Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  Cam was among the younger players when he joined the team—the others were in their thirties, mostly, though the catcher, Buck Hollingsworth, was probably over forty, judging by his hairline and his gut.

  Rich McGann was the Yellow Jackets’ main pitcher (his wife, Carol, was a nurse who sometimes arrived late to games, still in scrubs). Sal Perrone played second base, no doubt unaware that back in the bleachers, his wife, Lucinda, was making appreciative comments about every reasonably nice-looking man who came up to bat, drawing unfavorable comparisons to Sal. Sal was the slowest runner on the team, but he could hit. He had more home runs than anyone, though every time he hit one, this look of astonishment came over his face, as if he couldn’t quite believe a person like himself had accomplished this.

  The weakest player on the team was Harry Botts, who’d opened a coffee bar that sold used records in a long-abandoned storefront on the main street of Akersville. Every year or two, some outsider would move to town and open some interesting little business: a bookstore, a ceramics gallery, a health food co-op. Usually they closed within the year. But Harry’s record store had survived a half dozen seasons, mostly because he had a trust fund, people said.

  The Yellow Jackets were the first team Harry had ever played on, and they’d put him in the outfield, where he had yet to field a single ball. His at-bats were understood to be guaranteed strikeouts. But the players maintained a certain amused affection for Harry, and it helped that he never showed up without a cooler of good German beer. That, and his Cubs hat. Nobody knew what had brought Harry from Chicago to Akersville—an unlikely move—but they embraced him as a kind of mascot. He might not know anything about the game of softball, but he never failed to show up with the beer.

  Eleanor’s most frequent companion on the bench was Peggy Olin, whose husband, Bob, played shortstop. Every time he slid into a base, Peggy groaned. “You know how hard it was getting out the grass stains last time?” she said to Eleanor.

  Peggy and Bob had a daughter, Gina, a year older than Alison, and an older daughter, Katie, who led games of red light, green light and tag with the younger kids. The summer they met, Peggy had recently read a book by Adelle Davis that inspired her to transform her family’s diet. She handed out samples of healthy but barely edible snacks that the children generally disposed of once they were out of sight while, off at the hot dog stand, her husband scarfed down fries.

  Peggy believed in breastfeeding on demand—was still nursing three-year-old Gina, and never missed an opportunity to comment when she saw one of the other mothers taking out a bottle of formula. “Don’t they know all the health benefits their child is missing out on when they give them that stuff?” Peggy said to Eleanor. Eleanor breastfed, too, though not as determinedly as Peggy did. (Two years later, Peggy would still be giving her daughter her breast on occasion, though by age four Gina could unbutton her mother’s shirt and ask for it.) Gina was large for three—a pale-skinned strawberry blonde who mostly sat on the bleachers with her mother and required constant reapplication of sunscreen and bug spray.

  Observing this, Bonnie Henderson—wife of the third baseman—rolled her eyes. Bonnie was that other type of mother, whose parenting philosophy, if she had one, mainly involved giving her two sons a large bag of cheese puffs and a Coke at the beginning of every game and shooting a stream of ice-cold water from her boys’ squirt guns in their direction any time one of them acted up. Back before kids, she’d worked as a corrections officer at the state prison, and still employed a few of her old techniques.

  “If I’m walking a little funny today, girls,” Bonnie told them one evening, “it’s on account of all the crazy stuff Jerry and I were up to last night.” Her stories tended to feature times their children had come into their bedroom at an inopportune moment—which could have been just about any moment, to hear Bonnie tell it—or surprising places where they’d had sex.

  “I think she’s making it up,” Carol said.

  “I don’t know,” Lucinda offered. “Did you see the way Jerry cupped his hand around Bonnie’s butt the other night, after he came in from hitting that home run?”

  Partly, the women were shocked. More so, envious. Though none of the women seemed deeply unhappy with their lives. They were young. Their children were healthy, and so were they. The banter of those summer nights felt less like complaint than a ritual of bonding, a way for the women to make connections with each other, over the shared travails of children and husbands, judgmental mothers-in-law and losing the baby weight.

