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

I didn’t get to finish the thought, and my mother didn’t touch my cheek, either. Instead she grabbed the (empty) can of beer out of my father’s hand and went into the kitchen. Then it was just me and my father again, just two men in a room struggling to understand the woman who had just left them alone with each other. This would clearly be a never-ending battle. I could see the two of us sitting in that room until kingdom come, trying — and failing — to understand the women we loved. The past washed over me right then, as you can’t ever stop it from doing, and there was Anne Marie, in my heart, my eyes and ears and brain, wondering what I was doing there with my parents when I should be at home, begging Anne Marie to let me come back to it, and her, and them, and us.

“Should I just go home, Dad?”

“Home?” he asked, confused, as if to say, I think, Home? Why, you’re already in it.

“My other home, I mean. Shouldn’t I just go back to Anne Marie and the kids?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be better that way? Wouldn’t things have been better for all of us if you hadn’t taken three years to come home?”

“Wait … wait,” my father said.

“For what?”

“Time,” he said.

“How much time?” I asked. “I don’t think I can wait three years. Do I have to wait three years like you did with me and Mom?”

Speaking of my mother, there she was again, in the living room, holding a triangle of big beers in both hands. She placed one can in my father’s ready claw and he immediately began drinking from it, violently, as if trying to suck up some of the aluminum from the can along with the beer. Then my mother tried to give me a beer, and I held up my hands in protest and said, “Oh no, not me.”

About me as a drinker: I wasn’t much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I’d tried drinking — in high school, at subdivision barbecues — I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss’s Christmas party (it was vodka I was drinking, more than two glasses, and so too much of it), I passed out for a minute — passed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional — and when I came to, I found myself in my boss’s kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pass before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen’s population — there was a big crowd in there, including my boss, Mr. Janzen, a tall, stern man who had a big nose that he couldn’t help, physically speaking, looking down at you with — staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, “Sandwich.” Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is.

“I don’t really drink,” I told my mother.

“You do now,” she said, with such certainty that I believed her. I took the can and we all drank our big beers, one after the other, and I discovered that my mother was right: I did drink, and I learned that when you drank, things happened, nearly by themselves. It got dark, and someone turned on the light; it got too quiet and someone turned on the television; the television got too noisy and someone turned it off; we got hungry and someone produced food — pretzels, chips, popcorn, something we ate right out of the bag. Things happened, and questions were asked, too, that might not have been asked without the beer. I asked my mother, “You got rid of your books because of me, because of what I did and what happened to me, didn’t you?” and she said, “Ha!” And then I asked, “Are you still an English teacher?” and she said, “Once an English teacher, always an English teacher.” And then I asked, “How can you teach English if you’re through with books?” and she said, “It’s perhaps easier that way.” And then I asked, “Were those stories you told me, those books you made me read, supposed to make me happy?” and she said, “I don’t know what they were supposed to do.” And then I asked, “Why did you tell me those stories, then? And why did you make me read if the reading wasn’t supposed to make me happy?” And she said, “Why don’t you ask me questions I can answer?” And then I said, “Dad is a tough old guy, isn’t he?” and she said, “No, he’s not.” And then I asked, “Will you ever forgive him for leaving us?” and she said, “All is forgiven,” and raised her beer, and for a second I thought she was going to dump it on my father’s head in a kind of baptismal forgiveness. But she didn’t, and I asked, “Can people know each other too long, too well?” and she said, “Yes, they can.” And then I asked, “What happens to love?” and she said, “Ask your father.” And I said, “Dad, what happens to love?” and he said something that sounded like, “Urt.” And then my mother asked me, “You have a job, correct? Are you going to work tomorrow?” And I said, “I think I’ll quit,” and I did so, right there, called up Pioneer Packaging and told the answering machine that I was quitting. And while I was at it, I also mentioned a number of things I hated about them and the job they’d given me, things that were totally untrue and that I wouldn’t be able to take back later on and that I would have regretted immediately if I hadn’t had so much beer in me in the first place. In this way I discovered something else drinking made possible: it made self-destruction seem attractive and let you say things you didn’t mean and you might regret, but it also made you too drunk to regret them. When I hung up on my career in packaging forever, my mother said, “Are you going to stay here for a while?” and I said, “Do you want me to?” And she said, “I’ve missed you, Sam. I’m so sorry about everything,” which I took to mean, Yes, I do want you to stay awhile. And I said, “Who needs another beer?” We all did, and then we all did again, and again, until I forgot that I’d been kicked out of my house, just like my father seemed to forget he was incapacitated: the more beer he drank, the more mobile he seemed to be, and by his sixth beer he was walking around and could get to the refrigerator and back under his own power, even, and his slurring wasn’t quite so dramatic when he asked if anyone needed another drink, which we all did. We drank together, as a family, until there was nothing left to drink and nothing else to do but pass out, right there on the couch. Not once while I was drinking did I think about Anne Marie and the kids, just a few miles away, and this was another thing I learned that night: drinking helps you forget the things you need to forget, at least for a little while, until you pass out and then wake up two hours later and vomit all over yourself and then the hallway and then the bathroom.

Because drinking was another thing I’d bumbled and wasn’t much good at. All the beer flooded out of me, and all my failures flooded back in, as if in retaliation for my thinking I could forget them: those letters, my wife, my kids, my job, my parents, Thomas Coleman, his parents, their deaths, my life! They were all speaking to me, their voices shouting over the sounds of my retching, a regular chorus of recrimination bouncing off the porcelain and tile. And then there was another voice, a voice that had a hand, a gentle hand on my back, and was saying, “It’s OK, it’s OK.”

“It is?” I asked.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” she said.