Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  “I need to be around people who didn’t know me before.” Al’s face looked, suddenly, both very young and at the same time much older.

  “Before what?” Eleanor asked her.

  “Before I transition.”

  It took a moment for Eleanor to understand what Al was saying.

  “This isn’t some quick decision, Mom,” Al told Eleanor. “I’ve been thinking about this a long time. I’ve done the research. I won’t be doing it all at once, but I know what I want. What I need to do takes some time.”

  Later, Eleanor would remember this moment. She was not just sending her daughter off on a plane. She was saying goodbye to her daughter.

  “I always knew I was meant to be a boy,” Al said. “It’s not like you did anything wrong. It has nothing to do with our family. It has nothing to do with you.”

  How Al looked at that moment was beautiful. Her voice—Eleanor still knew no other way of speaking of this—was firm, but for once, there was no anger as she spoke.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Al said. “This is the opposite of a tragedy. I know the next stage will be hard, but I’m clear about my decision. I’m getting on with my life, and when I do I’ll be a lot happier.”

  Al stood very straight as she spoke. Studying her face, Eleanor felt the shift come over her. Al was not beautiful. She was handsome.

  “Got to go,” Al said.

  “When will we see you again?” Eleanor asked.

  “I don’t really know,” Al told her. “When you do, I’ll be different.”

  “That’s true of us all, all the time,” Eleanor told her.

  Her daughter turned to the door. Daughter. A word that would not apply much longer.

  “One thing stays the same,” Eleanor called out. “I’ll always love you.”

  “Same here,” Al called back.

  88.

  Happy, or Close Enough

  Two years into the hormone treatment that ultimately led to the final surgery and Al’s gender reassignment, he sent an email to the family (his siblings, including Elijah, as well as Cam and Eleanor, also Coco) informing them that from here on out, the pronouns employed to speak of the person he was—the person he had always been, he was just claiming it fully at long last—should be “he,” “him,” and “his.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” he wrote. “I’m happy. I have a great job at a start-up in Seattle that pays a ridiculous amount of money, and I’m learning how to sail. I met a great woman, Teresa. We’re in love.”

  But he didn’t come home—not to Brookline, and not to the farm, either.

  “It’ll happen,” he wrote. “I miss you all. This just isn’t the right time.”

  As sad as it made Eleanor to think of Al disappearing from their lives for an unspecified period of time—a long one, from the sound of it—she recognized something in Al’s voice (a deeper voice, but recognizable) that hadn’t been there for as long as she could remember: a firmness, but a lightness, too. This was a long time coming, and no doubt a lonely struggle, but he had made his decision.

  It was an adjustment, but Eleanor had experienced plenty of those. And it had come to her, taking in the words in Al’s letter, that this was what good news looked like. What did a parent want more than for her children to be their true selves, live their fullest lives? Al was doing that, finally.

  Not long after Al sent out his email to the family, Ursula sent an announcement of her marriage to Jake—her high school sweetheart, the first boy she ever kissed—shortly after her graduation from UVM. “It was either put on a big wedding, or put the money toward the down payment on a house,” she told Eleanor. “We chose the down payment.”

  Eleanor called her right away. “I would have paid for a wedding,” she told Ursula. “Consider it going to the down payment fund.”

  The house they found was just outside of Burlington, Vermont, where Ursula worked at a day care center and Jake coached soccer at a high school within biking range. It seemed to Eleanor that the experience of making a home together had the effect of softening the faint air of disapproval she’d felt from Ursula ever since the divorce from Cam. Maybe the wound of seeing her family broken up as it had been, back when she was seven, no longer seemed so raw to Ursula, now that she was in the process of building a family of her own.

  Ursula called Eleanor more often now—a big improvement on how things had gone in the years before this. Most Sunday afternoons, she’d call—to talk about work, or her garden, or one of the home renovation projects she and Jake were undertaking on their place, an old cape not so different from the one in which she’d been raised.

  At least once every six weeks, Eleanor made the drive to Burlington to see Ursula and Jake. After all those years in which Eleanor had walked on eggshells with her younger daughter, it felt as though she’d gotten her back—not the old, relentlessly sunny Ursula, but a more authentic version, probably, a young woman who stayed up late with her mother as she wept over the murder of her best friend, and talked with her about the lessons she’d learned from clients at the center where she worked who were going through gender reassignment surgery similar to Al’s. Eleanor could talk with Ursula about her times with Toby at the center in Baltimore, and about her experiences in the strange, alien world of Hollywood. One topic only remained off-limits—Eleanor could feel this without Ursula’s saying it. They never mentioned Cam, or Coco, or the divorce. Ursula had witnessed way too much of her mother’s bitterness toward her father. They both understood it was best to steer clear of that territory.

  89.

  No Big Drama, No Sleepless Nights

  The Cork People TV series was a hit. The network ordered thirteen episodes and hired Eleanor to come on as a story consultant. She still lived in Brookline, mostly, but she sublet an apartment in Silver Lake and flew out to L.A. every six weeks to advise on the show.

