Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  She put on her Doc Watson record. Shady grove, my little love, shady grove, my darling. Happy songs, mostly. This was not a Joni Mitchell moment, or one for Bob Dylan, either. She heated soup and set a bowl of bread dough next to the woodstove to rise. “By the time it’s baked there might be another person in this house,” she told Cam. Someone who didn’t enter through the door.

  By midafternoon, the contractions were coming strong, the spaces between them shorter in duration. She called Valerie again.

  Walt stopped by in his truck. She could hear him talking with Cam in the kitchen. “Back when Edith delivered Walt Junior and Cassie, they made the fathers sit outside in the waiting room,” he said. “Times sure have changed.”

  “Or gone back to how it used to be,” Cam pointed out. Theirs was not the first baby born in this house.

  “You got a point there,” Walt told him. “If it ain’t broken, why fix it?”

  After Walt left, Cam’s friend Jeremy showed up with supplies—a box of Cocoa Puffs and his recycled copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for Cam, and a tie-dye T-shirt in size zero. From the bedroom, Eleanor could hear the two of them, her husband and his friend, whooping it up about the Celtics game—John Havlicek had just pulled off a miracle shot from mid-court—and the swimsuit model he found particularly hot. Jeremy had a bead on a car for them: a Plymouth Valiant, always a good bet. The car had twelve years on it, all but the last few months of them spent in the state of Georgia.

  “This one’s a peach, buddy,” she heard Jeremy tell Cam. Slant-six engine. Push-button transmission.

  Their neighbor Betsy stopped by with her daughter, Coco, in tow. “We thought you might like some banana bread,” Betsy said. “Coco made it herself.” Eleanor got up briefly to say hello, and because she thought the pain might not be so bad, standing up, but it was. She took in the sight of their neighbor’s little girl just for a moment, Cam, kneeling beside her so they were at eye level, explaining how burls formed on trees.

  More contractions now. Sharper than before, and so close together that as soon as she caught her breath from one, another overtook her. Eleanor knelt on the floor, her cheek against the wood, remembering the nights she and Cam had made love in this spot.

  Now came the strongest contraction yet. Eleanor pictured Valerie at the wheel of her four-wheel drive, making her way along the snowy roads toward the farmhouse. Come soon.

  A sound came out of her then that she’d never heard before, the sound a person makes when she’s doing the hardest thing she ever attempted. From the living room came the roar of the fans, and Bob Cousy announcing some amazing play. She heard whooping from Jeremy in the living room; the Celtics must be winning.

  Valerie arrived—door swinging open, door slamming shut, her daughter Asa in her sleeper suit, carrying the Fisher-Price farm set. Eleanor heard Valerie talking to Cam—“You won’t even know she’s here.” Then the sound of the faucet—Valerie washing her hands, laying out towels and a bowl of water, warming a stack of blankets on the woodstove, unpacking her roll of implements. Cam, back at Eleanor’s side, telling her she was doing great. Asa, in the corner, making animal noises.

  Eleanor, in the brief calm between contractions, lay on the bed, legs apart, knees bent.

  Valerie returned to the room and inspected her. “You’re almost there,” she said. “Eight centimeters.” She laid her towel out on the table by the bed and set out swabs, speculum, scissors. A pitcher of water. A bowl of ice cubes.

  “It’s good to walk,” Valerie told Eleanor, but her body had started to tremble, in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room, which was plenty warm enough. That morning Cam had stoked their woodstove to the top and opened the dampers.

  Another voice at the door. Darla’s. The sound boots make when you slap them against the side of the woodstove to knock the ice off.

  It was dark out, a full-moon night. The moonlight came in the bedroom window, slashing across the blue double-wedding-ring quilt. From the kitchen, Asa was asking if they had any chocolate milk. Darla was talking to Cam, who had defrosted a steak when the contractions first started. Now he was setting it in the pan.

