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

“That’s silly,” she said when I told her this after we were married. “I wasn’t too beautiful for you to speak to. I never thought so, not ever.”

“If you didn’t think you were too good looking,” I asked her, “then why didn’t you come up and talk to me in the first place?”

“That’s a good question,” she said, and I never did get the answer.

But back to our senior seminar, where we were to choose our paths, and Anne Marie’s path was lids — those plastic travel lids you put on your coffee and soda cups. This was in the spring of our senior year, and Anne Marie had the misfortune of giving her presentation right after James Nagali, the only other male student at Our Lady of the Lake, who gave a masterly speech on new soap-dispensing technologies. James was from Ivory Coast, and immediately after graduation he went to work for Ivory soap, but I don’t think there’s any connection.

Our teacher for the seminar was Professor Eisner, a mostly bald man who looked like a walking advertisement for forehead and who, it was rumored, had screwed up a supposedly revolutionary sanitary napkin packaging design that had cost Procter and Gamble a million dollars or two — which was why, the rumor went, he had ended up teaching us. Professor Eisner gushed over James’s presentation, but not over Anne Marie’s. He pointed out certain structural flaws in her lid designs; he asked her rhetorically if she knew what it felt like to have hot coffee pour not into your mouth but onto your chin and down your neck; he asked Anne Marie if she had learned nothing in her four years as an Our Lady of the Lake packaging-science major; he asked her if she had any contingency plans for when the offers from all the prestigious firms didn’t come rolling in. “Because roll in they certainly will not,” he said.

It’s true that Anne Marie wasn’t exactly a born packaging scientist, and it’s also true that her lids, had they ever been manufactured (they weren’t), would have burned a few faces and spawned a few lawsuits. But still, I didn’t like the way Eisner was talking to her. I looked over at Anne Marie, and while she didn’t look a bit upset, not anywhere near tears — she was a tough one, and still is — Anne Marie was playing with her gold crucifix necklace in an agitated manner, and I felt I had to say something in her defense.

“Hey, Professor Eisner,” I said. “Ease up a little. Be nice.” It’s true I didn’t exactly scream this at the top of my lungs, and it’s also possible that Professor Eisner might not have heard me at all, because he moved right on to the next presentation, but the important thing was that Anne Marie heard.

“Thank you,” Anne Marie said to me after class.

“For what?” I asked, although I knew, because, of course, I’d said what I’d said so she’d thank me, because there’s not a pure motive in me or in anyone else, I don’t think.

“For standing up for me.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Would you like to have dinner?”

“With you?” she asked.

This was just the way she talked — bluntly and always in pursuit of the simple truth — and it didn’t suggest anything negative about her true feelings for me. As proof, we did have dinner, at this German place in Springfield called the Student Prince. She was the rare thin Italian girl who liked German food; you couldn’t talk her out of the Munich sausage platter, and this was just one of the reasons I fell in love with her. And then a month later we slept together, in my apartment, which happened to be directly above the Student Prince. There must be something of my modest parents in me, because I won’t say anything about the sex except that I enjoyed it. But I will say that I missed my virginity, maybe because I’d had it for so long, and right afterward — my face so hot and red it felt like something nuclear — I said to Anne Marie, “I was a virgin.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, “I wasn’t.” She put her hand on my blazing cheek, and you could see the sweet sadness in her eyes, the pity for the thirty-year-old virgin I’d just been. I’d never seen a person’s heart so overlarge and weak with real emotion, and so I asked, “Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” Anne Marie said. There may have been pity behind her saying yes, but there was love, too: in my experience, you can’t expect love to be unaffected by pity, nor would you want it to be.

Moving quickly now: We graduated. A few months later we were married, with the wedding at St. Mary’s, the reception at the Red Rose in the South End. Anne Marie’s family paid for it and was in attendance (more on them eventually), but my parents were not, mostly because I didn’t tell them about it. When Anne Marie asked, “Why aren’t you inviting your parents to our wedding?” I told her, “Because they died.”

“How?” she wanted to know. “When?”

“Their house burned down,” I said, “and they died in the fire,” which just goes to show that every human being has a limited number of ideas, and which, as you’ll see, ended up being pretty close to the truth. Anyway, my answer seemed to satisfy Anne Marie. But the truth was more complicated. The truth was, I could hear that voice in my head asking What else? What else? and I couldn’t be sure if it was my voice or my parents’.

Anne Marie and I took our honeymoon in Quebec City, and since it was December and cold, we skated, which reminded me of my parents’ applauding my skating on the golf course pond, so many years ago, and of how nice that was. It should also have reminded me of how badly my parents and I ended up, but I was me, and Anne Marie was Anne Marie, and we weren’t my parents, and this wasn’t any pond but the mighty Saint-Laurent (St. Lawrence) River, which was frozen over for the first time in who knows how long and everyone was speaking French and things were different enough to make me think that history does not necessarily repeat itself and that a man’s character and not his gene pool is his fate. We talked it over that night in our room at the Château Frontenac and Anne Marie was game, and so we decided to make a baby.

We made one; it was a girl. We named her Katherine, after no one in particular. By the time she was born, I was already turning heads at Pioneer Packaging, helping to make antifreeze containers that were more translucent than previously thought possible. Katherine was a good baby: she cried, but only to let you know she hadn’t stopped breathing, and it never bothered us much, and it didn’t bother the people downstairs at the Student Prince, either. They would often bring up plates of cold schnitzel for her to gum when she was teething. During our first Christmas we strung blinking lights around our windows, and on Christmas Eve, Mr. and Mrs. Goerman, who’d owned the Student Prince for fifty years, brought up platters of creamed whitefish and several bottles of Rhine whine and we toasted the birthday of the baby Jesus, and all in all, this might have been our happiest time.

Then, two years later, we had another child, a boy named Christian, after Anne Marie’s father, and suddenly the apartment we loved got too small, and suddenly the smells from down in the restaurant became too strong and we started eating potato pancakes in our dreams. One day Anne Marie came up to me looking like a less happy, more tired version of the woman I’d married just three years earlier and Christian was shrieking in the background like a winged dinosaur fighting extinction, and she said, “We need a bigger place.”

She was right: we did. But where? We liked Springfield just fine, but the Puerto Ricans had moved in and Anne Marie’s parents and the other Italians had moved out, to West Springfield and Ludlow and so on, and while we didn’t want to live where they lived, we didn’t want to live in Springfield, either — not because of the Puerto Ricans who would be our neighbors, but because of what the Mirabellis would say about them when they came to visit. This was one of the things the College of Me preached — avoid heartache, even at the expense of principle — and it was one of the few things it got right.