Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

“In my distraction, I’ve made a few calculation errors. And they’ve raised a stink about it. That’s all. These kids today feel entitled to everything instantly. You say you’ll review the grade, and they say they can’t wait until the next class. They go berserk! I like to take my time with things, give them an honest going-over. That’s impossible with a crowd of people at your desk. Especially when they speak in such a fresh and disrespectful way.”

So much of what he was saying was odd. He was one of the most popular professors in the department, a status made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was no pushover in the grading arena. They wanted to work for him, to impress him. His belief in them made them want to believe in themselves. It also made her want to kill him sometimes, because she didn’t believe they deserved it.

• • •

After taking an old sheet from the linen closet, she went out to the driveway and picked up one of the cinderblocks holding down the good sheet. Beneath the sheet lay two-by-fours that had been sawn in an irregular fashion. Ed had been attempting to construct something. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be ornamental or structural. What it resembled more than anything was a pile for a bonfire. There were none of the heavy tools she’d imagined Ed hadn’t wanted to move several times, only this inert, enigmatic heap. She folded the good sheet up and replaced it with the old one in a way that would discourage his noticing she had done so. When she had finished, she hurried away as she sometimes did when she got spooked in the basement and felt something closing in on her.

She considered saying something to Ed on the way back in. Then she decided the time for checking things with him had passed. If he noticed it was a different sheet tomorrow — by no means a certainty — he would just have to deal with the fact that she had messed with his arrangement.

• • •

She awoke to find herself alone in bed. She stumbled out to the living room and saw Ed’s light on in the study. He was hunched over, as if so many hours of sitting at the desk had sapped the energy in his back. His hair was wild. The desk lamp radiated tremendous heat. The smell of sweat mingled with the mushroom odor of old books to give the room a greenhouse quality.

“Come to bed,” she said.

“I’m working.”

“It’s three in the morning. Come to bed.”

“I have to finish this.” His voice sounded weak, as if he’d fallen asleep in the chair, but his expression was oddly alert. His eyes were sunken and dark, like he’d reached the end of a long fast.

“Can you finish it tomorrow?”

“I can’t.”

“Let me see,” she said.

She leaned over him. He shifted his body to block her view, but she could see the piles on either side of him on the desk, the calculator between them. She picked up the pile of tests and flipped through them. They all had grades on their first page, which surprised her, because what was Ed doing if not grading these things? She put the tests down and picked up the lab reports, over his protestations. The same was true of those: grades had been assigned, red numerals in distended circles emblazoning their upper right corners.

“These are all graded,” she said. “Why don’t you come to bed?”

“I’m still working.”

“You have more to grade?”

“I do.”

He covered a pad on the desk with his hands. She could see it was the set of names and numbers he had been working with earlier. Yet another pad lay next to it.

“What’s that?” She pointed to the second pad.

“Will you leave me alone? Will you go back to sleep? I’ll be in when I’m done.”

She picked up the second pad, fending off Ed’s hands. On it were written all the same names and numbers as on the first pad. They appeared to be identical.

“What is all this?”

She answered her own question by looking at the first test. Each number listed on the pad corresponded to the student’s performance on a section of the exam. His grade book lay splayed open at the back of his desk. She picked it up to check her hunch; indeed, the grades weren’t there. Was he that nervous about making a mistake? Just how fresh had the kids become that a teacher of his stature could be moved to such excessive scrutiny of his no-doubt flawless math well into the night? He should have been resting and quelling the psychic demons that were draining his confidence in the first place. All of this had become far bigger in his sleep-addled mind than it ever should have been allowed to be.

“Let me help you with this,” she said, careful not to describe what “this” was. He surprised her by capitulating quickly. She gathered his things and led him to the kitchen table. “You keep the grade book,” she said. “I’ll tell you the number to enter.”

He held his pen poised over the book. She took the first test off the pile. Edwin Alvarez had earned an 84. She flipped through the test, making sure the subsection grades added up to the indicated total. Eighty-four it was. This was probably the kind of kid Ed was proudest to see achieve, a kid from the neighborhood.

“All right,” she said. “Edwin Alvarez.”

“Wait!” Ed said, suddenly panicked. “Wait! Wait!”

He stood up and bolted out of the room. Before she could follow he reappeared holding a long ruler. He squared himself in the chair and lined the ruler up under Edwin Alvarez’s row of boxes. She had to laugh at his intensity. He didn’t share the laugh, though; he didn’t look up at all, as though he had to stare unblinkingly at the name in front of him in order to prevent it from disappearing.

“Okay,” he said. “Go.”

“Edwin Alvarez.”

“Edwin Alvarez,” he said hesitantly, as if cross-referencing it with the names in the list, an odd thing considering it was the first.

“Eighty-four on the test. We’re only dealing with the test right now.”

“Yes,” he said. “The test only.”

“Okay? Can we move along?”

“Eighty-four?”

“That’s correct,” she said, biting her tongue. As disturbing as this drill was, now wasn’t the time to discuss it. She had to get them both back to bed.

“Okay,” she said. “Lucy Amato. Give me one second.”

She flipped through the test, adding the numbers in her head. She saw how this could get to a person; late at night, numbers ran together. Ed had added them correctly again. She could see it would play out as an exercise in redundancy. It was the kind of thing you signed up for when you got married, idiosyncrasies that bordered on obsessions at times, quirks that became handicaps if allowed to thrive. It could have been worse: he could have had a wandering eye, a gambling habit.

He had located Ms. Amato’s name; his ruler was brought to a sharp congruency with the line underscoring her performance for the semester.

“Seventy-three,” she said.

“Seventy-three.” The desperate edge had left his voice. Despite her tiredness, she was touched by the feeling of working together with her husband on a project; it beat being adversaries. Maybe she’d even be able to tell him about the house.

They went through the stack, she calling out the name, he orienting himself in the ledger, she checking his addition, which grew quicker the more she saw he’d been accurate in his math, she calling out the number like a bingo caller, he repeating the number before committing it to paper, he confirming it again with a rising intonation, she reconfirming it in a tone that made her feel uncomfortably like a teacher with a student. They got to the end without incident, Ed never wavering in his focus, his laser-like application of the ruler’s metal edge. He was sweating; he paused to wipe his forehead while she did her quick math, but didn’t look up from the page.