We Are Not Ourselves

15

After Connell turned in, Ed surprised her by not moving to the study to grade lab reports or read journal articles. He lay on the couch with the newspaper listening to Wagner. She didn’t have to know music to recognize that it was Wagner, because the swelling crescendos and singer’s deep voice gave it away. Ed often listened to Wagner when he was in a contemplative mood.

She sat on the other couch with her book, happy to share with him the beaten-back chill of a February night, which made itself known in the frost on the windows. She switched the light on in the artificial fireplace, pausing briefly to rattle the glass coals and hear them clack against each other. It pleased her that the man she’d married, in addition to possessing an erudition that impressed even worldly friends, read the sports section in its entirety. At one point he rose and went to the study, and she thought she’d lost him for the night, but he returned with a pen to do the crossword. She loved the carefree way he called on her for help when flummoxed by a clue. It suggested an abiding faith in the soundness of his intellect that he could meet head-on those swells of ignorance that might capsize another man’s confidence; they were wavelets lapping against his hull.

“I’ve done everything I can do,” he said, as he lay the quarter-folded newspaper on the coffee table. “I want to be realistic. Maybe it’s time for me to relax.”

She glanced up from her book to catch his eye, but he was looking at the ceiling.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“I’m turning fifty soon. I’m slowing down. I’ve earned a rest.”

“Nonsense,” she said.

“I’m going to become one of those guys who come home and call it a night. Maybe I’ll watch some TV.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“I can start right now.”

Her heart leapt a little. It was pleasant to imagine him spending more time in their bed. He had finally given up the night classes, thank God, but he still worked so hard, often coming in from the study long after she was asleep.

“I don’t know how long you could keep that up,” she said. “You’d get bored.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Well, if it makes you happy,” she said.

He’d already moved to the stereo to change the record. He plugged his headphones in and had them on before she could hear what he was listening to. He lay back down and closed his eyes.

She waited for him to acknowledge her gaze. He liked to lie like that and slip into a reverie, but he usually opened his eyes between movements to give her a little review with his raised brows. She wondered if he were sleeping, he was lying so still, but then he began tapping his foot rhythmically. When the side ended, he lay there, arms crossed across his chest, impassive. She shut off her light and stood to head into the bedroom. She called his name, but he didn’t reply. She watched for some kind of acknowledgment of her departure, but he only shifted his glasses. She went to him and stood over him. He must have imagined he could outlast her in this game, but she was starting to grow disturbed by it. She leaned in to kiss his cheek good night; before she reached it he had opened his eyes and was staring back at her in a kind of horror, as if she’d interrupted him in a reflection on something monstrous.

“I’m heading to bed,” she said.

“I’ll be right in.”

After a few bouts of fitful sleep — she never slept well without him beside her — she headed to the living room. She found the end table lamp on and Ed still wearing the headphones. A record was spinning, and he’d set up a stack to be played by the autochanger. She shut the stereo off and called his name. He put a hand up to silence her.

“I’m just going to lie here a minute,” he said.

“It’s four in the morning.” She switched off the lamp, but ambient light still filtered into the room from the coming sun. “You need good, quality sleep. You’re always saying that. Don’t lights interrupt sleep? You need REM sleep. Restful sleep. Come on inside. You have to teach in a few hours.”

“I think I’m going to cancel class,” he said. “I’m not feeling it.”

“Huh?”

He hadn’t missed a class in twenty years. They’d had fights about it. You can miss a single class, she would say when something came up. They can’t fire you for it. They can’t fire you, period.

“I think I’ve earned a day off,” he said.

“Well, either way, just come to bed. It’s late.”

She stood over him until he got up. They shuffled down the hall together. In the morning when she woke he was sitting at the foot of the bed.

“Maybe you’d better call for me,” he said.

After she’d made the call, she showered and dressed. When she headed to the kitchen, she saw him lying on the couch again, as if he hadn’t moved from the night before, the only difference being the cup of tea on the table.

“You’re taking this whole ‘taking it easy’ thing pretty seriously,” she said.

“I’m just gathering my energy,” he said. “I’ll be all right tomorrow. I’ll go in tomorrow.”

He let himself be kissed good-bye. She went to work. When she returned she was surprised to find him in the same spot, wearing the same clothes. She hadn’t really believed he’d stay home all day; it was unlike him. His record of never missing work was a matter of somber pride. Connell’s bag and jacket were slung over a chair in the dining room.

Ed’s eyes were closed. His feet beat the time. She stood over him, tapped him on the shoulder. As she spoke, he motioned to the headphones to indicate he couldn’t hear her. She mimed pulling them off her ears.

“I’m listening to music,” he said.

“Plainly.”

“How was work?”

“Work was fine,” she said. “Did you stay there all day?”

“I got up to eat.”

“So this is the new thing?”

“I’m trying it out. I’m feeling enormously refreshed.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” she said.

“I’ve been meaning to spend more time attending to my needs,” he said. “This is step one. I’ve had a cloudy head for a while. I’m trying to get back to basics.”

“What about work?”

“I’m going to need you to call in again for me tomorrow.”

In the big mirror in the other room she saw herself in the coat she’d been meaning to replace. She had once thought of thirty as a terribly old age, but now she was turning fifty at the end of the year, and thirty seemed impossibly young.

“How long do you plan to do this?”

“I hadn’t formulated a plan.”

“Shall I expect you to eat with us tonight?”

“Of course,” he said, waving her off and putting the headphones back on.

As she began to prepare dinner, she reflected on what this thing could be. It was clearly some kind of midlife crisis. Something was spooking him: getting old, probably. She was confident it wasn’t another woman. They were coconspirators in a mission of normalcy. A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life. She knew he was reliable, and not only because he wasn’t going to miss work to sleep off a drunk, or gamble his paycheck at the track, or forget their anniversary. He was, in a subtler way, reliably knowable. Some women yearned for a hint of mystery about their men; she loved Ed’s lack of mystery. It had shade, depth, texture; it was just complex enough. His heart contained too little passion for him to attempt a grand affair, and too much for him to endure a scurrilous one. He was too preoccupied with his work to love two women at once; he lacked that tolerance for superficial interaction every successful adulterer wielded.

A few days later he returned to work, but the headphones ritual persisted in the evenings. One night he returned to his study, and she felt relieved. She assumed he was grading lab reports, but when she went in to bring him a plate of cookies she found him writing in a notebook, which he took pains to block from her view. When she went back later that night to look for it, it was gone.

• • •

Their dinners began to feel strange to her. Ed looked away when she tried to meet his gaze, and he never wanted to talk about his work — or about anything, really, but Connell’s day and the happenings at school.

“And then,” Connell said, “they lifted him up to grab the rim, but they didn’t give him the ball to dunk. Somebody pulled his shorts down. And then they pulled his underwear down! He just hung up there until Mr. Cotswald ran over and got him.”

“Ha!”

Ed laughed with just a bit too much gusto. She’d expected him to condemn the boys’ behavior. It was as if he hadn’t really absorbed what Connell had said. Something in the warmth in his voice, the distraction that flickered in his eyes, made her wonder if she’d been too hasty in ruling out an affair. A listlessness had come over him lately that seemed at times like a species of dreaminess.

“Well.” Ed pushed back his chair. He gave Connell a perfunctory pat on the head and retired to the couch and the privacy of his headphones. Connell looked embarrassed, as if he’d extended a hand for a shake and been rebuffed. She knew enough not to compound it by speaking to him.

She went to bed feeling frowsy. She squeezed the deposits of fat at her hips and wondered how they had managed to sneak up on her. She knew the doctors at work still turned to look at her in the halls, but if Ed didn’t see her that way, then the interest of other men felt less a vote of confidence than a shabby habit that in its mindless lack of differentiation — she saw the way they looked at so many of the girls — called into question whether she had ever been beautiful at all.

Ed came in after midnight. He stood over her, gazing oddly. She could feel herself stiffen.

“Anything you want to tell me?”

“Not really,” he said.

“What are you listening to, anyway?”

“Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I have so many records I haven’t even cracked the plastic on. It makes me anxious to see them all sitting there. I’m working my way through them.”

She was surprised by how relieved she felt to hear this. It was sufficiently particular to actually be plausible. It was the kind of thing she imagined people did when they came to a point where the roads to the past and the future were equally muddy — retreat to the high ground of a major project.

• • •

She had long measured a meal’s success by the range of colors arrayed on the plate, but it felt hopelessly middle-class now to conceive of food in this fashion, and she looked askance at orange carrots, bright green beans, white mashed potatoes, the dark pile of meat and onions, picking at it with her fork in the way she resented in her child.

She used to love to sit at her kitchen table and watch the drapes kick up in the wind, to look through the window across the little divide and see the Palumbos gathered in their dining room, but now the house next door felt far too close. She hated its plain brick face and the shabby décor visible within. She had long tolerated this vulgarity because she felt privileged to have a house at all, but now she found it too disappointing to bear.

Lately she couldn’t stop thinking about Bronxville. When she’d left Lawrence in 1983 for the nursing director job at St. John’s Episcopal in Far Rockaway, she’d missed going to Bronxville every day. When she returned to Einstein a couple of years later to be head of nursing, she’d begun to think the timing might finally be right to move to Bronxville. The commute would be shorter for both of them, she was making good money now, Ed had gotten into a decent pay class himself, and they’d made a few good investments. They had put eight thousand dollars into oil shale stock on the advice of one of Ed’s colleagues, a geologist at NYU, and it had climbed to forty-four thousand. But then in ’85 the shale oil company went bankrupt. That year, they also lost twenty grand on a penny stock scam with First Jersey Securities. The final nail came in 1987, when her boss left for a government appointment, and the new head of the hospital fired those he could and appointed his own leadership team. Though she landed on her feet at North Central Bronx, she had to take a pay cut to do so.

She couldn’t look across at the Palumbos’ just then, with their dreadful chandelier glowing like margarine and the two of them looking all their years as they sat down to a cheerless meal, so she got up to close the drapes. Ed took her rising as a cue that the meal was over and headed for the couch.

• • •

When she and Ed moved in, the neighborhood was Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish, and they knew everyone on the block. Then families started to trickle out, and in their place came Colombians, Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis. Connell played with the new kids, but she never met the parents. When an Iranian family — they called themselves Persian, but she couldn’t bring herself to refer to them as anything but Iranian — bought her friend Irene’s place up the block after she moved to Garden City, the son, Farshid, became a classmate of Connell’s at St. Joan of Arc and started hanging around the house.

It wasn’t hard to feel the pull of the suburbs, because the neighborhood was half suburb already, arranged around mass transit but also around car travel. There were driveways next to every house, and gas stations and car dealerships at regular intervals along Northern Boulevard. LaGuardia Airport was a short drive away, and Robert Moses’s highways, and the massive parking lots at Shea, and the husk of the World’s Fair, which had left detritus like a glacier.

Most of the stores she loved were gone, replaced by trinket shops, T-shirt shops, fireworks black marketeers, exotic hair salons hidden behind heavy curtains, over-the-counter purveyors of deadly martial arts paraphernalia, comic book stores, karate schools, check-cashing places, Korean-run Optimo-branded cigar and candy stores that sold cheap knockoffs of popular Japanese toys, taxi depots, sketchy bars, fast food, wholesalers of obscure cuisines, restaurants suggestive of opium dens, bodegas stocked with products she would never consider eating. The Boulevard Theatre on the corner was now a Latin dance hall with neon lights flickering late into the night and an insistent beat that hectored the remaining old guard to leave. Cars piled up outside it and the cops were always breaking up fights. The gloomy little Irish bar was the last stand against the invasion, but she couldn’t take some specious pride in it now after avoiding it all these years.

The memory of wealth haunted the nearby garden apartment buildings. She imagined gaunt bachelors presiding over dwindling fortunes, long lines coming to a silent end. There were remnants of the way it had been, like Barricini’s Chocolates and Jahn’s, but stepping into them only reminded her how few of the old places were left.

She knew it was possible to see the changes as part of what made the city great, an image of what was to come, the necessary cycle of immigration, but only if you weren’t the one being displaced. Maybe even then you could, if you were a saint. She had no desire to be a saint, not if it meant she’d have to blunt the edge of her anger at these people. It certainly wasn’t saintliness that led her to attempt to get past her resentment at the break-in that occurred a couple of years back, while they were on a cruise in the Bahamas. Rather, it was a desire to continue living in the neighborhood without boiling over into outright vitriol whenever she stepped into the grocery store, where anyone she laid eyes on, worker or customer, unless they looked respectable, could have been one of the offenders. She had returned from that cruise to find her jewelry box rifled through and her drawers turned inside out. Luckily, she’d long ago overridden Ed and spent the money to rent a safe deposit box at Manufacturers Hanover, where she stored Ed’s LeCoultre watch and her mother’s embattled engagement ring. All the bonds were in the box as well. She took a certain satisfaction in thinking of how little the thieves had made off with; for once it seemed an advantage that Ed had never been the sort to buy necklaces and bracelets for her birthday or their anniversary. The degenerates had pinched Ed’s stereo, that was true, but he’d needed a new one for years, and this was an excuse for her to buy one for him. She was angry too at the Orlandos, who’d been home at the time. She couldn’t imagine how they hadn’t heard anything, or done anything if they’d heard. What kept her awake some nights, though, fantasizing about revenge, was the fact that they’d taken Mr. Kehoe’s clarinet from the bedroom closet. What could they possibly have wanted with a clarinet? How valuable could such a thing have been on the secondhand market? There was no way they were keeping it for themselves, because the swine wouldn’t know what to do with such a delicate instrument. She pictured them back in their sty of an apartment, surveying their loot, sniffing it, looking at the clarinet’s pieces in stupefaction and dropping them into a garbage can.

She couldn’t blame everything on the latest waves of immigration. Her immediate neighbors had been there longer than she had and both had fallen on tough times. Both houses used to look respectable, if a little dull, with dingy lace curtains in the windows and bleached paint on the trim, but now a rusted-out car sat on blocks in the Palumbos’ backyard, next to a rain-filled drum, and Gene Cooney’s house was under permanent construction, with ugly scaffolding marring the facade and a garden box full of crabgrass and construction debris. Gene stalked the perimeter all day with an edgy intensity, wearing a tool belt around his waist. Wild rumors had sprung up about him and his family, spread by newer residents. He was said to be an IRA arms smuggler lying low. There were whispers about his daughter, who wore short skirts and fishnet stockings and kept nocturnal hours. Eileen knew the truth: he’d gone off the rails after his wife had been killed on Northern Boulevard by a hit-and-run driver, and his daughter wasn’t a prostitute but a girl who had fallen victim to the fashions of the Hispanics she’d grown up around — though one could be forgiven for confusing some of them with hookers.

When she’d first moved onto the block, the garden boxes in front of the houses were lush with flowers in bloom and respectable attempts at horticulture, but many had since returned to the wild, with giant weeds poking up over their walls. She 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 again with the next pitch, and the one after that. The ball coming off the bat sounded like a melon getting crushed. The whole place smelled like burning rubber.

When the coins ran out, he held the bat out to his father. “You want to get in here?”

“No,” his father said. “You have fun.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I don’t think I could hit a single pitch.”

“Sure you could. You’re selling yourself short.”

“My best days are behind me,” his father said.

“Why don’t you take a few hacks? Come on, Dad. Just one coin.”

“Fine,” his father said. “But you can’t laugh at me when I look like a scarecrow in there.”

His father came into the cage and took the helmet from him. He took the bat, refused the batting glove. He was in a plaid, button-down shirt and jeans that fit him snugly, and Connell thought that he actually did look a little like a scarecrow. His glasses stuck out from the helmet like laboratory goggles. Connell stepped out of the cage and positioned himself where his father had been standing. His father dropped the coin in and took his place in the batter’s box, the lefty side, Connell’s side.

The first pitch slammed into the backstop. The next one did as well. His father had the bat on his shoulder. The next pitch came crashing in too.

“Aren’t you going to swing?”

“I’m getting the timing,” his father said.

The next pitch landed with a thud, and the following one went a little high and came at Connell. His father didn’t offer at any of them.

“You have to swing sometime,” Connell said. “Only three left.”

“I’m watching the ball into the glove,” he said. “I’m waiting for my pitch.”

“Two left.”

“Okay,” his father said.

“Dad. You can’t just stand there.”

The last pitch came and his father took a vicious cut at it. The ball shot off like cannon fire and the bat came around to rest on his father’s back in textbook form, Splendid Splinter form. The ball would have kept rising if it hadn’t been arrested by the distant net, which it sank into at an impressive depth.

“Wow!”

“Not bad,” his father said. “I think I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.”

Connell went in and took the helmet and bat from his father, who looked tired, as if he’d been swinging for half an hour. He dropped the coin in and found the spot in the batter’s box. His father’s hit must have freed his confidence up, because he made solid contact on all but one of his swings, and then he put another coin in and started attacking the ball, crushing line drives.

“Attaboy,” his father said.

He hit until he was tired, and they drove to the diner they liked to go to after the cages. Connell ordered a cheeseburger and his father ordered a tuna melt. They shared a chocolate shake. Connell drained his half and his father handed him his own to drink.

“That’s okay, Dad.”

“You drink it,” his father said.

The food came and his father didn’t really eat. Instead he seemed to be looking interestedly at Connell.

“What’s up?” Connell asked.

“I used to love to watch you eat. I still do, I guess.”

“Why?”

“When you were a baby, maybe two years old, you used to put a handful of food in your mouth and push it in with your palm. Like this.” His father put his hand up to his mouth to show him. ‘More meatballs!’ you used to say. Your face would be covered in sauce. ‘More meatballs.’ You had this determined expression, like nothing was more important in the world.” He was chuckling. “And you ate fast! And a lot. You used to ask for more. ‘All gone!’ you said. I used to love to watch you eat. I guess it was instinct. I knew you would survive if you ate. But part of it was just the pleasure you took in it. A grilled cheese sandwich cut into little squares. That was the whole world for you then. You getting it into your mouth was the only thing that mattered. You couldn’t eat it fast enough.”

His father was making him nervous watching him. He hadn’t eaten any of his sandwich.

“You going to sit there and watch me the whole time?”

“No, I’m eating.”

His father took a couple of bites. Connell called for more water and ketchup.

“I wish I could explain it to you,” his father said after a while.

“What?”

“What it’s like to have you. What it’s like to have a son.”

“You going to eat those fries?”

“They’re all yours,” his father said. Connell took some. “Eat as many as you like.” His father slid the plate toward him. “Eat up.”

17

She decided to scrap the intimate dinner they’d agreed upon for his fiftieth birthday and throw a full-scale surprise party instead. One thing it couldn’t fail to do was get him off the couch for a night, but she wanted more than that: she wanted to wake him up, set him on the course to recovering his lost enthusiasm. He’d spent so much time alone lately that it would be good for him to be forced to mix with others.

Until she was drawing up the list for the party, she’d never noticed how weighted toward her side their social group was. So many of the friends they’d lost touch with were Ed’s. When she considered her friends’ husbands, she saw the same thing — a withdrawal, a ceding of the social calendar to the wife. It was her responsibility to ensure that her husband didn’t get domesticated entirely. She would go beyond the usual crowd. She decided to track down some of the guys who were his regular buddies when they first got married and reach out to the cousins he never saw. She would remind him how much there was to look forward to.

• • •

She gave her garden box a full makeover, even though she knew the early-March chill would kill everything right after the party.

As she finished patting the soil down around a rosebush, a car zoomed past at a murderous clip bound for Northern Boulevard, salsa music pounding from its four-corner speakers. If she were a man she would have spat in disgust. She hated the driver; she hated the drug cartel he likely worked for; she hated worrying that people taking the train to the party might run into some kind of trouble. God forbid any of them got propositioned by the prostitutes that had begun to walk Roosevelt Avenue. One of them had approached Ed while Eileen and he were coming off the stairs holding hands.

She hoped that the NCB executives she’d invited wouldn’t judge her for her current situation. Her career depended on their seeing her as the kind of person who belonged in their midst. How could she ever explain to them the way Jackson Heights used to be?

She didn’t think of herself as racist. She was proud of her record of coming to the aid of black nurses who’d been unjustly targeted by superiors. She enjoyed an easy rapport with the security guards at NCB, most of whom were black.

She loved to tell the story of her father’s stepping forward to drive with Mr. Washington when no one else would. She also enjoyed recounting the tale of how, when none of the old Irish guard would shop at the Chinese grocer up the block, and the new store was on the verge of failure, her father had paid the man a visit to take his measure. Satisfied that the man, Mr. Liu, was a hard worker and an honest proprietor, her father had stood for a few evenings on the corner near the grocer with the suspect vegetables and stopped people and said, “Go spend some money at the chink son of a bitch’s place,” and they’d listened. Now the whole of Woodside was Chinese grocers. She wondered if the newer generation would do for an Irish immigrant looking to make an honest living the same thing her father had done for one of their own years before. She wondered if some of the black nurses she’d helped along the way would lift a finger for a white woman in need. She’d watched the Bronx spiral downward over the years, and she hadn’t flinched. The security guards marveled at her driving into the neighborhood alone every day. They never let her walk to her car unescorted at night.

No, she couldn’t be called racist. That didn’t mean she had to like what they were doing to her neighborhood. They were making it into a war zone.

• • •

The day of the party, her house had never seemed so small. An hour before Ed was supposed to arrive, there was barely room to pass in the halls; she had to ask her cousin Pat to carry a side table down to the basement. Still, as soon as people began assembling in the kitchen, she felt their presence as a kind of armor around her. She tended to the ham and the broccoli casserole in the stove and the separate duty of each pot on the stovetop. She had made nothing to offend anyone’s palate, and so she presented it without anxiety. When the caterer arrived with trays containing more food than could possibly get eaten, she told herself it was safe to begin to relax.

When Connell called from a pay phone and said they were ten minutes away, she was surprised to find herself seized by terror. She passed the news to the living room, which filled with that clamor particular to a crowd silencing itself. A quiet grew louder than the din that had preceded it; she could almost hear her pulse in its murky depths. She moved through the wall of people to be near enough for him to see her when he entered.

As Ed stepped into the room, Eileen closed her eyes, obeying a strange compulsion not to look at his face. A frenzied chorus rang out around her. When she opened her eyes, she saw him beaming and being passed from person to person, shouting as he encountered every new face — shouts like war whoops that could have been either exultant or lunatic. He was red with excitement, and sweat was gathering on him. As she moved close to hug him, she heard him whoop the way he had for the others, as though he hadn’t seen her in years. His whoops went on; they wouldn’t die down. He greeted each successive person with the same ecstatic disbelief.

She was afraid to leave him, afraid to stay. She saw him engulfed in friends’ arms and ducked into the kitchen to get him a drink. When she returned he was miming his own shock for them over and over. She didn’t want anyone else to notice the unconvincing mirth in his performance. She shouted to Connell to cue the stereo. Ed was ushered into the dining room. In the mirror she tried to look at other people’s reactions but was inexorably drawn back to her husband’s expressions. When he saw his brother Phil in from Toronto, he let out a howl that sounded like that of a dying animal. She reached for a tray of hors d’oeuvres to pass. The food smells were mingling successfully; no trace of dust came off any surface she touched; nothing was out of place. The only messes were the ones guests were making themselves — someone bumped into the punch bowl and sent a couple of crystal mugs crashing to the floor — and for those she had great patience.

She poured herself a glass of wine and drifted into the living room, where she gave herself over to conversation. Behind the timbre of any individual voice lay the lovely murmur of the group, but she couldn’t distract herself from the thought of her husband’s frenzied surprise, and she went in search of him.

She went out on the stoop with Pat and the smokers and the kids, but no one had seen him come outside. The bathroom was locked, but after a little while her aunt Margie came out. She went down to the basement and searched its recesses, where she found no sign of him.

When she got back up to the landing at her back door, instead of heading inside she called up the stairs. There was no response, but she had an instinct to proceed upstairs anyway, and she found him sitting on the flight between the second and third floors, just sitting there, looking directly at her as she approached, in a way that unnerved her, as though he’d been waiting for her to find him. The music and talking muffled through the intervening flight rose and fell in waves, following the rhythm of its own respiration. There had been no dip in the revelry yet.

“Frank wants to take your picture,” she said. “Fiona just got here. I don’t know if you saw her.”

He sat in silence, though he didn’t look away.

“Pat’s only here to see you. He doesn’t go to parties anymore. You should have heard him when I finally got him on the phone. ‘For Ed?’ he said. ‘Sure. Anything.’ ”

“Keep him away from the bar,” Ed said.

“He won’t even come inside,” she said, chuckling. “He’s on the stoop.”

She could feel her eyes watering, though she wasn’t consciously sad. “We’re having a real party downstairs,” she said. “It’d be even better if you were there.”

He patted the spot beside him. The gentleness of the gesture touched her, and being moved when she was also angry confused her, so that she wanted to go back down alone, but she gave in, gathered her skirt under her and sat.

“I’m getting old,” he said. “I can feel my body breaking down.”

“You just feel that way because it’s your birthday,” she said. “Everyone gets old.”

“I didn’t expect to see all these people. I thought we’d have a quiet night.”

She looked at him wryly. “Haven’t we had enough quiet nights lately?”

“I don’t even know half these people.”

“You know almost every single one of them,” she said. “There are maybe four people that you’ve never met.”

“Then I don’t remember them.”

“Of course you do. I’ll go around with you and start conversations and you can hear who they are that way.”

He looked away.

“You love parties,” she said. “You grumble and complain that I entertain too often, but once the party’s going, no one enjoys it more than you. Those people are here to see you. I don’t know what to tell them when they ask where you are.”

“Tell them you saw me a second ago in the other room.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m tired. I can’t tell you how tired I am. I’m tired of standing in front of a bunch of people and being the center of attention. Do you have any idea how much energy that takes? You’re never off. Never. You can never have a bad day. I feel like I’ve been trying to keep all these juggling balls in the air, and I can’t let them hit the ground or something bad will happen. I’d love to just lie down right now.”

“Well, you can’t. Everyone’s here. We have to make the best of it. I’m sorry I did this.”

“You don’t need to be sorry.”

“I am. This was a stupid idea. Stupid, stupid.”

“I just need the school year to end,” he said. “That’s it. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to vacation. No summer classes for me this year, that’s for sure. I’m just going to stay put.”

Another day, she might have hissed at him to get off his ass and get down there, but something prevented her. She was about to say she’d come back and get him in five minutes when he slapped his knees and stood.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Before they reentered the party, she ran down to the basement to grab a bottle from the rack.

“Wave this around when we get in there,” she said. “In case anyone noticed you were gone.”

Frank McGuire had the camera around his neck and called Ed over, as relieved as a retriever reassembling the pack. She watched him arrange the guys in a row in the dining room, the group waiting for him to focus, and then a moment of stillness that seemed to expand and breathe. She tried to memorize the scene — not the visual details, which she could recall later by looking at the photograph, but the mood, the nimble camaraderie, the way they clutched each other, the hint of annoyance at having to pose, the way afterward they laughed off the brush with intimacy. Every picture of men in a row, she thought, ended as this one did, with them expelled as if by force, dispersing into separate corners to get a drink, a plate of food, to smoke a cigarette. Ed looked vulnerable standing there in the lee tide. She decided not to leave his side for the rest of the party, and ushered him around with a subtle steering of her arm. He was a perfect sailboat, responding to the slightest tug on the line, tacking when she wanted him to tack, coming about when she wanted him to come about. She could feel him relax with her there, and soon she was having fun again. She had to resist her impulse to leave him and head to where the good conversations were taking place. She’d always considered it a luxury that she could count on her husband to entertain himself at parties. From across the room they would check in with each other with a wave, a nod, a wink, and a charge of desire would run through her as she watched the way women’s eyes danced when they were near him. It was hard to see him as well up close; something was lost in the foreshortening.

Cindy Coakley brought the cake in. They sang “Happy Birthday” and Eileen put her hand on his back as he blew out the candles with a remarkable lack of wind, so that a few stray flames survived his second and even third attempts. The lights came on and Cindy passed him the knife. He stood for a moment brandishing it before him, and Eileen couldn’t help finding something menacing in the image. She put her hand over his in what she hoped would look like an evocation of the gesture of unity with which they’d cut their wedding cake, and she pressed his hand down into the thin layer of frosting and the forbidding brick of ice cream beneath it. When she released her hand he struggled to free the knife from that frozen denseness and, failing, threw up his palms in defeat and took a step back from the cake. She laughed with an expression she hoped said something universal and vague about the uselessness of men and took his face in her hands and gave him a big, unrestrained kiss. To do so in front of all those people went against every ounce of culture she’d ever absorbed. He stiffened at first, but then he relaxed and let her kiss him. People began hooting and cheering. She let him go and pulled the knife from the cake and started serving little slices.

