Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

The girl nodded and returned with an identical-looking dress. He must have written Eileen’s size on the slip of paper. She couldn’t imagine the effort he’d expended in memorializing this detail. Still, there was little chance the number was correct. She needed a ten now.

As Ed approached the cash register, she realized that the dress must have cost well over a hundred dollars. She rushed over. She knew Ed would be furious, but she couldn’t worry about that now. She tapped him on the shoulder. He sprang forward, startled, and let out a little cry. When he saw it was her, he yelled her name a few times in manic excitement, the trapped heat of emasculation radiating off him.

“Funny meeting you here,” she said.

“You like this?” he asked. The girl, who had arranged her features into a beatific grin, handed it over for inspection.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. She glanced at the dress size: eight. He was closer than she thought.

“I like you in blue,” he said. The simplicity of the declaration put an ache in her chest. He directed no animosity at her for having rescued him in the transaction. He seemed to feel only a naked desire to please. He was being stripped of pride, of ego, ruined, destroyed. He was also being softened.

“We’ll use this.” She handed her credit card to the salesgirl before Ed could reach for his wallet, which was sitting on the counter. The girl passed her the index card Ed had written on. It said, “Eileen’s size,” with a big “6” crossed out and an “8” written in its place. When Ed turned away, she took a pen and crossed out the “8” and wrote “10” next to it in as close a hand to his as she could manage. She would come back and exchange it for a ten. She slid the paper back in his wallet and put the hundred into her own. There was no reason for him to be walking around with a bill that large.

• • •

The McGuires and Coakleys couldn’t make it that year. They had excuses — the Coakleys had been talking about heading out to Arizona to see Cindy’s brother for years, and Frank’s niece in Maine had just had a baby — but she couldn’t help being annoyed at their not trying harder to be in town. They’d been so strange around Ed lately, the women tentative, the men garrulous and impersonal, that she imagined they were relieved to have a reason to get away. It seemed to her that she had graduated from the ranks of ordinary wives into a rare stratum inhabited by widows whose husbands were still alive.

At one in the morning, she and Tess sweated to get the mess cleaned up. Just when it looked as if she might escape the evening without a major disturbance, Ed woke and wandered out of the bedroom. He paced back and forth in the upstairs hallway, screaming and flailing his arms violently. She couldn’t silence him. One by one the houseguests gave up the pretense of sleep and emerged from their rooms — Pat, Tess, the girls, her aunt Margie, who had also decided to stay. Pat tried to intercede, puffed up by macho gravitas, but she held him off and allowed Tess to help her corral Ed.

The morning saw no enthusiastic ripping open of presents; the girls handed them around with a perfunctory languor. As Connell had grown older, she’d worked hard to keep alive the Christmas morning ritual, and she tried to pump some life into the girls, but their exhaustion won out. They put in a lackluster effort at breakfast as well, nursing cups of coffee and leaving heaps of food untouched. She thought, Connell was right not to come home .

As she scraped scrambled eggs into the trash, she resolved to have one more real Christmas, with all the trappings and ceremonies of the occasion. Next year, the big green star would make its way to the top of the tree. She hadn’t felt safe when she’d been on the top step of the ladder, leaning over the branches, and she certainly wasn’t about to ask Ed to get up there and do it, and by the time Pat arrived she’d moved on to other tasks for him to do and had forgotten all about it. When she’d sat at dinner, though, all she’d been able to focus on, other than her anxiety about Ed’s embarrassing her, was the treetop sticking up like a tumor, even though it was out of sight in the den. It was in plain view in her mind’s eye. She hadn’t realized how important that star was in rounding out the scene she so carefully constructed. When the lamps were off, it winked with a hazy, emerald loveliness that seemed to pull you toward it. Next year, she would need Connell there to put it up for her. After that, he wouldn’t have to come home for another holiday if he didn’t want to. She was going to wring enough perfection out of next Christmas to last her the rest of her years on earth.

When Paula Coogan, who had hired Eileen at North Central Bronx, moved to another hospital, Eileen was surprised and dismayed to learn that Paula’s replacement was Adelaide Henry, whom Eileen had supervised at Einstein many years before. Adelaide promptly put Eileen on nights, claiming she needed someone of Eileen’s stature watching over that shift, but Eileen guessed she was trying to get her to leave, maybe out of insecurity, maybe out of revenge. She remembered being tough on Adelaide, but only because she’d noted her potential and hadn’t wanted to see her waste it, especially as executives making promotion decisions were going to be more exacting with Adelaide because she was black.

If Adelaide wanted to get rid of her by putting her on nights, though, she would fail. Eileen would’ve held on in the midst of a flaming apocalypse to last the two more years she needed to get health benefits. And it was actually a blessing to be put on nights, because with the sundowning, Ed was going to bed early, and he mostly stayed in bed, and the dark of night had begun to frighten him, so that even if he got out of bed he would never leave the house. Short of his filling the place with gas from the stovetop burners, there was very little she had to worry about if he went unsupervised at night, so she would climb into bed with him in the late afternoon and awake at ten to report for duty at eleven. It was working out better than she could have hoped for: she didn’t have to pay anyone to be there; she could take care of him when she came home in the morning and still get adequate sleep.

Maybe she spoke to the wrong person about being comfortable with the night shift, or maybe she didn’t affect a sufficiently beleaguered air, because within a month she was switched back to days. She had made it work with Ed home alone for a good while, but the idea that he would get lost worried her, and he was now a known quantity at the police station. She wanted to keep him home with her as long as she could.

She asked around at the hospital to see if anyone knew a good in-home nurse who worked off the books. She found a girl to stay with him, a robust Jamaican who wore her hair in a tower, radiated ease, and seemed perfect for the job until she made Eileen late for work one morning when she showed up late herself, claiming bus trouble. The girl’s commute involved two connections and a longish walk, so Eileen didn’t dismiss the excuse immediately; besides, she wasn’t in a position to act rashly, not without a backup in place. She gave the girl a warning; it happened again; she gave her another warning, one more than she would have given any of the nurses on her staff. The third time, she fired her, but by then she already had her replacement on call.

The second girl got to work on time, but Eileen came home early once and found Ed in the armchair in the living room, where he never sat, picking at his hands like a chimpanzee while the girl stretched out on the couch in the den watching a soap opera and talking on the cordless phone. Eileen told her that part of her job was to sit with Ed and make him feel like a human being. She came home early again the following week and ran into the girl on the phone again, this time on the patio. She paid her for the full week, even though four days remained in it, and told her not to come back.