Authors: Lucy Ellmann
Mimi (17 page)
Of the four elements, only two seem threatening: those two sworn enemies, fire and water. Water can engulf you,
quickly
, drown you; and fire is a lion, indifferent and uncontrollable. There’s no negotiating with it, no telling where it wants to go or what it will do. Fire is a realm unto itself, unearthly, ornery, and ignorant as hell. Fire has no idea you’re in its way, it can’t see you (not that it would
care
). You and your slippers and your mother and the roof are all equally palatable, and fire will burn right through you in its brainless effort to survive. But it’s
not
alive, has no will, no stake in whether it burns or not. It has nothing to gain, no progeny to look out for, no pension to protect, no interests, no plans, no needs, no worries. It feels no hope, no pain, and no despair. Fire
isn’t
maddened, it only seems so. It’s more like a virus. But it’s hard to believe it’s not out to get you, hard not to sense its rampant joy in its own finite life, and its triumph over earth and air and water, by coming into being at all. Hard to believe, in the midst of it, that a fire doesn’t get
off
on itself, sadistically. And—it’s not a great thing to meet in your hallway.
TV and comic strips had provided me with all the exclamations necessary for a rich and full life: Ahoy there! Timber! Geronimo! Eureka! Kerpow! Kerplunk! AK AK AK! AIEEEE! Boom! Hey, watch it, buster! Arrgh! Boing! Hiyo, Silver! Kiss my ass! Why I oughta. . . And FIRE! I duly yelled “Fire!” again and again, but my family wasn’t buying it. They must not have watched the same TV shows. Maybe no one had actually cried “Fire!” for a hundred years, for all I knew, and it was the equivalent of yelling “Blackguard!” “Brigand!” and “Gadzooks!” (Even in the middle of a disaster, I was worried about being a corny goo
f
ball.)
Giving up on that idea, I banged desperately on Bee’s door. She sleepily opened it, making the fire in the kitchen brighten and a cloud of smoke rush at us. We ran the other way, towards Mom and Dad’s room—where we knocked, we were so well trained! There was no response, so we defied taboo and entered. Drugged to help her sleep inside her itchy cast, Mom was sound asleep in the center of that tall bed of hers (the bed Bee and I always secretly coveted and jumped on when nobody was around). Dad wasn’t there, so Bee and I just started tugging at Mom to wake her up. Smoke was coming in, so Bee kicked the door shut with her foot, making windows burst elsewhere in the house. This sound was what finally woke Mom, who started to scream. We screamed too, when we realized she wasn’t capable of doing anything for us! She couldn’t even get off the bed without help. Working from both sides, Bee and I had to slide our panic-stricken mother out of bed and drag her over towards the window. She didn’t seem able to move.
Bee jumped down onto the lawn below, and braced herself to break Mom’s fall (we’d been trained to be very respectful of that expensive plaster cast). I got Mom onto the window ledge. She sat down okay, but when I tried to swivel her around so her feet were sticking out the window, she said she wasn’t going.
“Come on, Mom, it’s not that far down. You’ll be okay.”
But it wasn’t fear of the drop, or hurting herself. It was a stubborn, deranged refusal to leave the house she’d tended for so long. “I love this house!” she cried. Okay, she’d spent half her life fixing the place up, keeping it shipshape, but now it was time to disembark. “I can’t leave!” she yelled. “I love this house!”
This was hysterical behavior. I knew from TV and the movies that when women get hysterical you have to slap ’em! But I didn’t dare slap my
mom
, so I just kept prodding at her, nudging her further and further out the window. She was so upset, she barely noticed what I was doing, and finally Bee grabbed hold of one of Mom’s feet and tugged. Mom was still wailing, “I love this house!” when she wobbled a bit, overbalanced, and fell, landing on Bee. Making me the last to leave the sinking ship, a role honored in song and story: I reached the ground a hero.
Or so my dad said, when we got far enough from the house to be able to speak over the roar. For some reason, Dad had been outside when the fire started, so he ran to a neighbor’s house to call the Fire Department. Then he’d watched helplessly from afar—it was too hot to get near the house, and the neighbors forced him to wait and let the firemen handle it—they were professionals, they would know best how to get us out. So now he just kept clapping me on the back, while Mom peered at the smoke pawing at her dream house, and started to keen. She sounded like a very tired hyena.
Not everything is lost in a fire. The firemen threw all our furniture out onto the front lawn and doused it with water and foam, so later we found whole drawers of intact, if damp, stuff: clothes and board games and Christmas ornaments, books, papers, schoolwork and prehistoric family heirlooms nobody wanted. I didn’t care, I just watched the firemen, whose heroism I now connected with my own. It was a thrill just to be up so late! But nobody could send me to bed: no bed!
Later, it was decided that the fire had started in the kitchen and was therefore somehow Mom’s fault—she’d recently resumed a few of her kitchen duties. Women are the bearers of fire, after all. They’re always fooling with it: ironing things and boiling things and baking things and burning things. But the actual cause didn’t matter anyway, except to the fire inspectors—the insurance company paid for a whole new house to be built. Mom insisted on the new one being exactly like the old one, right down to the tricky window catches, the one and only bathroom, the thin walls, cramped bedrooms, lack of porch, and every other inconvenient detail. The only outright changes she allowed were a few more closets, a slightly bigger fridge, and insulation in the attic so that
I
could have it as my teenage lair, in tribute to my bravery and strength of mind in an emergency (Bee’s bravery went wholly unrewarded).
