Wilde Lake(23)
My father thought it a kindness to Miss Maude to send me over there on Fridays to keep her company, but he insisted to her that she was doing him a favor, that if she looked after me for a couple of hours, Teensy could leave early and avoid the rush-hour traffic. (“My husband wants me home by five on Fridays” was one of her pronouncements.”) Miss Maude began stocking her refrigerator and pantry with my favorite treats. She introduced me to the world of soap operas. I seldom got to her house before The Edge of Night and I saw only the Friday episodes, but it wasn’t that hard to follow. Soap operas moved slowly then, and a lot of the best stuff happened on Fridays. She would walk me home when she saw my father’s car in the drive and, often as not, he invited her to share our standing Friday night dinner of Colombo’s pizza, which he picked up on the way home. But they never spent any time alone and they certainly never had dates. When we all went ice-skating for my birthday, Miss Maude sat in the stands, stamping her feet and breathing smoke. “I grew up in the South,” she said when I asked her to join us. “I never learned to skate. It’s a hard thing to pick up when you’re older, although your father did, at college. He was on the hockey team.”
“He never was,” I said, sure that I knew everything about him. But when I asked my father, he agreed that he had played hockey in college, although on an intramural team, not the official one. And he had learned to skate in boarding school, Deerfield. Miss Maude had gotten that part of the story wrong. That made me feel better for some reason.
I remember the winter that followed my seventh birthday as a particularly bitter one. (When it comes to weather, I have not bothered to check if my memory is right. I can’t check everything.) Single-digit temperatures, icicles like daggers, yet relatively little snow. For just the second time in my life, Wilde Lake was almost solid enough to walk across, although only the boldest boys risked that. The cold air leaked into our house from every window and faultily hung door. We burned fires in all the fireplaces, even at night, violating our father’s long-standing rule about not leaving fires untended.
Yet it wasn’t our old house, with fireplaces going around the clock, that went up in flames. It was Miss Maude’s.
Now when I was a child, I was famous for being able to sleep through anything, so it wasn’t the orange glow outside my windows or even the sirens in the distance that woke me. But then, there were no sirens, not yet. There was just my father, still in his work clothes at 1 A.M., shaking me and calling my name. “I need to get you outside, Lu. To be safe. We have to go outside. It could jump.”
“What jumps?” I asked, rolling away from him and curling up like a potato bug, determined not to leave my wonderfully warm bed, where I had piled three quilts on top of me.
“The fire. Miss Maude’s house has caught fire and ours might catch, too. We have to go.”
He eased me into my coat and boots. My mind had finally registered the urgency of the situation, but not my limbs, and it was as if I were a toddler, requiring assistance. AJ had dressed himself and was waiting for us by the front door. Once outside, the overwhelming sensation was one of extreme cold and extreme heat. It was so cold that I began to move instinctively toward the flames, only to have my father pull me back. He then crouched low to the ground, holding me between his knees so we could keep each other warm.
The fire trucks seemed to take so long. We heard the sirens first, then saw the lights flashing through the bare trees, visible as the trucks raced down Green Mountain Circle and then turned onto our cul-de-sac. The hoses didn’t go on right away.
“Are they frozen?” AJ asked.
“I don’t know, son. I just don’t know.”
The high-powered hoses came on and we almost cheered. But then they shattered the windows on the upper levels of Miss Maude’s house, and the water poured in. I thought of her pretty rooms, the pale green sofa where we watched our programs, the freezer full of Good Humor bars.
Yet she seemed almost nonchalant about the damage being done. “I bought this place for the yard,” she muttered. “The house can go to hell.”
Fine for her, but now our house was under threat. We had always thought of our house as far from its only neighbor, sitting as it did on a double lot, but Miss Maude’s house seemed terrifyingly close that night. I understood, then, why people speak of flames licking. That fire had a thousand little tongues that kept darting at our house, eager to taste it, devour it. Sure, it was stone, but there was wood trim and the windows could burst from the heat. My window had been warm to the touch when my father awakened me.
A tree near the rear of Miss Maude’s property, right next to the unmarked boundary between our houses, began to go up. It was like watching snakes race up that tree, crimson-orange lines going up, up, up the trunk.
“They might have to train their hoses on our house, just to be safe,” our father said. “If that happens—well, water will get in. It can’t be helped.”
I thought of my room, my beloved stuffed animals, the new toys from my birthday. I had been given a wooden contraption with two long metal arms; the game was to coax a large ball-bearing up those arms until it dropped into one of the circles below. I was better than AJ or my father at this game; I had a delicacy of touch they couldn’t match. I could not bear to lose that game, the game at which I always won. Pinned between my father’s legs, I started to cry and he tightened his hold on me, as if fearful I would try to run inside. Miss Maude stroked my hair almost absentmindedly.