We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  Declan’s unruly curls peeked out from under his cap, which said U.S. Open. Even Connell’s Mets cap didn’t make the grade; it was the height of naïveté to wear a baseball cap that represented an actual baseball team.

  “And those pants. You look like you’re jumping out of a plane. Do you see anyone else around here wearing Z Cavaricci or Bugle Boy? You don’t want all these pockets and loops. You could be a construction worker in that outfit. Just buy jeans, regular jeans, not those acid-washed atrocities.”

  Connell’s mother had bought him the jeans Declan hated. Connell couldn’t help noticing how Declan’s mother seemed to get every detail right: pressing his school pants neatly; wrapping his sandwiches tightly in wax paper so that they resembled Christmas presents; lining up, alongside a bright bag of mini carrots that practically screamed good health, two perfectly round, homemade chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. She even folded his napkins into neat triangles. And it wasn’t just when Declan was at school that no seams were visible: Connell couldn’t believe how neat and perfect-looking everything at Declan’s house was. His own house had never looked like the Coyne house. Then again, his mother had always had a full-time job.

  “And don’t tight-roll the bottoms either. That’s totally guido.”

  He imagined he looked to Declan like a member of an indigenous tribe that had just come into contact with civilization.

  “Throw out those Reebok Pumps. Get some deck shoes. Bass is fine. And nobody wears tighty-whities. Boxer shorts. Only boxer shorts.”

  “Boxer shorts.”

  “No exceptions. I can’t be emphatic enough about this.”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “And get some soccer shoes. Adidas Sambas.”

  “I don’t play soccer.”

  “That’s because you don’t know what’s good for you,” he said. “Everybody plays soccer. Get some soccer shoes.”

  “Won’t I look like I’m trying too hard?”

  “Would you rather look like you’re not trying at all?”

  • • •

  The park ran alongside the Bronx River. Its western border was the Bronx River Parkway. Palmer Road lay to the south, Pondfield Road to the north. Trees lined its major path, and broad stretches of grass made up its main terrain. At night kids gathered in it to drink.

  There wasn’t much crime in town. The police were always driving up onto the lawn from the Parkway to take the kids by surprise, sending an under-aged exodus toward Palmer Road. He’d seen them leaving the park in a hurry and wondered how he would ever hang out with these kids.

  Declan led him to a large group gathered a little ways from the path. Most of the guys, Declan said, went to Fordham Prep; a couple went to Iona; a few went to Bronxville High. The girls went to Ursuline, Holy Child, or Bronxville. There were older guys too: college students, dropouts, guys who had never gone to college and were working jobs.

  One guy held a flashlight up to his own face as Declan introduced Connell, so that his features jumped out spookily. He had a fleshy face situated atop a pink-and-white-striped Oxford shirt. His eyes looked bloodshot. Declan said he was a senior at Fordham.

  “Here,” the guy said. “Have a beer.”

  He pulled a bottle out of a six-pack sleeve and handed it to Connell, who felt he couldn’t refuse. He tried to twist off the top.

  “Let me get that for you.” The guy popped the cap off with an opener on his key chain. Declan waved over a guy who looked about Connell’s age.

  “Brewster, Connell,” Declan said.

  “So you go to school with this kid?” Brewster pointed to Declan.

  “Yeah,” Connell said, “but I’ll probably fail out. I’ll probably wind up at Fordham. I don’t want to work all the time.”

  These kids didn’t need to know that Connell was pulling good grades. He didn’t want to start out in this town having everyone think he was just a nerd.

  “You want another one?” the older guy asked, taking the bottle from Connell’s hands. Connell had drained it into the ground when no one was watching. With Declan looking at him with a slightly buzzed warmth, Connell felt the need to actually drink this one. He took a sip; it tasted bitter.

  “You see that girl over there?” Declan was talking louder now. “The blonde? Her name’s Rebecca. She’ll suck your dick. You ever have your dick sucked?”

  Connell hadn’t ever even kissed a girl. “Nah,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “She’ll fool around with anyone.”

  He couldn’t understand why a girl that pretty would fool around with just anyone.

  “Did you ever fool around with her?” Connell asked.

  Declan’s face spread in a slow smile. “It was great,” he said. “Feels awesome.” He finished off his beer. “Why don’t you go and talk to her?”

  Declan pushed him in her direction. She was standing near the older guy who’d given him his first beer, and he chugged the bottle in his hand and went over and asked for another.

  “My man,” the guy said approvingly. “Plenty to go around.”

  He felt a burp coming up through his chest and let it out as the guy opened his beer for him. Rebecca had a cherubic face and a sweet smile. It was hard to imagine her being easy. Somebody made a joke and she laughed in a giggly way that made a wave of warmth pass over Connell’s body. Declan came over and introduced him to a couple of nearly identically dressed guys, and Connell returned their desultory handshakes. He could feel the alcohol settling in. He felt a strange boldness steal into him.

  “Is it always this dead around here?” he asked, and felt Rebecca look interestedly at him.

  “Pretty much,” one guy said.

