We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  He heard his father cry out and dashed down and found him lying facedown in the kitchen. The runner was bunched up on the floor; he had evidently tripped on it. Connell rolled him over, saw that his mouth was bloody and that he’d broken one of his front teeth. Connell sat him up and soaked a dish towel and put it in his mouth. He saw the piece of tooth lying on the floor and laid it on the island. The quantity of blood on the bricks made Connell worry that his father might have bitten part of his tongue off, but when he forced his mouth open he saw that he had only cut his gums and split his lip. Blood pooled under his tongue. Connell leaned him over the sink and got him to spit, then sat him at the table. A broken plate rested facedown on the floor. He must have thrown it as he’d fallen. Connell gathered its halves and the plastic-wrapped sandwich into a saggy bundle that he deposited in the trash.

  The runners formed little rolling hillocks. He had even slipped on them himself a couple of times. He remembered now—how had he forgotten it?—that his mother had asked him to buy double-sided tape to secure them to the floor.

  He watched his father’s Adam’s apple rise and fall as his father swallowed blood. He gave him ice in a wet towel to suck on. After a while, he brought him up, got him changed, and returned him downstairs. He mopped the floor of the blood and put the piece of tooth in the little pocket of his jeans, because he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out and was too ashamed to leave it on the counter. Then he sat with his father on the couch and waited for his mother to come home and see what had become of both of them.

  • • •

  He heard the garage door. His mother came up the stairs carrying some bags of groceries. She handed them to him and slung her pocketbook onto the island. She told him to put them away.

  “Leave that chicken out,” she said. “I’m going to make it.”

  She called in “Hello” to his father and filled a glass with water. Connell emptied the bags purposefully, trying not to look at her. When there was nothing left to find a spot for, he turned to see her taking down a second glass of water with deliberate sips, as though it were medicine. She was looking at him over the glass.

  “I might send you to the store for garlic,” she said. “I forgot to get garlic.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve got to turn that down. I can’t hear myself think. Edmund!” she called again. “I’m home.”

  She put her glass in the sink. There was a strange buoyancy in her step.

  “Mom, wait.”

  “What?”

  “Something happened earlier. Dad got hurt.”

  She started in his father’s direction. “What is it?” she asked with surprising panic in her voice. “What’s happened?”

  She took the remote and lowered the volume on the television.

  “What’s happened?” she asked again, sounding more alarmed than Connell had heard her sound, perhaps ever. “Are you going to tell me, or what?”

  His father sat there like a statue, looking past her at the screen’s flashing, unaccompanied images.

  “He fell down. I was out of the room. He landed hard on the bricks.”

  “Let me look at you, Edmund. What did he hurt?”

  “He fell on his face. Cut his chin. Broke his tooth.”

  “Let me see your mouth, Edmund.”

  His father sat stone-faced.

  “Open up!” she said, sounding shrilly desperate. She turned to Connell. “How bad is it?”

  “There was a lot of blood.”

  “Open up!” she said. She sat on the couch and put her hand to his father’s mouth. She pried his lips open. He had his teeth squeezed shut, but Connell could see the space where his tooth had been. His mother didn’t turn and yell at him. She smoothed out his father’s hair and kissed his cheek.

  “Oh, Edmund,” she said mutedly. “What are we going to do with you?”

  “Nothing,” his father said finally. “Nothing. Leave me alone.”

  He hadn’t taken his eyes off the television, but now he took one glance at Connell. There was embarrassment in the glance, but also something like a flash of defiance.

  Connell waved his mother into the kitchen. She didn’t follow him right away. He stood away from the doorway while he waited for her, because he didn’t want his father to see him. He was ashamed.

  The volume went back up, and a few moments later his mother came in.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t think I can do this,” Connell said, his hands against the edge of the countertop.

  “Do what?”

  “This thing with Dad. I don’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  He looked down. “He fell. That’s all.”

