Alison had not yet reached her fourth birthday when Toby joined the family, but she begged to hold her brother, and Eleanor knew Alison would sooner let her arm fall off than drop that baby. He had entered the world the way he entered every room, from that moment on—like a rodeo bull released from the pen, bucking and kicking. Though there was this other side to Toby. Of the three children, he was the one most hungry for touch, the one for whom rubbing up against the skin of another human being seemed more vital than food.
In that brief stretch of months before he started crawling—something he did younger than the others, or any baby she’d ever observed—Eleanor kept his infant seat on the girls’ craft table at a height at which Ursula, when she ran through the room in the middle of some game, could pat his head as she flew by, like Cam’s beloved left fielder Carl Yastrzemski tagging third base on the way to completing a game-tying home run. His eyes stayed locked on his sisters as they ran past him, off to play in the snow or dig in the sand. Even then you could tell how crazy it drove Toby that he couldn’t run after his sisters, but once he could crawl, then run, he never stopped. Wherever the girls went, he followed.
That March—when Toby was just three months old—they made their cork people for the first time, and the boats to bring them on their journey along the brook. The idea had come to them on a morning right after Ali’s birthday. After a solid month of below-freezing temperatures, a freakishly warm couple of days had melted much of the snow, and when they took their daily walk to the falls, they saw how the water had risen from all the runoff. Water crashed over the rocks; the brook was running again.
“If only we had a boat,” Alison said. “We could float down the stream.”
It wasn’t a river, of course. The brook was only a few feet wide in most places. Deep enough for trout, but not for the kind of vessel that might transport a person. But when they got home, Eleanor announced they were making boats to sail down the river.
“We need people,” Ursula said. “To ride in the boats.”
“No problem,” Eleanor said. “We’ll make some.”
So they crafted a half dozen little boats, and the day after, with the water racing faster than ever, they brought them to the brook—Eleanor holding tight to the girls’ hands, one on each side, with Toby in the front pack.
They spent most of the afternoon launching their boats and running along the water’s edge, following them. When they got back to the house, Eleanor made hot chocolate.
“Let’s always do that,” Ursula said. “Every year. Our family tradition.”
That was Ursula for you. She never wanted anything to change. Neither did Eleanor, actually. The difference was, she knew, as her children didn’t yet, that this was impossible.
20.
This Was Her Artwork
Sitting in the front of Eleanor’s shopping cart at the checkout one time, Ursula had spotted an issue of People magazine dedicated to the upcoming wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Maybe it was the word “princess” that captured Ursula’s attention—that, along with Diana’s beauty. When Eleanor explained what the story was about, Ursula begged her to buy the magazine, which she carried around with her and took to bed, to study the pictures. On the morning of the royal wedding in London—a July day when the temperature hovered around ninety—she had sat on the living room floor, eyes glued to the television set. She wanted to know how a person got to be a princess, and if she could be one, too.
Even very young, Alison had acquired her sharp, witheringly honest way of addressing her sister, and everyone else in the family.
“Nope,” she told Ursula. “You’d have to be rich. Your parents have to live in some fancy house. Forget about it.”
But Ursula didn’t. She wanted to know who the other princes were that hadn’t found wives yet. She was particularly interested in Diana’s tiara, and the coach she and Prince Charles rode off in after the ceremony was over.
After, she always kept a picture of Princess Diana taped to her wall. As time passed and the story unfolded, she added others, until there was a whole collage that included Prince William and Prince Harry and her favorite, of Princess Diana dancing with John Travolta. When Eleanor explained that Prince William would probably be the king someday, she decided to marry him.
“I already explained to you,” Alison told her. “It’s hopeless.” But Ursula was an incorrigible optimist.
“Party pooper,” she told her sister.
