We Are Not Ourselves (27 page)

“I just can’t!” he said, pounding the pillow. “Don’t you hear me?”

She fooled with the little raised flower at the front of her camisole, to disperse the humiliation she felt at being spoken to that way.

“I’m not going to stop looking, and I’m not going to sell the house out from under you, Ed. I need your consent.”

“I’m going to work on the house this summer,” he said. “Maybe you’ll want to stay after that.”

“Do it if it makes you happy,” she said. “But don’t go thinking it’ll make a difference. You can’t put out a fire with a thimbleful of water.”

23

E
ileen went in Gloria’s car. One house had six bedrooms, more space than she’d ever imagined in even her most lavish dreams of dinner parties and extended visits, and she wanted Gloria to leave her there to sleep on the floor in the master bedroom and wake in the night to roam the dark spaces like a watchman in an empty office building. She registered her approval of touches Gloria pointed out, the beauty of which she needed no vocabulary to understand. It was impossible not to be enchanted by the exquisite good taste of the wood running everywhere, the quiet granite of the countertops.

“I want to see as many houses as I can,” she said giddily as they left. “I want to take them all in.”

Gloria was a willing enough conspirator that Eileen allowed herself to relax. She’d been afraid of wasting the agent’s time, but Gloria did such a good job of projecting professional aplomb that Eileen decided to believe in the durability of her patience. Gloria would tell her the price on the way and what she thought they could get them down to. Eileen could see Gloria watching her for some reaction that would establish benchmarks to strive for, and she gave her none; she merely marveled indiscriminately at the gorgeous interiors, the manicured lawns, the impeccable patios, the huge kitchen windows that might look out, in the future, on grandchildren at play. Every time, Eileen said the same thing: “Wow!” or “Gee!” or “Beautiful!” or some other blandishment that kept Gloria off the trail of what she really felt, which was terror. She dispatched that terror with manic exuberance and affirmation. They would sit in the car for a few minutes talking, then head up to begin another simulation. The afternoon passed in a haze.

After perhaps the fifth house, Gloria paused before turning the key in the ignition.

“This is fun, isn’t it?”

“Enormous fun,” Eileen said. “I could do this all day.”

“Yes. Well, at some point we have to settle on some parameters.”

“It’s so hard to say. They’re all so beautiful. Who could ever leave some of these houses, except to move to the others?”

“I’m pretty sure you’re going to love this next one,” Gloria said determinedly. “I’m not even going to give you the fact sheet. I just want you to react. I want to see what tickles you.”

They drove to the house, which turned out to be the most impressive yet. It was a gray brick center hall colonial—she knew that term now—set high off the road, with a front lawn that sloped gently downward. It had long black shutters, a gorgeous front porch, and a room off to the side with floor-to-ceiling glass windows. It must have had three times the space of the floor they inhabited in their house. After they’d walked through it, Eileen studiously wide-eyed the whole time, Gloria led her to the porch.

“Do you mind sitting for a minute?”

“Not at all,” Eileen said, and took a seat in one of the tall white rockers. Gloria sat on the top step and faced her. It felt as luxurious to sit on the porch as it had seemed it might from the curb.

Gloria took out a pack of cigarettes. “Care if I smoke?”

Eileen shook her head.

“I don’t normally smoke around clients. Believe me, it’s not easy not to.”

“Please feel free.”

“I feel comfortable around you,” Gloria said.

Eileen looked down. Gloria was a working girl, like her. Her shoes were slightly scuffed, and Eileen could tell she painted her nails herself. She wondered what her father would have thought of this performance of hers. Her lip began to tremble.

“When I said under a million, I think I wasn’t being entirely realistic.”

“What’s a better number?”

“You’re not going to like it,” Eileen said.

“I can work with any number. I just need to know where to start.”

“I don’t even know if I can convince my husband to move.”

“Look at you. You’re a beauty. He’ll go wherever you want.”

“You’re sweet,” she said. She could feel sadness gathering in her chest, as though scattered shards of it were being pulled from her extremities by a powerful magnet.

“What are we talking about? Eight hundred? Seven?”

Eileen felt anxious talking about money this explicitly; she felt as if the agent had held a bright light up to her face and could see the imperfections on her skin.

