We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  • • •

  One day in the last week of March, when she was waiting to have her hair cut, she heard the woman before her—who despite being a little older than her was wearing stiletto heels and had alternating streaks of chocolate, caramel, and butterscotch dye in her hair—tell the hairstylist about the miracle they’d performed cleaning her mink at Bronxville Furrier after she’d leaned against some wet paint. Eileen saw the fur hanging on the hook. It looked shiny and full, as if it had just gotten a cut, shampoo, and blowout itself. The way the woman discussed her fur, it was as though she were actually discussing something else, speaking in a secret code that Eileen could decipher only if she had the corresponding key. She’d had the thought before that a fur might just be the thing to make her feel she belonged in this town.

  A week later, when she walked past Bronxville Furrier and saw that they were having a spring sale, she went in and purchased a mink. It was so plush and full and enveloped her so thoroughly that she felt as though she had shrunk down to her teenaged size just by putting it on. In some quarters, it wasn’t so fashionable anymore to own a fur coat, what with all the work PETA activists had done to stigmatize the wearers of them, but fur seemed to still have a foothold in Bronxville. She had the two important things—money to buy it with, or at least a still-viable line of credit, and someone to go out with in it. Who knew how long either would last?

  “What about our rainy day savings?” Ed asked when he saw it.

  “If it rains any harder than this,” she said, “not even Noah’s Ark would save us.”

  • • •

  The weather was too warm for her new coat, but the Saturday after she’d bought it was chilly, and she decided that this might be the last chance she’d have to put it on for half a year. She made a reservation for seven o’clock at Le Bistro on Pondfield, the fancy place across from the post office that she’d been wanting to go to for months. She and Ed parked a few blocks up, where Kraft met Pondfield, because she wanted to take a little stroll through town and be seen. As soon as she started walking, though, she felt overdressed. No one else was in fur, and the truth was that she hadn’t seen many women her age in fur since she’d moved.

  By the time they reached the restaurant, she’d worked up such a sweat that she took it off before she went in. She’d had a vision of the maitre d’ taking it from her shoulders slowly, one arm at a time. It was heavy enough in her arms to feel like a sleeping child. She handed it over, hoping no one would see the transfer. She would have to try again next winter.

  For as long as she could remember, she’d wanted to wear a mink coat. Women in minks always looked as if they had no problems in the world. She’d spent her own good money on it—the credit card payment, in the end, came from her own money. She’d pay it off as soon as the bills settled down. She was almost proud to think of how much the total had come to, even after the off-season discount had been factored in.

  46

  Connell’s uncle Phil was in from Toronto. After dinner, Connell’s father began telling a story everyone had heard before about the summer he’d spent in college doing service work in Peru. The punch line involved the drastic height differential between himself and the priest in charge.

  “There I am, all six feet of me,” he said, “and—”

  “You’re not six feet,” Connell interrupted. “You always say you’re six feet. You’re like five eleven.”

  “I’m six feet tall,” his father said with dignity.

  “You wish you were six feet.” Connell had just measured himself, and he knew he was five ten and that his father wasn’t much taller. He went over and squared up against his father back-to-back. Then he made him take his shoes off. He took off his own Doc Martens.

  “Son, I’m six feet.”

  “Maybe you were once,” he said. “Maybe you’re shrinking.”

  “I’m not old enough to shrink.”

  “Maybe you are,” he said. “Maybe you’re losing it early, Dad. It would explain a lot.”

  His father gave him a quick, deadly stare. “Enough,” he said, and turned away. “Do you need a drink?” he said to Uncle Phil.

  “I’ll come with you,” Uncle Phil said.

  Connell followed them into the kitchen. “If you’re six feet,” he said, “then prove it.”

  “Let it go, son,” his uncle said.

  “Here,” Connell said. “The door’s right here. We’ll mark you off against it. Like we did for me in the old house.”

  His father looked annoyed, but he stood against the door. Connell made him take his shoes off again.

  “Five foot ten and three-quarters,” he pronounced as he made a deep score in the side of the door with the pencil.

  • • •

  Connell was emptying the dishwasher. He pulled up the handle of a knife whose blade had been broken off near the base. It was nothing but a stump.

  “This has seen its last day,” he said, holding it up to the light. “I’m getting rid of it.”

  He threw it out; his father walked over and quietly fished it from the garbage.

  “That knife is guaranteed for a lifetime,” his mother said with matter-of-fact triumph. “That’s a high-quality knife.”

  “I can tell,” Connell said archly.

  His father rubbed the handle between his fingers like a worry stone.

  “I’ve been meaning to call that company for a while now,” his mother said.

  Connell was incredulous. “Can we just get rid of it? You’re not going to call the company. What could you possibly do with that knife, Dad? Seriously.” He strained for a tone he would take with a father he could spar with, a tone he knew would hurt him.

  “You’d be surprised,” his father said. “I use this knife to stir my sauces.”

  “I am too going to call that company,” his mother said. “They’ll honor their guarantee.”

  “We have plenty of other knives. Why do we need this one?”