• • •

She hated to wake up to a messy house; it felt like paying a bill for something consumed without being savored. Still, when the last guest left, she went straight to bed. Ed slept on his back, inexorably flat. It was nearly her favorite thing about him. She’d read that it took confidence to sleep on one’s back, because it exposed the internal organs. He’d always been confident in bed. She loved how small he made her feel, how she could nestle up to him and be enveloped in his reach. She thought of the first time they’d danced, her surprise at his size, which he had hidden in his overlarge jacket. He had a rangy athleticism that put him at ease in the company of men who made their living with their hands. He allowed her to bridge two worlds, the earthbound one she’d come from and the rarefied one she aspired to. And he was the only man in whose arms she’d ever been able to fall asleep.

In the morning, she fixed herself tea and got to work dispatching the pots and pans. When she’d cleaned the countertops and cabinet doors, she ran the mop over the kitchen floor, but her usual feeling of pride at the glossy shine and the piney scent didn’t come. How had she tolerated the floor’s permanently dingy linoleum this long? The wallpaper had bubbled up in places, and the joints in the window frames were so slack that the glass shifted like a loose tooth when the window was lifted. In the dining room she felt better for a while as she ran the rag over those stately pieces and breathed in the easy astringency of Murphy’s Oil Soap, but soon the tarnish along the bottom edge of the wall-length mirror was all she could see. In the bathroom, she noticed places where the enamel had worn away in the tub, exposing the black beneath it.

She began to obsess over the details of her guests’ attentions. Had they seen the stains on the rug under the ottoman? The evidence of rot on the vanity? She imagined them picking up objects and finding a layer of dust beneath.

She moved to the basement to clean the laundry room. She would have to have a talk with Brenda about the dryer sheets she always found in the machine and the empty detergent boxes she ended up throwing out herself. These little quality-of-life infractions added up to a diminishment of her happiness on the planet. When she was done, she moved to the storage shelves to organize those and decided she’d have to talk to Donny about keeping his tools better organized. Then came the cedar closets. This time she chided her own inattention, because a few of her favorite sweaters had been eaten through by moths. Then she went upstairs and started to give the grout between the bathroom tiles a proper scouring. When she looked up, Ed was standing in the doorway, Connell behind him. They were wearing their Sunday best.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“We’re going to Mass,” Ed said. “Isn’t that what we do on Sundays?”

“What time is it?”

“Four forty-five,” Connell said.

She had missed every Mass except the five o’clock service. She felt them regarding her strangely and looked down at rubber gloves on hands that seemed to belong to someone else, one of which held a crumbling green sponge.

“Wait for me,” she said, as she peeled them off and closed the door to freshen up.

18

Connell dreaded when the teacher left the room, because in that vacuum of authority he was subject to a tribunal of his peers. And so when Mrs. Ehrlich went to the bathroom during geography class and brought Laura Hollis up to the board to take names, Connell knew the general contours of what was coming. That day, Pete McCauley ran up to the blackboard and grabbed an eraser, missing badly when he threw it at him. Somebody in the rear made up for this errant toss by throwing a pencil, then another, the latter of which hit him in the back of his impassive head. The laughter in the room clattered like shutters in a howling wind. Even his nerd friends chuckled a little. Laura wrote nothing down, as Juan Castro stood by the door keeping the real watch. Pete retrieved the eraser and ran over and stamped it on his back. He couldn’t get the chalk splotch off his blazer, though he rubbed at it the rest of the day.

He used to hang out with these kids. Most of them lived in apartments, so his backyard made him useful. They’d meet there, drop their bikes off. He’d go with them to Woolworth’s to steal Binaca. He never stole it himself, but he went on the expeditions and spent the whole time fretting that he’d be grabbed by a guard. When they were just outside the front door, they’d pull it out conspicuously and spray it into their mouths like it was some kind of drug. They said they needed it for their girls. Shane Dunn and Pete McCauley claimed to have already had sex, and Connell had no reason to doubt them. Every summer at CYO camp there was at least one pregnant seventh- or eighth-grade girl riding the bus.

Then, in the spring of fourth grade, something happened that changed his life. One day they rode over to Seventy-Eighth Street Park because of some dispute Juan’s older brother had gotten into. Connell found himself walking with his classmates and a bunch of older kids in a line, toward another group coming at them. He saw one of the kids on his side take out a knife, but he kept walking forward as though powerless to do anything else, and he was sure he was going to get stabbed in the melee to come. Then he heard sirens and everything slowed down and he could see it would end with him in the back of the squad car, his future ruined. The lines atomized in all directions. He ran with his friends to the bikes. They rode down Thirty-Fourth Avenue to his house. He pedaled furiously, his heart pounding in his chest, feeling like a crocodile was snapping at his heels.

After that, he hung out with the nerds in his special math group. Starting in fifth grade, he never got less than ninety-five on anything. He won the math bee twice, the spelling bee, the science fair. He didn’t show people up when they were wrong the way John Ng did; he didn’t crow about his accomplishments the way Elbert Lim did; but still he was everybody’s favorite target, probably because he acted like a wooden soldier, sitting stiffly upright and barely ever turning his head. He wouldn’t respond when kids tried to get his attention, because he didn’t want to get in trouble with the teachers. He didn’t let kids copy off his tests anymore. It didn’t help that he was chubby. Starting when he was in third grade, the fat came on stealthily, as though in his sleep. Now, in eighth grade, he’d grown several inches, and the fat was hardening into muscle, but that didn’t matter: he was the fat kid. Being the only one in his class to get into the best Catholic high school in the city made matters even worse. It felt like it’d be years before he ever got to kiss a girl. It was like the other kids smelled something on him. He used to talk to his father when he’d had a bad day. Now he just went to the basement and started lifting weights.

• • •

At lunchtime, he served a funeral Mass. He’d started serving funerals whenever he could, to avoid the cafeteria. He wasn’t eating lunch anyway. When he did, sometimes he threw it up afterward. He wanted his muscles as tight as the skin on action figures.

The church was tall and long, and dark everywhere except the altar, which had spotlights and floodlights on it, especially the tabernacle. He liked to look at the faces in the pews. He was the best altar boy they had. He arrived early and knew the ceremony as well as the priests. He didn’t sway the way other kids did when they stood holding the big book. He was a human podium. He offered the cramps in his legs and arms up to God.

Gym was his least favorite class, despite the fact that his athleticism made him a temporary asset to whoever his teammates were on a given day. Changing for gym was a nightmare. Someone sadistic had decided that they should wear their gym clothes under their uniforms and shed their outer layers in a proto-striptease. They peeled their uniforms off in front of each other, girls on one side of the auditorium, boys on the other. He made sure not to look across at the girls, because the fallout of being caught doing so by one of the other boys would be unspeakable. He couldn’t look down or to the side either, because then someone might call him a fag. So he looked at the high ceiling, almost as tall as the one in church, and the high windows up at the ground level, which were always open and which made the outer world seem tantalizingly near.

There were a couple of minutes of milling around before Mr. Cotswald blew the whistle to start class. He kept to himself the way he had ever since the day he’d allowed himself to be hoisted up to the basketball hoop by Pete and Juan, who’d interlocked their fingers to make a step for each of his feet. Other kids had been getting lifted up there and getting the ball passed to them, and then dunking and dropping off, and since it looked like fun he’d let his guard down when Pete and Juan waved him over. Instead of passing him the ball, Shane had pulled his shorts and underwear down. He still felt weird about telling his parents it had happened to someone else. He still had no idea why he hadn’t just dropped off the rim when they’d done it.

At the end of the day he sat in homeroom waiting for the bell. He wanted to spring to his feet when it rang, but he knew better than to let that happen again. Last week he jumped the gun on the okay-to-rise sign and the class erupted in laughter.

Mrs. Balarezo gave the signal for everyone to stand. Then she gave a second go sign to John Ng to lead the ordered procession out. Connell was at the head of the second row. He slid in behind Christina Hernandez and waded out into the sea of kids heading down the stairs. Thank God Ms. Balarezo sat him up front. It gave him a fighting chance to escape. It was the one good thing that had come of being singled out. A while ago she’d switched his and Kevin’s desks. She didn’t have to say why she was doing it; everybody knew he was getting murdered back there.

He got down the stairs and out to the street, no lingering, no talking to anyone. Passing through the gate he exhaled deeply. He loosened his tie, undid the button. He couldn’t relax entirely. It was a long couple of blocks, each house feeling slightly safer than the last. The route was a fist slowly releasing its clench.

The first block was the avenue that ran along the school. It was a short stretch before he turned at Eighty-Third, and it should have been the safest one, with all the cars and adults around, and the church on the corner, but it wasn’t; it was the worst. He walked past the rectory. Somehow they had all gotten there first, as if by teleportation, and were sitting on the steps. He felt them deciding his fate: Tommy, Gustavo, Kevin, Danny, Carlos, Shane, Pete. Danny lived on his block; that meant something — after school, anyway. At school, Danny was like everybody else. When they cracked jokes, he laughed louder than the others. He never hit Connell, though. He’d push him, but he wouldn’t fight.

As Connell passed the church, his mind was afire. Did he do anything today to get their notice? Did he talk to a girl? Did he talk to anyone at all? Did he offend anybody by not talking? Anything was possible. He wanted to be invisible. If he could get to the corner unnoticed, and across the street, the chances of their following him home dropped, but then it was one and a half long side-street blocks, narrow ones, less busy, and he had to hurry. If they wanted to get him in that stretch, he was a man in the desert without a horse.

He crossed the avenue. Out of the corner of his eye he could see them following him. When he reached the other side, they were upon him. They surrounded him quickly, a phalanx closing its gaps. There was a moment of indecision, in which the fact of their outnumbering him seemed to hang in the air like a question. He thought they looked vulnerable in this in-between moment, as though they saw something absurd in the ritual of his submission. He imagined them calling the whole thing off, Danny saying, “Hey guys, let’s forget about it,” and then the group breaking up and walking home.

Sometimes lately he looked at them, even at times like this, and saw not bullies but lost children and, down the road, lost adults. He didn’t know why he thought all this stuff, why he did laps around the block after dinner, saying hello to strangers and waving at old ladies perched on their stoops.

The hiccup of indecision passed. As though propelled by an electric wind, one kid shot out of the circle. Today it was Carlos Torres, quiet Carlos, disappearing Carlos, and the role was bigger than him, so he puffed himself up to fit it. He approached Connell awkwardly, jabbing at the air. Connell did his best to avoid the blows. He felt his shirt riding up on him, the buttons straining as he darted around. It was only a matter of time. The circle grew smaller and smaller. A stinging slap landed on his ear and he heard a deafening pop. The one thing he needed to do was hold on to his bookbag; God forbid they should get that from his grasp. Another smack landed hard on his face. The kids gaped in a kind of amazed half respect as they watched him take the blows. Then it turned to anger: why wouldn’t he defend himself? He wondered too. He was bigger than them, stronger too. Maybe it was the fact that some of them carried knives to school. He saw them show them off. One recent graduate, whose older brother was in the Latin Kings, had become a legend for bringing in a gun. It would be nice to have an older brother, Connell thought sometimes: to be in a band of brothers that took on the world, instead of getting his solitary ass beaten to a pulp. It wasn’t always fear that he felt, though, when he didn’t fight back. It was something else, something mysterious.

His hands went up to cover his face and he felt a thud in his side. He was winded, and he focused on keeping his feet. If he fell he would have to cover his body with his arms, leave himself to their mercy and hope they didn’t kick him in the head. Something about his keeping his feet kept them civil. He staggered around, Carlos screaming at him, growing in confidence with every blow he landed.

“Fight back!”

He looked to the blurry group for help. It was the same way he always looked at them, and he sensed something like sympathy in the way some of them looked back, but they were also revolted, and they joined Carlos in hectoring him.

“Fight, maricón!”

They pushed him into Carlos.

“Oh, snap, Carlos, you gonna take that?”

He kept his hands up.

“You wanna fight, huh? You wanna fight?”

“No,” Connell said. “No.”

He felt a fist explode in his gut and he doubled over. His stomach was burning, but the tears didn’t come. He wasn’t afraid for them to come. He had wanted to cry for a while, but he just couldn’t.

Carlos was grinning maniacally. For a second he looked like he was sharing something with Connell, letting him in on a joke. “Fight back!” he screamed. “Faggot!” Connell saw the hatred in his eyes, tried to watch his hands. Carlos smacked him so hard that Connell could actually hear it resound, as though it had happened to someone else. The kids were startled. Connell staggered, and an adult, a stranger, came to break up the fight. Everyone scattered.

Connell let himself in with his key. He collapsed on the couch and awoke to the sound of his father coming home. He could hear him in the study, where he always stopped to drop his briefcase. Soon he would move to the living room. Connell didn’t want to be on the couch when he walked in. He didn’t want him to see any marks or bruises and start asking questions, but more importantly, he didn’t want to deal with the weird negotiations that could ensue if he were there, his father hovering over him, waiting for Connell to move so that he could resume his headphoned isolation.

He thought of how he used to tell his father anything. His father knew how to make him feel better about things. He would hang on his father and cover his face and neck in kisses. It embarrassed him to think of it. He knew it wasn’t as long ago as he liked to pretend.

He stood up. “I’m going out,” he said to his father’s back, which was bent over the desk. His father nodded wordlessly. He started walking up the block. He turned up Northern, heading toward Corona. He had started taking longer trips into areas he didn’t feel safe in, but it didn’t matter. He would walk until it was time go home and eat. He could feel the fat on him burning up with every step.

• • •

They sat through another dinnertime silence, every clinking fork magnified as though by a set of speakers. His parents’ former banter had given way to remorseless, efficient eating, like that of lions after a hunt. A vague unease hung in the air, localized for Connell in the spot above the doorway where a pair of plaster doves sat perched on a heart, locked in a kiss. The doves were a wedding present from friends his parents had since lost touch with. They hung loosely on the nail and were dislodged by the slightest bump or bang. A year ago, one of those falls broke off a chunk of the heart. His father had Krazy-Glued it back together, and there were white cracks in the broken places. Connell wanted to take it off the wall, thrust it up under their noses, and say, “You see this! This is supposed to be you two! Lovebirds!”

The silvery clinks grew more frequent as the meal progressed, as though his parents were hurrying to dispatch the business of eating so they could return to the more complete nourishment provided by their private thoughts. His mother hadn’t noticed that he’d slipped most of his fatty steak into the napkin in his lap. He would deposit it into the garbage when she wasn’t looking.

His mother slapped her hands on the table. “Since when does this family have nothing to say to each other?” His father kept chewing, so Connell did too. They had a nice little solidarity going. His father was looking down at his plate. Connell tried to do the same, but he could feel his mother’s eyes on him.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll start. What about school? Any interesting assignments?”

Lately he’d felt called upon to drive the silences away. Never before had his comings and goings generated so much fodder. He felt perpetually on the verge of blurting out something embarrassing.

He shook his head.

“Okay,” his mother said. “I’ve had enough of the both of you.” She stood up to clear her plate.

“I’m writing an essay about Uncle Pat,” he said. He hadn’t wanted to mention it, because he resented the responsibility of keeping conversation alive in their family, but the assignment was real, and if it could bring his mother back to the table, it would take some pressure from his father.

“Why Uncle Pat?” his mother asked, resuming her seat.

Uncle Pat wasn’t really his uncle. He was his mother’s first cousin. He put Connell on stools in dark saloons and introduced him as “the Dude.” He had a scar on his face from the time he stopped the mugging of an old lady. Wherever they went, Uncle Pat knew everyone.

“I have to find someone in my family with an interesting job,” Connell said. “Go where this person works if possible, and write five hundred words about it.”

“I’ll tell you who has an interesting job. Your father does. You can watch him teach.”

His father put down his knife and fork and looked up. “He doesn’t want to watch me teach,” he said firmly. “Let him follow Pat around the cages. He can learn some valuable lessons.”

“Ed,” she said.

“He can ask him why he’s cleaning up canary poop after owning one of the most successful bars on the North Fork. He can ask him why we had to write a check to pay his state taxes last year.”

“I’d rather you watched your father,” his mother said.

“I can’t watch Dad,” he said. “It’s due tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, snorting. “That’s just great. And when exactly were you planning on getting out to the Island?”

“I’ve seen the farm,” he said. “I can just make it up.”

“No, you can’t. I won’t let you avoid the research.”

“Jeez.”

“I’ll call the school in the morning and say you’re sick. You’ll turn it in a day late.”

“Cool! I’ll take the train out to Uncle Pat.”

“You’re dreaming,” his mother said. “You’re going to the college with your father.” She threw her napkin on her plate. “I’m going for a walk. I cooked, you two can clean.”

He and his father exchanged glances as the front door slammed. His father didn’t notice him emptying the napkin into the garbage.

Normally he needed a raging fever to stay home. People died on his mother’s gurneys; a guy once died in her arms.

“Tomorrow’s your lucky day,” his father said flatly. “I don’t teach until eleven.”

Connell did a victory dance. He expected his father to laugh, but his father kept his head down and his hands plunged in the filmy water.

• • •

Connell awoke to the odd sensation of a motherless house and stumbled out to the study to find his father leaning over his desk writing something. He started to speak, but his father put up a hand to cut him off.

“Get in the shower.”

He hadn’t finished his cereal when his father told him to start the car. Connell loved to sit in the driver’s seat when the engine was running. The rumbling under him spoke of power and freedom, as well as great potential for danger. If he shifted the gears incorrectly, he could go crashing through the new garage door, or back into a pedestrian on the sidewalk.

“Move over,” his father said. “This isn’t the time. And keep that thing off.” He snapped at the radio knob before Connell could.

“Let me tell you about my students,” he said after some silence. “They’re tough.” He had that look in his eye that he got when he was moved by something. “They’re proud. They can spot a faker a mile away. They don’t tolerate being treated like children. There’s too much at stake for them.”

Connell had no idea what his father was getting at.

“When we get to the lecture room, I’m going to introduce you, and I want you to sit in the back and listen. I don’t want you to distract anyone. I won’t be able to talk to you, so you can’t ask any questions. Please don’t interrupt me, because I have to concentrate.”

They arrived at the campus and parked in the garage. His father shut the engine off and sat still. He had his eyes closed and was taking deep breaths. Connell waited for something to happen. His father started rubbing his temples. After a while he opened his eyes and looked at him.

“You ready?”

“Yeah,” Connell said.

His father reached to the back seat for his briefcase. “I was just doing a little relaxation ritual I have before I go in to teach.”

It was hard to believe his father needed such a thing. He’d always projected such easy command, and there were plaques on the wall attesting to his excellence as a teacher.

He was looking for something in his briefcase, not finding it, and growing agitated. He pulled a pile of papers out in a panicked frenzy and rifled through them. In the close quarters of the front seat, Connell could almost hear his father’s heart pounding. When he found what he was looking for, a legal pad, the heaving in his chest and the kinetic fury of his hands settled into an eerie stillness that overtook his whole body. Connell had no idea what to say. His father was staring straight ahead.

“It’s nothing,” his father said. “It’s that you’re here. I want everything to be perfect.”

They walked through the campus, passing people his father knew. His father introduced him quickly, barely stopping to do so, even though the people sported those deliberate expressions of instant delight that all people, however curmudgeonly, were required to produce upon meeting the progeny of their colleagues. He was walking so fast that Connell had a hard time keeping up with him, and eventually he broke into a little trot, which prevented Connell from taking in the sights as he would have liked. It looked like one of those fancy campuses in movies, with buildings with august columns and stonework, not like a place for people hanging on by a hair.

“This is nice,” Connell said.

“This campus was designed by a famous architect named Stanford White,” his father said automatically. “At one time, it was the Bronx satellite of New York University.” His voice sounded distant, as though he were delivering a lecture. “When NYU built this campus, their chancellor said he wanted it to look like the American ideal of a college. In the early seventies, after it had gotten too expensive to maintain, NYU sold it to the State of New York, and we moved over here from the old Bronx High School of Science.”

“Dad,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Are we late?”

“No.”

“Then why are we running?”

Something in his voice must have given his father pause, because his father stopped and put a hand on his shoulder.

“This isn’t how I would have wanted this to go,” he said. “Believe me. There’s a lot here I wanted to show you. There’s a beautiful overlook point called…” He rubbed his nose. “The Hall of Fame for Great Americans,” he said after a few seconds. “You can see for miles up there. It has a lot of statues arranged in a circle around you. Maybe if everything goes well I can take you there after class.”

They arrived at the building, but instead of marching directly into the lecture hall to a throng of expectant students, as his father’s pace suggested they might have to do, they headed to his lab, where he closed the door behind him. His father told him to absorb himself in whatever he might find interesting, so long as he didn’t break anything. He waved at a human skeleton suspended in the corner, a row of rat cages along the far wall, and a lonely assemblage of beakers and petri dishes. Then he took out his legal pad and paced back and forth, quietly reading aloud.

Connell left the beakers huddled in their fragile little gathering. He avoided the accusing eyes of the rats and hurried past the hollow ones of the skeleton. Finding nothing more promising, he circled back to tap on the glass of the rat cages and listen to what his father was reading.

“You can feed them if you want,” his father said, gesturing to the rats, which almost seemed to listen along over his shoulder. “There’s a bag of pellets in the drawer behind you.”

“I’m okay,” Connell said.

“I’m trying to focus,” his father said, “and it would help if I didn’t have to worry about you listening to every word.”

His father searched around. “Here, take this,” he said, tossing him an issue of Scientific American. Connell didn’t like that magazine; they had a lot of them at home. His father was always drawing his attention to articles on black holes or glaciers or acid rain, but Connell stuck to Sports Illustrated and the “People” page in the back of Time.

“Why don’t you sit outside and I’ll come get you when I’m done?”

Connell wanted to tell him he didn’t have to come to his stupid class at all if he wanted him gone that badly, but he held back. He did have to write the report. But something else told him not to make a big deal of it. “I’ll just go to the class and wait for you,” he said.

“Great,” his father said, visibly relieved. “Two flights up. Room four forty-three. Introduce yourself.”

As Connell left, his father was splashing water on his face in one of the sinks at the end of the long tables.

He took the stairs three at a time. The classroom door was open; he walked past it as casually as he could. The room was more full than he’d expected. How was he supposed to introduce himself to a room full of college students? He could barely get up in front of kids his own age without worrying about his voice betraying him with squeaks and squawks.

He mimed absorption in a bulletin board, then doubled back, passing the room again. The floor sloped upward from the front, so that the people at the back stared down from a lofty perch. A box on the wall taunted him: In Case of Emergency, Break Glass. The words took on a sudden poignancy; he would’ve been helpless even with an axe in his hand. He was beginning to see the wisdom in his father’s having prepared a speech.

He stepped into the room and hustled to one of the empty seats in the back. He waited for the thumping in his chest to subside. They could figure out who he was for themselves if they cared so much.

When his father walked in, he didn’t look up but headed for the podium and started reading from his pad.

“Today we are going to begin our discussion of the central nervous system,” he said. “I have quite a bit of material to cover, and it is crucial that you assimilate this material for the final exam, so I would ask you to take careful notes, because I will not be able to repeat myself or interrupt the lecture to answer questions. Should you happen to find yourself confused at any point, please write your questions on a sheet of paper to hand to me at the end of class, and I will provide you with a written response when we meet on Thursday. Additionally, I am sorry to report that, due to the demands of a long-term research project, I will be forced to cancel office hours for the remainder of the semester.”

The room erupted in incredulous groans. His father didn’t look up but only held his finger on the page and waited for the furor to die down.

“At the end of each remaining class session, I will collect your questions. After I do so, I will pass out the detailed responses I have written to your earlier questions. Writing these responses will come at the expense of a considerable amount of my time, so I hope you will rest assured that any lost office hours will be more than adequately compensated for in this fashion. If on occasion I appear sluggish or distracted, or seem to need a second to compose myself, be aware that I am likely exhausted from the busy schedule I am keeping.

“One other point of note. Beginning today, I will be reading exclusively from prepared lectures and leave off answering or posing questions. In recent class sessions, we have covered comparatively less material than we did in the earlier part of the course, as you are all no doubt aware.”

There were murmurs of acknowledgment, though his father didn’t stop to notice them.

“I ask your forgiveness for the relatively inert nature of my presentation of the material from now on, but I assure you that a certain briskness is vital to your being adequately prepared for the final examination. And so, without further ado, I would like to begin.”

When his father walked in, an indignant chatter had percolated throughout the room. At the beginning of his speech, a few students scanned the room for the reactions of others, but now several who didn’t have notebooks out before took them out, and many pens were poised over pages.

He began.

“The central nervous system,” he said, “represents the largest part of the nervous system. It consists of the brain and the spinal cord. Along with the peripheral nervous system, which we will learn about later, the central nervous system plays an essential role in the control of behavior.”

All around Connell, people were writing down everything he said.

“The central nervous system is contained within an area known as the dorsal cavity, which can be broken down into two subcavities, the cranial and the spinal. The cranial cavity contains the brain, while the spinal cavity contains the spinal cord.”

A few hands went up; it was evidently a hard habit to break immediately. If his father saw them out of the corner of his eye, he didn’t give any indication. He flipped pages in his pad as he read.

“The central nervous system is protected by an elegant, two-tiered system. First, both the brain and the spinal cord are enveloped in a sheath of membranes known as the meninges. The meninges are three continuous sheets of connective tissue. From the outside in, these sheets are known as the dura mater, the arachnoid mater, and the pia mater.”

The students seemed confused. Most had stopped writing. They were looking at each other and adding their hands to the gathering chorus in the air.

“The second tier of protection of the central nervous system is provided by bone. The brain is protected by the skull, while the spinal cord is protected by the vertebrae.”

Now most of the class had its hands raised. His father had said he didn’t want questions, but Connell was sure that if he knew how many hands were up, he would want to clear up the point so everyone could move along.

“The brain receives sensory input from the spinal cord as well as from its own nerves — which we will name and discuss later. It dedicates most of its capacity to processing sensory inputs and instigating motor outputs.”

He had to think of something. His father obviously couldn’t hear the grumbling that had overtaken the class. He was in some kind of zone. No one was taking notes anymore. Connell didn’t want to anger him, but he knew his father would thank him later if he helped him solve this problem now.

His fingers tingled as he stood and felt everyone turn to face him. All he wanted to do was get his father to look up from the page. He cleared his throat.

“Dad!” he said sharply.

His father must not have heard him, or if he did, he must not have understood the seriousness of the situation. Connell wanted to sit back down, but now he couldn’t. He felt short of breath.

“The spinal cord serves three main functions,” his father went on. “It conducts sensory information from the peripheral nervous system to the brain. It conducts motor information from the brain to various effectors. And it serves as a minor reflex center.”

“Dad!” he said again, this time more emphatically. “Dad!”

His father looked right at him. It felt as if they were the only two people in the room. All the hands in the air fell at once. His father looked around at the faces staring back at him. Everyone seemed to wait to see what would happen next. His father bent over the pad again. As he did so, hands shot up all over the room. Voices called out.

“Professor Leary!”

“Professor!”

But he didn’t hear them. “The second tier of protection of the central nervous system,” he said, to a round of groans, “is provided by bone.” One man hopped in his seat, as if he were about to run up and tackle him away from the lectern.

“The brain is protected by the skull…”

Connell knew he had heard this already.

“What is this shit?” the hopping man asked.

“Hello!” shouted a lady a few rows up. “You can’t just ignore us here.”

Connell had seen his father determined before. When he wanted to do something, when he really wanted to do it, he put his head down and got it done.

A growing outcry was filling the room, so that you could barely hear him reading.

“Dad!” Connell shouted. “Dad!”

His father stopped again. This time he backed away from the pad and the lectern. Connell saw the pages he’d folded under the bottom flip back onto the pad. His father looked at him again in that uncanny way, as if Connell was the only other person there. He backed up to his briefcase and squeezed the handle as though to keep it away from someone trying to snatch it from him. Then he seemed to recover a bit and approached the podium again. Connell sat down.

“Today we are going to begin our discussion of the central nervous system,” he said. He stopped talking and looked around at the room. They were eerily quiet. Connell was desperate for someone to say something. He knew he couldn’t do it himself.

