We Are Not Ourselves (22 page)

“Dad!” he said again, this time more emphatically. “Dad!”

His father looked right at him. It felt as if they were the only two people in the room. All the hands in the air fell at once. His father looked around at the faces staring back at him. Everyone seemed to wait to see what would happen next. His father bent over the pad again. As he did so, hands shot up all over the room. Voices called out.

“Professor Leary!”

“Professor!”

But he didn’t hear them. “The second tier of protection of the central nervous system,” he said, to a round of groans, “is provided by bone.” One man hopped in his seat, as if he were about to run up and tackle him away from the lectern.

“The brain is protected by the skull . . .”

Connell knew he had heard this already.

“What is this shit?” the hopping man asked.

“Hello!” shouted a lady a few rows up. “You can’t just
ignore
us here.”

Connell had seen his father determined before. When he wanted to do something, when he really wanted to do it, he put his head down and got it done.

A growing outcry was filling the room, so that you could barely hear him reading.

“Dad!” Connell shouted. “
Dad!
”

His father stopped again. This time he backed away from the pad and
the lectern. Connell saw the pages he’d folded under the bottom flip back onto the pad. His father looked at him again in that uncanny way, as if Connell was the only other person there. He backed up to his briefcase and squeezed the handle as though to keep it away from someone trying to snatch it from him. Then he seemed to recover a bit and approached the podium again. Connell sat down.

“Today we are going to begin our discussion of the central nervous system,” he said. He stopped talking and looked around at the room. They were eerily quiet. Connell was desperate for someone to say something. He knew he couldn’t do it himself.

After a few seconds, his father gestured to a woman in the front who had been taking notes through the chaos.

“Karen,” he said. “Karen? Is that right?”

“Yes, Professor Leary.”

“Karen, if you don’t mind, would you tell me where I left off?”

“You had just finished telling us that the spinal cord serves as a minor reflex center.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s good. That’s good. Thank you. That’s exactly what I needed. The spinal cord as a reflex center.”

He flipped through the pad furiously. When he had gone through all the pages, he flipped back through them again so hard that it looked like he might rip them off.

“You see,” he said. “I’m tired. I’ve been working hard. And there’s a lot on my mind. In fact, there’s something specific on my mind that’s distracting me, and I hope you’ll forgive me for letting it get in the way today. If you’ll all turn and look, you’ll see my son at the back of the room.”

Connell could feel the blood rush to his cheeks.

“My son came along with me, as you can see,” his father said. “Today is an important day for him.” His father was looking directly at him. “Isn’t it, son?”

He was going to make him talk about the project.

“Yes,” Connell said.

“Today’s his birthday,” his father said.

Everyone was staring at him. It had been almost a month since his
birthday. He could see it all: the metal bat, the batting gloves, the high-end tee, the netting, the boxes of balls, the bucket to keep them in; heading out into the cold and the whipping wind after dinner and setting up at the back of the driveway; under the moon, in the quiet of the evening, slamming balls into the net and delighting in the
ping
produced by a ball squarely struck.

The faces smiled. He heard a volley of clucking. One lady near him asked him how old he was.

“I’m fourteen,” he said.

“Fourteen today,” his father said. “And he’s been such a good kid, waiting for me. You see, we’re going to the Mets game right after this class. Opening Day. And I’ve had that in the back of my mind. I’ve been worried about the traffic. We’re going to be cutting it a little close. So I apologize for not being all here today. Really, if I’m being honest with myself, I should ask you all if you wouldn’t mind if we just ended class early and made up for it next week. I realize some of you have come from far away. Would you forgive me if we canceled today’s class and made it up next time?”

The students looked around at each other. Some grumbled; one man slapped his desk in frustration, yelled “Bullshit!” and walked out. Others shrugged.

“Good. Good. That’s great,” his father said. “Then we’ll end class now.”

They started packing up their stuff. “I’ll draw up a handout explaining in depth what I was going to go through today, and I’ll spend a little time at the beginning of next class taking you through it point by point.” He picked up the briefcase from the floor and began gathering his things. “Thank you all,” he said, over the rustle of bags and jackets. “This is kind of you. I apologize for imposing on your time like this.”

