Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  “It’s just like in The Sound of Music, where the girl starts out being a nun that’s just helping out with the family, and then one day the dad figures it out that they should get married,” Ursula said.

  Except that in this case, unlike that of the von Trapps, the children’s mother hadn’t died. She was alive and well—alive, anyway—in a Brookline condo. Coco was not much of a singer. Other than that, she was evidently assuming the role of Julie Andrews.

  “It’s really good Dad fell in love, finally,” Ursula said. “He was so lonely in the house by himself all that time.”

  Eleanor gripped the steering wheel tightly. She could feel her chest tightening. “How about Coco’s mom and dad?” she asked. “How do they feel about this?” Most parents would not consider it cause for celebration, hearing their daughter’s announcement that she was marrying a man twice her age, only a few years younger than her father.

  “Coco said at first they needed some convincing,” Ursula said. “But once they saw how happy Coco was, they said it was fine with them. I guess that makes Betsy and Evan kind of like our grandparents.”

  “That’s really great,” Eleanor told her. “You kind of came up short in that department, before.”

  “Dad said you might be mad,” Ursula said. She was probably still waiting for the Crazyland moment.

  “Why would I be mad?” Eleanor adjusted the rearview mirror, studying Al’s face, and Ursula’s. Toby’s, she knew. “We got a divorce. He can do what he wants.”

  “That’s what I said,” Ursula said. “It’s not like some stranger we never met is moving in. We love Coco. You love her, too, right, Mom?”

  They got married six weeks later—a small gathering, just Evan and Betsy and the children, Eleanor gathered—though nobody mentioned it until after, and might not have said anything even then if Toby hadn’t told about the cake they had with two miniature people on the top, and chocolate frosting, his favorite.

  Every Friday now, when Eleanor drove out to the farm to drop off Alison and Ursula and Toby she’d see Coco’s little yellow VW Bug in the driveway, and once, when there was laundry hung out to dry, she noticed a row of tiny bikini underpants clipped to the line. Coco had planted petunias, but in that way that a person does who’s a first-time gardener. A single row of plants, twelve inches apart, like soldiers.

  The children said very little more to their mother about Coco after that, but when they got home at the end of weekends at the farm now, and they unpacked the contents of the backpacks, there were craft projects (not the kind Eleanor might have thought up; these came from store-bought kits, mostly: potholders with happy faces, key chains with identical googly-eyed puppies) and little Tupperware containers full of healthy-looking cookies of a kind Cam would never have gotten around to making. Sometimes, when they unpacked, Eleanor would spot a new shirt with a unicorn on the front (this would be Ursula’s) that said “Dreams can come true,” or a vial of some kind of herbal remedy for Toby that was supposed to help new brain cells develop.

  Al returned home one Sunday with a pair of Doc Martens Coco had bought for her at the mall—the shoes she’d been wanting all year. Once, undressing Toby for bed, she had found a press-on tattoo of a goat with the word “Capricorn” circling it. Coco might as well have taken out a Sharpie and written the words “Coco was here.”

  He’s not your son, she wanted to tell Coco. Don’t scribble your graffiti on him.

  62.

  Dream Girl

  Dark as it was at Timmy Pouliot’s apartment—with a smell always hanging in the air of other people’s dinners, the sound of other people’s babies crying, the faded Farrah poster—it was the place where Eleanor most consistently found comfort. Stepping in the door, Friday nights, after dropping off her children, she could feel her whole body soften. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he’d be there holding her, his face buried in her hair.

  “Take off your shoes,” he said. She took off everything.

  She loved that moment when he’d hold out the towel for her, as she stepped out of the tub. Later, on his saggy waterbed, he’d lay his head on her belly and kiss her stretch marks.

  “I know you,” he had said to her once.

  She knew him, too—not just his body, though that, too.

  Often, when she got to his apartment, he’d be playing Guns N’ Roses, but he also loved Hank Williams and Vince Gill. He had a sweet voice, and he was teaching himself the guitar. He’d written Eleanor a song that he called “Dream Girl.”

