We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  How had they gotten to the point where she could write him a note like this? She thought of the hours he spent grading papers every night, how he never came to bed before eleven anymore, how just recently she’d spent a night helping him tabulate the grades for a lab report, as she’d done during the crisis at the end of the last academic year. She thought again, as she couldn’t help doing lately, of that inscrutable pile of wood with the sheet over it in the backyard in Jackson Heights. She recalled the scene with a strangely heightened clarity, as if it were an installation in a museum dedicated to preserving the unimportant details of her old life. She panned around it in her mind, studying it from every angle, attempting to understand why this nettlesome image hadn’t receded into the ether of the past.

  The dawning came all at once, though it felt as if it had been heading her way for a while, like a train she’d heard whistle from miles off that was now flying past and kicking up a terrible wind.

  Still, she couldn’t pronounce the sentence in her head, Ed has . . . , because it was impossible that he had it. He had a demanding job that kept him stimulated. Until recently, he had read constantly, done the crossword puzzle almost every day, exercised four times a week. He was still the fittest man in their circle.

  Maybe it was a tumor. Maybe it was a glandular problem, a dietary deficiency, a failing organ.

  Whatever it was, she would get him checked out.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to bring it up. He was going to tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, that if something was wrong with his brain he’d be the first to know, being a brain expert, she could hear him saying. And part of her wanted him to dismiss her fears with an imperious wave and tell her she was behaving hysterically. But she couldn’t allow him to overpower her on this topic. She needed to find out if something was wrong with him.

  She waited for an opening. She wanted him to forget something or say something demonstrably strange, but he just went to work and came home and started in on the basement like an indentured servant paying off his debt. He made runs to the hardware store and returned with Sheetrock, cinder blocks, and bags of cement that he hauled piece by piece from the car. She worried his body would give out on him.

  When she called Ed’s doctor and suggested worry about Ed’s health, he told her she was crazy, that Ed was as healthy as a horse. “I just saw him, what is it, six months ago,” he said. “He’s got the lungs of a swimmer. Not a whisper when I put the stethoscope to him. Only thing is his blood pressure’s a little high. Let him put his feet up on the weekend. Give him a glass of iced tea and put the game on for him. And his cholesterol could be lower. Maybe no cheeseburgers for a while. No more shrimp.”

  It sounded like an indictment of her, somehow. “We don’t eat any shellfish,” she said. “I’m allergic.” She tried to rein in her annoyance. “Did he seem fuzzy to you at all?”

  “Fuzzy?”

  “In the head. Slower on the uptake.”

  “Maybe you’re expecting too much of him. Men aren’t perfect creatures. We get miles on the engine. We need repairs. The warranty runs out. Ed’s got a good engine. He’s got a lot of road left ahead of him.”

  She watched him and waited for the mishap, the big slipup. He continued to make incremental progress, continued to refuse outside help, but every day, as he beat himself harder and harder to finish the work, as she watched patiently, intently, she could feel the ground shifting in her favor, Ed’s resilience weakening. As much as she needed to bring the work on the house to completion, as much as she couldn’t wait to have a team of workers laying down boards in her living room and dining room, and as much as she was glad to see the ground ceded to her, she found herself rooting for Ed and feeling sorry for this man who spent every night hammering away. She saw him on his haunches, head in a manual, hammer poised, his back a rounded stone, and she willed him to brilliance, though she knew she was willing the impossible.

  She watched Ed grow more weary at each dinner, look more disheveled, push away his plate after a few bites.

  One night he didn’t come when she called him to eat and she sent Connell to get him.

  “He says he’s not coming,” the boy said when he returned.

  “Tell him I said to get in here.”

  “Maybe you should go in, Mom.”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s just sitting there.”

  She went into the dining room and saw Ed surrounded by planks of wood. He had half a plank in his hands. Nails were sticking out of it, and its end was a comb of shards. She could see the other half nailed into the floor. He must have tried to rip it up in his hands.

  “Get up, Ed.”

  “I’ll be in when I’m done,” he said. He was hunched over, breathing hard. He looked like he’d been whipped. He lifted himself up onto one knee in a vaguely supplicating manner, and the sight of him there put her uncomfortably in mind of the Stations of the Cross. She wasn’t going to give him the chance to make some kind of poetical self-sacrifice, if that was what he was after. The only person who’d feel sorry for him if he did that would be himself. He’d had all the chances in the world to bring someone in. They had enough money for at least the floors and the kitchen. He was too damned stubborn.

  “You’re done.”

  “I have to finish this section.”

  “You’re done,” she said. “Come and eat.”

  But he didn’t follow. After she and Connell had finished, she brought a plate of cold sausage and beans in to him. She could barely stand to look at him as she left it on the floor by his feet. He hadn’t moved in half an hour. He was in the same place in the middle of the room, a perfect vantage point from which to survey the mess he’d insisted on making.

  • • •

  She made the phone calls and settled on a general contractor who could finish the kitchen, do the floors, put in high-hats, and plaster and paint all the walls on the first floor.

