Summary
The title story of the collection begins with the narrator describing the night he and his family purchase a Christmas tree in the parking lot of a supermarket. The narrator has slipped a disc in his back, so he's unable to help load the tree onto the car, and he describes the purchase in terms of it being embarrassing having to watch his wife and eight-year-old son hoist the tree without his assistance. He describes the way the tree salesman regards him with "a look he reserves for shirkers, layabouts, vandals and those destroying the social fabric by refusing to pull their weight" (73). When they return to their house with the tree, the narrator's wife has to leave immediately for work. She works as a nurse at a hospital and has had to take on extra shifts for the four months her husband has been out of commission. The imbalance has clearly put a strain on their relationship.
The Saturday after they pick up the tree, the narrator defies the advice of his physical therapist and tries to bring boxes of Christmas decorations down from the attic. Upon descending, he misses a rung of the ladder and drops the boxes, crushing many of the family's ornaments and his wife's beloved nativity scene. He doesn't fall, but the stress from missing a rung and planting his foot on a lower rung twinges his back. Everything in the nativity has broken except for the infant Jesus.
The narrator, from his now-customary place lying down in the middle of the living room, tells his children to turn off the TV and demands that they decorate the tree. His youngest, Eve, wants to decorate, but the eldest, Ben, doesn't want to, and his younger brother Sam falls into line. But the narrator insists, so the boys help their sister decorate in a huff. Then, to the narrator's chagrin, he realizes he won't be able to lift Eve into the air to place the angel on the tree. He's dreading her asking him to, but she never does, and instead she hands him a pillow for his back.
As soon as his wife, Claire, walks through the door from her shift at the hospital, Ben tells her that the narrator broke the nativity scene. She immediately has to attend to the home—pull the washed clothes out, get her husband ibuprofen, clean the kitchen, etc. Then, she tells him that she could make triple pay if she works on Christmas Eve. He tells her not to do it, but she says they can't afford for her not to do it. The narrator then reflects on the whole experience since he had his accident. The doctors had said that after six weeks, he should be back on his feet and able to work again. It has now been sixteen weeks, and his recovery seems to have plateaued.
In his reflection, the narrator informs the reader of he and his wife's domestic "script," wherein she is "the slapdash one" (80), and he is the neat and tidy perfectionist. The narrator can't stand a mess—a pillow out of place, an imprecisely loaded dishwasher: these are things he simply cannot abide. This is, coincidentally, related to how he injured his back in the first place. The narrator is a supervisor for a landscaping company. One afternoon, while supervising maintenance on some private tennis courts, the narrator noticed "an errant bit of cypress bough just at head height, offending [his] perfectionist streak" (81). It was right before the owner was going to come out and check their work, so the narrator took it upon himself to huffily clip the bough with an automatic hedge clipper, but when he jerked it above his head, he slipped a disc. The pain made him drop the clipper, and the blade dug into the manicured grass of the court.
From his place on the living-room floor, the narrator expresses his concern about Christmas gift shopping, but Claire cuts him off and tells him she's already taken care of the shopping; she went during her lunch break. She tells him that he can do his part by wrapping the gifts, and she makes a slightly cutting joke about how he'll be certain to wrap them perfectly. The narrator's perfectionism is an ongoing source of tension between him and Claire. As he wraps the presents, the narrator contrasts them with last year's presents. He received a nice holiday bonus and they splurged and bought the kids all bikes, and then took a leisurely holiday on the beach. This year, the presents are meager—cheap, plastic toys.
On Christmas Eve, Claire leaves for her shift, and the narrator prepares dinner for the kids. The previous year, he made a pancake dinner, but this year he's making pasta, and his oldest child, Ben, expresses his disappointment. The narrator comments to himself about how he would technically be able to make pancakes, but he's placed limitations on himself which are hard to break out of. His limited range of motion has developed into a habit, and he can no longer tell what he is incapable of versus what he has only convinced himself he is incapable of. During dinner, his daughter Eve asks how reindeer fly, and his son Ben smugly says, "Yeah, Dad, ... I’ve got a few questions about those flying reindeer myself" (87). The narrator is sad to see his son growing out of his childhood beliefs, but is at least relieved that Ben stops short of ruining Santa for his younger siblings. Ben poses rhetorical questions: "how does Santa get into houses where there’s no chimney? And how did he carry our trampoline in his sack?" and the narrator cautions him: ‘Ben, I’d appreciate it if you thought for a second before you continued with this." He then describes the scene's resolution: "The other two are staring at him with wide hungry eyes. He falters. I see it. ‘They must be special reindeer,’ he says finally. ‘He breeds them.’ / ‘An excellent answer,’ I say" (88).