After a few seconds, his father gestured to a woman in the front who had been taking notes through the chaos.

“Karen,” he said. “Karen? Is that right?”

“Yes, Professor Leary.”

“Karen, if you don’t mind, would you tell me where I left off?”

“You had just finished telling us that the spinal cord serves as a minor reflex center.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s good. That’s good. Thank you. That’s exactly what I needed. The spinal cord as a reflex center.”

He flipped through the pad furiously. When he had gone through all the pages, he flipped back through them again so hard that it looked like he might rip them off.

“You see,” he said. “I’m tired. I’ve been working hard. And there’s a lot on my mind. In fact, there’s something specific on my mind that’s distracting me, and I hope you’ll forgive me for letting it get in the way today. If you’ll all turn and look, you’ll see my son at the back of the room.”

Connell could feel the blood rush to his cheeks.

“My son came along with me, as you can see,” his father said. “Today is an important day for him.” His father was looking directly at him. “Isn’t it, son?”

He was going to make him talk about the project.

“Yes,” Connell said.

“Today’s his birthday,” his father said.

Everyone was staring at him. It had been almost a month since his birthday. He could see it all: the metal bat, the batting gloves, the high-end tee, the netting, the boxes of balls, the bucket to keep them in; heading out into the cold and the whipping wind after dinner and setting up at the back of the driveway; under the moon, in the quiet of the evening, slamming balls into the net and delighting in the ping produced by a ball squarely struck.

The faces smiled. He heard a volley of clucking. One lady near him asked him how old he was.

“I’m fourteen,” he said.

“Fourteen today,” his father said. “And he’s been such a good kid, waiting for me. You see, we’re going to the Mets game right after this class. Opening Day. And I’ve had that in the back of my mind. I’ve been worried about the traffic. We’re going to be cutting it a little close. So I apologize for not being all here today. Really, if I’m being honest with myself, I should ask you all if you wouldn’t mind if we just ended class early and made up for it next week. I realize some of you have come from far away. Would you forgive me if we canceled today’s class and made it up next time?”

The students looked around at each other. Some grumbled; one man slapped his desk in frustration, yelled “Bullshit!” and walked out. Others shrugged.

“Good. Good. That’s great,” his father said. “Then we’ll end class now.”

They started packing up their stuff. “I’ll draw up a handout explaining in depth what I was going to go through today, and I’ll spend a little time at the beginning of next class taking you through it point by point.” He picked up the briefcase from the floor and began gathering his things. “Thank you all,” he said, over the rustle of bags and jackets. “This is kind of you. I apologize for imposing on your time like this.”

Some of them wished Connell a happy birthday as they left. His father waved them out the door. Connell remained seated until everyone had gone. He walked up to the front of the room. His father stood facing the blackboard, his hands on the chalkwell. Connell could see his shoulders rising and falling.

“I have to pee,” Connell said, though he didn’t really have to.

In the bathroom, he looked in the mirror. He lifted his shirt up, then took it off and flexed with both arms. There was more mass and definition. He brought his fists to his ears and squeezed his muscles like Hulk Hogan. He smiled a big, crazy smile with lots of teeth. He drew close to the mirror, leaned his forehead against it. His breath collected on it and evaporated. He slapped at the little bit of baby fat still on his stomach, hard enough to leave a red mark.

“Go away,” he said. “Go away!” Then he started to worry that someone would walk in on him.

He put his shirt on and went back out. They walked to the car in silence.

“I don’t have tickets to the game,” his father said after they’d been driving awhile. “We can still go. We can try to get in.”

“We don’t have to.”

“It might be hard to get tickets.”

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking we could go watch some planes.”

Connell turned the radio on and the volume up a few clicks. He watched his father’s face for flickers of anger, but his father didn’t seem to notice the change in volume. Connell turned it up even more. His father’s hand shot to the knob.

“That’s too loud,” he said. “Not too loud.”

It was lower now than it had been before he raised it the first time, but he didn’t want to chance it. He looked out the window.

“Hey, Dad?”

“What?”

“What was all that about?”

“I just didn’t feel like teaching today.”

“Why did you say it was my birthday?”

He could see his father’s face reddening, his hands gripping the wheel tighter.

“Don’t you think I know my own son’s birthday? It’s March thirteenth!” His father took a deep breath. “I just wanted everything to go perfectly. I wanted you to have good material for your project.”

“You seemed confused.”

“I was fine!” he shouted. “That’s the end of it! I wanted things to go well while you were there. I’ve never had you in the classroom with me before. End of discussion!”

The pitch in his voice rose along with the volume, and his words became a kind of shrieking. Then he stopped and his breathing settled down.

“I didn’t want to be cooped up inside today,” he said.

They drove in silence.

“I’m sorry about your project,” he said. “Maybe you can come back and watch me sometime.”

“It’s all right,” Connell said. “I can make it up. I already know what kind of teacher you are. You teach me every day.”

They drove back to Queens, heading to the strip of grass they’d come to call their own, along a road that led to LaGuardia Airport. When they parked, his father turned to him.

“Can you do me a favor? Can you not tell your mother about this?”

“Coming here?”

“No. The other thing.”

“Sure. Sure.”

“She won’t understand it the way you do.”

They walked to the fence near one of the landing strips. In the distance, Connell could see planes coming in in a line, separated by long intervals. Planes took off around them; engines roared. They stood there dwarfed by arrivals and departures. His father’s arm was around him, and his own fingers clung to the chain-link fence.

They listened to the game on the way back. When they got home, instead of putting a record on and breaking out the headphones, his father put the game on the radio and they sat on the couch listening to it. The Mets beat the Phillies by a run, Gooden throwing eight solid innings and Franco nailing down the save.

• • •

He thought about telling his mother how weird it had been, but so much about his father was weird that it was hard to say where the weirdness began and ended. It wasn’t a generation gap so much as a chasm that had opened up and swallowed a whole lifetime. Instead of hanging out with the flower children, his father had haunted laboratories and listened to Bing Crosby. He loved foreign languages and corny puns. How often, when Connell reached for another helping at breakfast, did his father stop his hand and ask him in mock earnest if one egg wasn’t un oeuf?

Who could forget the events of that past Thanksgiving? They went to the Coakleys. The Coakleys used to live a few blocks away in a three-family house like their own; now they lived on Long Island, in a house with plush carpets and a low-lit den that had a couch on all sides and a large television perfect for watching the game. Cindy Coakley had been his mother’s friend since first grade at St. Sebastian’s.

His parents were getting ready in their bedroom. Connell was lying on his bed reading. The radio was on in the living room; his parents must have thought he was out there listening to it, because his mother started laughing in a girlish way that made him feel as if he was hearing something he wasn’t supposed to be hearing. He crept to his door.

“Oh, Ed,” he heard her say. “Don’t do it!”

“Why not? I think it’s a great idea.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” she said, but the delight in her voice said otherwise. “I insist — no, I demand—that you not do this.”

“I’m doing it,” he said. “Here I go.”

“Ed!” she squealed. “That’s brand new!”

It wasn’t strange to hear them laughing, but this was different; this was playful. Around him they laughed like parents, with a certain restraint. He had never heard his mother sound so young.

“How does that look?” his father asked.

“You are not going to show that to anybody. Do you hear me?”

“You’re afraid the women won’t be able to handle it,” he said. “You think they’ll swoon.”

A few seconds passed in silence. He went right up to their closed door, his heart pounding in his chest. He heard some muffled sounds.

“We don’t have time,” his mother said, but she sounded as if she was saying they had all the time in the world.

She made little moaning noises. Connell’s blood ran cold. He had never seen them kiss on the lips, and yet there they were, kissing and doing God knew what else. He thought of all the times he’d watched Jack Coakley pull Cindy to him in brute affection, the times he’d silently urged his father to sweep his mother up in his arms in front of everyone.

“We’d better get going,” his mother said. He heard the sound of the zipper on her dress.

“Maybe I’ll give Jack a laugh. He needs a laugh.”

Connell dashed back to his room. When his parents emerged, he watched for some sign of the mischief he had heard them discussing, but there was nothing.

They drove in a pleasant silence to the Northern State Parkway and the Coakleys. The men watched football in the den while the women talked and transferred food from pots to serving dishes. The dining room table was set with good silver and wineglasses, salt and pepper in sterling silver shakers, and two layers of tablecloths. As everyone trickled in, Connell was already at the table, looking forward to the painful bloat about to overtake him. After the meal, he would sit on the couch with the rest of the men and pat his swollen belly, burping quietly.

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.

• • •

When his mother got home, she pulled him aside. “What was it like at Daddy’s school?” she asked. “How was he?” Her expression was strangely intense, and she was practically whispering. Connell was so unnerved that he almost said something. Then he remembered his promise.

“Dad was Dad,” he said. “I didn’t understand a word he was saying.”

19

An article in a nursing journal said that a fixed routine had a deleterious effect on the mind of a person prone to depression and that shaking up elements of a depressive’s environment could be a productive way to introduce treatment. She didn’t know for sure that Ed was technically depressed, but she knew she’d never be able to get him to a psychiatrist to find out.

What Ed needed — what they all needed — was to climb out of a rut. She started to wonder whether a move to another house might not be just the thing to jolt him out of his torpor. The timing was right: Connell was starting high school next year and could commute into the city from almost anywhere; the value of their home, given the encroaching neighborhood decay, would only go down. In a few years, they’d be trapped.

A house could make all the difference. Things improved for the Coakleys after Jack got promoted to director of cargo for SAS and they moved out to East Meadow. Jack had shown some signs of depression himself when they were still in Jackson Heights, but in East Meadow he started making furniture in his big garage and got into gardening and landscaping. He established an idyll in their backyard for all to enjoy: the echoing pool, the radio raised to drown out the rattle of distant mowers, wet footprints drying on hot concrete, the ubiquitous smell of sunblock.

It had been five years since she’d raised the rate on the already far-below-market rent she charged the Orlandos, and even then she’d raised it only a pittance. The knowledge that her son was safe had always offset in her mind the revenue she’d lost by floating the Orlando clan. Connell went up to one or the other of their apartments after school and stayed until she and Ed came home. Now that he was getting old enough to take care of himself, though, the protection they offered meant less than it once had.

“I’ve been thinking about this house,” she said. Connell was having dinner at Farshid’s, and they were alone at the dinner table. Ed didn’t respond. She’d gotten used to these one-sided exchanges. She’d learned to read different meanings into his silences. That night’s silence was auspicious; it lacked the heaviness of other varieties. It was like a sheet she could project her thoughts onto.

“I’ve been thinking that it might be nice to have a place of our own, where we don’t have renters. I’m tired of being a landlord. Aren’t you?” She filled a plate with chicken, potatoes, and steamed green beans and handed it back to him. It looked bland, but it was just the two of them, and Ed never seemed to care either way.

“This is our home,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I was just thinking we could look for a place that would be… more ours.”

“We’ve done a lot of work on this house.” Ed cut into his chicken. Rather than cut a small bite, he sawed it in the middle until it was in two halves.

“You’re happy here?”

“I am.” He began cutting the halves in half, his head into his work.

“You’re not happy,” she said. “You’re miserable. You won’t get off the couch.”

“I’m happy.”

“We could move to the suburbs. Get a nice house.”

“We have a nice house right here.” He looked up at her for the first time. His chicken was arranged in a neat mosaic of bite-sized pieces, but he hadn’t begun to eat.

“This neighborhood is going to hell.”

“I’m a city boy,” he said. “All those empty streets. All the space between houses.” He gestured dismissively with his fork.

Space between houses was all she wanted in the world.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to get out of here? Start somewhere else? The timing is perfect. Connell’s starting a new school next year. We’ve saved so well.”

“This place is a lot better than what I had growing up,” Ed said.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re right about that.”

She hated being made to feel churlish. She wasn’t looking for a palace, just a step up from where they were. It was for him that she was thinking of all this, but how could she talk to him about it without alerting him to her line of reasoning?

“I don’t want to have anyone walking over my head anymore,” she said.

“We’ll switch apartments with Lena. She’d jump at it. Those stairs probably kill her.”

She gave him a withering look. His green beans were all cut in half now too.

“Our life is here,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you like to get to know another neighborhood?”

“I don’t want to be isolated,” he said. “I don’t want to have to get used to a whole new way of life.”

She bit her tongue, then said it anyway. “You already have a whole new way of life.”

She watched him finally begin to move some food into his mouth and chew it slowly, as if considering the mechanics of chewing anew. It was driving her crazy. She put her knife and fork down and waited.

“We can’t afford to move where you want to move,” he said, but it was as if he wasn’t in the conversation anymore, so caught up was he in bringing small bites to his mouth, gnashing them between his teeth, and swallowing.

“You don’t know the first thing about where I want to move,” she said bitterly.

• • •

She had long ago stopped concerning herself with the details of their money management. They had a common bank account that he balanced fastidiously. He also handled their investments. Since he was conservative in his portfolio choices (the First Jersey Securities investment had been her idea, based on a tip she’d gotten from a doctor at work; Ed had reluctantly agreed to it), they’d seldom suffered the effects of overexposure, and they were in a strong position relative to peers of similar or even greater income. This was one decision, however, that she couldn’t afford to let him control. If she couldn’t get him excited about this project, she would have to generate enough excitement for both of them.

She began searching through the listings in Bronxville.

“This place looks perfect,” she said, as she showed Ed an open house notice in the newspaper.

“You know how I feel about this.”

“Humor me. It’s on Saturday. We’ll make a day of it.”

“I’ve got something lined up for us for then.”

He almost never made plans. She couldn’t help but smile at the obvious ploy.

“Do tell,” she said.

“Mets tickets,” he said.

“You’ve bought these tickets? It has to be this Saturday?”

“Somebody at work is holding them for me. I said I had to check with my wife’s schedule.”

Such a hopeful look came over his face, as if he really thought she hadn’t seen through his ruse, that she couldn’t bring herself to argue. The next night he showed off the tickets, undoubtedly purchased at the stadium on the way home from work. He’d even bought four, the unnecessary fourth there to lend verisimilitude to the bit of theater.

Saturday came. It was a sunny, mild day in early May, and, she had to admit, a perfect day for a game. With the other ticket, Connell brought Farshid. On the 7 train, adults in the infantilizing garments of fandom buzzed with an adolescent excess of energy. When the doors opened at Willets Point, she felt carried along by the buoyancy of the crowd. Instead of following the switchback ramp to the top as they usually did, though, they stopped after a single flight. When they emerged from the corridor and were flooded with light, they saw that the players looked unusually life-sized.

The boys took their seats with palpable pride at being envied from above. Batting practice was still going on, and they got their gloves out. Connell never failed to bring his glove to games and wear it for hours in an uncomfortable vigil, despite having never come close to snagging a ball; they were always in the wrong seats. On the lower level, though, having a glove was good planning.

Ed took their orders and went for refreshments. In the absence of his moderating influence, the boys fired fusillades of obscure terms at each other: hot smash, can of corn, high and tight, round the horn, hot corner, filthy stuff, the hook. As she listened to them speak, a meditative calm came over her. She did some of her best thinking at ball games, or while Ed was listening to them on the radio. She’d always understood the basic mechanics of baseball, and Ed had successfully explained a good deal of the more complex aspects to her, but she’d never cracked the code of the priestly solemnity her husband and son greeted the game with, in which old bats and split-leather gloves were revered like relics, as saints’ fingers and spleens had been in earlier centuries. In truth, she was impressed by the range of her son’s knowledge. It was an arrested form of scholarship he was practicing when he allowed his brain to soak up these facts. It was really history men craved when they fixated on the statistics of retired athletes — men who hadn’t been to war, in a nation still young enough to feel dwarfed by the epochal moments of its onetime rivals. The rhetoric of baseball was redolent of antiquity, the hushed tones, the gravitas, the elevation of the pedestrian into the sublime. Connell and Ed would read write-ups of games they’d watched or listened to on the radio, even ones they’d attended. The narrative that surrounded the game seemed as important as the game itself. Ed raved about the descriptive power of some sportswriters, but she never saw what he was talking about; it seemed like boilerplate stuff, dressed up as the chronicle of an epic clash. She focused on the visceral particulars of the stadium experience instead: the smell of boiled meat, nestled under sauerkraut; the thunder of the scoreboard exhorting them to clap; the feel of her son’s hand as he slapped her five.

Ed had been gone a long time. She panned around for his Members Only jacket. After some restless searching she spotted him a section over, leaning into the railing, staring around with his hand over his eyes like a lookout in a crow’s nest. She had his ticket stub in her pocket, so he couldn’t show it to the ushers, one of whom was trying to move him along. She could see Ed growing agitated as he swatted a second usher’s hand from his shoulder. She hated making a spectacle of herself, but any second now the guards would be called, and that would create an even bigger scene. She stood and shouted his name, waving her arms. He finally saw her and broke free of the ushers, who gave no chase, seeing order restored. He made his way down the aisle encumbered by trays; she distributed the quarry to the boys.

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.”

She stood in the hallway watching him trudge to his room. Then she found herself stepping back onto the stoop and looking again to the night sky, trying to divine what ancient people might have seen in it — animals, hunters, maybe kings. Nothing came into focus, except when she thought she saw a dog with a long leash around its neck. When she looked up again it was gone.

That night, when she couldn’t sleep, she concentrated on the steadiness of the stars, their transcendence of human sorrow and confusion, the reassurance offered by the unfathomable scale of geologic time.

21

On Sundays, they went to one o’clock Mass. Ed was never the driving force in their church attendance. When Connell was a baby, Ed had loved to usher him out the back of the church at the first hint of a meltdown.

For someone whose responsibility it was to get everyone to Mass, she didn’t feel confident of her own belief in God anymore. It had been years since she’d thought of the world as the product of a divine plan. Maybe working as a nurse was too much for belief to fight against. She’d seen people expire on the table in every way — noisily, quietly, thrashingly, completely still. Death had come to seem no more than the breaking down of an organism: the last exhalations of the lungs, the final pumpings of the heart, the brain deprived of blood.

That didn’t mean she was going to stop going to Mass. She liked the moral lessons for the boy, and the good works the Church did were the most important reason to attend — God or no God. When alone with her thoughts she couldn’t help detecting some frequency she was tuning into, and she prayed to that frequency after communion when she knelt alongside her pew mates, though most of the time she felt like she was talking to herself.

The previous Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, at the end of the last Mass he would celebrate at the parish, Father Finnegan, who had been there thirty years, had introduced his replacement, Father Choudhary. Everyone registered the new, dark figure up there preparing the gifts as a harbinger of the future. Over the last decade, the priests had gone from being mostly Irish to mostly Hispanic; now, apparently, they were coming from India too.

Every year, there were more Indians around her at church. A few months ago, an Indian family had bought the Wohls’ house up the block, and because she’d assumed they were Hindu, she’d been surprised to see them at Mass the following week. She’d lingered a bit so she wouldn’t have to walk down the block with them, something she hadn’t been proud of when she lay in bed thinking of it that night. The next Sunday, she made sure to catch them on the way out and walk with them. It had felt good to make amends for a slight no one knew she’d committed, and thereafter she felt comfortable letting them walk home alone.

Ed was more open-minded about other cultures. When they walked through Greenwich Village, he marveled appreciatively at the stratospheric Mohawk haircuts of the punk rockers, while she felt only disgust. So when they found themselves at Father Choudhary’s first Mass, she wasn’t surprised that Ed seemed extra attentive. To her, Father Choudhary looked spooky under his stark-white vestments, with the effigy of Jesus behind him on the altar. He spoke in a trilling accent. Even the Hispanics looked around as if to say, This guy isn’t one of us. Ed just sat with his arms folded in amusement, or tapping the church bulletin against his thigh.

During the reading, Ed was usually good for a flip to another section of the liturgy — he was more into the literature of the Bible than the sacred text aspect — but with Father Choudhary at the pulpit, he held the book open to the reading. At least she could understand Father Choudhary better than Father Ortiz, who she wished would give in and speak Spanish with an interpreter beside him.

It was a reading from the book of Proverbs, on how the wisdom of God was born before the earth was made:

When he established the heavens I was there,

when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep;

When he made firm the skies above,

when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth;

When he set for the sea its limit;

so that the waters should not transgress his command;

Then I was beside him as his craftsman,

and I was his delight day by day,

Playing before him all the while,

playing on the surface of his earth;

and I found delight in the sons of men.

When Father Choudhary closed the book to begin his homily, Ed settled in to listen. Father Choudhary began preaching about matters wholly unrelated to the reading: the idea that if we are all made of dust, then the same dust, cosmic dust, he called it, could be found throughout the universe; that this cosmic dust might have been created by the Big Bang; that somehow our sharing in this dust called us to responsibility to each other. Ed looked positively enthralled. Father Choudhary spoke of the smallness of man in relation to the vastness of the universe, and how that smallness was instructive, how it reminded us that part of our humanity was a sense of humility. He exhorted everyone gathered to allow themselves to feel wonder and awe in the face of all creation, big and small. Then he quoted from a French Jesuit named Teilhard de Chardin: “He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.” She had never seen Ed more enthused at church. He slapped his hand on the back of the pew in front of him, and for a moment, as she watched him shift in his seat in restless indecision, she thought she would have to reach over and keep him from standing and applauding.

After Mass, a crowd gathered outside the church. Eileen worked her way to the curb, but when she turned, only Connell was behind her. Ed was on the steps, waiting in the receiving line to greet the priest like a well-wisher at a wedding. This was too much.

She reached him just as he was extending his hand for a shake.

“Great speech,” he said absurdly, as though congratulating a politician. “Where are you from?” She was mortified, but Father Choudhary seemed delighted as he pumped Ed’s hand. They talked at length, the receiving line at a standstill.

She waited until they had gotten far enough away.

“What was all that about?”

“All what?”

Connell had produced a tennis ball from his pocket and was bouncing it to himself.

“Since when are you so interested in the lives of priests?”

“He did a good job,” Ed said.

Connell lost the ball and Ed fetched it from the street, flipping it in his hand as he walked, infuriating her. In her anger she twisted the bulletin into a baton that she smacked into her open palm like a nightstick.

“You really needed to ask where he’s from? He’s from India.”

“He’s from Bangladesh.”

“You needed to know that?”

“I like to learn new things. If we don’t learn, we die.” Ed threw the ball to Connell. “Isn’t that right, buddy?”

When they arrived home, Ed stood rooted to a spot on the sidewalk in front of the house. She waved Connell inside, and the boy hesitated, then went in. Ed didn’t budge. She began to climb the stairs, hoping Ed would follow.

Ed bounced Connell’s ball on the ground and caught it. “I saw the paper,” he said. “The houses you circled.”

She tucked up her skirt and sat on the top step. She felt as if she’d been caught canoodling with a boyfriend. The ball went thwunk as it hit the sidewalk; Ed cradled it back into his cupped palm.

“I don’t want to leave,” he said. “We have a perfectly nice house. We know the neighborhood. Doesn’t that count for anything? Plus, we have this new priest.”

“He’s Indian,” she blurted out incredulously before she could catch herself. “Look around you. Look at what’s happening to this neighborhood. What’s already happened.”

“It’s home,” he said.

“How about that?” she asked, pointing to some graffiti at the base of the big apartment building across the street.

“That too,” he said.

“How about when you walked in covered in eggs on Halloween?”

“Kids horse around everywhere.”

“How about when Lena got mugged?”

“You can’t live in a bubble,” he said.

“How about what happened to Mrs. Cooney? You want that to happen to me?”

“Of course not. But that was an accident.”

“I’d say it was closer to murder.”

She paused, feeling herself shift from anger to resolution. She didn’t need to argue with him. She could do this without him if she had to.

“I want us to look,” she said. “Just to know what’s out there.”

He shook his head. A tiny patch of bald was forming, but she could only see it from this angle. He stopped bouncing the ball and put his hand on her foot and gave it a squeeze. The touch electrified her, as if he had channeled all his energy into his hands.

“I can’t explain why I can’t give you more in this,” he said. “I just really don’t want to go anywhere. Have you ever felt like life was getting away from you, and people were lapping you and you couldn’t catch up? And if you could just stop the world and take it all in, and nobody would go anywhere for a little while, you’d have enough time to understand it? I wish I could do that. I don’t want anybody or anything to move an inch.”

“People move,” she said. “That’s life.”

“I’m lodging my protest,” he said, and he put the ball in his pocket and rose to go inside, leaving her alone on the stoop.

22

The first house she saw cost nine hundred thousand, at least twice what they could afford. She had to see it, though, to have a basis for comparison.

She wore a nice gray suit, a ruffled blouse, and heels. She drove up a long driveway that turned into a circle in front of the house, along whose perimeter a few cars were parked: a BMW, a VW, an Audi. She was embarrassed to be driving a Chevy Corsica. She was glad that Ed’s torpor hadn’t led to an attenuation of his car-washing habit; at least she had neatness on her side.

The door was open. She entered a capacious vestibule with marble floors, oil paintings on the walls, and an enormous chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling. She took in the sweep of the place for only a few moments before an effervescent real estate agent descended the stairs, trailing behind her a young couple who were dressed more casually than Eileen and looked more comfortable there. She had made a mistake. She removed her jacket — it was too warm for one — as they took the final steps of what seemed an endless staircase.

“Welcome,” the agent said, extending both arms as if drawing her in for a hug. The couple had to be ten or fifteen years younger than Eileen. She felt she was intruding. She wanted to turn around and head to the car.

“I saw the door open,” she said.

“Of course! Of course! We were just about to look at the back patio. Join us, or take a look around yourself if you like.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I think I’ll walk around.”

She stood there while they made their way outside. She thought again about leaving but couldn’t bear the idea of their talking about her after she was gone. The inevitable simmering potpourri wafted in from the kitchen. She didn’t want to fall for it, but she couldn’t resist the mood it put her in. She headed upstairs. In the bedroom at the top she was surprised by another couple who looked closer to her age and had two girls in tow, the younger of whom was bouncing lightly on the bed. When the mother saw Eileen standing there, she told the girl to stop. The husband was admiring the craftsmanship of the window. He took Eileen in with an appraising glance from top to toe, as though she were part of the house, and smiled. The wife ushered the girls out, but the husband lingered behind, making pronouncements about the bones of the house as though he imagined being trailed by an audience of onlookers.

After they left, she drifted to the window the man had been admiring. Her car looked like a miniature version of itself. Birds and acorns had taken a toll on its roof; it needed a paint job.

She fluffed up the pillows the little girl had leaned against. She tried to resist the impulse to sit but felt suddenly tired and didn’t know what else to do in the room, which she now felt trapped in, as she didn’t want to face the young couple and the agent downstairs. She heard the low murmur of voices and labored to slow her breathing. She hadn’t noticed until this moment that her heart was racing. She tried to calm herself by gazing at the beautiful sunlight coming through the window and feeling the lace of the duvet, but what put her at ease eventually was the quiet of the house. There were no horns honking outside. She breathed deeply and remembered that these people did not know she was an impostor; for all she knew they were impostors themselves. Maybe no one visiting the house really belonged there — including the agent, who had to project an air of aristocracy to blend in with her surroundings, but when it came down to it was working a job like anybody else.

She had almost willed herself into equanimity when she noticed three photos, each nicely framed, standing sentry around a bedside table lamp. Nothing in the photos could have explained the twisting in the gut she felt. She saw a tableau of a family, possibly from the holidays; a wedding portrait in black and white; and a picture of an elderly couple on horseback, the husband wearing a grin of effortless control. The house was probably being sold so they could move to an inviting snowbird locale or else as an inheritance after the death of one or both of them. It seemed they had lived a full life. The husband possessed a heartiness that belied his years. She felt a surge of nerves that verged on nausea.

What Ed didn’t understand was that in a house like this she would finally be able to breathe enough to put things in order for both of them. Here, she could make herself into the kind of wife who wasn’t always rushing to get lunch made before he walked out the door in the morning. She didn’t even mind thinking that the next place she lived could be where she died.

She gathered the courage to head downstairs. She found the agent and the young couple outside on the patio, the husband taking in the sweep of the yard, the wife inspecting the grill. She straightened her blouse before she slid the glass door open.

“I’ve got to run. I don’t have much time to stay and chat.”

“Of course!” the agent said. “Did you pick up a brochure?”

“It’s a lovely house, but it may not be exactly what we’re looking for.”

“Everyone has a checklist, right? Otherwise it’d all be one big house!”

“My husband and I would like to look at other properties in the area.”

“Please! Take my card. Where are you now?”

“The city,” Eileen said. Queens was technically the city, but she knew that wasn’t what she was conveying.

