Too Pretty to Burn

The first time I set fire to something for fun, I couldn’t believe how good it could feel. Watching paper change from white to black to grey, watching it go from something to nearly nothing, was the biggest thrill I’d had since my mother took me to the fair and let me ride the Ferris wheel as many times as I wanted. 

From the top of the wheel I could see my town from a different vantage point, could see distant hills of emerald green shining brightly in the sun. 

And I could see my mother and John, or at least I think his name was John, rocking carelessly back and forth in the cabin above me. I had asked to ride with them, begged really, but Mom kept saying something about the weight limit and insisted I ride alone. 

I could see the man in the booth below working the wheel. He was yelling at my mother and maybe-John to stop rocking their cabin. And through the guardrails, I could see my mother with her head thrown back laughing, could see John’s hands groping her thighs and doing God knows what else as they took turns on a bottle of Jack. Finally the guy below had enough. “No more rides!” he shouted. We all had to get off. 

The little slip of paper I burned just for the hell of it was a note from a boy in my 4th period English class. The note from Ray burned about as fast as a wad of toilet paper, even though it was fourteen pages, the same number as my age. It felt good to see the note that likely took him the whole period to write, forty-five minutes of Ticonderoga to paper, disappear in less than sixty seconds.

In the note, Ray asked me to be his girlfriend, his “one and only”, and I believed that nonsense. I’m a real sucker sometimes. A week later my friend Ramona showed me her own note from Ray with the same line. One and only. I could have thrown up. But I’m sure burning that note felt a lot better than throwing up would have. 

One time my mother forgot to pick me up from school. I waited with Mrs. Harris for two hours playing (and losing) tic-tac-toe and checkers. I have a lot of respect for that lady. I have a lot of respect for people who don’t let kids win just because they’re kids. When my mother’s car pulled up in the parking lot, I could see it from the classroom window, and I ran to hide under a table. 

“Becky, get out from under there. Your mom’s here,” Mrs. Harris said, all light and airy as if I was playing hide and seek. 

“She’s not my mother,” I said. 

“Come on Becky, you’re being silly.” 

A slight sternness crept into her voice. But I refused to get out from under the table, and when my mother came in, her face the same color as her lipstick, Mrs. Harris politely explained the school’s policy on late pick-ups while I remained crouched on the floor. My mother, full of shame, barked back at my sweet teacher using dirty words I’m not allowed to say, yelled at her. I could tell by the slur of her words she was drunk. I was only seven. Finally, Mrs. Harris had enough of Mom and threatened to call the police if she didn’t calm down. Like I said, I have a lot of respect for Mrs. Harris. 

After burning Ray’s note, I wondered what other things I could burn just as quickly and easily as folded paper. I started stealing candles from the dollar store on the way home from school. My friend Mike, two years older than me, has a car and drives me home sometimes so I don’t have to take the bus. We usually stop by the store to buy chewing gum or candy. I was always buying (or stealing) him Reese’s cups, his favorite, and Mike and Ike’s, mostly because of the name, with the money I’d conned Mom into giving me. The price of lunch money went up five times my 9th grade year and Mom, gullible as a gull or forgetful as a turkey, believed it every time.  

Soon my bedroom was filled with Yankee candles and enough tealights to fill a Catholic church. On any given day the scent of Home Sweet Home, Baby Powder, Fluffy Towels, or Vanilla Cupcake crept into the hallway and down the stairs. Mom never noticed, or if she did, never mentioned anything about the smell. 

I started leaving candles everywhere. On the kitchen table, on bookshelves, on the mantle above the fireplace. The house was festooned with jars of colorful wax. Sometimes I’d burn several at a time. The scents would mingle together in a strange oil-and-water way, and would be so strong I’d get headaches. 

Still. Mom never said anything about the candles. 

When I asked her one day if Mike could come over after school, she said with a straight face, “who’s Mike?”

It took my mom a long time to catch on to what I was doing, and I think the only reason she did was because I started burning her stuff. Mom has all these hideous scrunchies that she keeps in a clay bowl I made for her in the only pottery class I’ve ever taken. One day I took one of those scrunchies, an ugly green one with little four leaf clovers on it, and held it over a Vanilla Lime. It lit up like a Saint Patrick’s Day parade. If Mom noticed it was gone, she didn’t mention it. A week later I took another one and burned it too. I burned two more before she finally said to me huffily one morning, “Becky, for God sakes, quit taking all my hair scrunchies!”

