Fiction

July

The Barn Fire

Jen Miller

Loretta Burns arrived at our apartment one day after she alleged that her husband, Greg Burns, had tried to kill her by burning the family barn to the ground in a drunken fit. She brought only one suitcase, which my mother carried through the front door with an ease that suggested she wasn't as put off by Loretta's arrival as I was, and several cartons of cigarettes stuffed into her shoulder bag. I stood in the living room, wearing an outfit forced on me by my mother—a shapeless pink shift dress with black patent leather flats that pinched my toes—and watched this stranger stalk into our living room. Her eyes flickered over me when she paused to light a cigarette, carefully touching the orange flame to the tobacco tip. She blew out a cloud of smoke, and didn’t mind that it lingered around her face.

“It’s nice and…cozy,” Loretta said. She took a good look at her surroundings. The living room was our room—my mother’s and mine. We were used to its funny smell, the torn couch and the small black and white television on which we watched old movies together. Loretta poked a finger in a large hole in the arm of the couch, and wrinkled her nose.

“You can take the bed,” my mother said, sliding a hand over a larger hole in the couch Loretta had not yet seen. “I’ll sleep out here. Reenie has her own room.”

“Aren’t you gonna say hello, Princess?” Loretta asked. Her voice was noticeably thinned by years of cigarette smoking.

My mother wrapped her arm around my shoulders. I had hit a growth spurt after my fifteenth birthday, but was still a couple inches shorter than her 5 feet 10 inches frame.

“She’s bony like Brian,” Loretta said, referring to my father, a man we hadn’t seen in 10 years.

My mother loosened her grip on my shoulder.

“She’s got my face though, right?” she asked.

Loretta shrugged. “I guess,” she said, dropping her plump body into the couch. She kicked off her shoes.

I found a picture of my father a few years back, tucked into the top drawer of my mother’s bureau. His face was a mess, tinged a sickly yellow and pocked with scars. He had enormous ears which bent forward from the sides of his head. I had a slight curl to my ears, but nothing so dramatic. My jutting chin and almond-shaped eyes were distinctively my mother’s features.

“I think I look like her,” I said.

Loretta forced a smile, her eyes rolling over my face. Girls at school sized each other up similarly.

“I still see a little of your father in you,” she said. “Let’s hope you’re spared the worst.”

There were certain things I knew about Loretta that I wasn’t supposed to know. For starters, I knew that she had a foul mouth. Words like “shit” and “fuck” appeared regularly in the monthly letters she wrote to my mother. These letters were off limits to me, but I had found them hidden in an old suitcase under my mother’s bed. It gave me a thrill to repeat these words out loud, words that I might flippantly share with the girls my age if I had made any friends at school. My mother and Loretta were childhood friends, schoolmates from my mother’s old neighborhood. I wondered if Loretta had introduced my mother to these forbidden, dirty words, or if like me, she had stumbled upon them. A new side of my mother, a side that had had a life before me, was slowly revealing itself to me between each line of messy handwriting.

Accompanying the letters was my favorite thing of all: pictures of Loretta’s four daughters. Neatly printed on the back of each photograph were the names and ages of the girls: Diana, 15; the twins, Jenna and Tracey, 12; and Amanda, 10. I would often lay them out on the carpet in front of me, and compare my features with the Burns girls. Amanda and the twins had puffy, shiny cheeks and small eyes that squinted against the camera’s flash. Diana Burns had a round, dented face and crooked eyes. She held her thin lips in a tight frown instead of smiling like her sisters. She was striking despite her ugliness; her confidence was unmistakable. Her broad shoulders were square, not hunched like mine. I took this picture from my mother’s collection and practiced Diana’s face in the mirror. At night I studied it and shut it safely in the drawer of my bedside table. I knew it would take me a while to get it just right.

My mother made a feast the night of Loretta’s arrival: pot roast and mashed potatoes, corn and green beans, warm, buttery rolls and a salad sprinkled with cheese and bacon bits. Over dinner, Loretta told us about how she had escaped Greg and ended up in town. It had been pretty easy she said; once Greg passed out, she grabbed her bags, and slipped out the front door to the train station. She bought a one-way ticket to Landon.

“Anyway, I’m sorry to barge in like this, but I remember you saying in one of your letters that I was always welcome to visit.”

Loretta’s had pushed her barely eaten dinner away from her, and lit a cigarette. Since her intrusion hours earlier, smoke lingered everywhere. I even spied long cigarettes balanced on the edge of the sink as she curled her hair before dinner. Her smoke floated towards the kitchen’s ceiling at steady intervals. I covered my mouth and coughed loudly. My mother nudged my leg under the table.

“I just had to get away from that man. He’s awful. Really, Stella, you wouldn’t believe the things—”

Loretta stopped short and pressed her fingers into her eyelids. When she looked up at us, there were tears.

