We Are Not Ourselves (25 page)

“I can’t explain why I can’t give you more in this,” he said. “I just really don’t want to go anywhere. Have you ever felt like life was getting away from you, and people were lapping you and you couldn’t catch up? And if you could just stop the world and take it all in, and nobody would go anywhere for a little while, you’d have enough time to understand it? I wish I could do that. I don’t want anybody or anything to move an inch.”

“People move,” she said. “That’s life.”

“I’m lodging my protest,” he said, and he put the ball in his pocket and rose to go inside, leaving her alone on the stoop.

22

T
he first house she saw cost nine hundred thousand, at least twice what they could afford. She had to see it, though, to have a basis for comparison.

She wore a nice gray suit, a ruffled blouse, and heels. She drove up a long driveway that turned into a circle in front of the house, along whose perimeter a few cars were parked: a BMW, a VW, an Audi. She was embarrassed to be driving a Chevy Corsica. She was glad that Ed’s torpor hadn’t led to an attenuation of his car-washing habit; at least she had neatness on her side.

The door was open. She entered a capacious vestibule with marble floors, oil paintings on the walls, and an enormous chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling. She took in the sweep of the place for only a few moments before an effervescent real estate agent descended the stairs, trailing behind her a young couple who were dressed more casually than Eileen and looked more comfortable there. She had made a mistake. She removed her jacket—it was too warm for one—as they took the final steps of what seemed an endless staircase.

“Welcome,” the agent said, extending both arms as if drawing her in for a hug. The couple had to be ten or fifteen years younger than Eileen. She felt she was intruding. She wanted to turn around and head to the car.

“I saw the door open,” she said.

“Of course! Of course! We were just about to look at the back patio. Join us, or take a look around yourself if you like.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I think I’ll walk around.”

She stood there while they made their way outside. She thought again about leaving but couldn’t bear the idea of their talking about her after she was gone. The inevitable simmering potpourri wafted in from the kitchen. She didn’t want to fall for it, but she couldn’t resist the mood it put her in. She headed upstairs. In the bedroom at the top she was surprised by another couple who looked closer to her age and had two girls in tow, the younger of whom was bouncing lightly on the bed. When the mother saw Eileen standing there, she told the girl to stop. The husband was admiring the craftsmanship of the window. He took Eileen in with an appraising glance from top to toe, as though she were part of the house, and smiled. The wife ushered the girls out, but the husband lingered behind, making pronouncements about the bones of the house as though he imagined being trailed by an audience of onlookers.

After they left, she drifted to the window the man had been admiring. Her car looked like a miniature version of itself. Birds and acorns had taken a toll on its roof; it needed a paint job.

She fluffed up the pillows the little girl had leaned against. She tried to resist the impulse to sit but felt suddenly tired and didn’t know what else to do in the room, which she now felt trapped in, as she didn’t want to face the young couple and the agent downstairs. She heard the low murmur of voices and labored to slow her breathing. She hadn’t noticed until this moment that her heart was racing. She tried to calm herself by gazing at the beautiful sunlight coming through the window and feeling the lace of the duvet, but what put her at ease eventually was the quiet of the house. There were no horns honking outside. She breathed deeply and remembered that these people did not know she was an impostor; for all she knew they were impostors themselves. Maybe no one visiting the house really belonged there—including the agent, who had to project an air of aristocracy to blend in with her surroundings, but when it came down to it was working a job like anybody else.

She had almost willed herself into equanimity when she noticed three photos, each nicely framed, standing sentry around a bedside table lamp. Nothing in the photos could have explained the twisting in the gut she felt.
She saw a tableau of a family, possibly from the holidays; a wedding portrait in black and white; and a picture of an elderly couple on horseback, the husband wearing a grin of effortless control. The house was probably being sold so they could move to an inviting snowbird locale or else as an inheritance after the death of one or both of them. It seemed they had lived a full life. The husband possessed a heartiness that belied his years. She felt a surge of nerves that verged on nausea.

