Fishbowl, page 10
“I don’t know.”
“Only the person who caused the fire needs to have the insurance,” Jodine says slowly.
“So who caused it?”
“Allie did, if she has insurance.” Jodine’s head pounds as though it were the planet Krypton in Superman I, about to detonate. Stop drop and roll. Tea. Tea! Why did she need tea in the middle of the night? Stop, drop and roll. She must have left the stove on. She must have caused the fire. What if the whole place burns down? She’ll be in debt for the rest of her life. Panic is racing last night’s wine up her throat. “Otherwise, I don’t know who—or what—caused it.” She pauses. “Do you?”
“No,” Emma answers slowly. She rubs her eyes with the palm of her hand, rubbing the crusty remnants of last night’s mascara into under-eye circles.
Jodine cringes. Why would someone not take the two minutes to remove makeup? All it takes is a cotton ball and a little cream. She was intoxicated and she still found the strength to make the effort.
“Does that mean if one of us caused it, we’ll be responsible for paying for the damage?” Emma asks.
“Yes, legally. But it’s possible Allie has insurance. She’s lived here for two years. She’ll have to say it was her fault.”
“Will she get arrested?”
“You don’t get arrested for causing an accidental fire,” Jodine says. (Jodine hopes.)
“She’s taking a long time. I’m gonna see if she’s okay.” Emma sprints across the street.
Stop, drop and roll. Tea. Stop, drop and roll. Jodine won’t admit to the firemen that she used the stove. She can’t. Not if Allie’s insurance will pay. She’ll tell Allie the truth, she’ll beg Allie, she’ll be Allie’s slave for life. She’ll be her personal lifelong lawyer free of charge. She’ll bite her nails for her. Anything. She just can’t afford thousands of dollars of debt.
Allie, Emma and Janet emerge. Janet is wearing a white robe and holding an animal carry-on cage stuffed with a beige cat. Every step Janet takes causes the cat’s head to smash into the top of its cage, and the cat to meow its disapproval.
“She doesn’t have insurance, either,” Emma whispers to Jodine. Allie shakes her head in confirmation.
“Shit,” Jodine says. “How can you live on your own for two years without insurance?”
Emma raised her eyebrow. “You’re the law student. You should have been more responsible about letting us know we needed insurance.”
“How are we going to pay for all this?” Allie wails.
No answer.
Notice that no one suggests faulty wiring. Not one of them insists, “It wasn’t me! I demand an investigation!” They’re all keeping suspiciously quiet.
“They’re going to call Carl,” Allie says.
Carl lives in Winnipeg. Carl owns the house. Carl owns houses all over the country. Carl wrote explicitly in the lease that tenants are responsible for taking out accident insurance.
Carl is going to be pissed.
When the fire truck pulls up, the driver sees four women standing on the street, two waving frantically at him. He notices what they’re all wearing, but being a man, these are the observations he misses:
The first waving woman, Emma (he doesn’t know her name yet), is wearing flip-flops on her feet, the kind you used to buy at a thrift store to wear in the shower at either the gym or European youth hostels, but now come with a designer label stamped on the underside and cost twenty bucks a pair. She’s also wearing Diesel jeans and a sleazy thin shirt that isn’t done up all the way. (This the fireman does in fact notice.) The combo must be for effect, because really, if she had time to do up her jeans, she’d have time to do up her buttons, wouldn’t she?
The second waving woman, Allie, is wearing a sweatshirt and lime-green boxers. They look like an old boyfriend’s boxers, the kind he discards in the corner of his bathroom when he undresses to shower, and then forgets about. You wash them for him and then you break up and you keep them either because you’re still in love with him and they remind you of him and you sleep with them beside your pillow, as revolting as that seems to you in retrospect, or because you’re planning on shredding them in some sort of exorcist ceremony that you never get around to because you meet someone else, someone better, someone who doesn’t call you only when he wants to get laid.
Actually, Allie got her boxers at the Gap.
