The doctor must have had one of those operations where they take out your vocal cords. The voice that spoke to her came out of a machine.
When it was over, the woman came into the room. She gave Eleanor a very thick sanitary napkin for right away and another one for later.
Matt must have paid while she was having the procedure. They left as soon as she could stand up. He dropped her off a couple of blocks from her dormitory a little before nine thirty.
Patty was in the room, changing her nail polish.
“No offense, but you look like someone just ran you over with a truck,” she said.
Eleanor had to carry the blood-soaked pad out to the dumpster behind the dorm—that one, and the others she used over the course of the next six days—so Patty wouldn’t see and wonder. Normally, she used tampons.
At Thanksgiving—never the greatest day, even when her parents were alive—Eleanor opted to stay in the dorm, and to Alice and Jim’s frustration—though Patty’s relief, probably—she did the same at Christmas. The following summer, Eleanor was accepted into an art program in San Francisco, where she finished the drawings for the book that became Bodie Under the Sea. When her English teacher back at school saw the book, she suggested that they send the book to her editor friend at Applewood Press, and by Thanksgiving she had a contract.
Eleanor never went back to Rhode Island. When everyone else at school was visiting colleges with their parents and filling out applications, she was correcting her book galleys. Alice Hallinan offered to bring Eleanor along on a college tour with Patty, but Eleanor said no thanks. She had other plans. A girl she knew from history class had told her about a school she’d visited in upstate New York that seemed pretty and easy to get into, where they didn’t have any math or science requirements. Eleanor sent in an application and a few weeks later got the letter of acceptance.
The summer before college, with the money from the advance on her book, she rented a room in Boston. She took a class at the Museum of Fine Arts and finished another Bodie story.
That fall she went off to college, but mostly what she did there was make pictures in her notebooks and think up more stories. Near the end of sophomore year, with her grade point average hovering around 2.8 and embarrassingly large royalty checks arriving in her campus mailbox every six months, she decided she’d had enough of school. She bought the red Toyota and set out on the road to buy a house. Thirteen days later, she landed in Akersville.
9.
A Blue-Eyed Boy and a Good Dog
Eleanor made a full-price offer on the farm at the end of the dead-end road with the giant ash tree in the front yard. Ed himself even suggested she try a lower number first, see how the sellers—the various Murchisons, living far away, the children and grandchildren of the people whose names and annual heights were recorded on the pantry wall—might respond. But Eleanor saw no reason to dicker. The house was worth the price they were asking, so why not just pay it?
The day she moved in, her neighbors Walt and Edith showed up to introduce themselves. Edith looked dubious when she saw how young Eleanor was. Not Walt. “Anytime you need a little help around the place, give me a holler,” he told her.
She painted her name on the mailbox and with Walt’s help she hung a swing from one of the lower branches of the giant ash tree out front.
There was more substantial work to be done, of course, and plenty of it. Nobody had lived in the house year-round for more than fifty years, so she hired a crew to blow in insulation and install a new oil burner and water heater, new windows, new floorboards to replace the ones that were giving way. An electrician upgraded the wiring and an outdated fuse box. It turned out the septic system was failing. Until she’d bought the farm, Eleanor hadn’t known what a septic system was.
What she loved most was furnishing the place, adding to what was already there: quilts and pillows, tablecloths from the fifties, an old electric mixer, a picnic basket outfitted with tin plates and silverware with Bakelite handles—all the stuff to make a life, except the characters to populate it.
All summer, Eleanor went alone to auctions in search of treasures: an old sleigh bed for upstairs, a set of wicker furniture for the porch. At a yard sale she found an old worktable that she set up in the barn. She laid out her colored pencils and India inks then, and her drawing paper, to get to work on the new Bodie book.
Every afternoon around four o’clock she walked down to the swimming hole below the waterfall and jumped in. Sometimes there’d be a couple of teenagers sharing a beer or making out on the rocks.
(Making out. These kids were only a few years younger than she was. Still, for Eleanor now, the idea of kissing someone, feeling a pair of arms around her, hands on her body, felt as remote as the memory of her childhood home. In her mind’s eye she saw herself and Matt, that Rhode Island summer—his big sweaty hand on her breast, his other hand on her stomach and moving down. She could remember how it was, her work uniform pulled up around her waist, her thighs sticking to the vinyl seat under her, his fingers digging into her flesh.)
One time down at the waterfall she brought her sketchbook. She was drawing a group of boys fishing for trout. One of them had come over. He hung back, but he seemed to want to see what she was doing. He stood a little ways off, watching. “You can take a look if you want,” she told him.
From the looks of him, she figured he was probably twelve or thirteen years old. But the voice in which he spoke to her was deep, and there was something strangely mature, almost manly, about him.
“You must be an artist, huh?” he said.
“I just like to make pictures. You can do it, too, if you want.” She pointed to her extra sketchbook, lying next to her on the rocks.
“I’m no good at art,” he said. “I just like looking at it.”
His name was Timmy. His family used to run Pouliot’s Garage out by the dump, only they closed it last year on account of his dad died. She’d probably seen the place.
She didn’t ask, but he volunteered the next part. “He shot himself,” Timmy said. “I was the one that found him.”
