“I never did this before,” she told him. “Not since I got married.” Not much before, either.
He was running his hands through her hair now, kissing her neck. His body, pressed against hers, felt hot, vibrating, almost.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“I do,” he told her.
He had a waterbed. There were all these motorcycle magazines on top of it. Those, and a Stephen King novel, It. He swept them onto the floor.
“Come here,” he said.
Eleanor had a rule about Timmy Pouliot. Starting with the way she spoke of him, though the only person she mentioned him to was Darla. But when she thought about him—and she did, a lot—she never thought of him as Timmy. Always Timmy Pouliot. It put him in a different category from the other people in her life—her ex-husband, parents of her children’s friends, Toby’s speech therapist, other former softball teammates of Cam’s. She spoke of him the way a person would speak of a movie star or a politician or some famous athlete—some character you knew about, and observed from afar. Admired, maybe. But she wouldn’t have thought of him as a friend, or even—even after they had sex—as a lover. Timmy’s apartment was a place she could go, now and then, where she got to step out of her life for an hour or two, and instead of taking care of everyone else, she was the one who got taken care of.
After that first time she’d paid a visit to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment, she figured it had probably been this onetime deal, but a few weeks later he called her up. “I was just thinking about you,” he said. “Who am I kidding? I’m always thinking about you.”
The first thing he did when she got there was to run her a bath. Eleanor didn’t know anything about how people conducted love affairs, but she guessed this was unusual. Timmy Pouliot had recognized that she was a woman overdue for tender care, and it turned out he was very good at providing it. After that first time, he always had bath salts for her, also lotion, and candles, which he lit for her while she soaked in the tub. He had asked if she’d like to be private for her bath, but she liked his company, so he sat on the toilet with a beer and they talked.
It got to be a thing she did Friday nights, after dropping off the children. Going over to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment for her bath, followed by lovemaking on the waterbed, was something she looked forward to all week, but never counted on. Now and then—if the children were with their father for some school holiday, and once in the middle of a weekday when they were all at school, when it had come to her that this was the anniversary of her parents’ accident—she made the drive unconnected to a drop-off or a pickup, just to see him. She played music loud as she drove, and didn’t even mind the time it took getting there. Time in the car on the way to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment always felt peaceful to Eleanor, but also exciting. She loved how he touched her. But equally, the part that came before. The bath.
This was not exactly the kind of bath they featured in the pages of women’s magazines, in articles she’d read and occasionally even illustrated about “me time” or “Create Your Own Spa Vacation Right at Home”—though he always lit a candle for her, cinnamon spice, and put on one of the few tapes he owned that wasn’t heavy metal or country. There was the giant New England Patriots towel hanging from a hook on the door, and on the shelf above the tub, a can of Right Guard and another of shaving cream, a jock strap looped over a hook on the door, and a poster tacked up that appeared to have been there awhile—the classic shot of Farrah Fawcett, from so long ago Farrah’s swimsuit was totally faded.
He always tested the water temperature on his wrist, as a person might do bathing a baby. He had wine chilling for her, and he had bought a special sponge—a loofah—that he used to rub her back.
That first time, she’d been careful to keep certain aspects of her body concealed from him. She held in her stomach when she got up from the bed. She didn’t like how her breasts sagged now. Then there were the stretch marks.
“You don’t have to be shy with me,” he told her. “I think you’re beautiful. You had kids, that’s all. You’re a mother.”
After that Eleanor felt a surprising absence of self-consciousness taking her clothes off around Timmy Pouliot. She had seen plenty of his girlfriends over the years, with their perfect bodies. But he always made it plain that he loved looking at her, and that nothing about Eleanor’s naked body altered any of that.
Walking out to her car after—sometimes at midnight, sometimes later, the night air so cold on her face it stung—and on the long drive back to Brookline, she told herself that what she had with her former husband’s former softball teammate, these Friday night visits, represented no more than a small oasis of comfort where she’d allowed herself to touch down, just for now.
It didn’t mean anything.
All that summer and into the fall, on Fridays after dropping the children off at Cam’s (it was odd, still, speaking of their old house this way), Eleanor drove to the apartment building with the video store down below. She parked on a side street and walked up the two flights of stairs to Timmy’s apartment. Sometimes she could hear the water running in the bathtub before he even opened the door.
She had questioned what was in it for him, having this woman seven years older than he was coming over to his apartment and getting into his bathtub, but she came to accept that in some odd way, he enjoyed their times together. She might talk to him while she lay in the water, tell him stories about her week. Sometimes she’d just lie there while he sat on the edge of the toilet drinking his beer, and sometimes he’d tell her about something that happened on the job that day, or a problem he had with his car, or a fishing trip he’d taken with his brother, or an evening he spent at his mother’s house with her new boyfriend, who was pretty much a jerk but she seemed happy with him so he let it alone. It was not unheard of, at these moments, for Timmy Pouliot to recount the story of something that happened with one of his seemingly endless succession of beautiful young girlfriends. He knew Eleanor wouldn’t be jealous, and she wasn’t.
