Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  Franklin’s power hitter stepped up to the plate. Swung. They could hear the crack of the bat. Another few inches and he would have had a home run on his hands, but it was a foul. Strike one.

  Another pitch. Another strike. Even Eleanor, who—even after all these summers—knew little about the game and mostly spent her time on the bleachers keeping an eye on her children, could tell from watching the batter that this was the kind of guy who, if he got his swing just right, could hit it to the far end of the field.

  On the third pitch, he did just that. Even the two-year-olds, gathered around Coco as she handed out Rice Krispies treats, looked up from the dirt at the sound of the wood smacking the ball. Eleanor shaded her eyes from the sun to watch as it sailed over the outfield.

  Then came an amazing moment. Harry Botts, the player who had never once in his seven years on the team actually made a catch, ran toward the spot where the ball was arcing down. Harry had a funny, loping run—not particularly fast—and his arm, as he reached out with his glove, seemed like a wet and floppy noodle. The way he held out his arm, he looked not so much like a ballplayer as he did a person going for a jog and checking the sky for rain first, to see if he needed to take his umbrella.

  He caught it. More accurately, maybe, the ball landed in Harry’s glove.

  The Yellow Jackets went crazy. So did the wives and girlfriends on the bleachers. Nobody could believe what had just happened, including Harry Botts.

  He stood there, frozen, in the middle of the field, still holding on to the ball and shaking his head.

  “I caught the ball,” he said. “I can’t believe I caught it.”

  Harry just stood there. He was still gazing at the ball, still looking stunned. His teammates were calling out to him to field the ball to second base for a double play. Harry just stood there.

  “Throw to second, Harry,” someone called out. Everyone did.

  But Harry Botts just stood there. You couldn’t even be mad at him. He was just so amazed at what he’d done, it did not occur to him.

  The other team scored, but the Yellow Jackets cheered for Harry anyway.

  27.

  Hawaii Ho

  Labor day again. Cam and Eleanor’s annual potluck. The Hendersons came, and Sal and Lucinda Perrone with their son, Josh, the Olins with their two girls, Katie and Gina. Harry Botts—always alone. Ray and Timmy Pouliot, on their motorcycles.

  Walt and Edith came, of course—Walt bearing his cider press and a bushel of Cortlands for the children to run through the press. Coco’s parents, Evan and Betsy, showed up, and their neighbors Simon and Tilda, who lived in the geodesic dome down the road, though like every other Buckminster Fuller follower they knew who’d constructed one, they’d had a “For Sale by Owner” sign out front almost since they’d built it.

  “You know how hard it is to put furniture or hang pictures in a house with no right angles and no normal walls?” Tilda said. They were hoping to move to Oregon, but nobody wanted to live in a geodesic dome anymore.

  Darla came without Bobby, which was fine with Eleanor. She still couldn’t understand why Darla stayed with her husband.

  That night she showed up with a black eye, which she told everyone came from walking into a door.

  “I’m just waiting for the right moment,” Darla told Eleanor. The familiar line. “I just need a little more housecleaning money in the kitty to make my getaway.”

  Eleanor no longer made any comment when Darla said this.

  The Labor Day blowout was a potluck—everyone bringing a casserole or a pan full of grilled potato skins or a pot of chili, buffalo wings, tacos, and in Edith’s case, a deadly-looking meat loaf made with Hamburger Helper. After everyone went home, Eleanor set it out for Sally, but she wasn’t interested.

  That year, Eleanor had taken her party theme inspiration from a feature in Family Circle, “Aloha! How to Throw Your Own Backyard Luau.” She hung paper lanterns with white lights across the yard and followed the recipes for coconut shrimp and pineapple upside-down cake, and though Cam told her that really, the guys would just as soon have beer, she mixed piña coladas in the blender. Toby had got his hands on the mix and downed a whole blender full—before they’d added the liquor, fortunately.

