We Are Not Ourselves (6 page)

He came in when she was done and poured out another glass.

“What’s going on?” she asked, feeling woozy.

“Drink this.”

She woke in the morning with a headache, grateful it was Saturday.

“You will never again drink anything you can’t see through,” her father said when he saw her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter after taking an aspirin. “You will never pick up a drink again after putting it down and taking your eye off it.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Drink whiskey,” he said. “Good whiskey. Not too much. That’s the long and short of it.”

“I don’t think I’m ever drinking again.”

She thought she saw a trace of a smile cross his lips.

When New Year’s Eve came around, he raised a glass to her, and everyone else gathered did too.

“Here’s to my Eileen for making the honor roll again,” he said to a loud cheer. “God bless her, we’ll all be working for her one day.” He paused. “And let me tell you, there must be something right with her if she can stand after half a dozen zombies. She’s definitely my daughter.”

She’s definitely my daughter
. She heard a lifetime of unexpressed affection in the words. She imagined she could go for years on it, like a cactus kept alive by a sprinkling of rain. Still, she was so embarrassed that she decided never to drink anything but whatever the most boring girl in any group she was in was drinking.

5

F
rom the moment students entered the doors of St. Catherine’s Nursing School, on Bushwick Street in Brooklyn, until the day they graduated, the one bit of knowledge instructors seemed most concerned to impart was that they’d be thrown out for poor performance, but Eileen was used to those tactics after thirteen years of Catholic education, and
she knew that even if nursing wasn’t the field she’d have chosen, she’d been training for it without meaning to from an early age. There was nothing these veterans could throw at her that life hadn’t thrown already, and they somehow knew this themselves. There were times she could feel them
treating her with something like professional courtesy. She couldn’t help thinking this was what it felt like to be her father, to be praised for something you’d never had any choice about, to wonder if there was a way out of the trap of other people’s regard.

Martyrdom was never her aim, the way it was for some of the halo polishers she went to school with. They might as well have joined the nunnery for all the secret satisfaction she heard in their voices when they complained about the exhaustion and thanklessness of it all. But they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at a nunnery. They lacked the mental fortitude.

She’d never dreamed of being a nurse. It was just what girls from her neighborhood did when they were bright enough to avoid the secretarial pool. She would’ve preferred to be a lawyer or doctor, but she saw these professions as the purview of the privileged. She didn’t know how she’d ever have gotten the money to pursue them. She thought she might have had the brains for them, but she was afraid she lacked the imagination.

•  •  •

After St. Catherine’s she went on scholarship to St. John’s for her bachelor’s, enrolling in the fall of 1962. Her plan was to take summer classes, finish in three years instead of four, get through grad school, and begin the path to administrator pay. She earned spending money—and savings for the nursing administration degree tuition to come—as a dress model at Bonwit Teller. Women came to look at dresses and she showed them how they could look if they lost a few inches from their waist, or were taller, or had neat divots by their clavicle, or a galvanizing shock of black hair, or smooth skin, or arrestingly heavy-lidded, owlish emerald eyes. What they had on her was money and the insolent ease that came with it. Despite herself she became the preferred girl in the showroom. She didn’t try to push dresses on potential buyers by slinging a hand at the waist and jutting an elbow out. She simply put a dress on and stood there. She didn’t smile or not smile; make eye contact or avoid it; speak to customers or remain silent; she did whatever came naturally to her. If her nose itched, she scratched it. She turned to show them the dress at all angles when they asked her to, and when they were done looking at it, she went back to the dressing room and took it off. The other girls seemed to linger more, attempting to convince themselves of what they hadn’t convinced the customers of.

