We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  She parked in a garage close to the strip of stores. She expected him to gripe his way through the wall of humanity, but he didn’t pull against her as she led him by the hand.

  They started at Lord & Taylor. “Jingle Bells” poured down from the hidden speakers above, and in the first window, figures revolved and bobbed mechanically in a mute and tireless tableau of Christmas morning. A boy moved up and down with his arms spread wide as though in a Cossack dance as he beheld the miracle of his new bike; a girl swung her new baby doll back and forth as if it were a model airplane; and their father forever pulled a stocking from the mantle above the fireplace. Ed jabbed her shoulder.

  “Isn’t it the greatest thing you’ve ever seen?” he asked in a surge of enthusiasm more unlikely than any she’d seen from him over the course of their marriage. “Look!” he said. “Look!”

  It was the same at the next window, and all the windows from Fortunoff to Macy’s. His childish wonder never abated, and his expression was blank with anticipation as she led him to the next garland-wrapped queue.

  Later, in bed, she was disappointed not to be able to recall any of the scenes. Instead, all she could see was Ed’s huge smile and his glasses reflecting the lights of the displays.

  Connell called the next day to let her know he wasn’t coming home for Christmas. He had decided to spend the holiday at the house of his new girlfriend. He’d had the same excuse at Thanksgiving.

  “Who is this girl? Thanksgiving and now Christmas? Sounds like someone we need to meet.”

  “You will,” he said, to her dismay.

  “Well,” she said. “Your father will certainly be disappointed.”

  She decided to cancel the little Christmas Eve party she’d planned. Ed wouldn’t know the difference; they could eat frozen dinners and watch television. She’d have followed through if her cousin Pat hadn’t called shortly after she’d gotten off the phone with Connell and said he and Tess and the girls were going to be able to make it after all. Pat was as close to a brother as she had. He used to come over to her parents’ apartment every year, starting in her late teens, to put up the Christmas tree with her father. He reminded her so terribly of her father. When he heard how upset she was that Connell wasn’t coming home, Pat said they’d come on Saturday the twenty-third and stay through the long weekend.

  “The girls will help you get ready,” he said. “They’ll cook, they’ll clean, they’ll do whatever I tell them to.”

  She knew she should have been touched, but it wasn’t as she would have planned it, and she wanted something, anything, to go exactly as she’d planned it.

  • • •

  Ed was there to greet Pat and Tess and the girls when they arrived, but a few minutes later, when it was time to eat the big lunch she’d prepared, he had disappeared upstairs. She found him sitting on the divan at the foot of the bed, looking confused.

  “Are you planning to join us?”

  “That lady downstairs,” he said. “I know I should know her. Who is she?”

  “You mean Tess?”

  “That’s her name?”

  “Tess,” she said. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said, rising. As they got to the door and were about to head downstairs, he stopped her. “Don’t tell her I don’t know her.”

  “But you do know her.”

  “Don’t tell.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Believe me.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Don’t test me.”

  “It’s not a test,” she said. “I’m trying to help.”

  He stood there thinking. “What is it?” he asked after a bit.

  “Tess.”

  “I said don’t test me.”

  “No,” she said, laughing. “Not test. Tess. Tess is her name.”

  He repeated the name a few times. “And how do I know her again?”

  “She’s Pat’s wife.”

  He looked annoyed. “Pat, your cousin Pat?”

  “Yes,” she said, unable to keep from laughing.

  “Well,” he said, “why didn’t you say so?”

  “You know who Pat is?”

  “Your cousin Pat,” he said, as if she were being obtuse. “Of course I do.”

  “Of course you do,” she said, chuckling. She straightened his glasses on his face and led him downstairs.

  • • •

  In the morning, Ed went for the paper. She was relieved to get him out of the house for a while. She had a lot to do for the party, and her nieces were there to help her. It was unseasonably warm, so she imagined he might take a seat on the bench by the Food Emporium.

