We Are Not Ourselves (26 page)

“We’ll both be driving,” she said flatly. “He teaches at Bronx Community College.”

“Do you want to be in the school district?”

“It’s not necessary. My son Connell will be going to school in the city.” She paused for effect, then added, “To Regis,” expecting the revelation to inflate a protective balloon of prestige around her, and indeed the agent raised her brows.

“Well!” Gloria said. “He must be a bright young man!” Then she punctured the balloon. “My husband went there. It’s all he ever talks about. I get tired of hearing about it. I have all girls, but if I’d had a son, I would have sent him there myself.”

Eileen had to fight to suppress her urge to correct the woman. You didn’t “send” your son to Regis: your son took the scholarship exam in November and you prayed for a letter inviting him to the interview round; then, after the interview, you prayed again that he’d aced it—actually prayed, no figure of speech, even if you never prayed otherwise. Then you gathered around your son as he sat at the dining room table and opened the letter that informed him he’d been admitted, and when he said he didn’t want to go to an all-boys’ school that was full of nerds, you told him he was going and that he’d thank you later, and you saw a little grin flash across his face, though he was trying to pretend to be annoyed. And when you said, “Your grandparents would have been so proud,” you felt something in your spirit lift, because you had a responsibility to them that you’d carried for years, and now you could hand off part of it to him. And you saw that he understood somehow what it meant for this to have happened, that he wasn’t the only person involved. You imagined your father looking over your shoulder, nodding silently, and your mother, that enigma, was there too, and you could almost see her smile at the thought of what might become of the boy, of all of them, the living and the dead.

“So what’s a comfortable range? Over a million? Under a million?”

She had been thinking she could afford as much as four hundred thousand. Once they sold the Jackson Heights house and paid down the taxes and commissions, they’d have enough for a good down payment, but four hundred thousand was the upper limit. It was a long way off from “under a million,” but that was her reply.

“Anything else I can work with?”

“I want a house that makes an impression from the street,” Eileen said. “A house that almost pulls you up into it. A big, impressive house.”

•  •  •

Sunday after Mass, instead of taking to the couch, Ed packed a picnic lunch for the three of them and drove them to their spot near LaGuardia. She spread the blanket and they ate the strangely spartan sandwiches he’d prepared: turkey on bread, no mayo, no mustard, no lettuce or tomato; they weren’t even cut in half.

It was the first hint of repose they’d had in who knew how long. She wanted to enjoy it as a family, but Connell took out the gloves, bounding around like a buck, and Ed rose to gratify him.

The sun was out after a sojourn behind some clouds. Planes glinted in the sunlight and gradually diminished in the distance, leaving a trail of noise. A light breeze took the edge off the heat. The moment struck her as perfect, in the way that quotidian moments sometimes did. She tried to freeze it in her mind: the acid sweetness of her apple, the crunch of it against her teeth, the smell of the grass. It was cheating, in a sense, to circumvent the natural sifting process of memory, but she found that those moments when she stopped and thought
I’m awake!
as though in the midst of a dream, were ones she remembered with an uncommon clarity.

Ed stood sturdily, a bit stodgily, as he waited for throws to arrive, though a surprising spring entered his step when he had to move laterally. His button-down shirt and dress slacks weren’t conducive to the activity, but he adjusted gamely. Connell’s accuracy suffered in his enthusiasm to return the ball almost as quickly as it landed in his glove. They started out close together. Connell seemed to want to spread out and drifted steadily back. Ed arced his throws in broad parabolas, and Connell threw on a line, though in his zeal he would sometimes overshoot and send Ed scurrying
to retrieve the ball before it reached the street. A row of parked cars flanked them on either side. The last thing she wanted was for the pastoral quality of the moment to be shattered along with a window. Ed began to call Connell closer. The boy resisted at first but crept forward when Ed held the ball in his mitt and waved him toward him. They were back to a distance not much farther apart than they’d been when they first started throwing. Ed signaled to him to slow it down.

“Not so fast,” he said. “We’re just having fun.”

“I’m not throwing that hard, Dad,” Connell said.

