He waited for the sensation of panicked blankness to come back, and after a while he started to wonder whether it had happened at all or whether he’d conjured it out of his fears. Something in the scene in the classroom had triggered it, some nagging déjà vu. He kept circling back to the moment when he turned to the board and saw the single word and didn’t remember how it got there. It hovered inscrutably, an insistent message in it.
He thought of the visit he had paid to his father’s own classroom before anyone knew what was really going on with him. He had watched his father come apart before his eyes.
Empathy. He hadn’t always had it. It was a muscle you had to develop and then keep conditioned. Sometimes he thought his real goal wasn’t to teach them to write better essays but to get them to think more about what it meant to be human.
Michelle had been trying to persuade him to reconsider his firm stance against having children, a child. He had told her from the beginning that he wasn’t comfortable taking the chance he’d get the disease or that the kid would. The line was going to end with him, he had said, and she had accepted it, until she lost her mother after Christmas.
He took out his wallet and dug around in the recesses of its folds for the little piece of tooth. He held it in the sunlight, felt the smooth enamel against his fingertips. It could have been a sliver of seashell, a shard of stone or scree. He had transferred it from wallet to wallet over the years. He had to stop torturing himself with it. He wasn’t helping anyone with all this regret.
He had agreed the night before to go in for genetic testing. She had gotten him to commit to having a child if he definitely didn’t have the gene. It struck him now that what he had been thinking about when he drew a blank before the class was an idea of this potential child. He could see a suggestion of this child’s face, an amalgam of his wife’s and his own. The truth was that even if he had the gene, he’d be willing to have a kid anyway, and not just because there was a chance he wouldn’t get the disease. If he got it, he’d do whatever he needed to do to shield the kid from it as long as he could.
The truth, he saw now, was that he wanted more than anything to have a child with his wife. Her life was as sparsely populated as his was, familywise. After her mother’s passing, her father had moved out to California to live with her brother, Ricky. Except for a cousin in Houston, Michelle didn’t have anyone else. Michelle and his mother had circled around each other for a few years. At first he thought it had to do with Michelle’s being Nicaraguan American, but lately he believed it had more to do with the fact that Michelle and his mother both had such strong personalities. They butted heads without the release of ever actually meaning to do so. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Michelle was a lawyer, that she’d been a clerk for a Supreme Court judge and was now at a corporate law firm. She’d already lived a lot of the life his mother might have wanted to live, and she wasn’t even thirty-five. His mother and Michelle had gotten close enough lately, though, that Michelle was now the one who called his mother when they had to make plans with her, and when they went over to his mother’s house, Michelle and his mother sat at the kitchen table after dinner playing backgammon while he watched television in the den. He knew that if he had a kid, Michelle and his mother could pull together even more, and it wasn’t hard to imagine Michelle calling his mother “Mami” soon enough, which he thought would make both of them happy.
He could honor his father by loving the kid the way his father had loved him. And if he had to be vulnerable in front of the kid, if he had to be defenseless and useless and pathetic, if he had to forget things and piss himself and get lost on the way home, then so be it. If the kid didn’t handle it well—well, that was what kids did. They went out too often, they stayed out too late, they said things that cut to the quick, they forgot responsibilities, they broke your heart. Years later they thought about it all.
And what did parents do? They saw more clearly than their kids did. They forgave their kids, even if they didn’t say so. Even if they couldn’t say so. They did.
He couldn’t wait to get home to his wife. She would be surprised by his change of heart. She might be more surprised by how much he had to say. She was always trying to get him to talk. Well, tonight he was going to talk. She wasn’t going to be able to shut him up. He was going to tell the whole story, even the parts he wasn’t proud of. He would have to find a way to tell it so it made some kind of sense. He would have to tell it from the beginning. He’d have to give her enough detail to let her see it for herself. It was lucky that he had such a good memory for that kind of thing. It was all in there somewhere, he was sure of that. He would dig it out.
