Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

He put his shirt on and went back out. They walked to the car in silence.

“I don’t have tickets to the game,” his father said after they’d been driving awhile. “We can still go. We can try to get in.”

“We don’t have to.”

“It might be hard to get tickets.”

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking we could go watch some planes.”

Connell turned the radio on and the volume up a few clicks. He watched his father’s face for flickers of anger, but his father didn’t seem to notice the change in volume. Connell turned it up even more. His father’s hand shot to the knob.

“That’s too loud,” he said. “Not too loud.”

It was lower now than it had been before he raised it the first time, but he didn’t want to chance it. He looked out the window.

“Hey, Dad?”

“What?”

“What was all that about?”

“I just didn’t feel like teaching today.”

“Why did you say it was my birthday?”

He could see his father’s face reddening, his hands gripping the wheel tighter.

“Don’t you think I know my own son’s birthday? It’s March thirteenth!” His father took a deep breath. “I just wanted everything to go perfectly. I wanted you to have good material for your project.”

“You seemed confused.”

“I was fine!” he shouted. “That’s the end of it! I wanted things to go well while you were there. I’ve never had you in the classroom with me before. End of discussion!”

The pitch in his voice rose along with the volume, and his words became a kind of shrieking. Then he stopped and his breathing settled down.

“I didn’t want to be cooped up inside today,” he said.

They drove in silence.

“I’m sorry about your project,” he said. “Maybe you can come back and watch me sometime.”

“It’s all right,” Connell said. “I can make it up. I already know what kind of teacher you are. You teach me every day.”

They drove back to Queens, heading to the strip of grass they’d come to call their own, along a road that led to LaGuardia Airport. When they parked, his father turned to him.

“Can you do me a favor? Can you not tell your mother about this?”

“Coming here?”

“No. The other thing.”

“Sure. Sure.”

“She won’t understand it the way you do.”

They walked to the fence near one of the landing strips. In the distance, Connell could see planes coming in in a line, separated by long intervals. Planes took off around them; engines roared. They stood there dwarfed by arrivals and departures. His father’s arm was around him, and his own fingers clung to the chain-link fence.

They listened to the game on the way back. When they got home, instead of putting a record on and breaking out the headphones, his father put the game on the radio and they sat on the couch listening to it. The Mets beat the Phillies by a run, Gooden throwing eight solid innings and Franco nailing down the save.

• • •

He thought about telling his mother how weird it had been, but so much about his father was weird that it was hard to say where the weirdness began and ended. It wasn’t a generation gap so much as a chasm that had opened up and swallowed a whole lifetime. Instead of hanging out with the flower children, his father had haunted laboratories and listened to Bing Crosby. He loved foreign languages and corny puns. How often, when Connell reached for another helping at breakfast, did his father stop his hand and ask him in mock earnest if one egg wasn’t un oeuf ?

Who could forget the events of that past Thanksgiving? They went to the Coakleys. The Coakleys used to live a few blocks away in a three-family house like their own; now they lived on Long Island, in a house with plush carpets and a low-lit den that had a couch on all sides and a large television perfect for watching the game. Cindy Coakley had been his mother’s friend since first grade at St. Sebastian’s.

His parents were getting ready in their bedroom. Connell was lying on his bed reading. The radio was on in the living room; his parents must have thought he was out there listening to it, because his mother started laughing in a girlish way that made him feel as if he was hearing something he wasn’t supposed to be hearing. He crept to his door.

“Oh, Ed,” he heard her say. “Don’t do it!”

“Why not? I think it’s a great idea.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” she said, but the delight in her voice said otherwise. “I insist — no, I demand —that you not do this.”

“I’m doing it,” he said. “Here I go.”

“Ed!” she squealed. “That’s brand new!”

It wasn’t strange to hear them laughing, but this was different; this was playful. Around him they laughed like parents, with a certain restraint. He had never heard his mother sound so young.

“How does that look?” his father asked.

“You are not going to show that to anybody. Do you hear me?”

“You’re afraid the women won’t be able to handle it,” he said. “You think they’ll swoon.”

A few seconds passed in silence. He went right up to their closed door, his heart pounding in his chest. He heard some muffled sounds.

“We don’t have time,” his mother said, but she sounded as if she was saying they had all the time in the world.

She made little moaning noises. Connell’s blood ran cold. He had never seen them kiss on the lips, and yet there they were, kissing and doing God knew what else. He thought of all the times he’d watched Jack Coakley pull Cindy to him in brute affection, the times he’d silently urged his father to sweep his mother up in his arms in front of everyone.

“We’d better get going,” his mother said. He heard the sound of the zipper on her dress.

“Maybe I’ll give Jack a laugh. He needs a laugh.”

Connell dashed back to his room. When his parents emerged, he watched for some sign of the mischief he had heard them discussing, but there was nothing.

They drove in a pleasant silence to the Northern State Parkway and the Coakleys. The men watched football in the den while the women talked and transferred food from pots to serving dishes. The dining room table was set with good silver and wineglasses, salt and pepper in sterling silver shakers, and two layers of tablecloths. As everyone trickled in, Connell was already at the table, looking forward to the painful bloat about to overtake him. After the meal, he would sit on the couch with the rest of the men and pat his swollen belly, burping quietly.

Jack carved the turkey. Everyone began passing dishes.

“Ed,” Jack said. “Why don’t you take your jacket off? Join us awhile.”

Everybody knew what was coming.

“I can’t,” Connell’s father said. “There’s no back to this shirt.”

A little wave of laughter passed over the table. Connell felt his face redden. They played this routine out every year. Connell didn’t care if everyone else was amused by the line; why did his father have to be so weird? He was the only one in a suit; everyone else wore sweaters and khakis. Even on the hottest days of summer he wore long-sleeved shirts and pants. Connell didn’t care about his warnings about skin cancer and the shrinking ozone layer. All he knew was his father looked like a dork.

“You know, Ed,” Jack said. “You always say that. What does that mean? What are you trying to tell me?”

Jack was six-four, two-fifty, an ex-Marine. When they watched the game in Jack’s den, it wasn’t hard to imagine Jack on the field protecting the quarterback. In a booming voice, he told stories that ended in uproarious laughter; Connell’s father spoke gently and people leaned in to hear him. Jack’s face lit up whenever Connell’s father talked, but Connell always wanted his father to finish quickly; he was nervous that Jack would see how strange his father really was.