  “I wasn’t sure my car would make it.” Darla was in the doorway now. “Thought you might like these.”

  A bag of Florida oranges tumbled out on the bed and rolled onto the floor. From her spot at the foot of the bed (Eleanor breathing hard now, sweating), Darla dug into the peel of one with her thumbnail, and a spurt of orange sprayed into the air. Between breaths, Eleanor took in the scent like a meal.

  From the kitchen, another smell, but this made her feel sick. The odor of meat. Cam’s steak, sizzling in the pan.

  “Take it outside,” Eleanor said, between contractions. “I’m going to throw up.” A look came over Valerie’s face—impatience, irritation, the expression of a woman accustomed to the failures and disappointments provided by men. This was not the first time in her days as a midwife that a father had proved himself oblivious to the strains of his wife’s labor. Not the first time a sporting event provided the soundtrack to a child’s birth.

  The contractions got stronger. Cam returned, taking his place on the bed next to Eleanor. From the living room, she could hear the sound of the basketball game.

  Then no more words. Everything coming fast and faster. Cam was pulling Eleanor up on the pillows, bracing her back, Darla rubbing her shoulders. At the foot of the bed, with the reading lamp in position to illuminate the place where the baby would make its entrance, knelt the midwife.

  Cam leaned in to kiss Eleanor, as recommended in Spiritual Midwifery. An open-mouth kiss, meant to help Eleanor dilate those last two centimeters. Eleanor could smell steak on his breath.

  On the third push, she was overcome by the most searing pain—like hot metal branding flesh, like her whole body ripping in two, a jagged tearing of her softest, most tender part.

  Then the baby spiraled out of her, and everything else—steak, Celtics, swimsuit models, Fisher-Price animals, oranges—fell away.

  They saw her face first—small and round, and wailing, with large black eyes and a full head of hair. Valerie ran a hand over the creamy white substance covering her skin and placed it on her own cheeks and around her eyes.

  “Vernix,” she said. “The best moisturizer ever invented. How else did you think I got to be this age without any wrinkles?”

  Laughter. More talk of basketball. Jeremy entering from the living room, where the game had ended by now.

  “She looks like Bill Walton,” he said.

  What was he doing here anyway? Eleanor wanted to be alone with Cam.

  “Here’s your daughter,” Valerie said. Then Alison was in her arms, and nothing else mattered.

  14.

  Second Fiddle

  A week after Alison was born—March now, snow melting, mud season—the insurance check for their wrecked Toyota showed up in the mailbox, and they purchased the 1965 Plymouth Valiant with Georgia plates. There was just enough money left over for a car seat and a Johnny Jump Up, recommended by Darla.

  Eleanor’s milk came in, her breasts cartoonishly inflated. She wept at the sight of her body—her belly still protruding, everything soft. Nobody had prepared her for this part. Her husband could enter into fatherhood with his body unscathed, his stomach as flat as it ever was, those same abdominal muscles rippling over that perfect chest. But after delivery, Eleanor bore stretch marks and shredded skin in the most intimate place of her body, not to mention thirty extra pounds.

  Three weeks after the birth, a woman who saw Eleanor in the grocery store asked, “When is your baby due?”

  Afterward, out in the parking lot, she leaned against the steering wheel and wept.

  There was one part that thrilled her, though: the power she possessed, within her own body, to nourish their daughter. When Alison cried, all she ever needed was Eleanor’s nipple, and the world was right again. Eleanor gloried in the wild, animal connection she had with this chi
ld. She had only to hear Alison’s voice—and sometimes, had only to walk into the room and see her lying there—for milk to come pouring out of her.

  Cam loved Alison, too, of course. But it was different for him. At this point in Alison’s life the most important thing in her world was getting fed, and Cam couldn’t provide that. Eleanor considered, for a moment, how it must feel for a man at moments like these—holding his infant daughter, hearing her scream, and knowing there was nothing he could do for her but hand her to her mother. The powerlessness of that.

