Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

I went over to God’s house. We made spaghetti.

  44.

  Call Me Al

  I wish you’d give up already,” Ali told her sister. “I’m sick of watching you wasting your time. Toby just sits there and he’s not even looking at you. No offense, but it’s kind of depressing.”

  Alison took a different approach from her sister’s to Toby’s transformation. Back in the old days—meaning before the accident; that was how they measured time now—she’d been the most enthusiastic of the family about going along with Toby on his wildest adventures—carrying on the long conversations in the language they’d made up, camping out in the woods, building a rope swing, rescuing a baby skunk whose mother had been run over by a car, dissecting a cow’s eye—big as a pool ball—that her teacher had given her during their unit on the human body, taking apart an old radio Walt dropped off when he was cleaning out his garage. Ursula didn’t love Toby any less than Alison did, but she was a more careful type, and she not only followed the rules laid out for her, she actually liked rules—where to Toby, and to Alison, little offered greater satisfaction than breaking them.

  Toby had been the one in their family who shared Alison’s love of everything mechanical—putting things together or (his specialty) taking them apart, and in the first days after the accident, Alison had kept trying to arouse a response from her brother. She spoke to him in their old secret language. She set a baby turtle in his hand, and a worm, and a piece of owl scat. She showed him Walt’s broken radio with the suggestion that they fix it together, but he just sat there, staring at the objects she set in front of him. No glimmer of interest.

  By September, Alison no longer spoke to Toby. She avoided all mention of his name. Passing through a room in which he sat, staring at a ball or a truck or wrapping his old pink ribbon around his finger, she seemed not to acknowledge he was even there.

  “Can’t you just pat him on the head or something?” Ursula said to her once. “You pet Sally more than Toby.”

  “Toby’s not a dog,” she said. “Toby’s not anything anymore.”

  Another change took place in Alison’s life that year, possibly touched off by the accident, and by a growing attitude of skepticism in her as to whether or not anything you thought was real in your life could actually be counted on, and the general pointlessness of everything.

  Alison had never liked girl clothes and most of the other apparatus that went along with them—barrettes and bracelets, dolls, anything pink. But that summer seemed to mark a passage for Alison from simple tomboy behavior to living, as much as possible, like a boy. To Alison, it appeared, the position of son in their family stood vacant. Maybe that was part of it. Or maybe she just decided it was too hard putting on an act anymore.

  At dinner one night, a couple of months after (no need to say after what), Alison made the announcement.

  “You know that song Toby used to love so much?” she said, as Eleanor was wrapping up the leftover chicken, and she and Cam were loading the dishwasher. “I was thinking about it. When a person says they’re born in the U.S.A., it’s supposed to mean they’re free, right? In this country, we’re supposed to be who we want. Even way back when I was little, we were always playing that record with the pink cover.”

  She meant Free to Be . . . You and Me. For years, that was the family favorite on road trips.

  “So I want to be free, Mom,” Alison told her. “My real self.”

  “And you don’t feel free now?” Eleanor asked her. “Did your father and I give you the impression you had to be someone you’re not?”

  “It’s not your fault or Dad’s,” Alison said. “I just want my name to match who I am. From now on, I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Al.”

  Later that night, in the dark of their bedroom, Cam had reached for Eleanor. They had not made love since the accident. He placed his hand on her belly and stroked it.

  “Here’s where our babies came from,” he said. “I will always love this place.”

  She lay there, not moving. She didn’t speak. They lay in silence for a minute. Longer, probably.

  “Al. Can you beat that?” he said. “Do you think it’s a phase?”

  He was trying it out. Saying the name. Getting used to this. He might worry very briefly about Alison, but it wouldn’t eat away at him. He’d move on.

  Cam was good at that.

  45.

  Happy Anniversary

  Eleanor and Cam’s anniversary fell six weeks after the accident. That week, Eleanor had traveled to New York, a two-night trip to meet with her newspaper syndicate. She had noted the day, of course, but though she called the children that night, she didn’t ask to speak to their father.

  After she greeted the children and gave them the presents she’d brought home for them (a pair of reflector sunglasses for Al, who didn’t want you to look her in the eye anymore, a jewelry box for Ursula, a stuffed monkey puppet for Toby), Cam led her into their bedroom blindfolded. “Happy anniversary,” he said, untying the bandanna over her eyes. He sounded excited. It took a moment for her to figure out what was different here.

  In her absence, Cam had replastered the walls.

  The color was a soft, creamy white, the texture like linen. The sun, coming in the window, made the room seem to glow.

  This wasn’t Sheetrock. Cam had applied plaster, the old-fashioned way, and covered the whole thing with a beautiful coat of milk-based paint he’d mixed himself. After he’d finished, he had set everything back in its place, and there was a new bowl on the dresser—a very small one, made from a burl she recognized, found on a camping trip they’d taken long ago, back when she was pregnant with Alison. A good size for holding a pair of earrings or a necklace.

  He had not given her jewelry. The gift was the plaster, and it was a beautiful plaster job, a beautiful bowl. But that day all she registered was the emptiness of the bowl.

