After he picked her up and brought her home, the law partner, Don, told her she could leave everything till the summer, when school got out. But when school got out, and Eleanor returned to Newton, it was no easier to figure out what she was supposed to do with a houseful of the possessions of two dead people who in many ways she barely knew. In the end, somebody called in a company that ran estate sales, who promised to empty the house by July, so it could go on the market.
Eleanor spent an afternoon alone there. “Pick out what you want, honey,” Don told her. She started making a pile, but at the end of an hour the things she’d set out filled most of what had been their dining room. Where was she supposed to put all of this stuff, anyway?
In the end, Eleanor walked away with her father’s clarinet, her old cereal bowl decorated with Beatrix Potter animals, a dress of her mother’s from the fifties, and a pair of velvet pants that weren’t even her size. She took the photograph albums, of course, though it would be a few years before she opened any of them, and when she did, she was struck by how many photographs there were of Martin and Vivian, how few of herself. Judging by the slightly off-kilter way in which the images had been captured, she guessed she had served as her parents’ photographer. Anyone else, leafing through the album, would have no way of knowing that Eleanor had been along on those trips at all.
She was eleven years old when they’d traveled to New York City to take in the World’s Fair—riding an escalator past the Pietà, flown in from Italy; taking in water-skiers and a parrot at the Florida pavilion and the World’s Biggest Cheese at the Wisconsin pavilion. Later that afternoon, her parents drank so many mai tais at the Hawaii pavilion (seven, based on Eleanor’s count of the paper umbrellas) that they had trouble making their way back to the parking lot.
The next day, after a breakfast involving a large pitcher of Bloody Marys, as they were walking along Fifth Avenue—Eleanor a few steps behind the two of them, as usual—she had decided to simply stop walking. Just stand still on the sidewalk and see how long it took before they noticed.
Her parents had gone more than a block before they looked back, and even when they did, they did so with an unnerving measure of calm.
Oh, there you are, her mother said. Her speech was only very slightly slurred. Nobody would have noticed but Eleanor.
The last time she’d seen her parents, Eleanor had told her mother she didn’t plan on going skiing with the two of them over break.
Did it ever occur to you to ask my opinion about what I’d like to do instead of making all these plans and then letting me know? Did it ever occur to you that I might have my own ideas about what I’d want to do, besides tagging along after the two of you, watching you order cocktails and stare into each other’s eyes? Cleaning up the broken glass in the morning?
That Christmas they’d given her a pair of warm gloves and a parka, a watch, an art kit of the sort best suited for a child around eight years old who may or may not have expressed an interest in painting, and a gift certificate for Filene’s. Eleanor was in her room, packing her suitcase, her face still hot from the argument with her parents. Her mother appeared in the doorway, without a drink.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come skiing with us?” her mother asked, again. She put her hand on Eleanor’s shoulder. She seemed relieved when Eleanor said no thanks, she was going to visit her school roommate, Patty, over winter vacation.
At the funeral, someone who’d seen Martin and Vivian at the mountain the day of the accident had told her how great the conditions had been. How happy the two of them had looked, sitting in the lodge after their last run, sipping their Irish coffees.
“In a way, it’s sort of perfect that they died together,” a friend of her father’s had suggested. Imagine either one of those two without the other.
They’d ended their lives side by side in the front seat of their Oldsmobile, with their only child at school a few hundred miles away. Once again, Eleanor had been left out, and though this time it was a good thing, it seemed to her that really, she’d been on her own forever anyway.
Who else did Eleanor know who—as she discovered, cleaning out their kitchen, after—had one whole cupboard devoted to swizzle sticks? And another containing two dozen jars of maraschino cherries?
7.
One Small Step for Man
Patty’s parents, the Hallinans, invited Eleanor to spend her summer vacation with their family in Rhode Island. Patty was going to be away working as a camp counselor for most of the summer, but Alice Hallinan said that only made them all even more eager to have another teenage girl around, so they wouldn’t miss Patty so much.