His teacher had a poster up on the wall in his classroom, by this artist named Vincent van Gogh. Some people said he must have been a weirdo because he cut off his ear, but Timmy had memorized that picture. He thought it was the best artwork he ever saw. Then he found out this artist, van Gogh, had killed himself, just like his dad.
“My dad died, too,” she told him. “I know it’s hard.”
Though in Eleanor’s case, anyway, it hadn’t been that great when he was alive. Not in Timmy’s, either, most likely.
“Why don’t you give it a try?” Eleanor said. She held out a piece of charcoal.
He shook his head. “If I was an artist I’d make a picture of you.”
A voice called out. His older brother, probably. “Hey, Romeo. We’re leaving.”
“I have to go,” he told her. “See you around.”
Timmy was a few yards away when he turned around one more time. She’d never known a person to have bluer eyes. “Do you have a boyfriend or anything?” he said.
She laughed.
“I think I’m a little old for you,” she told him. Seeing his face when she said that, she wished she hadn’t. He had meant what he told her and she had acted like it was the most ridiculous thing ever and flicked him off like a deerfly.
She was going to say something else, like “Come back again and I’ll let you try my watercolors.” But he was gone.
That July she’d gone to the ASPCA and adopted a dog—a mutt she named Charlie who loved chasing squirrels and chewed up a box of oil pastels one time when she’d left the barn door open and her work out.
“You better watch that pup of yours come hunting season,” Walt told her. “You don’t want him to go chasing deer.”
What Charlie seemed to love best were squirrels and butterflies. He had no chance of ever catching any, of course, but that didn’t stop him. Sometimes, at the end of the day, s
he’d sit out under the tree and watch him. One minute he’d be stretched out with his head in her lap, but suddenly he’d sit up and a look of total concentration would come over him. Then he was off like a shot on his joyful, futile pursuit. There was a dog’s life for you: no memory of losses, no expectation of future reward. No heartbreak when the squirrel disappeared up the tree. All Charlie appeared to care about was the feeling of the sun on his belly and the racing of his heart, no doubt, when some small animal or fluttering creature came into view. The endless, uncrushable hope that one day he would actually catch that squirrel.
His devotion to Eleanor was absolute. Wherever he was in the house, whatever he was doing—including sleeping—she had only to walk past him and he’d slap his tail against the floor. When she came home to that empty house—and it was always empty when she came home, empty of human companionship, anyway—he’d be there at the door, waiting for her.
No family. No man, only a dog. No man, though Walt stopped by in his truck to check up on her and put on the storm windows when the cold weather came. A man of few words, though it occurred to her at some point that if he didn’t stop by, as he did nearly every afternoon, she’d miss him.
In the warm weather, he brought her vegetables from his garden. (Zucchinis above all else. More zucchinis than a person could eat in a year.) In the fall, he came with a basket of apples. After a snowstorm, she could count on Walt to show up with his plow, and after he finished with the plow he climbed down from the cab of his vehicle and cut her a path to the driveway with his shovel.
She knew from Edith that she and Walt had been married thirty-two years by this point, and when Edith was around, she did all the talking. But when he came by on his own he’d linger longer than was necessary and never said no to the coffee she offered. Once he showed up when she was still in her nightgown, and she could feel the heat of his gaze. She guessed that Edith, though she saw none of this, disliked her.
“Don’t you get lonely, out here by yourself?” he said to her once.
“I was an only child,” she said. “I’m used to it.” The loneliest she’d ever been, probably, was in the front seat of Matt Hallinan’s car, though nights with her parents back at their house, in Crazyland, came close. There was more than one way of feeling lonely.
Fall came. Her tomato plants were hit with frost. The ash tree’s leaves turned red and for a week every time she stepped out the door of the house she just stood there, taking in the color and the way the light illuminated them, the brilliance of that red against the sky. The leaves fell, and the branches were bare against the sky—brown leaves swirling in the wind. By three thirty she had to turn the lights on over her desk. There was an album of very sad Irish ballads she loved, and one by Leonard Cohen, with “Suzanne” on it, that she played so much it was all scratched up. She lit candles and sketched images of the new Bodie adventure, as distant from anything going on in her own life as Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Sometimes she made popcorn for dinner. More often than not she was in bed by nine.
Driving into town at the end of the day—Charlie in the seat beside her, with the window cracked even though it was cold, so he could take in all the smells—she could see into the houses of the families along the road, fixing dinner and watching TV. Maybe things weren’t really all that great in those houses, but through the windows, it looked pretty nice.
The first time Eleanor built a fire in the woodstove the house filled up so swiftly with smoke that she opened all the windows. The next day she called Walt, who told her she’d left the dampers shut. After he cleaned the chimney he told her she was lucky to have avoided a fire. “That thing was so full of creosote, it’s a wonder any smoke got out at all,” he said.
“You can always call me. Not easy, a girl like you living by herself way out here like this without a family. Without a man.”
She heard from Patty now and then. Her old roommate was finishing college a year early, engaged to a Yale guy she’d met at a mixer, pre-med. “My mom always asks about you,” she said. “You should come for Christmas this year. My brother asks about you, too.”