  “Well, you just have to keep a better eye on him.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think I can do it. I thought I could do it. But I can’t. It’s too hard for me. It’s too much.”

  “I did it when I was ten years old.”

  “But I’m not you,” he said. “That’s the problem right there.”

  “Well, that’s just terrific,” she said. She motioned for him to move and took a cutting board out of the cabinet below.

  “It’s driving me crazy,” he said.

  “What do you think it’s doing to me?”

  “You go to work.”

  “I never go anywhere,” she said. “All day long, I’m right here in my mind.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to disappoint you.”

  She sliced through the thin layer of plastic on the chicken. “Don’t worry about disappointing me. Worry about leaving me in the lurch. I need help, goddammit!”

  “I can get a job. Bring some money in. You can pay someone with it.”

  “Keep your money,” she said. “You’re going to need it for therapy later.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “I thought it would be good for him, for you”—she pointed with the knife—“if you were around. If it’s not, it’s not.”

  “I wish I could do it,” he said.

  “You can,” she said. “You just don’t know it.” She had started to cut the chicken, but she set the knife down. “Here,” she said. “You do this. You think you can handle it? Or you want me to find someone else to do this too?”

  He felt the blood drain from his face. His mother seemed to notice. “Thin slices, across the breast,” she said a little more softly. She went to the refrigerator and brought back some broccoli. “Cut this when you’re done with that. Small pieces. My feet ache.” Then she went into the living room. He cut the chicken and rinsed the broccoli, but before cutting the latter he went to the doorway and leaned into the dining room to look at her. She had her legs up on the couch. She was holding one of the sheer curtains aside with one hand and rubbing at her foot with the other. She was looking out at the street and didn’t notice him there. He had an impulse to tell her he would rub her feet for her. When he was a kid, she would ask him to rub them, and he would grumble his way through it, because she worked all day and her feet were clammy and smelly. Her feet had only gotten more forbidding over the years, the soles tougher, the cracks deeper, but he wanted to rub them and not complain. He couldn’t find a way to tell her what he was thinking, so he just looked at her for a while. It seemed she was watching for something. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her sitting there. When they first moved in, she sat there all the time.

  He went back to the broccoli and cut it with heavy chops, because he remembered her saying she found the sound a knife made on a cutting board satisfying. When he was done he hacked at the bare board for a while, rhythmically so that it would sound like the real thing. He went into the living room. She had stopped rubbing her feet. She wasn’t looking out the window anymore but was sitting on the couch. She gave him a weary glance as he approached.

  “What is it?”

  “Can I help?”

  “You chopped the broccoli?” He nodded. She let out a faint sigh. “I’ll be in to cook.
Just leave everything there.”

  “Can I help with your feet?”

  “My feet?”

  “Do you want me to rub them?”

  She had a wry expression on, as if she was weighing making a dry remark. Then she seemed to consider it further. “You’re offering to rub them,” she said dubiously.

  He thought of the gap in his father’s mouth, the pool of blood under his father’s tongue.

  It had been years since he’d touched his mother’s feet. He had half expected he’d never touch them again.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She raised her brows. “That would be nice,” she said.

  He settled into the couch and took one foot in his lap as he used to. He was almost queasy with embarrassment at his proximity to her. He pressed a tentative hand against the ball of her foot. It was all there, the familiar moistness, the tufts of knuckle hair, the burst blisters, the gunky nails.

  “Is your father all right?” she asked.

  “He’s fine. Just watching TV.”

  She seemed to relax, let her head fall against the pillow. He gave himself over to the task, using both hands to apply the proper pressure. Somehow he’d always been good at this. He’d had a certain amount of practice. His father would be busy in the study and his mother would put down the paper and ask if he’d rub her feet. There was something sweetly cajoling in the way she told him that she never sat down at work; it was the only time she ever behaved that way around him. Now, even more than before, he saw the evidence of what she’d been talking about. There was a history of her career in the bulging veins, the cramped muscles, the corns and bunions, the calluses and cracks. She wore neat shoes, but they covered a sprawling account of an overtaxed life, and there was no hiding the truth when she took them off.

