The Poky Little Puppy. Stone Soup. Frog and Toad Are Friends. One Morning in Maine. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths—the one whose illustrations of Zeus had once reminded her of Cam. They were all here. Charlotte’s Web, naturally. When she read certain parts from that one out loud to her children, Ursula would cover her face with a pillow. No no no no. It’s too sad. But when Eleanor put the book down, it was always Ursula who begged her to keep reading.
Coco had followed Eleanor into the house. She stood in the kitchen, a few feet back, as if whatever it was that possessed Eleanor might be contagious. “Maybe you should talk to Cam about this first,” she offered, but even as she spoke the words, she must have recognized their futility.
Eleanor had started out setting the books, one by one, into the first plastic garbage bag, but she was flinging them in the bag now—all the beloved stories, familiar covers, characters who had been, for her children, as real as friends—a half dozen at a time. Picture books and chapter books. Where the Sidewalk Ends. Madeline. A Chair for My Mother. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. Baby books, books of poems, books about rocks and minerals, the solar system, dinosaurs. All those wonderful Laura Ingalls Wilder stories they loved, about the homesteading family off in the woods, a little like them. Only not.
When the first bag was filled, Eleanor started in on the next. She was sweating now, only in part from the heat of the day. Coco stood a few feet back, saying nothing.
In the end, it took four garbage bags to contain all their children’s books, with a few stragglers that didn’t fit.
The bags were so heavy she couldn’t lift them. One by one she dragged them across the kitchen floor that she’d mopped a few thousand times. Coco still stood there, watching.
There had been a time when Eleanor and Cam had sanded this floor together, by hand. Here was the place where the slant of the floorboards was so extreme, Toby could let go of a truck and it went by itself.
She remembered how, when Alison was just crawling, she had cut out pictures of babies from magazine ads for Pampers and taped them onto the inside of the low cupboard doors for Alison to see while she sat there. Her first word, spoken to the image from the Pampers ad, when she opened the cupboard, had been “baby.”
When she had all the bags in the back of the station wagon, Eleanor went back in the house one more time for the handful that still lay on the floor. As she passed through the kitchen with the last of the books, Coco pointed to a paperback in Eleanor’s hands and said in a whisper, “I gave Toby that one.”
Eleanor studied the cover. Coco was right.
It was a stupid book, the kind she would never have bought for their children, a pop-up whose main character was a cartoon character from television, with buttons that made noises when you pushed them.
“Then you should keep it,” she said, holding out the book. Her voice carried a tone of magnanimity. The image she summoned for herself was of Princess Diana, extending her hand to an AIDS sufferer. Diana—regal and beautiful and, like Eleanor, wronged by her husband—visiting the site where land mines exploded, offering comfort and compassion to the victims.
Coco stood there holding on to the one last book. At some point during the heist, despite the heat, she had put on a sweater. Eleanor recognized it as one of Cam’s. Maybe Coco had realized how easily a person could see through her nightgown.
“Have a great day,” she said, as Eleanor got in the driver’s seat and turned the key. As she made her getaway, she took in a last glimpse of her ex-husband’s young wife, barefoot in the dirt. Standing in the driveway in her nightgown, still holding the pop-up, along with a paperback copy of The Berenstain Bears Visit the Dentist. Another of her contributions to their library, evidently.
As Eleanor drove back down the road, her car was so weighed down that its belly skimmed the gravel. She should have driven slowly, till she reached the tar, but she flew out of that place like Cruella de Vil with her carload of dalmatian puppies. When she got home, she saw the oil pan was punctured. Later, when she got the repair bill, it came to three hundred dollars.
Later, Eleanor told Darla the whole story of the raid on their children’s books. The friendship was unequal that way. Eleanor told Darla everything. For Darla, though she made joking references to Bobby’s impossible behavior, there remained areas Eleanor knew she wouldn’t go—bruises covered with makeup, visits to the emergency room she didn’t mention. Darla told Eleanor about Kimmie’s recently acquired habit of pulling out her hair, but when Eleanor tried to raise the reasons why she might be doing that in the first place, Darla went silent. They could talk about what Cam did, but seldom if at all about Bobby.
“I’m glad you’re not with him anymore,” Darla said, speaking of Cam. Darla did a better job of defending her friend than she did defending herself.
“You know the funny thing?” Eleanor said. “I know Coco must have told Cam what happened when I came to take the children’s books, but he didn’t say a word about any of it.”
“If I tried something like that with Bobby,” Darla said, “you’d be shopping for a funeral arrangement.”
Cam wasn’t the type to display anger, least of all to Eleanor. In some ways, his anger would have been easier to take, because a person who is angry at you is at least acknowledging your existence. But Cam drifted along like a cork person. The kind that somehow, miraculously, makes it all the way down the brook without getting caught in the weeds.
65.
You Don’t Live There Anymore
It was not the marriage that killed the last of the good feeling between them. It was the divorce.
