We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “It’s not worth it,” she said. “We’ll leave it alone. Don’t worry, that kid will have bad luck after stealing from you.”

  Then she imagined the kid’s sniveling, triumphal expression, and she worked herself up into such a pique that she put Ed in the car and drove him back to the store. Ed peered into the plate-glass window, hands and nose pressed like a child.

  “That’s him,” he said, pointing.

  She stood staring in at the kid. He was black, and he wore his shirt untucked in the back. He moved gracefully, economically, his quick hands passing items across the scanner from the logjam at the end of the conveyor belt. He looked like someone used to moving faster than others, escaping undetected. He had probably had Ed in his aisle a few times. Maybe Ed had handed him his wallet and asked him to take the money out. Maybe this was the time the kid had taken advantage. Her blood pumped hard; there was a metallic taste in her mouth.

  “Sit on that bench,” she said to Ed.

  She went inside. The crisp, air-conditioned air in the store clashed with the muggy thickness of the August evening outside, and the shiver that overtook her inflamed her anger even further. She thought of going directly up to the kid’s aisle, but she didn’t want to appear hysterical; better to get the drop on him. She walked as casually as she could to the dairy aisle, where she picked up some eggs. When she got to the kid’s register, the man in front of her was paying. She plucked a pack of gum off the rack and set it on top of the eggs. She held up a crisp twenty.

  “I want all the change,” she said as quietly as she could while still conveying the extent of her displeasure. “All of it. And I will have your job if you ever do that to my husband again. And if you think you can come into this town from wherever the hell you come from and steal from people, you’re mistaken. I will have the police on you.”

  The kid gave the wad of gum in his mouth a few slow, aggressive chews as he slid the bills into his hand, gathered the coins, and snapped the receipt off the roll.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, handing them over and looking past her to the next customer, whose things he started to scan. She made a show of counting the change in front of the kid. She caught a glimpse of the customer behind her and resented the look he was giving her, which suggested it was she who was in the wrong.

  She didn’t move, though. She felt like she was just getting started.

  “I hope you live long enough to feel the shame you made him feel,” she said. “I hope you are a haunted, lonely old man someday. I hope you are sitting in a nursing home somewhere wondering where everyone is.”

  • • •

  He told her he went to church between Masses, when the doors were left open, and sat in the back. “It’s quiet,” he said. “Calm.”

  She thought about all the tangled noise in his brain. What did it sound like in there? She imagined it to be like the static on a radio tuned between stations.

  “What do you think about?” she asked.

  “You,” he said. “Connell. I don’t want things to be hard for you when I’m gone, and I don’t want him to get this. I’d do anything to avoid that.”

  The thought of Ed alone in that big church oppressed her.

  “If I write a prayer for you, will you use it?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  He might have been telling the truth.

  “Dear God,” she wrote, “I will offer this up to you without complaint, but please protect all I know and love.” She copied it out neatly onto an index card that she folded and put in his wallet.

  She never heard Ed ask, “Why me?” but she couldn’t help asking it for him. Why Ed? Why now? Why so young? There was the obvious answer—it was random, senseless, genetic, environmental—but she didn’t like that one. She also knew she couldn’t sign on to any system that said it had all happened for a reason. So she took a third path, the pragmatic one. It hadn’t happened for a reason, but they would find something to glean from it anyway. There didn’t have to be a divine plan for there to be meaning in life. People’s lives will be better because of his illness, she told herself. They’ll appreciate life more. He’ll remind them that their lives are better than they think. It was as good a story as any, and it had the virtue of often seeming plausible, though never when she lay awake at night, when the public life faded away, and other people vanished, and she was left staring at the back of her hand and thinking, All of this is an illusion, even the consolations. She was taken back to her bed when she was a child, when she would lie awake listening to her parents in the living room rehearsing their fixed roles after her father had returned from the bar, and she thought, No time has passed since then. I’m there right now. She remembered examining her hand then as well, and the only thing to differentiate this moment from any of a hundred in the past—the only thing that reassured her that the loop of her life wasn’t about to start over again—was the crenellated landscape of wrinkles around her knuckles, which she ran her fingers over, feeling their washboard knobbiness.

  58

  They were staying home on New Year’s Eve for the first time in the twenty-eight years since they’d met. Last year all they’d done was drive to the McGuires’ to watch the Times Square telecast, but at least they’d left the house. This year she couldn’t face all the work involved in getting him out. She knew she’d spend the whole night minding him and wouldn’t have any fun.

  New Year’s, being the anniversary of the night they met, meant extra to them. When they lived in Jackson Heights, they’d go to balls, Ed in a tux, she in a shimmering gown with pearls. She’d rush around in her slip, blow-drying her hair and applying makeup, and come up short when she saw Ed wrapped in a towel, staring into the mirror as he shaved. They’d leave Connell with Brenda Orlando and come back very late. She’d be contentedly exhausted the next morning as she got the three of them out to Mass.

  She sat at the kitchen table in her housecoat and slippers, her hair pulled back in a plastic clip. Connell sat across from her, reading the sports pages.