But she could tell he was. He seemed to be reaching back and giving the throws all his strength. Ed was catching them, but he looked almost frightened at their speed.

“Slow it down,” Ed said, his voice skirting anger.

“Why? Can’t catch it?”

Connell unleashed a throw that came at Ed like a fist. Ed stepped aside and let it sail past. He gave the boy a look and went to retrieve it.

“That’s enough,” she said when Ed was out of earshot. “Your father asked you to stop throwing so hard.”

“I’m not! I’m not throwing my hardest.”

“Just listen to him.”

“Okay,” he said. “Relax, Mom.”

Ed looked more defeated than angry. He was at the mercy of the Darwinian logic of an adolescent, and he stood for a minute, seeming to consider his options, then threw the ball to Connell, who snatched it out of the air midhop.

She could see it before the ball left his hand, the coiled fury in Connell’s body. There was something majestic about the physical changes that turned a boy into a man, the inexorability of the need to advance, to clear away the previous generation and make room for the current one. There was also something terrifying about the impending clash between the males in her life. Neither would come out unscathed.

Maybe he was angry with his father for yelling at him in the car. Maybe he was upset that his father was having a hard time corralling his throws. Maybe it was that his father had always been a step behind some other
fathers. Ed wasn’t just older, he was also old-fashioned, but he and Connell had always had baseball in common. Maybe it was too much for Connell to withstand aging’s incursion into his father’s ability to carry out this ritual. Whatever it was, he put everything he had into the throw, so that as it left his hand she let out a little involuntary gasp.

It came so fast at Ed that he seemed to freeze in anticipation of it. He didn’t even try to get out of its way. She could see, as time slowed for her observation, that sometime since she’d married him there’d been an attrition in his motor functions. His hand was no longer as fast as his mind. Even from that far away, she could see his eyes widen. The ball struck him square in the chest. He staggered and fell backward, first on his rear, then on his back.

She shouted and leapt to her feet and started running. Connell did the same. He was on his knees talking to Ed when she got there, and she pushed him aside. Ed was clutching his chest as though he’d had a heart attack. Connell was stammering apologies. He kept trying to get at Ed as she shoved him away. Then Ed was stiff-arming her as he rose to his elbows and looked at both of them.

“I’m fine, goddammit,” he said. “Let me stand up.”

As Ed stood, Eileen raised her hand at Connell and held it there, poised to smack him. She could feel the way the three of them were suspended in the moment as though in the relief of a sculpture. Her hand throbbed with the need to connect. Her son almost quivered in anticipation of the blow. She smacked him once, hard, on the face.

“The boy doesn’t know his own strength,” Ed said, taking hold of her ringing hand. He picked up the ball from the ground. “Get back out there.”

“Let’s go back to the blanket,” she said quietly.

“We’ve got a few more throws left.”

“We don’t have to play anymore,” Connell said to Ed. He wouldn’t look at her.

“We’re not done,” Ed said.

“Ed,” she pleaded, uncomfortable with every possibility she could imagine.

“Have a seat,” he said, pounding his glove. “Get going,” he said to Connell.

Connell walked out halfheartedly. Ed threw it to him and he lobbed it back.

“Harder!” Ed said.

Connell threw again with less force than he could have.

“Harder!” Ed yelled. “Air it out!”

•  •  •

That night, as they lay in bed, Eileen could see, at the V of his undershirt, the mark the baseball had made on his chest. She ran her hand over the spot; he picked her hand up in an oddly vertical way, as though lifting the cover to a butter dish, and moved it away in one swift motion.

They lay in silence, both flat on their backs, not an inch of their bodies touching, their arms flush against their sides, as though they were mummified. Her hand against her own thigh still registered a ghostly vibration of the smack she’d given Connell.

No matter how much they’d fought, the bedroom had always been an inviolate space. She could express things there that she couldn’t express elsewhere. She could cuddle up to him in a way that would have surprised the nurses she supervised. There was something old-fashioned, she knew, in the way she waited for him to take the lead. He’d never had a problem doing so. Touch was their high ground when the slick cliffs of words proved treacherous.