Some of them wished Connell a happy birthday as they left. His father waved them out the door. Connell remained seated until everyone had gone. He walked up to the front of the room. His father stood facing the blackboard, his hands on the chalkwell. Connell could see his shoulders rising and falling.

“I have to pee,” Connell said, though he didn’t really have to.

In the bathroom, he looked in the mirror. He lifted his shirt up, then took
it off and flexed with both arms. There was more mass and definition. He brought his fists to his ears and squeezed his muscles like Hulk Hogan. He smiled a big, crazy smile with lots of teeth. He drew close to the mirror, leaned his forehead against it. His breath collected on it and evaporated. He slapped at the little bit of baby fat still on his stomach, hard enough to leave a red mark.

“Go away,” he said. “Go away!” Then he started to worry that someone would walk in on him.

He put his shirt on and went back out. They walked to the car in silence.

“I don’t have tickets to the game,” his father said after they’d been driving awhile. “We can still go. We can try to get in.”

“We don’t have to.”

“It might be hard to get tickets.”

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking we could go watch some planes.”

Connell turned the radio on and the volume up a few clicks. He watched his father’s face for flickers of anger, but his father didn’t seem to notice the change in volume. Connell turned it up even more. His father’s hand shot to the knob.

“That’s too loud,” he said. “Not too loud.”

It was lower now than it had been before he raised it the first time, but he didn’t want to chance it. He looked out the window.

“Hey, Dad?”

“What?”

“What was all that about?”

“I just didn’t feel like teaching today.”

“Why did you say it was my birthday?”

He could see his father’s face reddening, his hands gripping the wheel tighter.

“Don’t you think I know my own son’s birthday? It’s March thirteenth!” His father took a deep breath. “I just wanted everything to go perfectly. I wanted you to have good material for your project.”

“You seemed confused.”

“I was fine!” he shouted. “That’s the end of it! I wanted things to go
well while you were there. I’ve never had you in the classroom with me before. End of discussion!”

The pitch in his voice rose along with the volume, and his words became a kind of shrieking. Then he stopped and his breathing settled down.

“I didn’t want to be cooped up inside today,” he said.

They drove in silence.

“I’m sorry about your project,” he said. “Maybe you can come back and watch me sometime.”

“It’s all right,” Connell said. “I can make it up. I already know what kind of teacher you are. You teach me every day.”

They drove back to Queens, heading to the strip of grass they’d come to call their own, along a road that led to LaGuardia Airport. When they parked, his father turned to him.

“Can you do me a favor? Can you not tell your mother about this?”

“Coming here?”

“No. The other thing.”

“Sure. Sure.”

“She won’t understand it the way you do.”

They walked to the fence near one of the landing strips. In the distance, Connell could see planes coming in in a line, separated by long intervals. Planes took off around them; engines roared. They stood there dwarfed by arrivals and departures. His father’s arm was around him, and his own fingers clung to the chain-link fence.

They listened to the game on the way back. When they got home, instead of putting a record on and breaking out the headphones, his father put the game on the radio and they sat on the couch listening to it. The Mets beat the Phillies by a run, Gooden throwing eight solid innings and Franco nailing down the save.

•  •  •

He thought about telling his mother how weird it had been, but so much about his father was weird that it was hard to say where the weirdness began and ended. It wasn’t a generation gap so much as a chasm that had opened up and swallowed a whole lifetime. Instead of hanging out with the flower children, his father had haunted laboratories and listened to
Bing Crosby. He loved foreign languages and corny puns. How often, when Connell reached for another helping at breakfast, did his father stop his hand and ask him in mock earnest if one egg wasn’t
un oeuf
?

Who could forget the events of that past Thanksgiving? They went to the Coakleys. The Coakleys used to live a few blocks away in a three-family house like their own; now they lived on Long Island, in a house with plush carpets and a low-lit den that had a couch on all sides and a large television perfect for watching the game. Cindy Coakley had been his mother’s friend since first grade at St. Sebastian’s.

