“Where?” I asked as I reached for a fry from George’s plate that I had no intention of eating. My stomach hurt from so much greasy food. We all, even Finn, who was the most solicitous I had ever witnessed, looked to Kate to tell us what our next move would be.
She picked up her bag and flung it over her shoulder. “Come on,” she said without an explanation as she marched around the tables and out of Denny’s.
Everyone but me seemed to understand that we were going to make a show of drowning our sorrows at the billiards place. Inside the pool hall our father’s friend the bartender recognized us and gave us a greeting like we were his long-lost family. I appreciated that and smiled back, but when I looked at Kate she appeared to be sucking lemons. I slipped onto a stool next to George. Kate stood on his other side while Finn, whose blood alcohol level even when he wasn’t drinking was still too high, secured a pool table. The bartender, Mike, set us each up with a shot. Nobody was more surprised than me when Kate lifted it to her lips and tossed it back in one gulp.
George elbowed me in the ribs in case I didn’t notice that Kate was tapping her glass on the counter for another. When she got her refill I heard her say, “Start a tab.”
Since that was the case, I raised my glass for another as well. And another and another. It was unfortunate that by the time I realized just how much I’d had to drink I needed help getting off the stool and going to the bathroom. I didn’t acknowledge that it was Kate who helped me until her face appeared from under the stall next to mine. “Give me some paper.”
I blinked at the sight of her head at an odd angle. “What the hell?”
“Amy, damn it, give me some paper.”
As only the drunk can do, I hesitated too long and put inappropriate spaces in between words when I finally spoke. “Where’s your hand?”
“Oh fuck.” Her head disappeared and her hand appeared in its place. “Give me some paper,” she demanded.
“What are you going to give me?” I asked as I struggled with the roll, my fingers slipped over the tightly wound roll until I managed to get three pieces of paper. I crumpled it into Kate’s hand. “There,” I said as I slumped against the side of the stall. My eyes focused on something scratched into the door. Apparently Tiffany gave great head. I yelled this out to Kate above the flush.
A few seconds later she yanked open the door to my stall.
“Ooops, I guess I forgot to lock it.”
Kate frowned. “Do you need help?”
“Hey,” I said as I realized that she didn’t appear to be drunk at all. “How did I drink more than you?”
Kate grabbed me under my arms and lifted me off the toilet. When Kate saw that I was fully dressed she said, “Do you have to go or not?”
My mouth felt funny and I ran my tongue over my teeth and then my lips. “I guess not.”
“Then come on—but wash your hands first.” She looked at her watch. “It’s time to go get Dad.”
I took two steps that got me to the sink. “Get Dad?” I shook my head. Why was she trying to confuse me? I looked into the mirror above the sink. It was dark and I said so to Kate.
“Take those stupid glasses off then,” she snapped.
I looked in the mirror again and adjusted my glasses without taking them off, but I did remove my headband. The flesh behind my ears ached. I guess I was taking too long at the sink because Kate came over and turned the water on for me and squirted some pink soap into my palm.
“Wash,” she commanded.
I did as I was told and rubbed my palms together under the water. “Tell me what you mean about getting Dad,” I said.
Kate sighed before she said, “The ashes, Amy, the ashes. We have to go get the ashes.” She tapped her foot.
I turned the faucet off and dried my hands on the cashmere wrap from the thrift store before I realized that Kate was holding a paper towel out to me. I looked around for a trash can. “I have no idea where to put him,” I said to Kate.
“Paper towels are neither feminine nor masculine,” she said as she pointed to the trash can.
I took the unused paper towel and dropped it into the trash. “I meant Dad. I have no fucking idea what to do with Dad.”
Her eyes turned to slits and her face darkened. “Goddamn all of you,” Kate said as she opened the door with her shoulder. “I tried to do something I thought would be considerate. I see now that maybe I should have just taken him all for myself.”
