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

It was my mother. And because it was my mother, I felt I could say anything and not be too ashamed of it, and so I said, “Oh, Mom, I’m scared I’ve lost them forever. I miss them so much.”

“I know you do,” she said.

“Is that an old story, too?”

“Yes,” my mother said. “The oldest.”

“Stories,” I said. “It feels like I don’t know anything about them. Please teach me something about these stories.”

“I already tried to,” she said, and then she led me to bed, which is where I made up my mind: I would have to learn something about stories, and fast. My mother wouldn’t teach me; that much was clear. My old dad was too far gone to do me much good; that was clear, too. I would have to go somewhere else to learn, and I thought I knew where.

I would go to a bookstore. I couldn’t go to a library, I knew that, because libraries demand quiet and decorum and I wasn’t exactly wired for that: as a child I’d been shushed to death too many times by too many bony librarians in their cardigan sweaters, and I wasn’t going back, the way the intelligent bull never goes back to the china shop after that disastrous first or second or third time. But I didn’t recall bookstores’ requiring any such absolute delicacy, although it’s true that I hadn’t been to one in twenty years.

But first I had to do something about my hangover. The story of one’s first significant hangover is overlong and familiar and I won’t add to it here except to say that it felt as though someone had taken their diseased head and switched it with my healthy one. I got out of bed, hopped in the shower, which didn’t make my hangover go away but did wet it down some. Someone — my mother, I assumed and still do — had taken my suitcase (the one I’d taken with me to Cincinnati) out of my van and put it in my room. I unpacked the suitcase, got dressed, and went downstairs. The house was empty — you can always tell when a house is empty, especially if you yell out several times, “Hello! Mom? Dad? Anyone here?” and then check each and every room for signs of life. They were both gone, all right. I had once again woken up late: it was just past noon. My mother had gone to work, no doubt, but where was my father? Had the university press kept him on out of pity so that he’d still feel somewhat normal? Oh, I missed Pioneer Packaging right then, missed the feeling of normality it gave me. Because isn’t this what work is good for? Not so much a way to make your money, but a way you can feel normal, even (especially) when you know you are not? I had those hungover, jobless blues, all right, and maybe my father knew I would, because on the kitchen table there was a tall glass full of something dark, murky, and potent and next to it a note, in his handwriting, handwriting that was a little shaky but definitely still his — I recognized it from those many postcards he’d sent me — that said, “Drink me.” Like Alice, I did. For a second I felt much worse, and then the second after that I felt much better. Whatever the cure for drinking was, it was much like drinking itself, which I suddenly felt ready to do more of, right after I went to the Book Warehouse.

The Book Warehouse: I’d driven past it many times. It was maybe a mile from my house, right on Route 116. I knew that Anne Marie and the kids went there all the time: for story hour, story circle, story time, story share, and other story-related activities, all, apparently, with their own separate purpose and function. But I’d never been there, and how was that possible? This was the question I asked myself as I pulled into the enormous parking lot, next to a series of other enormous parking lots serving adjacent superstores. How had I, who’d lived near this place for years and years and whose life had been ruled by stories and books — how had I not once entered its doors? I was like the ancient fisherman who’d never been swimming and who, on the verge of taking his invigorating first dip, wondered what had taken him so awfully long.

The Book Warehouse was big. That was the first thing I noticed. Plus bright. The bookstores my mother had taken me to when I was young smelled like the back of a damp storage closet and were dim and narrow and filled with towering, overflowing bookshelves that leaned over the aisles and obscured the flickering overhead lights. The Book Warehouse was nothing like that. No, when you walked into the Book Warehouse it was like walking into an operating room, with cheerful music piped in and purple banners hanging from the ceiling that told you to READ!!! Except there weren’t any books, not that I could see, because when you entered the store, you walked right into a café. There isn’t much to say about the café itself. I don’t remember what it looked like, really, or whether they served food there, and if they did, whether there was anyone there to serve it to you. It was the sort of place where you entered and seemed to pass out for a second and suddenly you came to and were holding a cup of coffee. It was West African native dark bean coffee. I don’t know what that meant, exactly, but the coffee was excellent and came in an attractive ceramic mug with good heft and balance to it. I remember that much.

It was three in the afternoon at this point, and the café was empty except for a group of women, mostly, sitting around in a circle in their comfortable chairs sipping their coffee with their books on their laps. These women looked like our female neighbors in Camelot, with their severe, sensible haircuts and expensive casual clothes that were baggy enough to hide how thin they either were or weren’t and shoes that were somewhere between clogs and running sneakers and that in any case had very good traction. I’d never really thought about this kind of female Camelotian, pro or con, but Anne Marie hated these women before she started to become one of them. And because I was married to Anne Marie and was on her side, I’d hated them, too, although without much feeling or reason. After all, were they so different from me? What was wrong with them? Was that same thing wrong with me? How could the books help make us all better? I decided to sit down, inconspicuously eavesdrop on their conversation about the book spread-eagled in each of their laps, and find out.

They weren’t talking about the book, not exactly; that’s the first thing I found out. Instead, they were talking about how they felt. When I sat down, one woman with a flowing tan barn coat and dark circles under her eyes was talking about how a character in the book reminded her of her daughter.

“Oh, it was heartbreaking,” the woman said. “It made me cry.” Speaking of that, she started crying right then, and since crying is as contagious as laughter or the worst kinds of disease, I nearly started crying, too. But I got hold of myself and managed to choke back my tears, and finally the woman did, too — her sobs became whimpers that became sniffles that became brave, quivering sighs. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, wiped the hands on her barn coat, and again said, “It made me cry. I loved it. That’s all I have to say.”

“Wait a minute — hold on,” I said. I had all these questions already. What exactly in the book reminded the woman of her daughter? And why did this make her cry? Did she, the woman in the barn coat, cry in great, shameless, heaving sobs in public places, or quietly, behind a closed bathroom door with the water running so that no one could hear her? I remembered my mother assigning me books and asking me, after I’d read them, to tell her about them. Details, she always wanted details and more details, and apparently I was my mother’s son, more than I wanted to be, because now I wanted details, too. But I’d said too much already, this was obvious: the other women, mostly, were glaring at me as if I’d murdered both the woman and her daughter with my outburst, and the woman herself looked as though she were on the verge of another crying jag. “Sorry,” I said, then sank back into my chair and pledged to listen quietly, very quietly, and with my mind as wide open as possible.