“I’ll be happy to show you other properties.”

“Thank you.” She turned to the couple. “I wish you the best of luck in your search.”

“And you in yours, wherever it leads,” the young man said in a grand way that struck her as ungracious.

• • •

When she got home Ed was on the couch with his eyes closed and the headphones on. She stood there waving both arms, trying to draw the gaze of his inner eye. Then she went into Connell’s room.

He was lying on the floor in his baseball uniform. It touched her to see how cute he looked in it. It was small on him; he had grown a lot over the past year, and his arms were wiry and long. He had begun to fill out in the upper body. She wondered how concerned she should be about how much time he spent in the basement lifting weights. She’d heard it could stunt his growth, but there was so much else to worry about lately, and she was just glad he wasn’t getting into anything really destructive.

He’d had the sense to take off his mud-caked cleats, but the rest of his uniform sported a layer of that clayey dirt that never came off in the wash.

“How did it go?”

“We lost. I stink. I walked nine guys.”

He was flipping a ball to himself and catching it; it was coming close to hitting his face. One toss would have crushed his nose if he hadn’t turned away at the last second.

“You’ll get better.”

“I threw pretty hard, though,” he said, a proud smile spreading across his face.

“Just don’t dent the garage door,” she said. “I don’t want to have to spend money on yet another one right now.”

He nodded. “Dad came to the game,” he said.

“Really?”

“He did something weird.”

She felt herself begin to panic. “What happened?”

“He wigged out on me after the game. I had to stay and help with the ball bag and bases and stuff. Dad went to get the car. When I got in, he started screaming at me. I’ve never seen him like that before. He kept yelling, ‘You kept me waiting! You kept me waiting!’ ”

“Well, it’s not good to keep people waiting,” she said halfheartedly, wondering if he could hear how tenuous her solidarity with his father was at the moment.

“I couldn’t leave all the bats and stuff. My coach asked me to help. And I wasn’t that long, I really wasn’t. He screamed all the way home.”

“Your father’s going through a hard time right now,” she said. “You can’t take it personally.”

“I didn’t ask him to wait for me. I didn’t ask him to come.”

“He loves going to your games.”

“Whatever.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Mom, you weren’t there. He was crazy.”

A careless toss caused the ball to roll out of reach and he sat with his hands on his knees looking like a little man, already beleaguered by experience. He was a smart kid; he knew some kids had fathers who beat them or simply weren’t there. Still, it was hard to see him disillusioned. Normally she was jealous of the bond between the two of them, but now she wanted to defend it.

“Daddy has a thing about being made to wait in the car,” she said. “You can’t take it personally. I’m sure he’s sorry.”

“He made us sit in the driveway for half an hour so he could apologize.”

“See,” she said. “There you go.”

In bed that night, though, she confronted Ed.

“Connell said you flipped out on him.”

“I lost my temper.”

“He’s just a kid, Ed.”

“That’s not going to happen again.”

“It had better not. I don’t give a damn what your father did to you. That boy’s not him.”

• • •

She parked a few blocks away and walked to the realty office on the chance that the agent hadn’t seen her car the first time. The ruse would be exposed eventually, but she liked being taken seriously as a contender for these places. It was like when she was younger and would ask that a certain item be placed on hold at a store. The cashier would write her name on a slip of paper, and she would be granted time for consideration. The mere idea of possessing it in that allotted limbo was sufficient to quench the desire for it and she would almost never come back to complete the purchase. Perhaps it could be like that with the expensive houses; a few minutes in them could inoculate her against the need to live in them.

The office was in the center of Bronxville, and though it was sandwiched between two boutique shops, it had the feel of an old dentist’s office. There was paneling on the walls, a thin blue carpet, and a few worn desks on either side of an aisle that ran through the center. The desk chairs didn’t have wheels. The office made Eileen feel she was not completely out of her realm. One other agent talked quietly in the corner.

Gloria wore her brown hair cut short, like a politician’s. There were ghostly remains of blond in it. She wore a navy business suit with what looked like a silk blouse. Her teeth were bright white, and level and straight enough that they could have been caps. She was around Eileen’s height.

Once again, Gloria extended both hands in greeting. Eileen wondered whether this was something she had learned in a real estate textbook. And yet, she found herself succumbing to it as she had to the potpourri. They sat at the desk.

“Why don’t we start by talking about what kind of house you’re looking to see? Is there a style you’re particularly interested in?”

Eileen had no real grasp on the terms of art that governed houses. Colonial? Edwardian? Tudor? These were terms she’d heard. As much as she’d always wanted a house in the suburbs, it was an abstract desire. It was about what the house represented: polish, grandeur, seclusion, permanency.

“I liked the house I saw last week quite a lot,” she said.

Gloria looked surprised. “I thought it hadn’t appealed to you.”

“Well, yes, that’s true. In some ways it didn’t. But in many ways it was a perfect house.”

Gloria looked like she was weighing whether to let her off the hook or not. Then she smiled. “It has to be a perfect house in every way,” she said. “That’s what I want for you.”

“Thank you.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, was it a matter of price?”

“Not at all,” Eileen said. “Money wasn’t the issue.”

Gloria raised her brows. “Okay,” she said, clicking her pen into action. “Well, if I’m going to find your future home, I’m going to need certain guidelines.”

“Of course,” Eileen said.

“Why don’t we just start from the top, Eileen. It’s Leary, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you live in the city, you said?”

“We do.”

“Which part?”

“Queens.”

“Parts of Queens are so lovely, aren’t they? I actually have a brother in Douglaston.”

Douglaston was another world entirely. Eileen paused. “We’re in Jackson Heights,” she said.

“One of the garden co-ops?” Gloria asked, raising her brows again in what looked like a hopeful manner. “I hear they’re quite beautiful.”

“We own a house,” she said. “A three-family house.”

“Okay.” She was writing things down. “And you’re looking to move to Bronxville specifically? Or is it this general vicinity you’re interested in?”

“Bronxville.”

She looked up from the pad, beaming. “Isn’t Bronxville just beautiful? When my husband moved us here I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

“I used to work at Lawrence Hospital,” she said. “Years ago. I remembered loving it.”

“So you liked the house you saw. What did you like most about it?”

“The size.”

“How many bedrooms do you want? Three? Four? Five?”

“At least four,” Eileen said, feeling like a drunk picking the figure in the middle.

“Okay! That’s a start. Now, what’s your price range?”

Eileen thought for a minute. “It depends,” she said, “on whether you’re asking me or my husband.”

Gloria laughed. “But that’s why we love them, isn’t it? Men will lay their heads anywhere. I’m always trying to get my husband to consider moving to a bigger house, to tell you the truth. There’s nothing wrong with living up to your means. Does your husband work on Wall Street? The train ride down is so easy.”

“He’s a college professor.”

Another silence ensued, another appraisal from Gloria.

“So, four bedroom. Close to the train, or no? Does he teach in the city? NYU? Columbia?”

“We’ll both be driving,” she said flatly. “He teaches at Bronx Community College.”

“Do you want to be in the school district?”

“It’s not necessary. My son Connell will be going to school in the city.” She paused for effect, then added, “To Regis,” expecting the revelation to inflate a protective balloon of prestige around her, and indeed the agent raised her brows.

“Well!” Gloria said. “He must be a bright young man!” Then she punctured the balloon. “My husband went there. It’s all he ever talks about. I get tired of hearing about it. I have all girls, but if I’d had a son, I would have sent him there myself.”

Eileen had to fight to suppress her urge to correct the woman. You didn’t “send” your son to Regis: your son took the scholarship exam in November and you prayed for a letter inviting him to the interview round; then, after the interview, you prayed again that he’d aced it — actually prayed, no figure of speech, even if you never prayed otherwise. Then you gathered around your son as he sat at the dining room table and opened the letter that informed him he’d been admitted, and when he said he didn’t want to go to an all-boys’ school that was full of nerds, you told him he was going and that he’d thank you later, and you saw a little grin flash across his face, though he was trying to pretend to be annoyed. And when you said, “Your grandparents would have been so proud,” you felt something in your spirit lift, because you had a responsibility to them that you’d carried for years, and now you could hand off part of it to him. And you saw that he understood somehow what it meant for this to have happened, that he wasn’t the only person involved. You imagined your father looking over your shoulder, nodding silently, and your mother, that enigma, was there too, and you could almost see her smile at the thought of what might become of the boy, of all of them, the living and the dead.

“So what’s a comfortable range? Over a million? Under a million?”

She had been thinking she could afford as much as four hundred thousand. Once they sold the Jackson Heights house and paid down the taxes and commissions, they’d have enough for a good down payment, but four hundred thousand was the upper limit. It was a long way off from “under a million,” but that was her reply.

“Anything else I can work with?”

“I want a house that makes an impression from the street,” Eileen said. “A house that almost pulls you up into it. A big, impressive house.”

• • •

Sunday after Mass, instead of taking to the couch, Ed packed a picnic lunch for the three of them and drove them to their spot near LaGuardia. She spread the blanket and they ate the strangely spartan sandwiches he’d prepared: turkey on bread, no mayo, no mustard, no lettuce or tomato; they weren’t even cut in half.

It was the first hint of repose they’d had in who knew how long. She wanted to enjoy it as a family, but Connell took out the gloves, bounding around like a buck, and Ed rose to gratify him.

The sun was out after a sojourn behind some clouds. Planes glinted in the sunlight and gradually diminished in the distance, leaving a trail of noise. A light breeze took the edge off the heat. The moment struck her as perfect, in the way that quotidian moments sometimes did. She tried to freeze it in her mind: the acid sweetness of her apple, the crunch of it against her teeth, the smell of the grass. It was cheating, in a sense, to circumvent the natural sifting process of memory, but she found that those moments when she stopped and thought I’m awake! as though in the midst of a dream, were ones she remembered with an uncommon clarity.

Ed stood sturdily, a bit stodgily, as he waited for throws to arrive, though a surprising spring entered his step when he had to move laterally. His button-down shirt and dress slacks weren’t conducive to the activity, but he adjusted gamely. Connell’s accuracy suffered in his enthusiasm to return the ball almost as quickly as it landed in his glove. They started out close together. Connell seemed to want to spread out and drifted steadily back. Ed arced his throws in broad parabolas, and Connell threw on a line, though in his zeal he would sometimes overshoot and send Ed scurrying to retrieve the ball before it reached the street. A row of parked cars flanked them on either side. The last thing she wanted was for the pastoral quality of the moment to be shattered along with a window. Ed began to call Connell closer. The boy resisted at first but crept forward when Ed held the ball in his mitt and waved him toward him. They were back to a distance not much farther apart than they’d been when they first started throwing. Ed signaled to him to slow it down.

“Not so fast,” he said. “We’re just having fun.”

“I’m not throwing that hard, Dad,” Connell said.

But she could tell he was. He seemed to be reaching back and giving the throws all his strength. Ed was catching them, but he looked almost frightened at their speed.

“Slow it down,” Ed said, his voice skirting anger.

“Why? Can’t catch it?”

Connell unleashed a throw that came at Ed like a fist. Ed stepped aside and let it sail past. He gave the boy a look and went to retrieve it.

“That’s enough,” she said when Ed was out of earshot. “Your father asked you to stop throwing so hard.”

“I’m not! I’m not throwing my hardest.”

“Just listen to him.”

“Okay,” he said. “Relax, Mom.”

Ed looked more defeated than angry. He was at the mercy of the Darwinian logic of an adolescent, and he stood for a minute, seeming to consider his options, then threw the ball to Connell, who snatched it out of the air midhop.

She could see it before the ball left his hand, the coiled fury in Connell’s body. There was something majestic about the physical changes that turned a boy into a man, the inexorability of the need to advance, to clear away the previous generation and make room for the current one. There was also something terrifying about the impending clash between the males in her life. Neither would come out unscathed.

Maybe he was angry with his father for yelling at him in the car. Maybe he was upset that his father was having a hard time corralling his throws. Maybe it was that his father had always been a step behind some other fathers. Ed wasn’t just older, he was also old-fashioned, but he and Connell had always had baseball in common. Maybe it was too much for Connell to withstand aging’s incursion into his father’s ability to carry out this ritual. Whatever it was, he put everything he had into the throw, so that as it left his hand she let out a little involuntary gasp.

It came so fast at Ed that he seemed to freeze in anticipation of it. He didn’t even try to get out of its way. She could see, as time slowed for her observation, that sometime since she’d married him there’d been an attrition in his motor functions. His hand was no longer as fast as his mind. Even from that far away, she could see his eyes widen. The ball struck him square in the chest. He staggered and fell backward, first on his rear, then on his back.

She shouted and leapt to her feet and started running. Connell did the same. He was on his knees talking to Ed when she got there, and she pushed him aside. Ed was clutching his chest as though he’d had a heart attack. Connell was stammering apologies. He kept trying to get at Ed as she shoved him away. Then Ed was stiff-arming her as he rose to his elbows and looked at both of them.

“I’m fine, goddammit,” he said. “Let me stand up.”

As Ed stood, Eileen raised her hand at Connell and held it there, poised to smack him. She could feel the way the three of them were suspended in the moment as though in the relief of a sculpture. Her hand throbbed with the need to connect. Her son almost quivered in anticipation of the blow. She smacked him once, hard, on the face.

“The boy doesn’t know his own strength,” Ed said, taking hold of her ringing hand. He picked up the ball from the ground. “Get back out there.”

“Let’s go back to the blanket,” she said quietly.

“We’ve got a few more throws left.”

“We don’t have to play anymore,” Connell said to Ed. He wouldn’t look at her.

“We’re not done,” Ed said.

“Ed,” she pleaded, uncomfortable with every possibility she could imagine.

“Have a seat,” he said, pounding his glove. “Get going,” he said to Connell.

Connell walked out halfheartedly. Ed threw it to him and he lobbed it back.

“Harder!” Ed said.

Connell threw again with less force than he could have.

“Harder!” Ed yelled. “Air it out!”

• • •

That night, as they lay in bed, Eileen could see, at the V of his undershirt, the mark the baseball had made on his chest. She ran her hand over the spot; he picked her hand up in an oddly vertical way, as though lifting the cover to a butter dish, and moved it away in one swift motion.

They lay in silence, both flat on their backs, not an inch of their bodies touching, their arms flush against their sides, as though they were mummified. Her hand against her own thigh still registered a ghostly vibration of the smack she’d given Connell.

No matter how much they’d fought, the bedroom had always been an inviolate space. She could express things there that she couldn’t express elsewhere. She could cuddle up to him in a way that would have surprised the nurses she supervised. There was something old-fashioned, she knew, in the way she waited for him to take the lead. He’d never had a problem doing so. Touch was their high ground when the slick cliffs of words proved treacherous.

“I have a confession to make,” she said. “Yesterday, when I said I was with Cindy, I was really looking at houses.”

He gave her an irritated look and then shut his eyes as if he were sleeping. “I don’t know why you’re obsessed with leaving,” he said. “I like it here.”

“How can you say that? You’re not even here. You spend all your time on the couch. You could be in a sensory-deprivation chamber. You put those headphones on and don’t hear the horns honking or the car stereos pumping. I do all the grocery shopping, so you don’t get jostled in the aisles of Key Food and you don’t have to deal with the checkout girls not speaking English. You’re not a woman, so you don’t have to fear for your safety after dark.”

“Now’s not a good time,” he said.

“It is too a good time. Connell’s done at St. Joan’s. Haven’t we been in this hellhole long enough?”

“Jesus,” he said, finally opening his eyes. “Who are you all of a sudden?”

“I was fine with it until recently. But now it feels like some pressure is going to cave my head in.”

“I’ve been engaged in a project of recuperation, of rejuvenation,” he said, as if he’d been having a different conversation entirely. “I’ve become preoccupied lately with things I haven’t done. I didn’t want that pile of records staring at me. So I decided to take action, even if it wasn’t popular with you, or Connell, or the chattering classes of your friends.”

She burned to hear him talk of her friends. She hadn’t said a word to them about how he was behaving, afraid as she was to hear what they might have to say.

“It’s time I did some things for myself,” he said.

She should have been furious. Do things for himself? What about all the sacrifices she’d made to get him through graduate school? But his speech sounded vaguely rehearsed. Something rattled around in it, like a dead tooth that hadn’t fallen out. Was it that he didn’t believe it himself?

“I can’t live like this forever,” she said.

“It’s almost summer. I’m going to have more time to fix this place up. I’ve got projects in mind. I can revamp the garage. I can paint the house.”

“Can you bring back our old neighbors? Can you drown out the noise?” She smirked. “For the rest of us, I mean. You’re doing a fine job of doing it for yourself. Can you give us a lawn in front?”

“You need to relax.”

“Don’t tell me what I need. And don’t patronize me. Not when you’ve been half-crazy yourself. This all started when you started going crazy, come to think of it.”

“Things are going to get better now.” He reached to stroke her hair. Now it was her turn to recoil from his touch.

“I want you to go with me. Just come to look at them with me. I hate going alone.”

“What’s the point of looking if we’re staying put? I’m going to fix this place up.”

It was like talking to a child. She felt something in her snap. “You may be staying here,” she said slowly. “But I can’t.”

“And I can’t leave. I told you.”

“You can’t go back in the womb, Ed.”

“Don’t be a bitch.”

He’d never called her that in all their years together. She looked at him savagely.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

She ground her teeth. “Don’t talk filth to me,” she said, practically hissing. “You want to talk that way to a woman, get a girlfriend. Is that what this is about? This mooning, this philosophical mumbo jumbo? Is there a girl in the neighborhood you can’t bear to leave? A chiquita?”

Ed rolled over. “Good night,” he said.

She wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence. She lay there turning her ring on her swollen finger, chafing at the discomfort of its digging into her skin. The salty corned beef she’d cooked for dinner had made her fingers expand as if they’d been inflated. She wanted the ring off, not so much because of the discomfort but just to have it off, just so that Ed wouldn’t have any claim on her at the moment, even if he didn’t know he didn’t, but she couldn’t get it past her knuckle.

“You’re all wrong,” Ed said after a while. She felt his hand between her shoulder blades. “There’s no girl. You’re my only girl. You know I adore you.”

She didn’t turn over. She stared at the handles on the chest of drawers. “Then why won’t you do this for me?”

He slapped at the bed in frustration. She felt it shake. “I can’t right now,” he said. “I just want to stay in place.”

“That’s what the suburbs are for—staying in place.” He didn’t respond. “Honey, listen. Is everything all right with you? Really? You don’t seem yourself lately.”

“I’m fine. It’s just been a long year.”

They lay in silence again. Finally she turned to him. “We wouldn’t be moving right away,” she said. “It takes months to move. Maybe even more than a year.”

“I just can’t!” he said, pounding the pillow. “Don’t you hear me?”

She fooled with the little raised flower at the front of her camisole, to disperse the humiliation she felt at being spoken to that way.

“I’m not going to stop looking, and I’m not going to sell the house out from under you, Ed. I need your consent.”

“I’m going to work on the house this summer,” he said. “Maybe you’ll want to stay after that.”

“Do it if it makes you happy,” she said. “But don’t go thinking it’ll make a difference. You can’t put out a fire with a thimbleful of water.”

23

Eileen went in Gloria’s car. One house had six bedrooms, more space than she’d ever imagined in even her most lavish dreams of dinner parties and extended visits, and she wanted Gloria to leave her there to sleep on the floor in the master bedroom and wake in the night to roam the dark spaces like a watchman in an empty office building. She registered her approval of touches Gloria pointed out, the beauty of which she needed no vocabulary to understand. It was impossible not to be enchanted by the exquisite good taste of the wood running everywhere, the quiet granite of the countertops.

“I want to see as many houses as I can,” she said giddily as they left. “I want to take them all in.”

Gloria was a willing enough conspirator that Eileen allowed herself to relax. She’d been afraid of wasting the agent’s time, but Gloria did such a good job of projecting professional aplomb that Eileen decided to believe in the durability of her patience. Gloria would tell her the price on the way and what she thought they could get them down to. Eileen could see Gloria watching her for some reaction that would establish benchmarks to strive for, and she gave her none; she merely marveled indiscriminately at the gorgeous interiors, the manicured lawns, the impeccable patios, the huge kitchen windows that might look out, in the future, on grandchildren at play. Every time, Eileen said the same thing: “Wow!” or “Gee!” or “Beautiful!” or some other blandishment that kept Gloria off the trail of what she really felt, which was terror. She dispatched that terror with manic exuberance and affirmation. They would sit in the car for a few minutes talking, then head up to begin another simulation. The afternoon passed in a haze.

After perhaps the fifth house, Gloria paused before turning the key in the ignition.

“This is fun, isn’t it?”

“Enormous fun,” Eileen said. “I could do this all day.”

“Yes. Well, at some point we have to settle on some parameters.”

“It’s so hard to say. They’re all so beautiful. Who could ever leave some of these houses, except to move to the others?”

“I’m pretty sure you’re going to love this next one,” Gloria said determinedly. “I’m not even going to give you the fact sheet. I just want you to react. I want to see what tickles you.”

They drove to the house, which turned out to be the most impressive yet. It was a gray brick center hall colonial — she knew that term now — set high off the road, with a front lawn that sloped gently downward. It had long black shutters, a gorgeous front porch, and a room off to the side with floor-to-ceiling glass windows. It must have had three times the space of the floor they inhabited in their house. After they’d walked through it, Eileen studiously wide-eyed the whole time, Gloria led her to the porch.

“Do you mind sitting for a minute?”

“Not at all,” Eileen said, and took a seat in one of the tall white rockers. Gloria sat on the top step and faced her. It felt as luxurious to sit on the porch as it had seemed it might from the curb.

Gloria took out a pack of cigarettes. “Care if I smoke?”

Eileen shook her head.

“I don’t normally smoke around clients. Believe me, it’s not easy not to.”

“Please feel free.”

“I feel comfortable around you,” Gloria said.

Eileen looked down. Gloria was a working girl, like her. Her shoes were slightly scuffed, and Eileen could tell she painted her nails herself. She wondered what her father would have thought of this performance of hers. Her lip began to tremble.

“When I said under a million, I think I wasn’t being entirely realistic.”

“What’s a better number?”

“You’re not going to like it,” Eileen said.

“I can work with any number. I just need to know where to start.”

“I don’t even know if I can convince my husband to move.”

“Look at you. You’re a beauty. He’ll go wherever you want.”

“You’re sweet,” she said. She could feel sadness gathering in her chest, as though scattered shards of it were being pulled from her extremities by a powerful magnet.

“What are we talking about? Eight hundred? Seven?”

Eileen felt anxious talking about money this explicitly; she felt as if the agent had held a bright light up to her face and could see the imperfections on her skin.

“More like four,” she said. “Five at the most.”

“Hoo-wee!” Gloria exhaled a deep puff and stabbed the butt out on the step. “Do you have any idea how much this house is listed at? Take a guess.”

“Eight hundred thousand.”

“Nine fifty,” she said with a flourish, like she was calling out someone’s weight at a carnival. Gloria laughed. “We’re going to have to change our strategy.”

“I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time,” Eileen said miserably.

“Look, I’ll be straight with you. We’ve wasted some time. But I don’t really mind. I like looking at houses. I’ll find you a good one. One your husband won’t be able to resist.”

They agreed to go looking again the following week. As she returned Gloria’s hug good-bye, it occurred to her how grateful she was that this woman who weighed her fate in her hands hadn’t humiliated her.

• • •

She had an electrolysis appointment scheduled at her regular place in midtown. She didn’t feel like going, but it was impossible to get an appointment, and she had begun to obsess over the little hairs that poked through her top lip and dotted her jawline. She wondered if they were harbingers of greater changes to come. Lately her skin tingled and itched a little more than usual. She felt warm at odd times; she wasn’t ready to call them hot flashes. Her breasts seemed slightly less full. She’d always had irregular periods, so there wasn’t anything to read into those, but she did have more headaches lately, though it was hard to imagine anyone not having headaches under her circumstances. She wasn’t going to bury her head in the sand when the change began, but she also wasn’t ready to conclude that it had begun before she had firmer proof. In the meantime, she was going to fight to hold on to her beauty as long as she could.

To avoid the traffic snarl, she took the train. On the way back, the crowd on the 7 platform pressed close, and the train offered no relief. At every stop the car got more crowded instead of less, until at Seventy-Fourth Street the train bled riders making connections to other lines. The walk home from Eighty-Second Street thrust in her face the horrors of the change. The street had once been the jewel in the neighborhood’s crown. The white stucco storefronts were crisscrossed with wooden planks to give it a Tudor charm — Tudor was another style she recognized now when she saw it — and the streetlamps were made of ornate iron, but now gangs clotted its great arterial expanse, and the mom-and-pop stores had given way to bodegas, check-cashing places, and dollar stores with cheap signs that obscured the old facades. The globes that used to adorn Eighty-Second Street’s lamps were gone. Similar ones could still be found on Pondfield Road in Bronxville, which might have been part of why she was so drawn to the town: it was like a time capsule of Jackson Heights before the collapse.

As she made her way down the street, a group of young men in sweatshirts and baseball caps — they looked Hispanic to her, but she couldn’t always tell — were heading in her direction, taking up the width of the sidewalk. One of them walked backwards in front of the others, gesturing wildly with his arms outspread as the others clapped and hooted. A collision would ensue unless she went into the street, and she wasn’t about to do that; they should all be able to share the sidewalk. The one with his back to her wasn’t turning around. She decided to stop and hope they would filter around her, like water around a branch lodged between rocks. She held her hands in front of her protectively. The young man reacted too slowly to the wide-eyed looks of his friends and bumped into her.

“Excuse me!” she said, more shrilly than she’d intended. He spun around in a defensive posture, as though in preparation for a karate chop. When he saw her he dropped his hands.

“Sorry, lady,” he said. The others snickered. She knew she should just keep moving and not say anything. She had an instinctual fear of groups of young men like this. She’d heard stories of ugly incidents. Still, she felt a wave of righteous indignation pass over her.

“This sidewalk’s for everyone, you know.”

“Sorry,” the young man said. “It was an accident.”

She had wrung a second apology from him; she knew this was probably the time to stop. They could run off and have a laugh at the crazy white lady. Maybe they’d shout curses at her as they receded from view. The perfunctory way he’d apologized irked her, though. She was going to teach this young man how to comport himself, even if no one else was bothering to take the time to do so.

“You should watch where you’re going,” she said. “It’s hard enough to get down this sidewalk. There was no room to get past any of you.”

“Whatever you say.” There was a restrained quality to him, as though he were a tiger waiting to pounce.

“It’s my neighborhood too,” she said. “Just because you’re taking over doesn’t mean I’m leaving.”

One of the boys standing behind the one who had bumped her moved forward. She knew what was coming: Fuck you, white bitch! But the other put up his hand to restrain him. “Hold up,” he said. “I’m sorry for running into you. I didn’t mean to crowd the sidewalk. Nobody’s taking over your neighborhood. I was born here. There’s room for all of us.”

His articulateness shocked her. He parted the group to make room for her and indicated with a pacific gesture that she should pass. As she hastened to leave she replayed the incident in her mind, trying to make sense of the inscrutable turn it had taken. She had expected hate to be directed at her and had almost been disappointed not to face it. The kid had been raised well, there was no denying it. She wanted to forget the encounter. It unsettled her more than a brush with violence would have. A vision of the future loitered in it, an intimation of her obsolescence.

That night, when she told the story, she substituted for the young man’s oddly delicate apology a bowdlerized version of the slurs she’d anticipated hearing — which was, in any case, closer to the truth of her lived experience than this inexplicable aberration. “I wouldn’t repeat some of the vile things I heard,” she said, “even if Connell weren’t here.” It was a venial sin, she knew, but she didn’t have to labor to justify it to herself, because it was in everyone’s interest that they move to the suburbs. Ed, though, offered up only a muted version of the chivalric indignation she’d expected to hear, which stoked the fire of her anger at the gang members. Within a few days, she’d begun to consider the possibility that they’d actually said some of the things she’d put in their mouths, and there was a decent chance they had, memory being such a slippery thing.

• • •

When she went back to the realty office, she parked in front this time, and Gloria greeted her in a more familiar and less overtly warm way. A bridge had been crossed, a confidence shared. There was perhaps a greater investment on Gloria’s part in finding a house for her.

