Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  Beyond an occasional clipped greeting, few of them spoke to her now. Maybe the women thought she’d set her sights on their husbands. Maybe they imagined divorce was contagious. Or she was just a reminder of everything they didn’t want to happen to them.

  Cam showed up at Al’s games, too, of course—never with Coco, though one time, on her way to her old house to pick up the children, she’d seen Evan and Betsy walking along the road. Their brief conversation when she’d rolled down the window to greet them—Betsy’s observation that it must be easier getting first-rate help for Toby, now that she lived near Boston, Evan’s report on the ins and outs of Coco’s life at the Center for Holistic Studies—made it clear to Eleanor that Coco’s parents still had no clue of the relationship between their daughter and Cam. The way they had spoken with Eleanor that day conveyed a combination of regret and wariness. She noted a small, strange chill in their tone toward her. In the story they had constructed, it appeared, Eleanor was the one who must have decided to end the marriage, with Cam, the lonely abandoned husband, left to hold down the fort.

  Another time, in June, right before school got out, Eleanor had run into Coco herself at the house—out in the yard, kicking a ball around with Al. Coco had actually waved when she caught sight of Eleanor, as if she forgot for a minute the most recent chapter in their long history. As for Cam, when he showed up on her doorstep to pick up the children on Sunday afternoons, he might have been the pizza delivery man for all he spoke to her now.

  After he left, she walked over to Coolidge Corner to buy herself an ice cream cone. Sitting on a bench outside the ice cream parlor, she could hear someone’s car radio tuned to a country station, and Dolly Parton came on. “I Will Always Love You.”

  A couple of teenagers came out of the shop carrying a giant banana split, the girl dressed in short shorts like Daisy Dukes, the boy in a tank top, though he looked like a person who had only recently begun shaving. When the girl got ice cream on her chin, he licked it off her while, on the radio, Dolly sang that part that always got to Eleanor.

  Bittersweet memories. That’s all I’m taking with me.

  One of those older couples walked by, who had probably been married so long the husband didn’t need to ask his wife what flavor she wanted, or if she wanted a sugar or waffle cone. The wife stayed outside on the other side of the bench, waiting, while the husband made his way up to the window to get their cones.

  “We always get maple walnut,” she told Eleanor.

  Eleanor finished off the last of her cone and walked the five blocks home. But home had a whole different meaning now. Home was a neat, bland condo in Brookline with Corian countertops and vinyl tile floors. No dog. No hooting owl. No stars. No small warm bodies climbing in next to her in the middle of the night. When she woke in the morning, with nobody there but her own self, the bed felt vast as the ocean.

  57.

  Crazyland Dead Ahead

  She had always been careful about drinking. She never wanted to be like her parents. But one time, she’d bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s—the brand her father had favored. She had four shots that night. Pouring herself another, she dialed Cam’s number.

  “You alone? Or is your girlfriend there? Maybe she’s babysitting?” She spoke the word as if it were an obscenity.

  Crazyland, dead ahead.

  “Stop it, Eleanor. You don’t want to do this.”

  “So when are you planning to tell them the truth?” she asked him. “Maybe you’re waiting for Coco’s twenty-first birthday? If so . . . that’s a long time.”

  “The children have gone through a lot of changes,” Cam said. He spoke in the calm, even tones of the narrator on a nature video, or Mister Rogers.

  “It’s pretty convenient, from your perspective,” Eleanor told him. “Keeping them in the dark about the reason for the divorce. Leaving them with the impression that I’m the one who bailed on our family.”

  “Nobody bailed on our family,” Cam said. (Mister Rogers again. Soft music—Kate Bush, she thought—in the background.) “We just grew in different directions.”

  “And yours led you straight to an eighteen-year-old girl.” She was gripping the phone so tightly that if it were a kitten, it would be dead. Her heart was beating hard. “How do you think your old friends Evan and Betsy might feel, if they knew?”

