We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  He had no idea how she withstood the deluge of inanity that flowed from his father. Connell couldn’t even be in the same room with him. He brutalized her, and when you confronted him on it he denied it like a scheming boy. He wanted her ready to attend him at a moment’s notice, yet he showed no sign of gratitude.

  When his father came downstairs, bloody bits of tissue clung to his face like a swarm of exploded mosquitoes.

  “You should use another razor,” Connell said. “The ones you use are cutting up your face.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my razor,” his father said.

  “You should try the Mach Three.”

  “Mine are perfectly fine,” his father said through gritted teeth, kneading his hands angrily.

  “Or maybe an electric razor.”

  “Why is everybody picking on me?”

  “No one’s picking on you,” Connell’s mother said. “He’s trying to help you.”

  “I don’t need any help. I do fine by myself.”

  “You use too much cream,” Connell said.

  “Goddamned ingrate!”

  “Edmund!”

  His mother followed Connell into his bedroom. “You should just love your father,” she said.

  “I do,” Connell said. “I know.”

  “These fights you’re having now—they won’t mean anything in twenty years.”

  Connell cut her off. “And whatever I have to put up with is less than anything you had to put up with, I know.”

  His mother seemed to be considering what he’d said. He couldn’t remember the last time she waited before reacting to him. It made him feel worse than when she just blew up.

  “You need to think long and hard about what kind of person you want to be. That’s all I’ll say. Did you get your father anything for Christmas?”

  Connell looked away.

  “Here,” she said, and went to her pocketbook. She handed him a pair of twenties.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Go to the mall,” she said. “Get him an electric razor if you care about his face so much.”

  • • •

  On Christmas morning, after he’d given him the razor, Connell heard his father shaving with it. His father came down holding a Bic in his hands.

  “This time, as it happens,” his father said, “I didn’t cut myself.”

  “Good,” Connell said. “How do you like the electric razor?”

  “I didn’t use it.”

  “I heard it going.”

  “You heard nothing of the sort,” his father said indignantly.

  “I heard it.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He jabbed the Bic in Connell’s direction. “This is what I used.”

  “No way. I heard it.”

  His mother sighed, then abruptly snapped, “Would you leave your father alone?”

  “Fine, fine.” Connell got ice from the freezer. “No, you know what? That’s bullshit.”

  “Watch it!” his mother said.

  “I heard it. Why won’t he admit it? Why won’t you admit it, Dad? It’s stupid.”

  “I used the Bic.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I used it like this.” His father put the razor up to his face and started digging at his dry cheeks. He winced, kept going. “Like this.”

  “Stop!” Connell’s mother screamed. “Stop, stop!”

  Connell went to take it from his hand. A dewdrop of blood clung to his father’s chin. His father shifted and lunged the razor at him. Connell reared his head back.

  “Ed!” his mother screamed.

  “Okay!” Connell said. “You used the Bic!” He tried to wrest it from his father, but his father dropped it and grabbed him by the wrist, twisting it.

  “I did use it.”

  Connell was in pain. “Will you use the other one for me, Dad? Because it’s Christmas. I got it for you for Christmas.”

  “Sure.” His father released his grip. “What other one?”

  “The razor I got you.”

  “I used it already,” his father said, smiling. “Works like a charm.”

  Connell eyed the razor on the floor. It looked like a piece of bloody evidence. His wrist throbbed. He thought of picking the razor up and holding it at his father himself.

  “I’m glad you like it,” he said quietly.

  “It’s a great gift,” his father said, rubbing his chin and looking curiously at the blood on his palm. “A great gift. You’re a good kid.”

  Connell saw his mother’s face twist up as she turned to the dishwasher. She seemed to be fighting back tears.

  “Now can we please have a nice Christmas, please?” she asked. “Can we all forget everything and have a nice Christmas?”

  62

  In the middle of a Valentine’s Day commercial, his father stood and went out without his jacket. He was halfway down the driveway when Connell caught up to him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “It’s Val, it’s Valen, Valtine’s. I’m going to get a Valen-en-tine’s card for Mom.”

  “We can go when Mom gets home with the car. It’s freezing.”

  His father turned and headed down the street. Connell called after him, then ran inside, grabbed their coats, and caught up with him. His father was shivering as he walked with purpose. Connell could barely stop him long enough to get the coat on him.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “Slow down.”

  They walked into town, buffeted by wind. Connell took his father’s elbow and led him into the stationery store and to the aisle of Valentine’s Day cards. His father picked up card after card and made a pile of them in his hands.

  “Wait, Dad.” Connell laid a hand on his shoulder to calm him down.

  “I need it,” he said, panting.

  “Let me help you.” Connell wrenched the pile of cards from his father’s hands. He led him to the cards for wives. “Everything from here to here,” he said, drawing an imaginary rectangle with his finger.

  His father quickly made another pile. Connell tugged them from his hands.

