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The Three Properties of Life
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The edge of the brown paper catching, a slim lovely line of blue and yellow spreading horizontally first, then gaining depth in little coves of blooming flame as the paper bag burned. You had to shake the match out before it curled too far down the black strip, folding back on itself to sting your fingers red with hurt. The flame on the paper was wide, flowing, soft and beautiful, something you had made. You could actually watch it forever, mesmerized. Until you realized it was on fire. The garbage bag was on fire. It was in the kitchen. You had to put it out. Grab the dishtowel. Hit it. Hit it. Beat it out. Stop it. Stop it. Don't let it spread. Oh stop. Stop. Okay. It's okay. It's out. Now wrap it up tight and put it outside in the aluminum trash can. #
Was it traumatic? You would think a person would never get over having her mother die. No. It wasn't traumatic. There were no tantrums. No howling in the night. The nightmares had nothing to do with her mother's death. She tried to be good. But there was her pregnant twenty-four-year-old sister at the bottom of the backstairs slumped against the outer door as if she were trying to press her way through it, hands over her face sobbing, telling her, "It's okay, go back upstairs." She had been particularly bratty although she did not remember what it was she had actually said. She had come down the three flights of stairs from the bedroom where they had been watching TV together to look for her sister when she did not come back. When she had found her sister like that, in that surprising way, all she could do was say her name. #
Where was everyone? Where was her sister? Where was her brother-in-law and the first baby? Where was her father and her sister's mother-in-law who were often there? Where were all the in-laws, all of the husband's brothers and sisters who were always over? Why didn't anyone smell the acrid tinge of stink the fires made? Why hadn't anyone heard her? Why were there three bags of garbage in the kitchen? The garbage was never kept in that corner of the kitchen. Was it? Could she be remembering correctly? #
Her sister had taught herself to read English from comic books after she dropped out of the eighth grade. They had put her in that grade even though she was seventeen because she only spoke Polish. Her sister had beautiful, long hair then and a good figure. Even in high school she could not fit into her sister's wedding dress. At her sister's wedding in February of the same year in which their mother would die, her sister stood at the top of the church stairs. Her beige coat was over her shoulders. Her mother and her new mother-in-law were holding up the hem of her dress to keep it out of the slush. But her sister was pressing down the tiered skirt with her hands to keep the hoop from flipping up. She remembers staying up late at her sister's wedding reception. Her feet hurting so much, they felt as if the bones themselves were pressing against the soles of her new shoes even as she sat on the couch in the lobby of the reception hall waiting for her mother to say goodnight to her sister. #
Later, watching the home movies her brother-in-law had taken of her after her mother died, she is embarrassed. "You used to do that with your hands. Squeeze your nose and then sniff your fingers. Remember?" her sister had said. She did not remember. She shriveled inside to know how overt and repetitive that action was. Everyone saw. So everyone knew. Everyone except her. She had not known she was doing that. #
When they moved to the farm, her sister was getting sicker and sicker with the next baby. That pregnancy seemed to last forever. Her sister seemed sad and thin and always unwell. She wanted her sister's pregnancy to be over. Her sister told her later that she used to get down on her hands and knees in the dining room to play with the first two boys because if she was going to die with that baby, she wanted to spend her time with her children. Her sister had hoped they would remember her playing with them. But it was the baby who died. She did not remember her sister playing with the boys. The whole thing just seemed a waste to her. All that time spent pregnant and sick just to have the baby die anyway. Her sister had carried it to full term and it was born a stillbirth, another little boy. Her sister made the doctor let her see him. Her sister told her she had needed to see him. #
When you watch anything burn, you are looking into a small world, a magical kingdom with caves and rooms glowing and shimmering. The colors shift. You have no role. You just observe. You are not vigilant. You are passive. The flames cannot hurt you. Indeed the heat bathes you soothingly. You sit. You watch. The destroyer. You face it. You are in awe. That is your only role. That and to remember. #
Her sister hated the farm. She was very lonely. She missed her customers, her work. Her husband did not set up her beauty salon on the farm like he had in their first house. Once when her sister was chasing the stupid cow, the one that always got out of the field into the road, or worse, onto the neighbor's patio where she would inevitably defecate, her sister caught the dangling rope, chasing the cow as it galloped all around the gravel covered drive. Her sister managed to wrap the rope around a tall thin tree stump and brace her feet. The cow stopped. It was her sister's pregnant stomach she remembered seeing, thinking, even at that age, that her sister should not be doing this sort of thing. Which baby was that? Her god-daughter or the baby that died? #
Her sister came with her to her mother-daughter tea when she was in high school. Her friend reminds her of this at her sister's funeral. She, her sister, her friend and her friend's mother all sat on the lawn under the trees dressed in their pastel '60s A-line dresses. It was a lovely day, sun shining in patches through the leaves, flickering on the grass. But there was also that mother-daughter weekend in college when her sister could not come. Was it another baby or was she already having heart attacks? Or had she not even invited her sister? The note that she stuck on her dorm door said, "FUCK THE WORLD." Her roommate took it off, worrying about what all the mothers would say. She had stayed in her top bunk all day, under the covers. She did not want to get up. She wanted to stay there even if she needed to soil herself. She wanted to be unconscious. #
