29.
Sometimes Even Breast Milk Isn’t Enough
That was the year Eleanor and Cam built the pond.
They’d been talking about this for years. Every afternoon in warm weather, the five of them walked to the waterfall (four, if Cam was off on his mountain bike or at softball practice), and sometimes they brought their poles to fish downstream, but it wasn’t a place for young children to swim—the water too rough and swirling, the stones too sharp.
A few months before, Eleanor had sold an article to a women’s magazine. It was a story about Alison’s decision, when she was six, to stop answering to any name but Little Joe. She had fallen in love with the character played by Michael Landon on Bonanza reruns on Nickelodeon. For her birthday that year, all she wanted was a pair of cowboy boots.
It was a funny story. “Your daughter has some imagination,” one of the softball wives had observed.
Because the money felt like a windfall, Eleanor and Cam used it to hire a backhoe. For ten days straight, Buck Hollingsworth, the Yellow Jackets catcher, had shown up at their place every morning at seven to dig out the pond site.
Alison found the machine too noisy and stayed in her room a lot during this period, working on a scale model of the Titanic, but Ursula and Toby were transfixed by the process. They sat on the grass for hours every day watching Buck work, and when he asked if they’d like to come up in the cab with him and help operate the machine, Toby looked as if the doors of heaven had just opened. Ursula, always the caretaker, yielded her time in the cab of the backhoe so her brother could stay there longer, working the controls with Buck.
After the hole was finished and Buck made his way down the driveway that last day, Toby looked as bereft as if he’d lost his best friend.
In the days that followed, the water began to fill the hole, frogs appeared out of nowhere, and the dirt turned to the most wonderful mud, and for the rest of the summer, all any of them wanted to do was play in it. Even Alison—though she was always quieter and more reserved—slathered the rich dark goop over her legs and arms and face and lay in the sun till it dried. Once the water got deep enough, they all jumped in the beginnings of their pond. Self-conscious about her body, even when very young, Alison kept her swimsuit on, but Ursula and Toby spent much of that summer naked in the mud. Just about the only time they put on clothes was when they all piled into the car to attend one of Cam’s softball games.
Eleanor and Peggy Olin had one of those friendships formed through children. The fact that Peggy’s daughter, Gina, was older than Alison and Ursula, conferred a certain authority. Peggy regularly advised Eleanor on which kindergarten teacher she favored and where to get winter boots at the best price. Other than Bonnie Henderson’s bulletins on her sex life, no deep exchanges occurred on the bleachers at Yellow Jackets games. But for a few summers there, Eleanor regarded Peggy as her closest friend, after Darla.
Then one day—late May, black fly season—Peggy was absent from the bleachers, Bob gone from the field, and one of the other wives told them the news: Peggy and Bob’s daughter Gina—the child raised on brown rice and tofu—had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
The team took up a collection. Someone suggested a bake sale and someone else passed around a card for all the team members and wives to sign. Peggy and Bob were driving to Boston that weekend to consult with a specialist at Dana-Farber. Then they were going to Johns Hopkins. St. Jude’s. Then they were visiting some clinic in Arizona.
By Fourth of July weekend, with no word from Peggy, Eleanor knew she should call. But every time she began dialing their number, the thought of what she might hear about Gina’s condition made her stop.
Here was the awful truth about being a parent. From the moment of your children’s births, you did all these things to protect them. You made your own baby food; you checked to make sure the fabric of their pajamas wasn’t flammable and there was the correct space between the bars of the crib. When, in your second pregnancy, you read about a rare disease contracted from cat feces in a litter box, you got rid of your cat.
You read the books all the experts had written, and you followed their advice. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when one of your children was sick, you stepped quietly into the room where they slept, to listen to their breathing.
And still, there was no protecting them. You could burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom—the image that haunted Eleanor, when she rented Sleeping Beauty from the video store—and still, the fair-haired princess in your care could prick her finger and fall into that deep and terrible sleep.
