Authors: Jean Thompson
I
t's
forest fire season and every day the newspaper runs a map of the state to show where the big fires are. These are marked with flames, stylized drawings of flames sprouting up in Los Gatos and Kings Canyon and Grass Valley and Mariposa. Nowhere close, and none of them places that Patsy's ever going to go. But it scares her, ten years in California and she still can't get used to it, land itself burning. Fires are meant for houses or other normal buildings, and fire engines with sirens are meant to pull up and open hydrants and take care of business. That's what she's always been used to and she's too old to change her way of thinking. But in California it's trees and grass that burn, all the dried-up, dried-out vegetation caused by the unnatural way it doesn't rain out here. In California there are smoke jumpers, and planes with bellyfuls of chemicals, and exhausted men with soot-blackened skin and lungs scarred from breathing the smoke from burning poison oak, and whole neighborhoods lost under flames that rise up and crash like ocean waves.
Sometimes when Patsy is on the very edge of sleep, the balance point between thought and dream, she sees the fires behind her closed eyes. Fire has devoured everything right down to the earth itself, a layer of black crust, and in the next instant the crust is eaten too and the fire has turned it into nothing. Inch by inch, the world falls away into nothing. It's the End of Days, the final judgment, the failure of all things hopeful and human, the failure of kindness and courage and faith, of striving and beauty and of love itself, all fallen short, God's great experiment ending in wrath and burning.
This is when Patsy comes awake with her heart going hard, and looks around her to find the room is still here. This room will never change. There are worse things than the world ending. The leather recliner is shaped like some humpbacked dinosaur, the drapes are nubby and overwashed, the television never really changes either, no matter what the program is, if it talks or brays or sings. Time settles over every surface like dust. One more night and one more and one more. She's fallen asleep in the recliner again. It's a bad habit, this early, unsatisfactory sleep that keeps her from any genuine rest. The clock tells her it's only a little after ten. The room is hot, all the heat of the day trapped inside. Waking up to it makes her fretful and heavy-headed. She listens for house sounds, her niece or nephew moving around, but everything is quiet.
In the kitchen, in the back of the refrigerator, is a new bottle of wine that is not, technically, hidden, only placed in this inconspicuous spot. Patsy takes the bottle and a glass and slips back down the hall and settles into the recliner again. The television flickers and changes colors. She knows she'll be awake for hours and hours. What would God do with himself if he destroyed the earth and everyone on it? Really, who would there be for him to punish and push around and be disappointed in? He'd still have the angels but they are perfect and boring, something else that never changes. What's the point of being God if there's no one around to be impressed? What a strange thing to be thinking.
I am getting as bad as Angela
, Patsy tells herself. But this is only a way of reassuring herself that she's not anything like Angela. A kind of superstition or backward good luck charm. She's too old to be so foolish, an old woman now, or maybe because she's old she can be as foolish as she wants because nothing she does matters to anyone.
The house is laid out in an L shape, one of countless ranch-style constructions from the eighties, one story, siding and shingle, attached garage. From the outside the house gives the impression of spaciousness, while inside you are conscious of how narrowly everything is laid out, what sacrifices of space and comfort have been made in order to fit the requisite number of bathrooms, etc., and still come in under the price ceiling. The master suite, so called, which is Patsy's, lies at one end of the L. The kitchen and living areas occupy the middle, and there are two more bedrooms and a bath at the far end. Sliding glass doors look out to the patio and the back yard. Although the patio is equipped with a grill and a picnic table and a movable fire pit and an umbrella for shade, all the apparatus of determined outdoor enjoyment, no one in the house goes out there. The drapes covering the glass doors are left closed.
The grill and everything else date from ten years ago when Angela, Patsy's younger sister, lived here with her husband. Their children, Leslie and Jack, still reside in the house, but neither they nor Patsy ever prepares or eats a meal outdoors, or comes out to sunbathe or tend the yard. Once, soon after Patsy came to live with them, she organized a back yard picnic with hot dogs and corn chips and orange soda and a bakery apple pie with ice cream. The children ate their food while Patsy admired the trellised roses and the hummingbird feeder and the ceramic frog perched on a railing, the verdant grass, the marvelous sunshine, the perfect lack of humidity.
Leslie, who was fourteen at the time, remembers the careless food that was meant to be festive, remembers her heart turning to stone as her aunt went on and on, pointing out the yard's attractive features, as if to convince them that they were fortunate, blessed, the possessors of rare vistas and enviable circumstances. How she hated her aunt for her stupid chirping noise, although she knew even at the time that Patsy jabbered away because of her own terror, her fear that if she let up for a moment she would be overwhelmed by her own inadequacy. Much later Leslie comes to realize just how fortunate she and Jack were, in a perverse, non-Patsy sense of the word, having someone so available for hating when they needed it most. Because the import and refrain of Patsy's caretaking is that one has to look on the bright side, soldier on, do the best with what you are given and consider that many, many people have things far worse. Who wouldn't hate that when all you want is to rage and curse and throw your anger into the air again and again, so that no one forgets for a minute what a heap of unfair crap has been shoveled onto your plate, what a screaming bad joke the world is.
Leslie works in a small insurance office, sending out policies and fielding claims. From time to time she takes classes at the community college, business classes mostly, but once in a while something just for pleasure, like art history or photography or Spanish. She's always hoping to discover some special interest or aptitude in herself, something that will propel her into a different life. On Fridays after work she meets her married boss in a Holiday Inn north on I-5, where they fix drinks from the bottle of Scotch he brings with him, make love, talk in bed for a time, then shower and dress and eat dinner at one or another of the surrounding chain restaurants. Happy hour, they call it. Her boss is older than Leslie, forty-two, and he makes sad jokes about how typical this is, his age and the whole younger woman thing. His name is Wes and he is prone to depression, and sometimes when he talks about his two small children, their little hands and their wise, artless remarks, their innocent joy when he returns home, he gets weepy. “I don't deserve you,” he tells Leslie. “I don't deserve to be so happy, I'm a bad person, I ruin everything.”
