We Are Not Ourselves (41 page)

“He’s in his second year already,” Ed said. “He’s got to settle down soon.”

Eileen flinched.

“I thought he was a freshman,” Ruth said. This was the danger of having friends like Ruth and Frank who paid attention when you talked about your kid.

“Yes, freshman,” Ed said. “That’s what I said.”

“He likes English,” Eileen said quickly.

“That’s great,” Frank said. “I love literature. I’m going to take a Shakespeare course next semester.”

“Ed’s disappointed,” she said. “He wants him to love science. He wants him to go to medical school.”

“Speak for yourself,” Ed said. “I want him to follow his bliss.”

“Maybe he’ll come around,” Frank said. “Listen, we were thinking of having him up for a weekend. Do you think he’d like that? Or would it be more of a drag for him?”

“He’d love it,” Eileen said.

“Maybe while he’s here you can talk some sense into him,” Ed said. “He’s having a hard time with biology, if you can believe that. He’s not applying himself, is all.”

“I don’t know how much help I’ll be,” Frank said. “I failed bio the first time I took it.”

“That sounds like Connell, I’m afraid. His biology grades aren’t the greatest. He’s focused on literature.”

“Is there an echo in here?” Frank asked, laughing. “I might have to cut you off.”

“Please do.” Eileen tried to sound authentically relieved. “For all our sakes.”

“Or maybe what he needs is not less but more.” Frank stood up and took her glass, then Ed’s, which was still full. He looked at it for a moment.

“Let me freshen this for you,” he said.

The business of getting drinks occupied a few minutes, and Ruth refilled the cheese and cracker plates.

“So tell Connell to think about what weekend he wants to come up,” Frank said.

“You’re having Connell over?” Ed asked.

“If he wants.”

“Do me a favor and talk to him about giving more of his time to science,” Ed said.

“Before I forget,” Ruth said abruptly, “I have to tell you the funniest story.” She embarked on a narrative about having had her car towed the last time she went into the city. It wasn’t funny at all, and it wound up being far shorter than Eileen had hoped, but she felt her eyes well up in gratitude.

Soon it was pumpkin bundt cake and coffee. The rituals of meals had never been more of a comfort. Ed ate his cake without trouble and they sat in the pleasant ease of digestion. She could see the distance to departure beginning to narrow. They might very well escape without further incident.

Ruth gathered the coats, and they said their good-byes in the hallway.

“Remember,” Frank said. “Ask Connell when would be good for him to come up.”

“I will,” Eileen said.

“Maybe you can talk some sense into him,” Ed said. “He’s slacking in science.”

Frank’s eyes widened. He broke into an awkward grin that looked more like a grimace. “Don’t let this guy drive,” he said.

Although she had had more to drink than Ed, she got behind the wheel. She felt exhausted, and more than once she had to blink away sleep. Ed snored the whole trip, like a child, oblivious of the danger he was in every time she let her mind wander.

40

T
he floors in the living room and dining room were still a mess. Not only hadn’t he begun to lay down wood, he hadn’t even bought any, and it was now the second week of December. He had put the floor job on hold to focus on the basement. It drove her crazy to have the most important rooms in the house be off-limits. She had given up on the dream of entertaining the first Christmas in the new house (when the Coakleys agreed to host, she was afraid she might have lost dibs on Christmas Eve to Cindy forever), but she wanted to be able to finally sit in her living room. He was kidding himself if he thought he was going to be able to handle it alone.

The noises of destruction and toil emanating from below made it sound as if he was overseeing a torture chamber. She never approached him when he was down there, and when he came up covered in plaster dust and dried concrete, he sat and ate in remorseless silence. When he was asleep she went down to check on his labor. The space was coming together somehow. A do-it-yourself home improvement book sat perpetually splayed on the floor, its dog-ears attesting to the concentration that had gone into making things flush and square.