  “What are you doing for New Year’s?”

  “Going to a party with Cecilia.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Somewhere in White Plains. I don’t know.”

  “How were you planning to get there?”

  “I thought I’d take Dad’s car.”

  “Have you asked him yet?”

  “I didn’t think I had to. I thought you were staying home.”

  Something in his tone irked her. “We were,” she said. “But I’ve changed my mind. I think I’d like us to go out as a family.”

  “I have plans.”

  “The three of us are going to go to dinner. You can go out after that.”

  “I’m supposed to eat with Cecilia and her parents before the party.”

  “You’ll simply call her and tell her you’ll see her later.”

  “Whatever. Fine.”

  Connell left the room in a huff. She called to Ed in the den and told him to go shower. She went up and laid out a sports coat, dress shirt, tie, and neatly pressed pair of pants for him. She put on an evening gown and zipped the plastic sheath off her mink.

  • • •

  It was snowing out. The Caprice was in the driveway, blocking her car in the garage. Ed headed for the driver’s side door. She pulled on his arm.

  “You have your car key?” she asked Connell.

  “Yes.”

  “You drive. Your father and I are tired.”

  There was no way she was letting Ed drive in this weather. Even when it was perfect out, lately he gave her a heart attack any time he was behind the wheel. Backing out of the driveway once, he’d hit the stone wall, torn off the side-view mirror, and dragged an ugly streak down the length of the car. Outside church, he’d have run over an old lady in the crosswalk if Eileen hadn’t shouted and thrown her arm across his chest. She’d been trying to think of a way to take his car away from him without turning him against her. She didn’t w
ant to be the one to tell him that that part of his life was over. She couldn’t just take away his keys or sell the car, but she couldn’t just let him crash it either. Someone could end up dead. Ed could end up dead. She would have to figure something out soon.

  Connell hopped in. Ed got in the shotgun seat, she in the back. She watched him fumble with the belt buckle until Connell reached over and snapped it in.

  Connell turned to her. “Where are we going?”

  “Surprise us. Take us to the city. Someplace you like to go.”

  “You wouldn’t like the places I go,” he said. “Diners. Pizzeria Uno. I went to the Hard Rock Café once. Ed Debevic’s. You’d hate that place.”

  “Just drive. I’ll tell you where.”

  The snow was heavier than she’d expected. The roads had iced over. Connell drove carefully, gripping the wheel with both hands. At one point he slid a couple of car lengths and stopped just before he hit a hedgerow-lined stone wall.

  “We’d better not risk it,” he said. “We can go out in the neighborhood. The Tap. Town Tavern.”

  “Keep driving,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Tumbledown Dick’s.”

  “We’re going downtown,” she said firmly.

  “Buckle up, please,” he said.

  She saw him glancing in the rearview mirror. “You just worry about the road,” she said. When he looked away, she fastened the buckle.

  He crawled for another block before he lost control of the Caprice again. They slid a good distance and bounced, hard, off a BMW parked in the street.

  The seat belt was squeezing her ribs; she got it unbuckled. Adrenaline made her feel as if she’d touched an electric outlet. “Everyone all right?” Ed looked shocked, but he wasn’t hurt. Connell was fine. So was she.

  When she got out, she saw the other car’s rear end had been demolished, along with most of the front of the Caprice.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Connell said.

  “Watch that low-class language,” she snarled, and then she softened her tone. “Oh, hell. ‘Shit’ is right.”

  She picked her way carefully around the car, holding on as she walked from passenger-side door to the front fender, which was smashed into the wheel well. The frame on the chassis had buckled where it met the door. Ed sat shivering in the car, his hand fishing for the door handle.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have driven,” Connell said.

  “It’s not going to open, Ed!” she yelled, and shook her head at him. She turned to Connell. “Do you think it’s drivable?”

  “It looks pretty bad,” he said. The right front wheel was bent sideways as if kneeling toward the snowy ground. Connell scratched his ear. “I don’t know how the wheel got so bent. I wasn’t going fast.”

  “I’d say it’s done, wouldn’t you? A car this old?”

  “Probably.”

  “Go up there, tell them what happened. Ask them to call the police.” She pointed toward a house, atop a mound and recessed from the street, that looked like a mansion.

  She slid into the driver’s seat and reached across Ed—who was slapping at the top of his head with the grim determination of a mortifier of the flesh—into the glove compartment. She pulled out the envelope they’d used for years. It said “Insurance and Registration” in Ed’s old handwriting. It was hard to imagine the man who now communicated in thunderous block letters writing in this fluent script.

  She watched Connell disappear with the paperwork up the sloping stairs and started the car. The light from the one working headlamp diffused into the snow and reflected off the mangled BMW. She blasted the heat. When Ed reached to turn it off—it had to be unconscious, the force of habit, because no one, not even him, could be that absurd—she smacked his hand away and turned it up again.

  • • •

  She and the boy stood in the snow waiting for the tow truck to arrive. Ed was in the car.