  The night before the workers were scheduled to start, she told Ed they were coming, and he didn’t put up any kind of fight. She wondered whether she should have forced his hand sooner, but they gave out no manual when you got married, no emergency kit with a flashlight for when the power went out. You had to feel your way around in the dark for the box of matches.

  41

  The work began a couple of weeks after the new year, 1992. The bustle in and out of her kitchen was exciting. She offered them drinks and set out platters of cold cuts on the island, rolls, tubs of potato salad, bags of potato chips.

  She brought home a couple of six-packs for them one day. Ed took one and threw it to the floor. One of the cans landed with a thud and shot a stream of beer all over the cabinets. A floor installer who had been using the bathroom stopped in the kitchen on the way back to the living room.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Mind your fucking business,” Ed said.

  She hadn’t heard Ed utter that word in years. Maybe she’d never heard him say it.

  “You okay?” the worker asked her, ignoring Ed.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Ed said.

  “Whatever you say,” the worker said. “Whatever you say.” He backed out of the room, his hands up in bemused resignation.

  Eileen followed him in, carrying the unexploded beers on the plastic yoke. “My husband has been under a lot of stress,” she said. “I’m sorry he spoke to you like that.”

  “No worries,” the worker said. “We come across all kinds of people in this line of work.”

  “He’s not the kind of man he seemed like back there.”

  He gave his head a sage tilt. “Some guys just don’t like other guys in their house, doing work they think they should be doing.”

  She felt a need to protect Ed. “It’s just that he’s losing his job,” she said, surprising herself with the lie. “Layoffs.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.”


  He and the other worker looked at her as if they were waiting to see if she’d make another revelation.

  “Please drink these,” she said, holding up the beers.

  “You don’t have to tell us twice,” he said. “But we have to wait until we’re done for the day.”

  It reminded her of her father, to hear him responsibly defer having a drink. They returned to laying in the boards, and she went to the breakfront to find the red velvet-lined box that held the set of crystal glasses with “Schaefer” etched into them that her father had received upon his retirement. She took them out and ran a cloth over them.

  At the end of the day, when she laid the six-pack on the dining room table, she set out the glasses too, on a Schaefer bar tray she’d saved for years.

  “Please use these,” she said.

  “Oh, we don’t need glasses, ma’am,” he said politely.

  “It would make me happy if you’d use them. They were my father’s. I’d like to see them filled with beer for once.”

  • • •

  The roof could wait for a couple of years. The rot in the basement would have to remain for now. The tile floors she’d pictured down there were a project for another time. So was renovating the half bath between the kitchen and den. So was moving the laundry room to the first floor from the basement. There was old wallpaper on the second floor that couldn’t come down, and there were walls that needed to be painted. She had pictured fresh paint and white tiles wherever she looked. She had flipped through design magazines for elaborate ideas, but in the end, white had seemed appropriate, the cleanest option, the only one she could deal with right now. She would have to wait for everything to be white. She would have to deal with gray and yellow and brown and a sickly mauve. She thought that a lot of her house looked like a waiting room. The path from kitchen to dining room to living room, though—the path that company would travel—this path was ready to go. She could keep them from going upstairs or downstairs. And as soon as she had a spare few thousand dollars, she was going to put a better half bath in for them and spruce up the den.

  There was, on the other hand, the question of the furniture. She simply wouldn’t be able to live with the things she’d brought from the old house, not if she couldn’t fix this one up the way she wanted. Her furniture squatted shabbily and hardly filled the room. The scratched dining room table, the worn armrests on the chairs, the boxy end tables, the permanently depressed couch cushions: they were like placeholders for the real pieces to come. She saw now that she would need to replace nearly all of it. She would put it all on credit cards. Upstairs, she would create a sitting area, buy the desk she’d always lacked, and outfit each guest room with a stereo, an armchair, and a beautiful reading lamp. As soon as she got these bills paid off, she would replace Connell’s childhood furniture.

  She knew she lacked the aesthetic sense necessary to give the house the ambiance it deserved. She would bring in an interior decorator. There would have to be new art everywhere, and the little touches that put one in mind of real discernment. She could pay for that with credit cards too. Ed would veto these expenses if given the chance, but he was past the point of possessing veto power. He was simply going to have to place his fate in her hands. They would pay it off. Ed would get another grant. Their salaries would rise. Once everything was in place, they would live frugally, sensibly, like Boston Brahmins. They would even find a way to build their savings back up. There was always a little more money to be had every year.

  42

  If nothing’s wrong with him,” Eileen told her own doctor, when she went in about a shortness of breath she’d been experiencing, “I’m going to divorce him. I can’t take it anymore.”

  Dr. Aitken told her to bring her husband in. She sold it to Ed as his annual checkup, that she’d like him to try her doctor, and when he didn’t object in spite of having gone in for a checkup less than six months before, she knew she was doing the right thing. They sat in the discordant placidity of the waiting area before she led him into the examining room and went back out. She’d blustered about divorce, but now she saw that she would put up with anything in exchange for hearing that her husband had simply become an asshole.

  After spending half an hour with Ed, Dr. Aitken came out to meet her.

  “Don’t divorce him yet,” he said, handing her a referral to a neurology team he trusted.

