We Are Not Ourselves (23 page)

“I realize he wants to wear his jacket, Frank. But I’m asking him to take it off. He’s making me nervous.”

“Is that what you want? You want me to take my jacket off?”

Jack was giving Connell’s father a hard look. Cindy, who had only belatedly caught on to the tension in the scene, as though it were occurring on a frequency only dogs could hear, put a hand on Jack’s arm in a silent plea.

“Yes,” Jack said. “That’s what I want.”

“Well, it is your house.”

“Last time I checked it still was.”

“Jack!” Cindy said.

Even Connell’s mother, who had been smiling at the outset, looked concerned. Connell wasn’t supposed to know what his parents both knew, which was that Jack’s airline was planning major cuts and Jack was worried about getting laid off. At night Connell stood in the darkened door of his room, listening down the hall to his mother on the phone in the kitchen.

“It’s okay, Cindy,” Connell’s father said. “This jacket is really bothering you, huh?”

“Nobody else has a jacket on.”

“Okay,” his father said, rising. “I understand. I’m sorry to have caused
a disturbance.” He took one arm out of his jacket slowly, then the other. He had cut the entire rear panel from what looked like an expensive shirt. The sleeves clung to the shirt’s outline like windsocks in a strong gust. His skin was a blank, ridiculous canvas flecked by freckles and scraggly hairs. For a moment, the room seemed suspended in time.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asked. “To see this? Does this make you happy? Behold, then!”

Then Jack let out a bark of laughter so loud and sudden it could have been a death rattle; another followed to punctuate it; then his laughs came quick and plentiful, like the little skips a stone makes on the water’s surface after the first big few. The laughter was passed around the room like a contagion.

“Sit down at this goddamned table and eat some of my turkey, you goofy son of a bitch,” Jack said after he’d composed himself. The look on Jack’s face said he’d charge into battle for Connell’s father if he had to. Connell had seen people give his father that look before. Maybe you had to be an adult to really appreciate him.

That fall, he had made Connell do a project on habituation for the science fair. They tapped a bunch of roly-poly bugs a number of times with a pen. Some stopped rolling up quickly; the rest just kept getting annoyed. Eventually they all quit responding. This was supposed to be extremely significant, the fact that they could learn to ignore millions of years of inherited instincts after five minutes of pointless irritation. Connell gathered the data; his father helped him draw up the findings on a couple of poster boards—charts, graphs, everything low-tech. When he arrived at the auditorium, Connell knew he didn’t stand a chance. Other kids were setting up huge working volcanoes, radio-controlled cars, and full ecosystems with convoluted loops that ran the length of two tables. He didn’t even have a box full of bugs. When the teachers came around for the presentation, he started sweating. He explained the way they—
he
—had gone about it, as best as he understood it, which was less than he should have.

In awarding him first prize, they cited the project’s elegant simplicity and its careful application of the scientific method. Other parents hooted and hollered when their children’s names were announced. His father kept
his seat and gave him a cool little nod and pumped his fist. Connell was never more impressed by him in his life. It was as if his father had known all along that they were playing a winning hand.

•  •  •

When his mother got home, she pulled him aside. “What was it like at Daddy’s school?” she asked. “How was he?” Her expression was strangely intense, and she was practically whispering. Connell was so unnerved that he almost said something. Then he remembered his promise.

“Dad was Dad,” he said. “I didn’t understand a word he was saying.”

19

A
n article in a nursing journal said that a fixed routine had a deleterious effect on the mind of a person prone to depression and that shaking up elements of a depressive’s environment could be a productive way to introduce treatment. She didn’t know for sure that Ed was technically depressed, but she knew she’d never be able to get him to a psychiatrist to find out.

What Ed needed—what they all needed—was to climb out of a rut. She started to wonder whether a move to another house might not be just the thing to jolt him out of his torpor. The timing was right: Connell was starting high school next year and could commute into the city from almost anywhere; the value of their home, given the encroaching neighborhood decay, would only go down. In a few years, they’d be trapped.