The doctors say I have something called pyromania which is different from the word my mother used. I’m not an arsonist. It’s not like I’m burning down houses or the public library or anything like that. I just like to make fires, watch fires, watch things being burned by fires. Some of my friends drink or do drugs. I know one girl who’s a cutter. But for whatever reason, fire is what does it for me. I don’t know why.

The food in this treatment center, where I’ve been staying for the past three weeks, is always the same. Meat and two vegetables. When I leave this place I never want to look at peas and carrots again. At home, we eat a lot of frozen meals, and they taste so much better than all the healthy crap they serve us here. Give me some Hot Pockets, some Stouffer’s lasagna, Bagel Bites, and Eggo waffles. I’d take a TV dinner over a home cooked meal any day of the week. 

Speaking of TV, one night Mom and I were watching The Brady Bunch. I don’t know why she loves watching those cringy old sitcoms, but it’s become a bit of a thing. It was the episode where Jan, who needs glasses but is too stubborn to wear them, accidentally takes someone else’s bicycle. Right in the middle of the show Mom got up from the recliner, and without saying a word, grabbed her car keys and walked out. Just drove off. 

After a few minutes I turned on Netflix and played some shows I’m not usually allowed to watch as I polished off the last slice of Mom’s frozen pizza. Two episodes of BoJack Horseman later, when Mom still hadn’t come home, I burned the cardboard box the pizza came in and tried to go to sleep. I lay awake in bed for two hours that night waiting for her to come home, and when she didn’t, I took a photo of the two of us from a frame in the living room. We were at IHOP, I think I was four or five, cheesing hard with mouths full of pancakes. Dad must have taken the photo. I stared at that picture for a long while and felt the smoothness of the Polaroid in my hands. Then I burned it over a Pumpkin Cinnamon Swirl. Talk about bittersweet.

After a while, burning scrunchies and photos and paper boxes started to lose its appeal. Forget candles. I wanted to make a real fire. So one day in February, on the way home from school, I stole some gasoline from the Shell station while Mike went in to pay for his fill up. When no one was looking I put the gas in a gallon milk jug, set it on the floorboard and hid it underneath my coat. The whole way home I had to hold back from laughing every time Mike sniffed himself thinking he’d spilled gas on his sleeve. 

When I got home, I went to the backyard and gathered some sticks and fallen tree limbs, whatever I could scrounge. When the pile was big enough, I went to look for some rocks so I could arrange them in a circle like a campfire. 

I’ve never been camping before. Never made s’mores or stargazed, never slept in a sleeping bag. Mom promised to take me camping last year but backed out at the last minute. “Becky,” she said, “this is something you should do with your dad.” She had slipped and used the present tense, a thing she does sometimes, and being the snarky teenager I am, responded with, “well I’d love to, Mom, but that’ll be pretty tough since Dad died when I was six.” 

Mike likes marshmallows. Maybe he would make s’mores with me one day. 

All the rocks in our yard were either too jagged and pokey, too small or too flat. But our neighbors, the Frantz’s, have a lovely landscaped rock garden in theirs. Irises and box shrubs peeked at me between arrays of smooth stones. Perfect size. Perfect shape. There were so many of them just lying there. I couldn’t help myself. 

Pleased with the aesthetics of my fire circle, I was ready to start. Slowly I tipped the milk jug over the sticks, letting the fuel trickle onto each one like a waterfall. I inhaled. Gasoline has always had a pleasant smell for me. Then I struck a match, took a deep breath, and tossed it gently onto the pile. Flames surged high. Sparks flew about in the air like a sparkle of fireflies.

I hadn’t really planned on what I was going to burn, figured I’d know when the time came, and when I went into the house, something was pulling me towards Mom’s closet. I took a black and white striped sweater and ran outside to throw it on the fire before I could change my mind. The fire roared, spewed black and white threads of acrylic and nylon in the air. It was like watching a lion attack a defenseless zebra. 

I was in awe.

I don’t know what came over me. I ran back into the house in an elated frenzy and grabbed more of Mom’s clothes. T-shirts. Bras. Skirts. A canvas “I heart New York” tote bag from Aunt Stacey. One by one, I took an item from the pile and threw it on the fire. The more of Mom’s clothes I burned, the better I felt. It was as if I’d been swimming underwater, holding my breath for years, and had just come up for air. A taut rubber band being released. 

