Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  “Those damned newcomers that moved into your house,” he said. “They’re not even mowing the field like we used to. Whole place is going to seed.”

  “They’re not exactly newcomers,” Eleanor told him. “I used to be married to Cam, remember? Coco’s from down the road. Evan and Betsy’s daughter.”

  “I don’t care who they are,” he said. “I don’t think much of those two. They got themselves a bunch of goats. Crazy animals. Tearing up your garden.”

  He was wearing his same overalls, and the checked wool jacket he had favored since the first time she met him. His face was thinner now, and though it appeared that he’d shaved, he’d missed a few places, and there was a piece of food—mayonnaise, maybe—on his chin. He wasn’t okay.

  Slowly then, like a man in a dream, he reached for her. His fingers touched her hair and stroked it, as a lover of horses might stroke a horse’s mane. Eleanor stood there, unable to move.

  “Pretty,” he said.

  “I should be going, Walt,” she told him.

  “That old woman isn’t home,” he whispered. “We can go inside. I want to take off your dress.”

  “Oh, Walt,” she said. “That’s not a good idea.”

  A look of sorrow and confusion passed over his face. He reached for her breasts. He was fumbling at the buttons on her blouse. “I always wanted to touch you,” he said. “That bastard that was always hanging around. He wasn’t good to you. I would have taken good care of you.”

  Both his arms were around her now, his face buried in her breasts. He had pushed her against the side of the truck, the full weight of his body pressing down, and he was breathing hard. Whatever else was lost, he still had the grip of a man who’d worked all his life hauling and splitting wood, running farm equipment, moving rocks. His hands on her skin were rough. His breath was hot on her neck.

  This was not the first time in Eleanor’s life that she’d felt a man’s weight holding her down.

  “I love you,” he told her. “I want to kiss you all over.”

  “No, Walt,” she said. “You need to let me go.”

  His mouth was on her neck. His large hands were locked on her shoulders. Eleanor might have been scared, but what she felt, more than fear, was a terrible sadness.

  “Get off me,” Eleanor said. She spoke in the voice a parent might use with a child, when she discovered him doing something that was not simply forbidden, but dangerous—a voice she had employed with Toby many times, back in the old days. “Get off me, right now.”

  He did then. Recoiled, like someone who’s touched a live wire. Or simply like a person who has suddenly remembered he’s been dreaming and come back, reluctantly, to the world where the things a person dreams no longer remain possible.

  “Let me give you some tomatoes,” he said. “The Early Girls came in great this year.”

  Two months later came the news, from Darla. “Your neighbor Walt drove his truck off the road last Tuesday,” she told Eleanor. “Hit a tree. Died instantly. There’s a memorial service on Saturday.” Eleanor was due to fly to California that day, and sent her condolences.

  84.

  Car Wreck in Paris

  The same week Eleanor learned of Walt’s death, a very different kind of loss struck her, though this one had involved a person she had never met. She was at her drawing table, working on the sequel to The Cork People, when a voice interrupted the radio program to announce an accident in Paris. A car carrying Princess Diana and the man with whom she was spending the weekend—not her husband; he’d been out of the picture for a while now—had crashed in a tunnel. Diana was dead.

  Eleanor took the news harder than made any sense. What connection did she possibly have with a British princess, the mother of a future king? But she had always loved Princess Diana—the idea of her, anyway, the mother she imagined her to be to those two little boys, close in age to her own children. Most of all, the struggles in her marriage that Diana had talked about so openly (never mind the obvious differences) somehow spoke to her own.

  For the next three days, she kept the television on, following every stage of the grieving across Britain and the world. She watched the funeral, of course, and the procession that preceded it—the two motherless princes (one of whom Ursula used to say she’d marry someday) making their way down the wide avenue from Buckingham Palace behind their mother’s coffin, as thousands of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of them; the stoic, anxious expression on the face of Diana’s former husband, whose lover probably awaited him in a castle somewhere, when it was over. Elton John at the piano (the only one visibly weeping). The queen, in her hat. The endless display of photographs of the dead princess. Her hair. Her clothes. Her trips to Africa. Her dance with John Travolta. Her haircuts. Her too-thin body. Her sad and lovely smile. The expression on her face when she looked at her sons.

  Like Eleanor, Diana had tried so hard to be a good mother, whatever that was, though no doubt she had fallen short in many ways. This had connected them.

  85.

  The Life of Some Whole Other Person

  A film company in L.A. bought the rights to The Cork People. They were turning it into an animated TV series. Another check arrived, bigger than the earlier ones.

  Once every six weeks, Eleanor and Toby made the trip to the clinic of Dr. Almendinger. After years in which Toby could only manage the simplest phrases, he could tell them stories now. He had made a friend at the clinic—Kara, the brain-injured girl from California. When they went bowling, he could knock down some pins, and he cared about his score.

