The Summer We Fell Apart

by Robin Antalek

  Now in old sweats and a faded Columbia T-shirt, she rummaged in the trash can for the bag of chips she’d thrown away in disgust last night. They were right on top where she’d left them, and she quickly picked them up before she had a chance to really think about what she was doing. With the chips, along with the remains of a very expensive bottle of wine sent to her by an appreciative client last month, Kate climbed into her unmade bed and pulled the comforter gingerly up around her. Her veneer was fragile—like a shell whose insides had been blown out and instead held in the qualifying mess she had become since her father’s death. She looked at the clock. It was nearly eleven and she had to be up in six hours. She sighed and popped a chip into her mouth and chewed. Before she swallowed, she chased the chip down with a long sip of wine right from the bottle and then put the bottle down on the coaster on her nightstand. The coaster seemed to be the last holdover from her life before the funeral.

  Before the funeral, Kate took as much pride in her apartment as she did in herself. Even though most mornings she rose before the sun, she’d always made her bed and rinsed her coffee mug before she left for work. She had a cleaning lady twice a week to change the linens, dust, and vacuum. She’d avoided the Pottery Barn trap and instead acquired things piece by piece from small independent shops in Georgetown and even once on a trip through rural Virginia after a long deposition at a client’s house, even if that meant she didn’t have a dining table for the first year after she bought the apartment. It wasn’t as though she entertained. She took pleasure in the uncluttered space, the carefully chosen pieces, and that everything had its place and no one but she would ever rearrange them. At thirty-four she had officially left her youth behind. She paid a mortgage, chose paint colors, voted, scheduled regular doctor’s visits, and paid taxes.

  She had no distractions from work—that meant no boyfriend. She had lied to her brother George. Occasionally, she’d invented boyfriends and romantic holiday weekends in a B&B in Virginia, if the occasion arose, when, in fact, she hadn’t had a boyfriend since law school. Sex was something Kate didn’t really consider anymore, even though it seemed she was surrounded by it. Her clients oozed sex—they were motivated more by sex than money. And it didn’t seem to matter to any of them whom they had sex with—gender was no longer an issue. They definitely didn’t possess an on/off switch. That, apparently, was Kate’s job.

  Before the funeral, Kate thought hers had been off so long that it couldn’t be turned back on, so it was a shock to find that she had reciprocated Eli’s kiss more passionately than either of them expected when he’d surprised her in the chambers of the church. If she hadn’t heard someone coming, if she hadn’t broken away from his arms, there was no telling what she might have done. And after that Eli had been persistent. He’d left voicemails nearly every day since her father died in September. Eventually, the calls slowed down to a trickle, until a week ago, when they’d stopped.

  Eli and Kate had met twelve years ago in the library over Thanksgiving break while they were seniors at an above-average state college north of New York City. With the exception of the foreign exchange students, each had thought they alone were eating ramen instead of turkey and avoiding their families. In Kate’s case, there had been no reason to go home. The house was falling apart, no one would remember to defrost the turkey (if they’d even purchased one), and her three younger siblings made her crazy, while her parents (if they were even together under the same roof) fought constantly. The air was tinged with disappointment and angst, and once she’d escaped the house for college, she vowed not to be lured back by guilt. Besides, she had work to do that she couldn’t get done at home. At that time she was working toward a degree in translation, and she was in the difficult middle stages where the idea of translating an obscure Italian poetess from the 1600s was becoming tedious and losing its luster. She’d yet to fully grasp the meaning of the poem and she was grumpy and frustrated and wishing she’d not been so ambitious.