“Will you just stop the freaking drama? He’s yours—he’s always been yours. Okay?”
Kate paused in the doorway, “What the hell do you mean by that?”
I screamed louder than I intended. “He loved you the best. You should have had that written into the funeral service.” I demonstrated by holding my hands above my head like the words were in lights on a marquee. “Dad Loved Kate the Best,” I shouted.
With a look of absolute disdain Kate turned and walked away and I ran to catch up to her for the thousandth time that day. I tugged on her jacket. “What?” I said, huffing hard, out of breath from too much greasy food and booze. “You have that many fucking good memories? Take my share then, Kate!” I yelled. “Take my goddamned share and do something with him.” I was aware that the few people in the bar at five in the afternoon along with bartender Mike seemed totally unfazed by our familial drama.
George and Finn came toward us, holding their pool cues like weapons cocked and ready.
“What’s going on?” asked George with concern.
Kate pushed past him and picked her clutch up off the bar. Finn took a few steps back and turned to her and I saw him put a hand on her lower back and say something into her ear. I noticed that he had taken his jacket off and the whiteness of his dress shirt looked like heavy cream under the dim bar lighting.
I looked at George. “She’s pissed because I said I didn’t know what to do with Dad’s ashes.” I sighed. “I told her she could have mine and she got all in my face.”
“Looks like you were the one offering a smack-down,” George said, trying to make a joke out of it as he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I shrugged him off and headed toward the door. I was sick and tired of the bunch of them. I wanted to go home and crawl into my bed and stay there until Owen came home.
I paced back and forth in the parking lot until my siblings appeared, in their funeral clothes, stumbling and blinking against daylight. Kate barked at Finn, “You drove, right? Give me your keys.” She wiggled her fingers, palm up at him. “I know the faster way.”
Finn had his suit jacket tossed over one shoulder. He took his time, slipping his arms inside the sleeves and adjusted the lapels, as if the suit were worth a million freaking dollars instead of the cheap polyester knockoff that it was, before he said quietly, “I think it’s better if I drive, Kate.”
Obediently Kate nodded at Finn and fell into step beside him as we walked back to where Finn had parked his car. It smelled like wet dog and was covered inside with silver tape where the roof obviously leaked. I marveled at how Finn handled Kate and, more surprisingly, how Kate let herself be handled. I did notice, however, that Kate seemed to be slightly ahead of Finn now as we walked, as if she had to get to the car first. I remembered how annoyed I would get when she did the same thing when we were kids, always calling shotgun before anyone else.
I was in the backseat next to George, who was smashed against the door because of the nasty black stain that was on his seat. There was a sleeping bag down on the floor beneath my feet and I felt guilty that none of us had asked where Finn was staying. I wondered if he had slept in the car. Kate was slumped in the passenger seat while Finn drove. We waited quietly like chastised children when Kate went into the funeral home.
“Hey.” I leaned forward and tapped Finn on the shoulder. “Why didn’t Miriam come?”
I could see the muscles in Finn’s jaw working while he considered how to answer me. Eventually he said, “I guess she didn’t think the rest of you wanted her here.”
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br /> I couldn’t formulate an argument to his response, so I fell back against the seat and turned toward the window, ignoring George, who I knew was staring in my direction. Twenty minutes later Kate emerged from the funeral home carrying a high square brown box that she placed in the trunk.
When she got back into the car and slammed the door she didn’t say a thing and Finn, uncharacteristically, waited to turn on the car. We sat there wordlessly for what felt like forever. Finally, Finn broke the silence.
“I know what we should do with Dad.”
It was the first time Finn and Kate had seen that our childhood home was gone. I was relieved that it looked just as dark and deserted as it had a few nights ago. Finn parked down the street so the car wouldn’t be visible from the house just in case someone was inside. Kate popped the lock on the trunk and retrieved the box containing Dad’s ashes as George and I extricated ourselves from the backseat. It was dusk and still light enough to find the path once we’d circumnavigated the huge stone columns at the end of the drive. We walked single-file but close together, so I kept stepping on the backs of George’s fancy shoes.