  Her son was seventeen years old now; his voice had changed, and his body was filling out. He still carried rocks in his pockets, still loved goats. When he grew up, he said, he wanted to be a strawberry farmer. That, or breed rabbits, though only for pets, not meat. He would live on his father’s farm forever, that much was sure. Except for his trips to Baltimore with Eleanor, to Dr. Almendinger’s clinic, there was no place else he wanted to be.

  If you had told Eleanor, twelve years earlier, that she’d be spending one week out of every month in a fluorescent-lit classroom, doing puzzles with her teenage son—lining up stars, triangles, rectangles, and circles by color, matching the animal with the sound he made, reading Hop on Pop—she would have called that a picture of tragedy. But Toby’s accident and the years that followed had taught her patience.

  Very slowly—in increments almost too small to measure—Toby was doing better. He might never live on his own or hold a regular job, but he could catch a ball, and crochet a potholder for the woman he considered his grandmother, and write a postcard to his little brother. Sometimes, sitting on the couch with him, watching a cartoon together—or dropping him off at the farm after one of their Baltimore trips, watching him burst out of the car and run to Elijah, who would be waiting for him at the door—Eleanor would see on her son’s face the most radiant smile, unencumbered by the ambivalence or wariness of her other two children. Nothing about him but his red hair resembled the person he had been before, but in some ways, he had become, of the three of them, the one in possession of the greatest capacity for joy, and the one who provided the greatest joy to those who loved him.

  Al was off at college, spending most nights in a computer lab, building programs—a whole other language Eleanor could not understand. A couple of years had passed since she’d come back to see any of them, not even to the farm.

  Ursula, at college in Vermont, was interested in nothing but her boyfriend, Jake. To someone who didn’t know her well, it would have appeared that Ursula was an unusually cheerful and easygoing person, but Eleanor recognized something else in her. She was wound tight as one of those rubber band balls Toby liked to make—always busy, always taking care of everyone around her, but harboring a generally well-concealed resentment of this role. Even if she was the one who’d chosen it.

  The success of Eleanor’s book provided plenty of money, but changed very little. It seemed to her as if she were a cork p
erson herself, who had gone over the waterfall. Not at the bottom of the brook just yet, but off in the weeds, just barely visible, as swift and icy water raced past. She had made it through some rough patches.

  At age thirty she had imagined she knew where she’d be for the rest of her life and what she’d be doing there. Now, the future looked like some vast body of water with no shoreline in sight.

  The producers of the animated series The Cork People invited Eleanor to a screening for the first episode—a first-class ticket, a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Eleanor invited Toby and Ursula to come with her (no point asking Al, she was barely communicating), but air travel made Toby nervous and Ursula didn’t want to be away from Jake.

  No doubt there was more to it. There seemed almost a direct relationship between how attached Eleanor’s children had been to her in the old days and how distant they had grown in recent years. For Eleanor, the distance that existed now between herself and her daughters was a grief greater than anything she’d known, including the deaths of her parents, and in her worst moments, she had pointed this out to them, not that they needed reminders. Their father was the one, not she, who’d found someone he loved better. But the way the story of the divorce had taken shape in their minds, she remained—after all these years—the one her daughters saw as responsible for the breakup of their family.

  Eleanor knew some of the reasons why, of course. She was the one who remained angry, and she could no more conceal it than a person with a port-wine stain can cover it with foundation. The red part kept bleeding through. There was almost a smell to her bitterness. She knew this without being able to contain it.

  She had not succeeded in keeping the promise she and Cam had made to each other that night, in the first days of their separation, when they’d agreed they would never speak badly of each other to their children. But of all the critical and angry remarks she’d let them overhear, and had directly addressed to them, she had never told her children about their father’s affair with Coco—the kiss at the waterfall, Cam’s announcement that he was in love with Coco, and his declaration to Eleanor that night that he was done with their marriage. For a long time she had believed he’d tell them himself, and by the time she realized he never would, the damage was done. If she told them now, they’d see her as trying to alienate them from their father. And maybe they’d be right.

  Here was the irony. The thing Eleanor had done to hold on to her children’s love—signing over, to their father, the farm that meant more to her than any place on earth—was the thing, more than any other, that made it possible for her children to keep her at a distance. She could fly them to Club Med with her, fly them to Hollywood, or not—but the farm was home to them and always would be. And she was no longer welcome there. All those years she spent reading picture books and constructing cork people, picking out library books, helping with science projects and making valentines and Halloween costumes, driving to games—it all felt like the life of some whole other person than the one she was now.

  86.

  The Red Carpet

  She called Darla. “Come to L.A. with me,” she said. “You can be my date at the screening. We’ll take one of those cheesy tours of stars’ houses and go to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and Venice Beach. We’ll go shopping on Melrose Avenue.”

  “You know how much I’d love that,” Darla told her. “But I can’t. I’ve got even bigger plans for that weekend.”

  In all the time they’d been friends, Darla had hardly ever had plans.

  “I’m finally doing it,” Darla said. What she’d been talking about since the day Eleanor met her. She was moving out.

  She could only talk for a minute. Bobby was passed out on the couch, but you never knew with him when he might come to, mad as a bear with his foot in a trap. Her voice was low, but excited.