A third girl, Jodine, is wearing fuzzy black slippers that appear to have ears, green-striped pajama bottoms and a navy blue T-shirt. She’s not waving.
Next, the fireman’s eyes pass over an old woman and a cat. In fact, his eyes basically pass over everything, except for the girl in the open-button shirt. For the next few hours, he’ll engage in a bit of flirting with her, a minor amount, nothing his live-in girlfriend should be concerned about. What she should be more concerned with is the fact that they’ve been living together for two years and he’s no closer to popping the question than he was when they first shacked up. Her mother shakes her head a lot and says it’s because he gets the milk for free so why would he bother buying the cow, but that’s not really it. He wants to get married, just not to her. Want to know what happens to the slimy fireman and his girlfriend? Does she get fed up and ultimatum him? Does she fall in love with someone who deserves her? Does she bump into her ex-boyfriend one random Wednesday in the food court in the mall, start e-mailing him, have an affair, then move all her clothes into his apartment one night while Slimy Fireman is playing squash? Eh? Not knowing is killing you, isn’t it?
Moving on.
The first fire truck slams on its brakes smack in the center of the street. Three men dressed in padded vomit-yellow uniforms charge out of the truck. Slimy Fireman rushes over to the girls, and the other two firemen prepare for the fire-elimination process by pressing large buttons, removing fire extinguishers, pulling and twisting various levers. Slimy unravels a hose at least two hundred feet long, and Jodine imagines how much water the two-hundred-foot hose is about to unleash on her apartment and whether any of her belongings other than her goldfish can swim.
Emma smirks. “That’s quite a hose you’ve got there, honey,” she says under her breath.
Jodine ignores Emma’s comment. “Does anyone have any gum?” she asks. She has a crappy taste in her mouth, which she would like to obliterate before talking with the firefighters.
Emma has one piece left in her purse but she doesn’t want to share it. “No.”
Slimy Fireman is now within breath range. “Are you the girls who called the fire department?”
No, they’re the other girls who are standing outside at three in the morning. Sheesh.
The girls nod.
“Is everyone out of the building?”
The girls nod again, murmuring “Uh-huh.”
“Where did the fire start?” His skin looks as though he’s spent too much vacation time in Miami.
“In the kitchen,” Jodine says.
“Do you know how it started?”
“I think we left the oven on by accident,” Emma says.
Jodine doesn’t know why Emma says this, but she’s not planning on offering any insight. Maybe they used the stove when she was out. Maybe one of them made cookies before going to bed. Who cares? What is key is that they used the oven, think they might be responsible and don’t want an investigation.
“Where is the kitchen?”
Allie outlines the geography of their apartment as two more screeching fire trucks pull into the street. The other firemen organize the hoses and then three of them, including Slimy, charge into the apartment, holding a fire extinguisher and some sort of ax device. A police car and an ambulance have joined the party and sit at the top of the street.
“Mr. Fireman, can I go for a slide down your pole?” Emma asks in a happy-birthday-Mr.-President voice.
“Emma!” Jodine says in a stop-being-so-immature voice. “Punning is the lowest form of humor.”
Emma discreetly removes her last piece of gum from her purse, throws the wrapper on the pavement and sneaks the gum into her mouth.
Allie asks to borrow Emma’s phone. She calls Clint so she can tell him what happened, hoping that he’ll be inspired to come get her and play hero. Excitement races through her, but then she feels guilty for feeling excited when her apartment is burning down, although really, it’s a perfect opportunity for him to come take care of her and fall madly in love. He doesn’t answer and she hangs up.
Janet consoles her cat.
Emma wonders why it’s taking her father so fucking long to get here.
Jodine continues to silently freak out. Stop, drop and roll. Stop, drop and roll. She feels ashamed she lost control. She hates losing control. If she can’t control her ability to keep control, how can anyone control anything? Is life a collection of random, uncontrollable events strung together into an existence? But no, she reasons. She was the last one in the kitchen; she must have left the stove on and caused the fire. She was responsible.
