We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

“It’s a stupefying, hypnotic loop. It puts you in a suggestible state.”

  “Do you have to be so heady about everything? Do you have to analyze everything to death?”

  “What’s amazing is that they’re exactly the same every year.”

  “That’s an ignorant remark,” she spat. “They’re not the same at all. They put a lot of work into these. Months of planning.”

  She wouldn’t have minded his objections so much if he hadn’t insisted on drawing her into a dialogue about them. Was it too much to ask to share a moment of joy?

  She looked around at the other husbands. They didn’t look any happier to be there, but they stood back dully, hands folded behind them or scratching their noses. They couldn’t have been as cleverly cruel about it as Ed if they’d tried.

  “And the battling of tourists,” he said. “Every year it gets worse. The jostling, the jockeying for position. They’re descending on the imperial city for their bread and circuses. I wish we didn’t have to do this.”

  She started walking to the train. A couple passing in the other direction gave her curious looks, as though they could see the intensity of her disgust in her expression. She found herself unaccountably smiling at one man, giving him a manic sort of grin full of the slightly breathless ecstasy of being unmoored, and he returned it with a delighted blush. By the time she felt a tug on her elbow, she was at the next corner.

  “Don’t be hysterical,” Ed said. “I was just making a few observations.”

  “The world isn’t a lab.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back and look.”

  In his worn jacket with the frayed sleeve ends, he looked like a war veteran about to ask for change for the subway.

  “You’ve ruined it.”

  “Don’t say that. Listen, I can’t help myself sometimes. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “I do,” she said. “You didn’t have enough fun as a kid.”

  He pulled her arm, but she wouldn’t budge. She watched steam rise from a manhole cover and felt in her chest the rumbling of a passing bus. She was keenly aware of the limits of the physical world. She wanted to be in one of those scenes in the windows, frozen in time, in the faultless harmony of parts working in concert, fulfilling the plan of a guiding, designing hand. It would be lovely not to have to make every decision in life, to be part of a spectacle brought out once a year, for the safest of seasons, and put to work amusing people who stared back in mute appreciation. The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.

  “One of these years,” she said, “we will come here and you will enjoy it and not make me feel miserable about it. I dream of that.”

  “Let’s let that be this year,” he said. “Let’s go back and look at those windows. Please, honey. Let me make it up to you.”

  “It’s too late,” she said.

  “It’s never too late,” he said. “Don’t say that.”

  She hadn’t been looking at him; now she stopped to. Streams of people flowed past in either direction, rushing toward obscure destinations. This was her life right here, petty as it seemed at the moment, and this was the man she’d chosen to spend it with. He was holding his hat in his hand as if he’d taken it off for the purpose of beseeching her, and she saw that he would always have flaws, that he would always be a little too intense in his objections, a little too unbending when it came to the decadence of the world. She thought, We can’t all wear a hair shirt all the time. But there he was, trying to pull her back to the scene he despised, and she saw that he couldn’t live in a way other than the one he thought was right, and when he saw what the right thing was, like now, he cared about it as if it were the only thing that mattered. Everyone else around seemed as insubstantial as the air they moved through, the shopping bags they carried the only things anchoring them to the ground.

  “Did I tell you I love what you did with your hair?” he said, and she let herself be mollified, because she’d thought he hadn’t noticed. She took his hand. They retraced their steps, the street around them thrumming with life. She saw that there was something perfect about the imperfection of her husband—her mortal, living husband with his excessive vigilance about the effects of capitalism and his unmistakable pair of bowed legs that she watched carry him forward. She kept her eyes on his shoes hitting the pavement and let him guide her wherever he was going.

  11

  Shortly after getting his PhD, Ed came home with the news that he’d been sought out by an executive at Merck, who’d read an article of his in a journal. Eileen was in the kitchen cutting vegetables for stew.

  “He said I could have my own lab, with state-of-the-art equipment, everything top of the line. I’d have a team of assistants.”