Jim Hallinan found Eleanor a job doing daytime kitchen prep at a restaurant owned by a golfing buddy of his. And the best part was, their son, Matt, would be home from college, retaking a class he’d flunked the year before and studying for the law boards, so he could drive her to work and look out for her.
An older brother. Eleanor had envied Patty for having one. It was her Anthony dream in real life.
She moved into Patty’s room, with its twin canopy beds and the poster of Donovan on the wall, along with Patty’s swim team medals and a collage of pictures from family trips to the Cape. Alice—who’d told Eleanor to call her Mom, not that she did—had cleared out half of the drawers for her clothes, though she didn’t have that many. Their dog, Buddy, licked her shin. She’d always wanted a dog, but that wasn’t her parents’ style.
“We all want you to consider yourself one of the family,” Alice said.
On the ride over to her first day of work at DiNuccio’s, Patty’s brother, Matt, turned on the radio. Eleanor recognized the warbly strains of “Crimson and Clover.”
“My sister goes for all this sugar crap,” he told her. “But I’m thinking you might appreciate Led Zeppelin.” He changed the station.
He was back at the restaurant at four to bring her home, and every day after that, he drove her. Both ways.
“This must mess up your plans,” Eleanor said. “Having to go back and forth to DiNuccio’s all the time.”
“I have no plans,” he told Eleanor. “My dad’s got me on a short leash on account of my grades. He basically laid down the law: if I don’t pass this stupid Spanish class I need to graduate and get a decent score on the LSATs, he’s taking back the car. The good thing about driving you is I get an excuse to bust out of the coop twice a day.”
Eleanor liked sitting in the front seat with Matt, listening to the radio. Sometimes they rode without speaking—Matt pounding on the steering wheel when a good song came on, Eleanor looking out the window—but more and more, he talked with her. She felt special and grown-up, that a boy as old as Matt would pay attention to her this way. It was almost like having a real brother.
One day he handed her a joint. “You smoke?”
She never had, but she didn’t want to seem like a goody-goody.
“Sometimes.”
She inhaled, more than a person should. She started coughing.
“Not much I guess, huh?” he said. His laughter sounded like some kind of animal. A hyena, or the way hyenas sounded in cartoons anyway.
“What do you figure the story was with this guy Billie Joe McAllister?” he asked her. “Ode to Billie Joe” had come on. “Like, why did the guy jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge?”
Eleanor didn’t know what to say, so she kept quiet. Something about “Ode to Billie Joe” always made her uncomfortable. Nobody ever explained what they threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
“You have a boyfriend?” he asked her.
“No.”
“You ever have a boyfriend?”
For a minute, she thought she’d lie, but she figured he wouldn’t believe her anyway. “Not really.”
“Any guy ever kiss you?”
She shook her head.
They were at the point in the road where, if he went left, they’d be back at the Hallinans’ in around two minutes. There was another road, off to the rig
ht. Smaller. No sign of houses. She’d never been down that one.
That’s where he took her. Not saying anything, he pulled the car over.
He leaned over to her side of the wide bench seat and put his hands on her shoulders. He pressed his face against hers. At first the kiss was the normal kind, as much as Eleanor had imagined. Then his tongue was in her mouth.
After that, he always turned down the other road when he picked her up after work. They didn’t talk about it. This was just something he did, and Eleanor let him. It usually lasted only a few minutes. Then they went back to the house.
After a couple of times Matt started putting his hand down the front of her shirt. Inside her bra, pinching her nipple. She wondered if that was supposed to feel good. If someone had told him it did. If he cared about things like that.
Then he had his hand in her underpants. The next time—middle of July, probably—he pulled her skirt all the way up. He unzipped his pants. Except in museums, on statues, and one time when she’d walked in on her parents, Eleanor had never seen a man’s penis. Now he was pressing his against her. Then he was thrusting it inside. At first it wouldn’t go, but then it did.
