“I don’t want to turn our children against their father,” Eleanor said.
“So they turn against you instead.”
“That won’t happen. That couldn’t ever happen.”
“A lot of shit starts coming down, once people that used to love each other don’t anymore,” Darla said. “They start rewriting their history. I probably do that myself. There must have been a time when I actually loved Bobby, but I can’t even remember why anymore.”
“Our children love us both,” Eleanor said. “That won’t ever change.”
55.
A New Mattress
Long before this, in the aftermath of a different hard time in her life, Eleanor had set out to buy a house. Two weeks after Cam told her he was in love with Coco, she set out again in search of a home, though this time she’d be a renter.
Once, this would have seemed unimaginable for a person who loved swimming or skating in their pond and growing tomatoes and looking at the stars, but that was before. Now she headed south to Boston—a place to which she would have said once she’d never return. Close enough that the children could go back and forth. Far enough away that she might manage to start fresh.
She figured she’d find a condominium. Simpler than a house. Easier upkeep. Cheaper. The first three she looked at were no good; Eleanor recognized this the moment she walked in the door. But the fourth was perfect—recent construction, a little bland, but with a tiny yard and enough space that each of the children could have their own room. The kitchen was small, but the children could do their homework there while Eleanor made dinner, with space for a couch where they could watch movies. There was a sunny dining room where she’d put a big table where they could lay out their valentine-making supplies every February and a bay window for the Christmas tree.
She wasn’t going to love this condo the way she had loved their farm, but she didn’t need to. And in certain ways—particularly those having to do with the children—this place offered advantages to life on the farm. At the special school Toby had attended near Akersville, children with totally different kinds of disabilities were placed in the same too-small classroom. Where they’d be living now, there was a school whose entire focus was on children with brain injuries like Toby’s. A bus would pick him up every morning and bring him there.
The plan was for the children to stay put until the end of the school year. Eleanor would come to see them on weekends. The rest of the time she’d get the new place set up for them to move in when summer vacation started. That way, by the following September, they’d be accustomed to their new home.
The girls would have to change schools, naturally, but they’d have better teachers, more opportunities. Where they’d be moving, they could walk by themselves to the library. There was no pond, of course, but there was a big public pool and in winter, an outdoor skating rink and a much more competitive basketball team for Al. Eleanor would get a family membership at the Museum of Science.
These were all the aspects of the move Eleanor pitched to Al and Ursula (less so to Toby, though he was there in the car when she laid it all out).
“Your friends can come over without their parents driving them,” she said.
“What friends?” Al said. “We don’t know anybody in Brookline.”
Eleanor didn’t kid herself. None of the attractions of city life she suggested replaced what they were losing, and the children all knew it. Who their mother had been in their lives, until now, was the person Al, Ursula, and Toby had counted on to fix things. Who she was now was the person who broke them.
About the particulars—the requirement, far into the future, that their father buy out Eleanor’s share of the farm they shared—she said nothing. The main thing was that the children would still have the farm in their lives. They’d go there on weekends. Even though she would no longer be there herself, Eleanor knew this was a good thing.
The owners of the condo Eleanor chose to rent had moved to Florida to be near their grandchildren, and the place was available for as long as she wanted. The first week of March (cork people season, but not this year), she rented a U-Haul truck. Walt helped, but there was surprisingly little to be done in the end. Eleanor didn’t want to dismantle her children’s home, and she didn’t want much of the old stuff anyway. Mostly, she assembled the furnishings she needed from secondhand stores and a bunch of things the former owners didn’t want to bring south with them.
She bought a new drawing table—a smaller one—and turned a small storage room into her studio and plugged in her Mac. Pulling her car in the driveway of the condo, she did not say, “I’m home.”
A few days after the move, Eleanor drove back to their farm one more time to pick up the last couple of boxes (a few clothes, her cookbooks, a couple of muffin tins) that hadn’t fit in the U-Haul. It was late morning, a Tuesday, all three children in school. Cam was out in the yard bucking firewood.
“Those look heavy,” he said. “I’ll give you a hand.”
He followed her into the house. In the kitchen, she took in the sight of a pan of homemade Rice Krispies treats on the counter (not part of her repertoire or, in the past, her children’s, and Phyllis was not a baker). An unfamiliar pair of women’s skates hung by the woodstove.
“Coco’s been here,” she said.
“She was home from school on a break. The kids wanted to see her.”
His voice was flat, revealing nothing.
The full moon. Black ice. The sound of cracking beneath her skate blades.
She had left the box of clothes in the closet. To reach it meant passing through their old bedroom.
“I’ll just be a second.”
All those years, through the births of three children and a thousand times they’d made love on this bed (every day, at first, then less)—the nights in which one or another of their children, and usually all three, had ended up there next to them—they’d always meant to get a real mattress but never did. All those years, they had slept on the futon from Cam’s cabin, back in his Vermont days.
