“It must be my lucky day,” he said. “Running into you here.”
It was Timmy Pouliot. “You disappeared on us,” he said. “The guys on the team all miss you and Cam.”
He knew what had happened, of course. Everyone did.
“I could always count on seeing you up in the stands at our games,” he said. “I used to ask Cam how he got so lucky to nab a babe like you.”
Eleanor hadn’t felt like a babe in a long time, if ever. Getting called that threw her off balance.
“Cam’s been spending a lot of time with Toby,” she told him. “There just wasn’t room for softball anymore.”
“We all feel terrible about your boy.”
“Yeah.”
He picked up a melon. Smelled it. “A person still has to have a little fun sometimes, right?”
“I guess.”
He must have seen it on her face: how long it had been since Eleanor did anything remotely approaching fun. Maybe it showed, how long since anyone had kissed her. She studied an avocado.
“I should get some of these,” she said. “My younger daughter loves guacamole.”
He asked her, “You doing anything for yourself these days?”
She laughed.
“I’m buying you a beer,” he said.
“I’ve got all these groceries.” Milk, eggs, butter, cereal, paper towels.
“Do something dangerous,” he said. “Abandon your cart.”
Just like that, she did.
There was a bar across the street. He ordered IPAs for both of them.
“So, who are you dating these days, Timmy?” she asked him.
“Nobody at the moment,” he said. “Nothing that matters.”
“Every summer, you’re with a different gorgeous woman.”
“It’s not about how they look in a bikini, you know?” he told her. “At some point you gotta get off the bike.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Riding away on the back of a motorcycle sounds pretty good to me right about now.”
“Oh yeah?” he said. “Let’s go.”
She only had half an hour, she told him. Right about now, Cruella de Vil would be kidnapping the dalmatian puppies and taking them off to that castle of hers, to turn them into fur coats. In the old days she would have worried how it would be for Toby, seeing that. She would have had to tell him in advance that they were going to be rescued in the end. But Toby, now, would probably not even take in what happened on the screen.
“I’ll get you back to your grocery cart in plenty of time,” he told her.
Out in the parking lot, he realized the problem.
“Oh, jeez, I don’t have a helmet,” he said. “I’ve never been the helmet type, but you should be wearing one. With those kids and all.”
She told him she preferred feeling the wind in her hair.
She put her arms around his waist. This was just standard practice for a passenger, she reminded herself. But it felt good just taking in the feel of his body this way.
“I never rode on a motorcycle before,” she told him. With the engine running, she had to yell.
“You don’t really need to hold on so tight. But I like it.”
Her breasts had been pressing against his back. She loosened her grip. They were rounding a corner now, heading west out of town in the direction of the sunset. She leaned in.
“You’re a natural,” he called out over his shoulder.
She would have been happy to keep going, far from this place, toward the ocean or the mountains. But he took his promise seriously. They were back at the supermarket parking lot by the half hour mark. She hopped off the bike and arranged her hair, that had been blowing in all directions. She could feel her heartbeat.
“Next time, I’ll take you to this road I know where there’s this great boulder. From the top, you can see the world. We’d just need a couple hours.”
“That was just what I needed,” Eleanor told him. I wish I had a river I could skate away on.
“Call anytime,” he said. He took a pen out of his pocket and took hold of her hand in a way that made her think, for a moment there, that he was going to kiss it. He uncapped the pen and opened her palm. He wrote his number on it.
After he dropped her back at the parking lot and drove away on his bike she retrieved her cart and paid for her groceries. Cam was in the yard when she got home. Her husband did not look up as she pulled the car in and lifted the groceries from the back.
Alison—Al—was upstairs, the place she spent most of her time these days. Ursula was playing Candy Land with Toby. She had taught him to work the spinner, but she moved his pieces for him. From the living room, she could hear her younger daughter’s sweet, high voice, patiently explaining to her brother, not for the first time, why she had to move his piece all the way back to the Molasses Swamp. Not that Toby showed any indication he minded. Ursula just liked to pretend he would care who won.
Putting the groceries away, Eleanor allowed herself to think about the hour she’d just spent.
Timmy’s body was completely unlike her husband’s. More solid and substantial. Not as tall as Cam, but a burlier build, where Cam was lanky. If she had placed her hands on her husband’s stomach, as she’d done with Timmy, she would have been able to feel every rib, but Timmy liked his beer.
She opened a bag of frozen peas and set them on the counter, put the water on to boil. Ursula came in the kitchen, in search of snacks.
“What’s that on your hand?” she asked.
“A number I wrote down off a bulletin board,” she said. “Some guy who sells cordwood.”
After, it occurred to her that this was the first time she’d ever lied to one of her children.
That winter Cam enrolled in a program to become a physical therapist. There was a place in Boston with once-a-month weeklong immersion classes and summer intensives designed to get a person through the program in three years. He was thinking he could see clients out in the barn after he got his certification, he told Eleanor. Clear out his tools. Put in nicer floors maybe. Eleanor could keep her workspace out back. It didn’t take up that much room.