They began their rounds. On the way to each house, Gloria enumerated the positives in what Eileen was about to see but also addressed certain ineluctable realities, a little confidentially, as if to allow her to encounter these realities in a mood of mutual trust. Then they went inside. If the memory of the previous visits hadn’t been fresh, Eileen might have found the houses appealing; they were, after all, in a neighborhood more desirable than her own. But what a falling off! Where there had been five bedrooms, there were now three; where marble, now linoleum; where wood, some sort of composite, or else actual wood in a state of such severe neglect as to necessitate its wholesale removal and replacement. Expansive atriums became foyers not much larger than the claustral vestibule in her current house. And the magisterial light that pervaded the earlier houses, born of high ceilings and plentiful windows, gave way to a darkness that was all too familiar. Eileen’s expectations sank with the price of the houses.

Gloria saw the shift in mood and tried to bolster her with recitations of hidden advantages, but Eileen would have none of it. She could live down the road from the houses she coveted, she could make friends with their inhabitants, but she could not live in them, not in this life she had with Ed. She had enjoyed years of intellectual partnership, and she’d raised a happy, healthy child, and this was far more than some women ever came close to having. She felt churlish even beginning to wonder what life would’ve been like if she’d married someone else. And yet as she sat outside the latest disappointing house, she couldn’t help thinking that these were the wages of self-respect, sitting in a car outside a house she couldn’t afford anyway, turning her nose up at it.

A baleful air hung in the car. She wanted to reassure Gloria, to express her gratitude for the kindness and patience she’d been shown. “I had unrealistic expectations,” she said. “I can’t get what I want with the money I’m capable of spending.”

“Some of these houses are pretty nice, actually,” Gloria said.

“Some of them remind me of where I live now,” Eileen said. “The neighborhoods are on the border. They could go either way. I’m looking for this next house to be the one I settle down in. I don’t want to have to look over my shoulder. I might as well stay in Jackson Heights if I’m going to do that.”

The houses Gloria had shown her were in areas like Yonkers and Mount Vernon, where poor and comparatively wealthy populations — they happened to be drawn along black and white lines — abutted each other. It wasn’t that she wanted to avoid black faces. She wanted to avoid black anger, black retribution, black vigilante justice. She wanted a buffer from the encroachment of crime. She didn’t want to have to watch a neighborhood go to ruin again and preside over the memory of it like a monk guarding the scrolls of a dwindling people.

“Don’t give up yet,” Gloria said. “Give it some more time.”

“Of course,” Eileen said.

24

On days Connell didn’t have games or practice at Elmjack Little League, he went to Seventy-Eighth Street Park, even though it scared him to go there sometimes. They played softball there — no league, just pickup — and during the games he felt protected. The older white crew came around, guys in their twenties who wore bandanas and sweatpants, blasted classic rock on boom boxes, and played roller hockey when they weren’t playing softball. They drank beer out of bottles in paper bags. Somehow they didn’t have to be at work in the late afternoons. The girls his age swooned over them.

He liked to throw with the high school kids who sometimes came around, because they didn’t complain if he gassed it up. He was playing catch with one of them when Benny Erazo sauntered up in a way that looked like he was carrying bricks in his pockets. Benny had gotten kicked out of St. Joan’s the year before. He went to IS 145 now. Connell had helped Benny through fifth-grade math by letting him copy his homework and look at his tests. Benny’s little brother José was still at St. Joan’s and was sometimes in the group that jumped Connell after school.

“You need to worry about your rep,” Benny said.

“My rep?”

“Your reputation on the street is that you’re soft.” Benny was wearing a Bulls jersey. He had a light mustache and smelled of cologne under several layers of clothes.

“I didn’t even know I had a rep on the street.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I’m not soft,” he said.

“People say shit. You need to take care of your rep.”

“Thanks for telling me.” Connell slapped the ball into his glove.

“Come with me and tag up later. You need to have a handle.”

“I already do.” He didn’t know why he was saying this.

Benny looked at him dubiously. “Yeah? Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

He thought quickly. “PAV,” he said, because they were the first letters that came to mind.

“I’ve seen that shit,” Benny said.

He hadn’t thought he’d stumble on a tag that easily. “Don’t tell anyone it’s me,” he said nervously.

“What does it mean?”

He thought again. “People Are Vulnerable,” he said.

Benny considered it for a second. “Deep.”

“Thanks.”

“Somebody hears you claiming his tag, that’s it for you.”

“It’s mine.”

“Draw it for me later,” Benny said. “When I come back from my moms.”

“I don’t do that anymore,” he said, trying to sound cool.

“Why?”

“I almost got caught once.”

“You really are a pussy-ass white boy.”

“No, I just have to worry about my reputation.” He paused. “With my parents.” He was trying to make a joke of it. Benny pushed him and he staggered back a step. The guy he’d been playing catch with walked away.

“I’m not fooling with you,” Benny said. “Your rep is that you’re soft. I was telling you to tell you.”

Connell knew what he was about to do might look crazy, but he did it anyway. He rolled up the sleeves of his T-shirt. “You think this is soft?” he asked, flexing. Benny reached into his pocket and took out a switchblade.

“Tell me again you’re not soft,” Benny said quietly. “Tell me again.”

Connell stood there in silence.

“Tell me you tagged up.” There was menace in his voice. “Tell me, Connie.” Benny switched the blade out for a second and showed it to him, then popped it back in with the heel of his palm. He kept it in his hand.

“What do you want me to say?” Connell asked, his terror confusing his thoughts.

“Say, ‘I’m a pussy-ass pussy motherfucker.’ ”

“I’m a pussy-ass pussy,” he said, and paused. He wasn’t comfortable saying that word. Benny laughed like he’d read his mind.

“Motherfucker!” Benny corrected. “Pussy-ass pussy motherfucker.”

“Pussy-ass pussy.”

Benny showed him the knife again. “Say it!”

“Motherfucker,” Connell said, his stomach tightening.

“Say the whole thing. ‘I’m a pussy-ass pussy motherfucker.’ ”

“I’m a pussy-ass pussy motherfucker.”

Benny howled with laughter. “You want to take care of your rep, you better not go around telling people that!” He put the knife in his pocket. “Man — I wasn’t going to use this shit on you.” He motioned to push him, and Connell flinched. Benny laughed again. “You want to stay alive, you better not go around claiming someone else’s tag. They’ll end you. That’s it for today’s lesson.”

The whole way home, Connell replayed in his head what he’d said. I’m a pussy-ass. I’m a pussy-ass pussy. When he got there, his father was on the couch with the headphones on. Connell stood over him and watched him. He watched his hand going back and forth, the index finger raised. His father’s eyes were squeezed shut, as if he was trying to see something he needed absolute dark to see. When the dull murmur coming from the headphones rose to a crescendo, the upward thrusts of his arm lifted his body off the couch. When the symphony lulled, he lay there, eyes still squeezed shut, and his chest rose and fell with his breathing.

Connell dropped his bookbag on the dining room table and headed to the basement. He added a ten-pound plate to either side of the bar and then lay on the bench. Lift it, pussy-ass, he thought, but he couldn’t make it budge. He took the plates off and did a couple of sets of ten.

While he was lifting, he thought of something he could have said to Benny to make him laugh. When Benny asked, “What does it mean?” he could have said, “Pussy-Ass Virgin.” But he only ever thought of that kind of stuff after the fact. He even knew a French expression to describe coming up with witty things too late; that was the kind of pussy he was. His father had taught it to him: Esprit d’escalier, the spirit of the stairs; the thing you think of when you’re already gone. The kids who thought of snappy things on the spot never had to worry about being fat or smart or pussies. You had to have a little meanness in you to do it. You had to be willing to embarrass other people sometimes. He didn’t want to have to embarrass other people. Deep down, or not even that deep, he knew he was a pussy-ass; maybe that was why it hadn’t been that hard for him to say what he’d said to Benny.

Maybe it was partly his father’s fault that he was such a pussy-ass. His father was a nice guy. Not that he told Connell not to fight back. The last time Connell had come home with a swollen eye, his father had said, “You have my permission to fight back. You’re not going to get in trouble with me.” But Connell hadn’t wanted to risk it. He hadn’t wanted to get a JD card or suspended or worse. He’d been thinking of his permanent record. He hadn’t wanted to ruin his chances of getting into a good high school or having a good life. He’d needed the teachers on his side, the principal. He’d wanted to get out of the neighborhood. Well, now he was going to a fancy school in Manhattan on scholarship. You couldn’t get more out of the neighborhood than that. Maybe he was a total pussy-ass, but at least he wasn’t an asshole like Benny.

He put the plates back on. He thought, Lift it, motherfucker, and then he said it aloud, like he was uttering the password to a new club. He got the bar up once; it came crashing down with a loud bang. His father didn’t come running down to see whether he’d hurt himself, because his father couldn’t hear anything with those headphones on.

Pussy-ass pussy, he thought. Motherfucker.

25

Ed had been working in the garage since she woke up. He had emptied much of its contents into the backyard, which now bore an uncomfortable resemblance to those of their immediate neighbors. It was a hot May morning, and sweat was pouring off him.

“I’m taking Connell,” she said.

“Okay.”

“You sure you don’t want to come?”

“I’m a little busy.” He gestured to the clutter. She felt bad taking the boy, who probably should have been helping him with whatever this project was, but she couldn’t face those houses alone again.

In the car, Connell found Z100 and turned the volume up.

“How come you’re not telling me to turn it down?”

“It’s not that loud,” she said.

“Dad doesn’t let me turn it up when he’s driving. He says he needs to concentrate.”

“I don’t mind.” She started tapping the fingers of her free hand on the door. It was a song she’d heard while driving to work. Connell smiled at her, and she felt like the favored parent for a change. He’d always gravitated toward his father — a consequence, she suspected, of her having returned to work so soon after he was born. It probably wasn’t just that she was out of the house so much; it was also the way she got on the phone with her friends after dinner as though punching the clock at a second job. But some of that, she saw now, had been the need for escape. There would be less of that when they moved. She could begin to be more of the mother he wanted.

“Your father’s got a lot on his mind,” she said generously.

“He’s the most uptight person in the world. He grips the wheel with both hands the whole time. You can’t say anything to him.”

When they first met, he would pick her up with one elbow hanging out the window, like a cool guy in a movie.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be an adult,” she said. “There’s a lot to think about all the time.”

“He wants me to have the change ready for the tollbooth about a mile in advance. He gets all weird about it. He freaks out if I don’t have it in my hand, counted out. And then he throws it in that bin with all this force, like he’s throwing a baseball. It’s so awkward. What’s up with him? Why is he so weird?”

She had been a passenger of Ed’s herself. It was as if he was doing brain surgery instead of driving a car. “Fathers are just weird sometimes,” she said. “Don’t think too much about it.”

“It’s so embarrassing.”

A song came on that he liked and he bobbed his head up and down and tapped his hands on the dashboard.

“I want your input,” she said. “I’ve been looking at all these houses and I can’t tell what I think anymore.”

“What about Dad? What does he say?”

“Your father and I have a difference of opinion right now about whether we should move,” she said. “I’m going to have to ask you to be a man about this. I might need you to keep quiet about it for a while if we find a place we really like.”

“Sure.”

She felt her foot falling heavier on the gas pedal as they hit the Grand Central Parkway. A new spirit entered the car. She had a conspirator. She could feel it making a difference already. She felt freer than Ed as she drove. She was cool enough to appreciate her son’s music, to pick up a little speed on the highway, to let the coins wait until they got right up to the booth. She had enough energy to make important changes in her life, to pull her husband out of a pit, to yank her whole family out of the maw of a neighborhood that threatened to swallow them whole.

• • •

Gloria gave Connell the full open-armed treatment. She seemed inordinately glad to meet him. At first Eileen thought it was a salesperson’s come-on, but then it occurred to her that by existing, Connell might have been confirming that his mother wasn’t a fantasist.

“I’ve found the perfect place for you,” Gloria said. “It’s gorgeous. It’s slightly out of your price range, but only slightly. I want you to consider it. It’s as close as you can get to your perfection with the money you can spend.”

They drove up Palmer Road toward Yonkers, past the stately complexes of condos and leafy gardens, but turned off it before they’d gone too far. She had studied the area enough to know that this was an outpost of Bronxville with Bronxville post office boxes and Yonkers schools. But the schools wouldn’t matter with Connell heading into the city in the fall. A sign announced — either proudly or defensively, it was hard to tell which—“Lawrence Park West.”

The area was promising. It was a mixture of old and new homes, but the road was curvy and lined with enormous oaks, and between the wooded plots, she caught glimpses of stucco Tudors with carriage houses, and even what may have been a tennis court. They turned onto a wider street and the road flattened and the houses were all easy to spot but majestically elevated above the road. They stopped in front of a gray colonial with overgrown hedges and columns that linked the porch on the first level to one on top. Stone pillars flanked the driveway, and next to the front walk was a jockey holding a lantern. His red coat had been chipped and bleached to pink in the sun. The house looked as if it had been built sometime in the first half of the century, but built well, and it was twice as large as the houses she’d seen the week before. She was hopeful.

Gloria led them up the driveway to a staircase at the back entrance. A patio of moss-covered brick, framed by a stone wall and a terrific amount of growth, resembled an English garden gone to seed. It opened up onto the craggy slope, which contained an enormous stone blanketed by ivy. Atop the hill were houses accessed by another street.

The kitchen looked like it had been despoiled by squatters. Cabinet doors didn’t close right, the wallpaper bubbled, and the brick floor was coated in a thick, dingy skin of polyurethane. Everything on the rear side of the house — the kitchen, the den, the dining room — was dark as a catacomb, but she could tell that light would penetrate its depths on a good day, particularly if she trimmed some of the bushes, and while the dining room had a matted rug and a rickety-looking chandelier, she could envision the grand meals she’d serve there, and the living room was practically bleached by light. Next to it was the brick-floored foyer and the entrance proper, and a flight of banistered stairs leading to the second floor. Off the landing at the bottom of the stairs was a little flight down into what could be a reading room, next to what would be Ed’s study, with a bay window and built-in bookshelves.

Gloria went to the two front doors and threw them open with a flourish. Light flooded in. Looking left from the front porch, which was fringed by a rotting wooden fence, Eileen could see where the road curved and headed down to Palmer Road, the main artery into the town that lent this house its respectable mailing address.

Eileen stood on the porch, imagining people opening the big metal gate at the bottom and making their way up the gently winding path. The thought of their approach thrilled her, the moments of anticipation, the embraces, the handing off of wine bottles, cakes, presents. And then she turned and saw Connell looking out the window in the living room, an ethereal light flooding against him, so that he resembled a figure in one of those portrait paintings of the children of nobility from centuries past. These days and years would act as a crucible in which his fate was distilled. The closing down of possibilities had begun, almost imperceptibly. She had to act quickly to preserve her image of the life she imagined, in which Ed toiled happily in his study, turning over ideas until they yielded fresh hypotheses, and she was a grand hostess and the matriarch of a respected clan. This house would be the backdrop to the second act of their lives together. It was Connell’s contemplative gaze that gave her that assurance.

“What do you think?” Gloria asked rhetorically as she drifted into the room. She was a maestro of timing: there was no need to respond. She led them up the stairs like a groom guiding his bride to the bower.

“I’ll show you the other bedrooms first,” she said, “and then the master suite.”

She led them to a room so massive it could have swallowed Connell’s current bedroom whole, along with the spare, with room left over.

“This could be your bedroom,” Eileen said.

“Sweet!” He darted into the room and walked its perimeter like a cat marking its territory. He opened and closed the closet doors and then lay in the center of the room and stretched his arms and legs as far as he could. She laughed out loud at his exuberance.

“Come on,” she said. “Get up now.”

“It’s okay,” Gloria said. “He can be excited.”

“You could land a plane in here,” he said.

“Maybe a helicopter,” Gloria allowed.

“There’s no doubt it’s a big enough house,” Eileen said cautiously. How “slightly” out of her price range was this house? This might be another tease, only this time she wouldn’t have done it to herself.

“You haven’t even seen the master bedroom.”

“I’m a little worried about the price.”

“You’re prepared to spend four hundred thousand,” Gloria said. “Five at the most.”

“The uppermost,” Eileen said.

They were in the hallway now, their voices low.

“This house is five sixty.”

“That’s a big difference.” Eileen tried to hide the panic and disappointment that had already set in.

“Not when you think about the fact that when it’s fixed up, it’s a three-quarter-of-a-million-dollar house. Minimum. Minimum.” Gloria spoke coolly, a little impatiently, as if they were discussing an artwork she didn’t want to sully with considerations of money. “There are some catches, though.”

“Catches,” Eileen said.

“Not necessarily deal breakers. How handy is your husband?”

She thought of Ed at home in the garage, tools strewn around him in a blast-radius circle, trying to make the house presentable enough to entice her to stay in it. Everything he knew about home improvement he’d learned from how-to books. Whenever he made a study of something, though, he could do it at least passably well. “If I can earn a PhD,” he’d said when they’d had a short in the hallway light, “I can figure out how to fix some faulty wiring.” And he had. The handiness came at the expense of great effort. Doing a big project around the house always left him exhausted.

“He’s pretty handy,” she said. “Why?”

“This house was on the market for over a year, then taken off and relisted. They just dropped the price.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s suffered some water damage. It’s a twofold problem. It’s at the bottom of a hill, so there’s always runoff. And it’s built on a rock, with a rock behind it, so everything just flows into it. On top of that, the pipes burst this winter. There’s a lot of damage in the basement. A lot of it needs to be ripped out and rebuilt. Plus there’s no guarantee the water won’t come back. You’re going to need a new roof in a couple of years. It’s an expensive proposition to fix this place, but it’s a steal if you can do any of the work yourself.”

“My husband can do it,” she said.

It would be good for him. He could sweat this thing out through manual labor. She could see him drinking a beer in jeans and a T-shirt, wiping his brow and holding a baseball cap at his hip.

“Let’s make our way to your room,” Gloria said. They left Connell and stopped briefly at each of two average-sized bedrooms and a bathroom with matching sinks below bulb-lighted mirrors like those in dressing rooms. A toilet hid demurely behind French doors.

The master bedroom suite contained a closet as large as her current guest bedroom. She pictured a sitting area in the corner of the bedroom proper. The same light poured in as below but unencumbered by tree cover. It would be impossible to dwell on sad things in that light.

In recent years, a tentative mood had obtained in their bedroom. They fumbled over each other’s bodies. It was as if they’d entered a new phase of life and had to get reacquainted. She needed light for play, discovery. Something could be gained if they saw each other naked in the bright light of day.

The wallpaper was all seams and bubbles, and something would have to be done about the stain on the ceiling in the corner of the room. There would be time and money to worry about such particulars in the proper order.

She made her way to the window. She’d heard all about suburban ennui, but she couldn’t imagine feeling it in a house like this. If the abundant space and light failed for a moment to confirm for her how far she’d gotten from what she’d left behind, and a shadow of uncertainty drifted over her, she needed only to throw open the curtains on this window, gaze out onto the empty street, and wait for a car to drive down the block, and then another. In the substantial interval between them, she would feel a calm settling in: there was no reason to be there unless you had someone to see; there was no way to stay there long unless you had a reason to stay.

“I think you like it,” Gloria said.

“I do,” she said quietly. “I like it a lot. I’m trying to figure out how I can afford it.”

She was in the middle of the sort of reverie that invented the future by imagining it. The spell would be broken in a moment, but she lingered in it, telling herself to remember the details.

They wouldn’t be able to put as big a percentage down. They’d have a much higher monthly payment. They might not be able to immediately do all the renovations she had in mind. They’d have to work in stages. They’d have to live lean, not go to restaurants or shows.

“What about you?” Gloria asked Connell.

“Can we put a hoop in the driveway?”

What a simple thing, Eileen thought. What a different set of concerns he has.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Yes!” He pumped his fist.

“Someone’s excited,” Gloria said.

“I’m excited too,” she said, “but the person we need to convince is his father. Provided the structure is sound and the repairs are possible and the finances are in order, I think this might just be the perfect house for us.”

Gloria clapped her hands. “That’s the spirit,” she said. “You wouldn’t get this house at this price except under some very specific circumstances. Now, having said that, why don’t we go take a look at those circumstances.”

They headed downstairs. Gloria pointed out some flood marks that Eileen hadn’t seen earlier, and then she took them into the house’s bowels. Eileen passed her eyes over everything Gloria pointed to, but she did her best not to register it. Connell poked at a section of rot. When he pulled a piece off, she barely mustered enough indignation to scold him. She heard, as though from underwater, the litany of troubles the house had endured. She nodded when she needed to nod and pulled long faces to demonstrate concern. She even heard herself sigh when Gloria showed her a section of foundational wall in the garage that had been soaked through and was threatening to collapse. She was determined to let these subterranean details remain subterranean. They could be handled in due time. The issue now was preserving her vision. The base of the house might be rotting, but the visible portion was commanding enough to chase any qualms away.

“It’s not an inconsiderable amount of work,” Gloria said.

“We could make it work.” Eileen turned to Connell. “You and Daddy could take this on, don’t you think?”

“No way.”

“He just doesn’t want to have to do anything around the house,” she said to Gloria. “But they could handle it. I’m confident.”

“If you say so, Mom.”

“Maybe we’ll pay you like a contractor. Maybe it’s time you earned your allowance.”

“There are things he can’t do. There’s the roof, as I said. You’ve got a little time on that. The electrical wiring is old. You might not have enough amp service. You might blow some fuses. Some of the outlets don’t work. Am I scaring you yet?”

“I’m just listening.”

“There’s asbestos around the plumbing and ductwork. That could make it hard to resell. So could the underground oil tank.”

“I’m not worried about selling it. I’m worried about buying it.”

“Water gathers in the fireplace. Some of these are expensive jobs. Thankfully there’s no mold from the flooding. That we know of.”

“It sounds like we need a plumber. And a roofer.”

“And a general contractor,” Gloria said. “And an electrician. And a willing husband.”

“I can live without a few outlets for a while. I don’t know if I can live without this house.”

• • •

They stopped for gas on the way home. When she went in to pay, she bought a couple of scratch-off tickets, something she’d thought she’d never do, and scarfed a pair of Twinkies while she rubbed a quarter on the tickets. She didn’t win, and she bought five more. Then she got two more with the free tickets she’d won, and those were losers too. She bought five to take home with her and another package of Twinkies to split with Connell and headed out to the car, where the boy sat oblivious of the turmoil she was in.

She drove with an anxious feeling in the pit of her stomach, fidgeting with the button for the electric window. When they pulled in, she saw one of her good sheets strewn like a makeshift tarp over whatever tools Ed had left in the driveway. Cinderblocks held the sheet down at the corners, and the garage door was closed. The stark whiteness of the sheet put a chill in her.

Ed was sitting at his desk. The vestibule abutted his office, a glass-paneled door between them. He had a pleasant habit of wheeling around in his chair whenever he heard her come home, but he didn’t turn this time. “We’re home,” she said. When he didn’t respond, she went over and stood behind him. He was calculating his semester grades. His desk was cluttered with tests and lab reports; little piles of them abounded. He jotted notes on a legal pad as he did his calculations. She’d never seen him do his grades with such elaborate exactitude. He had written the last name of each student, along with the roman numerals from the test sections, in a long row. She watched him meticulously check each number against those he’d written on the exams. It was double work, and moreover it was the kind of task he usually dispatched in his head.

When she placed a hand on his shoulder, he almost leaped out of his seat. He didn’t turn around to her.

“What’s the matter with you?” he exclaimed.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“Don’t bother me when I’m doing my grades.”

“Since when?”

“I want to get these right. It’s a big class, and I’ve graded a lot of assignments in the last few days, so I feel a little fuzzy, as you can imagine. I don’t want to make any mistakes in my calculations. When I look at this stuff long enough, I feel like I’m seeing double.”

“What’s up with the sheet?”

He took off his glasses, the way he sometimes did when he was going to give thoughtful consideration to a question, but then he just dropped his shoulders.

“Sheet?”

“Outside,” she said. “The bed sheet.”

“I wanted to leave things there.”

“Why did you use a good sheet?”

“Good sheet?”

“There were other sheets you could have used.”

He slammed his pencil down. “What’s the difference?”

“You used one of the sheets I put on the bed. There are about ten old sets in that linen closet that you could have used.”

He spun around in his chair. She backed away from him instinctively. His face was red and his mouth contorted. “I took the first sheet I could find!” He was on his feet now. “I didn’t have time to work out which sheet was which. I just grabbed a sheet!” He had begun to shout. “I took the first sheet!” He had his hand in front of his face, as if to strike her or bite it. “People walk by the house all day long, peeking back there. I needed to cover everything up!”

She had intended to let it go, but now she had to ask. “Why did you leave it out in the first place?”

“I didn’t want to have to set it up again,” he said. “Is that okay with you? God damn it! God damn it!”

She was quiet. She wondered whether Connell could hear.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s a lot of pressure on me to get these grades right. Dealing with these kids has upset me. This younger generation has no respect. It’s disgraceful.”

“What do you mean? What’s happened?”

“What’s happened,” Ed said, “is that with everything going on lately, I’ve been distracted.”

She wanted to know what he meant, because it seemed at times as if nothing was going on, hence the big pile of ungraded papers, but she held back.

“In my distraction, I’ve made a few calculation errors. And they’ve raised a stink about it. That’s all. These kids today feel entitled to everything instantly. You say you’ll review the grade, and they say they can’t wait until the next class. They go berserk! I like to take my time with things, give them an honest going-over. That’s impossible with a crowd of people at your desk. Especially when they speak in such a fresh and disrespectful way.”

So much of what he was saying was odd. He was one of the most popular professors in the department, a status made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was no pushover in the grading arena. They wanted to work for him, to impress him. His belief in them made them want to believe in themselves. It also made her want to kill him sometimes, because she didn’t believe they deserved it.

• • •

After taking an old sheet from the linen closet, she went out to the driveway and picked up one of the cinderblocks holding down the good sheet. Beneath the sheet lay two-by-fours that had been sawn in an irregular fashion. Ed had been attempting to construct something. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be ornamental or structural. What it resembled more than anything was a pile for a bonfire. There were none of the heavy tools she’d imagined Ed hadn’t wanted to move several times, only this inert, enigmatic heap. She folded the good sheet up and replaced it with the old one in a way that would discourage his noticing she had done so. When she had finished, she hurried away as she sometimes did when she got spooked in the basement and felt something closing in on her.

She considered saying something to Ed on the way back in. Then she decided the time for checking things with him had passed. If he noticed it was a different sheet tomorrow — by no means a certainty — he would just have to deal with the fact that she had messed with his arrangement.

• • •

She awoke to find herself alone in bed. She stumbled out to the living room and saw Ed’s light on in the study. He was hunched over, as if so many hours of sitting at the desk had sapped the energy in his back. His hair was wild. The desk lamp radiated tremendous heat. The smell of sweat mingled with the mushroom odor of old books to give the room a greenhouse quality.

“Come to bed,” she said.

“I’m working.”

“It’s three in the morning. Come to bed.”

“I have to finish this.” His voice sounded weak, as if he’d fallen asleep in the chair, but his expression was oddly alert. His eyes were sunken and dark, like he’d reached the end of a long fast.

“Can you finish it tomorrow?”

“I can’t.”

“Let me see,” she said.

She leaned over him. He shifted his body to block her view, but she could see the piles on either side of him on the desk, the calculator between them. She picked up the pile of tests and flipped through them. They all had grades on their first page, which surprised her, because what was Ed doing if not grading these things? She put the tests down and picked up the lab reports, over his protestations. The same was true of those: grades had been assigned, red numerals in distended circles emblazoning their upper right corners.

“These are all graded,” she said. “Why don’t you come to bed?”

“I’m still working.”

“You have more to grade?”

“I do.”

He covered a pad on the desk with his hands. She could see it was the set of names and numbers he had been working with earlier. Yet another pad lay next to it.

“What’s that?” She pointed to the second pad.

“Will you leave me alone? Will you go back to sleep? I’ll be in when I’m done.”

She picked up the second pad, fending off Ed’s hands. On it were written all the same names and numbers as on the first pad. They appeared to be identical.

“What is all this?”

She answered her own question by looking at the first test. Each number listed on the pad corresponded to the student’s performance on a section of the exam. His grade book lay splayed open at the back of his desk. She picked it up to check her hunch; indeed, the grades weren’t there. Was he that nervous about making a mistake? Just how fresh had the kids become that a teacher of his stature could be moved to such excessive scrutiny of his no-doubt flawless math well into the night? He should have been resting and quelling the psychic demons that were draining his confidence in the first place. All of this had become far bigger in his sleep-addled mind than it ever should have been allowed to be.