She heaves a sigh of relief. Although she is acting libelously and completely irresponsibly by acting libelously, due to the fact that she was, in fact, responsible, she knows that the fire was not random.
Stop, drop and roll.
It makes perfect sense.
9
JODINE NAMES HER FISH
JODINE
Five minutes later, the fireman who asked us the ridiculous amount of questions when he seemingly should have been putting out the fire reappears outside. “It’s out,” he announces, and I exhale a blowup doll’s worth of air. “We’re just checking for fire extension,” he says.
He’s checking for fire what?
Emma articulates my inquiry, “What the fuck is that?”
“We’re ripping into the cabinets until we can’t see any more damage. We have to make sure the fire didn’t spread through the walls. It seems to have started from the oven, just as you girls guessed.”
“How can you tell?” Allie asks, and Emma and I shoot her glares of death. Allie doesn’t notice.
“Fire travels upward in a V shape. Your fire traveled up from the location of the oven. By the way, I’m Norman,” he says, thrusting his yellow-gloved hand toward Allie. Allie shakes it.
At first I’m not sure why Norm here suddenly wants to get to know us, but then I realize he’s trying to peer into Emma’s absurdly open shirt.
We all introduce ourselves. Wonderful, now we’re all friends. Norman can be on my Christmas card list.
Allie nudges her head toward the police cars. “Are they going to investigate?”
What’s her problem? We don’t want an investigation! Shut up, big mouth! Close your diuretic mouth! I try to silence her with poisoned telepathy.
“Investigate? Why?” Norm asks.
If I continue staring at the spiderweb cracks in the sidewalk, will they solidify into nooses and hang Allie?
“I just thought…uh, why are the police here?” she stammers.
Norm isn’t trying very hard not to be distracted by our favorite exposed roommate. “They come in case there’s a traffic problem,” he offers, his eyes still glued to the valley between my roomie’s breasts.
A traffic problem? At four in the morning? Who is even up at four in the morning? “Or in case the fire is not an accident,” he adds. “Which this obviously is.”
“Oh,” Allie says. “Good.”
Good. Good? Our kitchen has been zapped into another dimension and this is good?
“Did the fire spread through the walls?” she asks.
“Not as far as we can tell.”
“Is the apartment ruined?”
“No. It was a good thing you girls closed the doors. You limited the damage.”
There’s that word again—good. If it gets any better, we can pop open the champagne and celebrate.
“We closed them after we—” Allie says.
“What’s the damage?” Emma interrupts. It’s obvious that she, too, no longer cares to hear the sound of Allie’s voice.
“The kitchen will need some work. The walls are brick, so they survived. But they’ll need to be plastered and painted. The cabinets, shelves, microwave and stove are toast.” He laughs at his choice of words.
I decide not to share my opinion of puns with him, since he has the power to make me bankrupt. “What about the living room?” I ask.
“You’re lucky. We’ll ventilate it, and you’ll need to get someone to dry-clean the curtains and couch, but it’s livable.”
“How much will all this cost?” Emma asks.
“Damage-wise? I don’t know. The insurance guys will tell you. You won’t have to worry about it.”
Terrific. I choke on my own saliva.
“Who’s your insurance agency?” he asks.
No one answers. He looks at each of us and sighs what I assume is his silly-silly-girls sigh. “You don’t have insurance?” We shake our heads, mirroring his solemnity. “Who owns the apartment?” he asks.
Shit. Shit. He’s going to call Carl, our landlord. And Carl is going to exorcise our existence from the apartment, then drown us in lawsuits. Drown me in lawsuits. Because he’s going to want an investigation, and the investigation will reveal that the stove, not the oven, caused the fire, and I’m going to be in debt until my teeth are false, my shoes orthopedic, and I talk to my grandchildren during the prime-time sitcoms they’re trying to watch, which I can’t hear without my hearing aid.
“I do,” I answer, suddenly enlightened with a potentially hugely libelous plan.
The fireman looks up and stares at me. For an elasticized second I am positive he’s going to call me on my lie and have me arrested. “Okay,” he says, his eyes returning to Emma’s exposed cleavage.
