We Are Not Ourselves (31 page)

She knew what it was about, even if he didn’t. It was about getting old. She felt it too, but somehow she knew it was different for men. They got spooked when they lost their hair, when their backs gave out. Women were better prepared to deal with death and old age, especially mothers, who, having delivered children, saw how tenuous the line was between life and death. And as a nurse she had seen so many people die, people to whom she’d grown attached. Ed had taught anatomy and physiology. He’d been in the museum of death, not on its front lines. It was irrational for him to react this much to a bit of misentered data, but what was rational about a midlife crisis? Weren’t they always a little absurd?

They were beginning the next phase of their lives together. She was not afraid of it.
Let it come
, she thought.
He’ll be in good hands
.

Within minutes he was sound asleep, the crying having exhausted him. She lay awake until the alarm clock went off. He slept through her getting dressed. She made a neat stack of the papers on the table.

•  •  •

The Joint Commission sent eight people to do the inspection. She and the other administrators went into a conference room to make their presentations. She was glad she’d taken some extra time doing her hair and makeup that morning, and that she’d worn her gray skirt suit, which clung enough
to give her some sex appeal while still looking professional, because the team was mostly male.

She was exhausted, but she felt confident about her staff’s preparedness. She’d been readying the nurses for a year, training them in how to answer questions. They were up to date on all the standards: pharmacy, equipment, staff knowledge, patient care. It was the patient interviews that troubled her. Usually the patients were generous in their comments. Still, one disgruntled patient was all it took to get the commission sniffing around. “How is the service?” “Terrible.” “How is your room?” “The place is filthy.” “Are you getting the medicines you need in a timely fashion?” “I can never get anyone around here to answer my call.”

She gave a rundown of the state of affairs in nursing and took a seat. She struggled to stay awake through the other administrators’ presentations. Then they loosed the team.

She wasn’t allowed to follow them around. It made her feel like a criminal. Accreditation was at stake; there were standards to uphold. Still, they were so damned humorless about it. They stalked the place like stormtroopers. They went through labs, making sure everything was cleaned and stored properly. They looked at every chart in the place. They pored over paperwork like district attorneys looking for a break in a prosecution. They grilled staff members. No one knew exactly how long they’d be there once they showed up. It could be three days; it could be the whole week.

Her staff could have withstood a press conference after all the paces she’d run them through. Still, things don’t always go as planned. One inspector found an expired IV solution while interviewing a patient. That got the others digging. They found an expired medicine in one of the carts. The expirations killed you. You could have nurses trained to say all the right things, but if they found one bottle a couple of weeks past its prime in a lineup of fifty good ones, it negated weeks of coaching. A crash cart wasn’t in the locked cabinet it was supposed to be in. They didn’t tell her where it was, of course, only that it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. That one hurt. She prided herself on running a tip-top ER. No one in her hospital was ever going to expire after cardiac arrest because the cart didn’t
have the proper medications on it. If the cart wasn’t where it was supposed to be, though, it didn’t matter what was on it.

Before they left for the day, they gave her a list of citations. Too many and the accreditation could be compromised. They gave her a chance to follow up the next day. It was a simple matter of a few fixes—switching out the old medicine, changing the IV, putting the cart back where it belonged—but it also served to tell her that she was on notice. She’d get through it; North Central Bronx would retain its accreditation. Nothing about it promised to be easy, though. They seemed like the kind of crew that wouldn’t give them a pass on anything. It was going to be a long week. In the meantime, life continued at the hospital. People didn’t stop getting sick. People didn’t stop having heart attacks. One kid came in having blown off his hand with a firecracker.