Patty wrote again six months later. Engagement off. Her ex-fiancé had wanted to settle down and start having babies right away and she wanted a career. She had moved into an apartment in New York City, the Upper East Side. Just a studio, but it had a balcony where she could set up a fondue pot. She’d gone out with her brother and his girlfriend to some club where she saw Liza Minnelli. At least she thought it was Liza Minnelli. It could have been some guy dressed up like her.
Eleanor did not pay a visit to the Hallinans that Christmas, preferring to spend the holiday alone with Charlie.
That winter, the snow was so deep it covered most of the downstairs windows, and even with the furnace going—also the woodstove—it was so cold she slept with a hot water bottle. Days went by, sometimes, when she wouldn’t make it down the driveway to pick up her mail, though when she did she could usually count on at least one letter, forwarded from her publisher, from a child who’d read one of her books.
“I love how brave Bodie is,” one girl wrote to her. “I wish I was brave like that. I get scared just asking for a hall pass at school.”
“I never told anyone this before,” another child wrote. “But my dad hits me a lot. Sometimes I like to pretend I could be Bodie, and just go away someplace by myself and have adventures like she does, with nobody yelling at me or saying I’m stupid or taking out their belt.”
When Eleanor got letters from children about her books, she always wrote back.
Months passed, marked by days at her desk, late-afternoon walks with Charlie to Hopewell Falls. She saw Timmy Pouliot now and then, fishing with his brother at the falls or riding his dirt bike through town. If he recognized her, he showed no sign.
10.
Wish I Had a River
Eleanor had been living on the farm for two years now. Days went by sometimes in which she barely spoke, except to her agent or her editor or her dog, and occasionally Walt and Edith, on her daily walk to the waterfall.
There was a woman Eleanor observed sometimes at the swimming hole. She had a little girl, and the two of them would sit on a flat stone by the edge of the swimming hole and dangle their feet in the water to cool off. The woman didn’t swim and the little girl didn’t go in the water, either. She’d stay for about as long as it took to smoke a cigarette, then pick up her daughter, gather her toys in a bag, and head back to her car, an old Chevy so rusted Eleanor wondered how it ever passed inspection. Something about this woman—sitting on the rock, staring out at the water—made Eleanor want to be her friend.
One time, the woman looked so upset that Eleanor had spoken to her. “Are you okay? Anything I can do to help?”
“No big deal,” the woman said. “It’s just my husband. I should leave the jerk. But it’s not like I’ve got anyplace to go.”
Her name was Darla. Her daughter was called Kimmie. “Why don’t you come over for tea?” Eleanor said.
Darla showed up with a six-pack.
“No offense,” she told Eleanor, “but I never understood this whole tea thing. Sitting around drinking hot water with a bag of crumbled-up leaves.”
They sat in the living room with their Budweisers. Darla took it all in: the vases of cut flowers, the Matisse reproduction tacked to the wall, the plate of Brie, the record albums. She spotted a box of books on the table, newly arrived from Eleanor’s publisher. With Eleanor’s name on the front.
“Hey, that’s you,” she said, studying the picture on the back.
“You should take one for your little girl,” Eleanor told her.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Darla said. “Wild guess.”
Darla wasn’t, either, it turned out. She came from northern Maine. Potato country.
“We were a mill family,” she said. “You know what that means? Payday’s Friday. You can count on your dad being drunk through Sunday night, hungover Monday.”
/> Darla’s father had a habit of slapping her mother around when he was drinking. “I guess with five kids and no job of her own, she figured there wasn’t much she could do about that.”
To look at her, you might have thought Darla was closing in on forty, but she was twenty-eight. She had met her husband, Bobby, at a motorcycle rally in Loudon. Not too many women came to the track at Loudon on their own bike—as opposed to riding on the back of some man’s—but Darla did. A Suzuki 350.
Eleanor didn’t know anything about motorcycles.
“For your information,” Darla said. “A three fifty isn’t the kind of bike a person takes to Loudon. But I was just happy having any bike. Bought with my own damn money.”
“I never won anything in my life,” Darla told her. “But I used to buy a lottery ticket every Friday, and one week they pulled my number. Two thousand dollars. That’s how I ended up with the Suzuki.”
She went to motorcycle school and everything. “I wasn’t going to be like my mother, with a houseful of kids and a drunk husband by the time she was thirty, sweeping the floor at a beauty parlor for three dollars an hour,” Darla said. “I had this plan to ride my bike to California, camping along the way. Not that I knew what I’d do when I got there but it was 1967, you know? Summer of Love.”
Then came Bobby. For a good ten minutes she thought the love might be right there, at the Loudon track. “He was sweet to me that time,” she said. “He had this shirt on that said, ‘If you’re gonna do it, do it on a Harley.’
“First thing he said, when he came up to me at the rally, was ‘You actually ride this thing? Or is it, like, an accessory?’
“That’s Bobby for you. Master of the putdown,” Darla said. But at the time it hadn’t bothered her. That’s how her dad always was, until he ran off with his second cousin. And Bobby was funny. Used to be, anyway.
Count the Ways Page 6