An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [35]
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?"