She daydreamed that the next person who walked in would be a rich man looking for a dress for his girlfriend, who would see her and change his mind about the drift his life was taking. He would let her forget about nursing, fly her around the world, care for her parents’ needs. She could sleepwalk through life, never changing a dirty bedpan, never batting away an exploratory hand when she leaned over a man in his senescence, never pressing through a fog of halitosis to take an old lady’s temperature, never working another day, never thinking another thought. She would come back to this store and sit in the chair and put the girl through her paces. She’d make it seem as if she was going to leave without buying anything, that she’d wasted everyone’s time, and then she would order one of everything to remind them that they had no idea how women like her really lived. But the only people who showed up were women a little older than her, or teenaged girls with their mothers. They said how radiant she looked, but she could hear them thinking of themselves.

One afternoon in April of 1963, a girl about Eileen’s age came in looking for dresses for her bridesmaids. The girl made apparently random selections, projecting a nervous aura. She looked familiar—alarmingly so; only after Eileen had modeled a handful of dresses did she realize the girl was Virginia Towers, who’d left St. Sebastian’s in seventh grade to move to Manhasset. Eileen prayed she wouldn’t recognize her, but while Virginia was examining the seams she started patting excitedly on Eileen’s shoulder.

“Eileen?”

“Yes?”

“Eileen! Eileen Tumulty!”

Virginia’s voice was all heedless abandon. Eileen raised her brows in silent acknowledgment, perturbed to be addressed so familiarly in a place where she’d worked to keep her distance from the other girls.

“It’s me, Ginny. Ginny Towers.”

“Virginia, my goodness,” she said mutedly.

Kind, sincere Virginia had been the only kid in her class with an investment bank executive for a father. Her father was also a Protestant, though her mother was a Catholic who’d grown up in the neighborhood. No one teased Virginia, even though she’d been shy and fairly awkward; it was as though her family’s means draped a protective cloak across her shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” Virginia asked.

There was no answer that wasn’t awkward, so Eileen gave the dress a demonstrative little tug in the chest and raised her hands in amused resignation.

“Right!” Virginia said. “Dresses.” She had two in her hands and three more draped across the armoire, none promising. “Well, hell. Do you like any of these?”

If Eileen had the money to buy bridesmaids’ dresses this expensive, she would buy different ones entirely—sleeker ones, less vulgar, more versatile. She was convinced she had nicer dresses hanging in her closet than Virginia did. She owned only half a dozen, but each was perfect. She would never buy five dresses for twenty dollars each when she could snag one
truly gorgeous one for a hundred. She went out infrequently enough that she never worried about being seen too often in any of them.

“I think the one I tried on a couple of dresses ago is quite nice,” Eileen said.

“The lavender one? I knew it! I liked that one too. I’ll just have them order that one then.”

Standing in the billowing dress, Eileen felt like one of those men in sandwich boards advertising lunch specials.

“Eileen
Tumulty
,” Virginia said, as though it were the answer to a quiz-show question. “I’m guessing this is just your day job.”

“I’m doing my bachelor’s,” she said. “I went to nursing school.”

“I figured you’d be on your way to being a doctor or something. You were always the smartest one of us.”

She felt her face redden.

“I’m finishing at Sarah Lawrence this year. And I’m getting married! But you knew that already. He’s a Penn man. Very square—he makes me giggle he’s so square. My father has set him up with interviews at Lehman Brothers. We’re going to live in Bronxville. I’m going to walk to school my last month!”

She knew of the town; it was a wealthy bedroom community in lower Westchester County. “That sounds just lovely.”

“And I know you won’t guess what I’m doing next year.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to law school. At Columbia.”

“You were always intelligent,” Eileen said, stifling her surprise.

“Not like you. You were a whip.”

“You’re very kind.”

“You were more of an adult than the rest of us,” Virginia said. “I often think about that day in sixth grade when you took me to Woolworth’s and made me buy a notebook for every class. Do you remember?”

She remembered, but she didn’t relish recalling what an excess of energy she’d had then for grand improving projects, as though she’d thought the moral balance of the world could be restored by a regimen of directed efforts.

“I remember you weren’t the most organized girl, but I don’t remember going to Woolworth’s, no.”

