When You Are Engulfed in Flames Read Online Free PDF

finished with tung oil. This brought out the character of the wood, allowing it, at certain times of day, to practically glow. Nothing was more beautiful than our dining room, especially after my father covered the walls with cork. It wasn’t the kind you use on bulletin boards, but something coarse and dark, the color of damp pine mulch. Light the candles beneath the chafing dish, lay the table with the charcoal textured dinnerware we hardly ever used, and you had yourself a real picture.
    This dining room, I liked to think, was what my family was all about. Throughout my childhood it brought me great pleasure, but then I turned sixteen and decided that I didn’t like it anymore. What changed my mind was a television show, a weekly drama about a close-knit family in Depression-era Virginia. This family didn’t have a blender or a country club membership, but they did have one another — that and a really great house, an old one, built in the twenties or something. All of their bedrooms had slanted clapboard walls and oil lamps that bathed everything in fragile golden light. I wouldn’t have used the word “romantic,” but that’s how I thought of it.
    “You think those prewar years were cozy?” my father once asked. “Try getting up at five a.m. to sell newspapers on the snow-covered streets. That’s what I did, and it stunk to high heaven.”
    “Well,” I told him, “I’m just sorry that you weren’t able to appreciate it.”
    Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn’t live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at. And the history! Wasn’t it crushing to live in a house no older than our cat?
    “No,” my father said. “Not at all.”
    My mother felt the same: “Boxed in by neighbors, having to walk through my parents’ bedroom in order to reach the kitchen. If you think that was fun, you never saw your grandfather with his teeth out.”
    They were more than willing to leave their pasts behind them and reacted strongly when my sister Gretchen and I began dragging it home. “The
Andrews
Sisters?” My father groaned. “What the hell do you want to listen to them for?”
    When I started buying clothes from Goodwill, he really went off, and for good reason, probably. The suspenders and knickers were bad enough, but when I added a top hat, he planted himself in the doorway and physically prevented me from leaving the house. “It doesn’t make sense,” I remember him saying. “That hat with those pants, worn with the damn platform shoes . . .” His speech temporarily left him, and he found himself waving his hands, no doubt wishing that they held magic wands. “You’re just . . . a mess is what you are.”
    The way I saw it, the problem wasn’t my outfit, but my context. Sure I looked out of place beside a Scandinavian buffet, but put me in the proper environment, and I’d undoubtedly fit right in.
    “The environment you’re looking for is called a psychiatric hospital,” my father said. “Now give me the damn hat before I burn it off.”
    I longed for a home where history was respected, and four years later I finally found one. This was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’d gone there to visit an old friend from high school, and because I was between jobs and had no real obligations I decided to stay for a while, and maybe look for some dishwashing work. The restaurant that hired me was a local institution, all dark wood and windowpanes the size of playing cards. The food was OK, but what the place was really known for was the classical music that the owner, a man named Byron, pumped into the dining room. Anyone else might have thrown in a compilation tape, but he took his responsibilities very seriously and planned each meal as if it were an evening at Tanglewood. I hoped that dishwashing might lead to a job in the dining room, busing