She remembered a movie she saw back in her brief days at college, The Last Picture Show. Specifically, she was thinking about the character of the lonely, sex-starved coach’s wife, played by Cloris Leachman, who has an affair with a boy on her husband’s team, played by Timothy Bottoms. At first he’s excited to be having passionate sex with an older woman, but later the relationship is nothing but an awkward embarrassment. Cloris Leachman is pleading with him not to leave her. He walks out the door, with Cybill Shepherd waiting for him.
“I’ll be forty before you know it,” Eleanor told Timmy from her place in the tub.
“Is that supposed to sound old?” he said.
“How would I ever introduce you to my children?” she said. The words had come out faster than she intended. She could see their effect on his face.
“You’re ashamed of me,” Timmy said. “I guess it comes down to that. Your ex-husband doesn’t worry that his kids will stop loving him because he’s shacked up with a twenty-one-year-old. But you still feel like you need their okay?”
He was right about that. But Eleanor knew she wouldn’t get off as easily with her children as Cam had with Coco. She could see Al’s face, sizing up Timmy Pouliot. Ursula would be more kind, but privately, she would judge him. She’d judge Eleanor too. What Ursula wanted was a normal life, free of drama. A regular boyfriend, the kind who wore a suit and tie and carried a briefcase and drove a minivan, not a Harley.
“You don’t need a woman with three children,” she told him. “You should have your own kids. With someone young.”
“And what makes you so darned sure you know what I need?” he said.
“You know it’s true. You’d love to have kids.”
“You’ve got kids. I could love them.”
He was fighting for her. But she believed she saw something else, too. Part of him knew she was right. He was letting go.
“We need to stop.” Until she spoke, she hadn’t planned on saying this. There was a terrible sound to her words, as if the act of speaking them made it true.
She was in the bathtub when she told him. Timmy Pouliot was kneeling on the floor next to her, running a washcloth over her back. When she got up, so did he.
He held the towel out for her, same as he always did. But there was something different about the way he looked at her this time. As she stepped out of the bathtub, he seemed to be memorizing her body.
They made love one more time. She wasn’t sure, but she thought he might be crying. She dressed quickly. She was on the highway ten minutes later. Not that it mattered now, but it occurred to Eleanor, driving away that last time, that she had probably loved this man.
68.
Not Their Half Brother
She carried on as before. A mother of three children did not have the luxury of doing otherwise. What she’d been doing with Timmy Pouliot all those Friday nights was nothing but an escape from her real life. She couldn’t afford that. She told herself it was better, spending her Friday nights getting caught up on the laundry. And anyway, she should focus her attention on her kids. They gave her plenty to worry about.
Since the separation Eleanor had watched a transformation in Al. Back when they’d first moved to Brookline, and Al enrolled in middle school there, she had taken herself to a barbershop in town where she’d had her hair chopped off short as a boy’s and razor-cut around her neck and ears. Something about seeing her older daughter’s tender pink skin, exposed for the first time since she was a baby, felt to Eleanor like a wound as raw as if her own body had suffered it.
This was always her problem, of course. That her children’s sorrows became hers. She felt their pain so deeply, she hardly registered her own. It was funny (but not very) to remember the time she’d once wept over a scratched-off chicken pox scab.
There was a harder part. In the old days—meaning, days Eleanor was with Cam on the farm, when her children were going through something difficult, they’d come to her to talk about it. There had been a time, not so long past, when they had viewed their mother as the one able to fix whatever trouble it was they encountered. Sometimes, as with the death of Christa McAuliffe, there was no fixing possible, but she could comfort them. They looked to her for that.
More and more, they didn’t. Toby might turn to her as he always did—climb on her lap, ask for a back rub—but she recognized a change in her girls. It was small things, mostly—a certain sharp, critical way Al looked at her across the table when they had dinner, Ursula’s uncharacteristic silences. Much of the time now her daughters treated her with chilling politeness. Eleanor could hear the way they spoke with their father, when he called them up during the week—their easy laughter, their readiness to recount stories they had not mentioned to her. Once, when she had walked through the room in the middle of one of their phone conversations with Cam, Ursula had abruptly fallen silent, as if Eleanor’s very presence in the room constituted an intrusion on something precious and intimate. They had secrets from her. Secrets they shared with Cam.
