Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

“Did I tell you I love what you did with your hair?” he said, and she let herself be mollified, because she’d thought he hadn’t noticed. She took his hand. They retraced their steps, the street around them thrumming with life. She saw that there was something perfect about the imperfection of her husband — her mortal, living husband with his excessive vigilance about the effects of capitalism and his unmistakable pair of bowed legs that she watched carry him forward. She kept her eyes on his shoes hitting the pavement and let him guide her wherever he was going.

Shortly after getting his PhD, Ed came home with the news that he’d been sought out by an executive at Merck, who’d read an article of his in a journal. Eileen was in the kitchen cutting vegetables for stew.

“He said I could have my own lab, with state-of-the-art equipment, everything top of the line. I’d have a team of assistants.”

“Did he say how much you’d be paid?” She pushed the peppers into the stewpot and rinsed the knife in the sink. She could smell something fried and sickly sweet coming up from the Orlandos’ apartment below.

“He didn’t have to. More than I’m making now. Let’s just say that.”

“How much more?” She began to cut the beef into cubes. It was a thick cut with veins of fat. Ed would not have approved of how much she had spent on it.

“We’d be very comfortable.”

He didn’t appear terribly enthused to be able to make such a statement.

“Honey!” she said, hearing herself squeal as she put the knife down. “This is amazing!” She threw her arms around him.

“We’d have to move to New Jersey.”

“We could live anywhere we wanted,” she said, letting him go to take a few steps and get the motor started on her thoughts. She was already envisioning a house in Bronxville. “If not New Jersey, then Westchester County, for instance.”

“That’s too far to commute.”

“Then we’ll move to New Jersey.”

“Not me,” he said.

“How do you want to do this, then? What would make you comfortable?”

“Staying where I am,” he said.

She looked at him. He was seriously considering not taking the job. If she had to say, he had already made up his mind. She picked up the knife and cut the last slab.

“You love research. Think of the lab you’d have. I’d have to drag you home.”

“It’s not research. It’s making drugs.” Ed paced toward the living room and back.

“Drugs that help people ,” she said, pushing the meat into the pot.

“Drugs that make a lot of money,” he said.

This opportunity looked like their destiny. There had to be a way to get him to listen to reason. She added salt and pepper and two cups of water and turned the burner on. “You research drugs already. What’s the difference?”

Ed stood in the arched doorway between the kitchen and living room. He stretched his hands up and flexed his muscles against the doorway. “Researching drugs and making them are not the same,” he said. “On my own I can be a watchdog. For them I’d be a lapdog. Or an attack dog.”

“What about when we have kids?” She put the caps back on the oil and the spices. “Don’t you want to be able to provide for them?”

“Of course I do. I guess it depends what you mean by providing .” He gave her a meaningful look, let down his hands, and peered through the glass lid of the stewpot. He switched the radio on and played with the antenna to relieve the static. The kitchen filled with the violins and flutes of a classical orchestra.

“I could make you do it,” she said. “But I won’t.”

“You could not.”

“I could. Women do it all the time. I could find a way. But I won’t.”

He straightened up. “You’re not like that.”

“Lucky for you, that’s true,” she said, though what she was thinking was that she was more like that than Ed understood. If her husband wasn’t going to fight to secure their future, someone had to. “I just want you to know that I know what I’m not doing here. What I’m not making you do.”

“Don’t forget I’m on the fast track to tenure,” he said, and she could tell it was a done deal in his mind.

Ed was an assistant professor at Bronx Community College, where he’d started teaching while in graduate school at NYU. One day soon he would be an associate professor, and then, probably soon after that, a full professor.

“There’s nothing fast about the track you’re on,” she said bitterly, looking at him in the window’s reflection in order not to have to look right into his face. “I don’t care how quickly you get there.”

• • •

Five years into their marriage, when Eileen was thirty-one, they decided to stop using birth control and try to conceive a child. At Einstein Hospital, where she worked, she had established a reputation as a head nurse and was confident she’d be able to return to the field after a short absence. She would have to go back to work eventually, something she wouldn’t have had to do if Ed had said yes to Merck.

Seven months passed with no results and she started to worry. She wasn’t too old yet by any means, but she also knew the time for rational calculations had arrived. They’d been going about it haphazardly, having sex when they felt like it and leaving it to chance. She decided to make getting pregnant a conscious project, turning her attention to managing it as she’d managed so many others. She drew up ovulation charts and held Ed to a schedule. They both went in for tests. Ed’s sperm count was normal, his motility strong. Nothing was wrong with her ovaries. Every month, she cried when her period came. Every month, Ed reassured her.

Then, finally, after another six months had passed, she got pregnant. A new lightness entered her spirit. Things that had once annoyed her hardly registered with her anymore. She laughed more easily, gave Ed more rope, and was practically a pushover with the nurses she supervised. She surprised herself with how serene she felt. She never thought she’d be one of those egregious earth mothers, but there she was, tired all the time and yet still making meals and keeping the place in order and smiling through it — laughing, even, at the comedy of being alive. She didn’t get angry at the evening news. When she got cut off on the highway, she shrugged her shoulders and shifted over a lane and hoped everybody arrived safely where they were going.

• • •

Her mother was over at her apartment, reading the newspaper. She grunted in appreciation and handed it to Eileen.

“Here,” she said. “Read this. You might learn something.”

It was an article about Rose Kennedy; one paragraph discussed how the Kennedy children used to hide the coat hangers so their mother couldn’t deploy them on their backs. Eileen seldom thought anymore about her mother using the hanger on her, both because the memory was so unpleasant and because it was woven so thoroughly into the fabric of her childhood that it barely merited conscious thought, but even this many years later, as she pictured her mother cracking her with that little metal whip, she could almost physically feel it on her body.

“See?” her mother said proudly when Eileen handed it back. “I’m not the only one. If Rose Kennedy can do it, I can too. You should do it yourself, but you won’t. You’re too soft.”

If Eileen hadn’t been pregnant, she might have said something about how all that money doesn’t necessarily buy you class, you can still act the same as a cleaning lady from Queens, because it would have cut to the quick, but she just said, “I guess it takes all styles,” and decided then and there that she would never lift a hand in anger at her child.