Cleaning up Ursula’s room one day—vacuuming around her Barbie hospital, the papier-mâché puppet of Madonna—Eleanor found herself studying her daughter’s wall of tacked-up Princess Diana photographs. Those beautiful gowns, all those exotic trips with Prince Charles, the pictures of Diana and her sons. Whatever was difficult or possibly crazy about having three children so close together in age, Eleanor always knew this: there was nowhere she’d rather be, nothing she’d rather be doing with her life. On the rare occasions when her hands were free, and there were no more diapers to wash or laundry to fold, Eleanor set her magical red-headed baby on his blanket and took out her sketchbook, trying to capture it all. Not that she ever succeeded. Still, there was a quality to the drawings she made at this time in their lives that had not revealed itself in anything she’d made before, a kind of tenderness.
There was something else, too. She could feel how quickly time was passing, how fast her children were growing, and though every stage that disappeared signaled the arrival of another (crawling, to walking, to jumping, to skipping), she felt the changes with a twinge of loss. Eleanor remembered how she had felt when Toby lost interest in nursing (and she knew by then that he was the last). She had registered the moment as a small death.
No more babies. A chapter had closed. That wonderful stretch of months when all this particular child needed was right there in her own body, and all she had to do was unbutton her blouse to provide it, was over. She could begin to reclaim her body, maybe. Allow herself thoughts and ideas that weren’t centered on those three small people who had occupied her every waking moment for the last few years. Maybe ideas for books and pictures would begin to come to her again. Her stalled career might revive, if she was lucky. She and Cam would reclaim their bed for lovemaking, or uninterrupted sleep. But every springtime after that when they stood at the side of the brook, launching their boats, it would occur to her that she was one year closer to the day her son and daughters would no longer live with her and Cam. How would she ever bear that?
Years later, looking back on those days, Eleanor would try to pinpoint when it had started—the slow, relentless leak of passion from her marriage, so gradual you’d barely notice any change, and Cam’s regretful resignation as he began to drift away from her, like one of the boats they made for their cork people every March, floating dreamily down the brook. It had taken place so gradually that maybe neither of them noticed until somewhere along the line she’d looked up and he was gone.
“Jesus, what’s happened to us?” Cam said one night, as the two of them sat across a table from each other at the pub in town, having a steak dinner. “I’m sitting here with my wife, and it’s the first time we’ve actually been alone together in—what? Four months? Maybe six? And we’re talking about whether we need to put tubes in Ursula’s ears because of all the damned infections, and if we can afford to buy Alison a bike.”
He reached across the table then to take her hand. “When we get home tonight, let’s have sex,” he said.
She nodded and smiled. Back at the house, Cam paid the babysitter—Coco, in their children’s eyes the goddess of the softball field, now thirteen years old—and drove her home. While he was gone, Eleanor lit candles in the bedroom and put on music and inserted her diaphragm —a new one. She checked on the children—all asleep, in their own beds for once—and climbed into the one she shared with Cam. No nightgown for a change.
The next morning, when she got up, he was already shaving.
“What happened to our plan?” she aske
d him. He laughed, a little ruefully.
“By the time I got back from dropping Coco off you were sound asleep,” he told her. “Never mind. You probably needed the rest.”
More than many men (Darla’s husband, Bobby, for instance, who reportedly had never changed a single one of Kimmie’s diapers, or given her a bath), Cam reveled in fatherhood. But it was abundantly clear that he was the fun parent, Eleanor the practical one. Eleanor was the parent who made sure the children got to bed at a reasonable hour and knew that if you decided to make s’mores in the fireplace at eight thirty, this was unlikely to happen. Cam was the one who built crazy snow forts and got them out of bed to see a meteor shower and oversaw the preparations for a Mother’s Day with breakfast in bed: waffles and maple syrup they’d made from tapping their trees, and a bunch of dandelions in a jar. “You wouldn’t believe how the kitchen looked when I got up,” Eleanor told Darla.
Never mind all that. Here at last was the thing she had always wanted above all else. Where Eleanor and Cam had always slept naked, skin touching skin, before the children, now there were small, warm bodies in sleeper suits that occasionally smelled faintly of pee separating the two of them most nights. Never mind that she wasn’t making children’s books anymore, and that editors no longer called her, or that she had to lose the twenty pounds she was still carrying from the last pregnancy, or possibly the one before.
