We Are Not Ourselves(94)

She didn’t know whom Donny was going to ask for the money, or what kind of trouble he would be exposing himself to in order to get it, but that was his concern.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and as she hung up she understood that there was nothing she was willing to do. She had to get out while she could.

She called Gloria and told her to make an offer on the Bronxville house.

The next day—she forgave herself in advance for the lie—she told Donny there had been a competing bidder and the first bidder had gone above asking, but it was his final offer, and he needed an answer immediately.

He was no closer to having a down payment, he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m going to have to take it.”

Eileen had bid below asking for the house in Bronxville, but they hadn’t had another bid, so they took it without parrying.

The Indian buyer insisted on a thirty-day closing, but Eileen was able to extend it to sixty when she pled the case of her tenants. That was the most she could do for them.

Donny still fixed her car.





33


Connell woke up to his father screaming at him and wagging his finger in his face.

“Christ! Do you know what you’ve done? Do you?”

Connell’s mind raced, but he could recall no hanging offenses.

“You left the jelly out all night!” his father said. “You left the cover off!” Connell stammered an apology, but his father waved him off. “How could you do such a thing?” He stamped his feet, one after the other, as though smashing grapes. Connell had never seen him make such a childish gesture, and it disconcerted him more than the yelling had.

Ten minutes later his father was back in his room, sitting on the bed. “I don’t know what came over me,” he said.

All that summer, he was on an energy crusade. He said they didn’t need to shower every day, that every other day was sufficient. If you walked away from a stereo for a second, he hit the power button. If you ran the hot water too long for dishes, he reached across you and pressed the handle down. If you turned on the air conditioner in the car, he told you to open the window instead. When he turned off the air conditioning in the house, Connell’s mother threatened to leave and turned it right back on. That got through to him; nothing else did. He let the air conditioner run, but unplugged the coffeemaker, the toaster, the stereo, the TV, the Apple IIe.

One night, while they were sitting at the kitchen table, his father howled in frustration after breaking the point off a pencil by pressing too hard. “This goddamned thing’s no good,” he said as he snapped it in half. “It’s no good at all.”

His mother took them on scenic drives in the area they were moving to, but when they parked and got out, his father just stood by the car with his arms crossed. They went peach-picking once, in Yorktown, and his father stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned against the enormous wheel of an idle tractor while his mother filled a basket with the most shapely peaches she could find. When they walked back to the barn to pay, his father reached into the basket in his mother’s hands and began tossing peaches to the ground. “We don’t need all these!” he said.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” He’d gotten about half of them out before she fended him off. She was looking around to see who had noticed the outburst. “Have you gone crazy?”

“We don’t need this many!” he said, squashing them underfoot as he followed Connell’s mother. “We can’t eat this many!”

“I was just going to make some pies,” she said to Connell, as though appealing to his fairness. The only thing he felt safe doing was shrugging.

“Not for me!” his father said. “I could go the rest of my life without another bite of your pie.”

Then his mother herself turned the basket over, dumping out the remaining peaches. She dropped the basket and they walked to the car in silence. They drove home all the way like that, half an hour at least. Connell put his earphones in, but he didn’t turn his Walkman on. He waited and waited to hear the silence end, but it never did, and a queasy feeling grew in his gut. The only thing he heard was a little quiet sniffling from his mother in the passenger seat when they were almost home. He hit play on his Walkman after that.





34


It was the end of August when they moved, as hot a day as she could remember, the kind of heat that made a person happy to escape the city. She had packed boxes for weeks, and the walls were lighter in color where the pictures had hung and the furniture had stood, as if a slow-exposure photograph had been taken of their lives. The ghostly outlines of their things, together with the austere emptiness of the space and the dirt and dust gathered in the corners and wedged under the molding, increased her eagerness to get out of there. The movers came and loaded up the truck.

“Do you want to do a last walk-through with me?” she asked Ed, who was sitting on the stoop with Connell.

“I’ve made my peace with it,” he said.

She resented the private ceremony Ed’s statement implied. She’d pictured them opening a nice bottle of wine when they started filling boxes, or a celebratory bottle of champagne on their last night, but they’d had neither.

“You don’t want to take a final look at it?”