We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  Martyrdom was never her aim, the way it was for some of the halo polishers she went to school with. They might as well have joined the nunnery for all the secret satisfaction she heard in their voices when they complained about the exhaustion and thanklessness of it all. But they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at a nunnery. They lacked the mental fortitude.

  She’d never dreamed of being a nurse. It was just what girls from her neighborhood did when they were bright enough to avoid the secretarial pool. She would’ve preferred to be a lawyer or doctor, but she saw these professions as the purview of the privileged. She didn’t know how she’d ever have gotten the money to pursue them. She thought she might have had the brains for them, but she was afraid she lacked the imagination.

  • • •

  After St. Catherine’s she went on scholarship to St. John’s for her bachelor’s, enrolling in the fall of 1962. Her plan was to take summer classes, finish in three years instead of four, get through grad school, and begin the path to administrator pay. She earned spending money—and savings for the nursing administration degree tuition to come—as a dress model at Bonwit Teller. Women came to look at dresses and she showed them how they could look if they lost a few inches from their waist, or were taller, or had neat divots by their clavicle, or a galvanizing shock of black hair, or smooth skin, or arrestingly heavy-lidded, owlish emerald eyes. What they had on her was money and the insolent ease that came with it. Despite herself she became the preferred girl in the showroom. She didn’t try to push dresses on potential buyers by slinging a hand at the waist and jutting an elbow out. She simply put a dress on and stood there. She didn’t smile or not smile; make eye contact or avoid it; speak to customers or remain silent; she did whatever came naturally to her. If her nose itched, she scratched it. She turned to show them the dress at all angles when they asked her to, and when they were done looking at it, she went back to the dressing room and took it off. The other girls seemed to linger more, attempting to convince themselves of what they hadn’t convinced the customers of.

  She daydreamed that the next person who walked in would be a rich man looking for a dress for his girlfriend, who would see her and change his mind about the drift his life was taking. He would let her forget about nursing, fly her around the world, care for her parents’ needs. She could sleepwalk through life, never changing a dirty bedpan, never batting away an exploratory hand when she leaned over a man in his senescence, never pressing through a fog of halitosis to take an old lady’s temperature, never working another day, never thinking another thought. She would come back to this store and sit in the chair and put the girl through her paces. She’d make it seem as if she was going to leave without buying anything, that she’d wasted everyone’s time, and then she would order one of everything to remind them that they had no idea how women like her really lived. But the only people who showed up were women a little older than her, or teenaged girls with their mothers. They said how radiant she looked, but she could hear them thinking of themselves.

  One afternoon in April of 1963, a girl about Eileen’s age came in looking for dresses for her bridesmaids. The girl made apparently random selections, projecting a nervous aura. She looked familiar—alarmingly so; only after Eileen had modeled a handful of dresses did she realize the girl was Virginia Towers, who’d left St. Sebastian’s in seventh grade to move to Manhasset. Eileen prayed she wouldn’t recognize her, but while Virginia was examining the seams she started patting excitedly on Eileen’s shoulder.

  “Eileen?”

  “Yes?”

  “Eileen! Eileen Tumulty!”

  Virginia’s voice was all heedless abandon. Eileen raised her brows in silent acknowledgment, perturbed to be addressed so familiarly in a place where she’d worked to keep her distance from the other girls.

  “It’s me, Ginny. Ginny Towers.”

  “Virginia, my goodness,” she said mutedly.

  Kind, sincere Virginia had been the only kid in her class with an investment bank executive for a father. Her father was also a Protestant, though her mother was a Catholic who’d grown up in the neighborhood. No one teased Virginia, even though she’d been shy and fairly awkward; it was as though her family’s means draped a protective cloak across her shoulders.

  “What are you doing here?” Virginia asked.

  There was no answer that wasn’t awkward, so Eileen gave the dress a demonstrative little tug in the chest and raised her hands in amused resignation.

  “Right!” Virginia said. “Dresses.” She had two in her hands and three more draped across the armoire, none promising. “Well, hell. Do you like any of these?”

  If Eileen had the money to buy bridesmaids’ dresses this expensive, she would buy different ones entirely—sleeker ones, less vulgar, more versatile. She was convinced she had nicer dresses hanging in her closet than Virginia did. She owned only half a dozen, but each was perfect. She would never buy five dresses for twenty dollars each when she could snag one truly gorgeous one for a hundred. She went out infrequently enough that she never worried about being seen too often in any of them.

  “I think the one I tried on a couple of dresses ago is quite nice,” Eileen said.

  “The lavender one? I knew it! I liked that one too. I’ll just have them order that one then.”

  Standing in the billowing dress, Eileen felt like one of those men in sandwich boards advertising lunch specials.

  “Eileen Tumulty,” Virginia said, as though it were the answer to a quiz-show question. “I’m guessing this is just your day job.”

  “I’m doing my bachelor’s,” she said. “I went to nursing school.”

  “I figured you’d be on your way to being a doctor or something. You were always the smartest one of us.”

  She felt her face redden.