The narrator dwells on something he sees in his wife's search history on her laptop: "back pain psychosomatic" (85). Clearly, Claire is beginning to believe that the pain the narrator feels originates in his mind, rather than a more 'legitimate' physical source, like the nerves in his spine. The accusatory nature of the search prompts the narrator to constantly question his pain, wondering whether it is legitimate, and worrying that when he gets an MRI, it will show nothing wrong with his back. In the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, he goes up to his children's' rooms to check on them. Ben is still awake, and addresses him sarcastically as Santa Claus. They share a good-natured, joking exchange, and the narrator goes back downstairs. He then does something he admits is probably unhelpful to his recovery; he goes back upstairs just to look at his children sleeping peacefully.
Claire returns home at 5:30 am on Christmas morning. The narrator is lying in his usual spot in the middle of the kitchen floor. She brings in large bags of groceries full of special foods and desserts. She sits beside the narrator in the living room, and he asks her to walk on his back, like she did years ago when he was experiencing minor back pain. At first, she's hesitant, but he convinces her to do by making a joke about how he's sure she'd love to walk all over him (91). She cracks his back, and he feels temporary relief. They lie down together on the living room floor, and the narrator notices "a line of ground-in glitter and stars stuck in the carpet. Probably with glue" (92). He brings it to Claire's attention, and she responds, "Oh … yes! Don’t they look great, in this light" (94). The story concludes as the narrator tenderly removes Claire's hair ties.
Analysis
The title of the titular story of the collection derives from an idiomatic phrase, "to get on like a house on fire," meaning to get along well and quickly, referring to the speed with which houses burn. If two people are described as having "gotten on like a house on fire," then it took no time at all for them to graduate from being acquaintances to the best of friends. The idiom itself is ironic in the sense that it describes something positive—harmony between people—by way of an inherently negative referent: a burning-down house. The inherent irony of the phrase becomes central to both the story it names and also the collection as a whole, which focuses largely on fraught domestic scenarios.
The narrator of "Like a House on Fire" extends the metaphor, pressing into its inherent irony. He says, "listening to the two of us, you’d never believe that we used to get on like a house on fire, that even after we had the kids, occasionally we’d stay up late, just talking. But now that I think of it, a house on fire is a perfect description for what seems to be happening now: these flickering small resentments licking their way up into the wall cavities; this faint, acrid smell of smoke." (86)
However, in the conclusion of the story, the narrator further extends the metaphor in a way that lends his marriage more credit than his initial explication of the idiom. He says, "I look at her, feeling that small heat build between us. Our breaths fuelling it, close to the ground. This is how you do it, I think, stick by careful stick over the ashes, oxygen and fuel, a controlled burn. I open my mouth to tell her sorry" (92). By saying, "this is how you do it," the narrator questions the integrity of the original phrase. To get on "like a house on fire" is easier work than nursing a low flame over a long period time, a flame that sustains and keeps warm. This seems to be a proposal of the story: the work of a marriage, the resentments that can arise from dependence and co-dependence, is hard work, with precious respites sprinkled throughout.
Dependence and power are major themes of "Like a House on Fire," as they also are of "Flexion," "Ashes," and "Laminex and Mirrors." In "Like a House on Fire," the narrator is forced to contend with the failure of his own body, an unexpected betrayal that occurred while he was at work, in a moment that crystallizes what the story proposes as his greatest flaw: perfectionism. But his perfectionism manifests in superficial ways like rearranging the dishes in the washing machine, or trimming stray hedges in an otherwise perfectly manicured landscape. The narrator's job is as a supervisor for a landscaping company, and his injury occurs when, in a fit of righteous particularity, he swings a hedge-clipper over his head to cut a stray branch (which isn't even his job to do).
The narrator's compulsive need for petty control over small things ultimately puts him in a position of complete vulnerability and powerlessness. The powerlessness is compounded by the supposed minor nature of the injury. His prognosis is that he should be healed within six weeks, however, the story takes place sixteen weeks into the injury. He lies on his back in the center of the living room and watches clutter develop around him. Claire points out the ironic and incriminating nature of where he chooses to lay himself down. She calls him a control freak, and when he expresses his "genuine shock," she says, "When it’s coming from someone lying flat on their back in the middle of a busy family room, it morphs pretty quickly into orders. I mean, why there? Just where you can keep your eye on everything, like Central Control?" (84). Claire's indictment gestures toward the narrator's somewhat masochistic instinct to position himself exactly where he can see the worst of the mess. On the other hand, her frustration also unfairly stems from her impression that his pain isn't entirely justified or legitimate, revealed in her search history: "back pain psychosomatic" (85).
The story ends on a tender, hopeful note. The narrator, revising his former criticism of his and Claire's marriage, insists that their "careful, controlled burn" of a relationship is "how you do it" (92), in contrast to "getting on like a house on fire." They lay on the living room floor, waiting for their children to come downstairs on Christmas morning, and he tenderly undoes her hair, which is tied back tightly from her hospital shift. This moment communicates that, despite all of the tension in their house, it is still a place of refuge and relief.
