We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  She thought she’d made her feelings clear to Ed, and that he’d understood and agreed, but one day he came home and told her he’d turned the deanship down. “The classroom is too important,” he said. “I want them getting the education they’d get at elite schools, and I know that, at least in my classroom, that’s what they’re getting. I can control that much.”

  This about-face infuriated her—the caprice in it, the self-indulgence. This wasn’t the sober man she’d thought she’d married. Sure, he had his arguments: his ambition had never been for fancier titles and fatter paychecks; he was after something unquantifiable, philosophical, the kind of aim never properly rewarded in earthly terms. She grew increasingly impatient with his disquisitions, but she found herself parroting them to her friends, wrapping herself in the chastening rhetoric of sacrifice and duty.

  She wanted Ed’s idealism to trump her pragmatism, and for a couple of weeks it did, until one night at dinner she said that she was tired of living in their apartment, and that after fifteen years it was time for a change, time, even, to own a house. Ed made his case for the low rent the Orlandos charged and the fact that they were socking away money for Connell’s education and avoiding the expenses and headaches of ownership. Another day Eileen would have let herself be appeased, turned the temperature down on the conversation, but now she allowed her anger to boil up at Ed and his unbecoming lack of courage. She felt herself on the verge of screaming one of those unforgettable phrases that could alter the dynamic of a relationship forever, and so she told him to put the boy to bed and slammed the door on her way out the room.

  After work the next day, when that regular crowd that were never in a rush to get home to their families went to a bar in the vicinity of the hospital, Eileen for once accepted the invitation to join them. She was determined to stay out until God knew what hour, even with the young boy at home, and do whatever these people did as they watched their numbers dwindle to a determined few, but she was only halfway into her first glass of wine when a memory rose up of one particularly lugubrious episode during the period when her mother went out after work. She reached for her wallet to settle up, but the others wouldn’t let her pay. As she drove home, she decided that she couldn’t just pretend to Ed that nothing had changed. She felt a timer ticking on the way they were currently arranging their lives. She was getting restless. She had thought they were walking a mutual path toward greater stakes in a shared dream, but the more he insisted on staying in their apartment, the harder it was for her to see him as a fully vested partner in her future. She needed him to be her partner, because she loved him terribly, despite the difficulty of living with him sometimes, and so she was going to save him from himself, and save their marriage if that was what it was coming to, by insisting that they leave. He had always been good at listening to her. As he got older and more fixed in his fears and habits, she had to shout a little louder to be heard, but once he heard her, if he could stomach what she was asking for, he did what she asked. She did what she could do for him as well. He needed a real home no less than she did. His mind had grown smaller as he’d bunkered himself in his ideals. He needed space for his thoughts to breathe. He needed to regroup, to see new possibilities, to think bigger than ever. If there was anything she could help him with, it was thinking big.

  • • •

  She’d almost reached her landing with the basket of folded clothes when she heard the doorbell ring. Ed was teaching his night class. She groaned in frustration and elbowed the door open, hustling to the front stairs to get down there before the bell rang again. The boy had always been a light sleeper, but in the months since he turned five he’d seemed to awaken at the mere suggestion of activity. This constant up and down—two flights to the laundry room, a long flight to answer the door—was driving her crazy.

  When she saw Angelo standing there, she wondered if she’d forgotten to slip the rent payment under the door. She found the whole exercise so humiliating every month—stooping in subservience, struggling to slide the envelope past the stubborn insulating lip—that she might unconsciously have followed her desire to forget about it and see how long it would be until they said something.

  “Is this a good time to talk?”

  “Sure, come in.”

  She was in a form-fitting sweat suit, which made her a little self-conscious walking up the stairs in front of him. When they got upstairs, she asked him to have a seat at the dining room table, but he chose to stand in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb, holding the knit cap he’d taken off his head.

  “Can I get you some coffee? Water?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She sat.

  “I’ve run into a little financial trouble,” Angelo said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, and because she didn’t want to hear the details, she began to worry the upholstering on the chairs.

  He inhaled deeply, cracked his swollen knuckles. “I don’t want to burden you with the whole story. Long story short, I’ll have to sell the house.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “I wanted to see if you had any interest in it.”

  Recently, she and Ed had begun to seriously discuss the possibility of buying a house. She’d campaigned to sway him to the virtues of home ownership by appealing to his practical side. Owning would mean an added financial burden, but they’d be building equity instead of flushing rent money, and they had already put enough aside for a down payment. The only things holding them back were his conservatism about expenses and general fear of change. She hadn’t been thinking multifamily, but the rental income would offset part of the mortgage, and it struck her that it wasn’t going to get any easier to convince Ed to buy a house than telling him she wanted to buy the one they were already in. They wouldn’t even have to get a moving truck. This was her best chance to capitalize on his recent softened stance; the longer they waited, the more time he’d have to convince himself that they shouldn’t tie their money up in a home. And when he heard that Angelo was in trouble, he would want to help him out.

