We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “We don’t have to rush into anything,” she said, disturbed by the quickness of his about-face.

  “You found a house, you say?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We can move.”

  “Really?” Connell asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m glad to see you’re open to the idea. We’ll discuss it more later.”

  “It’s a fine idea.” His grin was so wide as he buttered a slice of bread that Connell broke into a goofy one of his own.

  “Someone’s in a good mood,” she said, but Ed didn’t hear her. “I said, someone’s in a good mood.” The pair of them chomped lustily. Ed signaled for another bowl of bread. When the waiter brought it, Connell ordered another Coke. “Save some room for dinner,” she said, unsure which of them she was addressing. She had ripped a sugar packet open without realizing it; its contents deposited into her lap. She rubbed the crystals until they formed a grainy film on her fingers, but she refused to get up to wash her hands.

  “All right,” she said. “Connell wants to move. You want to move. I want to move. Does that mean we’re all in agreement?”

  Ed nodded as he slathered butter on a new piece.

  “You don’t mind if I go ahead and get some plans in motion. You’re on board.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She felt herself growing angry. “Just back up a second,” she said. “Do you not remember saying you didn’t want to move? Do you not remember saying it wasn’t the right time?”

  “I know we talked about it,” he said.

  “And do you or do you not remember telling me in no uncertain terms that you didn’t want to—you couldn’t—move?”

  He was nodding, but once again it wasn’t clear he was actually listening.

  “All of a sudden it makes perfect sense to you?”

  Her voice had been rising without her permission. People at nearby tables picked up their heads.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t just trying to quiet her down; there was a note of real contrition.

  “Hey, Dad!” Connell said. “It’s okay. This is a good thing!” The boy had moved over to put an arm around his father.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to have some of this bread.”

  His apologies were making her uncomfortable. “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “What changed your mind? What’s so different today?”

  “I just feel good today. I’m so happy to be done! I don’t have to go in there for weeks—months!”

  He was almost giddy. Maybe this thing wasn’t depression. Maybe it was manic depression.

  Now that the year was over, now that he could look forward to three uninterrupted months, he’d sign off on anything she wanted. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to move; it was that he hadn’t been able to deal with anything extraneous at all. He’d had to spend so much energy managing his depression, his midlife crisis, his students, his research, that formerly ordinary tasks like doing his grades had become insuperable burdens. The strain had caused him to short-circuit. He had lost his mind over a few calculations, some entry of data into a book, some transposition of that data onto a sheet to tape to the wall. He had falsified the record for it, lost sleep over it, screamed at her because of it, cried in her arms about it. All he’d wanted was to be alone to lick his wounds, and his job never let him be alone. As long as he lay on the couch with his eyes closed, shutting out his thoughts with music, the demon couldn’t get to him.

  Ed and Connell scarfed their meals. Eileen stared into her plate to avoid conversation and took her time eating. After the plates were cleared, Sandro approached grandly, the waiter behind him bearing a dessert platter.

  “With my compliments,” he said. “I’d like you to choose one each.”

  Sandro had chosen this of all moments to allow his circumspection to falter. “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “We’re celebrating tonight,” he said. “Believe it or not, we’ve been here thirty years. You’re one of our oldest customers.”

  He must have seen her stiffen.

  “I don’t mean oldest,” he said. “Longest-standing.”

  “We don’t need three.”

  Sandro turned to Ed. “You see?” he said, a hint of pique in his voice. “This is why she still has such a nice figure.”

  Ed smiled warmly, registering no tension, though Connell squirmed in his seat. Sandro left.

  “Here’s to the end of the year,” Ed said, raising his glass and taking the little bit of wine left in it down in a gulp.

  “Here’s to finding a house,” she said. Ed held out his empty glass. Connell raised his water and the three of them clinked.

  “Here’s to high school,” Connell said. They clinked again.

  Ed looked at her. “Good luck,” he said.

  “With what?”

  “Finding the right house.”

  “I told you I found the right one.”

  He turned to Connell. “Good luck in high school.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Good luck to all of us.”

  31

  His mother yelled for him to come outside. When he did, he saw her leaning on a shovel in the garden box, where she’d spent a lot of time lately. Anytime he left for a game on the weekend, she was hunched over a plant, flashing a spade in her gloved hand, or spreading enriched soil from a bottomless bag.

  “I want you to bury this for me.” She handed him a statue that looked like the ones on the breakfront in Lena’s apartment. It depicted a man in a red gown holding a baby, probably Jesus, dressed in pink. She pointed to a space between rose bushes. “Put the hole here,” she said.

  “How far down?”

  “Start digging. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  “Why are you burying this?”

  “St. Joseph is supposed to help people sell houses,” she said. “You have to bury him upside down, facing the street.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “It can’t hurt,” she said.

  He felt the shovel strike something hard. He cleared some dirt away and saw a large rock. He trenched around it and pulled at it. It came up slowly, like a recalcitrant root. He took off his shirt, hung it on the railing, and kept digging. He was enjoying his new physique. He had grown about four or five inches that year. He watched his muscles tighten and release as he worked.