What Ed didn’t understand was that in a house like this she would finally be able to breathe enough to put things in order for both of them. Here, she could make herself into the kind of wife who wasn’t always rushing to get lunch made before he walked out the door in the morning. She didn’t even mind thinking that the next place she lived could be where she died.

She gathered the courage to head downstairs. She found the agent and the young couple outside on the patio, the husband taking in the sweep of the yard, the wife inspecting the grill. She straightened her blouse before she slid the glass door open.

“I’ve got to run. I don’t have much time to stay and chat.”

“Of course!” the agent said. “Did you pick up a brochure?”

“It’s a lovely house, but it may not be exactly what we’re looking for.”

“Everyone has a checklist, right? Otherwise it’d all be one big house!”

“My husband and I would like to look at other properties in the area.”

“Please! Take my card. Where are you now?”

“The city,” Eileen said. Queens was technically the city, but she knew that wasn’t what she was conveying.

“I’ll be happy to show you other properties.”

“Thank you.” She turned to the couple. “I wish you the best of luck in your search.”

“And you in yours, wherever it leads,” the young man said in a grand way that struck her as ungracious.

•  •  •

When she got home Ed was on the couch with his eyes closed and the headphones on. She stood there waving both arms, trying to draw the gaze of his inner eye. Then she went into Connell’s room.

He was lying on the floor in his baseball uniform. It touched her to see how cute he looked in it. It was small on him; he had grown a lot over the past year, and his arms were wiry and long. He had begun to fill out in the upper body. She wondered how concerned she should be about how much time he spent in the basement lifting weights. She’d heard it could stunt his growth, but there was so much else to worry about lately, and she was just glad he wasn’t getting into anything really destructive.

He’d had the sense to take off his mud-caked cleats, but the rest of his uniform sported a layer of that clayey dirt that never came off in the wash.

“How did it go?”

“We lost. I stink. I walked nine guys.”

He was flipping a ball to himself and catching it; it was coming close to hitting his face. One toss would have crushed his nose if he hadn’t turned away at the last second.

“You’ll get better.”

“I threw pretty hard, though,” he said, a proud smile spreading across his face.

“Just don’t dent the garage door,” she said. “I don’t want to have to spend money on yet another one right now.”

He nodded. “Dad came to the game,” he said.

“Really?”

“He did something weird.”

She felt herself begin to panic. “What happened?”

“He wigged out on me after the game. I had to stay and help with the ball bag and bases and stuff. Dad went to get the car. When I got in, he started screaming at me. I’ve never seen him like that before. He kept yelling, ‘
You kept me waiting! You kept me waiting!
’ ”

“Well, it’s not good to keep people waiting,” she said halfheartedly, wondering if he could hear how tenuous her solidarity with his father was at the moment.

“I couldn’t leave all the bats and stuff. My coach asked me to help. And I wasn’t that long, I really wasn’t. He screamed all the way home.”

“Your father’s going through a hard time right now,” she said. “You can’t take it personally.”

“I didn’t ask him to wait for me. I didn’t ask him to come.”

“He loves going to your games.”

“Whatever.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Mom, you weren’t there. He was crazy.”

A careless toss caused the ball to roll out of reach and he sat with his hands on his knees looking like a little man, already beleaguered by experience. He was a smart kid; he knew some kids had fathers who beat them or simply weren’t there. Still, it was hard to see him disillusioned. Normally she was jealous of the bond between the two of them, but now she wanted to defend it.

“Daddy has a thing about being made to wait in the car,” she said. “You can’t take it personally. I’m sure he’s sorry.”

“He made us sit in the driveway for half an hour so he could apologize.”

“See,” she said. “There you go.”

In bed that night, though, she confronted Ed.

“Connell said you flipped out on him.”

“I lost my temper.”

“He’s just a kid, Ed.”

“That’s not going to happen again.”

“It had better not. I don’t give a damn what your father did to you. That boy’s not him.”

