“I was talking to God the other day,” he’d begin. He was not yet three when he said this.
“Did you know I used to be a buffalo? Before I came to live in our family?”
He was a boy now, he conceded. But a boy like no other. His rock collection was lined up five deep along the wall of the borning room, where they’d set a mattress on the floor for his bed, and he could tell you what patch of ground, what spot in the woods, every one of them had come from. He knew things without anybody explaining them, and regularly offered up observations about life and the world that seemed to indicate he’d been around a few hundred years before the rest of them. All day long, he barely stopped running—or dancing, or leaping—but when bedtime came, and they all curled up together on the couch with the most recent haul of books from the library, it was Toby who pressed up alongside Eleanor the closest, stroking her arm with a look of reverence as he held on to a piece of ribbon he’d had since he was very small—once pink, now gray—that he twirled around one finger and liked to brush against the inside of his ear. “I want us to be like this forever,” he said.
The family had only recently celebrated Toby’s second birthday when he explained to them all, at dinner, “My brain keeps wanting to be good. But my body keeps wanting to be bad.” That was the day when Toby’s day care teacher had called Eleanor and Cam to come down to the school (not the first time) because he was in trouble again. He’d taken a pair of craft scissors handed out for a project in which he had no interest and cut off a piece of Amanda Dunfey’s hair. He just thought it was so beautiful, he told Eleanor in the car on the way home—his low, husky voice (almost a man’s voice, coming out of a two-year-old) rueful, but baffled. She could grow it back! He just wanted to have that tip of her ponytail—well, maybe more than just the tip—to take home and put in his special box, with all his other treasures.
“Amanda has the softest hair, Mama,” he told her. “I wanted to brush it on my cheek.”
23.
A Non-Comic Strip
Early in her marriage, after the sting of her book publisher’s rejection had faded—and with no particular belief that anything would come of it—Eleanor had started drawing a comic strip about their life on the farm. For reasons still unclear to herself—perhaps because it was too fragile, and maybe too precious to bring out into the light—she kept this project a secret. She hadn’t even shared it with Cam.
This wasn’t the kind of strip that featured jokes, or made you laugh out loud. What she liked to do in her panels was to give an honest, loving, but unsentimental picture of the life of a family. She never saw the strip as providing income or becoming any kind of career. It was the thing she did at her desk—early in the morning, generally, before anyone else woke up—for the pure joy of it. Years earlier, before her marriage, she had often known the feeling of such pleasure in her work. With the strip she found that she was able to reawaken a part of herself that might otherwise have disappeared during those long, tiring, and occasionally mind-numbing days of caring for a young child, and then another one, and another after that.
As the years passed, the cast of characters in Eleanor’s strip expanded—a fictional family, but one that bore a strong resemblance to her own. The central character was the mother, Maggie, a librarian who played ukulele in a local rock and roll band—a woman who was always trying without success to get in better shape (she did the Jane Fonda workout, but followed up every session with a brownie). Maggie’s hair, like Eleanor’s, usually looked untidy (except in the strip about the time Maggie gave herself a disastrous perm). The father, Bo, was a handsome potter who was part of a local men’s basketball team and made beautiful mugs that hardly anybody ever bought.
Eleanor’s non-comic-strip family featured two older girls—Jessie and Kate—and a younger son named Jasper, who collected rocks and got into trouble a lot. With all the other characters in the strip, Eleanor had taken pains to insert fictional details into the story that distinguished them from the real people who’d inspired them. But when she got to the character of Jasper, she felt a need to model him more closely on her real son.
Most of the themes she explored in what she called her non-comic strip stayed close to her experience. There were all those peaches to puree, all those Legos and Playmobil people to pick up.
She wanted to tell stories, but ones that were about real, hard things in a person’s life—about a mother who drove back and forth over the same stretch of road for an hour, looking for a lost Playmobil Pirate sword, or a very young son who stuck his face in a bowl of jello to see what it felt like.
My brain keeps wanting to be good. But my body keeps wanting to be bad. Eleanor had included that observation—made by the Jasper character, of course—in the last panel of an early strip.
Eleanor wanted to present a picture of parenthood that went deeper and truer than the kinds of things she saw in the women’s magazines—an ongoing look at family life and parenthood that didn’t soften the edges or ignore the hard parts. Her passion for the job of raising children would be at the center of every strip, but she would look squarely, unblinkingly, at the other part of the story: how difficult it was, and frustrating, and lonely; the stress it put on a person’s marriage. She wanted to explore how it might be possible to be both a stay-at-home mother with children and a feminist of her generation, all within the same twenty-four-hour day. She wanted to portray all those hours spent lying on the rug with a baby reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar seven times in a row or playing Candy Land, her most hated game, and the one Ursula loved best. (More, she used to cry out. More. More.) She wanted to share the humor and boredom and love in those moments—and the lessons they taught her. Also—and maybe this explained why, for a long time, she showed her strip to no one—she wanted to explore the complexities of making a marriage, and the ongoing struggle between her love for her husband and the many aspects of being married that frustrated her.
A couple of years after she’d started drawing it she sent one of her strips to the local paper, the Akersville Gazette. They published it and asked if she had another. (Yes, actually. A hundred, probably. And new ones coming to mind every day.)