Most evident to Eleanor were the looks on their faces when her station wagon pulled down the road to drop them off at Cam’s on Friday afternoon. She hadn’t even turned off the ignition before the three of them were opening the car doors, racing toward the house.
“We’re home,” Ursula called out.
Then there was Coco—her belly just beginning to show under her apron—or Cam, opening the door in his brown work jacket and the hat Al had knitted him for his birthday two years ago, that he evidently wore even in the house. Eleanor knew that Ursula probably waited until the four of them were inside to express the full measure of her joy at being reunited with her father. (Coco, too, probably.) But driving away one time, Eleanor could see them all through the window: Cam bending low to hear what Ursula was telling him, Al hugging her bookbag and some CD—punk, for sure—that she wanted to play for her father. Toby, loping over to the spot by the woodstove where their new puppy, Buster, was lying, to scratch his belly and lie down next to him. Coco in the rocking chair by the woodstove, probably. Good spot for a pregnant woman.
They spent Friday night to Sunday afternoon with their father—their father and Coco—but Toby saw Cam on Wednesdays, too, when Cam drove to Boston for Toby’s physical therapy classes. After, they’d attend the restorative yoga class in Cambridge that Toby loved. It would be nine o’clock by the time Cam dropped him off at the house.
“I miss my dad,” Toby said, as he climbed the stairs to bed. “I miss my home.”
The yoga was helping. Or something was. Toby’s motor control had improved dramatically since the two of them had been going to classes and working together, just the two of them, weekends on the farm.
The children never said much about this, but Cam had evidently completed his physical therapy training. Darla had told Eleanor about an ad that appeared in the Akersville Gazette that spring, announcing that Cam and Coco were opening a joint practice—physical therapy and massage—in what used to be his old woodshop. A friend of Darla’s had consulted with Cam about a back injury and reported that her session with him had been amazing. This was not a surprise to Eleanor. Cam always had a natural, intuitive sense about the workings of the body. What he’d done with Toby in their long afternoons together in the woodshop, going through exercises he’d designed, had done more for their son than anything he had received at his expensive school.
At some point the girls announced they were all vegetarians now. Then vegan, like Cam and Coco. Ursula still liked to bake, but what she produced in the kitchen now, and the snacks she brought home from her weekends at the farm, featured oats and carob and chia seeds. Most recently, when Eleanor had set one of her key lime pies on the table, the girls had told her no thanks. Only Toby still cleaned his plate.
Coco was one of those women (having known her since she was in grade school, it was still hard for Eleanor to think of Coco as a woman) who looked beautiful pregnant. In her own pregnancies, Eleanor’s whole body had been overtaken: her a
nkles swelled and her face got puffy. Even her fingers had looked fat.
Eleanor laid eyes on Coco for the first time during her pregnancy somewhere around the sixth month—pulling the car up to her old house to bring the children for their summer vacation. She looked like some farm maiden, in from the garden, with an apronful of fresh produce. Or just one perfect watermelon. Her breasts had filled out a little, but from behind you wouldn’t have known she was carrying a baby in that long, slim-hipped body of hers. She looked twenty-two years old, and she was.
It was August the next time Eleanor returned to Akersville. The children had been spending the summer there, which had made it possible for Ursula to perform in a kids’ summer theater production of Oliver! Eleanor was just taking her seat when she spotted the two of them—Cam and Coco—off to one side of the auditorium, talking with a couple she recognized from the softball team, back in the old days—Peggy and Bob Olin, parents of Gina, the pale, strawberry blond child they’d all watched slowly dying over a single long softball summer. Except for the day of Gina’s memorial service, Eleanor hadn’t seen the Olins since. Peggy had disappeared from the bleachers, and not so long after, so had Eleanor.
