Back to Issue Fifty-Nine

A FIRE IN THE HILLS

by EMMA GOSS

Palm fronds scatter the Boulevard. Snails, dead from the smoke, glisten the pavement. Ash falls across endless car dealerships, Super Kings, the CIVIC center and Elaine’s windshield. I look out at it all from the backseat of Elaine’s car, her ponytail swooshing back and forth very beautifully. She’s wearing a light blue scrunchie that has only to be wrapped twice around her hair in order to pinch it into a taut and perfect ponytail.

She drives down the Boulevard fast, fearful of arriving late. Nobody likes Oxnard Boulevard. Not now, not ever, not when the entire street longs for fire. I pull down my leotard. The seams pinch hard into the sides of my crotch and one of the shoulder straps falls off. It is the beginning of January. Elaine’s had her license for nearly two months and picks me up for practice every Monday and Wednesday afternoon in the car she was given for her seventeenth birthday.

The Santa Monica Mountains have been on fire for six days. Mama isn’t worried, especially here from the valley where the canyon acts as a bulwark from the sirens. Not a single practice has been cancelled. Coach Al sent an email, subject: NOT CANCELLING!, to all the parents, assuring us “Those gyms on the other side won’t know what hit ’em! This is our chance to one-up them before regionals. See you all Monday night.”

A sycamore has fallen outside the gym. Elaine has to park a block away to avoid it. Outside of the car, I pull the leotard down again. A few dumb pigeons perch atop a wire, holding on for dear life as the Santa Anas whip through the city. I open the door with my left hand, avoiding a large blister forming on my right, and step into the gym.

Inside, the girls are prepping in the lobby. The younger kids’ sessions have been cancelled due to poor air quality, so the gym is empty save for the coaches: Coach Al, Coach Bette, and Coach JP. They wait for us on the floor.

The back garage door is rolled up. A warm sheet of air slips in. This is my chance to get ahead,I think. Regionals are only three weeks away and I have a real chance at placing in bars this year.

Elaine and I walk over to the cubbies and I ask her how her family is doing. Her house is right at the top of the canyon and my mother told me they’d better start packing up just in case. The house is magnificent with a lap pool that stretches across the width of the property. The backyard has an abandoned well that they’ve turned into a hydroponic garden with herbs that grow outwards before stretching toward the sky.

“Oh, we’re alright,” she says, cleaving her ponytail in two and pulling at both ends. “Honestly I’m not too worried about it. My mother says as long as we stay in the orange zone, evacuation is just a precaution.” She senses my confused look. “FireHack?” I nod but it’s not convincing. “It’s the new app with all up-to-date fire news in all of L.A. county. Turns out Blaze Watch, the free app, had a 45 second delay.” She pulls out her phone and shows me a map of Los Angeles outlined in various reds and oranges and auburns. “Though it’s $5.99 a month. See here?” She zooms in on the canyons, where a grapefruit-like color is creeping along. “This is my house. As long as we stay this color we’re fine.”

“But what would 45 seconds really do?” I ask. She puts her phone away and takes out her grips, chalk, and a nut bar.

“45 seconds could be the difference between one more trip back inside the house or not. That’s what my mom says anyway.”

We follow the other girls to the floor and I’m hyper aware that I don’t have those 45 seconds into the future. I don’t even have Blaze Watch.

Every practice starts the same. We stretch as a team, jog the one mile warm up around the perimeter of the floor, and complete a quick ab rotation led by Coach Bette. The air is fat and dirty. She leads the ab rotation in between reaching for her inhaler.

For a moment, I wonder what I am doing here. This happens sometimes.

Next, we break up into events. I head to bars with two other girls and Elaine. I’m the youngest of us all, by four years. Elaine tells me if my leotard has scrunched up into my crotch. The coaches hate it when the leotard shifts and exposes us like that. They call it “Rude.”

Today she’s wearing my favorite leotard. It’s sparkly and patina blue. It accentuates her breasts and stabs into her rear so that a roll bulges out underneath. Occasionally, her underwear slips out.