She dozed off at a red light on the way home. When she pulled into the driveway she saw the sheet still over the pile in the back. In the tumult of the day she’d forgotten about it. She walked over to it and lifted a corner. It was all there, untouched. She didn’t have the energy to spare Ed’s ego. She whipped the sheet off. If it was a bonfire he was after, he’d have to find another way to exorcise his demons. She gathered up the pieces of lumber and put them in the garbage can; they stuck out jagged and tall. She dragged the can to the curb for pickup the next day. Ed would flip out when he saw it; in fact, that was the point. Fatigue was hardening her toward him. His vulnerability last night, and her tenderness—it felt as if it had happened a year ago. She hardly remembered it at all; it could have been a dream. It was all so stupid; how could she have indulged him in it?

She marched inside and found him hunched over the stack of lab reports they hadn’t gotten to the night before. She felt she’d fallen into a film loop.

“I took your wood to the curb,” she said. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep the backyard from looking like a junk heap.”

“Okay,” he said without looking up.

“That’s it? Just ‘okay’? No rage? No telling me not to mess with your stuff?”

He kept working as though he hadn’t heard her. She could smell a musky odor coming off him. He hadn’t showered. He had changed his
clothes, thank God, but he hadn’t washed before he left for work. Ed hated not to shower. He felt a layer of grime sitting on him all day when he didn’t.

“What were you trying to make, anyway?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, swiveling in his chair. He gave her a look that said he was only trying to get an honest bit of work done. He was one of those aggrieved husbands who had to deal with the not-always-sensible ravings of wives who meant well but made things so difficult sometimes.

“I’m talking about the pile out back,” she said pointedly. “Your little Stonehenge.”

“I really have to focus,” he said. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t remember the sheet you put over the pile of wood in the backyard?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.” She could see that he remembered it, possibly for the first time since he’d done it; he was that absorbed.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Just tell me something, and I’ll let you work all night. What were you making?”

“What?”

She knew this gambit; he was pretending he hadn’t heard her, stalling for time.

“What were you making?”’

“Oh, you know.”

“I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

“I was making something. I told you what I was doing. You know this.”

“When I left on Saturday you told me you had some projects in mind. Home improvement projects.”

“Yes! Yes. I was making something for the house.”

His answers sounded like those given over the phone by kidnapped people being watched for signs of betrayal.

“What exactly?”

“Well, it was a surprise.”

“I don’t need any more surprises.” She looked at him for a few moments. “How did it go today?”

“Fine.”

“No problems?”

“No.”

“No students complaining?”

“No.”

She hesitated for a moment, then came out with it.

“Do you want some help with that other stack tonight?”

“Yes,” he said in an instant.

•  •  •

She had no energy to cook, so they ordered pizza. At the end of the meal she took a long, hot shower. Afterward, she wanted to rest for an hour before she helped Ed with the lab reports. She didn’t feel like drowsing in the musty air of the bedroom, so she availed herself of the couch. It was one of those times she wished they had a television in the living room. It had been a principled stance of theirs—of Ed’s, mostly, though she went along with it. At the beginning of their marriage, Ed didn’t hate television, precisely; he just didn’t like what it was doing to American life. It wasn’t always convenient to be without a set in their living room, but there were benefits. Actual conversations took place when people came over, unlike at Ed’s sister Fiona’s house, where the all-seeing eye made any exchange a series of distracted monologues. And when the three of them crawled into the big bed on Sundays to watch
Fawlty Towers
, it was an event. Recently, though, Ed had grown more severe about it, insisting she shut it off when she tried to watch Johnny Carson at night. It was part of a general trend in his thinking. He was becoming more reflexive, more reactionary. She was becoming the opposite. When they moved to the new house, she would get a big television for the den.

She went to the bedroom and wheeled the little television out to the living room. She wanted to shut her brain off. She didn’t care if the noise bothered him. He couldn’t be doing anything of consequence, and it was only a matter of time before she’d be sitting with him at the kitchen table, running through the grades.

She woke to Ed pounding on the television set.

“Keep that off,” he said. “I’m trying to work.”

She was too sleepy to take umbrage at what he was saying. She waited curiously for the next thing.

“Take it inside. Take it away.”

