We Are Not Ourselves (42 page)

He and the other worker looked at her as if they were waiting to see if she’d make another revelation.

“Please drink these,” she said, holding up the beers.

“You don’t have to tell us twice,” he said. “But we have to wait until we’re done for the day.”

It reminded her of her father, to hear him responsibly defer having a drink. They returned to laying in the boards, and she went to the breakfront to find the red velvet-lined box that held the set of crystal glasses with “Schaefer” etched into them that her father had received upon his retirement. She took them out and ran a cloth over them.

At the end of the day, when she laid the six-pack on the dining room table, she set out the glasses too, on a Schaefer bar tray she’d saved for years.

“Please use these,” she said.

“Oh, we don’t need glasses, ma’am,” he said politely.

“It would make me happy if you’d use them. They were my father’s. I’d like to see them filled with beer for once.”

•  •  •

The roof could wait for a couple of years. The rot in the basement would have to remain for now. The tile floors she’d pictured down there were a project for another time. So was renovating the half bath between the kitchen and den. So was moving the laundry room to the first floor from the basement. There was old wallpaper on the second floor that couldn’t come down, and there were walls that needed to be painted. She had pictured fresh paint and white tiles wherever she looked. She had flipped through design magazines for elaborate ideas, but in the end, white had seemed appropriate, the cleanest option, the only one she could deal with right now. She would have to wait for everything to be white. She would have to deal with gray and yellow and brown and a sickly mauve. She thought that a lot of her house looked like a waiting room. The path from kitchen to dining room to living room, though—the path that company would travel—this
path was ready to go. She could keep them from going upstairs or downstairs. And as soon as she had a spare few thousand dollars, she was going to put a better half bath in for them and spruce up the den.

There was, on the other hand, the question of the furniture. She simply wouldn’t be able to live with the things she’d brought from the old house, not if she couldn’t fix this one up the way she wanted. Her furniture squatted shabbily and hardly filled the room. The scratched dining room table, the worn armrests on the chairs, the boxy end tables, the permanently depressed couch cushions: they were like placeholders for the real pieces to come. She saw now that she would need to replace nearly all of it. She would put it all on credit cards. Upstairs, she would create a sitting area, buy the desk she’d always lacked, and outfit each guest room with a stereo, an armchair, and a beautiful reading lamp. As soon as she got these bills paid off, she would replace Connell’s childhood furniture.

She knew she lacked the aesthetic sense necessary to give the house the ambiance it deserved. She would bring in an interior decorator. There would have to be new art everywhere, and the little touches that put one in mind of real discernment. She could pay for that with credit cards too. Ed would veto these expenses if given the chance, but he was past the point of possessing veto power. He was simply going to have to place his fate in her hands. They would pay it off. Ed would get another grant. Their salaries would rise. Once everything was in place, they would live frugally, sensibly, like Boston Brahmins. They would even find a way to build their savings back up. There was always a little more money to be had every year.

42

I
f nothing’s wrong with him,” Eileen told her own doctor, when she went in about a shortness of breath she’d been experiencing, “I’m going to divorce him. I can’t take it anymore.”

Dr. Aitken told her to bring her husband in. She sold it to Ed as his annual checkup, that she’d like him to try her doctor, and when he didn’t object in spite of having gone in for a checkup less than six months before, she knew she was doing the right thing. They sat in the discordant placidity of the waiting area before she led him into the examining room and went back out. She’d blustered about divorce, but now she saw that she would put up with anything in exchange for hearing that her husband had simply become an asshole.

After spending half an hour with Ed, Dr. Aitken came out to meet her.

“Don’t divorce him yet,” he said, handing her a referral to a neurology team he trusted.

•  •  •

She braced for the fit she expected Ed to throw once they got to Montefiore, but he sat docilely again on the papered, padded table, waiting for the doctor to arrive. His big, fleshy back looked like raw dough.

First came blood tests and a physical exam. Dr. Khalifa, the lead doctor, wanted to eliminate anything that might cause memory loss, so he checked Ed’s thyroid levels, as thyroid problems had run in his family. They gave him a CT scan.

