by Brock Clarke
So no sex, and no sex club. Of course, I can’t say how far Mr. Coleman got with Mrs. Coleman that night. After the fire was through with them, they were just so much bone and connective tissue. That much I know.
And it was not true that I was, as my first-grade teacher testified, a “little firebug.” Not true! As proof, she told, in court, about the time on the playground when I was six, when she found me burning an anthill with a magnifying glass, or trying to (there were clouds that day, too many of them). Let me tell you, I was not the only kid in Miss Frye’s class that tried to torch an anthill and learn a little something about solar power in the bargain. And let me tell you, what happened in first grade had no bearing whatsoever on what happened in and to the Emily Dickinson House. I had forgotten all about the anthill, in fact, and wasn’t thinking of fire at all that night when I broke into the Emily Dickinson House. I was thinking of my mother’s stories—like the one in which Emily Dickinson’s corpse was hidden in one of the house’s many secret compartments and came to life (or at least became ambulatory) only when there was a full moon. There was a full moon that night, and out of nervousness I was smoking a cigarette—which was a new habit, a short-lived one, too—when I heard a noise. Who knows what it was? It could have been the house creaking or a tree moving in the wind. It could have been the Colemans, enjoying their last private moment on earth together. Or it could have been Emily Dickinson, as glassy eyed as your best movie zombie, breaking out of her secret compartment and heading full steam in my warm-blooded direction. Whatever, I dropped my cigarette at the noise and hightailed it out of the house and so didn’t notice that my dropped cigarette had lit a heavy living room drape on fire, which set the living room rug on fire, and so on. So. Accidental fire starter? Yes. Firebug? No.
But you know what is true? My mother’s stories were good, or must have been. The judge pointed this out at my trial, the sentencing part, when my defense attorney was again explaining why I was in the Emily Dickinson House in the first place, and I was explaining again about my mother’s stories. The judge interrupted and said, “Those must have been some good stories.”
“I guess they were,” I said.
“But then again,” the judge said—and he was really editorializing here, but I guess his robes and his elevated seat and his handsome wooden gavel gave him the right—“if a good story leads you to do bad things, can it be a good story after all?”
“Come again?” I said. “I’m not following.”
“I’m afraid I’m not, either, Your Honor,” my lawyer said.
“I agree,” said the prosecutor, who was exactly the same as my lawyer except that he wore a cheaper suit and was touchier because of it.
“Bear with me,” the judge said. “It’s an interesting question, is it not? Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Should we expect it to? Can we blame the story for anything? Can a story actually do anything at all?” Here he looked at me learnedly, over his glasses, and you knew right then that he’d always longed to be a college English professor instead of a judge and that he subscribed to all the right literary periodicals and magazines. “For instance, Mr. Pulsifer, can a story actually be blamed for arson and murder?”
“Huh,” I said, then acted as if I were thinking about the question, which I should have been; instead I turned and looked at my mother, who was sitting behind me in the courtroom. There might as well have been a neon sign on her forehead that flashed the words DEFIANCE, OUTRAGE, REGRET, much like our driveway would flash the words MURDERER and FASCIST in the years to come.
“Huh,” I said again.
“You’ll have plenty of time to think about the question in prison, Mr. Pulsifer,” the judge said to me. “Make sure you do.”
“I will,” I said. Because it was an interesting question, to the judge.
But I hadn’t thought about the question, and I wasn’t really thinking about it in the morning, either, when I woke up in my old bedroom for the first time in ten years. I wasn’t thinking about any of the things I should have: my wife, my kids, Thomas Coleman, or his dead parents. No, I was thinking about those letters, couldn’t stop thinking about them—maybe because I’d stopped myself from thinking about them for so long. Or maybe I was thinking about the letters because it’s easier and safer to think about the things we shouldn’t than the things we should. The voice asking, What else? What else? knew that truth, too. There I was, lying in my childhood bed, and when the voice asked me, What else? it didn’t mean, What about your wife, your kids? What about going home and telling them the truth? It meant, What about the letters? Where are the letters? Yes, that voice was a coward, just like me.