  “I know he’s trying,” Eleanor said. “But at this point, Cam almost feels”—she felt guilty saying this out loud—“superfluous.”

  “Tell me about it,” Darla said. “All Bobby wanted to do, after Kimmie was born, was hand out cigars and drink shots of tequila and ask if we could have sex yet.”

  Eleanor did not share Darla’s bitterness. But the thought had occurred to her that once the impregnation part was over, there wasn’t a whole lot for a father to do besides folding and changing the diapers and standing around, trying to be supportive.

  She thought about her parents, and how, for them, she had been a kind of interloper in their love affair. Her birth had been grudgingly accepted—her presence in their lives like the regrettable but necessary visit of a relative from out of town who overstays her welcome.

  For Eleanor’s child—Eleanor and Cam’s—it would be different. Alison’s birth marked the beginning of a new kind of love affair—hers with their daughter. If there was an outsider in the story, it was Cam. “I didn’t know it was possible to love anybody so much,” she said to Walt and Edith, when they came by to see the baby.

  Walt had patted Cam on the back with the air of a man welcoming a comrade into a new and unfamiliar club.

  “From here on out, you play second fiddle, bud,” he said. “Might as well get used to it.”

  15.

  Ships in the Night

  It was hard to understand how one very small infant who slept most of the time could have created so much upheaval in their lives, but Eleanor was exhausted all the time, inhabiting a state that somehow combined euphoria with sorrow.

  They had created this precious, miraculous person. Whole hours passed in which all Eleanor wanted to do was hold Alison and study her face. But there was this other part: her body belonged to her child now. She could hardly remember who she had been before. Somehow, in the course of becoming a mother, she had lost a piece of herself.

  The sadness came to her, in a rush, every time she placed Alison on her nipple to nurse. Some hormone must have released itself into her bloodstream, she figured, but knowing it was her own body chemistry playing tricks didn’t make any less real the feeling that she was plummeting down some bottomless well.

  For Cam, none of the same hormones came into play, but he felt the effects of Eleanor’s. Her breasts, that had been, for Cam, a source of seemingly endless pleasure—never more so than during her pregnancy—were vessels of milk now, whose sole function was to feed their child. One night, in bed, not so long after the birth of their daughter, he had reached over to touch them, and she recoiled as swiftly as if she’d received an electric shock.

  Afterward, she apologized. “It just doesn’t feel right anymore, you touching me there,” she told him.

  They were having sex again by this point—not so often as before, or as energetically. It was disconcerting to Eleanor that more often than not, when they made love—no matter how quietly—Alison would wake from her sleep in the little basket they put her in at the side of their bed, and cry out—as if she knew something was going on that wasn’t about her, and she didn’t like it. Here came the reminder: she was the center of their universe now.

  “You don’t have to pick her up right this second,” Cam whispered. “She’s okay.”

  But the mood was broken.

  Alison was six weeks old when Eleanor returned to her desk. In the absence of a new book contract, she was drawing illustrations for a series of elementary school reading textbooks. The work didn’t bring in much money, and it was unexciting, but it provided regular checks, and they needed those.

  She figured out a way to hold her daughter—nurse her, even—while she was drawing. She had figured out a way to sit with her legs folded in a kind of modified lotus position, with Alison cradled against her mother’s thigh, and propped against her nursing breast.

  There had been a time when Eleanor would visit Cam in the barn almost every afternoon when their work was winding down, with a beer for them both, and more often than not they would peel off each other’s clothes and lie down on the foam mat he kept out there, for just this purpose.

  This happened less frequently now. One day, when she’d come out to the woodshop—she needed his signature on their tax return—Cam mentioned that he couldn’t even remember the last time they’d made love.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I’m just so tired.” These days, if there was ever a half hour when the baby was sleeping and there was no laundry to wash, all she’d want to do with it was to be alone.