Eleanor lay there on the seat, letting him move up and down on top of her. She closed her eyes.
It got to be a regular thing. Driving to work, listening to the radio. Eleanor tried hard to focus on that, rather than what would happen in the car with Matt.
They always seemed to be playing Creedence Clearwater that summer. “Bad Moon Rising.” Though sometimes Matt put on the news.
There was a riot in New York City in reaction to some policemen beating up homosexual people. As far as she knew, Eleanor had never met a homosexual, but she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to beat them up.
“That’s one way to get out of the draft,” Matt said, listening to the broadcast about the Stonewall riots. “Just tell them you’re a fag.”
Eleanor hardly ever said anything in the car with Matt, but this didn’t seem to matter. He was mostly just talking to himself, probably.
“Me, I’d rather take my chances in the army,” he said.
That summer there was a lot of talk about the moon, of course. The Apollo 11 astronauts were going there soon. Not just orbiting, but landing this time, actually walking around. Mrs. Hallinan had already made plans to host a neighborhood moon walk party.
“It’s a night you’re going to remember your whole life,” she told Eleanor. “We’re living in the middle of a historic moment.”
One time, on the drive home from work, when he pulled her underpants off, he’d seen the string of her tampon hanging out. He put his penis in her mouth that day. “No offense,” he said, “but I get sick at the sight of blood.”
That week, the cover of Life magazine had featured a photograph of the lunar landscape—those vast, empty craters with nothing around them but blackness and stars.
Remember the moon. Forget the rest.
“You ever wonder what the astronauts do about going to the bathroom in space?” Matt asked her.
“No.”
“They have a special bag in their suit,” he said. “Then they release it into outer space. Gross, huh?”
He made the right turn. He always did. She had learned now, when he got on top of her, to put some other picture in her head and focus on that one.
Sometimes she pictured the dog, Buddy. Sometimes the moon.
Matt’s biggest concern that summer was Vietnam. He wasn’t that political, and the Hallinans wouldn’t have approved of their children attending protest marches, but he knew that among the consequences of his failing to get the credits he needed and a good enough score on the law boards to get into some law school, the worst was the strong possibility of getting drafted. Whenever President Nixon’s voice came over the radio, Matt got particularly agitated.
“No way am I going into some jungle with a goddamn M15,” he said. He had a backup plan for the law boards. A guy he knew would take the test for you, with a fake ID in your name. It wasn’t cheap, but if you paid him the money, he guaranteed you a score over 700.
In other circumstances, Eleanor might have said something. As it was, she just sat there letting it happen again: The turn in the road. The engine going, so he could keep the radio on. Her underpants around her ankles that she’d pull up, after. The vinyl seat upholstery sticking to her skin and later, back at the house, Mrs. Hallinan in the kitchen offering a snack. No, thank you.
She could smell it on herself. Matt Hallinan’s semen dripping down her leg.
“You’re wasting away,” Alice told her. “You aren’t going anorexic on us or anything, are you?”
Up on the bed in Patty’s room, after, Eleanor would put on Clouds. Sad as she sounded, Joni Mitchell always made Eleanor feel better, or maybe simply less alone. First she took a shower, always. Then set her colored pencils out to draw. She knew that if she said anything to the Hallinans about what happened with Matt, they wouldn’t believe her. The whole thing—her job at DiNuccio’s, her Rhode Island summer, Mrs. Hallinan offering to take her back-to-school shopping, her friendship with Patty—would be over. Not that any of those things were so great. But where else was she supposed to go?
This was the summer Eleanor started working on the Bodie stories—the adventures of a ten-year-old girl orphan who met all sorts of kind, wonderful people in places like Maine and Antarctica and Paris. With no parents around, but also nobody like Matt Hallinan. Bodie was a girl who got to do whatever she wanted, and nobody told her what it should be. There were no boys in the story, no kissing, or any of the rest of it.
