We Are Not Ourselves (47 page)

She was watching the movie so intently that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had to give her mother a report on it afterward. All he could think of was how much like spring she smelled and whether she could tell he had an erection.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey yourself.” She glanced at him and then looked back at the movie.

“I’m feeling sad.”

“What’s up?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing.”

She turned to him fully now. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s watch the movie.”

“You tell me right now.” She had a deadly earnest look on her face, and he couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. He felt bad when he realized she was serious. Her father’s bar, and his ghostly presence at it, looked on in silent disapproval.

He put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, which inflamed her.

“Either you tell me or I’m not kissing you anymore tonight,” she said.

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said. “I just don’t know how to talk about it.”

She put the popcorn bowl on the coffee table and sat on her legs, drawing her feet up under her. “Now you really have to tell me. What?
What?
”

“I was just thinking of my father. It makes me sad to think of him.”

Her features arranged themselves into a look of concern.

“Tell me,” she said. Her hand was on his knee.

“Just that he’s not going to be here. He’s going away. He’s going to forget me.”

She started shaking her head. She looked like she was about forty years old. “He won’t forget you,” she said in a way that was both dismissive and reassuring. It was like she could see what was actually going to happen.

“He will. Everyone’s going to go away eventually.”

“Not me. I’ll be here.”

“You’ll go away too.”

“I will
not
,” she said.

She went to hug him. He kissed her neck and moved up to her lips. The movie kept playing in the background, but now she wasn’t watching it either. She was kissing him long and with a different level of feeling. His erection now pressed painfully against his pants. He was running his hands all over her body. He put his hand under the bottom of her shirt and moved it up quickly when she didn’t shove it away. He ran his hand over her bra and slipped his hand under it. He felt his breath coming short. He moved his other hand up under her shirt, so he had one of her breasts in each of his hands. It felt like he had made it to the other side of some great divide. He started kissing her neck and ears, and eventually he had lifted her shirt up and was kissing her breasts. He would not try to do more than this. There would be other opportunities. He would keep something in reserve. His father had helped him. It was a powerful thing that he would have to use sparingly, what was happening with his father; he didn’t want to get addicted to it. But there was nothing wrong with letting some good come from it.

The room seemed to get darker. He sucked at her nipple like he was trying to draw something out of it, which he knew was all wrong. She winced a few times at the pressure of his teeth.

The door upstairs came open, and she rushed to pull her shirt down, which was just as well, because his kisses on her breasts had turned into something he was practicing doing, and he had begun to feel guilty about losing his innocence. There was no going back for it now.

51

V
irginia was in the phone book, as she’d said she’d be so many years before. Or rather her husband was: Callow, Leland. Eileen had been meaning to reach out to Virginia since the day she’d closed on the house. She’d gone for the phone several times, but the idea of fumbling through the initial conversation gave her an anxious pit in her stomach and she always hung up before dialing. She didn’t want to degrade herself any more than she’d have to. She decided to show up instead.

She chose a Saturday. If they weren’t home, she’d leave a note and try again the next day. She put on a nice blouse and skirt and did her hair. Virginia’s address was in the town proper, up the hill, on one of those winding streets with houses set far back from the street on enormous lots.

When she was a block away, Eileen felt so jittery that she had to pull over and calm herself down. This was the encounter she’d been anticipating for years, though she hadn’t realized as much until she was on its threshold. The visit Virginia had made to the dressing room planted a seed in her mind that had broken through the surface and survived long winters. She wanted Virginia to see the tree in its full flowering. Would Virginia recognize it for what it was? She hoped it would seem to Virginia like the most natural thing in the world for Eileen to be standing there, a neighbor of sorts, even if she lived across town, dropping in unannounced, an old friend, a surprise visitor.

There were so many trees on the front lawns. They seemed older than the nation itself. It was early October; the leaves had started to turn, and the sight of the street in the lightly misty air made her stop and pull over for a minute before she could continue.

She pulled up in front of Virginia’s house. There was a car in the driveway. She put her own car in park and turned off the engine, and the old vehicle settled heavily. She regretted not stopping at Topps for a box of cookies, or at Tryforos for some flowers, but on the other hand it would have been strange to come bearing a gift after thirty years. She imagined handing over the rattling box of cookies and Virginia receiving it with a skeptical look, as though it were a store of keepsakes from an intentionally forgotten past.

She stood in the street, gazing at the house. It was almost perfectly beautiful. There was nothing about it she would change, nothing she could imagine anyone—even those tasteless people who ruined old houses by updating them—would ever dream of changing. The landscaping alone looked expensive enough to break a bank account. The house wore its affluence easily, though. There was a quiet about it, broken only by the low hum of a distant weed whacker. She imagined an old man roving the grounds in a pair of gloves, dragging a heavy garbage bag and filling it with weeds.

She couldn’t convince herself to approach the front door. The thought of sitting over tea with Virginia had gotten her through some lonely afternoons after everything had been unpacked. She had been waiting for the moment when her house looked polished enough to show it off, when everything had settled down long enough to allow her to operate from a position of strength, but that moment hadn’t come. She had kept alive the idea of a steadfast friend capable of great enthusiasm on her behalf, even after years of silence. She knew that seeing Virginia again might rob her of a consolation that had been more important than she wanted to admit.

She started up the stone path that transected the lawn. She had only taken a few steps in when a dog came running up, barking and freezing her in place. It looked harmless enough, a little Jack Russell terrier, but it barked so insistently and with such a strange, alert intelligence that she began to hear a message beyond a simple warning to stay away. The dog marked a half-moon around her, then left off its clamoring and stood with nose up and eyes narrowed, assessing her in a manner that unnerved her. She tried to hide her fear—not of the dog but of what the dog was thinking, what it saw and understood—because she thought it absurd to feel
apprehension before such a diminutive creature. No one emerged from the house to call the dog off. The compact thing had an almost impossible solidity to it; its thick coat seemed to stand at permanent attention.