The last time George turned around and hissed, “Stop with the flat tires.”
I mimicked him under my breath. I’d lost my sense of humor as I sobered up. My head was pounding, my mouth was dry, and my stomach was queasy. The triple-header hangover.
Kate, at the front of the line, turned around and hushed us as we passed the enormous back patio. “For fuck’s sake, would you all be quiet—what don’t you understand about the word trespassing?”
I ignored Kate because I couldn’t help but stop and stare. There were three levels at least of slate and planters and low stone walls suitable for seating, along with an outdoor fireplace. The back stoop where I’d spent so many early mornings sipping my coffee, the yard where we’d play a stupid pickup game of ball, everything was gone.
Finn was behind me and wasn’t prepared to stop when I did. He grabbed me by the shoulders and said in my ear, “Come on—let’s get this over with.”
I looked ahead of us. George had been right. They’d cleared the land all the way down to the rocks so there was no longer a secret path to the water. I broke rank and walked up next to George. I gave him a sidelong glance and he echoed my look. He had to be thinking of the same thing I was, of the summer before he went off to college when he had taught Miriam to dive and Finn had come home to live. That was the last time I could remember swimming here. Soon after that George left for New Hampshire to go to school. We didn’t venture down that winter to skate. Then the following summer I left town as soon as I graduated, before the water had a chance to warm up enough for swimming. And even though I’d been back since then, I never went back to the swimming hole.
We reached the pond and Kate put the box on the ground and opened the flaps. One by one she passed the urns that contained our father’s ashes to each of us. The urns were smaller than I expected and I held mine between the palms of my hands like a coffee mug. I tried to pretend that it wasn’t pieces of my father and when I couldn’t convince myself of that, I became fixated on what part of him I did have. I hated to think he was all jumbled together like a Picasso painting. My heart was racing and all of a sudden I had this tickle at the back of my throat. When I coughed everyone turned to me like I was going to say something. I shook my head and coughed again so hard that my temples throbbed and my eyes ran watery. It was a relief to cry even if it snuck up on me after I held it in all day.
“Are these warm or is it my imagination?” Finn asked.
I shuddered. At its best, when he was alive, my father’s presence in my life could be described as ghostlike. Now that he was dead? I honestly didn’t know. It couldn’t get any worse, that was for sure.
“Should we say something?” George ventured.
Everyone turned to Kate. For once she seemed at a loss for words and shrugged.
I raised my mini-urn up in one hand and offered, “Here’s to you, Dad—we hardly knew ya.”
The only sound after that was George snorting.
I put my arm down and tried hard to think of something nice to say. It shouldn’t be this hard, should it? We all seemed to be struggling with the same thing.
“I say we just do it,” Finn finally announced.
Once Finn said aloud what we’d all obviously been thinking, we walked closer to the water’s edge. It was marshy around the bank and I looked down to see thin brown liquid creeping up around my white boots. I stole a look at George’s tasseled loafers—they too were sinking into the muck.
Kate was the first to pop the seal on her urn. It actually gave off a little vacuum-pack sound, as if she opened a jar of peanuts. I could have sworn I saw a puff of smoke rise out of the jar. After Kate, we all opened our jars and it was easier than I imagined it would be.
“Ready?” Finn asked, with his jar positioned as far away from his body as humanly possible.
“Ready,” George echoed.
I took a giant step closer to the water and without looking at my brothers and sister I flicked my wrist and upended the urn. I watched the puff cloud of smoke and the ashes swirl before landing on the water’s surface. They sunk slowly into the water and then disappeared. There were several larger pieces of what I imagined must be bone. Those were the first to go. When I looked down at my boots, I saw that they were covered all over with a gray powder. My father. The first thing that popped into my mind after that was: these boots are made for walking.