  Partway through the season, a new player joined the team. Two of them, actually: Ray and Timmy Pouliot. Ray was a relief pitcher whose specialty was a knuckleball. He worked as a carpenter and wore wifebeater shirts that showed off his muscles. It took Eleanor a few minutes to realize that Timmy, drafted for right field, was the same person she’d met years before, that day she’d gone to the falls, when he’d admired her drawing and asked her if she had a boyfriend. Eleanor remembered the story Timmy told her about finding his father in the garage that day. The gun.

  She figured he must be eighteen years old, and he had filled out. He had a compact build, and a tattoo of his father’s name on his bicep, but Eleanor still recognized a certain angelic softness in those incredibly blue eyes of his—sadness maybe—that set him apart from the other men on the team.

  The Pouliot brothers rode motorcycles. The two of them generally arrived just as the game was starting, roaring up to the ball field on their Harleys, no helmets; you could hear them coming all the way from Main Street.

  Timmy’s girlfriend that summer was Mandy, who worked at the Stop & Shop checkout. At the beginning of the season she’d sat on the bleachers with the other players’ wives, but when the conversation turned as it generally did to pregnancies and breastfeeding, day care and playgroups, she drifted over to the edge of the field in her midriff top and short shorts to help Coco with whatever project she’d taken on that evening—French braiding everybody’s hair, more often than not—or else she’d just stand there watching the game. When it was over, she hopped on the back of the bike and wrapped her arms around Timmy’s waist, and the two of them took off in a cloud of dust.

  Eleanor was eight and a half months into her second pregnancy by this point in the season. Her back ached all the time now, and she’d developed an odd rash on her face. That night, lying with Cam in the dark, her head nestled into his chest, she spoke of the Pouliot brothers.

  “That was some catch Ray made,” Cam offered.

  “That girlfriend Timmy brought to the game has an amazing body,” Eleanor said. She had not yet lost the weight from having Alison when she’d gotten pregnant again. “Mandy,” Eleanor said. “The blonde.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” he told her.

  17.

  Black Ice

  A few miles down the road from where they lived, there was a lake where they’d skated, that first winter before Alison’s birth. Eleanor’s center of gravity was off, due to her large and growing belly, but she’d managed to get across the ice, with Cam’s arm around her for support. The ice was uneven, though, and Eleanor’s back hurt. They only stayed out for a few minutes. But it was a good day.

  A year later, newly pregnant with Ursula, with a baby to care for now, it had been harder to get out on her skates. Then came one of those rare and precious days (sometimes whole years went by between them) when the perfect combination of meteorological events took place: A hard freeze. No snow. Rain maybe, followed by frigid temperatures that left a layer of black ice over everything. Perfect skating conditions.

  They discovered this on a night they’d been at the movies—a rare evening out, Darla babysitting for Alison. Eleanor and Cam had pulled over by the side of the frozen lake to take in the full moon.

  “You know what we need to do,” Cam said to Eleanor, as they stood on the embankment, looking out.

  They kept their skates in the back seat for moments like this. Now they laced them up and stepped out onto the
ice. With no light but what the moon provided, they took off across the lake, just the two of them.

  That night the ice was glass—Eleanor’s skate blades newly sharpened, her husband’s arm around her waist, one of her mittened hands in his. A sensation came over her—she could still summon it—as close to flight as Eleanor would ever know. Remember this moment, she thought.

  They’d heard a strange groaning sound under their skate blades then, like an ancient sea creature waking from a long sleep to find himself trapped under the ice and pushing to escape. Eleanor had thought the frozen lake was giving way, but Cam told her it was just the ice expanding.

  “We’re safe,” he said. “I won’t let you fall through.”

