Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

He accelerated, and his father jumped back; he touched the brake, and his father gasped; he passed a car, and his father clutched the handle in the ceiling.

• • •

The next time they went out, his father screamed at him practically from the moment they pulled out of the garage until the moment they pulled back in. He then sat there miserably, apologizing, saying he couldn’t help himself.

They went out a couple more times. The results were the same, and eventually Connell stopped asking to drive. He decided to wait until his junior year, when he could take driver’s ed through school.

• • •

One night, at ten o’clock, his father appeared in the doorway of Connell’s bedroom wearing his Members Only jacket.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Where?”

“Just come with me.”

His mother was drinking tea in the kitchen. His father headed past her to the basement.

“Where is he going?”

“I don’t know,” Connell said, and walked past her too.

His mother called down after them. His father didn’t answer, so Connell didn’t either. He followed him to the garage, climbed into the passenger seat. As they were backing out, his mother appeared in the doorway of the garage. His father didn’t lower the window, and Connell just shrugged. She followed the car out into the driveway, a look of mild concern on her face. She had a teacup in one hand and her robe clutched in the other to ward off the chill of the spring night.

His father backed slowly down the driveway and his mother turned and headed back to the house. The driveway was curved and bordered on both sides by hedgerows anchored in stone walls that ended in stone columns. It was difficult to negotiate forward, never mind backward, and his father had scraped the car so many times that his mother had given up fixing it. His father took it slowly and made it onto the street without touching the hedge, the stone walls, or the pillars.

They didn’t head down the hill toward town, but went the other way, taking back roads until they came to the entrance to the Cross County Parkway. They continued past it, turning under the overpass and taking the ramp up into the shopping center. The stores were all closed. His father pulled into a spot far from the entrance to Macy’s and turned off the engine.

“You’re going to drive.”

They both got out and passed in front of the car. The lot was mostly dark, the lighted store signs combining with ambient light from the highway and the low glow of the light poles to provide a mist of illumination. A few cars were scattered about, but otherwise the lot was empty. He had never driven under cover of night before. He knew the lot from his fledgling efforts behind the wheel, but there had never been so much open space, so little against which to establish a sense of perspective, and it was with a slight rush of breath that he turned the ignition over and put the car into gear.

“I want you to drive out of the lot, make a left and then a right at the light.”

He drove up Midland Avenue, which ran parallel to the parkway.

“Go through the first light. After the following light, you’re going to make a left to get on the Cross County East.”

“I’m not allowed on the parkway.”

“Do as I tell you,” his father said calmly. There were no spastic jerks or fake pumps of the brake. Lately his father drifted in and out of being his old self, like a wraith passing through dimensions.

The light before the entrance to the parkway turned red as he approached it, and Connell checked to see that his belt was securely buckled. When the light turned green and he inched forward and made the left to merge, he felt like the car was running away from him.

“I want you to build up speed as you merge. We’re going to head to the Hutch.”

“The Hutch? What if I get pulled over?”

“Hutch north,” his father said. “Get in the left lane. Don’t be nervous. Just relax. There aren’t many cars now. If you relax, you’ll be a fine driver. Just get up to about fifty, fifty-five.”

Connell pressed the accelerator. The speed was exhilarating, and he pressed it deeper, watching the needle climb to fifty, then sixty. He eased off. His father had his eyes closed.

“We have to get you used to real-world conditions,” his father said. “Stay left. We’re going to merge onto the Hutch north. I want you to look for signs for Mamaroneck Avenue, twenty-three north.”

It felt like all the highways in the country could be reached from this one, that he could go anywhere from here. He wanted to drive through the night.

“It’s coming up,” his father said. “Twenty-three north. When you exit, you’ll be on a ramp. As long as there’s nobody behind you, when you get to the light at the end, I want you to slam on the brakes. Anything can happen at any moment, and you need to stay alert.”

Before she could leave for work she had to get herself and Ed showered and dressed, fix breakfast, and cobble together a lunch and dinner for him.

She highlighted the start button on the microwave in pink magic marker. To the front of the microwave she taped an index card with an arrow pointing to “start” and a note that read “Press here.” The last thing she did before she left was put the plate in the microwave for his lunch and then set the cook time. She waited until the last minute, because she was hounded by the thought of those dishes sitting out for hours and spoiling.

She spent all morning worrying about him screwing it up. He needed perfect accuracy to pull it off. If he hit any button other than start, he ended up gnawing on frozen manicotti or choking down cold beef stew. She came home to the time unchanged on the microwave, half the meal on the floor, a broken plate under the table, the Times intact in its sleeve. He had stopped reading.

The microwave routine could work only once a day. She left a plated, covered sandwich in the refrigerator for his dinner. He ate dinner early, before she got home, due to the sundowning. It would have been easier to prepare him two sandwiches, but there was something disgraceful in the idea of his eating more than one cold meal in her absence. Connell always came home too late to heat anything up for him.

She couldn’t count on him to attend to a churning in the gut or notice the time on the cable box, so she called to remind him to eat and talked him through the steps.

In the morning she set the television to a channel that showed dependable series in syndication in mini-marathons. It was easier to pick a halfway-decent channel and make him stick to it than let him range off the reservation. When he wasn’t looking, she slipped the television remote and the one for the cable box into the end-table drawer.

He made chaos out of everything he touched, but she continued to let him handle the bills; it was a part of his masculine identity. Some bills he paid twice, others he threw out without opening them. The phone company called to say they had five hundred dollars of her money and she shouldn’t send any more for a while. When the next bill came, she squirreled it away, but the following month he beat her to the mail and wrote a check for the outstanding amount of their credit. They were almost a thousand dollars in the clear.

She couldn’t leave lists everywhere explaining how to do everything in excruciating detail, because it wasn’t clear how well he read anymore, and anyway, where did helpfulness end and absurdity begin? Was she going to lay out how to wipe his ass, how to aim his penis at the bowl? The easier thing was to clean the piss off the floor when she got home from work.

When they walked into town together, he avoided the bank with phobic deliberateness. He wouldn’t even go in with her when she went to withdraw money from the ATM. Maybe it was because he often heard her talking nervously about money, how it was a besieged resource in their household. She knew it was hard for him to feel so out of control. He didn’t realize that she would have loved to continue ceding responsibility to him, that she would have wanted nothing more in the world, but that had become impossible.