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

I remember the day my father left us. It was a Saturday. I remember this because I didn’t have to go to school that day and so was witness to the aftermath. My mother and I watched, side by side, from our living room’s bay window as my father backed out of the driveway in his Chevy Monte Carlo. It was October, late, and the trees were missing their leaves, their bony branches waving good-bye to my father and his car. The trees knew he was leaving, too, and when he did, it was as though he pulled my mother’s face with him. The face of the pretty, modest woman I’d known as “Mother” stretched out as she watched my father pull away from the curb, and when he was out of sight, it snapped back. Now the face was harder, the blue eyes sharper, the mouth tighter, with a little smirk at the corners. This new mother of mine was less pretty but more beautiful than my old mother, which is to say, I guess, that prettiness is something to like and beauty is something to be scared of, and I was scared of it, and her. My mother walked around the house, picking up magazines, records, coasters, couch cushions, and framed family pictures, staring at them as if not believing they were actually hers, and then tossing them aside. That scared me, too.

“You’re hungry,” she finally said, turning suddenly toward me, as if just then remembering that though my father was gone, I was not. She was right: it was lunchtime, and I was hungry. “I’ll cook something,” she said, then retreated to the kitchen. I remained in the living room, picking up the things she’d scattered and in general staying out of her way, until I smelled something burning in the kitchen and went to see what it was.

The smell came from open-faced broiled cheese and tomato sandwiches, my favorite thing to eat for lunch. My mother had burned them to something resembling bread-shaped coal. She had rescued the sandwiches from the broiler, but too late, and was waving a towel over the charred mess and laughing, too loud and hysterically, and that also was scary. She was singing over and over, “She loved to cook, but not like this,” as if it were a lyric to a song, a popular one I should have known but didn’t. I said to my mother, “I don’t know that song.” Then, for some reason, thinking I’d let her down by not knowing the song, I said, “I’m sorry,” and started crying.

This calmed my mother down, other people’s hysteria being a well-known cure for your own. She stopped singing, made me another broiled cheese and tomato sandwich, and paid attention and didn’t burn it this time. While I ate, my mother told me the first of her stories about the Emily Dickinson House, which, as everyone knows, I accidentally burned, just like my mother accidentally burned that sandwich.

Speaking of that sandwich, by the time I finally got back to Amherst from New Hampshire, it was nine in the morning, and I hadn’t eaten anything in almost twenty-four hours. I was so hungry I would even have eaten my mother’s by now thirty-year-old burned broiled cheese and tomato sandwich. So I stopped off at my parents’ house to have a little breakfast before heading on to my mother’s apartment in Belchertown. My father’s car was parked in the driveway, and I figured while I was getting something to eat I’d ask him a few questions. The bond analysts had obviously stolen the Robert Frost Place letter from my father, and probably the four letters he couldn’t remember, too. But how had they known where to find the letters, or even that they existed? Did my father know the bond analysts? And then there was my mother. How had my mother known that I was going to the Robert Frost Place? Had my father told her? Why had he done that? Had he told my father-in-law, too? And why had they followed me?

I opened the door and could immediately hear the ping and splash of the shower, meaning, of course, that my father was taking one. I went to the kitchen, intent on eating whatever I found in there, and fast. There were Knickerbocker beer cans scattered around, as usual; on the kitchen table, there was what appeared to be a shopping list that read, “Milk, cereal, beer, wine, flowers, cheese, bread,” and so on. There was nothing unusual about that, necessarily, and in my hunger I nearly forgot about it until I considered the handwriting itself: it was absolutely unfamiliar, absolutely nothing like the other notes, nothing like the notes that said, “Drink me,” or the note that said, “I think I know you,” and, it now occurred to me, also nothing like my father’s postcards. I took the note from the night before — the note my mother had left on my windshield up in New Hampshire — out of my pocket. The shopping list and the note were clearly written by two different people: one who dotted the i ’s, the other who didn’t; one whose writing was cramped, one whose writing was expansive. These were two different writers. The writer who had written the notes had not written the grocery list. I knew my mother had written the note on my windshield, which meant my father had written the grocery list. But the postcards? Who had written those?

I dropped the grocery list, ran upstairs to my bedroom, pulled a chair over to the closet. I stood up on the chair, and for the second time in two days I took the envelope down from the top shelf, took the postcards out of the envelope, and read them. I read them for the handwriting and not the content and then compared the handwriting on the postcards to the handwriting on my mother’s note. They had been written by the same person. Then I compared them to the grocery list. And then I looked at the postcards themselves. From Florida there were two large, barely bikinied breasts with the familiar coconut joke underneath; from Wyoming there was a bucking bronc, its back legs kicked upward toward the postcard’s northern border — but the postmarks on the postcards read not Boca Raton and Cheyenne, but rather Amherst, Massachusetts. This, of course, made perfect sense: my father hadn’t sent them at all (which is why he hadn’t seen himself in Morgan Taylor’s memoir). But my mother had, and my mother had sent them from Amherst, because that’s where she lived, with me. But why had she done that? Why had she pretended to be my father sending me postcards from places he’d never actually visited or lived in? And if my father hadn’t been doing all these things in far-off places, then where had he been? On that October day when he left us, and my mother sang her mysterious lyric and burned my sandwich and made me cry, where had my father gone? And what had he pretended to be once he got there?

“Dad!” I yelled out, charging down the stairs and armed with the postcards. “Dad!” Just after I yelled, I heard the shower kick off and so I positioned myself outside the downstairs bathroom door, my head filled with questions and waiting for my father to give me the answers.

“Sam?” I heard the voice coming from behind me, from the kitchen and not the bathroom. I knew it was my father’s voice without having to turn around, the same way I knew the notes and postcards were written by one person, the grocery list by another. If I were a real detective, I might have had a voice and handwriting expert to tell me these things for sure. But this is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: sometimes you have to be your own expert, and then after you acquire this expertise, you sometimes wish you hadn’t.

“Sam, look at me,” my father said. This wasn’t the stroked-out father, not the drunk one, either, but rather the insistent, scared father, the father wanting to spare his son from seeing that which no son should see. “Sam, turn around right now.”

I didn’t turn around. I kept my eyes fixed on the bathroom door, which opened slowly, creaking the way doors in movies and old houses do, and my father’s voice creaked a little bit too as he yelled, “Deirdre, don’t open the door!”