The Summer We Fell Apart

by Robin Antalek

I closed my eyes and fell into a deep dreamless sleep, woken only by the sounds of an inhuman chattering and the rustling of garbage bags below my window. When I reluctantly rubbed apart my crusted lids, I half-expected it to be morning. But it was an hour before dawn and the raccoons must have crawled from the woods to ravage scraps from the trash bags. I sat up in bed unable to sleep and considered going downstairs for something to eat but given the state of the kitchen I figured there was probably nothing. When it was obvious I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon, I swung my legs out of bed and padded across the room and out into the hallway. I stopped outside my mother’s room and tested the knob and was surprised when it turned. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I could make out a teetering pile of framed photos she’d removed from the walls in the hallway, mounds of clothing, and stacks of books, and distinguish them from the form of my mother sleeping on her back, arms flung off to the side like she was reaching for something. I couldn’t remember the last time I had wandered into my mother’s room in the middle of the night looking to be comforted. It was George’s room I usually sought out, his narrow twin bed and the slim spot of mattress he afforded me as I used to curl up next to him.

  So I was surprised when she asked in sleep-thickened voice, “Did you have a bad dream?”

  To my amazement my mother moved over and swatted the space next to her with an open palm. I accepted the invitation and adjusted my body into the rippled waves of the already warmed sheets. The bed linens had the combined smell of my mother’s perfume and cigarette smoke.

  I thought my mother had fallen back to sleep when she asked quietly, “Is everything okay?”

  “I’ve just been going for weeks and not getting much sleep. I think I’ve confused my internal clock.” My voice sounded loud and strange in the dark.

  My mother rolled over onto her side so that she was facing me but her eyes were still closed. “You never needed a lot of sleep.” She paused. “When you were a baby I would find you lying in your crib with your eyes wide open. You had been so quiet I thought you were asleep, but it turned out you had probably been awake for hours. Watching. Listening.” She swallowed. “You never even cried when you were hungry. I was so worried that I would sleep right through and forget to feed you, I had to set an alarm to wake me every three hours when you were a newborn. Your father hated it; he used it as an excuse to sleep in his study until you were eight months old.” She pulled the sheet up around her shoulders and tucked it beneath her chin. “You never complained, Amy. Never fussed. It was like you knew something that I didn’t.”

  I held my breath. I had almost no stories from my infancy. If it hadn’t been for Kate and a project she was doing for school that had her documenting a family member, which coincided with my birth, there probably wouldn’t be any baby pictures of me either. My mother startled me when she said, “Maybe that’s why you are an artist, all that watching.”

  I sighed. Recently I had begun to worry that without any real future plans I was nothing. My degree and four years of projects in a portfolio did not make me an artist. Without school and course-work defining who I was, what would I do? And surprise, surprise, did my mother really think of me as an artist? “I’m scared,” I finally admitted out loud.

  “Who isn’t?”

  “What?”

  “Everyone is scared, Amy. Everyone. The trick is to close your eyes and look away before the bad part.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  I hadn’t been looking at my mother. I had been staring up at the ceiling but I sensed she had opened her eyes and I was right. Her face was inches from mine on the pillow and I couldn’t help but wonder if this had been my father’s side of the bed. How long had it been since she had shared this bed with anyone? Was I naive to think that she lived a celibate life in this room since he’d left?

  “I think that was the difference between your father and me. Richard faced everything head-on. I averted my eyes to the tragedy.”

  “How long did it take you to figure that out?” I asked the question because I didn’t want her to stop talking. I had never had this kind of intimacy before with my mother. I knew it was tenuous at best and might only last until the sun rose and everything reverted back to normal.

  She laughed. “I knew it before I married him.”

  “And you did it anyway?”

  “I was looking the other way, remember?”

  “And you were pregnant with Kate?”

  “I was.” She yawned.