  Now he stood on the bed—his body swaying a little on account of it being filled with water. He wore nothing but a bandanna, and he had a belly on him, but not much of one. A sweet smile. That tattoo of his dead father’s name, “Brian.” The tattoo artist should have written “Bryan,” but making the change would have cost too much, so he just left it. Sometimes, lying next to him, Eleanor traced her finger over the letters.

  A person who didn’t care about Timmy Pouliot might have said this was a pretty bad song, but for some reason it made her cry. He only knew a couple of chords. The lyric featured “love” and “skies above.” The refrain had to do with Eleanor being his dream girl.

  “I never wrote a song before,” he told her. “I guess you inspired me.”

  After, as she hit Route 93 South back to Brookline, Eleanor thought about what it would be like if she invited Timmy Pouliot over for dinner some night, to have dinner with her and her children. They knew him slightly from Yellow Jackets games. But they would never in a million years picture him as someone who could be their mother’s boyfriend.

  Toby wouldn’t mind, of course. Toby liked everyone, but a guy on a motorcycle, more so. Timmy would take him for a ride. Slow enough not to worry her, and with a helmet. Most people to whom Toby showed his rock collection would take about sixty seconds to look at it and then say something like “Wow, impressive,” but Timmy would study each rock and ask where it came from, ask Toby which one was his favorite, at which point Toby would bring out his best find, a piece of granite with a very small garnet embedded in it.

  Ursula, meeting Timmy in this unexpected role of boyfriend, would be baffled, then disappointed. She’d recently started making suggestions to Eleanor about men she thought her mother should date—the widowed father of a boy in her class, whose gaze seemed fixed on the floor every time she met him at some school event. Their neighbor down the street, Barry, who wore beautiful suits and had a poodle. Barry was clearly gay, but Ursula loved his dog.

  To Ursula, Timmy would appear poorly dressed and scruffy. “What’s his job, anyway?” she would ask. Ursula would like her mother to marry someone with a house at the Cape, or a mansion, or a boat. Either that, or British royalty. Observing Timmy’s choice of transportation (the motorcycle or his ten-year-old Subaru), she would conclude, not incorrectly, that Timmy was poor.

  Al would be mortified by the way Timmy looked at her mother, and the way he touched her. Which he would do, for sure. He couldn’t help it.

  “I promise I won’t do anything totally nuts,” he would say to Eleanor, if she invited him to their home. “But you can’t expect me to keep my hands off you all night. I have to at least kiss you.”

  She would push him away when he did that. But not very hard.

  63.

  Mr. Fun

  Many times over the months and then years after she and Cam parted, Eleanor reminded herself what they had told each other, told themselves: that they would never speak ill of their children’s other parent. Cam probably managed to keep to his side of the bargain. He seemed to go on with his life as if Eleanor had never existed. She, on the other hand, brooded over their story until she questioned even the good parts of their marriage, or the parts that had seemed good once.

  Maybe they had only appeared to be happy, back in the old days. Maybe Cam never loved her, he just liked living on the farm and everything that went with it. Maybe all those years she’d said it wasn’t a big deal that Cam spent so much time off
making bowls and playing softball, it had been eating away at her, and she was just now waking up to her anger.

  Eleanor didn’t know what was real anymore. The story she’d lived—the one she had told in her Family Tree strip—felt like fiction now.

  In the old days, when they were married—the early years, anyway—she had said it was okay that she made most of the money. They each did the things they were good at. They were a team. But with the syndicate money gone, and the pressure to come up with enough to pay for the braces Al needed, and for Ursula’s braces, and for Toby’s rehabilitation sessions—nobody there to shovel the snow or fix the dishwasher when it gave up the ghost—the absence of a contribution from her children’s father began to wear more heavily. She had no doubt that even with his new income as a physical therapist, money was even tighter on his end, particularly since he now had to come up with the mortgage payment. And still, Cam seemed to move through the world (as little as she saw of him in it) with the same easy, relaxed air he always had.