  She had checked a record out of the library—Don Ho, Hawaii-Ho! When the sun went down, the garden was illuminated with tiki lights. Still carrying an extra ten pounds of the baby weight from Toby, she chose a loose, muumuu-style dress. Cam went shirtless that night, looking as fit as he had been the night she first went back to his little cabin in Brattleboro. Lucinda Perrone—with her husband, Sal, the only ones among their guests who appeared to have noted the Hawaiian theme—had shown up wearing a grass skirt and a bikini top. Sal wore a shirt he’d bought at a Jimmy Buffett show.

  At some point in the evening, Eleanor observed Lucinda, piña colada in hand, laughing with Ray Pouliot by the big ash tree. She was demonstrating her hula moves, tossing her hair, touching his arm. Eleanor found Sal, in his too-bright parrot and hibiscus shirt, sitting by himself at the edge of the field, studying the moon. He’d probably consumed more than a few beers. He sat hunched with another cold one in his hand.

  “You tell me,” he said when she approached him. “What do women want these days, anyway? I try to be a good husband, but I can never please my wife.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “We hardly ever talk to each other, except about who’s going to pick up the kids. All we do is watch TV.”

  Eleanor didn’t know what to say, so she just sat there. Sometimes the only thing you could do was listen.

  “I try to make her happy,” Sal said. “She had her heart set on Disney, so we took the kids. The middle of July when it was a hundred degrees in Florida, standing in line at some ride so you can sit in a boat watching mechanical pirates. I’ll be working overtime all year to pay for it. And every night, back at the hotel, she was telling me all the ways I disappoint her. I’m not exciting enough. I should go to the gym.”

  Eleanor knew all about the Disney trip. Lucinda had sent her a postcard from Orlando. “Joshie threw up on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad,” she wrote. “Greta pitched a fit because we wouldn’t buy her a Snow White costume that cost sixty dollars. Goofy gave Jessica a hug and she burst into tears. Sal and I aren’t speaking to each other.”

  “She says I’m not romantic,” Sal said. “One of her girlfriends’ husbands gave her a diamond pendant for her birthday. Nothing I do ever surprises her.”

  “It’s a different kind of romantic, being dependable,” Eleanor said. Her voice was quiet.

  “Lu and I hardly ever have sex anymore,” he told her. “She’s always too tired.”

  “It’s not so easy, after a long day with the kids.” The picture came to Eleanor of Cam, reaching for her as he had a couple of nights back. How she had pretended she was sleeping. “I understand where she’s coming from.”

  “You know how I would have liked to spend that vacation?” he said. “In a tent in Maine, cooking over a fire. Sleeping under the stars with my wife next to me.”

  The two of them sat on the grass, far enough from the pit where Cam was grilling lamb kebabs that the smoke wouldn’t get in their eyes. Eleanor and Lucinda Perrone had a superficial kind of friendship, from years of having each other’s children over to play, and softball nights, but the truth was that Eleanor had never liked Lucinda. Still, she understood how easy it could be, when you had kids, for two people to lose track of each other. There they’d been, all of them, back in their twenties, going to Grateful Dead shows in Vermont and reading The Joy of Sex, or just having a lot of it. There was a time when even Lamaze classes had felt sexy.

  Now there were all these children to show for it. And they’d forgotten what got them there in the first place.

  Eleanor and Sal sat there for a while, looking out at the old ash tree and the field beyond it, taking in the night peepers, the distant sound of Don Ho singing “Tiny Bubbles” and Coco teaching
the dance that was Toby’s current obsession, the Moonwalk, to the younger children. (When had her body filled out this way? All those Friday nights, paying her for babysitting, Eleanor hadn’t noticed, but suddenly, in addition to those long legs of hers they’d all observed, softball summers, cartwheeling along the perimeter of the ball field, she had these breasts. Now Eleanor found herself staring at them.)

