House Fires: Nancy Reisman

This article was originally published in the March 1999 issue of CLASnotes

Reisman New assistant professor of creative writing Nancy Reisman received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1991. Her fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Fiction, Lilith, and Press, and recent work is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review. She has received literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Reisman's collection House Fires (University of Iowa Press), won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award and will be on bookstore shelves this fall. An excerpt from the collection's title story, "House Fires," follows.

from "House Fires," by Nancy Reisman:

When Randi died, my family went haywire: one by one we shorted out. My father, a dignified cardiologist, took to drinking and belligerence. My mother's mannered calm gave way to hysteria. I became pale and inept and forgot how to hold conversations.

My sister was killed at night by fire; afterward, the indigo-black sky seemed intolerable. Ordinary flames left us stricken and obsessed. Her last minutes seemed a vast unlit space I could neither penetrate nor ignore. In my attempts to comprehend them I went as far as lowering my fingers over lit matches and holding my breath. I ended up writing Randi secret notes which I left crumpled in the kitchen trash. Wake up and jump out a window. Do this scene over again, some way I can see it: a rescue, a sprained ankle, momentary coughing, an embrace on the street in the light of fire engines. Here, steady yourself. Let me wrap your ankle. I will bring you blankets. Within weeks I took to dressing in Randi's old clothes, cast-off sweaters, worn jeans, dresses from her past: some of them held traces of her crushed-lilac scent. I'd wear them until my mother made me take them off, or until there was nothing of Randi left in them.

The house Randi lived in was a two-family in New Haven I saw only once, after the fire; the surviving structure was roofless, open along the western side, char and ash and air where Randi's room had been. Left over were objects from storage: books she didn't use, an olive raincoat, camping equipment, all smoke damaged. The fire was caused by faulty wiring and fanned by high winds, the sort of thing you'd never anticipate. Imagine, for example, your life is rising, the proof is everywhere, at your Ivy League law review, in your lovemaking, in the mirror. Certainty crests, crests again. You work impossibly hard and sleep heavily, sleep through the first scent of smoke. When do you realize you are trapped in sheets of flame?

Her voice burned. Her intellect burned. I don't know what to say about her soul. Randi's body reminded me of certain sea pebbles: white, smooth, perfectly separate. That night she was sleeping, a woman wrapped in quilts, a woman turned inward, a self on a bed. No one reported hearing her—no cries, no calls. Did she, at the end, remain asleep? Did she wake to the knowledge of fire and nothing else, not even herself?

That winter I became unsure of my skin: it seemed too thin and insubstantial to contain me. At night I felt a sudden panic and imagined spilling out into the dark air, slipping beneath the sound of stray sirens, dissipating. Near my parents' house a local diner burned and I stayed at the window biting my nails and watching the sky grow chalky. I couldn't ignore the ways fire annihilates: the objects that steady us—landmarks, banisters, familiar walls—disappear or char down to remnants. An address no longer counts; a phone number drops away. Proof of the past vanishes and the infrastructure of our days collapses into chaos. It is pure loss, and yet, coming upon someone else's fire, we pull over to the side of the road, stand in the street, stare from the top of the hill at the gorgeous and terrible flames. In some living room the family photos are seared off the wall; outside the house we stand back, stand back but can't leave.

On the worst nights I crept downstairs to my parents' dark family room and turned on late movies: Stella Dallas, Splendor in the Grass, Shampoo. I would watch anything. At first I fell into film because of the story lines, but it also seemed a world impervious to fire. Even celluloid, which can so easily shrivel from heat—a sudden melting on screen, burns blooming over a city street or hotel lobby or a woman's bewildered face—seemed salvageable. The image curls away into brown arcs and blank space; the film breaks; the projectionist snaps off the machine. But wait, and the film begins again, skipping a few lines of dialogue, losing a gesture. The damaged reel will be replaced by a new, flawless print. Finally, somewhere, there was recourse.