  At a gallery opening Eleanor attended in Santa Monica a few months after she’d taken on the television work, she met an art dealer in his late sixties, Peter, who invited her for a drink, which led to dinner. The next time she came to California, he invited her to go to Ojai with him for the weekend. Then, even more incongruously for a person like Eleanor, she accompanied him on a trip to Hawaii.

  None of this bore any resemblance to how she had spent the first five decades of her life, but Peter was a smart and interesting man who seemed to appreciate her company and, unlike many other men his age in Los Angeles, did not set his sights on some twenty-five-year-old. He expressed affection for her drawings. In addition to art (mid-twentieth century prints and photography his specialty) he knew a lot about wine and architecture and Irish wolfhounds. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that they only saw each other once every six weeks. It suited them both.

  Peter did not move Eleanor the way Cam had, or Timmy Pouliot. But he was good company, and kind, which at this point in Eleanor’s life mattered more than the qualities of being handsome, sexy, exciting, or wildly romantic. His business took him regularly to London, and he invited her to come with him. With the exception of one brief trip to promote the British edition of her book a couple of years back, she’d never spent any time exploring there, but she had loved visiting the Tate and going to the theater every night.

  After London, they flew to Venice. Then Paris. She thought about Darla, how much she would have loved hearing about their trip—Darla, who had never traveled farther from northern Maine and New Hampshire than Boston. Once, and once only, she had started telling Peter about her friendship with Darla—how she’d sold her motorcycle to buy a double-wide trailer, and hidden away her earnings from cleaning people’s houses to save up for mortuary school. She could see, on Peter’s face, as she talked about her friend, a blankness. He had no frame of reference for a person like Darla, or a place like the one Eleanor had lived all those years and still missed. It was best to keep that part of her life separate from her California world.

  The good thing was, no heartbreak existed in her relationsh
ip with Peter—no big drama, no sleepless nights. He had a daughter in her forties, but she lived in Argentina and hardly ever came to California. California! Every time her plane touched down at LAX, and she looked out the window at palm trees, it amazed her that she had a life, even a part-time life, in a place like this. And what was California, anyway—their California, anyway—if not a place where the sun always shone, and your biggest problem was getting through the freeway traffic?

  It probably said something about what Peter and Eleanor shared, and what they didn’t, that he never came to Boston—let alone New Hampshire—or asked to meet her children. In an odd way, that made it easier. Too much had happened to start over now. How could she ever explain everything? Better not to try.

  Peter knew that Toby had issues with his cognitive development, of course, and that Al didn’t come home. He’d heard about Eleanor’s visits with Ursula and Jake in Vermont. But how did you explain having given birth to a child you had considered to be your daughter, who told you that everything about the first twenty-two years of her life had felt like a performance? (“What did you think you were performing?” Eleanor had asked her, that day outside the airport. “The act of being female,” Al said.) How did you explain what it was like finding your four-year-old son facedown in that pond you’d built—standing in the hospital corridor as the doctor spoke the words “irreparable brain damage”?

  How could you explain to a man who owned a house in Pacific Palisades and another in Ojai about all those years you spent starting every day making two columns on the back of an envelope: Money coming in. Money going out? Bills that could wait. Bills that couldn’t. Taking a pen to a piece of paper and in the time it took to sign your name, giving away forty acres of land on which you once believed you would live forever.

  How could you explain to a man like Peter what it meant to love a piece of land as Eleanor had loved that one? Better to let it all go, say nothing, start over fresh on a whole other coast, at the wheel of a rented forest-green BMW convertible.

  Only—what was a person supposed to do with all that history? Who would she be without it? How could she ever be known?

  For a little over three years, Eleanor split her time between the Boston condo and Peter’s house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. When she was out west, she drove to Pacific Palisades on Friday nights to spend the weekend with Peter. Sometimes they went to an art opening or a fundraising event for one of the many cultural organizations Peter supported, on whose boards he occasionally sat. Sometimes they went out for dinner, or took a weekend trip to his house in Ojai, or to Big Sur maybe. Carmel. London.

  One Friday she called him to say she thought she’d stay home that weekend, if he didn’t mind. She needed time for herself. As she anticipated, he expressed no concern or dismay.

  When the next weekend approached, she realized she didn’t feel like going to see Peter then, either. On the third weekend, when he sent a text to tell her he’d been called away to Beijing on some kind of business, she felt only relief.

  They had a few dinners after that, and one more weekend away together, at which time they agreed that the relationship had run its course. The astonishing thing, for Eleanor, was that no tears were shed, no rancor expressed on the part of either of them. It stunned her how easy it had been to end things, and how sad it was that this was so. Maybe a person only had a certain amount of wild, obsessive attachment to offer up over the course of her lifetime, and Eleanor’s had been spent already. (Most of it for Cam, in their early days. And, though she hadn’t realized this until it was over, for Timmy Pouliot.)

  She might have viewed the ease of her breakup with Peter as good news, but it made her sad. It was a surprise to discover that among the emotions she missed, one was a particular kind of deep grief that can come only from the deepest variety of love.

  When the series ended, and her responsibilities as a script consultant were over, she gave up her furnished sublet in Silver Lake and returned to Brookline, full-time, with no regrets.

  90.