“I think you’d had enough of watching me never be able to find anything when I needed it. You made me separate my notes. That was one of the most helpful things anyone’s ever done for me.”

“I’m glad,” Eileen said, feeling a churning in her gut.

“You should come to law school with me. We could be study partners. I’d get the better end of that deal.”

It was as if Virginia was speaking to her from the outside of a circus cage, clutching a bar in one hand as she absently held a lamb chop in the other. Eileen had to get away before she said something she’d regret.

“Maybe in my next life,” she said, and the awkwardness she’d kept at bay came rushing back at once. The dress’s low cut left her feeling exposed. A new customer had arrived, and the other girl was busy with someone else, so Eileen asked Virginia if she was sure about the lavender dress and left her with the woman who arranged the accounts.

“Please look us up,” Virginia said on her way out. “Give us a couple of months to settle in. Bronxville, don’t forget. We’ll be in the phone book. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Callow. We’d absolutely love to have you over. There’s nothing so valuable in life as old friends.”

•  •  •

Her mother told her to save her money, to buy used if she had to have a car, but her father was the one to go with her to the showroom.

The new Pontiac Tempest was on the floor, the 1964 model.

“It’s most of what I have saved,” Eileen said.

“You’ll make more. You’ll save again.”

“It’s a bad investment.”

“It’s an investment in life,” her father said. “If this is what you want, this is what you’re getting. It beats the piss out of a beer truck, I’ll say that. Maybe I’ll get one myself. Or I could get one of those convertible types over there. What did he call that one? The GTO? I could drive your mother around in it. Do you think she’d take to it?”

For a moment, he sounded serious, and Eileen wanted to say,
Daddy, I think she would
, but instead she just said, “Now
that
is a
terrible
investment,” and asked him whether cherry red or navy suited her better.

She could buy used and save for the future, or she could make a statement about where she thought her life was heading, and shape the perceptions of others about that trajectory, and maybe sway the future by courting it.

“What the hell do you think I’m going to tell you?” her father said.

She went with cherry red.

•  •  •

She was at the table when her mother got in from work.

“Studying again?”

Eileen barely grunted in reply. In shedding herself of her effects, her mother had dropped her keys on Eileen’s splayed notebook. There were so many keys packed onto the interlocking rings; each represented a room, or several, that her mother had to clean. Eileen slid them off the notebook as if they were coated in pathogens.

“Why don’t you put those books aside for five minutes,” her mother said. “You can drive me and my friends.”

“Drive where? Which friends?”

“My meeting friends.”

Meeting friends
, Eileen thought crankily.
She almost makes it sound pleasant.

“Take my car,” she said, not looking up from her book.

“I’m nervous to drive it.”

Her mother had only had her license for a year, and she was shaky on the road. The Tempest was still brand-new.

“I’ve got a test.”

“We started a car pool,” her mother said. “I said I’d pick everyone up this week.”

“And how had you planned on doing this, exactly?”

“Come on,” her mother said. “It’s getting late.”

The first stop was in Jackson Heights. She was surprised to pull up outside one of the co-ops; she’d always imagined that people of means were
spared some of the sadder aspects of man’s nature. As soon as her mother left the car, Eileen took out her textbook. She was planning to study at every stop, even with others in the car. There wasn’t time for the squeamish propriety of small talk; the fact that she had submitted to this depressing task was enough.

When her mother returned, there was a brightness in her voice.

“Hiram,” she said to the man getting in the backseat, “this is my daughter, Eileen.”

“So I guess you’re Charon tonight.”

“
Eileen
,” she said.

“Charon. The ferryman. On the river Styx.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right.”

“Shuttling the dead.”

He had bumped his hairpiece on the doorframe in getting in; instead of adjusting it with a furtive hand, he had taken it off completely and was resetting it with such nonchalance that it seemed he wore it not to disguise his baldness but to bring it out in the open.

“You’re very much alive, Hiram,” her mother said, beginning to titter. “Though I can’t say the same for that rug you’re wearing.”