Look at Gina Olin. Breastfed until age four. Bald now, from the chemotherapy.
All that summer, Bob Olin still presided over the outfield, but his daughter’s illness had changed him. He seemed to run after the balls with a kind of manic ferocity absent in previous seasons, as if everything wrong in his life, which was just about everything, might be obliterated if he could just connect his glove with that one line drive coming his way. Men were supposed to protect their families, at all costs. But how was he supposed to protect his child against attack from inside her own body?
Peggy still brought Gina to games sometimes. She was in a wheelchair now, her body thin as a leaf, her eyes glazed. Toby offered her a mozzarella stick one evening, but she just looked at him as if he came from a whole different planet. Or she did. There was a look on her face as if she saw things nobody else did. She was floating high above the ball field. More like a cloud than a person.
Word on the bleachers was that Peggy and Bob had brought their daughter to see a healer in Quebec who was said to cure hopeless cases by touching a person’s forehead and placing a drop of a special water on their tongue, but when they got back, Gina was weaker than ever. By August, Peggy must have lost ten pounds. She wore the same clothes every game, and seemed to have given up brushing her hair. They’d discontinued chemotherapy by now, on the advice of the doctors, who’d told the Olins to bring their daughter home and make her as comfortable as possible. Bonnie Henderson told Eleanor that Peggy had approached one of the younger wives on the team, who was due to give birth any minute, about getting a vial of her breast milk for Gina once she delivered, to boost Gina’s immune system. To the women on the bleachers, her quest sounded crazy, but what else could she do? How was a mother supposed to give up trying to save her child’s life?
The others—the ones with healthy children—sat quiet, watching, vowing to never again complain about rowdy four-year-olds or six-year-olds who wouldn’t finish their sandwiches. Eleanor was one of these. Looking at the pale, shrunken form of Gina Olin in her sticker-bedecked wheelchair, with a Cabbage Patch doll propped up in her lap, she made a silent promise to herself that she would ask for nothing, ever again, but that her children stay healthy and safe.
This was the terrible part of being a parent. The more you loved, the more you had to lose. It might as well be your own heart the pitcher was firing off toward the plate, hovering out in midair, ready for some bat to smash into it. Once you had a child you were never safe again.
Gina died that August. When Eleanor told the children, Alison fell silent for a minute, then opened her homework. Ursula flung herself on the couch, weeping. Toby wanted to know where they were going to put her body, and what would happen to her soul.
Later that night, in bed—Toby pressed up against her body on one side, Cam on the other, the sound of their son’s breathing a soothing presence in the darkened room—Eleanor lay awake looking out the window at the moonlight, coming through the branches of Old Ashworthy. Somewhere off in the woods she heard the barking of a dog, and farther away, a howling that sounded like a pack of coyotes.
She pressed her face against Cam’s chest.
“You awake?”
“I am now,” he said.
“Let’s always remember today,” she said. “How much we have. How lucky we are. Having this family. Living here. Being together.”
“Sounds good,” Cam told h
er. He was only half awake.
“I don’t need one more thing,” she whispered. “Just this.”
By September the hole Bud Hollingsworth had dug for them, at the hopeful start of summer, was nearly filled with water. They had a pond. That winter they skated on it, and the next spring, as if by magic, tadpoles appeared. Cam and Eleanor still brought the children to the waterfall most afternoons to take in the sight and sound of that roaring water, but they swam now in their own family pond. They named it Tadpole Lake and planted lupine along the sunny side from seeds they’d gathered on a camping trip to Maine.
That Labor Day, on the day that would have been their annual softball team potluck, Cam and Eleanor attended Gina Olin’s memorial service. “If there’s anything I can do,” Bonnie Henderson offered, that day at the church. They all knew there wasn’t.
Home again, standing at the kitchen counter, looking out the window at the pond, the tree, the garden below, Eleanor could almost feel her heart expand in her chest. Two sensations came to her. Wild happiness at the sight of her three children, terror at the thought of what it would be to lose one of them. If it was possible to love someone any more than this, she could not imagine how.