What kind of an idiot thinks a barely twenty-five-year-old law student can afford her own duplex? Breast-ogling moron.
Allie’s mouth pops open like my goldfish’s. Emma’s eyebrows rise in eighty-degree angles.
If they ask Janet to confirm that I own this place, I’m as toast as the microwave.
A few minutes later, good old Norm leads us into the apartment to see the damage. Another firefighter brings in a ventilator to rid the apartment of smoke.
Two firemen are still inside. The apartment smells as if Emma smoked four hundred packs of cigarettes and then sprinkled the ashes over the apartment. We gasp at the sight of the kitchen. What was formally known as The Wall That Had a Stove is charred beyond recognition. This is what Norm calls “no damage to the walls”? What is left of the cabinets looks like confidential contracts, post shredder machine.
“Oh, my God.” Allie’s eyes look like two sinks about to overflow.
“We didn’t have to use the hose, so there wasn’t any water damage.” The fireman says. “The fire was pretty contained.”
Contained? They call this contained? What is uncontained? This looks like a nuclear wasteland.
“I think I’m gonna puke,” Allie mutters, bending forward and balancing her hands on her knees. “I have a really weak stomach.” Emma bends over to pat Allie on the back.
Norm gets a better look down Emma’s shirt, as I’m sure she is aware. “It could have been much worse,” he says gravely.
“We could have been killed,” Allie says, dry-heaving. “We are so lucky.”
Lucky? Winning the lottery is lucky. Finding the new jacket you were going to buy, anyway, for fifty percent off is lucky. We have no kitchen. This is lucky?
“The damage is pretty minimal, considering,” Norm continues. “You could have charred the entire place. The majority of the damage is in the kitchen. And if you hadn’t woken up—” he nods toward me “—the fire could have gotten all three of you.”
Okay, he does have a point. No kitchen is far preferable to no existence. “Thanks,” I say. “We appreciate all you’ve done.”
He nods and heads into the living room.
“Mr. Fireman, I’m on fire. Would you hose me down?” Emma whispers à la Marilyn.
“Shh,” I whisper back, and roll my eyes. “Look.” I point to the fishbowl. My goldfish appears to be on acid. He’s swimming incoherently all over his now yellow-tinged bowl of water. “The fish made it. I can’t believe it. Why does he never die?”
“The fish? Does he not have a name?” Emma shakes her head in disgust. “Do all law students lack creativity?” She opens the fridge, but no light comes on. “I’m thirsty.”
“I don’t think you should drink tap water now,” Allie says.
“I don’t care. Name him anything you want,” I say.
“Norm!” Emma calls into the living room. “Do you think the OJ is safe to drink?”
“I don’t know. Why take a chance?”
“We should throw it out,” Emma says. “It’s going to go bad. We have no power.”
“Norm?” I ask. “After the fireman? Is that a name for a fish?”
“Norm isn’t a name for a goldfish,” Allie says. “It’s the name of a guy in a bar. You remember Cheers, don’t you? I think Jay didn’t name him because she doesn’t want to let herself get attached to him. She knew if she named him, she’d want to keep him.”
“You don’t have to speak about me as if I’m not here, Allie. But you’re right. I’m obviously a petaphobe.”
“Or a commitmentphobe,” Allie says.
Emma flicks the fishbowl with her nail. “In Breakfast at Tiffany’s Audrey Hepburn called her cat, Cat.”
Allie looks confused. “You think she should call her fish Cat?”
I’d say the fire clouded her brain, but she was just as likely to make a comment like that yesterday. “I think she means I should call my fish, Fish.”
“That’s silly,” Allie says.
“I like it,” I say. “There’s something unnatural about this creature.”
“They should arrest you for attempted murder,” Allie says. “You tried to throw him in the fire.”
“I was trying to put out the fire.”
“Mission not accomplished,” Allie says, now giggling. She’s pointing to my head. “You look like you have an Afro.”
As if the appearance of my hair is of any relevance to the fire or my phobias. “Don’t we have more important things to worry about?”