My mother patted her hand before Loretta slipped out from under her grasp, and took a large gulp of the wine she brought with her. They drank the red liquor out of coffee mugs.

“Am I the only one who sees that he tried to kill me? He hated that barn, said it was a piece of shit. Well, he was right. He let it go all rotting and moldy. But as soon as I took it for my own, he wanted it back. Suddenly he had plans to fix it up. It burned him up that I had a place to myself.”

“Sweetie, you can stay here as long as you want,” my mother told Loretta.

I dragged my fork across my plate, producing a terrible screeching noise which cut through the heavy silence.

“Reenie, give it a rest ,” my mother said, taking the fork out of my hand.

“You know what the best part is? He lied about it. He told those pig cops that he was asleep the whole night. There I am covered in soot from head to toe—I hardly crawled out the place alive, and he’s pretending to be asleep! Then he tells them that I was probably in there with somebody. That we set the fire! They believed him too. I could see it in their beady little eyes.”

She took a long drag off her cigarette and smashed it out in her potatoes. My mother’s eyes went wide, but she let Loretta continue ranting.

“The nerve on those pig cops. You know what? Sometimes I wished he had killed me,” Loretta said, her words swallowed by gulping sobs.

My mother looked over to me, “I think Loretta needs her privacy.”

“But I’m not done my dinner.”

“Reenie,” my mother warned.

I slide my chair away from the table, the scraping of the chair’s legs against the floor echoing shrilly through the kitchen. Loretta stopped crying momentarily and glanced up at me, her eyes hard and cold.

That night I lay in bed thinking about the Burns girls and how cruelly Loretta had left them behind. I imagined us saving them, inviting them to live in our apartment, the seven of us squeezed under one roof. I’d have to share my room with four other girls, but all of us could get a drawer in my bureau if the twins agreed to split the bottom one. I saw Diana lying in my bed, the rest of the Burns girls and I gathered around her as we stayed up late, gossiping and laughing, sharing ice cream out of the same carton, our hands sticky from passing it back and forth.

Loretta found out about the Landon Ballroom, a seedy club on the edge of town that hosted Saturday night dance parties for adults, from the Landon Gazette. She stuck the advertisement (“Featuring Johnny G, playing the Music Hip Adults Like to Dance To!”) to the refrigerator and tried for weeks to convince my mother to go.

“You can’t mope around here waiting for things to happen,” Loretta said at the dinner table, “You might actually meet a nice man.”

My mother waved her comment off, and began clearing dishes from the table. “That’s just silly.”

“Why? What’s so silly about kissing an attractive man?”

“Men don’t like easy women,” I said, frowning at Loretta. She blew a raspberry in my direction.

“That shows how much you know, kid.”

I had ridden my bicycle through the parking lot of the Landon Ballroom, my tires rolling over smashed out cigarette butts, shiny plastics cups sticky with dried liquor, and the occasional discarded Trojan wrapper. I thought of the one and only time my mother talked about the place.

“What do you think goes on in there?” she asked, one afternoon as we past it on our way back from a matinee of Casablanca.

I thought of Mrs. Kerry, my chubby, middle-aged gym teacher, showing me how to square dance. She had stepped on my feet at least a dozen times.

“Bad dancing,” I offered.

My mother pursed her lips. “I wonder,” she said, faint mascara stains tattooing her cheeks. She was still clutching her Kleenex.

Loretta met me by the bathroom most mornings and asked me questions about my mother’s love life. She wanted to know if my mother had dated any one recently.

“Yeah, my father,” I said through a mouthful of toothpaste foam.

“Well, we all know that was a disaster.”

I spit into the sink and turned the facet on full blast. Droplets of water splashed up my arm.

Loretta leaned against the doorframe and smoked.

“We have to get her out of this house, Princess,” she paused and considered my profile. “You know, you’re old enough for a boyfriend too. But let your hair grow, hon. Boys like long hair.”

She reached out and petted my chin-length hair.

“I don’t care what boys like,” I said, moving away from her.

Loretta angrily tossed her burning cigarette into the toilet, “Fine. Stay a loser for all I care.”

She flushed the toilet and left me starring at myself in the streaky bathroom mirror.

At least once a week, Loretta brought up the Landon Ballroom at dinner.

“Okay. I’ll try it,” my mother said finally, broken down by Loretta’s persistence.

Loretta nudged me with her elbow. “See. I knew she’d come around.”

She stood and forced my mother up with her, grabbing her around the waist. They danced around the kitchen, their heels leaving skid marks all over the linoleum floor.

“You look ridiculous,” I shouted over Loretta’s singing.

“Oh lighten up, Maureen,” my mother said, “We just need a little practice.”

