We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  • • •

  When she was thirty-five, after she’d long since given up worrying about it, she conceived a child and carried the pregnancy to term, delivering at dawn a couple of days before the ides of March, 1977. She and Ed had been struggling for weeks to come up with something to call the baby if it happened to be a boy, and by morning of the second day they were no closer to an answer, to the consternation of the girl with the birth certificate paperwork. Ruth took the train in to visit and accidentally left her book behind on the hospital nightstand. When the girl came around again on the morning of the third day and said Eileen could always take a trip down to City Hall to file the documents herself, Eileen’s gaze landed on the name of the author of Ruth’s book, Mrs. Bridge, which she had never heard of. She had a distant relative named Connell, but the real reason she chose it was that it sounded more like a last name than a first name, like one of those patrician monikers the doctors she worked for often bore, and she wanted to give the boy a head start on the concerns of life.

  When Connell was a couple of months old, she realized, as though she’d awoken from an extended slumber, that his coming into the world had been a matter of grave importance. She had escaped a trap without knowing she’d been in it. For a while, she pushed Ed to conceive another child, until she stopped for fear of what misbegotten creature might result if she succeeded at her age. She would build the future on the boy.

  • • •

  It surprised her how much she enjoyed bathing her baby. She suspected it would have surprised anyone who knew her. As soon as she put the stopper in and opened the tap to fill the sink, a remarkable calm settled over her. She held his neck and head with one hand, her inner forearm cradling his body, and cleaned him with the other, pressing the cloth into the little creases in his skin. He smiled mutely at her and she felt a terrible unburdening of pent-up emotion. A little water splashed up in his face and he coughed and resumed his uncanny placidity. When he grew bigger and could sit up in the sink, she handed him a sopping washcloth to grip and suck on while she washed him with another, and she delighted in the sound of his draining it, the sheer vital pleasure he took in pulling it in his little teeth.

  When he was old enough to be bathed in the tub, she loved the sight of him leaning over its lip, standing on tiptoe as he reached for the water with his swinging hand, his little back muscles shifting in the effort. In his enthusiasm he nearly fell in headfirst. He splashed waves out of the tub with a succession of quick slaps at the water’s surface. He giggled and gurgled and pulled at his penis with exploratory joy as she rubbed shampoo into his black hair. He grabbed the rinse cup and took a long draft of the soapy water before she could seize it from him. She loved to wrap the towel around him when she was done, powder his little body, secure the diaper, and work his limbs into pajamas, sensing the calm and ease he felt when snug in the garment’s gentle pressure. Snapping the buttons gave her an unreasonable pleasure. She would breathe his baby smell and wonder how she could ever have lived without it. Her heart swelled when she bathed him, when she dressed him for bed, when she combed the last wetness out of his washed hair, when she gave him the breast, when she gave him the bottle, when she lay him down, when she went to check on him at night and felt his chest rise and fall under her hand and his heart beat through her fingertips. She thought of him as she lay awake, and though she was always exhausted, and though there were nights she imagined she’d rise in the morning and the enchantment would have worn off, the well of her affection filled up in her sleep and she plucked him from the crib and pressed him to her, kissing his soft neck. There were some things that couldn’t be communicated, and this was one—how much pleasure a woman like her could take in the fact and presence of her beautiful baby boy. She knew it wouldn’t be like this forever; soon she’d make demands on him, expect the world of him. She was going to enjoy this part. She was going to fill up her heart with it enough for years.

  12

  After Eileen’s mother got sober, sitting idly took more out of her than working long hours, so she continued to haul herself out to Bayside to clean up after grammar school kids even into her midsixties, long after Eileen’s father had taken the watch and pension and tossed the truck keys to the younger bucks. When her employer lost its contract with the schools, though, her mother didn’t look for another job. She had talked for years of putting money down on a beach home in Breezy Point, but Eileen suspected she’d realized she couldn’t make a vaulting leap forward in the time she had remaining. She started reading the Irish Echo instead of the Daily News and making trips to Ireland using the savings she’d accumulated. The line of her allegiances began to blur, as if her time in her adopted homeland had been an experiment whose hypothesis had proved unsound.

  Eileen had long been able to tell her mother about the fights over Ed’s career and know that she would click her tongue and shake her head in censure of his lack of drive. Some change was occurring in her mother, though, to make her less pragmatic. She seemed less bothered by her station in life. She stopped complaining about politics, or the idiots on the subway, or the ugliness and stench of city life. She read novels and met with a group to discuss them. Eileen couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed. She figured part of this transformation was her mother trying anything to avoid taking a drink. “Negative thoughts back you into a corner,” her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadow Park. “They multiply and surround you. Don’t think of what you don’t have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.” It was rich, this spouting of shibboleths, this late-stage wisdom-mongering. It was the tactic of a woman who’d played her hand and lost, or worse, never played it to begin with. But her mother had picked the wrong audience for her speech. It may have gone over well with down-and-outers at AA who’d wrecked their lives and slipped into a spiral of regret, but Eileen’s problem wasn’t negative thinking, it was too little positive thinking on the part of everyone around her. She had a vision, and she wasn’t turning away from it for a second, even if her husband, and now her mother, saw some ugliness in it. At least she had her father on her side—though God bless him, he supported anything you threw your heart into. She was going to do that, no question about it. What waited ahead, if only Ed would walk the path she’d laid out for him, was a beautiful life, an American life.