  “Did he say how much you’d be paid?” She pushed the peppers into the stewpot and rinsed the knife in the sink. She could smell something fried and sickly sweet coming up from the Orlandos’ apartment below.

  “He didn’t have to. More than I’m making now. Let’s just say that.”

  “How much more?” She began to cut the beef into cubes. It was a thick cut with veins of fat. Ed would not have approved of how much she had spent on it.

  “We’d be very comfortable.”

  He didn’t appear terribly enthused to be able to make such a statement.

  “Honey!” she said, hearing herself squeal as she put the knife down. “This is amazing!” She threw her arms around him.

  “We’d have to move to New Jersey.”

  “We could live anywhere we wanted,” she said, letting him go to take a few steps and get the motor started on her thoughts. She was already envisioning a house in Bronxville. “If not New Jersey, then Westchester County, for instance.”

  “That’s too far to commute.”

  “Then we’ll move to New Jersey.”

  “Not me,” he said.

  “How do you want to do this, then? What would make you comfortable?”

  “Staying where I am,” he said.

  She looked at him. He was seriously considering not taking the job. If she had to say, he had already made up his mind. She picked up the knife and cut the last slab.

  “You love research. Think of the lab you’d have. I’d have to drag you home.”

  “It’s not research. It’s making drugs.” Ed paced toward the living room and back.

  “Drugs that help people,” she said, pushing the meat into the pot.

  “Drugs that make a lot of money,” he said.

  This opportunity looked like their destiny. There had to be a way to get him to listen to reason. She added salt and pepper and two cups of water and turned the burner on. “You research drugs already. What’s the difference?”

  Ed stood in the arched doorway between the kitchen and living room. He stretched his hands up and flexed his muscles against the doorway. “Researching drugs and making them are not the same,” he said. “On my own I can be a watchdog. For them I’d be a lapdog. Or an attack dog.”

  “What about when we have kids?” She put the caps back on the oil and the spices. “Don’t you want to be able to provide for them?”

  “Of course I do. I guess it depends what you mean by providing.” He gave her a meaningful look, let down his hands, and peered through the glass lid of the stewpot. He switched the radio on and played with the antenna to relieve the static. The kitchen filled with the violins and flutes of a classical orchestra.

  “I could make you do it,” she said. “But I won’t.”

  “You could not.”

  “I could. Women do it all the time. I could find a way. But I won’t.”

  He straightened up. “You’re not like that.”

  “Lucky for you, that’s true,” she said, though what she was thinking was that she was more like that than Ed understood. If her husband wasn’t going to fight to secure their future, someone had to. “I just want you to know that I know what I’m not doing here. What I’m not making you
do.”

  “Don’t forget I’m on the fast track to tenure,” he said, and she could tell it was a done deal in his mind.

  Ed was an assistant professor at Bronx Community College, where he’d started teaching while in graduate school at NYU. One day soon he would be an associate professor, and then, probably soon after that, a full professor.

  “There’s nothing fast about the track you’re on,” she said bitterly, looking at him in the window’s reflection in order not to have to look right into his face. “I don’t care how quickly you get there.”

  • • •

  Five years into their marriage, when Eileen was thirty-one, they decided to stop using birth control and try to conceive a child. At Einstein Hospital, where she worked, she had established a reputation as a head nurse and was confident she’d be able to return to the field after a short absence. She would have to go back to work eventually, something she wouldn’t have had to do if Ed had said yes to Merck.

  Seven months passed with no results and she started to worry. She wasn’t too old yet by any means, but she also knew the time for rational calculations had arrived. They’d been going about it haphazardly, having sex when they felt like it and leaving it to chance. She decided to make getting pregnant a conscious project, turning her attention to managing it as she’d managed so many others. She drew up ovulation charts and held Ed to a schedule. They both went in for tests. Ed’s sperm count was normal, his motility strong. Nothing was wrong with her ovaries. Every month, she cried when her period came. Every month, Ed reassured her.