  Then she came upon Eli in the library, curled up asleep in the Cunningham Collections room. Sara Cunningham had been a trustee of the college, and upon her death her family had donated her books, papers, and enough money to keep said books and papers shelved for eternity. To Kate’s knowledge, no one ever went into the room, and she had appropriated the serene space before the break as her own. It was the perfect place to be alone and spread out her work. To see Eli asleep in one of the upholstered chairs, arms folded against his chest, mouth open, sheen of drool apparent on his chin, was disconcerting. She studied him—his shaggy dark curls, his broad chest beneath a rumpled, bleach-pitted blue oxford-cloth shirt, his jeans and stocking feet with the holes in the toes. She did everything she could think to wake him. She coughed. She dropped her books on the table. She sang loudly off-key. Nothing worked. Eli finally woke up an hour later, stretched, grinned, and asked her out for breakfast, even though it was five o’clock in the afternoon.

  It seemed Eli was hiding from his family as well—a new stepmother and stepbrother that made Eli, at twenty-one, no longer an only child. He maintained that he didn’t mind being usurped; he just didn’t want to bond. His plan after graduation was to travel through Europe. His philosophy degree most likely would not net him a job, since he didn’t know a damn thing he could do with it.

  Kate had boyfriends before, but she never had anyone like Eli in her life. When they were first together, she carried the thought of him inside of her like a secret. She would be going about her normal day: classes, library, a walk to the bank or the market, simple mundane tasks, and all of a sudden her chest would hurt—physically ache. But it wasn’t a painful ache—it was the secret of Eli that she fiercely protected. It wasn’t like she had a reason to hide him; she just wanted this new indescribable thing to herself for a while. Even she, in her limited experience, knew that once everything was out in the open, it changed—appropriated by others who claimed to know exactly how you were feeling.

  There wasn’t a single person besides Eli who could possibly know how Kate felt. And, as she had feared, once her father knew about Eli, she couldn’t get that feeling back. Her secret was simplified and tarnished—made tawdry in her father’s presence. If it weren’t for her father, she would have become Eli’s wife, instead of the smiling, ponytailed blonde that she’d seen in a picture in their alumni magazine. She had brought the picture up close to her face in an attempt to see what was behind the eyes of Eli’s wife, but her eyes looked unremarkably clear and vacant.

  Kate sighed and rolled over and reached for the file folder in the top drawer of her nightstand. When she did this, a gift from her mother, a video game and DVD of her last film, slid off the pile and onto the floor. Kate sighed again. Thankfully, no one she knew in this life would ever connect her to her mother the horror-movie queen. Once she had the file in hand, she sat up, took another swallow of wine, and arranged the contents on the blanket in front of her. There was the note her father scrawled on an envelope that by now she’d memorized.

  THINGS I WANT(ED) TO DO TODAY

  Call: Kate

  Finn

  George

  Amy *

  Kate took note that they were listed in birth order—she and her sister like female bookends for the boys. Kate assumed the star next to her sister Amy’s name meant she was the only one he’d talked to that day, although, as usual, she hadn’t heard this from Amy but George. Underneath their names was a paltry grocery list:

  Coffee

  Bread

  Cigs

  Aspirin

  She shook her head. Had he thought that aspirin was going to help with the headaches from the tumor? Below the list were two other names:

  Miriam

  Elias

  And after that, all in caps, was the phrase:

  TELL MARILYN !!!!!

  Kate hated the exclamation points. Hated that her father had Eli and Miriam’s names on the list. What could he possibly have wanted with them? Hated herself for not answering when she had seen
her father’s number come up on her caller ID, because the last time he’d called he asked her for a loan of a thousand dollars that he’d never repaid. She hadn’t wanted to be asked for more money by her father. She never guessed he was calling to say he was dying. She hated that Amy had been the one to answer his call, even though, to Kate’s knowledge, she, like the rest of her siblings, had really no relationship with him.

