When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris Page B

receive a present and say thank you,” I told her.
    “Not when they get garbage like that, they don’t,” she said.
    In fact these things were perfect for her, but Helen wouldn’t accept them for the same reason she wouldn’t accept anything: the other person had to owe and be beholden. Forever.
    I picked up the bag and headed for the door. “You know what you have?” I said. “You have a gift disorder.”
    “A what?”
    “It’s like an eating disorder, only with presents.”
    “Take that back,” she said.
    “My point exactly.” And then I left, slamming the door behind me.
    Helen knocked on January 1, just as I was leaving for a cleaning job. “Work on New Year’s Day, and you’ll work every day of the year,” she told me. “It’s the truth. You can ask anybody.”
    I wondered for a moment if she was right, and then I considered the last little truism she had passed my way: you won’t get a hangover if you sleep with the TV on. She also claimed you could prevent crib death by making the sign of the cross three times with a steak knife.
    “If you’re camping, could you use a Swiss Army knife instead?” I asked.
    She looked at me and shook her head. “Who the fuck goes camping with a baby?”
    Helen was shaking out her pills: the ones for her heart and her high blood pressure, the pain in her side and the new one in her right leg. Trips to the doctor were her only ticket out of the apartment, and after each visit she’d spend hours on the phone, haranguing the people at Medicare. When that got old, she’d phone McKay’s drugstore and have a go at the pharmacist. “I’d like to cut his balls off and stuff them down his throat,” she told me.
    Now there were new pills she needed to take. I offered to pick them up for her, and along with the prescription she handed me a receipt. It seemed her enemy at McKay’s had overcharged her for her last order, so after getting this new one I was to tell the hook-nosed Jew bastard that he owed my neighbor four cents. I was then to suggest that he shove his delivery charge up his fat ass.
    “Got that?” Helen asked.
    I was happy to pick up the medicine, but when it came to the disputed bill — and toward the end there was always a dispute — I’d make it up out of my own pocket and lie when she prodded me for details. “The pharmacist said he was very sorry and that it won’t happen again,” I’d tell her.
    “Did you tell him what he can do with his delivery charge?”
    “I sure did.”
    “And what did he say?”
    “Pardon?”
    “When you told him to shove it up his ass, what did he say?”
    “He said, um, ‘I bet that’s going to hurt.’”
    “You’re damn right it will,” she’d say.
    Back when she could still get up and down the stairs, Helen had all the run-ins she could handle: on the bus, at the post office, wherever peace reigned, she shattered it. Now she had to import her prey, deliverymen, most of them. The ones from the Grand Union, the supermarket we favored, tended to be African, recent immigrants from Chad and Ghana. “You black bastards,” I’d hear her yell. “You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”
    She hit bottom when she physically attacked a deaf-mute. This was a boy of fourteen, a beloved neighborhood figure who delivered for the nearby deli. “How could you?” Hugh scolded.
    “What do you expect me to do when somebody’s stealing my things?” she asked. “What, am I just supposed to stand there and do nothing?” It eventually came out that by “stealing” she meant that he had borrowed her pen. After using it to tally the bill, he stuck it in his shirt pocket, absentmindedly, most likely. Helen reacted by pulling his hair and digging her nails into his neck. “But not hard,” she said. “There was barely any blood at all.”
    When asked why the boy would steal a thirty-cent pen, a pen he could surely get for free at his father’s store, Helen sighed, exhausted at having to explain the