There stood Eleanor’s old studio, and Cam’s woodshop, where she would sometimes pay him late-afternoon visits and they would make love on a mattress by the woodstove. The crack in the plaster over the bed she’d chosen to focus on while pushing their babies out into the world.
How many hundreds of nights—a few thousand—had she stretched out on the bed, her children in their mismatched pajamas with a stack of library books, the three of them jostling for prime position on the bed (three children, but there were only two sides next to their mother)? Downstairs, she could hear Cam in the kitchen, washing the dishes and whistling, or listening to a Red Sox game. Outside the window, the sound of water running at the falls. Moonlight streaming in. Her children’s hot breath on her neck, craning to see the illustrations in the book. Just one more. We’ll be good.
Sometimes, by this point in the day, she’d be so tired the words on the page she was reading would no longer make sense, and she’d start speaking gibberish, at which point one of them—Alison, generally—would tap her arm, or Toby might pat her cheeks.
“Wake up, Mama. We need to know how it turns out.”
They were all grown up now.
Older people (the age she was now herself, midway through her fifties) making small talk at the grocery store, back in the days her cart overflowed with breakfast cereal and orange juice—when there was always a baby in the front and someone else scrunched up among the groceries—used to tell her how fast your children grew up, how quickly it all passed. At Stop & Shop one time, Toby got so wild—sticking carrots in his ears and pretending he was a space alien—that she’d abandoned her cart full of groceries, there in the middle of the aisle, whisking the children out to the car until her son calmed down enough that she could resume their shopping. Bent over the wheel of her late-model station wagon while her three children cowered in the back, she imagined hightailing it to someplace far away. The Canadian border, maybe. Mexico. Or half a mile down their dirt road, to spend one entire morning with her sketch pad and pencils, just drawing. Only there were the children to think about. There were always the children, until there weren’t.
All those small injuries, sorrows, wounds, regrets—the hurtful words, the pain people inflicted on each other, intentionally or not, that seemed so important once. You might not even remember anymore what they were about, those things that once made you so angry, bitter, hurt. Or maybe you remembered, but did any of it matter, really? (Who said what? Who did what, when? Who hurt whom? Well, everybody had hurt everyone.)
Now here you were at the end of it all, opening your eyes as if from a long sleep—a little dazed, blinking from the brightness of the sun, just grateful you were there to wake up at all. This was Eleanor, returned to the home of her youth on the wedding day of her firstborn child. Concentrating on the one thing that mattered, which was her family, together again. Beat up and battered, like a bunch of Civil War soldiers returning from Appomattox (whatever side they’d belonged to, it made no difference) but still alive on the earth.
Earlier today, when Ursula introduced her mother to her daughter, her voice had been polite, but wary—the tone a parent might utilize when overseeing her child’s first meeting with a new teacher, or with the pediatrician in preparation for receiving her shots.
“This is your granny, Lulu,” Ursula explained to Louise, who had shrunk back in the way a three-year-old does with a stranger. Then to Eleanor, “How was your drive?”
“I missed you,” she said, getting down low, studying her face. Memorizing it. She could see her daughter in that face, but mostly what she saw was a whole new person. “I was hoping I’d get to see you.”
This was when Louise had noticed her necklace. Amazingly, her granddaughter had climbed into her arms to study the small golden bird more closely.
Eleanor could see, on Ursula’s face, a look of caution and concern. She studied her daughter’s face now—her middle child, now almost thirty-one years old—for some familiar reminder of the girl she used to be, the one who liked to start every morning singing “Here Comes the Sun,” the one who arranged her vegetables on her plate in the shape of a face, always the smiling kind, the one who’d sucked her thumb till she went off to first grade. At which point she herself had begged Eleanor to paint her thumb with the terrible-tasting medicine, to make her stop. (Eleanor hated doing this. It was Ursula who had insisted. Ursula, so deeply invested in fitting in.)
Ursula was the one who, when Eleanor tucked her into bed every night, liked to say, “I love you more than the universe. More than infinity.” If you left the room before she got a chance to say the words, she’d make you come back.
It was three years since Eleanor had seen Ursula. Easy to keep track, because it had been three days after the birth of Louise. They were in the kitchen of Ursula and Jake’s house; Ursula had just finished nursing the baby. Eleanor was holding her when her daughter had stood up from the table. She took the baby from Eleanor’s arms.
“Don’t come back. Don’t plan on seeing your granddaughter ever again.” Those were Ursula’s words to Eleanor as she sent her away that day. Then three years of silence.
“I love our family,” Ursula used to say.
Our family. She spoke as if the five of them, together, constituted some whole entity, like a country or a planet.
This would have been in the mid-eighties, when the children were all in single-digit ages. She had been so busy with the children, most of all Toby, that she hadn’t noticed her marriage to their father unraveling. But her younger daughter did. Sometimes back then, observing Eleanor’s worried expression, Ursula had placed her fingers—one from each hand—in the corners of Eleanor’s mouth to form her lips into a smile.
At the time, Eleanor was always playing the same one song on her Patti LaBelle album, “On My Own.” She was always worried about money, worried about work. Mad at Cam. That most of all.