“More like four,” she said. “Five at the most.”

“Hoo-wee!” Gloria exhaled a deep puff and stabbed the butt out on the step. “Do you have any idea how much this house is listed at? Take a guess.”

“Eight hundred thousand.”

“Nine
fifty
,” she said with a flourish, like she was calling out someone’s weight at a carnival. Gloria laughed. “We’re going to have to change our strategy.”

“I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time,” Eileen said miserably.

“Look, I’ll be straight with you. We’ve wasted some time. But I don’t really mind. I like looking at houses. I’ll find you a good one. One your husband won’t be able to resist.”

They agreed to go looking again the following week. As she returned Gloria’s hug good-bye, it occurred to her how grateful she was that this woman who weighed her fate in her hands hadn’t humiliated her.

•  •  •

She had an electrolysis appointment scheduled at her regular place in midtown. She didn’t feel like going, but it was impossible to get an appointment, and she had begun to obsess over the little hairs that poked through her top lip and dotted her jawline. She wondered if they were harbingers of greater changes to come. Lately her skin tingled and itched a little more than usual. She felt warm at odd times; she wasn’t ready to call them hot flashes. Her breasts seemed slightly less full. She’d always had irregular periods, so there wasn’t anything to read into those, but she did have more headaches lately, though it was hard to imagine anyone
not
having headaches under her circumstances. She wasn’t going to bury her head in the
sand when the change began, but she also wasn’t ready to conclude that it had begun before she had firmer proof. In the meantime, she was going to fight to hold on to her beauty as long as she could.

To avoid the traffic snarl, she took the train. On the way back, the crowd on the 7 platform pressed close, and the train offered no relief. At every stop the car got more crowded instead of less, until at Seventy-Fourth Street the train bled riders making connections to other lines. The walk home from Eighty-Second Street thrust in her face the horrors of the change. The street had once been the jewel in the neighborhood’s crown. The white stucco storefronts were crisscrossed with wooden planks to give it a Tudor charm—Tudor was another style she recognized now when she saw it—and the streetlamps were made of ornate iron, but now gangs clotted its great arterial expanse, and the mom-and-pop stores had given way to bodegas, check-cashing places, and dollar stores with cheap signs that obscured the old facades. The globes that used to adorn Eighty-Second Street’s lamps were gone. Similar ones could still be found on Pondfield Road in Bronxville, which might have been part of why she was so drawn to the town: it was like a time capsule of Jackson Heights before the collapse.

As she made her way down the street, a group of young men in sweatshirts and baseball caps—they looked Hispanic to her, but she couldn’t always tell—were heading in her direction, taking up the width of the sidewalk. One of them walked backwards in front of the others, gesturing wildly with his arms outspread as the others clapped and hooted. A collision would ensue unless she went into the street, and she wasn’t about to do that; they should all be able to share the sidewalk. The one with his back to her wasn’t turning around. She decided to stop and hope they would filter around her, like water around a branch lodged between rocks. She held her hands in front of her protectively. The young man reacted too slowly to the wide-eyed looks of his friends and bumped into her.

“Excuse me!” she said, more shrilly than she’d intended. He spun around in a defensive posture, as though in preparation for a karate chop. When he saw her he dropped his hands.

“Sorry, lady,” he said. The others snickered. She knew she should just
keep moving and not say anything. She had an instinctual fear of groups of young men like this. She’d heard stories of ugly incidents. Still, she felt a wave of righteous indignation pass over her.

“This sidewalk’s for everyone, you know.”

“Sorry,” the young man said. “It was an accident.”

She had wrung a second apology from him; she knew this was probably the time to stop. They could run off and have a laugh at the crazy white lady. Maybe they’d shout curses at her as they receded from view. The perfunctory way he’d apologized irked her, though. She was going to teach this young man how to comport himself, even if no one else was bothering to take the time to do so.

“You should watch where you’re going,” she said. “It’s hard enough to get down this sidewalk. There was no room to get past any of you.”

“Whatever you say.” There was a restrained quality to him, as though he were a tiger waiting to pounce.

“It’s my neighborhood too,” she said. “Just because you’re taking over doesn’t mean I’m leaving.”