A house could make all the difference. Things improved for the Coakleys after Jack got promoted to director of cargo for SAS and they moved out to East Meadow. Jack had shown some signs of depression himself when they were still in Jackson Heights, but in East Meadow he started making furniture in his big garage and got into gardening and landscaping. He established an idyll in their backyard for all to enjoy: the echoing pool, the radio raised to drown out the rattle of distant mowers, wet footprints drying on hot concrete, the ubiquitous smell of sunblock.

It had been five years since she’d raised the rate on the already far-below-market rent she charged the Orlandos, and even then she’d raised it only a pittance. The knowledge that her son was safe had always offset in her mind the revenue she’d lost by floating the Orlando clan. Connell went up to one or the other of their apartments after school and stayed
until she and Ed came home. Now that he was getting old enough to take care of himself, though, the protection they offered meant less than it once had.

“I’ve been thinking about this house,” she said. Connell was having dinner at Farshid’s, and they were alone at the dinner table. Ed didn’t respond. She’d gotten used to these one-sided exchanges. She’d learned to read different meanings into his silences. That night’s silence was auspicious; it lacked the heaviness of other varieties. It was like a sheet she could project her thoughts onto.

“I’ve been thinking that it might be nice to have a place of our own, where we don’t have renters. I’m tired of being a landlord. Aren’t you?” She filled a plate with chicken, potatoes, and steamed green beans and handed it back to him. It looked bland, but it was just the two of them, and Ed never seemed to care either way.

“This is our home,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I was just thinking we could look for a place that would be . . .
more
ours.”

“We’ve done a lot of work on this house.” Ed cut into his chicken. Rather than cut a small bite, he sawed it in the middle until it was in two halves.

“You’re happy here?”

“I am.” He began cutting the halves in half, his head into his work.

“You’re not happy,” she said. “You’re miserable. You won’t get off the couch.”

“I’m happy.”

“We could move to the suburbs. Get a nice house.”

“We have a nice house right here.” He looked up at her for the first time. His chicken was arranged in a neat mosaic of bite-sized pieces, but he hadn’t begun to eat.

“This neighborhood is going to hell.”

“I’m a city boy,” he said. “All those empty streets. All the space between houses.” He gestured dismissively with his fork.

Space between houses was all she wanted in the world.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to get out of here? Start somewhere else? The timing
is perfect. Connell’s starting a new school next year. We’ve saved so well.”

“This place is a lot better than what I had growing up,” Ed said.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re right about that.”

She hated being made to feel churlish. She wasn’t looking for a palace, just a step up from where they were. It was for him that she was thinking of all this, but how could she talk to him about it without alerting him to her line of reasoning?

“I don’t want to have anyone walking over my head anymore,” she said.

“We’ll switch apartments with Lena. She’d jump at it. Those stairs probably kill her.”

She gave him a withering look. His green beans were all cut in half now too.

“Our life is here,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you like to get to know another neighborhood?”

“I don’t want to be isolated,” he said. “I don’t want to have to get used to a whole new way of life.”

She bit her tongue, then said it anyway. “You already have a whole new way of life.”

She watched him finally begin to move some food into his mouth and chew it slowly, as if considering the mechanics of chewing anew. It was driving her crazy. She put her knife and fork down and waited.

“We can’t afford to move where you want to move,” he said, but it was as if he wasn’t in the conversation anymore, so caught up was he in bringing small bites to his mouth, gnashing them between his teeth, and swallowing.

“You don’t know the first thing about where I want to move,” she said bitterly.

•  •  •

She had long ago stopped concerning herself with the details of their money management. They had a common bank account that he balanced fastidiously. He also handled their investments. Since he was conservative in his portfolio choices (the First Jersey Securities investment had been her idea, based on a tip she’d gotten from a doctor at work; Ed had reluctantly
agreed to it), they’d seldom suffered the effects of overexposure, and they were in a strong position relative to peers of similar or even greater income. This was one decision, however, that she couldn’t afford to let him control. If she couldn’t get him excited about this project, she would have to generate enough excitement for both of them.

