We Are Not Ourselves(197)

“Oh, you’re damned right about that,” she said. “I’m furious. Make no mistake. You had no right to do what you did. I don’t care if it’s your life. There were other lives involved here. Not just mine or your father’s. My father’s, my mother’s. Your father’s mother’s. A lot of people worked hard to put you in the position you were in. There was a lot of money involved.”

“I’ll pay it back.”

“What you will do,” she said sharply, “is quit that godforsaken job immediately and go back to that school and take the classes you need to take to graduate. I don’t care if I have to drive you to Chicago myself. I don’t care if I have to sit there and watch you do your work like I had to watch you when you were a child. I don’t give a good goddamn what kind of reasons you thought you had for doing this. Let me tell you what those reasons were. They were bullshit, is what they were. You will get that degree, and you will make a real life for yourself. And I will be goddamned if you think anything will happen other than that.” She clapped her hands. “I can’t believe I didn’t see this. I knew this wasn’t you. I knew it.”

“What wasn’t me?”

“This ridiculous life you’re leading.”

“What if it is?”

“It’s not,” she said. “I carried you in my womb. I know a thing or two about you.”

“What’s wrong with the life I’m leading?”

“Don’t you get superior on me,” she said. “My mother pushed a mop around for thirty years. Understand? She cleaned up the vomit of snot-nosed kids. There’s nothing wrong with hard work. What’s wrong with it is that it isn’t your life. It never was. It belongs to someone else. You’ve been borrowing it. You’re simply not allowed to do that anymore, is all.”

“You can’t make me go back to school,” he said.

“I can, and I will, and I don’t care if you’re too thick to see I say that out of love. You can thank me when I’m dead and you’re not getting up to open the door for some goddamned punk. I will be damned if I let that happen to my son. I’m still your mother.”





100


When Eileen heard that someone at work was selling a pair of tickets to the Mets game, she remembered the time, the spring before they moved, when Ed told her he’d bought tickets of his own at work. Back then she’d thought of it as a subterfuge, but now she liked to think of it as a troubled man’s authentic attempt to give his family a carefree afternoon, even if he couldn’t share in it fully with them. She had been hard on him in those days, before she understood what was happening. There was room to be easy on him now.

She bought the tickets and went alone, the empty seat for Ed. It was the first day of October 2000. The leaves had begun to turn. It was warm and a little cloudy—A good day for baseball, she could hear Ed saying. It was the last game of the season. She had been told that not much was at stake. The Mets would be in the playoffs no matter what happened. She arrived late and found the stadium packed. They were playing the Montreal Expos, whom she remembered as being not very good, but it hardly seemed to matter who the opponent was. A palpable energy hung in the air, the kind Ed would have loved, especially if he’d had Connell with him.

She placed her pocketbook and coat in the empty seat and settled in. A hot dog vendor made his breathless way up the aisle, stopping a few rows below her. She watched him cradle an open bun, deftly spear a floating dog, sift through the bulging apron pocket for change. She was hungry, but she felt too raw for his sweaty humanity, the workaday intimacy of the moment of transfer.

She had been trying to clear her mind of the interfering noise of everyday life, including the loud silences when she was alone in the house, and this was a good place to do so. She kept her seat when the others stood. She didn’t clap along to the rhythmic thumping coming from the giant speakers, and she didn’t shout “Charge!” when everyone else did, but she allowed herself to siphon off some of their excess spirit.

The Mets held a narrow lead until the seventh inning, when the Expos tied it up. The score remained tied heading into the bottom of the ninth; after the third Met out, she slammed her hand down on her knee and looked at her bitten nails and realized that it mattered a great deal to her that they win this game, even if it didn’t matter to the team. It would have pleased Ed to see it head into extra innings: the decision of fate forestalled awhile, both teams working on borrowed time. The outcome’s importance rose with every out, as if all would be right in the world if the Mets prevailed.

She understood what had made these games so compelling to her husband: every day could bring the breaking of a new record, but the larger world would persist undisturbed. There was always news, even if little of it was newsworthy. Every pitch was different, every swing, and yet they all were variations on a familiar theme. The lines on the field, the fences around it, the neat geometry suggested that these, for a discrete but somehow infinite period, were the limits of the world.

The tenth inning gave way to the eleventh. A pair of base hits and a sacrifice bunt—she could never forget that term, because the sacrifice bunt, when executed perfectly, was nearly Ed’s favorite play, surpassed in his esteem only by the hit-and-run and the triple—put runners on second and third with one out, and they walked the next batter, but the Met pitcher got the last two men out without incident, and she allowed herself a deep breath. After two quick outs in the bottom of the eleventh, the next batter hit a single, and the one after him followed with a thrilling line drive to center, but the center fielder threw to the shortstop, who threw to the catcher, who tagged the runner at home for the third out. The Met pitcher struck out three straight batters in the top of the twelfth—struck out the side, she could hear Ed saying while pumping his fist—and the Expo pitcher retired them in order in the bottom half of the inning. No one reached base in the top of the thirteenth, and she heard someone behind her say that this was the longest game the Mets had played that year, and she thought, Of course it is, and that her heart would not be able to take it.