Before the fourth fire, she lived like everyone else, setting her watch by the clock on the converter box, buying groceries according to the Sunday circulars, working solely as a measure of maintenance rather than sustenance.  She, too, stayed up nights reading Seventeen or Essence magazine, taking personality quizzes or jotting down five of the “10 Tips to Reaching Your Dreams,” and fell asleep with the list firmly planted under her pillow only to wake up to the inevitability of age and circumstance.  Despite all of her earlier intentions of having a life not necessarily like that of a hotel heiress, but certainly far removed from 5 o’clock news and muffled street noise, she faced every morning accepting (resenting) the fact that she had not made good on her own promises.  

She couldn’t credit some excusable occurrence, like having unprotected sex too early or joining the army after high school, as the reason for the state of things.   Neither was she plagued by a lack of ambition.  Independent of any parental prodding, she set out to do something, anything.  Take, for instance, the fact that she decided at eleven to be a fashion designer after seeing a fashion show on television.  Her mom, in a gesture of support, bought her copies of Vogue from the second-hand store, and she spent her weekends using old socks to make evening gowns for her Barbie dolls.  She sketched also, without the benefit of fancy art supplies or classes.

She continued like that, self-possessed and self-managed, until seventh grade where she battled one of those fancy, fabric tennis visors as a final project in Home Economics.  Though she cut out all the curved pieces of the pattern and bought all the necessary stuffing, she didn’t rise to the challenge of the sewing machine and failed the class.  She could still get by without learning to use a sewing machine.  She explained to the teacher that she had taught herself to sew Barbie’s sock dresses with a needle and thread and that Donna Karan had failed draping.  She forged ahead, dream intact.  

Later, in tenth grade, her sketching fell prey to an art teacher who refused to give her anything higher than a B+, regardless of assignment, one of which was a sketch based on that famous drawing of Igor Stravinsky emphasizing his large hands.  She was told she didn’t get an A because she made Stravinsky’s hands too big.  Granted, a B+ meant that her drawing skills were better than average, and on its own did not change her mind about being a fashion designer.  However, the combination of not learning to sew with a machine and not learning to draw with perfection, regardless of her initial success, compromised her belief in the future.  

That’s when she started the first fire, small enough to engulf the socks, sketches, and a paragraph that claimed, “No one can stop you if you’re confident in yourself” without waking her parents.  She carefully searched the rest of her list for a line about overcoming the tragedy of personal ineptitude, but she found nothing.  Not long after, she told her dad that she wanted to be a writer.   He told her, matter-of-factly, she “couldn’t just up and say” she wanted to be a writer, that “writers read Shakespeare and studied for years,” even though one of her poems – a dramatic monologue about a woman, a victim of domestic abuse, being arrested for killing her husband – was published in her high school’s literary journal.  

In college, she planned to major in English-Drama because she wanted to write plays like Tennessee Williams.  When she was about seven or eight, her mom, who received free tickets to art shows as a benefit for working in the fine arts department at the local college, took her to see a student performance of A Streetcar Named Desire.  It was at this performance that she began to re-imagine her family history and the work-life continuum, but without the words to articulate this to her mom, she spent the ride home in a kind of captured silence.  She couldn’t go back to being unaware.

Instead of English-Drama, she ended up going for the more generic and somewhat marketable Communications.  This time, she read articles for advice about “ambition and fortune” or “the price of talent in a capitalist society.”  Unfortunately, the pages were wanting and caused the second fire by spontaneous combustion (her suite mate absorbed the bulk of the spray from the inside sprinkler system).  She read more pages, other articles that encouraged someone in her position to “do what you love” or “find your passion.”  Keeping her faith in the words that remained, she put together a portfolio good enough for a graduate creative writing program in poetry.  Shorty into the writing workshops, she discovered that she would be finished in only four semesters.   Not wanting the burden of convincing potential employers of a poet’s transferable skills, she switched to the literature program, a decision that brought order to things temporarily.  