  There was a full moon that night. The children who were still awake were roasting marshmallows, Evan had taken out his guitar. To anyone dropping by, this could look like a perfect scene—the kind Eleanor used to imagine other families besides hers engaged in, back when she was growing up, the kind she had wanted to create with Cam. Only there was Sal’s wife, whispering something to Ray Pouliot, Ray nodding his head as if she’d made the most amazing observation ever, and here was Sal Perrone confessing to Eleanor (as he never would have if he hadn’t drunk all those beers) that sometimes, late at night, he sat out in the garage smoking pot and looking at old issues of Penthouse.

  “That’s my sex life,” he said. “Sitting on a camp chair, fantasizing about some Miss November from 1968.”

  Eleanor felt no attraction to Sal, but she could see how easy it might be, at a moment like this one, to imagine that some person other than the one you were married to might provide the answer to your difficulties. There was Sal, doggedly bringing home the paycheck, as Cam never had. There was Lucinda, hanging on the words of Ray Pouliot. There was Walt, cranking the mill on the cider press and Edith telling him he was doing it wrong—Walt, so often there when Cam was not.

  And once again, Eleanor didn’t know where Cam was. No place in sight.

  Off in the field, where Coco had organized a game of moonlight tag, she heard Toby’s voice rising above those of the others. Something about dog poop, followed by the sound of another child—Joshie Perrone, maybe, who was always a crybaby and a tattletale. She figured she had better investigate. Toby could get into trouble faster than any child she’d ever known. She found him on a branch in Old Ashworthy. He said he was pretending he was an owl.

  It was late when the last of the guests left—sleeping children in their arms, most of them—leaving a mountain of dishes to wash, the leftovers to wrap up and put away. To Eleanor, the best part always came after, when they got to take off their clothes and climb into bed. Eight years into marriage, they might not have sex so often anymore, but they pressed up next to each other.

  “Lucinda Perrone is going to leave Sal,” Eleanor said.

  “She told you that?”

  “I can just tell.”

  “Let’s never let that happen to us,” Cam said. He pulled her toward him. “The children would never get over it.” He put a hand on her breast.

  “Remember what these used to look like?” she said. “This is what nursing three babies does.”

  “I don’t care about that,” he told her. She took note of the fact that he didn’t contradict her assessment of her breasts. Just said it didn’t matter, what had become of them.

  “They fed our children,” he said. “That’s the important thing.”

  A wave of sadness passed over Eleanor. But something else, too. Acceptance, maybe. This was what happened. What had happened to them, at least. Some things disappeared, but in their absence, there was this strange and deep bond that came in part, probably, from the knowledge of their mutual disappointments. Here we are, she thought. Under this roof, at the end of this road, living this life.

  The rest of the world fell away then, and it was just the two of them on the bed. Just the two of them, until sometime in the middle of the night when one or another or even all three of their children padded into the room to climb in next to them.

  But for this one middle-of-the-night moment, they could be alone together in the dark, nothing but the sound of an owl—a real one this time, perched in the high branches of the giant tree, just beyond the window. Out the window, that long, mournful cry. A moment later, from some other tree, some other owl—his mate, perhaps—called back in response.

  28.

  The No-Cry Pledge

  Winters were hard at the end of their long dirt road. Cold mornings, car battery dead. Icy roads. Short days. The long process, every time you left the house with the children, of zipping up the snowsuits, finding mittens, hats, scarves, boots. It was a safe bet that by the time they were all dressed, someone would need to go to the bathroom, and all the gear would have to come off again. Then came the task of hanging up the wet clothes, drying out the boots, mopping. “Sometimes it feels like all I do, from November through March, is mop the floor,” Eleanor told Darla. Times like these, she allowed herself to dream, briefly, of what it might be like to live in a place like California. Only briefly. She knew she would never leave the farm.

  When the weather was on their side—cold temperatures, no snow—Eleanor loaded the children into the car and went looking for a pond, then laced up the children’s skates. They put a low wooden chair on the ice for Toby to push, and sometimes Ursula set him in the chair and pushed him around the ice. One time Eleanor brought out a boom box and put on a cassette of old Beatles songs, but the cold must have affected the batteries, so the songs started playing slower and slower, turning Paul McCartney’s voice very low, and the guitars weirdly off-key. Cam was a beautiful skater, whipping past them on the ice with his hockey stick, scooping Ursula up in his arms and taking her for a spin. “I’m flying,” she cried out, her arms spread wide, as if she were embracing the whole sky. She knew her father would never drop her.

