We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  She used the proximity of Frank’s birthday as an excuse to stick him at the head, Ed’s regular seat. She sat Ed next to her. If Frank figured it out, she could count on him not to say anything. When the chatter was at its loudest, she filled Ed’s plate.

  She was angry at Ed for putting off the telling of their friends. She didn’t care if he spilled food on himself or knocked his drink into his lap. He was on his own. She tried to absorb herself in conversations, but for the first time she derived little relief from the gathering of all these people. She ate distractedly enough to move even Jack to ask between courses if anything were the matter.

  Deep into the main course, Ed tapped on his wineglass. She squeezed his knee instinctively. He struggled to his feet.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said as the voices lowered. She stood as well, to be beside him. “I wanted to have all of you here,” he said. “My good friends. It’s good to see you.”

  He paused for long enough that it seemed he had stopped. She rubbed his back encouragingly. No one knew how to react. It was sort of funny, what he’d said; it was anticlimactic. She almost expected Frank or Jack to say, “Good to see you too. Now have a seat so we can eat.” They couldn’t, though, because Ed looked so deadly serious.

  “I wanted to tell you that we’ve had some news,” he said. “It isn’t good news.”

  Nobody moved; nobody said a word.

  “We’ve had some tests done. And talked to some good doctors.”

  It amazed her to hear him talk about Dr. Khalifa with such equanimity. Something deep in him was surfacing, some essential fiber in his character. Then he stopped again. His leg was shaking. He was steadying himself on the table. It struck her that he had tried his best. He had tried to spare her from having to tell them, but she would have to do it regardless. She put her hand on his shoulder to urge him into his seat.

  “It looks like I have Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.

  A second of stunned silence, then a round of gasps, hands held to mouths, looks of concern. Frank pounded the table and peppered Ed for details. Jack questioned the diagnosis. Evan and Kelly moved their seats closer together and pledged their support while holding hands. Cindy cried. Marie sat morose. Ruth made attempts at jokes. Tom drank whole glasses of wine in long quaffs and kept pulling his napkin through the circle formed by his thumb and forefinger. Nobody touched their food. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to serve dessert. She asked everyone if they’d like to move into the other room to sit with the news. They came up and hugged Ed one by one. He seemed more physically confident, quicker on the uptake, as if he had lanced a malignancy that had been draining his essence. She shuddered to imagine how much of his mental energy had gone into keeping everyone in the dark. In its own way, it had been a feat of fortitude.

  Jack came up to her in the kitchen, chewing around his words as though they were a shell he was trying not to swallow.

  “How could you do that? How could you embarrass that man like that?”

  She had to hold her hand down to keep it from smacking his face. “This was Ed’s choice,” she said firmly.

  “No man would choose that.” He turned and headed to the other room with the stiff uprightness of a former military man.

  She had to remind herself that men took news like this differently than women did. She’d seen that for years working in hospitals. The bigger they were, the more uneasy they acted around revelations of disaster.

  “It’s a matter of plaque deposits,” Ed was saying when she returned to the living room. Talking about the diagnosis had empowered him; he sounded professorial.

  “Plaque deposits,” Frank repeated, a stunned vacancy in his voice. “I take care of plaque deposits.”

  “Synapses get rerouted,” Ed said. “Brain mass decreases. Functionality suffers.”

  Whatever had happened to his short-term memory, Ed’s long-term memory was, at least for now, an impregnable fortress. The clinical detachment with which he discussed what was happening neurophysiologically might have made you forget he was talking about himself. He seemed to welcome the chance to talk in this abstracted way. The faces of the people around him registered an appreciation of his aplomb, and a somber awareness settled into all of them of how terrible it was that such a fertile mind had been subject to this perverse accident of biology.

  “Early-onset is the most virulent kind,” she said to Marie in the kitchen. “It dismantles motor functions and speech as it erases the memory.” She paused. “It’s the true Alzheimer’s,” she said, with something like pride at the thought that if her husband were to be destroyed by a degenerative neurological disorder, it would be the undiluted article, the aristocrat of brain diseases.

  • • •

  Everyone stayed later than usual. No one seemed to know when it would be okay to leave. Maybe they didn’t want to face the road yet, their dark thoughts, the reduced company of their spouses. Eventually Ed got cranky. “Is this thing ever going to end?” he asked, and went up to bed in a huff without pausing to say good night. Ruth raised her eyebrows, and Eileen raised hers back, and then Ruth started herding people toward the door.

  After the other guests had said their good-byes and were making their way down the back steps, Ruth and Frank were all that remained. Frank filled a thermos with coffee for the trip back.

  “I knew something was wrong,” he said.

  “It must have been obvious.”

  “I don’t know how to process all this. It’s like it isn’t real.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “It scares me,” he said. “I think about it myself sometimes. When I lose my keys, when I forget where I parked my car.”

  Frank did look scared. The pallor on his cheeks gave him a vaguely cadaverous look.

  “You can talk to him, you know. He’s still your friend. He’s still here.”

  “I don’t know how to talk to him about this.”

  “Just open your mouth and see what comes out.”

