Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  Some of it was a function of their ages, no doubt. In the old days, when they emerged from the tub she’d wrap a towel around each one of them, tight as a mummy, take them onto her lap, kiss them behind their ears, their necks, their toes. In their new life with their mother in the Brookline house, they didn’t want her in the room when they took their baths. Their bodies, that were changing so rapidly now, were hidden from her. Worse, though, so were their thoughts.

  The truth was that even if their parents had stayed together, that perfect life they knew, growing up on the farm, would have had to change. But as it was, the girls attributed every bad thing to Eleanor’s departure. All their lives she had been the one who’d made it her mission to protect them from disappointment and hurt. If they experienced, now, a level of disappointment that went so much deeper than the loss of a toy or an embarrassment at a T-ball game, it must be Eleanor’s fault. It was Eleanor—the one who’d promised to protect them always—who had let them down.

  They never said this. They didn’t even know it, probably. But Eleanor could see the silent disapproval on their faces, the way they looked at her as she set the cereal on the table or called out, as they headed to school, “Did you remember your math homework?” They viewed her with a nearly perpetual air of mild irritation and occasional contempt.

  You promised us one kind of life. You switched it out for another. They never said this, but their faces revealed the thought.

  They blamed her for their parents’ divorce. They blamed her for the life they led now, shuttling back and forth between two houses.

  Her worst offense—she knew this—was her bitterness toward their father. Most of the time she held her tongue in front of them on the topic of Cam, but now and then—mostly when she was tired, or she’d had a glass of wine or two, when her own father’s ghost seemed to inhabit her—she said things she’d regret later.

  “If your dad contributed,” she said, “you could go to summer camp.” “If your father contributed, we could get you a new bike.” “If your dad contributed, I wouldn’t have to work so hard all the time.”

  If their dad contributed, maybe she’d be a nicer person.

  They tuned her out, like a radio station playing music from the fifties.

  More and more now, Al stayed in her room. Even Ursula—sunny, cheerful, pliant, chatty Ursula, the peacemaker, though she still presented herself in the world as the easiest, most trouble-free of any child anybody ever met—seemed to have acquired an unfamiliar edge, a way of responding to whatever Eleanor said or asked that met the requirements of civility with little left over in the way of warmth.

  At the house Cam shared with Coco now, everything was different, a whole other life. Things happened there that Eleanor would never hear about.

  Goats, camping trips, yoga, the death of the family dog. A baby brother. A child she had never laid eyes on, about whom she knew nothing because that’s as much as they said about him.

  Whatever it was they felt about this new character in their lives, Eleanor could only guess. Her children were becoming mysterious to her, like someone you went to school with once who you meet up with at a reunion twenty years later and barely recognize.

  She saw, in her mind, those boats they used to make that they brought to the brook every March. The ones that disappeared in the culvert, the cork people who drifted away. This was where her children were now. Not quite out of sight, but heading there. Even Toby, doing his sun salutations and downward dog, lying on his yoga mat in happy baby pose, barely registered her presence sometimes when she came in the room. When she picked him up after a weekend with his father, his eyes stayed locked on his Game Boy. Al, bent over her homework or her computer programming manual, answered her questions with the fewest syllables necessary. Even Ursula seemed to be playing a role now when she got in the car—her smile tight, her brisk hug like the greeting a candidate might offer up on the campaign trail.

  Now Eleanor wondered if all of Ursula’s old sweetness had ever been real. Maybe she had been quietly resentful all along. Maybe her famous goodness had been her clever tactic. It was easier to be very good than troublesome. Maybe her cheerful demeanor had been an effective way for a girl to keep her mother out of her hair. All that time Eleanor had spent worrying about Alison, worrying about Toby, when all along, maybe the one she should have been focused on had been her perfect middle child—her compliance a strategy for keeping her mother at bay. Keep smiling, and they’ll never know what’s really going on.

  “What do you say we go for a bike ride?” Eleanor said to Ursula one time in April, a precious Saturday when the children were with her, not Cam (he was attending a workshop on spinal issues), and the whole day stretched before them. Precious now, in a way they never used to be.

  “Thanks, but I better do my homework,” Ursula said—her politeness more chilling than anger might have been.

  She still put her dishes in the dishwasher without being asked and read Toby his beloved truck book five times in a row without complaint, still cleaned out the crisper drawer, still brought home perfect report cards. But when her official responsibilities in the family had been met she disappeared into her room, much as Al did. When Eleanor asked about school, or friends, her answers were clipped and monosyllabic, like her sister’s. Mostly she avoided her mother’s gaze, but when their eyes met, hers betrayed nothing of what went on behind them.

  Even before the divorce, Al had announced that she would no longer answer to her old name. But only after the divorce had she insisted on the buzz cut. Now she wore nothing but jeans and army boots and baggy shirts meant to conceal her small but developing breasts. The year after Eleanor brought the children to live with her in Brookline, Al got her period—a piece of news she delivered to Eleanor with a determined brusqueness, the week after the event took place.

  “You don’t need to give me some big talk or anything,” she said. “I know everything. I’m taking care of it.”

