We Are Not Ourselves (79 page)

“Just for that extra bit of humiliation for Gregor. Anyway, how do we explain his parents’ instantly knowing that that dung beetle is their son? Maybe it’s not a stretch for them to see their son as a vermin. Maybe they’ve been seeing him as less than human all along. He’s been serving their needs, propping them up. Maybe his spirit, as they see it, has finally found the body it deserves.”

The bell rang. He reminded them to do the reading and gathered his
things. He kept his head down. He could sense a couple of them assembling at his desk. Danny Burbano was there, as well as Justin. Danny was always there. Danny was embarrassed to speak in front of the others, but he liked to talk about the books they read. Connell usually indulged him.

“Not today, Danny,” he said as he brushed past. “Tell me tomorrow.” He could sense the hurt pooling in Danny’s chest. He was gruffer than he should have been, but he had to get out of there. Justin followed him out the door, hustling to keep up.

“Am I in trouble?”

“
You?
For what?”

“That impression I did.”

“Nobody’s in trouble,” Connell said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

He was down the hall and through the doors before Justin could respond. He looked up from a flight below and saw Justin watching him descend the stairs. He knew he must have looked like a man on fire.

Outside, he broke into a trot. The light at the corner was turning red and he sprinted across the avenue. He ran several blocks, all the way to the park along the Hudson’s edge, where he slumped on a bench and tried to catch his breath. His shirt was soaked with sweat. He hadn’t run that hard, that long, since high school. He took deep, fugitive drafts of the river air and tried to focus on the sun on his neck. A passing tugboat let out its foghorn. The sound reminded him of a bullfrog lowing, and he had a strange, familiar feeling that he couldn’t place. He looked at the diaphanous vapors in the atmosphere and out at the boats passing slowly and the competing skyline across the river, and he thought of the way life arranged itself around water.

He’d had intimations of this moment before. Once, he’d stood in the predawn dark in the kitchen, unplugging his wife’s phone from the charger and plugging in his own, and as he held it in his hand he realized that he could not recall the device’s name. He pressed his hands against the countertop’s edge and leaned his forehead into the microwave, fighting through a thick, aphasic fog, and, after at least a minute had passed, he began to feel a panic like the kind he felt when he cut off the circulation
to his arm in his sleep and woke with a start and called out, shaking and flapping it uselessly for so long that he was sure he had lost the use of it forever, until the blood came pumping back in and he recovered sensation in painful stages. All he’d been able to conjure had been the last line of a vaguely recollected poem—
blackberry, blackberry, blackberry
—and then he’d remembered the poem’s title—“Meditation at Lagunitas”—and finally realized with a mixture of relief and fear that BlackBerry was the very name of the thing he was holding, that his subconscious mind had been faster at retrieving it than his conscious mind, and that this could be an augury of what was to come.

Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs in his career, Hank Aaron 755, Barry Bonds 763. Hack Wilson set the single-season RBI record with 190 in 1930, though decades later historians found a discrepancy in a box score and changed the number to 191. Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 consecutive games, Cal Ripken 2,632. Orel Hershiser pitched 59 consecutive scoreless innings in ’88, eclipsing Don Drysdale’s record of 58 1/3. Cy Young won 511 games, Walter Johnson 417, Christy Mathewson and Pete Alexander both 373. Barry Bonds walked 2,558 times, Rickey Henderson scored 2,295 runs, Hank Aaron drove in 2,297 men, and Pete Rose got 4,256 hits, passing Ty Cobb’s 4,191—some say 4,189—in ’85. Mickey Mantle finished with a .298 lifetime batting average because of some mediocre seasons at the end of his career. Ted Williams lost the MVP award in 1941 to Joe DiMaggio and his 56-game hitting streak, despite hitting .406 that year. Dwight Gooden struck out 276 men as a rookie. Ralph Kiner won 7 home run titles despite playing in only 11 seasons.

