We Are Not Ourselves. Matthew Thomas

presented the watch to Ed after the salad course. He undid the bow, neatly removed the green foil wrapping, opened the box, and held the watch.

      “It’s beautiful,” he said. Without trying it on, he put it back in the box. “I can’t take it, though. I’m not the kind of man who’s ever thought of wearing a gold watch. You should return it to the store.”

      In an astonished instant she’d gone beyond words, beyond anger, to a disappointment so deep it made her stomach ache.

      “It’s a prototype, Ed. I can’t.” She refolded the napkin in her lap, smoothed down the silk of her dress.

      “Why not?”

      “It’s unique.”

      “I’m sure they’d listen—”

      “It’s engraved, goddammit.”

      Ed was still talking, but she didn’t hear him. Quickly, dispassionately, she ran through the mechanics of how she would exit the restaurant. She wouldn’t say a word. She would of course leave the watch on the table. She would go home and tell her parents that the wedding was off. She was disappointed that she wouldn’t get to see her father in a top hat and tails. A busboy stacked and removed the salad plates, and now another stopped to replenish their water glasses, taking his time to keep too many ice cubes from tumbling out of the pitcher. His conscientious presence was the only reason she hadn’t risen yet.

      “Maybe you could have them take off this gold band and put a leather one on it for me instead, if you don’t want to take it back,” this man to whom she’d sworn her devotion was saying in lordly ignorance of how far from him she’d flown in her mind, how almost absurdly vulnerable he was to her at that moment. “I’m a regular guy. I don’t know how to wear a watch like this.”

      She saw how unfathomably easy it could be for her to walk out on her own life. She was awash in sudden sympathy for Ed. Then the cloudburst passed, and she sat in a little puddle of resentment over how benighted and pinched her future husband was.

      They endured a tense dinner, even managed to make it through dessert. After they’d risen to leave, a surge of spite compelled her to fish the watch out of her pocketbook and make him read the engraving on its back.

      He looked at it quietly. For a moment, it occurred to her that he might be moved enough to change his mind, and she grew unaccountably nervous. Then he handed it back.

      “I’ll give you love and devotion and work hard all my life,” he said. “And I appreciate your getting this for me, more than I could say. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever gotten. But I know I’m not going to wear it. If you take it back, we can put that money in an account to send our kids to college. I’m sorry. I can’t help the way I am. I wish I could. It’d be easier sometimes to be someone else. Right now, for instance. You look so beautiful tonight. I hate that I’ve disappointed you.”

      A couple of days later, her father saw Ed and asked where the watch was. When Ed told the truth—it was home in the box, he didn’t feel comfortable putting it on—her father didn’t react with the fury she’d anticipated. Ed’s answer put him in a contemplative mood.

      Later that night, her father called her into his room. “There’s a reason he can’t accept nice things,” he said. “His family’s been in this country a hundred years, but they never owned a house. That’s a sin. If you’re not in a house by the time I’m dead, I’ll haunt you from my grave.”

      They got married a little over a year after they met. They spent a honeymoon weekend in Niagara Falls. It wasn’t what she’d dreamed of—France, Italy, Greece—but Ed was researching a paper that would synthesize part of his dissertation work, and they couldn’t afford to go away for long.

      The Maid of the Mist didn’t run in the off-season, so they had to experience the falls from the viewing areas. Large blocks of ice had gathered in sections of the falls, and the cold spray made it hard to stay long. They went to restaurants and took scenic walks.

      On their final day, as she stood in the Prospect Point Park observation tower wrestling with the thought that all bodies of water were part of one larger body, Ed announced that when they returned home, there would be no time to go out while he did his research, which would take the better part of a year. She didn’t take this threat too seriously. She figured he believed he needed that kind of sequestration, but more likely he was just trying on the role of head of household—making a show of arranging his affairs with an exaggerated masculine correctness. He’d been doing the same research in the run-up to the wedding, and pretty much the whole time they were courting, and he’d managed to make himself available to her. True, they’d only seen each other on the weekends, but she’d been busy with work herself.

      They got back in late March 1967 and moved from their parents’ apartments into the second floor of a three-family house on Eighty-Third Street in Jackson Heights. She was elated that part of the dream she’d conceived for her existence had been fulfilled. For years, the neighborhood had exerted a powerful pull on her imagination, and now it was the one she came home to and slept in at the end of every day. The details were familiar, but they burned with a new intensity. Flowerpots at intersections announced the birth of new life, and the smell of spring through the windows lingered in the pillowcases.

      She was happy to put the turmoil of life in her parents’ apartment behind her. She wanted to be conservative, if not in politics—her father would disown her if she made that shift—then in comportment, in demeanor. She’d always behaved a little older than her age, but now she found herself making extremely prudent choices, like dumping expired milk down the drain, even when it didn’t smell, and driving more slowly on curves or in the rain. She bought Ed a beautiful new tweed jacket and made him get rid of all his old shoes, replacing them with wing tips and oxfords.

      There was still a little lingering restlessness in her spirit, though. It hadn’t been her dream to live in an apartment like the one she and Ed had ended up in, sandwiched between two ends of a family. The Orlandos, the owners, lived on the first floor, and Angelo Orlando’s older sister Consolata took up the third by herself. Angelo worked for the Department of Sanitation, and Lena was a housewife. They had three children—Gary, ten; Donny, nine; and Brenda, seven. The Orlando home was full of the sort of ambient noise she associated more with apartment buildings than houses. She had convinced herself that moving into a house, even a multifamily one, meant diving into a pool of blessed silence. The Orlando boys played tirelessly in the driveway with a small army of neighborhood kids. When it rained, they roughhoused indoors for hours, crashing into walls, and Lena’s voice rang out in shrill rebukes. The insistent murmur of a radio rose at night from Brenda’s room, which was below Ed’s office. Ed wore earplugs and possessed advanced powers of concentration, so the radio didn’t faze him, but it incensed Eileen. And Angelo and Lena’s fights, though infrequent, were of the screaming, door-slamming variety. The noise came at her from both sides. Most nights, Consolata made a restless circuit of her apartment, pounding between rooms with oddly heavy steps for a woman so thin, turning the television off in one room and on in another, leaving it on until programming ended and sometimes beyond, so that the rasp of a lost signal harassed Eileen to sleep.

      Three months into the marriage, Eileen was astonished to realize that she hadn’t entered a bar, restaurant, or party with her husband. She’d grown tired of making excuses to her friends; when they called and she had to say she couldn’t go, she wanted to hand the phone to Ed to have him explain. She showed up alone if she went at all when they got together at each other’s houses, and after she’d faced enough inquisitions about where Ed was, she decided it wasn’t worth it to go. She’d envisioned playing euchre with him at the Coakleys’, or watching him save Frank McGuire from grilling disasters, or seeing his entertainer side come out at the piano after everyone downed a couple of banana daiquiris at Tom Cudahy’s place. She’d envisioned her own dining room, which was finally appointed hospitably after Ed had agreed to let her spend the money on furniture, thronged with friends around the table, Jack Coakley clapping his hands and dramatically sniffing the roast chicken’s lemon-pepper aroma as she carried it proudly past him, but instead what she had