  “I wish you didn’t have to be so bitter, Eleanor. It’s not good for our children. It’s not good for you, either.”

  “And you’re so damned concerned about me, aren’t you, Cam? High on the list of your priorities, right after getting a new mattress and family trips to Disney on Ice with Coco.”

  The sound of her voice, speaking to him, had a new, hard edge. Not unlike what was happening to Al, it occurred to Eleanor. Even Ursula. Maybe this was what divorce did to people. It made them mean.

  “I guess you occupy the high ground here,” she said.

  “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Namaste.” The way she spoke the word was nothing like how a yoga teacher would say it.

  58.

  Code of Silence

  The children moved into the Brookline condo with Eleanor that June, the weekend after school let out. That night she took them out to dinner in downtown Boston—to a Chinese restaurant where the paper place mats let you figure out what animal year you’d been born in. Alison was the year of the snake. Ursula was—a happy discovery—the year of the horse. Toby, year of the monkey. Eleanor, to her chagrin, was also born in the year of the snake.

  They got a pupu platter and drinks with paper umbrellas, and after, walking home, they stopped for ice cream. Eleanor felt like a tour guide, pointing out all the stops. Here was the Y where they could go swimming—even in winter, imagine. Here was the craft supply store and the funny little store, on a side street, run by a man who sold comic books and action figures. Look at this, Toby. Castle Grayskull in the window.

  They stopped to look at the posters at the movie theater. A movie called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off looked like something Al would like. She was the choosy one. Ursula liked everything. Or used to.

  “Oh, boy,” Eleanor said, studying the poster. “This one looks really funny.” There was an unnatural brightness in her voice as she spoke to them, a false air of gaiety. She was like a person on a first date, but with her own children.

  Slowly, things got more like regular life around their house. New regular life. The children started school. They got to know other kids. Al joined the basketball team. Mornings, the bus picked Toby up for the school Eleanor had enrolled him in for children with cognitive issues, and twice a week he worked with a tutor who helped him with reading—an expense Cam’s parents had offered to cover. Toby had a friend, a boy named Jacob with Down syndrome. One day he came over and the two of them spent all afternoon looking at Toby’s rock collection.

  But the children were different now. They were older. Part of it was that. But they displayed an unfamiliar self-protectiveness around Eleanor, a wary distance. They didn’t climb into bed with her anymore at the new house—and maybe, she considered, that old tradition would have died out by now even if she and Cam had stayed together. But in other ways, too, she could feel them pulling away. Carrying their clothes in brown paper bags (Eleanor had provided them with small suitcases, but they seemed to prefer the paper bags), they moved back and forth between the houses of their parents as if they were navigating a demilitarized zone between enemy territories, the only constant in their lives now each other.

  Maybe this had been a formal decision on their part, though more likely, it was instinct that told them to behave this way: the three of them (Eleanor chose to include Toby here) adhered to a strict code of silence with one parent, where the activities of the other were concerned. What happened at one house was never reported in the other.

  Or at least—maybe this was more accurate—they hardly ever told Eleanor about what went on in her old house with Cam. What they told Cam about life in their mother’s
condo was unknown to her, though there was little to tell.

  Now and then they’d mention a visit from Coco, times she came home from school for the weekend—an outing, a dinner—but nothing Eleanor observed suggested they viewed her as anything more than a family friend who liked to stop by and play Monopoly or go ice-skating with them on the pond.

  Eleanor didn’t see Darla as much as she had when she’d lived in Akersville, but they talked a lot on the phone, though at odd hours, never when Bobby was home—Bobby being Darla’s primary topic of discussion. One night when he was drunk he’d yanked her arm so hard it came out of the socket, and she ended up in the emergency room, again, though when the nurses asked her how it happened, she’d lied. Another time, when Eleanor stopped by Darla’s house on her way back from delivering the children to Cam’s for the weekend, she’d seen a bruise on Darla’s arm. Darla had put foundation over it, but the purple showed through. To Eleanor, anyway.