“I happen to live here too,” she said, her blood rising.

“Get it out of here! I can’t concentrate.”

She stood and fixed the pillows behind her. “We don’t talk to each other like that in this household. I didn’t let my father talk to me like that, and I’m not about to let you do so. You’ve been a complete jerk for I don’t know how long. I’ve had it. I can’t take another day of it. Either you stop this behavior right now, or I swear, Ed, I’m leaving. I won’t make a big production of it. I’ll just take our son and go. Do you have any idea how tired I am? How long my day was? Because I stayed up to help you. You want to do everything yourself, fine. Do it. It’s easier for me to have nothing to do with you.”

He dropped into the armchair and sat looking at her. It almost unnerved her how intent his look was. Against her will, she felt herself warming to him. There was something in his gaze that could make her embers catch fire, even when they were buried under layers of ash.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You said that yesterday.”

“I’m under so much stress at work.”

“I am too,” she said.

“I know.”

“Since when are you under this kind of stress? I thought one of the perks of your job was how low-stress it was.”

“Lately it’s not.”

“Your head’s not in it,” she said. “I think your mind’s not right. But you won’t talk to me. You won’t let me in.”

“I’m dealing with a new generation,” he said. “I need to be perfect.”

“You’re having a midlife crisis,” she said. “I don’t mean to diminish it, but that’s what it is.”

“I just need to get through the next couple of weeks,” he said. “Then I’ll be fine. I need the summer to recuperate. I put a few things off, and now I’m dealing with them. I’ve tried to shield you from all this. I’m tired. I’m making mistakes. I haven’t been sleeping well. I just need to recharge my batteries.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“I know the feeling,” she said as she yawned. “When do you need to return those lab reports?”

“Tomorrow is the last day of classes.”

“Go get them and we’ll check them together. Then we can both get some sleep.”

She put on water for tea. She felt as if she was moving through a thick soup. She stood by the stove, watching the kettle boil. She fixed her tea and with languid movements joined Ed at the table. She wanted to insist on a little ceremony. She was going to sip her tea, not gulp it. But she needed Ed to calm down first. His knees were jackhammering up and down in that way that sometimes overcame him.

“Let me drink this before we start.”

“Fine, fine.”

She tried to let the warm liquid have a tonic effect, but she had put too much milk in it, and it wasn’t a good cup. It was foolish to make tea in order to stay awake; all her years of drinking it before bed had turned it into a soporific.

“Let’s get started,” she said.

He focused on the open grade book with the unwavering attention of a runner about to start a race. She thought back to the chaos at the end of the previous night’s efforts, the way a spirit of collaboration had devolved into a shouting match. If only there were a way to avoid the altercation that would ensue if—when—Ed made a mistake. She could feel it as a certainty for some reason, perhaps because of the barely contained mania in that pumping leg. He was in a place mentally where she couldn’t follow, where an entry error was a harbinger of doom. She thought of the bum rap women got: as hormonal as she’d been after delivering Connell, she’d never been certifiably nuts.

An idea occurred to her and she saw right away that it was the correct one, the only one. It should have occurred to her last night, but she was on Ed’s terms then, and tonight he was on hers. Still, she hesitated. Any deviation from the pattern, however short-lived that pattern happened to be, promised to unleash in Ed a disproportionate fury. She had a vision of his overturning the table like a card cheat before a shootout.

She cleared her throat. “I have an idea,” she said tentatively, and he didn’t respond. He was tossing aside, one by one, the gestures of nicety that accounted for much of conversation. “It can save us some time. Of course, if you want to do it another way, it’s up to you.”

He nodded to indicate he was listening—an improvement. She sipped her tea.

“I can just enter them directly into the book,” she said. “You can check it over when I’m done.”

“Yes,” he said, lightning-quickly. At first she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then he looked up and said it again. She felt her body relax. She hadn’t realized it, but she had been bracing for a shock—a blow, even.