Gustavo was saying something, but Connell had stopped listening. He walked into the street to get a little distance, turned, and threw the ball he’d been carrying as hard as he could. The big pane shattered with a terrific crash. Sheets of glass fell like icicles.
Gustavo shouted “Holy shit!” and he and Kevin ran down the Boulevard. Connell ran across it into traffic and kept running until he stood in front of his house, alone, his chest pounding. The front door was unlocked. He stood in the vestibule looking out to see if anyone had followed him. He wanted to switch skins with someone else, switch bodies.
His father was on the couch, wearing his headphones, and his mother was in the kitchen cooking what smelled like broccoli and ziti, which was what she whipped up when there was nothing left in the fridge. He said he was home and didn’t answer when she asked where he’d been. He headed to his room. He heard a cop siren outside and started biting his nails. He went into the bathroom and stripped naked and smelled his armpits.
She was right; he did smell. Maybe he was getting ready to stop being such a damned baby about everything. He got in the shower and turned the knob for hot water all the way, with only a little cold to balance it out. The water scalded his skin and he started turning red. Steam billowed out into the room, filling it up.
He couldn’t stop thinking of that window breaking. He could see it happening over and over, the glass caving in, the one big piece dangling and falling off with a crash. They would find the baseball. They would have it dusted for fingerprints. They wouldn’t need fingerprints, because he went in there every day carrying his glove and a baseball. Once, he’d even left his glove there and called in, and they’d held the store open late for him to come get it. He could see Andy shaking his head in wonderment at what the hell had come over this crazy kid. He’d always enjoyed Andy’s sarcasm whenever somebody said something less than intelligent or acted like an ass. Andy was in college but he had to spend all his time entertaining these little kids. Connell could see him banging his fist on the counter. He could see him locking the door and consoling his mother, and then the two of them sweeping up the shards. He pictured him emptying the window display of cards, picking pieces of glass out of boxes of packs, pulling the gate down with a muttered curse. They deserved better than what he’d given them.
He scrubbed himself with punishing quickness, but he could not calm down. He kept thinking of Christin Taddei telling him he reeked. Christin used to date Gustavo before she dated Shane, and some people said she and Gustavo had had sex. She hiked her skirt higher than the other girls did, and her blouse was always a little tight. He had an erection. He grabbed it in that steamy cloud, and after a few quick strokes he brought himself off and watched the viscous stuff disappear down the drain. He rubbed at his hand, trying to get the gluey residue off. He felt even worse now, even more scared. He was guilty, guilty. He would have to get caught. It was only a matter of time. He wanted to get out, get away. High school couldn’t come fast enough, but it would not be sufficient. He wanted to get far away. He never wanted to see Andy or Andy’s mother again. They would carry around the truth about him wherever they went.
He heard a knock at the bathroom door. “Dinner,” was all his mother said, but he felt like he’d been called up before a judge.
29
The night before he posted his final grades, Ed didn’t even grunt when she asked what he wanted for dinner, or lift his head; he just put his hand up in an imperious dismissal.
She retreated and pounded her frustration into some hamburger meat. She chopped the carrots with savage thwacks, relishing the sound of the knife crashing into the cutting board.
After dinner, as she was cleaning up, he brought all his papers into the kitchen.
“Sit with me until I’m ready for you to enter the numbers,” he said.
“I’ll be reading in the living room,” she said. “Come get me when you’re ready.”
“No,” he said. “I want you here. I want you ready. I’ll give you the signal.”
He was acting like the head of an ER team waiting for an ambulance to arrive. It was absurd that she had to be on such high alert. She didn’t raise a fuss, though. She made tea and got her book and sat at the table with him.
“No,” he said, looking up. “No.”
“What?”
“No reading,” he said. “I need you ready.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said, and returned to the book.
“No!” He grabbed the book out of her hands.
The testy ER doctors who took their nerves out on the nurses sometimes apologized later; with the ones who didn’t, you learned not to take it personally. But these men were saving lives. Whose life was Ed trying to save?
“Honey,” she said. “Is it really hurting anything if I just read here next to you while you work? What’s the harm in it?”
He slammed his pen down on the stack of papers. “We have a system!” he shouted. “We have a system that works! We need to follow it! Just follow the system!”
She had already figured out that they had a “system,” one of his doing whatever he wanted as she looked on his work silently, benignly, unblinkingly.
“Okay.” She closed her book and looked at him. His hair was graying at the temples, but otherwise it retained its deep-black hue. His lashes were still long enough to be the envy of any woman, and his crystal-blue eyes softened the sharp impression his nose and strong jaw made. It still took her by surprise how handsome he was.
She sat and waited, sipped her tea slowly. It seemed that tea drinking was something he could tolerate as in-system. She reached for a pile he’d finished with, thinking to get a head start on it. He stopped her hand and told her to wait. She stood up, just to stand, and walked over to the sink. He told her to sit down. She could feel herself messing with him. She peppered him with questions at short intervals. He ignored them and kept his head down. Eventually he looked up at her, breathing through his teeth, his eyes flashing with hate.