  It didn’t hurt that her father, who had promised to haunt her until she and Ed owned a house, would be appeased. She’d been thinking of her father’s curse more and more lately. She could make the case that she’d been in a house long before he was dead, and that it was just a matter of signing a few papers to make it officially hers. He would appreciate the neatness of such a solution.

  “This is all very sudden,” she said.

  “I’d sell it to you at a discount,” he said. “I’d only ask that you keep my family on at an affordable rent.”

  “I’ll talk to my husband about it.”

  “Please do,” he said. “I’m going to have to move quickly, one way or the other.”

  Her mind was churning. She didn’t like being on an upper floor, especially after Ed’s cousin’s kid in Broad Channel, playing Superman, had climbed out onto a second-story roof, jumped, and broken an arm and a leg. And she was tired of not having a driveway of her own. She used to consider herself lucky that Angelo allowed her and Ed to park in the driveway at all, but that gratitude had worn off, and now it nettled her to have to walk around the house to get to her door, or to have to ring Angelo’s bell when she was blocked in.

  “There’s one thing I would want,” she said.

  “You name it.”

  “I would want to switch apartments. I would want to be on the ground floor.”

  “It’s your house,” he said.

  “And one other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I would ask you to park your car on the street,” she said. “I would want the driveway clear for our use.”

  He seemed to chew on what she’d said. His mouth rose at the corners in a forlorn smile at the concessions his situation—she realized that she didn’t care to know the first thing about it, not the first thing—had forced upon him.

  “No problem,” he said, regaining the momentum he’d briefly lost. “
There’s plenty of parking around here. Worst case, I walk a block or two.”

  “And we’d need the garage cleaned out.”

  “Everything will come out of there.”

  “And the cedar closets in the basement. You can have the ones we use now.”

  She thought she heard him whistle. She couldn’t tell if he was taken aback or impressed by the bargain she was driving. “All of these details can be arranged,” he said. “We can work together on this.”

  “I just needed to get these things out in the open.”

  He picked up her keys from the bowl on the mule chest and let them twirl in his fingers. “I got you.”

  “I’ll talk to Ed.”

  “And you’d keep us on?”

  “Yes.”

  He dropped the keys and straightened up. “At affordable rents?”

  “I wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg,” she said. “You folks are like family now.”

  “Even if I die?”

  “Angelo! My God.”

  He gave her a look that suggested he saw her not as a woman but as another man. “I’m asking: even if I die?”

  “Even if you die. Of course.”

  “I just want to know my family is taken care of,” he said. “I’m not looking to break the bank. I just want to take care of my people.” He backed toward the stairs.

  “I understand,” she said, stepping toward him.

  “Why don’t we find out how much houses like this are going for, and then you can give me less than that.”

  “I need to talk to my husband,” she said again. “We’d have to qualify for a mortgage.”

  “Don’t worry.” He had taken a step downstairs and he turned, smiling fully now, so that he almost appeared mirthful. “People like you, with all your affairs in order—you can have anything you want in this country.”

  Part II

  The

  Salad Days

  Thursday, October 23, 1986

  14

  Eileen was understaffed again, so she had to stay late filling out charts and writing notes, and when she went around to dispense a final round of meds in little paper cups, one patient crashed his fist into his mouth in that way stupid people did when trying to look cool taking pills or eating peanuts, and he missed and sent the pill skittering across the linoleum floor. Pharmacy wasn’t picking up the phone, and she was out of that medication, so she got down on all fours and searched for it. A quarter of an hour later she found it covered in dust under the far bed. She reached her arm up with it from under the bed in a gesture of mutual victory, but as she crawled out backwards on her hands and knees, she saw that he was staring idiotically at her rear end, which she’d left hovering as she focused on the task at hand. She wanted to cram the pill in his mouth and slam his jaw shut, cracking his teeth, but she wasn’t about to let a useless fool like this defeat her poise, so she just placed it back in the little cup. In her chosen profession (in fact she felt it had chosen her, in a kind of malevolent possession) even administrators weren’t spared feeling like pieces of meat.

  It was almost six thirty when she hit Eastchester Road. The Hutch was moving, thank God, and the Mets were in Boston, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad on the other side of the bridge. The traffic during the playoffs had been a nightmare: mindless, endless, pointless; very nearly proof of the randomness of the universe. Her sciatic nerve was throbbing and her feet were going numb, and she didn’t have it in her to sit there inching along.