Maybe he should have committed other facts to memory. Maybe he should have learned the dates of elections and political coups d’état. Maybe he should know the presidents in chronological order and their vice presidents and the dates of their elections and deaths, or the history of Mesopotamia or metallurgy, or the basics of quantum mechanics, but he didn’t know those facts, he knew baseball facts. He’d learned baseball facts originally because his father had known baseball facts and he liked having them to share with him, and then eventually they were just what rattled around in his head.

Roberto Clemente had a .317 lifetime batting average, was voted to start 17 All-Star games, and finished with exactly 3,000 hits. His plane crashed in Puerto Rico during an off-season relief mission he attempted to fly to Nicaragua in 1974 to deliver food to starving people. He was elected to the Hall of Fame immediately, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America forgoing the five-year waiting period they gave themselves to consider the value of a player’s contribution to the game.

He waited for the sensation of panicked blankness to come back, and after a while he started to wonder whether it had happened at all or whether he’d conjured it out of his fears. Something in the scene in the classroom had triggered it, some nagging déjà vu. He kept circling back to the moment when he turned to the board and saw the single word and didn’t remember how it got there. It hovered inscrutably, an insistent message in it.

He thought of the visit he had paid to his father’s own classroom before anyone knew what was really going on with him. He had watched his father come apart before his eyes.

Empathy
. He hadn’t always had it. It was a muscle you had to develop and then keep conditioned. Sometimes he thought his real goal wasn’t to teach them to write better essays but to get them to think more about what it meant to be human.

Michelle had been trying to persuade him to reconsider his firm stance against having children, a child. He had told her from the beginning that he wasn’t comfortable taking the chance he’d get the disease or that the kid would. The line was going to end with him, he had said, and she had accepted it, until she lost her mother after Christmas.

He took out his wallet and dug around in the recesses of its folds for the little piece of tooth. He held it in the sunlight, felt the smooth enamel against his fingertips. It could have been a sliver of seashell, a shard of stone or scree. He had transferred it from wallet to wallet over the years. He had to stop torturing himself with it. He wasn’t helping anyone with all this regret.

He had agreed the night before to go in for genetic testing. She had gotten him to commit to having a child if he definitely didn’t have the gene. It struck him now that what he had been thinking about when he drew a
blank before the class was an idea of this potential child. He could see a suggestion of this child’s face, an amalgam of his wife’s and his own. The truth was that even if he had the gene, he’d be willing to have a kid anyway, and not just because there was a chance he wouldn’t get the disease. If he got it, he’d do whatever he needed to do to shield the kid from it as long as he could.

The truth, he saw now, was that he wanted more than anything to have a child with his wife. Her life was as sparsely populated as his was, familywise. After her mother’s passing, her father had moved out to California to live with her brother, Ricky. Except for a cousin in Houston, Michelle didn’t have anyone else. Michelle and his mother had circled around each other for a few years. At first he thought it had to do with Michelle’s being Nicaraguan American, but lately he believed it had more to do with the fact that Michelle and his mother both had such strong personalities. They butted heads without the release of ever actually meaning to do so. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Michelle was a lawyer, that she’d been a clerk for a Supreme Court judge and was now at a corporate law firm. She’d already lived a lot of the life his mother might have wanted to live, and she wasn’t even thirty-five. His mother and Michelle had gotten close enough lately, though, that Michelle was now the one who called his mother when they had to make plans with her, and when they went over to his mother’s house, Michelle and his mother sat at the kitchen table after dinner playing backgammon while he watched television in the den. He knew that if he had a kid, Michelle and his mother could pull together even more, and it wasn’t hard to imagine Michelle calling his mother “Mami” soon enough, which he thought would make both of them happy.

He could honor his father by loving the kid the way his father had loved him. And if he had to be vulnerable in front of the kid, if he had to be defenseless and useless and pathetic, if he had to forget things and piss himself and get lost on the way home, then so be it. If the kid didn’t handle it well—well, that was what kids did. They went out too often, they stayed out too late, they said things that cut to the quick, they forgot responsibilities, they broke your heart. Years later they thought about it all.

And what did parents do? They saw more clearly than their kids did.
They forgave their kids, even if they didn’t say so. Even if they couldn’t say so. They did.