  70.

  The Reason for Every Single Bad Thing

  A year or so after Eleanor moved out, she had received a call from the counselor at school expressing concern about Al. “Of course, we might also see this kind of behavior even in a child from an intact family,” she said. “But we need to consider closely the detrimental impact of recent changes in your family dynamic.”

  The counselor quoted an expert, a psychologist named Dr. Judith Wallerstein, who’d conducted an in-depth study of children of divorce. The findings weren’t good. Name virtually any psychological issue a person might suffer from, down the line; according to Dr. Judith Wallerstein, the children of divorce were more likely to suffer from it.

  “Alison resists having anything to do with the other girls at school,” the counselor told her. “She wants to play sports with the boys, but they don’t want to include her. She doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t seem to want them.”

  “Al,” Eleanor corrected her. “Our daughter goes by Al now.”

  When they’d done a square-dancing unit in gym, the counselor told Eleanor, Alison—Al—had refused to participate. For women’s history month, when the girls were supposed to choose a famous woman from the past and dress up as that woman to deliver a report on her, Al had requested that she be excused. “I don’t like putting on dresses,” she said, though in the end she agreed to portray Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

  Eleanor sat in the counselor’s office, trying to take in what she was saying, though her mind kept wandering to a plant on the windowsill, desperately in need of water, and the photograph on her desk displaying a smiling husband and two happy-looking children. An “intact family.”

  Did Al exhibit evidence of distress around issues of her gender before the divorce, the counselor wanted to know? The implication was clear enough: It had been Eleanor and Cam’s decision to end their marriage that triggered their daughter’s current struggles. Eleanor’s decision, from the sound of it. (There it was again. A reminder, from the counselor, that it had been Eleanor w
ho’d moved out of the family home. Al had told her as much.)

  It was a terrible thought for a parent: that she might have ruined her child’s life not just in the present, but far into the future, as Judith Wallerstein’s findings seemed to predict they would.

  Did divorce have to be the reason for every single bad thing that went on in your child’s life? Didn’t the children of those “intact” families the counselor was talking about have problems, too, now and then? And if she and Cam had subjected their children to irreversible trauma by their failure to stay married, what were they supposed to do about that now?

  So Al was depressed. Ursula was polite, but wary—like a distant relative come to visit, on her best behavior. Then there was Toby. Gentle, loving Toby, who could sit on the floor for a few hours making a ball out of rubber bands or examining a Rubik’s Cube with no particular goal of lining up the colors. Toby, who liked drawing rows of parallel lines and untying his shoelaces and humming songs from their Music Man soundtrack. The old Toby had loved Michael Jackson, but when they showed him the “Thriller” video now, it just scared him.

  He spoke more now—short sentences, constructed like telegrams—and thanks no doubt to all the work Cam did with him, he could run, in his funny, lurching way. And he seemed, if not precisely happy, content anyway. He loved his sisters and most of all he loved his new baby brother, Elijah.

  Before the accident, Toby had a dislike of clothes with buttons. After, he appeared to have forgotten about that, as if he had forgotten who he was: A boy who played the violin once. A boy who danced naked and peed outdoors in winter so he could spell his name in the snow. A boy who reported on his conversations with God and said once that he loved Eleanor’s toes so much, he wanted to marry them.

  One day, when Toby was nine—having lived almost as long with the damaged brain as he had with his healthy one—something had possessed Eleanor to put on their old recording of the Wieniawski Polonaise that he had loved.

  The record was all scratched up from all the times his four-year-old self had played it. Maybe she held out the crazy idea that after all these years some old synapse gone dormant after his time in the pond would have regenerated itself. Did Eleanor really believe this might be possible? Maybe she just wanted to hear that piece of music again, herself, and summon the memory of the child who used to play it. The first twelve measures, anyway.

  Toby, hearing the record now, displayed no reaction, except to be slightly annoyed by the intrusion of music. Except for The Music Man and the theme song from the Toys “R” Us commercial (featuring that maddening line “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid”), he seemed to prefer silence most of the time. That or humming. He sat in lotus position a lot, a function of his time with his father at yoga class, staring at some object—a rock, a pencil, a stick of wood—and turning it around in his hands.

  He liked Mister Rogers and televised golf tournaments. He liked laying toothpicks in rows on the rug, or side-by-side paint samples that Eleanor got for him at the hardware store. Small, simple, repetitive activities.

  One of the few aspects of who he was now, at nine, that had endured from his life before the accident was his habit of picking up rocks wherever he went and carrying them in his pockets. Though there appeared nothing distinctive in the specimens he collected, he resisted any suggestion of paring down his collection. Rocks filled his room—lined the walls and windowsills. Most of them were indistinguishable from each other, except to Toby, who knew every one.

  71.

  I Want to Go Home

  Out on the highway, heading north to Akersville to pick up her children after a weekend with Cam, she’d spotted him: Timmy Pouliot on his Harley. In Massachusetts, the law required a helmet, but the minute Timmy Pouliot crossed the line back into the Live Free or Die state, he always took it off.