  She called him up one night—rare event—to say that Ursula wanted to take guitar lessons. Al had bitten into a Brazil nut and broken a tooth. A doctor had recommended special shoes for Toby, to help with his balance issues.

  “I can’t do everything on my own,” she told Cam. “You need to chip in.”

  On the other end of the phone, she heard him sigh. “I don’t know what to tell you, Eleanor,” he said to her. His voice sounded far away, as if he were in some yoga pose—the one they did at the end of the class, where you just lie there chilling out—and she had crashed into the room playing some kind of awful music, with the volume cranked up high.

  “I’m sorry you’re so hung up on money,” he said. “For your own sake, I hope you learn to let go of your anger.”

  She could feel it happening: the bitterness taking hold of her. She no longer minded if her children heard her on the phone to him, the speeches she made about how hard she worked, how much it took to support a family. Maybe she wanted them to hear this, as if, hearing her, they would recognize how unfair he’d been, as if she could make them stop loving their father. Why would any loving parent want to accomplish such a thing?

  “Of course you’re the cool one,” she said—loud enough to be heard in the next room, where they were doing homework. “Mr. Easygoing, Mr. Fun. See how much fun it is to pay for braces.”

  Only he would never know that.

  This conversation took place on the phone. But she could see him on the other end of the line—knew, even, the place where he’d be sitting, at the old trestle table he’d built from a tree that had come down in a storm one time, his hair tied back in a ponytail, maybe, feet on the old velvet footstool that had belonged to his grandmother. There would be a fire in the woodstove, and Coco fixing some extremely healthy dinner for the two of them. Out the window, icicles, and snow drifting down over the bare branches of their old tree. She could picture Sally at his feet, having one of her squirrel-chasing dreams. There had never been any question, when the two of them split up, which of the two of them would get their dog.

  “Maybe I could be mellow and easygoing, too,” Eleanor told Cam now, over the phone. (Crazyland alert. She was heading in that direction.) “If I didn’t have to support three children.”

  Whatever their father said in response, the children couldn’t hear it. Only the shrillness in their mother’s voice, a sound nobody hated more than Eleanor herself.

  On the other end of the line, Cam said something about the farm. How hard he was working now to take care of it, on top of physical therapy classes and working with Toby.

  “You’re quite the hero, all right,” Eleanor said. “Maybe you forget who it was that bought that farm in the first place. Who paid the mortgage all those years while you were off at craft fairs charming the pants off some girl or other.”

  He must have put down the phone at that point. Ursula stood there.

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on Dad all the time,” she said. Al had already headed up to her room. Toby, on the floor, kept his eyes on the controls of his video game—something about lining up jewels so all the matching colors filled a row, not that he ever got them to do that.

  64.

  Goodbye Goodnight Moon

  It was August, and the girls were off from school. (Not Toby. For Toby, school was a year-round event, not that it seemed to be doing much for him.) Ursula was trying to show Toby how to tie his shoes. Al was stationed at her usual spot—the Commodore 64, having recently discovered a sound chip that could re-create songs in three-part harmony. She had just successfully programmed it to play a tinny version of “Fast Car.” Now Tracy Chapman’s words appeared on the screen—“Starting from zero, got nothing to lose”—as a bouncing snowflake followed along.

  Eleanor loaded the dishwasher as the three of them ate breakfast, and Ursula’s conversation turned to a yard sale they were planning to hold at their dad’s farm the weekend after next. Normally, even this amount of information would have been more than they’d share with their mother. But Ursula had been explaining how she intended to send the proceeds to Ethiopia for the babies who were starving there. They’d seen pictures in a magazine.

  “That’s great,” Eleanor said. “So what are you planning to sell?”

  She had made waffles that morning, feeling guilty at having spent the whole day before at her desk, sending out pitches for work.

  “Tons of stuff,” Ursula said. “Dad said we might as well get rid of all the old books we outgrew. There’s got to be a hundred.”

