We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “What happens to us?”

  “I don’t really know. The buyer can choose to let you stay. He can ask you to go. It’s up to him.”

  “There’s a buyer?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “I don’t care if they raise the rent,” Brenda said. “I’ll make it work. I just don’t want to move.”

  “You’ve been very kind to us.” Donny stretched an arm out as if to hold his sister at bay. “We appreciate it.”

  They sat in silence, Brenda taking deep drags.

  “It’s going to be strange not having you around here,” Donny said.

  “It’s going to be strange not being around here,” Brenda said.

  “What do you need us to do?” Donny asked. “How can we help?”

  He was broad-shouldered and game, and the warm roundness of his face admitted no despair.

  “I’m going to need to show the apartment, and the one upstairs. There’ll be an open house. A few of them. I’ll let you know when.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You can’t be here during them. The Realtor asks that. The same is true for your mother and Gary.”

  “Got it.”

  “She might want to bring some things in. Candles, comforters, et cetera.” She paused and then added, “She’s doing the same thing in my apartment.”

  “Not a problem,” he said.

  “When is all this happening again?” Brenda asked, jabbing her cigarette out forcefully.

  “Soon. We could start next week.” Brenda called Sharon over. As the girl took a seat between her mother and uncle on the couch, the moral balance of the room seemed to shift. “I’m sorry it’s so sudden. We just decided. I came to you as soon as I could.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Brenda said. “I’m happy for you. I don’t blame you. I’d get out of here if I could.”

  Eileen looked down at her interlaced fingers.

  “How much time do we have after you sell?”

  “It depends,” she said. “Thirty days. Sixty. Ninety. I don’t know.”

  “Don’t we have some kind of rights as tenants?”

  “I’m not sure, since we’ve never worried about a lease. I can ask the Realtor.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Brenda said. “Put us on a lease. Buy us some time.”

  Donny stood up. “It’s hot in here,” he said. “Anyone else want a beer?” He left the room.

  Eileen cleared her throat. “That might make it harder to sell the house. Especially because your rent is substantially below market.”

  “Then increase the rent. I don’t care. Double it. Whatever it takes.”

  “Let’s not worry about that right now,” Eileen said. “Maybe I’ll have a buyer who would prefer to have the house fully rented. I’ll see what I can do when I know more.”

  “Maybe we’ll buy it ourselves,” Donny said as he returned with a glass of ice water. She saw that he had meant for the beer comment to lighten the mood. “It’d be nice to have a room for my daughter when she comes over.” He checked his sister’s face to see what she thought of the idea. Brenda’s expression hardened, as if to say, Who’s got that kind of money? Donny sighed. “Don’t worry about us,” he said. “I’m sure you have a lot on your mind. I’ll see what we can come up with on our end. Whatever we can do to help, you let us know.”

  She thought about Lena. She knew Lena should hear the news from her, but she didn’t know if she had it in her to go upstairs and go through it again. Lena was upright in everything she did; decency and morality were her default positions. She was one of those heroic old women who sat in church all day taking on the burden of saving the sinners around them.

  “There is one more thing,” she said.

  “What is it?” said Donny. “Just ask.”

  “Will you tell your mother for me?”

  • • •

  A week later Jen had an open house. The thought of all those people gawking at her furniture, her possessions, her bathroom annoyed Eileen, but then she thought, Let them come. Let them see the oasis we made. Jen came an hour early to put duvets on the beds upstairs—where they’d all cleared out, as requested, despite Eileen’s visions of them haunting the stoop, hangdog or angry looks on their faces—and decorative items on the tables and breakfront. She’d warmed pots of potpourri on the stovetop. It already felt like someone else’s home.

  She wondered who would show up. This was the time to leave the neighborhood, not discover it—but perhaps some intrepid breed of young person might fancy themselves enterprising and patient enough to secure an outpost in the neighborhood of tomorrow. It wasn’t her responsibility to tell them that this neighborhood’s best days were in the past.

  Eileen left to get her hair done. When she returned, half an hour after the open house should have ended, she saw a tall Indian man on her stoop, talking with Jen. She stopped in front of the Palumbos’ house and watched him for signs of interest. He was gesturing around and nodding at whatever Jen was saying. A woman who must have been his wife was standing on the sidewalk, along with their son and daughter, both of whom leaned against her. Eileen resisted the urge to introduce herself and feel them out. When they left, Jen told her she thought they might bid on the house. The man had said he would need it empty to make room for his extended family—brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, grandparents. So that’s how they live, Eileen thought.

  A couple of days later, the Indian man offered the full asking price—$365,000, which Jen had originally thought a little high. Eileen called Gloria to find out whether the Bronxville house had sold. Then she called Donny to let him know there was an offer.

  “How much?”

  She told him. Donny whistled into the phone and there was a long pause. Did he know how much less she’d bought it from his father for?

  “That’s a lot,” he said. “That’s great, good for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He paused again. “How long do we have?”

  She explained that it would be soon, a week or two at the most. She wanted to sell as soon as possible.

