“Too young to know better.”
“Damn shame things worked out like they did,” he told her. “That’s probably why Edith and I stayed together all those years. If I tried to leave she might have got her hands on my truck.”
“There would be a heartbreaker for you.” Eleanor managed a laugh.
“Next time,” he said, “stay married. It might not be what you expected, but you get used to it.”
She studied his face. It occurred to her that all these years, in his quiet Yankee way, her neighbor had probably been in love with her. Not that he would ever have done anything about it, besides delivering a cord of nice dry almond wood now and then, back when she lived alone on the farm, and plowing her driveway when snow fell.
“Or just stay single,” he offered. “Safer that way.”
Her time with her children seemed to be contracting. Weekdays alone in Brookline, she worked, mostly, though now and then she went out to dinner or a movie with a friend. She was volunteering at a soup kitchen, where she’d made friends with a nice group of fellow volunteers.
Weekends she drove to Akersville to see the children, when they could work her into their increasingly demanding schedules. More and more often, they couldn’t. Even Toby was busy now, with 4-H. He was raising goats for the annual fair and helping Cam out on the farm, building a new pen.
Even in the best-case scenario, their times together were short. They’d get a meal at Friendly’s or bowl a few frames at Moonlight Lanes, but they hardly ever got to spend the kind of time together that Eleanor loved best—when there was no particular activity going on. Times they just got to be in the same place, breathing the same air.
The one she talked about this with was Darla, of course. “When they come to Brookline,” she said of her children’s increasingly rare visits, “they’re always either just taking their stuff out of those paper bags of theirs or gathering it all up again to go away,” she said. “It’s impossible to get a rhythm going. The truth is, they don’t want to be there. They prefer their dad.”
“That’s the one good thing about being married to an obvious asshole, instead of a nice guy who just got tired of being married to you,” Darla said. “With an asshole for a father, my kid is always grateful to have me around. She has no alternative.”
The main thing was, the condo where Eleanor lived now had never been her children’s home. Not really hers, either, though she lived there.
She remembered times, long ago, when it was a snow day and they all got to hang around all day in their pajamas, making popcorn and watching all three Herbie movies in a row or sitting around the table making their valentines or their paper boats, the day Ursula invited all her friends over to make miniskirts on Eleanor’s old treadle sewing machine, the time they had a skating party on the pond with a bonfire.
Now she needed to create a major event to get them together with her. When a big check arrived for a Father’s Day card she’d designed that became a big seller, she took them all to a Club Med in Florida for a week. They had a good time, but she realized something on that trip: that what she did now to make a good time possible seemed to require joining up with a group somewhere—another family, or a whole lot of them, as if the unit of herself, on her own, was not enough. She needed to throw in trapeze school and snorkeling and surfing lessons and karaoke nights. She wanted to make every day wonderful, and the pressure to do this often created the opposite result.
“It’s like I’m dating my own children,” she told Darla. “And it’s always a first date.”
One spring vacation, she rented a cottage on a beach in the Bahamas for the four of them, making the flight out of Boston in a blizzard and arriving to torrential rain and an infestation of sand flies. They spent the week playing card games and going out to eat a lot. Except for one day, it rained all week, and when the sun came out, Toby and Ursula got sunburned. When they went home, everyone seemed relieved.
“I miss my brother and my goats,” Toby said, in the car on the way back from the airport. “I want to go home.”
Home meaning the farm. That part never changed.
79.
What It Meant to Be Real
She read the news in the paper: Harry Botts died. No mention of his cause of death. “At home . . . following a short illness . . . survived by his mother . . . a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs . . . formerly a proud member of Akersville’s long-standing softball team, the Yellow Jackets.”
The old team, disbanded now, all showed up for the funeral: Cam and Coco were there, of course. Also Sal Perrone (long divorced now from Lucinda, who’d moved to Arizona with their children), Peggy and Bob Olin with their very young daughter (a strawberry blonde), Bonnie and Jerry Henderson, the Pouliot brothers.
Eleanor was past forty now. It had been a few months since Timmy Pouliot had taken Eleanor out on the Harley that last time. Catching sight of him in the pew a few rows ahead of her, she could hardly remember what it felt like, stepping into his dark little apartment, letting him peel off her clothes, lowering herself into the tub he’d run for her. No man had seen her body in a few years now.
Harry’s mother sat in the front row—a well-dressed woman, wearing gloves and the kind of hat that identified her as definitely not from New Hampshire, her face ravaged. In the row behind her were a couple of men Harry had evidently known from a group of amateur Gilbert and Sullivan performers he was part of in Boston. One of them looked almost as thin as Harry had that day Eleanor ran into him at the supermarket. Everyone in the church knew what that meant.
Harry had asked that a friend of his from Chicago read the poem “Casey at the Bat.” A Unitarian minister read out loud from The Velveteen Rabbit—a passage Eleanor remembered from back when she’d read that book out loud to her children. Toby in particular had loved this one—about what it meant to be real, and how it didn’t matter how beat-up you looked, or if your ear fell off, if you were loved.