  “You have to leave him,” Eleanor told her.

  “You know what kind of a dump I could afford for Kimmie and me?”

  “You’d still be better off. You think this is good for Kimmie, seeing her father beat you up?”

  “It’s not that bad,” Darla said. “He mostly only gets out of control when the Red Sox lose.”

  “So if they make it to the playoffs, your marriage problems are over?” Eleanor asked her.

  “If I get hit by a bus, my marriage problems are over,” Darla told her.

  59.

  A Waterbed

  It was March again, and with a warm front coming in, the snow had mostly melted. In the old days, this would have been the weekend for Eleanor and the children to make their boats and their cork people and launch them in the brook, but they were with Cam. After she dropped them off at the farm, she pulled up alongside a pay phone and called up Timmy Pouliot.

  Eleanor had not seen Timmy again since that day at the Stop & Shop, their unlikely motorcycle ride.

  The truth was, Timmy Pouliot had been on her mind for a while. Sometimes, alone in her bed back in Brookline, she allowed herself to think about him—how it had felt on the back of his motorcycle that day, her arms wrapped tight around him. She imagined other things, too. Timmy kissing her, peeling her clothes off her body. She pictured the tattoo on his arm, with his father’s name on it. Pictured him naked in the bed next to her.

  That afternoon, before setting out on the drive to Akersville, Eleanor had written his number on a piece of paper before she left Brookline. Dropping her dime in the slot, she could feel her hand trembling. Maybe he wouldn’t pick up. Most likely he’d be out on a date.

  He answered.

  “I was remembering how much you always liked my chocolate chip cookies,” she said. “I just made a big batch. I thought I might bring you some.”

  He sounded surprised, but not in a bad way. He gave her the address of his apartment.

  It was a third-floor walk-up above the video store. The kind of place only a young person would live, or someone with hardly any money. Timmy Pouliot was both.

  There was a bumper sticker on the door that said “Save Water, Drink Beer.” From another apartment on the same floor, Eleanor heard an album she thought might be Led Zeppelin, and from somewhere else, the sound of an unhappy baby and a woman yelling at the baby to shut up. Someone had hung up a poster in the hallway of a naked man under a yellow raincoat and the words “Good Boys Always Wear Their Rubbers.”

  Eleanor imagined what she must look like standing there—out of breath from the stairs, a thirty-four-year-old woman with a do-it-yourself perm, wearing lipstick for the first time in a couple of years, holding a tin of chocolate chip cookies. She had squirted perfume on herself, and it came out faster than she expected, so the smell of it seemed to fill the hallway. If she hadn’t already knocked on the door, she might have changed her mind and gone home.

  She thought about what would happen when he opened the door. She imagined handing him the cookies. She imagined kissing him.

  Were women supposed to carry condoms now that there was this terrible virus going around that nobody knew anything about except that it killed you? She had no idea of the rules these days, not that she ever had.

  His face, when he opened the door, looked so happy to see her. She had forgotten how blue his eyes were, and more so, the intensity of his gaze. He was in his housepainter pants and a T-shirt, and his hair looked as though he’d just come out of the shower. She held out the cookies.

  “I didn’t want to eat these all myself,” she said.

  “Not that you have anything to worry about,” he said. “I always thought you had a killer body.”

  He invited her in. There was a big-screen TV and a recliner chair and a beanbag, also a bong, and a couple of empty pizza boxes.

  “Jeez, I should’ve tidied up,” he said. “I’m not that accustomed to entertaining guests.”

  She sat on the beanbag. It was difficult knowing where to put her legs.

  She had changed clothes a couple of times before making the drive, Ursula noting with surprise that she had makeup on. She had also dug through her underwear drawer in search of a pair of underpants that weren’t stretched out from one or another of her pregnancies. She had also needed to make the cookies.

  He offered her a beer. She took it. He already had one going.