For her classmates, course discussion often dissolved into the semantics of the word “minority,” with respect to a Minority Literature class, and one professor openly criticized her for an essay she wrote about his novel, which he assigned as required reading in Caribbean Literature.  Luckily, there was a professor who seemed to breathe different air than everyone else, and she found her way into this professor’s class whenever possible.  She was introduced to works by authors she would have never read on her own.  The professor called books like Woman Warrior, Feather on the Breath of God, and Gangster of Love hybrid ethnic novels because they challenged the meaning and structure of traditional novels.  These were words of defiance, building identity, and shouting unapologetically.  With the second fire still smoldering, she used her graduate degree to get a teaching job through one of those alternative certification initiatives.  The two-year program catered mostly to recent graduates bent on saving the inner city from itself while preparing for plush administrative jobs or career changers who wanted built in summers, shorter work hours, and absolution for their corporate pasts.

 She made a decent showing as a middle school English teacher mainly because she looked and sounded enough like her students’ mothers to get them to trust her, an advantage she exploited to teach them about Jim Crow Laws and the Harlem Renaissance.  She lasted a good four years before the school found out she hadn’t been properly licensed within the time allotted by the certification initiative.  Forgoing formal announcements or meetings, the principal revealed her job status for the following year by inserting a blank spot where her name used to be on the school’s organizational chart.  As a parting gift, she gave all of her students an A and started a new fire in a wastebasket with old papers and poem collages made from magazine clippings.

 The third fire inspired her to build small-scale, two-dimensional sculptures out of steel and papier-mâché, which she sold to former coworkers on the suggestion of the remaining articles about self-empowerment and improvement.  After gaining a small following and the occasional gift request, she craved more expensive materials and more elaborate processes hoping to render working a regular job obsolete.  Not exactly full circle, she found herself in an art school not suited to her, in part, because her propensity for sculpting, she realized, was not based so much on the process of sculpting as it was on the instant gratification of sculpting objects quickly.  Whenever she spent more than thirty minutes on her work, she felt like a failure, which caused her to lose interest in the outcome.  Creating pieces that required less of her energy upfront made her feel accomplished.

Class projects were so involved that students camped out in the open studios after class, working through lunch, dinner, and sometimes well into the morning.  The next day, they would brag about how late they stayed in the studio or the fact that they hadn’t showered.  Because her work ethic was more style than substance, being in the open studio left her vulnerable to competitive scrutiny.  Therefore, she finished her projects at home, painstakingly filing and sanding to make up for what she lacked technically.  In class, she suffered the indignities of soldering – improper joins, gloppy solder-filled holes, burned thumbs – and feigned excitement for polishing as a consolation to teachers for her growing indifference to their teaching.    

Lengthy class projects aside, what disturbed her most about the program was the flat, leveled appearance of everything, as if someone had scraped off a layer of skin or knocked a wall down.  It wasn’t a surface flatness, like that of a chalkboard, but a material flatness, like ugly household paint, inherent in the chemical make-up.  The teachers seemed aware of this flatness, owning it in their speech and clothing, like they were from Chicago or Detroit or upstate.  She didn’t expect full on fluorescence.  She wanted to see a glow like the kind she had seen that night watching A Streetcar Named Desire.  She needed a clue that her life had begun, but nothing pushed her beyond mediocrity.  

She started the fourth fire on the day one of the teachers held class hostage while he flipped through a catalogue of tools (the textbook) and lectured for two hours about the uselessness of tools.  She went right home, headed straight to her bedroom, and held a lighter against the base of the curtains.  This gave her enough time to sit on her couch and reread the pages left over from the previous fire.   Since she could not find any information in the pages about how setting fires leads to salvation, she realized that she had created a niche.  Everything that she had searched for in the ordinary – inspiration, the key to her destiny, the glow of life beginning – culminated in this final fire as the flames crackled and spit through the walls of her bedroom into the living area.  With the edges of her existence connected, she closed her eyes, sat back against the cushions of her couch, and exhaled until her breath became heat and smoke.