When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,30

all but ignored in favor of the window, which afforded a view of the entire block and was Helen’s preferred source of entertainment. When in the living room, she usually sat on the radiator, her lower half indoors and her head and shoulders as far out as they could go. The waitress on the second floor coming home at 2:00 a.m., the shopkeeper across the street accepting a package from the UPS man, a woman in a convertible applying lipstick: nothing escaped her attention.

During the years I knew her, I’d guess that Helen spent a good ten hours a day at her window. Midmornings you could find her in the kitchen, but at 11:00, when the soap operas began, she’d switch off the radio and return to her perch. It hurt her neck to turn from the street to the screen, so most programs were listened to rather than watched. Exceptions were made for Friday episodes of One Life to Live, and, occasionally, for Oprah, who was one of the few black people Helen had any regard for. Perhaps in the past she had been more open-minded, but getting mugged in the foyer of our building convinced her that they were all crooks and sex maniacs. “Even the light-skinned ones.”

Talk show hosts were scumbags as well, but Oprah; anyone could see that she was different. While the rest of the pack accentuated the negative, she encouraged people to feel good about themselves, be they single mothers — a group that had included Helen — or horribly disfigured children. “I never would have thought about it, but I guess that girl does have a pretty eye,” she once said, referring to the young Cyclops fidgeting on the screen.

One afternoon Oprah interviewed a group of women who had overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Susan fell overboard while sailing and managed to survive for six days by clinging to a cooler. Colleen taught herself to read and got a job as an executive secretary. The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw. The poet and I had met and spoken on several occasions. Now here she was on Oprah, and nothing would do until I ran across the hall to tell Helen. She’d been half watching from her spot on the radiator and didn’t seem terribly impressed with my news.

“You don’t get it,” I said, and I pointed to the screen. “I know that person. She’s my friend.” It was too strong a word for what was, at best, a nodding relationship, but Helen didn’t need to know that.

“So what?” she said.

“So I have a friend on Oprah.”

“Big deal. You think that makes you special?”

If Helen had known someone who’d appeared on Oprah, she’d have had T-shirts made up, but of course that was different. She was allowed to brag and name-drop, but no one else was. Announce an accomplishment — signing a book contract, getting your play reviewed in the Times — and her hackles would go up. “You think your shit smells better than mine? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“But you’re old,” I once told her. “Your job is to be happy for me.”

“Stick it up your ass,” she said. “I’m not your goddamn mother.”

With the exception of my immediate family, no one could provoke me quite like Helen could. One perfectly aimed word, and within an instant I was eight years old and unable to control my temper. I often left her apartment swearing I’d never return. Once I slammed her door so hard, her clock fell off the wall, but still I went back — “crawled back,” she would say — and apologized. It seemed wrong to yell at a grandmother, but more than that I found that I missed her, or at least missed someone I could so easily drop in on. The beauty of Helen was that she was always there, practically begging to be disturbed. Was that a friend, or had I chosen the wrong word? What was the name for this thing we had?

When I told Hugh about the Oprah business, he said, “Well, of course she acted that way. You were being pretentious.”

The word threw me. “‘Pretentious’ is knowing someone who met Pina Bausch, not someone who met Oprah.”

“It depends on what circles you’re running in,” he said, and I supposed he was right, not that it gave Helen anything to be snippy about. I’d lost