  “Do you want me to pick out a good one for you?”

  “Yes!” his father shouted joyfully.

  Connell found one embossed “To My Beloved Wife” in cursive above a bouquet of flowers. Inside was one of those generic sentiments that made him wonder how people ever brought themselves to purchase these things. It looked the part of the cards his parents had exchanged in the past, though, and he didn’t want to get too particular. He handed it over.

  “That’s very nice,” his father said quietly. “Very nice.”

  As long as he was there, he figured he might as well pick one out for Kaitlin. He found one that, oddly enough, more or less captured how he felt about her, and he knew he was going to have to undercut the sincerity of the message with a little humor, to make it less awkward, so he bought a joke one too.

  63

  She liked the Starbucks by the train station. She’d heard some grumbling when it opened; Häagen-Dazs had been the lone exception to the town’s embargo on chain stores. But she saw no reason not to patronize it. She liked the Italianate style of the building, the tiled roof, the real wood. The patio and its tables reminded her of one of the piazzas she’d seen on her trip to Italy with Ed. Sometimes she took her coffee out there and watched the professionals heading to the train and the purebred dogs pulling their owners forward, though usually she sat indoors.

  She went on Saturdays, to get away from Ed for half an hour. She didn’t gravitate there for any caffeinated talk. She went because it was acceptable to sit alone among strangers and because order prevailed: the line moved quickly, pastries were stacked neatly behind glass displays, the pleasant smells of frothed milk and espresso grounds suffused the air, the music never hurt her ears, and the overheard conversations never devolved into table-slapping self-indulgence. She liked that it lacked the ambience of smaller cafés, with their intimate conspiracies. There
wasn’t that feeling that she was missing out. People were islands even when they sat together. She liked that no matter how often she went in, the staff never seemed to recognize her. She wanted not so much to be alone as to be left alone. They let her stay as long as she wanted.

  She sat inside, reading the Times she had brought from home. When she let her glance drift from its splayed pages to the neighboring table, she saw that the woman seated there had begun to cry. The woman was younger, perhaps in her midthirties; she was not unattractive, with her hair pulled back in a neat ponytail and a close-fitting business suit. She was sitting with her hands tucked under her knees, and her whole torso was heaving with sobs. Eileen tried to read but couldn’t stop looking over in embarrassed amazement. The sobs got louder. The people seated at nearby tables shot each other looks. One man raised his eyebrows at Eileen, as if to say, Can you believe it? It felt as if the calm waters of her reflecting pool had been disturbed by the entrance of a wild animal.

  She thought about getting up to leave but sat, transfixed. She had all of five more minutes before she had to get home to Ed. She wondered what this woman expected anyone to do. Was Eileen supposed to say, “Whatever it is, it’s going to be fine”? Was she, a total stranger, supposed to press her to her chest and say, “There you go, that’s it, just let it out”? Maybe that was the right thing to do, the only thing. But how did she know it was going to be fine? Could she make those assurances?

  She decided to bury her head in her newspaper again. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the woman stand up and leave, heading toward Pondfield. She had an impulse to go after her, but she didn’t want anybody to think she knew her. She waited a minute and then walked out slowly, throwing out her half-full cup.

  Outside in the fresh air, she felt her resolution wavering. She headed toward her car in the train parking lot and got as far as the first row of cars before she turned around and started running toward Pondfield. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d run like this. She didn’t know if the woman would still be visible anywhere, but she had to at least look for her. As she ran she saw herself reflected in the shop windows and thought she looked ungainly and ridiculous flinging her tired body after so foolish a person, especially when she had no idea what she was going to say if she managed to track her down.

  She got to the corner of Park and Pondfield and looked in all directions. She spotted the woman up past the drugstore, walking in the direction of the train station. She knew what she would say. She would stop next to her and ask if she could help in any way. She would say, “You’re not alone in feeling like this.”

  She hurried toward her, feeling her heart pound. When she got within a few car lengths of the woman, who was past Cravens by this point, she slowed down so as not to seem hysterical when she started talking. She was only a couple of feet behind her now. She took a deep breath.

  As she passed the woman, she picked up her pace and followed the curve of the block back around toward her car. She walked all the way there without turning around. When she got to the car, she had second thoughts and decided to drive around the block and see if she could find her. She could pull into a parking space and get out and walk up to the woman and just stand there in silence if she had to, if she couldn’t bring herself to speak. She could just stand near her and that might help a little. She saw the woman not far from where she’d passed her. She hesitated for a second and then kept driving. In her shame and embarrassment she found herself driving the back way home instead of her usual route. Whatever it was, the woman was going to have to work it out herself. That was just the way life was sometimes: you had to handle your own grief. There wasn’t any sense pretending otherwise.

  64

  Connell was leaving for college soon. His mother told him to take his father out for the day. Batting cages and driving ranges, their go-to spots for years, were out, and there wasn’t a game at Shea. He brought him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with him.