Then Leslie soothes him and tells him not to be silly, that he's a nice man, he's always nice to her. But she thinks he's right, he doesn't deserve her. He's already hogged more than his share of normal happiness. He makes all the sounds and gestures of suffering and guilt so that he does not actually suffer or feel guilty. As for her, she likes the good old sex part of things, the regularity of it, something you can count on. And more: she takes pleasure in the idea that she's
getting away with this
, that Wes doesn't belong to her and she's stealing him the same as you might steal money or goods. He's partial compensation for all the things that have been stolen from her, and if that's a sick, horrible way to feel, then that's what she is, sick and horrible, and it's nobody's business but hers.
Ten o'clock at night and Leslie is in her bedroom, reading a chick magazine that features advice on diet and career moves and hairstyles. She consumes such magazines the way other women eat chocolate. They are her guilty pleasure. Silly, most of them, their blend of earnestness and zippy prose. She has a store of knowledge about things like cucumber slices placed over the eyes, breast self-examination, stitched-down pleats, and how to handle harassment in the workplace, ha ha. And really, where else was she going to learn such things? Leslie was still a child when her mother began having her troubles, and as for Patsy, you might as well ask a nun about boys or mascara or which shoes went with what.
Patsy practically is a nun, with her big, pudding face and thick ankles and churchy exhortations. Leslie and Jack used to wonder, meanly, if Patsy had ever known the love of a man. It was easy fun to pretend she was like one of those dolls manufactured with a seamless crotch, that she was plastic clear through and that no sexual notion ever found means of entry. It is something else to consider she might have started out like anybody else, full of nervous flutterings and fears and bodily secrets and the desire to become one flesh with another being. Maybe there was somebody once, some boy or man that Patsy fancied, maybe there were excuses to brush up against each other, or mouths pressed wetly together, or even fumblings involving zippers and elastic. But Leslie can't go farther than this in her imagination. It simply shuts down, or becomes a vision of Patsy saying
no no no
. If she lets herself think otherwise it might put her off sex of any kind for a long time. So Leslie falls back on her old bitterness instead. Because Patsyâwhom she hears in the kitchen, trying to be quiet about getting herself a drinkânever allows herself any straightforward human desire. When she came from Chicago to live with them she was full of nice making and solicitude, but it was all a show, this vision of her noble sacrifice, giving up her own lifeâas if Patsy had any life worth giving up!âto raise her poor young relatives. And surely the part of the equation that Patsy did not allow herself to acknowledge was the calculation that if she took care of them, sooner or later they would have to take care of her.
Most nights Leslie needs pills to get to sleep. Without the pills, she lies on her back and feels each grain of the sheets on her skin, an unpleasant, abrading sensation that she can't get away from. Her thoughts begin to wheel and chase each other. Any stupid little thing will get her going. If she feels herself falling asleep, she catches herself at it, then tries to forget she's done so, and by then everything is spoiled. But when she takes the pills, they bury her under a layer of black unconsciousness and leave holes where her dreams should be. So that every night is a choice, pill or no pill, bad sleep or no sleep, willpower or chemistry.
The sleep problems have come on within the last year, and they are worrisome because insomnia was one sign of her mother's illness. If Angela slept at all it was in the late afternoon, so that Leslie and her brother, arriving home from school, had to tiptoe around, keep the television and their music turned down low, as if their mother worked the night shift.
But Angela didn't work. And at some point she had ceased to cook meals, in any normally understood sense of meals, or make beds, or dust, or go grocery shopping, or remember her children's birthdays, or check to see if they were in bed when they were supposed to be or up and dressed on school days, or kept their doctor's appointments, or much of anything else. She was always unwell in some hard-to-explain fashion that didn't involve things like chicken pox or broken bones. Leslie's father moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer and the children picked out what they needed from the clean pile. He bought groceries on his way home from work, or when Leslie got older, he left money on the kitchen table and she would be the one to shop and fry up the hamburgers or make spaghetti. Her little brother Jack ate all his meals in front of the television. He didn't remember ever doing things differently.
When her mother woke up in the early evening, Leslie would take a plate into the bedroom for her. The bedroom drapes were always drawn and the room had an odor of much habitation, like a hamster cage. “That food hurts my throat,” Angela would say. “Bring me something else.” She only wanted soft, sweet foods, like cake or iced doughnuts or crumbly tea cakes with heavy lemon sugar glaze, and after a time that was what Leslie fed her. Angela lived on sugar like the ants in the pantry. Her body became a strange combination of stringiness and bloat, and when Leslie was close enough to her, she smelled something that she knew to be decay. The inside of Angela's mouth, dying.
“There is too much population in the world now, and not enough food.”
The first time Leslie heard her mother say such a thing, it frightened her because she believed it. The true facts, said Angela, were that human beings had no natural predators these days, and so the law of nature was that we would kill ourselves through our own appetites. Soon it would be necessary to eat in conditions of utmost secrecy.
Once Leslie knew better, or at least realized that starvation would not be happening very soon or anywhere very nearby, she turned impatient, even scornful. “Nobody's running out of food,” she said, watching Angela lick the paper tray that contained the packaged cinnamon rolls. “Least of all you.” She was, after all, still a child, and no one had instructed her in kindness.
Angela's eyes rolled inward, her concentration shifting to the bubbling and squeezing of her digestion. She yawned like a crocodile. “Wait and see,” she said, nodding. “Wait until everybody lets their hungers loose all at once.”