We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  Gary and Brenda were on the couch, Sharon between them, resting her head on her mother’s lap while her uncle held her feet. Donny was in the easy chair. Connell had the smaller couch to himself. They were watching Jeopardy. Connell barely looked up when Eileen walked in. Donny waved; Gary looked embarrassed to be noticed. He was wearing corduroy pants and a T-shirt that was too tight in the gut. He wasn’t fat so much as the shirt was a shrunken relic of his youth.

  The question at hand was about which president served the shortest term in office, thirty-two days. Eileen couldn’t remember the name.

  “Harrison,” Gary called out, just before the contestant buzzed in with “William Henry Harrison.” Connell said “Yes!” with gusto and Donny grinned proudly at his older brother. The next question in the category asked for the name of the man who shot James Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station.

  “Charles Guiteau,” Gary said quietly, and a moment later the contestant did too.

  It was easier for her when Gary stayed in his room. She didn’t like to think about him. He was the oldest of the siblings, but he’d never held down a job. He had an air of resignation about him, as if he’d already given up on life. At the same time, he had a good deal of intellectual ability. She didn’t like to acknowledge that people with real ability might not arrive at comfortable stations in life. Her cousin Pat had been a bad enough disappointment; she didn’t want to consider the possibility that Connell might fall through the cracks like Gary. She certainly didn’t like to think that something similar had happened to her too, on a smaller scale. She had achieved professional status, but her existence wasn’t ideal, and hard as she tried to hack her way through the thicket of middle-class living, she couldn’t find a way out to the clearing. It would have been easier to see Gary as a savant with an overdeveloped capacity to absorb trivia, but the truth was he was a complex, intelligent individual. She’d heard him discussing issues of the day and couldn’t help agreeing with him, even being enlightened by observations she couldn’t have made herself. And yet there he was, living in the margins, talking to a television, dying half an hour at a time. A claustrophobic sensation swept over her. She needed to forget that people like Gary existed, to forget even the possibility of failure. She needed to spirit her son away or Gary would suck him into the black hole of his life.

  Connell rose and slapped Donny five across the coffee table. Then he looked up at her.

  “It’s time to go,” she said. “I’m making dinner.”

  “Can I come down when it’s ready?”

  “No,” she said sharply, then collected herself. “You’re coming down now. They’ve had enough of you up here. Let the Orlandos have their evening in peace.”

  “He’s no bother,” Angelo said over his newspaper. “He can stay as long as he wants.”

  “Thank you, but he’s going to help me get dinner ready.” She hadn’t had any intention to ask Connell for help, but she needed a good excuse.

  “We were discussing politics before,” Angelo said. “He said you wanted him to be a politician. I asked him if he knew what a politician was.”

  Eileen offered up a little embarrassed laugh. “What I mostly want is for him to get downstairs right now,” she said, loud enough for Connell to hear.

  She said her good-byes and walked to the door. Connell lagged behind, standing and watching the show. Gary got another question right, and Donny and Connell broke into hysterics.

  “Connell,” she said. “Come on.”

  He took his time getting his schoolbag and followed her down the stairs. She got him set up chopping lettuce while she grilled the chicken. She was going to make salad for dinner, with the chicken spread over it. She’d given in to pizza too often recently, and the nights Ed cooked it was grilled cheese in a lagoon of butter, or cheeseburgers, anything with cheese. The boy was too chubby for her liking. It was true that he hadn’t hit a big growth spurt yet, but it was also true that the tendency toward physical largeness on her family’s side could edge into overweight if it wasn’t watched scrupulously. In the absence of worldly cares, Connell stuffed his face with candy and ice cream. She hadn’t had time to get fat as a kid. When she was only a few months older than he was now, she was planning meals, shopping, keeping the house—things she couldn’t imagine him doing. When she sent him to the store, she had to write a list, and he still inevitably forgot something on it.