  “I’m finishing at Sarah Lawrence this year. And I’m getting married! But you knew that already. He’s a Penn man. Very square—he makes me giggle he’s so square. My father has set him up with interviews at Lehman Brothers. We’re going to live in Bronxville. I’m going to walk to school my last month!”

  She knew of the town; it was a wealthy bedroom community in lower Westchester County. “That sounds just lovely.”

  “And I know you won’t guess what I’m doing next year.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to law school. At Columbia.”

  “You were always intelligent,” Eileen said, stifling her surprise.

  “Not like you. You were a whip.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “You were more of an adult than the rest of us,” Virginia said. “I often think about that day in sixth grade when you took me to Woolworth’s and made me buy a notebook for every class. Do you remember?”

  She remembered, but she didn’t relish recalling what an excess of energy she’d had then for grand improving projects, as though she’d thought the moral balance of the world could be restored by a regimen of directed efforts.

  “I remember you weren’t the most organized girl, but I don’t remember going to Woolworth’s, no.”

  “I think you’d had enough of watching me never be able to find anything when I needed it. You made me separate my notes. That was one of the most helpful things anyone’s ever done for me.”

  “I’m glad,” Eileen said, feeling a churning in her gut.

  “You should come to law school with me. We could be study partners. I’d get the better end of that deal.”

  It was as if Virginia was speaking to her from the outside of a circus cage, clutching a bar in one hand as she absently held a lamb chop in the other. Eileen had to get away before she said something she’d regret.

  “Maybe in my next life,” she said, and the awkwardness she’d kept at bay came rushing back at once. The dress’s low cut left her feeling exposed. A new customer had arrived, and the other girl was busy with someone else, so Eileen asked Virginia if she was sure about the lavender dress and left her with the woman who arra
nged the accounts.

  “Please look us up,” Virginia said on her way out. “Give us a couple of months to settle in. Bronxville, don’t forget. We’ll be in the phone book. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Callow. We’d absolutely love to have you over. There’s nothing so valuable in life as old friends.”

  • • •

  Her mother told her to save her money, to buy used if she had to have a car, but her father was the one to go with her to the showroom.

  The new Pontiac Tempest was on the floor, the 1964 model.

  “It’s most of what I have saved,” Eileen said.

  “You’ll make more. You’ll save again.”

  “It’s a bad investment.”

  “It’s an investment in life,” her father said. “If this is what you want, this is what you’re getting. It beats the piss out of a beer truck, I’ll say that. Maybe I’ll get one myself. Or I could get one of those convertible types over there. What did he call that one? The GTO? I could drive your mother around in it. Do you think she’d take to it?”

  For a moment, he sounded serious, and Eileen wanted to say, Daddy, I think she would, but instead she just said, “Now that is a terrible investment,” and asked him whether cherry red or navy suited her better.

  She could buy used and save for the future, or she could make a statement about where she thought her life was heading, and shape the perceptions of others about that trajectory, and maybe sway the future by courting it.

  “What the hell do you think I’m going to tell you?” her father said.

  She went with cherry red.

  • • •

  She was at the table when her mother got in from work.

  “Studying again?”

  Eileen barely grunted in reply. In shedding herself of her effects, her mother had dropped her keys on Eileen’s splayed notebook. There were so many keys packed onto the interlocking rings; each represented a room, or several, that her mother had to clean. Eileen slid them off the notebook as if they were coated in pathogens.

  “Why don’t you put those books aside for five minutes,” her mother said. “You can drive me and my friends.”

  “Drive where? Which friends?”

  “My meeting friends.”

  Meeting friends, Eileen thought crankily. She almost makes it sound pleasant.

  “Take my car,” she said, not looking up from her book.

  “I’m nervous to drive it.”

  Her mother had only had her license for a year, and she was shaky on the road. The Tempest was still brand-new.

  “I’ve got a test.”

  “We started a car pool,” her mother said. “I said I’d pick everyone up this week.”

  “And how had you planned on doing this, exactly?”

  “Come on,” her mother said. “It’s getting late.”

  The first stop was in Jackson Heights. She was surprised to pull up outside one of the co-ops; she’d always imagined that people of means were spared some of the sadder aspects of man’s nature. As soon as her mother left the car, Eileen took out her textbook. She was planning to study at every stop, even with others in the car. There wasn’t time for the squeamish propriety of small talk; the fact that she had submitted to this depressing task was enough.

  When her mother returned, there was a brightness in her voice.

  “Hiram,” she said to the man getting in the backseat, “this is my daughter, Eileen.”

  “So I guess you’re Charon tonight.”

  “Eileen,” she said.

  “Charon. The ferryman. On the river Styx.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right.”

  “Shuttling the dead.”

  He had bumped his hairpiece on the doorframe in getting in; instead of adjusting it with a furtive hand, he had taken it off completely and was resetting it with such nonchalance that it seemed he wore it not to disguise his baldness but to bring it out in the open.

  “You’re very much alive, Hiram,” her mother said, beginning to titter. “Though I can’t say the same for that rug you’re wearing.”

  “I’m supposed to give you a tip,” he said. “How about this: avoid men in borrowed hair.”

  “Sound advice,” Eileen said.

