We Are Not Ourselves. Matthew Thomas

was committed to making hers an oasis against decay, although she hadn’t inherited her father’s sympathy with all manner of vegetable life. Angelo had helped her keep things alive, and she’d picked up a bit of knowledge working alongside him, but ever since his third heart attack had killed him a few years back, she was constantly buying new plants to replace the ones that wilted in the middle of the night.

      She overspent on furniture. She had the rugs cleaned and the walls painted every two years. She’d found a beautiful crystal chandelier on sale on the Bowery. The house wasn’t fancy, but it had a certain luster. The one thing she couldn’t escape was the sound of the Orlandos’ footsteps above her. The fact that she owned the whole building didn’t make it any more pleasant to hear them.

      Ed was seated at the table as she fixed the tea. His back was to her, possessed of that solidity that so delighted her the first time she put her arms around him. Now she wanted to pound on it. He was hunched over and rubbing his temples. She put a hand on his shoulder and he flinched at her touch. She thought, Who the hell does he think I am?

      She considered flinging herself on him before he could get the headphones plugged in. She thought of ripping the plug out once he’d settled into his pillow and filling the room with sound, screaming over the music the invectives she’d held in. But she didn’t do that. She sat in the armchair and read a book until she headed to bed.

      She wondered whether she was being hard on her husband. He had, after all, more than earned a rest after teaching for so many years. She hadn’t heard anything from Connell yet about it, and she expected that the boy, who was becoming a more sullen presence in the house as he slunk into adolescence, would be oblivious enough to his father’s new routines to allow her to conclude that it was all in her head.

      Connell noticed, though. “So what’s with all the record listening?” he asked one night, snapping his gum in that insouciant way that usually annoyed her. Now she saw that the attitude gave him the courage to speak.

      Ed looked up but didn’t respond.

      “What’s up with the headphones?” he asked again, stepping closer to his father.

      Given the strange way Ed had been behaving lately, she thought he might fly into a rage, but he simply took the headphones off.

      “I’m listening to opera.”

      “You listen to it all the time now.”

      “I decided I didn’t want to die not having heard all these masterpieces. Verdi. Rossini. Puccini.”

      “Who’s dying? You’ve got plenty of time.”

      “There’s no time like the present,” Ed said.

      “You don’t have to use those,” Connell said, pointing to the headphones.

      “I don’t want to disturb anyone.”

      “You don’t think you’re disturbing anyone this way?”

      Another night, when she picked him up from track practice, Connell asked her in the car if his father was unhappy.

      “I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I think he’s quite happy.”

      “He always says, ‘You have to decide in life. You deliberate awhile, you think of all the possibilities on both sides, and then you make a decision and stick to it.’”

      She’d never heard this particular line of reasoning from Ed. This must’ve been one of those things he and the boy talked about when she wasn’t around. She could almost feel her ears pricking up.

      “Like with girls. He says, ‘When you’re getting married, you make a decision and that’s it. Things aren’t always perfect, but you work at them. The important thing is that you decided.’”

      Her stomach tightened.

      “But what I don’t get is, if it’s such a chore, if you’re talking about having to stick to it because you decided it, why do people do it in the first place?”

      “They do it because they’re in love,” she said defensively. “Your father and I were in love. Are in love.”

      “I know,” he said.

      It occurred to her that perhaps he didn’t know. Overt affection had always been uncomfortable for her, but in front of the boy it felt impossible. Ed used to squeeze and kiss her when Connell was a baby, but she would wriggle out of it. Certainly she didn’t reach for him herself, but he knew when they married that he’d have to take the lead. She wasn’t like the women a few years younger who wore miniskirts. What she offered instead was the negotiated submission of her fierce independence. She was different in bed with him than she was anywhere else, but this wasn’t something her son could have any idea about.

      “Your father is happy,” she said. “He’s just getting older, is all. You’ll understand someday. The same exact thing will happen to you.”

      It didn’t feel like the best explanation, but it must’ve been good enough, because the boy was silent for the rest of the ride.

       16

      His father was always on the couch now, but that morning he came to Connell’s room and told him he wanted to take him to the batting cages. They drove to the usual place, off the Grand Central Parkway, in back of a mini-mall.

      Connell picked out the least dinged-up bat from the rack and tried to find a helmet that fit. His father came back from the concession stand with a handful of coins for the machines. Connell headed for the machine labeled Very Fast. He put the sweaty, smelly helmet on and pulled his batting glove onto his right hand. He took his position in the left-handed batter’s box and dropped the coin in. The light came on on the machine, and then nothing happened for a while, until a ball shot out and thumped against the rubber backstop. Connell watched another one pass and wondered if he was going to be able to hit any of them. They were easily over eighty miles an hour, though they weren’t the ninety miles an hour they were presented as.

      The next pitch came and Connell timed his swing a little too late and the ball smacked behind him with a fearsome thwack. The next pitch he foul-tipped, and the one after that he hit a tiny grounder on, and then the next one he sent on a line drive right back at the machine. It would have been a sure out, but it was nice to hit it with authority. His father let out a cheer behind him, and Connell promptly overswung on the next pitch, caught the handle on the ball and felt a stinging, ringing sensation in his hands and hopped in place, then swung through the next pitch entirely.

      “Settle down, son,” his father said. “You can hit these. Find the rhythm.”

      The next pitch, which he foul-tipped, was the last, and he stopped and put the bat between his legs and adjusted his batting glove. There wasn’t a line forming behind him, so he could take his time. Balls pinged off bats in nearby cages and banged off piping or died in the nets. His father had his hands on the netting and was leaning against it.

      “You ready?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Go get ’em.”

      He put a coin in and took his stance. The first pitch buzzed past him and slammed into the backstop.

      “Eye on the ball,” his father said. “Watch it into the catcher’s mitt. Watch this one. Don’t swing.”

      He watched it zoom by.

      “Now time it. It’s coming again just like that. Same spot. This is all timing.”

      He took a big hack and fouled it off. He was getting tired quickly.

      “Shorten your swing,” his father said. “Just try to make contact.”

      He took another cut, a less vicious one, more controlled, and drilled it into what would have been the outfield. He did it