There was a new mattress in their old bedroom. A good one, from the looks of it.
Eleanor stood at the side that had been hers, looking out the window. From this spot, when in the late stages of labor with their daughters—and, that last time, with their son—she had looked out to the branches of the old ash tree, reaching leafless across a winter sky. There was a spot on the ceiling she’d focused on during contractions, where, when she’d first moved into this house, before she and Cam got together, she’d stuck a single glow-in-the-dark star.
It was still there.
She remembered the first night they spent together, when she’d tried to count the freckles on Cam’s chest, but gave up. His pale naked skin in the candlelight seemingly lit from within.
A winter night. The sound of a basketball game coming from the other room, oranges tumbling off the bed, the world, or just her body, ripping in two.
We have a daughter.
Sixteen months later: We have another daughter. She had loved it that he registered no trace of disappointment at the news. He was not one of those men who required a son.
And one more time, another baby. The picture came to her of the moment, in the bathtub this time, when Toby burst into the world—Toby, the one of their children born so fast they had cut the cord and wrapped him in blankets before the midwife made it down their road. Before they even knew the sex of this baby, Cam had called out, “This one’s a redhead.” Those damp curls. Fists, punching the air. A boy. They had told themselves they didn’t care about the sex, but when they saw, Cam said the words, over and over, “I don’t believe it. We have a son.”
She remembered the pronouns. We have a daughter. We have a son. We. This part—the part where he’d speak of the two of them as a single unit—would change. Had already.
There had always been a quilt on this bed. Double wedding ring, stitched by Cam’s grandmother. But today there were only sheets.
She stood t
here looking out the window at the familiar view. The tree, the field below it. The stone wall. The pond she would give anything to have never built. She didn’t hear Cam enter the room.
“I was stripping the bed,” he said. So many phrases took on new meaning now.
She looked up to see her husband—she had not stopped thinking of him that way yet—standing beside her. He touched her arm.
Later, driving back to her new home in the unfamiliar town where she slept now, she tried to reconstruct the event that had taken place at the house with Cam that afternoon. He must have put his arms around her, but that embrace had nothing to do with lust or longing. The way he touched her was more of an acknowledgment of shared grief, like the comfort one person offers another when there’s been a death in the family.
Cam had wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t so much return the embrace as she collapsed against his body. If he hadn’t caught her she might have dropped to the floor.
He was the only other person on earth who remembered everything that had happened in this house. How could it be that a person could be both the source of your greatest sorrow and the source of your only comfort, all at once? That afternoon he was both.
Neither of them said anything. He pulled his shirt over his head—the same way he’d done all those years back in his Vermont cabin that night, the first one. She unbuttoned her blouse, let her tired, well-nursed breasts fall free, not even caring anymore what they looked like in the daylight because he already knew, and anyway, no further need existed to be what she was not, to him: an object of desire. The day would come when they’d be strangers, but this hadn’t happened yet. Who each of them was that day, to the other, was the only other person on earth who understood what had been lost.
They unzipped their jeans and stepped out of them, let their clothes fall to the floor and faced each other, less like a man and a woman than two parts of the same whole, two halves of a marriage coming apart. Unlike that first time, there was no shred of illusion on his part or hers that what was happening here held any promise for the future. They were honoring their shared past, was all. In an odd way, she believed she was paying homage to their children. The place they came from, where they began.
“I think we should have lots of babies together,” he’d told her once. “I want to make a family.” Well, they had done that. Now came the unmaking part.
She knew his body as well as her own. He could have said the same of hers. She knew where the birthmark was that he used to call North Dakota. He knew where the stretch marks were from that first pregnancy, and the two that followed.
“We both get to be the parents of this child,” she’d said. “But my body is wrecked. And you look like some marble statue at the Metropolitan Museum.”
“You’re beautiful to me,” he’d told her. At the time she believed him. At the time he probably meant it.
His body had barely changed since the day they met. One look at Eleanor’s and you would have known this was a woman who’d given birth. Now he was in love with a skinny girl with small perfect breasts and a flat stomach and legs that went on forever—a girl who believed he hung the moon.
A memory came to her.
They were in Maine, on a family trip on which Coco, twelve years old at the time, had accompanied them—to help entertain the children and make it possible for Eleanor and Cam to go out alone for a lobster dinner and a glass of wine now and then. At a rest stop on the highway, heading to Acadia National Park, Coco had gotten her period for the first time. She’d taken Eleanor aside, embarrassed to have gotten blood on her shorts. “Don’t worry,” Eleanor said.
She’d taken Coco to the ladies’ room. The two of them shared a stall, Eleanor squatting beside Coco as she sat on the toilet, teaching her how to insert a tampon.
Eleanor’s lovemaking with Cam that final afternoon had not lasted particularly long. Nothing happened that stood out as different in any way from a hundred other times their bodies had come together in this way, except for the knowledge that they were saying goodbye. They would never be in this place together again. They held each other but did not kiss.