Ursula was just eight at the time, but already she had designated herself the family cheerleader, the one who, through her own tireless efforts, would make everyone happy again. Ursula, the one of Eleanor’s three children who had, for a while, refused to read Charlotte’s Web because she’d heard what happened in the end and didn’t want to go there, though in the end she did. Ursula, the perpetual peacemaker, the optimist, the girl committed above all else to the well-being of everyone she loved (possibly ignoring her own feelings along the way). Sensing trouble between her parents, she was always thinking up things they might do to bring them all together.
“I call family hug!” she’d announce, in that determinedly cheerful tone of hers.
Who wants to play Twister? Let’s build an igloo and go inside and sing campfire songs! Tell us the story again, Dad, about how you met Mom.
Now their endlessly hopeful younger daughter had a second child of her own on the way, evidently. Her first—whose birth had been followed, three days later, by Eleanor’s disastrous visit—nestled into her grandmother’s arms as if she’d known her all her life.
Ursula had known the comfort of those arms herself. But she’d forgotten, to the point where the simple fact of Eleanor’s ability to hold a three-year-old in her arms without eliciting screams had seemed to surprise her.
“It’s okay, Lulu,” Ursula said to Louise, when Eleanor bent to pick her up. “She won’t hurt you.”
Why would anyone ever suppose otherwise? Least of all her own child.
2.
Intimate Strangers
In no other way that she could think of would Eleanor be called a superstitious person, but there had been a time when she could not round the final bend in the long, dead-end dirt road that led up to this place without saying the words out loud, “I’m home.” Maybe some part of her actually believed that if she ever failed to speak the words, something terrible might happen to one of them. How would she ever survive if it did?
Only, she had.
The first thing she’d always see, approaching the house, was the ash tree. Nobody rememb
ered who started this, but they had called the tree Old Ashworthy. The oldest in town—a rare survivor of the hurricane of 1938 that had wiped out so many of the biggest trees, their neighbor Walt told her. The tallest, anyway.
The trunk had been massive, its girth so vast that one time, when Cam and Eleanor were still together, and the children were little, the five of them had all held hands and circled it, or tried to.
It had been Ursula’s idea. “I have a plan, guys,” she’d announced. At her instruction they’d formed a circle around the base of the tree in their front yard—their backs against the scratchy bark, faces looking out, fingers touching, Alison with that dark, worried expression that seldom left her by this point—rolling her eyes, no doubt, and wanting nothing more than to be left alone—and sweet, vague Toby not fully grasping the concept of what they were trying to do here but ready as always to oblige.
Eleanor had tried to touch Cam’s fingers that day, but Old Ashworthy’s circumference exceeded their reach. In the end, even with Cam’s long arms, they couldn’t reach all the way around the trunk, or even close.
Even this—the failure of the five of them to execute her plan of a unifying hug around the tree, and the ominous sense of failure they might have taken from this—Ursula had managed to transform into a signal of something good.
“You know what our family needs to make this work?” she said. “Another baby!”
Looking back on that day now, Eleanor realized that her husband must have already given up on their marriage by then, though it said something about how distracted Eleanor was at the time that she had failed to notice.
All three of their babies had been born on this farm. The worst pain Eleanor had ever known—the worst physical pain anyway, the sense that her body was ripping in two, sounds coming out of her she would not have believed herself capable of making. Then the part where this whole new person showed up, and you looked into her face, wrapped your arms around her wet pink body.
“It’s a girl.”
She’d driven Al to Logan airport, the day she saw her firstborn off to college. It was back before Homeland Security prohibited you from walking up to the gate with someone you loved, or being there to watch as she came off the plane when she came home.
Only Al might not be coming home much, she told Eleanor. She had turned to face Eleanor, just before boarding the plane, to deliver the news.
“You might not be seeing me for a while,” she said. “I need to be on my own to figure everything out.”
Figure out what? Can’t I help you? I always used to be able to do that.
Al walked down the ramp then, into the tunnel that led to the plane. Standing at the gate, watching her go, Eleanor felt a stabbing in her chest, as real as a knife.
Sometimes a person has to leave home to become who they need to be.
That was a long time ago now. Her child had accomplished what he’d set out to do. If you hadn’t known him before, there would have seemed nothing out of the ordinary about the appearance of the man who stood there beneath a homemade arbor of grapevines, hair slicked back, wearing a suit and tie and a pair of lace-up oxfords, a sprig of lilac pinned to his pocket. Kissing the bride.
If you had told Eleanor this would be part of her family’s story—the child she had thought of as her daughter, who had sent her a letter to say that he was actually her son—she might have imagined this as their family’s central challenge. But Al getting to become the person he always wanted to be turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened.
Eleanor had thought it would be strange, seeing Al for the first time—Al, a man. But it wasn’t. When she pulled up that morning, he was standing on the porch in his wedding suit, with the bride’s two brothers along with Toby and Elijah—Cam’s son from his second marriage. The five of them were fixing each other’s boutonnieres.
As much as Al had changed since she’d said goodbye to him that day at the airport, she recognized him instantly—his eyes, his hands, that dark hair with the familiar cowlick, now tamed with hair product.