  The months after the birth of Ursula, that July, stretched out in a kind of milky blur for Eleanor. There was always someone who needed to be fed and held and someone who needed to be changed and a basket of laundry to be washed and a sinkful of dishes to be washed and somewhere in there, someone had to be earning a living. That turned out to be Eleanor, mostly. Cam was an endlessly entertaining father—funny and tender and surprising. You never knew when he might burst into the door with a jar of tadpoles he’d collected in the brook for the children to keep in a bucket and study, or a hand-carved dog he’d made for Alison (he spent all day on that), or, one winter, a snowy owl he found dead on the road, frozen in a storm and perfectly intact. One day he came home with a stack of 45s from the 1960s that he’d picked up at a yard sale on the way back from a craft fair. Alison was only three at the time, and Ursula only just walking, but they put them on, one after another, and had a dance party in the kitchen—with Ursula in Eleanor’s arms and Alison on Cam’s shoulders.

  More than anything, he loved showing them artifacts from the natural world: he’d put his hand in his pocket and, when it emerged, set down a strange, mysterious pellet that turned out to be animal scat—coyote, possibly, or fox, or moose even—that, when you picked it apart, contained small pieces of bones and fur from whatever the animal whose scat it was had eaten for dinner the night before. He knew the names of the constellations and the stories that went with them, and he could carve a doll with his penknife or make a fort out of an old cardboard box covered with an umbrella. He brought home finger paint, and let the girls cover one whole wall of the garage with it.

  Still he wasn’t the kind of father with whom Eleanor could leave two small children for a stretch of hours while she worked. She’d set up a desk at one end of the kitchen, close enough to keep an eye on the children, but it was hard to concentrate there. “I’m happy to help you out,” he’d say—a phrase that would once have sounded benign but now struck Eleanor as carrying with it the implicit belief that primary care of their children rested with her. She started to say something about his easy, offhand assumption but stopped herself.

  There had been a time, and it lasted years, when all Eleanor supposed she needed was to love someone deeply, someone who loved her back, and she had this now. And she had her family—the thing she’d wanted above all else. But there was also, now, a place in her where something like a small, hard nut of resentment resided. She could almost feel it there sometimes—watching the cool ease of the way Cam mounted his bicycle and headed out on a ride some Saturday morning, with the dishes from the waffles he’d made—he was a joyous but messy cook—still stacked high in the sink.

  “When do I get to take a Saturday morning off to go on an adventure?” she asked, out in the driveway as he pumped up the tires.

  “Be honest with yourself, El,” he said to her. “Do you actually see yourself getting on a mountain bike on a Saturday morning?”

  He had nailed it, of course. So much time had passed in which she had no time that she no longer knew what she’d do with herself if she had any.

  18.

  People You Care About Start Dying

  Ursula was still in diapers, and Alison not so long out of them, when Eleanor realized she was pregnant again. This time, it had not been the result of a romantic interlude with a soundtrack from Al Green, or a dinner by the fire after the kids went to bed, with a bottle of wine. Those didn’t happen anymore. She had been flat-out for so long, she just hadn’t noticed the small tear in her diaphragm. Maybe she’d even noticed, but she hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. She’d gotten pregnant once before, while breastfeeding—but even though she only nursed Ursula at bedtimes now, she’d allowed herself to believe it couldn’t happen a second time.

  That August, the day of the lunar eclipse—their daughters three and a half and two—Cam piled everyone in the truck to get the best view from the top of Hopewell Hill. “Maybe they won’t remember,” he said. “I just like to show them things.”

  This was what you did. You took your children out in the darkness to watch the moon disappear. You dissected coyote scat with them. You led your two-year-old down to the garden to press a handful of radish seeds into the soil and handed her the spatula to lick when you made chocolate pudding and turned the pages of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, pointing out the animal characters and naming their jobs. You gathered autumn leaves, pressed them with an iron in between two sheets of wax paper, and taped them on the window, where you’d set an avocado seed in a glass of water to watch it sprout; and carried your three-year-old outside in your arms at night—her and her sister—to let them catch snowflakes. Who knew what they’d remember, and what they’d make of it, but the hope was there that if nothing else, what they would hold on to from these times was the knowledge of being deeply loved. You showed your children the world. It was up to them to determine what they’d make of it.

