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

So my mother had her story (a story that never made either of us very happy, by the way), but now I was going to have mine, and it would be true. I would tell Anne Marie and the kids the truth about me and the Emily Dickinson House and how I’d burned it to the ground and killed those poor Colemans. I had lied for too long. Now that Thomas Coleman had shown up and threatened to spill the beans, I knew I should tell my family the truth while the truth might still do me a little bit of good and while I was somewhat in control of it. And maybe the truth would make me happy. This was what the bond analysts had told one another during their memoir-brainstorming sessions: “Just tell the truth, dude” (this was the way they talked: like surfers outfitted by Brooks Brothers). “You’ll feel better afterward.” It seemed a simple matter of cause and effect, which was the kind of thing I, as a packaging scientist, could understand and appreciate. But it would be tough, I knew that. On my walk out of Camelot, across Route 116, and around and around the parking lot of the gardening-supply superstore (I would have walked on the sidewalks along 116 or in Camelot, except there weren’t any), I was picturing my little bambinos’ faces as I tried to explain that Daddy was a murderer and an arsonist, not to mention a long-term liar, and that weakened my resolve a little. But that was OK, because I knew I was right to do what I was going to do, and I had surplus resolve and could stand to lose some of it.

And then I walked back into Camelot, into my driveway, and lost some more of the resolve. Anne Marie’s minivan was parked there. Like Camelot and the house and the children and Anne Marie herself, the van was well maintained and I loved it and them so much, could feel my love growing and growing, could feel my heart wanting to get bigger and bigger until it was so full of love that it would explode all over the place and make a mess and I would die and not care. I went around the house and through the back door and into the kitchen, the floor covered with gleaming adobe tile. I had no idea what adobe tile meant, exactly, except that I thought it had to do with Indians and clay and earth, and none of that seemed to have anything to do with what was on my kitchen floor. That floor and its name were mysterious and inexplicable, like love itself, and my heart continued to grow, testing the limits of its chambers. I bent to kiss the floor, put my lips right on the cool, cool tile. You are mine. That was my very thought, to the tile. You are mine, and I love you. But would the tile still love me back after I told it the truth about my past? I could feel the tile shrink from my lips at the very thought. Would my family not do the same? How could they not? Oh, I was afraid, not of one thing, but of everything, even though I’d been full of courage and determination not a minute earlier. I was even afraid of the adobe tile, wanted to get away from it as fast as possible before it rejected me completely. I wiped my lip prints off the tile and got up from my hands and knees just as my daughter, Katherine, walked into the kitchen.

Katherine was eight now, tall and bony, the kind of girl her mother had been — the kind of girl who in adolescence lived in overalls as she made her trip from tomboyishness to beauty. She’d learned from some television show or her friends to greet people not in the conventional fashion but by saying, “Hey-low,” and she said it now, to me, in the kitchen, and I wanted to say back, Oh, dear heart, my first born, I have to tell you something, and you might hate me for it, but even if you do, will you at least promise to never say “Hey-low” again? Instead, I asked, “Where’s your mother?”

“She’s upstairs, working out.” It was that time of day. Anne Marie would be upstairs in our bedroom, in her exercise outfit, all spandex and white strips of flesh and hair piled high and beaded sweat on her upper lip, watching television and pedaling the hell out of her stationary bike. At times I wondered how much longer it would stay stationary if she kept pedaling it that hard. My heart took a sad tumble at the thought of telling her about my true self; and then, since I’m not afraid of the big questions, I wondered if she would have been happier with someone else, someone who wasn’t a bumbler like me. There had been no shortage of bumbling in our time together. For instance, there was the time when we had dinner with a guy I worked with and his wife, and we got around to talking about Jews, or the Jewish religion at least, and Anne Marie asked the woman (she was an American) if she was Jewish, and she wasn’t, and then I said to the guy I worked with, “I know you’re not.” I said this because he was German, actually from Germany — his name was Hans — the implication being that since he was a German he must be a Nazi. Anne Marie pointed this out later on. As I told her, this wasn’t my intention, but our guests may have taken it that way: they left in a big hurry, even before dessert was served. After they left, Anne Marie got exasperated with me — exasperation, that testy cousin of resignation, which is what Anne Marie seemed to feel about me most of the time. I apologized to her. But in my defense, guess what: I found out later that the guy wasn’t. Jewish, that is.

But I suppose that wasn’t the point. Was Anne Marie happy? Had I ever made her happy? Or did I only make her busy: running the kids here and there, going to work, doing the things that needed to be done around the house that I didn’t do — which (except for the lawn and some bedtime TV watching with the kids) was pretty much everything — and cleaning up my accidents, so many of them that she didn’t believe they were accidents anymore? I was one of the things that kept her busy, all right, me and her stationary bike. Did she recently seem less miserable and weepy than she’d been because she was happy or busy? Did I make her happy, or just busy? Or was there a difference?

“Earth to Dad,” Katherine said. She was tall enough to reach up and knock on my head, as if checking to see if I were home, and she did just that, striking me on the forehead, but softly, so that it barely hurt and only for a second. “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” I said. “What’s your brother doing?”

“He’s watching TV in his room.”

I could picture Christian watching television (all of us had televisions in our bedrooms, plus one downstairs, plus one in the finished basement — we were like mission control with our many monitors). When Christian rode his scooter, he made happy sounds the way he had when he was a baby, noises that sounded like “Whee.” When he watched television he looked confused and angry at what he was seeing, like a dumb bully. I wished he were riding his scooter, even in the house, which we don’t normally allow, so I could picture him doing that instead of looking dumb and brutish in front of the television. I also wished I could give Christian and Katherine something to remember me by; this was a parental wish, I recognized it. For instance, my mother, during my father’s absence, gave me the stories about the Emily Dickinson House so that I’d have something besides a runaway father. And I still have them; I’ve kept them all this time, in my head, because they were good stories.

My mother always talked about the Emily Dickinson House in terms of last gasps, of children vanished and sadly forgotten, of the last drop, drop, drop of bodies, big and small, new and used, down a lonely and unforgiving chasm. When I was nine years old, for example, she told me increasingly long and horrific stories about strangers, out-of-towners: men with shady pasts, faded jeans, outstanding warrants, and Marlboro whispers. They arrived as hitchhikers or bus riders, looking for a place to sleep, a place to work, not voting, not paying taxes. For them, the Emily Dickinson House didn’t loom or threaten but existed only for their temporary use: another big old house with easy locks, daytime-only occupancy, and a dust problem. Their forced entries were casual, experienced, which made their disappearances (according to my mother’s stories, you could barely hear their howls over the creaking of that venerable hell house) even more awful: because these men had known bad things out there in the world and had survived them, but they couldn’t survive the house. That’s how bad and interesting the house was, and it was right down the street, too. And there was my father, who did not smoke and wore khaki pants and not blue jeans and had never known trouble before: he wouldn’t even make it back to Amherst and the Emily Dickinson House; he’d be swallowed up by the world before he made it home. When I say I was afraid for these outlaw men of my mother’s stories, I was really afraid for my father, who I believed was out there alone in the bad, bad world. My father was what my mother’s Emily Dickinson House stories were about, really, which is why I thought about them, and it (the Emily Dickinson House) and my mother and my father, so much way back then, and why I still did, and do.