“Let me help you with this,” she said, careful not to describe what “this” was. He surprised her by capitulating quickly. She gathered his things and led him to the kitchen table. “You keep the grade book,” she said. “I’ll tell you the number to enter.”

He held his pen poised over the book. She took the first test off the pile. Edwin Alvarez had earned an 84. She flipped through the test, making sure the subsection grades added up to the indicated total. Eighty-four it was. This was probably the kind of kid Ed was proudest to see achieve, a kid from the neighborhood.

“All right,” she said. “Edwin Alvarez.”

“Wait!” Ed said, suddenly panicked. “Wait! Wait!”

He stood up and bolted out of the room. Before she could follow he reappeared holding a long ruler. He squared himself in the chair and lined the ruler up under Edwin Alvarez’s row of boxes. She had to laugh at his intensity. He didn’t share the laugh, though; he didn’t look up at all, as though he had to stare unblinkingly at the name in front of him in order to prevent it from disappearing.

“Okay,” he said. “Go.”

“Edwin Alvarez.”

“Edwin Alvarez,” he said hesitantly, as if cross-referencing it with the names in the list, an odd thing considering it was the first.

“Eighty-four on the test. We’re only dealing with the test right now.”

“Yes,” he said. “The test only.”

“Okay? Can we move along?”

“Eighty-four?”

“That’s correct,” she said, biting her tongue. As disturbing as this drill was, now wasn’t the time to discuss it. She had to get them both back to bed.

“Okay,” she said. “Lucy Amato. Give me one second.”

She flipped through the test, adding the numbers in her head. She saw how this could get to a person; late at night, numbers ran together. Ed had added them correctly again. She could see it would play out as an exercise in redundancy. It was the kind of thing you signed up for when you got married, idiosyncrasies that bordered on obsessions at times, quirks that became handicaps if allowed to thrive. It could have been worse: he could have had a wandering eye, a gambling habit.

He had located Ms. Amato’s name; his ruler was brought to a sharp congruency with the line underscoring her performance for the semester.

“Seventy-three,” she said.

“Seventy-three.” The desperate edge had left his voice. Despite her tiredness, she was touched by the feeling of working together with her husband on a project; it beat being adversaries. Maybe she’d even be able to tell him about the house.

They went through the stack, she calling out the name, he orienting himself in the ledger, she checking his addition, which grew quicker the more she saw he’d been accurate in his math, she calling out the number like a bingo caller, he repeating the number before committing it to paper, he confirming it again with a rising intonation, she reconfirming it in a tone that made her feel uncomfortably like a teacher with a student. They got to the end without incident, Ed never wavering in his focus, his laser-like application of the ruler’s metal edge. He was sweating; he paused to wipe his forehead while she did her quick math, but didn’t look up from the page.

The last name, Arash Zahedani, also happened to be attached to the highest grade, ninety-seven, a happy coincidence that might send Ed to bed in a better mood. It was getting on four o’clock; she had to be up in a few hours. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep; she was far too awake now to drift off again. Still, she could lie there and rest her muscles. Tomorrow was an important day at work. The Joint Commission was examining North Central Bronx Hospital, bringing with it the usual headaches. Her people were well prepared, but she would have to dig deep to perform well on little sleep. She was already exhausted from the previous week of late nights getting ready for their arrival. She’d had ten nurses call in sick Friday, and she was going to have to fire some of them, because they’d known better than to do that at the start of the weekend. Since she’d been understaffed, she’d had to struggle to handle a room full of gang members who’d burst in after visiting hours, demanding access to the ICU to see one of their own who’d been shot in the stomach. They pushed past the security guard and through the double doors in front and were advancing on the room. It could have been two dozen of them. She ran to block their way. “You’re not allowed in there,” she said. “You can come back tomorrow.” One of them asked, “Aren’t you afraid of us, white lady?” She didn’t have the energy to be. Security backup arrived, two more guards, all three of them black. If the gang members didn’t stand down soon, the guards might draw their guns, and who knew what would happen then? She was the only white person in the room. The guards told the gang members to leave. There was a young girl among their number; she must have been the injured man’s girlfriend. She held a baby in her arms. She gave Eileen a pleading look. “I will let a few of you in, one at a time,” Eileen said, “and we will all be civil to each other. And then you can come back tomorrow. And I promise you he will be in good hands, and we’ll let it rest at that.” The guards relented. They had the gang members line up against the wall. She could see the leader of the gang calming everyone down. He gave her a look that said, Lady, you are all right. It had stuck with her, that look. It had meant something to be recognized, even by this thug. She wanted that young man to give her that look in front of her husband the next time Ed was half-crazed about some absurd infraction. There was more to life than Ed’s petty grievances.

She wanted to end on a high note, but a spirit of excess caution had crept into her own thinking. “Let’s go through the numbers again,” she said, and from his look she got the feeling he hadn’t planned for it to be any other way.

“We’ll switch,” she said. “I’ll read down the column. You call out the grades.”

They proceeded through the tests, Ed dispatching his task with a new alacrity. Four tests from the bottom, La Shonda Washington, she asked Ed to repeat the grade he’d just read out.

“Eighty-six,” he said.

But the number he’d entered for Ms. Washington was sixty-seven, which also happened to be the score received by Melvin Torres, the student above her in the grade book.

“One second.” She rose to look at the test in his hands. The glow of the sun was filtering into the air outside. It felt more like the remnant light at dusk than the herald of dawn.

“What? What is it?”

“I just wanted to check something.”

“I told you,” he said. “I told you. Eighty-six.”

“That’s what I thought you said, honey.” Her throat constricted. “I wanted to double-check.”

“Is there a problem? A mistake?”

“I just need to change one thing,” she said. “Give me a second.”

She reached for the pencil and he slammed his hand down on it. “What is it?” He was seething. “What is it?”

“The number for the student directly above La Shonda Washington has been repeated,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s all. I’m going to erase it and write in the correct number.”

“Ah, Jesus!” He threw his hands up. “Jesus Christ! It’s all wrong! It’s all wrong!”

“Just hold on while I make this one change.”

“Forget it,” he said. “What’s the use?”

“It was an honest mistake,” she said. “You wrote the number above it. It’s late.”

“Yes, yes,” he said dismissively. “That’s it. Now let me finish this. I’ll be in when I’m done.”

He took the book away and closed it, then held his head and rubbed his eyes.

“We have three more to go,” she said.

“It’s fine,” he said firmly. “We’re finished.”

She should have made the switch without saying anything. She should have come out and done it after he’d fallen asleep. Now she had to convince him to leave off his vigil.

“If we’re done,” she said, “then come to bed.”

“I’ll be in in a while.”

“Come now.”

“I said I’ll be in. I’ll be in.”

“You need some sleep.”

He slammed his fist on the table. “I’ll be in when I’m in! What the hell else do I need to say to you? Will you leave me alone, God damn it?”

She snatched the book out of his hands. “Don’t say a word to me,” she said slowly, giving him an icy stare. “Not one word.”

She opened to the page with the grades and looked at the last three numbers. Whitaker, seventy-three. Williams, fifty-eight. Zahedani, ninety-seven. She checked the tests and slammed the book shut.

“That’s it,” she said. “They’re all correct. I’m going to bed. You can come, or you can stay here. I don’t care either way.”

She felt her hands making fists as she walked down the hall to the bedroom. She’d already wasted too much time on him. She imagined he’d spend the whole night out there, going over the numbers endlessly.

She lay in bed, counting sheep for the first time since she was a child. She bit the pillow in frustration. Then she heard him walking down the hall. She rolled over and he climbed in bed alongside her. She moved as close to the edge as she could. Even an accidental touch might enflame her so much that she’d have to go to the couch. There was no point in trying to sleep; she would lie there until it was time to get up and shower.

She felt the slight shaking of the bed but didn’t register the sound as what it was until the shaking grew more forceful. Ed was doing a good job of keeping it in, but the springs of the bed gave him away. The sound of gasps followed. She had trouble identifying it at first because she had formed an image in her mind of Ed as a man who didn’t cry. It wasn’t macho posturing; he simply didn’t shed tears, not even at his father’s funeral.

She turned slowly in the bed. She was tentative with her body; there was no telling how he’d react if she touched him. It wasn’t impossible that he’d get violent, like an animal in a cage. They were in a new territory, with new rules.

She shifted closer to him. When he didn’t stir, she reached out to touch his shoulder, expecting him to slap her hand away; he let it rest there. She gave the shoulder a consoling rub; he sobbed a little harder. She pressed her whole body against his and he folded into its curve. She brought her other arm up against him so that she was hugging him fully. She found herself holding him to her as though he were a child. She’d always resisted cradling him in such a manner, fearing it would diminish her attraction to him, but attraction was the last thing on her mind at the moment. He sobbed as she held him, and she soothed him by making shushing sounds, long and slow and quiet, until he turned and sobbed into her nightgown.

She knew what it was about, even if he didn’t. It was about getting old. She felt it too, but somehow she knew it was different for men. They got spooked when they lost their hair, when their backs gave out. Women were better prepared to deal with death and old age, especially mothers, who, having delivered children, saw how tenuous the line was between life and death. And as a nurse she had seen so many people die, people to whom she’d grown attached. Ed had taught anatomy and physiology. He’d been in the museum of death, not on its front lines. It was irrational for him to react this much to a bit of misentered data, but what was rational about a midlife crisis? Weren’t they always a little absurd?

They were beginning the next phase of their lives together. She was not afraid of it. Let it come, she thought. He’ll be in good hands.

Within minutes he was sound asleep, the crying having exhausted him. She lay awake until the alarm clock went off. He slept through her getting dressed. She made a neat stack of the papers on the table.

• • •

The Joint Commission sent eight people to do the inspection. She and the other administrators went into a conference room to make their presentations. She was glad she’d taken some extra time doing her hair and makeup that morning, and that she’d worn her gray skirt suit, which clung enough to give her some sex appeal while still looking professional, because the team was mostly male.

She was exhausted, but she felt confident about her staff’s preparedness. She’d been readying the nurses for a year, training them in how to answer questions. They were up to date on all the standards: pharmacy, equipment, staff knowledge, patient care. It was the patient interviews that troubled her. Usually the patients were generous in their comments. Still, one disgruntled patient was all it took to get the commission sniffing around. “How is the service?” “Terrible.” “How is your room?” “The place is filthy.” “Are you getting the medicines you need in a timely fashion?” “I can never get anyone around here to answer my call.”

She gave a rundown of the state of affairs in nursing and took a seat. She struggled to stay awake through the other administrators’ presentations. Then they loosed the team.

She wasn’t allowed to follow them around. It made her feel like a criminal. Accreditation was at stake; there were standards to uphold. Still, they were so damned humorless about it. They stalked the place like stormtroopers. They went through labs, making sure everything was cleaned and stored properly. They looked at every chart in the place. They pored over paperwork like district attorneys looking for a break in a prosecution. They grilled staff members. No one knew exactly how long they’d be there once they showed up. It could be three days; it could be the whole week.

Her staff could have withstood a press conference after all the paces she’d run them through. Still, things don’t always go as planned. One inspector found an expired IV solution while interviewing a patient. That got the others digging. They found an expired medicine in one of the carts. The expirations killed you. You could have nurses trained to say all the right things, but if they found one bottle a couple of weeks past its prime in a lineup of fifty good ones, it negated weeks of coaching. A crash cart wasn’t in the locked cabinet it was supposed to be in. They didn’t tell her where it was, of course, only that it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. That one hurt. She prided herself on running a tip-top ER. No one in her hospital was ever going to expire after cardiac arrest because the cart didn’t have the proper medications on it. If the cart wasn’t where it was supposed to be, though, it didn’t matter what was on it.

Before they left for the day, they gave her a list of citations. Too many and the accreditation could be compromised. They gave her a chance to follow up the next day. It was a simple matter of a few fixes — switching out the old medicine, changing the IV, putting the cart back where it belonged — but it also served to tell her that she was on notice. She’d get through it; North Central Bronx would retain its accreditation. Nothing about it promised to be easy, though. They seemed like the kind of crew that wouldn’t give them a pass on anything. It was going to be a long week. In the meantime, life continued at the hospital. People didn’t stop getting sick. People didn’t stop having heart attacks. One kid came in having blown off his hand with a firecracker.

She dozed off at a red light on the way home. When she pulled into the driveway she saw the sheet still over the pile in the back. In the tumult of the day she’d forgotten about it. She walked over to it and lifted a corner. It was all there, untouched. She didn’t have the energy to spare Ed’s ego. She whipped the sheet off. If it was a bonfire he was after, he’d have to find another way to exorcise his demons. She gathered up the pieces of lumber and put them in the garbage can; they stuck out jagged and tall. She dragged the can to the curb for pickup the next day. Ed would flip out when he saw it; in fact, that was the point. Fatigue was hardening her toward him. His vulnerability last night, and her tenderness — it felt as if it had happened a year ago. She hardly remembered it at all; it could have been a dream. It was all so stupid; how could she have indulged him in it?

She marched inside and found him hunched over the stack of lab reports they hadn’t gotten to the night before. She felt she’d fallen into a film loop.

“I took your wood to the curb,” she said. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep the backyard from looking like a junk heap.”

“Okay,” he said without looking up.

“That’s it? Just ‘okay’? No rage? No telling me not to mess with your stuff?”

He kept working as though he hadn’t heard her. She could smell a musky odor coming off him. He hadn’t showered. He had changed his clothes, thank God, but he hadn’t washed before he left for work. Ed hated not to shower. He felt a layer of grime sitting on him all day when he didn’t.

“What were you trying to make, anyway?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, swiveling in his chair. He gave her a look that said he was only trying to get an honest bit of work done. He was one of those aggrieved husbands who had to deal with the not-always-sensible ravings of wives who meant well but made things so difficult sometimes.

“I’m talking about the pile out back,” she said pointedly. “Your little Stonehenge.”

“I really have to focus,” he said. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t remember the sheet you put over the pile of wood in the backyard?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.” She could see that he remembered it, possibly for the first time since he’d done it; he was that absorbed.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Just tell me something, and I’ll let you work all night. What were you making?”

“What?”

She knew this gambit; he was pretending he hadn’t heard her, stalling for time.

“What were you making?”’

“Oh, you know.”

“I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

“I was making something. I told you what I was doing. You know this.”

“When I left on Saturday you told me you had some projects in mind. Home improvement projects.”

“Yes! Yes. I was making something for the house.”

His answers sounded like those given over the phone by kidnapped people being watched for signs of betrayal.

“What exactly?”

“Well, it was a surprise.”

“I don’t need any more surprises.” She looked at him for a few moments. “How did it go today?”

“Fine.”

“No problems?”

“No.”

“No students complaining?”

“No.”

She hesitated for a moment, then came out with it.

“Do you want some help with that other stack tonight?”

“Yes,” he said in an instant.

• • •

She had no energy to cook, so they ordered pizza. At the end of the meal she took a long, hot shower. Afterward, she wanted to rest for an hour before she helped Ed with the lab reports. She didn’t feel like drowsing in the musty air of the bedroom, so she availed herself of the couch. It was one of those times she wished they had a television in the living room. It had been a principled stance of theirs — of Ed’s, mostly, though she went along with it. At the beginning of their marriage, Ed didn’t hate television, precisely; he just didn’t like what it was doing to American life. It wasn’t always convenient to be without a set in their living room, but there were benefits. Actual conversations took place when people came over, unlike at Ed’s sister Fiona’s house, where the all-seeing eye made any exchange a series of distracted monologues. And when the three of them crawled into the big bed on Sundays to watch Fawlty Towers, it was an event. Recently, though, Ed had grown more severe about it, insisting she shut it off when she tried to watch Johnny Carson at night. It was part of a general trend in his thinking. He was becoming more reflexive, more reactionary. She was becoming the opposite. When they moved to the new house, she would get a big television for the den.

She went to the bedroom and wheeled the little television out to the living room. She wanted to shut her brain off. She didn’t care if the noise bothered him. He couldn’t be doing anything of consequence, and it was only a matter of time before she’d be sitting with him at the kitchen table, running through the grades.

She woke to Ed pounding on the television set.

“Keep that off,” he said. “I’m trying to work.”

She was too sleepy to take umbrage at what he was saying. She waited curiously for the next thing.

“Take it inside. Take it away.”

“I happen to live here too,” she said, her blood rising.

“Get it out of here! I can’t concentrate.”

She stood and fixed the pillows behind her. “We don’t talk to each other like that in this household. I didn’t let my father talk to me like that, and I’m not about to let you do so. You’ve been a complete jerk for I don’t know how long. I’ve had it. I can’t take another day of it. Either you stop this behavior right now, or I swear, Ed, I’m leaving. I won’t make a big production of it. I’ll just take our son and go. Do you have any idea how tired I am? How long my day was? Because I stayed up to help you. You want to do everything yourself, fine. Do it. It’s easier for me to have nothing to do with you.”

He dropped into the armchair and sat looking at her. It almost unnerved her how intent his look was. Against her will, she felt herself warming to him. There was something in his gaze that could make her embers catch fire, even when they were buried under layers of ash.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You said that yesterday.”

“I’m under so much stress at work.”

“I am too,” she said.

“I know.”

“Since when are you under this kind of stress? I thought one of the perks of your job was how low-stress it was.”

“Lately it’s not.”

“Your head’s not in it,” she said. “I think your mind’s not right. But you won’t talk to me. You won’t let me in.”

“I’m dealing with a new generation,” he said. “I need to be perfect.”

“You’re having a midlife crisis,” she said. “I don’t mean to diminish it, but that’s what it is.”

“I just need to get through the next couple of weeks,” he said. “Then I’ll be fine. I need the summer to recuperate. I put a few things off, and now I’m dealing with them. I’ve tried to shield you from all this. I’m tired. I’m making mistakes. I haven’t been sleeping well. I just need to recharge my batteries.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“I know the feeling,” she said as she yawned. “When do you need to return those lab reports?”

“Tomorrow is the last day of classes.”

“Go get them and we’ll check them together. Then we can both get some sleep.”

She put on water for tea. She felt as if she was moving through a thick soup. She stood by the stove, watching the kettle boil. She fixed her tea and with languid movements joined Ed at the table. She wanted to insist on a little ceremony. She was going to sip her tea, not gulp it. But she needed Ed to calm down first. His knees were jackhammering up and down in that way that sometimes overcame him.

“Let me drink this before we start.”

“Fine, fine.”

She tried to let the warm liquid have a tonic effect, but she had put too much milk in it, and it wasn’t a good cup. It was foolish to make tea in order to stay awake; all her years of drinking it before bed had turned it into a soporific.

“Let’s get started,” she said.

He focused on the open grade book with the unwavering attention of a runner about to start a race. She thought back to the chaos at the end of the previous night’s efforts, the way a spirit of collaboration had devolved into a shouting match. If only there were a way to avoid the altercation that would ensue if — when — Ed made a mistake. She could feel it as a certainty for some reason, perhaps because of the barely contained mania in that pumping leg. He was in a place mentally where she couldn’t follow, where an entry error was a harbinger of doom. She thought of the bum rap women got: as hormonal as she’d been after delivering Connell, she’d never been certifiably nuts.

An idea occurred to her and she saw right away that it was the correct one, the only one. It should have occurred to her last night, but she was on Ed’s terms then, and tonight he was on hers. Still, she hesitated. Any deviation from the pattern, however short-lived that pattern happened to be, promised to unleash in Ed a disproportionate fury. She had a vision of his overturning the table like a card cheat before a shootout.

She cleared her throat. “I have an idea,” she said tentatively, and he didn’t respond. He was tossing aside, one by one, the gestures of nicety that accounted for much of conversation. “It can save us some time. Of course, if you want to do it another way, it’s up to you.”

He nodded to indicate he was listening — an improvement. She sipped her tea.

“I can just enter them directly into the book,” she said. “You can check it over when I’m done.”

“Yes,” he said, lightning-quickly. At first she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then he looked up and said it again. She felt her body relax. She hadn’t realized it, but she had been bracing for a shock — a blow, even.

“Good,” she said as she took the gradebook from him, but she didn’t mean it. He was so quick to relinquish control of the project, it was as if he had been hoping all along that she would take it over.

She filled in the grades. It took no time at all. It almost made her laugh. She had let herself be convinced that this was a task that required the gravest concentration. In fact it would have been difficult to make a mistake once the first few were in place. They were already alphabetized. She shuddered to imagine how much time Ed had spent checking the alphabetization.

“Done,” she said, closing the book. She hoped he wouldn’t insist on checking it himself.

“Thank you,” he said, to her surprise.

“Let’s go to bed.”

They made love; it was a frenetic affair. Ed seemed to take his stress out on her body, but she enjoyed it anyway. They hadn’t made love with vigor like that in a while. There was something less than terrifying about his anger; it was that of a man in chains. He finished with a grunt; she climaxed along with him. As they lay in silence afterward, their bodies coated in sweat, Ed looking at her intently, she felt an invisible barrier between them had been breached. It would be easier now. She would be able to tell him about the house.

26

On Saturday she drove up to Bronxville to meet Gloria. No bids had been placed yet, and she wasn’t interested in seeing any other houses. Still, she drove up. The clutter on Gloria’s desk infused her with a feeling of unease.

“What do you say we walk and talk.” Gloria gestured outside. “Take a look at the town.”

Outside, Gloria extended the pack; Eileen demurred.

“You don’t mind if I do, right?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. ’Cause I have to anyway!”

Gloria laughed a raspy laugh and began to cough. She lit the cigarette and took a long drag.

“Talk to hubby yet? What’s his name?”

She didn’t know when it had happened precisely, but Gloria had dropped all pretense of formality with her. A hint of coarseness idled in her voice. At first their familiarity had been bracing. Now that Eileen was a step closer to living there, though, she felt conflicted about it. It meant a small diminution of her ideal. She thought of all the people Gloria probably knew in town. A real estate agent could wield a lot of power if she wanted to. She could control the narrative. She knew people’s secrets no less than a psychiatrist or priest did.

“Ed. Ed’s his name.”

“Have you gotten the thumbs-up from him yet?”

“We haven’t discussed it. He’s been busy.”

Gloria took a drag. Eileen could feel her gaze on her.

“You’re afraid if you bring it up, you’ll hear a no, and then there’ll be no negotiating from there. I get it. I’ve been there — believe me.”

Eileen bristled. It was far more complicated, and even if she had time to explain the subtleties of it in a way that did them justice, she wasn’t sure Gloria was the kind of person who could appreciate such subtleties. She wondered how she had managed to let her guard down with this crude woman.

“I’m going to talk to him about it soon,” Eileen said, “and I’m confident we’ll be in a position to make an offer.”

“You have a bit of time,” Gloria said philosophically. “But I wouldn’t wait forever. This house is under market. You can’t afford to get into a bidding war.”

She had been thinking of the house as protected by the invisible bubble of her interest in it, and she felt a seed of panic take root. They did a loop around the block, Gloria waving to owners and salespeople, a few of whom came out to chat. Eileen felt edgy and ill-equipped to win anyone over. It was safer when they were in the car; it was safer to walk around alone.

• • •

She didn’t admit to herself where she was really heading until she had passed the on-ramp to the Bronx River Parkway. She kept driving until she came to the street with the two stone pillars at either side that Gloria had turned onto when she’d taken her there. She felt her way up a couple of turns until she saw the house. She didn’t have a plan. She just knew she had to be near it, to confirm her feeling about it.

She parked in front, figuring the driveway was too conspicuous. She sat in the car for a while, looking at the stone wall that girdled the front yard, working up the courage to walk the grounds. She knew what she intended to do was technically trespassing, even though whoever was selling the house wouldn’t have minded if it helped to firm up her resolve to buy it. She walked up the driveway to the back stairs. No table and chairs sat on the patio, but she saw them in her mind. Someone was being paid to care for the plants and shrubbery. She saw where she could add a few flowers. In a house like this she would be inspired to learn to keep them alive. A path of stone stairs led up the hill in the back. She followed it to a flat area halfway up that had been left untended. She could put another table there. It could be the aerie from which she looked down on her domain.

The property ran all the way up to a wall that abutted the yard of an Italian-style villa at the top of the hill. It dwarfed this house in grandeur and size, but there was no shame in being outstripped by a house that majestic.

After a little while she saw a worker turning over soil in the backyard of the house next door. He hadn’t seen her, but all he had to do was look up. She hid behind a tree and watched till he disappeared inside. Then she scampered down the steps. The bush cover on the patio gave her courage to try the screen door to the den. It slid open, as did the glass door behind it, and in an instant she was in the house.

She didn’t turn any lights on. Sounds echoed in the big empty spaces. She hesitated going deeper into the house, but a rustling of the leaves outside sent her scurrying into the living room.

She headed upstairs. The place smelled different than it had; she picked up a faint hint of mildew, perhaps wafting up from the basement. It might only have been the close air trapped in the house. She went to the bedroom where Connell had lain on the floor. The room felt imposingly empty with no one else there, and she couldn’t stay in it long. She went to the guest bathroom and ran both taps. She looked at herself in the mirror, then looked away, afraid that something would appear behind her. In the quiet of the house every sound was magnified.

She went to the master bedroom and sat leaning against the wall, by the windows. The longer she sat, the more nervous she grew, but she couldn’t bring herself to get up. She was waiting for external circumstances to dictate her next move. She felt like a mountain climber who had reached a longed-for summit and couldn’t bear to return to normal life.

She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting when she heard the voices. She shot to her feet and looked for a place to hide. She gave no thought to walking downstairs and forthrightly greeting them. She didn’t know who they might be: the owner, other prospective buyers, a neighbor, the police. She thought to hide behind the shower curtain in the master bath, but there was no curtain, and even if there were one, how would it look if they pulled it back and found her there? They’d call the cops for certain. She thought of the attic stairs hidden in a ceiling panel in one of the closets, but she didn’t know if she could pull them down quietly enough, and where was she going to hide up there?

She stood by the doorway to the bedroom. Lights were being flicked on downstairs. She heard enough to tell it was a couple looking at the house and a real estate agent who wasn’t Gloria. She decided to stay in the bathroom until she had heard them start up the stairs. If she heard them go left at the top, she would slip out and head down. If they stopped her, she would burble something and keep moving. They weren’t likely to follow her or keep interrogating her. And if they turned right and headed into the master bedroom suite, she would say she had stayed behind after looking at the house.

She listened to this foreign agent enumerating the house’s virtues. Hearing them presented to another couple curdled the joy she took in their particulars. They were taking forever down there. Anxiety and impatience combined to produce an unexpected boldness in her. She flushed the toilet for a bit of theater, then thrust herself out on the landing and headed down the stairs.

“Oh!” the agent said. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”

“Pardon me. I stayed behind to use the bathroom.”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” she said as the couple appeared from the kitchen. “It’s a great house.”

“It is,” the husband said.

“Well, we know the toilet works!” she said, and felt instantly foolish. The agent looked as uncomfortable hearing it as Eileen felt saying it.

“Yes — ha!” the agent said, a little belatedly.

“Do you mind if I leave through the front door? Could you lock it after me? I’d like to get a look at the front porch.”

“Not at all!” The agent looked relieved. “Please!”

Outside, Eileen’s frenzy subsided. She caught her breath leaning against the railing, feeling its smooth but bumpy paint. She smelled the mown grass and the lavender scent of the lilacs in the tree, and she listened to the birds, the shuffling leaves in the branches. The manicured bushes shook mildly in the wind. No police or ambulance sirens battered her ears, nor any thunder from souped-up cars. A little girl rode by on a bicycle and offered her raised hand in a wave. Eileen waved back, completing the illusion of ownership. And then it hit her, the peace she had sought in going up there, the ineffable something she’d been chasing. Then she heard the agent and the couple enter the foyer and felt the peace slip away. Their voices were muffled through the door, but she knew they were speculating about the house, weighing it, considering it. In her mind it already belonged to her. She would do whatever she had to do.

27

Connell wasn’t sure why he’d told his mother he wanted to move. Maybe it was because he’d seen how much she wanted him to want to. The truth was, he didn’t want to go anywhere. It felt like leaving right now would be like quitting, like saying, I really am the pussy you think I am. And he was heading to a new school. He’d make friends there, but if he moved, he’d lose the ones he had now; he was pretty sure of that. Farshid, Hector, and Elbert had stuck with him through all the teasing he’d endured. Farshid was going to Brooklyn Tech, Hector to St. Francis Prep, Elbert to Molloy.