At their children’s school performances and soccer and basketball games now, they sat on opposite sides of the bleachers, opposite corners of the room. When Cam arrived with Coco beside him, Eleanor could feel her body stiffen, but he always looked happy and relaxed. Once, when the two of them had attended the 4-H fair in Akersville where Ursula and Toby were displaying a pumpkin they’d grown, Cam’s face had lit up at the sight of their old friend, Harry Botts, on the other side of the room, with his entry in the annual pie contest. But Cam had not greeted Eleanor. Ever since the day she had come to refer to (though only in her head) as the Great Children’s Book Heist, his gaze passed over her as though she no longer existed. Beyond exchanging information concerning drop-offs and pickups, the two of them no longer spoke.
Somewhere over the course of those months, their old dog Sally had died. Eleanor found out months later, when Toby mentioned they were getting a puppy at their dad’s house, and Eleanor asked how Sally was dealing with having another dog around.
“I wish you’d told me,” she said when she learned the news.
“Dad took care of it,” Al said. They had buried Sally’s body under the ash tree.
“I would have wanted to be there,” she told her daughter. She had loved Sally, too.
“You don’t live there anymore,” Al said. “You moved, remember?”
The terms of Eleanor and Cam’s divorce specified shared custody, the children to spend weekends and school vacations in Akersville, along with most of the summer. The farm was the place where the children could play outside on their own and be with their new dog, camp out in the tree fort, swim in the pond.
The pond. Eleanor didn’t want to look at it, but the children still played there, catching frogs and swimming out to the raft. Even Toby. Toby most of all, probably, because he remembered nothing of the awful day. All he knew was that he loved splashing in the water, and that there was no place on earth he loved more than the farm where he’d been born. That was how all of them felt about the place. Including the person who no longer lived there.
The document that Eleanor and Cam had signed, drawn up by their lawyers, carried the stipulation that Cam would buy out Eleanor’s half of the property when Alison turned eighteen. Doing that—against the advice of her attorney—had been Eleanor’s way to postpone an awful moment. They had a ways to go yet before Al’s eighteenth birthday, bu
t the question hung in the air. What was going to happen when they reached the date for the buyout?
Cam had no money, and no likely prospect of saving up any. The only logical alternative Eleanor’s attorney had presented: putting the property up for sale.
It was an awful thought, even to Eleanor—to Eleanor as much as any of them, probably. She had loved that property before any of them. Three long winters, she’d lived there on her own.
“You’re going to need that money,” the attorney had told her, back when they’d worked out the divorce agreement. “A single parent making a living the way you do can’t afford to walk away from her most significant asset. Wait till you see what it’s like when you start paying for college. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from all appearances, you’re the one who’ll be footing the bill.”
Maybe, at the time they drew up the divorce decree, Eleanor had allowed herself to believe that someday Cam would earn the money to pay her for her share of the farm, but if so she’d been dreaming. From the poster she’d seen up at the health food store, Eleanor gathered that Coco was teaching yoga at the farm part-time now. Cam was still working on his physical therapy license, and doing massage therapy on the side. But it was impossible to imagine that even with their combined incomes, he and Coco could come up with a lump sum sufficient to buy her out.
In Eleanor’s life, too, money no longer flowed in as it once had. There were fewer jobs from her editor at the textbook company these days, and the royalties from sales of her Bodie series had largely dried up. She still took freelance jobs when they came her way, but when money was really tight, she picked up work as a substitute teacher in the Brookline school district.
She sent out a proposal to her old editor at Applewood Press. A few weeks later, a letter arrived, informing her that her editor had retired three years earlier. Nobody there knew her anymore. The form letter they sent thanked her for her interest. They were not considering queries at this time.
An idea came to her. That weekend, when the children were at Cam’s, Eleanor set herself up at her desk with her drawing pencils and a stack of white paper. She spent two solid days making greeting cards. By Sunday afternoon, when it was time to pick up her children, she had created over a dozen. Monday morning, she mailed them to the Sweetheart company in Indianapolis.
Two months passed with no money coming in. Eleanor made stacks of bills now: the ones she had to pay, the ones she could put off. Somewhere along the line, Cam’s parents had discontinued paying for the tutoring, and Eleanor cut Toby’s sessions back.
Now his tutor called her in for a conference. For Toby to make progress, he needed more than two sessions a week, she told Eleanor.
That afternoon a call came from Indianapolis, the greeting card company. The creative director liked her submissions. Of the fourteen designs she’d sent them, they were buying eight. “That’s highly unusual, by the way,” he told her. “All of us here think you’ve got a great future in greeting card design.”
Ten days later a check arrived with enough to pay for Toby’s tutoring and cover the next two months of rent on their condo. She sent off over a dozen more greeting card designs the following month and sold every one—three for birthdays, five for anniversaries, one for bereavement, and one each for Father’s and Mother’s Day.
For some reason ideas for Mother’s Day cards did not come as easily to Eleanor as the cards for birthdays and anniversaries did, the condolence cards, the thank-yous and Easter blessings. Eleanor had a hard time coming up with pictures and snappy lines about the bond between a mother and her children. She had too much to say about that one, too much feeling to put into a greeting card.