Nowadays her strip was a staple of the weekly paper. She called it Family Tree, in honor of Old Ashworthy, which was often pictured when a panel featured an outdoor scene. The pay was just twenty-five dollars a week. But it felt good to be working.
The truth was—and it felt almost dangerous saying this, when women her age were trying to rewrite the history of their housewife mothers, creating careers outside their homes—that for Eleanor the raising of their three children remained the primary focus of her life. Eleanor saw her days with her children as a kind of artwork, and as with the practice of making art, much that you attempted didn’t work out. Still, the act of doing it felt as demanding and precious as the creation of any book.
In her occasional conversations with Patty—off in New York in her Diane von Furstenberg dresses and heels, complaining that whatever man she was seeing at the time distracted her from her career—Eleanor’s life looked hopelessly outdated and out of step with the times. She didn’t mind.
She and Cam were old-fashioned parents, who still sang grace before the start of every meal and went for walks to the waterfall rather than to the mall. They had decided that there would never be a Nintendo at their house. She wanted to portray, in her drawings, the picture of a family that had somehow managed to hold on to a simple, uncomplicated way of life in a fast-moving world.
They baked pies and glued doilies onto construction paper for valentines and caught fireflies. They made cork people. But the couple in her strip struggled with their relationship, too. In the course of supporting their children’s hopes and dreams, they frequently wondered what had become of their own.
Eleanor liked to think of herself as putting a frame around the events of her day in such a way that they took on a kind of significance they might not otherwise have possessed. Setting down her stories
within the five frames of a weekly comic strip allowed Eleanor to take a few steps away from her life. She could make a series of panels about something as small as the despair she had felt when her daughter rubbed a chicken pox scab off her scalp, knowing that she would have a bald spot there forever—or her husband’s choice of a new toaster for her birthday present the year she turned thirty, or the day her son’s beloved cowboy hat had been lifted from his head by a gust of wind as they stood at the edge of the waterfall and plunged into the water—and her own anguish at his grief. Every time she memorialized these moments, large and small, by drawing the characters and putting the words they spoke in bubbles over their heads, she was able to locate the larger meaning in what she had chosen to do with her life.
One week she drew a series of panels featuring the character of the mother, Maggie, on the couch in a living room whose yard sale furnishings and braided rug looked a lot like the ones in their own living room—reading a book to the younger daughter, Jessie. The book Maggie was holding, in the drawing, happened to be one Eleanor had once read to Ursula—a story called The Dead Bird.
The cartoon child, Jessie, who sucked her thumb, just as Ursula did, asked Maggie where her own parents were.
“They died,” she said. Like Ursula, when she’d put the same question to Eleanor, Jessie had been quiet, taking this in.
“Are you going to die sometime?” the child asked her mother.
“Not for a long time, honey.”
Then the hardest part: “Am I going to die someday?”
In the final panel, the Maggie character just sat there, pondering her child’s question. Sometimes there were no good answers.
“We’re outnumbered now,” Cam had said, laughing, after the birth of their son.
Eleanor had loved this—loved the way their family, unlike the quietly lonely one in which she was raised, was loud and boisterous and always a little chaotic. She knew, from observing the way Cam’s parents greeted their son, and even their grandchildren, on their annual Christmas visit, and again, when they pulled down the driveway every August in Roger’s Lincoln Town Car—with clubs in the back for Roger’s annual game of golf with his son, and matching sweaters for each of the children, and the same observations every year (“Look how you’ve grown” and “How’s school?”)—that the home in which her husband was raised must have been similarly lacking in warmth.
This was what Eleanor had wanted for her life: the constant whirl of activity, the small warm bodies tumbling into her lap, the jumble of shoes by the screen door, which swung open and closed all day long, as the children headed in and out, the chorus of their sweet, high voices calling out. (And then Toby’s, that had been surprisingly deep almost from the beginning. He never seemed like a baby. More like a very small man.) The three of them piling into the bed after their baths, the smell of baby shampoo, Ursula flinging her arms around Eleanor’s neck, Alison (the one who hung back) smoothing her brother’s wet curls, Toby twirling his ribbon in his ear, his small foot (the one with the webbed toes) stroking her own. Why did people think having a tidy home, or a quiet one, was such a great thing? To Eleanor, the sound of her family’s voices was music. Even when they drowned out her own. Even when they drowned out her husband’s.
She saw the two of them—herself and Cam—like two white-water rafters, off on class 5 waters. You didn’t have time to debate your choices or question them once they were made. There was no space to think or even worry. You held on tight, paddled hard, and surrendered to the experience, hoping you’d make it to the spot, wherever it was, where you brought your craft into shore. But your heart beat so hard you thought your chest might explode. First you got wet. First the water swirled around you, tipped you over, or came close. You never knew if you’d make it, but you couldn’t stop.
Eleanor was too consumed with children and work to consider her goals in life. (It continued to amaze Eleanor the way her friend Darla—even in the middle of a messed-up marriage—never lost sight of hers. She still spoke regularly about leaving Bobby, saving up for a deposit on a place of her own for her and Kimmie, and signing up for undertaker school, where all Eleanor could think of was getting through the day.)