When they moved, he was going to leave part of himself behind. Even the ex-friends who gave him so much trouble were part of his life. Maybe they’d all look back on it and laugh when they were adults, drinking wine around each other’s kitchen tables, throwing their heads back and remembering how they were as kids. You had to stay in the same town to get that kind of rich history with people. You had to have ties that ran pretty deep.

He wasn’t going to have a home anymore, not in the same way. His mother didn’t seem to mind that idea. But his mother had stayed in Woodside until she was in her twenties. Her best friends were people she’d known since first grade. He saw the way they enjoyed each other’s company. She said it wasn’t like that anymore, that people moved around, that there weren’t neighborhoods anymore like there used to be, but he knew it could be like that. All you had to do was not go anywhere.

• • •

He was playing Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! at Farshid’s. He tried twice to get past Piston Honda, but his heart wasn’t in it. He handed the controls to Farshid and watched him work his way through Soda Popinski and Bald Bull. Connell couldn’t even get to the place Farshid started from. Farshid’s fingers on the buttons looked like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings.

Kids pretty much left Farshid alone. He’d come to St. Joan’s in sixth grade, by which point everybody had settled into cliques. He was kind of a free agent.

“My mother’s going to move us,” Connell said.

“Yeah?” Farshid sounded like he’d heard him but not heard him. He was moving the controller around in the air as he slapped furiously at the buttons.

“She wants to get us out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Westchester.”

“Where’s that?”

“The suburbs.”

“That’s cool.” He cursed and threw the controller, though it landed softly on the rug, and he retracted it by the cord and restarted the game.

“I don’t want to go.”

“Why not?”

“I have my friends here,” he said.

“You’d get a backyard. Maybe a pool.”

“Yeah.”

“I’d do it.”

“What about your friends?”

“What about ’em?”

“You wouldn’t care about leaving?”

“No offense,” he said, “but yeah — no.”

“I’d miss you and Hector. Even Elbert.”

“You’re not gonna see us anyway, even if you stay. You’re gonna be in the big city with all your nerd friends. You’re gonna jerk each other off in the locker room.”

“Maybe you have me confused with yourself,” Connell said.

“I’m going to have girls do that for me, thank you very much.”

“Everything’s going to change all at once.”

Farshid finished the level and paused the game. “You just need to reinvent yourself. That’s what my mother said to me, ‘Reinvent yourself.’ In Farsi, though: ‘Khodeto az no dorostkon.’ I didn’t want to come here, man. There was some political shit with my father. We had to leave fast. Talk about everything changing.”

“You couldn’t go to Brooklyn Tech if you moved.”

“I don’t give a shit where I go to high school, man! Here, there, I don’t care. I care about what’s after that. College! Living on my own.” He slapped his hands together. “Beautiful girls in my dorm room! Hah!”

Connell knew why the other kids didn’t tease Farshid. He wasn’t vulnerable to them; he already had a plan.

“This is home,” Connell said.

“Home?” Farshid said. “What does that even mean? I’m going to work on Wall Street. I’m going to have a hot wife like Alyssa Milano that I bang a lot in my big bed. I’m going to have a big house and a big pool. That’s home.”

Connell felt like a child; all he cared about was getting to hold a girl’s hand someday, and Farshid was already thinking of what he would do with his wife.

“Sounds good,” Connell said.

“Reinvent yourself!” Farshid said, handing him the joystick. “You can start by not sucking so bad at Punch Out!!”

“I have to invent myself before I can reinvent myself,” Connell said.

“Aw, don’t say that,” Farshid said. “You’re already somebody. You’re the biggest nerd I ever met in my entire life.”

28

It started in math class. Gustavo Cruz was tapping him on the back. Connell had been resisting all year, but Gustavo hadn’t given up. It was the time of year when every point counted for some kids. Usually Connell just framed his test more tightly with his arms, leaned over it more to obscure it with his body. He didn’t care if it made him look like a hopeless nerd; he wanted the teachers to know he had nothing to do with cheating.

Gustavo was slapping him on the neck now. Connell couldn’t turn around to tell him to stop without risking looking like a conspirator.

He thought about what he must look like to the others — a stiff kid incapable of acting normal, a former fat kid still awkward in his body, a nerd with no style or balls who would never, ever kiss a girl. He’d been insulted and made fun of a thousand times, and he’d hung from the basketball hoop, desperate to shift his hand down to cover his privates but too afraid to fall, but he hadn’t suffered the truest humiliation, because his parents always told him he was worth more than other kids could see. He wasn’t sure he believed that anymore.

He sat up straighter, leaned to the side, and gave Gustavo full view of his paper — the top part, at least. It was a multiple-choice test with a couple of show-your-work problems at the bottom. The multiple-choice alone was enough to get Gustavo to pass. Connell was nervous. He would have been even more nervous if Miss Montero ever even looked his way during tests, but he’d put up such staunch resistance that it must have seemed to her as if the fight on that front had been permanently won.

In the lunchroom Gustavo exulted.

“Man, that was the shit. Cuh-nell!”

“Shh…” Connell tried to play it cool, but he felt exposed. “Keep it quiet.”

“I get you, man.”

A couple of days later, when they had a surprise quiz, Connell waited until he’d finished and then leaned to the side a little. This time Miss Montero snapped, “Eyes on your own paper!” but Gustavo had probably had enough time.

“Cuh-nell!” Gustavo said again, and Connell thought, Con-null. Con-null.

• • •

That afternoon, instead of hustling home, he found himself sitting on the rectory steps with them. Some cosmic sleight of hand had deposited him in their midst. He hoped none of them would notice he didn’t belong.

They went to Shane’s apartment to make prank calls. They called Gianni’s and had a pie delivered to the address in the phone book for one of their teachers. They called Antigone Psillos, a good-hearted, untouchably homely girl who had been given the unimaginative nickname of An-pig-o-nee. Pete asked her out, and when she cautiously agreed, he said, “Psych!” and hung up the phone.

“What’s that Chinese kid you hang out with?”

“Who?”

“Your friend,” Shane said. “Elbert. Elbert Lim.”

“He’s not my friend.”

“Whatever. What’s his number?”

“I don’t know,” Connell said.

“Here,” Shane said, passing him the phone. “You dial it. Order some Chinese food.”

The guys were sniggling and slapping their knees. They were in Shane’s living room. His mother worked late, and his father wasn’t even in the country. He was a Marine who’d been in the Gulf War. He was supposed to have come back in March, when the war ended, but he’d been sent to Bangladesh to do relief work after a cyclone. There was a picture of him in his uniform on the wall right above the phone.

“I don’t know the number,” Connell said.

“Bullshit,” Pete said. “You talk to that kid every day.”

“Hang on,” Shane said. “I had to call him once for homework.”

Shane got his address book and dialed the number. He made excited faces as it rang.

“Hello?” he said into the phone. “Is this Chow-Chow Kitchen? I want to order some fried rice and spare ribs.”

The other guys were hooting. Connell tried to smile. Shane had his hand over the receiver. His father, he mouthed.

“No, I said I want to order spare ribs. For delivery.”

Shane slipped into laughter and hung up.

“Call back!” Pete said. He handed Connell the phone. “You call.”

Connell pretended to look at the paper and picked up the receiver. He dialed slowly, made a mistake on purpose and started again. Then he made a genuine mistake, from nerves. Shane grabbed the sheet and dialed. Connell was still holding the receiver. It rang a few times and someone picked up. It wasn’t Elbert’s father. It was Elbert himself now.

“Hello?” the voice said.

Connell was too nervous to speak.

“Hello? Who is this? Can you stop calling, please?”

Elbert hung up.

“He slammed the phone down,” Connell said, hoping that would be enough.

“Call back!”

“Don’t you want to call someone else?”

“Call back!”

Connell took the sheet and dialed the number. The phone rang for a while. He was relieved to have been spared. Then the line clicked on. It was Elbert again.

“You assholes need to leave us alone now. Isn’t your break over at McDonald’s? Oh wait, I forgot. Even McDonald’s wouldn’t hire you. I bet they’d hire your mama, though. By the hour. I hear she comes pretty cheap.”

He’d always appreciated Elbert’s adult air, his razor-sharp intelligence. Now it made him feel ashamed. They were looking at him intently, his new, old friends.

“Say something,” Shane urged.

“I want to order spare ribs and fried rice,” Connell said in a fake voice deeper than his own.

“That’s really funny,” Elbert said. “Original. I’ve never heard that before. Not even once.”

Connell didn’t know what to say. He felt an idiot grin spread across his face. He could feel himself getting dumber. He saw the other faces looking back at him with — could it be? — appreciation. All he could think to do was order more food.

“And some egg rolls,” he said in a fake Chinese accent that made his friends laugh even louder. “And wonton soup.” It made him feel sick to do it — his father would have lost his mind if he knew — but it also felt good to be one of the guys.

“Shane Dunn? Is that you? Pete McCauley?”

He was praying Elbert wouldn’t say his name.

“We’re not even Chinese,” Elbert said. “Not that you idiots would know the difference. We’re Korean. I don’t even like Chinese food. Why don’t you ask for some kimchi? Maybe my mother would make some for your ignorant asses. I could come over and throw it in your face.”

Elbert was like that: pugnacious. Usually it was awesome; now it just scared Connell. Elbert’s mother’s kimchi was delicious. The first time Connell had had it, he’d felt like his mouth was on fire; he’d never had anything so spicy at home.

“Come on, Connell!” Pete shouted. “Say something.”

A hush fell over the guys at this transgression of protocol. They feigned shock and started cracking up.

“Connell? Is that you?”

Connell hung up before he could answer. He knew Elbert wasn’t going to talk to him anymore, so when they told him to call Farshid, he just took the phone and dialed.

“Give me that,” Shane said. “I want to talk to this sand nigger myself.”

Standing beneath his father’s stern portrait, Shane shouted a stream of insults into the phone. He didn’t bother trying to disguise his voice.

• • •

When Donny went to the bathroom, Connell stood by the hall door and listened for the sound of a flush or footsteps. He grabbed handfuls of coins from the big bowl on the breakfront, filling his pockets. He had an allowance, but he took the money anyway. It made his stomach ache to do it.

He bought food, comics, baseball cards. At a store on Roosevelt Avenue, he watched some guys buy nunchuks and throwing stars. Then he bought a curved-bladed knife that snapped with a violent click into its protective handle. He brought the knife to school and unzipped his backpack to show his new friends.

“Put that shit away,” Shane said. “How can you be a nerd and so stupid at the same time?”

• • •

He didn’t have a game at Elmjack, so he went to the park. All his new friends played hockey. He didn’t have any hockey gear, so he played catch with one of the older guys for a while and then sat and waited.

Afterward they walked up to Northern to Dance Dynamics to watch through the blinds while the girls danced. All the girls he’d ever had crushes on were in that class, and every guy there but him was dating one of them. The class took a break for a few minutes and some girls came outside. He was the only guy not in hockey gear. He tried to hold his glove behind his back. “Baseball’s gay,” he’d heard Shane say, and even though he’d seen how awful Shane was in the field whenever he played softball with the older guys, he still felt like a kid carrying that glove, while the others wore protective padding and towered over him on skates and rollerblades. The girls only glanced at him quizzically, as though waiting for one of the guys to explain why they’d let Connell follow them there.

They headed to the Optimo store to steal. It was coming on evening; he knew he was supposed to have gone shopping for his mother before dinner. He should have left a while ago, but he wanted to preserve his legitimacy by doing everything they did.

The plan was for each of them to take something while the rest distracted Andy the Korean guy behind the front counter and his mother back by the storeroom. They fanned out around the store. Connell stood up front, by the baseball card display case. It wasn’t hard for him to pretend to be interested, because he went in there a lot for comic books and cards. He kept Andy busy by asking a lot of questions, but he didn’t steal anything. He was sure he’d be congratulated anyway for helping the cause, but when they got down the block and showed each other their loot — candy, soda, a thermos — and his hands were empty, they called him a pussy.

They went to Pete’s house a few blocks away. Pete got some liquor bottles out of his parents’ closet and passed them around. Connell wouldn’t take a sip.

“You are such a nerd,” Pete said. “I can’t believe what a nerd you are. What is he doing hanging out with us again?”

Pete looked to Gustavo, who shrugged his shoulders. “My man Connell is helping me out,” Gustavo said, and then he shot Connell a look that said, You have to help yourself out.

They went back out to meet the girls after their dance class. He could imagine what it would feel like to be able to relax, to talk to them as if he had a right to. Once, in seventh grade, he’d called up Christin Taddei at Farshid’s urging and asked her out. The call had ended in humiliation. Now Christin was standing right there. She said something he didn’t understand. He felt like he could barely hear anything, the way the excited blood was coursing through his system.

“You reek,” Christin said again.

“What?”

“You need to use deodorant. Or cologne. Or take a shower.”

The other girls tittered. “I will,” he said. In his embarrassment he could feel his toes curling.

“Damn, yo!” Shane said. “My girl just dissed you hard.”

Shane peeled off with Christin, Pete headed home, and Connell walked down Northern with Gustavo and Kevin. They neared the Optimo store.

“You should have taken something,” Gustavo said. “Everybody else did.”

Dusk was coming on. The store would be closing soon. Andy had his back to the window. He was in college; Connell had seen him wearing an NYU sweatshirt. Connell bought cards from him every day practically, and comics once a month at least. Andy put together a regular bag of comics for him. Sometimes he threw him a free baseball card pack, just for being such a good customer. He liked to watch Connell open packs and find rookie cards.

Gustavo was saying something, but Connell had stopped listening. He walked into the street to get a little distance, turned, and threw the ball he’d been carrying as hard as he could. The big pane shattered with a terrific crash. Sheets of glass fell like icicles.

Gustavo shouted “Holy shit!” and he and Kevin ran down the Boulevard. Connell ran across it into traffic and kept running until he stood in front of his house, alone, his chest pounding. The front door was unlocked. He stood in the vestibule looking out to see if anyone had followed him. He wanted to switch skins with someone else, switch bodies.

His father was on the couch, wearing his headphones, and his mother was in the kitchen cooking what smelled like broccoli and ziti, which was what she whipped up when there was nothing left in the fridge. He said he was home and didn’t answer when she asked where he’d been. He headed to his room. He heard a cop siren outside and started biting his nails. He went into the bathroom and stripped naked and smelled his armpits.

She was right; he did smell. Maybe he was getting ready to stop being such a damned baby about everything. He got in the shower and turned the knob for hot water all the way, with only a little cold to balance it out. The water scalded his skin and he started turning red. Steam billowed out into the room, filling it up.

He couldn’t stop thinking of that window breaking. He could see it happening over and over, the glass caving in, the one big piece dangling and falling off with a crash. They would find the baseball. They would have it dusted for fingerprints. They wouldn’t need fingerprints, because he went in there every day carrying his glove and a baseball. Once, he’d even left his glove there and called in, and they’d held the store open late for him to come get it. He could see Andy shaking his head in wonderment at what the hell had come over this crazy kid. He’d always enjoyed Andy’s sarcasm whenever somebody said something less than intelligent or acted like an ass. Andy was in college but he had to spend all his time entertaining these little kids. Connell could see him banging his fist on the counter. He could see him locking the door and consoling his mother, and then the two of them sweeping up the shards. He pictured him emptying the window display of cards, picking pieces of glass out of boxes of packs, pulling the gate down with a muttered curse. They deserved better than what he’d given them.

He scrubbed himself with punishing quickness, but he could not calm down. He kept thinking of Christin Taddei telling him he reeked. Christin used to date Gustavo before she dated Shane, and some people said she and Gustavo had had sex. She hiked her skirt higher than the other girls did, and her blouse was always a little tight. He had an erection. He grabbed it in that steamy cloud, and after a few quick strokes he brought himself off and watched the viscous stuff disappear down the drain. He rubbed at his hand, trying to get the gluey residue off. He felt even worse now, even more scared. He was guilty, guilty. He would have to get caught. It was only a matter of time. He wanted to get out, get away. High school couldn’t come fast enough, but it would not be sufficient. He wanted to get far away. He never wanted to see Andy or Andy’s mother again. They would carry around the truth about him wherever they went.

He heard a knock at the bathroom door. “Dinner,” was all his mother said, but he felt like he’d been called up before a judge.

29

The night before he posted his final grades, Ed didn’t even grunt when she asked what he wanted for dinner, or lift his head; he just put his hand up in an imperious dismissal.

She retreated and pounded her frustration into some hamburger meat. She chopped the carrots with savage thwacks, relishing the sound of the knife crashing into the cutting board.

After dinner, as she was cleaning up, he brought all his papers into the kitchen.

“Sit with me until I’m ready for you to enter the numbers,” he said.

“I’ll be reading in the living room,” she said. “Come get me when you’re ready.”

“No,” he said. “I want you here. I want you ready. I’ll give you the signal.”

He was acting like the head of an ER team waiting for an ambulance to arrive. It was absurd that she had to be on such high alert. She didn’t raise a fuss, though. She made tea and got her book and sat at the table with him.

“No,” he said, looking up. “No.”

“What?”

“No reading,” he said. “I need you ready.”

“You can’t be serious,” she said, and returned to the book.

“No!” He grabbed the book out of her hands.

The testy ER doctors who took their nerves out on the nurses sometimes apologized later; with the ones who didn’t, you learned not to take it personally. But these men were saving lives. Whose life was Ed trying to save?

“Honey,” she said. “Is it really hurting anything if I just read here next to you while you work? What’s the harm in it?”

He slammed his pen down on the stack of papers. “We have a system!” he shouted. “We have a system that works! We need to follow it! Just follow the system!”

She had already figured out that they had a “system,” one of his doing whatever he wanted as she looked on his work silently, benignly, unblinkingly.

“Okay.” She closed her book and looked at him. His hair was graying at the temples, but otherwise it retained its deep-black hue. His lashes were still long enough to be the envy of any woman, and his crystal-blue eyes softened the sharp impression his nose and strong jaw made. It still took her by surprise how handsome he was.

She sat and waited, sipped her tea slowly. It seemed that tea drinking was something he could tolerate as in-system. She reached for a pile he’d finished with, thinking to get a head start on it. He stopped her hand and told her to wait. She stood up, just to stand, and walked over to the sink. He told her to sit down. She could feel herself messing with him. She peppered him with questions at short intervals. He ignored them and kept his head down. Eventually he looked up at her, breathing through his teeth, his eyes flashing with hate.

“Be quiet,” he growled. “Sit there and be quiet and wait till I’m done.”

She wanted to say something acid, to humiliate him the way he’d humiliated her. The only thing that stopped her was the vague sensation that this was not the man she’d married, that some metempsychotic transfer had occurred. She sat in the chair with one hand on the table and one embracing the mug.

When he was done he slapped the pen down and took a deep breath, rubbing his eyes. He sat back in the chair pointedly, with as much presence as if he were studying her for the first time. She was surprised by his suddenly intense look and blushed. She wanted to touch him, to dispel her nerves. She took the pile of essays and began entering the grades in the book. She made short work of it. When she was done, he produced another sheet, with numbers on it and blanks next to them.

“Now this,” he said.

“What is it?”

“The final grade sheet.”

“What do I do?”

“You find the student number next to the names on this other sheet.”

He had everything ready for her. Considering how organized he was about all the papers, how much he seemed to have the situation in hand, it was a wonder he was asking her to do this at all.

When she was done she closed the book with a thump. Ed clapped his hands together and raised them above his head exultantly. The gesture embarrassed her — seeing him celebrate so quotidian an accomplishment. She looked for signs of irony, but there were none.

They had another bout of lovemaking. He went at her purposefully, giving her deep kisses and holding her down by the wrists. It reminded her of the way he had made love to her during their brief attempts to conceive a second child: both of their bodies moving as one; the thrust of his hips compact, rhythmic, and deliberate. The only thing that kept it from feeling perfect was her nagging worry that Connell would hear the headboard knocking against the wall.

In the middle of the night — a groggy check of the clock revealed it to be four in the morning — Ed was shaking her awake. It took some effort to figure out what he was saying, but eventually she understood that he wanted her to follow him to the kitchen.

The sheet from earlier was laid out before her, along with another that appeared identical. She looked at him, confused. Her eyes were adjusting to the kitchen light, but she could see that the grades she’d written next to the numbers had been crossed out, with new grades written in their place.

“I need you to make these changes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I made some changes. I need you to transfer them to this clean sheet. I have to tape it to the wall outside my classroom.”

“Why are you making changes? We were done.”

She wanted to put her head down on the table. She felt that if she did, he would be standing there in the same position waiting when she woke up.

“Changes!” he barked. “I made some changes! I need you to transfer them.”

She couldn’t make sense of it. She would simply have to submit to the logic of this inquisition. The pattern in the grades became obvious quickly: Ed had taken every grade and kicked it up a full letter, irrespective of pluses and minuses. A C— became a B; a C+ became a B; a B became an A. Ed had long held the line against rising grades. He gave out As sparingly; getting an A from Ed still meant something.

“What’s this about?”

“There were other things I had to factor in. Participation. Et cetera.”

“You were very generous,” she said sardonically.

“There’s nothing wrong with being generous.”

“Not at all.” She smiled. “But you were very generous.”

“I reconsidered a few grades. It’s not your concern.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’m tired. I don’t know why I said anything.” She filled in the grades next to the corresponding numbers in the new sheet and put the pen down. “There. I’m going back to sleep.”

In the morning she found him on the couch. On his desk the grade sheet had been revised upward again. Now there were only two categories, A and B. Below it was another blank grade sheet. She saw that it was her duty to transcribe these trumped-up scores to the final grade sheet. Or could there be another one in store, with all As?

Standing there, she remembered how, in the years after her father retired, when she was still living at home, she would slip cash in his pants pocket for him to find when he was out at the bar, to spare him the embarrassment of not having money to buy other people’s drinks. If she did this, it would be to spare Ed embarrassment.

He was curled on the couch, which was too small for his frame. It was hard to be worried about him when he was sleeping. He looked like a child, like a larger version of Connell. His hands were folded up near his face, as though he had been arrested in the act of praying. It seemed that all men were the same in the few vulnerable instants after they’d been awakened, as though they’d been called back from some universal state into the particulars of their lives. For a moment she stepped out of time and all of existence made sense; then the moment passed, and Ed returned to being her husband.

30

She sat on the stoop, listening with a new equanimity to the sounds of the neighborhood. She heard the rumble of a plane in the distance and watched it course across the sky. As a car rushed past toward Northern Boulevard, she could hear music faintly thumping within it. The laugh track of a sitcom echoed in the little valley between the two houses. It was easier to tolerate the flaws of a place when the promise of release from it loomed. Whoever bought the house would know what they were getting and willingly embrace it. If she wasn’t quite going to feel nostalgic for the neighborhood, she could at least imagine that once she’d signed the papers relinquishing the deed to the house, she’d feel the rage slip from her, and she’d be able to return to survey it with detachment. She could always come back to get her hair cut; no one tamed her cowlicks the way Curt did, and his price was reasonable. And she could imagine coming back to Arturo’s, though the truth was, Arturo’s was a good neighborhood place, the kind that made it bearable to live there, but it wasn’t anything more than that. There would be other places, better places.

• • •

Connell did a dance to avoid the back-swinging car door, pinching a plastic-sheathed comic book carefully between uplifted fingers as if holding aloft a key piece of evidence. In his other hand was a shopping bag.

“Big day at the comic book store,” she said dubiously to Ed.

“He did well this year. He’s a good kid.”

“Looks like he did well today too, big spender.”

“It’s an investment,” Ed said. “He knows his stuff. He didn’t get junk.”

She went to Connell’s room. He was slotting his new comics into his long boxes with the quiet gravity of a special-collections librarian.

“Did you take advantage of him?”

“No! Why?”

“He’s happy to be done with the school year. You must have seen that.”

“It wasn’t my idea. He just came home and said, ‘We’re going up the block to the comics store.’ I told him I didn’t want to go. He kept insisting. I kept telling him I don’t go to that store anymore. I don’t like those people in there.”

“Why?” she asked. “What did they do to you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “They’re just not nice. Anyway, I don’t go there anymore. He said, ‘Then let’s go to that store near where your orthodontist’s used to be.’ He drove us all the way out to Bayside. I didn’t want to get all this stuff. I mean, I wanted to, but I felt bad. He just kept saying, ‘Get what you want.’ ”

“How much did he spend?”

“A bunch.”

She moved closer to him. “How much?”

“Two hundred. Over two hundred.”

“How much over two hundred?”

“Two forty-eight,” he said. “And seventy-eight cents.”

She couldn’t believe the number. She would have thought it impossible to spend that much on comic books unless you brought a wheelbarrow into the store.

“You took advantage.”

“I did not,” he said, indignant. He was slipping cardboard backings into the comics’ plastic sleeves and ferreting them into the archival boxes he kept his collection in. If it really was an investment, she couldn’t accuse him of not tending to it. “He kept saying, ‘I want you to feel like you can have anything you want.’ He was telling me to fill up my basket. I didn’t get any really expensive ones.”

Eileen shuddered, as if a cold breeze had blown through the room. She sensed a sadness at the heart of Ed’s largesse. The boy seemed to have sensed it too; it had tainted his happiness at his haul. She felt a powerful sympathy for her husband, like one of those synchronized pains experienced by people miles apart, even though he was in the other room.

• • •

With a dignified informality, the ancient maitre d’ directed them to a table. Arturo’s hadn’t changed since it opened years ago: white aprons over black outfits; napkins draped over forearms; tinted, marble-patterned wall-length mirrors; mild music; steaming sliced loaves; a reliably robust house red. There were neighborhood Italian restaurants like it all over the city — strong in the specials, respectable otherwise — but she’d always felt this place represented a bit of refinement. Sandro, Arturo’s son, ran it with a seemly reserve. Still, she was looking forward to putting it behind her for places of real distinction.

Ed smiled and looked benignly at his menu, as if written in its pages were the answers to diverting but trivial questions.

“Are you happy the year is over?” she asked.

“Very happy,” he said.

She fidgeted with some sugar packets. “So, Ed,” she said, after what seemed like an interminable pause. She tried out a smile. “We saw a nice house. One we liked a lot.”

“You found a house?”

He was looking at her with a strangely blank expression.

“Well, we didn’t find a house, exactly,” she said. “We did see one. It may not be perfect. There’s no saying we can even afford it.”

“You want to move? We can move.”

“What?”

She felt a little light-headed. She put both hands on the table to steady herself. His capitulation was so instantaneous that she had to think it was because the boy was there and they were in a public place; once home, he would give full vent to his displeasure. Another thought gave her greater pause, though: that she actually believed him. It was as if he’d never truly been opposed to the idea in the first place.

Ed turned to Connell. “This is what you want?”

She took a deep breath. Her stomach was in such a knot that she felt she might throw up.

“Very much,” the boy said, with a strange gravity. “I’m ready to leave.”

“You are?” Ed asked.

“Right away.”

“Why?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been thinking it over a lot.” She wouldn’t have guessed he’d thought about it once since the day they’d seen the house. “And what I’ve come up with is that I’m starting high school in the fall, and that’s a fresh start for me, and I think we should all get a fresh start.”

The boy had come to her aid. She had no idea where he was getting this poise. Perhaps her dream of having a politician in the family might come true after all. Ed looked to her. She shrugged her shoulders.

“Plus,” Connell added, “the house we found is great. The driveway is wide enough for almost a half-court game.”

She had no need to sell it to Ed when Connell was doing so much of the work for her.

“You want to move?” Ed asked again, as he shoved more bread into his mouth.

Connell nodded.

“Why not?” Ed said. “Let’s move.”

“We don’t have to rush into anything,” she said, disturbed by the quickness of his about-face.

“You found a house, you say?”

“Yes, but—”

“We can move.”

“Really?” Connell asked.

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m glad to see you’re open to the idea. We’ll discuss it more later.”

“It’s a fine idea.” His grin was so wide as he buttered a slice of bread that Connell broke into a goofy one of his own.

“Someone’s in a good mood,” she said, but Ed didn’t hear her. “I said, someone’s in a good mood.” The pair of them chomped lustily. Ed signaled for another bowl of bread. When the waiter brought it, Connell ordered another Coke. “Save some room for dinner,” she said, unsure which of them she was addressing. She had ripped a sugar packet open without realizing it; its contents deposited into her lap. She rubbed the crystals until they formed a grainy film on her fingers, but she refused to get up to wash her hands.

“All right,” she said. “Connell wants to move. You want to move. I want to move. Does that mean we’re all in agreement?”

