Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

Of their three children, Alison was the most literal, the one least capable of recognizing a joke. Philippe’s question seemed to worry Alison, as if she was afraid she might disappoint him with her answer. “I never met any famous musicians,” she said. “I’m just seven.”

  “Well, keep up with the singing, babe,” Philippe told her. “At some point, you might want to learn how to stay on key.”

  “If you want to know the truth, buddy,” Cam said, “my daughter won first prize in the talent show at school, singing that song. Maybe you need to get your hearing checked.”

  “I was being nice,” Philippe said. “Maybe people around here aren’t familiar with the concept.”

  Eleanor had set the table in front of the fireplace. She lit oil lamps and put on a record, trying to imagine which of their limited selection might seem cool enough for a person like Philippe. When she put on Talking Heads, Philippe told them he’d played at CBGB a couple of months earlier. He kept talking about this person named David, which Eleanor finally realized meant David Byrne.

  “So, I guess you didn’t hear what my big brother’s been up to,” Patty said. “He got elected to Congress. His Christmas card this year was a picture of him and the family at some big dinner in Washington, with Ron and Nancy.”

  Eleanor said nothing, but Cam did.

  “So what’s his platform?” he asked her. “The issues he campaigned on.”

  “Here’s the wild thing,” Patty told him. “After all those years of making sure he didn’t get drafted and . . . shall we say . . . partaking of the white powder, Matt’s turned into this rah-rah Republican. He’s all about family values and the Pledge of Allegiance and increasing military spending. Just say no. You don’t want to hear what he has to say about women’s rights. It’s bizarre.”

  “That must be difficult for you,” Eleanor said.

  “Not really,” Patty told them. “It’s just politics. It’s not like my brother really believes any of that stuff. He was just trying to get elected.”

  Toby came downstairs, wearing one of Cam’s T-shirts that he liked to sleep in. He was carrying his violin.

  “I was wondering if you’d like to hear the Wieniawski Polonaise,” he asked them.

  “How cute is that?” Philippe said to Patty, after he’d finished the twelve measures he’d learned so far. “We got to get ourselves one of those.”

  “The boy or the violin?” Cam asked.

  Eleanor waited until their two youngest children were in bed before serving the dinner. Alison had disappeared back into her room. After an appetizer course of avgolemono, Eleanor brought out the coquilles St.-Jacques, served in real scallop shells bought for the occasion.

  “Jeez, this looks fabulous,” Patty said, studying the shells set before them—four scallops per person. “I guess I forgot to tell you we’re vegetarian.”

  “I’m not totally vegetarian, actually,” Philippe said. “I just don’t eat shellfish. Allergic.”

  Because the main dish was off-limits, Eleanor figured she’d leave as much of the French-cut beans as possible for their guests. As Cam spooned a generous portion on his plate, she tapped his leg under the table, but he seemed not to have taken the hint.

  Afterward, there was chocolate mousse with whipped cream. Another Julia Child recipe.

  “Don’t get the idea this is how we normally eat around here,” Cam told them. “My wife just wants to impress you. She thinks if you saw our real life you might get the idea we were a bunch of backwoods hicks. Which we probably are.”

  Patty scraped the whipped cream off her mousse and raised her spoon to her lips. From the kitchen, Eleanor could hear a sudden whoop from Toby. A moment later, Ursula was in the doorway.

  “He got hold of the Reddi-wip, Mom,” she said, with a look on her face that combined regret and pride. Then Toby appeared, naked. His penis was covered with whipped cream.

  “You know, Baby, I’m thinking we should hit the road tonight,” Philippe said to Patty, massaging his temples. Maybe the prospect of having a four-year-old of his own had lost some of its appeal.

  Eleanor walked out to the car with them. “I wish you could have stayed over,” she said. “We were going to make waffles.”

  “I can’t wait to tell Matt everything,” Patty said. “He still asks about you.”

  There it was again. That sick, hollow feeling Eleanor got whenever she remembered that summer in Rhode Island. She stood in the driveway, watching their car disappear down the road, and a while after.

  Later, in bed, Eleanor brought up Cam’s comments to Philippe.

  “You know how embarrassing that was?” she said. “When you said what you did about me trying to impress them with the fancy food?”

  “It was a joke, for Pete’s sake,” Cam told her. “But you’ve got to admit I had a point.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “I did want to impress them. I guess there’s some part of me that still feels I should be doing something important with my life.”

  “You are,” he told her.

  “You know the truth?” Eleanor said. “Until tonight I completely forgot. I never actually liked Patty.”

  34.

  You Have to Make Compromises

  There had been a time when Eleanor had told people, if they asked, that she was a writer and an artist, but over the years—and even now, with her Family Tree strip gaining traction—she had put that part of herself away. Exhausted as she was at the end of each day, Eleanor would not have traded places with Patty—off in New York City, working at her ad agency, and flying to London four times a year. She didn’t envy the writers she knew from back in the day when she went on book tours to promote her Bodie books. Some of them were still out there promoting new books and signing big contracts. But if she were doing those things, she figured, she couldn’t be home with her children, rolling out cookie dough or planting radish seeds or curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn watching a show about penguins.