  Then, finally, after another six months had passed, she got pregnant. A new lightness entered her spirit. Things that had once annoyed her hardly registered with her anymore. She laughed more easily, gave Ed more rope, and was practically a pushover with the nurses she supervised. She surprised herself with how serene she felt. She never thought she’d be one of those egregious earth mothers, but there she was, tired all the time and yet still making meals and keeping the place in order and smiling through it—laughing, even, at the comedy of being alive. She didn’t get angry at the evening news. When she got cut off on the highway, she shrugged her shoulders and shifted over a lane and hoped everybody arrived safely where they were going.

  • • •

  Her mother was over at her apartment, reading the newspaper. She grunted in appreciation and handed it to Eileen.

  “Here,” she said. “Read this. You might learn something.”

  It was an article about Rose Kennedy; one paragraph discussed how the Kennedy children used to hide the coat hangers so their mother couldn’t deploy them on their backs. Eileen seldom thought anymore about her mother using the hanger on her, both because the memory was so unpleasant and because it was woven so thoroughly into the fabric of her childhood that it barely merited conscious thought, but even this many years later, as she pictured her mother cracking her with that little metal whip, she could almost physically feel it on her body.

  “See?” her mother said proudly when Eileen handed it back. “I’m not the only one. If Rose Kennedy can do it, I can too. You should do it yourself, but you won’t. You’re too soft.”

  If Eileen hadn’t been pregnant, she might have said something about how all that money doesn’t necessarily buy you class, you can still act the same as a cleaning lady from Queens, because it would have cut to the quick, but she just said, “I guess it takes all styles,” and decided then and there that she would never lift a hand in anger at her child.

  • • •

  A few months into the pregnancy, she suffered a miscarriage. The sadness she felt was ruinous, unspeakable. Almost worse was the awakening in her of a dormant foreboding that went back, perhaps, to her mother’s own miscarriage and the effect it had had on both their lives. She’d never acknowledged it consciously, but in the blind alleys of her mind she’d feared that if she ever did manage to get pregnant, she’d have difficulty bringing the child to term.

  She tried not to let Ed see how distraught she was. She needed to keep him on task trying to get her pregnant again, and she didn’t want him thinking it would be gallant to take the pressure off her for a while. Another year passed with no results. She started having an extra glass of wine at restaurants. She took to suggesting wine with nearly every home-cooked meal. She began buying cases of wines she liked and storing them in the basement to have something on hand when company came over, and because buying in bulk was cheaper. She felt she was acquiring a little more insight into the way her mother’s life had played out. She was still in control, though; she kept going to work every day, kept depositing money into her savings account.

  Ed no longer made efforts to reassure her. He seemed to have resigned himself to not having children. At times she wondered if he weren’t relieved. Despite his protests to the contrary she imagined he wouldn’t terribly mind preserving for himself some of the time that fatherhood would claim. Once, when he said he was too tired on a night they were scheduled to try, she accused him of sabotaging their plans. She knew she was being hysterical, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Her friends ran into no trouble having babies. Cindy Coakley had three girls in five years until she finally delivered Shane to Jack. Marie Cudahy followed up Baby Steven with the twins, Carly and Savannah. Kelly Flanagan’s Eveline was born with a cleft lip, but then Henry came out a couple of years later looking like the Gerber baby. One after another, the calls came in with the cheerful news, and the cards arrived celebrating fecundity. The only holdout among her close friends was Ruth McGuire, who had raised the last two of her seven younger siblings herself. When Ruth told her she was done raising kids, Eileen felt herself drawing even closer to her. They would greet the childlessness together.

  Whenever they gathered around to watch whichever of her friends’ kids was celebrating a birthday open presents, Eileen bit her nails down to the quick. She was sure everyone could read her thoughts in her mortified grin. She always spent too much money and bought too many gifts. She felt a nervous expectancy whenever the kid began to tear the paper open. She needed to have gotten the essential gift, the inevitable gift.

