We Are Not Ourselves(60)

He stood in front of his seat. “Where the hell were you?”

She stole a glance around to see who was listening. “I was right here,” she said, trying to urge him toward calm. No one had cocked an ear yet, but she and Ed were on the border of a full-on commotion.

“I couldn’t find you,” he said sharply.

“I realize that, honey. But you’re here now.”

“I was looking all over for you.”

“Ed,” she said. “I’m here. You’re here. Enjoy the game.”

The boys were too caught up in the food to notice Ed. He still hadn’t taken his seat but was standing looking into the crowd as if the answer to what confounded him were projected on the backs of their heads. Farshid listlessly fingered a waxy-looking pretzel. Connell wolfed down a hot dog in two bites and started in on his own pretzel. When she picked up on annoyance behind her, she tugged on Ed’s sleeve and he fell into the seat and began to smooth out his pants with an insistent repetitiveness, as though trying to warm himself or clear crumbs from his lap. He had bought nothing for the two of them to eat.

“Where’s the food for us?”

“I didn’t get us anything.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “What are we going to eat?”

“You didn’t ask for anything.”

“I have to ask to eat now?” She took a piece of Connell’s pretzel.

“Hang on,” he said. A hot dog salesman had entered their section, and Ed flagged him down.

“I feel like you don’t think anymore,” she said when they were settled in with their dogs. “I need you to get with it, Ed.”

“Let’s just enjoy the game,” he said.

A couple of innings later, a Met lifted a high foul ball toward their section. She could feel it gaining on them. As it approached, time seemed to slow; an awful expectancy built. It shifted in the wind, so that it appeared to be headed elsewhere; then it was upon them. People all around reached for it, but it was headed right for Ed. He stabbed at it clumsily and it bounded out of his hand, snagged by a man behind them in the ensuing scrum.

For a moment, Connell appeared stunned. He had been brushed on the neck by the hand of destiny. His body seemed to shiver with contained nervous energy, and he hopped like a bead of oil in a saucepan.

“Wow!” he said, to her, to his father, to Farshid, to anyone who would listen. “Can you believe it?”

The victorious fan stared into empty space with a determined expression as he received the forceful backslaps of his friends. His studied lack of fanfare had the effect of holding the note of his triumph longer.

Ed was miserable. “I’m sorry, buddy,” he said. “I tried to get it for you.”

“No problem, Dad.”

“I’m really sorry.” He looked bereft. “I feel terrible.”

“Maybe if you’d had a glove,” Connell said sweetly, extending his own. Ed turned and asked if the boy could see the ball, which the man handed over more warily than Eileen thought appropriate. Connell held it covetously. She worried that he might ask to keep it, but after a few moments in which he seemed to communicate wordlessly with it, he gave it back, and the man secreted it into his jacket pocket. Something about these talismanic objects, spoils of an ersatz war, reduced men to primal feelings. Connell pounded his glove every time a foul ball was hit in their general direction, no matter how far away it was, and she could think of nothing to say to stop him.





20


She sat beside Connell on the top step, wondering about all the fuss people made over the constellations. The webs of light poorly described the forms they were meant to evoke, and even if she’d known what those forms were, she doubted she could have suspended her disbelief enough to see them characterized there.

On an average night the stars glimmered weakly, if they were visible at all, but that night they were unusually prominent. This was another reason to move—maybe in the suburbs he could see the stars well all the time.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“A lot of stars,” he said. “What about you?”

“There’s the Big Dipper,” she said.

“And the Little Dipper.”

“Yes.”

“And the North Star.”

“Yup.”

They had come to the limit of their knowledge. She was relieved to have a son who didn’t spew forth a stream of facts about the sky when he looked up at it. One fear in marrying a scientist had been that her children would be ill-equipped to live in the world of ordinary men.

“I like to imagine people thousands of years ago looking at the same stars,” he said.

She smiled at his philosophical tone.

“And people in the future long after we’re dead,” he said.

A shudder came over her. She was the one who was supposed to put it into perspective for him, not the other way around. She had lived through the loss of two parents and witnessed death nearly every day at work, and yet she was spooked to hear him invoke their inevitable finality.

“Come inside,” she said. “It’s late.”

“I want to see if the stars get brighter the later it gets.”

“It’s a school night.” She felt her grip on her temper begin to slip. The males in her life refused to cooperate with her. “You can investigate this in the summer.”