“Only the person who caused the fire needs to have the insurance,” Jodine says slowly.
“So who caused it?”
“Allie did, if she has insurance.” Jodine’s head pounds as though it were the planet Krypton in Superman I, about to detonate. Stop drop and roll. Tea. Tea! Why did she need tea in the middle of the night? Stop, drop and roll. She must have left the stove on. She must have caused the fire. What if the whole place burns down? She’ll be in debt for the rest of her life. Panic is racing last night’s wine up her throat. “Otherwise, I don’t know who—or what—caused it.” She pauses. “Do you?”
“No,” Emma answers slowly. She rubs her eyes with the palm of her hand, rubbing the crusty remnants of last night’s mascara into under-eye circles.
Jodine cringes. Why would someone not take the two minutes to remove makeup? All it takes is a cotton ball and a little cream. She was intoxicated and she still found the strength to make the effort.
“Does that mean if one of us caused it, we’ll be responsible for paying for the damage?” Emma asks.
“Yes, legally. But it’s possible Allie has insurance. She’s lived here for two years. She’ll have to say it was her fault.”
“Will she get arrested?”
“You don’t get arrested for causing an accidental fire,” Jodine says. (Jodine hopes.)
“She’s taking a long time. I’m gonna see if she’s okay.” Emma sprints across the street.
Stop, drop and roll. Tea. Stop, drop and roll. Jodine won’t admit to the firemen that she used the stove. She can’t. Not if Allie’s insurance will pay. She’ll tell Allie the truth, she’ll beg Allie, she’ll be Allie’s slave for life. She’ll be her personal lifelong lawyer free of charge. She’ll bite her nails for her. Anything. She just can’t afford thousands of dollars of debt.
Allie, Emma and Janet emerge. Janet is wearing a white robe and holding an animal carry-on cage stuffed with a beige cat. Every step Janet takes causes the cat’s head to smash into the top of its cage, and the cat to meow its disapproval.
“She doesn’t have insurance, either,” Emma whispers to Jodine. Allie shakes her head in confirmation.
“Shit,” Jodine says. “How can you live on your own for two years without insurance?”
Emma raised her eyebrow. “You’re the law student. You should have been more responsible about letting us know we needed insurance.”
“How are we going to pay for all this?” Allie wails.
No answer.
Notice that no one suggests faulty wiring. Not one of them insists, “It wasn’t me! I demand an investigation!” They’re all keeping suspiciously quiet.
“They’re going to call Carl,” Allie says.
Carl lives in Winnipeg. Carl owns the house. Carl owns houses all over the country. Carl wrote explicitly in the lease that tenants are responsible for taking out accident insurance.
Carl is going to be pissed.
When the fire truck pulls up, the driver sees four women standing on the street, two waving frantically at him. He notices what they’re all wearing, but being a man, these are the observations he misses:
The first waving woman, Emma (he doesn’t know her name yet), is wearing flip-flops on her feet, the kind you used to buy at a thrift store to wear in the shower at either the gym or European youth hostels, but now come with a designer label stamped on the underside and cost twenty bucks a pair. She’s also wearing Diesel jeans and a sleazy thin shirt that isn’t done up all the way. (This the fireman does in fact notice.) The combo must be for effect, because really, if she had time to do up her jeans, she’d have time to do up her buttons, wouldn’t she?
The second waving woman, Allie, is wearing a sweatshirt and lime-green boxers. They look like an old boyfriend’s boxers, the kind he discards in the corner of his bathroom when he undresses to shower, and then forgets about. You wash them for him and then you break up and you keep them either because you’re still in love with him and they remind you of him and you sleep with them beside your pillow, as revolting as that seems to you in retrospect, or because you’re planning on shredding them in some sort of exorcist ceremony that you never get around to because you meet someone else, someone better, someone who doesn’t call you only when he wants to get laid.
Actually, Allie got her boxers at the Gap.
A third girl, Jodine, is wearing fuzzy black slippers that appear to have ears, green-striped pajama bottoms and a navy blue T-shirt. She’s not waving.
