An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [39]
They weren't talking about the book, not exactly; that's the first thing I found out. Instead, they were talking about how they felt. When I sat down, one woman with a flowing tan barn coat and dark circles under her eyes was talking about how a character in the book reminded her of her daughter.
"Oh, it was heartbreaking," the woman said. "It made me cry." Speaking of that, she started crying right then, and since crying is as contagious as laughter or the worst kinds of disease, I nearly started crying, too. But I got hold of myself and managed to choke back my tears, and finally the woman did, too ― her sobs became whimpers that became sniffles that became brave, quivering sighs. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, wiped the hands on her barn coat, and again said, "It made me cry. I loved it. That's all I have to say."
"Wait a minute ― hold on," I said. I had all these questions already. What exactly in the book reminded the woman of her daughter? And why did this make her cry? Did she, the woman in the barn coat, cry in great, shameless, heaving sobs in public places, or quietly, behind a closed bathroom door with the water running so that no one could hear her? I remembered my mother assigning me books and asking me, after I'd read them, to tell her about them. Details, she always wanted details and more details, and apparently I was my mother's son, more than I wanted to be, because now I wanted details, too. But I'd said too much already, this was obvious: the other women, mostly, were glaring at me as if I'd murdered both the woman and her daughter with my outburst, and the woman herself looked as though she were on the verge of another crying jag. "Sorry," I said, then sank back into my chair and pledged to listen quietly, very quietly, and with my mind as wide open as possible.
So I listened and learned some things. Another woman wearing a matching sky blue velour sweat suit insisted that anger could be a good thing, a positive thing (she did not say what, if anything, this had to do with the book); a man (he was the only other man there; I thought this near-total absence of men meaningful, even though I couldn't be certain of what it might mean) in his fifties, wearing a shiny warm-up jacket scarred with multiple zippers and Velcro patches, said that he read the book in one sitting and then immediately went and hugged his father's gravestone. The man explained that he had hated his father for years for reasons he couldn't quite remember, and that he had also hated his father for dying on him before they could talk about the hate and the mysterious reasons behind it. "I felt lost, so lost," the man said, "and it was my father's fault." In his resentment the man had let his father's gravestone fall into something of a ruin. The man said that he hugged the gravestone for a long, long time, just so that his father would know that he loved him and that all was forgiven. "I got all dirty from hugging the gravestone," the man said, "but I don't care. It felt good to get dirty."
"Bring on the dirt," one of the women said. She was a white woman wearing wide-wale corduroys and penny loafers and she had the most severe of all the severely blunt, sensible haircuts, but she said, "Bring on the dirt," in a vaguely black-gospel fashion. This clearly gave the lone black woman in the group some pause. The black woman cleared her throat and got up to get some more coffee and left her book on her chair unattended. I made sure no one was looking, then picked up the book. On the front cover was a drawing of a coffee cup, the coffee