We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “So did my son.” She guessed the boy was attending the same high school as Connell, which was a powerhouse in debate, but she didn’t want to embarrass him by asking, in case he hadn’t gotten in. “You have a sister, I remember. Is she here?”

  “She’s at Yale,” Mr. Thomas said proudly. “We don’t see her often. Only holidays—and every other weekend, when she needs to do the laundry.” He chuckled at the absurdity of her coming all that way to wash her clothes, but Eileen also heard delight in the fact that his daughter, while being a high achiever on her way to a rewarding professional life, was still, in the end, his daughter.

  Just as a heavy feeling was about to settle into Eileen at how long it had been since her son had washed his clothes in her machine at home, which she now ran only about once a week, Mrs. Thomas emerged from the kitchen and let out a surprised cry at seeing a stranger there. She must have been so absorbed in her cooking that she hadn’t heard the knock at the door. Eileen knew that feeling well—the exigencies of household duties, the making of a meal for a pair of mouths that showed their appreciation by the way they wolfed it down. It had always moved her to watch her husband and son eat.

  “Hello,” the woman said, turning to her husband for an explanation.

  “Anabel, this is Mrs. Leary.”

  “Mrs. Leary?”

  Of course it was the husband, and not the wife, who recognized her, because her perpetual industry allowed him a clear head, and she barely had a brain left at the end of a day of housework. Eileen felt herself straighten up in respectful solidarity.

  “Mrs. Leary, from whom we bought the house,” he added.

  Her hand went to her mouth to stifle the sound of her shock. “Oh! Welcome! What brings you here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood.”

  “Forgive me, I’m a mess.” She gestured to the apron tied around her waist, a prominent, fresh stain on its front. “Vijay, please take Mrs. Leary’s jacket.” So that was the boy’s name. It had taken the wife’s entrance for this crucial detail to emerge. Thomas Thomas could have been Ed standing there in a somehow still-charming dereliction of protocol. The boy came over and helped the jacket off Eileen’s shoulders one at a time. “May I show you around?” the woman asked. “I’m sure you’re curious to see the house.”

  Eileen was curious. She was so refreshed to behold how accurate the woman—Anabel—had been in her perception, how sensitive to nuance, that she almost didn’t answer right away.

  “I would love to see it,” she said. “My name is Eileen.”

  Their shake was firm, appreciative—collegial. Anabel led her to the kitchen, which smelled like cardamom and curry. They had turned it into a galley kitchen. There was much more counter space now. They had granite slabs, not unlike the ones in her house. There was even a space to eat, with bar stools pushed under it, but she could tell they ate their meals in the dining room. The renovations were tastefully done, the sort she would have approved of had she and Ed committed the money to making them—had she not known in the back of her mind that she was thinking of some other house every time she looked at her own. Anabel gave her a quick tour. They had redone the bathroom: new tiles, a new clawfoot tub, a beautiful pedestal sink. They had converted one of the closets in the master bedroom into a little bathroom. She’d always wished for an extra bathroom on that floor, so she wouldn’t have to walk down to the basement when someone else was using it. New baseboard molding lined the house. Everywhere were elements obviously Indian—silk tapestries, carved wood figurines, an enameled brass vase—but there were also crosses on the walls, and a picture of the pope in the master bedroom. It took her a moment to register that this had once been her bedroom with Ed. Nothing in it looked the same. The bed seemed to radiate the life and energy of years of a couple sleeping side by side in it.

  “How are your husband and son?”

  She didn’t have it in her at that moment to deflect the question in an obfuscating ramble. “My husband died last March,” she said.

  “Oh! I’m so sorry! Mrs. Leary!”

  “Thank you,” she said. “And please call me Eileen.”

  “It must be strange to be back here.”

  “It’s nice, actually.”

  “Please stay for dinner. We’re just about to eat.”

