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

“You’re right,” I said. “Beth is a sweetheart.” I must have said this in such a way as to give the impression that I was smitten, because the bartender grimaced empathetically, and said, “Sorry, bud, she’s married.”

“Married,” I said, waving my hand, by which I meant to communicate, Who isn’t?

“Yeah, but she’s really married,” the bartender said.

“Have you met the guy?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but she talks about him a lot.”

“What’s she say about him?”

“He’s got a big brain,” the bartender said, and then, maybe sensing that I didn’t have one, he tapped his forehead with his forefinger.

“I bet he reads books,” I said.

“He gets paid to read books,” the bartender said, shaking his head, as though wondering who would pay a person to do such a thing, which, after all, he’d probably do anyway. The bartender poured himself a free beer, then began drinking it, still shaking his head at the good fortune of some men. “And he’s got a woman like Beth.”

“Do they have any kids?” I asked.

“Just one. He’s a scientist.”

“Packaging scientist,” I said.

“You know the guy?” the bartender said. “She talks about him a lot, too. Says he’s brilliant. A good son, to boot. You’ve never seen a woman love two guys more than she loves her son and husband.”

“Lucky guys,” I said.

“They are,” the bartender agreed, and then he moved to the other end of the bar. I knew now why my mother had stayed at the Student Prince after I’d moved to Camelot. At the Student Prince she could be Beth, a sweetheart with a terrific husband and son. But in Amherst, she was Elizabeth, a drunk ex-teacher who lived by herself in an apartment in Belchertown while her drunk husband was back in their house, where he’d been carrying on with another woman for thirty years, and her ex-con son was getting kicked out of his own house, quitting his job, kissing other women, and possibly (my mother thought) once again burning down writers’ homes in New England. I understood everything now: if I were my mother, I’d want to be Beth at the Student Prince, too.

Just then, someone clipped me in the back of the head, hard, and then didn’t apologize the way a complete stranger would have. I turned and my mother was there, holding her serving tray. There was an empty stool next to me, but my mother didn’t take it, preferring, I guess, to face me and get the complete view of the whole man.

“So tell me,” she said. “Who was that woman in New Hampshire?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Let me guess,” my mother said. “You were drunk. It didn’t mean anything.”

“I was drunk,” I said, not adding that it didn’t mean anything, because of course it did. “You wrote on that napkin that you thought you knew me. What did you mean by that?” And then, before my mother did or did not answer the question, I answered it myself. “I know all about Dad. I know Dad didn’t send those postcards from those places. I know you wrote and sent them from Amherst. I know you were fired from your teaching job for being a drunk. I know some things, Mom.”

My mother sighed, then sat down on the stool next to me. All the sweetness seemed to have left her, all the smart meanness, too. She didn’t seem like Beth or even Elizabeth anymore, just a sad, tired woman who hadn’t found a name to fit her yet.

“What do you want from me, Sam?” she said, closing her eyes and leaning against the bar.

“I want you to tell me what happened with Dad thirty years ago.”

She did. She was too exhausted not to tell me things anymore. So my mother told me about what had happened thirty-odd years ago. She’d been scheduled to stay in Boston overnight for a mandatory public school teacher’s conference, but when the day’s duties were finished early, my mother decided to come home that night and not the next morning. She thought my father would be pleasantly surprised — this was her exact thought when she walked into the kitchen and saw a woman sitting on her stove top, a pretty blond woman with her dress pushed way, way up her white, white legs, which were — as they said in some of my mother’s books — akimbo. My father was standing between the woman’s legs. His pants weren’t down at his ankles yet, but they soon would have been. You didn’t need to be a genius to know it was going to happen.

“She loves to cook, but not like this,” my father said to the woman, and they laughed identical, low, gurgling laughs deep down in their throats. The “she” who loved to cook, but not like this, was my mother. You didn’t need to be a genius to know that, either.

“Where was I when all this happened?” I asked.

“You were upstairs, sleeping. I remember that. I remember not wanting to wake you up. I remember telling the woman to get out of my house, but quietly, so I wouldn’t wake you up. And she did.”

“You said that same thing when I was a kid, the day Dad left us.”

“I said what?”

“‘She loved to cook, but not like this.’ You said that.”

“I did?” she said, opening her eyes for the first time since beginning the story.

“After you’d burned my sandwich.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “I don’t remember that. I remember so many things, but not that.”

“What did Dad say?”

“He said that he was drunk and that it didn’t mean anything and that he loved me and that this was the first time it had happened and that it would never happen again.”

“He did,” I said, recognizing most of his words as mine and feeling so ashamed — for the bad things I’d done and the borrowed words I’d used to excuse them. Why is it we can’t find our own words for the bad things we do? Is that part of what makes them so bad? “What did you do next?”

“I kicked him out.”

“I thought you kicked him out because he couldn’t decide what he wanted to do for a living and he was pathetic and driving you nuts.”

“That’s just what I wanted you to think. I really kicked him out because he was cheating on me.”

“Did you love him?”

“Yes,” she said immediately, just as my father had when I asked him if he loved my mother. My parents were certain they loved each other, and yet look at how they’d turned out. Maybe it would be better not to be so certain. Maybe love, and marriage, and life, and maybe anything that matters, would work out better if we weren’t so certain about them.

“Mom,” I said, “why did Dad come back?”

“Because I let him,” my mother said. “Because he said he’d made a terrible mistake. Because he missed us. Because he said he loved me and not that woman on the stove. Because he said he would never, ever see her again.”

“And you believed him,” I said.

“I did,” she said, and I could hear the voice the bartender no doubt heard when my mother talked about my father, the voice that wanted the story she told about her husband to be the truth, and the truth to be just a story. “I still do.”

“Mom,” I said, as gently as I could, “you live in another apartment in another town. You come back to the house to drink, but then when it’s time to go to bed, you drive to your apartment. On Tuesday nights you don’t come home at all. There must be a good reason.”

“There must be,” she said, nodding.

“What is it?”

She closed her eyes again, as though trying to remember the lies she’d told herself for so many years and now wanted to tell me. She kept her eyes closed for so long this time that I thought she’d fallen asleep. Then suddenly she opened them and said, “The apartment is a place for me to get away, that’s all.”