  I Met Somebody

  For a few years there, Eleanor used to invite Darla’s daughter, Kimmie, to join her for Christmas, and for a couple of years the two of them had shared a meal of Chinese food and a double feature of Blockbuster holiday films. But Kimmie was married now, with a baby. Off in Las Vegas, of all places, making a new life, the way her mother always wanted. Remembering what it had been like for herself, when she was young, to navigate life without parents, Eleanor made sure to call Kimmie now and then—on Darla’s birthday, and her own. But Kimmie had made the choice Eleanor recognized well—to immerse herself in the marriage she’d made to a man who appeared to bear no resemblance to her father, and to being a mother.

  These days Eleanor spent her holidays alone, or someplace warm that had a pool. There had been that one sad holiday she’d shared with Russell, from the personals, and his two sweetly hopeful sons. The three amigos. Maybe that one Christmas cured Eleanor of any future attempts to insert herself in anybody else’s holiday celebration. She must still have, somewhere in the back of her cupboard, the big roasting pan she used, back in the days she cooked the holiday turkey. But she hadn’t taken it out in years. Wouldn’t even know where to find it now.

  In the early days after her children moved back to the farm, Eleanor went on many dates, then fewer, then none. One time, when Darla was still alive, she had made the observation, about some online dating site to which she’d paid a rare visit, that the same profiles were there, of men she remembered from ten years back. A few had changed their pictures, and their ages were different now, of course, but they looked familiar. She had actually gone out with a few of them.

  “Pretty sad, huh?” Eleanor had observed to Darla. “They’re still knocking around after all these years.”

  “And you’ve been on there yourself long enough to know,” Darla had pointed out.

  Eleanor hadn’t given up her membership on Match.com, but she didn’t spend long hours reading profiles there, either, and on the increasingly rare occasions when a message popped up (“Hey babe! Nice smile”), it went unanswered. If you were over fifty years old, and you admitted you were, your dating prospects were probably not great.

  Even Timmy Pouliot wasn’t as young as he used to be. She had run into him only once since that night at the bar, and he seemed different. For the first time in all the years she’d known him—since he was thirteen years old—he hadn’t greeted her with the look she’d known since the day they first met at the waterfall. He was distracted, looking over her shoulder, as though he were keeping an eye out for someone.

  “I hear they made a TV show of a book you wrote,” he said. He would have watched it, only he didn’t get cable.

  He asked how her kids were doing. She asked about his brother and his mom.

  “Still trying to marry you off?” she asked.

  “I met someone, actually,” he told Eleanor. When she asked for details, he’d seemed reluctant to offer them. Maybe that meant he’d met someone he actually loved. Someone other than her.

  91.

  A Teenager in the House

  Flipping through the Sunday paper one morning, Eleanor’s eyes fell on an article about an exhibition opening at the natural history museum affiliated with Harvard. A major bequest had been made, of what was said to be the single most substantial collection of arrowheads assembled in North America. Oddly enough, the individuals responsible for the gift had not been wealthy collectors or archaeologists. It was a pair of brothers in their early twenties with no particular background in Native American history who had chosen to donate the arrowheads to the museum as a way of honoring their father.

  “Our dad worked at an insurance agency all his life,” the older of the brothers was quoted as saying in the article. “But this was his passion from when he was a little kid, and he passed it on to us. Just about every weekend, growing up, we’d drive to some crazy place, nowhere near anything, and take out our digging tools. It was like
a treasure hunt.

  “The way he talked about those arrowheads made us think about the people who’d made them and what their lives might have been like. He taught us to recognize the beauty in those little pieces of stone.

  “My brother has cerebral palsy,” the older brother said. “So you might think this would have been hard for him. But our dad never let him believe there was anything wrong with him. He hiked along on all those trails on our digs, same as I did.”

  There was more in the article, but Eleanor was stuck on the photograph of the two pleasant-faced and slightly geeky young men, standing beside a glass case (one of many, evidently) housing a part of the collection they’d amassed, along with a plaque commemorating their father. Russell.

  “Our dad died last year,” the older brother, Arthur, explained. “Our mother left when my brother and I were really little, so it was always just the three of us, but he worked so hard to make it okay for us. Going off on those digs on weekends, he made us feel like we were on this amazing adventure. He used to call us the three amigos.”

  One night she picked up the phone to hear the voice of a teenage boy. It took Eleanor a minute, placing him.

  “It’s Elijah,” he told her. “‘I’m calling from our farm.”

  She had seen Elijah often over the years, times when she picked her children up to bring them someplace. As a little boy, he had reminded her of Toby, as he’d been before the accident, though he was taller than Toby, with the lanky build of his father, where Toby’s body was shorter and more compact. Elijah had not inherited Cam’s red hair. In coloring, he took after his mother.

  She had always liked Cam and Coco’s son. Whatever bitterness a person might harbor toward her ex-husband or the woman he’d married, for whom he’d left her, none of it was Elijah’s doing. He always appeared, to Eleanor, like an interesting child and a kind one, where Toby was concerned, most of all. The irony had not escaped her that, having always hoped for a child who played guitar, this one—though not her own—actually did.