Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  She was also sad, and worried for Al. You didn’t have to harbor any moral judgment on a person’s sexual orientation to recognize that being gay was unlikely to make life easier for her daughter. It had not yet occurred to her that maybe the hardest part, for Al, was not her sexuality. It was trying to conceal who she was. Her life might actually be a lot easier and happier if she were able to present herself to the world as the person she had probably been all along.

  “The great thing about Al,” Ursula said, “is she also doesn’t care all that much what anybody thinks about her, or if she’s doing what they want. She’s not one of those people who’s always worrying what everybody thinks and how they’re doing.”

  Ursula didn’t add, but she might have, that she wished she could be more like her sister in that regard.

  81.

  Can You Forgive Him?

  Eleanor had read about a man in Maryland, Dr. Evans Almendinger, who ran a place called the Institute for Human Potential, where they worked with brain-injured children. The idea was that if one part of a person’s brain had been damaged or maybe even ceased to function altogether, some other part of his or her brain could be trained to take over some of the tasks normally handled by the injured portion. Now, with the money from the sale of The Cork People, she could bring her son to the institute.

  Dr. Almendinger was not a physician or a neurologist. In the book he’d written, Triumph over Brain Injury, he spoke of children he’d worked with in other parts of the world who’d experienced injury and trauma from war or other disasters but, through their work with Dr. Almendinger, managed to live active, productive lives. One story in particular had captured Eleanor’s attention. In India, some years back, when he was on some kind of medical mission, a woman had come to him carrying her nine-year-old daughter, who’d been unable to walk or speak since a near-drowning accident that took place when she was three years old. For six years, the child had mostly lain on a mat, only vaguely responsive. Then the mother brought her to Evans Almendinger.

  He taught the mother a series of exercises designed to reprogram the girl’s muscles. They created a series of flash cards for the girl. At first it seemed preposterous to imagine she’d respond, but slowly, miraculously, she had begun to do so. By the time Dr. Almendinger left Mumbai, the girl was walking and talking and doing math.

  Eleanor knew better than to run any of this by Cam. For Cam, the yoga practice he and Toby had established the year after the accident, and the physical therapy routines he’d designed for their son, were all Toby needed. And it was true, Toby had made real progress, especially physically. Cam had no interest in hearing about anything more.

  Maybe the thought was too painful, that more might be possible. The more you hoped for, the greater the disappointment when it didn’t work out. Or maybe—more likely—Cam was just more able to accept life as it was. But if Eleanor wanted to bring Toby to Maryland, and Toby was okay with it, he wouldn’t stand in the way.

  “It’s your money,” Cam said. “If you want to spend it chasing after some so-called experts, and it’s okay with Toby, that’s your business.”

  Three weeks later—with Al working as an intern at a computer start-up, Ursula waitressing at a hotel in Ogunquit—Eleanor and Toby headed to Maryland. Because Toby was afraid of flying, Eleanor drove, seven hours, for their consultation with Evans Almendinger, but after it was over she called up Darla to report on the meeting. (Not Cam. Eleanor had learned, long before this, that Cam no longer wanted to discuss their children with her, or anything else.)

  “You know, I told myself a long time ago I wasn’t going to chase after any more miracles for Toby,” she told Darla. “But this man makes so much sense.”

  In the printed materials sent to her from the center he ran, the head of the clinic was referred to as Dr. Almendinger, though it was unclear what kind of a degree he possessed. Eleanor didn’t actually care. Conventional medicine had so little to offer her son. If some outlier got results, she wasn’t about to ask for his credentials.

  The institute was housed in an old private school that had closed down years before. Clients were expected to stay at a motel down the road. “You won’t be spending much time there,” Dr. Almendinger’s assistant, Gillian, explained to Eleanor when she checked in. “You’ll be in training sessions every waking hour.”

  They met with Dr. Almendinger first, so he could evaluate Toby. He shone a light into Toby’s pupils and tapped his knee with a rubber mallet—all the usual routines. But he also wanted to talk with Toby. He showed him a ball and tossed it to him. Toby didn’t catch the ball, but he actually tried, which was unusual for him.

  Every day for a solid two weeks Toby and Eleanor attended trainings together. The idea was not simply to provide help for Toby during their time with the staff, but for Eleanor to learn the kinds of exercises she could do with him when they were back home. At first Toby couldn’t do most of the things they showed him in their training sessions, but he didn’t object, either, and after a few days he began to enjoy being around the other children in the program. Until now, his main companion had been Elijah—though more and more, even Elijah, loyal as he was, had been moving out into the world, playing with his friend Abner from kindergarten. Though Toby had attended special schools for years now, along with all the tutoring, none of the training he’d received before came close to what they found at Dr. Almendinger’s clinic.

  During their time in Baltimore, Eleanor made friends with a few of the other parents—a couple who had flown there from Denver with their mildly brain-injured daughter, and another whose twin sons had both suffered from oxygen deprivation at birth.

  Nights after the children were asleep, the parents sometimes gathered on the balcony at the motel—close enough that they could hear their children if they woke—to share their experiences. It was the first time in all the years since the accident, Eleanor realized, that she’d had the chance to talk about what it had been like for her, after.

