For whatever reason, this made everyone laugh very, very hard.
We arrived at my parents’ house in Wildwood a few hours before the party. The wind swept cool air off the ocean as we walked into the decorative maelstrom my mother had organized with the acuity and determination of Spielberg re-creating D-Day. Several full-size skeletons crawled up the sides of the house, peering in windows while an enormous black plastic spider the size of a car crept over the roof. When we got closer, I saw these decorations were actually moving, the skeletons craning to watch us approach, the spider snapping its mandibles: robotics.
“It’s kinda cute?” I suggested. Kate bulged her eyes.
My dad shoved Oktoberfest beers in our hands, my mom threw my niece, Gwen, into my arms. Gwen, riled to the nines by her grandma’s Halloween spirit, breathlessly explained to her uncle that she was dressed as a ballerina. My mom was a “basic witch,” including heavy pentagram earrings along with yoga pants and a Jamba Juice smoothie. My sister, Cara, and her husband, who we all called Habswam because his first name was also Matt, wore the gauzy outfits of Beyoncé and Jay-Z from their latest album cover.
“Hey, Matty,” said Cara, hugging me. She had her phone out and was making a twisted, pained face.
“What?”
She shook her head. “Sorry. Putting it away. A school shooting in Minneapolis.”
Morbid curiosity led me to check my news app and find that fourteen children, Somali refugees, had been murdered by a gunman who’d stormed into their school. I put my phone away because my sister was right. These horrors occurred with such frequency now, it left one numb to fourteen-child body counts.
“What are you waiting for?” my dad demanded. He was dressed as Indiana Jones, with a fedora and a bullwhip hanging from his belt, white hair popping out of his shirt. “Get your costumes on!”
As we changed in the room that had been mine during summers on the coast, Kate asked, “What do you think we should do?”
I held my elfin ears and had my green tights halfway up my legs, afraid I’d shred them because I’d bought a pair a size too small. “About what?”
She shook her head and the turquoise beads on her cowboy hat rattled. Farm Girl was the idea, but it was hard not to inject the word sexy in front of it. “About Randall. The endorsement.”
I just shook my head. “Above my pay grade, sister.”
“In your heart of hearts?”
“There is no path, remember? We make the path as we walk.”
“Kid, that’s not an answer.”
I held my hands out in utter unknowing. “It means whatever we choose, that’s the path we’ll walk.”
Kate’s eyes fell to my bare thighs, and she started laughing. “God help me, you’re cute.”
She flicked the button lock on the door, the same one I used to engage when I got out the lotion as a teenager. “I’m going to call Rekia to apologize. But I’m telling her we’re going for it with the endorsement. Time for bold moves.”
“Then that’s the path.”
She slipped the overall straps off her shoulders and dropped them to the floor, kicking them away with her boots; the plaid shirt was next, but she kept the cowboy hat on.
Twenty minutes later, we were back downstairs, and the party was roaring. Kate split off to play with Gwen and talk to Cara, while my parents’ friends were eager to hear what little Matty Stanton was up to. None of them gave much of a rip about the climate, and it was almost eerie to hear them ask, “A fierce blue what?”
One must constantly remind oneself that American life is divided into pockets that, at this point, were nearly hermetically sealed. If Gombo Bolorchuluun, the Mongolian Master, who’d put together incredible back-to-back wins at the PGA Championship and the British Open, had walked in this would have blown their minds, yet most didn’t seem to know who Kate was. In a way, it was nice. No one wanted to talk about the election, and all our rancorous meetings were scenes from another person’s life. Then my sister found me.
“Hey, I think you better come break this up.”
I followed Cara to the dining room where a crowd had gathered around Kate and my father.
My dad was in the middle of “… he barely even plays anymore since he moved there.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Kate demanded. “What does that have to do with children getting murdered at their school, Dan?”
“He doesn’t play.” My dad shook his head; he was drunk and slurring. Kate was drunk and furious, a pink heat scalding her cheeks. “He doesn’t play, and it’s ’cause you got him running around chasing socialism fantasies.” He poofed his hands in the air like he was flicking water in her face.
“So what? Children. Murdered. I didn’t think it would be controversial to be Con on that.”
“Young people don’t even play anymore!” he cried. “The game’s dying because young people don’t even play!”
Some tubby guy dressed as Pennywise the Clown roared at Kate, “He’s saying Hogan’s a Democrat! And she doesn’t even want the Somalians here, so why should anyone else?”
Kate ignored him. Now the entire party was more or less silent except for a faction still chatting in the kitchen. “No one’s playing golf, Dan, because it’s a hundred fucking degrees out, and you’re using fans to cool the greens and slurping up an aquifer to keep the fucking courses from going brown.”
“Whatever, Kate.” My dad reached to the table to grab a handful of potato chips, which he stuffed in his mouth. “You’re a little girl. Doesn’t know a thing about anything.”
When my dad said this, Kate’s eyes bulged and the muscles in her neck tightened. I hadn’t stepped in yet because I didn’t want to make it worse, and Kate was usually so expert at defusing these situations. I quickly took her by the waist.
“C’mon, let’s go outside.”
She kept glaring at my dad. Then she slipped free of me, stepped to him, and shoved her index finger in his face. “Fuck you, you privileged prick. You’re a fucking cancer.”
My dad rolled his eyes drunkenly and pushed another handful of chips into his mouth. I saw my mom across the room holding her cheek in her hand. The only sound in the room was him munching until someone snickered softly. Kate let me lead her outside then, and we walked silently through my mother’s Halloween fantasyland and then through the salt wind to the darkened beach where we stayed for the rest of the party.
In the morning Kate insisted we leave first thing. She didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I couldn’t tell if this was out of embarrassment or fury.
After leaving Wyoming eleven years earlier, between our spat in Tennessee and arriving in D.C., we took a detour to Asheville where Kate had friends. At that point, I hadn’t even realized she’d been to North Carolina before, and I met this whole crew of crunchy types living together in a five-bedroom house. The friends were nice enough, but as the stories and inside jokes whizzed over my head, I couldn’t help but feel like Kate had already lived two lifetimes before she’d even met me.
On our last day we hiked out to a waterfall. Dozens of people swam in the shallow pools formed by the river tumbling down the mountainside. Others lay on boulders, sunbathing. Women went topless and men had beards down to their nipples. We hopped from slick rock to slick rock, and while Kate’s bare feet gripped the stones with ease, with each precarious step I worried I’d slip and crack an ankle. Along the way, she pointed out flora: a leatherback milkcap mushroom, which squeezed out a milky white juice and made your fingers smell like fish, a turkey tail she claimed could help boost the immune system of cancer patients, a little red partridge berry she fed me that tasted like wet cotton.