We Are Not Ourselves (37 page)

“I was just going to make some pies,” she said to Connell, as though appealing to his fairness. The only thing he felt safe doing was shrugging.

“Not for me!” his father said. “I could go the rest of my life without another bite of your pie.”

Then his mother herself turned the basket over, dumping out the remaining peaches. She dropped the basket and they walked to the car in silence. They drove home all the way like that, half an hour at least. Connell put his earphones in, but he didn’t turn his Walkman on. He waited and waited to hear the silence end, but it never did, and a queasy feeling grew in his gut. The only thing he heard was a little quiet sniffling from his mother in the passenger seat when they were almost home. He hit play on his Walkman after that.

34

I
t was the end of August when they moved, as hot a day as she could remember, the kind of heat that made a person happy to escape the city. She had packed boxes for weeks, and the walls were lighter in color where the pictures had hung and the furniture had stood, as if a slow-exposure photograph had been taken of their lives. The ghostly outlines of their things, together with the austere emptiness of the space and the dirt and dust gathered in the corners and wedged under the molding, increased her eagerness to get out of there. The movers came and loaded up the truck.

“Do you want to do a last walk-through with me?” she asked Ed, who was sitting on the stoop with Connell.

“I’ve made my peace with it,” he said.

She resented the private ceremony Ed’s statement implied. She’d pictured them opening a nice bottle of wine when they started filling boxes, or a celebratory bottle of champagne on their last night, but they’d had neither.

“You don’t want to take a final look at it?”

He didn’t respond. Connell looked as if he preferred to sit there too. Rather than squeeze past them, she went around to the side door and up the back stairs to the second-floor landing. Peeking in, she was overcome by the emptiness of the place. A spasm of anxiety rooted her to the spot; she couldn’t enter the apartment. She’d half expected to see Donny and Brenda and Sharon there, but the previous week, Donny had moved them to a three-bedroom apartment—Brenda and Sharon in one bedroom, he and Gary in another, Lena in the third—in a monolithic structure around
the corner that possessed none of the charm of the garden co-ops, with a cramped, concrete common area instead of generous grass. She called “hello” in the echoing dining room and stepped inside. She stood where she’d sat and told the Orlandos of her plans—which was where she and Ed had eaten when it was just the two of them, and for the first few years after Connell was born—until she got spooked and left.

She hurried down the stairs to her own apartment. She could see it that way now, as an apartment. The whole time she’d been there, she’d preferred to think she lived in a house with floors she didn’t use.

When Angelo Orlando sold her the house in 1982, he’d done so in distress. Just shy of a decade later, his heirs had had an opportunity to buy back their childhood home, and they’d failed to secure it. The story of their line in the house had come to an end. They were adrift in temporary shelters: someone else’s apartment, someone else’s building. The great churning never stopped. Spackle was placed in the holes where nails had held family portraits, paint covered the dirt marks of shoes left by the door, a coat of varnish leveled the worn hallways, and it was ready for a new family.

The family who’d bought her house was making a stand against obscurity. It would be their nail holes puncturing a fresh coat of paint, their cooking smells sinking into the upholstery, their shouts of laughter, pain, and joy bouncing off the plaster walls. They would use all three of the house’s floors. In enough time they would forget the structure had ever belonged to anyone else. It was a thought that worked both ways: it would be as if she’d never lived anywhere but Bronxville.

•  •  •

At the closing, she’d met the Thomases. She was surprised to learn that the husband’s first name was also Thomas—though the middle name listed on the contract was something closer to what she’d expected, a tangled thicket of consonants and vowels. When she couldn’t stifle her surprise at such an odd name as Thomas Thomas, the husband, who was exceptionally tall and wore tinted glasses, explained to her that he wasn’t even the only Thomas Thomas in his hometown, that the name was extremely popular there, due to the fact that St. Thomas had gone there in the middle of the
first century to spread the faith among the Jewish diaspora. She dismissed this idea as ridiculous; St. Thomas might have visited India, but there was no way he or any other apostle had reached there before Western Europe or Ireland. Thomas Thomas seemed like an intelligent enough man, but his dates had to be incorrect.