30.
Barbie Shoe
Maybe it was knowing all the enormous things outside of her control as a parent that contributed to Eleanor’s obsession with the small ones. Cancer was a rogue villain. But there were problems of a scale Eleanor could handle (and therefore, tried to fix): lost toys, birthday party invitations that failed to arrive, sorrow when the bottom of the box of Cracker Jacks fails to yield the particular miniature whistle your child was hoping for. The look of sorrow on Alison’s face when the ride she loved—small boats going around in circles at the annual Foliage Festival—came to a halt. Another ticket cost a quarter. Who wouldn’t buy it?
Cam, probably. “You worry too much,” he told her. “You can’t make everything right all the time.”
When was the moment her obsession took hold, to spare her children the pain of loss? As if any parent could do that. As if it would be a good thing, if she could.
Eleanor knew the reasons for her own inability to endure her children’s small losses. In her life as a mother, she was rewriting her childhood—creating, for the children she and Cam were raising, the one she didn’t get to have herself. Somewhere along the line—here came trouble—she ceased to notice her own sorrows, she was so busy attempting to protect her children from theirs.
Opening the presents at her sixth birthday party, Ursula received, from Emily Finster, the gift of Crystal Barbie—the one that came with clear plastic shoes like Cinderella’s glass slippers.
“Let’s put those shoes up on the shelf till your guests have gone home,” Eleanor advised her. But Ursula wanted to carry those shoes around with her all afternoon, until the terrible moment (or what used to qualify as a terrible moment, in the world as they knew it then) when she realized one of the shoes was gone. Somewhere—in a house filled with ripped-up wrapping paper and ribbon, paper plates and half-eaten cake and melted ice cream and candle wax and party favors and three different guests’ allergy medicine and little baskets of M&M’s and melted M&M’s that fell out of the little baskets and Joshie Perrone complaining that Emily got a bigger piece of cake than he did, somewhere a Barbie shoe lay hidden. And here was Ursula, good, patient Ursula, who always wrote thank-you notes and emptied the dishwasher without being asked and looked out for her friends and her siblings before herself and never did anything unkind; here was Ursula, sitting in the middle of her birthday party, weeping inconsolably over the loss of a clear plastic Barbie shoe the size of the nail on her pinky finger.
After the other children went home—the mothers who picked them up lingering less than normal, on account of the birthday girl’s unprecedented meltdown—Eleanor had ripped the house apart to locate the shoe. She took cushions off the furniture, crawled under the table, poured the trash onto the kitchen floor, picking through ketchup-smeared French fries and frosting, in search of the lost shoe. Observing the scene, Cam had put a hand on her shoulder, briefly. “Do you really think this is necessary?” he said, before retreating. There was a game on. The Red Sox vs. the Yankees.
At some point in the afternoon—Eleanor having moved to the children’s bedroom upstairs in her search for the shoe—the balance between sanity and madness shifted as clearly as if the two main characters in the drama sat on opposite sides of a teeter-totter. Ursula had become the calm, reasonable one; it was Eleanor who’d gone crazy—whipping off bedsheets, upending the laundry basket, all in her quest for the Barbie shoe, while Ursula, her tears gone, watched uneasily, offering up soft, gentle supplications. It’s okay, Mom. I didn’t need it after all. I like it when Barbie goes barefoot.
Too late now. Without a single drop of Jack Daniel’s in her, Eleanor had crossed over into that old familiar country of her childhood, Crazyland. She was tearing around the house now, as if the only thing separating her child from heartbreak was whether or not she’d succeed in locating the Barbie shoe.
Door to the liquor cabinet thrown open. Then other cupboard doors. Every one in their kitchen, but she had moved on to the pantry—her father’s voice in her brain: Where did you put the damned olives, Vivian? Is it too much to ask when a man comes home from a long day at the office that there’ll be the makings of a martini waiting for him?
