When they learned she was going to have a baby, they danced in the kitchen. Cam got down on his knees and kissed her belly—still flat, though by fall it had begun to swell, as her breasts did. Neither one of them cared whether it was a boy or a girl. “Just so long as one of our children learns to play the guitar,” Eleanor said.
She loved almost everything about being pregnant. She didn’t feel sick that much, but when she did, she got under the quilt on their bed with her copy of Spiritual Midwifery by a woman named Ina May Gaskin and her husband, Stephen, who had founded a commune in Tennessee called The Farm, where people came from all over to deliver their babies. Eleanor had the birth stories in the book practically memorized. Sometimes now, driving next to Cam in his truck, she’d read out loud to him from its pages.
“Let me get this straight,” he said, when she read him the part about the most important things a woman’s husband could do when she was in labor. “You’re lying there yelling and screaming and I’m supposed to give you this long, passionate kiss?”
“Stephen says it helps a woman’s cervix dilate,” Eleanor told him. “So the baby can get out easier.”
“Fair enough,” Cam said. “Kissing you always sounds like a good idea.”
They were married that August—a wedding pulled together so fast that the only people in attendance were Patty (still living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, working for an ad agency), and Darla (accompanied by Bobby, who wouldn’t let her attend without him), and Walt and Edith, and a couple of friends of Cam’s who raised goats in Vermont. Cam’s parents, Roger and Roberta, made the drive from Amelia Island, in Florida, arriving the day before the ceremony and taking off the morning after. His brother, Roger Junior, came from Dallas with his wife, Annette—the first time the brothers had seen each other in years, evidently. Darla’s daughter, Kimmie, in her role as flower girl, scattered petals along the path to the makeshift arbor Cam had built, out behind the house, where they said their vows. Cam’s mother sprayed bug repellent wherever she went, and stayed close to Roger Junior and Annette.
Eleanor wore a Gunne Sax dress—unfastened in the back because it didn’t fit over her belly—and a garland of flowers in her hair. Cam wore a white shirt and suspenders and a pair of tuxedo pants she’d found for him at a thrift shop in Keene. A friend of his—one of the goat farmers—played the guitar and sang an Eric Andersen song, “Close the Door Lightly When You Go.” Given that the lyrics were about a couple breaking up, it wasn’t what you could call a wedding song, but Cam had explained that it was one of the few songs whose lyrics Jeremy remembered, so never mind the part about “Fare thee well, sweet love of mine.” The main thing was that he knew all the chords.
They spoke their vows in the field below the house, a few hundred feet from the giant ash tree at the top of the hill. Eleanor read the vows she’d written the afternoon before, on a rock at the waterfall. “I promise my heart will stay open to every single chapter in our lives together, even the hard ones,” she told him. “I know there will be some.”
Cam had a piece of paper, too, that he took from his pocket. She had never seen him cry, but that afternoon, reading the sonnet he’d chosen—Elizabeth Barrett Browning—his voice cracked.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
12.
The Money Part
They made love a lot that summer, and throughout the following fall. In the field behind the house—a mossy patch, their clothes flung on a nearby rock, and under the ash tree, on a blanket Cam laid down for them, and once, around dusk on the kind of drizzly afternoon when nobody was likely to show up for a swim, at the swimming hole below the waterfall. After years of being skinny, she loved the way her body felt as it filled out—as if she were some very ripe piece of fruit.
They kept a record player in their bedroom and put on music every night, a soundtrack to their life. Van Morrison singing “Tupelo Honey.” Cam’s favorites—the Grateful Dead—and Eleanor’s—Emmylou Harris, Buffalo Springfield, Doc Watson. The old albums of sad songs no longer spoke to her as they once had.
“I used to feel sad, even when my parents were still alive, that I wasn’t anybody’s favorite person,” she told Darla. “But I’m Cam’s favorite. I never knew what that felt like before.”