The fact that Indians had bought her home and were going to fill it with their entire extended family, floor to ceiling, was another reminder that Jackson Heights was a big cauldron and that it was spitting her out in a bubble pushed up by heat. Supposedly it was the most ethnically diverse square mile in the world. Someone more poetically inclined might find inspiration in the polyphony of voices, but she just wanted to be surrounded by people who looked like her family.

The only thing left to do was walk through her own apartment for anything left behind. In the guest bedroom she spotted a solitary die on the floor and went to pick it up but pulled her hand away right before she touched it.

In the kitchen pantry she found a broom leaning against the wall like a forlorn suitor at a dance. Ed and Connell were waiting outside, but she couldn’t resist the urge to sweep up the dust bunnies and bits of debris on the floor. She remembered sweeping the kitchen floor in Woodside as a girl, methodically, covering every inch of that fleur-de-lis-patterned linoleum in an invisible geometric march. Back then, she’d dreamed of a house like the one she was now leaving. Somewhere along the way, she’d adopted a higher standard. Her new house was large and full of light and made an imposing picture from the street, with a sloped driveway, slatted shutters, and stone pillars to mark the front walk. It was everything she wanted, and she tried not to wonder if the new house would one day feel as old and heavy as the one she was leaving.

She stared at the pile in the center of the floor. There was no dustpan, not even a scrap of cardboard to sweep it onto. It would be dispersed by the footsteps of movers, or the Thomas family themselves. It wasn’t her responsibility anymore. This was another woman’s kitchen now. There’d be a victory in leaving it there and heading outside, in allowing something niggling to go unattended to, but she’d been cleaning messes all her life.
She’d heard Ed tell Connell once that skin cells constituted the majority of dust. If that was true, then there were microscopic bits of her in that pile. She got down on her hands and knees, carefully because she was wearing stockings, and scooped the dirt with one hand into the cupped other. She dumped it in the sink. When she saw a little raised ridge of residue where her pinky finger had passed along the floor, she wet her hands to mop up the last remnants of her life in the house.

She went outside. Ed and Connell were already in Ed’s Caprice. She had driven the Corsica up the previous night after work and parked it in the driveway. The house had been dark, and she’d started for the train in a hurry, not wanting to linger too long there alone.

Ed didn’t look angry at having to wait. He looked simply blank. Blank was fine by her right then; she could map something onto a blank. There was a roiling complexity to Connell’s expression, though, an untidiness that she wanted nothing to do with at the moment. She took a seat in the back. With their Caprice in the lead and the moving truck behind them, the caravan of their belongings set out for the Triborough Bridge.

It was a clear day, and as they headed toward Northern, the sun cast a warm eye on the block’s houses. Connell waved to an old man who didn’t look familiar to her. The neighborhood itself hardly looked familiar anymore; it was as if she were slowly stirring from a dream. The faces she saw through the window looked benign in the heat. Pairs and trios, even solitary amblers, were carried along by an unseen buoyancy. She was no longer afraid of these people; she’d cleared that infection from her bloodstream. The previous day, when she’d realized she’d never again have to attend one of Father Choudhary’s Masses or walk on the Boulevard, she’d laughed in relief.

She spotted a clerk stacking cans in a bodega and leaned back against the headrest to stare at the ceiling foam. When she looked out again, they were a couple of blocks from the turnoff for the BQE. She knew the trip to Bronxville by heart; she could see one highway turn to another, then another, until they reached the surface streets and the house where they’d begin their second act as a family. There was still this short stretch left of her present life to go through, though. She felt no stirrings of nostalgia as
she took in the Boulevard for what might be the last time. She shut her eyes to put it behind her the sooner. There was a blessed nothingness behind her eyelids; the darkness there could have been the peace of death. She’d spent her whole life working toward this moment, and she was exhausted. She felt she could sleep for years without waking.

