We Are Not Ourselves (32 page)

“Good,” she said as she took the gradebook from him, but she didn’t mean it. He was so quick to relinquish control of the project, it was as if he had been hoping all along that she would take it over.

She filled in the grades. It took no time at all. It almost made her laugh. She had let herself be convinced that this was a task that required the gravest concentration. In fact it would have been difficult to make a mistake once the first few were in place. They were already alphabetized. She shuddered to imagine how much time Ed had spent checking the alphabetization.

“Done,” she said, closing the book. She hoped he wouldn’t insist on checking it himself.

“Thank you,” he said, to her surprise.

“Let’s go to bed.”

They made love; it was a frenetic affair. Ed seemed to take his stress out on her body, but she enjoyed it anyway. They hadn’t made love with vigor like that in a while. There was something less than terrifying about his anger; it was that of a man in chains. He finished with a grunt; she climaxed along with him. As they lay in silence afterward, their bodies coated in sweat, Ed looking at her intently, she felt an invisible barrier between them had been breached. It would be easier now. She would be able to tell him about the house.

26

O
n Saturday she drove up to Bronxville to meet Gloria. No bids had been placed yet, and she wasn’t interested in seeing any other houses. Still, she drove up. The clutter on Gloria’s desk infused her with a feeling of unease.

“What do you say we walk and talk.” Gloria gestured outside. “Take a look at the town.”

Outside, Gloria extended the pack; Eileen demurred.

“You don’t mind if I do, right?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. ’Cause I have to anyway!”

Gloria laughed a raspy laugh and began to cough. She lit the cigarette and took a long drag.

“Talk to hubby yet? What’s his name?”

She didn’t know when it had happened precisely, but Gloria had dropped all pretense of formality with her. A hint of coarseness idled in her voice. At first their familiarity had been bracing. Now that Eileen was a step closer to living there, though, she felt conflicted about it. It meant a small diminution of her ideal. She thought of all the people Gloria probably knew in town. A real estate agent could wield a lot of power if she wanted to. She could control the narrative. She knew people’s secrets no less than a psychiatrist or priest did.

“Ed. Ed’s his name.”

“Have you gotten the thumbs-up from him yet?”

“We haven’t discussed it. He’s been busy.”

Gloria took a drag. Eileen could feel her gaze on her.

“You’re afraid if you bring it up, you’ll hear a no, and then there’ll be no negotiating from there. I get it. I’ve been there—believe me.”

Eileen bristled. It was far more complicated, and even if she had time to explain the subtleties of it in a way that did them justice, she wasn’t sure Gloria was the kind of person who could appreciate such subtleties. She wondered how she had managed to let her guard down with this crude woman.

“I’m going to talk to him about it soon,” Eileen said, “and I’m confident we’ll be in a position to make an offer.”

“You have a bit of time,” Gloria said philosophically. “But I wouldn’t wait forever. This house is under market. You can’t afford to get into a bidding war.”

She had been thinking of the house as protected by the invisible bubble of her interest in it, and she felt a seed of panic take root. They did a loop around the block, Gloria waving to owners and salespeople, a few of whom came out to chat. Eileen felt edgy and ill-equipped to win anyone over. It was safer when they were in the car; it was safer to walk around alone.

•  •  •

She didn’t admit to herself where she was really heading until she had passed the on-ramp to the Bronx River Parkway. She kept driving until she came to the street with the two stone pillars at either side that Gloria had turned onto when she’d taken her there. She felt her way up a couple of turns until she saw the house. She didn’t have a plan. She just knew she had to be near it, to confirm her feeling about it.

She parked in front, figuring the driveway was too conspicuous. She sat in the car for a while, looking at the stone wall that girdled the front yard, working up the courage to walk the grounds. She knew what she intended to do was technically trespassing, even though whoever was selling the house wouldn’t have minded if it helped to firm up her resolve to buy it. She walked up the driveway to the back stairs. No table and chairs sat on the patio, but she saw them in her mind. Someone was being paid to care for the plants and shrubbery. She saw where she could add a few flowers. In a house like this she would be inspired to learn to keep them alive. A
path of stone stairs led up the hill in the back. She followed it to a flat area halfway up that had been left untended. She could put another table there. It could be the aerie from which she looked down on her domain.