  He went after the pain, tried to free it up. She gave a muted cry of relief. He would be a disappointment to her later, when she remembered how he had failed her, but for now she was probably only thinking that she didn’t want him to stop. He had more strength in his hands than he used to. He used to ask to quit and she would wheedle another minute out of him and he would say he was tired and she would give in, but now he wouldn’t tire so easily. He would let her be the one to tell him when she’d had enough. The television roared in the other room. He brought her other foot up so that he could move between the two feet. He thought of the tooth in his pocket. There was a chance this would be the last time in her life that she’d have her feet rubbed, because circumstances might not conspire again to bring them together like this. There was a limit to his ability to reach out to her. It was easier with girlfriends. He was always offering to rub their feet. He threw all his affection at them and hoped that some of it would stick, maybe even come back to him, though if it didn’t he gave it anyway, he gave it more, even, because everyone had something that needed to come out.

  75

  She wasn’t going to be able to rely on her son, but she didn’t want to just bring another nurse in. The time had come to approach the problem differently. The fact was, she was handcuffed to Ed. Everything she did when she wasn’t at work, she had to do with him. What she needed was someone who would be there more of the time and in a more unstructured way, who could free her up to have a bit of a life; someone who could effortlessly pick up Ed when he fell. Maybe this person could even help around the house in a handyman capacity. Maybe what she’d needed in the house from the beginning had been a man.

  • • •

  If she was going to bring someone in full-time, she had to find the money to pay for it. She decided to take advantage of the fact that mortgage rates had gone down significantly since she and Ed had bought the house. She refinanced to bring her rate down from 10.3 percent to just over 8 percent, which gave her a little more to work with every month.

  She put out feelers at work and posted flyers, but she didn’t get any promising leads. Then one of her nurses, Nadya Karpov, said her older brother Sergei was reliable and strong—too strong, Nadya said, to be driving a cab nights. He didn’t have nursing experience and he was in his fifties, but she thought he’d be good at it, as he was patient and calm. He didn’t have a car and he lived in Brighton Beach, but he was willing to make the long trip on the A train and the Metro-North. Eileen knew the nine hundred dollars a week she was offering would be a significant raise. The amount was just shy of what Ed’s pension and Social Security payments added up to, after taxes. Nadya said Sergei would probably jump at the chance to spend part of the week in Westchester and get away from her sister-in-law. “She’s Russian,” Nadya said simply, with raised brows, and Eileen nodded back, as if she knew something about the terror of Russian wives.

  “We’re having company today,” she said to Ed shortly before Sergei was scheduled to arrive with Nadya for an interview. “A friend from work and her brother. Sergei’s his name. I think you’re going to like him. He’s excited to meet you. He doesn’t have many friends in the area. They’re from Russia. So I’ll need you to show him a good time.” After she’d said this, Ed sat at the kitchen table and wouldn’t move. She wanted him in the den, out of the way, to give Sergei a few minutes to walk around and get acquainted with the place. She could bring him in to meet Ed after he’d seen how nice everything was, what kind of people she and Ed were. But Ed wouldn’t budge. She could already envision the scene—Sergei in the house less than a minute, Ed wringing his hands and wailing, decision flashing across Sergei’s face: this is too much, too weird, too uncomfortable, he’ll find something else, it’s nice to meet you and your husband. Then he would say a polite good-bye, would leave her with Ed again, with Connell drifting through like a ghost until he flew back to school.

  She tried to entice Ed into the den with a plate of cheese and crackers, but he just muttered at the kitchen table. She waved to him, patted the pillow at her side. Something must have told him she was plotting a betrayal.