  “His father was supposed to be watching him,” she told the others. “He didn’t notice when Toby wandered off.”

  “Can you forgive him?” one of them asked her.

  “If you notice,” Eleanor said, “I came here alone.”

  On their last day in Baltimore, they had a graduation for the eight children in attendance for the program and the parents who’d brought them. When it was Toby’s turn to get up, he recited a poem, “Fog,” by Carl Sandburg.

  “The fog comes on little cat feet,” he began. Just the idea of Toby saying that line would have seemed, to anyone who knew him, impossible two weeks earlier.

  “It sits looking over harbor and city, on silent haunches—”

  He paused. Looked out at the dozen or so people assembled in the room, all but one a stranger until a few weeks ago.

  Eleanor held her breath. A dreamy look came over Toby’s face, as if he was considering the scene. The fog. The harbor. The catlike haunches.

  “. . . and then moves on.” Then came the most surprising part of the evening. Toby broke into the most radiant smile. Except for rare times with Elijah, or alone in the goat pen (but Eleanor was seldom present for those), she had not seen her son look so happy and proud in years. But she saw something more than joy on his face. At that moment, for an instant anyway, she saw the old Toby again.

  Back at the motel, their last night, Eleanor wished she could tell someone what had happened. She knew Al didn’t like talking about Toby anymore. She preferred pretending he didn’t exist. Ursula would have been happy to hear the news, if she hadn’t been at her job. No way to reach her.

  The one she really wanted to call was Cam. She didn’t, of course.

  She called Darla.

  82.

  Crazies Out There

  Most people Eleanor knew in Brookline were married—and even more so, in Akersville, when she made her regular trips back to attend her daughters’ school events. Very possibly they were married unhappily. They might even be cheating o
n their partners or they just never had sex—with anyone—anymore. But they showed up in twos at school events and Al’s or Ursula’s games, which were the main social events on Eleanor’s calendar besides conferences with the team of therapists who worked with Toby and, on her rare trips to New York, meetings with her editor.

  A new way of meeting up had come along, Match.com, that allowed you to read the profiles of other single people online and email back, instead of the old system of using a 900 number. Sometimes now, if she couldn’t sleep, Eleanor scrolled through the listings of men in her age group. She told herself she’d like to find a man with some nice, comfortable professional career—no more yoga and burl bowls—but when she answered the ad of some lawyer type, or the emergency room doctor with whom she had a few phone conversations, or the Tufts professor who was an expert in trade with Asia, the worlds they inhabited felt far from her own.

  The men in Boston talked about good restaurants and Celtics tickets and golf, knew nothing of trout fishing in a fast-moving brook or how to whittle a slingshot. For all the bitter resentment she felt now toward Cam, she liked it that he knew the names of birds and stars and how to build a good fire and pick up a snapping turtle, and that he fixed things himself instead of hiring people to do it. She liked it that he stacked his own firewood and knew how to prune fruit trees. He owned ice skates and actually used them.

  Alone in her Brookline condo, Eleanor couldn’t stop herself from turning on her computer and studying the ads. Now and then she’d give her phone number to some man whose profile displayed no obvious red flags, but most of the time, if he called, the sound of his voice and—more so—what he said, was enough to discourage any thought of leaving a message of her own back. But now and then someone whose ad she’d responded to would sound promising, briefly. She still allowed herself to believe that somewhere out there was the partner she was looking for.

  It was never the profiles of the serious, stable professionals that spoke to her, in the end. She was moved, every time, by the men whose life stories revealed sorrow and trouble. Even when they didn’t write openly of some tragedy or loss in their lives, she had a sixth sense for recognizing a person who had lived through hard times.

  Widowers, men recently fired from their jobs. A man who’d been diagnosed with MS, a recovering alcoholic. Vietnam vets (so many of those). There was a man who had lost his wife and child in a boating accident. She left him a message and they ended up meeting at a pizza place off the highway outside of town, where they spent the evening talking about his dead son, and later, parked in the front of his car—Eleanor in the passenger seat—he wept in her arms while she held him. She had kissed him when they parted, but with no thought of seeing him again. He’d just needed someone to listen, and that night she’d been the one.

  One profile she responded to led to a date with a mortgage broker named Ken who eyed her up and down as she approached the table at the bar where they met and said, as his greeting, “Great legs. You should see some of the dogs I’ve met.”

  More than once, she’d meet a man for coffee who spent their whole (brief) date telling her about how his ex-wife and her divorce lawyer had screwed him over. Men who lived with their mothers, men who complained about child support, a man who was about to strike it rich, if she could just loan him a thousand dollars. (He’d invented a whole new kind of bicycle helmet—a soft one, that could be transformed into a belly bag. “Isn’t the whole point of a bike helmet that it should be solid?” Eleanor asked him. “Are you always such a negative person?” he said, getting up from the table. Leaving her with the check.)

  One man Eleanor met online turned out to have been recently released from prison on domestic abuse charges. She had coffee with a man (a few of these, actually) who was still married but separating any day now. One of her dates explained to her, partway through their (also brief) date, that he never went anywhere without a concealed weapon. “There’s a lot of crazies out there,” he told Eleanor.