The property ran all the way up to a wall that abutted the yard of an Italian-style villa at the top of the hill. It dwarfed this house in grandeur and size, but there was no shame in being outstripped by a house that majestic.

After a little while she saw a worker turning over soil in the backyard of the house next door. He hadn’t seen her, but all he had to do was look up. She hid behind a tree and watched till he disappeared inside. Then she scampered down the steps. The bush cover on the patio gave her courage to try the screen door to the den. It slid open, as did the glass door behind it, and in an instant she was in the house.

She didn’t turn any lights on. Sounds echoed in the big empty spaces. She hesitated going deeper into the house, but a rustling of the leaves outside sent her scurrying into the living room.

She headed upstairs. The place smelled different than it had; she picked up a faint hint of mildew, perhaps wafting up from the basement. It might only have been the close air trapped in the house. She went to the bedroom where Connell had lain on the floor. The room felt imposingly empty with no one else there, and she couldn’t stay in it long. She went to the guest bathroom and ran both taps. She looked at herself in the mirror, then looked away, afraid that something would appear behind her. In the quiet of the house every sound was magnified.

She went to the master bedroom and sat leaning against the wall, by the windows. The longer she sat, the more nervous she grew, but she couldn’t bring herself to get up. She was waiting for external circumstances to dictate her next move. She felt like a mountain climber who had reached a longed-for summit and couldn’t bear to return to normal life.

She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting when she heard the voices. She shot to her feet and looked for a place to hide. She gave no thought to walking downstairs and forthrightly greeting them. She didn’t know who they might be: the owner, other prospective buyers, a neighbor, the police. She thought to hide behind the shower curtain in the master bath, but
there was no curtain, and even if there were one, how would it look if they pulled it back and found her there? They’d call the cops for certain. She thought of the attic stairs hidden in a ceiling panel in one of the closets, but she didn’t know if she could pull them down quietly enough, and where was she going to hide up there?

She stood by the doorway to the bedroom. Lights were being flicked on downstairs. She heard enough to tell it was a couple looking at the house and a real estate agent who wasn’t Gloria. She decided to stay in the bathroom until she had heard them start up the stairs. If she heard them go left at the top, she would slip out and head down. If they stopped her, she would burble something and keep moving. They weren’t likely to follow her or keep interrogating her. And if they turned right and headed into the master bedroom suite, she would say she had stayed behind after looking at the house.

She listened to this foreign agent enumerating the house’s virtues. Hearing them presented to another couple curdled the joy she took in their particulars. They were taking forever down there. Anxiety and impatience combined to produce an unexpected boldness in her. She flushed the toilet for a bit of theater, then thrust herself out on the landing and headed down the stairs.

“Oh!” the agent said. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”

“Pardon me. I stayed behind to use the bathroom.”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” she said as the couple appeared from the kitchen. “It’s a great house.”

“It is,” the husband said.

“Well, we know the toilet works!” she said, and felt instantly foolish. The agent looked as uncomfortable hearing it as Eileen felt saying it.

“Yes—ha!” the agent said, a little belatedly.

“Do you mind if I leave through the front door? Could you lock it after me? I’d like to get a look at the front porch.”

“Not at all!” The agent looked relieved. “Please!”

Outside, Eileen’s frenzy subsided. She caught her breath leaning against the railing, feeling its smooth but bumpy paint. She smelled the
mown grass and the lavender scent of the lilacs in the tree, and she listened to the birds, the shuffling leaves in the branches. The manicured bushes shook mildly in the wind. No police or ambulance sirens battered her ears, nor any thunder from souped-up cars. A little girl rode by on a bicycle and offered her raised hand in a wave. Eileen waved back, completing the illusion of ownership. And then it hit her, the peace she had sought in going up there, the ineffable something she’d been chasing. Then she heard the agent and the couple enter the foyer and felt the peace slip away. Their voices were muffled through the door, but she knew they were speculating about the house, weighing it, considering it. In her mind it already belonged to her. She would do whatever she had to do.