Eventually I studied film; now on my insomniac nights I read theory. I return to Bazin, who wrote in the aftermath of World War II and, nevertheless, insisted on unity. He thought that film's promise and purpose was to elucidate the real, to reveal the patterns already before us, and he believed that unity of space and time were paramount. So he relied on long shots: if a scene includes a man and a woman in a room, the camera should give us a clear view of both the characters and the space, all within a frame. No jump cuts, no breaks in time. When the scene is whole, we witness the simultaneous body language, the woman stirring her coffee as the man stares into his lap, the man leaning forward as the woman says his name, the thickness of the oak table dividing them, the strange juxtaposition of their tensed bodies and troubled faces against extravagant floral wallpaper. How small they appear stumbling down a hill in the snow, how terribly close in the hospital elevator they must take together. Each shot reveals the shifts in power. I like this idea; I am drawn to Bazin's faith. But is wholeness itself illusory? So often I see things in pieces.

Picture, for example, my mother the months after Randi died, a forty-eight-year-old woman weeping into her coffee, weeping into the houseplants, slamming doors when contradicted, then weeping behind one or another slammed door. Every evening after six she'd prepare an impressive dinner none of us could eat. You could film her for minutes at a distance, a woman alone in an immaculate kitchen, snapping green beans and fishing Kleenex from her pocket, then calling, "Dinner everyone," as if there were ten of us. Or you could abandon Bazin's principle and film her face in close-up, film the lined hands, the manicured nails, elaborate rings and traces of arthritis, fingers breaking and breaking the beans, and then cut to a shot of my father pretending to work but actually drawing squares on a notepad.

Watch my father refill his Glenlivet, see in close-up the heavy lines beneath the eyes, a single twitch at the corner of his mouth, and hear my mother's voice: "Dinner everyone." Or you could view the plush empty rooms of the house, one after another, then cut to my father's face, his sip of scotch. Cut to me, disheveled, on the floor of the living room, thumbing the classifieds without looking at them, headphones over my ears. Hear the sound of those snapping beans. Cut to my mother's face, then to the wintry lawn, "Dinner everyone."

I hear my father's voice swim out of the dark. Beyond the window, blue snow accumulates over the college lawns. It is Vermont. It is December. His voice seems to emanate from the band of falling snow rather than the phone line; we are nearly mutes. He almost chokes on my name but then repeats it, breathlessly, "Amy," over the miles of cable between Boston and Bennington, across the five a.m. blue dark. He says that Randi was in a fire. "What do you mean?" I say. "She was in it. She didn't get out."

My mouth tastes of metal and the night flattens into slabs of light and dark, the snow into two-dimensional flecks. I brush my hair. I dial the bus line, write a schedule on a drugstore receipt, dress myself in a sweater and leggings, find matching shoes. In dawn light I board a bus which travels past fields of snow and stripped silver trees, stopping in tiny towns along the Connecticut River valley. Two seats away from me a woman hums songs from West Side Story, and once the driver stops to tell a man in the back to put out his cigarette. The air becomes increasingly white as we drive and the daylight thickens. All the way down the highway snow falls, small frenzied flakes that seem never to end.

In New Haven we held hands. My parents seemed crushed and ancient, and our gaits dropped off to a shuffle. On the grounds of Yale the three of us walked in a row, hand in hand: sometimes I was on the outside to the left and sometimes I was in the middle. At a restaurant table my father touched my hand, then clasped my mother's, then knotted his own together while a waiter brought us coffee and plates of eggs we ignored. At the funeral in Newton, my parents held hands at the graveside, and when I stepped back, away from the rest of the mourners, they appeared to be at the very edge of the grave, heads bowed; a gust of wind could have knocked them in. They were gripping each other's hands and didn't sway or lean or turn, became in that moment a still shot of snowflecked hair, shoulders in overcoats, almost trembling, a small bridge of hands. Aunt Marlene shepherded me from the funeral parlor to the graveside to my parents' house and into a chair; she held my hand and later other relatives and friends would take one hand or the other and hold it, sometimes purposefully, sometimes almost absently, as they sat with plates in their laps and spooned up mild foods, offering me pieces of bagel or sliced cucumbers. The Orthodox women on my father's side of the family wore dark velvet hats with delicate brims; their warm, soap-scented hands stroked my stubby, nailbitten fingers. It was as if in all this hand holding we would find the missing hands, or reconstruct them somehow.

"House Fires" first appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of Glimmer Train.

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