Still no Barbie shoe. An hour after she’d started her search, every room in their house had been ripped apart—the kitchen, also the bathroom, and the porch.
Sometime after dark, Eleanor found the shoe on the windowsill. “Oh, I put it there so it wouldn’t get lost,” Ursula told her—her face revealing a level of fear greater than what might be attributed to the loss of a plastic object. This was about her mother appearing, briefly, to lose her mind.
“I forgot.”
Eleanor placed the shoe in her daughter’s hand and collapsed on the sofa. Off in the doorway, beer in hand, her husband had observed it all unfolding but he kept his eye on the game.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I don’t know what got into me.”
He put his arms around her.
“I couldn’t stand it. Thinking about Ursula being sad on her birthday. When the real thing that probably made her sad was me.”
“You were just trying to make everything perfect,” he said. “But it won’t ever be that way. Our children have to get used to that.”
“If anything really terrible ever happened to one of our children, I couldn’t survive,” Eleanor told him.
“Hard things will happen,” Cam told her. “They always do. It’s called life.”
Eleanor wondered whether there was such a thing as loving your children too much. Maybe her problem was caring too deeply, knowing that because this was so, her love probably felt suffocating and oppressive to them. They might not have said as much, or even acknowledged this to themselves, but she imagined there were times when Alison, at least, probably hated her mother for how much she did, how hard she tried, and above all, how she suffered their pain—sometimes even before they’d had a chance to experience it themselves.
There was an afternoon that fall, at Alison’s T-ball game. Watching her daughter on the bench, waiting her turn at bat, Eleanor had recognized that Alison needed to pee, but wasn’t going to risk missing her turn to do something about it.
Eleanor could tell, even as it was happening, the exact moment when, seated on the bench, awaiting her at-bat, Alison wet her pants. Alison’s back was to her, but Eleanor could imagine the look of horror on her face.
It was her turn now to step up to the plate. There would be a yellow stain on her uniform. Everyone would know.
Eleanor didn’t even need to think about what to do next. She leapt up from her seat on the bleachers, a few feet away, grabbing the Coca-Cola of the mother sitting next to her. She moved toward the bench, crossing directly in front of Alison with the open can—positioned herself, awkwardly, directly i
n front of her daughter, at which point she appeared to trip, spilling the contents of the can as she went down. She spilled it, with exquisitely precise aim, directly on the crotch of Alison’s pants, so the only stain you could see there now was the one made by the Coke.
“Jeez, Mom,” Ali had said, looking down—her tone one of utter and complete disdain. “Could you be any more of a klutz?”
How could they understand? Not having grown up as Eleanor had, with parents who cared too little rather than too much, it was easy for her children to feel impatient with their mother, and to favor the effortless no-strings affection their father provided. If Cam was less likely to make sacrifices for his children, this was probably, in their eyes, nothing but a relief. When a person gave less, he required less in return.
31.
A Career in Dry-Cleaning
When she started drawing her strip about their life on the farm, Eleanor never pictured anyone actually reading it. (Well, Walt did. And Darla. But that was about it.) Telling her stories had been like having a conversation with herself, a journal that she happened to publish in the local paper.
As the months passed she started tackling tougher topics—the difficulty of getting through Mother’s Day without her mother, the time Cam forgot her birthday. (All day she’d been waiting for something to happen, figuring he must have a surprise in store for her, but it turned out the date had slipped his mind. The drawing she’d made to illustrate that part in the story had shown a lanky man with long curls coming out the sides of his baseball cap, slapping his forehead when he realizes his mistake, with a bubble over his head that read, “Maybe I can get the date tattooed on my forearm before next year.”)
After that strip appeared in the paper, his fellow softball team members had given Cam a hard time. “You made us all look pretty bad, man,” Jerry Henderson told him. At the hardware store, replacing a drill bit, the guy behind the counter had suggested he bring home a gift for his wife along with the drill bit he’d just bought. A hummingbird feeder, maybe? A pair of flower-print gardening gloves?
Count the Ways Page 15