His thyroid was fine. The CT scan showed no sign of a tumor.

She took him back for diagnostic exams. Dr. Khalifa sat Ed at a table and took a seat opposite him. She sat in the extra chair and felt nervous for
Ed, as though she were about to watch his debut in a theatrical production that had limped toward opening night.

Dr. Khalifa told Ed to count backwards from one hundred. Ed got to ninety-seven before pausing. “Eighty-six,” he said, then ran off a few other numbers in accurate succession, until he jumped another decile, at which point Dr. Khalifa stopped him.

The obstreperousness she’d anticipated was starting to seem like a fantasy. Ed looked vulnerable and small. He was smiling, trying to ingratiate himself with his examiner, perhaps in unconscious pursuit of mercy in the diagnosis.

Dr. Khalifa told him to draw three concentric circles, and Ed put a good one down on the page, then drew another that was ovoid and attached to the first like a chain link. The third, a shaky line meeting finally in something more like a quadrangle than a circle, sat apart from the first two.

“Great, that’s great,” Dr. Khalifa said dully when Ed was done. The doctor was a picture of imperviousness. She watched his eyes: he betrayed no sign of surprise, gave away no clues as to whether this was a normal result or not, the product of mere aging or something more sinister. She didn’t know whether she herself would have been able to draw the concentric circles. Certainly it would be difficult under this kind of scrutiny. She had a sensation that she was watching a child take a test, and she felt a sympathy with Ed that made her question her decision to expose him to this. What right did she have to subject him in the quiddities of his middle age to a man who would be looking for any sign of deviation from a norm that was probably arbitrary in the first place? She wanted to whisk him back home and let him go at things in his own way. A category existed to describe men like him, a time-tested, venerated one at that: absentminded professor.

“I’m not an artist,” Ed said, laughing. “You should see my drawings of the digestive system.”

The doctor chuckled.

“This could be something abstract,” Ed said.

Dr. Khalifa looked at it and shook his head. She didn’t like his attitude. He was too glib, too detached. His hair was too perfect, his teeth gleamed too white. She had long wished Ed had pursued medical school, but now
she felt she’d been too hard on him in her mind. She knew doctors like this at work; they thought they walked on water. The work Ed did might not have been as lucrative or flashy, but it laid the groundwork for guys like this to come to their conclusions. If Ed said nothing was wrong, then most likely nothing was wrong. She had insulted him by bringing him before this cipher who didn’t deserve to carry his briefcase, let alone pass judgment on him.

“We’re almost done with this part,” Dr. Khalifa said. “One more question and then I’m going to have you do some physical things.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me something. Do you know who the current president is?”

If he wanted to insult him, this was a perfect way to do it. She almost wanted Ed to answer sarcastically or deliberately incorrectly, but she didn’t want the doctor to have the satisfaction of writing it down on that little pad of his.

Ed sat with it; maybe he was coming up with a witty riposte.

“I know it’s a Republican,” he said. “I know that.”

“Can you tell me his name?”

Ed pulled on his chin. “Reagan?” he asked. “Is it Reagan? I can see his face. It’s not Reagan, is it? This is embarrassing.”

“You know this, Ed,” she said. The doctor gave her a look; she wanted to smack his face.

“I can see him,” Ed said. “I just can’t recall the name.”

Dr. Khalifa wrote something down. She wanted to call the answer out. The whole thing was so stupid. She couldn’t believe he was letting him dangle there like this. Ed looked ruined, as if he had failed a test not merely of memory but of character.

“Give it a second,” Dr. Khalifa said. “Sometimes it’s hard to think of a given thing when you have to. Think of something else. It might come to you.”

“White elephants,” Ed said.

“Something like that.”

Ed rubbed the top of his head, as if to massage the answer from his scalp. He let out a deep sigh. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Who is it?”

“Bush,” the doctor said. “George Bush.”

“Yes! That’s it! I knew it. God, I knew it! I could see his face. Of course! His running mate. It’s easy to confuse them.”

The doctor said nothing, just continued to write on his pad.