  Elyse helped her chop potatoes and Cecily polished the silverware. She showed the two of them how to make quiche. The Christmas music gave her movements an upbeat, cheery punctuation, and as she directed the girls she remembered the joyous way Ed, in the days before he switched over to headphones, would stand in the living room conducting along to the symphony recording with an invisible baton. She enjoyed watching him work himself into a frenzy. She loved how he laughed at his own ridiculousness.

  She was happy enough that she could almost forget that Connell hadn’t come home. Watching Elyse and Cecily work in their purposeful way, she wondered what it would have been like to have a daughter instead of a son. Daughters didn’t leave the way sons did. Her friends’ daughters never seemed to move more than a few miles away from their mothers.

  Ed had been gone an hour and a half. With his slow gait it wasn’t unreasonable to think he was still in transit, and anyway she was enjoying herself. A little while later, though, Tess asked, “Where’s Ed?” and Eileen began to worry: not that anything bad had happened to him, but that he’d gotten lost. She had allowed herself to get complacent.

  “Topps,” she said. “The local bakery. They spoil him there. I’d better go and save the counter girl from him. He’ll haunt that place all day if they let him.”

  She drove slowly down Palmer, stopping at storefronts to peer inside, feeling like a criminal casing them out. She did a circle of the town. He wasn’t on any of the benches. It had grown colder since he’d left; the wind had picked up. She regretted giving in to vanity, both his and hers, in not getting him a MedicAlert bracelet. He was wandering the streets with nothing to explain his situation.

  She drove down Kimball Avenue to double through the back streets where he might have gotten turned around. When she got to Midland, she saw a man approaching a car at the stoplight under the Cross County overpass, waving his hands, and it took her a second to realize that he was her husband. She threw the hazards on and walked toward him, and when he saw her he started clapping his hands. She pulled him back by the sleeve. A blue Mercedes honked and slowed as it passed. At first she thought it was her neighbor from up the block, but she was relieved to see a gray-haired man she didn’t recognize. Still, had he recognized her? Would he recount the scene over dinner?

  She was too angry to speak. She tried to imagine the melee Ed had caused since he’d gotten to the intersection. How long had it been? She was lucky the police hadn’t gotten to him yet.

  She buckled him into the passenger seat and returned to the driver’s seat before saying anything. “What were you doing so far from the house?” she asked finally.

  “You found me,” he said. “Don’t make a big deal of it. Let’s go.”

  “Did you get lost? Were you disoriented?”

  Ed looked at his feet. She noticed that the soles were separating from the leather of his shoes. He needed a new pair, or at least a resoling. She had been leaving details like this unattended to. Her secret thought, the shameful thought she’d been harboring more frequently lately, was that Ed wouldn’t notice anyway.

  “I was trying to get to the mall.”

  “What in the hell!” she shouted. “Tell me the truth. Did you get lost trying to get home?”

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “I need to know, Ed.”


  “I wanted to get you something.”

  “We decided about this. Remember? You and I aren’t exchanging presents this year. It’s just easier that way.”

  “Not for Christmas,” he said.

  “For what, then?”

  “Our anniversary.” He stretched out his hands and poked at his ring. “New Year’s Eve,” he said.

  “We got married on January twenty-second, Edmund.”

  “But we met on New Year’s Eve.”

  She was quiet. She pictured Tess’s concerned look when they got home. The look would say, in the most well-meaning way possible, Why did you let him go out in the first place? Ed sat heavily in the passenger seat. “We need to get back,” she said. “Everyone is worried sick.”

  When they were nearly home, she looked over and saw him holding his wallet.

  “I didn’t have any money anyway,” he said.

  She hadn’t put any in his wallet in a while. She’d also taken the cards, to prevent someone from taking advantage of him.

  She turned the car around and drove back to the mall, parked in front of Macy’s. She fished her own wallet out of her purse. A hundred-dollar bill flashed up at her, along with a couple of singles.