  She could see their covers, and the shelf in the borning room where they were kept. Blueberries for Sal and Babar and Caps for Sale, The Story of Ferdinand and Miss Rumphius and The Little House. Goodnight Moon, and, in the later years, The Borrowers, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach. And a few hundred others. It seemed to her that the story of her years of raising children in that house was contained in the pages of those books.

  “You can’t sell our books,” Eleanor said. She was trying her calm voice.

  “We don’t read them anymore,” Al said. “Even Toby isn’t interested.”

  Eleanor set the plastic jug of maple syrup on the table. Maybe she slammed it down.

  “My teacher says we should try not to buy so much plastic,” Ursula offered. Changing the subject, or trying to.

  “Dad’s syrup comes from trees,” Toby said. He was speaking sentences, finally. She could have been happy about this, but that wasn’t what she was taking in at this particular moment.

  “Your dad does everything right,” she said, in the bitter tone of voice she nearly always adopted when the topic came around to Cam.

  “Who are you anymore, anyway?” Al said. She got up from the table.

  “I’m serious. Who are you?”

  It was a question Cam had asked, too. It was a question Eleanor asked herself.

  The children were heading out on a camping trip with their father that weekend. This was the unit now: Al, Ursula, and Toby, a little tribe who trudged back and forth along the same stretch of road from the home of their birth, with their happy, carefree dad and his new wife, to the condo inhabited by their angry and resentful mother. No experience in their lives to date had bonded them more powerfully than their parents’ divorce.

  Saturday morning, Eleanor woke with a plan. If she were planning a bank robbery she might not have felt any greater level of adrenaline coursing through her body.

  She set out early for the farm. The temperature had been over ninety all week, and she thought if she went early she might escape the worst of the heat, but by eight thirty, when she arrived, the temperature was right back up there.

  Pulling into the driveway, she saw Coco’s VW Bug. As her car pulled up in front of the house, Coco appeared at the entrance to the porch. Evidently Cam had chosen to go camping alone with the kids. Maybe Coco had some massage appointments scheduled. Maybe a twenty-year-old needed a break from parenting.

  Except for one time
—just long enough for a quick wave—Eleanor had not seen Coco since her split from Cam. The last time they’d spoken was in her kitchen, baking together—back when she paid Coco a dollar an hour to look after her children.

  Now Coco was wearing a very short dress, more like a nightgown. Maybe it was one. Through the fabric she could see Coco’s tiny breasts, her dark nipples. Those long legs. Bare feet. Beautiful toes, with nail polish on them. Eleanor imagined her lying on the grass with Ursula (Toby, too, maybe, but definitely not Al) applying polish to each other’s toes.

  “I came to pick up some things,” Eleanor said, approaching the door. “It won’t take long.” Coco followed after her, as if all one hundred and ten pounds of her could have any effect on barring Eleanor’s entrance into the house she’d bought when she was the age Coco was now.

  Eleanor had brought a box of green plastic trash bags with her—the extra-large, heavy-duty kind.

  “I’m not sure Cam wants you to come in his personal space anymore,” Coco said. But nobody could have taken her seriously, saying this. Her voice was soft and tentative, and the way she spoke the words—her inflection going up at the end of the sentence—was more like a question.

  Eleanor brushed past her, headed for the borning room.

  She knelt on the floor by the bookcase. Someone—Cam, probably, but maybe the girls—had already taken the books off the shelf. They had been stacked in the corner, awaiting sale.

  This was my life. Eleanor didn’t say the words out loud, but she was thinking them.

  She allowed herself to look, for a moment, at the cover of the first book she picked up. The Little House—the story of a cottage built on a piece of land in the middle of a field with nothing else but trees in all directions, and how, page by page, a town and roads and then a whole city grew up around it until the little house was almost swallowed up. It struck her now as a sad story, though at the time she had not viewed the book this way, and neither had her children when she read it out loud to them.