“I’m only seventeen,” Eugene says quietly, almost as if he doesn’t want them to hear. “How am I supposed to understand all of this?”
“You haven’t really explained things,” Frank says.
Eleanor wants to kick Frank under the blanket, knowing that he had no experience with girls at seventeen. She gives in to the instinct to hug her son. “Come here.” He bends over, dutifully, and she reaches to kiss him on the forehead. “Go to bed. We can finish all of this in the morning.” Eugene leaves. Frank turns onto his side. Eleanor listens to the hum of the ceiling fan and the tweets of the sparrows.
ELEANOR CAN’T HELP but be a little shocked at what Eugene tells her.
“She says she wants to try being a lesbian, that the two sides of her sexuality are fighting with each other,” he says over his seven o’clock bowl of cereal. He is late. After brushing away the latest sparrow nesting material, Eleanor had knocked on his door to wake him, and was greeted with a muted “Fuck off!” She left him, only to return every ten minutes to try again. The disappointment she felt each time she heard him had crushed her. But now, minutes later, she experiences the revelation that she is needed again.
Yet, she can’t tell if he is truly upset. His attention seems focused on food. He shovels cereal into his mouth, trying to accumulate as much as he can over his tongue and lower jaw, while at the same time he talks.
“I didn’t realize …,” Eleanor says. “Maybe saying that is a way to let you down easily?” Looking at his expression, she is immediately sorry that she has said this. She is clearly an idiot. Eleanor asks instead, “What did you say to her?”
He looks up from his bowl. “This is not my fault,” he says through the food in his mouth. “It just ended up that way. Why do you always have to talk these things out?”
“You woke me in the middle of the night to talk about it.”
“I don’t want to talk anymore.” He swallows and waves his hand, his long narrow fingers splayed. “End of subject.” He gets up from his bowl and glass and walks away to get ready for school.
Eleanor hears his brother, Liam, coming down the stairs. He is still in his pajama pants and T-shirt. Liam’s middle school starts later than the high school. Without greeting his mother, he takes two eggs from the refrigerator, butter, and an English muffin, cracks the eggs and scrambles them in a soup bowl with a fork.
He looks up at his mother. “What was that? Was it about Margaret? They broke up, didn’t they?”
“You’re going to turn into an egg,” Eleanor says.
There have been times when Eugene won’t give Eleanor any information about the people he is texting with. So she asks Liam, who is three years younger, and doesn’t fully understand his brother’s acute need for privacy. Liam pays close attention to what his brother does, and Eugene, whom Eleanor believes is oblivious to things around him, is too focused on himself to notice.
Liam pours the eggs into a nonstick frying pan and uses a spatula to curdle them. The kitchen fills with the smell. “It was bound to happen,” he says. “You don’t have two-hour-long phone conversations without something really good or really bad happening.”
Eleanor smiles at her younger son’s youthful wisdom. “How do you know? You haven’t had any girlfriends yet.”
“I go on YouTube, Mom.”
WHEN THE HOUSE is finally empty, Eleanor sits in the kitchen, waiting for her computer to boot up, cradling the third mug of coffee in her palms. Annie barks at the back door because the recycling truck has pulled up in the alley behind the garage. Eleanor logs on to her Facebook account. Suddenly she isn’t listening to the dog. Her head is light. She didn’t expect an answer, not really. But there it is.
Hi Eleanor. Yes! I am the Phil Anderson from your high school trig class. Gosh that was a long time ago. And I haven’t thought about math since then! Fun to hear from you! My oldest daughter goes to college in Evanston! How far from Northwestern are you? And guess what, I have a border collie. She is so smart she could be writing this message! I am about an hour and a half from you in a small town called Bailey. Good to hear you are so close. Tell me more about you, your family, and your dog. Sincerely, Phil.
For a moment, in her housewife morning, she has no children, she has no husband, and she is free. She can’t hear extraneous noise, like nesting birds or the telephone ringing. Even if the sparrows are building their nasty little nests in the eaves of her house. She has a break in all of that. There is an opening before her. A clearing.
