Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  “You’ve got a lot to make up for with that gal,” he said. “And if you don’t mind the suggestion”—now came a reference to an earlier Family Tree installment—“don’t bring her any more weed whackers.” That had been his birthday present to Eleanor the previous year, later memorialized in her strip.

  Until now, it had not occurred to Eleanor that Cam might take issue with her telling stories about their life. The kinds of things she wrote about were the kind that happened to most people. What was the big deal? And anyway, she doubted that Cam read her strip.

  She had been drawing her Family Tree strip for almost five years when she got a call from a newspaper syndicate in New York. Someone there had become aware of the strip and felt Eleanor’s work could reach a broader audience. Would she be interested in having them pitch Family Tree to papers around the country?

  By the time Toby entered nursery school, Eleanor’s stories about Maggie and her family were running each week in over fifty newspapers nationwide—a milestone Eleanor marked by buying herself a real drawing table. Every month now, Eleanor collected a check for a couple of thousand dollars. They weren’t rolling in money, but it was more than she’d made since the days of her Bodie books, long out of print.

  No similar breakthrough occurred in the world of hand-crafted burl bowls, but now that Eleanor was making such good money, she didn’t worry about that so much. The hard part was finding time to work. She still got up before sunrise to write and draw, and if she was lucky, and nobody was home sick, and it wasn’t a snow day, she had the hours the children spent at school—just half days for Toby—to work at her drawing table. But she suggested that Cam might pitch in a little more.

  “So the idea is, your work is more important than mine now, because they pay you the big bucks?” he said. There was an edge to his voice that she hadn’t heard before, a look that reminded her of times during his parents’ infrequent visits, sitting in the kitchen with Roger and Roberta, as they recounted the accomplishments of his brother out in Texas. Cam would pour himself a glass of Jack Daniel’s then (a rare event) and sit across from them, whittling some piece of wood into no particular shape, saying nothing.

  What she heard from him now wasn’t anger so much. He wasn’t disputing her position. Eleanor would never have imagined that Cam was the sort whose ego would be wounded at the idea of his wife supporting the family, but maybe she was wrong about that.

  “I’m not saying my work is more important than yours,” Eleanor told him. “I just need a little more help.”

  She spoke the words in a quiet, even tone of voice, but she could feel an edge of bitterness creeping in that hadn’t been there before. Later, scrubbing potatoes for dinner, she reflected on how women spoke about domestic responsibilities, compared to the language their husbands employed. Eleanor couldn’t imagine any of the mothers she knew speaking of “helping” their husband with the housework or “babysitting” their own children.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” she had asked him, as she was packing the snacks for a night at the softball field to watch her husband play, “that I might like to go off and do something fun, too?”

  “I never knew you played softball,” he said. He stood behind her, his arms on her shoulders. He was stroking her neck. “You’d be an improvement on Harry Botts, anyway. And definitely cuter.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t make this a joke, Cam,” she told him. “You know what I mean.”

  “Listen, Ellie,” he said. “Anytime you want to take up some kind of hobby or pastime, I’ll be a hundred percent behind you.”

  “Somebody around here has to earn a living,” she told him.

  His face, when she said that, reminded her of Toby’s, the day she sent him to his room for picking every one of the squash blossoms in her garden, before they turned into squash. All she wanted to do, seeing that expression of sorrow and remorse, was reassure him.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re fine. You do other things.”

  Maybe it was getting to Cam that his father, Roger, off in Florida, still expressed concern about the unlikelihood of his son ever making a decent living selling wooden bowls. Cam’s mother, Roberta, had never had a paying job, though in Eleanor’s estimation, taking care of Cam’s father was a full-time occupation. Roger had recently reminded his son, for the third time, of his willingness to bankroll a business of some kind for Cam to manage in Akersville. A dry-cleaning establishment, possibly. There was good money to be made. Maybe not as much as Roger Junior took in, with his real estate development firm, but enough that he could pull his own weight and sock something away for retirement.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Cam told his father. “But dry-cleaning isn’t my thing. Besides, Eleanor and I like the work we do.”

  It ended there, but not really.

  The only times Eleanor had ever seen, in her husband, evidence of anything like melancholy were these—visits with his parents, and more so, after they left. Sometimes, after one of their rare phone conversations, he’d disappear into the woodshop and be gone for hours. His parents’ annual holiday trip north for Christmas could plunge Cam into a daylong silence.

  After his parents had driven away the last time—when Roger had raised the dry-cleaning idea—he’d headed out on a hike. Normally, at least one of the children would have accompanied him, but this time they could all sense it: he didn’t want company.

  It was hours later when he returned. The children were watching a video, Eleanor just about to put the lasagna in the oven. One look at his face, as he walked in the door, and she put her arms around him.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I sometimes think I’ve dedicated my whole life to making sure I’m nothing like my dad.”

  “Well, you’ve succeeded,” she said. This was a good thing.

  “I wish I could be a different kind of person for you,” he said.

  “Then you wouldn’t be you,” she told him.

  He buried his face in her hair.

  In the end, they hired Coco to come over after school five days a week. The children loved having her around more, naturally. Her presence on the farm made everyone happy.

