We Are Not Ourselves

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.

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