Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

“What is it?”

“The final grade sheet.”

“What do I do?”

“You find the student number next to the names on this other sheet.”

He had everything ready for her. Considering how organized he was about all the papers, how much he seemed to have the situation in hand, it was a wonder he was asking her to do this at all.

When she was done she closed the book with a thump. Ed clapped his hands together and raised them above his head exultantly. The gesture embarrassed her — seeing him celebrate so quotidian an accomplishment. She looked for signs of irony, but there were none.

They had another bout of lovemaking. He went at her purposefully, giving her deep kisses and holding her down by the wrists. It reminded her of the way he had made love to her during their brief attempts to conceive a second child: both of their bodies moving as one; the thrust of his hips compact, rhythmic, and deliberate. The only thing that kept it from feeling perfect was her nagging worry that Connell would hear the headboard knocking against the wall.

In the middle of the night — a groggy check of the clock revealed it to be four in the morning — Ed was shaking her awake. It took some effort to figure out what he was saying, but eventually she understood that he wanted her to follow him to the kitchen.

The sheet from earlier was laid out before her, along with another that appeared identical. She looked at him, confused. Her eyes were adjusting to the kitchen light, but she could see that the grades she’d written next to the numbers had been crossed out, with new grades written in their place.

“I need you to make these changes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I made some changes. I need you to transfer them to this clean sheet. I have to tape it to the wall outside my classroom.”

“Why are you making changes? We were done.”

She wanted to put her head down on the table. She felt that if she did, he would be standing there in the same position waiting when she woke up.

“Changes!” he barked. “I made some changes! I need you to transfer them.”

She couldn’t make sense of it. She would simply have to submit to the logic of this inquisition. The pattern in the grades became obvious quickly: Ed had taken every grade and kicked it up a full letter, irrespective of pluses and minuses. A C— became a B; a C+ became a B; a B became an A. Ed had long held the line against rising grades. He gave out As sparingly; getting an A from Ed still meant something.

“What’s this about?”

“There were other things I had to factor in. Participation. Et cetera.”

“You were very generous,” she said sardonically.

“There’s nothing wrong with being generous.”

“Not at all.” She smiled. “But you were very generous.”

“I reconsidered a few grades. It’s not your concern.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’m tired. I don’t know why I said anything.” She filled in the grades next to the corresponding numbers in the new sheet and put the pen down. “There. I’m going back to sleep.”

In the morning she found him on the couch. On his desk the grade sheet had been revised upward again. Now there were only two categories, A and B. Below it was another blank grade sheet. She saw that it was her duty to transcribe these trumped-up scores to the final grade sheet. Or could there be another one in store, with all As?

Standing there, she remembered how, in the years after her father retired, when she was still living at home, she would slip cash in his pants pocket for him to find when he was out at the bar, to spare him the embarrassment of not having money to buy other people’s drinks. If she did this, it would be to spare Ed embarrassment.

He was curled on the couch, which was too small for his frame. It was hard to be worried about him when he was sleeping. He looked like a child, like a larger version of Connell. His hands were folded up near his face, as though he had been arrested in the act of praying. It seemed that all men were the same in the few vulnerable instants after they’d been awakened, as though they’d been called back from some universal state into the particulars of their lives. For a moment she stepped out of time and all of existence made sense; then the moment passed, and Ed returned to being her husband.

She sat on the stoop, listening with a new equanimity to the sounds of the neighborhood. She heard the rumble of a plane in the distance and watched it course across the sky. As a car rushed past toward Northern Boulevard, she could hear music faintly thumping within it. The laugh track of a sitcom echoed in the little valley between the two houses. It was easier to tolerate the flaws of a place when the promise of release from it loomed. Whoever bought the house would know what they were getting and willingly embrace it. If she wasn’t quite going to feel nostalgic for the neighborhood, she could at least imagine that once she’d signed the papers relinquishing the deed to the house, she’d feel the rage slip from her, and she’d be able to return to survey it with detachment. She could always come back to get her hair cut; no one tamed her cowlicks the way Curt did, and his price was reasonable. And she could imagine coming back to Arturo’s, though the truth was, Arturo’s was a good neighborhood place, the kind that made it bearable to live there, but it wasn’t anything more than that. There would be other places, better places.

• • •

Connell did a dance to avoid the back-swinging car door, pinching a plastic-sheathed comic book carefully between uplifted fingers as if holding aloft a key piece of evidence. In his other hand was a shopping bag.

“Big day at the comic book store,” she said dubiously to Ed.

“He did well this year. He’s a good kid.”

“Looks like he did well today too, big spender.”

“It’s an investment,” Ed said. “He knows his stuff. He didn’t get junk.”

She went to Connell’s room. He was slotting his new comics into his long boxes with the quiet gravity of a special-collections librarian.

“Did you take advantage of him?”

“No! Why?”

“He’s happy to be done with the school year. You must have seen that.”

“It wasn’t my idea. He just came home and said, ‘We’re going up the block to the comics store.’ I told him I didn’t want to go. He kept insisting. I kept telling him I don’t go to that store anymore. I don’t like those people in there.”

“Why?” she asked. “What did they do to you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “They’re just not nice. Anyway, I don’t go there anymore. He said, ‘Then let’s go to that store near where your orthodontist’s used to be.’ He drove us all the way out to Bayside. I didn’t want to get all this stuff. I mean, I wanted to, but I felt bad. He just kept saying, ‘Get what you want.’ ”

“How much did he spend?”

“A bunch.”

She moved closer to him. “How much ?”

“Two hundred. Over two hundred.”

“ How much over two hundred?”

“Two forty-eight,” he said. “And seventy-eight cents.”

She couldn’t believe the number. She would have thought it impossible to spend that much on comic books unless you brought a wheelbarrow into the store.

“You took advantage.”

“I did not,” he said, indignant. He was slipping cardboard backings into the comics’ plastic sleeves and ferreting them into the archival boxes he kept his collection in. If it really was an investment, she couldn’t accuse him of not tending to it. “He kept saying, ‘I want you to feel like you can have anything you want.’ He was telling me to fill up my basket. I didn’t get any really expensive ones.”