5
ELEANOR GETS KAYE’S call on Thursday morning: drinks at her house, she’ll take care of everything. Eleanor senses that Kaye wants to get together more and more frequently, ever since Eric and Clara started work on the boat.
Eleanor changes from her T-shirt to a button-down blouse with small blue flowers and three-quarter sleeves. She applies mascara and lip gloss and walks to the happy hour. Kaye lives nearly a half mile from Eleanor’s house, in an older neighborhood with straight streets that meet at perpendicular angles. The houses, most of them, were built between 1900 and 1930 and are largely well kept. Huge deciduous trees grow along the parkways and in the front lawns. During thunderstorms, branches break and fall in the grassy yards and across the sidewalks as evidence of their vulnerability.
It is mid-May and the petals of the first blooms lay scattered on the ground. Eleanor is cold without a jacket. In her bag she carries a bottle of decent red wine, something Frank’s golfing partner brought with him when he invited himself to dinner. It had become a long dinner party. The golfing partner, newly separated from his wife, was morose. “We can’t just ask him to leave,” Frank had said, showing impressive empathy. Eleanor realized that the biggest surprise to her had been that she was married to a golfer, not that Frank wanted to take care of his friend, nor that he had unexpectedly brought home a dinner guest with emotional problems. Golf had not been a part of Frank’s repertoire when they first met.
Three women are having cocktails at Kaye’s this particular Thursday. Thursdays are good because they feel like the end of the week, but they don’t get in the way of weekend family time.
Eleanor and Kaye met as room parents for their children’s kindergarten class, where the school PTA created enough work to keep them busy. Both women took their responsibilities seriously, at least for that first year, hand making a papier-mâché solar system, creating all-inclusive winter holiday art and cooking projects, on-the-spot pancakes for the family breakfast, and the ever-stressful Teacher Appreciation Week breakfasts and lunches, where each grade took a day and each set of room parents prepared a meal for that day. This particular event had brought Eleanor and Kaye together for much-needed evening libations when the whole thing was over.
None of this was what Eleanor and Kaye had expected their lives to be when they were students and meeting their husbands. Eleanor had never had a full-time job that used her skills as a PhD candidate in English before getting pregnant and having children, only teaching assistantships and a brief part-time position at an open-enrollment college that paid her per class.
Now, Eleanor recognizes the cliché her life has become, with the constant barrage of popular fiction and television series. She feels her family has taken advantage of her as she drives her sons to music lessons, and cooks dinners that force her youngest son to make his own. She and her Thursday cocktail friends are always mildly annoyed at their husbands, who condescendingly tell them that they are high-maintenance women and laugh about it. “Why isn’t there a reality TV show about you?” Because, Eleanor thinks, it would be dull.
Now all of the duties of room parents are long over. There are few rewards for her past volunteer work. Instead there is the achy feeling one gets when one’s teenager berates one then instantly needs help afterward. Teenagers seem to need their mothers profoundly, in ways Eleanor and her friends would not have imagined, to talk to at odd times about homework, or teen love, or to tell Mom that she sucks at parenting.
For only a br
ief time, Eleanor, encouraged by her friends, thought about going back to school to finish her PhD, but all of the people she had originally worked with were either retired or dead. And her research had not been significant. Kaye once wanted Eleanor to partner with her to write grant proposals for nonprofits, but then the economy dipped.
Some days Eleanor feels that she could burst from the tedium. There are things Eleanor wants to say to her friends, she considers, as she approaches Kaye’s house. That she is bored during the day, even when she is very busy doing something voluntary and useful. When surrounded by people, she still feels alone. She is frightened that she will have to fill her time when her sons go off to college in a few years.
Maybe she could be reckless and not worry about consequences, skip her vitamins for a week, stay up late one or two nights without worrying about having to wake up early, or fall asleep naturally without having her anxieties take over. Exchange emails with Phil Anderson without worrying about how far it could go, or what he was really thinking. She wants to be able to drive without a seat belt. She wants to go fast.