  She knew what to say when politeness was extended in the due course of decency: I have to get going or I really can’t stay, whatever made it easier for everyone to save face and return to their regular lives. But she didn’t want to say any of that right now. She was so very tired. She wanted to stay there with these people in the attractive home they’d made of what she’d left behind. Something about these environs struck her as oppressively and irreducibly different, and yet she could imagine never leaving them. She didn’t look forward to returning to her empty house, with the wind screaming, the branches shushing against the siding, and the fear of someone creeping in through the window troubling her sleep. So much life filled this home that there was no way to feel dread in it, but then she’d seen that there was no way to feel dread in anyone’s home but one’s own. Something was sacred in being a guest.

  She was led to the dining room table and directed to sit. Thomas and Vijay shut the television off and made their way to the table with murmuring contentedness in their voices.

  “Do you like Indian food?” Thomas asked, breaking the spell as Anabel slipped into the kitchen. Eileen froze in terror. She’d sat already, had begun to arrange her napkin in her lap, so there was no way out. The last thing she wanted was to act discourteously to these people, but the truth was that she hated Indian food, hated the very sight of it—its little lakes of earth-toned sauces, its hillocks of meat in blasted landscapes of mud. She had smelled the spices but thought of them as an inevitable detail—a tribal marker, not part of the daily routine. She had somehow failed to consider that the Thomases actually made Indian food at home. Wasn’t the way forward to assimilate? She didn’t know how to read these people who blended in but didn’t, who were like her but weren’t, whose kids got where her own kid got, or even beyond, but started somewhere else entirely.

  How could she say she hated their food? She would have to explain everything—how she’d come to feel about the neighborhood, about her life, about the world as she’d wanted it to be: simple, predictable, familiar. It wasn’t about their food. It was the smell, the spices, the strangely proliferating condiments, the mystery of its preparation. It was the fact that she’d had no choice about it. So many Indians were there all of a sudden and so many of her friends were gone. At some point all the restaurants in the neighborhood had become Indian restaurants. Then the last of her friends had left, and the Indian restaurants had remained and seemed to multiply. She couldn’t stand the sight of the stuff, and now she was about to be served it.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had it.”

  And that, finally, was the truth. For all her revulsion, for all the times she’d insisted she couldn’t take a single bite without gagging, she’d never actually tasted it. It had been easier to say she had, because there had been less to explain. It had been easier to say, “I don’t like it,” instead of, “I’m too angry to try it.” But you couldn’t lie to yourself forever.

  Her throat was constricted and dry. She took a long drink of water, almost the entire glass.

  “You’re in for a treat,” Thomas said upon the entrance of his wife bearing platters. He listed names of dishes; Eileen was too keyed up to register them. He spooned out a plate for her as Vijay passed her a bowl filled with bread that resembled thin, soft mattresses. After she had her plate, the others filled theirs in turn, and the scent wafting up at her was not as offensive as she’d imagined it would be; there was a sweet pungency to it. The mound on her plate was the color of Mars. There was no turning back.

  Thomas said the name of the dish again, and she speared some on her fork. As she bit into it, she registered that it was chicken, and also that there was tomato in
the sauce, and cream of some sort, as well as some indeterminate spices. There was something complex and contradictory about it, a mildness and a stoutness that competed for primacy, and on top of these a pleasing fullness in the mouth, the medley of textures bolstered by stray grains of rice. She was aware of how she had no competing memory with which to dull the vibrancy of this experience. If to taste forgotten foods was to reanimate the past, then a different kind of reminder, a reminder of future possibility, waited in unfamiliar flavors. She was making a new memory. She was eating Indian food. She’d never thought she’d live to see the day.

  “It’s good,” she said, trying to be measured, until she couldn’t hold back. “It’s really very good.” She placed her fork on her plate, straightened up in surprise, and saw them looking at her warmly. It was only then that she registered that they were sitting in the same arrangement she and Ed and Connell had sat in in that room—the father nestled into the table’s head, his back to the window, the boy with his back to the mirror, the wife across from him, ready to shuttle dishes. Eileen was in the seat that had often gone empty at her own table. She’d looked at it in the middle of meals and thought how nice it would be to have someone drop in unannounced and bring the world to her. She’d never imagined the scene from the visitor’s vantage point, how complete a picture of life it might have presented, how much it might have looked as if everything that mattered in the world was there already.

