Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

“It— she —doesn’t hurt them?”

“She wouldn’t hurt anyone,” the woman said with a hint of indignation. “They can scream at her and flail around and she just acts like a lady.” The bird pecked at Eileen’s collar and seemed about to engage her ear when the woman whisked her away, clucking, ostensibly at the bird, but Eileen felt it directed at herself.

Ed wasn’t in the dense crowd in the television room.

“Where is my husband?” she asked the attending nurse at the main desk.

“Who are we talking about, ma’am?”

“Edmund Leary,” she said. “He was admitted yesterday.”

“He could be sleeping. He had an eventful day.” The girl raised her brows.

“What happened?”

“Sometimes there’s an adjustment period.”

“What happened ?”

“He had to be restrained. He didn’t want to be changed. He’s a little younger than our average patient. He’s got more pop in him.”

She felt a twinge of pride beneath her concern. She ached to see him. She walked down the hall and found him staring at the ceiling, the radio at his bedside playing at a low murmur. After a couple of seconds she realized it was tuned to a rap station. She shut it off angrily and headed back to the desk.

“There was a rap station playing on my husband’s radio.”

The girl gave her a blank look. Her straightened hair — whether it was her own or not — was piled on her head in a colorful tower that looked like a piece of glazed ceramic. She should have known better than to think this girl would understand.

“There should never be a rap station on his radio.”

“I’m sorry about that, Mrs….”

“Leary. Eileen Leary . My husband is Ed Leary, and I will be here every day. And I do not want rap music on his radio.”

“I’m sorry—”

“I’m a nurse. I understand they may put the radio on when they’re changing the sheets, doing up the room. Under no circumstances should the radio in his room be set to a rap station.” She could feel herself sweating. “I’m trying to make myself perfectly clear.”

“Would you like to speak to my supervisor?”

“I will call tomorrow,” Eileen said. “Thank you.”

“This won’t be a problem,” the girl said, “I assure you.”

“I know it won’t,” Eileen said, and she went back to Ed. She could hear in her head all the things that nurse was thinking about her. She’d heard this narrative in her head for as long as she had been supervising nurses, and she was fine with it.

Somewhere deep down, she knew that if Ed were his former self enough to take in the rap music with all his faculties, he might very well be curious enough to give it an honest listen. There had been times when she had suffered Ed’s open-mindedness like a thousand little cuts, but it was tolerable because he gave in to moments of tribal loyalty himself sometimes, and even displayed occasional ill-temper about the things that got her blood going — like that night she’d never forget, when a couple of Hispanic kids, who had been leaning against the streetlamp in front of the house for an hour, cursing up a storm, drew Ed out to the stoop. He dressed them down and told them to take that kind of low-class language elsewhere, because this wasn’t that kind of house, and she stood in the vestibule and watched over his shoulder as they skulked away. Now, though, that he could hardly discern the differences between things, there was no appeal she could make to a reasonable, mutual, even generational abstention from the noise around them. The silent radio reproached her. She put on a Nat King Cole CD for him.

At the end of her visit, she had a hard time navigating her way out through the identical hallways that seemed to loop back on each other. She asked for the “front entrance” because that was what she’d heard it called, even though it was at the back of the building, and even though facing the street was an entrance she imagined should have been called the “front entrance.” That entrance was the “back entrance,” and if she went out that door, she would have had to walk all the way around the facility to the “front entrance” to get to her car.

The place seemed designed to make you crazy. Maybe the idea was to make you want to stay away. Judging from the sparse population of visitors in the television room, most people obliged them.

She wasn’t visiting. What she was doing was seeing her husband after work. It was simply a part of her day. She was showing them that Ed might be there with them instead of home where he belonged, but nothing else had changed.

They could put his room in the middle of a maze and she would find her way to it every night.

She was going to be the woman who wouldn’t go away, in the marriage that wouldn’t die. Her idea of her husband wasn’t going to be diminished when orderlies looked at him as if he was just another old fool. They had no clue what kind of man had fallen into their lap, but she wasn’t going to explain it to them, because they didn’t deserve to hear it. She was content to let them think he was a gibberer, an invalid, an idiot, because she knew better. She would always know better than them.

She had him pour a layer of blacktop in the driveway. She had him paint everything that could be painted, and then she had him move outside to paint the cedar boards, the fences, the window moldings, the heavy metal gate to the stairs, even the bricks. He removed the old wallpaper and installed new paper with fresh patterns. She had him rip out the attic insulation and replace it, haul junk from the basement and attic to the dump, and dredge the drainage gutter in front of the house. He ripped out the horrible toilet in the first-floor half bath and installed a bright new one, along with a new vanity. He didn’t need assistance for most jobs; for the biggest ones, she paid the gardener to help him off-hours. He used his own tools, leaving alone the ones she’d bought for Ed. He patched the waterlogged wall in the garage. He reinforced the retaining wall at the end of the driveway, where the property shot up into a slope, because it had begun to lean slightly and she had been told it would eventually give way if left untended. He erected a temporary wooden buttress to keep the wall from pitching forward, dug out the backfill down to the footing, filled in the resultant gap with concrete blocks and fabric to keep the silt out, and then repacked the dirt. For a platform top over the two layers of wall, he built a wooden frame into which he poured concrete that he smoothed out so faultlessly that it reminded her of fondant atop a fancy cake.

Her friends marveled at his work. In their marveling she could hear a hint of prurience, but if they weren’t going to make their surmises explicit, then she was content to let them harbor them silently. Maybe they thought he was taking Ed’s place. Maybe they thought that she was in some fundamental way out of control . Maybe they thought it was sad that she needed a bridge between her old life and her new one. Maybe they thought she was sleeping with him. Let them think whatever they want , she told herself. Let them speculate and conjecture and cluck their tongues and drown in pity or disapproval or whatever else .

She was proud of the caliber of improvements to her property. Neighbors who had never said two words to her began to ask who had done her work. She made vague demurrals about his being a friend, and when she relayed these inquiries to Sergei, he radiated a pride she hadn’t expected. She would have preferred him to stand aloof from appraisals of the quality of his labor, because if he remained eternally elsewhere in his mind, somewhere more rarefied and abstract, then she didn’t have to think of him as reduced to his circumstances. When she saw how delighted he seemed by the compliments, though, she decided to stop worrying that she was condescending to him when she assigned him tasks, which made her more comfortable keeping him in the house, which was what she had been trying to feel for a while. She didn’t know what she would do with herself once he was gone.