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

“Get away from what?” I asked, because I wasn’t going to let it go. Because like Socrates and his method, I wasn’t going to let my mother get out of this conversation without her giving me the answer I wanted.

“From life,” she said.

“So what was our house for?”

“A place to come back to,” she said. “For you, too.” She got up, tucked her tray under her arm, and said, “Time to get back to work.”

“I know about Deirdre,” I told her, because I wanted everything out in the open, where we could see it, where we couldn’t ignore it anymore, and as I’ll say in my arsonist’s guide, once you get everything out in the open, you wonder why, oh, why would you ever want that.

“How do you know about her?” My mother was trying to remain calm, but it was a losing battle. She went fierce and far away in the eyes, as though she’d just spotted her enemy from a great distance. She raised her tray and held it in front of her chest like a shield. “How do you even know her name?”

“I met her at our house,” I said.

“Our house,” she repeated, trancelike. “When?”

“This morning,” I said. “I know you think it was me who burned down those houses. But it wasn’t. I think it was Deirdre.” I’m not sure my mother even heard this last part, though, because this is the way the human mind works, or doesn’t: when it understands that the worst thing has happened, it can’t think about the second- or third- or fourth-worst thing until it takes care of the first-worst thing, either by making it better or by making it even worse.

“You weren’t ever supposed to know about her,” my mother said. “He promised.”

“That’s why you sent me off to college, isn’t it?” I asked. “You knew Dad would go back to her, and you didn’t want me to find out.”

“He promised,” my mother said.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t just divorce him,” I told her. “Why didn’t you just end it and move on?”

“Why didn’t you just tell Anne Marie about the fire you set?” my mother wanted to know. “Why didn’t you tell her about the Colemans, about me, and about your father?”

I didn’t answer her; I didn’t need to. Because we both knew that sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them. My mother was too scared to get a divorce, and I was too scared to tell Anne Marie the truth. It was that simple. Sometimes there is a simple answer. Sometimes things aren’t complicated at all.

After a moment she placed the tray on the empty barstool, took off her apron, and put it on the tray. “Last week you asked me why I got rid of my books,” she said, looking me in the eyes. She was Elizabeth again, the mother she used to be, except there was a look of wild desperation in her eyes, and that scared me more than ever. “Do you really want to know why?”

“Yes.”

“Because,” she said, “they were always full of people like me, and her, and him and you and it.”

“It?” I asked.

“The house,” she said. “Our fucking house.” She said it the way Ahab might say to Ishmael, “ Our fucking whale,” and now I understood, for the first time, why Melville had him talk about the whale so many times, over so many pages, and why my mother had made me read the book, so many times, over so many years. To my mother, our house was more than just its roof and walls and the furniture inside them, just as Moby Dick was more than just its blubber to Ahab.

“Beth,” the bartender said, “would you bring these drinks over to table twelve?”

“No,” she said, and then she walked away from both of us, toward the door. There was a blue peacoat draped over an empty chair, and she grabbed it and put it on, even though I was pretty sure it wasn’t hers. She opened the door and the wind whipped her hair around.

“Where are you going?” I yelled.

“To see your father,” she yelled back, without turning around, before closing the door behind her.

“What did you do to Beth?” the bartender asked when she was gone, and then, before I could think of a concise answer, he said, “You’ve had enough,” and he snatched my last, half-consumed beer away from me. He was right. I’d had enough; everyone had had enough, that was clear. Maybe that’s why Deirdre wanted to meet me at the Emily Dickinson House: maybe she’d had enough, too.

It was twenty minutes before midnight when I got to where the Emily Dickinson House used to be. The place looked much different at night than it had in the daytime just a few days earlier. There was easily a half foot of snow on the ground, but it had stopped falling sometime earlier, and the sky had cleared, so that you could name the stars above, assuming you’d learned their names in the first place. It was windier than before, though, and the scattered clouds were racing across the sky, and the spindly birches were waving in the wind and sometimes knocking into their neighboring white pines and maples. One of the nearby streetlights sent its flickering glow through the trees, and I kept expecting to hear an organ and see Vincent Price emerge from the shadows. Plus, there was a bone-chilling hoo, hoo sound coming from somewhere nearby, the classic sound of a haunting, although it could just have been the sound fraternity brothers make while ritually beating their pledges. The sound was spooky, whoever was making it.

I made my way through the trees until I found Deirdre standing next to a wooden bench, a bench no doubt meant to commemorate the Emily Dickinson House. Deirdre was early, too. She was wearing a red jacket and a red scarf and red gloves and a red ski hat, all obviously part of a matching set. And this will also go in my arsonist’s guide: if you want to appear menacing, then don’t wear a matching set. Deirdre was the least spooky thing about the place.

“Sam,” she said, “how does it feel to be back here?”

“It feels excellent,” I said. “Terrific. Why am I here?”

Deirdre looked confused. Her face puckered, an expression you might find attractive if you were looking to be attracted. I could imagine my father finding it attractive. Her hair was long and blond, as my mother remembered it, almost down to her shoulders, and Deirdre stroked it nervously with one of her gloved hands. “You’re here because I asked you to meet me here.”

“I know that,” I said, “but why did you ask me to meet you here in the first place?”

Right then the birch trees started creaking and swaying, double time, in an uptick of wind, making such a racket that Deirdre and I momentarily forgot what we were saying and looked at them. They were silvery white and so different from the trees around them. The pines and maples were all clumped together and sturdy, but the birches were thin and lonely, each of them far apart and like an only child among larger, happier broods. I knew from Mr. Frost that the birch was supposed to be the most New England of trees, and if that was so, then I couldn’t help thinking that New England was a very bad idea.

Then the wind died down and the birches stopped making their noises and we returned to our conversation, which was, basically, why was I there?

“Because this was where the Emily Dickinson House was, Sam,” Deirdre said very slowly, as if I were having trouble keeping up. “You burned her house down. It’s ironic.”

“You’re right, it is ironic,” I said, except I wasn’t talking about the house: I was talking about Deirdre herself. She was clearly my double, my doppelganger in bumbling. She and I were our own matching set. I wondered if my father had fallen in love with her because she was like me, and fallen out of love with my mother because she wasn’t, and if love itself wasn’t something we, the products of love, then make impossible for our parents because we can truly be like only one of them. Maybe this is why people have more than one child: so that neither of the parents will feel jealous and lonely.