When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,28
equation: 2 young men + 1 bedroom ugly paneling = fags. “Yeah, we met.” Her voice was heavy with disdain. “We met, all right.”
For the first few weeks that we lived in the apartment, Helen clearly preferred Hugh over me. “My boyfriend,” she called him. Then the two of them got to talking, and she switched her allegiance. I knew I’d won her favor when she invited me into her kitchen. Owing to her Sicilian blood, Helen had an innate gift for cooking. This she boasted as she jammed meatballs into a frozen store-bought pie crust. Then she drowned them in a mixture of beaten eggs and skim milk. “My Famous Italian Quiche,” she called it. Other dishes included “My Famous Eggplant Parmesan with the Veal in It,” “My Famous Tomato Gravy with Rice and Canned Peas,” and “My Famous Spaghetti and Baked Bean Casserole.” If Helen’s food was truly famous, it was so in the way of sun poisoning and growling dogs with foam on their lips: things you avoided if you knew what was good for you. If I was superstoned I might wash the sauce off a bit of veal and eat it atop a cracker, but, for the most part, her food went straight into the trash can.
Throughout the seven years Hugh and I lived on Thompson Street, our lives followed a simple pattern. He would get up early and leave the house no later than 8:00. I was working for a housecleaning company, and though my schedule varied from day to day, I usually didn’t start until 10:00. My only real constant was Helen, who would watch Hugh leave the building, and then cross the hall to lean on our doorbell. I would wake up, and just as I was belting my robe, the ringing would be replaced by a pounding, frantic and relentless, the way you might rail against a coffin lid if you’d accidentally been buried alive.
“All right, all right.”
“What were you, asleep?” Helen would say as I opened the door. “I’ve been up since five.” In her hand would be an aluminum tray covered with foil, either that or a saucepan with a lid on it.
“Well,” I’d tell her, “I didn’t go to bed until three.”
“I didn’t go to bed until three thirty.”
This was how it was with her: If you got fifteen minutes of sleep, she got only ten. If you had a cold, she had a flu. If you’d dodged one bullet, she’d dodged five. Blindfolded. After my mother’s funeral, I remember her greeting me with “So what? My mother died when I was half your age.”
“Gosh,” I said. “Think of everything she missed.”
To Helen, a gift was not something you gave to person number one, but something you didn’t give to person number two. This was how we wound up with a Singer sewing machine, the kind built into a table. A woman on the third floor made her own clothes and, in her own quiet way, had asked if she could have it.
“So you want my sewing machine, do you?” Helen said. “Let me think about it.” Then she picked up the phone and gave Hugh and me a call. “I got something for you,” she told us. “The only deal is that you can’t give it to nobody else, especially nobody who lives in this building on the third floor.”
“But we don’t need a sewing machine,” I said.
“What, are you saying you already have one?”
“Well, no —”
“All right then, so shut up. Everybody needs a sewing machine, especially this one — top of the line. I can’t tell you all the outfits I made over the years.”
“Yes, but —”
“But nothing. It’s a present from me to you.”
As Hugh manhandled it through our door, I tried to block him. “But there’s hardly enough room for us,” I said. “Where are we supposed to put a full-sized sewing machine? I mean, really, why not just give us a tugboat? It would take up the same amount of space.”
Hugh, though, you really have to hand it to him. He sat on the horrid little bench that came with the machine, and five minutes later he was teaching himself to sew. That’s the kind of person he is — capable of anything.
“Can you make a body bag?” I asked.
Every day for the next six months, Helen mentioned her gift. “So how’s that Singer? You made any pants yet? You made any jeans?”