He rose and walked to the fence that cordoned off the edge of the island. He took one last look at the little chip of tooth and tossed it in the water. It disappeared without even the tiniest detectable splash, to settle unseen on the riverbed. Maybe in a few thousand years it would make its way out to the ocean. Maybe in another few thousand it would wash up on the shore of a wholly different world, with new species, a different atmosphere, and a tenuous place for man. For now, while he breathed and moved, while he felt and thought, there was still, between this moment and the one of his dying, the interval allotted to him, and there was so much to live for in it: the citrus snap of fresh black tea; the compression and release of a warm stack of folded towels carried to the closet between two hands; the tinny resonance of children in the distance when heard through a bedroom window; the mouth-fullness of cannoli cream; the sudden twitch of a horse’s ear to chase a fly; the neon green of the outfield grass; the map of wrinkles in one’s own hand; the smell and feel, even the taste of dirt; the comfort of a body squeezed against one’s own.
He would hug his kid as much as he could. “Good,” he’d say. “Good. Good.”
Acknowledgments
For the titles of parts I, III, IV and V, I am indebted to The Great Gatsby, “Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell, “Love Song: I and Thou,” by Alan Dugan, and “Meditation at Lagunitas,” by Robert Hass.
Many thanks to: Stephen Boykewich, Aidan Byrne, Joshua Ferris, Chad Harbach, Christopher Hood, and Tracy Tong, for careful reads and useful notes; Aaron Ackermann, Bonnie Altro, Charles Bock, John James, Matthew McGough, David Moon, Bergin O’Malley, Brad Pasanek, Amanda Rea, Chris Wiedmann, and Boris Wolfson, for friendship, encouragement, and support; all my teachers, especially Tristan Davies, Eric DiMichele, Stephen Dixon, Judith Grossman, Michelle Latiolais, Alice McDermott, Jean McGarry, John Mullin, David Powelstock, Mark Richard, Jim Shepard, Malynne Sternstein, William Veeder, Michael Vode, Robert von Hallberg, Greg Williamson, and Geoffrey Wolff; my classmates at Hopkins and Irvine; the staff and community at Paragraph, where I wrote a substantial portion of this book; my beloved colleagues at Xavier High School, especially Margaret Gonzalez, Ben Hamm, Mike LiVigni, and the entire English department; my extraordinary agent Bill Clegg, along with Chris Clemans, Raffaella De Angelis, Anna DeRoy, and Elizabeth Sheinkman at WME; my brilliant editor Marysue Rucci, publisher Jonathan Karp, and so many others at Simon & Schuster, especially Elizabeth Breeden, Andrea deWerd, Cary Goldstein, Emily Graff, Jessica Lawrence, Christopher Lin, Carolyn Reidy, Richard Rhorer, Lisa Rivlin, and Wendy Sheanin; copyeditor Peg Haller; Clare Reihill at Fourth Estate; Caroline Ast at Belfond; Mickey Quinn, for sharing his memories with me; my sister Liz Janocha and brother-in-law John; my mother and father, for a lifetime of love and stories; and my wife, Joy, for her indispensable edits and remarkable forbearance in giving me time to write while we raised twin babies in a one-bedroom apartment.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
READING GROUP GUIDE
We Are Not Ourselves
Matthew Thomas
About This Guide
This reading group guide for We Are Not Ourselves includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Matthew Thomas. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Epic in scope, heroic in character, and masterful in prose, We Are Not Ourselves is a multigenerational portrait of the Irish American Leary family.
Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed.
When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger stakes in the American Dream. Although she encourages him to want more, as the years pass it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future.
Through the Leary family, novelist Matthew Thomas charts the story of the American Century. At once expansive and exquisitely detailed, We Are Not Ourselves is a riveting and affecting work of art––one that reminds us that life is more than a tally of victories and defeats, that we live to love and be loved, and that we should tell one another so before the moment slips away.