But here they were now, the four of them, greeting each other like long-lost relatives and appearing to be in deep conversation. Maybe they were discussing their tomato crops, or the pros and cons of synthetic decking. Maybe Bob, a contractor, was offering his thoughts on some home renovation project Cam had embarked on. Or Cam was advising Bob on exercises for his back.
It felt like a hundred years ago that Eleanor sat on the bench next to Peggy at games—a barely pubescent Coco off on the field with the children, blowing bubbles and performing cartwheels—as Peggy held forth about the Adelle Davis diet while Gina and Ursula played in the dirt.
After Gina died, one of the other softball wives said she’d heard Peggy was drinking a lot, and there were rumors of Bob having an affair, but they must have worked things out, because here they were now, come to see their other daughter performing in the show, just as Eleanor was. They were holding hands, even. Eleanor had forgotten about Gina’s big sister. Checking the program, she saw that Katie Olin was playing Oliver.
There was something about the sight of the four of them—Peggy and Bob, Coco and Cam—standing there talking and looking so easy and happy. Eleanor couldn’t take her eyes off of them. Then Peggy took off her sweater. Eleanor watched as Bob lifted it gently from his wife’s shoulders. Sometimes it was the smallest things, like this one, that caused a stab. It had been so long since anyone had helped her off with her sweater, or anything close.
Timmy Pouliot helping her into the bathtub. But that was over.
With the sweater removed, it was clear: Peggy was pregnant, too—about as far along as Coco, from the looks of her. Eleanor watched as the two of them compared each other’s bellies, laid their hands on the places where at that very moment their babies were probably kicking.
Not so many years ago, Peggy and Bob had buried their younger child, but they were going for it again. That was the thing about a pregnancy. It represented hope that the future might offer something that the past had taken away. Another chance.
How long did Eleanor stand there, taking it in? The four of them were laughing about something—one of those pregnancy symptoms like how you get up five times in the night to pee, or an unlikely craving for ramen noodles or Eskimo Pies. A person could not have guessed, observing the two of them—Peggy and Coco—that only a handful of years earlier, one of them had spent a season at Boston Children’s, watching her child fade away. Not so long before that, Coco was teaching Gina how to execute a cartwheel.
Eleanor could still remember that last summer she spent sitting with Peggy—Gina bald and close to skeletal in her wheelchair, the blue veins visible under the translucent skin of her naked skull, Toby—Toby as he was then—looking baffled and worried when she’d ignored his offer of a mozzarella stick. Everybody always wanted to play with Toby, but Peggy and Bob’s daughter was already leaving the world by then. The other children sensed it. Other than Toby, they’d all hung back.
Within the space of a couple of years, Gina would be dead and Toby would be sitting on the couch with a look on his face as blank as the screen of Eleanor’s computer when she first turned it on. Now here they all were again—one character gone, another two on the way, the cards shuffled, deck redealt.
The show began. From up on the stage, Katie Olin was holding out a bowl and looking hungry.
“Please, sir, may I have some more?” she said.
Eleanor kept her eyes on Ursula, the fourth orphan to the right. She wondered if Peggy Olin, seeing Ursula, was imagining who Gina would be now if she had lived, whether she’d be up there on the stage with her sister and her friend. Sometimes, observing other people’s non-brain-injured nine-year-old sons, Eleanor caught herself trying to imagine who Toby would have been at this age. But there was nobody remotely like him, so that never worked. Toby had been a shooting star.
Cam and Coco’s son, Elijah, was born that fall. Cam called to tell the children the news. That afternoon, he drove to Brookline to pick them up to meet their new brother.
Their brother. That’s how they spoke of him. Not their half brother. Watching the car pull away, containing the three people she loved best in the world, going off to meet a person who would be part of their family now (theirs, not hers), she felt like a woman lost at sea. There had been a shipwreck, and the rescue boats had circled around and managed to pick up the survivors. Except for Eleanor.