I put on my pants and shirt from the day before, then crept down the stairs and into my father’s room. The lights were off in the room, the bed was made, my father wasn’t anywhere to be seen or heard. I opened the end table drawer, and there it was, the shoe box, and inside it were the letters, just as I remembered. It wasn’t so much a dramatic moment as it was comfortable, reassuring: the house and my father had changed, but at least the letters were in the same place. They were more tattered, smudged, and used than I remembered, and I could picture my father, sitting in his chair, reading the letters and reading them again and again and thinking of me, somewhere out in the world. It was a touching father-son moment in my head. Then I heard a noise—a sputter of a cough—coming from the living room, and I took it as a warning of sorts. So I put the letters back in the box, put the box back in the drawer, closed the drawer, and followed the noise.
The living room was a good deal more together than when I’d seen it the day before. There were no booze bottles to be seen, no rings on the tables where they had been, no trace of them at all, as if they’d been called home by the mother ship. There was only one ashtray, a glass one, on the living room coffee table, with no ashes in it. The exercise bike was still in the living room, but off to the side and not smack in front of the TV the way it had been. As for the TV, it wasn’t on, but my father was sitting in front of it on the couch.
“Dad,” I said. “Good morning.”
My father turned to face me. He had twelve extra hours of gray, patchy beard grown on him since I’d seen him last, and his eyes were filmy and half-closed, or half-open, depending on how you wanted to look at it. Dad had one leg crossed over the other, which I thought was quite an accomplishment for someone as stroked out as he was. And he was drinking a forty-ounce beer, a Knickerbocker in the can. I looked at my watch. I’d slept late. It was two in the afternoon, still a little early for drinking a beer that big, especially since I didn’t remember my father drinking before, ever. But then again, my old dad had been through a lot, and who was I to tell him from where he should get his pleasure and whether it was too early in the day to get it. After all, he’d managed to cross his legs, the brave guy, and maybe the beer was in celebration of that huge accomplishment.
“Good afternoon,” my mother said, coming in from offstage, as she had the previous night. I turned to face her. She also had a big beer in her hand, and unlike the night before, today I could see her clearly, could see clearly that she had changed since I’d seen her last. For one, she was pretty. I remembered her face being severe and impressive; it could scare you into admiring it, but it wasn’t what you’d call pretty. She had always been one of those harsh, clear-eyed New England beauties whose scarily blue peepers always seemed to be looking through the disappointment that was you and back to her own clear-eyed Puritan kin. But now there was a softness to her face, not as though she’d gained weight, but as though she and her face had called some sort of truce and were at ease: her blue eyes seemed at home over her nose, which hung like an awning over her mouth, which was smiling at me. My mother’s name is Elizabeth, and she had always seemed like an Eli
zabeth; but now she seemed like a Beth. As Elizabeth, she had always seemed to be what she was—a stern high school English teacher—but as Beth, she seemed something kinder and gentler. A nurse, maybe, an especially pretty one.
“You look like Nurse Beth,” I told her.
“Ha,” she said, girlishly tucking her hair—it was black as it had always been, and long, too—behind her ears. My mother went over to my father, took the empty beer can out of his hand, opened a new one, and placed it in the gnarled cup holder of his right hand. He said something garbled and multisyllabic, which I took to mean, Thank you.
“Should you be giving him another beer?” I asked. My mother didn’t respond in facial expression or word, and so I added, “Because of his stroke.”
“Did you hear that, Bradley?” my mother said to my father, her smile getting even softer, full of some private pleasure. “I shouldn’t get you another beer because you’ve had a stroke.”
My father didn’t say anything back, but he shot her a look and she met it, the look, halfway, and it remained there in the room, like another son, another human being with some mysterious, shifting relationship to the two adult human beings that had made it. Because maybe this is what it means to be a son. No matter how old you are, you are always a step behind the two people who made you, the two people who always know something that you need to know, too—like, for instance, how my mother had known that Anne Marie had kicked me out of the house, or even that there was an Anne Marie, or a house.
“Last night you said that my wife had kicked me out of the house,” I said. “How did you know that?”