27

C
onnell wasn’t sure why he’d told his mother he wanted to move. Maybe it was because he’d seen how much she wanted him to want to. The truth was, he didn’t want to go anywhere. It felt like leaving right now would be like quitting, like saying,
I really am the pussy you think I am
. And he was heading to a new school. He’d make friends there, but if he moved, he’d lose the ones he had now; he was pretty sure of that. Farshid, Hector, and Elbert had stuck with him through all the teasing he’d endured. Farshid was going to Brooklyn Tech, Hector to St. Francis Prep, Elbert to Molloy.

When they moved, he was going to leave part of himself behind. Even the ex-friends who gave him so much trouble were part of his life. Maybe they’d all look back on it and laugh when they were adults, drinking wine around each other’s kitchen tables, throwing their heads back and remembering how they were as kids. You had to stay in the same town to get that kind of rich history with people. You had to have ties that ran pretty deep.

He wasn’t going to have a home anymore, not in the same way. His mother didn’t seem to mind that idea. But his mother had stayed in Woodside until she was in her twenties. Her best friends were people she’d known since first grade. He saw the way they enjoyed each other’s company. She said it wasn’t like that anymore, that people moved around, that there weren’t neighborhoods anymore like there used to be, but he knew it could be like that. All you had to do was not go anywhere.

•  •  •

He was playing
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!
at Farshid’s. He tried twice to get past Piston Honda, but his heart wasn’t in it. He handed the controls to
Farshid and watched him work his way through Soda Popinski and Bald Bull. Connell couldn’t even get to the place Farshid started from. Farshid’s fingers on the buttons looked like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings.

Kids pretty much left Farshid alone. He’d come to St. Joan’s in sixth grade, by which point everybody had settled into cliques. He was kind of a free agent.

“My mother’s going to move us,” Connell said.

“Yeah?” Farshid sounded like he’d heard him but not heard him. He was moving the controller around in the air as he slapped furiously at the buttons.

“She wants to get us out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Westchester.”

“Where’s that?”

“The suburbs.”

“That’s cool.” He cursed and threw the controller, though it landed softly on the rug, and he retracted it by the cord and restarted the game.

“I don’t want to go.”

“Why not?”

“I have my friends here,” he said.

“You’d get a backyard. Maybe a pool.”

“Yeah.”

“I’d do it.”

“What about your friends?”

“What about ’em?”

“You wouldn’t care about leaving?”

“No offense,” he said, “but yeah—no.”

“I’d miss you and Hector. Even Elbert.”

“You’re not gonna see us anyway, even if you stay. You’re gonna be in the big city with all your nerd friends. You’re gonna jerk each other off in the locker room.”

“Maybe you have me confused with yourself,” Connell said.

“I’m going to have girls do that for me, thank you very much.”

“Everything’s going to change all at once.”

Farshid finished the level and paused the game.
“You just need to reinvent yourself. That’s what my mother said to me, ‘Reinvent yourself.’ In Farsi, though: ‘
Khodeto az no dorostkon
.’ I didn’t want to come here, man. There was some political shit with my father. We had to leave fast. Talk about everything changing.”

“You couldn’t go to Brooklyn Tech if you moved.”

“I don’t give a shit where I go to high school, man! Here, there, I don’t care. I care about what’s after that. College! Living on my own.” He slapped his hands together. “Beautiful girls in my dorm room! Hah!”

Connell knew why the other kids didn’t tease Farshid. He wasn’t vulnerable to them; he already had a plan.

“This is home,” Connell said.

“Home?” Farshid said. “What does that even mean? I’m going to work on Wall Street. I’m going to have a hot wife like Alyssa Milano that I bang a lot in my big bed. I’m going to have a big house and a big pool. That’s home.”

Connell felt like a child; all he cared about was getting to hold a girl’s hand someday, and Farshid was already thinking of what he would do with his wife.