And so, soon after, I began to come up with my theory of primary versus secondary. It was okay for primary people, my mother and father, my sister and Mary Alice, to share the story. They needed to, it was only natural. But the people they told, the secondary people, should not tell others. In this way, I thought I could contain the news of what had happened to me. I conveniently forgot all the faces in the dorm of those who had no vested interest in keeping faith with me.
I was returning home.
My life was over; my life had just begun.
THREE
Paoli, Pennsylvania, is an actual town. It has a center and a train line named after it, the Paoli Local. It was where I told people I was from. I wasn't. I was from Malvern. Or at least that was my mailing address. But actually I was from Frazer. I grew up in an amorphous valley of converted farmland that had been divided into treeless lots and sold off to developers. Our development, Spring Mill Farms, was one of the first to have been built in the area. For many years it was as if the fifteen or so original houses had landed in the midst of an ancient site of a meteor crash. There was nothing, save the equally new and treeless high school, for miles around. New families like mine moved into the two-story houses and bought sod or small, whirring seed spreaders that the fathers walked back and forth across the dirt lots as if they were the most disciplined of pets. Heartsick at her inability to grow anything resembling the lawns in magazines, my mother opened her arms wide to the advent of crabgrass. "To hell with it," she said. "At least it's green!"
The houses came in two options: garage sticking out in front, garage tucked to the side. There were two or three color options for the shingles and shutters. It was, to my teenage mind, a wasteland that involved endless trimming, mowing, planting, weeding, and keeping up with the neighbors on either side. We even had a white picket fence. I knew every picket, as it was my sister's and my job to crawl around on our hands and knees and use manual clippers on the grass that the mower couldn't reach.
Eventually other developments cropped up around us. Only the original residents of Spring Mill Farms could distinguish where our development ended and the others began. It was back to this collapsing Chinese fan of suburbia that I went after I was raped.
The old mill, for which my neighborhood was named, had not yet been restored when I was a teenager and the mill owner's house across the street was one of the few old homes in the area. Someone had torched it and the big white house now had black holes for windows and a green wooden railing that was charred and falling-in in places.
Driving by with my mother, as I did every time we went out of the development, I was fascinated by it-its age, the overgrown weeds and grass, and the marks of the fire-how the flames had licked out of the windows and left black ash scars above their rims like crowns.
Fires are something that seemed part of my childhood, and they beckoned to me that there was another side to life I hadn't seen. Fires were horrible, no doubt, but what I became obsessed with was how they seemed, inevitably, to mark a change. A girl I had known down the block, whose house was struck by lightning, moved. I never saw her again. And there was an aura of evil and mystery around the burning of the mill house that gave flight to my imagination every time I passed.
When I was five, I walked into a house near the old Zook graveyard out on Flat Road. I was with my father and grandmother. The house had been ravaged by fire and was set far off from the road. I was frightened but my father was intrigued. He thought that we might scavenge things inside that would add to the boxlike home he and my mother had just moved into. My grandmother agreed.
In the front yard some distance from the house was a half-charred Raggedy Andy doll. I went to pick it up and my father said, "No! We only want salvageable things, not some child's toy." I think that was when it struck me, that we were walking into a place where people like me-children-had lived, but didn't anymore. Couldn't.
Once inside, my grandmother and father got down to business. Most of the house was ruined; what was any good was so blackened by smoke as to be unsalvageable. There was furniture, still, and rugs and things on the wall, but they were black and abandoned.
So they decided to take the banisters from the stairs. "Good old wood," my grandmother said.
"What about upstairs?" my father asked.
My grandmother attempted to dissuade him. "It's black as night up there; besides, I wouldn't trust those stairs."
I'm a good stair tester. I always watch for this in movies where there is a fire and heroes rush in. Do they test the stairs first? If not, the critic in me cries, "Fake!"
My father decided that since I was little I could risk it best. He sent me up the stairs as he and my grandmother worked to dislodge the railings. "Call out what you see!" he said. "Any furniture or such."
What I remember is a child's room strewn with toys, most specifically Matchboxes, which I collected. They lay on their sides and backs on a braided rug, the die-cast metal bright in yellows and blues and greens in the dark, burned house. There were children's clothes in the open closet, singed along all their hems; an unmade bed. It had happened at night, I remember thinking when I was older. They were sleeping.
In the center of this bed was a small, dark, charred cavity that went through to the floor. I stared at it. A child had died in there.
When we got home, my mother called my father an idiot. She was livid. He arrived with what he thought might be a prize. "These banisters will make great table legs," he announced. I chose to remember the Matchboxes and the Raggedy Andy, but what child leaves behind these toys, even if slightly blackened? Where were the parents, I wondered all that night and in the nightmares that followed. Had they survived?
Out of fire grew narrative. I created for this family a new life. I made it a family like I had wanted: Mom and Dad and a boy and girl. Perfect. The fire was a new beginning. Change. What was left behind was done so on purpose; the little boy had grown out of his Matchboxes, I imagined. But the toys haunted me. The face of the Raggedy Andy on the path outside, his black and shiny eyes.
The first judgment of my family came from a six-year-old playmate of mine. She was small and blond, that kind of towheaded blondness that dissolves with age, and she lived down the road at the end of the block. There were only three girls my age in the whole neighborhood, including me, and she and I played at being friends until we got lost in the wider world of grade school and junior high.
We were sitting on my front lawn near the mailbox pulling up grass. We had just that week begun to ride on the bus together. As we pulled grass up in fistfuls and made a little pile by our knees, she said, "My mom says you're weird."
Shocked into a sort of mock adulthood, I said, "What?"
"You won't be mad, will you?" she pleaded. I guaranteed her I wouldn't.
"Mom and Dad and Jill's mom and dad said your family is weird."
I began to cry.
"I don't think you're weird," she said. "I think you're fun."
Even then I knew envy. I wanted her blond, strawlike hair, which she wore down, not my stupid brunet braids with the bangs my mother cut by strapping plastic tape across them and cutting along its edge. I wanted her father, who spent time outside and, on the few occasions I ever visited her, said things like "What's shakin, bacon?" and "See you later, alligator." I heard my parents in one ear: Mr. Halls was low-class, had a beer gut, wore workman's clothes; and my playmate in the other: My parents were weird.