  “Where would I be without Coco?” Eleanor observed to Darla. Coco was the most easygoing, helpful teenager she’d ever laid eyes on. When she’d gotten her license, Eleanor figured she be off all the time with her girlfriends, or boys, but coming over to the farm and organizing games for the children down at the softball field had remained her priority.

  “My daughter would probably pay you for the chance to hang out with your family,” her mother, Betsy, told Eleanor.

  “And my children would probably rather spend the afternoon with Coco than with me,” Eleanor said. “She’s a lot more entertaining.”

  On her second day of babysitting, Coco brought over her soccer ball. Afternoons now, when Eleanor sat at her drawing table, she could look out the window and see the four of them—her children and Coco—kicking the ball across the field, Coco with her wonderful long legs and her ponytail flying, graceful as a gazelle, the children following behind her like a flock of ducks. Except for Ali, their skills were pretty comical, but it didn’t seem to matter to any of them that sometimes Toby would pick up the ball and run with it or that Ursula tended to forget which goal she was shooting for. One afternoon Cam joined them in their pickup game. Bent over her sketch pad, Eleanor took in the sound of their voices, glad to know her children were having a good time. Having that thing she’d wanted for them more than any other: a happy childhood.

  After a few weeks it became a daily event that Cam closed up his woodshop early to play with them. Boys against the girls, they decided. Cam and Toby versus Coco, Alison, and Ursula. The matchup left them close to equally balanced, though one day Eleanor had looked out the window to see all three of her children playing on Coco’s team, with Cam on his own as the opposition. When they defeated him—with a questionable shot, from Toby, in which he’d run the ball between the goalposts—Cam had collaps
ed on the grass in mock agony. The children tackled him then. Their voices—announcing their victory and laughing—carried all the way up the hill.

  One time, when she finished her work earlier than usual, Eleanor decided to join them. She had to dig into her closet to come up with sneakers suitable for running through the grass, and a pair of shorts she hadn’t put on since before her first pregnancy. When she got down the hill to the spot where the game was going on, she called out to them.

  “Can you use another player?”

  “Come be on my team, Mama.” Toby flung his arms around her. The girls hung back.

  “No offense, Mom,” Alison said. “But I just don’t think you’re the soccer type.”

  Ali was right, of course. Eleanor sat on a rock instead, watching them, cheering equally for everybody. In a few minutes it occurred to Eleanor that she should probably head back up to her desk. This was the hour of day when, often, her editor at the syndicate checked in with questions about her strip before it went out over the wire.

  “I guess I’ll be going,” she said, but nobody appeared to notice. They had moved on from soccer to their other favorite Coco pastime—cartwheels. Even Cam, tall as he was, spun gracefully across a patch of field before collapsing in the grass.

  For a moment, seeing them all together that way, Eleanor thought of running back to join them. But she headed to her desk instead.

  Eleanor watched from the window after that, looking up from her work now and then when the sound of the voices of her children playing in the field suggested that someone—Coco or Cam—had scored. She could always tell when Coco and the children managed to get the ball past Cam, from the sound of their four high voices crying out, followed by Cam’s mock despair. He’d throw himself on the ground and lie there on the grass as if he’d been shot.

  “You got me,” he moaned. Toby and Ursula jumped on top of him then—in a pile of legs, arms, sneakers, laughter, ponytails. Even Alison joined in.

  Not Coco. Since turning sixteen, she had become more self-conscious, particularly around Cam.

  Watching her family from where she sat, bent over her drawings for that week’s strip, Eleanor felt relief to see them having so much fun together. She was working long days now on Family Tree. It felt good, making enough money finally that they didn’t have to worry all the time. Not that Cam ever seemed to worry about anything.

  There had been a time when she had loved that about him.

  32.

  Bûche de Noël

  That was the Christmas—Christmas, also Toby’s birthday—when Eleanor made the bûche de Noël.

  She had gotten the recipe from a cookbook she found at the dump. (“I think I know why someone threw this out,” Darla had said, flipping through the pages, when she’d come over later and found the book on Eleanor’s table. “Who has time for all this stuff? Or money for the ingredients? What the hell is ‘almond paste’?”)

  Long ago, at one of their annual holiday parties when she was growing up, her mother had served a bûche de Noël. Store bought; Vivian wasn’t much of a cook. Eleanor had been fascinated by its construction—not so much the layers of frosting and whipped cream, but the way whoever constructed this dessert had managed to create a cake that resembled a real log, with moss and mushrooms and tiny woodland creatures, all made out of marzipan. Eleanor had asked her mother (she was probably thirteen at the time) if they could try making a cake like that themselves, next Christmas, but they never did. Baking projects—projects of any sort—had not been Vivian’s thing.

  It was a crazy undertaking that called for making a sheet cake first, spreading it with mocha frosting, and rolling it up to form a log-shaped cylinder that you covered with more frosting. Then you got to work on the decorations—forming marzipan mushrooms and leaves, marzipan holly berries, marzipan moss.