One of the boys standing behind the one who had bumped her moved forward. She knew what was coming:
Fuck you, white bitch!
But the other put up his hand to restrain him. “Hold up,” he said. “I’m sorry for running into you. I didn’t mean to crowd the sidewalk. Nobody’s taking over your neighborhood. I was born here. There’s room for all of us.”

His articulateness shocked her. He parted the group to make room for her and indicated with a pacific gesture that she should pass. As she hastened to leave she replayed the incident in her mind, trying to make sense of the inscrutable turn it had taken. She had expected hate to be directed at her and had almost been disappointed not to face it. The kid had been raised well, there was no denying it. She wanted to forget the encounter. It unsettled her more than a brush with violence would have. A vision of the future loitered in it, an intimation of her obsolescence.

That night, when she told the story, she substituted for the young man’s oddly delicate apology a bowdlerized version of the slurs she’d anticipated hearing—which was, in any case, closer to the truth of her lived experience than this inexplicable aberration. “I wouldn’t repeat some of the vile things
I heard,” she said, “even if Connell weren’t here.” It was a venial sin, she knew, but she didn’t have to labor to justify it to herself, because it was in everyone’s interest that they move to the suburbs. Ed, though, offered up only a muted version of the chivalric indignation she’d expected to hear, which stoked the fire of her anger at the gang members. Within a few days, she’d begun to consider the possibility that they’d actually said some of the things she’d put in their mouths, and there was a decent chance they had, memory being such a slippery thing.

•  •  •

When she went back to the realty office, she parked in front this time, and Gloria greeted her in a more familiar and less overtly warm way. A bridge had been crossed, a confidence shared. There was perhaps a greater investment on Gloria’s part in finding a house for her.

They began their rounds. On the way to each house, Gloria enumerated the positives in what Eileen was about to see but also addressed certain ineluctable realities, a little confidentially, as if to allow her to encounter these realities in a mood of mutual trust. Then they went inside. If the memory of the previous visits hadn’t been fresh, Eileen might have found the houses appealing; they were, after all, in a neighborhood more desirable than her own. But what a falling off! Where there had been five bedrooms, there were now three; where marble, now linoleum; where wood, some sort of composite, or else actual wood in a state of such severe neglect as to necessitate its wholesale removal and replacement. Expansive atriums became foyers not much larger than the claustral vestibule in her current house. And the magisterial light that pervaded the earlier houses, born of high ceilings and plentiful windows, gave way to a darkness that was all too familiar. Eileen’s expectations sank with the price of the houses.

Gloria saw the shift in mood and tried to bolster her with recitations of hidden advantages, but Eileen would have none of it. She could live down the road from the houses she coveted, she could make friends with their inhabitants, but she could not live in them, not in this life she had with Ed. She had enjoyed years of intellectual partnership, and she’d raised a happy, healthy child, and this was far more than some women ever came close to having. She felt churlish even beginning to wonder what life would’ve
been like if she’d married someone else. And yet as she sat outside the latest disappointing house, she couldn’t help thinking that these were the wages of self-respect, sitting in a car outside a house she couldn’t afford anyway, turning her nose up at it.

A baleful air hung in the car. She wanted to reassure Gloria, to express her gratitude for the kindness and patience she’d been shown. “I had unrealistic expectations,” she said. “I can’t get what I want with the money I’m capable of spending.”

“Some of these houses are pretty nice, actually,” Gloria said.

“Some of them remind me of where I live now,” Eileen said. “The neighborhoods are on the border. They could go either way. I’m looking for this next house to be the one I settle down in. I don’t want to have to look over my shoulder. I might as well stay in Jackson Heights if I’m going to do that.”

The houses Gloria had shown her were in areas like Yonkers and Mount Vernon, where poor and comparatively wealthy populations—they happened to be drawn along black and white lines—abutted each other. It wasn’t that she wanted to avoid black faces. She wanted to avoid black anger, black retribution, black vigilante justice. She wanted a buffer from the encroachment of crime. She didn’t want to have to watch a neighborhood go to ruin again and preside over the memory of it like a monk guarding the scrolls of a dwindling people.