  Having no kids freed Ed to pursue his professional interests without the burden of nighttime feedings or diaper changes or pediatric visits. He did important work on neurotransmitters, gave talks at conferences, and was named full professor faster than his peers.

  She stopped thinking of each menstruation as a referendum on her femininity. She threw herself into her work with a compensatory vigor and was promoted several times. She sensed that her bosses and coworkers saw her as one of a new breed of women—it was 1975—willing to sacrifice motherhood on the altar of career. The men deferred to her and the mothers hated her, and there was an opportunity here if she was willing to pursue it fully.

  Still, the miscarriage haunted her. She had dreams of sitting on the toilet bowl and hearing an unusual plop and finding in there a tiny baby who’d open its eyes at her—she couldn’t tell its sex—and look at her angrily, blinking slowly, and she would wake with a start and shake Ed awake. She avoided looking into the bowl when she went to the bathroom. Eventually, she and Ed settled into the rhythms of a childless life, which offered undeniable compensations: they could go out with other couples without having to arrange for child care; they could indulge in the leniency reserved for aunts and uncles; and they were free to nurture their careers in the way they might have nurtured offspring. Maybe this was why she was so upset when Ed was offered the chairmanship of the department and turned it down to devote more time to teaching and research. It was as if he was telling her he didn’t love their child.

  • • •

  To make up for the money he’d left on the table in passing up the chairmanship, Ed started teaching night anatomy classes at NYU. He’d pop home for dinner and head into the city by train. On dissection nights, he came home smelling like a pickled corpse himself. She couldn’t stand to have him touch her after he’d been handling dead bodies, and whe
n he teasingly ran his hands over her anyway, she squealed and squirmed out of reach.

  A tenure-track position opened in NYU’s biology department. One of Ed’s advisors was on the search committee. He said Ed would be given serious consideration if he applied.

  She urged him to do it. NYU would be an obvious bump up in prestige.

  “They need me at BCC,” he said. “Anyone can teach at NYU. What’s important to me is having my students leave knowing they got a real education. I want to help them get into NYU. I want them prepared to meet the demands that will be placed on them when they do.” There were other reasons to stay: the city had an airtight pension plan and great health benefits; there was no guarantee of tenure at NYU; he had a pretty good lab at BCC and could do the same research there that he’d do at NYU; there were grants out there to be procured. “It’s all about having the right ambition,” he said.

  In the end, he never applied. To all the people she’d excitedly told about the NYU possibility, Eileen defended Ed’s choice by saying that when the opportunity arose, which was bound to be sooner rather than later, he would be a natural choice for dean of the college. That prospect, she said, wasn’t something you just flushed. That was the sort of career experience that could be parlayed into a parallel administrative position in a more prestigious institution.

  He kept teaching the night classes. Now when he came home stinking of embalming fluids, not only wouldn’t she let him near her in bed, she made him shower before she’d even hug or kiss him hello. Dinner and dishes would intercede after that, and often she could get to bed without having to touch him at all. She didn’t feel bad withholding herself from him. He had made his choice. He shouldn’t have expected to have everything he wanted, not if she had to give so much up to keep him happy.

  • • •

  The tall tree in the backyard, whose crown eclipsed the apex of the Orlandos’ gabled roof, blocked much of the light in their bedroom. They were into their midthirties, and hints of seniority crept into their thoughts; they held them off by making love. Sometimes the activity was tinged by anger. Neither of them was going anywhere, even if in the middle of fights that lasted for days she entertained thoughts of divorce and suspected he did, though neither raised its specter aloud. They knew they would never sever their union, and this knowledge opened a door to the basement of their psyches. They became familiar enough to each other to begin to feel like strangers in bed, which infused their love life with a new potency. She wondered whether her friends had wandered down similar alleys, but she never had the courage to ask.