  She was going to start mapping some order onto his life. Ed wasn’t a big help in that area. He loved the boy so much, was so permissive, seemed delighted by everything he did. Connell brought home a ninety-five and Ed beamed; she was always the one forced to ask where the other five points went. She resented the way Connell walked around oblivious of how carefree his existence was, how little responsibility he had.

  She put some cherry tomatoes in the salad and cooked the chicken quickly in the pan. She grabbed some dressing, tossed it all together, and told him to sit down. She served him salad and put the chicken over it.

  “This is dinner?” he said.

  “You need to eat more leafy greens. Some leafy greens.”

  It was seven thirty. Ed was just half an hour into his class, with an hour to go. She spent a few moments of pique in wondering if she and Connell were crossing his mind at all. Connell was eating too fast, as usual. He didn’t even like salad, and yet he was rushing to eat it. There was something irrepressible in the way he ate. Maybe he was trying to speed through dinner so he could get to dessert. He knew the rules: no dessert until his plate was clean. It had been a couple of years since she’d had to stage one of those nightlong sit-ins to get him to eat his meal. She’d figured out what to avoid, and he’d stopped trying to slip it in the garbage when she wasn’t looking and just ate what he was served. Dessert held that power over him. She always kept something in the house, for herself as much as for him, but she took only a little portion, nothing like the heaps he wolfed down. He was going to have to learn restraint if he ever wanted to make a success of himself among serious people. It was unseemly to behave with that kind of abandon. She told him to slow down and he nodded at her and kept on eating at his pace. “Slow down,” she said, annoyed. “You’re going to choke.” She got up to refill her water glass. She stood at the sink drinking it and filled it again. When she turned around she saw him waving his arms, his fork on his plate, and then she saw him leap to his feet, his hands on his throat. She told him it wasn’t funny, and then she saw his face and began screaming, “Are you choking?” but she already knew he was. It had happened a few times when he was a toddler, but it had always been a mere scare, some dense foodstuff, tuna fish or peanut butter, compacted in his esophagus, and he’d been able to breathe through it, but now he wasn’t making a sound. It was time to grab him coolly and dislodge the food with one fist to his abdomen and the other shoving up, but she couldn’t do it.

  She’d dealt with choking a number of times in her career. You got your hands in the midsection and gave the diaphragm a healthy shove and out the food popped. A couple of seconds and it was over. You had more time than people thought, a lot more, four full minutes until brain damage set in. But this was her son and she had no room for error.

  She had him by the shoulders. She began to panic. She knew she shouldn’t panic, but she couldn’t help herself; she loved the boy so much. She was thinking Please don’t die, please don’t die and she started screaming for help, and then she was shoving him out the door and pulling him toward the back stairs. She got to the stairwell and screamed, “Angelo! Angelo! Angelo!” and ran upstairs and banged on the door and screamed, “Come down!” and then she ran back down, because she had left the boy alone. Her hands were shaking. “He’s choking!” she screamed. Connell was turning blue. She heard someone flying down the stairs, and then Donny was shoving her aside, and then he was standing behind Connell, giving him a muscular approximation of the Heimlich, and then something flew out of Connell’s mouth onto the carpet. He started coughing and wailing
a terrified wail that sounded more like a cat’s than a child’s. It was a cherry tomato. He must have swallowed it whole. She picked it up and crushed it angrily in her hand. She sat him at the dining room table. Angelo, Gary, and Brenda came in. Connell kept coughing, though the wailing subsided. She went to get him a glass of water. In the kitchen she saw the plates and slammed them into the trash with their contents. She could feel the feelings rising up, getting ready to wash over her, take her over. He took the water down quickly. She would never get angry at him for eating fast again. It was Ed she was angry at, for not being there, for exposing Connell to this danger by his absence. She was grateful the Orlandos were reliably present in the evenings, and mortified that she, a nurse, hadn’t been able to save him herself.