But he was different, too, in ways that had nothing to do with the assignment of gender. The child who used to be Alison was never quick to smile. The young man Eleanor encountered on the porch now—her son Al—looked happier than she could ever remember. There was a lightness to him. He was actually laughing at something one of the future brothers-in-law had said.
“It’s good to see you,” Eleanor told him. The blandest words. Had they ever meant more than they did now?
Eleanor put her arms around him. He did not resist her embrace, as he might have done once. For a few years there he had been angry at everyone, himself included, no doubt. Angry at the world.
She should have recognized sooner that Alison had never felt she was born in the right body. She told no one when she got her period, though when Eleanor saw Alison’s underpants, hand-washed, hung to dry in her closet, she had put her arms around her daughter and asked, “Why didn’t you let me know?” When Ali’s breasts developed, she told Eleanor she wanted to chop them off.
Back in those days hardly anyone ever talked about things like that. You didn’t consider the possibility that there might be another way for a person like Ali to make her way through life, and if you did elect to do something about it (the hormones, the surgery), that would have seemed like the worst thing you could imagine your child going through.
Now here he was, Eleanor’s son Al, on his wedding day. Strong, handsome, happy.
“I want you to meet Teresa’s brothers,” he said, his hand on her shoulder.
“Mateo, Oscar. This is my mom.”
From where she stood, holding Louise near the back of the assembled guests, Eleanor had met the eyes of Teresa’s mother, Claudia—born in Mexico, raised in Texas, a woman who, years before, would have gone shopping with her daughter for a quinceañera dress. Forty years married, Claudia had told her earlier. Hers, a church wedding. Catholic.
“All that matters is love,” she had said to Eleanor, when the two of them met before the service. “Our daughter is happy. ¿Qué más necesitamos? What more do we need?” For her, the only issue about the match between her daughter and Eleanor’s son had been their refusal of a church wedding, but once they’d gotten a priest to give his blessing she’d gotten over it.
It was possible that Miguel and Claudia remained unaware of Al’s early history. What mattered to them was who these two adult children were now, not who they had been. When a person has been born in Michoacán, and lives now in a Dallas suburb, she knows all about letting go of the past. Making her peace with it, at least.
Eleanor studied the faces of the other guests, as many as she could see from where she stood. There was the Seattle crowd, Al’s programmer friends from his start-up, all unknown to her. The Mexican American contingent. But there were others she recognized—from school potlucks long ago, nights at the softball field, playground fundraisers, drop-offs and pickups at each other’s houses, times the children got together to play. They all just looked a lot older, but then so did Eleanor.
None of them had escaped large sorrows. A child in and out of rehab over the last ten years. A child dead by suicide. A son who lost a leg in Iraq. Scanning the assembled guests, Eleanor’s thoughts went to the friend who, if she were still alive, would have taken her for pre-wedding pedicures, and to her old neighbor Walt, who’d quietly loved her all those years—dead now for a dozen years. So many of those her age were no longer married to the wives and the husbands of their youth. Eleanor and the man with whom she’d raised three children among them.
It was never difficult to locate Cam in any crowd, given his height and his hair, which had retained its color, though now there were strands of gray among the red. If this event had taken place a couple of years earlier, the woman who’d replaced Eleanor as his wife would be seated next to him, but she was gone.
Maybe because he’d been busy setting things up, they had not spoken to each other yet, but now Cam
turned his head, which allowed Eleanor to see his face for the first time in many years. It was deeply lined, but still handsome, though he was thinner than she’d ever known him to be. Gaunt, even. Cam had always been a lean person, but as a young man he had a certain heft to his body. Now his face was so drawn you could almost see the actual bones of his skull under the skin. When she caught sight of him he was staring off in the distance, his expression impenetrable.
It was a familiar image to Eleanor: Cam, with his attention someplace else. If the occasion inspired in him some memory of a day, long ago, when it had been himself and Eleanor standing in this field looking into each other’s eyes, swearing their love for all time (neither one of them able to imagine the day their hearts would not beat faster in the presence of the other), nothing on his face betrayed it.
Cam had never been a man inclined to consider the past. When a person left, she was gone. When an event was over, it might as well never have happened.
They’d met at a craft fair in Vermont when Cam was just getting started with his woodworking.
“Cam,” he said, when she’d stopped to inspect a bowl, running her finger over the smooth interior. It took Eleanor a moment to understand he was speaking to her.
“I thought you’d never stop at my table.”
He looked like an illustration out of an old book of Greek mythology she’d owned as a child, with that flowing red mane. His lanky presence was something she often registered (this was later) even before he walked into the room, ducking his head slightly as he passed through the doorway—a habit acquired from long experience of the many times he had hit his head on some low-hung New England lintel. He exuded utter self-assurance and a quality whose implications for her own life she would only understand later—a kind of coolness she never came close to possessing. Worries that consumed Eleanor rolled off his back, or seemed to. He didn’t hold on to things the way she did. He had an easier time than most letting go of things, and people, though she didn’t know that part yet.
Count the Ways Page 2