  But the most heartbreaking thing of all for Kate, whether she could admit it or not, was that when her father sat down and made that list, he knew before he even wrote a word that he most likely wouldn’t live long enough to complete the things on it. The presence of the past tense in parentheses said volumes. She’d never know if the “today” he had written about was one day only or the next however many days he had until he died. She had avoided any visits not because she had been afraid to see him dying but because she knew he wouldn’t ever admit responsibility for the role he played in redirecting Kate’s life. Truth be told, she was embarrassed by her pedestrian desire for patriarchal approval. Even the thought of Amy being the only one there for him wasn’t enough to guilt her into going. If there was one trait she and her father had shared, it was surely stubbornness.

  She set aside the list along with a lone key on a ring that, at this point, she figured was a lost cause and rifled through the bills she’d paid with her own money. Not counting the funeral and quickie cremation, her father’s death had cost her nearly fifteen thousand dollars. She’d cashed in a 401(k) to do this, which she’d just replenished with her bonus. She hadn’t even dealt with the hospital yet, and none of her siblings had even asked about that bill. Amy would never ask, even though Kate had stayed up the night before the funeral going through everything at Amy’s dining room table. Certainly not Finn, who drank his money, not George, who would side with Amy even if he did have available cash, and going to her mother was out of the question.

  Kate closed her eyes and fell back against the pillows. When she was offered partner tomorrow, everything would be different. With that offer would come more money. Since she really had nothing to spend that money on—a vacation? more clothes? a better apartment?—she might as well let her father be solvent, in death anyway.

  When the alarm went off at six, Kate was already awake, her eyes focused on the wine bottle on her nightstand. This wasn’t how she expected to feel on the morning she was made partner, and certainly she never imagined that the first thing she’d see was an empty wine bottle.

  Kate rose quickly, carrying the bottle and the bag of chips into the kitchen and tossing them in the trash. As an afterthought, she returned to the bedroom and grabbed the video game and DVD. She dumped those in the trash as well and then tied the bag firmly with a giant knot. Over, done. She was finished with the whole business of mourning things she couldn’t change. She had to get over the pathetic funeral, her siblings, and the house that she hated growing up in, which now, courtesy of a bulldozer, was no longer there. Erased. Poof. Like magic.

  She put the coffee on and then went in to take a shower and dress. She took extra care with her hair, makeup, and clothing selection—the navy Donna Karan suit and a blush-colored cashmere shell underneath, a single strand of pearls around her neck and Tiffany pearl studs in her ears—even though she was fully aware that whatever her fate this morning, what she wore was of no consequence now. Still, she’d learned early that she needed to look the part and she was willing to go there. However, when she saw herself in the hall mirror, she noticed the accoutrements of success didn’t really seem to hide the melancholy lurking in her eyes. She squared her shoulders, slipped into her black trench coat, and adjusted the strap of her soft Italian leather briefcase on her shoulder, but avoided another glance in the mirror on her way out the door.

  The restaurant they agreed to meet at was a hangout for many who worked on the Hill. Kate, even though her days seemed far removed from her first year at the firm, when the cases were more political, was still recognized and greeted as she made her way to the table where her boss sat perusing a menu.

  When he put the menu down and saw Kate, he half-rose from his chair—an antiquated greeting from another generation—even though he was only five years Kate’s senior. Kate dismissed the gesture with her hand as unnecessary as she set down her case and removed her coat. When she was seated, Benjamin looked at her and smiled.

  “You look stunning considering the hour,” he said.

  Kate tucked her chin against her chest and studied the menu, even though she knew she’d order what would be her second cup of coffee, along with a muffin. Her throat felt raw, funny, like she was getting a cold. She waited until Benjamin remembered that she wasn’t a silicone-filled client that he had to flatter. Soon, she expected, he’d return to earth and tell her that she’d made partner. Like his manners, his attitudes toward the opposite sex seemed learned from an old movie starring Cary Grant.

  “Well, Kate,” Benjamin began as he cleared his throat.

  Kate looked up and echoed his opening line, “Well, Benjamin.” She smiled slightly and looked off to the waitress and signaled for her coffee, so as not to appear too fixated on what he was about to say. Never look too eager, she reminded herself. They placed their orders and waited until the waitress was gone.