69.
No More Onions in the Bed
Growing up, Eleanor had lived in a household where the only touch seemed to occur behind closed bedroom doors, between her parents. She had craved affection, and finally—for a while there—she’d gotten it. For close to ten years, Eleanor had not known a night without a human body pressed up against her own. Not only Cam’s skin against hers, but the warm and occasionally damp presence of her children wandering into their bed at midnight—small sojourners bearing their blankets and pillows—a stuffed meerkat, the piece of ribbon Toby liked to wind around his pointer finger when he sucked his thumb, the other end twirled inside the pearly shell of his ear. For a while there, Alison had insisted on bringing into bed (first her own bed, but later in the night, the bed of her parents) a doll she’d named Onion Head, made out of a sprouted onion, with a kerchief tied around the bulb of the onion that served as the doll’s head. Over the weeks, the onion had acquired a smell so rank that Cam had finally laid down the law.
“I draw the line at sleeping with onions,” he said, but in the end they let Alison into their bed anyway.
No more onions in the bed. No more anyone.
All those nights that Eleanor lay on the old futon—the same futon where in days past she’d given birth—with the hot breath of one child or another on her face, their hands on her belly, her breasts—silky hair tangled into her own, no inch of her body unclaimed, not even her brain, because she could never stop thinking about them or anticipating what they’d need next.
“I’m possessed,” she told Cam. “By children.”
Sometimes now, alone in her bed at night, Eleanor ran her own hands over her skin just to remind herself what it felt like, being touched. The thought had occurred to her that if she never experienced warm human touch again she might just wither up. Stroking your own skin wasn’t the same as the touch of another person. A familiar body, a familiar person. A person you loved, who loved you back.
If she and Cam had made it through, now might have been the moment they started having more sex again, but as it was, nothing was a clearer reminder of what had been lost than the unoccupied space in her bed. She filled it with pillows and books and a sketch pad, where, when she woke in the middle of the night—as she did a lot these days—she could scribble down ideas for greeting cards.
One time, late at night, in her bed, she’d written a long letter to Cam. “I just want to talk about our
children sometimes,” she wrote. “We might not be married, but we’re still parents together.” No response.
This was probably the worst part: the silence. It seemed as though everything that had happened between her and the man she once loved, and still shared three children with, had melted away, or that it had never happened in the first place. All those years they were a family seemed to have been wiped from the memory of the man who used to be her husband as surely as if it had been Cam, not Toby, who’d ended up facedown in the pond that day with his brain deprived of oxygen, the memory of every beautiful thing gone.
Who could say what Cam thought about that time? Eventually he had made a whole other life for himself, and except for the fact that the marriage he went on to make, with his new partner, his new child, took place on the same piece of land, under the same roof, where the two of theirs had played out, all memory of their old days seemed to have been erased. It wasn’t just that the two of them turned out to have no future together. More surprising, for Eleanor, was the obliteration of their past.
There had been a time when Eleanor craved nothing so much as ten minutes alone. “I’m having Quiet Time,” she told her children, setting the timer and pouring herself a cup of tea (or, later, wine), pulling her stool up to the counter with a copy of Redbook magazine that was probably two months old, to study some article about giving yourself an avocado facial, or ten interesting things to do with garbanzo beans.
Now it was always Quiet Time in Eleanor’s world. Her children still needed her—more than ever, maybe, but for driving and cooking and rounding up the materials for science projects and signing forms and finding lost sneakers. They needed her for writing checks.
When they were four and three, or seven and six, Eleanor had known everything there was to know about her daughters’ lives. Now whenever they returned from their father’s house—the place they still referred to as home—their wariness accompanied them into the Brookline condo; they moved through the rooms like double agents, their gaze conveying distrust. Their mother had let them down once, by her failure to stay married to their father. She was the one who’d left, wasn’t she? What would she do next to upend their world?
Count the Ways Page 30