  While she stood there taking it in, Cam stood quietly in the doorway. He moved closer and placed his hands on her hips. Maybe he touched her cheek. If so, Eleanor didn’t notice.

  “So when Darla asks what you gave me for our anniversary, I guess I tell her, plaster,” Eleanor said. Her voice was flat. Hard.

  “It’s not an ordinary plaster job,” he said, more quietly now. “I did it the old-school way. I thought you’d like it.”

  The truth was, she’d given him nothing to mark their anniversary that year. If Eleanor were honest with herself, nothing Cam could have offered her that summer would have changed anything. A stone rested on her heart. More than a stone. It might have been her son’s entire rock collection, piled on top of her. So many stones, you couldn’t even make out the presence of a woman’s body underneath them all.

  There was a Jazzercise class their babysitter Phyllis attended now and then at the YMCA where she used to teach. She brought Toby with her one time. The motions practiced by the women in Jazzercise were too complicated for Toby, and the loud music made him uneasy, but on their way out of the Y he’d spotted a bunch of old-timers doing gentle yoga, and something about that appealed to him. Phyllis told Cam and Eleanor, later, that he had stood in the doorway for a long time, watching, and when she suggested they might go home now, he hadn’t wanted to leave.

  Hearing this, Cam went to check out the class himself, and after, he brought Toby—the two of them the only ones under age seventy. He got a video of yoga postures and started working on them with Toby at home.

  Cam’s idea was that maybe, if he got his son’s body moving in new ways, it might stimulate his brain. The good thing about yoga for a person like Toby—Toby, now—was how quiet it was. There were no explosive bursts of energy required. A person could move slowly through the poses, or just sit there in child’s pose if he wanted. Or no pose at all. The music was soothing. Nobody asked anything of anyone else.

  The two of them shared a mat together, Toby in front of Cam, with Cam manipulating his limbs into something approximating the poses. Toby never initiated a move, but he nev
er resisted when Cam put him into a new pose. When he got comfortable enough, Cam brought him back to the Y to join the class.

  One day in class during downward dog—it was fall now—an elderly woman near the front of the room had let out a fart. The others in the class ignored this, but something wonderful happened to Toby at that moment.

  He laughed. This was not the big, hearty belly laugh from the old days when they watched old Laurel and Hardy movies from the library. But it was the first time in the months since the accident when anything he’d taken in had inspired that much of a response.

  When they got home, it was the first thing Cam told Eleanor. He found her standing at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables for dinner.

  “You won’t believe what our boy did at yoga,” he said.

  “Let me guess.” She spoke in the hard, sarcastic tone that was her usual now with Cam. “Maybe he recited the first stanza of ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’?” That one had been his favorite Shel Silverstein poem, before.

  “Or maybe he sang along with the words to a Dylan track.” Her back remained facing him. Her knife made sharp, rhythmic clicks against the cutting board.

  “A woman farted,” Cam said. “Toby laughed.”

  “I guess I’m supposed to get excited about this,” Eleanor said. She did not look up. She had not stopped chopping.

  “It just seemed so hopeful,” Cam told her. “If something like that can get through to him, other things can, too.”

  She sliced into a carrot, the knife coming down hard. Her face, a wall.

  That winter was the coldest since the year of Al’s birth. She was in third grade now. Ursula, second. Every morning a small, ten-seat bus pulled up at the end of their road—different from the one the girls took—to bring Toby to his special classes. All those days, back before the accident, he’d watched his sisters head out to school on the big yellow bus, asking why he had to stay home. Now finally he was getting on a bus, too. Just not the one they’d planned on.

  She’d researched schools for children with Toby’s kind of brain injury, and this one seemed like the best place within driving range. But even Eleanor would have admitted that it was the time Toby spent with Cam, doing their yoga together, riding the tricycle Cam had got him on the bike path, and out in the woodshop, making birdhouses together—Cam cutting the wood, Toby sitting at the bench next to him, handing him a nail now and then—that probably accounted for much of Toby’s progress.

  He could speak in short, simple sentences now—I want chips. Big truck come. Go home now—though there was a lack of intonation to his voice, a flatness. He didn’t dance or run the way he used to, but he no longer got down on all fours to climb the stairs as he had done in the first months after the accident. He had a funny, flat-footed gait and his body tilted as he walked. One time, when Eleanor had brought him with her to the girls’ spring concert, a boy in Ursula’s class had pointed to him and laughed. “Look, it’s a zombie,” he said.

  Everyone started laughing.

  “My brother just has a problem with his brain,” Ursula told them. “You know what your problem is? Your heart.”

  The next week, when it was Ursula’s time to give a report in school, she chose Toby for her topic.

  “My brother used to be really smart,” she told the class. “Then he fell in a pond. Maybe someday the doctors will figure out how to make his brain work better. In the meantime, he’s still him inside.

  “The thing you love isn’t the person’s brain,” she said. “It’s the person.”

  46.