Maybe loving her children too much was her downfall—the weight it placed on the three of them, knowing that for their mother they represented everything of greatest meaning in her life. No question their father loved them, too, but without the heavy sense of obligation her devotion seemed to carry with it. Cam’s sense of well-being did not reside, as hers did, in how the children were feeling that day. (Three children! Exposure to heartbreak, tripled!) If they were having problems, as surely they would, he would not suffer their pain in the way Eleanor did.
Young as they were, the children must have sensed this in their mother, and it seemed to leave them with a certain brittle edge of protectiveness where she was concerned. It was enough for a person to be responsible for his own happiness. No child wanted to be responsible for his mother’s happiness, too.
She kept it together most of the time, but she knew this, and so did her children: when you tried too hard all the time, and worried all the time about making things perfect for your children, every so often you reached the breaking point.
Eleanor recognized all of this without being able to change any of it. There was always that territory of Crazyland out there, just over the border, where she might find herself at any moment if she wasn’t careful. Always, just around the bend in the river, rapids to pull her down.
66.
A New Human Being
The first thing Eleanor had loved about Cam—more even than his handsome face and the bright red curls encircling it—was how he loved babies. The words he’d said to her the night they met: “I want to make babies with you.” Not “have” but “make.” Choosing to have a child represented an act of construction, embarking on a shared work of art.
“A cheap thrill,” he called their children. For him, maybe, that had been true.
“I can’t believe it’s possible for two people to get together and come up with something as great as this,” he’d said, a few days after Alison’s birth. “It’s like the best-kept secret, having a kid.”
Not such a secret, exactly, Eleanor had pointed out to him. Plenty of people throughout history had figured this out before they did.
“I’m not talking about sex or reproduction,” he said. “I mean, getting to be parents. Having this baby show up, that the two of us made by ourselves, without hiring any experts or going anyplace or spending anything besides a few bucks for the prenatal vitamins.” (Well, they didn’t just show up, she might have said to him. Anyone who described it that way had probably never experienced childbirth.)
Back at art school, Cam said, everyone used to talk about heading to New York City, getting gallery representation, having a show. It struck him as ironic—some kind of big cosmic joke—that all this time, they had this amazing capacity inside their own bodies to create something so much more important than any sculpture they’d build, or anything they’d ever put on a piece of canvas. A new human being.
“We made a person,” Cam had said to Eleanor, the day of Alison’s birth. “It’s the ultimate creative act.”
A few months after Cam and Coco’s wedding came the news. The girls must have known for a while, but kept it to themselves, recognizing that it would hit Eleanor hard. It was Toby—for whom no filter existed now between what you thought and what you said—who finally told her.
“Coco’s getting fat,” he said one day, when she’d picked them up at the farm that Sunday. She’d stayed in the car till they came out, as usual. No glimpse of Cam or Coco at these moments.
Coco, fat? This was hard to imagine. In the back seat, Eleanor could feel the tension in Ursula as she jabbed Toby, the code that meant Say no more.
“Last I looked, Coco was pretty skinny,” Eleanor said. She delivered the words like a friendly defense of her former babysitter, but there was strategy in what she offered, of course.
“Skinny legs,” Toby said. “Fat stomach.”
“Maybe she’s going to have a baby,” Eleanor suggested. If she kept her tone level and calm, they might tell her the rest.
The girls didn’t bite, but Toby did.
“Baby brother,” he said. “Maybe sister. I hope it’s a boy.”
From the back, she could feel the girls draw in their breath, waiting for an explosion—that part of Eleanor capable of spinning out into Crazyland.
“That’s wonderful,”
she told them, her voice level. “Whatever sex it is, you’re going to love being a big brother, Tobes.
“And you’ll love it, too, girls,” Eleanor went on. Hands steady on the wheel, ten o’clock and two. Eyes on the road. “I know you’ll be wonderful big sisters to the new baby, same as you already are.”
Silence. The three of them just sat there: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.
“So, when is it due?”
This must have served as a signal to Ursula that all was well. Or at least, not as bad as she might have anticipated. “October,” Ursula told her. “Dad said we never had a leaf season baby in our family before.”
Our family. Not Eleanor’s. But theirs.
“And you’ll have all Thanksgiving vacation to get to know the baby,” she offered. “Perfect timing.”
67.
The Last Bath
It was Friday night, five days after she learned about Coco’s pregnancy. It had been a few weeks since Eleanor had stopped by Timmy Pouliot’s apartment, but that morning she’d called him. “I was hoping I could see you.” She didn’t usually put it that way, but the news of Coco’s baby had left her wanting her bath.
It was all so familiar to her—as, once, her home with Cam had been. The Farrah poster and the beer signs and the upstairs neighbors’ baby (now a toddler) that never stopped crying. That night, it suddenly all seemed pathetic. Her ex-husband was remarried to a beautiful young woman and training for a new career. They were having a baby. And what was she doing with her life? Designing greeting cards and taking a lot of baths under a poster of Farrah Fawcett in an apartment full of pizza boxes, with a man who listened to heavy metal music and played horseshoes.
Count the Ways Page 29