  For Eleanor, there was little opportunity for tearing across the ice, if she even managed to get out there. She would no sooner have everyone’s hats and mittens assembled and skates laced up than Toby would need to go to the bathroom or Alison would say she was too cold. They’d head back to the house for popcorn and hot chocolate then, and reruns of The Love Boat or a movie on their newly acquired VCR—Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. Old Yeller. Disney in your own living room! Imagine.

  Even with the stove cranked up, it was hard keeping the house warm, especially upstairs where the children slept. Every night, twenty minutes before she put them to bed, Eleanor filled three hot water bottles to put under the covers so no matter how cold the room was, it would be warm when they climbed into bed. In bed—seldom late; most nights they were worn out by nine thirty—she wrapped her arms around Cam’s hard, firm chest, felt his heart beating. Now was the time—the only one, often—when they could talk about their day.

  “Do you think we should be worried about how much time Toby spends lining up rocks in his room?” she’d say. “Sometimes when I talk to him while he’s playing, he doesn’t even hear me. You don’t think he could be autistic, do you?”

  “I think you’re worrying too much,” Cam said. “Get some sleep.”

  “What do you think it means that Alison threw out that dress your mother sent for her birthday?”

  “You have to admit, it was a pretty ugly dress,” he told her. He was not prone to analyzing every aspect of what went on in their children’s world the way Eleanor did.

  “How about we focus on you and me for a change?” he said, pulling her close.

  “The dress wasn’t really that ugly,” Eleanor told him.

  They worked on craft projects a lot, in winter, and baked—cookies, muffins, bread. When they started to go stir-crazy, Eleanor piled the children in the station wagon and headed for the bowling alley, the one big attraction in town, other than the dump. A couple of games for the four of them—plus shoe rentals—wasn’t cheap, but sometimes, particularly when the temperature had been hovering around zero for three days straight, they all just needed to get out of the house.

  The one problem with bowling was Toby. As the youngest and smallest, it was not surprising that he had a harder time than his sisters knocking the pins over. But his pride made it unacceptable for him—even at age four, even at three—to accept the idea of using bumpers to keep his ball from ending up in the gutter eve
ry time his turn came up.

  Inevitably, he’d end up the low scorer. Then came the heartache. More than once, a happy afternoon at the bowling alley would conclude with Toby flinging his body on the floor in the spot they’d just tallied up their points, like a mourner on a funeral pyre. Inconsolable.

  In the end, Eleanor had instituted a tradition in which each of them was required to recite what she called the No-Cry Pledge—a two-sentence promise to stay calm, whatever the outcome of the game, written on the sun visor of her station wagon, which she’d flip down for the occasion before they entered the bowling alley. Of the four of them, only Toby was at risk of falling apart over a losing score (and it was Toby who lost every time). But all of them, including Eleanor, recited the pledge. Toby took his vow seriously. He never had another tantrum at the bowling alley.

  There was one good thing about winters, particularly the hardest ones. When the cold finally lifted, and spring came, you’d be left with a greater sense of joy than any resident of California or Florida could understand or appreciate. Then it was time to make cork people. Then the leaves on the ash tree unfurled and the lady’s slippers pushed up through the soil and burst out their strange, vaguely sexual, purselike blossoms. The air filled with the smell of lilac, which always reminded Eleanor of the first time she’d driven down this road. Ursula picked a basketful of blossoms and laid them on her pillow, so she could breathe in the smell all night long. Toby dug for earthworms and tried teaching them tricks. They launched their boats. Home again, after, they grieved the losses of the cork people who didn’t make it all the way down the brook and set the survivors on a high shelf until next year’s launch. A reminder that hard as winter might be, spring always came. Just when you reached your limit.

  Then it was time to plant the peas. Then it was softball season again.