“Be quiet,” he growled. “Sit there and be quiet and wait till I’m done.”
She wanted to say something acid, to humiliate him the way he’d humiliated her. The only thing that stopped her was the vague sensation that this was not the man she’d married, that some metempsychotic transfer had occurred. She sat in the chair with one hand on the table and one embracing the mug.
When he was done he slapped the pen down and took a deep breath, rubbing his eyes. He sat back in the chair pointedly, with as much presence as if he were studying her for the first time. She was surprised by his suddenly intense look and blushed. She wanted to touch him, to dispel her nerves. She took the pile of essays and began entering the grades in the book. She made short work of it. When she was done, he produced another sheet, with numbers on it and blanks next to them.
“Now this,” he said.
“What is it?”
“The final grade sheet.”
“What do I do?”
“You find the student number next to the names on this other sheet.”
He had everything ready for her. Considering how organized he was about all the papers, how much he seemed to have the situation in hand, it was a wonder he was asking her to do this at all.
When she was done she closed the book with a thump. Ed clapped his hands together and raised them above his head exultantly. The gesture embarrassed her—seeing him celebrate so quotidian an accomplishment. She looked for signs of irony, but there were none.
They had another bout of lovemaking. He went at her purposefully, giving her deep kisses and holding her down by the wrists. It reminded her of the way he had made love to her during their brief attempts to conceive a second child: both of their bodies moving as one; the thrust of his hips compact, rhythmic, and deliberate. The only thing that kept it from feeling perfect was her nagging worry that Connell would hear the headboard knocking against the wall.
In the middle of the night—a groggy check of the clock revealed it t
o be four in the morning—Ed was shaking her awake. It took some effort to figure out what he was saying, but eventually she understood that he wanted her to follow him to the kitchen.
The sheet from earlier was laid out before her, along with another that appeared identical. She looked at him, confused. Her eyes were adjusting to the kitchen light, but she could see that the grades she’d written next to the numbers had been crossed out, with new grades written in their place.
“I need you to make these changes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I made some changes. I need you to transfer them to this clean sheet. I have to tape it to the wall outside my classroom.”
“Why are you making changes? We were done.”
She wanted to put her head down on the table. She felt that if she did, he would be standing there in the same position waiting when she woke up.
“Changes!” he barked. “I made some changes! I need you to transfer them.”
She couldn’t make sense of it. She would simply have to submit to the logic of this inquisition. The pattern in the grades became obvious quickly: Ed had taken every grade and kicked it up a full letter, irrespective of pluses and minuses. A C– became a B; a C+ became a B; a B became an A. Ed had long held the line against rising grades. He gave out As sparingly; getting an A from Ed still meant something.
“What’s this about?”
“There were other things I had to factor in. Participation. Et cetera.”
“You were very generous,” she said sardonically.
“There’s nothing wrong with being generous.”
“Not at all.” She smiled. “But you were very generous.”
“I reconsidered a few grades. It’s not your concern.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’m tired. I don’t know why I said anything.” She filled in the grades next to the corresponding numbers in the new sheet and put the pen down. “There. I’m going back to sleep.”
In the morning she found him on the couch. On his desk the grade sheet had been revised upward again. Now there were only two categories, A and B. Below it was another blank grade sheet. She saw that it was her duty to transcribe these trumped-up scores to the final grade sheet. Or could there be another one in store, with all As?
Standing there, she remembered how, in the years after her father retired, when she was still living at home, she would slip cash in his pants pocket for him to find when he was out at the bar, to spare him the embarrassment of not having money to buy other people’s drinks. If she did this, it would be to spare Ed embarrassment.
He was curled on the couch, which was too small for his frame. It was hard to be worried about him when he was sleeping. He looked like a child, like a larger version of Connell. His hands were folded up near his face, as though he had been arrested in the act of praying. It seemed that all men were the same in the few vulnerable instants after they’d been awakened, as though they’d been called back from some universal state into the particulars of their lives. For a moment she stepped out of time and all of existence made sense; then the moment passed, and Ed returned to being her husband.
30
She sat on the stoop, listening with a new equanimity to the sounds of the neighborhood. She heard the rumble of a plane in the distance and watched it course across the sky. As a car rushed past toward Northern Boulevard, she could hear music faintly thumping within it. The laugh track of a sitcom echoed in the little valley between the two houses. It was easier to tolerate the flaws of a place when the promise of release from it loomed. Whoever bought the house would know what they were getting and willingly embrace it. If she wasn’t quite going to feel nostalgic for the neighborhood, she could at least imagine that once she’d signed the papers relinquishing the deed to the house, she’d feel the rage slip from her, and she’d be able to return to survey it with detachment. She could always come back to get her hair cut; no one tamed her cowlicks the way Curt did, and his price was reasonable. And she could imagine coming back to Arturo’s, though the truth was, Arturo’s was a good neighborhood place, the kind that made it bearable to live there, but it wasn’t anything more than that. There would be other places, better places.