Sometimes they’d skip a week. She didn’t want to use it up, or leave him thinking she expected anything from him, which she didn’t.
Every time she left the apartment and made her way back down those two long, dark flights of steps, Eleanor considered the possibility that this might be the last time she’d find herself here. Sooner or later he’d get a girlfriend again. It was never hard for Timmy Pouliot, getting a girlfriend. At some point, he’d marry one of them.
“I met this girl,” Timmy said. She was in the tub at the time, with the glass of wine he’d poured for her. Softball season starting up again. He was sitting in his usual spot with his beer. “It doesn’t mean anything. We just hang out. She likes Harleys.”
After that, Eleanor knew not to come by for a while. Then one night came the call. November now. They had just turned back the clocks, so it got dark around four thirty. She was getting ready to bring the children to Cam’s when the phone rang.
“You in the mood for a bath?” They started up again.
She never spent the night with him. But one night she had stayed later than usual. After they made love, she had fallen asleep. When she opened her eyes it was close to morning.
“You should have woken me up,” she said.
“Why would I do that?” he told her. “I figured you could use the rest. Plus I like watching you sleep.”
She surprised herself by how easy it felt, being naked with Timmy Pouliot. She loved his body—solid and thickly muscled, where Cam was lean. The first time he’d touched her naked skin, Eleanor had been startled by the roughness of his hands. “I know,” he said. He must have registered her reaction. “That’s what being on the road crew and grunt construction work does to a guy.” He told her he’d pick up some kind of lotion.
When she dressed to go, there was never any discussion of when they’d see each other again. She didn’t invite him over for a meal or bake him one of her pies. They never went out for dinner together, or to
the sports bar he frequented. Though he had taken her on his bike that time, the experience was not repeated. Their whole relationship, whatever it was, was played out in the two rooms of his apartment—two places, his bed and his bathtub, and nowhere else.
“My mom was getting after me the other day,” Timmy Pouliot told her one time. Lying side by side in bed, as usual. “She wanted to know when I was going to settle down with someone. Have kids.”
“And when will that be?” Eleanor asked him. Maybe this was the moment he was going to tell her he didn’t think she should come over anymore. It’s been great. Need to move on.
“I told her it would have to be the right woman,” he said. “These girls I always end up running around with. It won’t be any of them.”
Eleanor lay there next to him on his Patriots sheets, saying nothing. She was studying his strong, broad chest, the scar on his right hand from a time when he was just starting out as a carpenter and he’d almost lost a finger to a table saw, the tattoo with the name of his dead father on his bicep, his appendix scar, the one on his thigh from an accident on his motorcycle when he was sixteen. Sometimes, when it rained, he walked with a limp, though most people would not have noticed this.
She knew his body so well, as he did hers.
“Maybe you need to start hanging out with a different kind of woman,” she told him.
“Well, look at me,” he said. “I am, aren’t I?”
He should find someone younger, she told him. Someone who might have kids with him. Someone who didn’t spend her days caring for a brain-injured son. She started putting her clothes on.
“You know you’re my dream girl, right?” he said to Eleanor.
She laughed.
60.
Never a Good Time
Driving down the road to their old house to drop off or pick up the children, the words would come to her that she always used to whisper to herself when she rounded the last bend: “I’m home.” But this wasn’t her home anymore. She no longer spoke them.
She was not welcome inside their old house anymore, evidently. On Sundays, if it fell to her to pick up the children—as it did sometimes, when Cam was off on one of his physical therapy trainings and Phyllis was babysitting—the three of them were always outside waiting for her when she pulled up. If it was too cold for them to stand outside, Cam must have instructed them to keep an eye out for her, out the window, because they ran out very fast, as if to avoid the possibility that she might get out of the car and come in to get them.
She hardly ever saw Cam, but when she did, it caught her up short. He was cordial, but there was nothing in the way he behaved with Eleanor now to set her apart from some woman waiting on him at the hardware store or the bank. A person seeing the two of them together as they were now, meeting—very briefly—on the steps of the house where their babies were born, would never know these were two people who used to love each other, used to make love.
Those times in the driveway, watching her children disappear into their old house—the chill that lingered from the way she had become, to her ex-husband, a person he greeted no differently than he might a vacuum cleaner salesperson or a stranger canvassing for a political candidate—she took comfort where she found it. In ten minutes, she’d be climbing the stairs above the video store.
She had figured the visits to Timmy Pouliot would end when winter came. He’d lose interest, maybe, find a girlfriend his own age. But when the snow melted (cork people season, not that Eleanor and the children made those any more), she was still coming over, and in summer—the season she pictured him with some adorable new twenty-one-year-old on the back of his bike, they still had their Friday nights. Not every week, but more often than not.
After that first time she’d invited herself over, when she’d been so nervous—and Timmy so clueless—her visits felt like the best part of her week. Of all the things going on in her life—worrying about Toby’s brain and Al’s moodiness (call it what it was, depression), being mad at Cam, missing her house, missing the stars and the sound of the waterfall down the road, watching the changes in her children, figuring out how to pay the bills—this was the simplest part. Walking into Timmy Pouliot’s apartment and letting him unbutton her jacket. Stepping out of her jeans and into the bathtub.
