We Are Not Ourselves(38)

“Are you going to slow down now?” was all she could think to say when she went back to the dining room. Then she burst into tears. Connell seemed too dazed to cry.

“If you’d been Gary,” Donny said, “I would have let you choke. What do they call that, Gary? Euthanasia?”

Connell gave a little chuckle through his coughs.

“Don’t you do that again,” Angelo said. “I don’t need another heart attack. Two is plenty.”

“You good?” Brenda asked, putting her hand on Connell’s shoulder. He nodded. “Slow down. Your food’s not going anywhere.”

“Well, my work here is done,” Donny said. “I better go find a phone booth to change in.”

“Why don’t you go pick up your dirty drawers from the bathroom floor instead,” Brenda said. “I don’t think the hamper’s made of kryptonite.”

The laughs were welcome, but she could see that Donny had been affected by the brush with disaster. He was wide-eyed and shaking his head. The whole Orlando family seemed unnerved. Connell spent the afternoons up there, but it had never occurred to Eileen that they might in some way have thought of him as being part of their family too.

“Wheel of Fortune is on,” Gary said. They made their way up the stairs. She sat at the table with Connell.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded.

“Shaken up?”

He nodded again. “I couldn’t breathe,” he said.

“I know.”

“I couldn’t talk.”

He couldn’t know how hard on her he was making this.

“Horrible,” she said. “I froze up.”

“Donny saved me.”

“I don’t know what happened. I’ve done it before. I guess it never meant as much to me.”

“Thank God they were here,” he said.

“I would have done it eventually,” she said. “My training would have kicked in. I think because I knew they were here, I didn’t have to go into lifesaving mode.”

“He saved my life,” the boy said thoughtfully.

“Let’s not go overboard,” she said. “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.