We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “I’m sorry about your project,” he said. “Maybe you can come back and watch me sometime.”

  “It’s all right,” Connell said. “I can make it up. I already know what kind of teacher you are. You teach me every day.”

  They drove back to Queens, heading to the strip of grass they’d come to call their own, along a road that led to LaGuardia Airport. When they parked, his father turned to him.

  “Can you do me a favor? Can you not tell your mother about this?”

  “Coming here?”

  “No. The other thing.”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  “She won’t understand it the way you do.”

  They walked to the fence near one of the landing strips. In the distance, Connell could see planes coming in in a line, separated by long intervals. Planes took off around them; engines roared. They stood there dwarfed by arrivals and departures. His father’s arm was around him, and his own fingers clung to the chain-link fence.

  They listened to the game on the way back. When they got home, instead of putting a record on and breaking out the headphones, his father put the game on the radio and they sat on the couch listening to it. The Mets beat the Phillies by a run, Gooden throwing eight solid innings and Franco nailing down the save.

  • • •

  He thought about telling his mother how weird it had been, but so much about his father was weird that it was hard to say where the weirdness began and ended. It wasn’t a generation gap so much as a chasm that had opened up and swallowed a whole lifetime. Instead of hanging out with the flower children, his father had haunted laboratories and listened to Bing Crosby. He loved foreign languages and corny puns. How often, when Connell reached for another helping at breakfast, did his father stop his hand and ask him in mock earnest if one egg wasn’t un oeuf?

  Who could forget the events of that past Thanksgiving? They went to the Coakleys. The Coakleys used to live a few blocks away in a three-family house like their own; now they lived on Long Island, in a house with plush carpets and a low-lit den that had a couch on all sides and a large television perfect for watching the game. Cindy Coakley had been his mother’s friend since first grade at St. Sebastian’s.

  His parents were getting ready in their bedroom. Connell was lying on his bed reading. The radio was on in the living room; his parents must have thought he was out there listening to it, because his mother started laughing in a girlish way that made him feel as if he was hearing something he wasn’t supposed to be hearing. He crept to his door.

  “Oh, Ed,” he heard her say. “Don’t do it!”

  “Why not? I think it’s a great idea.”

  “It’s a terrible idea,” she said, but the delight in her voice said otherwise. “I insist—no, I demand—that you not do this.”

  “I’m doing it,” he said. “Here I go.”

  “Ed!” she squealed. “That’s brand new!”

  It wasn’t strange to hear them laughing, but this was different; this was playful. Around him they laughed like parents, with a certain restraint. He had never heard his mother sound so young.

  “How does that look?” his father asked.

  “You are not going to show that to anybody. Do you hear me?”

  “You’re afraid the women won’t be able to handle it,” he said. “You think they’ll swoon.”

  A few seconds passed in silence. He went right up to their closed door, his heart pounding in his chest. He heard some muffled sounds.

  “We don’t have time,” his mother said, but she sounded as if she was saying they had all the time in the world.

  She made little moaning noises. Connell’s blood ran cold. He had never seen them kiss on the lips, and yet there they were, kissing and doing God knew what else. He thought of all the times he’d watched Jack Coakley pull Cindy to him in brute affection, the times he’d silently urged his father to sweep his mother up in his arms in front of everyone.

  “We’d better get going,” his mother said. He heard the sound of the zipper on her dress.

  “Maybe I’ll give Jack a laugh. He needs a laugh.”

  Connell dashed back to his room. When his parents emerged, he watched for some sign of the mischief he had heard them discussing, but there was nothing.

  They drove in a pleasant silence to the Northern State Parkway and the Coakleys. The men watched football in the den while the women talked and transferred food from pots to serving dishes. The dining room table was set with good silver and wineglasses, salt and pepper in sterling silver shakers, and two layers of tablecloths. As everyone trickled in, Connell was already at the table, looking forward to the painful bloat about to overtake him. After the meal, he would sit on the couch with the rest of the men and pat his swollen belly, burping quietly.

  Jack carved the turkey. Everyone began passing dishes.

  “Ed,” Jack said. “Why don’t you take your jacket off? Join us awhile.”

  Everybody knew what was coming.

  “I can’t,” Connell’s father said. “There’s no back to this shirt.”

  A little wave of laughter passed over the table. Connell felt his face redden. They played this routine out every year. Connell didn’t care if everyone else was amused by the line; why did his father have to be so weird? He was the only one in a suit; everyone else wore sweaters and khakis. Even on the hottest days of summer he wore long-sleeved shirts and pants. Connell didn’t care about his warnings about skin cancer and the shrinking ozone layer. All he knew was his father looked like a dork.

  “You know, Ed,” Jack said. “You always say that. What does that mean? What are you trying to tell me?”

  Jack was six-four, two-fifty, an ex-Marine. When they watched the game in Jack’s den, it wasn’t hard to imagine Jack on the field protecting the quarterback. In a booming voice, he told stories that ended in uproarious laughter; Connell’s father spoke gently and people leaned in to hear him. Jack’s face lit up whenever Connell’s father talked, but Connell always wanted his father to finish quickly; he was nervous that Jack would see how strange his father really was.

