Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  Darla—who had recently begun attending Cam and Toby’s yoga classes, mostly as a way of trying not to let life with Bobby get her down—reported that everyone in the class loved Toby.

  “Cam’s incredibly patient with him,” she said. “In spite of everything, I’ve got to hand it to the guy.”

  After he moved back to the farm, Eleanor made a point of calling her son up most nights just so he could hear her voice. She always asked him about his day, without expecting much of a response. Played with goats. Little brother. Veggie burgers. Coco. Dad.

  “Come see me at my house,” he told Eleanor. He didn’t really want to come to her home in Brookline anymore, but he never understood why she couldn’t come to his.

  72.

  My Mother Just Hit Me

  Sometime that fall, Al picked up a Guns N’ Roses CD. It was called Appetite for Destruction and the cover featured skulls on a cross. A year before, Al’s artists of choice had been New Kids on the Block. Now all she wanted to listen to, for hours every day—up in her room with her computer manuals and her Commodore 64—was “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and “Welcome to the Jungle,” with an occasional dose of the Indigo Girls.

  That night they’d had one of their arguments—something to do with Eleanor’s request that Al write a thank-you note to her grandparents for the back-to-school gift they’d sent her, a dress that looked like something Shirley Temple might have worn in one of those old black-and-white movies they used to watch together after they got their VCR, on snow days, snuggled up on the couch with the popcorn.

  “Why should I thank people for a present I hated?” Al said. “I’ll never wear that dress. I threw it out already.”

  “It shows they were thinking about you,” Eleanor told her. “It’s the thought that counts.” She hated the sound of her own voice saying this. She was starting to sound like a greeting card.

  “It shows they don’t know me at all.” Al stabbed her fork into her tofu. “If they paid any attention they’d know I hate dresses.” Especially a dress with lace ruffles down the front and buttons shaped like hearts.

  The truth was, Eleanor didn’t have much affection for Cam’s parents, either. But she believed in good manners, and part of that meant writing thank-you notes.

  “You want me to be fake?” Al said. “Maybe I want to be real for a change.”

  Al did not say to her mother that for her, just going off to school in the morning felt fake. The person she was inside bore almost no resemblance to the one people perceived her to be, named Alison. Ever since she was four years old, and maybe even before this, she had been telling her parents this. Nobody listened.

  She got up from the table. She carried her plate into the kitchen and jammed it in the dishwasher.

  A minute later, from up in her room came the sound of Guns N’ Roses, the voice of Axl Rose screaming “Welcome to the Jungle . . . I wanna watch you bleed.” Louder than normal, even.

  Eleanor stood at the foot of the stairs and called up to Al to turn down the music. No change in volume. She climbed the steps, knocked, then opened the door to her older daughter’s room.

  “I asked you to turn down the music.”

  No response. Eleanor might as well be invisible. The same way Cam had treated her for years now. That was what set her off, probably.

  Eleanor knew, even as she did this, that she would regret it later, but she couldn’t stop herself. She advanced into Al’s room. She didn’t just turn off the music. She unplugged the boom box, whipping it off the table with enough force that she knocked over Al’s stack of Mandarin tapes and her collection of Japanese comic books.

  She carried the boom box out of the room, into her own bedroom, and threw the machine in the closet.

  Al had followed her mother into her bedroom. “Fuck you!” she screamed. “Bitch!”

  Eleanor turned around to face her daughter. She could feel her own blood pumping and her heart beating fast. She had never struck one of her children, but now she raised her hand, palm open, and slapped her daughter across the face.

  The two of them just stood there then, facing each other. In her daughter’s eyes, she could see no trace of anything resembling affection. Eleanor could barely breathe, but there was an eerie calm to Al as she crossed the room, picked up the telephone extension, and dialed.

  “I thought you should know, Dad,” she said. “My mother just hit me.”

  He was there in under two hours. By that time, Al had packed a bag full of her things (not the brown paper she used on weekends, but an actual suitcase this time). Also the boom box Eleanor had briefly confiscated, her Introduction to Algorithms book and her Mandarin tapes and all her CDs, her Commodore 64 and her precious Doc Martens. By the time Cam’s truck pulled up, she was out on the sidewalk with her things, waiting for him.

  Cam did not get out of his truck, but Eleanor could see from the window how he embraced their daughter when he reached her. He held her that way for at least a minute. Then they were gone.

  She left a message on his machine. (“We need to talk. I was wrong. But Al was out of line, too. It’s important, when things like this come up, that we can still present a unified front . . .”)

  He did not return the call.

  There was school the next day. Eleanor figured Cam would bring Al there, but sometime in the morning a call came from the office.

  “Your daughter didn’t show up. We just wanted to make sure you knew.”

  “You’d better call my children’s father,” she said.

  The next night Cam called her: “Al has chosen to remain here at the farm,” he said, in the way of speaking he’d adopted with her since the divorce. Quiet, calm, betraying no evidence of emotion. “She’d like to go back to her old school. You can make an issue of it if you choose, but we’re hoping you won’t turn this into a battle. She’s old enough to make her own decisions.”