While the new house was built, we all got to live in one room in a motel—not a log cabin this time, just a dump where we ate hot dogs every night, and Mom resented the maid service for depriving her of her usual housework routine. We slept in two big double beds, Mom and Bee in one, Dad and me in the other. For six months! No sign of Cliff
now
(his parents had zipped him off to a prep school, just to get him away from Bee, or so she said). Dad never spoke, just drove us over once in a while to see how things were shaping up with the charred remains of what was once 39 Cranberry Avenue.
My standing at school went up briefly, when news spread of my heroism. Until then my popularity had largely depended on the free samples of gum my father loaded me up with for “product-testing” purposes. He was trying to turn America into a nation of ruminants (I guess it worked!). I was supposed to get kids’ responses to the jingles while they ate the gum:
Catch the Chattanooga chew-chew, all the way to Virtue!
Or,
It’s bad to be glum! Try Virtue Gum!
And if you think I wasn’t regularly beaten up by kids chanting,
Every monkey in the zoo knows I love Virtue!
you’re nuts. Did my dad want to get me killed?
Pete and I became engrossed in firemen and especially fire
engines
, studying them intently, from the Button & Blake sixteen-man hand-pumper of 1857, to the “Type 7” double-tank combination engine of 1911. Also the Firecracker, an old engine with a hydraulic platform that had a telescopic upper boom capable of reaching seventy-five feet! That sort of stuff killed us. We loved every aspect of firefighting: the siphons, the stowage, the hooks and the ladders, the pumps, the hose reels, fire poles, foam, dousing techniques, tenders, the different divisions, uniforms, fire stations, and old photographs of fire crews all lined up in front of their apparatus. We even liked the “inevitable crowd of onlookers” who gather at every fire as if it’s their civic duty to gloat. (This is how Cary Grant manages to steal the pickup truck in
North by Northwest
—everybody’s looking the other way, staring at the exploding tanker. People can’t resist a fire!) Pete and I had a problem with the Dalmatians though: we felt they could be asked to do a bit more, at least attend fires and pull a hose or something.
Mom redecorated our new house with a whole new bunch of knickknacks to be dusted, and Bee got fat, conspicuously
un
heroic, wearing an old coat all day and night, smoking dope, and tearing her hair out. The manic playing of Bach partitas on the violin shook the house, and her graffiti sideline shook the town. Nobody in Virtue and Chewing Gum suspected a girl was behind all the Day-Glo BH’s all over the place, but they should have, the letters looked so much like bulbous female breasts and buttocks.
There were complaints in the local paper, the
Daily Virtue
, about the town being terrorized (or
territorize
d
) by this
BH
character, and about a million janitors scrubbed away at the emblems with ineffectual brushes and corrosives, while Bee sat in the woods, glowering. I told her it’s bad to be glum, try Virtue gum—and she swatted me like a fly for about five years.
“And that’s how I got into plastic surgery,” I explained to Mimi, who by now was lying on her stomach on the window seat, looking up at me, with Bubbles nestled in the small of her back. “I started out as a burns specialist, treating kids who’d disfigured themselves with fireworks, and firemen caught in back-flashes, or girls who’d had acid thrown at them by spurned lovers, and plenty of car-crash victims. Then I moved into facial-trauma cases: beatings and knifings. From there it was but a small step to reconstructive surgery after mastectomies. But the practice just kept going upmarket, everybody trying to make their pile. . . and now all I get are women who want to give their husbands new tits for Christmas! Women who want to be babes, and men who want the Berlusconi makeover, so they can
date
babes. I know it’s all nonsense, but I don’t know what to do about it. . . ” But by then Mimi had dislodged Bubs and was holding my head against her soft, warm, original-edition belly.
Mimi was still asleep in my bed when Gertrude called.
“What’s the matter?” I asked gruffly. “It’s kind of early.”
“Japan.”
“What?”
“This is a major disaster, Harrison!”
“The earthquake, you mean.” It was four days since the tsunami.
“No! My dividends! Japanese shares have plunged. I invested heavily in the Far East.”
“Gertrude, the bodies are still washing up on the shore! How do you think the
Japanese
would feel about your money worries?”
“They’re worried about the effects on the economy too,” she answered.
“Oh yeah? Who? The people searching for their relatives, or the radioactive workers in the nuclear plant?” All I could think about were the pictures of Japanese rescue workers pausing to pray before searching debris for the bodies of strangers.
“Well, I heard that people in Tokyo are a bit nervous about aftershocks, but people south of there aren’t worried. . . The Japanese have no capacity for empathy, Harrison. It’s not part of their culture. They don’t care about people they don’t know.”
“No, Gertrude, you don’t care about people you don’t know. you have no capacity for empathy!” I hung up. The woman was a menace. She’d probably
caused
the earthquake and tsunami! I should have known, when she ruined
Paris
for me, turning the whole place into one big shopping mall for herself. (REASON NO. 894: Anyone who can wreck Paris can wreck the world.)
I needed a drink, or drugs! I needed to let off steam. . . But Mimi was still asleep, and I tried not to mention Gertrude too much anyway. Also, Mimi wasn’t really up on the News (she’d made a decision years before not to follow current events, since they were unbearable, and she had exhausted herself trying to think up solutions). She was made aware of major stuff like the earthquake in Japan by going to diners where people would talk about it, and bars that had unignorable TV screens that gave you devastating headlines in between football games.
But Bee and I had an agreement that, whenever the world was threatened by a nuclear accident, we had to talk. So I had someone to go berserk with now. I got her during her lunch—she was eating a grilled cheese sandwich (like Mom), something she’d personally introduced into England. I gave her the latest on Gertrude’s atrocities (which now seemed to me inextricably linked to those of the nuclear industry.)