Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

He had to remember to give the old man a call.

After the eleven o’clock Mass, they took a walk through the neighborhood, then went to the Food Emporium. They were having the Coakleys over for dinner, and she needed to pick up a few things. As they passed through the first electronic door heading out of the store, Ed came to a halt in the vestibule and started yelling “No! No!”

“Not now,” she said. “We have to get home.”

“Not with her!” he yelled. “Police!”

She yanked his hand. He grabbed on to the sliding door to pull back. Somehow he managed to hold on to the bags.

“We have to go,” she said. “Please!”

“Not with you! Police! Police!”

She pulled harder. He stumbled two steps and threw himself to the ground. The cantaloupe he was carrying spilled out of its bag and rolled into the street. She couldn’t budge him. At first people gave her curious looks as they passed, but then a few stopped to gawk, and then a crowd gathered as Ed continued to call for the police. She offered them sheepish smiles as they thronged around her. Workers from the store came out. Someone must have called 911, because the next thing she knew two officers were parting the crowd.

“Police!” Ed shouted frantically when he saw them.

“The police are here ,” she said desperately. “Shut up .”

The flash of anger didn’t help her cause. She told them she was his wife, but Ed’s continued shouting made them question her. A neatly dressed woman in a shearling coat whom Eileen had never seen before came forward from the crowd and said she knew who she was. “I see her around,” the woman said quietly, as if to downplay the connection. “In church. She takes care of him. It’s not abuse.”

Eileen was relieved, but she felt a profound gravity come over her at the thought of what a spectacle she’d become. The police were mollified by this character witness; one of the officers told the crowd to disperse, while the other asked what was wrong with Ed and whether she had anyone to call for assistance. In her confusion she could think of no one, not a neighbor, not a single friend.

“You don’t have anyone to call?”

“I don’t know anyone around here,” she found herself saying, to her own amazement. The officers looked heavily at each other, as if they had been conscripted into helping her move a roomful of books. They hooked arms under Ed and led him to the car.

When they got home, she called the Coakleys to cancel. He was raving about how he wasn’t going to eat anything from her, he wasn’t going to eat a single thing she gave him. Eventually she convinced him to go upstairs to the bedroom, and he fell asleep.

“Wasn’t it wonderful?” he asked a few hours later when she woke him to give him his medicine. “We had such a nice day.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t we have a wonderful day?”

After dinner, Ed went right back to bed. She returned to the kitchen and opened the wine she’d bought for the Coakleys’ visit. She’d consulted the salesman to make sure it was a bottle to satisfy an exacting taste. For the last few years, Jack Coakley had been educating himself about wine. He was becoming — he’d taught her the word — an oenophile . The salesman had handed her a Bordeaux whose label she didn’t recognize and said it had big mouthfeel, with strong but creamy tannins, a blend of fruity aromas, and a smoky finish. She’d nodded and tried not to seem lost. It had been more money than she’d planned on spending, and she’d thought about getting a cheaper bottle she was familiar with, but the way he’d looked at her, seeming to evaluate her, had made her carry it up to the counter.

When she was nearly done with the bottle, she called Cindy.

“I almost went to jail,” she said. “And he’s saying, ‘Didn’t we have a wonderful time?’ ” She drained the last glass. “This is the best bottle of wine I’ve ever tasted.”

She hung up and began eating her way through the food in the refrigerator — the hors d’oeuvres she’d bought for dinner, leftovers, the cake she’d made that morning.

She felt the tremors of an incipient headache. The headaches were the reason she stayed away from alcohol. She could see the appeal of it, though: the obliteration of the day’s concerns, the loosing of the reins of control, the preoccupation with something as simple as the next drink, the forgetting. The forgetting could be wonderful.

Eileen knew facing the crowds and the cold might not be a good idea — Ed was more sensitive to cold than he’d ever been, and the excess stimulation might put him in a frenzy — but she couldn’t help herself. Though they’d gone every year they lived in Jackson Heights, she hadn’t been to see the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue since she’d moved to Bronxville. She was loath to miss them again.

She parked in a garage close to the strip of stores. She expected him to gripe his way through the wall of humanity, but he didn’t pull against her as she led him by the hand.

They started at Lord & Taylor. “Jingle Bells” poured down from the hidden speakers above, and in the first window, figures revolved and bobbed mechanically in a mute and tireless tableau of Christmas morning. A boy moved up and down with his arms spread wide as though in a Cossack dance as he beheld the miracle of his new bike; a girl swung her new baby doll back and forth as if it were a model airplane; and their father forever pulled a stocking from the mantle above the fireplace. Ed jabbed her shoulder.

“Isn’t it the greatest thing you’ve ever seen?” he asked in a surge of enthusiasm more unlikely than any she’d seen from him over the course of their marriage. “Look!” he said. “Look!”

It was the same at the next window, and all the windows from Fortunoff to Macy’s. His childish wonder never abated, and his expression was blank with anticipation as she led him to the next garland-wrapped queue.

Later, in bed, she was disappointed not to be able to recall any of the scenes. Instead, all she could see was Ed’s huge smile and his glasses reflecting the lights of the displays.

Connell called the next day to let her know he wasn’t coming home for Christmas. He had decided to spend the holiday at the house of his new girlfriend. He’d had the same excuse at Thanksgiving.

“Who is this girl? Thanksgiving and now Christmas? Sounds like someone we need to meet.”

“You will,” he said, to her dismay.

“Well,” she said. “Your father will certainly be disappointed.”

She decided to cancel the little Christmas Eve party she’d planned. Ed wouldn’t know the difference; they could eat frozen dinners and watch television. She’d have followed through if her cousin Pat hadn’t called shortly after she’d gotten off the phone with Connell and said he and Tess and the girls were going to be able to make it after all. Pat was as close to a brother as she had. He used to come over to her parents’ apartment every year, starting in her late teens, to put up the Christmas tree with her father. He reminded her so terribly of her father. When he heard how upset she was that Connell wasn’t coming home, Pat said they’d come on Saturday the twenty-third and stay through the long weekend.

“The girls will help you get ready,” he said. “They’ll cook, they’ll clean, they’ll do whatever I tell them to.”

She knew she should have been touched, but it wasn’t as she would have planned it, and she wanted something, anything, to go exactly as she’d planned it.

• • •

Ed was there to greet Pat and Tess and the girls when they arrived, but a few minutes later, when it was time to eat the big lunch she’d prepared, he had disappeared upstairs. She found him sitting on the divan at the foot of the bed, looking confused.