We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  He gathered his things quickly; there wasn’t much to gather. She asked where he would go and he said he would stay with his daughter until he figured out what was next. Something told her he would end up back with his wife, that he had been going to end up back with her from the beginning, that this had been something he had been doing for himself as well as for Eileen, that it was a life-giving escape for him too.

  He stood in the door and she felt a rush of something like panic and asked if he wanted to go into town and get some breakfast with her. When he said he did, she spirited them out quickly, as it felt somehow that the reality of what had been happening between them would become more permanent in her own mind if her son came down and saw them leaving for town together.

  She got in Sergei’s car, which she’d never been in before. It touched her to see how neat and clean it was, not a scrap of paper or food wrapper anywhere. There was an air-freshener smell in the car, and the smell of broken-in leather, and the smell—she wouldn’t have guessed she’d recognize it—of Sergei himself.

  She had thought of Pete’s, or the other diner in town whose name she could never remember, but as he drove she realized it would be uncomfortable to sit with him and have a full-on meal and have to wait for a check and manage all the time, the silences, and have to look at each other that long, because she realized she felt more for him than she’d ever admitted to herself, and she knew he did too, or else he wouldn’t have put up with being intimate with her just the one time.

  She had him pull into a spot on Palmer outside the bagel shop, and they went in. It surprised her to realize that it was the first time they had ever been in public together. She asked him what he wanted and he told her to get what she thought he would like. She remembered seeing him eat an egg and cheese sandwich once, so she ordered him one with American cheese, which he loved, a fact that had always surprised her somehow, on a plain bagel, because that was the safest choice, and a black coffee. She got the same for herself, except for the cheese, cheddar in her case, and she was so nervous paying that she had to hand over another dollar to have enough, and she felt a little of what she imagined Ed had felt when paying, and she also felt a pang of sadness or guilt, she wasn’t sure which, run through her like an electric shock. She glanced over while paying and saw Sergei looking at her, taking her in frankly and unapologetically, maybe because he was free to do so now, and she was sure the woman behind the counter would be able to see the whole story of their relationship—she had to call it that, if she was being honest—from that one look.

  She brought the food over and sat at the little café table with him, in a plastic chair, and they talked about the safest of things: the weather, how the coffee was. He asked her to get him another napkin, because they kept them behind the counter and it would have required some negotiation on his part to get one, and she felt a surge of connection to him that made all the nights of his holding her settle in, like a dog going to sleep with a sigh by a fireplace, and she wanted to reach out and touch his face, but she knew that she would never be with him, that something about the circumstances of how they’d come together made that impossible, that their lives were too different, too incommensurable, and that while they’d had this thing that she saw meant more to her than she’d understood while it was happening, it too, now, was gone.

  When the sandwiches were eaten she ordered a muffin for them to share, and they picked at it with a tender deliberateness that gave the sadness she’d been feeling room to breathe. After every crumb was gone, and there was no reason for them to be sitting there anymore, they sat and looked at each other for a little while. She didn’t care now what the woman behind the counter thought, because she was going to take this moment for herself and not let it slip away. She could tell he was feeling the same thing she was, though she wasn’t prepared to give it a name. They sat there and let that nameless feeling pass over them like a wind in an electric storm. Then she got up and he followed her out. She walked him to the car and he offered to drive her home, but she said she would walk, and the moment for him to get in his car was upon them, and people were coming at them from both directions, and she was nervous to be seen there with him, because she knew everyone would know, that it would take only one look at her for them to know. She put her arms around him quickly before she could stop herself and sank into his arms as he pressed her to him one final time. She wanted not to forget any of it: the fresh smell of his shirt mixed with cologne, smoke, and sweat; his jacket rough against her face and the strange innocence of its red and black checks; the strength of him squeezing her; the sound of his breathing. She felt rise up in her the years of Ed’s illness and the months since he’d been gone. She felt it in her chest but she didn’t let it out, because she didn’t think she deserved to do so. She would have to carry it around in her a little longer at least. He gave her small kisses on the neck and said something to her in Russian that she didn’t understand, and then he took her face in his hands by the ears and gave her a few smacking kisses on the forehead and walked around to the driver’s side door. He took one more long look at her before he dipped his big body down into the car, which shook with his entry into it. She listened to it starting up and watched it pull out and waited for him to come around the circle and head back the other way toward the Bronx River, and after he was out of sight she went back into the store to buy some bagels for Connell. She would eat again with him when he was up. It would give her less to explain, and it would make it less real, what she’d been feeling sitting there, and it would make it more real, in a way, it would make it more hers, something that didn’t have to exist for anyone else, something she’d done for herself, for once, and there was no need to apologize for it. She looked the woman in the eye and handed over her money and left to start the walk home. The second half was all uphill. She knew she’d barely be breathing by the time she arrived.

  Part VI

  The Real

  Estate of

  Edmund Leary

  1997–2000

  90

  She had a hard time leaving him at night. It was better not to say good-bye. She’d tell him she was going to run an errand or to take a nap—trying to imply, in the way she said it, that she’d be returning. “I just need to run to the store,” she’d say, and then mechanically make her way through the corridors and out the back door, the whole time telling herself she could turn around and go back.