She twirled away from me, laughing so hard she could hardly catch her breath.

That first Saturday night, my mother and Loretta buzzed around the apartment experimenting with lipstick and rouge and clomping around in high heels. I begrudgingly became my mother’s wardrobe consultant. From her closet, we picked pencil skirts and silky tops that sagged off her skinny frame. Loretta, on the other hand, dressed in no time, electing to wrap her bloated body in meager, stretchy fabrics. She spent the rest of the time balanced on the edge of the mattress, challenging my wardrobe suggestions and mixing cocktails for my mother to sample.

I waited for Loretta and my mother to return home, often falling asleep in front of a flickering TV. My mother shook me awake when they came in, and she helped me into bed, her face flushed and relaxed. When she bent down to kiss me goodnight, her breath smelled like a sour apple.

I could hear her high heels clacking against the wooden floors and Loretta’s excited chatter. There’d be the occasional male voice, and music that would always start out at a dull throb, but would get steadily louder. I listened for my mother’s hushed tone among the new tangle of sounds but as time went on, it became harder to decipher her voice from the others.

The house was usually empty by the time I woke up—except for the morning I came in for breakfast and found two hairy arms resting on the kitchen table. They belonged to a man named Robert, who drank a lot of coffee and told corny jokes that made Loretta double over in laughter. Robert had a quick, teasing response for everything my mother said and a sly smile that reminded me of Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde. He was clearly infatuated with my mother; I wasn’t sure if the feeling was mutual, but I knew I didn’t trust him.

By our third breakfast together, I knew Robert was more than my mother’s friend. I mulled over the way his hand had lingered on her hips as he scooted past her to set the table. My mother’s reaction to his touch told me everything: she seemed joyful, comfortable in his grasp. I had studied enough of her women’s magazines to know what this meant.

“Do you have sex with my mother?” I asked him.

Loretta’s jaw unhinged and her cigarette popped out of her mouth, rolling under the kitchen table. Robert waited for her to retrieve it before speaking.

“Yes,” he said.

I faced Loretta’s delighted expression.

“Fuck you,” I said to her.

“Hey,” Loretta began. My mother grabbed my messy ponytail and pushed me out into the hallway.

She let go of my hair, taking a few strands with her and turned away from me. Her body went limp.

“Why can’t you let me have just this one thing?” she whispered, looking older to me than she ever had before. I had a million reasons, none of which I thought I should need to say out loud.

We never saw Robert again after that incident and in response to this my mother stopped speaking to me. Daily chores became her preferred method of communication. At dinner, she put my plate on the table and walked into the other room to eat hers. She did my laundry and instead of tucking everything into my drawers and leaving behind the faint smell of her mixed with detergent on my clothes, she piled it up outside of my room for me to collect. She slipped back into the isolated routines she kept before Loretta arrived: work and home, home and work, most of her time spent in the kitchen or in her bedroom. She no longer honored our weekend movie dates, not even for her all-time favorite, The Sound of Music. I hardly existed to her, and when Loretta was around, blame volleyed among the three of us like a tennis ball.

I spent a lot of time in my room, trying to conjure illnesses so that my mother would take pity on me. I faked a fever by holding a hot towel against my forehead, and forced myself to throw-up. My mother was waiting for me when I came out into the hallway.

“You’re taking this a bit far, don’t you think?”

She folded her arms across her chest.

“I really don’t feel good, Mom,” I said, clutching my stomach.” I think I have a fever.”

“Well, then stop holding hot washcloths to your head,” she said, tossing the lukewarm towel at my feet.

Loretta continued to go to the Landon Ballroom without my mother. It was typical for her to stumble through the front door, pour herself a drink while she freshened up and then disappear again until next evening. She’d show up to dinner still smelling of cologne and cigarettes, her hair tangled and greasy.

Two weeks after the incident with Robert, she came home around midnight and found me curled up on the living room couch. Rod Serling’s staccato voice reminded us that we were in the Twilight Zone. Loretta sat down next to me and instinctively, I pulled my legs against my body to avoid touching her. I felt her hand move underneath the blanket and grab for my leg. I jerked away from her touch, but she had a firm grip on my ankle. She pulled the blanket away from my face and leaned right into me, her breath a warm blast of air tinged with the smell of ashes.

“Your mother hates you,” Loretta asked, her words slurring. “She’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done.”

Her thoughts mirrored my own. I wasn’t sure my mother would speak to me again after what I had done to her and Robert. I closed my eyes, squinting against the image of Loretta’s haggard face. Her nails dug into my flesh. I kicked my legs out of her grip and made contact with her chin. She stood up, licking blood from her lower lip.

“You’re selfish—all of you are selfish,” Loretta spat at me. “You are always wanting something. What about what I want?”