  “Just that the shirt I’m wearing happens not to have a back, and so I can’t take my jacket off.”

  “Now why would a shirt not come with a back?”

  “It’s cheaper this way,” his father said. “Less material.”

  “I don’t think anyone here would have a problem with seeing your back,” Jack said with an odd edge in his voice. He turned to Frank McGuire. “Do you have a problem with seeing Ed’s back?”

  Frank looked back and forth between Connell’s father and Jack, like he didn’t know what the right answer was. He broke into nervous laughter. “Come on, guys,” he said. “He wants to wear his jacket, he wants to wear his jacket. It’s Thanksgiving.”

  “I realize he wants to wear his jacket, Frank. But I’m asking him to take it off. He’s making me nervous.”

  “Is that what you want? You want me to take my jacket off?”

  Jack was giving Connell’s father a hard look. Cindy, who had only belatedly caught on to the tension in the scene, as though it were occurring on a frequency only dogs could hear, put a hand on Jack’s arm in a silent plea.

  “Yes,” Jack said. “That’s what I want.”

  “Well, it is your house.”

  “Last time I checked it still was.”

  “Jack!” Cindy said.

  Even Connell’s mother, who had been smiling at the outset, looked concerned. Connell wasn’t supposed to know what his parents both knew, which was that Jack’s airline was planning major cuts and Jack was worried about getting laid off. At night Connell stood in the darkened door of his room, listening down the hall to his mother on the phone in the kitchen.

  “It’s okay, Cindy,” Connell’s father said. “This jacket is really bothering you, huh?”

  “Nobody else has a jacket on.”

  “Okay,” his father said, rising. “I understand. I’m sorry to have caused a disturbance.” He took one arm
out of his jacket slowly, then the other. He had cut the entire rear panel from what looked like an expensive shirt. The sleeves clung to the shirt’s outline like windsocks in a strong gust. His skin was a blank, ridiculous canvas flecked by freckles and scraggly hairs. For a moment, the room seemed suspended in time.

  “Is this what you wanted?” he asked. “To see this? Does this make you happy? Behold, then!”

  Then Jack let out a bark of laughter so loud and sudden it could have been a death rattle; another followed to punctuate it; then his laughs came quick and plentiful, like the little skips a stone makes on the water’s surface after the first big few. The laughter was passed around the room like a contagion.

  “Sit down at this goddamned table and eat some of my turkey, you goofy son of a bitch,” Jack said after he’d composed himself. The look on Jack’s face said he’d charge into battle for Connell’s father if he had to. Connell had seen people give his father that look before. Maybe you had to be an adult to really appreciate him.

  That fall, he had made Connell do a project on habituation for the science fair. They tapped a bunch of roly-poly bugs a number of times with a pen. Some stopped rolling up quickly; the rest just kept getting annoyed. Eventually they all quit responding. This was supposed to be extremely significant, the fact that they could learn to ignore millions of years of inherited instincts after five minutes of pointless irritation. Connell gathered the data; his father helped him draw up the findings on a couple of poster boards—charts, graphs, everything low-tech. When he arrived at the auditorium, Connell knew he didn’t stand a chance. Other kids were setting up huge working volcanoes, radio-controlled cars, and full ecosystems with convoluted loops that ran the length of two tables. He didn’t even have a box full of bugs. When the teachers came around for the presentation, he started sweating. He explained the way they—he—had gone about it, as best as he understood it, which was less than he should have.

  In awarding him first prize, they cited the project’s elegant simplicity and its careful application of the scientific method. Other parents hooted and hollered when their children’s names were announced. His father kept his seat and gave him a cool little nod and pumped his fist. Connell was never more impressed by him in his life. It was as if his father had known all along that they were playing a winning hand.

  • • •

  When his mother got home, she pulled him aside. “What was it like at Daddy’s school?” she asked. “How was he?” Her expression was strangely intense, and she was practically whispering. Connell was so unnerved that he almost said something. Then he remembered his promise.

  “Dad was Dad,” he said. “I didn’t understand a word he was saying.”

  19

  An article in a nursing journal said that a fixed routine had a deleterious effect on the mind of a person prone to depression and that shaking up elements of a depressive’s environment could be a productive way to introduce treatment. She didn’t know for sure that Ed was technically depressed, but she knew she’d never be able to get him to a psychiatrist to find out.

  What Ed needed—what they all needed—was to climb out of a rut. She started to wonder whether a move to another house might not be just the thing to jolt him out of his torpor. The timing was right: Connell was starting high school next year and could commute into the city from almost anywhere; the value of their home, given the encroaching neighborhood decay, would only go down. In a few years, they’d be trapped.

  A house could make all the difference. Things improved for the Coakleys after Jack got promoted to director of cargo for SAS and they moved out to East Meadow. Jack had shown some signs of depression himself when they were still in Jackson Heights, but in East Meadow he started making furniture in his big garage and got into gardening and landscaping. He established an idyll in their backyard for all to enjoy: the echoing pool, the radio raised to drown out the rattle of distant mowers, wet footprints drying on hot concrete, the ubiquitous smell of sunblock.