  “One day at a time,” her mother said, and Eileen thought, And everything all at once.

  • • •

  Christmas of 1980 Eileen bought Ed a VCR. They’d looked at them together, but when he’d seen what they cost—about a thousand dollars—he had decided they could live without one. Eileen hadn’t worked hard all her life to sit on her hands when she could afford to buy something. She was making decent money now that she was the nursing director at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. It was the perfect gift for him, considering how much he loved old movies. Starting in August, she paid for it on layaway.

  When he unwrapped it, he looked horrified, as if it were a relic unearthed from a sacred burial ground that would bring a curse down upon their heads.

  “How could you do this?” he asked, seething in front of the three-year-old boy. “How could you think of buying this?”

  A few days later, she came in from the shower and saw him on his haunches putting a tape in the machine. She gave him a sardonic look.

  “All right,” he said. “I was wrong. It’s a great gift.”

  “Save it.”

  “I mean it. It was thoughtful of you.” He was clutching the empty sleeve of the VHS tape to his chest. “I appreciate it.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Look, I know I get set in my ways.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two.”

  He wheeled the TV cart over, so that it was right next to the bed. PBS was on, the fund-raising appeal between programs. Ed patted the bed. “Get in,” he said.

  “I’
ve got to brush my hair out.”

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to make sure I get this whole thing on tape.”

  “Anyway, I’m happy you’re using it.”

  “What can I say?” He threw his arms out in amused resignation. “You’re good for me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Really?”

  “Really and truly. I’d be lost without you.”

  Sometimes it felt like all the difficulty he put her through was worth it. It was a rare man who’d admit so thoroughly that he’d been wrong.

  “Honey,” she said, and she dropped her towel and stood naked before him the way he was always trying to get her to do. At first she hunched a bit, and then she stood tall, her hands at her hips, feasting on his gaze and letting him drink in her body. The movie was starting, but Ed didn’t take his eyes off her. She felt herself blush. “You’d better hit record,” she said. Ed didn’t stop looking at her. She climbed on him and hit the button.

  “We can watch it later,” he said, kissing her neck. “That’s the genius of this thing.” He moved his hand down her back, squeezed her butt, touched her sex.

  “Anytime we want,” she said breathlessly.

  She rolled off him and ripped the sheet away. He lowered the volume and yanked his underwear off. She reached across him to switch off the bedside lamp and he thrust up into her, flipped her onto her back. The tape whirred rhythmically. The television pulsed, filling the room with light and plunging it into darkness, outlining their bodies in the lovely deep of night.

  • • •

  In January of 1981, her mother was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.

  A nurse came to the apartment, but her father did his share of nursing too. Eileen would go over after work and find that he’d given her medicine, bathed her, changed her clothes, made her a liquid meal—she could no longer eat solid foods—and tucked her in. He’d moved into her room, and slept in the other twin bed.

  The day her mother entered the hospital for good—November 23, 1981—her father mentioned some pains in his chest. They admitted him and found that he had been concealing his own cancer, which had spread throughout his chest cavity, colonizing the organs. They gave him his own room, down the hall from her mother. They rolled them out to see each other once a day.

  Her parents had slept in separate rooms for thirty years, but a few days before Christmas, when the doctors rolled her mother away from her father for what would turn out to be the last time, she called to him from down the hall.

  “Don’t let them take me away from you, Mike, my Mike!” she said, for all on the floor to hear.

  • • •

  What they didn’t hear was what she asked Eileen later that night, with the tubes in her.

  The curtain was drawn. The lights were off except for the one above her bed. Eileen had filled two cups with ice water, but both were left full and the ice had long ago melted.

  “Was it worth it?”

  Eileen leaned in to hear her better. “Was what worth it, Ma?”

  “I didn’t touch a drop for twenty-five years. Did it make a difference?”

  She felt an uncomfortable grin forming on her face. She wasn’t at all happy, but she couldn’t keep this ghoulish smile away. She didn’t want to show her mother how much she was hurting. Through the open door, she heard the distant beeps of call buttons and voices in intercoms. She had worked in a hospital for twenty years, but somehow she felt she was in a place she’d never been before. Under the green glow of the fluorescent lamp, her mother looked like a wraith, her skin so thin you could count the veins.

  “How can you ask that?”

  “I’m asking you.” Her mother shifted her head on her pillow with great effort. Her cheeks were two smooth hollows beneath large, alert eyes. “Was it worth it?”

  Eileen had thought of the time since her mother had gotten sober as the happiest of both of their lives. There had been a quiet thawing of the glacier in her mother’s heart, with occasional louder crackings-off of icebergs of emotions, until, after Connell was born, it had melted so thoroughly that all that remained in an ocean of equanimity were little islands of occasional despond. Her mother appeared almost joyful at times. But perhaps it had been a performance.