Somebody always needed her. Food, bathroom, shoelaces, lost toys, Barbies, rocks, Band-Aids, unwanted dresses, volcano dioramas, insects, Legos, popcorn, sorrow. Joy again.
Come look. Come play. An event was not wholly real in her children’s lives unless they’d told her about it, unless she’d borne witness.
She knew every inch of their bodies, but seldom gave thought to her own. And though she knew this was not how women should live their lives—devoting themselves solely to the care of babies and children, and particularly the women of her generation, who had challenged the old definition of a woman’s role—she harbored an almost guilty pleasure concerning her love of caring for her children, to the exclusion—or the vast compromise, anyway—of her own sidelined dream of making art. And to the detriment of her marriage, probably.
These were not stories Eleanor explored in her Family Tree strip. She barely explored them in her own mind. Long ago, Eleanor had promised herself she’d never let a son or daughter of hers feel excluded the way she had. Instead, maybe, the one she relegated to last place was her husband. Somewhere along the way, she was losing sight of him. He was losing sight of her, too.
Maybe the problem went deeper than that. Maybe she had lost sight of herself.
24.
The Wieniawski Polonaise
From early on in their time together, Cam had told Eleanor that his brother, Roger Junior, was his parents’ favorite. To Eleanor, the idea of feeling greater love for one of your children over the others was unimaginable. But it may also have been true of Toby that he inspired a particular brand of wild love unlike anything she’d known. He was wild himself, so much so that one time, at the end of her rope, she put him in the borning room and stuck a broom through the door handle to keep him from breaking it down.
“I’m having quiet time,” she told him, as—through the door—he offered up that he’d be good from now on, for the rest of his life. He was weeping and so was she.
“I’ve reached my limit,” she told him, as—thirty seconds later—she let him out.
“Poor Mama,” he said, flinging his arms around her neck, licking the tears off her.
That summer, Eleanor had her best crop of tomatoes ever. In late August, she picked four bushels, with the plan of taking out the pressure cooker the next day to make a winter’s worth of spaghetti sauce. The garden had yielded a good crop of basil, too. She set the tomatoes in baskets in the kitchen, planning to work on the sauce that afternoon when the day cooled off.
She left Cam in charge while she drove into town to buy canning jars. Even before she set foot in the house, she could feel—all the way out where she parked, by Cam’s woodshop, that something had happened. Maybe it was the uncharacteristic stillness, the quiet.
One step into the kitchen and she saw it all, what looked at first like a crime scene. Her son had gotten into the tomatoes. It had probably started with a single one—a big, juicy Jet Star, maybe, or an Early Girl, poised on the top of the overflowing basket calling out to him. He had probably only intended to fling that one tomato, but once he’d done this, the thrill of throwing it and the desire to keep going had been too much for him. By the time Eleanor stepped into the room, her four bushel baskets were empty. Tomato juice, tomato seeds, tomato skin covered the cupboard doors and walls. Her son stood there in the center of the room, his face containing, simultaneously, a look of rueful regret and ecstasy.
“I couldn’t help it,” he told her, shaking his head so his curls bounced wildly, his face like that of an angel.
Cam ambled into the house in the aftermath of the tomato disaster, his mellow demeanor unaltered. “Hey, buddy,” he said, swinging Toby high over his head as Eleanor, on the floor, mopped up tomato seeds and skins. “Looks like you had yourself some fun.” He stripped off his son
’s clothes, then his own, and stepped outside to turn on the sprinkler. From her place at the sink, wringing out the mop, she watched them dance. Her two darling redheads.
Toby had only recently turned three when he saw a show on television featuring a child prodigy violinist from China named Mei Mei Ling, playing a piece of music called the Wieniawski Polonaise. The moment Mei Mei set down his small violin, Toby told Eleanor he needed one of those.
The first time Toby mentioned his desire for a violin, she imagined it was probably a fleeting whim, though even then he was not prone to those. His passions were clear and abiding—snails and other crustaceans, rock collecting, long hours spent studying Tintin books, swimming in the brook down the road every chance he got, and chasing their boats of cork people downstream—and it had been Eleanor’s experience that once Toby developed an interest, rather than diminishing, it only intensified.
In the case of his rock collecting, he filled his pockets daily with stones found on their property and, when they ventured out on hikes, beyond—so many rocks that the floor of his room was lined with specimens from his collection. The first thing Eleanor did now, before washing his pants, was to empty the pockets of that day’s latest finds.
Likewise, he had a terrarium filled with snails, and knew all their names. On the seventeen-hour car trip they made once (once, and never again) to visit Cam’s parents on Amelia Island, he had occupied himself for the entire drive with a library book about the species of snails found in South America.
He brought up the topic of the violin again that night when Eleanor put him to bed, and again at breakfast. He volunteered to sell his Troll collection—also, if necessary, his Ninja Turtles and Smurfs—as a way of earning money to buy the instrument. He promised to take on jobs. When they’d set out in the car later that day, to do errands, he asked Eleanor, “Are we going to get my violin now?”
Count the Ways Page 12
