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.”