  I touched my stomach, and in that moment I wanted to tell her my secret but I held back. I was too aware that this kind of sharing wouldn’t last, and too afraid of her judgment. “But you were crazy about Dad, weren’t you? When you married him?”

  “Yes, but it was the kind of crazy that takes over your life. The kind that consumes everything in your path and makes you feel like you have a fever. But when you come out of that kind of crazy, it is, to say the least, disorienting.” She closed her eyes again, looking like she was ready to go back to sleep.

  She sighed into the pillow and the features of her face settled into a mask of placidity. I was reminded of a series of photographs a friend of mine had done for his senior thesis: a photographic essay of his girlfriend sleeping. He’d photographed her every night for a year without her knowledge. When she found out she broke up with him because she didn’t know what else he might do while she was asleep. I thought it was perhaps because he had shown the world a side of her she herself had never seen and that was what she was most afraid of.

  “I’m too old for crazy,” my mother murmured.

  I stroked the slightly swollen pouch of flesh that was my stomach. “What am I going to do?” I whispered.

  “You will do what you need to do, Amy.” My mother urged, “Now go to sleep.”

  I didn’t want her to stop talking but even as I fought it I felt myself drift off as well. The next thing I knew it was morning and my mother was standing over me with a cup of coffee.

  “Amy.”

  She shook my shoulder and I moaned.

  “You slept in your clothes.”

  I opened my eyes enough to see her frown and then I closed them again. “What time?” I asked.

  “Six-thirty. Come on. The junk isn’t getting into the Dumpster all by itself.”

  I tried to sit up but the combination of coffee and my mother’s perfume that she thought covered the cigarette smoke conspired against me. My mouth felt all watery and I pressed my tongue against the back of my front teeth before I swallowed. Everything felt tight, including the clothes my mother felt it necessary to point out that I’d slept in.

  Eventually I managed to really open my eyes and say, “I need to take a shower.”

  She sighed in annoyance but released the pressure on my shoulder. Her voice had softened just a little when she said, “Fast, okay?”

  She searched for a place on top of the crowded nightstand to put the coffee. As she moved things around to make room for the mug she picked up a framed photo and stared at it for a moment. While she did, the corners of her mouth tugged downward and her lip trembled slightly before she dropped the frame, facedown, into a pile of clothing and books on the floor next to the bed and left the room.

  As soon as she shut the door, I reached over the side and picked it up. In the photograph Kate is a toddler squinting at the camera while wielding a shovel, and Finn is still a baby, propped upon a lump of sand at the beach on Long Island by hands I knew to be my mother’s. I took a moment to look around her room in the filtered daylight. The heavy violet curtains she had drawn against the sun sagged off the rod and the shadows on the ceiling made the gray circles of smoke damage from years of my mother’s cigarettes seem darker and more menacing like ominous spots of cancer on an X-ray. I figured the state of dishevelment the room was in could go either way: she had already started sorting through things for packing and discarding or this was just how she lived.

  After the shower I opened windows to let in the fre
sh air as I towel-dried my hair and brushed it out. My hair was heavy and wet through my T-shirt, but it felt oddly comforting. My stomach had settled enough for coffee and I was just pouring a cup when my mother came into the kitchen from outside.

  “Well,” she said with an edge of criticism in her voice as she gave me a serious stare, “that’s a very familiar look.”

  Instinctively I stood up straight and sucked in my stomach. “What look?” I asked.

  She laughed off my attempt to appear together. “Amy in the morning—wet hair, bleary-eyed, sucking coffee.” She moved quickly through the room after that and I heard the front door open.

  I followed her just in time to see a truck backing up into the driveway with a large blue Dumpster on the back of a flatbed. I walked out onto the porch and stood next to my mother. The sky was absolutely perfectly blue—not a wisp of cloud anywhere—and the air still held the remains of a cool night. Together, in silence, we watched the Dumpster’s slow release into the driveway. It wasn’t until it touched ground that I realized it entirely blocked in Polly’s car, sealing my fate for the weekend. There really would be no escape until the Dumpster was full.