  They no longer spoke about the old dream of ten children, or six, or even four. They’d catch sight of each other across the room, like two people who had met once, long ago, but couldn’t remember where.

  One time, out on the road, when she was driving into town—a grocery run, a trip to the dump—Eleanor had passed Cam, driving the opposite direction, at the wheel of his old green truck they’d finally managed to get running again. And for a split second, catching sight of her husband, she actually failed to recognize him. For a moment there, seeing his face, she thought, What a handsome man. Then she remembered: she was married to him.

  Ships passing in the night. It sometimes felt that way. And yet it was also true that having made this baby together—this person—and sharing in the strange and mysterious adventure of these early days with her had brought them closer.

  Days went by that Eleanor didn’t get out of her sweatpants. Some nights, all they could manage to throw together for dinner was a bowl of canned soup. But sometime in early September—just when the leaves were starting to turn and the first frost hit their tomato plants—Eleanor decided to make a special dinner for the two of them—spaghetti carbonara, with the last of their garden greens on the side, and homemade brownies for dessert. She picked up a bottle of Chianti at the liquor store. (Candles, they always kept on hand.) She waited until they had Alison in her crib, then changed into the one nice dress she owned that she could still fit into. She put on her Al Green album. Then lipstick.

  Cam, when he came in from his run, looked around the darkened room—just three candles and an oil lamp burning—with puzzlement. It had been that long.

  “What’s the occasion?” he asked her. “Did I miss something?”

  “Nothing in particular,” she said. “I just thought we should remind ourselves where all this baby stuff came from in the first place. You and me.”

  They ate by the fire, the way they had in the old days. (Not so old. It hadn’t even been two years since they’d met.) At one point during the meal, Cam had reached across the table to take her hand and brought it to his lips. “You’re still a beautiful woman,” he told her.

  “I don’t feel that way.”

  After, they brought the candles into the bedroom. Since Alison’s birth, Eleanor had been undressing in the dark, mostly, and sleeping in a nightgown, unbuttoned in the front to make it easier when the baby came into bed with them to nurse.

  “Let me see you,” he said, holding out the oil lamp.

  Six weeks later, her period was late.

  “I didn’t think you could get pregnant while you were nursing,” she said, when she told him. She had worried that Cam might be upset. She wasn’t sure herself how she felt about the idea of another baby, so soon after the first. But he threw his arms around her and let out a whoop.

  “I have no idea how we’ll pay for this,” she said.

  “There you go again.” He gri
nned. “It’s only money.”

  16.

  A First Baseman’s Wife

  I joined a softball team,” Cam told her, hopping out of the truck after a Saturday morning run to the town dump. “They’re called the Yellow Jackets.”

  To Eleanor, this seemed like an odd moment for her husband to take on a commitment to play ball three nights a week. It was April, six weeks past Alison’s first birthday, with three months to go before the new baby came. He was already headed to the garage to look for his old glove.

  “They made me first baseman,” he said. “Long-armed lefty. How can I go wrong?”

  That Tuesday night, he went alone to his game, but when he came home he told her how all the players’ wives liked coming to the games. “It’s a great group of guys,” Cam said. “I bet you’ll like the women, too. Everybody’s got little kids and babies on the way. You’re always saying you wished you knew more people in town.”

  After that, Eleanor never missed a game. Cam was right: it was fun sitting on the bleachers at the dusty ball field with Alison in her arms or on a blanket next to her on cool spring evenings (and, later, warm summer nights). Half watching the players, but mostly (always with an eye on the older children, playing in the dirt a little ways from the field) talking with the other wives—an experience she’d never had before—about all the small, seemingly insignificant details of their children’s lives that, at the time, consumed them: whether to use a pacifier, when to start solid food, what to do if you observed your four-year-old masturbating. They talked about other things besides the children, too. Recipes, for sure. But also, particularly after a beer—and there was always beer—the conversation came around to sex. Who was having it. Who wasn’t. Who still cared about it.