• • •
Connell did a dance to avoid the back-swinging car door, pinching a plastic-sheathed comic book carefully between uplifted fingers as if holding aloft a key piece of evidence. In his other hand was a shopping bag.
“Big day at the comic book store,” she said dubiously to Ed.
“He did well this year. He’s a good kid.”
“Looks like he did well today too, big spender.”
“It’s an investment,” Ed said. “He knows his stuff. He didn’t get junk.”
She went to Connell’s room. He was slotting his new comics into his long boxes with the quiet gravity of a special-collections librarian.
“Did you take advantage of him?”
“No! Why?”
“He’s happy to be done with the school year. You must have seen that.”
“It wasn’t my idea. He just came home and said, ‘We’re going up the block to the comics store.’ I told him I didn’t want to go. He kept insisting. I kept telling him I don’t go to that store anymore. I don’t like those people in there.”
“Why?” she asked. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “They’re just not nice. Anyway, I don’t go there anymore. He said, ‘Then let’s go to that store near where your orthodontist’s used to be.’ He drove us all the way out to Bayside. I didn’t want to get all this stuff. I mean, I wanted to, but I felt bad. He just kept saying, ‘Get what you want.’ ”
“How much did he spend?”
“A bunch.”
She moved closer to him. “How much?”
“Two hundred. Over two hundred.”
“How much over two hundred?”
“Two forty-eight,” he said. “And seventy-eight cents.”
She couldn’t believe the number. She would have thought it impossible to spend that much on comic books unless you brought a wheelbarrow into the store.
“You took advantage.”
“I did not,” he said, indignant. He was slipping cardboard backings into the comics’ plastic sleeves and ferreting them into the archival boxes he kept his collection in. If it really was an investment, she couldn’t accuse him of not tending to it. “He kept saying, ‘I want you to feel like you can have anything you want.’ He was telling me to fill up my basket. I didn’t get any really expensive ones.”
Eileen shuddered, as if a cold breeze had blown through the room. She sensed a sadness at the heart of Ed’s largesse. The boy seemed to have sensed it too; it had tainted his happiness at his haul. She felt a powerful sympathy for her husband, like one of those synchronized pains experienced by people miles apart, even though he was in the other room.
• • •
With a dignified informality, the ancient maitre d’ directed them to a table. Arturo’s hadn’t changed since it opened years ago: white aprons over black outfits; napkins draped over forearms; tinted, marble-patterned wall-length mirrors; mild music; steaming sliced loaves; a reliably robust house red. There were neighborhood Italian restaurants like it all over the city—strong in the specials, respectable otherwise—but she’d always felt this place represented a bit of refinement. Sandro, Arturo’s son, ran it with a seemly reserve. Still, she was looking forward to putting it behind her for places of real distinction.
Ed smiled and looked benignly at his menu, as if written in its pages were the answers to diverting but trivial questions.
“Are you happy the year is over?” she asked.
“Very happy,” he said.
She fidgeted with some sugar packets. “So, Ed,” she said, after what seemed like an interminable pause. She tried out a smile. “We saw a nice house. One we liked a lot.”
“You found a house?”
He was looking at her with a strangely blank expressi
on.
“Well, we didn’t find a house, exactly,” she said. “We did see one. It may not be perfect. There’s no saying we can even afford it.”
“You want to move? We can move.”
“What?”
She felt a little light-headed. She put both hands on the table to steady herself. His capitulation was so instantaneous that she had to think it was because the boy was there and they were in a public place; once home, he would give full vent to his displeasure. Another thought gave her greater pause, though: that she actually believed him. It was as if he’d never truly been opposed to the idea in the first place.
Ed turned to Connell. “This is what you want?”
She took a deep breath. Her stomach was in such a knot that she felt she might throw up.
“Very much,” the boy said, with a strange gravity. “I’m ready to leave.”
“You are?” Ed asked.
“Right away.”
“Why?”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve been thinking it over a lot.” She wouldn’t have guessed he’d thought about it once since the day they’d seen the house. “And what I’ve come up with is that I’m starting high school in the fall, and that’s a fresh start for me, and I think we should all get a fresh start.”
The boy had come to her aid. She had no idea where he was getting this poise. Perhaps her dream of having a politician in the family might come true after all. Ed looked to her. She shrugged her shoulders.
“Plus,” Connell added, “the house we found is great. The driveway is wide enough for almost a half-court game.”
She had no need to sell it to Ed when Connell was doing so much of the work for her.
“You want to move?” Ed asked again, as he shoved more bread into his mouth.
Connell nodded.
“Why not?” Ed said. “Let’s move.”
We Are Not Ourselves Page 27