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.”