When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris Page A

for the brass rack that she herself clearly used, she said, “Not there,” her voice a bark. “You can put your things in the guest bathroom. Not on the countertop, but on the toilet.” She pointed to a door at one end of the foyer. “Put the lid down first,” she told me. “Then put your coat and scarf on top of the lid.”
    I wondered who would be stupid enough not to have understood that, and I imagined a simpleton with a puzzled expression on his face. “Hey,” he might say. “How come my jacket’s all wet? And while we’re at it, who put this turd in my pocket?!”
    “Something amuses you, does it?” Mrs. Oakley asked.
    I said, “No. Not at all.” Then I jotted down the time in my portable notebook.
    She saw me writing and put her hands on her hips. “I am not paying you to practice your English,” she told me.
    “Excuse me?”
    She pointed to my notebook. “This is not a language institute. You are here to work, not to learn new words.”
    “But I’m an American,” I told her. “I spoke English before I got here. Like at home, growing up and stuff.”
    Mrs. Oakley sniffed but did not apologize. I think she wanted a foreigner so badly that she heard an accent where there was none. How else to explain it? Being a desperate, godforsaken immigrant, it went without saying that I coveted everything before me: the white wall-to-wall carpet, the framed reproduction of Renoir’s
Brat with Watering Can,
the gold-plated towel rack in the marble master bathroom.
    “I have very nice things,” she announced. “And I expect to
still
have them after you’ve left.”
    Was this the moment I decided to make up with Helen, or was it later, when Mrs. Oakley screamed at me for opening the medicine cabinet? “When I told you to clean the master bathroom, I meant everything
but that.
What are you, an idiot?”
    At the end of the day I caught the subway home. Helen was staring down from her window as I approached our building, and when I waved at her, she waved back. Three minutes later I was sitting at her kitchen table. “So then she told me, ‘I have very nice things and I expect to still have them after you’ve left.’”
    “Oh, she was asking for it, that one,” Helen said. “What did she say when you slapped her?”
    “I didn’t slap her.”
    She looked disappointed. “OK, then, what did you break on your way out?”
    “Nothing. I mean, I didn’t walk out.”
    “Are you telling me you stayed and took that shit?”
    “Well . . . sure.”
    “Then what the fuck?” She lit a fresh cigarette and tucked her disposable lighter back into her pack. “What the fuck are you good for?”
    The first time I went to Normandy I stayed for three weeks. After returning, I went straight to Helen’s, but she refused to hear about it. “The French are faggots,” she said. As evidence, she brought up Bernard, who was born in Nice and lived on the fourth floor.
    “Bernard’s not a homosexual,” I told her.
    “Maybe not, but he’s filthy. Did you ever see his apartment?”
    “No.”
    “OK then, so shut up.” This was her way of saying that the argument was over and that she had won. “I bet you’re glad to be back, though. You couldn’t pay me to go overseas. I like it where’s it’s civilized and you can drink the water without running to the terlet every five minutes.”
    While in France, I’d bought Helen some presents, nothing big or expensive, just little things a person could use and then throw away. I placed the bag of gifts on her kitchen table and she halfheartedly pawed through it, holding the objects upside down and sideways, the way a monkey might. A miniature roll of paper towels, disposable napkins with
H
’s printed on them, kitchen sponges tailored to fit the shape of the hand: “I don’t have any use for this crap,” she said. “Take it away. I don’t want it.”
    I put the gifts back into the bag, ashamed at how deeply my feelings were hurt. “Most people, most humans,