Whenever she sent her sister a mother's day card or told her how much she appreciated all she had done for her, how lucky she had been to have her sister, to have somewhere to go, her sister said, "I always worried about whether I raised you right, about whether I did a good job". #
When she met the man who would be her husband, he told her a story about his father standing on the roof of their house, flames shooting up on either side, throwing bucket after bucket of water this way and that. Her husband-to-be, the oldest boy, was in a tree handing full buckets of water to his father, the other children making a line to the well, passing buckets up to him. It was winter. The house belonged to his father's mother. She had died that morning in the house. Her body had already been taken away. That evening the fire started in the chimney, spread to the roof. The family put the fire out. The old-timers said the old woman had tried to take her house with her. When she first heard the story it had felt wrong to her, mean-spirited. She thought his grandmother would rather have had her family keep the house. But now, there is something about the story that feels right. We cannot help wanting what we need. We may not even be aware of the feeling, but we still have the desire, the longing. We burn. We cannot help ourselves. It takes us by surprise. We cannot control it. #
At her sister's funeral she remembers the matches. More than once. No one ever knew. Or was there a time her sister found the burnt matches under her bed? She always knew you did not play with matches. It was stupid and dangerous and she was a smart and careful child. Very careful. #
"1) Uses energy. 2) Has a boundary. 3) Can reproduce. If scientists are right then fire is alive. It has all three properties of life," her son said triumphantly as he bit into his burger. She loved these moments. Strange little bits of information that he would share with her in the midst of their banter. Her son was a talker, like she was. She was always telling stories. She would share self-revealing stories even with strangers. She always admired reticence, no doubt that is why she had married her husband. He was one of the few people she knew who understood that her chatter was just another form of reserve. Her son's talk on the other hand occasionally hooked up some profoundly surprising item of fact or fancy. "I remember staring into a campfire and being fascinated by its beauty when I was a little girl", she said. "People say that, but I've never felt that way," said her son. "Did I ever tell you about the time I almost burnt the house down?" she found herself asking, amazed to be touching on the memory. Her son looked up interested, skeptical. She knew how to build interest in a story and he knew all her techniques. Sometimes the payoff was a purely exaggerated, silly joke and then sometimes not. She was in a strange mood. They had gone to a matinee to see a light comedy and he had been surprised, after hearing her sniffing, to look over and see tears running down her face and her muscles contorted, trying to tense away the wave of grief threatening to break into shoulder-shaking sobs. She never knew when she would suddenly get sad nowadays. He placed his head on her shoulder and held her hand until he felt her body relax under his weight. "You know, what if fire is alive? What if it is an alien life form? Humans could have domesticated it a long time ago. Aliens could be life forms like nothing we could ever imagine. We have no way of knowing, because we can't communicate with it. Maybe fire tries to communicate by being destructive, like when someone is careless," her son said. Aliens were her son's favorite topic. He loved to speculate about different alien life forms. She had never been interested in aliens when she was a girl. She had been more concerned with ghosts. #
Ghosts. Memories. Synapses firing. Chemicals suffusing the brain. Recently she had read that the lower the level of serotonin in a person's brain, the more likely he is to be violent, the person with the lowest levels being the arsonist. A lack of something provoking the strongest reaction. The reverse of adding fuel to the fire. #
On their way home from her sister's funeral, they stopped in a city to break up the drive, to relax. After the bookstore, and the ice cream parlor, they stopped in a gallery exhibiting art glass. Strands of red glass curved from the floor up above her head. On pedestals, glass gourds settled on fluted glass petals. Tentacles, fronds, and tendrils of glass hung grouped from the ceiling. In the very back, a videotape demonstrated the glassblowing process. She had watched thinking how every time she saw art being made, whether painting, silver smithing or, now, glassblowing, it was always filthy, grubby hard work. And then there was always something like this glass in a pristine, elegant gallery, inviting the smashing fist and, therefore, the protective gesture. She watched the artist draw the molten clot of glass out of the fire, breathe into that potential searing pain, forming a substantial vessel, useful and transparent. It is not its destructible delicacy she remembers now, rather she marvels at its very existence, the formed, captured impermanence of the artist's breath. #
Her sister had taken care of her. Her sister took her to the doctor the year her mother died. Her sister told the doctor she was not eating. She had to take some sort of syrup that was kept in the refrigerator to increase her appetite. She thought that was silly. The only reason she had no appetite was because she was always running down to the corner store to buy Mallo-cups and Reeses cups. Or was that after she started taking the medicine? Maybe she has trouble remembering because, in the end, she turned out fine. That's why she does not remember. She turned out just fine.
Bio Note
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