When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,2

her life, that she reads them for free in doctors’ waiting rooms, and she asked what my cholesterol level was. “You better see a doctor, mister, because you’re not as young as you think you are. And while you’re there, you might want to have those moles looked at.”

It’s nothing I wanted to think about, especially on Christmas, with a fire in the fireplace, the apartment smelling of goose. “Let’s talk about accidents instead,” I said. “Heard of any good ones?”

“Well, it’s not exactly an accident,” Lisa said, “but did you know that every year five thousand children are startled to death?” It was a difficult concept to grasp, so she threw off her blanket and acted it out. “Say a little girl is running down the hall, playing with her parents, and the dad pops up from behind a corner, saying ‘Boo!’ or ‘Gotcha!’ or whatever. Well, it turns out that that child can actually collapse and die.”

“I don’t like that one bit,” Maw Hamrick said.

“Well, no, neither do I,” Lisa said. “I’m just saying that it happens at least five thousand times a year.”

“In America or the world over?” Maw Hamrick asked, and my sister called to her husband in the other room. “Bob, are five thousand children a year startled to death in the United States or in the entire world put together?” He didn’t answer, so Lisa decided it was just the United States. “And those are just the reported cases,” she said. “A lot of parents probably don’t want to own up to it, so their kids’ deaths are attributed to something else.”

“Those poor children,” Maw Hamrick said.

“And the parents!” Lisa added. “Can you imagine?”

Both groups are tragic, but I was wondering about the surviving children, or, even worse, the replacements, raised in an atmosphere of preventive sobriety.

“All right, now, Caitlin Two, when we get home a great many people are going to jump out from behind the furniture and yell ‘Happy Birthday!’ I’m telling you now because I don’t want you to get too worked up about it.”

No surprises, no practical jokes, nothing unexpected, but a parent can’t control everything, and there’s still the outside world to contend with, a world of backfiring cars and their human equivalents.

Maybe one day you’ll look down and see a worm, waving its sad, penile head from a hatch it has bored in your leg. If that won’t stop your heart, I don’t know what will, but Hugh and his mother seem to have survived. Thrived, even. The Hamricks are made of stronger stuff than I am. That’s why I let them cook the goose, move the furniture, launder the hideous creatures from my secondhand clothing. If anything were to startle them to death, it would be my offer to pitch in, and so I settle back on the sofa with my sister and wave my coffee cup in the air, signaling for another refill.

Keeping Up

My street in Paris is named for a surgeon who taught at the nearby medical school and discovered an abnormal skin condition, a contracture that causes the fingers to bend inward, eventually turning the hand into a full-time fist. It’s short, this street, no more or less attractive than anything else in the area, yet vacationing Americans are drawn here, compelled for some reason to stand beneath my office window and scream at one another.

For some, the arguments are about language. A wife had made certain claims regarding her abilities. “I’ve been listening to tapes,” she said, or, perhaps, “All those romance languages are pretty much alike, so what with my Spanish we should be fine.” But then people use slang, or ask unexpected questions, and things begin to fall apart. “You’re the one who claimed to speak French.” I hear this all the time, and look out my window to see a couple standing toe to toe on the sidewalk.

“Yeah,” the woman will say. “At least I try.”

“Well try harder, damn it. Nobody knows what the hell you’re saying.”

Geographical arguments are the second most common. People notice that they’ve been on my street before, maybe half an hour ago, when they only thought they were tired and hungry and needed to find a bathroom.

“For God’s sake, Phillip, would it kill you to just ask somebody?”

I lie on my couch, thinking, Why don’t you ask? How come Phillip has to do it? But these things are often more complicated than they seem. Maybe Phillip was here twenty years ago and has been claiming