  Nobody needed a cake like this. The girls—sprawled out in the living room, inspecting their loot, with Alvin and the Chipmunks playing, Toby in his golden birthday crown with a number four on top, and Sally at work on her holiday bone—would have been just as happy (more so, as things turned out) if she’d served vanilla ice cream, or Jell-O. This was Eleanor wanting to give her children what she herself had missed, of course. Eleanor, trying to make everything perfect.

  When she finished decorating the cake, she set it on the counter. She still had to truss the turkey and bake the sweet potatoes, along with the dozen other jobs before Cam’s parents arrived from the airport for their annual twenty-four-hour holiday visit.

  Now here was her husband, standing at the door, winding the Christmas scarf that Alison had made for him on her Knitting Nancy. He had chosen that of all moments to head out cross-country skiing. “What a day, huh?” he said, as he laced up his boots. “Perfect snow conditions.”

  She looked at him—this handsome man she loved and sometimes hated. Wrapping paper and packaging from toys were scattered everywhere. Sally had gotten hold of Toby’s new stuffed meerkat and had chewed off the ear. In another minute, when he discovered this, he’d be crying. Cam, heading toward the door, reached for his winter hat.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Eleanor said. “You’re leaving now?”

  “Can’t a guy have a little fun on Christmas?” he said.

  The bûche de Noël sat on the counter, freshly decorated. From the record player, the voices of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore: “Silver Bells.”

  What happened next seemed to take place in slow motion—slow but deadly, irrevocable. She picked up the cake. With no visible trace of anger—yet—she walked to the trash bin. Threw it in. Smashed it down hard, past all recognition.

  But she was only getting started. She whirled through the house then, stuffing pieces of used wrapping paper into a trash bag.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said, tearing through the living room, wading in the mountain of presents she’d spent all of December picking out, wrapping. A He-Man figure, a Lite-Brite, a microscope. A baby doll.

  “Happy New Year.”

  Ursula and Toby just stood there watching. Alison retreated upstairs.

  Eleanor had gathered up a pile of wrapping paper now. She was heading toward the fireplace.

  “I was going to save that piece of ribbon for my dolls,” Ursula said quietly. Nobody else seemed able to speak.

  “Count to ten, Mom,” Ursula said. Toby sat mute, studying a rock he’d picked up on their walk to the waterfall a few days before and humming the Rudolph song. Cam, pulling the hat over his ears, walked out into the snow.

  33.

  He Got Hold of the Reddi-Wip

  She heard from Patty—working in advertising in New York City and living with her latest boyfriend, the bass guitar player with a band called Manic Depression. They were driving to Vermont to spend New Year’s skiing and wondered if they could stay over for a night on their way north.

  Eleanor spent the whole morning, the day of the visit, cleaning the house. She bought scallops for a special dinner—coquilles St.-Jacques. Cam, watching her preparing the meal, a Julia Child cookbook propped on the counter, ingredients lined up—had surveyed the scene on his way to his woodshop, looking amused.

  “Who are these guests of ours, anyway—Charles and Diana?”

  “They live in New York City,” Eleanor said. “They’re not the macaroni and cheese type.”

  “It could be an exotic experience,” he said. “Let them find out how the natives live, in the backwoods.”

  But she made the Julia Child dish. Also chocolate mousse and French-cut beans amandine. Before their arrival, she sent Cam to town to buy a bottle of wine.

  “What kind?” he asked her. Neither of them knew anything about wine, beyond “white” or “red.”

  Expensive, she told him. The safest bet.

  Patty had told Eleanor they’d get to the house around five thirty, but it was past seven when they arrived. Eleanor had gone ahead and fed the children. Toby and Ursula were having their bath, Alison upstairs with a book on some kind of com
puter programming language. More and more these days, that’s where Alison stayed these days: off with a book.

  Patty and Philippe pulled up in a bright red Porsche. The last time Eleanor had seen Patty, she was a brunette, but her hair was platinum now. She was very thin and dressed in the kind of outfit that would have identified her, immediately, as having come from someplace other than Akersville. Eleanor wished she’d put on something besides the thrift shop Laura Ashley dress she’d chosen for the occasion.

  “Come meet our guests.” Eleanor stood at the foot of the stairs, calling up to her children. She might not be thin or fashionable, or have a sports car, but she had the best thing of all: them. This was what she’d been doing with her life while her boarding school friend got to be partner at her advertising agency: making a family.

  Patty and Philippe had brought a gift from the city: an orange tin full of a kind of Italian cookie that came wrapped in very thin special paper that, when you lit it on fire, floated up into the air in wispy clouds of smoke and ash. The children didn’t like the taste of the cookies so much, but Toby and Ursula kept reaching for more just so they could watch Philippe set the papers on fire. Alison—present, but still holding on to her book about MATLAB programming—kept herself apart from the group, watching.

  “You didn’t tell us your name,” Philippe said to her. When she answered, he started singing the Elvis Costello song. She knew it, of course. At one point, when Philippe forgot the lyrics, she sang them herself. This was rare, for Ali. But she loved that song. It was a big thing for her, that there was a song with her name in it.

  “So did Elvis Costello have the hots for you or something?” Philippe asked her. “Did you two, like, hook up at some point?”