Next, the fireman’s eyes pass over an old woman and a cat. In fact, his eyes basically pass over everything, except for the girl in the open-button shirt. For the next few hours, he’ll engage in a bit of flirting with her, a minor amount, nothing his live-in girlfriend should be concerned about. What she should be more concerned with is the fact that they’ve been living together for two years and he’s no closer to popping the question than he was when they first shacked up. Her mother shakes her head a lot and says it’s because he gets the milk for free so why would he bother buying the cow, but that’s not really it. He wants to get married, just not to her. Want to know what happens to the slimy fireman and his girlfriend? Does she get fed up and ultimatum him? Does she fall in love with someone who deserves her? Does she bump into her ex-boyfriend one random Wednesday in the food court in the mall, start e-mailing him, have an affair, then move all her clothes into his apartment one night while Slimy Fireman is playing squash? Eh? Not knowing is killing you, isn’t it?
Moving on.
The first fire truck slams on its brakes smack in the center of the street. Three men dressed in padded vomit-yellow uniforms charge out of the truck. Slimy Fireman rushes over to the girls, and the other two firemen prepare for the fire-elimination process by pressing large buttons, removing fire extinguishers, pulling and twisting various levers. Slimy unravels a hose at least two hundred feet long, and Jodine imagines how much water the two-hundred-foot hose is about to unleash on her apartment and whether any of her belongings other than her goldfish can swim.
Emma smirks. “That’s quite a hose you’ve got there, honey,” she says under her breath.
Jodine ignores Emma’s comment. “Does anyone have any gum?” she asks. She has a crappy taste in her mouth, which she would like to obliterate before talking with the firefighters.
Emma has one piece left in her purse but she doesn’t want to share it. “No.”
Slimy Fireman is now within breath range. “Are you the girls who called the fire department?”
No, they’re the other girls who are standing outside at three in the morning. Sheesh.
The girls nod.
“Is everyone out of the building?”
The girls nod again, murmuring “Uh-huh.”
“Where did the fire start?” His skin looks as though he’s spent too much vacation time in Miami.
“In the kitchen,” Jodine says.
“Do you know how it started?”
“I think we left the oven on by accident,” Emma says.
Jodine doesn’t know why Emma says this, but she’s not planning on offering any insight. Maybe they used the stove when she was out. Maybe one of them made cookies before going to bed. Who cares? What is key is that they used the oven, think they might be responsible and don’t want an investigation.
“Where is the kitchen?”
Allie outlines the geography of their apartment as two more screeching fire trucks pull into the street. The other firemen organize the hoses and then three of them, including Slimy, charge into the apartment, holding a fire extinguisher and some sort of ax device. A police car and an ambulance have joined the party and sit at the top of the street.
“Mr. Fireman, can I go for a slide down your pole?” Emma asks in a happy-birthday-Mr.-President voice.
“Emma!” Jodine says in a stop-being-so-immature voice. “Punning is the lowest form of humor.”
Emma discreetly removes her last piece of gum from her purse, throws the wrapper on the pavement and sneaks the gum into her mouth.
Allie asks to borrow Emma’s phone. She calls Clint so she can tell him what happened, hoping that he’ll be inspired to come get her and play hero. Excitement races through her, but then she feels guilty for feeling excited when her apartment is burning down, although really, it’s a perfect opportunity for him to come take care of her and fall madly in love. He doesn’t answer and she hangs up.
Janet consoles her cat.
Emma wonders why it’s taking her father so fucking long to get here.
Jodine continues to silently freak out. Stop, drop and roll. Stop, drop and roll. She feels ashamed she lost control. She hates losing control. If she can’t control her ability to keep control, how can anyone control anything? Is life a collection of random, uncontrollable events strung together into an existence? But no, she reasons. She was the last one in the kitchen; she must have left the stove on and caused the fire. She was responsible.
She heaves a sigh of relief. Although she is acting libelously and completely irresponsibly by acting libelously, due to the fact that she was, in fact, responsible, she knows that the fire was not random.