  Frank shuffled out the door with his thermos held like a lantern, and Ruth gave her a long hug, and then Eileen was alone in the kitchen. Dishes and glasses were scattered everywhere, and food had to be covered in plastic or scraped into the garbage. She had never before been relieved to see her house left in such a mess. She wouldn’t have to turn the lights off and head upstairs for an hour at least.

  • • •

  The following Saturday, they ate in the languid silence that followed games in which Connell pitched. His exhaustion passed to the two of them through some invisible membrane.

  “How did you do?” she asked.

  The gleaming newness of the kitchen hadn’t yet faded; it still felt like someone else’s room.

  “Fine,” Connell said.

  “Fine,” Ed said, amused. “He did more than fine. He struck out—what?” He looked to Connell.

  “Thirteen.”

  “And not one batter made solid contact,” Ed said.

  “I also walked eight guys.”

  “His control is an issue, there’s no denying it. He was pitching out of jams the whole game. He threw a ton of pitches.”

  As if on cue, Connell rubbed his shoulder.

  “But the sky’s the limit. A lefty with this kind of velocity? If he keeps working at it, he’s going to be a force.”

  She waited for Ed to transition into the discussion of the disease. She caught his eye; he shook his head to say the plan was off. She tried to indicate displeasure, but he looked down at his soup to avoid her gaze.

  “Ed,” she said, coughing. He looked up.

  Connell’s eyes were heavy with fatigue. Ed stood up and put his hand on Connell’s head for a second and tousled his locks affectionately. He walked over to the sink and gazed out the window.

  “What’s up? You guys fighting again?”

  “No,” Ed said, still looking out the window. “Just listen to your mother.”

  “You’re getting older now,” she said. �
�You’re getting to the point where you can hear adult things.” Connell sat up straighter in his seat. “The things adults talk about. What your father and I talk about.”

  “Please don’t tell me this is about the birds and the bees. I’m way too old for that.”

  She couldn’t hold back a thin, sad smile. She felt a lump in her throat. “We’ve got some bad news,” she said.

  The boy’s jocular expression faded. “What is it?”

  “It has to do with your father’s health,” she said after a bit.

  Ed turned around and walked back toward the table. He sat. “What your mother is trying to say is that I have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.”

  “Do you know what that is?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He looked back and forth between them. “It’s where you forget things.”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that what old people get?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Most of the time. But sometimes it happens to younger people.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “There’s not a lot of medicine out there,” he said. “I’m on some experimental drugs. We’ll see. But it’s going to get worse.”

  “Are you scared?”

  This was the first time she’d seen anyone ask Ed how it affected him personally. It had always been questions about the illness. She hadn’t even asked him herself.

  Ed straightened up. His eyes got a crinkly, philosophical look in them. “Sometimes I am, sure,” he said. “That’s part of it, no question about it.” He looked at the sugar bowl, the top of which he’d been clacking like a cymbal. “I like my life. I love my life. I don’t want to lose it.”

  “Aren’t you too young for this?”

  “If you’re asking me, yes,” he said. “If you’re asking the disease, no.”

  “How quickly will it get worse?”

  “Honey,” she said to him, “don’t pepper your father with questions.”

  Ed put up a hand to quiet her.

  “It could be quick,” he said. “It could be years. Every case is different.”

  Connell seemed to chew on what he’d heard for a little while.

  “Is there going to be a time when you don’t know who I am?” he asked.

  Ed’s face took on a fierce expression, as though the question had angered him. She thought to intervene, but then he rose from his seat and leaned down to put his arms around the boy.

  “I will always know who you are,” Ed said, kissing the top of his head. “I promise you that. Even if you think I don’t know, even if I seem not to. I will always know who you are. You’re my son. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  “You neither,” he said, rising to hug his father.

  She started clearing the dishes.

  “Mom,” Connell said. He held out his gangly arm to her.

  She walked over and stood near them. Connell seemed to urge her to join them in some sort of embrace. She had wanted him to hear, and now that he’d heard, she wanted him to come to terms with it and carry on stoically, but he was a different kind of creature from her. She and Ed had worked to give him an easier life than they’d had. Sometimes she wondered if she’d erred in not making him tougher.

  The idea of a group hug embarrassed her and she couldn’t comply. There was going to be more darkness than hugs could begin to dispel. She thought of this embrace he was offering as the come-on of a huckster selling a spurious remedy. She gave him three quick, sharp pats on the back, as if to punctuate some unstated conclusion, and headed upstairs.

  49

  After they’d finally told Connell, she could talk openly with her girlfriends about Ed’s condition. She called them every night—Ruth, Cindy, Marie, Kelly, Kathy, her aunt Margie—going through the lineup, dialing a new number the instant she’d hung up with the first. She didn’t want to be interrupted once she’d started, so she waited to make the calls until after dinner, when Ed was in his study grading lab reports and writing out lectures. Her friends invariably ended whatever calls they were on when she rang through. She didn’t always know what she was going to talk about when she picked up the phone, but the conversations followed their own rhythms, and they always had to do with Ed. She didn’t even try to talk about other things. She thought if she talked it out enough, she could make it more familiar, less overwhelming, less frightening.