  We worked separately. If my mother felt any differently toward me after the night before, she didn’t show it.

  A night with the window open made the air in George’s room bearable. I finished bagging the clothes and anything else I could fit into a trash bag. I called George seven times and each time I got his voice mail. I was going to kill him when I saw him. I slid his mattress and box spring down the front stairs along with the bags and then hauled them out to the Dumpster. I did the same with the rest of the bedrooms on the second floor except for my mother’s. In my room I boxed up what I’d left behind to bring back with me to Rhode Island. That included peeling off some of the collages from the wall. Maybe they’d help me figure out where I was going.

  I found a bag of Asian snack mix in the pantry and despite its scary expiration date I was too hungry to care. I figured the salt was enough of a preservative anyway. It was on a shelf next to a piece of molding that had our names and heights on it. I ran my finger down the dozens of marks and dates of my siblings until I found my own. I counted two recorded measurements at age three and five. Kate had always been the one who did the measuring. Considering that she had been thirteen and probably plotting her own escape the last time she measured me, I expected there to be none after that. I noticed that she had even measured our father once while he still was a good six inches taller than both of the boys. I searched for a marking for our mother, but Kate hadn’t bothered. I licked my finger and tried to rub out the decade-old exclamation point with a heart for the period that Kate had placed next to Dad’s measurements but I only succeeded in creating a smudgy mess.

  I took the bag of Asian snack mix off the shelf and ate it as I talked to my mother. She was emptying my father’s desk by pulling out drawers and dumping the contents into a large box in the center of the floor. My father, according to his attorney who delivered the signed divorce papers, was on sabbatical from his position at Skidmore College. My mother snorted at the use of the word sabbatical and explained that he meant he was on another continent with a benevolent girlfriend. How she knew I could only begin to wonder, but didn’t ask. At different times in my life I felt alternately that I knew too much about my parents’ private lives and then, at other times, nothing at all. I just wanted to be like everyone else: somewhere in the middle.

  I watched my mother. She had some sort of selection system, because every once in a while she would stop and add a random item to a rapidly growing pyramid that included my father’s Tony Award for Best Play and Richard Ford’s book Independence Day, about a man who leaves his family for a fling with a woman in France only to return and try to ingratiate himself back into his family’s good graces. Considering our current circumstances it seemed the book was a talisman and an odd reading choice; but I said nothing.

  I sucked on a wasabi pea that I found at the bottom of the bag and wondered aloud if a yard sale was worth it. My mother looked up from her pillaging and squinted at me through the dust. “I’ve seen the crap people buy—are you kidding me?”

  Inexplicably, she was saving the furniture for a yard sale on Sunday. She told me about it when I found her in my father’s study, repeating her words slowly like she was wasting her time because she claimed she had explained this all before.

  “So Dad doesn’t want anything?” I felt a bit shy, as if I shouldn’t be peeking at any of his stuff. I could count on my fingers the number of times I’d ever been in my father’s office. Even after all this time it felt a little sacrilegious.

  “I asked. Never got an answer. So I’m going on no.” She turned and started on the bookshelves. “But if you’d like to call him you can.” It was a challenge I recognized, delivered in the most nonchalant of tones. She pointed in the general direction of the phone but I stayed rooted to the floor. I knew she was paying close attention to me even as she pulled down a leather-bound book.

  When she turned it over in her hands I could see it was a copy of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. “Get me another box, would you, sweets? I think we can sell some of these.”

  I probably had earned the affectionate word sweets because I hadn’t immediately run to the telephone. I wasn’t that dumb—maybe I’d try him later when she wasn’t around. But even as I thought about calling him, I knew I probably wouldn’t bother. When I didn’t make a move to leave, my mother stopped what she was doing and frowned. “What is it, Amy?”