  You stirred up emotions in a man when you gave him cash. She’d practiced defusing that ticking bomb during her father’s retirement years, when she still lived at home. When Ed handed her his wallet, she folded the hundred in briskly, economically, as though she were giving a flu shot.

  They went inside. She told him she’d wait in the purse section and watched him amble off. He stopped to talk to a salesgirl, who pointed him toward the escalator. As he began to rise, clutching the thick rubber rail with both hands and looking over the side as though it were the edge of a ship, she decided to follow him from a distance. She trailed him into the women’s section. She had a vision of him throwing dress after dress over his shoulder in a frenzied spree, but he walked the aisles deliberately, like a big cat stalking its prey, looking at dresses without touching them. He moved from rack to rack, evidently making quick decisions, and stopped in front of a row of dresses along the far wall. He appraised them as she pretended to look at clothes across the aisle. A salesgirl came over and he waved her off. As if he had read Eileen’s mind about the dowdy-looking dresses in front of him, he headed to an adjacent rack and, after a sweep of those offerings with his eyes, held up a dress. She could see it shimmering in the light. The pattern was tasteful, the cut elegant. He waved the salesgirl over again with a frantic hand, holding the dress in front of him as though it were a banner in a parade.

  She watched a strange exchange between Ed and the salesgirl. A look of patient confusion crossed the girl’s face as he passed her his wallet. She held it dubiously as he jabbed at a pocket behind where his credit cards would have been. Frustrated, he took the wallet back, removed a slip of paper, and handed it to her.

  The girl nodded and returned with an identical-looking dress. He must have written Eileen’s size on the slip of paper. She couldn’t imagine the effort he’d expended in memorializing this detail. Still, there was little chance the number was correct. She needed a ten now.

  As Ed approached the cash register, she realized that the dress must have cost well over a hundred dollars. She rushed over. She knew Ed would be furious, but she couldn’t worry about that now. She tapped him on the shoulder. He sprang forward, startled, and let out a little cry. When he saw it was her, he yelled her name a few times in manic excitement, the trapped heat of emasculation radiating off him.

  “Funny meeting you here,” she said.

  “You like this?” he asked. The girl, who had arranged her features into a beatific grin, handed it over for inspection.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. She glanced at the dress size: eight. He was closer than she thought.

  “I like you in blue,” he said. The simplicity of the declaration put an ache in her chest. He directed no animosity at her for having rescued him in the transaction. He seemed to feel only a naked desire to please. He was being stripped of pride, of ego, ruined, destroyed. He was also being softened.

  “We’ll use this.” She handed her credit card to the salesgirl before Ed could reach for his wallet, which was sitting on the counter. The girl passed her the index card Ed had written on. It said, “Eileen’s size,” with a big “6” crossed out and an “8” written in its place. When Ed turned away, she took a pen and crossed out the “8” and wrote “10” next to it in as close a hand to his as she could manage. She would come back and exchange it for a ten. She slid the paper back in his wallet and put the hundred into her own. There was no reason for him to be walking around with a bill that large.

  • • •

  The McGuires and Coakleys couldn’t make it that year. They had excuses—the Coakleys had been talking about heading out to Arizona to see Cindy’s brother for years, and Frank’s niece in Maine had just had a baby—but she couldn’t help being annoyed at their not trying harder to be in town. They’d been so strange around Ed lately, the women tentative, the men garrulous and impersonal, that she imagined they were relieved to have a reason to get away. It seemed to her that she had graduated from the ranks of ordinary wives into a rare stratum inhabited by widows whose husbands were still alive.

  At one in the morning, she and Tess sweated to get the mess cleaned up. Just when it looked as if she might escape the evening without a major disturbance, Ed woke and wandered out of the bedroom. He paced back and forth in the upstairs hallway, screaming and flailing his arms violently. She couldn’t silence him. One by one the houseguests gave up the pretense of sleep and emerged from their rooms—Pat, Tess, the girls, her aunt Margie, who had also decided to stay. Pat tried to intercede, puffed up by macho gravitas, but she held him off and allowed Tess to help her corral Ed.