All fall they ate meals of vegetables and grains, healthy food, but she also baked pies and cookies, brownies, poppy seed cake. After the years living alone in the house, it felt good having someone to make meals for. More often than not, they ate naked on the rug by candlelight.
Walt surprised them by stopping by one night with a package that had been delivered to him and Edith by mistake—a gift from Cam’s parents, a mobile featuring Disney characters that played “It’s a Small World.”
Eleanor, when she heard Walt’s truck pulling up, had grabbed her shirt and started pulling on her maternity pants. Cam just sat there, butter from the corncob trickling down his beautiful, freckled skin. But Eleanor buttoned up her shirt as she went to the door.
After Walt gave her the package and drove away, they burst out laughing.
“Maybe he’ll think twice about dropping by unannounced next time,” Cam said later. “Come to think of it, with these breasts of yours, he’ll be stopping by every night now hoping to get a look.” He reached across their shared slice of pie to touch her skin. She felt like the goddess of fertility.
“We should make six babies,” he told her. “Ten.”
“Let’s see how this one goes first,” she said as he pulled her down onto the rug.
Until that winter they had worried surprisingly little about money. Sales of Cam’s burl bowls didn’t bring in much, but he set up his workbench in the barn and turned Eleanor’s writing space into a woodshop while Eleanor moved her desk into the house. Every morning, she worked on the next Bodie book. Every few months she could count on a royalty check showing up in the mailbox from the previous ones. They didn’t live extravagantly, but if she wanted to buy an expensive crib or a pair of earrings or beautiful handmade slippers for Cam, she didn’t think twice about it.
Sometime around Thanksgiving, Eleanor got a call from her agent. “We just got the latest sales figures on the new Bodie book,” she told Eleanor. “It’s just not selling. There’s been a shift. All the kids are into fantasy these days. It’s looking like the Bodie thing has run its course. They aren’t renewing your contract.”
She spent the month of December working on proposals for a new series. Nobody in New York was reading book proposals over Christmas, but in January, when they finally did, all that came in were polite rejections.
In February, property taxes would be due, and the Toyota needed new tires. Then the transmission on Cam’s truck died, and the cost of the repair came in greater than the value of the vehicle. The people who wanted burl bowls all seemed to have bought them by now, with few new customers on the horizon.
A call came from the bank. For the first time ever, the check Eleanor had written for the mortgage on the house had bounced. Insufficient funds.
Cam never let this kind of thing worry him. It had been something Eleanor had loved in the past—how relaxed and carefree he always seemed, how totally oblivious to the practical considerations she lay awake thinking about. But now when she sat at her desk, her head throbbed. She looked down at her huge belly. She finally had the family she’d dreamed about. But all she wanted to do was bake bread or climb into bed and read recipes and seed catalogs. Or maybe do nothing. Her chest constricted.
She started her day making lists of avenues to pursue. Cam started his day running to the waterfall and back. Eleanor was getting frown lines in her forehead. Not Cam.
Often, now, lying in bed at night, Eleanor thought about money. She calculated the cost of installing a washing machine compared to visits to the laundromat and the hourly rate of day care they’d need once their baby was born and she was ready to get back to her writing and drawing—assuming someone would actually pay her again for the work she
did there.
“I guess I got spoiled,” she told Cam. “For all these years, my work was in big demand. I never worried about earning a living.” What had seemed unattainable then had been the family part. And look, now she had that.
“You’ll figure things out,” Cam told her. His choice of pronoun did not go unnoticed. The summer he moved in they’d gotten a bank loan to build him a woodshop out behind the house and he was finishing the roof now, but they both knew—though did not discuss—that his income from the sale of his woodworking projects in no way offset the cost of its construction.
Still, much of what they had was good. Eleanor loved the hum of her husband’s tools out in the shop, and the sound of his whistle when he came back in the house at the end of the long day to wrap his arms around her where she sat in the rocking chair by the woodstove, reading her well-worn copy of Spiritual Midwifery. But she could feel a very small knot forming in her, too—questions she didn’t like to ask herself, but sometimes did. Who contributed what, and how much? Thoughts entered her mind now of a kind that had never arisen before. Why was it always Eleanor who had to figure out where the money came from?
