Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

When Connell was a couple of months old, she realized, as though she’d awoken from an extended slumber, that his coming into the world had been a matter of grave importance. She had escaped a trap without knowing she’d been in it. For a while, she pushed Ed to conceive another child, until she stopped for fear of what misbegotten creature might result if she succeeded at her age. She would build the future on the boy.

• • •

It surprised her how much she enjoyed bathing her baby. She suspected it would have surprised anyone who knew her. As soon as she put the stopper in and opened the tap to fill the sink, a remarkable calm settled over her. She held his neck and head with one hand, her inner forearm cradling his body, and cleaned him with the other, pressing the cloth into the little creases in his skin. He smiled mutely at her and she felt a terrible unburdening of pent-up emotion. A little water splashed up in his face and he coughed and resumed his uncanny placidity. When he grew bigger and could sit up in the sink, she handed him a sopping washcloth to grip and suck on while she washed him with another, and she delighted in the sound of his draining it, the sheer vital pleasure he took in pulling it in his little teeth.

When he was old enough to be bathed in the tub, she loved the sight of him leaning over its lip, standing on tiptoe as he reached for the water with his swinging hand, his little back muscles shifting in the effort. In his enthusiasm he nearly fell in headfirst. He splashed waves out of the tub with a succession of quick slaps at the water’s surface. He giggled and gurgled and pulled at his penis with exploratory joy as she rubbed shampoo into his black hair. He grabbed the rinse cup and took a long draft of the soapy water before she could seize it from him. She loved to wrap the towel around him when she was done, powder his little body, secure the diaper, and work his limbs into pajamas, sensing the calm and ease he felt when snug in the garment’s gentle pressure. Snapping the buttons gave her an unreasonable pleasure. She would breathe his baby smell and wonder how she could ever have lived without it. Her heart swelled when she bathed him, when she dressed him for bed, when she combed the last wetness out of his washed hair, when she gave him the breast, when she gave him the bottle, when she lay him down, when she went to check on him at night and felt his chest rise and fall under her hand and his heart beat through her fingertips. She thought of him as she lay awake, and though she was always exhausted, and though there were nights she imagined she’d rise in the morning and the enchantment would have worn off, the well of her affection filled up in her sleep and she plucked him from the crib and pressed him to her, kissing his soft neck. There were some things that couldn’t be communicated, and this was one — how much pleasure a woman like her could take in the fact and presence of her beautiful baby boy. She knew it wouldn’t be like this forever; soon she’d make demands on him, expect the world of him. She was going to enjoy this part. She was going to fill up her heart with it enough for years.

After Eileen’s mother got sober, sitting idly took more out of her than working long hours, so she continued to haul herself out to Bayside to clean up after grammar school kids even into her midsixties, long after Eileen’s father had taken the watch and pension and tossed the truck keys to the younger bucks. When her employer lost its contract with the schools, though, her mother didn’t look for another job. She had talked for years of putting money down on a beach home in Breezy Point, but Eileen suspected she’d realized she couldn’t make a vaulting leap forward in the time she had remaining. She started reading the Irish Echo instead of the Daily News and making trips to Ireland using the savings she’d accumulated. The line of her allegiances began to blur, as if her time in her adopted homeland had been an experiment whose hypothesis had proved unsound.

Eileen had long been able to tell her mother about the fights over Ed’s career and know that she would click her tongue and shake her head in censure of his lack of drive. Some change was occurring in her mother, though, to make her less pragmatic. She seemed less bothered by her station in life. She stopped complaining about politics, or the idiots on the subway, or the ugliness and stench of city life. She read novels and met with a group to discuss them. Eileen couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed. She figured part of this transformation was her mother trying anything to avoid taking a drink. “Negative thoughts back you into a corner,” her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadow Park. “They multiply and surround you. Don’t think of what you don’t have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.” It was rich, this spouting of shibboleths, this late-stage wisdom-mongering. It was the tactic of a woman who’d played her hand and lost, or worse, never played it to begin with. But her mother had picked the wrong audience for her speech. It may have gone over well with down-and-outers at AA who’d wrecked their lives and slipped into a spiral of regret, but Eileen’s problem wasn’t negative thinking, it was too little positive thinking on the part of everyone around her. She had a vision, and she wasn’t turning away from it for a second, even if her husband, and now her mother, saw some ugliness in it. At least she had her father on her side — though God bless him, he supported anything you threw your heart into. She was going to do that, no question about it. What waited ahead, if only Ed would walk the path she’d laid out for him, was a beautiful life, an American life.

“One day at a time,” her mother said, and Eileen thought, And everything all at once.

• • •

Christmas of 1980 Eileen bought Ed a VCR. They’d looked at them together, but when he’d seen what they cost — about a thousand dollars — he had decided they could live without one. Eileen hadn’t worked hard all her life to sit on her hands when she could afford to buy something. She was making decent money now that she was the nursing director at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. It was the perfect gift for him, considering how much he loved old movies. Starting in August, she paid for it on layaway.

When he unwrapped it, he looked horrified, as if it were a relic unearthed from a sacred burial ground that would bring a curse down upon their heads.

“How could you do this?” he asked, seething in front of the three-year-old boy. “How could you think of buying this?”

A few days later, she came in from the shower and saw him on his haunches putting a tape in the machine. She gave him a sardonic look.

“All right,” he said. “I was wrong. It’s a great gift.”

“Save it.”

“I mean it. It was thoughtful of you.” He was clutching the empty sleeve of the VHS tape to his chest. “I appreciate it.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Look, I know I get set in my ways.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two.”

He wheeled the TV cart over, so that it was right next to the bed. PBS was on, the fund-raising appeal between programs. Ed patted the bed. “Get in,” he said.

“I’ve got to brush my hair out.”

“Come on,” he said. “I want to make sure I get this whole thing on tape.”

“Anyway, I’m happy you’re using it.”

“What can I say?” He threw his arms out in amused resignation. “You’re good for me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Really?”

“Really and truly. I’d be lost without you.”