  Eleanor knew she was out of step with women like Patty and her New York friends—determined to let no man, and no child, get in the way of their careers. She had the thing she’d wanted most, a family. Still, the other part—earning a living—was always on her mind.

  There was nothing glamorous about Eleanor’s work life now. She has her non-comic strip of course but, in her spare time, she created company logos, textbook illustrations, the wedding invitations of a wealthy summer resident who wanted a pen-and-ink drawing of the bride and groom, framed by a heart. She hardly ever turned down work. It didn’t matter if the job she was hired to do failed to inspire her. She found her inspiration in her Family Tree strip. And in the family that inspired it.

  One time, a Harvard graduate student, working on a thesis about the difficulties of women artists raising young children, tracked Eleanor down. The young woman had been a fan of the Bodie books when she was growing up. Nothing else could have explained why Eleanor’s name would have made it to her list.

  The graduate student, Ashley, had driven up to the farm from Cambridge to interview her. Eleanor was hanging out the laundry when her car pulled up.

  “I didn’t know anybody still did things like this,” Ashley said.

  “Here comes the crazy part,” Eleanor told her. “I love hanging out the laundry. You know how much better clothes smell when they’ve been hung out in the fresh air to dry?”

  Ashley appeared unconvinced. “But your husband participates, too, right?” she said. No way was this young woman going to use the term “helps out.”

  Eleanor laughed. “Cam may or may not know what a clothespin is,” she said. “But no is probably the safer bet.”

  “Doesn’t it make you mad?” Ashley said. “The double standard? All the things women artists put up with that men never would?”

  It was funny. Eleanor knew there were all kinds of things she could feel angry about, if she started thinking about them. She chose not to. Or maybe she actually was angry, and she just hadn’t admitted it to herself.
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  The bûche de Noël smashed in the garbage pail. Cam heading off on his mountain bike. Her words as he headed out the door: “When do I get to take a Saturday morning off to go on an adventure?”

  “I’m not angry,” she said. “Where would it get me if I were?”

  “I mean, it’s got to deplete your creative energy,” Ashley went on. “Housework. Childcare.” She didn’t even know the other part. The part about who earned most of the money.

  “You know where my creative energy comes from?” Eleanor told the young woman. “Them.” She gestured in the direction of the field where, at that moment, her three children were engaged in a game that seemed to involve an old tennis ball and a flyswatter. “In one way or another, all the best things I’ve ever done come out of the things I’ve learned raising my children.”

  She fixed the two of them a lunch of broccoli quiche and salad that they ate on the porch—the children racing in on occasion, and then back out to play.

  “Do you ever, you know, imagine what you could be doing, if you didn’t have all these kids?” Ashley had asked her. From the way she said it, Eleanor got the impression that she found it a sad and possibly even tragic turn of events that Eleanor had gone from bestselling children’s book author to carpool-driving mother working freelance and cutting the crusts off Toby’s bread.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Taking care of my children means I have a lot less time to put anything down on paper. But when I finally get to my desk, I have a lot more to say.”

  She was speaking about her non-comic strip, of course, though the truth was that until recently the majority of Eleanor’s time at her desk was spent drawing logos for plumbers and insurance companies. Not that she’d mention that part to this young woman who had started out their visit by telling her how the Bodie books had changed her life.

  Even without knowing that part, Ashley looked dubious. “I get it,” she said. “But you have to feel angry sometimes, right? At all the things that are expected of women that men take for granted? Wouldn’t you like to have a room of your own to work in? Instead of a kitchen table?”

  “I don’t think about that much, actually,” Eleanor said. “For me, being a feminist means manifesting the strength and confidence and tenacity to pursue whatever it is you most want to do with your life. In my case, the goal was having a family. I’m doing that. If I don’t get to make art that much at the moment, I can live with it. Nobody gets everything in life. You have to make compromises.”

  Ashley left in the middle of the afternoon. After, standing at the sink, washing the dishes, Eleanor thought again of the younger woman’s question. Maybe she was angrier than she knew. Maybe she just didn’t allow herself to admit it.

  And maybe she just didn’t have time to think about it. Eleanor woke early to get to her desk—piled high with school papers and grocery store coupons—before the children got up. She had bought an extra-long cord for their phone so if a client called, she could stretch the cord and take the call in the downstairs closet without the sound of children’s voices in the background. She was trying to give the impression, to anyone on the other end of the line, that she was a professional person sitting in an office somewhere, instead of a woman in a pair of stretched-out sweatpants with a naked four-year-old banging on the other side of the door, wanting to show her his poop.

  She hadn’t bought new underwear since her last pregnancy. But she wasn’t a martyr, she told herself. She had her family. She had made this choice.

  Sometimes, standing at the counter, stirring cheese into the macaroni, Eleanor would listen to the sounds of her children’s voices coming from different corners of the house—Ursula’s Barbies having conversations with each other about fashion; Alison teaching herself Mandarin from a tape she’d checked out of the library; Toby, in the bathroom, at work on the Wieniawski; even Sally, asleep in front of the woodstove, making noises that suggested she was dreaming of chasing squirrels.