Stop, drop and roll.
It makes perfect sense.
9
JODINE NAMES HER FISH
JODINE
Five minutes later, the fireman who asked us the ridiculous amount of questions when he seemingly should have been putting out the fire reappears outside. “It’s out,” he announces, and I exhale a blowup doll’s worth of air. “We’re just checking for fire extension,” he says.
He’s checking for fire what?
Emma articulates my inquiry, “What the fuck is that?”
“We’re ripping into the cabinets until we can’t see any more damage. We have to make sure the fire didn’t spread through the walls. It seems to have started from the oven, just as you girls guessed.”
“How can you tell?” Allie asks, and Emma and I shoot her glares of death. Allie doesn’t notice.
“Fire travels upward in a V shape. Your fire traveled up from the location of the oven. By the way, I’m Norman,” he says, thrusting his yellow-gloved hand toward Allie. Allie shakes it.
At first I’m not sure why Norm here suddenly wants to get to know us, but then I realize he’s trying to peer into Emma’s absurdly open shirt.
We all introduce ourselves. Wonderful, now we’re all friends. Norman can be on my Christmas card list.
Allie nudges her head toward the police cars. “Are they going to investigate?”
What’s her problem? We don’t want an investigation! Shut up, big mouth! Close your diuretic mouth! I try to silence her with poisoned telepathy.
“Investigate? Why?” Norm asks.
If I continue staring at the spiderweb cracks in the sidewalk, will they solidify into nooses and hang Allie?
“I just thought…uh, why are the police here?” she stammers.
Norm isn’t trying very hard not to be distracted by our favorite exposed roommate. “They come in case there’s a traffic problem,” he offers, his eyes still glued to the valley between my roomie’s breasts.
A traffic problem? At four in the morning? Who is even up at four in the morning? “Or in case the fire is not an accident,” he adds. “Which this obviously is.”
“Oh,” Allie says. “Good.”
Good. Good? Our kitchen has been zapped into another dimension and this is good?
“Did the fire spread through the walls?” she asks.
“Not as far as we can tell.”
“Is the apartment ruined?”
“No. It was a good thing you girls closed the doors. You limited the damage.”
There’s that word again—good. If it gets any better, we can pop open the champagne and celebrate.
“We closed them after we—” Allie says.
“What’s the damage?” Emma interrupts. It’s obvious that she, too, no longer cares to hear the sound of Allie’s voice.
“The kitchen will need some work. The walls are brick, so they survived. But they’ll need to be plastered and painted. The cabinets, shelves, microwave and stove are toast.” He laughs at his choice of words.
I decide not to share my opinion of puns with him, since he has the power to make me bankrupt. “What about the living room?” I ask.
“You’re lucky. We’ll ventilate it, and you’ll need to get someone to dry-clean the curtains and couch, but it’s livable.”
“How much will all this cost?” Emma asks.
“Damage-wise? I don’t know. The insurance guys will tell you. You won’t have to worry about it.”
Terrific. I choke on my own saliva.
“Who’s your insurance agency?” he asks.
No one answers. He looks at each of us and sighs what I assume is his silly-silly-girls sigh. “You don’t have insurance?” We shake our heads, mirroring his solemnity. “Who owns the apartment?” he asks.
Shit. Shit. He’s going to call Carl, our landlord. And Carl is going to exorcise our existence from the apartment, then drown us in lawsuits. Drown me in lawsuits. Because he’s going to want an investigation, and the investigation will reveal that the stove, not the oven, caused the fire, and I’m going to be in debt until my teeth are false, my shoes orthopedic, and I talk to my grandchildren during the prime-time sitcoms they’re trying to watch, which I can’t hear without my hearing aid.
“I do,” I answer, suddenly enlightened with a potentially hugely libelous plan.
The fireman looks up and stares at me. For an elasticized second I am positive he’s going to call me on my lie and have me arrested. “Okay,” he says, his eyes returning to Emma’s exposed cleavage.
