Only the Women Are Burning - Nancy Burke

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told Grace, “I’ll take this entire table. How much?”

      And it was done. I wished for a clap of thunder, a sudden spring storm, torrents of rain, lightning, to appear, to wash this entire operation into an utter failure.

      “There’s another box,” Grace said. “Want to see it?”

      “I’ve already bought them,” I said. I turned on my heel. There, under the old picnic table bench, was a plastic bin like the one in my attic with my dissertation notes. These were the bulk of the Nancy Drew mysteries and the Mary Stewart novels that inspired my anthropology path. The Moon Spinners, once a Disney movie, a novel about a woman who traveled and collected folk music from cultures around the world. There too was The Source, by James Michener, which fired my first choice of graduate work at the stone circles in England. The roots of it all, right here. No, these would come with me. And there, amid them, was something else. Something I had tossed in the trash decades ago. What on earth was it doing here?

      I studied Grace from a safe distance, watching her charm a woman into taking a set of chairs in need of refinishing. I didn’t recognize the chairs. They were veneer and could not be dipped or stripped of old finish without melting the glue holding the coating to the cheap plywood underneath. I said nothing. Just watched.

      Here were the fragments of pages I had torn to shreds and tossed in the wastebasket in our kitchen years before. The cover of a black and white marble notebook, inked with pink doodles and my name and the words “do not read.” There had been comments made with a thick marker in the margins and across the tops of pages, stick figures on the blank unused pages with balloons over their heads containing insults and mocking words. Ugly, pimple face, freak, and worse. Clearly Grace had read it and done this. I had torn it to shreds and dumped it in the trash basket. My journal. There it was, in with the books of my coming of age, in a plastic zip bag, bringing back painful remnants of my childhood. How had it got out of the trash and into this bag? I couldn’t be there any longer. I’d been out here long enough. I lifted the box, hid the journal under the other books, and carried it to my car. I returned twice more for the teapots and a vase I had sent to Mother from England. I said, “Goodbye,” and left.

      I did not want to ask Grace why and how it had come to be among our books. Talking about it would give her a power I would not give. I was feeling enough throbbing of scar tissue already. I drove off, past the park where it had once been Lou and me riding bikes along those paths, Lou and me reading the books I now carried in my trunk. Lou and me, playing checkers and chess, swapping books, riding to the library together. Grace pre-occupied with her friend down the street, Lou and me collecting soda bottles for deposit pennies and saving enough to buy bottles of root beer and sipping them slowly as we read in the shade of our front porch, a contest to see who could make their root beer last the longest and finish her book fastest. Lou and me ended at age thirteen.

      Lou, twelve at the time, was suddenly no longer my best friend but instead followed fourteen-year-old Grace everywhere. Grace refused to let me join their twosome. Mom had stated with firmness I couldn’t challenge, “Go find friends of your own. They’re different from you.” I spent so much time after that in my tiny bedroom, my books, Natural History magazine, Smithsonian, National Geographic filling my mind and my time. That was perhaps when the roots of my dream of becoming an anthropologist took hold.

      Sheffield was my Mecca, after that high school estrangement from my sisters that lasted through my bachelor’s degree as a commuter from home. Sheffield was my landing after a turbulent flight, one of those experiences I describe as suddenly discovering that I was from another planet and here were others from my same home planet and here we all were. It was a sudden collective recognition of how we had come from elsewhere and now were reunited in a common cause. Fellow aliens as graduate students.

      As I fled from Lou’s house, my early flight from home was mimicked in the speed at which I drove through the streets with the bounty I had saved. My girls would love the teapots, they would adore the books and the jewelry. I felt a bit of guilt at my theft, but that was what hurt me the most. It was the thumbing of their noses at my kindness, my sharing of my world with them. These jewels had not cost $5 even in India where prices were low. There were mythologies associated with crystals and I chose for each sister with precision, for Mother also.

      I wanted to be home. No matter what kind of pouting I might get from Pete, no matter if we launched into a fight, I wanted to tell him what I needed to say. This was my own home, my own safe haven, away from my sisters and their oblivious indifference, even now, so many years later. I suppose if it had been only one sister who was this way, it wouldn’t be so bad, but with two, it was something so foreign to what one could expect from family. I had never really revealed the extent of this to Pete. I hadn’t known how to talk about it to him. I had never told him how I needed closeness with him and what the void was that I wanted him to fill and how his always being gone left this emptiness more hollow that it should. Maybe now I could find the words to explain to him how much I needed him to be a different kind of partner for me.

      The architecture of each neighborhood in Hillston reflected the town’s growth through the century since the first railway station was erected to take bankers from their homes to their offices in New York City. I paid attention to all of it right now, in a way I could not when the kids were in the car. My sister’s home was built in the 1890s. The gas lines for lighting were still in the walls and ceilings when my parents bought it in 1973. Small houses with front porches. The fashion had called for stained glass windows next to the main entry. The neighborhood seemed to belong to Glen Brook, not Hillston, due to Third River Park on Glen Brook Avenue. As I drove between the park’s two sections of green, crossed over the river, I understood why Lou wanted to stay there. It was a secret little enclave, not yet discovered by the new people. The new people lived where the homes reflected growth in the years after the World Wars, larger properties, larger homes with center halls in the colonial style on wide avenues. More breathing room, more money and charm, each house uniquely different. I passed the park and the village where several storefronts were vacant, past one of Hillston’s smaller train stations, this one with no station house, merely a platform and a few steps up to it. I came, to my surprise, to concrete barricades along the left. Backhoes and other earth moving equipment, still, like mechanized dinosaurs, were strewn about on the lawns of several homes. I hadn’t passed this on my way from the library and, while I waited at a red light, I remembered the digs I had worked at Stonehenge. The roped off area seemed to be an entire block. Lawns were brown and lumpy, sidewalks looked as though they’d been lifted then replaced haphazardly. A once pretty block ruined, temporarily, I hoped. Whatever was being excavated, it surely was creating a disaster, just as May was bringing its blossoms and warmth. HPW, printed on the sides of sawhorses, told me this was not a private matter. I drove on while music filled the car. Folk rock, a good Saturday morning song. I let the song finish before I shut off the engine in my driveway. Before I turned the key and silenced the engine, a shadow moved near the back door in my peripheral vision. It was Pete. He was about to get into his car but hesitated as I pulled up. I wondered if he was waiting for me, worrying about me, hoping I was safe, considering the fires and the mayor’s warnings. As I met his gaze in the side view mirror, he approached the car and I opened the door.

      “Welcome back,” he said. My study of his face was deliberate. My thanks were hovering there in the chasm between the real and my imagined next steps. My heart was literally holding up a yardstick and secretly, what demonstration of pleasure at my return registered on it was bound to steer us either further into conflict or back toward a sense of where we were on the continuum of our shared lives. I desperately needed him to be aware of the importance to me of what he said or did next. It was the most loaded minute I could remember and my fear was that it might be lost on him, the small fraction of responsibility he held in his hands for my happiness. I can’t say now what might have been enough for me in that moment, what constituted a passing grade in the subject of marital love. I do know that after his rejection last night and the lack of regard for me by my sisters just now I needed a show of love. The newly open wound of that old diary incident had heightened my need for a gesture of contrition and conciliation. How deeply I needed this; it surely was visible to him in the smile I gave him, in the lightness of my step as I moved to the trunk.

      “Can you

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