We Are Not Ourselves(157)

He went back to the broccoli and cut it with heavy chops, because he remembered her saying she found the sound a knife made on a cutting board satisfying. When he was done he hacked at the bare board for a while, rhythmically so that it would sound like the real thing. He went into the living room. She had stopped rubbing her feet. She wasn’t looking out the window anymore but was sitting on the couch. She gave him a weary glance as he approached.

“What is it?”

“Can I help?”

“You chopped the broccoli?” He nodded. She let out a faint sigh. “I’ll be in to cook. Just leave everything there.”

“Can I help with your feet?”

“My feet?”

“Do you want me to rub them?”

She had a wry expression on, as if she was weighing making a dry remark. Then she seemed to consider it further. “You’re offering to rub them,” she said dubiously.

He thought of the gap in his father’s mouth, the pool of blood under his father’s tongue.

It had been years since he’d touched his mother’s feet. He had half expected he’d never touch them again.

“Yes,” he said.

She raised her brows. “That would be nice,” she said.

He settled into the couch and took one foot in his lap as he used to. He was almost queasy with embarrassment at his proximity to her. He pressed a tentative hand against the ball of her foot. It was all there, the familiar moistness, the tufts of knuckle hair, the burst blisters, the gunky nails.

“Is your father all right?” she asked.

“He’s fine. Just watching TV.”

She seemed to relax, let her head fall against the pillow. He gave himself over to the task, using both hands to apply the proper pressure. Somehow he’d always been good at this. He’d had a certain amount of practice. His father would be busy in the study and his mother would put down the paper and ask if he’d rub her feet. There was something sweetly cajoling in the way she told him that she never sat down at work; it was the only time she ever behaved that way around him. Now, even more than before, he saw the evidence of what she’d been talking about. There was a history of her career in the bulging veins, the cramped muscles, the corns and bunions, the calluses and cracks. She wore neat shoes, but they covered a sprawling account of an overtaxed life, and there was no hiding the truth when she took them off.

He went after the pain, tried to free it up. She gave a muted cry of relief. He would be a disappointment to her later, when she remembered how he had failed her, but for now she was probably only thinking that she didn’t want him to stop. He had more strength in his hands than he used to. He used to ask to quit and she would wheedle another minute out of him and he would say he was tired and she would give in, but now he wouldn’t tire so easily. He would let her be the one to tell him when she’d had enough. The television roared in the other room. He brought her other foot up so that he could move between the two feet. He thought of the tooth in his pocket. There was a chance this would be the last time in her life that she’d have her feet rubbed, because circumstances might not conspire again to bring them together like this. There was a limit to his ability to reach out to her. It was easier with girlfriends. He was always offering to rub their feet. He threw all his affection at them and hoped that some of it would stick, maybe even come back to him, though if it didn’t he gave it anyway, he gave it more, even, because everyone had something that needed to come out.





75


She wasn’t going to be able to rely on her son, but she didn’t want to just bring another nurse in. The time had come to approach the problem differently. The fact was, she was handcuffed to Ed. Everything she did when she wasn’t at work, she had to do with him. What she needed was someone who would be there more of the time and in a more unstructured way, who could free her up to have a bit of a life; someone who could effortlessly pick up Ed when he fell. Maybe this person could even help around the house in a handyman capacity. Maybe what she’d needed in the house from the beginning had been a man.

? ? ?

If she was going to bring someone in full-time, she had to find the money to pay for it. She decided to take advantage of the fact that mortgage rates had gone down significantly since she and Ed had bought the house. She refinanced to bring her rate down from 10.3 percent to just over 8 percent, which gave her a little more to work with every month.

She put out feelers at work and posted flyers, but she didn’t get any promising leads. Then one of her nurses, Nadya Karpov, said her older brother Sergei was reliable and strong—too strong, Nadya said, to be driving a cab nights. He didn’t have nursing experience and he was in his fifties, but she thought he’d be good at it, as he was patient and calm. He didn’t have a car and he lived in Brighton Beach, but he was willing to make the long trip on the A train and the Metro-North. Eileen knew the nine hundred dollars a week she was offering would be a significant raise. The amount was just shy of what Ed’s pension and Social Security payments added up to, after taxes. Nadya said Sergei would probably jump at the chance to spend part of the week in Westchester and get away from her sister-in-law. “She’s Russian,” Nadya said simply, with raised brows, and Eileen nodded back, as if she knew something about the terror of Russian wives.

“We’re having company today,” she said to Ed shortly before Sergei was scheduled to arrive with Nadya for an interview. “A friend from work and her brother. Sergei’s his name. I think you’re going to like him. He’s excited to meet you. He doesn’t have many friends in the area. They’re from Russia. So I’ll need you to show him a good time.” After she’d said this, Ed sat at the kitchen table and wouldn’t move. She wanted him in the den, out of the way, to give Sergei a few minutes to walk around and get acquainted with the place. She could bring him in to meet Ed after he’d seen how nice everything was, what kind of people she and Ed were. But Ed wouldn’t budge. She could already envision the scene—Sergei in the house less than a minute, Ed wringing his hands and wailing, decision flashing across Sergei’s face: this is too much, too weird, too uncomfortable, he’ll find something else, it’s nice to meet you and your husband. Then he would say a polite good-bye, would leave her with Ed again, with Connell drifting through like a ghost until he flew back to school.