•  •  •

She parked a few blocks away and walked to the realty office on the chance that the agent hadn’t seen her car the first time. The ruse would be exposed eventually, but she liked being taken seriously as a contender for these places. It was like when she was younger and would ask that a certain item be placed on hold at a store. The cashier would write her name on a slip of paper, and she would be granted time for consideration. The mere idea of possessing it in that allotted limbo was sufficient to quench the desire for it and she would almost never come back to complete the purchase. Perhaps it could be like that with the expensive houses; a few minutes in them could inoculate her against the need to live in them.

The office was in the center of Bronxville, and though it was sandwiched between two boutique shops, it had the feel of an old dentist’s office. There was paneling on the walls, a thin blue carpet, and a few worn desks on either side of an aisle that ran through the center. The desk chairs didn’t have wheels. The office made Eileen feel she was not completely out of her realm. One other agent talked quietly in the corner.

Gloria wore her brown hair cut short, like a politician’s. There were ghostly remains of blond in it. She wore a navy business suit with what looked like a silk blouse. Her teeth were bright white, and level and straight enough that they could have been caps. She was around Eileen’s height.

Once again, Gloria extended both hands in greeting. Eileen wondered whether this was something she had learned in a real estate textbook. And yet, she found herself succumbing to it as she had to the potpourri. They sat at the desk.

“Why don’t we start by talking about what kind of house you’re looking to see? Is there a style you’re particularly interested in?”

Eileen had no real grasp on the terms of art that governed houses. Colonial? Edwardian? Tudor? These were terms she’d heard. As much as she’d always wanted a house in the suburbs, it was an abstract desire. It was about what the house represented: polish, grandeur, seclusion, permanency.

“I liked the house I saw last week quite a lot,” she said.

Gloria looked surprised. “I thought it hadn’t appealed to you.”

“Well, yes, that’s true. In some ways it didn’t. But in many ways it was a perfect house.”

Gloria looked like she was weighing whether to let her off the hook or not. Then she smiled. “It has to be a perfect house in every way,” she said. “That’s what I want for you.”

“Thank you.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, was it a matter of price?”

“Not at all,” Eileen said. “Money wasn’t the issue.”

Gloria raised her brows. “Okay,” she said, clicking her pen into action. “Well, if I’m going to find your future home, I’m going to need certain guidelines.”

“Of course,” Eileen said.

“Why don’t we just start from the top, Eileen. It’s Leary, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you live in the city, you said?”

“We do.”

“Which part?”

“Queens.”

“Parts of Queens are so lovely, aren’t they? I actually have a brother in Douglaston.”

Douglaston was another world entirely. Eileen paused. “We’re in Jackson Heights,” she said.

“One of the garden co-ops?” Gloria asked, raising her brows again in what looked like a hopeful manner. “I hear they’re quite beautiful.”

“We own a house,” she said. “A three-family house.”

“Okay.” She was writing things down. “And you’re looking to move to Bronxville specifically? Or is it this general vicinity you’re interested in?”

“Bronxville.”

She looked up from the pad, beaming. “Isn’t Bronxville just beautiful? When my husband moved us here I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

“I used to work at Lawrence Hospital,” she said. “Years ago. I remembered loving it.”

“So you liked the house you saw. What did you like most about it?”

“The size.”

“How many bedrooms do you want? Three? Four? Five?”

“At least four,” Eileen said, feeling like a drunk picking the figure in the middle.

“Okay! That’s a start. Now, what’s your price range?”

Eileen thought for a minute. “It depends,” she said, “on whether you’re asking me or my husband.”

Gloria laughed. “But that’s why we love them, isn’t it? Men will lay their heads anywhere. I’m always trying to get my husband to consider moving to a bigger house, to tell you the truth. There’s nothing wrong with living up to your means. Does your husband work on Wall Street? The train ride down is so easy.”

“He’s a college professor.”

Another silence ensued, another appraisal from Gloria.

“So, four bedroom. Close to the train, or no? Does he teach in the city? NYU? Columbia?”