An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [107]
Thomas scrambled to his feet, then stood there, still smiling, his arms crossed over his bare chest, and I finally considered his strange getup.
"Why are you dressed like that?" I asked him.
"Boola, boola, boola," he said.
"Oh no," I said.
"Boola, boola, boola," he said again, as though he were a Muslim calling other Muslims to prayer.
Which was exactly what he was supposed to be, I should say that now, and I knew exactly what was going on. The Mirabellis are a sentimental, rearward-looking brood, which is not only to say that they find comfort in the past, but that they re-create those comforts whenever they might most need them in the present. For instance, Anne Marie had a considerable stretch in her childhood when she went everywhere in her tutu, to which she was greatly attached. When we first moved to Camelot, and Anne Marie was having such a hard time with the thinness of the walls, her parents showed up one night wearing tutus, and this somehow made Anne Marie feel better, as though the thinness of the walls could be redeemed by the thickness of the past. As though it wasn't enough simply to remember the past; as though one had to re-create it in order for it to do any good. Then there was the time, right before Katherine was born, when Anne Marie had some complications in the pregnancy, some hiccup in our girl-to-be's heartbeat, and Anne Marie had to be hospitalized for a few days. To buck her up, and because Ben Franklin had always been by far Anne Marie's favorite founding father in grade school, Mr. Mirabelli had visited her dressed as Ben Franklin, complete with the spectacles and knickers and kite and almanac, and Mrs. Mirabelli had dressed, on alternating days, as Mrs. Franklin or a bawdy French dame. There were too many of these childhood moments to count, and one of them was the Mirabellis' only trip abroad, to Morocco, where they had heard Muslims calling to Muslims, which brings us to this lunchtime in Camelot. I'd always been included in these reenactments ― had worn a tutu and dressed up as either Sam or John Adams, the stouter one ― until now.
"Out of my way," I said, then charged past Thomas and into my house, through the empty living room and into the dining room. The table there was much lower than normal and was balanced on four of Christian's building blocks, its legs removed and stashed in the corner of the room, like kindling ready for the fire. The normal tablecloth ― white, lace ― had been replaced with a tablecloth with some complicated pattern meant to seem Middle Eastern. There were covered serving dishes filled with something I guessed would be almost edible (the Mirabellis weren't known for their skill around the kitchen). Mrs. Mirabelli was the only person in the room besides me; she was, despite her arthritis, sitting crossed-legged on the floor and was wearing a white homemade burka, which was clearly just a bedsheet with a hole cut in it in such a way that it covered her hair and ears and then extended southward. She had unstitched and then restitched a lace napkin or handkerchief for a veil; when she heard me come in, she lifted her homemade veil, looked at me in the way you might expect a mother-in-law to look at her wayward son-in-law ― a look that was somewhere between pity and poison ― and then dropped the veil again.
"Well, look who's here," my father-in-law said as he walked into the room. Mr. Mirabelli was dressed like the underground leader of a radical Islamic faction: he was wearing a green army jacket, a long white gown he might have stolen from a hospital, and a red-and-whitechecked scarf wrapped around his head and flowing down his back. All he lacked was the Russian-made machine gun, for which, considering the circumstances, I was grateful. My father-in-law had his left hand on Christian's shoulder. Christian