The sounds of the streets, muffled by the air conditioning, grew less and less distinct, and the next thing she knew the car was pulling into the driveway.
Her first thought as she took in the house through the window was that it didn’t look the way she’d remembered it. It was smaller somehow, more ordinary. She thought to tell her husband to pull back out, that this was not their house, that they’d find their real house if they kept looking. Then she saw the truck with their belongings coming around the bend.

She stepped out and stretched her long limbs to shake off the drowsiness. Ed and Connell were standing looking aimless. She remembered that she had the only set of keys in her pocketbook.

The driveway, which had baked in the heat of a dry summer, was scored with cracks that would only expand as the weather got colder. The forecast called for clear skies for a couple of days. If Ed and the boy got started first thing in the morning, there would be time for a new layer of blacktop to dry. In a little while she would send Ed to the hardware store for push brooms and buckets of asphalt.

She let the three of them in. They drifted to different corners of the kitchen and stood looking at each other in silence, frozen by the unknown future awaiting them in other rooms. She opened a cabinet door held on by only the top hinge, and it swung like a pendulum in her hand. She had seen the chipped paint, the peeling paper, the old cabinets, the ugly lacquer, the Formica countertops missing edges and chunks, but somehow she had forgotten just how bad it all was. It struck her now that this kitchen was worse than the one she had left behind. She was beginning to understand how much work everything was going to be and how much it would cost.

She considered saying something to christen the house, but she didn’t want to think about how inept her words would sound. Instead she just sent them out to unload the car. There would be time later to savor the reality of their altered lives, to appreciate having arrived where they’d arrived.

She opened the front doors and stepped out onto the porch, leaning cautiously into the rickety railing. She watched the couch sway slightly as it rose up the lawn, the heavy hickory dresser behind it undulating as the movers took their halting steps. For a moment the furniture seemed borne on invisible waves, like flotsam from a sunken vessel, and she imagined she’d been hauled up from the wreck of her old life to stand on the deck of a ship bound for an unfamiliar shore.

She stepped inside and made way for the wide arcing path the couch took through the expansive foyer. She examined the bricks. The finger-thick lacquer on them would have to go immediately. She felt she was coming out of a stupor.

The movers held the couch up in the living room and looked to her for instructions, but the simple question of where it should go baffled her utterly. She told them to put it down while she thought it over. She directed the men with the dresser upstairs. She wanted the next phase of her life to remain forever potential and the rest of her things to stay in the truck. When the movers were finished, they would drive off, leaving her and her family behind in the empty spaces she’d fought so hard to procure.

She told them to place the couch flush against the wall, under the windows. She didn’t get the jolt of pleasure she’d expected from making her first decision in the house, because aside from the fact that nothing would have a home for a while, certainly not the kind of permanent home that could put her restless mind at ease, she also had a nagging feeling that it was only the first of many more decisions to come, that she was the ship’s captain now.

The men with the couch were heading back to the truck, but she asked them to wait a second. They stood on the steps looking up at her. They were all, herself included, waiting for the next thing she would say. She tried to freeze the moment in her mind. She knew it would be one she’d want to come back to later. The future stretched out before her like a billowing fog, nothing about it distinct. All she had was her vision for the house and their lives in it. The house itself, as it was, was not what she wanted. It could be what she wanted, but it would take time and money, and she was afraid that both would soon run out. The reality of how their
lives would be lived was waiting at the bottom of that hill, in the dark of that truck. These men, on the other hand, were clearly in focus. They pulled at their damp T-shirts, leaned on the railing. She would have to say something; there would have to be something to say. If only she had another minute, she could come up with the perfect thing. She could see them growing impatient. All they wanted to do was move her things from one location to another. They had no idea that everything they placed in a definite spot brought her one step closer to disappointment.