I can hold on now only to Pom. The rest of them have already taken what they need from me. The other morning, because I drink it so quickly, the coffee does not have time to go stale, because coffee is not one of the things, I tell myself, that I care about, about which I make my life difficult, I do not grind the coffee—and because I was afraid the coffee machine would play its tricks (as it did this morning, leaking water and coffee from an unidentifiable place in the mechanism), I pulled out the French press and boiled the water in the stained but beautiful teakettle which is by now totally impractical. Years ago, it was only somewhat impractical. It does not whistle—which I like, as the sound of a teakettle whistling always sounds desperate to me—but the square, elegant handle gets very hot, and you must use a mitt to pour the boiling water into the pot or cup.
Now, what’s more, it leaks. The stove in the kitchen is vast, and the little bit of water in the kettle leaked and caused a rust spot or pool of water on the griddle—but so many things in the kitchen cause water spills and rust that only when George pointed out that the kettle was sitting in a pool of water did I notice it. It is the kind of thing he notices. I think it leaks because it has been left to boil out too often, and over time the heat has made a hole in the bottom. It is impossible to see the hole, dear Liza, the hole in the bucket. Then fix it, dear Henry. Somehow along the way I have become both Liza and Henry. Shall I note here that you know this, and bought me a replacement for this kettle? The same one, at great expense.
That morning, I burned myself trying to make coffee in the French press. After the kettle boiled (the new one, which you supplied from God knows where, un negozio nell’aria), I put too much water in the glass cylinder, and when I pressed down, hot water and coffee grounds spewed over the counter, onto the green tiles that edge the vegetable sink, onto the floor. The hot water splashed on the inside of my left forearm and onto my chest. I was wearing a thick sweater over a T-shirt, and while the sweater is stained, I am wearing it anyway, as I type this—I have not washed it, as lately I have not done so many things. It is an ugly, checkered brown-and-red sweater. At first the burn didn’t hurt. I did know enough to put my arm under cold water, which I did at the double sink. The water hissed on my arm. The swan-neck tap, with its two silver wings. That should have been a warning, but as it did not hurt immediately, I did not recognize it. Even once it began to hurt, I did not hold it under running water long enough. I wanted to make more coffee before Naomi, who was staying in the house for a few days, came down for breakfast. I had an almost perverse desire to please her. So my attention was taken up with wiping off the counter and the tiles, and remaking the coffee. She did come down, her red hair just washed and wrapped in a towel. Or I think I did not remake it, as the coffee left in the press was perfectly good. And now that I reread this, I remember that I did not tell her about the burn, as it was her husband who had set himself on fire.
I am guiding my mind back to the burn, as one would coax a dog or a child, a child who keeps picking at holes in a fence with a stick she has broken off from a shrub, the white end oozing a little sap, the clean smell of wood, the exciting feeling, almost erotic, of having altered the world just slightly. The branch was intact before she tore it off with her hand, walking a few steps behind her mother, who has no idea of the violence she is capable of at six. If she could she would gnaw at the stick with her teeth. The burn was at first bright red, the color of a sunburn, but defined, as if I had burned myself by focusing a magnifying glass on the inside of my arm a few inches from the wrist. The burn is the shape of Australia. On the first day it stayed bright red, and it hurt a little, but I thought nothing of it. I burn myself often. One of the first times I woke up in your cavernous apartment, the curtains pulled over the bow window, and the light as always gray, as if in these rooms it is always raining, the ceiling mother-of-pearl, you said, it is better. I had badly burned a knuckle on my left hand, cooking. That was, I understand now, by looking at pictures of scarifying burns on the Internet, a second-degree burn, because it blistered. For a number of days, I kept knocking it open. So you must have seen it at least twice, the burn on my knuckle: once when it was raw, and next when it was better. When we are together, you often take my fingers and press them to your mouth. But now I have a burn you have not seen, and it is almost healed. It did not hurt very much the first or the second day. It turned a darker red, the color of a wine stain, but on the third night it began to burn.
It kept me up, a night visitor. But one I had invited myself, as I invite so many things.
The burn turned a darker red, the color of a port-wine stain. When I was little, I had a birthmark on my right shoulder blade, a large splotch. Between the ages of nine and thirteen I wore a shirt on the beach because I was embarrassed. Then I forgot about it. Now the marks are gone, replaced by others. It didn’t occur to me that other girls had their own catalog of flaws: to me they seemed unmarked and unencumbered. Pom asked, the other day, whether I knew that in French ouch is not ouch but aïe. What is it in Italian? she asked. You must ask Lorenzo. You tell me a story about burns: After an affair with a Belgian woman, you did not see her for ten years, and then she called you in the middle of the night. She was in the hospital. In her house in France, in the country, she had fallen in front of a fireplace. Her stockings caught fire. She had been burned over forty percent of her body. You remembered that exactly: forty percent. A terrible thing. You saw her again, after that. Well, this is not that, I said. A deflection: what is there to complain about, really? A little patch of sunlight? Are you thinking of lying down in it?
The burn was covered by the dress I bought yesterday, which I chose because the silk is printed with swirls, like the marbleized paper that once upon a time you could only buy at Il Papiro in Florence, but now, like everything else, you can get it anywhere. This morning the burned skin is sandpaper, the skin bunching a little, as when you catch a thread in a sweater and the weave puckers. It is still burning. The household, which consists at the moment of Pom and Frank, here for a week, is exasperated by my lack of interest in it—what lack of interest, you would say, reading this, all you do is carry on about this so-called burn. They are proponents of aloe and ice. I think it is just one more hurt I am doing nothing about. And I can hear you saying, it is inelegant to feel sorry for yourself, cara, and not what I would expect of you, who can make a fire with one stick in the forest. Did you learn that in the Girl Scouts? I was not a Girl Scout, I was a Brownie, for about two weeks. But, you say, you are a Girl Scout now—un’Esploratrice. You have to be grown-up, cara mia, to be a Girl Scout.
__________________________________
From Estate by Cynthia Zarin. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Cynthia Zarin.