  The morning saw no enthusiastic ripping open of presents; the girls handed them around with a perfunctory languor. As Connell had grown older, she’d worked hard to keep alive the Christmas morning ritual, and she tried to pump some life into the girls, but their exhaustion won out. They put in a lackluster effort at breakfast as well, nursing cups of coffee and leaving heaps of food untouched. She thought, Connell was right not to come home.

  As she scraped scrambled eggs into the trash, she resolved to have one more real Christmas, with all the trappings and ceremonies of the occasion. Next year, the big green star would make its way to the top of the tree. She hadn’t felt safe when she’d been on the top step of the ladder, leaning over the branches, and she certainly wasn’t about to ask Ed to get up there and do it, and by the time Pat arrived she’d moved on to other tasks for him to do and had forgotten all about it. When she’d sat at dinner, though, all she’d been able to focus on, other than her anxiety about Ed’s embarrassing her, was the treetop sticking up like a tumor, even though it was out of sight in the den. It was in plain view in her mind’s eye. She hadn’t realized how important that star was in rounding out the scene she so carefully constructed. When the lamps were off, it winked with a hazy, emerald loveliness that seemed to pull you toward it. Next year, she would need Connell there to put it up for her. After that, he wouldn’t have to come home for another holiday if he didn’t want to. She was going to wring enough perfection out of next Christmas to last her the rest of her years on earth.

  Part V

  Desire Is Full

  of Endless

  Distances

  1996

  69

  When Paula Coogan, who had hired Eileen at North Central Bronx, moved to another hospital, Eileen was surprised and dismayed to learn that Paula’s replacement was Adelaide Henry, whom Eileen had supervised at Einstein many years before. Adelaide promptly put Eileen on nights, claiming she needed someone of Eileen’s stature watching over that shift, but Eileen guessed she was trying to get her to leave, maybe out of insecurity, maybe out of revenge. She remembered being tough on Adelaide, but only because she’d noted her potential and hadn’t wanted
to see her waste it, especially as executives making promotion decisions were going to be more exacting with Adelaide because she was black.

  If Adelaide wanted to get rid of her by putting her on nights, though, she would fail. Eileen would’ve held on in the midst of a flaming apocalypse to last the two more years she needed to get health benefits. And it was actually a blessing to be put on nights, because with the sundowning, Ed was going to bed early, and he mostly stayed in bed, and the dark of night had begun to frighten him, so that even if he got out of bed he would never leave the house. Short of his filling the place with gas from the stovetop burners, there was very little she had to worry about if he went unsupervised at night, so she would climb into bed with him in the late afternoon and awake at ten to report for duty at eleven. It was working out better than she could have hoped for: she didn’t have to pay anyone to be there; she could take care of him when she came home in the morning and still get adequate sleep.

  Maybe she spoke to the wrong person about being comfortable with the night shift, or maybe she didn’t affect a sufficiently beleaguered air, because within a month she was switched back to days. She had made it work with Ed home alone for a good while, but the idea that he would get lost worried her, and he was now a known quantity at the police station. She wanted to keep him home with her as long as she could.

  She asked around at the hospital to see if anyone knew a good in-home nurse who worked off the books. She found a girl to stay with him, a robust Jamaican who wore her hair in a tower, radiated ease, and seemed perfect for the job until she made Eileen late for work one morning when she showed up late herself, claiming bus trouble. The girl’s commute involved two connections and a longish walk, so Eileen didn’t dismiss the excuse immediately; besides, she wasn’t in a position to act rashly, not without a backup in place. She gave the girl a warning; it happened again; she gave her another warning, one more than she would have given any of the nurses on her staff. The third time, she fired her, but by then she already had her replacement on call.