KAYE’S HOUSE IS vast and lined in dark oak, as an original Arts and Crafts home might be, but Eleanor knows that Kaye has had it meticulously remodeled to look this way. The kitchen is painted a dark blue with oak cabinets and wrought iron handles. The three women sit on benches around an antique wood table.
Kaye has provided a beautiful arrangement of multicolored tortilla chips with various dips from a Central Street caterer. They drink wine from thick sturdy glasses that were a wedding gift from a longtime friend of Eric’s.
They talk about Eleanor’s upcoming thirtieth high school reunion. “Remember when I thought you should bring me as your lesbian lover for your twenty-fifth?” Kaye says.
Eleanor shakes her head. “Could we not go there?”
Their other friend Magda smiles as she holds a chip overwhelmed with salsa, and pulls a straight brown hair out from where it is caught in the corner of her mouth.
“Going as a lesbian couple only shocks if people care,” Eleanor says. “We aren’t lesbians, we aren’t a couple, and no one I went to high school with cares.”
“I think you look young for your age,” Magda says, moving her eyes along Eleanor’s face as though she is looking for lines.
“She’s forty-eight,” Kaye says. “How old are you?”
“Forty-five.”
“I’m sure that compared to the other folks at the reunion, Eleanor will look good. Everyone else there has, I’m sure, put on a ton of weight, and people in our neighborhood work out and we diet like there’s no tomorrow. I doubt they do that in every community. So, she will have that. Eleanor, you have distinguished yourself by aging well. You should go. Even if they have no idea who you are. They will look at you and want to know you.”
“They certainly did not want to know me when I was sixteen.”
“Don’t go as a lesbian,” Magda says. “And don’t talk to them about being a liberal.”
“No one is going to care if you are a liberal now, they only care about high school,” Kaye says. “Is there someone you want to see?”
Like Phil, Eleanor’s new pen pal? Who, during the past week, in emails, has written that he lives only an hour and a half away and that his daughter goes to Northwestern, not far from Eleanor’s house? And sometimes he comes into town, and would they ever run into each other?
Eleanor has the geek girl fantasy of showing up to a high school reunion on the arm of a beautiful former football player. But she doesn’t even know for sure what Phil looks like now.
PHIL’S EMAILS ARE upbeat with an undertone of vulnerability that leads Eleanor to think that he is confiding in her. A part of her wonders why and a part of her enjoys the attention, the second part being more dominant. He asks more about her day than her husband, Frank, does. But mostly, he wants her opinion. He doesn’t seem to talk at her. They are writing to each other; it is a discussion, an exchange.
This is what she thinks about while she is sitting with her friends, in a haze of alcohol.
Sometimes I get an email from you and it’s the bright spot of my day of boring work with the almost-ex-wife. At night we have to sit at the dining room table with each other and divide up all our crap, even our kids’ time. So, tell me, what are you up to today? Are you meeting your friends for coffee? Are you walking your dog? Are you cooking something interesting?
Magda and Kaye absorb themselves in a complicated story while Eleanor pretends to listen. She stares out the window above the sink, watching the branches and leaves move in the light. Phil writes to her long emails that interest her, and always end with an open question, and an expectation that she will answer. While he frequently writes early in the morning, she tries to wait until later in the afternoon to answer him, so that she doesn’t appear anxious or too solicitous. She is married. She isn’t sure where he is going with this.
His wife is leaving him, but she hasn’t actually left yet. She still lives in the house. He says that he is the one taking care of the daughter who is still in high school, though she is rarely home. He cooks the evening meals and does most of the housekeeping. It’s going to be his house. His wife spends a lot of time “out there” looking for a new place to live. Eleanor suspects that Phil’s wife has found someone new. Or at least, wants to find someone new. After twenty years of marriage, you wonder what is on the other side, just as the beauty of your body and hair begin to fade.
