When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,35
man. Too bad you didn’t get any of his genes.”
“Well, I’m sure I got some of them,” I told her.
“No, you didn’t. You must take after your mother. And she’s dead, right?”
“Yes, she’s dead.”
“You know we’re the same age, me and Lou. Is he dating anybody?”
The thought of my father and Helen together made the bottoms of my feet sweat. “No, he’s not dating anyone, and he’s not going to, either.”
“No need to get so sensitive,” she said. “Jesus, I was only asking.” And then she lowered her shirt a little and asked me to do her back.
I’d just returned from another trip to the pharmacy when Helen asked me to dab some white shoe polish on her kitchen ceiling. A slight stain had formed, and she insisted that it was dog urine, leaking down from the apartment above her. “The sons of bitches, they think that if they ruin my ceiling, it’ll drive me into a nursing home.”
I don’t remember why I didn’t do it. Maybe I had someone waiting for me, or perhaps I’d just had enough for one day. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” I told her, and as I shut the door, I heard her say, “Right. You and your ‘tomorrows.’”
It was Joe who found her. Helen kept a sawed-off two-by-four in her kitchen, a weapon against possible intruders, and he awoke to hear her banging it against the inside of her door. He had a key in case of emergency and entered the apartment to find her on the floor. Beside her was the overturned step stool, and beneath the kitchen table, lying just out of reach, was the bottle of white shoe polish.
On One Life to Live, and all soap operas, really, the characters are forever blaming themselves. The male lead is nearly killed in a car accident, and as the surgeons do what they can to save him, the family gathers in the waiting room to accept responsibility. “It was my fault,” the ex-wife says. “I never should have upset him with the news about the baby.” She starts to bang her head against the wall and is stopped by the lead’s father. “Don’t be stupid. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.” Then the girlfriend horns in and decides that it was all her fault. In the end, the only one who won’t feel guilty is the driver of the other car.
“Why the heck would she stand on a chair to polish her shoes?” Joe asked as the ambulance headed off toward St. Vincent’s. “That’s what I can’t figure out.”
“Me neither,” I said.
During the next few months Hugh and I visited Helen in the hospital. The problem wasn’t her broken hip, but the series of strokes that followed her operation. It was as if she had been struck by lightning, that’s how fried and out of it she was. Unable to put a sentence together, she’d also been literally defanged. No teeth, no glasses, and when the last of the henna had faded, her hair, like her face, was the color of old cement.
The hospital room was small and hot. Near the door was a second bed, and in it lay a Dominican woman who had recently lost a leg. Each time I was there, she pointed to Helen’s food tray and begged. “Is she going to eat that applesauce? Do you think she wants those crackers? If not, I’ll take them.”
Had Helen been her old self, this woman would have been missing a lot more than a leg. As it was, the roommate left no more of an impression than the wall-mounted TV, which was permanently tuned to the Bullshit station, and was on all the time.
At the funeral home were people I had heard about but never met. Helen once told me that as a young woman her nickname had been Rocky, as in Graziano, the fighter, but according to her sister, she was called any number of things. “To me she was always Baby Hippo, on account of her great big behind,” she told me. “I’d call her that and, oh, she used to get so mad.”
Most everyone I met had a good anger story: Helen cursing, Helen smacking, Helen slamming down the phone. In the months after she died, these were the moments I’d recall as well. Gradually, though, the focus shifted, and instead of Helen attacking a deaf-mute, I’d picture her the following morning, sitting in her kitchen as I applied the Tiger Balm. It was such a strange