His parents were getting ready in their bedroom. Connell was lying on his bed reading. The radio was on in the living room; his parents must have thought he was out there listening to it, because his mother started laughing in a girlish way that made him feel as if he was hearing something he wasn’t supposed to be hearing. He crept to his door.

“Oh, Ed,” he heard her say. “Don’t do it!”

“Why not? I think it’s a great idea.”

“It’s a
terrible
idea,” she said, but the delight in her voice said otherwise. “I insist—no, I
demand
—that you not do this.”

“I’m doing it,” he said. “Here I go.”

“Ed!” she squealed. “That’s brand new!”

It wasn’t strange to hear them laughing, but this was different; this was playful. Around him they laughed like parents, with a certain restraint. He had never heard his mother sound so young.

“How does that look?” his father asked.

“You are not going to show that to anybody. Do you hear me?”

“You’re afraid the women won’t be able to handle it,” he said. “You think they’ll swoon.”

A few seconds passed in silence. He went right up to their closed door, his heart pounding in his chest. He heard some muffled sounds.

“We don’t have time,” his mother said, but she sounded as if she was saying they had all the time in the world.

She made little moaning noises. Connell’s blood ran cold. He had never seen them kiss on the lips, and yet there they were, kissing and doing God knew what else. He thought of all the times he’d watched Jack Coakley
pull Cindy to him in brute affection, the times he’d silently urged his father to sweep his mother up in his arms in front of everyone.

“We’d better get going,” his mother said. He heard the sound of the zipper on her dress.

“Maybe I’ll give Jack a laugh. He needs a laugh.”

Connell dashed back to his room. When his parents emerged, he watched for some sign of the mischief he had heard them discussing, but there was nothing.

They drove in a pleasant silence to the Northern State Parkway and the Coakleys. The men watched football in the den while the women talked and transferred food from pots to serving dishes. The dining room table was set with good silver and wineglasses, salt and pepper in sterling silver shakers, and two layers of tablecloths. As everyone trickled in, Connell was already at the table, looking forward to the painful bloat about to overtake him. After the meal, he would sit on the couch with the rest of the men and pat his swollen belly, burping quietly.

Jack carved the turkey. Everyone began passing dishes.

“Ed,” Jack said. “Why don’t you take your jacket off? Join us awhile.”

Everybody knew what was coming.

“I can’t,” Connell’s father said. “There’s no back to this shirt.”

A little wave of laughter passed over the table. Connell felt his face redden. They played this routine out every year. Connell didn’t care if everyone else was amused by the line; why did his father have to be so weird? He was the only one in a suit; everyone else wore sweaters and khakis. Even on the hottest days of summer he wore long-sleeved shirts and pants. Connell didn’t care about his warnings about skin cancer and the shrinking ozone layer. All he knew was his father looked like a dork.

“You know, Ed,” Jack said. “You always say that. What does that mean? What are you trying to tell me?”

Jack was six-four, two-fifty, an ex-Marine. When they watched the game in Jack’s den, it wasn’t hard to imagine Jack on the field protecting the quarterback. In a booming voice, he told stories that ended in uproarious laughter; Connell’s father spoke gently and people leaned in to hear him. Jack’s face lit up whenever Connell’s father talked, but Connell always
wanted his father to finish quickly; he was nervous that Jack would see how strange his father really was.

“Just that the shirt I’m wearing happens not to have a back, and so I can’t take my jacket off.”

“Now why would a shirt not come with a back?”

“It’s cheaper this way,” his father said. “Less material.”

“I don’t think anyone here would have a problem with seeing your back,” Jack said with an odd edge in his voice. He turned to Frank McGuire. “Do you have a problem with seeing Ed’s back?”

Frank looked back and forth between Connell’s father and Jack, like he didn’t know what the right answer was. He broke into nervous laughter. “Come on, guys,” he said. “He wants to wear his jacket, he wants to wear his jacket. It’s Thanksgiving.”