  Crying was never a good idea with Cam. Neither was yelling into the phone, or slamming the receiver down. At times like these she always ended up sounding like a crazy woman.

  “I hope you get help, Eleanor,” he said. “I pray you find peace.”

  It always worked this way, that after she hung up, she thought of all the things she wished she’d said to him, instead of what she did. Which was nothing.

  It was May when Ursula made her decision to leave Eleanor’s house and go live on the farm, too, with her brother and sister. She waited until seventh-grade graduation. Once Al made the move, it was probably inevitable that Ursula would follow.

  “Toby needs me,” she said. “Plus, Coco needs help with the baby.” And Betsy was teaching her how to sew.

  By the time school started in the fall—eighth grade for Ursula, ninth for Alison—the visitation schedule had been flipped. The parent they visited on weekends was Eleanor now, but more and more, their activities got in the way of those visits, too. Field hockey and basketball games, soccer and 4-H. Ursula was helping Toby raise rabbits, along with the goats. Then Cam’s old friend Jeremy gave them an old horse he’d bought in the classifieds, before it occurred to him he had no place to put her. Once Midnight showed up, and the chickens, the children hardly ever came to Eleanor’s anymore. There was always some job to take care of back on the farm.

  She called them up most nights, but often, when she did, they’d be in the middle of some game with Elijah, or tending to the animals.

  “Can we call you back later, Mom?” Ursula would say.

  Sometimes they did. More often they didn’t.

  There had been a time when Eleanor craved quiet so much she had sent Toby to the borning room for ten minutes of peace. Now her house felt like a tomb. Toby’s Legos and rock collection were gone, along with Ursula’s Judy Blume books and hair products, the glitter she tossed in the air every morning as she walked out the door to school to make herself sparkle, the bottles of nail polish lining the bathroom sink. She missed Al’s wardrobe—black shirts, black pants, black socks—scattered on the floor of
her room, her collection of underground comic books, along with odd Japanese snack foods, exotic fly-eating plants. Weirdly, Eleanor even missed the sound of Guns N’ Roses blasting from Al’s bedroom.

  Eleanor hadn’t played her old vinyl records in years, but now she set up the turntable again and took out the Blue album. It felt almost as if she were back where she’d started (same sad songs, the same Boston suburb, even).

  I wish I had a river I could skate away on. It was almost as though that other whole life—her real one—had never happened.

  73.

  Perfect Christmas

  Cam used to say Eleanor became a crazy person for the entire month of December, and she probably did, though in the scale of problems, going overboard for your children at the holidays didn’t seem like the worst problem a person could suffer from. It didn’t take a great therapist to recognize the origins of this particular obsession. All you had to do was look at the photograph albums from Eleanor’s childhood—the stiff, formal annual Christmas card portrait of Eleanor and her parents in front of a tree covered with one color of ornaments only (blue one year, gold the next). Martin and Vivian always had a drink in their hands, even in the pictures. Eleanor, in that year’s holiday dress, sat soberly on her stool, not so much smiling as turning the corners of her mouth up. Her mother didn’t like giving her paints because they were messy, so she got dolls and ski equipment. Never the dog she asked for every year.

  Eleanor had spent her children’s whole childhood obsessed with doing Christmas differently. Ever since they were very little—but old enough to understand the concept of the gift inside the wrapping paper, and not just the wrapping paper—Eleanor had seen the presents she chose for her children as a way of acknowledging to them the things she loved and valued about them, all the aspects of who they were that only someone who knew them as well as she did would recognize. The best presents were the ones that only someone who paid as close attention as she did would know to put under the tree.

  For Alison, one year, it had been a pogo stick. She never asked for one, but Eleanor remembered a time, in Boston, when they’d watched a subway busker perform an act on a pogo stick, and Alison, not yet six years old, had stood transfixed, watching him. Very shyly, and only once, Ursula had expressed the dream of becoming a fashion designer. That was the year Eleanor drove three hours to a department store in western Massachusetts that was going out of business and getting rid of its mannequins. She’d bought one, the same size as Ursula. Driving home in a snowstorm with the naked, bald-headed child mannequin stretched across the back seat, she pictured how her daughter would dress up the mannequin—the wonderful, crazy outfits Ursula would create for her. She wasn’t wrong about that.

  For Toby—the old Toby—it was always easy. Geodes and crystals. Books about birds and insects and planets. For Cam, there had been a year when Eleanor tracked down an African drum, and another year when, broke as they were that season, she got him an antique pocket watch.

  That was the year Cam gave her the wooden hat. From a distance, it looked like a regular cowboy hat, but when you got close you realized it was made from a single maple burl, though he had worked the wood so finely, with such care, that it was very thin and amazingly light. Cam had never been one for big romantic gestures, but he’d burned an inscription into the inside of the hat. My cowgirl.

  In the years since the divorce, they’d alternated holidays, but this particular time—even though it was Eleanor’s year, but knowing they would want to share the holiday with Elijah—she’d let the children stay with Coco and Cam.