Eleanor thinks of all of this when she reads Phil’s emails (all four of them). She has not seen him in twenty-five years. She knew him in high school, lost touch with him during college, and wondered what happened to him. He had joined the marines at some point. She’d wondered if he had seen combat. During that time, she’d asked other people about him, but no one knew anything. Of all things, Eleanor had not imagined him married.
Sitting at Kaye’s kitchen table amidst the buzz of the other women’s voices, Eleanor wonders: What if I wasn’t bored at home? What if Frank made surprise dinner reservations every month or so? What if he laughed at my jokes? What if he made his kids eat the dinner she had prepared every night? Would I still be interested in connecting with Phil?
So, Phil writes to Eleanor. He emails photos of his daughter and her junior prom date. He talks about his vegetable garden. She counters by asking him if it isn’t too early for lettuce (she has a black thumb). Phil says that he saves Eleanor’s emails in a file because they make him laugh.
So, what does Eleanor do about this at the cocktail hour with Kaye and Magda? As she sits there and lets the wine slip from her lips to her brain, eating, smiling as though she is really listening. She is far away wondering what Phil is doing right now. Is he watching his younger daughter at an athletic event? Is he still trying to have family dinners? Is he reading, listening to music, doing anything Eleanor would find interesting? Is he dreaming about his wife?
Early in Frank’s career, when trading firms had big holiday parties and everyone dressed to the nines to go, Eleanor learned that she could nod and smile and half listen to conversations that didn’t hold her interest. So, she is not listening to Sheryl Crow piped into the kitchen, or to much of what her friends are discussing. Her mind is a million miles away: there are imaginary hands on her shoulders, there is imaginary breath in her ear.
Eleanor, This thing with Linda has been dragging out—the “her living here in the house” thing. She goes out on weekend nights like she is a teenager. She doesn’t even talk to me unless it’s about the furniture. Eleanor, what would you do in this situation? What would you do?
AS ELEANOR THINKS of Phil’s emails, Kaye opens the third bottle. Eleanor can’t believe they’ve got this far. It is clear that Magda is tipsy. She teaches at the university, and in her department, a young, unbalanced woman has filed a sexual harassment suit against a male professor, who is Magda’s office mate. It is the student’s word against her office mate’s and there are clearly subtleties and lies on both parts. “Althou
gh,” Magda says, holding her index finger in the air, “These things are never cut-and-dried.” She pushes her glass toward Kaye for a refill. She has been telling a long story. It is now impossible for her to be in her office with this man. When Eleanor wakes up from her daydream to pay attention to Magda, she realizes it’s a story she’s heard before.
Eleanor wishes she could unload her own thoughts as Magda has done, to talk about the emails from Phil, but it’s too risky. “You’re getting loopy,” she tells Magda.
“Kaye keeps filling my glass.”
Kaye rolls her eyes as she pours.
“You’re going to have to leave your car here and walk home,” Eleanor says to Magda.
“It isn’t far. I can walk.”
“You’re a safe drunk,” Kaye tells her.
Magda frowns and changes the subject. “How is the boat going, Kaye?”
“It’s complicated. There were Vikings in Scotland. And yet, one does not have to be a Viking, or even Scottish, to want to build a Viking boat.”
“How do you build it?” Eleanor realizes she has never asked for the details.
“From a kit,” Kaye says. “One day a large truck pulls up in the alleyway of your house and men unload a Viking boat kit. Wood. Directions. You can buy a prefab vacation house and have it sent in a kit from Scandinavia. So, why not a boat?”
“It’s like an Ikea boat,” Magda says.
“You should both come and see it sometime.”
Kaye turns toward one of the walls, then she turns back again. “I have a picture of the finished product somewhere. I’m not in the mood to get it out. This is their thing. Eric and Clara’s. I stay out of it. I don’t know a thing about boats. I have a recurring nightmare of taking the stupid thing out into the harbor and everyone pointing and laughing as we try to set sail in it as a family. It’s like that dream you have where you arrive at school without your clothes and there is no way you can go home to get them. The only thing that would save me would be for it to sink in shallow water and it not to be my fault.”
We Have Everything Before Us Page 3