  “What a disaster,” Connell said. “This is going to be expensive.”

  She’d fought endlessly with Ed over keeping collision on the Caprice. Time and again she’d said it was a waste of money on a ten-year-old car, but Ed had insisted.

  “Maybe not as expensive as it looks. Anyway, that’s what insurance is for.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “Nobody got hurt,” she said. “Nobody died. Cars can be replaced.” Or not, she thought. She felt a hint of a smile cross her lips but stifled it. “Well,” she said under her breath. “That’s one way to get rid of a car.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said, ‘That’s one way to ring in the New Year.’ ”

  “Happy New Year,” he said glumly.

  “Happy New Year.”

  • • •

  The AAA guy offered to drop them off at home before taking the car in. She sat on Ed’s lap in the seat, Connell between them and the driver.

  When they pulled into the driveway, Connell asked the driver if he’d mind giving him a lift to the train.

  She was flabbergasted. “You’re not still planning on going out?” He must have known that once inside, he wouldn’t be able to leave. The driver and Connell both looked to her for approval. “Go,” she said, annoyed, waving him off.

  She climbed off Ed and helped him out of the truck. The snow was now a few inches thick. She held his hand as he navigated the fluffy terrain. She punched in the code for the garage door and watched the truck pull out.

  Upstairs, she took off her string of pearls and changed out of her evening gown into a sweat suit. She got him ready for bed, in case he wanted to go up early.

  She pulled a half gallon of ice cream out of the freezer and took two spoons from the drawer, though the second spoon was a fig leaf for her own guilt. Ed would have two spoonfuls, tops.

  They sat through the lip-synched entertainment, waiting for the countdown. Ed fell asleep with his head back and his mouth open, hours before the New Year. She didn’t wake him.

  As midnight approached, she thought of the night they’d met, the way he’d leaned in to kiss her when the hour struck. She’d been waiting for him to do it all night. They’d been in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by hundreds of couples. When he kissed her, she experienced a sensation she’d heard described a thousand times but always dismissed as malarkey: that everyone around had disappeared, and it was just the two of them. And now it really was just the two of them, and everyone had more or less disappeared. The ball made its languorous drop; “1994” lighted up onscreen. She tried to remember what it had felt like to kiss him that first time. All she could remember was that he had begun simply, almost politely, and then he had taken her face in his two hands and kissed her with a sudden intensity, as if he had been waiting to do so for longer than the few hours he had known her. She knew right away that she would marry him. So many years had passed since that night that it was almost a different man she was looking at now. Hairs poked up over the neckband of his undershirt. His chest rose and fell weakly, as if he were not really breathing. She leaned over him, touched her lips to his. His eyes were closed now, as hers had been that night. She was afraid he’d startle awake and scream, or throw her off him, but he just started to kiss her in his sleep.

  • • •

  The Caprice was declared a total loss. She took the insurance payout and added it to their checking account.

  Maybe, she thought, she should use the money for a new car for herself. She was tired of buying American cars. Maybe she’d buy herself a sporty two-door BMW like the one Connell had crashed into, or one of those E-Class Mercedes that looked perfectly enameled and invincible. She wouldn’t have to cringe at the paint peeling from the roof, the felt bagging around the center light in the ceiling, the rusty creak and thunderclap of the door closing. She could get a car she wouldn’t be ashamed to park in the church lot.

  The boy could be expensive, but there were times he returned something on the investment.

  59

  People came from all
over for the funeral for Ed’s mother. It was the first time Eileen had seen Fiona leave Staten Island since the surprise party for Ed. Phil and Linda flew in from Toronto. Having Phil around seemed to add to Ed’s grief, not diminish it. It was as if Ed had finally realized that all the years they’d spent in different countries couldn’t be gotten back. The night before the funeral they’d sat at the kitchen table together for hours, Phil talking and Ed listening. Every time she went in there, Ed was crying big, unrestrained tears.

  Cora had been a force in the parish, St. Mary’s Star of the Sea in Carroll Gardens, and so the church was packed with a lot of people Eileen had never met. Ed didn’t seem any more at home than she felt in his childhood church. His face was so red during the services that she kept reminding him to breathe. Cora had been ill for a while, and she’d had a good, long life, but it looked as if it had never occurred to Ed that his mother would actually die.

  Eileen had always thought of Ed’s conscientious presence at his mother’s apartment, his willingness to go and change a bulb for her or pick her up groceries, as the fealty of a dutiful son, but the way he was responding to her death suggested a depth of feeling for her that Eileen hadn’t imagined. It might have had something to do with his condition. He was a step closer to death than an average person.

  Afterward, as everyone hurried to their cars—it was a frigid day in February—her aunt Margie asked Ed for directions to the cemetery.

  “Well,” he said, standing in front of the church, “where are you parked?”

  “Around the corner.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He was kneading his hands together as if they might release an answer. “You need to take the highway.”

  “Which one?”

  “The highway around here. God, what’s the name of it?”

  “You mean the BQE?”

  “Yes! That’s it.”

  “Where can I pick it up?”