“What?” my mother said loudly, because my father had begun drinking the beer, slurping it heroically and at top volume, and I had to shout the question—“How did you know that my wife had kicked me out?”—so she could hear it over the soggy racket of my father’s imbibing.
“Oh, Sam,” my mother said, “it’s an old story.”
“An old story,” I repeated, thinking now of what the judge had said to me at my sentencing about good stories and bad stories, and for the first time in years I recognized that stories were everywhere and all-important. There were all those letters stashed away in the shoe box, all those people who wanted me to burn down those writers’ homes because of the stories the writers had told; there was the story that Thomas Coleman told Anne Marie that made her kick me out; there were stories that the bond analysts had told about themselves in their memoirs, if they’d even written them (one had, sort of, but I didn’t know that yet); and there were my mother’s stories, which everyone knows all about, and suddenly I knew the answer to the judge’s question, or at least half the answer. Of course a story could produce a direct effect. Why would anyone tell one if it didn’t?
But what was the direct effect? That, I didn’t know, didn’t know the stories—new or old—well enough to know what effect they might have. But my mother did, that was clear, and I hated her for it, hated her on top of already hating her for what her stories had done to me, hated her for knowing something that I didn’t and for making me feel powerless because of it, and maybe this is also what it means to be a child: always needing your parents and hating them for it, but still needing them, and maybe needing to hate them, too, and probably that was an old story as well.
“An old story,” I said again, and then in a rush reminded my mother about the judge, what he’d said so many years before about stories and what they could and could not do, and how I still didn’t know and needed to: because if my wife’s kicking me out was an old story, then her taking me back (or not, or not!) was also an old story, and I needed to know it. Would my mother help me? “It’s important,” I said. “Please.” I was even prepared to grovel and cry a little, too, and then also prepared to hate her for making me grovel and cry.
“You’re talking to the wrong woman,” my mother said. “I’m through with books. I’m through with stories of any kind.”
“You are?” I said. This was big news, all right. I couldn’t imagine my mother without her stories, stories that had meant so much to her that she’d had to force them on me. It was like imagining a musketeer without his sword or musket or the other musketeers—just one unarmed Frenchman, alone with his fancy mustache and his feathered hat and his foppishness. Then I looked around and noticed what I’d already noticed the day before: there were no books anywhere. “What happened to your books?” I asked her.
“I got rid of them,” she said.
“Why?”
“Why?” she said. Here her voice got sharp, her face got sharp, too, and I could see my new mother, Beth, revert to the old mother, Elizabeth; it was like watching the presidential faces on Mt. Rushmore morph back into the big rock they once were. “Do you want to know why?”
“I do,” I said, because I did.
My mother looked at me for a long time, and as she did, her face got kindly again. You could see pity, love, and pain filling her up, rising from her toes, through the hollow tubes of her legs and torso and leveling off in her eyes, where I could see them, the emotions, sloshing around in her pupils. My mother raised her right arm slightly, as if to touch my cheek, and I needed her then more than ever, but this need was closer to love than to hate. I wanted to say, Oh, touch my cheek, Mother. You told me those stories and ruined my life, and I ruined yours, too, but if you touch my cheek …
I didn’t get to finish the thought, and my mother didn’t touch my cheek, either. Instead she grabbed the (empty) can of beer out of my father’s hand and went into the kitchen. Then it was just me and my father again, just two men in a room struggling to understand the woman who had just left them alone with each other. This would clearly be a never-ending battle. I could see the two of us sitting in that room until kingdom come, trying—and failing—to understand the women we loved. The past washed over me right then, as you can’t ever stop it from doing, and there was Anne Marie, in my heart, my eyes and ears and brain, wondering what I was doing there with my parents when I should be at home, begging Anne Marie to let me come back to it, and her, and them, and us.
“Should I just go home, Dad?”
“Home?” he asked, confused, as if to say, I think, Home? Why, you’re already in it.
“My other home, I mean. Shouldn’t I just go back to Anne Marie and the kids?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be better that way? Wouldn’t things have been better for all of us if you hadn’t taken three years to come home?”
“Wait … wait,” my father said.
“For what?”
“Time,” he said.