  Once, when she said, “I’m going to get something to eat,” he seemed to laugh sardonically, and she looked at him, trying to find a deliberate message in his expression, some chastening meant for her, but she saw only that familiar blankness as he stared at something she couldn’t see. This disease was making her paranoid too.

  She went every day. She never accepted the invitations for weekends in the country or at the beach. Her friends said she was being too hard on herself. She thought she was being too easy. I could bring him home, she wanted to say. I could take care of him. They told her she needed to have some semblance of a life, that it was too much. And she thought, It’s not enough. I’m a nurse, for God’s sake, that’s what I do, but all she said was, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  • • •

  His wallet was still on the mule chest. She rubbed her fingers on the worn, smooth leather, took out the driver’s license and looked at it, read the prayer they’d written together. Inside was everything she’d allowed him to carry in his final ambulatory years, and everything he’d been carrying on his last day as a full-dressed member of civilization: seven dollars cash; an index card listing his name, address, and phone number and her work phone number, written in her own hand; his Alzheimer’s Association Safe Return card (“If I appear lost or confused, please help me by calling . . .”); his Mobil and Amoco gas cards; his AAA card (“Membership year 27”); two different Board of Elections voter registration confirmations; his Waldbaum’s Valued Shopper Card with Check Cashing Privileges; his PriceCostco card under Jack R. Coakley Consultin
g; his AARP card; his ID from BCC; an index card with the number for the car phone; his Sears card (“Valued Customer Since 1973”); his Blue Cross/Blue Shield card; his GHI card; his PSC-CUNY card indicating he was a member in good standing of the AFT Local 2334 (AFL-CIO); his New York Academy of Sciences membership card; a picture of her from June of 1968, when she had been thin; a picture of Connell in his baseball uniform from his freshman year of high school; a picture of Connell from preschool; a picture of Connell graduating from St. Joan of Arc; and the edited index card with her size written on it. She opened the card. She was going to cross the “10” out and write “12” in its place, and then throw it in the garbage, but when she saw that the “10” was in her own handwriting, the tears came all at once.

  • • •

  His roommate was named Reinhold Huggins. Mr. Huggins had been a celebrated piano teacher. Now he pushed a walker around and refused to wear an undershirt under his hospital robe, his naked back bisected by the tight string, his steps tiny and shuffling, his posture slightly hunched. He was surprisingly alert. He didn’t say anything unprompted, except to ask for water, but if she asked how he was doing he would say, “Rather well, thank you, and yourself?” always quietly and gently, so that she had to lean in to hear him, and without the rising intonation that would have made the statement a question. Despite his manner of speaking, he was fearsome-looking, with a hoary, streaked beard and an unsmiling visage. The one time she had tried to direct him to the piano in the lounge, he gripped her shoulders with his long, bony fingers and squeezed hard. She didn’t do it again. Often when he spoke or sat in his chair, he raised his forefinger and beat it back and forth like a metronome. Other than that, he wasn’t a bad roommate; there were worse in the building.

  Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Sonnabend liked to sit in the lounge and talk by the picture window. Eileen was surprised at how present they were. Watching from a distance, she became convinced, by their facial expressions, laughs, hand gestures, and the way they interrupted one another to make an excited point, that they were gushing over their grandkids. After she’d seen them there enough times, she grew fascinated enough to get up close to listen in. Mrs. Klein said, “My daughter, my daughter, she’s going to come, my daughter, with a hundred dollars,” and Mrs. Sonnabend responded, over and over, with something that sounded like “Gesundheit.”

  • • •

  On December 2, 1997, she made it to her ten-year pension. Before she left for work, she called Connell in Berlin, but he wasn’t home, and she was almost relieved not to get him. She wasn’t sure he’d have appreciated the full significance of the news, and she didn’t want to feel silly or diminished about it, so she left a message for him to call her and figured she’d hear from him in a week or so, when it would be just another curiosity to report. On this day, the actual day of the event, she felt too raw to mention anything about it and risk not hearing back from him. It meant more to her than she would ever have guessed it would. She hadn’t always been sure she’d get to this day, and it wasn’t even about health insurance anymore so much as having something to strive for, something that allowed her life to hang together.

  She went to the home after work with a half bottle of champagne. A drum circle had been organized in the community room; Kacey the social director was standing in the center, her own drum suspended from a strap around her neck. Eileen stopped in the doorway to watch. Kacey was slapping at her drum, which was fancier than the others, and looking at the patients with a manic grin, trying to get them to imitate her. The gathering was mostly women, though a few men were scattered throughout. Eileen was glad Ed’s physical infirmity kept him out of activities like this. She watched long enough to hear the haphazard drumming peter out. Kacey slapped each hand down once in quick succession, generating a popping sound like that of a plastic cup hitting a hardwood floor. “Now you!” Kacey said, earnestly, casting about with imploring eyes. An old woman sighed and said, “Oh, come on,” and Eileen wanted to hug her in gratitude.