All four of us gather on the mats beneath the uneven bars to put on our grips. A flake of chalk meets Elaine’s lips and she coughs and spits it out. On the scale of spitting, 10 being a hideous gurgling bordering on throwing up, I’d place this at a two point five. She’s so terrific at making herself palatable.

Last week in the break room, Elaine told all of us how she’d kissed a girl named Juda. She had a heaping bruise on her neck that had a strip of lime green. She explained that she had a girlfriend now. I didn’t know you could get a bruise on a place like the neck. It made her look wonderful.

The grips strap around our wrists with thick velcro, connecting a white, rough piece of leather from the bottom of your palm to the base of your pointer and middle fingers. The hope is that the grips keep you from flying off the high bar when conducting giants—a maneuver in which one flings herself around the entirety of the bar, a trust experiment with herself and God.

Coach Al lists what skills we are practicing today. Elaine and I start with an ankle weight drill. The coaches love making us strap various contraptions to our bodies just so that, one day, we can rip them off and feel ourselves light as whipped butter.

Elaine helps me tie on the five pound ankle weights. I thank her and look directly into the lime green bruise instead of her eyes.

“’Course, Tiger,” she says. “Now show ’em what’s up.” She pushes me towards the bar.

I start the exercise and am shocked that I’m able to manipulate my momentum. Swing myself up and land sturdily on top of the bar. Elaine sits behind the bar on a mat like a mother might do.

By the fourth kip, I can feel the rip I have on my hand widening. It appeared a few weeks ago and hasn’t gone away. Without the grips on, the wood would peel the flesh off like tissue paper. Elaine sees my grimace and waves me off the bar.

“Let me see it,” she says. I dismount the bar and hold out my palm. It’s white and taut underneath like a ceiling. I focus on Elaine’s leotard instead of the stinging pain. “It’ll hold until the end of practice. Try not to touch it.” She pats my back and replaces me on the bar.

Elaine isn’t the only girl I’ve ever met who kisses girls instead of boys. My Aunt Tula kisses women. The problem is that to acknowledge such a liking I would need to be sure. There’s no point in sounding the alarm if I am not sure. I focus on Elaine’s scrunchie as she goes through her reps. Each time she starts anew, I can see her nipples through the leotard. She grips the bar so tight, I watch her knuckles go white.

“Is that blood?” she asks as she prepares to do another rep. I look down and see it running down my thigh. For a moment I’m worried it’s my period, which I haven’t gotten yet, until I trace the grapefruit-like color all the way up to my hand.

*

Outside, the smoke is pungent and thick. The other girls find their mother’s cars in the lot and slip into the air-conditioned interior. Elaine shoots a snot rocket onto the pavement. She unlocks the car and motions to the passenger seat.

“I think you’re ready for the front,” she says. “When you sit in the back it’s like I’m your taxi driver.”

I smile and open the front door. I like to do what she says. The passenger seat is positioned higher off the ground than the back seats, my feet hover off the ground. I sit with my hand on my thighs. Elaine was nice enough to stay with me after practice and disinfected it with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide she found in the first aid kit. Though it’s clean now, the bandage is slowly turning red.

The drive back home is gross. I pray for rain until I realize that I shouldn’t be. Papa’s voice echoes: The rain is what started it all. If we had no rain, bug, we’d have no fires. We need everything to be dead so that there’s nothing left for the fire to burn. He always calls me bug as if I am not a machine.

“Your mom called my mom during practice,” Elaine says. “She asked if you could stay at ours for a little while this afternoon. Something about a second interview your mom was called into?”

“Oh, okay.”

“Is she still at Trader Joes?” Elaine asks.

“Not really,” I say. “She’s in between positions.” Elaine says nothing to this.

I’m always eager to be invited into Elaine’s house. Her mother is always elected to host team events, but besides those annual parties I haven’t been inside. It makes my heart feel especially tender as we race down the freeway: the possibility of witnessing Elaine in her endangered house on the top of her canyon.

She rolls down her window and flicks a nail clipping out the window. Rolls it back up. We both cough. To be sure I liked her would mean I would not be able to stop thinking about her. Which I can.