  Whenever she called the McGuires and Frank answered, he handed it right to Ruth. Once, about a month after the dinner at which they’d told Ruth and Frank and the others about Ed, Frank annoyed her with the way he rushed off, and she asked Ruth to hand the phone back to him.

  “Where the hell did you go?” she asked. “Why haven’t you called? Why hasn’t he seen you? Why haven’t you taken him out for a beer? Why haven’t any of you goddamned guys taken him out? He’s in that study night after night.”

  “I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

  “He knows that. Just call him and say hello.”

  “I will,” Frank said.

  Frank didn’t call, though, and a week later she got Ruth to put him on. She pretended Frank had called and handed the phone to Ed. She was afraid Ed would notice that the phone hadn’t rung, but he just took the phone and started talking to Frank like a teenager, his excitement palpable. She listened to Ed’s end of the conversation, which lasted an hour. Nothing about the disease came up. That was one difference between men and women. Men got along fine without revealing anything. She almost admired them for it. The downside was that they retreated to their islands.

  When she took the phone back from Ed, she made Frank promise to call Ed again soon, but Frank didn’t call, and the next time they went to the McGuires’, Frank hardly spoke at dinner, and they left right after dessert.

  • • •

  Eileen had been telling Ruth about the anxiety dreams she was having about all her teeth falling out and her skin peeling off her body, when Ruth surprised her by suggesting she see a psychologist. She was amazed to hear Ruth speak of the positive experience she’d had in therapy. She didn’t even know Ruth had ever been in therapy. It was nearly impossible to imagine. It wasn’t that Ruth was a stone; she was in fact tirelessly empathetic when listening to the troubles and pains of others, and she always made time for her friends. It was just that she herself never gave anything away. You wouldn’t catch her crying if you tied her up and strangled her cats before her eyes one at a time. For years, Eileen had taken at face value Ruth’s assertion that, having more or less raised her younger siblings, she’d decided she was done bringing children up. Then, late one night when the men were asleep, Ruth admitted she’d been terrified to wreck a kid’s life with drink the way her mother had done. Ever since, when Eileen saw Ruth looking at Connell with affection, she knew there was more in Ruth’s heart than she’d admit to anyone, including Frank.

  Eileen had dismissed therapy as an indulgence for those with too much time and money and too few friends. Besides, Catholics didn’t go to shrinks; that was what the confessional booth was for. What were you supposed to do, though, when you hadn’t been to confession since your early twenties? She pictured herself enumerating her sins for an hour and a half, being handed an inexhaustible list of prayers to recite, and leaving with no more clarity than she’d had going in.

  Ruth’s therapist was named Dr. Jeremy Brill, and his office was near Ruth’s, a block from the Flatiron Building. He greeted Eileen at the door and directed her to an armchair. Eileen looked around for the couch she’d been expecting, but there was only a mahogany desk, two armchairs, and a trio of reassuring diplomas—Harvard, Cornell, Yale—on the wall above a little bookcase. The room was dark except for a floor lamp and the little light that came through the slatted blinds.

  Dr. Brill sat in an armchair and asked her to speak. She found it easier to begin than she had expected. She was talking about her mother and father, her youth in Woodside, her life in Jackson Heights, her career, even Mr. Kehoe, and after she’d b
een speaking for a while, she felt the first sprigs of unburdening bloom in her chest. After she’d subsided into silence, it gratified her to hear Dr. Brill—he insisted that she call him Jeremy, but that wasn’t going to happen, even though he was at least ten years younger than her—say that Ed must possess superior intelligence to preserve outward normalcy for as long as he had.

  “A less intelligent man might have given himself up long ago,” Dr. Brill said. “Who knows how long he’s been keeping this hidden?”

  He prodded her to speak about the way Ed’s illness made her feel, and though she’d vaguely decided beforehand to parry such questions, she began to speak with a pointedness and clarity that surprised her, until, many minutes later—it amazed her how silent Dr. Brill remained, how he seemed to draw the words out of her as though hypnotizing her with his eyes, which narrowed and widened to some hidden rhythm—she felt the engine of her thoughts wind down, midsentence. He told her their time for that session was up.

  The next time, she didn’t feel comfortable talking. After an initial greeting, Dr. Brill didn’t say anything either. A long silence settled into the Oriental rug. It put her in mind of the silent treatment Ed sometimes gave her, or the standoffs Connell would enact as a little boy, when he stubbornly refused to speak.

  “What’s your biggest fear?” Dr. Brill asked after a while.

  “I’m not quite sure,” she said. “Probably being alone.”

  Another silence.

  “And why is that?”

  “Who wants to be alone?”

  “Some people might.”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “Do you feel that your husband is leaving you alone?”

  “Sometimes I do, I suppose. Yes. I guess I do.”

  “I understand,” he said. “This is a disease where you never win. It doesn’t just take down the sufferer. It takes down the spouse, the children, the friends. It can feel tremendously isolating.”