menial job duties to Kate and briefly summarized the Dewey decimal system, which Kate happened to be very familiar with. In fact, she had recently read a biography of Melvil Dewey. She expressed her appreciation for his dedication to spelling reform but stopped short of mentioning her shock at discovering that Dewey was an unrepentant womanizer. Kate remembered something Anna once said on the subject: There are two kinds of womanizers. Those who love women too much and those who hate them. Kate wondered what kind of womanizer Melvil Dewey had been.