  “If I ever brought my boys from the city up here,” he said, “these cops would shit their pants.”

  “Hard guy,” one guy said derisively; Connell saw him look at another guy and smirk.

  “I used to be in a gang,” Connell said. He saw Declan shake his head. “I wonder what these cops would do if anything real ever happened here.”

  The guy made a remark Connell didn’t hear, and the other guys started laughing. He wanted to say something witty, but nothing came to him. Rebecca walked off toward the trees by the river. Declan shifted his body, so he had his back to Connell as he talked to his friends. Connell couldn’t hear them. When the others walked off, Declan stood there with him.

  “Please tell me that was ironic,” Declan said. “Please tell me you’re not that corny.”

  Connell just drank his beer. When he was done, he went back to the flashlight guy for another.

  • • •

  People around him began to scatter before he realized what was going on. He was at the outskirts of the group closest to the cop car, and there was time to run and join the pack of kids leaving the park, but for some reason he just stood there. He was drunk, that was certain. He’d never been drunk before. The next thing he knew, an officer was removing the beer from his hand. “That’s evidence now,” the officer said. Another officer told him to stand against the car with his hands behind his back.

  He’d played with handcuffs as a kid, but these were more substantial. They dug into his wrist bones. He felt himself being urged down into the car, and he sat back with a wince, the metal digging into his skin. The officers climbed in and they drove off. Through the grating he studied the impressive backs of their heads and felt strangely calm. The revolving lights illuminated the muddy grass outside. He knew he should probably be more upset, but something about this felt inevitable somehow. His parents were going to kill him.

  They drove to the station house. One of the officers led him to a little room. “I’ll bring you a glass of water,” he said. “Have a seat.”

  Connell sat in the desk chair the officer pointed to, his head pounding. Above him, a framed print depicted a seafaring mission. The officer walked in with a glass, and Connell drained it.

  “What I’m interested in hearing is where you got the alcohol. Did you purchase it yourself?�
�

  Connell shook his head.

  “I’m going to need verbal responses from you.”

  “I don’t know who gave it to me,” he said. “It was an older kid.”

  The other officer stood. “This is going to be in the paper, you understand,” he said. “Your school is going to hear about this. Your parents are on their way here.”

  “They are?”

  “What was the kid’s name?”

  “I just moved here, Officer,” he said. “I don’t know anybody’s name.”

  “Do you remember anything about him?” the other officer asked.

  “He was an older kid. A nice guy. He had on a collared shirt.”

  “This kid is wasting our time.”

  “You’re going to go to juvenile court,” the first officer said. “We take this kind of thing seriously around here. You should know that right now. This isn’t wherever you came from.”

  “Jackson Heights.”

  “Wherever the hell.”

  • • •

  A little while later, his parents arrived. When his mother walked in, she smacked his face. His father looked more concerned than furious.

  He was grounded from everything but cross-country practice. At the juvenile court in Eastchester, the DA offered a plea deal: thirty hours of community service. Connell had to stand before the judge. “If I ever see you in my courtroom again,” the judge said, “you’d better have a toothbrush with you.”

  On the way out, his mother added her own threat. “If you ever disgrace me like that in this town again,” she said, “don’t come home. And don’t even think of taking another drink until you turn twenty-one. You’re not even close to man enough to handle it.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “Not even close to man enough,” she said again.

  36

  Because Ed’s floor project had taken over most of the kitchen except for a narrow path between the refrigerator, sink, and stove, they ate their meals in the dining room. She was going to have to give up the dining room when Ed turned his attention to the rotted-out floor beneath it, but in the meantime she was determined to enjoy it. She had pinned up a bed sheet to separate it from the living room, which was packed not only with its own furniture but also with the pieces destined for the den and the foyer when Ed was done with the bricks. The dining room was her sanctuary. She had brought it to such a fastidious level of completion that it looked like a little theater in which a nightly drama was staged. The china leaned against the back of the cabinet, the polished candlesticks stood sentinel on the breakfront, the crystals sparkled in the chandelier after a chemical bath, and the white field of the lace tablecloth suggested a pristine altar.

  Ed took a seat, rivulets of sweat still running from his head. He dropped his drenched forearms on the table and wiped his brow with the napkin she’d folded neatly.

  When the kitchen floor was finished, the new cabinets and countertops could be installed.

  “I don’t know why you don’t let me bring a contractor in for the floors,” she said. “We have money for help.”

  “I’m doing a fine job,” he said.

  “I don’t want to live like this. We didn’t buy this house to live out of boxes. I want a real kitchen.”

  They had some money to work with. After they’d paid the depreciation recapture tax (she regretted the low rents she’d charged the Orlandos all those years; the house had hardly generated “income” to speak of) and put 50 percent down on the new house, they’d pulled over forty thousand dollars out of the Jackson Heights house to make improvements with.

  “You’ll have your precious kitchen,” Ed said. “The floor will be done soon enough.”

  “We’re already two weeks from November, Ed. We could bring guys in and have this done in a day. They probably have machines that could do this in a couple of hours.”

  He grabbed her by the wrist, leaned into her.

  “One guy touches that floor—one single guy that’s not myself or Connell—and I’ve had it. Do you understand?”

  She wrested herself free. “Have it your way,” she said bitterly, rubbing at her wrist. “But don’t expect any help from that boy. You’re going to be the hero on this, be the hero. He’s not helping you. He has too much work at school.”

  “I don’t need his help.”

  She could almost taste the disgust she felt. A curd of sarcasm gathered in her mouth.

  “Good,” she said. “This is just beautiful. This is everything I dreamed it would be.”

  37

  At the gas station, when his father went inside to pay, Connell’s mother whipped around to him in the backseat.

  “I just want you to know,” she said, “how much this means to your father. I would have preferred to stay in a nice bed-and-breakfast by the mountains and look at the foliage. But your father wanted to do this for you. You remember that, and be grateful. Do you hear me?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “And I have a bone to pick with you. What did you say to upset him before we left this morning? He said it was between the two of you, but I could tell he was bothered by it.”

  “Nothing,” Connell said.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t nothing.”

  “He’s right. It is between us.”

  “Don’t get testy with me,” his mother said. “You live under our roof. Don’t you forget that.”

  He didn’t want to tell his mother what he’d said. It would confirm that he was just the sort of brat she’d been implying he was. He didn’t know why he’d said it; it had just come out. He and his father had been standing near the sink together. Connell was rinsing his dish before he put it in the dishwasher, and his father reached across him for a hand towel, and as he did so, Connell said, “You have bad breath.” His father looked at him quizzically, and Connell said it again, a little differently this time: “Your breath stinks.” His father put his hand up to his mouth to blow some air into his nose, and then he looked at him with a look that could have been hurt, confused, or grateful, Connell couldn’t tell which. “Thanks,” his father said, again inconclusively, and he left the room and headed to the bathroom. He didn’t come out for almost an hour. Connell heard him brushing his teeth endlessly in there, the tap running while he brushed, and then silence, and then the tap running again.

  His mother’s mood brightened when they got to Cooperstown, which was full of nice little stores. They parked and walked to the Hall of Fame, a red brick structure that looked like a university building or a large post office. Outside, at his father’s request, his mother took a picture of the two of them in front of one of the rounded doors. Then she left to go shopping. They arranged to meet back in front in two hours.

  Inside, Connell and his father walked past the parade of plaques. His father pointed out players he’d loved in his day—Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese. He complained that Gil Hodges, his favorite player, hadn’t been elected along with the others. He stopped at the plaques of players he’d admired for their personal characteristics who hadn’t been Dodgers: Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, Roberto Clemente. It was cool to read the plaques and see how the writers of these brief biographies condensed players’ careers into a handful of statistics and a few pithy lines, but Connell would have liked it more when he was about twelve. He couldn’t get enough of this stuff then.

  After a little while it felt like they’d seen a lot, and Connell was thinking about lunch and wondering whether his mother might have had a point about the foliage, which, boring as it was, at least wouldn’t have required him to spare his father’s feelings by pretending to be as interested in this stuff as his father wanted him to be. They were passing through a big room with glass cases on all sides and people crossing in every direction when his father stopped short.

  “The next time we come here,” his father said, “they’ll be inducting you.”

  Connell waited for an ironic chuckle, but it didn’t come. “Sure, Dad,” he said, r
olling his eyes. “Okay.”

  He was good enough to make his high school team, but he wasn’t going to get scouted; his father knew that as well as he did.

  “I want you to listen to me,” his father said. “I’m going to talk to you seriously for a minute.”

  A cute girl was standing with her parents and her little brother, looking at some old mitts in a case.

  “Here?” Connell asked. “Does it have to be here?”

  “I’ve noticed something in you that worries me,” his father said. “Maybe because it reminds me of me at your age. I made life harder for myself than it needed to be. I see you hardening yourself. That isn’t you. I see you closing your mind. You are open and beautiful.”

  “All right, Dad,” he said, putting his hands up to stop him.

  “Do you understand what I mean by that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I’m okay, Dad. I’m good. You don’t have to worry.”

  “You are okay,” his father said. “You’re more than okay. You’re wonderful. I know that, believe me. But there’s something in you that is closing up.”

  “Dad,” he said, “is this about me saying you had bad breath?”

  His father laughed. “Listen. I’m going to ask you to do something you might find a little strange. Will you do it for me?”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll have to trust me.”

  “Is it going to be embarrassing?”

  “Nobody but us will know about it.”

  “All right.” Connell slapped his hands on his thighs in defeat. “Okay. Sure.”

  “Life is going to give you things to be angry at. I don’t want you to be consumed by that anger or forget how much you’re capable of. So we’re going to do a little exercise right now.”

  “Are you okay? I mean, is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine,” his father said. “Are you ready?”

  “Sure.” Now Connell was genuinely curious.

  “What I want you to do now is to feel in your bones that the next time we are here, they will be inducting you.”

  This was too much. “What does that even mean?” Connell asked as the cute girl passed him, meeting his gaze.