  Nothing Matters Anymore

  For the first weeks after Toby’s accident, recognizing what Eleanor was going through, the newspaper syndicate ran old strips from Family Tree in place of any new material. After a month had passed, she got back to work, but her mind felt as blank as Toby’s now appeared to be. She still filed the strip every Monday, but the story lines she came up with now had a forced quality to them, like episodes of some old sitcom she might have watched growing up.

  One thing about the strip: Eleanor had always managed, within the structure of those five frames, to resolve the family stories she told, in pictures and dialogue, with some kind of hopefulness. But the story they were living now offered no humor, and no happy resolution.

  She told herself she had to keep it going. This was their main source of income. Only she couldn’t. The whole point had been telling honest stories about the life of a family, but the story that defined their lives now was the one she could never bring herself to tell. The beloved character of Jasper wasn’t Jasper anymore.

  At this point Family Tree was running in almost a hundred newspapers across the country. The strip paid their family’s bills, but what had gratified Eleanor just as much was the way a community had grown up around the characters. Every week since it started appearing—more and more, as readership expanded—she’d open their mailbox to find it stuffed with letters from readers telling her how much her stories meant to them, how grateful they were that someone was talking about the kinds of things going on in the family she drew that nobody else talked about. Mostly, these letters came from women around Eleanor’s age, raising families of their own and navigating their own complicated relationships, but others wrote to her, too, telling her how much the strip meant to them. She heard from a woman in her nineties who said, “You really bring me back to my own young days,” and from a young woman who wrote to say that it was reading Eleanor’s strip, week after week, that made her feel she wanted children.

  “Who would think that a few simple drawings could tell a whole story?” she wrote. “But there’s always so much going on in those pictures you draw.”

  “I had this idea that if I wanted to be a successful woman in the world, I had to set aside the idea of having a family,” one reader wrote. “You make me feel that it might be possible to have both. Not easy, but possible.”

  There was a man in prison who wrote to her every few months. “I haven’t seen my own wife and kids in five years,” he wrote. “When I open up the paper and see the pictures you draw about Maggie and Bo and their kids, I like to pretend it’s my family. That dad, Bo, is me.”

  For a while after Toby’s accident she just left Jasper out of the strip, but people started sending letters asking what happened to him. Some of them were actually worried. Correctly, of course. She decided to bring him back.

  After a dozen false starts, Eleanor finally managed to create a single frame. It was a picture of Jasper staring out the window, his eyes totally blank. Behind him stood his mother, Maggie. Eleanor herself couldn’t have said how it was she’d accomplished this, but she had somehow managed, with a few strokes of her pen, to convey, on the mother’s face, a look of utter and irredeemable devastation.

  On the fifth day of having nothing further to show for her hours at her drawing table out in the studio, Eleanor called her editor at the syndicate.

  “The strip is finished,” she said. It used to be her joke, calling Family Tree “a non-comic.” Now this was real. “Until I can find someone in the market for a tragic strip,” she told Darla, “I’m going to have to find another line of work.”

  “What are you going to do about money?” Darla asked. Even before Cam—who would not have expressed any particular concern one way or the other—it was Darla with whom she shared her decision to end Family Tree.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Eleanor said. It felt as though nothing did anymore.

  She went back to her old freelancing—picking up one-shot jobs drawing logos. She called the textbook company she’d worked for, before the strip got picked up by the syndicate, to say she was ready to take on work again.

  “I don’t get it,” her old boss at the textbook company told her. “I thought you hit the big time. I can’t compete with the kind of money you must have been making with the syndicate.”

  “Never mind that,” Eleanor told her. She had no desire to go into her reasons.

  47.

  Sh
avasana

  There was never this moment when Cam announced he was abandoning his woodshop. He had just stopped going out there. What was the point of creating one more burl bowl, when the shelves of his shop were filled with them—beautiful, but unsold?

  Cam spent his days with Toby now—working him through the physical therapy exercises that never seemed to make a discernible difference in his motor skills, turning the pages of their Baby’s First Hundred Words book.

  “Show me the turtle, Toby,” Cam would ask him. Sometimes he got it right. More often not.

  For a few months, Toby and Cam had been attending their senior citizens’ yoga class together. Every Saturday morning the two of them set off for the Y. Toby had his own mat now, next to Cam’s. When their teacher announced warrior one, he took his position, same as he did for tree and fish and downward dog, happy baby, and shavasana. When the class was over, he said namaste.

  “You should give it a try,” Cam told Eleanor. “If there’s anyone who could use an hour to chill out, you’re it.”

  Maybe he said this out of loving concern, but she took his words as a criticism. The irony had not escaped her that in many ways what made it possible for her husband to mellow out at yoga class was the fact that his wife was home earning a living.

  Eleanor no longer knew how to slow down or be still. She said she was too busy, but there was more to it. As long as she kept moving fast, she was okay. Those moments when she was not doing anything were the hardest. The last thing Eleanor wanted was to lie still on a yoga mat for ten minutes, or even one, alone with her thoughts.

  48.

  Riding Without a Helmet

  It was a Sunday afternoon. Cam had taken their children to the movies—a rerelease of One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Eleanor went out for groceries. She had just rounded the ice cream aisle when she heard a familiar voice calling out her name from the produce section.