We Are Not Ourselves(134)

“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.





60


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.

He went through the list of colleges he and his mother had come up with together: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Williams, Amherst, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown, along with a couple of local safeties, Drew and Fordham. Every school on the list was less than five hours away. He decided he wouldn’t apply to any of them except the safeties. He made a new list: Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Stanford, Rice. Nothing small or that she hadn’t heard of or whose virtues he’d have to explain. Nothing, in short, that she wouldn’t pay for. He was going to force her hand. She’d never let him go to either of the safeties if he got into one of the better, farther-flung schools, even if the safety gave him scholarship money, which there was a chance they would: he had the grades, the SAT scores, and he had finished third in the state in Lincoln-Douglas debate. She would rather pay full freight and put a Notre Dame sticker on the car. She had explained how she was going to pay for his schooling: something about borrowing against the equity they had in the house and taking out private loans. All he knew was she’d told him she was going to make it so that he wouldn’t have to worry about paying the loans back. And if it didn’t work out, he would put the Drew sticker on the car himself—because what right did she have to be disappointed in him for going to Drew, when she’d only gone to St. John’s?

He felt like he could see the whole world, clearly, all at once. He was going to leave everything behind. He was about to be born again, but this time complete with all the defenses he would ever need. He would invent the world as he went along. He would pass through a thousand years in the blink of an eye.





61


Connell ran to catch the last train out of Grand Central, the one-thirty, but it was pulling out as he arrived at the platform. He sighed and kicked the big metal newspaper recycling bin. He had already seen that when you lived in the suburbs and you missed the last train, you entered a netherworld, a night town. It was going to be a long time until the five-thirty train.

He decided not to call to say he’d missed the train, even though his mother had told him to call no matter how late if he wasn’t coming home, because he felt too guilty to hear her voice. He had left that morning and hadn’t checked in all day. There wasn’t room in his mother’s overtaxed mind for her to enforce curfews and restrictions. She just counted on him not to get into trouble. He kept up his end of the deal, but he knew she wished he were around more. She had grown accustomed to his coming home late, but she hadn’t stopped feeling hurt by it. When he came in at half past two, after walking a silent path from the station, he sometimes heard her call to him quietly as he passed his parents’ room at the top of the stairs. Lately, though, she had learned to sleep through the night. Tonight he was going to take his chances that he’d get in before she awoke in the morning. It was easier to avoid conflict of any sort.