  “This is my radical act,” she had told the young Harvard woman. “Raising three human beings who will go out and change the world.”

  35.

  Family Values

  She was driving to pick Ursula up at gymnastics with the radio on. Usually Eleanor favored music, but for some reason the dial had been set to news. A segment came on about rising stars in politics. A familiar voice came out of the speaker—one she hadn’t heard in a long time, but even before she could put a name to it, her stomach clenched.

  “We’ve got all these welfare recipients out there, sitting around watching TV and collecting checks,” he said. “It’s time to start thinking about hardworking middle-class Americans for a change.”

  There was more. Something about church, old-fashioned family values. The sacredness of human life, from the moment of conception.

  This was Matt Hallinan. Now representing the state of Rhode Island in the United States House of Representatives.

  She could still hear his voice whispering in her ear and remember his hands on her shoulders, and then her face, pushing her down.

  Eleanor turned off the radio and pulled over by the side of the road. Knowing what was coming, she stepped out of the car. She threw up.

  36.

  Female Party Guest Number Four

  That spring, Alison’s teacher had sent a note home to Cam and Eleanor. She wanted them to come in for a conference.

  Plans had begun for the annual show, a musical version of Cinderella, and all the girls in class—all but those cast in the roles of Cinderella, the stepsisters, and the stepmother—were supposed to play guests at the ball. When the teacher directing the play, Mrs. Ferguson, had shown all the girls the ball gowns they’d be wearing for their roles in the show (a move intended to make them feel better about not having speaking parts), Alison had refused to try hers on. She wanted to play one of the male party guests. That, or the prince.

  “This is actually the first time any of us has seen Alison assert herself so forcefully,” Mrs. Ferguson told Eleanor and Cam at their conference. “She’s always been so quiet. She’s always gone with the flow. But I have to say, this whole thing brought out a side of your daughter I wouldn’t have expected. It’s been very difficult.”

  “Can’t you just let our daughter wear a suit jacket if that’s what she’d prefer to do?” Cam said. “The whole point of this show is to let the kids enjoy themselves, right? Clearly, putting on a fancy dress is not Alison’s idea of a good time.”

  “Once we start bending the rules for one student, there’s no telling what the others will start asking for,” the teacher told them. (This seemed bogus to Eleanor. How many other eight-year-old girls in the class shared her daughter’s aversion to putting on a dress?)

  In the end, Alison agreed to play Female Party Guest Number Four. But her acquiescence struck Eleanor as closer to defeat than acceptance. The night of the performance she had a stomachache, and the family stayed home.

  Later that night, Ursula had come to her parents’ bedroom. “I think you should know,” she told them, “Ali says she’s really a boy. You just made a mistake when she got born.”

  This was one story from their lives Eleanor would not be including in her Family Tree strip.

  37.

  No More Cork People

  That spring, when they launched their cork people, Alison stayed home—the first time any of the children had failed to participate in their tradition. “It’s just dumb,” she told Eleanor. “I don’t get the point of dumping a bunch of stupid boats in the water with some stupid corks attached and getting your shoes all muddy chasing after them. Then Ursula starts bawling if one of the people falls off the boat. Like they’re actually real.”

  “They are real,” Ursula told her. “Real cork people.”

  Ten more newspapers signed on to run Family Tree. Eleanor was getting invitations to appear at events in other cities now. Staying in hotels, like in the old days. But in the old days, there were no children.

  It was difficult, l
eaving home. Cam, unfailingly good at impromptu art projects and backyard sports—igloo building and nature hikes—was not very reliable when it came to school pickups and getting children to soccer practice and music lessons. Whenever she left him in charge, she’d come home to find they’d missed appointments, failed to turn in homework—and had a great time. Once, after a weekend visit to a newspaper convention in Chicago, she returned to find they’d painted a mural on the living room wall. Another time, Ursula had applied a T-shirt decal of Michael Jackson’s face directly on Toby’s stomach. For weeks after, it remained on his skin, slowly peeling off, until all that was left was a faint outline of one eye and part of a mouth.

  When she first started traveling for work, Eleanor had counted on Coco to step in with babysitting, but Coco—almost eighteen now—was a senior, applying to colleges, and had cut back on her hours.

  Eleanor put an ad in the paper. When she thought about the best person for the job, it felt as though the most important thing was finding someone energetic enough to run after Toby—and above all else, reliable in ways his own father never was.

  In the end, she hired Phyllis, a fifty-two-year-old divorced woman who’d raised a couple of children on her own. Ten years of teaching Jazzercise at the Y had left her in excellent shape. She cooked. And she could knit.

  “Give me a few months with your family and you’ll all be wearing new sweaters,” she told Eleanor. But what really sold Eleanor was how Phyllis responded to Toby.

  Some people who met their son, observing his explosions of wild energy, didn’t know what to do with him, but Phyllis seemed unfazed. The first time they met, she had spoken to him in a calm voice, not baby talk, and when she saw that he had a couple of rocks in his hand, she asked if he would show them to her. He laid them in her hands and she studied them closely before speaking again.

  “I like rocks, too,” Phyllis said.