Eleanor’s relationship with Cam was nothing like Darla and Bobby’s, of course. When she talked to Darla—who was still setting aside money to leave Bobby—she felt nothing but lucky that the man she had married was not just handsome and talented but supportive and loving. Nights in their bed, when her husband reached for her—or she for him—her skin still came alive. Just the sight of him stepping in the door at the end of the day, shaking the snow off his boots, still made her draw in her breath. What was a steady paycheck compared to the feeling she got when he put on Donna Summer and he took her in his arms—she with her eight-months-pregnant belly—and twirled her around the kitchen.
“With the baby coming, and me not having another book contract yet,” she said to him one night, in bed, “we might need you to get a real job.”
His expression, when he met her gaze, was not anything she’d seen before.
“I have a real job,” he told her. “I make bowls.”
Usually they made love every night, but that night they didn’t.
She knew he was trying to bring in more money. Saturdays, he set off for craft fairs to sell his work—driving greater distances than before, gone longer hours—and sometimes, though not always, he came home with some cash in his pocket.
Occasionally, Eleanor would go along. A woman in her early twenties, who was wearing earrings made from the feathers of some exotic bird and a pair of handmade sandals, had fallen in love with a burl jewelry box, one of the nicest pieces he’d ever made. When she told Cam she couldn’t afford the price—fifty dollars—he’d placed the box in the young woman’s hands. Her name was Fiona, she told him. She was an astrologer.
“Take it,” Cam said. He put up his hand and stroked the feather dangling from her right ear. “I’ll enjoy thinking about my box holding those beautiful earrings.”
“Let me guess,” Fiona said. “You’re a Scorpio.”
Even Eleanor, who didn’t believe in astrology, knew what that meant.
She watched Fiona float off, feeling the heaviness of her own body—her swollen ankles, her puffy face. Their baby kicked all day long now, and her back ached. As an economy measure, she had stopped buying the expensive cream she used to ask Cam to rub over her belly. When the ritual had ended, somewhere around her fifth month, he seemed not to have noticed. The skin of her belly was covered with striations now. Fiona had worn a midriff top, with a peasant skirt that hung low on her hips.
Another beautiful young woman approached Cam’s table. Didn’t anybody but gorgeous, penniless twenty-two-year-olds love burl bowls?
Eleanor told herself not to worry. The money part would work out. She was part of a family now.
13.
Here’s Your Daughter
They didn’t have health insurance. Even if they’d had the money for a hospital, she and Cam had decided after studying Spiritual Midwifery that their baby would be born at home. Eleanor had located a midwife who lived outside of Concord, a thirty-mile drive from Akersville. Valerie was in her early forties—a single mother of three girls, who sometimes came along with her to attend births. Once a month, Eleanor traveled to Concord for her checkup. In the fall, when she’d failed to get a new publishing contract, she had asked Valerie if they might pay the last installments for attending the birth with a large burl bowl. When Valerie agreed, Eleanor realized that saving the money accounted for only part of her happiness in the arrangement. It felt good to know that Cam was contributing to supporting their baby’s care. “If only we could pay the property taxes in bowls,” she said, the day they delivered Valerie’s.
Two weeks before her February due date, with Cam off in Vermont at another fair, she made the thirty-mile drive to the midwife by herself. It was already snowing lightly when she took off that morning, but by the time she set out for home—with the news that she was three centimeters dilated—the road was slick and the windshield kept icing up. A couple of miles from home, Eleanor hit a patch of ice and crashed into a tree. When she looked up the car had spun a full 180 degrees.
The instant before impact, her hand left the wheel to rest on her belly—the baby not yet born but already her instinct to protect it overtaking everything else, as it would continue to do a few thousand times in the years to come. Later, Eleanor would see the bruise from where her forehead hit the windshield and feel the throbbing in her neck. But at the time, all she felt was the quick, firm kick of the baby—the now-familiar foot, or maybe it was a hand, pressing out just under her rib cage.
