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

The living room was a good deal more together than when I’d seen it the day before. There were no booze bottles to be seen, no rings on the tables where they had been, no trace of them at all, as if they’d been called home by the mother ship. There was only one ashtray, a glass one, on the living room coffee table, with no ashes in it. The exercise bike was still in the living room, but off to the side and not smack in front of the TV the way it had been. As for the TV, it wasn’t on, but my father was sitting in front of it on the couch.

“Dad,” I said. “Good morning.”

My father turned to face me. He had twelve extra hours of gray, patchy beard grown on him since I’d seen him last, and his eyes were filmy and half-closed, or half-open, depending on how you wanted to look at it. Dad had one leg crossed over the other, which I thought was quite an accomplishment for someone as stroked out as he was. And he was drinking a forty-ounce beer, a Knickerbocker in the can. I looked at my watch. I’d slept late. It was two in the afternoon, still a little early for drinking a beer that big, especially since I didn’t remember my father drinking before, ever. But then again, my old dad had been through a lot, and who was I to tell him from where he should get his pleasure and whether it was too early in the day to get it. After all, he’d managed to cross his legs, the brave guy, and maybe the beer was in celebration of that huge accomplishment.

“Good afternoon,” my mother said, coming in from offstage, as she had the previous night. I turned to face her. She also had a big beer in her hand, and unlike the night before, today I could see her clearly, could see clearly that she had changed since I’d seen her last. For one, she was pretty. I remembered her face being severe and impressive; it could scare you into admiring it, but it wasn’t what you’d call pretty. She had always been one of those harsh, clear-eyed New England beauties whose scarily blue peepers always seemed to be looking through the disappointment that was you and back to her own clear-eyed Puritan kin. But now there was a softness to her face, not as though she’d gained weight, but as though she and her face had called some sort of truce and were at ease: her blue eyes seemed at home over her nose, which hung like an awning over her mouth, which was smiling at me. My mother’s name is Elizabeth, and she had always seemed like an Elizabeth; but now she seemed like a Beth. As Elizabeth, she had always seemed to be what she was — a stern high school English teacher — but as Beth, she seemed something kinder and gentler. A nurse, maybe, an especially pretty one.

“You look like Nurse Beth,” I told her.

“Ha,” she said, girlishly tucking her hair — it was black as it had always been, and long, too — behind her ears. My mother went over to my father, took the empty beer can out of his hand, opened a new one, and placed it in the gnarled cup holder of his right hand. He said something garbled and multisyllabic, which I took to mean, Thank you.

“Should you be giving him another beer?” I asked. My mother didn’t respond in facial expression or word, and so I added, “Because of his stroke.”

“Did you hear that, Bradley?” my mother said to my father, her smile getting even softer, full of some private pleasure. “I shouldn’t get you another beer because you’ve had a stroke.”

My father didn’t say anything back, but he shot her a look and she met it, the look, halfway, and it remained there in the room, like another son, another human being with some mysterious, shifting relationship to the two adult human beings that had made it. Because maybe this is what it means to be a son. No matter how old you are, you are always a step behind the two people who made you, the two people who always know something that you need to know, too — like, for instance, how my mother had known that Anne Marie had kicked me out of the house, or even that there was an Anne Marie, or a house.

“Last night you said that my wife had kicked me out of the house,” I said. “How did you know that?”

“What?” my mother said loudly, because my father had begun drinking the beer, slurping it heroically and at top volume, and I had to shout the question—“How did you know that my wife had kicked me out?”—so she could hear it over the soggy racket of my father’s imbibing.

“Oh, Sam,” my mother said, “it’s an old story.”

“An old story,” I repeated, thinking now of what the judge had said to me at my sentencing about good stories and bad stories, and for the first time in years I recognized that stories were everywhere and all-important. There were all those letters stashed away in the shoe box, all those people who wanted me to burn down those writers’ homes because of the stories the writers had told; there was the story that Thomas Coleman told Anne Marie that made her kick me out; there were stories that the bond analysts had told about themselves in their memoirs, if they’d even written them (one had, sort of, but I didn’t know that yet); and there were my mother’s stories, which everyone knows all about, and suddenly I knew the answer to the judge’s question, or at least half the answer. Of course a story could produce a direct effect. Why would anyone tell one if it didn’t?

But what was the direct effect? That, I didn’t know, didn’t know the stories — new or old — well enough to know what effect they might have. But my mother did, that was clear, and I hated her for it, hated her on top of already hating her for what her stories had done to me, hated her for knowing something that I didn’t and for making me feel powerless because of it, and maybe this is also what it means to be a child: always needing your parents and hating them for it, but still needing them, and maybe needing to hate them, too, and probably that was an old story as well.

“An old story,” I said again, and then in a rush reminded my mother about the judge, what he’d said so many years before about stories and what they could and could not do, and how I still didn’t know and needed to: because if my wife’s kicking me out was an old story, then her taking me back (or not, or not!) was also an old story, and I needed to know it. Would my mother help me? “It’s important,” I said. “Please.” I was even prepared to grovel and cry a little, too, and then also prepared to hate her for making me grovel and cry.

“You’re talking to the wrong woman,” my mother said. “I’m through with books. I’m through with stories of any kind.”

“You are?” I said. This was big news, all right. I couldn’t imagine my mother without her stories, stories that had meant so much to her that she’d had to force them on me. It was like imagining a musketeer without his sword or musket or the other musketeers — just one unarmed Frenchman, alone with his fancy mustache and his feathered hat and his foppishness. Then I looked around and noticed what I’d already noticed the day before: there were no books anywhere. “What happened to your books?” I asked her.

“I got rid of them,” she said.

“Why?”

“Why?” she said. Here her voice got sharp, her face got sharp, too, and I could see my new mother, Beth, revert to the old mother, Elizabeth; it was like watching the presidential faces on Mt. Rushmore morph back into the big rock they once were. “Do you want to know why?”

“I do,” I said, because I did.

My mother looked at me for a long time, and as she did, her face got kindly again. You could see pity, love, and pain filling her up, rising from her toes, through the hollow tubes of her legs and torso and leveling off in her eyes, where I could see them, the emotions, sloshing around in her pupils. My mother raised her right arm slightly, as if to touch my cheek, and I needed her then more than ever, but this need was closer to love than to hate. I wanted to say, Oh, touch my cheek, Mother. You told me those stories and ruined my life, and I ruined yours, too, but if you touch my cheek …