  The lobby was aswarm with refugees from the rain. “It looks like a waiting room for a train station,” his father said, and the remark’s aptness took Connell by surprise. He was taken back to another time, years before, when the two of them stood at the top of the Met’s steps, about to go in. “This is what makes our country great,” his father had said as he rubbed two quarters together. “This is more than enough to get us in.” He had handed Connell the coins. “Bygone philanthropists, men of vision and character, gave something back to the people. To see all this priceless art, you pay what you feel you can.” His father had paid the suggested rate anyway.

  Connell led him up the endless flight from the lobby. They stood in front of a painting called “The Gulf Stream” that depicted a lone man on the deck of a small, broken-masted boat in a little plateau between substantial waves on the open sea, sharks circling. The man leaned back against an elbow, looking like a champion of calm, or else like a man resigned to his circumstances.

  “Homer,” his father said.

  “You know him?”

  “He’s one of my favorites. When I was a kid, I picked up a book on him in the library on Union Street. I didn’t know who he was. I just liked the picture on the cover. I kept that book for months.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Connell was taken aback at the thought that his father remembered aesthetic preferences. He thought with a pang of the many afternoons they’d spent on different floors of the house. He wanted, one day, to be a person who went out of his way to find out what made other people happy.

  “This looks like dire straits,” his father said. “I wonder what he did when he was in dire straits.”

  “Who?” Connell asked. “Homer? Or the guy in the boat?”

  His father only nodded. “Thank God all these artists did what they did,” he said, “or we’d have nothing.”

  Connell laughed. “Maybe not nothing,” he said.

  • • •

  The rain was coming down in sheets when they left. His father’s hands were shaking. Connell put a hand in his armpit and guided him down the wet stairs, rain whipping at them from all directions.

  At the bottom, his father stopped short, and Connell was annoyed. He wanted to get out from under the stinging droplets. In the thick gray of the avenue he could hardly see his father’s face behind the rain slicker’s hood and his wet glasses.

  “You all right?” he asked, and then he saw the bright flash of a toothy smile.

  “It’s so beautiful,” his father said.

  “What is?”

  “This,” he said, gesturing around. “Everything.”

  • • •

  He went looking for some tape in his father’s study and found him sitting there staring up at his diplomas. Some books on the ends of shelves had fallen over, and Connell stood them up. A fine layer of dust covered everything.

  A couple of hours later, he brought the tape back and found his father in the same position. At first he thought his father must have fallen asleep, but then he saw that he was awake and staring at the wall. Connell asked him what he was thinking about.

  “It must have taken a lot of work to get these,” his father said.

  • • •

  Connell’s mother was at work when it was time for him to head to the train to go to the airport to leave for Chicago for the first time. He wished she’d taken the day off. He slung an army duffel bag over each shoulder and got his backpack on and started walking. His father was walking into town to go to church, so they walked together.

  When they crossed the overpass that stretched across the Sprain Brook Parkway, Connell saw cars streaming by in both directions and thought of how much a map of roads and highways, when it included all the little ones like this, looked like a map of rivers, or an illustration of the circulatory system. He stopped and watched for a while. He was having another of those inchoate ideas that he couldn’t entirely articulate to himself. He knew that these cloudy notions would come
into sharper focus when he was away at college, where he would divest himself of the stultifying habits of personality and the false conclusions of biography and shine the light of pure reason on experience.

  When they reached the bridge over the Bronx River a block from the train, his father was the one to stop. He leaned over the stone wall. At first Connell thought his father’s mind was just wandering, but then he wondered whether his father might not be imitating him from a few minutes earlier, so he put one of the bags down and tugged on his father’s sleeve as cars sped past. “Dad!” he said, more exasperated than he had intended. His father shook his head and pointed down at the water. “What is it? What’s up?” Then Connell saw a frog on a rock, lazing in the sun. Maybe this was the frog’s habitual spot. Maybe his father had seen it before and remembered to look for it. He seemed pleased that Connell had been there to see it too. He clapped, and it jumped into the river and left a ripple on the water.

  He was half a block away when he saw the 12:23 train pull into the station. If he ran, he could make it. His father looked stooped and pale from the heat and uneasy on his legs. Connell could take the next train, at 12:55, or even the one after it; he had plenty of time to make his flight.

  He led him under the tracks to Slave to the Grind, the coffee shop he had haunted all summer.

  “Two brain freezers,” he said when they got to the counter. After he’d said it, he felt like a fool. If his father noticed, he didn’t seem to care. Connell bought a corn muffin for them to split. He led him to a table in the back, where they drank and ate slowly.

  “I’m sorry to be going so far.”

  “Have fun,” his father said. “Study what you want.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “Forget that. Live your life.”

  Outside, heat radiated off cars, and the sun pounded through a severely clear sky. The town thrummed with end-of-summer energy. He had another twenty minutes until the 1:23.

  “You okay getting back by yourself?”