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

But here, too, no one recognized me; no one seemed to know who I was. As I left the farmers’ market, I even walked up to one woman I thought I recognized from high school, a fit woman in expensive running shoes, walking her three children in their complicated, rickshaw-style stroller with its many mesh pockets and cup holders, and I said, “Hello, I’m Sam Pulsifer.”

“That’s fantastic,” she said, and then veered around me on her fast-walking way through the farmers’ market and around the town green.

“That is fantastic,” I shouted after her. She didn’t recognize me; no one recognized me! It was like Nero coming back to Rome years later and the few singed citizens who remained not knowing who he was.

There was one more thing to do to test my anonymity, one more bit of final accounting. I walked a couple of blocks to the east, to where the Emily Dickinson House used to be. They’d cleared away the charred wreckage, of course, the yellow emergency tape, too, but they hadn’t built a new house to take the place of the old one. Instead they had planted trees, which were now decent-size eighteen-year-old birches and white pines and maples, and in the midst of this arbor there was a bronze plaque on a four-foot-high metal pole, probably explaining what had once been there and why it wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t read what was on the plaque, and if you didn’t, you probably would have thought that there was nothing there before those trees except for other, older trees. You wouldn’t have known about Emily Dickinson or her house, or about my accidentally burning it down and killing those poor Colemans.

And if you saw me standing there, chances are you wouldn’t have recognized me as the boy who, some twenty years earlier, et cetera, even though, as mentioned, I’d once achieved a good deal of local celebrity. Was this so strange? After all, I no longer looked like the boy who had done what he had done: my face was redder even than it had been then, with more wrinkles and some flab and the beginning of jowls; my hair was both higher and curlier on my head and retreating backward; plus, I’d just started growing a beard, which promised one day soon to truly cover large parts of my face. I looked nothing like a boy anymore: I looked like someone else — a grown-ass man, maybe, who had a family he loved and had hurt, and who’d been exiled because of it and quit his job and moved back in with his parents and was now ready — no, determined —to make amends. Finally I really was a grown-ass man, and it was about time. I had waited so long to become one.

And what does one do when one finally becomes a grown-ass man? Why, one goes back to the people he’s loved and lost and tells them, as the poet says, the whole truth and nothing but and then refuses to go anywhere until he is forgiven for lying in the first place. It was time. Hopefully it wasn’t past time. I turned away from the Emily Dickinson House and began to walk back to my van, parked outside my parents’ place. I was going back to Camelot, and in doing so, I had the idea that I was walking away from the past and heading toward the future and that I’d better hurry up and get there before I — like those poor farmers and their pesticided produce — was no longer needed and, if remembered at all, was remembered only as something that was bad for you.

Except then, finally, I was remembered; I was recognized and I learned some useful information when I was. I’d almost made it back through the farmers’ market when I ran into Sandy Richards, a tenth-grade biology teacher at Pioneer Regional High School, which was where my mother taught eleventh-grade English. She walked right toward me, and I couldn’t avoid her. I also couldn’t avoid noticing Sandy had aged the way my mother had not: her face was a map of wrinkles and blotches; she had begun the once-a-week home-permanent routine in order to obscure her thinning hair; and most damning, she was wearing the sort of sweat clothes people wear, not when they exercise, but when they can’t feel comfortable in anything else.

“Sam?” she said. “Sam Pulsifer?”

“That’s me, Mrs. Richards,” I admitted.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said.

“Almost,” I said.

“How have you been?”

“I’ve been OK,” I told her. After that, there was a huge, oppressive silence surrounding us, a silence made up of all the past we couldn’t speak of and all the present and future made unspeakable by the past. It was awkward. And in order to break that awkward silence, Sandy Richards said something that ended up being an important fact I learned that day.

“We’ve missed your mother,” she said.

“You have?”

“I wish she was still at school,” Sandy said. “We miss her”—and here her background in biology betrayed her and she searched long and hard for just the right word to describe what about my mother she missed—“spirit,” she finally said.

“I bet,” I said. “Now, I can’t remember. How long have you missed it?”

“It must be about six years now,” Sandy said.

“That’s right,” I said. “It must be.” And then, “You know, my mother has always been a little foggy on the details of her retirement.”

“Retirement …,” Sandy said, clearly unnerved by the conversation’s turn. Her blotches and liver spots seemed to grow and throb with her unease. “Well, I suppose she was asked to retire, sort of.”

“Oh.”

“Because of her drinking,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “Her drinking.”

“It’s a disease,” Sandy said. “Treatment, not punishment, that’s my motto.”

“That’s a very good motto to have,” I told her.

After that, we were surrounded by another silence — a more rewarding one for me, although I can’t speak for Sandy. My mother had been forcibly retired from her job six years ago but hadn’t told me, had lied to me about going to work, and not just on a Saturday, either. Why? Had she told my father? Where did my mother go every day? And how could I find out?

“Sam?” Sandy said. “Hello?” She had clearly been talking to me while I’d been having these thoughts, and I heard her voice from far away, then followed it until I left my world and returned to hers.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m back.”

“Yes, well, I have to go,” Sandy said, and then she shook her canvas tote bag full of organic vegetables, as though the vegetables were late for an appointment. “Please give my best to your mother.”

“I will,” I said. “I most definitely will.”

It was a triumphant walk from the farmers’ market to my parents’ house that afternoon. I had learned something, something large, but it wasn’t the learning something, in itself, that was so satisfying: it was that I would get to go home, tell my mother that I knew the truth about her “work,” and then say, Aha! It was the Aha! I was so looking forward to, so much so that I momentarily forgot my plan to go back to Camelot, to force myself and my apologies and confessions and further apologies upon Anne Marie and the kids until they took me back. The prospect of saying, Aha! to my mother had that effect on me, like amnesia. I bet I wasn’t the only one for whom this was the case. I bet it was also the triumphant Aha! and not the truth itself that had fueled all those famous literary detectives I knew not much about except their names — Philip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Joe and Frank Hardy. I felt like yelling something celebratory on my way home, something like, Yeah! or Fuck, yeah! just like Marlowe would have yelled, just like the Hardys would have yelled, and maybe Holmes, too, although maybe that’s why he kept Watson around: to tell Holmes to simmer down and not get too far ahead of himself.