Ed nodded as he slathered butter on a new piece.

“You don’t mind if I go ahead and get some plans in motion. You’re on board.”

“Sure,” he said.

She felt herself growing angry. “Just back up a second,” she said. “Do you not remember saying you didn’t want to move? Do you not remember saying it wasn’t the right time?”

“I know we talked about it,” he said.

“And do you or do you not remember telling me in no uncertain terms that you didn’t want to — you couldn’t—move?”

He was nodding, but once again it wasn’t clear he was actually listening.

“All of a sudden it makes perfect sense to you?”

Her voice had been rising without her permission. People at nearby tables picked up their heads.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t just trying to quiet her down; there was a note of real contrition.

“Hey, Dad!” Connell said. “It’s okay. This is a good thing!” The boy had moved over to put an arm around his father.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to have some of this bread.”

His apologies were making her uncomfortable. “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “What changed your mind? What’s so different today?”

“I just feel good today. I’m so happy to be done! I don’t have to go in there for weeks — months!”

He was almost giddy. Maybe this thing wasn’t depression. Maybe it was manic depression.

Now that the year was over, now that he could look forward to three uninterrupted months, he’d sign off on anything she wanted. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to move; it was that he hadn’t been able to deal with anything extraneous at all. He’d had to spend so much energy managing his depression, his midlife crisis, his students, his research, that formerly ordinary tasks like doing his grades had become insuperable burdens. The strain had caused him to short-circuit. He had lost his mind over a few calculations, some entry of data into a book, some transposition of that data onto a sheet to tape to the wall. He had falsified the record for it, lost sleep over it, screamed at her because of it, cried in her arms about it. All he’d wanted was to be alone to lick his wounds, and his job never let him be alone. As long as he lay on the couch with his eyes closed, shutting out his thoughts with music, the demon couldn’t get to him.

Ed and Connell scarfed their meals. Eileen stared into her plate to avoid conversation and took her time eating. After the plates were cleared, Sandro approached grandly, the waiter behind him bearing a dessert platter.

“With my compliments,” he said. “I’d like you to choose one each.”

Sandro had chosen this of all moments to allow his circumspection to falter. “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“We’re celebrating tonight,” he said. “Believe it or not, we’ve been here thirty years. You’re one of our oldest customers.”

He must have seen her stiffen.

“I don’t mean oldest,” he said. “Longest-standing.”

“We don’t need three.”

Sandro turned to Ed. “You see?” he said, a hint of pique in his voice. “This is why she still has such a nice figure.”

Ed smiled warmly, registering no tension, though Connell squirmed in his seat. Sandro left.

“Here’s to the end of the year,” Ed said, raising his glass and taking the little bit of wine left in it down in a gulp.

“Here’s to finding a house,” she said. Ed held out his empty glass. Connell raised his water and the three of them clinked.

“Here’s to high school,” Connell said. They clinked again.

Ed looked at her. “Good luck,” he said.

“With what?”

“Finding the right house.”

“I told you I found the right one.”

He turned to Connell. “Good luck in high school.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Good luck to all of us.”

31

His mother yelled for him to come outside. When he did, he saw her leaning on a shovel in the garden box, where she’d spent a lot of time lately. Anytime he left for a game on the weekend, she was hunched over a plant, flashing a spade in her gloved hand, or spreading enriched soil from a bottomless bag.

“I want you to bury this for me.” She handed him a statue that looked like the ones on the breakfront in Lena’s apartment. It depicted a man in a red gown holding a baby, probably Jesus, dressed in pink. She pointed to a space between rose bushes. “Put the hole here,” she said.

“How far down?”

“Start digging. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“Why are you burying this?”

“St. Joseph is supposed to help people sell houses,” she said. “You have to bury him upside down, facing the street.”

“Do you believe that?”

“It can’t hurt,” she said.

He felt the shovel strike something hard. He cleared some dirt away and saw a large rock. He trenched around it and pulled at it. It came up slowly, like a recalcitrant root. He took off his shirt, hung it on the railing, and kept digging. He was enjoying his new physique. He had grown about four or five inches that year. He watched his muscles tighten and release as he worked.

“This is the second one I got,” his mother said as he dug. “The first one cost four dollars. It didn’t feel right. It was white plastic. Just Joseph; no Jesus. I brought it in to the girl at the religious store. I told her, ‘I need a good one, not this chintzy one.’ She showed me this. She said it wasn’t intended for burial.”

“How much was it?”

“Forty bucks.”

It seemed like a lot of money to bury in the ground. When he had cleared the space of backsliding dirt, he dropped the statue in headfirst, covered it up, and stomped the mound to make it flat again.

“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

“It’ll work,” his mother said.

32

She gave the listing to Cindy Coakley’s sister Jen, who was with Century 21 in East Meadow. It might have been easier to go with someone local, but she wasn’t about to leave any money in the neighborhood that she didn’t have to.

The next thing she had to do was tell the Orlandos. She went up the back staircase to the second-floor landing and listened without knocking. She could hear them all in there — Gary and Lena too, from the third floor — watching Wheel of Fortune and laughing. Donny was good-naturedly yelling at the set, calling out answers and cursing the contestant.

Selling meant throwing them out on the street, or at least putting more burden on Donny, who wrote the checks for both apartments. Brenda didn’t make much money at Pathmark; Gary’s odd jobs never lasted; and Lena was past the point of being able to work.

She went back downstairs. The next day, after steeling herself, she headed up again. She heard some murmurs of conversation and knocked. Brenda opened the door onto the dining room, where Donny and Sharon were sitting at the table.

“This looks like a bad time.”

“Not at all!” Donny gestured to an empty seat. “You want to join us? We have plenty.”

She felt herself drift into the apartment. Brenda disappeared into the kitchen.

“Did you eat?” Donny asked.

“I don’t want to trouble you.”

“Sit down,” Donny said. “I’ll get you a plate.”

The truth was, she was hungry. Ed and Connell were going to stop at a diner on the way home from Connell’s game; she’d been planning to heat up leftovers. A big pasta bowl sat in the middle of the table with huge, gorgeous meatballs under a blanket of deep-red tomato sauce.

Sharon regarded Eileen with elfin eyes over a glass of soda. Brenda came in with steaming garlic bread wrapped in tin foil.

“Are you joining us?” Brenda asked.

Donny grabbed a big forkful of spaghetti and ladled out a few meatballs and poured a little lake of sauce around them. Before Eileen could answer, he handed her the plate.

“I guess I am,” she said.

Sharon’s plate was taken and the girl smiled silently across the table at Eileen. She had beautiful straight hair and striking features. She was nine years old, shy and gentle, the compensation for all the dead ends and suffering in the family, and remarkably unspoiled, though they all doted on her. Her radiance was like a recessive gene come to life after generations of hibernation in the bloodline.

Brenda said grace, a habit Eileen had abandoned at her own table after trying it out for a while after Connell was born. Her conscience rumbled as Brenda spoke the familiar words and added a makeshift prayer.

“This looks amazing,” Eileen said nervously after everyone had crossed themselves.

“Thank you very much,” Donny said, winking at her broadly. “I try.”

“That’s rich,” Brenda said. “You can’t even boil an egg.”

Donny caught Eileen’s gaze and gestured theatrically with his eyebrows as he spoke to his sister. “What do I need to boil an egg for,” he said, “when I have you to do it?”

“Keep it up,” Brenda said. “You’ll find poison in your coffee one morning.”

Donny smilingly bit his outstretched tongue and shivered in triumph at having provoked her. Sharon giggled through the whole exchange.

“Did you want to talk about something, Eileen?” Brenda asked. “I was trying to get everything on the table; I forgot why you came.”

“Would you let the poor woman eat? Look, she has a mouthful of food, and you’re asking her questions.”

Eileen held a finger up while she chewed. Donny looked at her with placid interest. He had a kind, broad face with exaggeratedly fleshy features, like those of a prizefighter. He had a boxer’s broad back and meaty hands. He could have become a depressive like his brother or a gambler like his father but he had sought to make a life for himself instead. He used to run with a tough crowd, the kind that in retrospect was almost wholesome in comparison to the drug gangs that roved the neighborhood now. She stopped seeing them around the house after Donny’s best friend Greg from up the block wrapped his motorcycle around a streetlamp. Donny got a job as a sanitation worker through his father. He still worked on cars, but now only on his days off and more as a hobby than as a source of income. The Palumbos let him park whatever he was working on in the back of their driveway.

“What I really want to know,” Eileen said, “is how you make this sauce. Mine never tastes this good.”

“The key is to use fresh sausage. Spicy or sweet, whatever you like. Good stuff, nothing cheap. You have to burn it in the saucepan.”

“On purpose?”

“When you have a nice charred coat, you put the tomatoes in. The acid eats the burnt part off the pan. It gets in the gravy. I’ll show you sometime.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Donny said. “Our mother’s is better.”

“For once this idiot is right,” she said. “No one’s is better than my mother’s. I’m okay with that. I have time to perfect it.”

“She’s gotta perfect it,” Donny said. “She needs something to bait the hook.”

“That’s enough out of you.” Brenda smacked him on the head. It was impossible not to get caught up in the high spirits around the table. It was no wonder Connell didn’t come right down when she came home from work, why she had to go up and fetch him.

“I’ve been hearing your car make some noises I don’t like,” Donny said as he pulled on his chin. “You know what I’m talking about?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Let me take a look at it. Maybe I can catch something before it turns into a problem.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I can take it to the shop.”

“They’re gonna charge you an arm and a leg. I’ll do it for nothing, and I’ll do a better job. I can keep that thing running forever.”

“Thank you,” she said guiltily. In her nervousness she had put her finger through one of the lace stitchings on the old tablecloth and broken it. This was going to be even harder than she’d thought. How could she tell him that the first chance she got she was going to buy a much nicer car? She placed her napkin in her lap and pushed herself back from the table.

“You okay?”

“I ate a bit quickly,” she said.

“Brenda’s cooking will do that,” Donny said. “You want to get through it as fast as possible.”

Sharon chuckled.

Eileen wanted to abandon the plan, go downstairs, and come back when she’d be more collected, but there were signs to put up, and she was going to need access to all the apartments.

“Who wants dessert and coffee?” Brenda said after the clinking of forks on plates had died down.

“I don’t want to put you out any more.”

“Nonsense. Have a seat inside. I’ll make a pot.”

Donny led her to the living room. She sat on the yellow floral couch, which had a pattern she’d always found garish and worn areas by the skirt and armrests. She’d considered it a telling detail that they’d bought a big new television and kept this sofa. Now, as she sank into it, she was taken by its softness. The room, which she’d always thought of as a model of how not to decorate, radiated the warmth of shared usage. In the corner sat a small, beaten piano that looked like it might have survived the ransacking of an old saloon. At times she could hear someone practicing up here, and she’d never realized until that moment that it gave her pleasure.

Donny sat on the opposite couch. Sharon came and sat next to Eileen. The television was on, muted; Donny glanced at it out of the corner of his eye.

“Are those yours?” she asked, pointing to the framed artworks on the wall. Sharon nodded.

“I don’t know where she got it,” Donny said. “Nobody in this family has any kind of talent like that. You should see how she does in school. Tell Mrs. Leary how you did on your last report card.”

The girl demurred.

“Go ahead. Tell her.”

“Straight As,” she said in a quick burst.

“I didn’t even graduate high school,” Donny said. “Gotta be proud of this kid.” He had a faraway look in his eye. “I try to help her at the table, but she don’t need it. My little daughter is the same way. She’s like a whip. Not even two years old and she can count to ten. She don’t get it from me, that’s for sure. I tell Sharon to watch you and Mr. Leary. You folks are on another plane. I tell her to be like you. I never knew what an education really meant. I tell her to look at me and just do the opposite.”

“Don’t say that,” Eileen said. “I bet she’s proud to have you as an uncle.” As she spoke, she realized to her surprise that she believed what she was saying. “And you’re going to be a great father to that girl.”

He smiled wearily, accepting the verdict without objection. Brenda came in with a plate of Duplex cookies, followed by mugs of coffee. Eileen searched about for a coaster.

“Don’t worry about it,” Brenda said. “This table’s older than me. It does the job.”

Circular embossments emblazoned the table’s surface like trophies from all-night conversations. They were suddenly so appealing that Eileen wondered for a moment why she’d always been concerned to preserve a pristine surface on her own table, which looked almost as new as the day she bought it, no history engraved on its face.

“I have to tell you something,” she began, as Brenda settled into the couch next to Donny. “It’s not easy to say.”

Brenda, who seemed to have a radar for danger, shifted in her seat.

“Ed and I have decided to move. We’re going to have to sell the house.”

Donny’s eyebrows rose. Brenda took a sip of coffee with two hands.

“That’s great, Eileen,” Donny said. “Where are you moving?”

“To Westchester,” she said. “Bronxville.”

“That’s up by Yonkers, right? It’s beautiful up there.”

It unnerved her a little to hear Donny place it so quickly, though she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he knew every major road within a hundred-mile radius.

Brenda took out a cigarette and flapped the arm of her robe out to sit more comfortably, a gesture that made Eileen unaccountably uneasy. It was then that the smell of smoke, which ineluctably pervaded the apartment, came to her all at once. It was in everything; Connell came downstairs smelling of it. She hated to think of him sitting in it, or of Sharon sleeping in a cloud of the settling vapors. It also angered her that it might be a detracting factor in the minds of potential buyers.

“When is this happening?” Brenda leaked a small stream of smoke as she spoke. Her cigarette dangled at the end of her lip, just as Eileen’s mother’s had so often. She felt her heart hardening toward Brenda, and by extension Donny and Sharon. Brenda was making it easier on her without meaning to.

“Soon. I’m not sure.”

“How soon?”

“I found a house. We’re ready to make an offer.”

“What happens to us?”

“I don’t really know. The buyer can choose to let you stay. He can ask you to go. It’s up to him.”

“There’s a buyer?”

“I’m just thinking out loud.”

“I don’t care if they raise the rent,” Brenda said. “I’ll make it work. I just don’t want to move.”

“You’ve been very kind to us.” Donny stretched an arm out as if to hold his sister at bay. “We appreciate it.”

They sat in silence, Brenda taking deep drags.

“It’s going to be strange not having you around here,” Donny said.

“It’s going to be strange not being around here,” Brenda said.

“What do you need us to do?” Donny asked. “How can we help?”

He was broad-shouldered and game, and the warm roundness of his face admitted no despair.

“I’m going to need to show the apartment, and the one upstairs. There’ll be an open house. A few of them. I’ll let you know when.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You can’t be here during them. The Realtor asks that. The same is true for your mother and Gary.”

“Got it.”

“She might want to bring some things in. Candles, comforters, et cetera.” She paused and then added, “She’s doing the same thing in my apartment.”

“Not a problem,” he said.

“When is all this happening again?” Brenda asked, jabbing her cigarette out forcefully.

“Soon. We could start next week.” Brenda called Sharon over. As the girl took a seat between her mother and uncle on the couch, the moral balance of the room seemed to shift. “I’m sorry it’s so sudden. We just decided. I came to you as soon as I could.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Brenda said. “I’m happy for you. I don’t blame you. I’d get out of here if I could.”

Eileen looked down at her interlaced fingers.

“How much time do we have after you sell?”

“It depends,” she said. “Thirty days. Sixty. Ninety. I don’t know.”

“Don’t we have some kind of rights as tenants?”

“I’m not sure, since we’ve never worried about a lease. I can ask the Realtor.”

“That’s bullshit,” Brenda said. “Put us on a lease. Buy us some time.”

Donny stood up. “It’s hot in here,” he said. “Anyone else want a beer?” He left the room.

Eileen cleared her throat. “That might make it harder to sell the house. Especially because your rent is substantially below market.”

“Then increase the rent. I don’t care. Double it. Whatever it takes.”

“Let’s not worry about that right now,” Eileen said. “Maybe I’ll have a buyer who would prefer to have the house fully rented. I’ll see what I can do when I know more.”

“Maybe we’ll buy it ourselves,” Donny said as he returned with a glass of ice water. She saw that he had meant for the beer comment to lighten the mood. “It’d be nice to have a room for my daughter when she comes over.” He checked his sister’s face to see what she thought of the idea. Brenda’s expression hardened, as if to say, Who’s got that kind of money? Donny sighed. “Don’t worry about us,” he said. “I’m sure you have a lot on your mind. I’ll see what we can come up with on our end. Whatever we can do to help, you let us know.”

She thought about Lena. She knew Lena should hear the news from her, but she didn’t know if she had it in her to go upstairs and go through it again. Lena was upright in everything she did; decency and morality were her default positions. She was one of those heroic old women who sat in church all day taking on the burden of saving the sinners around them.

“There is one more thing,” she said.

“What is it?” said Donny. “Just ask.”

“Will you tell your mother for me?”

• • •

A week later Jen had an open house. The thought of all those people gawking at her furniture, her possessions, her bathroom annoyed Eileen, but then she thought, Let them come. Let them see the oasis we made. Jen came an hour early to put duvets on the beds upstairs — where they’d all cleared out, as requested, despite Eileen’s visions of them haunting the stoop, hangdog or angry looks on their faces — and decorative items on the tables and breakfront. She’d warmed pots of potpourri on the stovetop. It already felt like someone else’s home.

She wondered who would show up. This was the time to leave the neighborhood, not discover it — but perhaps some intrepid breed of young person might fancy themselves enterprising and patient enough to secure an outpost in the neighborhood of tomorrow. It wasn’t her responsibility to tell them that this neighborhood’s best days were in the past.

Eileen left to get her hair done. When she returned, half an hour after the open house should have ended, she saw a tall Indian man on her stoop, talking with Jen. She stopped in front of the Palumbos’ house and watched him for signs of interest. He was gesturing around and nodding at whatever Jen was saying. A woman who must have been his wife was standing on the sidewalk, along with their son and daughter, both of whom leaned against her. Eileen resisted the urge to introduce herself and feel them out. When they left, Jen told her she thought they might bid on the house. The man had said he would need it empty to make room for his extended family — brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, grandparents. So that’s how they live, Eileen thought.

A couple of days later, the Indian man offered the full asking price—$365,000, which Jen had originally thought a little high. Eileen called Gloria to find out whether the Bronxville house had sold. Then she called Donny to let him know there was an offer.

“How much?”

She told him. Donny whistled into the phone and there was a long pause. Did he know how much less she’d bought it from his father for?

“That’s a lot,” he said. “That’s great, good for you.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He paused again. “How long do we have?”

She explained that it would be soon, a week or two at the most. She wanted to sell as soon as possible.

“Can you wait a little longer?” he asked. “I might have some options, but I could use more time.”

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?”

He didn’t respond. Connell looked as if he preferred to sit there too. Rather than squeeze past them, she went around to the side door and up the back stairs to the second-floor landing. Peeking in, she was overcome by the emptiness of the place. A spasm of anxiety rooted her to the spot; she couldn’t enter the apartment. She’d half expected to see Donny and Brenda and Sharon there, but the previous week, Donny had moved them to a three-bedroom apartment — Brenda and Sharon in one bedroom, he and Gary in another, Lena in the third — in a monolithic structure around the corner that possessed none of the charm of the garden co-ops, with a cramped, concrete common area instead of generous grass. She called “hello” in the echoing dining room and stepped inside. She stood where she’d sat and told the Orlandos of her plans — which was where she and Ed had eaten when it was just the two of them, and for the first few years after Connell was born — until she got spooked and left.

She hurried down the stairs to her own apartment. She could see it that way now, as an apartment. The whole time she’d been there, she’d preferred to think she lived in a house with floors she didn’t use.

When Angelo Orlando sold her the house in 1982, he’d done so in distress. Just shy of a decade later, his heirs had had an opportunity to buy back their childhood home, and they’d failed to secure it. The story of their line in the house had come to an end. They were adrift in temporary shelters: someone else’s apartment, someone else’s building. The great churning never stopped. Spackle was placed in the holes where nails had held family portraits, paint covered the dirt marks of shoes left by the door, a coat of varnish leveled the worn hallways, and it was ready for a new family.

The family who’d bought her house was making a stand against obscurity. It would be their nail holes puncturing a fresh coat of paint, their cooking smells sinking into the upholstery, their shouts of laughter, pain, and joy bouncing off the plaster walls. They would use all three of the house’s floors. In enough time they would forget the structure had ever belonged to anyone else. It was a thought that worked both ways: it would be as if she’d never lived anywhere but Bronxville.

• • •

At the closing, she’d met the Thomases. She was surprised to learn that the husband’s first name was also Thomas — though the middle name listed on the contract was something closer to what she’d expected, a tangled thicket of consonants and vowels. When she couldn’t stifle her surprise at such an odd name as Thomas Thomas, the husband, who was exceptionally tall and wore tinted glasses, explained to her that he wasn’t even the only Thomas Thomas in his hometown, that the name was extremely popular there, due to the fact that St. Thomas had gone there in the middle of the first century to spread the faith among the Jewish diaspora. She dismissed this idea as ridiculous; St. Thomas might have visited India, but there was no way he or any other apostle had reached there before Western Europe or Ireland. Thomas Thomas seemed like an intelligent enough man, but his dates had to be incorrect.

The fact that Indians had bought her home and were going to fill it with their entire extended family, floor to ceiling, was another reminder that Jackson Heights was a big cauldron and that it was spitting her out in a bubble pushed up by heat. Supposedly it was the most ethnically diverse square mile in the world. Someone more poetically inclined might find inspiration in the polyphony of voices, but she just wanted to be surrounded by people who looked like her family.

The only thing left to do was walk through her own apartment for anything left behind. In the guest bedroom she spotted a solitary die on the floor and went to pick it up but pulled her hand away right before she touched it.

In the kitchen pantry she found a broom leaning against the wall like a forlorn suitor at a dance. Ed and Connell were waiting outside, but she couldn’t resist the urge to sweep up the dust bunnies and bits of debris on the floor. She remembered sweeping the kitchen floor in Woodside as a girl, methodically, covering every inch of that fleur-de-lis-patterned linoleum in an invisible geometric march. Back then, she’d dreamed of a house like the one she was now leaving. Somewhere along the way, she’d adopted a higher standard. Her new house was large and full of light and made an imposing picture from the street, with a sloped driveway, slatted shutters, and stone pillars to mark the front walk. It was everything she wanted, and she tried not to wonder if the new house would one day feel as old and heavy as the one she was leaving.

She stared at the pile in the center of the floor. There was no dustpan, not even a scrap of cardboard to sweep it onto. It would be dispersed by the footsteps of movers, or the Thomas family themselves. It wasn’t her responsibility anymore. This was another woman’s kitchen now. There’d be a victory in leaving it there and heading outside, in allowing something niggling to go unattended to, but she’d been cleaning messes all her life. She’d heard Ed tell Connell once that skin cells constituted the majority of dust. If that was true, then there were microscopic bits of her in that pile. She got down on her hands and knees, carefully because she was wearing stockings, and scooped the dirt with one hand into the cupped other. She dumped it in the sink. When she saw a little raised ridge of residue where her pinky finger had passed along the floor, she wet her hands to mop up the last remnants of her life in the house.

She went outside. Ed and Connell were already in Ed’s Caprice. She had driven the Corsica up the previous night after work and parked it in the driveway. The house had been dark, and she’d started for the train in a hurry, not wanting to linger too long there alone.

Ed didn’t look angry at having to wait. He looked simply blank. Blank was fine by her right then; she could map something onto a blank. There was a roiling complexity to Connell’s expression, though, an untidiness that she wanted nothing to do with at the moment. She took a seat in the back. With their Caprice in the lead and the moving truck behind them, the caravan of their belongings set out for the Triborough Bridge.

It was a clear day, and as they headed toward Northern, the sun cast a warm eye on the block’s houses. Connell waved to an old man who didn’t look familiar to her. The neighborhood itself hardly looked familiar anymore; it was as if she were slowly stirring from a dream. The faces she saw through the window looked benign in the heat. Pairs and trios, even solitary amblers, were carried along by an unseen buoyancy. She was no longer afraid of these people; she’d cleared that infection from her bloodstream. The previous day, when she’d realized she’d never again have to attend one of Father Choudhary’s Masses or walk on the Boulevard, she’d laughed in relief.

She spotted a clerk stacking cans in a bodega and leaned back against the headrest to stare at the ceiling foam. When she looked out again, they were a couple of blocks from the turnoff for the BQE. She knew the trip to Bronxville by heart; she could see one highway turn to another, then another, until they reached the surface streets and the house where they’d begin their second act as a family. There was still this short stretch left of her present life to go through, though. She felt no stirrings of nostalgia as she took in the Boulevard for what might be the last time. She shut her eyes to put it behind her the sooner. There was a blessed nothingness behind her eyelids; the darkness there could have been the peace of death. She’d spent her whole life working toward this moment, and she was exhausted. She felt she could sleep for years without waking.

The sounds of the streets, muffled by the air conditioning, grew less and less distinct, and the next thing she knew the car was pulling into the driveway. Her first thought as she took in the house through the window was that it didn’t look the way she’d remembered it. It was smaller somehow, more ordinary. She thought to tell her husband to pull back out, that this was not their house, that they’d find their real house if they kept looking. Then she saw the truck with their belongings coming around the bend.

She stepped out and stretched her long limbs to shake off the drowsiness. Ed and Connell were standing looking aimless. She remembered that she had the only set of keys in her pocketbook.

The driveway, which had baked in the heat of a dry summer, was scored with cracks that would only expand as the weather got colder. The forecast called for clear skies for a couple of days. If Ed and the boy got started first thing in the morning, there would be time for a new layer of blacktop to dry. In a little while she would send Ed to the hardware store for push brooms and buckets of asphalt.

She let the three of them in. They drifted to different corners of the kitchen and stood looking at each other in silence, frozen by the unknown future awaiting them in other rooms. She opened a cabinet door held on by only the top hinge, and it swung like a pendulum in her hand. She had seen the chipped paint, the peeling paper, the old cabinets, the ugly lacquer, the Formica countertops missing edges and chunks, but somehow she had forgotten just how bad it all was. It struck her now that this kitchen was worse than the one she had left behind. She was beginning to understand how much work everything was going to be and how much it would cost.

She considered saying something to christen the house, but she didn’t want to think about how inept her words would sound. Instead she just sent them out to unload the car. There would be time later to savor the reality of their altered lives, to appreciate having arrived where they’d arrived.

She opened the front doors and stepped out onto the porch, leaning cautiously into the rickety railing. She watched the couch sway slightly as it rose up the lawn, the heavy hickory dresser behind it undulating as the movers took their halting steps. For a moment the furniture seemed borne on invisible waves, like flotsam from a sunken vessel, and she imagined she’d been hauled up from the wreck of her old life to stand on the deck of a ship bound for an unfamiliar shore.

She stepped inside and made way for the wide arcing path the couch took through the expansive foyer. She examined the bricks. The finger-thick lacquer on them would have to go immediately. She felt she was coming out of a stupor.

The movers held the couch up in the living room and looked to her for instructions, but the simple question of where it should go baffled her utterly. She told them to put it down while she thought it over. She directed the men with the dresser upstairs. She wanted the next phase of her life to remain forever potential and the rest of her things to stay in the truck. When the movers were finished, they would drive off, leaving her and her family behind in the empty spaces she’d fought so hard to procure.

She told them to place the couch flush against the wall, under the windows. She didn’t get the jolt of pleasure she’d expected from making her first decision in the house, because aside from the fact that nothing would have a home for a while, certainly not the kind of permanent home that could put her restless mind at ease, she also had a nagging feeling that it was only the first of many more decisions to come, that she was the ship’s captain now.

The men with the couch were heading back to the truck, but she asked them to wait a second. They stood on the steps looking up at her. They were all, herself included, waiting for the next thing she would say. She tried to freeze the moment in her mind. She knew it would be one she’d want to come back to later. The future stretched out before her like a billowing fog, nothing about it distinct. All she had was her vision for the house and their lives in it. The house itself, as it was, was not what she wanted. It could be what she wanted, but it would take time and money, and she was afraid that both would soon run out. The reality of how their lives would be lived was waiting at the bottom of that hill, in the dark of that truck. These men, on the other hand, were clearly in focus. They pulled at their damp T-shirts, leaned on the railing. She would have to say something; there would have to be something to say. If only she had another minute, she could come up with the perfect thing. She could see them growing impatient. All they wanted to do was move her things from one location to another. They had no idea that everything they placed in a definite spot brought her one step closer to disappointment.