He always poured her a glass of wine when she got there. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said. Mostly what Eleanor had to report had to do with her children, but Timmy always seemed interested.
There was this one Friday night, almost a year since Eleanor had started going over to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment. She must have looked even more worn out than usual. It was winter, and the drive to Akersville had taken a particularly long time. When she walked in his apartment, he had taken one look at her and said, “I know what you need.” He’d given her a massage. Then, as always, the bath.
Darla came to see her in Brookline. She’d only been to Boston a few times in her life—long ago on a school field trip to the Museum of Science and once, with Bobby, to Fenway Park.
On their big Boston weekend, Darla and Eleanor went out for breakfast and had croissants and cappuccino, a new experience for Darla. They brought Toby to the Children’s Museum and after, crossed the Congress Street Bridge to visit the Tea Party ships—Eleanor explaining the story of the settlers throwing the tea overboard, Toby more interested in the granola bar Eleanor had given him, and after he was finished with it, the wrapper.
Seeing him, as she did, every day, it was hard for Eleanor to pick up on changes in her son, but to Darla, who hadn’t spent time with the two of them in months, Toby was doing better.
“I have to hand it to Cam,” Eleanor told her friend. “He’s the one, when I felt hopeless, who started bringing Toby to yoga. That was the first time after the accident that he seemed interested in anything.”
“Cam’s not a bad guy, really,” Darla said.
“I know,” Eleanor said. It would have been easier if he were.
They rode back to Eleanor’s place on the T, another first for Darla. That evening, they left Toby back at the condo with the girls and went out for dinner in the North End. They had real pizza, not the kind you got in Akersville. Darla loved the North End—the markets selling fresh pasta, the smell of garlic, the street musicians at Faneuil Hall.
“When I get the cash together to leave Bobby, this is where Kimmie and I are coming,” Darla said. She had researched mortuary schools in the area. There were two.
When Darla had said this in the past, Eleanor always encouraged her, but this time what she expressed was simply impatience.
“You’re always talking about this and you never end up doing it,” Eleanor said. The words came out sharper than she’d intended. She could see, on Darla’s face, a flicker of hurt.
“This isn’t a good time.”
“There’s never a good time,” Eleanor told her.
61.
Just Like in The Sound of Music
Somewhere along the line—from Darla, who cleaned Betsy and Evan’s house—she learned that Coco had graduated from her holistic studies training. She was gone then—off in Hawaii attending a course in what her mother had called “higher-level healing modalities.” Word came back that she’d met someone there at an acro-yoga retreat. “It sounds serious,” Betsy had told Darla. Hearing the news secondhand, Eleanor had felt a rush of relief, though she could not have said why.
Then, suddenly—more than a year later now—there was surprising news.
“Coco’s back,” Toby announced. They were in the car on a Sunday afternoon, making the long drive back from Akersville to Brookline after the weekend with Cam. From the back seat, Eleanor could sense the uneasy silence from her daughters. Ursula had poked Toby—a signal to keep quiet. But Toby wasn’t having it.
“She lives at our house now,” Toby said. “They told us on the way home from ice cream.”
“Coco and Dad are getting married,” Ursula said. They must have designated her to announce this.
>
Eleanor knew they were all watching her closely. Or the girls were, anyway. Possibly even Toby understood this was a big moment.
Eleanor kept her eyes on the road. “When did this happen?”
“When Coco came back from Hawaii they realized how much they missed each other when she was away,” Ursula said. “It’s like in a movie: they knew each other practically her whole life but it just hit them they were in love.”
Eleanor could hear the cautiousness in her younger daughter’s voice, the air of tension in the car from the others—even Toby. The children hardly ever spoke of what happened at their father’s house, but Ursula had made the decision, evidently—more likely, she and Al made it together—that their mother needed to be told about Coco moving in, Cam and Coco getting married.
They knew they were headed into dangerous territory, but she was going to find out anyway. They must have figured it was better to tell her now—and while they were at it, Ursula was doing her best to make it clear to Eleanor that she and her siblings were fine about what was happening. More than fine. Happy. The last thing any of them wanted would be to suggest that their father was doing anything that had upset them. Their mother had enough grievances against their father. They weren’t about to contribute any others to the list.
Eleanor had learned this over the years: children of divorced parents were like citizens of two hostile countries, observing the laws and customs of each, depending on where they were at the moment. Crossing borders, going through customs. Shedding the language and clothing and manners of one culture when they entered the other, doing the same when they crossed back. Having to keep their story straight, depending on where they were. Their one source of continuity, each other.
“He said it just happened, when she came back,” Al added. The fact that now Al was contributing information struck Eleanor as out of character. Maybe she wanted to emphasize to Eleanor that the romance between their father and Coco was a recent development. Maybe some part of her had actually considered the possibility that it wasn’t.
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