After she’d put her clothes on again, she picked up the box she had set down before—the one with her cookbooks, which she would seldom if ever use again. The Tassajara Bread Book. (Homemade sourdough slathered in butter that they fed each other by the fire, naked.) Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. (Consulted one time only, the night Patty came to dinner. Coquilles St.-Jacques. Chocolate mousse.) The Silver Palate. (Chicken Marbella, for years, her standby when her in-laws came to visit.) So many ways to mark the passage of time in a marriage, the seasons of love.
Neither of them said anything as she walked out the door, after.
Where would you begin? Where would you end?
56.
I Will Always Love You
Sometimes, waking up alone in the new condo, she would forget where she was, reach for a door that would have been there if she were back in their old bedroom, or—not yet familiar with the layout here—find herself bumping into a wall she hadn’t expected.
It was strange for Eleanor, after her years of caring for young children, to find herself living as she did over those first months after moving out—alone in a city condominium, with nobody to cook meals for or ask: Have you done your homework? Have you practiced your clarinet? For the first few weeks after she moved, she called them every night, but there was an uncomfortable awkwardness to their conversations, and sometimes even the sense that the girls were going through the motions, impatient to get off the phone and back to their lives.
One time, when Eleanor called, Ursula told her that Coco was there. Home from school, she’d stopped by for a visit. She’d fixed them a stir-fry dinner in a wok, with a kind of noodles she’d brought from Chinatown.
“Coco’s taking us to Disney on Ice,” Ursula said. She’d seen ads on television since she was little and always wanted to go.
“We even got Dad to come. Even though he’s not the Disney type.”
“Coco’s around an awful lot these days, huh?” Eleanor said.
“She misses us,” Ursula told her. “Phyllis still babysits. Coco’s just our friend now.”
Cam hadn’t told them the rest. Whatever went on between him and Coco—weekends the children were with Eleanor, probably—he kept from them.
Eleanor asked Ursula something about her social studies report then. She had been working on a project about Helen Keller. Maybe the two of them could go to the library when they got together over the weekend.
“Maybe,” Ursula said.
She had to go. It was her turn in Monopoly. She didn’t want to keep everyone waiting.
“Coco made popcorn balls,” Ursula told Eleanor. In the background, the sound of laughter.
Alone in the Brookline condo, Eleanor spent her days on a series of Easy Reader books she’d signed up to write and illustrate, on the presidents. (She’d been assigned the biographies of Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft. Could there be a more boring president?) Shutting her computer down at the end of the long days at her desk, she painted the walls in the children’s bedrooms in the colors they’d picked out with her—buttercup yellow for Ursula, green for Toby, and an awful shade of purple that Al insisted on.
“Did you ever consider that surrounding yourself with four walls the color of an eggplant might be kind of depressing?” Eleanor asked Al.
“It’s not the color of my walls that’s depressing,” Al said. She spoke in a low, faintly sarcastic snarl. More and more these days, this was her tone, to Eleanor at least. She wondered if Al did the same with Cam. The one time she’d tried to bring this up to him, his response had been clipped, dismissive.
“You have your relationship with Al, I have mine,” he told Eleanor. “How your children speak to you is their business, not mine.”
She told herself it would be better once the school year ended and they moved into the new place with her. She bought a fo
osball table and a trampoline. Other than a few things she’d bought that she hoped would be fun for her children, there was little furniture in the place, still. Her shoes on the floor made a hollow, echoing sound as she walked through the rooms.
Friday afternoons now, Eleanor drove up the highway to pick up her children—her first time returning to their old place as a visitor. The three of them were standing outside waiting for her, their bags lined up beside them in the driveway. The message was clear enough: Cam, though not in evidence, didn’t want her coming inside what had once been her home.
When they got to the condo, she showed them their rooms. “I didn’t know mine would be so purple,” Al told her.
“It’ll be fine. Once you put up a bunch of posters, it won’t show so much.”
All spring, she made the trip to Akersville on weekends. Eleanor took the Friday afternoon pickup. Cam took Sundays, bringing them home to the farm.
Because the condo wasn’t set up for cooking yet, and none of their things were there, on their weekends with Eleanor they went out for hamburgers at the diner mostly, or bowling. When Al’s baseball season started, Eleanor made the long drive to her games when she could and the longer drive home. She sat on the bleachers with the other parents—one or two of them old friends from softball summers watching the Yellow Jackets, and mothers of children in Al’s class whom she’d known since their children were babies—women whose children had played at their house over the years, women who’d worked with her selling Avon products to raise money for the class trip to the science museum.
They all knew her name, and some of them greeted her. (They knew the story, too. Or thought they did: That Eleanor was the one who’d moved out of their house. That Cam had stayed. That the children were living with him.)
Count the Ways Page 25
