Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

The girl motioned in Ed’s direction. The boyfriend, packed like a sausage into his suit, started punching his palm in a manner both absurdly unoriginal and genuinely frightening. Eileen shifted instinctively in front of Ed, holding up her hand to halt their advance like a crossing guard protecting a child.

“It’s not what you think,” she said as calmly as she could. “It’s not what you think at all.”

04/16/94: Grab-ass at Karen’s wedding. Be there when he meets people. Stay by his side at parties. That time he held onto Susan’s breast when saying good-bye? No accident .

They were invited to a party in Chelsea at the home of the chief of staff. They parked several blocks away and walked, soaking up the energy of a Manhattan evening. Ed had on a beautiful suit, she an expensive dress she’d bought a year ago and hadn’t had occasion to put on. She was enjoying wearing it. It fit a little snugly, with all the stress she’d been under lately, but it still framed her shape nicely.

She didn’t notice until she was a few paces ahead of him that Ed had fallen back like a recalcitrant dog on a walk.

“What is it?” She went back and tried to pull him along. “What’s going on?”

“You go without me.”

“This is absurd,” she said. “We’re a block away.”

“I’ve never met these people.”

“So what? They’re nice people.”

He shook his head.

“You’re going , Ed. I RSVP’d. I can’t mess around here. This guy, the chief of staff, he didn’t bring me in. He’s younger. I need to make a good showing tonight. I need you to rise to the occasion. Okay? I need to make it to ten years.”

“They’ll never know the real me,” he said.

It hadn’t occurred to her that Ed might think this way, but then they hadn’t spent much time around people who didn’t know him before.

“Half of you is better than ninety percent of people with a whole brain,” she said, and was surprised to find she believed it. “Even now, you’re funnier and smarter than most of those people in that room will be. Don’t forget who you are. Stick by me and they won’t notice a thing.”

He was at her elbow all night and no one was the wiser. The good thing about parties was that no conversation had to go that deep. If Ed didn’t answer a question right away, it fell back to the questioner. He only seemed more interesting the more time he took to answer. She held the plate and gave him only one-bite morsels. The dim lighting, the noise, and the crowd all helped. In his suit, Ed cut a dashing figure. He gave her an advantage with the chief, who talked with him for a long time about the research he’d done.

When they reached the street on departure, Ed was shaking so much that he could have been having a seizure. She saw that he must have exerted superhuman will to keep it together for her.

For several days, he seemed drained, and not long after, his conversation began to suffer.

05/20/94: Slurred speech after Chelsea shindig.

A few months after Frank had his stroke, they met Ruth and Frank at the Metropolitan Museum. Frank was in a wheelchair.

They’d only been there a few minutes when Ruth insisted she needed a break from her husband. Eileen understood; Ruth had Frank to herself round-the-clock now. They told Ed and Frank to wait at a bench and slipped away to a costume exhibit. Even though she was thoroughly utilitarian in her attire — a powder-blue cardigan was an extravagance for her — Ruth performed delighted astonishment at the beauty of the elaborate dresses. Eileen’s gaze lingered on the cascading folds of finger-thick fabric, which seemed almost big enough for a person to hide away in.

When they returned to the bench, their husbands were gone. Eileen felt panicked, but a hunch led her to the main gallery, where she saw Ed standing, hands on the wheelchair handles, in front of his favorite painting, David’s Death of Socrates . Between him and Frank they barely had a whole working body.

She and Ruth walked up silently behind them.

“This one in the middle is Socrates,” Ed was saying. Eileen and Ruth looked at each other. “And this man with his hand on his knee. I forget his name.” She wanted to say “Crito,” as she’d heard him say before, but she kept quiet. “And the man at the end. I forget his name too.” Plato , she thought. “You know the story?” Frank was nodding along. “They’re making him take the cup.” Frank’s head was nodding like a piston. “They’re afraid of the influence he’s had on people.” She was amazed at how much of this he remembered. Ed wheeled Frank closer to the painting, and she felt the guard’s eyes on them.

“Look at his finger pointing up,” Ed said. “He’s saying, ‘I know there’s more after this.’ The cup is filled with… with…” Ed grappled for the word. Frank started to say it but couldn’t get it out. He stammered a couple of syllables.

“Hemlock,” Ruth said tersely, but not without emotion, as she took the handles of Frank’s wheelchair and began the march out of the room.

6/11/94: Went to Met. Ed forgot Crito, Plato, hemlock.

He was haunting her in the kitchen. She could tell he wanted to feel useful. She told him to chop a turnip. She had her back to him cooking and heard a lot of noise. When she turned he had lodged half the turnip on the knife and was banging both of them, turnip and knife together, on the cutting board. Connell, who had been sitting at the table looking through philosophy books for quotes for the upcoming debate season, leaped up and seized the knife.

“Give me that!” he said. “Jesus! What the hell are you doing?”

She pulled Connell into the dining room. “I will smack your face,” she said, “if I ever see you talk to your father like that again. I don’t care how old you are.”

Ed sulked in front of the television until he went up to bed — at three thirty in the afternoon.

08/03/94: Bedtime today broke the 4:00 barrier.

His father stood bowlegged before the coffee machine, looking at once like a baby with a load in his pants and an old gunslinger who had walked through the desert and been struck by lightning. He was wearing a tie but it was backwards, the thin part in front of the thick part.

He shook the filter out what seemed like a hundred times, smoothed it against the swing-hinged filter holder, righting and rerighting with animal vigor what was already in place. Connell watched uneasily. His father worked as though everything depended on this, looking the way he used to look when sanding edges or sawing boards. He’d crumpled the filter, so it didn’t fit properly. Connell took a new one out of the box and put it in. He took the tie off him and retied it on himself while his father laughed meekly and looked at the floor.

When his mother came home, Connell went down to the car to help with the groceries, his father following closely behind. He could see his mother evaluating the bags she handed to his father. She made sure he only had cans, lunchmeats, and boxes, nothing that would roll too far away or break.

His mother pulled out a box of Ritz and opened it before the bags were even unpacked.

Connell tore open a bag of potato chips. “I can’t stop eating lately,” he said to his mother. Both their mouths were full.

“Don’t catch my disease,” his mother said. “I eat to fill the void.”

It occurred to Connell that the void was the house itself. It was too big, too empty; he could imagine eating himself into obesity in it.

• • •

He needed to go far away for college. The farther he went, the harder it would be to come back. The cost of plane tickets would be too high to make flying home a regular possibility.