  It had been five years since she’d raised the rate on the already far-below-market rent she charged the Orlandos, and even then she’d raised it only a pittance. The knowledge that her son was safe had always offset in her mind the revenue she’d lost by floating the Orlando clan. Connell went up to one or the other of their apartments after school and stayed until she and Ed came home. Now that he was getting old enough to take care of himself, though, the protection they offered meant less than it once had.

  “I’ve been thinking about this house,” she said. Connell was having dinner at Farshid’s, and they were alone at the dinner table. Ed didn’t respond. She’d gotten used to these one-sided exchanges. She’d learned to read different meanings into his silences. That night’s silence was auspicious; it lacked the heaviness of other varieties. It was like a sheet she could project her thoughts onto.

  “I’ve been thinking that it might be nice to have a place of our own, where we don’t have renters. I’m tired of being a landlord. Aren’t you?” She filled a plate with chicken, potatoes, and steamed green beans and handed it back to him. It looked bland, but it was just the two of them, and Ed never seemed to care either way.

  “This is our home,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I was just thinking we could look for a place that would be . . . more ours.”

  “We’ve done a lot of work on this house.” Ed cut into his chicken. Rather than cut a small bite, he sawed it in the middle until it was in two halves.

  “You’re happy here?”

  “I am.” He began cutting the halves in half, his head into his work.

  “You’re not happy,” she said. “You’re miserable. You won’t get off the couch.”

  “I’m happy.”

  “We could move to the suburbs. Get a nice house.”

  “We have a nice house right here.” He looked up at her for the first time. His chicken was arranged in a neat mosaic of bite-sized pieces, but he hadn’t begun to eat.

  “This neighborhood is going to hell.”

  “I’m a city boy,” he said. “All those empty streets. All the space between houses.” He gestured dismissively with his fork.

  Space between houses was all she wanted in the world.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to get out of here? Start somewhere else? The timing is perfect. Connell’s starting a new school next year. We’ve saved so well.”

  “This place is a lot better than what I had growing up,” Ed said.

  “Yes,” she said. “You’re right about that.”

  She hated being made to feel churlish. She wasn’t looking for a palace, just a step up from where they were. It was for him that she was thinking of all this, but how could she talk to him about it without alerting him to her line of reasoning?

  “I don’t want to have anyone walking over my head anymore,” she said.

  “We’ll switch apartments with Lena. She’d jump at it. Those stairs probably kill her.”

  She gave him a withering look. His green beans were all cut in half now too.

  “Our life is here,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you like to get to know another neighborhood?”

  “I don’t want to be isolated,” he said. “I don’t want to have to get used to a whole new way of life.”

  She bit her tongue, then said it anyway. “You already have a whole new way of life.”

  She watched him finally begin to move some food into his mouth and chew it slowly, as if considering the mechanics of chewing anew. It was driving her crazy. She put her knife and fork down and waited.

  “We can’t afford to move where you want to move,” he said, but it was as if he wasn’t in the conversation anymore, so caught up was he in bringing small bites to his mouth, gnashing them between his teeth, and swallowing.

  “You don’t know the first thing about where I want to move,” she said bitterly.

  • • •

  She had long ago stopped concerning herself with the details of their money m
anagement. They had a common bank account that he balanced fastidiously. He also handled their investments. Since he was conservative in his portfolio choices (the First Jersey Securities investment had been her idea, based on a tip she’d gotten from a doctor at work; Ed had reluctantly agreed to it), they’d seldom suffered the effects of overexposure, and they were in a strong position relative to peers of similar or even greater income. This was one decision, however, that she couldn’t afford to let him control. If she couldn’t get him excited about this project, she would have to generate enough excitement for both of them.

  She began searching through the listings in Bronxville.

  “This place looks perfect,” she said, as she showed Ed an open house notice in the newspaper.

  “You know how I feel about this.”

  “Humor me. It’s on Saturday. We’ll make a day of it.”

  “I’ve got something lined up for us for then.”

  He almost never made plans. She couldn’t help but smile at the obvious ploy.

  “Do tell,” she said.

  “Mets tickets,” he said.

  “You’ve bought these tickets? It has to be this Saturday?”

  “Somebody at work is holding them for me. I said I had to check with my wife’s schedule.”

  Such a hopeful look came over his face, as if he really thought she hadn’t seen through his ruse, that she couldn’t bring herself to argue. The next night he showed off the tickets, undoubtedly purchased at the stadium on the way home from work. He’d even bought four, the unnecessary fourth there to lend verisimilitude to the bit of theater.

  Saturday came. It was a sunny, mild day in early May, and, she had to admit, a perfect day for a game. With the other ticket, Connell brought Farshid. On the 7 train, adults in the infantilizing garments of fandom buzzed with an adolescent excess of energy. When the doors opened at Willets Point, she felt carried along by the buoyancy of the crowd. Instead of following the switchback ramp to the top as they usually did, though, they stopped after a single flight. When they emerged from the corridor and were flooded with light, they saw that the players looked unusually life-sized.