Harry had definitely looked pretty beat-up that time Eleanor saw him buying groceries, and he probably looked even worse by the end. She hoped he had felt loved. It made her sad that she didn’t know if he had, or anything about what that part of his story had looked like.
They ended the service with the hymn “Morning Has Broken,” that most of them probably knew from the Cat Stevens version. Eleanor remembered an end-of-season softball party at the farm—buffalo wings, potato skins, homemade cider and doughnuts—and how she and Harry had danced to a Cat Stevens record, Tea for the Tillerman. What a good dancer he’d been.
“You and Cam are so lucky,” he’d told her. “You’ve got this beautiful farm, those beautiful kids.”
He had grown up in Oak Park, he told her. His parents had a huge house, right down the street from one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. “But they were never happy,” he told Eleanor. “And I could never tell them who I really was. They don’t even know me.”
Maybe his mother did now, finally. A little late.
She thought about her own children. She used to say she knew every inch of their bodies. But more and more, they were a mystery to her. What had it meant that Ursula had seemed so relentlessly happy and hopeful all the time—until she wasn’t anymore? Why did Al stay in her room, all the time, and why was she so angry? Who were these people she’d given birth to? What if, like Harry Botts’s mother, it turned out she never really understood who they were?
She didn’t stay around for the reception. She didn’t feel like catching up with all those wives she used to know from their days together on the bleachers, didn’t feel up for the uncomfortable looks married women give to the single—part pity, part fear. There had been a time when they had shared the most intimate details of their lives (marriage, sex, childbirth, the hunger for a life beyond the kitchen and the bleachers, the death of a child) but they were strangers now, or something worse. For the women who had stayed married—and so far, all of the other women in this room had—someone like Eleanor, whose marriage had ended, was as thr
eatening a presence as a man with AIDS had been. Her face might as well have been covered by Kaposi’s sarcoma. She was that untouchable.
To many of those at the church that morning, anyway, but not all. As Eleanor was heading out to her car, Timmy Pouliot approached her. She had thought she’d make a swift getaway without seeing him—what could either of them say in this place?—but he ran up and put his arms around her. What did it matter who saw them? On that day it didn’t.
Much had changed, but not those blue eyes of his.
“I miss you,” he told her.
“I miss myself,” she said.
80.
The Cork People
Long ago, when she was growing up—only child of two parents so involved with each other they frequently seemed inconvenienced by her presence—she had acquired the habit of finding escape in the pictures she made.
Something happened when Eleanor began to draw. She left the world for a while and stepped into a new one. Again, that fall, she took out her pencils. Two decades had passed since Eleanor had worked on a children’s book, or any story at all. Now this one consumed her. Alone at her drawing table with no children to look after, most days, she plunged so completely into the lives of her characters that she almost forgot her own.
At first she started with drawings—random images of a young mother and her children, the three of them closely modeled on her own. She drew them on one of their walks to the falls, drew a small boy looking out over a bridge as his cowboy hat got blown into the water, and another boy—an older one—standing on the banks of that same brook with a fishing pole, a little farther downstream. There was a dog who looked a lot like Sally, and a girl, like Al, who had cut her hair very short and only wore pants, and another girl who loved ruffled dresses and hair ornaments. The images of the children were never the problem. It was bringing the parents to life that got in Eleanor’s way, so she left them out of it.
In the story that came to Eleanor, the parents were off somewhere, doing their jobs, probably. It was that time of year that’s not quite spring yet, but you know it’s coming. (Snow melting. Runoff.) So the children decided to make some boats, and some cork people.
Once she had that part, the story came easily. But it wasn’t really about the children. It was about the cork people, attached by rubber bands to their various small boats, launched into the dangerous waters that looked a great deal, in Eleanor’s drawings, like Hopewell Falls.
From then on, the story was about the adventures they had, the places their boats took them, from the brook to a small river, to a larger river, all the way to the ocean and beyond. The cork people made it to Africa, and to the South Sea Islands, New Zealand, and the Maldives. They faced dangers, of course—sharks, oil tankers, cruise ships, giant waves, even a spoiled child who found one of them washed up on a beach in Florida and wanted to bring him home with her as a toy. (Imagine a cork person, shut up in a fancy dollhouse!) But he’d escaped. The cork people in Eleanor’s story—as the months passed, a whole collection of stories—always made it through.
At some point it occurred to her that the children who’d launched the cork people in the first place needed to be brought back into the story. It turned out there was a magic rock at the falls. (Toby would like that part.) When you rubbed it, you got very small, just the size of a cork person, though lacking a cork person’s useful powers of flotation. For this reason, the children—who had climbed into one of the boats themselves to follow their cork people—were constantly in jeopardy. More than once, it was one of the cork people who rescued them.
The story was a happy fantasy. The children got to be in charge of their own lives, without the troublesome interference of parents. Every day for them was a wonderful adventure in which nobody ever told them what they couldn’t do. In Eleanor’s story, they encountered danger and adversity, but they always overcame it. At the end of every one of their treacherous but thrilling escapades, the children grew back to normal size again, put the cork people in their pockets, and headed back home to their farm—just in time for dinner, it turned out. Their parents, setting the food on the table, had somehow failed to notice they’d been away. (That was parents for you. Their children might be off having these whole other lives, and all the parents would want to know was “Did you do your homework? Did you brush your teeth?”)