She thought of the time she’d had to memorize the presidents and their dates of service. She remembered Sister Alberta calling them up one by one to the front of the room to answer one question each, Sister asking her which president followed Teddy Roosevelt. So many
W
names surrounded Roosevelt—to this day she could remember them: William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding. Though she had memorized them conscientiously, at that moment they ran together in her mind. She was terrified of being called stupid in front of the class. Her heart began to race; then her mind went blank, so she could picture only the hazy outlines of names. “
Now, Miss Tumulty
,” Sister said, and when Eileen said,“William Wilson,” laughter exploded in the room.

“You’re right,” she said. “It is easy to confuse them.”

Ed looked guiltily at her, as if she were on Dr. Khalifa’s side and not his. She shifted her chair closer to him. The doctor seemed to write endlessly.

“Just one more thing I have to get down here,” he said, holding up a finger as he wrote. “Perfect. Now I’d like you to change into shorts. I’m going to have you do some exercises for me.”

They went into the next room and she helped him change. It felt like she was getting him ready for gym class. She wondered what humiliations awaited him. Dr. Khalifa came in and had him touch his toes from a standing position and rise from a seated one. He had him jog in place. He took notes throughout. Ed looked to her between exercises. She tried to give encouragement. When Dr. Khalifa told him to touch his finger to the tip of his nose, Ed had a hard time doing it.

“I’m not drunk,” he said. “I promise. Although I might get drunk after this.”

43

T
hey were waiting for his father to pull the car up after Mass. It had snowed, and his mother didn’t want to walk in it. Another light dusting was coming down, and his mother held an umbrella over both their heads while they waited.

“You’re going nowhere with baseball. You know that.”

The comment might have stung more if Connell hadn’t known it was more about debate than baseball. His mother had been on him lately to join the debate team.

“I like baseball,” he said.

“Liking it is one thing. Spending your time doing it is another. You don’t have to like everything you do. Besides, you’d like debate. You’re naturally competitive. You get that from my side.”

“Why do you want me to do debate so badly?”

“I want you to make the most of your advantages. I want to see you use your talents wisely.”

“You want me to be a senator,” he said.

“I want you to be happy.”

“President of the United States.”

“Don’t try to make me out to be some fire-breathing dragon. So I want to push you a little. So what?”

He stood in silence, thinking about it. So what, indeed? The shoveled driveway across the street was getting recoated in a sheen of snow. It might be nice to own a house like that someday, to be able to hire someone to shovel. But he had no interest in joining the debate team. Those guys were always on the verge of cutting your throat.

“What does Dad say?”

“Your father and I both want what’s best for you.”

“What does he
say
?”

“What does your father say?” She laughed. “ ‘Leave the kid be,’ he says. ‘Let the kid do what he wants. Let him have some happiness. Let him have some innocence while he still has time.’ ” She was getting worked up. Some people walking past on the way to their car jerked up their heads. “ ‘All that matters is that the kid experience joy.’ If you must know, that’s what he says. And you know what I say?” There was a fierce expression on his mother’s face. “I say give the kid a chance to make a real mark. Those debate kids are the ones who get the best grades in the school. Get him among them, is what I say. Those are the kids who go to Ivy League colleges. Let him get into a topflight school with them, become a lawyer, a politician. Those are the kids who take home awards and scholarships. What’s wrong with his being one of them? What’s wrong with his making a nice living? Being comfortable?”

“It’s just debate, Mom.”

“They’re the best. You should be the best with them. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.”

“I like baseball,” he said.

“You’re not going to be a professional player.”

“Probably not.”

“Definitely not.”

“Fine. Definitely not.”

“Look,” she said, “there’s your father. Don’t tell him we talked about this. He just wants you to play baseball and not think about anything complicated right now. Or maybe not ever. He wants you to be like a horse in the fields or something. Unfettered.” She said it with a sharp little laugh. “I don’t think that’s real life, though. Maybe I want to tame you. Make you useful. I guess that’s just who I am. But I know one thing. You listen to me, you’re never going to want for anything in this life—not with your ability. I could guide you to the good life. If I’d been born a man, I’d be there myself.”