Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

Eileen had been daydreaming about the demolished mansion she’d just seen the picture of. Sister’s question snapped her to attention. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

But all she could think was what a shame it was they’d knocked that house down. A big, beautiful house in the country with land around it — that wasn’t a bad thing at all.

“And think of this,” Sister Mary Alice said in closing. “Not a single one of you would be here if that estate were still around. None of us would. We simply wouldn’t exist.”

Eileen looked around at her classmates and tried to conceive of a reality in which none of them had come into being. She thought of the little apartment she lived in with her parents. Would it be a loss if it had never been built?

She pictured herself on a couch in that mansion, looking out a window at a stand of trees. She saw herself sitting with her legs crossed as she flipped through the pages of a big book. Someone had to be born in a house like that; why couldn’t it have been her?

Maybe she wouldn’t have been born there, but she’d have been born somewhere, and she’d have found a way to get there, even if the others didn’t.

• • •

Some nights she went up the block to see her aunt Kitty and her cousin Pat, who was four and a half years younger than her. Her uncle Paddy, her father’s older brother, had died when Pat was two, and Pat looked up to her father like he was his own father.

Eileen had grown up reading to Pat. She’d delivered him to school an early reader, and he could write when the other kids were still learning the alphabet. He was whip-smart, but his grades didn’t show it because he never did his homework. He read constantly, as long as it wasn’t for school.

She sat him at the kitchen table and made him open his schoolbooks. She told him he had to get As, that anything less was unacceptable. She said there was no end to what he could do with her help. She told him she wanted him to be successful, and rich enough to buy a mansion. She would live in a wing of it. He just rushed through his work and read adventure stories. All he wanted to do when he grew up was drive a Schaefer truck.

• • •

Her mother’s morning powers of self-mastery, so impressive in the early days, began to dry up, until, when Eileen was a freshman in high school — she’d earned a full scholarship to St. Helena’s in the Bronx — they evaporated overnight. Her mother went in late to Loft’s one day, and then she did so again a couple of days later, and then she simply stopped going in at all. One day she passed out in the lobby and the police carried her upstairs. After the officers left — her father being who he was meant nothing would get written up — Eileen didn’t say a word or try to change her mother into clean clothes, because her mother would be embarrassed, and Eileen still feared her wrath, even when her mother was slack as a sack of wheat, because the memory of her mother taking the hanger to her when she misbehaved as a child was never far from her mind.

The next day, when they were both at the kitchen table, her mother smoking in silent languor, Eileen told her she was going to call Alcoholics Anonymous. She didn’t mention that she’d gotten the number from her aunt Kitty, that she’d been talking to others in the family about her mother’s problem.

“Do what you want,” her mother said, and then watched with surprising interest as Eileen dialed. A woman answered; Eileen told her that her mother needed help. The woman said they wanted to help her, but her mother had to ask for help herself.

Eileen’s heart sank. “She’s not going to ask for help,” she said, and she felt tears welling up. She saw her mother’s darting eyes notice the tears, and she wiped them quickly away.

“We need her to ask for assistance before we can take action,” the woman said. “I’m very sorry. Don’t give up. There are people you can talk to.”

“What are they saying?” her mother asked, pulling the belt on her robe into a tight knot.

Eileen put her hand over the receiver and explained the situation.

“Give me that goddamned phone,” her mother said, stubbing out her cigarette and rising. “I need help,” she said into it. “Did you hear the girl? Goddammit, I need help.”

• • •

A pair of men came to the apartment the following evening to meet her mother. Eileen had never been more grateful not to find her father home. She sat with them as they explained that they were going to arrange for her mother to be admitted to Knickerbocker Hospital. They would return the next evening to take her in.

That night, as soon as the men had left, her mother took the bottle of whiskey down off the shelf and sat on the couch pouring a little of it at a time into a tumbler. She drank it deliberately, as if she were taking medicine. They’d told her mother to pack enough clothing for two weeks, so Eileen filled a small duffel bag for her and slipped it under the bed. She would explain things to her father once her mother was in the hospital.

Eileen spent the school day worrying that, with so many hours left before the men returned, something would go awry. Her mother seemed okay, though, when Eileen got home. All in the apartment was still. The kettle sat shining on the small four-burner stove, the floor was swept, the blinds were pulled evenly across the windows. Eileen cooked some sausage and eggs for them to eat together. Her mother ate slowly. When the men arrived, shortly before six o’clock, both wearing suits, her mother acquiesced without denying she’d agreed to go. The strangely tender, sorrowful look she wore as she shuffled around the apartment gathering the last of the things she needed — toothbrush, wallet, a book — made Eileen’s chest ache.

Eileen rode with them to the hospital. At the end, the two men drove her back. When they reached the apartment building, the driver put the car in park and sat motionless while the man in the passenger seat came around to open her door. She stood outside the car, thinking she might like to say something to express her gratitude, but there wasn’t a way to do it. The man took his hat off. A strange, knowing silence filtered into the air around them. She was glad these men weren’t the kind that said much. He handed her a piece of paper with a phone number on it.

“Call if you need anything,” he said. “Any hour.” Then they drove off.

Her mother stayed in for nine days. When she reemerged, she attended meetings and took a job cleaning grammar schools in Bayside. She complained about being beholden to the Long Island Rail Road schedule, but Eileen figured what actually bothered her was all the time she had to herself on the train to consider how she hadn’t gotten very far in the years since she’d made similar trips.

Eileen dreamed of taking a dramatic journey of her own. When she learned about Death Valley in geography class, how it was the hottest and driest spot in North America, she decided to visit it sometime, even though she wouldn’t be able to leave her alabaster skin exposed there for long without suffering a terrible burn. A vast, desert expanse like that was the only place she could imagine not minding the absence of company.

In the fall of 1956, when Eileen was a sophomore, another round of relatives started coming over from Ireland. How she loved it! Sure, at times the apartment was like a sick ward, teeming with newly landed, sniffling relations who commandeered a bit of the floor or even her own bed, but still: with all those people crowded around, her father came alive, charming them like a circus animal keeping a ball aloft on the tip of its nose, and her mother worked alongside her to keep the peace in cramped quarters.