  Finally, Benjamin spoke. “How do you feel about Los Angeles?”

  Kate’s spine stiffened. Los Angeles? “I don’t know. Too sunny, I suppose?”

  Benjamin laughed too hard, showing all of his teeth. Kate thought he looked feral. “Ah come on, Katie, you look like you might need a little fun in the sun.”

  While she and Benjamin had always maintained a strictly business relationship, Kate felt all of a sudden like she had missed something essential that may have happened between them. First of all, he was acting way too chummy; second, no one ever called her Katie. Maybe she should call him Benny. She shook her head slightly. The only bathing suit she owned was a faded red one-piece that she wore to the Y when she swam laps. Los Angeles?

  Benjamin put his hands one on top of the other on the table in front of him and leaned forward so his face was close to Kate’s. The waitress came at that moment and set down their coffees. Kate’s coffee sloshed all over the saucer and the waitress reached across Kate, momentarily obscuring her view of Benjamin, to sop it up with a napkin. When she was done, Kate reached for the coffee to stall.

  Benjamin continued, “So what do you say?”

  “Say?” Kate asked, with the cup to her lips.

  “About Los Angeles?”

  Kate shook her head. “What are you asking me?”

  Benjamin leaned back in his chair and said, “To head up the Los Angeles office, of course, Kate—what else would I be asking you?”

  “Does this mean as a partner?”

  He cocked his head off to the side and licked his lips. “Well, this is a mega opportunity—we’re talking huge.” He paused. “You hold the firm’s future direction in your hands.”

  Kate could think of something else she’d like to get her hands around at this moment. She had already let on more than she wanted to when she snapped, “There shouldn’t even be any pause in your answer to my question.”

  “When?” Kate asked.

  Benjamin hesitated. “Considering all you’ve been through”—he stopped before he continued—“is six weeks or eight good for you?”

  Kate shrugged.

  “Katie,” Benjamin conceded in a cloying voice, “of course partner is in your future. You’re the best I have. Go to Los Angeles, wow me, and then make partner.” He accepted his plate of eggs and sausage and eagerly speared some of each with a fork. He noticed Kate staring as he lifted it to his mouth and he smiled, wolflike, before he shoveled it in.

  Kate looked down at her muffin and picked a blueberry off the top. She delicately placed it on her tongue. She decided she would say nothing else until she figured out her plan of action. Let Benjamin sweat it out. Let him guess whether or not she was heading to California. Mayb
e then, and only then, would she have him by the balls. Kate felt sick to her stomach. She had a feeling that Benjamin’s balls in her hand would be precisely the kind of thing that would wow him.

  Back in her office, Kate closed the door and told her secretary she didn’t want to be disturbed. She sat at her desk, swiveling back and forth in her chair, because if she didn’t move she was going to scream. It was the same feeling that, years ago, propelled her to take up running. Her mind never shut down but at least the physical exertion released enough endorphins that she felt calmer. She hadn’t run in months, and she told herself she hadn’t had the time, when the truth was she hadn’t the desire. Her eye had been on the prize for so long, and now she felt like a Miss America contestant forced to strut herself in the bathing suit competition just to prove she was worthy. Her entire body hummed with an electrical energy and she could barely contain herself, but she needed to be in court in thirty minutes and a jog around the monuments just wasn’t going to happen.

  At the thought of the monuments she laughed out loud. Wasn’t the Washington Monument the biggest fucking phallic symbol of all time? Shouldn’t that have been a warning to her, when she came to D.C., that only boys with the big ones got to play here?

  When she stopped swiveling in the chair, her legs continued to jiggle up and down on their own. She took several deep breaths and pulled out her cell phone. Whom would she call? She dialed her mother, only to realize that would be a terrible mistake. What would Marilyn have to say to make it better? As a child, she had vowed to never be like her. When had she ever made anything more bearable?