  “Can you wait a little longer?” he asked. “I might have some options, but I could use more time.”

  She didn’t know whom Donny was going to ask for the money, or what kind of trouble he would be exposing himself to in order to get it, but that was his concern.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and as she hung up she understood that there was nothing she was willing to do. She had to get out while she could.

  She called Gloria and told her to make an offer on the Bronxville house.

  The next day—she forgave herself in advance for the lie—she told Donny there had been a competing bidder and the first bidder had gone above asking, but it was his final offer, and he needed an answer immediately.

  He was no closer to having a down payment, he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m going to have to take it.”

  Eileen had bid below asking for the house in Bronxville, but they hadn’t had another bid, so they took it without parrying.

  The Indian buyer insisted on a thirty-day closing, but Eileen was able to extend it to sixty when she pled the case of her tenants. That was the most she could do for them.

  Donny still fixed her car.

  33

  Connell woke up to his father screaming at him and wagging his finger in his face.

  “Christ! Do you know what you’ve done? Do you?”

  Connell’s mind raced, but he could recall no hanging offenses.

  “You left the jelly out all night!” his father said. “You left the cover off!” Connell stammered an apology, but his father waved him off. “How could you do such a thing?” He stamped his feet, one after the other, as though smashing grapes. Connell had never seen him make such a childish gesture, and it disconcerted him more than the yelling had.

  Ten minutes later his father was back in his room, sitting on the bed. “I don’t k
now what came over me,” he said.

  All that summer, he was on an energy crusade. He said they didn’t need to shower every day, that every other day was sufficient. If you walked away from a stereo for a second, he hit the power button. If you ran the hot water too long for dishes, he reached across you and pressed the handle down. If you turned on the air conditioner in the car, he told you to open the window instead. When he turned off the air conditioning in the house, Connell’s mother threatened to leave and turned it right back on. That got through to him; nothing else did. He let the air conditioner run, but unplugged the coffeemaker, the toaster, the stereo, the TV, the Apple IIe.

  One night, while they were sitting at the kitchen table, his father howled in frustration after breaking the point off a pencil by pressing too hard. “This goddamned thing’s no good,” he said as he snapped it in half. “It’s no good at all.”

  His mother took them on scenic drives in the area they were moving to, but when they parked and got out, his father just stood by the car with his arms crossed. They went peach-picking once, in Yorktown, and his father stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned against the enormous wheel of an idle tractor while his mother filled a basket with the most shapely peaches she could find. When they walked back to the barn to pay, his father reached into the basket in his mother’s hands and began tossing peaches to the ground. “We don’t need all these!” he said.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” He’d gotten about half of them out before she fended him off. She was looking around to see who had noticed the outburst. “Have you gone crazy?”

  “We don’t need this many!” he said, squashing them underfoot as he followed Connell’s mother. “We can’t eat this many!”

  “I was just going to make some pies,” she said to Connell, as though appealing to his fairness. The only thing he felt safe doing was shrugging.

  “Not for me!” his father said. “I could go the rest of my life without another bite of your pie.”

  Then his mother herself turned the basket over, dumping out the remaining peaches. She dropped the basket and they walked to the car in silence. They drove home all the way like that, half an hour at least. Connell put his earphones in, but he didn’t turn his Walkman on. He waited and waited to hear the silence end, but it never did, and a queasy feeling grew in his gut. The only thing he heard was a little quiet sniffling from his mother in the passenger seat when they were almost home. He hit play on his Walkman after that.

  34

  It was the end of August when they moved, as hot a day as she could remember, the kind of heat that made a person happy to escape the city. She had packed boxes for weeks, and the walls were lighter in color where the pictures had hung and the furniture had stood, as if a slow-exposure photograph had been taken of their lives. The ghostly outlines of their things, together with the austere emptiness of the space and the dirt and dust gathered in the corners and wedged under the molding, increased her eagerness to get out of there. The movers came and loaded up the truck.

  “Do you want to do a last walk-through with me?” she asked Ed, who was sitting on the stoop with Connell.

  “I’ve made my peace with it,” he said.

  She resented the private ceremony Ed’s statement implied. She’d pictured them opening a nice bottle of wine when they started filling boxes, or a celebratory bottle of champagne on their last night, but they’d had neither.

  “You don’t want to take a final look at it?”

  He didn’t respond. Connell looked as if he preferred to sit there too. Rather than squeeze past them, she went around to the side door and up the back stairs to the second-floor landing. Peeking in, she was overcome by the emptiness of the place. A spasm of anxiety rooted her to the spot; she couldn’t enter the apartment. She’d half expected to see Donny and Brenda and Sharon there, but the previous week, Donny had moved them to a three-bedroom apartment—Brenda and Sharon in one bedroom, he and Gary in another, Lena in the third—in a monolithic structure around the corner that possessed none of the charm of the garden co-ops, with a cramped, concrete common area instead of generous grass. She called “hello” in the echoing dining room and stepped inside. She stood where she’d sat and told the Orlandos of her plans—which was where she and Ed had eaten when it was just the two of them, and for the first few years after Connell was born—until she got spooked and left.

