We Are Not Ourselves



67


After the eleven o’clock Mass, they took a walk through the neighborhood, then went to the Food Emporium. They were having the Coakleys over for dinner, and she needed to pick up a few things. As they passed through the first electronic door heading out of the store, Ed came to a halt in the vestibule and started yelling “No! No!”

“Not now,” she said. “We have to get home.”

“Not with her!” he yelled. “Police!”

She yanked his hand. He grabbed on to the sliding door to pull back. Somehow he managed to hold on to the bags.

“We have to go,” she said. “Please!”

“Not with you! Police! Police!”

She pulled harder. He stumbled two steps and threw himself to the ground. The cantaloupe he was carrying spilled out of its bag and rolled into the street. She couldn’t budge him. At first people gave her curious looks as they passed, but then a few stopped to gawk, and then a crowd gathered as Ed continued to call for the police. She offered them sheepish smiles as they thronged around her. Workers from the store came out. Someone must have called 911, because the next thing she knew two officers were parting the crowd.

“Police!” Ed shouted frantically when he saw them.

“The police are here,” she said desperately. “Shut up.”

The flash of anger didn’t help her cause. She told them she was his wife, but Ed’s continued shouting made them question her. A neatly dressed woman in a shearling coat whom Eileen had never seen before came forward from the crowd and said she knew who she was. “I see her around,” the woman said quietly, as if to downplay the connection. “In church. She takes care of him. It’s not abuse.”

Eileen was relieved, but she felt a profound gravity come over her at the thought of what a spectacle she’d become. The police were mollified by this character witness; one of the officers told the crowd to disperse, while the other asked what was wrong with Ed and whether she had anyone to call for assistance. In her confusion she could think of no one, not a neighbor, not a single friend.

“You don’t have anyone to call?”

“I don’t know anyone around here,” she found herself saying, to her own amazement. The officers looked heavily at each other, as if they had been conscripted into helping her move a roomful of books. They hooked arms under Ed and led him to the car.

When they got home, she called the Coakleys to cancel. He was raving about how he wasn’t going to eat anything from her, he wasn’t going to eat a single thing she gave him. Eventually she convinced him to go upstairs to the bedroom, and he fell asleep.

“Wasn’t it wonderful?” he asked a few hours later when she woke him to give him his medicine. “We had such a nice day.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t we have a wonderful day?”

After dinner, Ed went right back to bed. She returned to the kitchen and opened the wine she’d bought for the Coakleys’ visit. She’d consulted the salesman to make sure it was a bottle to satisfy an exacting taste. For the last few years, Jack Coakley had been educating himself about wine. He was becoming—he’d taught her the word—an oenophile. The salesman had handed her a Bordeaux whose label she didn’t recognize and said it had big mouthfeel, with strong but creamy tannins, a blend of fruity aromas, and a smoky finish. She’d nodded and tried not to seem lost. It had been more money than she’d planned on spending, and she’d thought about getting a cheaper bottle she was familiar with, but the way he’d looked at her, seeming to evaluate her, had made her carry it up to the counter.

When she was nearly done with the bottle, she called Cindy.

“I almost went to jail,” she said. “And he’s saying, ‘Didn’t we have a wonderful time?’?” She drained the last glass. “This is the best bottle of wine I’ve ever tasted.”

She hung up and began eating her way through the food in the refrigerator—the hors d’oeuvres she’d bought for dinner, leftovers, the cake she’d made that morning.

She felt the tremors of an incipient headache. The headaches were the reason she stayed away from alcohol. She could see the appeal of it, though: the obliteration of the day’s concerns, the loosing of the reins of control, the preoccupation with something as simple as the next drink, the forgetting. The forgetting could be wonderful.




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