  She turned the television off and joined him in the kitchen. She put some potpourri on, as if she was trying to sell the house, and in a way she was. She understood that Russians were big readers. Maybe Sergei would get a kick out of all Ed’s books. Maybe they’d stoke a fire in him to work on his English, make his way through the rows.

  She poured a glass of wine and tried to read the paper but kept staring at the same sentence over and over. When the doorbell rang, she leapt from her seat and rushed to adjust Ed’s collar, which was pointed up. Through the glass she saw Nadya smiling broadly, her brother hulking behind her. Sergei doffed his cap as he crossed the threshold, seeming to fill the room. He shook her hand, then walked over and did the same with Ed’s. A bald patch rested on top and gray nibbled at the sides of his head, but otherwise Sergei was the picture of virility: a ruddy glow, hair sprouting out of his collared shirt, a quiet formality about him, even in his jeans and leather jacket. He was shorter than Ed but bigger in the trunk.

  “What a beautiful house!” Nadya gushed. “What a beautiful neighborhood! Isn’t it beautiful, Sergei?”

  He nodded. Eileen invited them to sit and took their coats into the den. When she returned, Nadya was seated beside Ed, Sergei across from him. Nadya was looking at Ed with sensitive eyes, though Eileen had told her to play it like a regular visit. The relief was how calmly Sergei was carrying it. He too wore a compassionate expression, but he was sitting back, giving Ed space. His bearing said he understood something of what Ed was going through. His hands reminded her of her father’s. She could picture those hands grabbing barrels of beer from a truck, securing a big metal hook to their rings, and dropping them into cellars. She could see Sergei jamming metal rods into barrels to tap them without getting his head knocked off by the pressure they released.

  She left Ed with Nadya and gave Sergei a tour of the house. In the spare bedroom she heard the floorboards creak under him, and for a moment she was sure he would break through, that the house couldn’t bear his weight.

  • • •

  Ed woke up raving at three in the mor
ning. She tried to rub his head, but he batted her hand away and seethed through his teeth. Then she felt the wetness of the sheets. He might have drained his entire bladder into the bed. She was careful about making him pee right before sleep, but maybe she’d forgotten. It wasn’t the first time. It had gotten to the point where she could sleep, and felt comfortable letting him sleep, in a little wetness of the sheets. This was a full-on soaking, though.

  For a few days, she’d experimented with putting adult diapers on him before they went to bed. He complained about the way they cinched his waist and the loud crackling noise whenever he moved, but the real problem, she understood, was the humiliation he felt wearing them. One night he took them off and peed the bed anyway. She gave up trying to get him to wear them after that.

  Moaning, flushed with agitation, Ed left the bed and began to roam mindlessly, bent on something inscrutable. She alternated between securing a corner of the fresh sheet and shooing him away from the stairs so he didn’t spill down them. When she was done, she tugged the T-shirt off him, but he wouldn’t let her change his underwear. She was too tired to argue, so she let him crawl sopping into the clean sheets. She didn’t sleep the rest of the night; her hand kept drifting over to his underwear to feel if it had dried.

  • • •

  She cleaned the house top to bottom in preparation for Sergei’s arrival. She felt nervous taking a strange man into her home. It was a Sunday, the start of his work week. She’d never liked Sunday evenings, which filled her with a creeping dread that went back to grammar school.

  In the days leading up to Sergei’s arrival, she mentioned him often, casually, hoping through these hints to make his presence in their lives seem natural in Ed’s mind. She felt the way she imagined Ed must have felt when he used to condition his lab rats with tiny, nonfatal doses of pure cocaine. “Sergei is going to help us around the house,” she said. “Sergei is going to take care of a few things for us.” “Sergei will be here on Sunday.” “Sergei might stay the week.”

  That morning, after they stopped in at Mass for a few minutes, she walked Ed around town for two hours. He behaved better when he was tired. Still, when she answered the bell and led Sergei in, Ed said, “No, no!” again and again, until he wasn’t speaking anymore but yelling in a high-pitched wail that sounded like a baby’s cry.