  She hurried down the stairs to her own apartment. She could see it that way now, as an apartment. The whole time she’d been there, she’d preferred to think she lived in a house with floors she didn’t use.

  When Angelo Orlando sold her the house in 1982, he’d done so in distress. Just shy of a decade later, his heirs had had an opportunity to buy back their childhood home, and they’d failed to secure it. The story of their line in the house had come to an end. They were adrift in temporary shelters: someone else’s apartment, someone else’s building. The great churning never stopped. Spackle was placed in the holes where nails had held family portraits, paint covered the dirt marks of shoes left by the door, a coat of varnish leveled the worn hallways, and it was ready for a new family.

  The family who’d bought her house was making a stand against obscurity. It would be their nail holes puncturing a fresh coat of paint, their cooking smells sinking into the upholstery, their shouts of laughter, pain, and joy bouncing off the plaster walls. They would use all three of the house’s floors. In enough time they would forget the structure had ever belonged to anyone else. It was a thought that worked both ways: it would be as if she’d never lived anywhere but Bronxville.

  • • •

  At the closing, she’d met the Thomases. She was surprised to learn that the husband’s first name was also Thomas—though the middle name listed on the contract was something closer to what she’d expected, a tangled thicket of consonants and vowels. When she couldn’t stifle her surprise at such an odd name as Thomas Thomas, the husband, who was exceptionally tall and wore tinted glasses, explained to her that he wasn’t even the only Thomas Thomas in his hometown, that the name was extremely popular there, due to the fact that St. Thomas had gone there in the middle of the first century to spread the faith among the Jewish diaspora. She dismissed this idea as ridiculous; St. Thomas might have visited India, but there was no way he or any other apostle had reached there before Western Europe or Ireland. Thomas Thomas seemed like an intelligent enough man, but his dates had to be incorrect.

  The fact that Indians had bought her home and were going to fill it with their entire extended family, floor to ceiling, was another reminder that Jackson Heights was a big cauldron and that it was spitting her out in a bubble pushed up by heat. Supposedly it was the most ethnically diverse square mile in the world. Someone more poetically inclined might find inspiration in the polyphony of voices, but she just wanted to be surrounded by people who looked like her family.

  The only thing left to do was walk through her own apartment for anything left behind. In the guest bedroom she spotted a solitary die on the floor and went to pick it up but pulled her hand away right before she touched it.

  In the kitchen pantry she found a broom leaning against the wall like a forlorn suitor at a dance. Ed and Connell were waiting outside, but she couldn’t resist the urge to sweep up the dust bunnies and bits of debris on the floor. She remembered sweeping the kitchen floor in Woodside as a girl, methodically, covering every inch of that fleur-de-lis-patterned linoleum in an invisible geometric march. Back then, she’d dreamed of a house like the one she was now leaving. Somewhere along the way, she’d adopted a higher standard. Her new house was large and full of light and made an imposing picture from the street, with a sloped driveway, slatted shutters, and stone pillars to mark the front walk. It was everything she wanted, and she tried not to wonder if the new house would one day feel as old and heavy as the one she was leaving.

  She stared at the pile in the center of the floor. There was no dustpan, not even a scrap of cardboard to sweep it ont
o. It would be dispersed by the footsteps of movers, or the Thomas family themselves. It wasn’t her responsibility anymore. This was another woman’s kitchen now. There’d be a victory in leaving it there and heading outside, in allowing something niggling to go unattended to, but she’d been cleaning messes all her life. She’d heard Ed tell Connell once that skin cells constituted the majority of dust. If that was true, then there were microscopic bits of her in that pile. She got down on her hands and knees, carefully because she was wearing stockings, and scooped the dirt with one hand into the cupped other. She dumped it in the sink. When she saw a little raised ridge of residue where her pinky finger had passed along the floor, she wet her hands to mop up the last remnants of her life in the house.

  She went outside. Ed and Connell were already in Ed’s Caprice. She had driven the Corsica up the previous night after work and parked it in the driveway. The house had been dark, and she’d started for the train in a hurry, not wanting to linger too long there alone.

  Ed didn’t look angry at having to wait. He looked simply blank. Blank was fine by her right then; she could map something onto a blank. There was a roiling complexity to Connell’s expression, though, an untidiness that she wanted nothing to do with at the moment. She took a seat in the back. With their Caprice in the lead and the moving truck behind them, the caravan of their belongings set out for the Triborough Bridge.

  It was a clear day, and as they headed toward Northern, the sun cast a warm eye on the block’s houses. Connell waved to an old man who didn’t look familiar to her. The neighborhood itself hardly looked familiar anymore; it was as if she were slowly stirring from a dream. The faces she saw through the window looked benign in the heat. Pairs and trios, even solitary amblers, were carried along by an unseen buoyancy. She was no longer afraid of these people; she’d cleared that infection from her bloodstream. The previous day, when she’d realized she’d never again have to attend one of Father Choudhary’s Masses or walk on the Boulevard, she’d laughed in relief.