  She found him in his room. The popping cork startled him; his eyes widened, though he didn’t move. She had to pour the champagne slowly into his mouth to keep him from dribbling it all out, but once he could feel the bubbles on his tongue he lapped it up. She could have sworn she detected a smile on his lips when she told him her news.

  For years she had imagined she might be moved to retire the day she’d secured the pension, but as she sat there finishing off the little bottle, she realized that even if her financial situation had worked out better, and even if the cost of the nursing home didn’t go up every six months, to almost seven thousand a month now, she wouldn’t be giving a passing thought to quitting. If she retired she would have nothing to do but spend all day at the home, and she still had some life left to give. One of the inescapable facts of her existence was that she was good at her job. She had spent her life thinking of all the other things she might have been—a lawyer, she’d often concluded, or a politician, which was probably the best career for any child of Big Mike Tumulty’s, even if that child didn’t happen to be male—but now it struck her that she was doing what she did best. Her profession had been becoming hers the whole time she’d been looking away from it. The point wasn’t always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well. She had worked hard for years, and if she had nothing to show for it but her house and her son’s education, there was still the fact of its having happened, which no one could erase from the record of human lives, even if no one was keeping one.

  91

  The morning after Thanksgiving of 1998, Connell went up to the home alone. After his visit, he got halfway down the hall before he headed back to his father’s room and stood in the doorway looking in; then he left again. When he was about to turn the key in the car, he went back in again, but this time he entered the room. He sat in the chair next to his father’s bed and took his father’s hand as though he’d just arrived.

  At noon, they went to lunch. The lunchroom was noisy with women calling for help or screaming incoherently, which pierced the fog in which his father was generally lost and caused him to tremble and start in his wheelchair. Connell attributed this to his father’s chivalrous nature. The men’s screams didn’t have the same effect.

  After lunch, in his father’s room, Connell quickly came to the end of everything he could think to say. He told him about how the Mets barely missed the wild card after collapsing in the final week of the season, losing five straight, and about how the Yankees won the World Series again after winning the most games in regular season history. He told him how his last year of college was going. There was no way to tell whether his father understood anything. When his mother was there it was easier. She spoke as if he might answer her at any moment. She would tell him something that had gone wrong at the house and say, “You always told us not to do that,” or “You knew that already, didn’t you?” But he couldn’t bring himself to speak rhetorically to his father. He couldn’t suspend his disbelief that his father would answer, and he felt like he was disrespecting him if he phrased his sentences as questions. He sat with him in silence instead or put music on.

  The room was quiet, peaceful. A small piano on Mr. Huggins’s side was the resting place for a flowerpot and a pair of framed pictures. He had never seen Mr. Huggins sit down at it, but then Mr. Huggins was almost never in the room. He walked the halls endlessly, pushing his walker as though trying to wear himself out.

  “You know Mr. Huggins is German? I know I’ve told you about Berlin, but let me tell you about it again. Berlin is great. The art, the culture, the literature. The whole city is a construction site. They’re making everything new. They’re also trying not to make anything new, in the sense that they’re unwilling to paper over anything in the past without tremendous deliberation. They’re trying to deal with the legacy of the past in a thoughtful way. It’s not perfect, and they know they’ll never live down the atrocities of the Nazi era, but they’re trying to be the world’s hist
orian, or at least the world’s agonized conscience. They look relentlessly inward. They guard ruthlessly against historical revisionism or sentimentality about the old ways of life or anything that smacks of even the slightest hint of the kind of thinking that led them down the road to hell. Sure, there are some neo-Nazis there, just as there are racists and xenophobes anywhere, but as a culture, at least the intellectual culture, they are tremendously deliberate about quashing that sort of thing before it gains a foothold. You can’t accuse the Germans, or at least Berliners, or at least intellectuals in Berlin, or at least the intellectuals at the Freie Universität that I came to know—you see? I learned from them to qualify my statements down to the point of the granite and the unassailable—of trying to pretend the Nazis never happened. They even guard against the idea of getting angry at having to be so thoughtful and conscience-stricken all the time. There’s a kind of unwavering discipline about their watchfulness about conscience fatigue. Consciousness fatigue. Conscientiousness—no; they wouldn’t say conscientiousness; that suggests something of ‘good manners.’ They’re almost brutal to themselves in their unwillingness to feel good about the fact that they remember to feel bad about the evils committed in the past, before they were born. They admit their lack of discipline and prosecute it even when it’s not there. We could learn a thing or two from them about how to address the legacy of slavery, or the treatment of Native Americans, or the Japanese internment camps, or Jim Crow, or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or any number of atrocious episodes that leave a stain on the soul of America.”

  They sat in silence again until he put on some Mozart from the boxed set he had bought his father as an early Christmas present. He had decided not to fly back for Christmas that year, though he hadn’t told his mother yet. He figured it would force her to accept the invitation to the Coakleys’ instead of spending another depressing Christmas Eve at Maple Grove, as she had the previous year, when he’d been in Germany. If he came home she’d want the three of them to spend it together, and he didn’t want to do that to her, so he was going to force her hand, make her let someone—Cindy, whoever—take care of her for a change.