When the figure of a woman appeared from behind a hedgerow at the side of the house, Eileen felt her heart stop in a fear that made her forget about the dog. She thought to turn and walk away, but after she didn’t immediately take the first retreating step, she knew she couldn’t do so without seeming to scurry guiltily. The woman—it had to be Virginia—walked briskly to retrieve the animal, which hustled with a chastened dutifulness to meet her halfway and circle back by her side. Watching the woman approach from the middle distance, Eileen had trouble recognizing her as the gamine girl she’d last seen trying on bridesmaids’ dresses. She was nicely attired, in a pair of brown slacks and a mustard-colored blouse whose sheen glinted in the sunlight.

“Can I help you?” Virginia asked from a few feet away. Her hair had gone an ashen shade of gray that somehow looked sun-bleached and healthy. She wore it pulled back in a neat, attractive bun. She’d grown thinner with age, so that she appeared almost military in her bearing. She looked inquisitively at Eileen, and Eileen thought for a moment that Virginia had recognized her, until she realized Virginia was probably simply wondering what this woman was doing on the perimeter of her lawn.

“I hope so,” Eileen said. “I seem to have gotten a little lost. The road took a few turns, and I got off it somehow. I have to get back to the highway.”

“Where are you looking to get?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Where are you looking to go?”

“I was visiting a friend, you see. I just need to get home.”

“Where’s home?”

“The city,” she said, afraid Virginia would hear the nervous lump in her throat. “Queens. I believe I need the Bronx River Parkway to the Hutchinson Parkway.”

“Queens? What part?”

Her heart pounded. “Douglaston,” she said, the dryness in her mouth choking off the end of the word.

Virginia gave her very specific instructions, down to the approximate number of feet after the light till she’d encounter the turnoff to the Bronx River. She radiated none of the scattered, frazzled energy Eileen remembered, and Eileen felt a sudden crushing loneliness at the thought that she hardly knew Virginia at all.

She listened to Virginia describing the familiar route. She had bought herself time to catch her breath. She would never come back now, never be able to reveal herself to her or sit in her living room without a great deal of uncomfortable explaining. She searched Virginia’s face for clues to the story she’d never get to hear—whether she’d had kids, whether her husband was still around, whether she’d had a happy life.

“Thank you,” Eileen said when Virginia was finished.

“It’s my pleasure.”

“You have a beautiful house,” she said. “A very beautiful house. I really can’t help admiring it.”

52

A
fter they left his grandmother’s apartment, they drove through the neighborhood, up Smith, along the Gowanus Expressway, and looped around to come down Court. When they hit Lorraine, they turned right and crept along.

He knew all the street names by now. This was the third weekend in a row his father had taken him to his old neighborhood to show him around. His father was trying to squeeze it in before he forgot what everything was.

They reached the Red Hook Pool. “This is where we swam when I was a boy,” his father said. “It’s hard to believe it’s been so long. Everybody was naked and nobody realized it. It was great. We spent the whole day here and at the end we were like prunes. It’s still being used today, you know.”

Connell nodded politely; he was missing a Halloween party for this.

“Not today,” his father said. “I know
that
. It’s too cold today. Today in general.”

His father stopped the car. There was an honest, open look on his face. Ugly thoughts flashed through Connell’s mind.

Do you know, really? What do you know anymore? You never really were like a normal father in the first place, were you? You were always more of a dork than the others. You and your obsessively catalogued cassette and VCR tapes, your long-sleeved shirts in the summer, your never wearing shorts, your old movies, your corny jokes. You and your lab coats and sharpened pencils. You and your insistence on perfect grammar and enunciation. You and your spazzy sneakers, your sweat-stained baseball caps, your ear hairs. You and your never exceeding the speed limit by more than a couple of miles an hour. You and your beakers, your clipboards, your briefcase. You and your boring stories of the old neighborhood. I could break your heart right now if I wanted to, you big dork, you nerd, you spaz, you geek, you herb, you Poindexter.

Then his father faced the road again and they turned onto Columbia. They came to a derelict building with a long, faded sign that spelled
KOHNSTAMM
in capital letters. “This is what’s left of the factory I worked at,” his father said. Graffiti dotted its surface, and weather had worn off much of the paint, so that the ghostly outline of the words
MANUFACTURING CHEMISTS
could just barely be distinguished below the name. “There used to be so much manufacturing in this city. Now those jobs are gone. Factory work was a—how do I say it? It was an incubator for the middle class.”

His father was having one of those extended moments of lucidity in which he could hold forth about some topic and it wouldn’t seem like anything had happened to his mind. Connell always got a little charge of hope from them, a sense that some part of his father might be able to make it back from the other side of the creaky rope bridge.

“I wouldn’t have gotten where I did if it weren’t for a manufacturing job. We don’t make anything in this country anymore.”

“We make missiles,” Connell said. “Movies. Hamburgers.”

His father seemed not to have heard him. “I worked here at your age,” he said. Then he looked at him searchingly. “No, a little older than you. In my early twenties. I keep thinking you’re older than you are. You look so much like my brother Phil.”

Connell turned the radio on, found WDRE. The beginning notes of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were playing and he turned it up. He didn’t even care if his father told him to turn it down, because in his mind he wasn’t really there. Maybe he wasn’t really there in his father’s mind either.

53

I
need you to help me prepare for the tournament tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“The resolution has to do with whether euthanasia is morally justified. I have to develop both a pro and a con argument. Do you know how this works?”