  “Tell it to my wife. Not that I had this when she met me. You should have seen the locks. I was Samson.”

  In the rearview mirror she watched him look contemplatively out the window. He returned her gaze alertly, as if he was used to being watched.

  “Beware of women bearing scissors,” he said, chuckling. He was in on some private joke that made even the heaviest things weightless. “Beware of three-drink lunches.”

  “One-drink lunches,” her mother said.

  “Well, if we’re going to hell, at least we’re doing it in style. This is a beaut.”

  “Thank you,” Eileen said.

  “You’ve got it backwards,” her mother said. “We’re leaving hell.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said agreeably. “We’re in purgatory, but we’re hopeful. Or if we’re not hopeful, at least we’re not succumbing to despair. Or if we’re succumbing to despair, at least we’re in this beautiful car.”

  Her mother was buoyant as she rang bells and led her meeting friends to the car, where she peppered them with chatter to put them at ease. Eileen couldn’t bring herself to open the book even when it was only Hiram in the car. She ended up having a marvelous time. In even a few minutes with some of them she could see they radiated hard-won perspective. She made three trips; then she parked up the block and watched in the mirror as her mother and the final quartet, a spectrum of widths and heights, disappeared down into the church basement.

  On the way home, after they’d dropped everyone off, her mother blew smoke through the cracked window and talked with a quick and ceaseless fluency. Upbeat as her mother seemed, Eileen saw that the corners of her mouth were being pulled down, as though by a baited hook. She could tell that her mother didn’t entirely believe in her own forgiveness. Eileen wasn’t sure she believed in it herself, even though she’d been the one to grant it, through tears, after her mother had sat her down at the kitchen table and unearthed mistakes Eileen had successfully buried and said how sorry she was for them. Her mother had worked hard to kill the past, but it clung to life in Eileen’s mind, in the thought that this apparently solid form might dissolve back into the liquid that had seeped into every corner of her childhood, bringing disorder and rot. The smell of the past, that irrepressible smoke, was spoiling the air between them, where, in the absence of others to filter it, an acrid cloud now hung.

  “Roll that down further, please.”

  Without a word, her mother did as asked. She stared straight ahead, smoking and avoiding Eileen’s gaze as she used to at the height of her drinking days. Eileen pulled over and got out to roll down the rear windows. She stood briefly outside the car gazing at the back of her mother’s head, which for a strangely exhilarating moment looked as if it belonged to someone else. Whatever her mother was going through, Eileen would allow herself to care only so much about it. She had her own life to worry about. Life was what you made of it. Some of the houses she’d dropped these people off at would have been enough for her, so why couldn’t they be enough for them? If she lived in one of these houses, she wouldn’t need to get into another woman’s car and head to a damp lower church for a meeting. She could look at her fireplace, her leather sofa, her book-lined drawing room; she could listen to silence above her head; she could peer in on empty bedrooms lying in wait for fresh-faced visitors, pleasantly useless otherwise. It would all be enough for her to put a drink down for. And yet there these people were. The fact that they were there, that everything they owned wasn’t enough somehow, disturbed her, suggesting a bottomlessness to certain kinds of unhappiness. She shook the thought from her head like dust from an Oriental rug and decided that a house would have to be enough.

  6

  She spent the entire fall of 1963 trying to convince her cousin Pat to apply to college. Then Decemb
er rolled in and the application deadlines were around the corner, and many of them had already come and gone. She went to him to make one final appeal.

  “I’m not college material,” Pat said, his big feet up on the coffee table in her aunt Kitty’s apartment, where Eileen sat with her knees together under the pressed pleats of her cotton skirt.

  “Bull.”

  “I’ve never been big on school.” He leaned over and tapped ashes into a coffee cup, stretched back again.

  “You could have been a great student. You’re smarter than all those boys.”

  “You need to give up on this idea of me as a Future Leader of America.”

  The truth was, she already had. He was smart enough to make it to his senior year without doing a lick of homework, and he possessed an intuitive ability to make men champion his causes that reminded her of her father’s own. He was pissing away his apparently unbearable promise at underage bars, but she didn’t care about that anymore. All she wanted was to keep him safe.

  “You could get As in your sleep,” she said, “if you gave it a tiny bit of effort.” She crossed her legs and played with the pack of cigarettes. She resisted blowing away the smoke that was traveling in her direction.

  “I can’t sit and study. I just get restless.”

  “I’ll do the applications for you.”

  “I need to move. I can’t be cooped up.” He snubbed out his cigarette and folded his hands behind his head.

  “You’ll have plenty of chances to move in Vietnam,” she said bitterly. “Until you’re in the ground, that is.”

  He turned eighteen that February, 1964, and she tried to get him to marry the girl he was dating, but he wouldn’t do it. When he graduated in June and received the notice to report for his physical, she was terrified, because he was a perfect specimen, big and strong and almost impossibly hale, with 20/10 vision, practically, and great knees despite the family curse, so there was zero chance of his getting declared 4F. She tried to get him to enlist in the National Guard to avoid a dangerous posting, and then after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August she was sure he’d find some college to enroll in, but instead a couple of weeks later he went to the recruiter for the Marines.