We Are Not Ourselves(57)

Jack carved the turkey. Everyone began passing dishes.

“Ed,” Jack said. “Why don’t you take your jacket off? Join us awhile.”

Everybody knew what was coming.

“I can’t,” Connell’s father said. “There’s no back to this shirt.”

A little wave of laughter passed over the table. Connell felt his face redden. They played this routine out every year. Connell didn’t care if everyone else was amused by the line; why did his father have to be so weird? He was the only one in a suit; everyone else wore sweaters and khakis. Even on the hottest days of summer he wore long-sleeved shirts and pants. Connell didn’t care about his warnings about skin cancer and the shrinking ozone layer. All he knew was his father looked like a dork.

“You know, Ed,” Jack said. “You always say that. What does that mean? What are you trying to tell me?”

Jack was six-four, two-fifty, an ex-Marine. When they watched the game in Jack’s den, it wasn’t hard to imagine Jack on the field protecting the quarterback. In a booming voice, he told stories that ended in uproarious laughter; Connell’s father spoke gently and people leaned in to hear him. Jack’s face lit up whenever Connell’s father talked, but Connell always wanted his father to finish quickly; he was nervous that Jack would see how strange his father really was.

“Just that the shirt I’m wearing happens not to have a back, and so I can’t take my jacket off.”

“Now why would a shirt not come with a back?”

“It’s cheaper this way,” his father said. “Less material.”

“I don’t think anyone here would have a problem with seeing your back,” Jack said with an odd edge in his voice. He turned to Frank McGuire. “Do you have a problem with seeing Ed’s back?”

Frank looked back and forth between Connell’s father and Jack, like he didn’t know what the right answer was. He broke into nervous laughter. “Come on, guys,” he said. “He wants to wear his jacket, he wants to wear his jacket. It’s Thanksgiving.”

“I realize he wants to wear his jacket, Frank. But I’m asking him to take it off. He’s making me nervous.”

“Is that what you want? You want me to take my jacket off?”

Jack was giving Connell’s father a hard look. Cindy, who had only belatedly caught on to the tension in the scene, as though it were occurring on a frequency only dogs could hear, put a hand on Jack’s arm in a silent plea.

“Yes,” Jack said. “That’s what I want.”

“Well, it is your house.”

“Last time I checked it still was.”

“Jack!” Cindy said.

Even Connell’s mother, who had been smiling at the outset, looked concerned. Connell wasn’t supposed to know what his parents both knew, which was that Jack’s airline was planning major cuts and Jack was worried about getting laid off. At night Connell stood in the darkened door of his room, listening down the hall to his mother on the phone in the kitchen.

“It’s okay, Cindy,” Connell’s father said. “This jacket is really bothering you, huh?”

“Nobody else has a jacket on.”

“Okay,” his father said, rising. “I understand. I’m sorry to have caused a disturbance.” He took one arm out of his jacket slowly, then the other. He had cut the entire rear panel from what looked like an expensive shirt. The sleeves clung to the shirt’s outline like windsocks in a strong gust. His skin was a blank, ridiculous canvas flecked by freckles and scraggly hairs. For a moment, the room seemed suspended in time.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asked. “To see this? Does this make you happy? Behold, then!”

Then Jack let out a bark of laughter so loud and sudden it could have been a death rattle; another followed to punctuate it; then his laughs came quick and plentiful, like the little skips a stone makes on the water’s surface after the first big few. The laughter was passed around the room like a contagion.

“Sit down at this goddamned table and eat some of my turkey, you goofy son of a bitch,” Jack said after he’d composed himself. The look on Jack’s face said he’d charge into battle for Connell’s father if he had to. Connell had seen people give his father that look before. Maybe you had to be an adult to really appreciate him.

That fall, he had made Connell do a project on habituation for the science fair. They tapped a bunch of roly-poly bugs a number of times with a pen. Some stopped rolling up quickly; the rest just kept getting annoyed. Eventually they all quit responding. This was supposed to be extremely significant, the fact that they could learn to ignore millions of years of inherited instincts after five minutes of pointless irritation. Connell gathered the data; his father helped him draw up the findings on a couple of poster boards—charts, graphs, everything low-tech. When he arrived at the auditorium, Connell knew he didn’t stand a chance. Other kids were setting up huge working volcanoes, radio-controlled cars, and full ecosystems with convoluted loops that ran the length of two tables. He didn’t even have a box full of bugs. When the teachers came around for the presentation, he started sweating. He explained the way they—he—had gone about it, as best as he understood it, which was less than he should have.

In awarding him first prize, they cited the project’s elegant simplicity and its careful application of the scientific method. Other parents hooted and hollered when their children’s names were announced. His father kept his seat and gave him a cool little nod and pumped his fist. Connell was never more impressed by him in his life. It was as if his father had known all along that they were playing a winning hand.