  As she approached the Whitestone and the road sloped up toward the start of the cables, she felt her mood lift. Her time on the bridge was the only part of her commute she didn’t mind. She loved the way the cables shot up in a triumphant curve as the first arch neared and then plunged down immediately afterward. Sometimes—it was happening now—the music on the radio matched the rhythm of the bridge. The cables climbed toward the second arch, and she felt herself in the uncanny presence of beauty. Nothing else in her day stirred her to the contemplation of abstract ideas. The bridge was making an argument for its own soundness as she drove over it. High above the East River, the sharp focus of ordinary life gave way to hazy impressions as the eye worked to contain the vastness it beheld. Then the cables rolled into anchor, the landscape resumed a human scale, and that hopeful notion she’d conceived for the evening at the peak of the span began to recede.

  At least the traffic was flowing. She’d be home by seven at this rate. She had called at five to say she expected to be quite late and to ask Lena to feed Connell, and then she’d called again before she left and said not to feed him. Lena had assured her it was no trouble, and Eileen had heard the touch of sharpness in her own voice when she’d said she wanted to have dinner with the boy herself. She had put chicken in the fridge to defrost it, and if she didn’t cook it, it was going to go bad.

  That morning, she’d decided that they were going to have a family meal, even though Ed wouldn’t be there with them. If he was forcing her to compromise on her ideal of family time by continuing to teach these night classes, then a compromise was all she could stand anymore, not the complete capitulation she’d made lately on nights he taught, when she let Lena feed the boy and took a restless bubble bath before she went up to get him. She and Connell were enough to make up a family; in fact, they were plenty. In some families, mother and child was all there was. She didn’t need Ed to be happy.

  She was angry at Ed for the class that met two nights a week, and she was angry at him for staying late another night to attend to his research. If he was going to be away this much, at least he could be making good money doing it. His turning down the job at Merck still bothered her, and the fact that he’d spent these years taking on extra instruction only served to make him seem more irresponsible somehow.

  At the exit for Northern off the Whitestone Expressway, she took pleasure in seeing Shea Stadium empty. Soon enough—it couldn’t come soon enough—this endless season would be over. At 114th Street, she headed over to Thirty-Fourth Avenue, because she didn’t like driving through Corona on Northern. It depressed her to live next to a neighborhood that run-down, though things closer to her end of town weren’t all that great lately either. Some of the reliable old stores were becoming junk shops, and the number of signs with Spanish in them was on the rise.

  She wasn’t looking forward to fetching Connell from the Orlandos. It used to be, when he was in kindergarten or first grade, he’d come running when she appeared at the back door, but lately she’d had to fight to get him out of there. They always had the television going, that was part of it, and the place was comfortable in a way that appealed to a kid, with knick-knacks everywhere and interesting clutter. Brenda’s four-year old daughter, Sharon, was usually there. The number of Orlandos present never seemed to dip below three. It reminded her of her apartment during the happy period in her teens when a new wave of relatives came over from Ireland. There were differences, of course: the Orlandos were louder, more physical, certainly more affectionate. She’d dealt with smoke as a kid, but there were more smokers in the Orlando house; everyone but Sharon seemed to have lit up at some point in Eileen’s presence. She suspected that whatever fun Connell had up there paled in comparison to the afternoons she’d enjoyed with all her cousins around, but he didn’t know the difference. Or maybe it was like when she went up to the Schmidts’ apartment to watch television as a girl. She always felt she was escaping the reality of her life. Was that how Connell felt? If so, he had no reason to. She and Ed provided a calmer home than she’d ever had. Still, these days he never wanted to come down. She had to admit that for the first few minutes after they got downstairs, until she put the kitchen radio on and started cooking, her house felt empty by comparison.

  She parked and went inside, took her shoes off, and changed quickly out of her stockings. She put her slippers on and went up the back stairs. Lena answered the door in a smock and said, “Come in, come in,” with the carefree informality of a woman perfectly comfortable in her own home. Beh
ind her, Angelo sat at the table in the dining room that had once been Eileen’s own, smoking a cigarette and flipping through the Post. He still had his Sanitation Department shirt on, unbuttoned and untucked, with an undershirt beneath it. His hands were thick, and his fingers were stained from cigarettes, but there was an elegance in the way his hair was cropped and the longer strands on top were slicked back. He gave her a warm smile and welcomed her with a small gesture of the hand. The only books in the house were a few dusty volumes in the glass case behind him, and he hadn’t finished high school, but still he gave the impression he could summon up reliable answers to almost any question put to him. She watched him luxuriously turn the pages of the newspaper, licking his finger and sliding his hand behind the page to flip it as though it were a leaf in an illuminated manuscript. Since Consolata’s death a few months back, he was less quick to yell, and he sat at the table and talked to Connell more, which the boy delighted in. The family was still paying the rent for Consolata’s apartment, presumably out of whatever small inheritance she’d left them. Lena and Angelo were planning on moving upstairs with Gary, to give Donny, Brenda, and Sharon room to breathe. The kids were grown, but it was evident they wouldn’t be striking off on their own anytime soon.