We Are Not Ourselves. Matthew Thomas
“You were going to be fine. We had time.”
He looked like he was in shock. She went to the freezer and scooped some ice cream into a bowl for him.
“Here, have this,” she said. “I don’t think you can choke on this. Maybe you’ll find a way.”
Ordinarily at this time of night she would have made him sit down with his homework, but she didn’t say anything about it. At the moment she didn’t care if he never did his homework again. Maybe this was how Ed felt all the time.
She told him he could take the ice cream to the couch—another first—and she went to get the television for him. The only set in the house was the little black-and-white one in their bedroom. They had been wheeling it out to the living room during the playoffs and the World Series. She cleaned up the pan from the chicken while he watched Entertainment Tonight, and joined him when she was done. The games usually started at eight, or before eight, but when he got up to change the channel to NBC, The Cosby Show was on. It took only a moment to understand that preempting The Cosby Show would have cost the network ad revenue. They lay on separate couches. It wasn’t easy to see the set from that far away. The girl, Vanessa, was trying to wear makeup to school, against her mother’s wishes. The boy, Theo, was attempting to organize his family to do a fire drill. It could have been Leave It to Beaver, except that everyone was black. The world was changing fast. It was hard to fit her son’s America into her memory of how the world had been ordered when she was a child. She felt like a member of an in-between generation, straddling sides in a clash of history. Her life was as remote and ancient to Connell as the stories of the pilgrim settlers had been to her when she was his age.
The Cosby Show ended and the game was about to come on. She told him she was going to the bedroom to lie down, and he gave her a stricken look.
“You’re not watching the game?”
She could tell he was disturbed by what had happened to him, that he didn’t want to be alone. “I’ll watch for a little while,” she said, relenting.
She didn’t blame him. Over and over she had been reliving in her mind the moment when she’d watched Donny pop the tomato out. She wanted to sit next to Connell, to hold him close to her, but she had no idea how to do it. She had no interest in watching another of these games she’d had to sit through so many of in the run-up to the playoffs, so after a few minutes she rose to get Lonesome Dove. She flipped through it distractedly, reading and rereading the same page several times. The Mets fell behind early, and by the end of the fifth inning they were down 4–0.
She knew she wasn’t the softest mother in the world. She worked a lot. She worked, period. Other mothers stayed home, baked cookies, talked to their kids all the time, knew everything their kids were thinking. It had never occurred to her to try to be Connell’s friend. She did her best to encourage meaningful conversations at dinner, the three of them talking as a family, and not only because it would be constructive in lubricating Connell’s future advancement among people who judged a person by how he spoke, but also because she liked to hear what he was thinking. She had worked hard to give him a comfortable life. That was as valuable as providing emotional sustenance. Life wasn’t only about expressing feelings and giving hugs. Still, she couldn’t figure out how to break through the defenses her son had put up, and it bothered her, an intellectual problem as much as an emotional one.
She placed her bookmark in the page and held the book in her hands. “I’m thinking of turning in,” she said.
“Can you stay here and read?”
So, he needed her there. He couldn’t say it in so many words, but he had more or less admitted it. She opened her book again and started in on the first page of the chapter she’d been reading.
Ed walked in before ten. They heard the door, and then they heard him hanging his coat in the vestibule, and then they heard him dropping his briefcase on his desk in the study before he came into the living room.
“Still four–nothing?” he asked when he walked in.
Connell nodded. “Gooden got smacked around.”
“They were saying on the radio his velocity is down.”
“El Sid has been great in relief. But the bats are ice cold.”
“Something happened,” she said, interjecting. “Connell choked.”
“What?” Ed turned to her, then back to him. “What happened, buddy?”
“I was trying to concentrate on not choking, and then the next thing I knew I was choking.”
He looked at her. “Really choking?”
“It was in his windpipe.”
“What was?”
“A cherry tomato.”
“You got it out?”
“Donny did.”
He pointed upstairs. “You ate with the Orlandos?”
“Donny came down,” Connell said.
“To eat with us?”
Her blood ran cold at the thought of discussing the particulars around the boy, who would see on her face how unsettled she still was.
“I’ll explain later,” she said.
“Come here,” Ed said, and he sat on the couch and put his arm around Connell, who leaned into the lapel of his father’s tweed jacket. It was so easy for Ed to connect to him. She always had to be the scold. Maybe Connell had hardened his heart to her. He leaned in further, so that his chubby belly pressed against the waistband of his sweatpants. He had his face in Ed’s flannel shirt and started sobbing. Ed kissed the top of his head and rubbed his back. Connell kept his face buried there for some minutes. Ed was looking to her for a mimed narrative of what had happened, but she kept waving him off. After a while, Connell lifted his head.
“Will you do what your mother has asked you to do a few times now, if I’m not mistaken,” Ed said in a firm but gentle voice, “and try to slow down when you eat? Can you do that for me?”
Connell nodded.
“Good.”
And then, without another word, they had transitioned out of that conversation and were watching the game. She stopped reading Lonesome Dove and directed her attention to them. It was something to behold, Ed’s physical comfort with the boy, who had his leg draped over his father’s. She’d been affectionate with Connell when he was very young, up until he was about three, but then something had interceded to make it subtly harder for her to connect to him. She knew Ed could do it, so she’d never spent much time worrying about the boy being deprived, but now she had the sensation that she was on the other side of something important. She wasn’t angry so much as hurt and darkly fascinated.
The Mets scored a run in the top of the eighth inning, and then, in the ninth, after Ray Knight grounded out and Kevin Mitchell popped out—she’d sat through so many playoff games of late that she knew the players’ names by now—Mookie Wilson doubled, and then Rafael Santana singled him in. Ed said this team had a knack for getting two-out hits. Lenny Dykstra came to the plate as the tying run, but a few pitches later he struck out swinging and the game was over. The Mets were down three games to two in the World Series. Another loss and their season, which seemed to have united New York for a while and which even someone like her, who paid little attention, knew had been an extraordinary success, would be over.
“Complete game for Hurst,” Ed said. “Impressive.”
“They couldn’t get to him,” Connell said.
Ed rose and shut the volume off but left the screen on, and they watched the Red Sox players celebrate as the credits rolled and the news came on. Then he shut the television off and pulled the plug on it to prepare to roll it back into the bedroom.
“Clemens is up next,” Connell said, foreboding