  • • •

  She braced for the fit she expected Ed to throw once they got to Montefiore, but he sat docilely again on the papered, padded table, waiting for the doctor to arrive. His big, fleshy back looked like raw dough.

  First came blood tests and a physical exam. Dr. Khalifa, the lead doctor, wanted to eliminate anything that might cause memory loss, so he checked Ed’s thyroid levels, as thyroid problems had run in his family. They gave him a CT scan.

  His thyroid was fine. The CT scan showed no sign of a tumor.

  She took him back for diagnostic exams. Dr. Khalifa sat Ed at a table and took a seat opposite him. She sat in the extra chair and felt nervous for Ed, as though she were about to watch his debut in a theatrical production that had limped toward opening night.

  Dr. Khalifa told Ed to count backwards from one hundred. Ed got to ninety-seven before pausing. “Eighty-six,” he said, then ran off a few other numbers in accurate succession, until he jumped another decile, at which point Dr. Khalifa stopped him.

  The obstreperousness she’d anticipated was starting to seem like a fantasy. Ed looked vulnerable and small. He was smiling, trying to ingratiate himself with his examiner, perhaps in unconscious pursuit of mercy in the diagnosis.

  Dr. Khalifa told him to draw three concentric circles, and Ed put a good one down on the page, then drew another that was ovoid and attached to the first like a chain link. The third, a shaky line meeting finally in something more like a quadrangle than a circle, sat apart from the first two.

  “Great, that’s great,” Dr. Khalifa said dully when Ed was done. The doctor was a picture of imperviousness. She watched his eyes: he betrayed no sign of surprise, gave away no clues as to whether this was a normal result or not, the product of mere aging or something more sinister. She didn’t know whether she herself would have been able to draw the concentric circles. Certainly it would be difficult under this kind of scrutiny. She had a sensation that she was watching a child take a test, and she felt a sympathy with Ed that made her question her decision to expose him to this. What right did she have to subject him in the quiddities of his middle age to a man who would be looking for any sign of deviation from a norm that was probably arbitrary in the first place? She wanted to whisk him back home and let him go at things in his own way. A category existed to describe men like him, a time-tested, venerated one at that: absentminded professor.

  “I’m not an artist,” Ed said, laughing. “You should see my drawings of the digestive system.”

  The doctor chuckled.

  “This could be something abstract,” Ed said.

  Dr. Khalifa looked at it and shook his head. She didn’t like his attitude. He was too glib, too detached. His hair was too perfect, his teeth gleamed too white. She had long wished Ed had pursued medical school, but now she felt she’d been too hard on him in her mind. She knew doctors like this at work; they thought they walked on water. The work Ed did might not have been as lucrative or flashy, but it laid the groundwork for guys like this to come to their conclusions. If Ed said nothing was wrong, then most likely nothing was wrong. She had insulted him by bringing him before this cipher who didn’t deserve to carry his briefcase, let alone pass judgment on him.

  “We’re almost done with this part,” Dr. Khalifa said. “One more question and then I’m going to have you do some physical things.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me something. Do you know who the current president is?”

  If he wanted to insult him, this was a perfect way to do it. She almost wanted Ed to answer sarcastically or deliberately incorrectly, but she didn�
��t want the doctor to have the satisfaction of writing it down on that little pad of his.

  Ed sat with it; maybe he was coming up with a witty riposte.

  “I know it’s a Republican,” he said. “I know that.”

  “Can you tell me his name?”

  Ed pulled on his chin. “Reagan?” he asked. “Is it Reagan? I can see his face. It’s not Reagan, is it? This is embarrassing.”

  “You know this, Ed,” she said. The doctor gave her a look; she wanted to smack his face.

  “I can see him,” Ed said. “I just can’t recall the name.”

  Dr. Khalifa wrote something down. She wanted to call the answer out. The whole thing was so stupid. She couldn’t believe he was letting him dangle there like this. Ed looked ruined, as if he had failed a test not merely of memory but of character.

  “Give it a second,” Dr. Khalifa said. “Sometimes it’s hard to think of a given thing when you have to. Think of something else. It might come to you.”

  “White elephants,” Ed said.

  “Something like that.”

  Ed rubbed the top of his head, as if to massage the answer from his scalp. He let out a deep sigh. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Who is it?”

  “Bush,” the doctor said. “George Bush.”

  “Yes! That’s it! I knew it. God, I knew it! I could see his face. Of course! His running mate. It’s easy to confuse them.”

  The doctor said nothing, just continued to write on his pad.

  She thought of the time she’d had to memorize the presidents and their dates of service. She remembered Sister Alberta calling them up one by one to the front of the room to answer one question each, Sister asking her which president followed Teddy Roosevelt. So many W names surrounded Roosevelt—to this day she could remember them: William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding. Though she had memorized them conscientiously, at that moment they ran together in her mind. She was terrified of being called stupid in front of the class. Her heart began to race; then her mind went blank, so she could picture only the hazy outlines of names. “Now, Miss Tumulty,” Sister said, and when Eileen said,“William Wilson,” laughter exploded in the room.