  “Are you going to slow down now?” was all she could think to say when she went back to the dining room. Then she burst into tears. Connell seemed too dazed to cry.

  “If you’d been Gary,” Donny said, “I would have let you choke. What do they call that, Gary? Euthanasia?”

  Connell gave a little chuckle through his coughs.

  “Don’t you do that again,” Angelo said. “I don’t need another heart attack. Two is plenty.”

  “You good?” Brenda asked, putting her hand on Connell’s shoulder. He nodded. “Slow down. Your food’s not going anywhere.”

  “Well, my work here is done,” Donny said. “I better go find a phone booth to change in.”

  “Why don’t you go pick up your dirty drawers from the bathroom floor instead,” Brenda said. “I don’t think the hamper’s made of kryptonite.”

  The laughs were welcome, but she could see that Donny had been affected by the brush with disaster. He was wide-eyed and shaking his head. The whole Orlando family seemed unnerved. Connell spent the afternoons up there, but it had never occurred to Eileen that they might in some way have thought of him as being part of their family too.

  “Wheel of Fortune is on,” Gary said. They made their way up the stairs. She sat at the table with Connell.

  “Are you okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Shaken up?”

  He nodded again. “I couldn’t breathe,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I couldn’t talk.”

  He couldn’t know how hard on her he was making this.

  “Horrible,” she said. “I froze up.”

  “Donny saved me.”

  “I don’t know what happened. I’ve done it before. I guess it never meant as much to me.”

  “Thank God they were here,” he said.

  “I would have done it eventually,” she said. “My training would have kicked in. I think because I knew they were here, I didn’t have to go into lifesaving mode.”

  “He saved my life,” the boy said thoughtfully.

  “Let’s not go overboard,” she said. “You were going to be fine. We had time.”

  He looked like he was in shock. She went to the freezer and scooped some ice cream into a bowl for him.

  “Here, have this,” she said. “I don’t think you can choke on this. Maybe you’ll find a way.”

  Ordinarily at this time of night she would have made him sit down with his homework, but she didn’t say anything about it. At the moment she didn’t care if he never did his homework again. Maybe this was how Ed felt all the time.

  She told him he could take the ice cream to the couch—another first—and she went to get the television for him. The only set in the house was the little black-and-white one in their bedroom. They had been wheeling it out to the living room during the playoffs and the World Series. She cleaned up the pan from the chicken while he watched Entertainment Tonight, and joined him when she was done. The games usually started at eight, or before eight, but when he got up to change the channel to NBC, The Cosby Show was on. It took only a moment to understand that preempting The Cosby Show would have cost the network ad revenue. They lay on separate couches. It wasn’t easy to see the set from that far away. The girl, Vanessa, was trying to wear makeup to school, against her mother’s wishes. The boy, Theo, was attempting to organize his family to do a fire drill. It could have been Leave It to Beaver, except that everyone was black. The world was changing fast. It was hard to fit her son’s America into her memory of how the world had been ordered when she was a child. She felt like a member of an in-between generation, straddling sides in a clash of history. Her life was as remote and ancient to Connell as the stories of the pilgrim settlers had been to her when she was his age.

  The Cosby Show ended and the game was about to come on. She told him she was going to the bedroom to lie down, and he gave her a stricken look.

  “You’re not watching the game?”

  She could tell he was disturbed by what had happened to him, that he didn’t want to be alone. “I’ll watch for a little while,” she said, relenting.

  She didn’t blame him. Over and over she had been reliving in her mind the moment when she’d watched Donny pop the tomato out. She wanted to sit next to Connell, to hold him close to her, but she had no idea how to do it. She had no interest in watching another of these games she’d had to sit through so many of in the run-up to the playoffs, so after a few minutes she rose to get Lonesome Dove. She flipped through it distractedly, reading and rereading the same page several times. The Mets fell behind early, and by the end of the fifth inning they were down 4–0.