“You’re okay,” she said out loud. Nobody else in the car but her not-born baby.
The engine had stalled on impact, so she turned the key. Nothing. For a few minutes all Eleanor could do was sit in the driver’s seat of their undrivable car, her parka no longer zipping up over her belly, staring out through the shattered windshield at a tree branch resting across the glass. Sitting in the front seat, the little pine-scented cardboard tree still spinning—and outside, snow falling around her—Eleanor tried not to think about what came next. When she stepped out of the car, she took in the crumpled front end of the Toyota—the same vehicle their handful of friends had decorated with tin cans and brown-eyed Susans on their wedding day the summer before and painted with the words “Call Us Crazy, We Did It.”
Now that day felt like a hundred years ago.
Walt and Edith’s house was not that far. She knew once she got there, Walt would drive her home.
Later, when Cam got back, they had the car towed, but it was beyond salvaging. Nothing for it then but to wait for the insurance money to come through, and hard to say, when it did, what kind of vehicle they could find with the eight-hundred-dollar settlement. But Eleanor wasn’t hurt, and the baby was fine—all that really mattered.
“You shouldn’t have been driving by yourself like that,” Walt had said to her, as he stoked the woodstove after driving her home. “Where is your husband?”
Over the days that followed, as the snow kept falling and she crossed the days off the calendar, they made do with what they had in the freezer and a delivery of quiche brought in by their neighbors Simon and Tilda down the road, on snowshoes.
Darla had a low opinion of the home birth plan, observing that her own three days at the hospital following the birth of her daughter, Kimmie, six years earlier had been the only time she could remember when someone actually took care of her, as her husband, Bobby, definitely did not.
“Take advantage of the vacation,” she’d told Eleanor.
The snow kept falling. Even in the midst of her worry, there was no denying the beauty of what they saw out the window, and most of all its aftermath—the snowdrifts, like sheets draped over the furniture at some old English country estate, covering up the mess (rusting propane tanks, the busted washing machine discarded back in the spring) so all you could make out was a single expanse of white
, vast and unbroken. On the last night of the storm, the snow had turned briefly to freezing rain, so when they woke up every branch and twig—also the electric wires to the house, and the clothesline, and the two mismatched socks still dangling from it—were encased in ice. The sun came out then, and for a few hours the sight of it all was so brilliant that when he went outside to shovel, Cam had to put on his sunglasses. He looked, that morning, like a movie star.
The world never looked more peaceful than it did right after snow fell. The only vehicles on the road were the creeping snowplows scraping the frozen dirt, but it would be hours before one of those reached their little farmhouse. For a few days, Eleanor occupied herself with baking—casseroles from her Tassajara cookbook, granola, whole wheat muffins that she wrapped in foil and stored in the freezer they’d bought with what was left of the advance from the last Bodie book. The pregnancy, and the worries about money, had left her with a fixation on storing food. (She left one muffin out of the batch for Cam, but took none for herself.)
“Take a picture,” she said to Cam, placing the stash in the one spot not yet filled with all the other foods she’d prepared, for their future. Better to see it all there, with the labels facing out, and the dates, than to actually consume any of what she’d set aside. The contents of that freezer were the closest they had to money in the bank. It occurred to her, as he took the picture that day, of her in his stretched-out hockey shirt—her amazing breasts, her belly presented to the camera like some prize she’d won at a fair—that this would be the only photograph she had of herself pregnant. Cam was never one for taking pictures. “I keep it all in my head,” he told her.
That afternoon—day nine since the snow had begun falling, almost nonstop—standing at the sink filling the teakettle, Eleanor felt a burst of warm water trickle down her leg.
“It’s going to happen today,” she said to Cam, dialing the midwife. Valerie lived half an hour’s drive away, but she had four-wheel drive, and the plow had finally made it down their driveway sometime in the early hours of morning. There was one good thing.
Count the Ways Page 8