  One morning that December—Alison nearing her fourth birthday, Ursula two and a half, Eleanor two weeks away from her due date—Walt stopped by with a load of firewood. As he was throwing the split logs off the back of his truck, he asked if they’d heard the news. “Remember those boys they had on Ed Sullivan a while back?” he said. “The ones with the hair, that all the girls used to scream about? You know the one with the Japanese wife?”

  Nobody but Walt would have chosen to identify John Lennon as one of the singers from Ed Sullivan.

  “Somebody shot him last night,” he said. “Dead on the spot.”

  Walt was saying something else now, about New York City—how dangerous it was, why would anyone want to live there? Eleanor couldn’t focus on the rest of what he was saying.

  “I figured you’d want to know,” he told her. “Seeing as how you’re always playing those records.”

  Eleanor went back in the house. She thought about that Sunday night so long ago, at her parents’ house in Newton, when she’d heard the Beatles for the first time—she and a few million other people. She had been ten years old. Most of the girls liked Paul the best, but for Eleanor it was always John. The picture came to her of Charlie, her dog, lashed to the roof of the police officer’s car that day, shot for chasing deer. She stood at the sink, watching Alison, on the couch with a half-eaten bagel, Ursula propped up on pillows beside her with her bottle, the gaze of her two daughters totally focused on the television screen, where Bert was explaining to Ernie why it was a good idea to carry an umbrella.

  So much is going to happen to them.

  There was nothing she and Cam could do about most of it.

  She heard his truck in the driveway. When he came in the door, he put his arms around Eleanor. He’d heard the news in the car, driving home from town.

  “I know it’s crazy to be this sad about someone I never knew,” she said. “When people are dying every day, all over the world. I just never pictured it happening to one of the Beatles.”

  “The older you get, the more bad things happen,” he said. “Good ones, too. People you care about start dying. There’s no getting around it.”

  19.

  A Web-Footed Boy

  The odds were long, given what she knew about the gene for red hair—recessive—but finally, with their son Toby, they got their red-headed baby. A Chr
istmas Day boy, he burst into the world weighing ten pounds, and howling. A couple of hours after his delivery, holding him against her breast, examining every inch of him, she had discovered a magical trait. The first of many, as it turned out.

  “Our son has a webbed foot,” she told Cam, not with any dismay. More like wonderment.

  “Maybe he’ll swim the English Channel,” Cam said. “Or to Cuba.”

  “I get this feeling he’s going to be different from the other two,” Eleanor said. “Not just because he’s a boy, or a redhead. He’s like some foundling child who shows up in the cabbage patch. Like some magic person.”

  “Here’s all I know,” Cam said. “We’re outnumbered now.”

  Even then Toby had this surprisingly deep voice. He was like a man trapped in a baby’s body, she used to say. Impatient to grow up.

  Eleanor loved her children equally, but Toby occupied a particular place in her heart. It seemed to Cam and Eleanor as if he’d landed from another galaxy—a strange and miraculous alien baby come to live at their house.

  He had the most unusual ears, like shells, but pointed at the tips. Somewhere in those first minutes Eleanor spent inspecting every inch of her new son’s body she had discovered a thin, almost transparent piece of skin connecting each of the toes on his left foot—only the left, and very briefly this had worried her, though soon enough her son’s webbed left foot would become another of the things she loved about this otherworldly child. When Ursula and Alison’s friends came over to play, the girls would remove his shoe and his sock, if he wasn’t barefoot already, to display this magical feature of their amazing brother.

  He was born in the bathtub, and maybe because of this he seemed drawn to water. Wherever a body of water lay, Toby made his way to it and, whenever possible, jumped in. The special toes on his left foot made him swim fast as an otter, he told them. Or a muskrat. Where had he learned about muskrats? In some other lifetime, maybe.