  “I didn’t know what I was missing,” she said, and because there was no way to say what she was thinking without telling her whole story, she picked up her fork, took another bite, and hoped they’d see something more than mere politeness in the smile that was spreading across her face.

  Epilogue

  2011

  The day had been a muggy slog, everything moving at half speed. He had the windows open and the fans on, but the air just sat in the room, menacing them. The looming final exam made him rush through the lesson, lecturing more than he liked to. Ordinarily, once the weather turned this warm, sophomores would do anything to avoid the indignity of actual learning, but the extreme heat had sunk them into a state that resembled attentive silence. It was also the class period before lunch. They didn’t draw chalk-dust penises on loose-leaf paper and slap them on each other’s backs, or put on goofy accents when asked to read, or read unbearably slowly on purpose, or read the last word of every sentence in unison. He used to love these muggy days at the beginning, but now that he was a veteran, now that he commanded respect and attention, they were the days he enjoyed least, because he could feel the limits of his craft. There was always room for improvement. He felt almost pleased when Carmine Priore threw his book in the air and told him to end the charade and let them out early: at least it was a sign of life.

  Toward the end of class, he realized he’d forgotten what they were discussing, what point he was about to make, even what book they were talking about. He turned to the blackboard for help, but found no clue there, save for a single word, “Empathy,” scrawled and underlined, apparently by him. He looked to one of the desks in front. The Metamorphosis. He began to panic. His first thought was Alzheimer’s, and terror moved through him. He was only thirty-four.

  He took a deep, deliberate breath. He simply had to relax. He knew The Metamorphosis. He knew these kids too: there was Nick Indelicato and Tommy Daulton; there was Marvin Neri; there was Brendan King; there, asleep—he slapped his hand on the desk and the boy jerked up violently—was Carmine Priore.

  As for him, he was Connell Leary, Con-Man to his friends, Mr. Leary to his students. He would be Mr. Leary to them when they were forty and had kids of their own.

  He tried to shake it off, but the waterlogged, blank feeling persisted in his head. Terror welled up in him. It was no dream. His room, an ordinary classroom that he shared with a colleague in the history department, was appointed with maps of the ancient and modern world, a poster of Shakespeare, another of Thomas Jefferson, a framed reproduction of David’s Death of Socrates. The faces of the boys flashed with delight as the electric silence deepened. They looked at each other and began to murmur.

  “Quiet!” he shouted. “Quiet this instant!” He heard his own voice and thought he sounded not like himself but like one of those teachers in the movies, impossibly stuffy. He needed to act quickly if he wanted to maintain authority. “I will wait here all day until you gentlemen are ready to learn,” he said, walking over to his father’s desk. “And you can wait with me.” He paused, long and fruitlessly. “We’re going to do something important. We’re going to take control of our educations. You gentlemen are going to own this material. You’re going to teach it to me as if I don’t know it. One of you is going to come up here and be the teacher.” They emitted a collective theatrical groan. “Or else we can have a surprise quiz,” he said, to louder protests. He settled on Justin Nix in the back row—Justin of the kind, broad face and the nearly perfect indifference to the grammatical conventions of standard written English. Justin pointed to his chest and mimed looking behind him for another student as the kids laughed.

  “Okay, Mr. Leary,” Justin said, rising and high-stepping toward the front of the room. “Here I come. I’m going to be Mr. Leary, guys.”

  He handed Justin a piece of chalk. “Go to work,” he said. “What do we know? What do we need to know?”

  He fell into his chair, overwhelmed by the hothouse smell of teenage boys baking in the heat. He heard Justin at half volume, as though from the bottom of a pool. Justin wasn’t teaching The Metamorphosis. He was doing an impression of the way Mr. Leary stood at the board, the way he rubbed the top of his head and pushed his glasses up. Justin had his gestures down cold. A minute into this pantomime, Connell felt the air come back into his lungs. The kids were watching for his reaction. “You’ve really helped,” he said, trying to sound calm, sarcastic. He didn’t want them to know he meant it. “I think we’ve all benefited enormously from this little display. Give him a hand.”