This was her artwork. This family.
21.
Over the Coals
Summer came, and softball. In one of the last games of the season, Harry Botts, running in the wrong direction for a ball, slammed into Cam as he stood at first base. The impact broke Cam’s ankle. The snap of his bone carried all the way over to the hot dog wagon out beyond right field, where Coco was doing Ursula’s nails.
They had to borrow a couple thousand dollars from Cam’s parents to pay the medical bills. In one way, it was easier, not having to pack up all the children—preparing the many Tupperware containers of snacks, assembling the sweatshirts and shoes—and head out to games all those nights. But Eleanor missed the games. Not so much the softball, but the society of the women in the bleachers—watching the children in the grass, handing out Goldfish and boxes of Juicy Juice and sandwiches. Studying the figure of her red-headed husband guarding first base, his right arm outstretched, just waiting to get the next batter out.
Halfway through softball season, Eleanor ran into Timmy Pouliot at the liquor store, buying beer.
“I’ve missed seeing you at games,” he told her.
“Come to our Labor Day party,” she said. It was that time of year again already. “Bring your girlfriend.”
Eleanor and Cam had not yet made plans for their annual end-of-season potluck, but now—though money was in even shorter supply thanks to the broken ankle, not to mention a third baby—it seemed important to maintain the tradition. Cam was still on crutches, but able to man the grill. Eleanor fixed pitchers of mojitos, and Harry Botts came through with the beer. They set their stereo speakers in the yard, blasting Blondie—the first album they’d bought on CD, Parallel Lines. Even with his ankle out of commission, Cam danced by the fire, as sparks rose around him in the darkness. Eleanor leaned against the porch door, holding tight to her son. Even then—not yet walking—he was the kind of child a mother couldn’t let out of her sight.
Eleanor had started doing the Jane Fonda workout, but she hadn’t come close to reclaiming her body. The one she used to have. She’d bought a sundress for the party, shorter than anything she’d put on in a while, with a halter top that exposed more skin than her usual.
It had disappointed Eleanor that Cam hadn’t noticed her dress. Handing out the ice cream bars to the kids (Sal and Lucinda Perrone’s son Joshie complaining, as usual, that someone had pushed ahead of him in the line), she’d gotten waylaid by one of her least favorites among the team wives—Jeannie Owen, who hadn’t been seen out of maternity clothes since 1978. Now she was pregnant with her fifth. Her oldest, Paulette, had an ongoing problem of constipation, she told Eleanor. She wanted to know Eleanor’s thoughts on enemas, though really, it appeared, she was more interested in sharing her own.
Darla—always quick to recognize a situation—called out to her. “I need you in the kitchen, El.”
They were clearing away dishes when she heard the roar of a motorcycle. It was Timmy Pouliot with that summer’s girlfriend on the back of his bike.
“Let’s see who Timmy’s brought with him this year,” Darla said. “The one he brought to your party last year would be hard to top.”
The new girlfriend was named Amber. She had on an outfit that reminded Eleanor of the actresses on The Dukes of Hazzard, a show her children loved. Feeling suddenly ridiculous in her pink-and-green-striped sundress with its pointless ruffles and too-short skirt, she ducked into the bedroom for a sweatshirt to throw over her outfit.
After Timmy parked his bike and grabbed a beer from the cooler, he joined the other men at the spot in their field where Cam had set up horseshoes. Amber headed in the direction of the mojitos. She was a good ten years younger than any of the other women. She took a long swig of her drink.
She made her way to the horseshoe pit. Every man on the team watched as she crossed the lawn and bent over to toss her horseshoe.
Standing at the sink, Eleanor looked toward the barbecue. It was never difficult to pick her husband out in a crowd—the tallest man, the reddest hair. He had a beer in one hand, and the other on the shoulder of one of his softball buddies. He was the life of the party. If she’d never met him before, she could have fallen in love with him all over again that night.