•  •  •

She found a disposable razor on the coffee table in the den, sitting in a streak of shaving cream. She told herself that Ed had come downstairs to answer the phone while shaving and gotten distracted. When she picked the razor up, though, and saw that the book under it was his beloved fifth-edition copy of
The Origin of Species
, she let out a shriek. No one but Ed ever touched that precious volume, and it never left his study. The fact
that it was on the coffee table at all was amazing enough, but for its front cover to be stained by a filmy dollop of Barbasol was simply unfathomable. Her first thought, her only thought, was to leave the razor alone so he could see he had ruined the book himself.

•  •  •

She’d written him notes lately—gentle reminders she would leave on his nightstand before bed, like a secretary laying out the next day’s agenda for the executive she was secretly sleeping with.
We’re going out with the Cudahys tonight
, or
Don’t forget parent-teacher conferences at 6:00
. There had been something pleasant about writing the notes; whatever tension still hung in the air after a given evening’s misunderstandings evaporated like a cup of water on a hot afternoon.

One note struck her as odd when she read it over. It grew more opaque the longer she looked at it, like one of those unfathomable koans. She couldn’t escape the sensation that she’d written the note to tell herself something as much as to get a message to Ed.
Christmas is six days away, Edmund
, the note said.
Please don’t forget to get Connell a new baseball glove. I’ve asked you three times now. I’d take care of it, but I don’t know the first thing about them. It seems like the kind of thing a father should pick out. That is still you, right, a father?

How had they gotten to the point where she could write him a note like this? She thought of the hours he spent grading papers every night, how he never came to bed before eleven anymore, how just recently she’d spent a night helping him tabulate the grades for a lab report, as she’d done during the crisis at the end of the last academic year. She thought again, as she couldn’t help doing lately, of that inscrutable pile of wood with the sheet over it in the backyard in Jackson Heights. She recalled the scene with a strangely heightened clarity, as if it were an installation in a museum dedicated to preserving the unimportant details of her old life. She panned around it in her mind, studying it from every angle, attempting to understand why this nettlesome image hadn’t receded into the ether of the past.

The dawning came all at once, though it felt as if it had been heading her way for a while, like a train she’d heard whistle from miles off that was now flying past and kicking up a terrible wind.

Still, she couldn’t pronounce the sentence in her head,
Ed has . . . ,
because it was impossible that he had it. He had a demanding job that kept him stimulated. Until recently, he had read constantly, done the crossword puzzle almost every day, exercised four times a week. He was still the fittest man in their circle.

Maybe it was a tumor. Maybe it was a glandular problem, a dietary deficiency, a failing organ.

Whatever it was, she would get him checked out.

It wasn’t going to be easy to bring it up. He was going to tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, that if something was wrong with his brain he’d be the first to know, being a
brain expert
, she could hear him saying. And part of her wanted him to dismiss her fears with an imperious wave and tell her she was behaving hysterically. But she couldn’t allow him to overpower her on this topic. She needed to find out if something was wrong with him.

She waited for an opening. She wanted him to forget something or say something demonstrably strange, but he just went to work and came home and started in on the basement like an indentured servant paying off his debt. He made runs to the hardware store and returned with Sheetrock, cinder blocks, and bags of cement that he hauled piece by piece from the car. She worried his body would give out on him.

When she called Ed’s doctor and suggested worry about Ed’s health, he told her she was crazy, that Ed was as healthy as a horse. “I just saw him, what is it, six months ago,” he said. “He’s got the lungs of a swimmer. Not a whisper when I put the stethoscope to him. Only thing is his blood pressure’s a little high. Let him put his feet up on the weekend. Give him a glass of iced tea and put the game on for him. And his cholesterol could be lower. Maybe no cheeseburgers for a while. No more shrimp.”

It sounded like an indictment of her, somehow. “We don’t eat any shellfish,” she said. “I’m allergic.” She tried to rein in her annoyance. “Did he seem
fuzzy
to you at all?”

“Fuzzy?”

“In the head. Slower on the uptake.”