The day of the moon landing, Mrs. Hallinan prepared pigs in a blanket and deviled eggs and they all gathered around the TV set—not just the Hallinans and Eleanor, but a dozen neighbors from up and down the street—to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Privately, Eleanor wished he hadn’t stuck that flag there. She liked how the craters looked with nothing on them. When she thought about the moon, which she did, in the car, it looked the way it did in Life magazine. Empty craters. No flag.
The next time Matt drove her home from work, he pulled over same as he always did. She closed her eyes, as usual.
As he entered her body—a sensation that had felt like a poker going into her the first time but no longer did—he put his face against her ear.
“One small step for man,” he whispered.
Patty returned home from her job at the camp the second week of August, and the five of them—Mr. and Mrs. Hallinan, Patty, Matt, and Eleanor—spent five days together in Maine. There was a music festival going on somewhere in upstate New York that week. “Bunch of hippies,” Mr. Hallinan said. “Probably pals of that nutcase that murdered the movie star.”
Alice told Matt he should take Eleanor out on the speedboat, show her how to water-ski, but she said no thank you and mostly stayed in her room that week. She didn’t even get a tan.
One night near the end of their time at the lake, she had heard Patty and her mother in the kitchen, discussing the situation. “I wish we hadn’t even brought her,” Patty said. “She turned out to be such a drag.”
“You have to remember what Eleanor’s been through,” Alice told her. “It hasn’t even been a year. I’m not saying it’s easy having her around all the time, but let’s try to be understanding.”
A couple of days after they returned to Rhode Island it was time for the two of them to go back to school. As she was struggling to get her bag down the steps, Jim Hallinan called out to his son.
“Matthew! Get your butt down here. I expect you to carry out Eleanor’s bag. And while you’re at it, give our girl a nice big hug.”
She stood a little ways off as he placed her bag in the trunk, next to Patty’s.
“Good luck on your test,” she told him.
“See you next summer,” he said. “Sooner than that, actually. You’ll be back at the ranch for Thanksgiving, right?”
“Like I keep telling Eleanor,” Alice chim
ed in. “We’re your family now.”
“Family. Everybody’s gotta have one, right?” Matt grinned. “Even Charlie Manson knew that.”
8.
Like Someone Just Ran You Over with a Truck
She was back at school—rooming with Patty again, not that either of them felt particular affection for the other at this point.
Her period was due the week classes started, but it didn’t come. By November she knew why.
She had thought she’d never have to speak to Matt Hallinan again, but now she found his number in Patty’s address book, the frat house where he lived. Someone else picked up, a boy nicknamed Ratso, who’d changed his name from Bill after he saw some movie called Midnight Cowboy, Patty explained to her. Loud music in the background. A party going on. A minute later, Matt was on the phone.
It had taken him a minute to place her, but then he did. When she told him she was pregnant, he didn’t deny it. He just kept saying, “oh shit oh shit oh shit.”
He picked her up at school that weekend. Not on campus, obviously. Nobody could find out about this.
He’d gotten the name of a doctor from one of his fraternity brothers who’d recently had to deal with a similar problem. The doctor, who was up near Poughkeepsie, could take care of it, no questions asked. Eleanor had no way to get that kind of money without asking her father’s old law partner, Don, but Matt worked out that part, not that it wasn’t a pain.
Five hundred dollars. Fuck.
They didn’t talk in the car. Five hours. He kept the radio on. Neil Diamond. The Fifth Dimension. They must have heard “Light My Fire” six times, on the drive north, but the Doors song that got to her most was “The End.” She couldn’t get Jim Morrison’s dark, haunted voice out of her head.
The address Matt had been given turned out to be an apartment on the outskirts of town. A woman answered the door. She brought Eleanor to a room in the back where a man was waiting. He didn’t have a beard, exactly, but he needed a shave. He told her to climb up on the table.
Count the Ways Page 5