He didn’t see her watching him. He was looking at Timmy Pouliot’s girlfriend. Who wouldn’t?
Eleanor caught her reflection in the window—the ridiculous outfit she’d chosen for the party, her hair, with the bangs she’d cut herself recently, in a misguided attempt to cover her frown lines.
She took out a Brillo pad to scrub the pan she’d cooked the ribs on.
“Need help?” A man’s voice, behind her. “I like that dress, by the way,” he said. It was Timmy Pouliot, carrying in glasses.
“Now I know you’re lying,” she laughed.
“Honest to God,” he said. “You looked great even when you were popping out all those babies. That’s my opinion, anyway.”
“Your girlfriend’s really something,” Eleanor said. “None of the guys can take their eyes off of her.”
“You know how it is,” he said. “Show a bunch of guys a girl in a tight getup and they all go nuts. We’re all like a bunch of dogs with our tongues hanging out, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Don’t you know I’ve always been in love with you?” His voice sounded different. Huskier. He set down the tray of glasses. One by one, he arranged them on the counter, as if he were setting up chess pieces on a board. As if he wanted to take as much time as possible.
“How much have you had to drink tonight?” she said.
“You think I’m joking?”
She had been scrubbing hard, but now she turned around. Timmy stood there, holding the empty tray—a soft, sad expression on his face. Later, she would remember this—the sound of the children calling out “red light, green light” in the darkness, the smell of the meat on the grill, Debbie Harry singing “Heart of Glass.” Timmy Pouliot, just standing there with those blue eyes of his. Not even Cam, in their first days together, had ever looked at Eleanor the way Timmy Pouliot did at that moment.
22.
My Body Keeps Wanting to Be Bad
Except for her father’s periodic visits to Crazyland—the fights when her parents got not simply drunk but plastered, and the cries of their lovemaking in the night—Eleanor’s childhood home had been eerily quiet. She spent a lot of time in her room, with her colored pencils. There was conversation at meals, but it seldom involved Eleanor. The house was immaculate, mostly because so little went on there.
&
nbsp; The house they lived in now, at the end of the dead-end road, in the shade of Old Ashworthy, was almost never even close to tidy, and except for the nights, never quiet, but to Eleanor that suggested only good things. Life happened here. Children played. Walk in the door from the porch and there’d be art projects on the kitchen table. Bug collections on the windowsill. Neon-colored shoes and action figures and mateless socks and experiments, pictures and magnet alphabet letters on the refrigerator, sprouting avocado seeds, skates, crayons, swords, naked Barbies with their hair chopped off, half-finished Fruit Roll-Ups, Smurfs, rocks. There was a dog underfoot, a chart on the refrigerator awarding stars for peeing in the toilet (for Toby, though once he abandoned diapers, he preferred to pee outdoors, even in winter. Whooping and laughing, he pulled down his pants if he wasn’t naked already and squirted yellow designs in the snow).
Where Ursula maintained a virtually perpetual air of steadiness and good spirits, Toby was, from the first, a child of wildly fluctuating emotions, big passions, and large feelings—ecstasy or despair. Unlike Alison’s frequent dark moods, which often lingered for days, then disappeared as mysteriously as they’d arrived, Toby’s moments of sorrow—from when he was just a few months old—touched down like a tornado, swift, powerful, then gone, all within the space of a few minutes.
He spoke earlier than either of his sisters, and even before he was two, he was offering up all these surprising revelations. “I hear music in my head all the time,” he said, in that deep voice of his. He hummed a lot, sometimes even when he was sleeping. He danced, whether or not a record was playing.
It had been Ali, though, with whom Toby made up his own language, which only the two of them understood. Sometimes, sitting at her desk, drawing, Eleanor could hear their strange, unknowable conversations, made of sounds unlike any in the English language. Though when he chose to communicate in words the rest of them understood, what he said was almost equally otherworldly.
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