  They burst into exaggerated applause, ironic hoots, and arm pumps—a release of pent-up energy. He brought another kid up, and a third; they said some things about the book. Then he rose from his chair, willing himself to feel refreshed and in possession of all his powers.

  “What I want you to consider,” he began, “is that as soon as the door is opened and Gregor’s parents see the enormous bug for the first time, they immediately know it’s their son. Did this strike any of you as strange? Why didn’t they rush to check for Gregor in the closet? Why didn’t they go to the window to make sure he didn’t break his leg jumping out? Why do they instantly assume their son has been transformed into a—what is he again, Trevor?”

  “A cockroach,” Trevor said.

  “We’ve gone over this. What Kafka called him in the original German can be translated as something more like vermin. We also know that toward the end of the story Kafka has the cleaning lady describe him as a certain kind of insect. Justin, since you’ve done such a good job already?”

  “A dung beetle,” Justin said.

  “Great! A dung beetle. Which eats, as we’ve discussed, feces.”

  They groaned in unison. He felt himself in something like a fugue state. He knew he’d be able to finish what he’d started. He’d stood before a class and guided it through a text often enough to do it now without falling apart, without even an apparent hitch in his delivery. Inside, though, he was boiling with fear.

  “Just for that extra bit of humiliation for Gregor. Anyway, how do we explain his parents’ instantly knowing that that dung beetle is their son? Maybe it’s not a stretch for them to see their son as a vermin. Maybe they’ve been seeing him as less than human all along. He’s been serving their needs, propping them up. Maybe his spirit, as they see it, has finally found the body it deserves.”

  The bell rang. He reminded them to do the reading and gathered his things. He kept his head down. He could sense a couple of them assembling at his desk. Danny Burbano was there, as well as Justin. Dan
ny was always there. Danny was embarrassed to speak in front of the others, but he liked to talk about the books they read. Connell usually indulged him.

  “Not today, Danny,” he said as he brushed past. “Tell me tomorrow.” He could sense the hurt pooling in Danny’s chest. He was gruffer than he should have been, but he had to get out of there. Justin followed him out the door, hustling to keep up.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “You? For what?”

  “That impression I did.”

  “Nobody’s in trouble,” Connell said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He was down the hall and through the doors before Justin could respond. He looked up from a flight below and saw Justin watching him descend the stairs. He knew he must have looked like a man on fire.

  Outside, he broke into a trot. The light at the corner was turning red and he sprinted across the avenue. He ran several blocks, all the way to the park along the Hudson’s edge, where he slumped on a bench and tried to catch his breath. His shirt was soaked with sweat. He hadn’t run that hard, that long, since high school. He took deep, fugitive drafts of the river air and tried to focus on the sun on his neck. A passing tugboat let out its foghorn. The sound reminded him of a bullfrog lowing, and he had a strange, familiar feeling that he couldn’t place. He looked at the diaphanous vapors in the atmosphere and out at the boats passing slowly and the competing skyline across the river, and he thought of the way life arranged itself around water.

  He’d had intimations of this moment before. Once, he’d stood in the predawn dark in the kitchen, unplugging his wife’s phone from the charger and plugging in his own, and as he held it in his hand he realized that he could not recall the device’s name. He pressed his hands against the countertop’s edge and leaned his forehead into the microwave, fighting through a thick, aphasic fog, and, after at least a minute had passed, he began to feel a panic like the kind he felt when he cut off the circulation to his arm in his sleep and woke with a start and called out, shaking and flapping it uselessly for so long that he was sure he had lost the use of it forever, until the blood came pumping back in and he recovered sensation in painful stages. All he’d been able to conjure had been the last line of a vaguely recollected poem—blackberry, blackberry, blackberry—and then he’d remembered the poem’s title—“Meditation at Lagunitas”—and finally realized with a mixture of relief and fear that BlackBerry was the very name of the thing he was holding, that his subconscious mind had been faster at retrieving it than his conscious mind, and that this could be an augury of what was to come.