What kind of an idiot thinks a barely twenty-five-year-old law student can afford her own duplex? Breast-ogling moron.
Allie’s mouth pops open like my goldfish’s. Emma’s eyebrows rise in eighty-degree angles.
If they ask Janet to confirm that I own this place, I’m as toast as the microwave.
A few minutes later, good old Norm leads us into the apartment to see the damage. Another firefighter brings in a ventilator to rid the apartment of smoke.
Two firemen are still inside. The apartment smells as if Emma smoked four hundred packs of cigarettes and then sprinkled the ashes over the apartment. We gasp at the sight of the kitchen. What was formally known as The Wall That Had a Stove is charred beyond recognition. This is what Norm calls “no damage to the walls”? What is left of the cabinets looks like confidential contracts, post shredder machine.
“Oh, my God.” Allie’s eyes look like two sinks about to overflow.
“We didn’t have to use the hose, so there wasn’t any water damage.” The fireman says. “The fire was pretty contained.”
Contained? They call this contained? What is uncontained? This looks like a nuclear wasteland.
“I think I’m gonna puke,” Allie mutters, bending forward and balancing her hands on her knees. “I have a really weak stomach.” Emma bends over to pat Allie on the back.
Norm gets a better look down Emma’s shirt, as I’m sure she is aware. “It could have been much worse,” he says gravely.
“We could have been killed,” Allie says, dry-heaving. “We are so lucky.”
Lucky? Winning the lottery is lucky. Finding the new jacket you were going to buy, anyway, for fifty percent off is lucky. We have no kitchen. This is lucky?
“The damage is pretty minimal, considering,” Norm continues. “You could have charred the entire place. The majority of the damage is in the kitchen. And if you hadn’t woken up—” he nods toward me “—the fire could have gotten all three of you.”
Okay, he does have a point. No kitchen is far preferable to no existence. “Thanks,” I say. “We appreciate all you’ve done.”
He nods and heads into the living room.
“Mr. Fireman, I’m on fire. Would you hose me down?” Emma whispers à la Marilyn.
“Shh,” I whisper back, and roll my eyes. “Look.” I point to the fishbowl. My goldfish appears to be on acid. He’s swimming incoherently all over his now yellow-tinged bowl of water. “The fish made it. I can’t believe it. Why does he never die?”
“The fish? Does he not have a name?” Emma shakes her head in disgust. “Do all law students lack creativity?” She opens the fridge, but no light comes on. “I’m thirsty.”
“I don’t think you should drink tap water now,” Allie says.
“I don’t care. Name him anything you want,” I say.
“Norm!” Emma calls into the living room. “Do you think the OJ is safe to drink?”
“I don’t know. Why take a chance?”
“We should throw it out,” Emma says. “It’s going to go bad. We have no power.”
“Norm?” I ask. “After the fireman? Is that a name for a fish?”
“Norm isn’t a name for a goldfish,” Allie says. “It’s the name of a guy in a bar. You remember Cheers, don’t you? I think Jay didn’t name him because she doesn’t want to let herself get attached to him. She knew if she named him, she’d want to keep him.”
“You don’t have to speak about me as if I’m not here, Allie. But you’re right. I’m obviously a petaphobe.”
“Or a commitmentphobe,” Allie says.
Emma flicks the fishbowl with her nail. “In Breakfast at Tiffany’s Audrey Hepburn called her cat, Cat.”
Allie looks confused. “You think she should call her fish Cat?”
I’d say the fire clouded her brain, but she was just as likely to make a comment like that yesterday. “I think she means I should call my fish, Fish.”
“That’s silly,” Allie says.
“I like it,” I say. “There’s something unnatural about this creature.”
“They should arrest you for attempted murder,” Allie says. “You tried to throw him in the fire.”
“I was trying to put out the fire.”
“Mission not accomplished,” Allie says, now giggling. She’s pointing to my head. “You look like you have an Afro.”
As if the appearance of my hair is of any relevance to the fire or my phobias. “Don’t we have more important things to worry about?”