  “I put a deposit down on a place outside of Arlington, close enough to mortuary school that I can take night classes. My cousin Ricky’s coming down from Maine with a U-Haul as soon as Bobby leaves for work.”

  No explanation necessary. The only way for Darla to get out of the house the two of them had shared all those years was to do it fast, while he was gone, and be out of there before he got home. The only person she could tell, besides her cousin and Kimmie, was Eleanor.

  “This is the best news,” Eleanor said. “I’ll be back in five days. We can go yard-saling, find stuff for your place.”

  “Just so long as we steer clear of Akersville,” Darla told her. “If Bobby knows where I’ve gone he’ll come after me. You know what he’s like.”

  The L.A. trip went fine. Everyone loved the Cork People series. Eleanor got room service at her hotel and sat by the pool a lot. On Melrose Avenue—shopping alone—she bought Darla a housewarming present: a T-shirt that said, “No. How Is That for a Boundary?”

  Eleanor was in a taxi coming home from the airport when she heard the news on the radio in the cab: a woman had been shot and killed at a gas station outside Arlington as she was filling her tank.

  Darla Ferrell. Age forty-nine. Her estranged husband the apparent gunman. After shooting his wife, he’d turned the gun on himself. Both of them were dead at the scene.

  Eleanor must have let out a cry, because the taxi driver turned around to ask if she was all right. She couldn’t answer.

  When Eleanor got home, she didn’t unpack. She had been a young woman who lost both parents in a single night. She knew that story, though this one was worse.

  She needed to find Kimmie, and when she did, she would tell her the only thing a person can offer at such a moment, that nobody had said to her all those years back.

  “I’m here.”

  87.

  I Won’t Be Coming Home

  Three years earlier, when Al was a senior in high school, she’d applied to MIT, CalTech, and Stanford and got accepted at all of them. She chose Stanford for its proximity to Silicon Valley but most of all for its affiliation with her longtime hero, Dr. Winograd. That September, when Eleanor brought her to the airport (one suitcase only), had been the moment when her daughter had first indicated the changes that were coming, but at the time, she hadn’t understood their magnitude.

  “You might not be seeing me for a while,” Al told her that day. “I need to be on my own to figure everything out.”

  By second semester she had designed a program in a language she’d created. Before school got out, she’d been hired on at a gaming company in Menlo Park and because they were working on some huge deadline, she’d written to say she couldn’t come home to New Hampshire for the holiday. Or to Brookline.

  The year Al left for college was the start of her gradual disappearance from their lives. When spring semester ended, she touched down at the farm—and, for an afternoon, in Brookline—but then she was back on a plane to San Francisco for the rest of the summer. She’d been hired on by a different company this time.

  For the rest of her years at college, Eleanor saw Al only once or twice a year. She doubted Cam did much better. They did not speak again about what Al had told her that day at the airport, when Eleanor put her on the plane for California that first time. But slowly, she came to understand.

  All her life, Al had felt she inhabited the wrong body. After years in which Eleanor had totally missed all the abundant indications Al offered them concerning her feelings about her sexual identity, Eleanor understood this, finally. When she thought back to Ali’s struggles—as a six-year-old, presented with dresses she didn’t want to wear; as a second grader cast in the role of a dancing princess at Cinderella’s ball; as a high schooler, secretly in love with another girl and unable to speak of it—Eleanor felt the deepest regret and shame. How could she have failed to notice? Her child must have been in great pain. And she, the mother, had been so consumed with her own sorrows—the disappearance of the old Toby, the end of her marriage, the loss of the farm—she’d failed to notice.

  When Al graduated from Stanford, she returned to the farm for the longes
t stretch of time since she’d left for California that first time—two weeks. After, she’d be heading to England to begin a program in—weirdly—medieval studies. Nothing to do with computer programming and engineering. Al’s studies wouldn’t begin for a couple of months. The idea was she wanted to settle in, get comfortable in this new place.

  “Could you have chosen any graduate program farther away?” Eleanor said, when Al announced the choice of Oxford over Harvard and Yale.

  “Maybe that was the point,” Al said.

  Eleanor drove Al to the airport. On the sidewalk in front of the airport, the two of them faced each other for a few moments. Even Al—who had remained, over the course of their brief visit, more evasive than at any other time in their relationship—appeared to recognize this as a moment in their lives that needed to be honored.

  “I won’t be coming home for a long time,” Al said. Not for the first time. “I mean, not back to the farm or anything.”

  She barely ever came home anyway, Eleanor pointed out. This was nothing new.

  “I mean, you won’t see me for a long time. A really long time, possibly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t take it personally,” Al said. “I just have some things I need to work out. It’s easier without my family around.”

  They were standing together at the departures drop-off at Logan airport. Cars pulling up, passengers getting out. Young mothers with babies and strollers. Grandparents with golf clubs or walkers. Teenagers carrying surfboards, carrying backpacks. Couples in love, or thinking they were.