  “Your father bought that knife when we got married. He spent a lot of money on it at the time. Is that enough of an answer for you?”

  She looked on the verge of tears. He knew he shouldn’t have anything more to say.

  “Doesn’t mean you have to keep it forever,” he said.

  47

  Eileen had helped Ed with his classwork here and there throughout the year, but as the end of the spring semester approached, she found herself grading more and more of his lab reports and tests. He looked over her shoulder, explaining things. They each took a stack and went through them, and she checked his work at the end.

  For a year, he’d been gathering evidence toward a paper based on his government grant research, which he was going to present at a conference. After the diagnosis, he redoubled his efforts, staying late at the lab many nights. She knew she should have been proud of him for continuing to follow the faint trail of a fleeing ambition, and she was proud, sometimes, but she knew it would come to nothing—no new grants or appointments, no extra prestige, not even a completed paper—and she wished he were home with her instead. The nights were lonely, and it was a small compensation to imagine him sharing that loneliness with her from afar. She pictured him in his poorly lit lab, digging at his scalp as he scrutinized data skunked by faulty observations.

  • • •

  Ed took the study drugs twice a day. She wasn’t willing to risk his missing a dose, so she watched him swallow one every morning and every evening. After thirteen weeks, she brought him in for his first evaluation.

  “I feel like one of my rats,” he told her as they sat in the attached orange chairs in the waiting room. She gave him a quizzical look. “In the lab,” he said.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It is,” he said. “It’s okay, though. I can be the rat after all these years.”

  “Stop that, Edmund.”

  “Maybe it will help someone,” he said.

  “Maybe it will help you.”

  “I’m not the point of th
is. This is a trial. Other people are the point of this.”

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  “It’s fine. It’s science. I’m here for science.”

  She was silent for a while.

  “I’m the rat,” he said, more definitely now.

  “Fine,” she said. “You’re the rat.”

  “They all died eventually,” he said. “I never liked finding them stiff. It never got easier.”

  She imagined the stench from the cages, the dead eyes, the reduced bodies looking like cat toys. “It must have been unpleasant,” she said.

  “It was sad. It was a thankless job they had.”

  • • •

  They weighed him and took his vital signs, drew his blood and collected his urine, gave him an electrocardiogram and performed memory tests. They monitored his ability to do certain tasks. They had him play with blocks. They had him cut meat. They had him write things. Writing was the hardest thing to get him to do. He hated his own handwriting. It was more proof than he was willing to look at.

  At the end, they handed her enough drugs to last Ed the thirteen weeks until his next scheduled visit. There was a jolt of promise in the bag of medications. She wondered for a moment whether, if she gave him the whole bag at once, he would be his old self for a few days, an afternoon, a couple of hours. It would be worth it, even if the rest of the time he was a mess. She knew it didn’t work like that, though. His real self wasn’t hiding in there waiting to be sprung for a day of freedom. This was his real self now.

  48

  It was a Tuesday in early July. They were lying in bed with the windows open. She tried reading a novel but felt jittery and distracted until she gave up and retrieved one of her Alzheimer’s books from the pile she kept hidden under the bed. Ed was supposed to be reading, but he had his hands folded across his chest and was looking at the ceiling.

  Four months had passed since the diagnosis. She had gotten swept up in the strange logic of that moment—Don’t tell a soul—but it was clear that Ed couldn’t be counted on to know when enough was enough.

  She couldn’t just tell people herself, because she knew Ed wouldn’t forgive her for betraying his trust.

  She closed her book and propped herself on her elbow to face him. “How about if we have a dinner? Invite our closest friends over. We can tell them all at once.”

  “I’d prefer if we didn’t.”

  “It would be easier than telling everyone individually.”

  “Who says we have to tell them individually?”

  “A nice dinner party,” she said. “It would make it feel like a team effort to tackle this thing. I’ll see if I can get it together for Saturday.”

  He gritted his teeth. “You sound determined.”

  “We’ll have to tell Connell.”

  “That’s where I draw the line,” he said, almost growling. “I’m not telling him yet. I don’t want him to see me that way, reduced like that. I still want to be his father.”

  “You’ll always be his father,” she said, but instead of soothing him she only disturbed herself with thoughts of what that “always” implied—the time when the disease would have tangled his synapses and hobbled him, when he would no longer be all there.

  “In any event,” Ed said, “I want to wait.”

  Connell was often playing baseball or in the city or at a friend’s house. When he was home, he stayed in his room. If she was extremely careful, she could keep it from him a little longer.

  “Fine,” she said. “We’ll hold it back a bit. But you’d better prepare for it. We can’t keep it from him forever.”

  “I could.”

  “Honey, no offense—you couldn’t.”

  “If I’m not alive,” Ed said darkly, “then he doesn’t have to see me like that. He can remember me as I was.”

  “That’s nice. That’s just lovely. You get that goddamned thought out of your head this instant. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “If it could just stay like this,” he said, his tone changing, “I could live with it.” He pulled the sheet up under his chin.

