Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

Then I opened the door — it wasn’t locked — and found that everything had changed: it looked nothing like the house I remembered. The house I remembered had the neat sort of disorder peculiar to the well-read and overeducated: in the house I remembered, there were books and magazines everywhere, but everything else — dishes, glasses, clothes — was in its proper place. This house, on the other hand, looked as though it had been strip-mined by Vikings. There were empty bottles — gin bottles, beer bottles, red wine bottles — scattered everywhere. There were even empty peach schnapps and wine cooler and white zinfandel bottles here and there — in between couch cushions, in the fireplace, on top of the microwave — which made me wonder if my parents had been drinking in the house with high school girls or sorority sisters. My parents had once been big believers in natural woodwork — the wainscoting, banisters, overwide windowsills — but now the wood looked pale and sickly, as though it were turning into linoleum. There were ashtrays on nearly every surface — the kind of shallow, thin metallic ashtrays that you could only get by stealing them from diners and restaurants — but since all the ashtrays were overflowing, some of the bottles had cigarette butts soaking in the remaining drops of booze. There were stacks of dishes in the sink and piles of pots and pans on the stovetop, and none of them had been washed; the food had been caked and dried on them for so long that the spaghetti sauce and the flecks of vegetable and meat matter looked as natural a part of the pots and pans as the handles and the lids. The pantry shelves were totally empty except for those things — confectioners’ sugar, toothpicks, tiny marshmallows — that you couldn’t ever get rid of, plus boxes and boxes of these candy-bar-looking things. They were called Luna bars, and I assumed they were some sort of health food for women because the boxes featured highly stylized drawings of women jogging around the moon. The only items in the refrigerator were a half-empty two-liter bottle of tonic water and a jar of light mayonnaise that had probably been there for several presidential terms. The whole house smelled like a perfumed dog, even though my parents had never, to my knowledge, owned a dog, and my mother, to my knowledge, had never worn perfume. There was an exercise bike stationed in front of an enormously big and impossibly thin TV, which was perched on the middle shelf of an otherwise empty bookcase — empty of books, and empty even of other shelves. That was the biggest change: in the house I remembered, there were books everywhere, but now I couldn’t find a one, not even a TV Guide. I had even begun to wonder whether I was actually in the right house when I heard a noise — a grunt or a squeak — coming from the guest room. I followed the sound. That’s when I saw my father.

He was an invalid and in bad shape; this was obvious at first glance. His face was shrunken and drawn back, and he had a plaid wool blanket on his lap. When he saw me, my father made a kind of wounded-animal noise that I took to mean one-third surprise, one-third Welcome home, one-third Please don’t look at me, I’m hideous, and the blanket slid off his lap and onto the floor, kicking up a good amount of dust that floated there in the sunlight like something beautiful and precious and then sank to the wide-planked pine floor.

I returned the blanket to his lap and asked, “Oh, Dad, what happened to you?” even though it was obvious what had happened to him: he’d had a stroke. There is no mistaking a stroke victim, even if you haven’t seen one before, which I hadn’t. I didn’t know what else to say, so I repeated, “Oh, Dad.” He seemed to appreciate my awkward position, because he made the wounded-animal noise again, but this time it was much more soothing, and I was calmed by it.

“Don’t say another word,” I told him. “Relax. Let me do the talking and get you up to speed.” I told him about college and my switch from English to packaging science, and I told him about Anne Marie and Katherine and Christian and about my job at Pioneer Packaging and our house in Camelot and how much I missed him and Mom. I didn’t tell him, though, about the voice that asked, What else? or Thomas Coleman or Anne Marie’s kicking me out, because I figured he already had enough to worry about. But even so, this story must have overwhelmed him a little in its detail and scope, because by the time it was done he seemed to be asleep. I shook my father by the arm, gently at first, but then harder and harder until he woke up with an alarmed snort. From then on I asked only short, factual questions, like “Where’s Mom?” to which he responded in a two-syllable grunt that I took to mean, She’s out.

We sat there for a while in silence. It got darker and I turned on the light. I didn’t feel the need to talk, maybe because whatever I might have said wouldn’t have been as smart as the silence. My father had a holy-man quality to him: he struck me as having the sort of deep wisdom cripples seem to get with their crippling, and I was prepared to sit there and soak up whatever knowledge he might emanate. It was nice. But the place really was a mess. Even my father’s bedroom was littered with beer cans and empty wine bottles, and there were even a few boxes of wine, the sort that comes with its own spigot. I was certain they were my mother’s because she would always have a drink with dinner and my father never did. Besides, I couldn’t imagine him drinking anything now without a straw and I didn’t see any of them scattered around.

And on the topic of my mother, where in the hell was she? Where did she get off, leaving my crippled father alone in his condition and not even cleaning the house before she left it? Did her crippled husband not deserve a little more dignity, a little less filth? The more I ruminated on it, the more I realized how typical this was of my mother. She, as mentioned, was always the hard-hearted one, and even when my father left us for those three years, she didn’t shed a tear. My mother wasn’t exactly the welcome wagon when my father came back, either, and my old man really wore himself out trying to get back in her good graces. Thinking about it now, I decided there was a direct connection between his stroke and that difficult time, too. And then there were those Emily Dickinson House stories she used to tell me, the ones that ruined so many lives, and I was really getting worked up about her, my callous mother, who had now apparently abandoned my father in his time of need. Where did she get off? I might have said this out loud, because my father nearly raised his eyebrows at me and for a second I thought he was going to chastise me for being rude to my mother, but instead he said, “Man.”

“Man what?” I said.

“Grown,” my father said, or that’s what I thought he said, and then he raised his finger as if to point at me. Or that’s what I thought he was doing. The finger made it only about an inch off his lap and then fell back again. Of course, this could all have been a big misunderstanding. But then again, maybe misunderstanding is what makes it possible to be in a family in the first place. After all, when I was eight I understood my father all too clearly: he was scared, and so he left us. My mother was lonely and angry at his leaving, and so she told me those stories about the Emily Dickinson House. I understood that, too. Maybe we had understood too much about one another; maybe if we’d misunderstood one another, then we’d have been more of a family. Maybe if we’d been more of a family, I would have seen my father in the last ten years and he wouldn’t have to marvel at how much I’d grown. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

“I am a grown man,” I said to my father. And then, remembering Terrell in prison, I clarified: “I’m a grown- ass man.”