  There were good men, too, who could have broken her heart if she’d let them—not out of passion, but sorrow. One whose wife had died in a fire. “I’ll never be okay,” he said, “but I have to keep living.” One whose time in Vietnam left him unable to sleep more than an hour at a stretch. The night they met he asked her to marry him.

  “I think, if you were next to me in bed, I could finally get through the night,” he said, clutching her tight as a gun.

  There was a man with a stutter so bad it was difficult to understand what he was saying to her. “I stutter,” he told her, “but I never stutter when I sing.”

  There was a man who turned out to be homeless. He’d logged in to the dating site from the library. When they met at a restaurant, he urged her to order the steak, but said he wasn’t hungry and requested tap water. He had money enough for one meal, evidently. Unlike some of the others, he insisted on paying for hers.

  And more: A man—also married—whose wife was tired of sex and gave him permission to have girlfriends. A man who was married and wanted to bring her home to his wife, so the three of them could get together. A man who believed there was a plot to murder the surviving Beatles, one by one. He was trying to get a message to Ringo Starr, to warn him.

  There was an artist with whom she spent one extraordinary four-hour dinner—talking and laughing and sharing intimate stories that allowed Eleanor to believe this might actually be something good, which was followed by another three hours of wild necking in the restaurant parking lot. She never heard from him again.

  There was a very handsome man—romantic, unnervingly poetic in his emails to her, a truck driver who told her in their first phone conversation that he listened to opera on long drives and, when certain arias came on the classical station, could not help himself from weeping. The voice of Kiri Te Kanawa, in particular, traveled straight to his heart. When Eleanor met him at the restaurant the first and only time, and he stood up from the table to embrace her—tears in his eyes—he revealed himself to have a hunchback so extreme he was nearly doubled over.

  “I know,” he said. “Not what you expected, right?”

  The new online sites made it possible to check in at any hour of the day or night, type in your zip code, and find out who might be out there, awake at 3:00 A.M. like you, searching. You could study their pictures, read their profile, send them a note, hear back, all without even meeting for coffee.

  Sometimes, briefly, these men sounded promising, though on those rare occasions when Eleanor actually agreed to meet up with one of them, they generally turned out to be older, fatter, shorter, or crazy. She began to wonder what it said about her that she was there meeting them in the first place.

  She’d go home and renew her vow to give up on her search, knowing she had to write a note to the person she’d met that night, offering the gentlest possible explanation for why she would not be pursuing a relationship. She’d put the blame on herself. She was confused, she told them. She had issues.

  “Fucking cunt,” one wrote back. “You don’t look as good as your picture in real life by the way. I didn’t want to date you anyways.”

  83.

  I Would Have Taken Good Care of You

  It was a Saturday afternoon. Eleanor was driving back from a visit with Toby. As she passed Walt and Edith’s place, she noticed Edith’s car was gone—she was off selling Avon, probably, or visiting the grandchildren. Walt’s truck was out front, though, and Walt underneath it, replacing some part, no doubt.

  Maybe it was the knowledge that she wouldn’t have to experience the air of disapproval Eleanor always encountered in Edith’s company that inspired her to stop that day. All those years she’d lived on the farm, a week never went by, and seldom more than a day or two, that Walt didn’t pay her a visit. Now almost two years had gone by since she’d seen him last.

  The familiar work boots stuck out from the front end of the truck, and the cuffs of his pants. “That old Dodge just never quits, does it?” she called out to him. It was t
he same thing she might have said of Walt himself.

  “What do you know?” he said, as he pulled himself out from under the chassis. “I thought you were gone for good.”

  He stood alongside the truck, taking in the sight of her. Except for that one time, right after she’d discovered Cam and Coco together at the falls, he had never reached out to put his arms around her. An old Yankee, that was Walt. A married man didn’t go around hugging other people’s wives, or their ex-wives, either. If he had an affection for a person, as Eleanor knew he did for her, he might drop by with a half dozen ears of Silver Queen corn, or pop over to till up a flower bed. He kept his hands busy with tools.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” she said. She had been in the neighborhood plenty, of course, over these two years. Something had kept her from saying hello. Maybe she was afraid, if she did, that she might cry, and that would have been hard on Walt.

  “You moving back to the old place?” he said. “It’s about time.”

  “Not moving back,” she told him. “Just stopping by to see the kids.”

  “You should come back,” he said. “You bought that place. It’s your home.”

  “It was. Not anymore.”

  If he took this in, he made no indication. “When are you coming back?” he said. More insistent this time.

  “Cam lives there now,” she told him. “Cam and Coco. They have a son.”

  “I’ll help you move. We can use my truck.”

  She had recognized, when she first laid eyes on Walt, how much he had aged—his hair mostly gone now, except for a few thin white wisps around his ears. Now she noticed something else—a vacancy in his eyes, not unlike that of her son before they’d started work at the clinic in Baltimore. Walt’s body looked surprisingly solid and strong, but she understood now that his mind was betraying him.