  Their Christmases hadn’t always ended up so magical, of course. Not just the bûche de Noël year, but others, Eleanor spent so much time—also thought, also money—trying to make everything perfect that by the time the actual day came, she was exhausted. More than once, she had gone to Crazyland then. After it was over, and they’d taken the tree down, a terrible sadness came over her. It was about that vast space she never seemed able to breach, between the dream of a happy family Christmas and the reality of what happened when she tried to pull one off.

  Then came the divorce, the every-other-year holiday meals that left her with the perpetual sense of coming up short. It wasn’t just Cam’s absence they felt now, though that was enough. As difficult as the visits had been with his parents, now that they no longer came for Christmas, Eleanor missed them. More accurately, she missed the feeling of being part of a big family, or even a medium-size one, with all kinds of personalities (even the irritating ones) gathered around the table, reminiscing about long-ago holidays—overcooked turkeys, ugly holiday sweaters. At other people’s houses—the houses of the people with big families—there would be presents wrapped in ten different kinds of paper, three kinds of pies, charades and caroling by the fire, ending the evening with popcorn and a video of It’s a Wonderful Life. Eleanor knew, from Darla, that just having a big family was no guarantee of a happy holiday. Still, she couldn’t let go of the feeling that she was letting her children down for her inability to provide for them a family like the ones in the greeting cards she was so good at creating.

  At the Brookline condo, Eleanor tried, once, inviting other people over to join her and the children—a ragtag bunch of casual acquaintances who didn’t have another place to go—but the evening had felt a little sad, with everyone making uneasy small talk and exchanging candles and soap. Partway through the meal that year—whose guest list had included a teacher from Toby’s school, on a one-year visa from the Czech Republic, and a neighbor from their condominium development, and a woman she’d met in line at the DMV, Ursula got up to call her father. He must have put Elijah on the phone, because then the three children all gathered around, laughing and saying the kinds of things a person says to a thirteen-month-old.

  “I wish we could see our baby brother,” Ursula said when she returned to the table. The woman from the DMV line had asked Ursula if she had any hobbies. The teacher from Toby’s school, who’d drunk a surprising amount of punch, knocked over the gravy onto Eleanor’s lace tablecloth. The condo neighbor was telling them his theory that the world would be coming to an end at midnight, December 31, 1999.

  After that, Eleanor decided not to try making Christmas at her house anymore. Even on the years when she was legally allowed to have the children with her, she let them go to Cam and Coco’s. That’s where they wanted to be.

  The year the children moved back to the farm with their father, Patty invited Eleanor to come to New York City for a holiday dinner at her apartment in SoHo with her new husband and their baby. (Philippe was long gone. This was Greg, a stock trader.)

  Patty’s father had died the previous summer, but her mother, Alice, would be there. “Mom still asks about you all the time,” Patty said. “And we might even rate a visit from my brother, the congressman, though between the twins and everything going on in Washington, he’s spread pretty thin.”

  Matt Hallinan had been getting a lot of press lately, Eleanor knew. She’d seen an article that spoke of him as “a rising star in the new Republican Party.”

  Eleanor wrote back to thank her old friend for the invitation. But she’d have to pass.

  74.

  The Three Amigos

  Back in October, she’d bought a copy of an alternative newspaper published in Vermont with personal ads on the back page, accompanied by a 900 number you could call to leave a message if someone whose ad you read seemed interesting. (Or maybe, simply, if nothing in the ad contained any immediate deal breakers. The bar was low.)

  There were no photographs attached in these ads, and most of the time they contained only basic information. People who ran them paid by the word, which kept most of them short, though now and then she’d come upon a very long ad that must have cost its author a lot of money. All Eleanor could learn from virtually every ad she read was that the man who’d placed it was easygoing, considerate, romantic, and liked to play golf.

  Sometime in early December, she had seen one that
looked different from the others.

  Russell looked to be a few years older than Eleanor—early forties, probably. He was divorced, with two sons, eight and ten years old, who lived with him full-time. Whatever it was that might have explained the disappearance of his children’s mother was more than a man could explain in a personal ad, but Eleanor gathered that he was on his own with his children now. In the one and only sentence he’d provided about himself, he said he liked hiking and bird-watching. “I think I’m a nice person,” he wrote. He’d been an Eagle Scout. He still lived by that code, or tried to.

  One of the things about a personal ad, particularly one as simple and brief as this one, was the way it allowed whoever it was reading it to fill in all those things that were left out with a picture of how she’d like the person to be.

  Sometimes, just having a fantasy got a person through a few days. She recorded a response to his ad (LovingSingleDad), with a suggestion that he send her a note telling her more about himself. Two days later a letter arrived. Maybe she detected a hint of desperation in his eagerness to meet up, but who was Eleanor to find fault with a person for occasional feelings of despair?

  Christmas was coming. She was going to be alone for the holiday for the second year in a row. She figured they could make a date. She’d get to put on a nice dress for once, and maybe high heels.

  She gave him her phone number.

  Eleanor had always believed you could tell more about a person from his voice than from his photograph. Russell’s voice was low and soft, and he chose his words well, as not everyone did, even in the ads they published, let alone in conversation.

  “Would you consider having a date?” he said. It was a little difficult for him, leaving his boys. But maybe she’d be up for coming over?

  “You’re probably doing something on Christmas,” he said.