  “So how are your kids doing?” he asked her. “I mean, I know it’s been difficult with your little boy. But the main thing is, he could’ve died, right? Cam saved his life. I’d hope I could pull it together to do something like that. Keep my wits about me.”

  Eleanor just sat there. She couldn’t speak. But Timmy kept going.

  “Not that you’d ever want something like that to happen in the first place, naturally. But if it did.”

  “My kids are pretty good,” she said. “Everybody’s doing okay, considering.”

  Except her daughter who pretty much lived in her room all the time. Her son who had been trying to master the first five letters of the alphabet for three months, and hadn’t managed yet. Her former husband, former woodworker turned yoga devotee and physical therapy student, in love with their babysitter, though nobody was supposed to know about that. With the exception of Ursula—good, steady, dependable Ursula—every member of their family, including Toby, was basically unrecognizable from the person they’d been not even two years earlier, but Ursula wasn’t the same, either, since the Challenger exploded.

  “We’re already talking about the new softball season,” he said. “We were just saying how much we’re going to miss Cam the Man on first base. I haven’t seen the guy in over a year.”

  Eleanor raised the beer bottle to her lips. It had dawned on her finally that Timmy Pouliot didn’t know that she and Cam weren’t together anymore.

  “That husband of yours is a lucky man,” Timmy said, biting into a cookie. For as long as she’d known him, he’d had a way of looking at her. A kind of yearning. He had it even when he was thirteen, that first time she’d met him at the waterfall when they’d talked about Van Gogh and he told her about his father’s suicide.

  “Tell him hello from me, would you? We all miss him.”

  Whatever Eleanor had imagined might happen when she went to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment, it wasn’t this. Sitting on the yellow plastic beanbag, breathing in the too-strong smell of her own perfume mixed with the faint scent of pizza and marijuana, she realized she had not constructed any specific pictures of what might happen once she showed up here. She had not gotten any further than the idea of putting on the mascara, delivering the cookies. But she had worn her one pair of decent underwear.

  “Too bad he couldn’t come over, too,” Timmy said. “I really admire Cam. I hope someday I can be as good of a dad to my kids. If I have kids.”

  His mouth was full of cookie, and it looked like it had been a couple of days since he’d shaved. He wasn’t handsome like Cam, but he had a kind face.

  She put her head in her hands for a mom
ent before looking up, looking him straight in the eye.

  “I didn’t actually come here to talk about my husband,” Eleanor said.

  She was jumping off the ledge now. She was falling. She didn’t even care. What did it matter anymore if she looked totally stupid and crazy? She didn’t even care if she looked to him like a terrible mother.

  “I guess you hadn’t heard,” she said. “Cam and I separated last winter. The divorce will be final any day now.”

  “Oh, jeez,” he said. “Holy cow. I always thought you two were, like, the perfect couple.”

  Once, maybe.

  “Those kids. It must be rough,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do—”

  She looked at the beer poster, the pizza box. Through a beaded curtain, the bed.

  “I was thinking I’d like to have an affair with you,” she told him.

  It looked to Eleanor as though Timmy was having trouble processing her words to him, the same thing that was true when she spoke to Toby. For a moment his face took on a similar baffled expression.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “Oh, man. I wasn’t expecting that.”

  Already, she was apologizing. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “I was just a little crazy for a moment there.”

  He reached out then and touched her hand. “You’re not crazy.”

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. She was trying to get up out of the beanbag chair now, but it wasn’t easy. “You must think I’m some kind of pathetic idiot.”

  He moved over toward her then so his face was even with hers, on the low chair. He touched her face.

  “I’m the idiot here,” he said. “A beautiful sexy woman that I’ve been nuts about since I was in seventh grade shows up at my apartment to say she’d like to make love with me and I start talking about softball, and what a great guy her husband is. Ex-husband.”

  He kissed her. That first kiss was oddly tentative, like the kiss a junior high school boy might deliver, but the next one was different.