Never mind the parents. Now that the children knew about the special rock, and had made friends with their cork people, there would always be more adventures.
She worked all winter on her book, and into the spring. With the children gone, Eleanor was able to work on her story with almost no interruption. Apart from her increasingly infrequent Saturday trips back to Akersville, she spent the days at her drawing table.
As long as she kept working she felt happy. She particularly loved working on the character she based on Toby. Those hours she spent at her drawing table, it was as if she had the old Toby back.
It was all she wanted to do that winter—to lose herself in a story other than the one she was living. At some point, it seemed to her, these characters she’d created took on lives of their own, and all she was doing was telling about what she watched them doing, in her head. And she loved taking herself back to her old farm—still her favorite place in the world and the one where she’d been happiest.
She titled the book The Cork People. In May she mailed her manuscript to an editor who’d sent her a note long ago, asking if she had any new projects in the works.
No word for a couple of months. Then came a letter from the editor, beginning with an apology. “I hope my silence won’t be mistaken for any absence of enthusiasm,” she wrote. “I just didn’t get to your manuscript until four days ago.
“All of us love what you’ve done here,” she told Eleanor. “We’d like to offer you a contract.”
The initial advance for The Cork People was considerably smaller than what she’d been paid for her Bodie books, but before the first book about the cork people had even come out Eleanor’s publisher asked for another one, and this time the advance was a large one. A few months later the publication rights were sold to a lot of other countries Eleanor had never been to. They’d be sending her on a European tour in addition to all the major U.S. cities.
“I don’t ever have to write one more sappy line for some anniversary card,” Eleanor told Darla the day she announced to the creative director at Sweetheart Card that she would no longer be submitting designs. “I didn’t have it in me to think up one more poem about how great it is to have a grandmother,” she said. “Or one more way for somebody to talk about the fact that a person died without ever using the word ‘death.’”
The Cork People was published the following fall, with sales so strong it went back for a second printing within weeks, earning more money than Eleanor would have made by selling her half of the farm.
“You can buy your own damn farm now if you want,” Darla told her.
She wasn’t interested in other farms.
After Cam and Coco took over formal ownership of the property, they had put up a sign at the end of the long dirt road leading to the house with the name of their physical therapy, massage, and retreat center, “Healing Hands.” Now when Eleanor drove there to pick up the children or deliver them back to Cam, she passed the sign, along with a second one that said simply “Namaste.”
The girls hardly ever came to Brookline for the weekends now, though she sometimes managed to wrench one of them away from the farm—for a Beastie Boys concert one time, and another time, when she got tickets to see Madonna. Mostly the girls wanted to be where their friends were.
Toby never wanted to be anyplace other than the farm. From the stories her children recounted of their lives there, she knew that Elijah was old enough now to climb the ladder up to the tree fort the girls had built long ago in Old Ashworthy. The two of them—Toby and Elijah—spent whole days up there, playing games and looking at books. Elijah was reading now, as Toby was not. They both loved rocks.
Elijah had taken up the guitar, and sometimes the two of them made up songs together. Or Elijah made up songs, and Toby hummed along, clapping his hands, though seldom in time with the beat.
Toby—the person he was now, anyway, and he’d been this person for most of his life—preferred familiar things and places. He had not gotten used to Eleanor’s house, or the small yard out back, the presence of all those cars driving by, and neighbors, the streetlights shining in his window at night. Nights he stayed over, he’d wake up early and come into her room. “Can I go home now?” he said. “Lijah needs me. I got to feed my goats.”
She didn’t argue.
Al, when she visited Eleanor’s (there was that word again, “visit”), spent most of her time on the phone with Garrett, a boy she’d met at computer camp, and a girl named Siobhan, from her school, who also wore a buzz cut and, after junior year, only answered to the name Steve. Sometimes the two of them talked so late into the night that Eleanor would find Al passed out on her bed, the phone still in her hand, the sound of nothing but a dial tone, suggesting that off in another house, miles away, Steve or Garrett had probably fallen asleep in the middle of their conversation, too.
One time, driving Ursula home from the orthodontist, Eleanor had asked Ursula about Garrett and Al’s relationship.
“Are they boyfriend and girlfriend?” she said.
“Oh, God,” Ursula said. “Did you really think Al would have a boyfriend? Are you living under a rock?”
“I was just asking,” Eleanor said.
“Al’s gay, Mom. She’s the most obviously not-straight person I ever met. If you want to know who Al’s got the hots for, it’s Steve.”
The news should hardly have been a shock, only it was. Up until then—crazily, perhaps—Eleanor had never viewed all the things about Al that had been different from other people’s children as indicative of her sexuality. Al was simply different from other kids. Now, hearing her sixteen-year-old explain this most basic information about her own child left Eleanor feeling like an idiot, and—worse—a bad mother. Here she was, a woman obsessed with meeting her children’s needs even before they named them, and in this most basic and essential way, she’d failed to see her daughter for who she really was.
Count the Ways Page 35