  “This is the second one I got,” his mother said as he dug. “The first one cost four dollars. It didn’t feel right. It was white plastic. Just Joseph; no Jesus. I brought it in to the girl at the religious store. I told her, ‘I need a good one, not this chintzy one.’ She showed me this. She said it wasn’t intended for burial.”

  “How much was it?”

  “Forty bucks.”

  It seemed like a lot of money to bury in the ground. When he had cleared the space of backsliding dirt, he dropped the statue in headfirst, covered it up, and stomped the mound to make it flat again.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

  “It’ll work,” his mother said.

  32

  She gave the listing to Cindy Coakley’s sister Jen, who was with Century 21 in East Meadow. It might have been easier to go with someone local, but she wasn’t about to leave any money in the neighborhood that she didn’t have to.

  The next thing she had to do was tell the Orlandos. She went up the back staircase to the second-floor landing and listened without knocking. She could hear them all in there—Gary and Lena too, from the third floor—watching Wheel of Fortune and laughing. Donny was good-naturedly yelling at the set, calling out answers and cursing the contestant.

  Selling meant throwing them out on the street, or at least putting more burden on Donny, who wrote the checks for both apartments. Brenda didn’t make much money at Pathmark; Gary’s odd jobs never lasted; and Lena was past the point of being able to work.

  She went back downstairs. The
next day, after steeling herself, she headed up again. She heard some murmurs of conversation and knocked. Brenda opened the door onto the dining room, where Donny and Sharon were sitting at the table.

  “This looks like a bad time.”

  “Not at all!” Donny gestured to an empty seat. “You want to join us? We have plenty.”

  She felt herself drift into the apartment. Brenda disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Did you eat?” Donny asked.

  “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “Sit down,” Donny said. “I’ll get you a plate.”

  The truth was, she was hungry. Ed and Connell were going to stop at a diner on the way home from Connell’s game; she’d been planning to heat up leftovers. A big pasta bowl sat in the middle of the table with huge, gorgeous meatballs under a blanket of deep-red tomato sauce.

  Sharon regarded Eileen with elfin eyes over a glass of soda. Brenda came in with steaming garlic bread wrapped in tin foil.

  “Are you joining us?” Brenda asked.

  Donny grabbed a big forkful of spaghetti and ladled out a few meatballs and poured a little lake of sauce around them. Before Eileen could answer, he handed her the plate.

  “I guess I am,” she said.

  Sharon’s plate was taken and the girl smiled silently across the table at Eileen. She had beautiful straight hair and striking features. She was nine years old, shy and gentle, the compensation for all the dead ends and suffering in the family, and remarkably unspoiled, though they all doted on her. Her radiance was like a recessive gene come to life after generations of hibernation in the bloodline.

  Brenda said grace, a habit Eileen had abandoned at her own table after trying it out for a while after Connell was born. Her conscience rumbled as Brenda spoke the familiar words and added a makeshift prayer.

  “This looks amazing,” Eileen said nervously after everyone had crossed themselves.

  “Thank you very much,” Donny said, winking at her broadly. “I try.”

  “That’s rich,” Brenda said. “You can’t even boil an egg.”

  Donny caught Eileen’s gaze and gestured theatrically with his eyebrows as he spoke to his sister. “What do I need to boil an egg for,” he said, “when I have you to do it?”

  “Keep it up,” Brenda said. “You’ll find poison in your coffee one morning.”

  Donny smilingly bit his outstretched tongue and shivered in triumph at having provoked her. Sharon giggled through the whole exchange.

  “Did you want to talk about something, Eileen?” Brenda asked. “I was trying to get everything on the table; I forgot why you came.”

  “Would you let the poor woman eat? Look, she has a mouthful of food, and you’re asking her questions.”

  Eileen held a finger up while she chewed. Donny looked at her with placid interest. He had a kind, broad face with exaggeratedly fleshy features, like those of a prizefighter. He had a boxer’s broad back and meaty hands. He could have become a depressive like his brother or a gambler like his father but he had sought to make a life for himself instead. He used to run with a tough crowd, the kind that in retrospect was almost wholesome in comparison to the drug gangs that roved the neighborhood now. She stopped seeing them around the house after Donny’s best friend Greg from up the block wrapped his motorcycle around a streetlamp. Donny got a job as a sanitation worker through his father. He still worked on cars, but now only on his days off and more as a hobby than as a source of income. The Palumbos let him park whatever he was working on in the back of their driveway.

  “What I really want to know,” Eileen said, “is how you make this sauce. Mine never tastes this good.”

  “The key is to use fresh sausage. Spicy or sweet, whatever you like. Good stuff, nothing cheap. You have to burn it in the saucepan.”

  “On purpose?”

  “When you have a nice charred coat, you put the tomatoes in. The acid eats the burnt part off the pan. It gets in the gravy. I’ll show you sometime.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Donny said. “Our mother’s is better.”

  “For once this idiot is right,” she said. “No one’s is better than my mother’s. I’m okay with that. I have time to perfect it.”

