When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,29
“So did you like the turkey meat loaf with Italian seasoning?”
“Very much.”
“Nobody makes it like me, you know.”
“You won’t get any argument there.”
The food Helen brought was presented as a slight to the couple next door. “The sons of bitches, if they knew that I was making this for you, they’d die.”
The common areas of our building were covered in small ceramic tiles, giving the impression that you were in an empty pool. Even the slightest noises were amplified, so with very little effort, your voice could be deafening. Standing in the hallway outside my door, Helen would shout so loud that the overhead lights would dim. “All week they’ve been trying to beg food off of me. ‘What’s that that smells so delicious?’ they want to know. ‘You got any extras that need a good home? We’re practically dying of hunger over here.’”
In real life the couple next door were pleasant and soft-spoken. At the time we moved in, the wife had already developed Alzheimer’s, and her husband, an eighty-five-year-old man named Joe, was doing his best to care for her. I never heard him whine or grovel, so that, I suspected, was just wishful thinking on Helen’s part. None of her impersonations were very good, but there was no denying her showmanship. She was a dynamic person, and even Joe, whom she was crueler to than anyone, was quick to acknowledge her weird star power. “A real pistol,” he’d call her. “A peach of a girl.”
“Begging off of me when he’s got his railroad pension, that plus the social security. The both of them can go fuck themselves,” Helen would shout.
Hugh is the type who’d hear this sort of thing, and say, “Oh, come on, now. That’s no way to talk about your neighbors.”
This was why Helen waited until he left for work every morning — he was a downer. “Living with someone like that, I’d go crazy,” she’d say. “Jesus Christ, I don’t know how you can stand it.”
Before moving to New York I spent six years in Chicago. During most of that time, I lived with my then boyfriend and, between the two of us, we seemed to know a fair number of people. There were wild dinners, wild parties — always something fun and druggy going on. Never again would I have so many friends, and such good ones, though I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps I’ve grown less likable over the years, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how to meet people. The initial introduction — the shaking-hands part — I can still manage. It’s the follow-up that throws me. Who calls whom, and how often? What if you decide after the second or third meeting that you don’t really like this person? Up to what point are you allowed to back out? I used to know these things, but now they’re a mystery.
Had I met Helen when I was in my twenties, we wouldn’t have spent nearly so much time together. I’d have been off with people my own age, either taking drugs or looking for them, this as opposed to drinking instant coffee and listening to someone talk about her colitis. When Helen said “oil,” it sounded like “earl.” Subsequently, “toilet” came out as “terlet,” as in “I was up and back to the fucking terlet six times last night. Shit so hard I think I sprained my asshole.”
That we both found this fascinating was, I suppose, proof that we had at least one thing in common. Another thing we could always agree on was a soap opera called One Life to Live. It aired in the early afternoon, and, often, when I wasn’t working, I’d go across the hall and watch it at her place.
Helen had lived in the same apartment for close to fifty years, though you’d never know to look at it. I had stuff everywhere — the sewing machine, for example — but her living room, much like her kitchen, was spartan. On one wall was a framed photograph of herself, but no pictures of her daughters, or any of her seven grandchildren. There were no chairs, either, just a sofa and a coffee table. These faced the room’s only extravagance: a tower of three televisions stacked one atop another. I don’t know why she kept them. The black-and-white model on the bottom had died years earlier, and the one above it had no volume control. This left the TV at the top of the pile. It blathered away,