  I shrugged. “I was just wondering if years from now when I think about home will this be it? I mean, even if it isn’t ours anymore?”

  My mother’s entire body sagged as she leaned back against the desk and considered what I said, still holding the Fitzgerald book to her chest. “I never realized that any of you thought fondly of this house.” She sighed. “Who really wanted to be here in this wreck?”

  “You must have at one point?” I ventured.

  She shook her head. “Not really.” She narrowed her eyes at the far end of the room as if the answer was written on the wall. “We were only supposed to be here for a short time and then your father was going to make a triumphant return to Broadway.”

  “And?”

  She smiled, but not happily, and gestured around her at the boxes. “And look where we are today.”

  Perhaps this was yet another example of what my mother had said last night: she looked away before the bad part and found herself living here. Forever. Or so it seemed.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, there are still memories here, none of us can deny that.”

  My mother straightened up and looked down at the boxes of books. As she rearranged a few in the sell pile I noticed that the veins on the backs of her hands stood out more than usual and her knuckles were thick and knotted. Her hands looked like they belonged to someone else, someone older. Still intent on reconfiguring the books, she said, “You know what they say about memories, don’t you?”

  There was a lump in my throat and I shook my head in response, even though she wasn’t looking at me.

  “We always remember things better than they were. Never worse.” She smiled and tucked her chin against her chest. “Can you go get me those boxes now?”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked, even though as the words escaped my mouth I knew what she meant. Less than twenty-four hours in the home I’d known my entire life and I was having a hard time recalling the specifics of my discontent. Perhaps time and age had muted the details?

  “It helps,” she admitted quietly.

  The downstairs rooms had already been stripped of any extraneous possessions. The furniture pushed out of place and into the corners in odd configurations looked like the first people at a party huddled in clumps around the edges of the room. In the center of the dining room was a stack of collapsed boxes and a tape gun.

  Reluctantly I put down my rice mix and taped together the botto
m center seam of the closest box. I tossed it aside and did several others in quick succession. In this one moment I could see the Zen-like appeal in a simple repetitive task and so I continued. It helped to focus on the job in front of me and not to dwell on my mother’s curious mood; I was unused to her sharing so much. My concentration was broken only when I heard tires on the gravel drive. I didn’t think the Dumpster company was coming back until Sunday. I walked over to the bay window in the dining room and looked out through the overgrown bushes. Lucky for me the lime-green leaves of spring were just beginning to unfurl on the hydrangeas. Before long there would be total obliteration.

  My father’s ancient red Honda was parked behind the Dumpster. Apparently my mother’s source had been wrong. I didn’t know whether to run into my father’s study to warn my mother or stay here and hide. I held my breath as I watched the driver’s side door open quickly, trying to recall the last time I’d seen my father. When Miriam stepped out of the car, I smashed my forehead against the window and said, “fuck,” under my breath over and over again. Of course, like a highway strewn with bodies after a wreck, I couldn’t look away. She went around to the passenger side and knocked on the window. Again, I held my breath and waited.

  She looked annoyed and tired as she gestured at whoever it was through the glass. When the door opened a crack, she stepped aside and looked over her shoulder toward the house. I moved back from the window so I could still see, but so that I wasn’t too obvious. I didn’t want to start off with Miriam after four years with the accusation of spying hanging over my head.

  Finn got out of the car slowly. He was stooped like he’d been punched in the stomach. His hair was long, greasy, and the skin on his face was an unflattering color combination of yellow and gray. When he was fully out of the car, he squinted up at the house. Despite his obvious state of physical deterioration his face lightened when he said something to Miriam. She smiled at him and shook her head then went back over to the car and took an item out of the backseat. A worn and scuffed leather backpack. She slung the pack over her shoulder and waited solicitously for Finn to make the first move. When he ambled unsteadily over the grass in a diagonal line toward the front porch, I skidded across the dining room and ran back down the hall to the study.