“I want to be more of a contributor around here,” he told Eleanor. “A good physical therapist can bring in a nice income. It could make a big difference. Take some of the pressure off you. And I might learn some new techniques for working with Toby.”
“Whatever,” she said.
Coco was off at school now—a place called the Center for Holistic Studies in Vermont, where they taught Reiki and massage and yoga, which Cam (Cam and Toby, she said) had inspired her to explore. Home on Christmas break, she stopped over to see them. She’d made tie-dye shirts for the children and bigger ones for Cam and Eleanor.
Coco thought the physical therapy idea was great, of course. Coco thought everything Cam did was pretty great, but physical therapy in particular.
“It’s got to be a big advantage,” she said, “having worked with your hands all this time.”
“The yoga classes I’ve been going to with Toby really got me thinking,” he said. “I could see the relationship between the body and the brain. Yoga’s great that way.”
“You should try it, Eleanor,” Coco said. “It might help you to be not so stressed out.”
“So now even my babysitter is giving me advice about how to relax,” Eleanor said to Darla when she came over the next day. (There had been a bad scene with Bobby on Christmas Eve. The makeup she’d applied did not conceal the bruise.)
“Coco actually had the nerve to tell me I should be taking better care of myself,” Eleanor told her. “The big eighteen-year-old expert.”
“Of course she’s right,” Darla said. “That’s what’s so annoying. Same as you’re right when you keep telling me to leave Bobby. Sometimes it just feels crummy, hearing the truth.”
Eleanor did know, in fact, that she needed to have something in her life besides taking care of her children and paying the bills. But the idea of hanging out on
a mat listening to a CD of kirtan chanting while performing sun salutations just didn’t have any appeal to her. What she wanted to do, actually, was call up Timmy Pouliot and go for another motorcycle ride.
49.
Zero Gravity
That was the year Eleanor got her first computer, and they announced that a teacher was going up in space.
She’d always resisted technology—held on to her manual typewriter for years before finally buying her IBM Selectric. Back when she had her comic strip her editor at the syndicate was always urging her to upgrade. More significantly, maybe, Al, who’d been obsessed with technology as far back as kindergarten, when her grandparents sent them a Pong game for Christmas, had told her mother she should buy a computer from a new company called Apple. A Macintosh.
Everything was going to be about computers and programming now, Al told her. If you didn’t accept that, you’d be living in the dark ages. Look at the Challenger! That’s where the world was heading. Technology.
“Before you know it, Mom, computers are going to have graphic programs,” Al told Eleanor. Movies, too, maybe, and ways of communicating with people without having to use a phone. On one of her visits to the library she’d found an article about a lab at Stanford run by a man named Terry Winograd—whom she now quoted regularly to her parents. “Pretty soon people will be able to talk to their phone and tell their stereo what music to play,” she told Eleanor. She already knew she was going to study with Dr. Winograd at Stanford someday.
According to Al, computers were going to revolutionize the world. She herself preferred PCs, but for her mother’s purposes, the Apple Macintosh was best.
“Just take my word for it,” she said. “This is something I understand.”
Finally, though it represented a big investment, Eleanor had ordered one of the new Macintosh computers. The box sat in her studio for two months before she had the courage to open it.
“You have no idea how much memory they can store on one tiny chip,” Al told her. “It’s like magic, only it’s real. You’ll see, Mom. This is going to change everything.”
There isn’t a computer in the world that can help Toby, Eleanor thought. But she didn’t say it.
That fall it felt as though everyone was going off in different directions. Eleanor, working her long hours in the studio, was trying to come up with money. Cam was driving back and forth to Boston for physical therapy training and, weeks he was home, spending more and more time off somewhere—Eleanor never even asked anymore—studying his anatomy books in between drives to bring Toby to yoga. With Eleanor working so hard, Phyllis made most of the meals. Al just stayed upstairs in the kids’ room, reading about programming and studying Mandarin. Days went by sometimes now when they didn’t even have meals together anymore. The one thing Eleanor had said they’d always do.
Ursula was focused on the Challenger space launch. Christa McAuliffe lived half an hour from Akersville, in Concord. She had a husband and two kids, and a job as a high school science teacher, as well as a lifelong ambition to go into space. Except when she put on her astronaut suit, she looked like a regular mother. The happy kind.
They made a bulletin board about the Challenger in Ursula’s classroom. Whenever you found an article in the newspaper about Christa McAuliffe or the other astronauts, you were supposed to cut it out and bring it in to add to the bulletin board. By Thanksgiving, the board had been almost filled up, and they weren’t even going to launch the Challenger until January.
By November, the mission to space was all Ursula talked about. She knew the names of every one of the astronauts, but her particular focus was Christa McAuliffe. Christa just seemed so cheerful about everything—like Ursula herself, actually. In every one of the pictures of Christa on the bulletin board, she was smiling.
At Stop & Shop with Eleanor one time, Ursula saw a commemorative edition of People magazine with Christa McAuliffe on the cover. Eleanor didn’t buy things like this normally, but Ursula said she’d rake all the leaves under Old Ashworthy plus empty the dishwasher for a month if her mother would buy the magazine. Eleanor had put it in her cart, though probably less because the deal impressed her than because she had no energy to argue.