Elaine exits the freeway into the canyon, flashes her wipers to erase the soot. I press my palm against my thigh, realizing that if I press it a certain way I can get it to sting in the exact right way. It even feels good.

Elaine takes a hand to her neck, massages the bruise.

She pulls into her garage and we exit the car. Outside it’s more apocalyptic than before; I can convince myself it’s exciting from all the way up here.

The inside of Elaine’s house is lush with light. I spot the sofa, emerald green with an array of blue pillows, that gloriously fills up the entire room. You would never think that the house was in danger, not from her mother’s reclined position by the TV. A glass of iced-tea sits on the coffee table. It wafts peppermint through the air.

“Hey girls,” her mother says, not sitting up.

The windows reveal the crisis. The sky now completely gray. I can see a heap of glinting orange and red at the top of a mountain in the distance. The fire slowly creeping along. Elaine ignores her mother and leads me up the stairs to her room.

“I love your room,” I say, stepping inside.

The little balcony is just as I remember it; you can see the whole world from it.

She immediately lays down on the bed. Pats a spot next to her and thanks me. Her quilted bed cover is made of soft pinks and greens. I’m surprised to see glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. I study her bedside table for a while and become very aware of how sad I would be if I didn’t end up liking her. How, eventually, I’d probably give up the whole ordeal due to confusion on the matter.

Elaine picks up a book from her bedside table. I spot a precarious tube of something, maybe a glue stick, beside it.

“Is that a glue stick?” I ask.

She places the book down on her lap, still in her leotard.

“Body glue,” she reaches over and grabs the stick. “All elite gymnasts use it. It’s made for gymnasts, by gymnasts, in order to prevent leotard slippage.” She untwists the cap, revealing a roller ball covered in sticky glue. “You just rub it all over the seams of your leotard and press it tight against your skin. I got it for Christmas.”

I wonder how my mother’s interview is going.

“Should we try it?” I say it without wanting to. Elaine’s eyes look glassy. She lets out a stifled laugh.

“I mean, I already have, but you’re welcome too.” She hands me the glue stick. I lift up a piece of the leotard just below my hip bones, swipe and press the glue stick against my skin. I turn around so she doesn’t see me swipe down lower beneath the leotard.

A gust of wind shakes the house ever so slightly and I remember that the city is on fire.

I swipe the glue stick against all the seams of the leotard and smooth it over, like you would a temporary tattoo.

“Like this?” I ask, laughing. “I feel ridiculous.”

“Yep,” she says, fingering the page she’s on to look at me. “Now test it.” She scooches over and gives the leotard a tug. It stays tight against my body, like I’ve grown a new layer of skin.

“Wow. They weren’t messing around when they made this.”

She nods, stops the tutorial, and resumes reading.

“Feel free to hop in the shower real quick to wash it off. It’s kind of impossible to take off without an excessive amount of soap.”

I look out past the balcony at the winds sweeping across the valley. A canopy of silver gauze hangs above the city. I try to spot my house in the distance.

I place the glue stick back on Elaine’s bedside table. I can feel her next to me, the presence of her body in the thick, terminal air. She flips a page of her book.

*

It isn’t until I’m in the shower, the gingham curtains drawn, that I look down to see the rip on my palm oozing its first gust of pus. I hold it under the hot water, and for just a moment I’m able to forget about everything. About Mama, about Elaine, about the fires that won’t affect me much. About the 45 seconds I don’t have.

It takes a while to work soap in between the leotard and the glue. I have to rip it off, a thin streak of red outlining where the glue was. The wet leotard sags on the floor like roadkill.

I spend several minutes arranging Elaine’s spare towel around myself in the most delightful way. I comb my short hair behind my ears and tousle it as much as it will be tousled. But when I creak open the bathroom door, Elaine is not there. Her book is closed on the bed, the bookmark thrown beside it.

In my towel, I wander down the staircase. The TV is still on, but her mother isn’t there. At the bottom of the stairs, I see them in the backyard.