“Maybe you’re expecting too much of him. Men aren’t perfect creatures.
We get miles on the engine. We need repairs. The warranty runs out. Ed’s got a good engine. He’s got a lot of road left ahead of him.”

She watched him and waited for the mishap, the big slipup. He continued to make incremental progress, continued to refuse outside help, but every day, as he beat himself harder and harder to finish the work, as she watched patiently, intently, she could feel the ground shifting in her favor, Ed’s resilience weakening. As much as she needed to bring the work on the house to completion, as much as she couldn’t wait to have a team of workers laying down boards in her living room and dining room, and as much as she was glad to see the ground ceded to her, she found herself rooting for Ed and feeling sorry for this man who spent every night hammering away. She saw him on his haunches, head in a manual, hammer poised, his back a rounded stone, and she willed him to brilliance, though she knew she was willing the impossible.

She watched Ed grow more weary at each dinner, look more disheveled, push away his plate after a few bites.

One night he didn’t come when she called him to eat and she sent Connell to get him.

“He says he’s not coming,” the boy said when he returned.

“Tell him I said to get in here.”

“Maybe you should go in, Mom.”

“What is it?”

“He’s just sitting there.”

She went into the dining room and saw Ed surrounded by planks of wood. He had half a plank in his hands. Nails were sticking out of it, and its end was a comb of shards. She could see the other half nailed into the floor. He must have tried to rip it up in his hands.

“Get up, Ed.”

“I’ll be in when I’m done,” he said. He was hunched over, breathing hard. He looked like he’d been whipped. He lifted himself up onto one knee in a vaguely supplicating manner, and the sight of him there put her uncomfortably in mind of the Stations of the Cross. She wasn’t going to give him the chance to make some kind of poetical self-sacrifice, if that was what he was after. The only person who’d feel sorry for him if he did
that would be himself. He’d had all the chances in the world to bring someone in. They had enough money for at least the floors and the kitchen. He was too damned stubborn.

“You’re done.”

“I have to finish this section.”

“You’re done,” she said. “Come and eat.”

But he didn’t follow. After she and Connell had finished, she brought a plate of cold sausage and beans in to him. She could barely stand to look at him as she left it on the floor by his feet. He hadn’t moved in half an hour. He was in the same place in the middle of the room, a perfect vantage point from which to survey the mess he’d insisted on making.

•  •  •

She made the phone calls and settled on a general contractor who could finish the kitchen, do the floors, put in high-hats, and plaster and paint all the walls on the first floor.

The night before the workers were scheduled to start, she told Ed they were coming, and he didn’t put up any kind of fight. She wondered whether she should have forced his hand sooner, but they gave out no manual when you got married, no emergency kit with a flashlight for when the power went out. You had to feel your way around in the dark for the box of matches.

41

T
he work began a couple of weeks after the new year, 1992. The bustle in and out of her kitchen was exciting. She offered them drinks and set out platters of cold cuts on the island, rolls, tubs of potato salad, bags of potato chips.

She brought home a couple of six-packs for them one day. Ed took one and threw it to the floor. One of the cans landed with a thud and shot a stream of beer all over the cabinets. A floor installer who had been using the bathroom stopped in the kitchen on the way back to the living room.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Mind your fucking business,” Ed said.

She hadn’t heard Ed utter that word in years. Maybe she’d never heard him say it.

“You okay?” the worker asked her, ignoring Ed.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Ed said.

“Whatever you say,” the worker said. “Whatever you say.” He backed out of the room, his hands up in bemused resignation.

Eileen followed him in, carrying the unexploded beers on the plastic yoke. “My husband has been under a lot of stress,” she said. “I’m sorry he spoke to you like that.”

“No worries,” the worker said. “We come across all kinds of people in this line of work.”

“He’s not the kind of man he seemed like back there.”

He gave his head a sage tilt. “Some guys just don’t like other guys in their house, doing work they think they should be doing.”

She felt a need to protect Ed. “It’s just that he’s losing his job,” she said, surprising herself with the lie. “Layoffs.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.”