YMCA tank top. Into the fire. 

Camouflage leggings. Into the fire. 

Black turtleneck. Into the fire. 

Then I came to a Christmas sweatshirt. The white one with a big green tree on it, one of those battery operated ones with real lights inside. My hand froze. I have one of those sweatshirts too, or at least I think I still do, in the closet somewhere. It doesn’t fit me anymore. She wanted us to have matching Christmas sweatshirts that year, and I remember wearing mine nearly every day. She had to pry it off my body to wash it, I wanted to wear it so much. 

I pressed the button on Mom’s to see if the battery was still good. The tiny, multi-colored lights blinked and twinkled, just as they did years ago, glowing beside the light of the fire. It felt like Christmas morning when Dad was alive and we would sit in front of the fireplace sipping hot chocolate and eating homemade sugar cookies.

My first instinct was to burn that sweatshirt, burn those memories, burn the mess Dad left behind. But I couldn’t. Not that sweatshirt. 

It was simply too pretty to burn. 

And just as I was about to put it back on the pile, I saw another light, Mom’s car pulling up in the driveway. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she saw me in the backyard with the fire. A huge pile of her clothes was still lying on the ground. She stood there speechless, stunned, her eyes going back and forth from the pile to my face.

I was sure she would scream and yell and ground me for eternity. But she didn’t. Slowly she walked towards me and didn’t stop until she got so close I could smell the bourbon in her breath. She put her arms around me. Her body felt so soft against mine, so tender. It was a foreign feeling.

At first, my arms hung limply at my sides, her Christmas sweatshirt still in one hand, and I didn’t hug her back. She was holding me so tightly, her hands were pressed so deep and hard into the curve of my back, into my shoulder blades, that my own arms couldn’t move. Then she started crying, a loud lamentation, and I didn’t know what to do or say.

I dropped the sweatshirt on the ground and felt, to my surprise, that my own face was wet. 

Finally Mom loosened her grip and looked into my eyes. She stared at me for a long while, unblinking, unmoving, as if she was looking at me for the very first time. Then she finally spoke and her words were simple, yet utterly profound. She said, “I’m sorry.” 

And I thought to myself, well it’s about time. 

The doctors said it was important for my recovery that Mom and I talk, to reconnect and work on our “relationship”. Talking to my mother, the woman who has barely acknowledged my existence most of my life, was somehow supposed to help me get over this thing. I wasn’t buying it.

We didn't talk a lot in the beginning. She would ask me how I’m getting along, and I would say “fine.” A lot of the time we spent staring at the floor or the ceiling. I hated the way she started every session with, “how you holding up, kiddo?”, and wondered where the “kiddo” suddenly came from. I hated the way her hair looked in those awful scrunchies. I hated that I was forced to spend time with her. Sometimes, I just hated her. 

At first I thought she only came to keep up appearances, to be seen as a “good” parent. I assumed she’d come to the first meeting or two then dip out, make excuses like she always does. But to my surprise, she’s been pulling her weight, keeps showing up, day after day, week after week. She hasn't missed a single visiting hour yet. 

Yesterday she brought me a gift basket with candy in it. Most of them were the sour kinds I don’t like, but I’ll keep the Snickers and trade the rest for something else. I know some kids here who would gladly swap their chocolate for Lemonheads, their M&M’s for Sour Patch Kids. 

Then Mom started talking, really talking. She told me how sorry she was for not being there for me and for not realizing how much I needed her. Said she hated herself and wished she could go back and redo the last eight years. We had both been grieving for so long, each in our separate ways, and she admitted she’d been too caught up in hers to notice. The drinking. She was going to work on that too. She had already found an AA group and had been to one meeting. 

“Becky,” she said, “do you think you could ever forgive me?” My mother was looking at me with sad, puppy dog eyes, like a Golden Retriever that’d lost its favorite ball. 

I thought about all the times she had ignored me, forgotten me, or just plain didn’t pay any attention to me. How do you forgive a person for that? How do you forgive your mother for that? Maybe I was her lost ball. And I wasn’t sure yet if I wanted to be found. 

But then I thought about how it must have been for her all these years. How she must have felt when we lost Dad, when she lost her husband. 

“I think so,” I said and hoped I was telling the truth.