An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [19]
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.
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