  “Of course,” Eileen said, taking her hand.

  “I wish I hadn’t stopped.” Her mother didn’t look at her but gazed at the folds of the curtain, her other hand palm down on the blanket.

  “Think of all the things you wouldn’t have had. Think of all the lives you touched. We had some great years.”

  Her mother pulled her hand back, folded it into her other one. “I would have given it all away for a drink.”

  “Well, you didn’t.”

  “I still would.”

  Eileen took her hand again and held it with force. “It’s too late. You did all that. You can’t take it back. You had a great life.”

  “Fair enough,” her mother said, and in a little while she was dead.

  • • •

  Her father died two weeks later. In going through the papers, Eileen learned that he had cashed in the bonds and sold the life insurance policies decades before. Maybe that was how he’d gotten her mother’s ring back from the pawnbroker. Or maybe he’d incurred bigger debts than she’d ever suspected. She knew he’d always played the horses, but it had never occurred to her that he’d had an actual gambling problem. If so, he’d been good at keeping the consequences from her. She remembered something she’d witnessed when she was ten, at her friend Nora’s apartment after school. Nora opened the door to a man in a dark suit and hat who told her to give her father the message that he should pay what he owed. Eileen was standing behind her. “You kids will pay if he doesn’t,” the man said, pointing at Nora and herself. “Tell him.” Eileen went home frightened, and when she told her father what had happened, he said, “He didn’t mean you. He thought you belonged to that girl’s father. But you don’t. You belong to me.” It was impossible to imagine any man having the courage to show up at her father’s apartment that way, not when her father counted every Irish policeman in the city as an ally, and many of the non-Irish too. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t in someone’s debt. Maybe that explained why they’d never lived in a house. And maybe it explained why he’d been so adamant that she own one herself. In any case, she had to dip into her savings to pay for her parents’ funerals.

  The wakes were so close together that she worried few relatives would be able to return for her father’s, but those who’d flown in for her mother flew back, and if they hadn’t there would still have been standing room only at the parlor.

  She was staring at his coffin trying to understand how he could fit into that little box when a black man about her age came over and introduced himself as Nathaniel, the son of Carl Washington, her father’s longtime driving partner. Nathaniel asked if she knew how their fathers had come to drive together. With all the stories told about her father over the last couple of days, she was amazed there was one she hadn’t heard.

  “My father was the first black driver Schaefer ever hired,” Nathaniel said. “The first morning my father showed up for work, none of the other drivers were willing to be paired with him. There were rumblings of a walkout. My father wondered if he was going to have to go find another job. Your father walked into the warehouse after the others and took one look at everyone back on their heels with their arms across their chests and said, ‘Get in this truck with me, you black son of a bitch.’ Then he hopped up in the truck without another word.”

  She cringed, but Nathaniel was smiling.

  “His language could be rough,” she said.

  “My father heard worse,” he said. “Your father wouldn’t drive with anyone but my father after that. For twenty years. I don’t know if you remember, but he used to hold a Bronx route.”

  She nodded.

  “Once he had my father with him, he insisted on being switched to the Upper East Side.”

&nb
sp; “I remember when he switched.”

  “ ‘There’s enough blacks in the Bronx,’ he told my father. ‘Let them see a black face in that neighborhood for a change.’ ”

  She put a tissue to her eyes and handed him one as well.

  “Big Mike this, Big Mike that,” Nathaniel said. “Growing up I heard your father’s name around the house more than the names of people in my own family.”

  He waved his wife and children over and she greeted all of them in turn.

  She was embarrassed to learn that Mr. Washington had died a few years before. She was even more embarrassed to see in Nathaniel’s face, when she said, “I wish I’d known,” that he never would have dreamed she’d show up at his father’s funeral.

  13

  In February of 1982, Bronx Community College announced that the dean would be stepping down at the end of the semester. They offered Ed the job and even mentioned the possibility of his becoming president someday. She felt like a chess master who had seen several moves ahead. Taking the deanship would mean the end of Ed’s teaching career, but there was no question of his refusing: he would strap the boy and herself to his back and carry them further up the ladder of respectability.

  Working at Lawrence had opened her eyes to how people lived on a higher rung of that ladder. She found herself walking or driving around Bronxville after work, to marvel at the manicured shrubbery, the gorgeous houses set back from the street, the shining plate-glass windows behind which every table looked set for Christmas dinner. From time to time her car was in the shop and she had to take the Metro-North, but it was almost a pleasure to do so, because the Bronxville station was quaintly beautiful, with no graffiti in sight and the lambent glow of the station house and cars idling amiably as they dropped people off. She waited in the strange serenity of the platform’s airy expanse, and when the train came around the bend, it bore the dignity of another era. Drowsing riders slipped past sleepy towns on the way to Grand Central Station. She began to dwell on the idea that she could finally begin to really live her life if she came home to an enchanted place like that, but they would need more money to live there. Ed’s job offer had come just in time.