  “She’s gotta perfect it,” Donny said. “She needs something to bait the hook.”

  “That’s enough out of you.” Brenda smacked him on the head. It was impossible not to get caught up in the high spirits around the table. It was no wonder Connell didn’t come right down when she came home from work, why she had to go up and fetch him.

  “I’ve been hearing your car make some noises I don’t like,” Donny said as he pulled on his chin. “You know what I’m talking about?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Let me take a look at it. Maybe I can catch something before it turns into a problem.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I can take it to the shop.”

  “They’re gonna charge you an arm and a leg. I’ll do it for nothing, and I’ll do a better job. I can keep that thing running forever.”

  “Thank you,” she said guiltily. In her nervousness she had put her finger through one of the lace stitchings on the old tablecloth and broken it. This was going to be even harder than she’d thought. How could she tell him that the first chance she got she was going to buy a much nicer car? She placed her napkin in her lap and pushed herself back from the table.

  “You okay?”

  “I ate a bit quickly,” she said.

  “Brenda’s cooking will do that,” Donny said. “You want to get through it as fast as possible.”

  Sharon chuckled.

  Eileen wanted to abandon the plan, go downstairs, and come back when she’d be more collected, but there were signs to put up, and she was going to need access to all the apartments.

  “Who wants dessert and coffee?” Brenda said after the clinking of forks on plates had died down.

  “I don’t want to put you out any more.”

  “Nonsense. Have a seat inside. I’ll make a pot.”

  Donny led her to the living room. She sat on the yellow floral couch, which had a pattern she’d always found garish and worn areas by the skirt and armrests. She’d considered it a telling detail that they’d bought a big new television and kept this sofa. Now, as she sank into it, she was taken by its softness. The room, which she’d always thought of as a model of how not to decorate, radiated the warmth of shared usage. In the corner sat a small, beaten piano that looked like it might have survived the ransacking of an old saloon. At times she could hear someone practicing up here, and she’d never realized until that moment that it gave her pleasure.

  Donny sat on the opposite couch. Sharon came and sat next to Eileen. The television was on, muted; Donny glanced at it out of the corner of his eye.

  “Are those yours?” she asked, pointing to the framed artworks on the wall. Sharon nodded.

  “I don’t know where she got it,” Donny said. “Nobody in this family has any kind of talent like that. You should see how she does in school. Tell Mrs. Leary how you did on your last report card.”

  The girl demurred.

  “Go ahead. Tell her.”

  “Straight As,” she said in a quick burst.

  “I didn’t even graduate high school,” Donny said. “Gotta be proud of this kid.” He had a faraway look in his eye. “I try to help her at the table, but she don’t need it. My little daughter is the same way. She’s like a whip. Not even two years old and she can count to ten. She don’t get it from me, that’s for sure. I tell Sharon to watch you and Mr. Leary. You folks are on another plane. I tell her to be like you. I never knew what an education really meant. I tell her to look at me and just do the opposite.”

  “Don’t say that,” Eileen said. “I bet she’s proud to have you as an uncle.” As she spoke, she realized to her surprise that she believed what she was saying. “And you’re going to be a great father to that girl.”

  He smiled wearily, accepting th
e verdict without objection. Brenda came in with a plate of Duplex cookies, followed by mugs of coffee. Eileen searched about for a coaster.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Brenda said. “This table’s older than me. It does the job.”

  Circular embossments emblazoned the table’s surface like trophies from all-night conversations. They were suddenly so appealing that Eileen wondered for a moment why she’d always been concerned to preserve a pristine surface on her own table, which looked almost as new as the day she bought it, no history engraved on its face.

  “I have to tell you something,” she began, as Brenda settled into the couch next to Donny. “It’s not easy to say.”

  Brenda, who seemed to have a radar for danger, shifted in her seat.

  “Ed and I have decided to move. We’re going to have to sell the house.”

  Donny’s eyebrows rose. Brenda took a sip of coffee with two hands.

  “That’s great, Eileen,” Donny said. “Where are you moving?”

  “To Westchester,” she said. “Bronxville.”

  “That’s up by Yonkers, right? It’s beautiful up there.”

  It unnerved her a little to hear Donny place it so quickly, though she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he knew every major road within a hundred-mile radius.

  Brenda took out a cigarette and flapped the arm of her robe out to sit more comfortably, a gesture that made Eileen unaccountably uneasy. It was then that the smell of smoke, which ineluctably pervaded the apartment, came to her all at once. It was in everything; Connell came downstairs smelling of it. She hated to think of him sitting in it, or of Sharon sleeping in a cloud of the settling vapors. It also angered her that it might be a detracting factor in the minds of potential buyers.

  “When is this happening?” Brenda leaked a small stream of smoke as she spoke. Her cigarette dangled at the end of her lip, just as Eileen’s mother’s had so often. She felt her heart hardening toward Brenda, and by extension Donny and Sharon. Brenda was making it easier on her without meaning to.

  “Soon. I’m not sure.”

  “How soon?”

  “I found a house. We’re ready to make an offer.”