When You Are Engulfed in Flames Read Online Free PDF Page B

tables and eventually waiting on them, but I kept these aspirations to myself. Dressed as I was, in jodhpurs and a smoking jacket, I should have been grateful that I was hired at all.
    After getting my first paycheck, I scouted out a place to live. My two requirements were that it be cheap and close to where I worked, and on both counts I succeeded. I couldn’t have dreamt that it would also be old and untouched, an actual boardinghouse. The owner was adjusting her Room for Rent sign as I passed, and our eyes locked in an expression that said, Hark, stranger, you are one of me! Both of us looked like figures from a scratchy newsreel, me the unemployed factory worker in tortoiseshell safety glasses and a tweed overcoat two sizes too large, and she, the feisty widow lady, taking in boarders in order to make ends meet. “Excuse me,” I called, “but is that hat from the forties?”
    The woman put her hands to her head and adjusted what looked like a fistful of cherries spilling from a velveteen saucer. “Why, yes it is,” she said. “How canny of you to notice.” I’ll say her name was Rosemary Dowd, and as she introduced herself I tried to guess her age. What foxed me was her makeup, which was on the heavy side and involved a great deal of peach-colored powder. From a distance, her hair looked white, but now I could see that it was streaked with yellow, almost randomly, like snow that had been peed on. If she seemed somewhat mannish, it was the fault of her clothing rather than her features. Both her jacket and her blouse were kitted out with shoulder pads, and when worn together she could barely fit through the door. This might be a problem for others, but Rosemary didn’t get out much. And why would she want to?
    I hadn’t even crossed the threshold when I agreed to take the room. What sold me was the look of the place. Some might have found it shabby — “a dump,” my father would eventually call it — but, unless you ate them, a few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone. The same could be said for the groaning front porch and the occasional missing shingle. It was easy to imagine that the house, set as it was on the lip of a university parking lot, had dropped from the sky, like Dorothy’s in
The Wizard of Oz,
but with a second story. Then there was the inside, which was even better. The front door opened onto a living room, or, as Rosemary called it, the “parlor.” The word was old-fashioned but fitting. Velvet curtains framed the windows. The walls were papered in a faint, floral pattern, and doilies were everywhere, laid flat on tabletops and sagging like cobwebs from the backs of overstuffed chairs. My eyes moved from one thing to another, and, like my mother with her dining room set, Rosemary took note of where they landed. “I see you like my davenport,” she said, and “You don’t find lamps like that anymore. It’s a genuine Stephanie.”
    It came as no surprise that she bought and sold antiques, or “dabbled” in them, as she said. Every available surface was crowded with objects: green glass candy dishes, framed photographs of movie stars, cigarette boxes with monogrammed lids. An umbrella leaned against an open steamer trunk, and, when I observed that its handle was Bakelite, my new landlady unpinned her saucer of cherries and predicted that the two of us were going to get along famously.
    And for many months, we did. Rosemary lived on the ground floor, in a set of closed-off rooms she referred to as her “chambers.” The door that led to them opened onto the parlor, and when I stood outside I could sometimes hear her television. This seemed to me a kind of betrayal, like putting a pool table inside the Great Pyramid, but she assured me that the set was an old one — “My ‘Model Tee Vee,’” she called it.
    My room was upstairs, and in a letter home I described it as “hunky-dory.” How else to capture my peeling, buckled wallpaper and the way that it brought everything