As an epitaph, that would have suited him just fine.
part two
George
four
I’M PRETTY SURE HOLDEN CAULFIELD COULD DATE IF HE WANTED TO
It was four days before winter break and George was teaching this year’s freshmen The Catcher in the Rye, again. He liked to introduce Holden to the kids at this time of year, since the novel took place in the weeks before Christmas almost directly outside the doors of this very school. He would culminate the lesson plan with a walking field trip. They’d go up a few blocks to the Museum of Natural History where Holden met his little sister, Phoebe, and then they’d go into the park and over to the carousel. Along the way George would encourage conversation and try to get the students to imagine the path Holden took.
This year’s boys would be more of a challenge than in years past. They seemed to be a particularly immature bunch, though physically they appeared older; some of them were as tall as George and he was just a hair over six two. And at first glance their clothing styles mimicked George’s since he currently wore what his sister Amy called his “frat boy college costume” of wrinkled flat-front khakis, loafers, argyle socks, blue oxford cloth shirt, and a striped tie every single day. At Tate the dress code was such that the boys wore loosely culled uniforms of khaki trousers, white oxford cloth shirts, and a navy tie. So distinguishing teacher from students, in George’s class anyway, might take a few minutes for the untrained eye.
Most of the freshmen classes had settled into the routine of high school by this time in the year, but these boys were still grappling with an almost puppylike affection for each other. They gave each other wedgies and yanked each other’s pants down several times a day, joked about penis size, and, in the boys’ showers after gym class, hypothesized often about which one of their classmates was the serial masturbator. These boys seemed preternaturally aware of each other’s sexuality in a way that girls might have been aware of the clothing other girls wore. You couldn’t blame it on the same-sex school thing. They had plenty of social interaction with the Tate School for Girls, which was directly across the street on West 68th Street. It was the electrically charged homoerotic air combined with the fact that it just didn’t occur to any of them that sex—for most—was not for a public venue. At times all George could think was thank God it wasn’t a boarding school. There were also times that George wondered if they acted like this around him because they’d guessed that he was gay. His sexuality wasn’t something he had hi
dden from his colleagues, but it also wasn’t something he’d offered up for conversation in the teachers’ lounge. Often kids knew these things way before adults, and he sometimes got the uneasy feeling that the boys might be testing him.
Naturally, because of this, George had been more than hesitant to introduce the sexually strangled Holden to them—especially the scene in the hotel where the young hooker gets sent to Holden’s room and he can’t perform—but in the back of his mind he’d hoped that they might calm down a bit if they saw that sexuality was something everyone struggled with at this age.
Right now George had floated a question to them and was waiting for a response. He asked why they thought that Holden, while admiring Jane from afar, never had the nerve to ask her out even though his loutish roommate boasted of sleeping with her. The boys seemed to consider this while George waited. Finally, Asa Malik, a recent transfer, at Tate only a month now, raised his hand.
George nodded at him enthusiastically, hoping for a thoughtful comment. Asa’s written work had shown a disquieting maturity.
Asa coughed and squirmed in his seat before he said, “I’m pretty sure Holden Caulfield could get a date if he wanted to.”
The class erupted into laughter and catcalls, and George raised his hands in the air to hush them because it looked like Asa had more to say. The boy had remarkable composure. His dark-brown, heavily lashed eyes focused on a point above George’s head as he waited and there was no flush of embarrassment on his mocha-colored skin. When the class was quiet, he glanced over at Asa and nodded again for him to continue.
Asa looked down at the top of his desk and stumbled through the first few words before he said, “It wasn’t about the sex for Holden…even if he was, well, you know? He wanted to be with Jane like it was when they were kids. Holden still wanted to be a kid. That was why he wanted to protect Phoebe so much.” Asa shrugged. “And of course if Holden was still a kid then his brother would be alive. Holden probably would have liked to freeze time.”
The Summer We Fell Apart Page 10