“Reenie?”

My mother stood in the hallway, a slice of light from her open bedroom door spilling into the living room with her.

I stood up, breathing heavily. Loretta collapsed into the couch, touching her swelling lip.

“Go to your room, Maureen,” my mother said.

She shut the door behind me, though I could still hear their muffled voices. A minute later, the front door slammed. My mother appeared in my bedroom.

“Lay down,” she said, flicking on the lamp beside my bed.

She sat next to me taking my leg in her hand and studied the red mark on my ankle where Loretta had pinched me.

“Does this hurt?”

I shrugged. “Not anymore.”

My mother seemed satisfied with this answer; she adjusted the covers over my body. For a brief moment she put her hand on my cheek.

“Do you hate me?” I asked.

“No, Reenie, I don’t hate you,” she said.

“Is Loretta gone?”

“For now,” my mother said. As she turned away from me, I could see the troubled look in her eyes.

The Burns family showed up at our door the following afternoon. My mother, playing the part of gracious hostess, ushered Greg Burns and Loretta’s four daughters into our living room. The girls squeezed themselves onto the couch, and Greg stood awkwardly near the front door. Greg was a short and solid; deep wrinkles and shadows shaped like crescents surrounded his black eyes. I noticed the dirty, cracked skin of his hand as he reached up to light the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He had a weary look about him, but he didn’t seem dangerous.

Diana Burns sat in the middle of her sisters. Her eyes which were more noticeably crooked in person, swept around the living room. Her hair hung limply over her shoulders and she wore an oversized quilted jacket with blackened cuffs. All four girls were wearing their school uniforms.

“This is my daughter, Maureen. I call her Reenie,” my mother said.

Diana was the only one who looked right at me. The other girls fussed with the hems of their skirts.

“Can we see your bedroom?” Diana asked.

“Reenie take them into your room,” my mother ordered.

Once in my room, they spread out to explore their surroundings. Amanda was drawn to my old doll house. Tracey and Jenna browsed through the clothes in my closet. They didn’t speak but an invisible rope seemed to link them; they hadn’t left each other’s side since entering the room.

Diana straddled my vanity stool, sitting directly across from where I had settled on the bed. She sprayed some perfume on her wrist—a scent my mother had outgrown—and made a face.

“You wear this stuff?”

“Not really.”

“It’s real fancy.”

“I guess,” I said and watched Amanda remove all the tiny pieces of furniture I had in the dollhouse.

“You can tell her to stop. She doesn’t understand much, but she knows what ‘No’ means,” Diana said.

“It’s okay,” I said. Amanda’s brown eyes looked up at me, slightly unfocused.

Diana leaned forward and whispered something into her ear. Amanda scooted away from us. Behind her, Jenna and Tracey rummaged through my shoe collection. Jenna slipped on my penny loafers.

“Mom must be causing problems again.” Diana said, picking at the frayed sleeves of her coat. “Did she tell you that she was fucking our neighbor, Mr. Moffett?”

“No,” I said.

Diana sprayed her other wrist with more perfume, and placed it on the vanity behind her. “Well she was. Amanda was the first one to find them in the barn.”

Diana nodded at her youngest sister.

“She still doesn’t understand what happened,” Diana said. “I had to explain it to her, but she didn’t get it. She don’t understand much anyway.”

“That must have been awful for her,” I said.

Diana didn’t respond. She took a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket.

“I used to sneak them,” she said, lighting one, “But no one cares anymore. I had a stash in the barn but most of them are gone now. I could only save a few packs before the fire took them all.”

Diana watched my reaction to this with a steady gaze. Smoke puffed out of her thin lips. I pictured her standing in the shadow of darkness, watching as the barn that housed Loretta and her lover burned to the ground, defiance gripping her crooked features.

I tried not to react, but my mouth twitched, giving me away. Diana smiled, and deliberately stubbed out her cigarette on my vanity. She glanced over her shoulder at Jenna and Tracey. Tracey had on my gym sneakers.

“You better watch them. They like to steal.”

“They can have them,” I said.

My mother never admitted that she called the Burns family to come and get Loretta but Loretta knew she had. As Greg Burns dragged her out our front door, she screamed at my mother and me to burn in hell. My mother said nothing; she shut the door and disappeared into her bedroom. I didn’t see her until the following afternoon.

I thought about Diana’s reaction to seeing her mother come through the front door: she stood up slowly and left without saying a word. Diana Burns and her sisters left just as they had entered: a weary ball of shuffling feet and frayed fabric, except this time their pockets had been fattened with my belongings, treasures pilfered from another life.

The suitcase under my mother’s bed materialized on the curb next trash day. I didn’t have to open it to know that it contained the Burns’ girls’ photographs and every single one of Loretta’s letters.