“I have a confession to make,” she said. “Yesterday, when I said I was with Cindy, I was really looking at houses.”

He gave her an irritated look and then shut his eyes as if he were sleeping. “I don’t know why you’re obsessed with leaving,” he said. “I like it here.”

“How can you say that? You’re not even
here
. You spend all your time on the couch. You could be in a sensory-deprivation chamber. You put those headphones on and don’t hear the horns honking or the car stereos pumping. I do all the grocery shopping, so you don’t get jostled in the aisles of Key Food and you don’t have to deal with the checkout girls not speaking English. You’re not a woman, so you don’t have to fear for your safety after dark.”

“Now’s not a good time,” he said.

“It is
too
a good time. Connell’s done at St. Joan’s. Haven’t we been in this hellhole long enough?”

“Jesus,” he said, finally opening his eyes. “Who are you all of a sudden?”

“I was fine with it until recently. But now it feels like some pressure is going to cave my head in.”

“I’ve been engaged in a project of recuperation, of rejuvenation,” he said, as if he’d been having a different conversation entirely. “I’ve become preoccupied lately with things I haven’t done. I didn’t want that pile of records staring at me. So I decided to take action, even if it wasn’t popular with you, or Connell, or the chattering classes of your friends.”

She burned to hear him talk of her friends. She hadn’t said a word to them about how he was behaving, afraid as she was to hear what they might have to say.

“It’s time I did some things for myself,” he said.

She should have been furious.
Do things for himself?
What about all the sacrifices she’d made to get him through graduate school? But his speech sounded vaguely rehearsed. Something rattled around in it, like a dead tooth that hadn’t fallen out. Was it that he didn’t believe it himself?

“I can’t live like this forever,” she said.

“It’s almost summer. I’m going to have more time to fix this place up. I’ve got projects in mind. I can revamp the garage. I can paint the house.”

“Can you bring back our old neighbors? Can you drown out the noise?” She smirked. “For the rest of us, I mean. You’re doing a fine job of doing it for yourself. Can you give us a lawn in front?”

“You need to relax.”

“Don’t tell me what I need. And don’t patronize me. Not when you’ve been half-crazy yourself. This all started when you started going crazy, come to think of it.”

“Things are going to get better now.” He reached to stroke her hair. Now it was her turn to recoil from his touch.

“I want you to go with me. Just come to look at them with me. I hate going alone.”

“What’s the point of looking if we’re staying put? I’m going to fix this place up.”

It was like talking to a child. She felt something in her snap. “You may be staying here,” she said slowly. “But I can’t.”

“And I can’t leave. I told you.”

“You can’t go back in the womb, Ed.”

“Don’t be a bitch.”

He’d never called her that in all their years together. She looked at him savagely.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

She ground her teeth. “Don’t talk filth to me,” she said, practically hissing. “You want to talk that way to a woman, get a girlfriend. Is that what this is about? This mooning, this philosophical mumbo jumbo? Is there a girl in the neighborhood you can’t bear to leave? A
chiquita
?”

Ed rolled over. “Good night,” he said.

She wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence. She lay there turning her ring on her swollen finger, chafing at the discomfort of its digging into her skin. The salty corned beef she’d cooked for dinner had made her fingers expand as if they’d been inflated. She wanted the ring off, not so much because of the discomfort but just to have it off, just so that Ed wouldn’t have any claim on her at the moment, even if he didn’t know he didn’t, but she couldn’t get it past her knuckle.

“You’re all wrong,” Ed said after a while. She felt his hand between her shoulder blades. “There’s no girl. You’re my only girl. You know I adore you.”

She didn’t turn over. She stared at the handles on the chest of drawers. “Then why won’t you do this for me?”

He slapped at the bed in frustration. She felt it shake. “I can’t right now,” he said. “I just want to stay in place.”

“That’s what the suburbs are
for
—staying in place.” He didn’t respond. “Honey, listen. Is everything all right with you? Really? You don’t seem yourself lately.”

“I’m fine. It’s just been a long year.”

They lay in silence again. Finally she turned to him. “We wouldn’t be moving right away,” she said. “It takes months to move. Maybe even more than a year.”