  She knew she wasn’t the softest mother in the world. She worked a lot. She worked, period. Other mothers stayed home, baked cookies, talked to their kids all the time, knew everything their kids were thinking. It had never occurred to her to try to be Connell’s friend. She did her best to encourage meaningful conversations at dinner, the three of them talking as a family, and not only because it would be constructive in lubricating Connell’s future advancement among people who judged a person by how he spoke, but also because she liked to hear what he was thinking. She had worked hard to give him a comfortable life. That was as valuable as providing emotional sustenance. Life wasn’t only about expressing feelings and giving hugs. Still, she couldn’t figure out how to break through the defenses her son had put up, and it bothered her, an intellectual problem as much as an emotional one.

  She placed her bookmark in the page and held the book in her hands. “I’m thinking of turning in,” she said.

  “Can you stay here and read?”

  So, he needed her there. He couldn’t say it in so many words, but he had more or less admitted it. She opened her book again and started in on the first page of the chapter she’d been reading.

  Ed walked in before ten. They heard the door, and then they heard him hanging his coat in the vestibule, and then they heard him dropping his briefcase on his desk in the study before he came into the living room.

  “Still four–nothing?” he asked when he walked in.

  Connell nodded. “Gooden got smacked around.”

  “They were saying on the radio his velocity is down.”

  “El Sid has been great in relief. But the bats are ice cold.”

  “Something happened,” she said, interjecting. “Connell choked.”

  “What?” Ed turned to her, then back to him. “What happened, buddy?”

  “I was trying to concentrate on not choking, and then the next thing I knew I was choking.”

  He looked at her. “Really choking?”

  “It was in his windpipe.”

  “What was?”

  “A cherry tomato.”

  “You got it out?”

  “Donny did.”

  He pointed upstairs. “You ate with the Orlandos?”

  “Donny came down,” Connell said.

  “To eat with us?”

  Her blood ran cold at the thought of discussing the particulars around the boy, who would see on her face how unsettled she still was.

  “I’ll explain later,” she said.

  “Come here,” Ed said, and he sat on the couch and put his arm around Connell, who leaned i
nto the lapel of his father’s tweed jacket. It was so easy for Ed to connect to him. She always had to be the scold. Maybe Connell had hardened his heart to her. He leaned in further, so that his chubby belly pressed against the waistband of his sweatpants. He had his face in Ed’s flannel shirt and started sobbing. Ed kissed the top of his head and rubbed his back. Connell kept his face buried there for some minutes. Ed was looking to her for a mimed narrative of what had happened, but she kept waving him off. After a while, Connell lifted his head.

  “Will you do what your mother has asked you to do a few times now, if I’m not mistaken,” Ed said in a firm but gentle voice, “and try to slow down when you eat? Can you do that for me?”

  Connell nodded.

  “Good.”

  And then, without another word, they had transitioned out of that conversation and were watching the game. She stopped reading Lonesome Dove and directed her attention to them. It was something to behold, Ed’s physical comfort with the boy, who had his leg draped over his father’s. She’d been affectionate with Connell when he was very young, up until he was about three, but then something had interceded to make it subtly harder for her to connect to him. She knew Ed could do it, so she’d never spent much time worrying about the boy being deprived, but now she had the sensation that she was on the other side of something important. She wasn’t angry so much as hurt and darkly fascinated.

  The Mets scored a run in the top of the eighth inning, and then, in the ninth, after Ray Knight grounded out and Kevin Mitchell popped out—she’d sat through so many playoff games of late that she knew the players’ names by now—Mookie Wilson doubled, and then Rafael Santana singled him in. Ed said this team had a knack for getting two-out hits. Lenny Dykstra came to the plate as the tying run, but a few pitches later he struck out swinging and the game was over. The Mets were down three games to two in the World Series. Another loss and their season, which seemed to have united New York for a while and which even someone like her, who paid little attention, knew had been an extraordinary success, would be over.