She began searching through the listings in Bronxville.

“This place looks perfect,” she said, as she showed Ed an open house notice in the newspaper.

“You know how I feel about this.”

“Humor me. It’s on Saturday. We’ll make a day of it.”

“I’ve got something lined up for us for then.”

He almost never made plans. She couldn’t help but smile at the obvious ploy.

“Do tell,” she said.

“Mets tickets,” he said.

“You’ve
bought
these tickets? It
has
to be this Saturday?”

“Somebody at work is holding them for me. I said I had to check with my wife’s schedule.”

Such a hopeful look came over his face, as if he really thought she hadn’t seen through his ruse, that she couldn’t bring herself to argue. The next night he showed off the tickets, undoubtedly purchased at the stadium on the way home from work. He’d even bought four, the unnecessary fourth there to lend verisimilitude to the bit of theater.

Saturday came. It was a sunny, mild day in early May, and, she had to admit, a perfect day for a game. With the other ticket, Connell brought Farshid. On the 7 train, adults in the infantilizing garments of fandom buzzed with an adolescent excess of energy. When the doors opened at Willets Point, she felt carried along by the buoyancy of the crowd. Instead of following the switchback ramp to the top as they usually did, though, they stopped after a single flight. When they emerged from the corridor and were flooded with light, they saw that the players looked unusually life-sized.

The boys took their seats with palpable pride at being envied from above. Batting practice was still going on, and they got their gloves out. Connell never failed to bring his glove to games and wear it for hours in
an uncomfortable vigil, despite having never come close to snagging a ball; they were always in the wrong seats. On the lower level, though, having a glove was good planning.

Ed took their orders and went for refreshments. In the absence of his moderating influence, the boys fired fusillades of obscure terms at each other:
hot smash, can of corn, high and tight, round the horn, hot corner, filthy stuff, the hook
. As she listened to them speak, a meditative calm came over her.
She did some of her best thinking at ball games, or while Ed was listening to them on the radio. She’d always understood the basic mechanics of baseball, and Ed had successfully explained a good deal of the more complex aspects to her, but she’d never cracked the code of the priestly solemnity her husband and son greeted the game with, in which old bats and split-leather gloves were revered like relics, as saints’ fingers and spleens had been in earlier centuries. In truth, she was impressed by the range of her son’s knowledge. It was an arrested form of scholarship he was practicing when he allowed his brain to soak up these facts. It was really history men craved when they fixated on the statistics of retired athletes—men who hadn’t been to war, in a nation still young enough to feel dwarfed by the epochal moments of its onetime rivals. The rhetoric of baseball was redolent of antiquity, the hushed tones, the gravitas, the elevation of the pedestrian into the sublime. Connell and Ed would read write-ups of games they’d watched or listened to on the radio, even ones they’d attended. The narrative that surrounded the game seemed as important as the game itself. Ed raved about the descriptive power of some sportswriters, but she never saw what he was talking about; it seemed like boilerplate stuff, dressed up as the chronicle of an epic clash. She focused on the visceral particulars of the stadium experience instead: the smell of boiled meat, nestled under sauerkraut; the thunder of the scoreboard exhorting them to clap; the feel of her son’s hand as he slapped her five.

Ed had been gone a long time. She panned around for his Members Only jacket. After some restless searching she spotted him a section over, leaning into the railing, staring around with his hand over his eyes like a lookout in a crow’s nest. She had his ticket stub in her pocket, so he couldn’t show it to the ushers, one of whom was trying to move him along. She
could see Ed growing agitated as he swatted a second usher’s hand from his shoulder. She hated making a spectacle of herself, but any second now the guards would be called, and that would create an even bigger scene. She stood and shouted his name, waving her arms. He finally saw her and broke free of the ushers, who gave no chase, seeing order restored. He made his way down the aisle encumbered by trays; she distributed the quarry to the boys.