  That’s how she knew she must be in New Hampshire now.

  There was a woman on the back, of course. Timmy Pouliot always had a woman on the back of his bike. No doubt she was young and no doubt beautiful.

  Eleanor only caught a glimpse of the two of them. Timmy Pouliot was going faster on the bike than she was in her old Subaru. She figured he wouldn’t have noticed. But as he passed, he raised one hand very slightly, the way Harley riders did, seeing another person on a bike, only there was nobody on a bike around. He must have been waving at her.

  A feeling washed over her then. Regret, possibly.

  There had been more than a few reasons Eleanor had believed she had to break things off with Timmy Pouliot as she had. But above all others was the fear of her children’s disapproval.

  Now look. Her children disapproved of her anyway.

  The children raised the subject at dinner on a night they’d just come home from their father’s house. She’d made spaghetti carbonara, one of their favorites. Cam was a vegan now, as was Coco, and the girls had given up meat and even dairy-based foods now, too, but spaghetti carbonara—the most comforting meal she knew—had been their tradition, and even after they shifted to the new vegan diet at Cam and Coco’s, they made an exception for this particular dish.

  Eleanor set down the platter and took her seat. Except for rare occasions, they had abandoned their old tradition of singing their song, “Simple Gifts,” before beginning the meal.

  “We have something we need to talk to you about, Mom,” Al said.

  It had seemed like a good sign, Al saying this. They wanted to talk, for once. Eleanor was ready to listen. She waited as Al took a long breath.

  “Toby wants to live on the farm with Dad,” Al said. “We all think it’s a good idea.”

  She was picking out the prosciutto. Next to her, Ursula scraped the cream off the noodles.

  Eleanor steadied herself. Toby? Move? Who was this “we” her daughter spoke of, who’d evidently agreed on what a good idea this was before mentioning it to her?

  “I’m his mother,” Eleanor said. “He needs me.”

  “It’s just too confusing for Toby, going back and forth all the time,” Ursula chimed in. “And he gets more help from Dad than at that expensive school you’re sending him to. Dad works with Toby all the time. The physical therapy and the yoga are really helping.”

  “Then there’s Elijah,” Al added. “You should see how those two get along with each other.”

  She had not seen this, of course. She had not seen anything that went on at their father’s house.

  Ursula now: “Dad thinks it would be better if Toby could stay put. Al and I think so, too. And Coco.”

  Eleanor steadied herself. She could hear, in Ursula’s words, how carefully she’d prepared them. She had probably practiced this moment in her room and discussed it with her father. (“Your mother’s not going to like this,” he would have said. “But it’ll go over better coming from you.”)

  “It always takes him a whole day adjusting from one place to the other one. Plus, he really loves being around the goats.”

  “Goats,” Toby said—the first time he’d weighed in. “I got four goats, Mama.” This was news to Eleanor, too.

  She turned to study her son—the only one of the three of them who seemed to be enjoying the carbonara. “How do you feel about going to live at your dad’s, Tobes?” Eleanor asked him.

  “I love you, Mama,” he said. “But I want to go home.”

  She didn’t have to ask her son where home was. Or any of the three of them. It didn’t matter whether she bought a trampoline, an air hockey table, or a Commodore 64 computer. Her son wanted to live on the farm with his father.

  Eleanor knew how much Toby loved Elijah—the one person in the family whose developmental level remained below his own, though the days were numbered when that would remain true. Every Sunday night when he returned from his father’s house, Toby talked about Elijah. Soon enough Elijah, young as he was, would be able to do things Toby could not, but for now Toby could hold him and line up blocks on the rug beside him and the two of them could play—and unlik
e all the other people in his life, for Elijah, playing with Toby was never a chore. Of course Toby would want to be with Elijah. Every day, if possible.

  She wanted to throw her glass against the wall, but she set it down as gently as if it were fine crystal. She got up from her chair and knelt beside Toby. He was arranging his peas in a circle and humming. “I’d miss you a whole lot if you move back to the farm,” she said, “but I want you to be happy.”

  “I want to be with Lijah,” Toby said. “I like my home.”

  Eleanor couldn’t argue with that. She understood the feeling. Even now, even to Eleanor, the farm remained the place she loved more than any other.

  Toby must have recognized this was hard for her. He patted her on the arm and laid his head on her shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” he said. “You can come see me when I go live with my dad.”

  Toby had a particular way of arranging his rocks, and it troubled him when one was out of place. In preparation for the move back to Akersville, the girls labeled every rock with a numbered sticker so they could re-create the lineup in the upstairs bedroom at Cam’s house he’d share with Elijah now.

  “I’ll bring him down to see you on weekends,” Cam told Eleanor when she brought Toby to the house.

  For a few weeks, they tried this. But Toby didn’t like leaving Elijah, or his goats.

  Mostly, now, when Eleanor and Toby spent time together it was in Akersville. She took him bowling a couple of times, with bumpers in the gutters so he’d knock over some pins. (There was no further need to require that he recite the No-Cry Pledge. He didn’t care whether he knocked over any pins.)