“How much time?” I asked. “I don’t think I can wait three years. Do I have to wait three years like you did with me and Mom?”
Speaking of my mother, there she was again, in the living room, holding a triangle of big beers in both hands. She placed one can in my father’s ready claw and he immediately began drinking from it, violently, as if trying to suck up some of the aluminum from the can along with the beer. Then my mother tried to give me a beer, and I held up my hands in protest and said, “Oh no, not me.”
About me as a drinker: I wasn’t much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I’d tried drinking—in high school, at subdivision barbecues—I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss’s Christmas party (it was vodka I was drinking, more than two glasses, and so too much of it), I passed out for a minute—passed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional—and when I came to, I found myself in my boss’s kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pass before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen’s population—there was a big crowd in there, including my boss, Mr. Janzen, a tall, stern man who had a big nose t
hat he couldn’t help, physically speaking, looking down at you with—staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, “Sandwich.” Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is.
“I don’t really drink,” I told my mother.
“You do now,” she said, with such certainty that I believed her. I took the can and we all drank our big beers, one after the other, and I discovered that my mother was right: I did drink, and I learned that when you drank, things happened, nearly by themselves. It got dark, and someone turned on the light; it got too quiet and someone turned on the television; the television got too noisy and someone turned it off; we got hungry and someone produced food—pretzels, chips, popcorn, something we ate right out of the bag. Things happened, and questions were asked, too, that might not have been asked without the beer. I asked my mother, “You got rid of your books because of me, because of what I did and what happened to me, didn’t you?” and she said, “Ha!” And then I asked, “Are you still an English teacher?” and she said, “Once an English teacher, always an English teacher.” And then I asked, “How can you teach English if you’re through with books?” and she said, “It’s perhaps easier that way.” And then I asked, “Were those stories you told me, those books you made me read, supposed to make me happy?” and she said, “I don’t know what they were supposed to do.” And then I asked, “Why did you tell me those stories, then? And why did you make me read if the reading wasn’t supposed to make me happy?” And she said, “Why don’t you ask me questions I can answer?” And then I said, “Dad is a tough old guy, isn’t he?” and she said, “No, he’s not.” And then I asked, “Will you ever forgive him for leaving us?” and she said, “All is forgiven,” and raised her beer, and for a second I thought she was going to dump it on my father’s head in a kind of baptismal forgiveness. But she didn’t, and I asked, “Can people know each other too long, too well?” and she said, “Yes, they can.” And then I asked, “What happens to love?” and she said, “Ask your father.” And I said, “Dad, what happens to love?” and he said something that sounded like, “Urt.” And then my mother asked me, “You have a job, correct? Are you going to work tomorrow?” And I said, “I think I’ll quit,” and I did so, right there, called up Pioneer Packaging and told the answering machine that I was quitting. And while I was at it, I also mentioned a number of things I hated about them and the job they’d given me, things that were totally untrue and that I wouldn’t be able to take back later on and that I would have regretted immediately if I hadn’t had so much beer in me in the first place. In this way I discovered something else drinking made possible: it made self-destruction seem attractive and let you say things you didn’t mean and you might regret, but it also made you too drunk to regret them. When I hung up on my career in packaging forever, my mother said, “Are you going to stay here for a while?” and I said, “Do you want me to?” And she said, “I’ve missed you, Sam. I’m so sorry about everything,” which I took to mean, Yes, I do want you to stay awhile. And I said, “Who needs another beer?” We all did, and then we all did again, and again, until I forgot that I’d been kicked out of my house, just like my father seemed to forget he was incapacitated: the more beer he drank, the more mobile he seemed to be, and by his sixth beer he was walking around and could get to the refrigerator and back under his own power, even, and his slurring wasn’t quite so dramatic when he asked if anyone needed another drink, which we all did. We drank together, as a family, until there was nothing left to drink and nothing else to do but pass out, right there on the couch. Not once while I was drinking did I think about Anne Marie and the kids, just a few miles away, and this was another thing I learned that night: drinking helps you forget the things you need to forget, at least for a little while, until you pass out and then wake up two hours later and vomit all over yourself and then the hallway and then the bathroom.