Eleanor felt tired all the time now, though the feeling had nothing to do with staying up late or working harder than usual. It was a bone-deep weariness. When she tried to summon an image of something hopeful to look forward to, she came up blank.
For Ursula, nothing exemplified hope better than the Challenger launch.
At dinner, when the family gathered around the table, she talked nonstop about Christa. She knew the names of her children and that she had played piano when she was Ursula’s age, and how she believed that everyone should have a dream and never give up on it. Ursula had seen a special on TV that showed Christa McAuliffe at the space center in Texas, practicing what it would be like not to have any gravity around. They showed her floating around a pretend space capsule doing somersaults in the air.
You would think a person’s hair would look really crazy in a situation like that, Ursula pointed out, but Christa’s hair had looked pretty much the same in the no-gravity space capsule model as it did in the other pictures on the bulletin board. Ursula found this difficult to understand, but Eleanor said that was a perm for you. It took more than zero gravity to mess it up.
Ursula wished she could be someplace where there wasn’t any gravity. “When I grow up I’m going to be an astronaut,” she told them at dinner.
“Good luck with that,” her older sister observed, in the new, bitter tone of voice in which she delivered just about every remark. They all knew they were supposed to call her Al now, but they kept forgetting, which was one more source of irritation.
“You have to be wicked good at math,” Al went on. “Plus, they give you a test where you do all these push-ups and jumping jacks. You’d never be able to pass.”
“That’s not what Christa says,” Ursula told her. “Christa says if you just try hard enough and believe you can do it, anything’s possible. Christa says, reach for the stars.”
Al rolled her eyes and took a piece of chicken. Her hand extended across Toby’s plate, as if no one was sitting there. Toby, observing the chicken passing by, studied his fork.
“Anyways, I got a B plus in arithmetic this report card,” Ursula said. Also, she was doing sit-ups every night.
“You know how many people there are that try out for NASA? Like, a million.”
“I think it’s great that Ursula wants to be an astronaut,” Eleanor offered. She still said the kinds of things normal mothers said to their kids, even though Ursula could tell it was mostly an act.
“I might just sign up to be an astronaut, too,” Cam told them. “What do you think, El?” He held out a biscuit as if it were a spaceship and landed it on her plate.
She just looked at him. Her behavior had started to resemble Toby’s. Whatever faraway place he occupied now, she seemed to have gone there, too. Or maybe a different one.
“You’d be a great astronaut, Dad,” Ursula said. “You’re great at everything.”
“They have an age limit on astronauts,” Al told her.
“Oh, well,” Cam said. Come to think of it, if he went up in space he’d miss his family too much.
There was another reason why Ursula brought up the Challenger so much. It gave them something to talk about. She never remembered them having this problem before, but in the six months since the accident, they had less and less to say to each other. Maybe because so often it had been Toby who got the ball rolling, his silence now left them all at a loss for words.
A loss for words. Ursula couldn’t remember where she’d heard that expression, but she understood what it meant now. You could lose your money, or your appetite, and one time she heard a woman at the post office talking about a man she knew who lost his marbles. But a loss for words seemed to her now the saddest of all.
There was this giant space in their family that Toby us
ed to occupy, and even though he was right there in the room with them—more so than ever before, actually, now that he never ran off on his own the way he used to, climbing up on things and disappearing at museums and shopping malls—Ursula did everything she could to fill it. Not that her efforts worked very well.
It was as if their whole house was a zero-gravity chamber, Ursula thought. They were all floating around like astronauts, waving their arms, turning upside down or sideways, doing these normal kinds of things like eating Jell-O or getting toothpaste out of the tube, except the Jell-O just hung there in the air waiting for one of them to get a hold of it.
Nobody bumped into anybody. They spread out their arms, but nobody touched each other. The only difference was, when they showed zero gravity on TV, the astronauts all looked like they were having fun.
50.
A Million Pieces
All month, Ursula had been counting down the days to the Challenger launch. They’d canceled it twice on account of unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral. Then came the news: the shuttle was launching. That morning, the astronauts were going into space.
Students at the girls’ school were going to watch the launch in the cafeteria. They had all signed a card that they mailed off to Concord, where Christa McAuliffe lived, letting her know they’d be cheering for her as she blasted off the launchpad. Nobody would be cheering louder than Ursula.
Eleanor was packing the school lunches when Ursula came down for breakfast. She had on a light blue jumpsuit to match the jumpsuits of the shuttle crew. She told her mother she was too excited to eat. She’d eat after at the party they were planning at school for after the liftoff. Cam was heading out that day for an all-day physical therapy workshop. Watching him as he headed out the door, Eleanor was struck by what a beautiful man he was, and how long it had been since they’d touched each other. When he bent low to kiss Ursula and touch her cheek, Eleanor felt a strange little stab, remembering how that felt. She had been so angry for so long now, she had almost forgotten.
Count the Ways Page 21