Elaine’s mother is waving her hands at Elaine. They seem to be yelling at one another, hurling outdoor furniture into the pool. I watch, stunned, as Elaine topples a wrought iron chair into the navy blue water. I open the sliding glass doors.

“Help me get the barbeque on the baja shelf!!” Her mother screams at Elaine. She notices me standing in front of the sliding doors.

“What’s going on?” I say. Elaine looks up briefly from the side of the pool where she’s launching chaise longue chairs into the deep end.

“We are officially in the red zone. We have to evacuate, like, right now!”

I feel the towel cold against my legs and notice I’m stepping in a puddle of soot.

I recognize the strategy. Last winter, Mama had shown me Rob Lowe on TV, standing in the street with a blaze behind him, telling everyone to flood their pipes with wet socks, leave all their sinks running, and drop their furniture in the pool. A very smart idea, if you had a pool.

“Shit,” I say. It’s one of the only times I’ve used the word.

“Get over here and help us!”

I run over while trying to keep my towel up. A fire pit, two more chairs, and a wooden coffee table capsize into the pool. While helping Elaine’s mother with the standing hammock, my towel slips off. I’m standing there naked with my bleeding hand in Elaine’s backyard. I quickly pull it back up.

“Why the hell is your friend naked, Elaine!”

The pool is nearly full. A bowlful of jello, I think, full of Pottery Barn’s nicest furniture. The sky is ominously beautiful. I wouldn’t mind if it stayed this way even if the fires went away.

“Elaine, go inside and grab the emergency packs,” her mother pulls her car keys out from her pocket. “I’m gonna go start the car.”

Elaine leaves us outside and heads for the house. I know about these, too: backpacks pre-filled with one’s savable mementos, passports, valuables, and electronics. I’d gotten into a fight with Mama last year about whether or not we needed to prepare them. She’d said I was being silly. For some reason, I had wanted to be a part of that chaos.

*

“Your mother is coming to pick you up shortly,” Elaine’s mother says. “Our car won’t be able to fit all three of us.” We are in the front yard of the house. The two-door Mercedes looks like it might pop.

“We can’t leave her here, Mom!”

“We aren’t leaving her here, Elaine.” Her mom’s face is scrunched up with panic. “Her mother is on her way. Where do you suppose she will sit?” She looks around the car in disbelief. “Should we strap your naked friend on the roof?”

Elaine doesn’t laugh. She mouths “I’m sorry” to me.

The car doors shut. I can hear the bluetooth speaker announce itself as they pull out of the driveway. I’m still standing in my towel as the car starts down the hill.

I follow the car down the street. The pavement is hot and the air hurts my head. I readjust the towel so I can jog. Cars skid out of neighboring driveways as mothers, fathers, and children flee. I watch one woman hop into her car, phone to her ear and a tote bag in hand, eating kettle chips like she’s about to go to the mall. I remember my mother’s interview and wonder if she got pulled out of it. If she needed just 45 more seconds.

A block later, I spot a small cat underneath a bougainvillea. She’s white with small black spots and hops onto a nearby fence. The house behind the cat has left their sprinklers on. The cat is drizzled by the cool water. I imagine the cat will be the only creature left once everybody has evacuated.

I walk another block before turning to look back at Elaine’s house. The fire is just above it, like a halo, though it isn’t clear if it will descend and actually burn the whole house down. I remember learning that fire travels quicker uphill than downhill, and wish, for once, that weren’t true. I imagine Elaine’s house in ruins. The only thing left would be the pool, their furniture sewn into its folds.

When I turn back towards the valley, I see her. Elaine’s mom’s car has stopped and she’s standing there, still in her leotard, walking back towards me. Of course she’d walk back to me, I think. The sky seems to salute me as I trudge towards her, my feet burning bright with hope. She draws nearer and nearer, her flip flops clomping up the street. Her ponytail swishing very beautifully in the haze.

 

Emma Goss is a writer from Los Angeles and a graduate of Vassar College. She is the recipient of the Beatrice Daw Brown Prize and Princeton University’s Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in Panyrus Magazine and The Attic at Trinity College Dublin.

 

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