  “Maybe the drugs will start working,” she said. “Or if these drugs don’t work, there’ll be others that work better. The science will catch up to this disease. And we’re going to do everything we can in the meantime. We’re going to be very busy. You’re going to stay alert. You’re going to read a lot.” She looked at his book on the nightstand, which he hadn’t picked up in days. “We’ll do the crossword together, we’ll go to plays and operas. We’ll go on trips. We’ll keep this thing at bay.” She took his hand; it felt stiff, a little cold. She put her other hand on his chest to feel his heart beat.

  She didn’t know how much of what she’d said she believed, but it felt good to say it. She went back to her book. The chapter she was reading discussed how the disruption of context might accelerate the patient’s decline. Familiar settings and people, it suggested, could have a prophylactic effect on memory loss.

  She thought of how strenuously Ed had fought leaving Jackson Heights. Had she exposed him to harm in moving him to Bronxville? A guilty feeling took root in her thoughts and blossomed into panic.

  “We can’t afford to wait to tell Connell,” she said. “What if he finds out for himself? What if he overhears me on the phone?”

  “Don’t talk on the phone.”

  “We have to tell him tomorrow,” she said.

  “Give it another week.”

  “Fine,” she said. “This Saturday is the dinner. The one after that, we tell Connell.”

  “He has a game that day.”

  “You have his schedule memorized?”

  “He plays every Saturday.”

  “After his game, then. Trust me. It’s the best thing.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I trust you.”

  She was strangely disappointed to hear him give in so easily. She understood that this new relationship of theirs signaled the beginning of the end of the old one. He would have to become something like a child to her.

  • • •

  The afternoon of the dinner, as she was running around getting the last things ready, Ed came in and told her to call it off.

  “It’s not true,” he said. “It’s a lie we’d be telling them.”

  “Honey,” she said.

  “It’s a lie.”

  It was too late; the Cudahys, possibly the McGuires, were already on their way. Dishes were simmering on the stove.

  “These are our friends.”

  “It’s a lie.”

  “Would it be easier for you if I told them myself?”

  “Do what you want,” he said, waving his hand at her in a way that called to mind an angry old man.

  “They’ll be here in a little while. Tell me what to do.”

  “This is your affair,” he said. He ran the tap and put a glass under it. Water filled the glass and spilled up over the sides. He held it under for a while. It looked as if he was making a little fountain out of it.

  “I think we should do it the way we discussed.”

  “No!” he said sharply. “They don’t need to know anything. It’s all a lie.”

  “Do you think they can’t tell anything?” she found herself shouting. “You think they can’t figure it out? You think they don’t have eyes and ears?” She paused. “And brains?” She regretted it as soon as she’d said it.

  “They won’t see anything,” he said, seething. “There’s nothing to see.” He left the room.

  She found him stewing on the front stairs and took a seat beside him. “We have to tell them sometime.” She reached to touch him, but he flinched away. The neighbors across the street were pruning their flowers. She hadn’t met them yet. She had wanted to wait to introduce herself until she felt herself to be operating from a position of strength, but that time hadn’t come, and she felt too self-conscious to go over there now that they had looked at each other so many times across hedgerows without waving.

  “There
’s nothing to tell.”

  “Would you rather nobody knew?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Because if you want to do this alone, just us and Connell, I can’t. Maybe I’m not as strong as you. I thought I was, but I need all the support I can get. Now more than ever.”

  He turned and looked at her.

  “I won’t say anything tonight,” she said. “We can do this when you’re ready. On one condition.”

  He was blinking intently.

  “Until then, don’t make me feel like I’m alone with this. Connell needs to know. Let’s deal with the reality of this. Other people, fine. But I need to know we in this house are going to deal in reality.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “You have Alzheimer’s.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “This is what I’m talking about,” she said. “We need to stick together on this.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Good.”

  “I know you know,” she said. “But I need to hear it from you.”

  “I do know.”

  “Say it, then.”

  “Say what?”

  “Say that you have Alzheimer’s.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “I’m not saying any such thing.”

  • • •

  She almost didn’t care if he didn’t join them. She could tell them he was sick, and if he chose to wander in, she could joke about a miraculous recovery. Maybe they’d think it strange; maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d notice things; maybe they’d have blinders on. She couldn’t worry about managing impressions anymore. She almost couldn’t care anymore whether they wandered upstairs and saw the state of disrepair her house was in, outside the carefully curated area for hosting guests.

  Frank and Ruth, Cindy and Jack, Tom and Marie, Evan and Kelly: they arrived all at once, as if they’d rented a bus for the occasion. She tried to distract them with drinks and a flurry of hanging coats and shuttling dishes. She was trying to think of an alibi for Ed when he appeared in the door to a round of salutations.

  She directed everyone to the dining room. She had decided to say that the occasion for their gathering was no occasion, that they simply wanted to see close friends and didn’t want to wait until Christmas to do so. It wasn’t a lie, exactly; she was very happy to have them there. For months now, she’d had to make excuses for not seeing them.