He couldn’t wait to get home to his wife. She would be surprised by his change of heart. She might be more surprised by how much he had to say. She was always trying to get him to talk. Well, tonight he was going to talk. She wasn’t going to be able to shut him up. He was going to tell the whole story, even the parts he wasn’t proud of. He would have to find a way to tell it so it made some kind of sense. He would have to tell it from the beginning. He’d have to give her enough detail to let her see it for herself. It was lucky that he had such a good memory for that kind of thing. It was all in there somewhere, he was sure of that. He would dig it out.

He rose and walked to the fence that cordoned off the edge of the island. He took one last look at the little chip of tooth and tossed it in the water. It disappeared without even the tiniest detectable splash, to settle unseen on the riverbed. Maybe in a few thousand years it would make its way out to the ocean. Maybe in another few thousand it would wash up on the shore of a wholly different world, with new species, a different atmosphere, and a tenuous place for man. For now, while he breathed and moved, while he felt and thought, there was still, between this moment and the one of his dying, the interval allotted to him, and there was so much to live for in it: the citrus snap of fresh black tea; the compression and release of a warm stack of folded towels carried to the closet between two hands; the tinny resonance of children in the distance when heard through a bedroom window; the mouth-fullness of cannoli cream; the sudden twitch of a horse’s ear to chase a fly; the neon green of the outfield grass; the map of wrinkles in one’s own hand; the smell and feel, even the taste of dirt; the comfort of a body squeezed against one’s own.

He would hug his kid as much as he could. “Good,” he’d say. “Good. Good.”

Acknowledgments

For the titles of parts I, III, IV and V, I am indebted to
The Great Gatsby,
“Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell, “Love Song: I and Thou,” by Alan Dugan, and “Meditation at Lagunitas,” by Robert Hass.

Many thanks to: Stephen Boykewich, Aidan Byrne, Joshua Ferris, Chad Harbach, Christopher Hood, and Tracy Tong, for careful reads and useful notes; Aaron Ackermann, Bonnie Altro, Charles Bock, John James, Matthew McGough, David Moon, Bergin O’Malley, Brad Pasanek, Amanda Rea, Chris Wiedmann, and Boris Wolfson, for friendship, encouragement, and support; all my teachers, especially Tristan Davies, Eric DiMichele, Stephen Dixon, Judith Grossman, Michelle Latiolais, Alice McDermott, Jean McGarry, John Mullin, David Powelstock, Mark Richard, Jim Shepard, Malynne Sternstein, William Veeder, Michael Vode, Robert von Hallberg, Greg Williamson, and Geoffrey Wolff; my classmates at Hopkins and Irvine; the staff and community at Paragraph, where I wrote a substantial portion of this book; my beloved colleagues at Xavier High School, especially Margaret Gonzalez, Ben Hamm, Mike LiVigni, and the entire English department; my extraordinary agent Bill Clegg, along with Chris Clemans, Raffaella De Angelis, Anna DeRoy, and Elizabeth Sheinkman at WME; my brilliant editor Marysue Rucci, publisher Jonathan Karp, and so many others at Simon & Schuster, especially Elizabeth Breeden, Andrea deWerd, Cary Goldstein, Emily Graff, Jessica Lawrence, Christopher Lin, Carolyn Reidy, Richard Rhorer, Lisa Rivlin, and Wendy Sheanin; copyeditor Peg Haller; Clare Reihill at Fourth Estate; Caroline Ast at Belfond; Mickey Quinn, for sharing his memories with me; my sister Liz Janocha and brother-in-law John; my mother and father, for a lifetime of love and stories; and my wife, Joy, for her indispensable edits and remarkable forbearance in giving me time to write while we raised twin babies in a one-bedroom apartment.

SIMON & SCHUSTER
READING GROUP GUIDE

We Are Not Ourselves

Matthew Thomas

About This Guide

This reading group guide for
We Are Not Ourselves
includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Matthew Thomas. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Epic in scope, heroic in character, and masterful in prose,
We Are Not Ourselves
is a multigenerational portrait of the Irish American Leary family.

Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed.