We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “Nobody wants to hurt Ed here,” he said.

  Then it came to her, as if Ed had whispered it in her ear: a palatable option for both sides that would forestall a protracted fight. His preoccupation with getting to work every day no matter what shape he was in, which she’d always found frustrating and even a little insane, would benefit her in the end. It would get him to thirty years.

  “I’m not asking for a review process,” she said. “He has over a year of sick days coming to him. Let him finish this year and then give him the sick days.”

  • • •

  Stan called back the next day to say that Ed’s colleagues had volunteered to fill in his classes for the remainder of the semester. The school would keep him on the payroll through the summer. The sick days wouldn’t start counting down until the fall.

  “I wanted to do that much for him,” Stan said. “He won’t have to teach. He won’t have to come in at all.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing,” she said. “Like you don’t know how much he loves his job.”

  “Everyone knows how much he loves teaching.”

  She wanted to believe that, in his heart of hearts, he had never really loved teaching. That would bring them closer, somehow. She wanted to believe he’d pretended to love it, pretended to be patient in reviewing material endlessly with imbeciles, in order to get his students to respond positively and ultimately make a distasteful job easier on him. The truth, she knew, was that none of it had been a sacrifice. He’d been happier with his career than anyone she knew. It was she who had made sacrifices for his happiness.

  “None of those kids will ever know how much he gave up,” she told Stan.

  • • •

  On February 13, 1993, Ed went to work for the last time. A week later, she went in with him to sign some HR paperwork and learned that she’d miscalculated. She’d been correct about the amount of unused sick time coming to him, but she hadn’t understood that it wouldn’t count toward his pension. By then it was too late to reverse course. She tried to call Stan about it, to feel him out about procuring Ed some kind of time credit, but she got nowhere. She signed off by telling him he was a jerk and slamming down the phone.

  Ed would finish in June with twenty-nine years of service to the city instead of thirty, which meant he was due a lower percentage of his salary. And since he’d be retiring before the minimum retirement age, he’d see that number drop even farther. The fourteen hundred dollars a month or so he’d receive from Social Security disability would make up part of the difference, but they were going to have to adjust to new means.

  Ed hadn’t had a raise in four years, due to a budget freeze. There was rumored to be a raise coming in the next year or two that would have bumped him up to where he should have been all along. He’d never see the raise he’d already earned. He hadn’t been holding on for just one raise, though. He’d been about to enter the period in his career in which he would make real money. He’d have taught until he was seventy or older, his salary rising every year.

  He was also losing his grant from the government, which budgeted thirty thousand dollars a year for his efforts and was up for renewal for four more. The loss of the grant was the keenest blow for her. It was the surplus, the comfort fund, the dream of luxury, the symbol of his status.

  As long as Ed was on the payroll, she’d be covered by his health insurance, but once the sick-day checks stopped coming and he started receiving his pension, that would cease.

  When he’d chosen a benefits plan, a few years after they’d gotten married, he’d chosen the plan that would deliver them—and her, in his absence—the most after-tax money per month. The trade-off had been that this particular plan didn’t confer health coverage on her in the event of his retirement or death. They’d made that decision with conviction, anticipating that she’d get health insurance in retirement through some job or other. They hadn’t known then that something would keep her moving every few years: the promise of more responsibility; a better salary; a higher-up who took exception to a strong-willed woman; her inability to keep her mouth shut when she found something ethically questionable.

  In order to retain health benefits, she was going to have to keep a full-time job, any full-time job. Thinking longer term, she was going to have to survive at NCB, or at another city hospital, for ten years if she wanted to qualify for the basic New York City pension and have health insurance in retirement. That wasn’t going to be the easiest task at her age and pay scale.

  She wished she and Ed had foreseen the health-coverage issues that would arise later, but who could predict the future to that degree? They’d thought he was staring at decades of work ahead. They’d bet on the bigger payout and lost. The cost to her was going to be that she would have to hold on to her job at a time when Ed needed her there most, to care for him.

  If she lost her job before she’d been at it ten years, and had to buy insurance, there wouldn’t be enough money to go around, because not only would she no longer have her salary, but now there would be insurance bills in addition to the mortgage payments, utility bills, food costs, Connell’s tuition coming up in a couple of years (Ed had made her promise early after his diagnosis that she wouldn’t let his illness stop Connell from going to the college he wanted to go to), and whatever nursing costs she’d eventually have to pay for Ed while she was at work (six hundred bucks a week at the going rate), not to mention the cost of putting him in a nursing home (four grand a month and going up), the idea of which she wasn’t willing to entertain but which she knew was a possibility. And that was if she could buy anything like an affordable plan. The reality was that because of an episode of cellulitis that had caused one of her calves to balloon up to nearly twice its size a few months back, she might not be able to buy private insurance without spending every available dime on it—if she was insurable at all. And if she got sick without benefits, she’d be looking at losing everything. She’d worked her whole life and diligently socked away, from the age of fifteen on, 10 percent of every paycheck she’d ever gotten, and still her family’s fortunes could be ruined overnight because the American health care system—which she’d devoted her entire professional career to navigating humanely on behalf of patients in her care, and which was organized in such a way as to put maximum pressure on people who had the least energy to handle anything difficult—had rolled its stubborn boulder into her path.

  56

  For years, Connell had heard his father talk up how much he looked forward to teaching him to drive, but when he turned sixteen and got his learner’s permit, he had to cajole his father into letting him behind the wheel. They drove through a whipping March wind to the parking lot in front of Macy’s in the Cross County Shopping Center. His father got out, went around to Connell’s side, and waved him to slide over.

  His father sat calmly as Connell practiced accelerating, braking, turning, parking in a spot, and backing up. Once Connell worked up the nerve to venture from the lot onto the streets, though, his father looked terrified. As they approached the first intersection, he hit an imaginary brake. “Slow down!” he shouted.

  “But it’s green!” Connell shouted back, though he applied the brake anyway.

  At the next light, Connell signaled, slowed, and turned left.

  “Watch the building!” his father said, his leg pumping the floor.

  He accelerated, and his father jumped back; he touched the brake, and his father gasped; he passed a car, and his father clutched the handle in the ceiling.

  • • •

  The next time they went out, his father screamed at him practically from the moment they pulled out of the garage until the moment they pulled back in. He then sat there miserably, apologizing, saying he couldn’t help himself.

  They went out a couple more times. The results were the same, and eventually Connell stopped asking to drive. He decided to wait until his junior year, when he could take driver’s ed through school.

  • • •
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  One night, at ten o’clock, his father appeared in the doorway of Connell’s bedroom wearing his Members Only jacket.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Just come with me.”

  His mother was drinking tea in the kitchen. His father headed past her to the basement.

  “Where is he going?”

  “I don’t know,” Connell said, and walked past her too.

  His mother called down after them. His father didn’t answer, so Connell didn’t either. He followed him to the garage, climbed into the passenger seat. As they were backing out, his mother appeared in the doorway of the garage. His father didn’t lower the window, and Connell just shrugged. She followed the car out into the driveway, a look of mild concern on her face. She had a teacup in one hand and her robe clutched in the other to ward off the chill of the spring night.

  His father backed slowly down the driveway and his mother turned and headed back to the house. The driveway was curved and bordered on both sides by hedgerows anchored in stone walls that ended in stone columns. It was difficult to negotiate forward, never mind backward, and his father had scraped the car so many times that his mother had given up fixing it. His father took it slowly and made it onto the street without touching the hedge, the stone walls, or the pillars.

  They didn’t head down the hill toward town, but went the other way, taking back roads until they came to the entrance to the Cross County Parkway. They continued past it, turning under the overpass and taking the ramp up into the shopping center. The stores were all closed. His father pulled into a spot far from the entrance to Macy’s and turned off the engine.

  “You’re going to drive.”

  They both got out and passed in front of the car. The lot was mostly dark, the lighted store signs combining with ambient light from the highway and the low glow of the light poles to provide a mist of illumination. A few cars were scattered about, but otherwise the lot was empty. He had never driven under cover of night before. He knew the lot from his fledgling efforts behind the wheel, but there had never been so much open space, so little against which to establish a sense of perspective, and it was with a slight rush of breath that he turned the ignition over and put the car into gear.

  “I want you to drive out of the lot, make a left and then a right at the light.”

  He drove up Midland Avenue, which ran parallel to the parkway.

  “Go through the first light. After the following light, you’re going to make a left to get on the Cross County East.”

  “I’m not allowed on the parkway.”

  “Do as I tell you,” his father said calmly. There were no spastic jerks or fake pumps of the brake. Lately his father drifted in and out of being his old self, like a wraith passing through dimensions.

  The light before the entrance to the parkway turned red as he approached it, and Connell checked to see that his belt was securely buckled. When the light turned green and he inched forward and made the left to merge, he felt like the car was running away from him.

  “I want you to build up speed as you merge. We’re going to head to the Hutch.”

  “The Hutch? What if I get pulled over?”

  “Hutch north,” his father said. “Get in the left lane. Don’t be nervous. Just relax. There aren’t many cars now. If you relax, you’ll be a fine driver. Just get up to about fifty, fifty-five.”

  Connell pressed the accelerator. The speed was exhilarating, and he pressed it deeper, watching the needle climb to fifty, then sixty. He eased off. His father had his eyes closed.

  “We have to get you used to real-world conditions,” his father said. “Stay left. We’re going to merge onto the Hutch north. I want you to look for signs for Mamaroneck Avenue, twenty-three north.”

  It felt like all the highways in the country could be reached from this one, that he could go anywhere from here. He wanted to drive through the night.

  “It’s coming up,” his father said. “Twenty-three north. When you exit, you’ll be on a ramp. As long as there’s nobody behind you, when you get to the light at the end, I want you to slam on the brakes. Anything can happen at any moment, and you need to stay alert.”

  57

  Before she could leave for work she had to get herself and Ed showered and dressed, fix breakfast, and cobble together a lunch and dinner for him.

  She highlighted the start button on the microwave in pink magic marker. To the front of the microwave she taped an index card with an arrow pointing to “start” and a note that read “Press here.” The last thing she did before she left was put the plate in the microwave for his lunch and then set the cook time. She waited until the last minute, because she was hounded by the thought of those dishes sitting out for hours and spoiling.

  She spent all morning worrying about him screwing it up. He needed perfect accuracy to pull it off. If he hit any button other than start, he ended up gnawing on frozen manicotti or choking down cold beef stew. She came home to the time unchanged on the microwave, half the meal on the floor, a broken plate under the table, the Times intact in its sleeve. He had stopped reading.

  The microwave routine could work only once a day. She left a plated, covered sandwich in the refrigerator for his dinner. He ate dinner early, before she got home, due to the sundowning. It would have been easier to prepare him two sandwiches, but there was something disgraceful in the idea of his eating more than one cold meal in her absence. Connell always came home too late to heat anything up for him.

  She couldn’t count on him to attend to a churning in the gut or notice the time on the cable box, so she called to remind him to eat and talked him through the steps.

  In the morning she set the television to a channel that showed dependable series in syndication in mini-marathons. It was easier to pick a halfway-decent channel and make him stick to it than let him range off the reservation. When he wasn’t looking, she slipped the television remote and the one for the cable box into the end-table drawer.

  He made chaos out of everything he touched, but she continued to let him handle the bills; it was a part of his masculine identity. Some bills he paid twice, others he threw out without opening them. The phone company called to say they had five hundred dollars of her money and she shouldn’t send any more for a while. When the next bill came, she squirreled it away, but the following month he beat her to the mail and wrote a check for the outstanding amount of their credit. They were almost a thousand dollars in the clear.

  She couldn’t leave lists everywhere explaining how to do everything in excruciating detail, because it wasn’t clear how well he read anymore, and anyway, where did helpfulness end and absurdity begin? Was she going to lay out how to wipe his ass, how to aim his penis at the bowl? The easier thing was to clean the piss off the floor when she got home from work.

  When they walked into town together, he avoided the bank with phobic deliberateness. He wouldn’t even go in with her when she went to withdraw money from the ATM. Maybe it was because he often heard her talking nervously about money, how it was a besieged resource in their household. She knew it was hard for him to feel so out of control. He didn’t realize that she would have loved to continue ceding responsibility to him, that she would have wanted nothing more in the world, but that had become impossible.

  She decided to cancel the newspaper delivery and asked him to pick it up from the newsstand in town. It gave him some dignity to have a task to accomplish. He also picked up a quart of milk. She didn’t always need the milk, but routine made life easier; things got burned into his long-term memory. Most of the time the milk made it into the refrigerator. Sometimes it spoiled on the countertop. Connell ate cereal at all hours—it seemed to be the only thing keeping him alive at times—so she seldom had to dump it.

  Ed also came home with a box of doughnuts every day. She didn’t know why he’d alighted on this fixation. She threw a lot away, but she also ate her share. She’d been eating more lately in general. Stress
was driving her to it. She’d gone up a couple of dress sizes in less than a year. Ed ate half a dozen doughnuts a day, but all he seemed to do was get skinnier.

  When the summer came, they walked into town together on the weekends. She couldn’t believe how many people he knew along the way. She learned that he liked to camp out on the bench up the block from the Food Emporium. It satisfied her to have been right in the end about the move. He would not have been able to live as freely in Jackson Heights.

  She slipped money into his wallet when he was sleeping, as she’d done with her father after he’d retired, to keep him flush for his nighttime bar crawls. Most of the storekeepers knew him, which helped when he was at the register. He handed his wallet over and they fished out the right bills and put the change back in. She hoped they were patient with him. The guys at Gillard’s were kind enough to simply keep a tally. Once a week, she stopped on the way home from work to settle his debts.

  He liked going to Topps Bakery for coffee and a bun because they had a table and a chair. Diana, the proprietor, brought it over to him personally. “If you never paid,” she told Eileen, “he’d still get it.”

  Once, he came home from the Food Emporium looking distraught.

  “I don’t think they gave me the right money,” he said.

  She checked his wallet. The amount there didn’t match the change on the receipt.

  “Did you stop anywhere else?”

  He shook his head vehemently. The theft must have been obvious if he’d noticed it. Still, she didn’t know if she could trust his perceptions. She could never be sure anymore if what he was saying conformed to reality.

  “Let’s go back,” he said.

  She considered the scene that might result, the whole store craning their necks, the mortifying attention, the lack of proof. Her voice would get shrill; she would need to find another place to shop.