An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    But enough. There were many, many more stories, and they were my mother’s gift to me, and look where that gift got me — that’s the point. I didn’t want to leave my kids anything like that; but neither, I was realizing, did I want to give them the truth, which was dangerous and might end up hurting all of us and helping no one. While I was thinking of something safer to give them, Katherine opened the refrigerator, reached in, took out a tall Styrofoam cup, and began sucking loudly on the straw coming out of its lid.
    “What are you drinking?”
    “A smoothie,” she said.
    “Is that like a milkshake?”
    “No,” she said.
    “What makes a smoothie different from a milkshake?” I asked.
    Katherine thought about this for a moment, and then said, “It’s smoother.”
    “Good,” I said, and meant it. I had come home intending to give my family the truth. But instead I had given my daughter a nice, factual conversation about smoothies, something not to remember me by, and maybe this is the most we can do for our children after all: give them nothing to remember us by. “Good,” I said again.
    “What’s good?” Anne Marie said, coming into the kitchen from behind me. I turned to face her. Her hair was wet; she’d obviously just taken a shower. It was funny: she never blow-dried her hair, even though it was rope thick and long enough for Rapunzel to be jealous of — even so, she never owned a hair dryer, and still her hair managed to dry. I often imagined, in my spare moments, that her hair had its own heating coils, firing from within, and just looking at her I felt my own heating coils firing from within, the flames coming up through my legs and private parts and chest and into my face. I had to resist the urge to tackle her right there, out of love and desire. I had done this once, in the Pioneer Valley Mall, in a shoe store, where Anne Marie was trying on a pair of black knee-high boots, turning this way and that like the model she easily could have been, and my need for her was so big that there seemed no way to do justice to its enormity except to tackle her. So I did, scattering boxes and display tables and other customers. After we’d cleaned up the mess and apologized to the manager and bought the boots, Anne Marie had made me promise never, ever to do it again. So instead I said, “Smoothies.”
    “Smoothies what?”
    “Katherine is drinking one. We were just talking about how a smoothie isn’t a milkshake.” Anne Marie looked at me quizzically, as if I were speaking one of the many foreign languages I’d never learned to speak. So I clarified. “They’re different.”
    “How was your day?” Anne Marie asked. “Anything special happen?”
    This was the moment, of course, for me to tell her the truth. It was there in front of me, like another family member in the