After that, Eleanor never missed a game. Cam was right: it was fun sitting on the bleachers at the dusty ball field with Alison in her arms or on a blanket next to her on cool spring evenings (and, later, warm summer nights). Half watching the players, but mostly (always with an eye on the older children, playing in the dirt a little ways from the field) talking with the other wives—an experience she’d never had before—about all the small, seemingly insignificant details of their children’s lives that, at the time, consumed them: whether to use a pacifier, when to start solid food, what to do if you observed your four-year-old masturbating. They talked about other things besides the children, too. Recipes, for sure. But also, particularly after a beer—and there was always beer—the conversation came around to sex. Who was having it. Who wasn’t. Who still cared about it.
Cam was among the younger players when he joined the team—the others were in their thirties, mostly, though the catcher, Buck Hollingsworth, was probably over forty, judging by his hairline and his gut.
Rich McGann was the Yellow Jackets’ main pitcher (his wife, Carol, was a nurse who sometimes arrived late to games, still in scrubs). Sal Perrone played second base, no doubt unaware that back in the bleachers, his wife, Lucinda, was making appreciative comments about every reasonably nice-looking man who came up to bat, drawing unfavorable comparisons to Sal. Sal was the slowest runner on the team, but he could hit. He had more home runs than anyone, though every time he hit one, this look of astonishment came over his face, as if he couldn’t quite believe a person like himself had accomplished this.
The weakest player on the team was Harry Botts, who’d opened a coffee bar that sold used records in a long-abandoned storefront on the main street of Akersville. Every year or two, some outsider would move to town and open some interesting little business: a bookstore, a ceramics gallery, a health food co-op. Usually they closed within the year. But Harry’s record store had survived a half dozen seasons, mostly because he had a trust fund, people said.
The Yellow Jackets were the first team Harry had ever played on, and they’d put him in the outfield, where he had yet to field a single ball. His at-bats were understood to be guaranteed strikeouts. But the players maintained a certain amused affection for Harry, and it helped that he never showed up without a cooler of good German beer. That, and his Cubs hat. Nobody knew what had brought Harry from Chicago to Akersville—an unlikely move—but they embraced him as a kind of mascot. He might not know anything about the game of softball, but he never failed to show up with the beer.
Eleanor’s most frequent companion on the bench was Peggy Olin, whose husband, Bob, played shortstop. Every time he slid into a base, Peggy groaned. “You know how hard it was getting out the grass stains last time?” she said to Eleanor.
Peggy and Bob had a daughter, Gina, a year older than Alison, and an older daughter, Katie, who led games of red light, green lightand tag with the younger kids. The summer they met, Peggy had recently read a book by Adelle Davis that inspired her to transform her family’s diet. She handed out samples of healthy but barely edible snacks that the children generally disposed of once they were out of sight while, off at the hot dog stand, her husband scarfed down fries.
Peggy believed in breastfeeding on demand—was still nursing three-year-old Gina, and never missed an opportunity to comment when she saw one of the other mothers taking out a bottle of formula. “Don’t they know all the health benefits their child is missing out on when they give them that stuff?” Peggy said to Eleanor. Eleanor breastfed, too, though not as determinedly as Peggy did. (Two years later, Peggy would still be giving her daughter her breast on occasion, though by age four Gina could unbutton her mother’s shirt and ask for it.) Gina was large for three—a pale-skinned strawberry blonde who mostly sat on the bleachers with her mother and required constant reapplication of sunscreen and bug spray.
Observing this, Bonnie Henderson—wife of the third baseman—rolled her eyes. Bonnie was that other type of mother, whose parenting philosophy, if she had one, mainly involved giving her two sons a large bag of cheese puffs and a Coke at the beginning of every game and shooting a stream of ice-cold water from her boys’ squirt guns in their direction any time one of them acted up. Back before kids, she’d worked as a corrections officer at the state prison, and still employed a few of her old techniques.
“If I’m walking a little funny today, girls,” Bonnie told them one evening, “it’s on account of all the crazy stuff Jerry and I were up to last night.” Her stories tended to feature times their children had come into their bedroom at an inopportune moment—which could have been just about any moment, to hear Bonnie tell it—or surprising places where they’d had sex.
“I think she’s making it up,” Carol said.
“I don’t know,” Lucinda offered. “Did you see the way Jerry cupped his hand around Bonnie’s butt the other night, after he came in from hitting that home run?”
Partly, the women were shocked. More so, envious. Though none of the women seemed deeply unhappy with their lives. They wereyoung. Their children were healthy, and so were they. The banter of those summer nights felt less like complaint than a ritual of bonding, a way for the women to make connections with each other, over the shared travails of children and husbands, judgmental mothers-in-law and losing the baby weight.
Partway through the season, a new player joined the team. Two of them, actually: Ray and Timmy Pouliot. Ray was a relief pitcher whose specialty was a knuckleball. He worked as a carpenter and wore wifebeater shirts that showed off his muscles. It took Eleanor a few minutes to realize that Timmy, drafted for right field, was the same person she’d met years before, that day she’d gone to the falls, when he’d admired her drawing and asked her if she had a boyfriend. Eleanor remembered the story Timmy told her about finding his father in the garage that day. The gun.
She figured he must be eighteen years old, and he had filled out. He had a compact build, and a tattoo of his father’s name on his bicep, but Eleanor still recognized a certain angelic softness in those incredibly blue eyes of his—sadness maybe—that set him apart from the other men on the team.
The Pouliot brothers rode motorcycles. The two of them generally arrived just as the game was starting, roaring up to the ball field on their Harleys, no helmets; you could hear them coming all the way from Main Street.
Timmy’s girlfriend that summer was Mandy, who worked at the Stop & Shop checkout. At the beginning of the season she’d sat on the bleachers with the other players’ wives, but when the conversation turned as it generally did to pregnancies and breastfeeding, day care and playgroups, she drifted over to the edge of the field in her midriff top and short shorts to help Coco with whatever project she’d taken on that evening—French braiding everybody’s hair, more often than not—or else she’d just stand there watching the game. When it was over, she hopped on the back of the bike and wrapped her arms around Timmy’s waist, and the two of them took off in a cloud of dust.
Eleanor was eight and a half months into her second pregnancy by this point in the season. Her back ached all the time now, andshe’d developed an odd rash on her face. That night, lying with Cam in the dark, her head nestled into his chest, she spoke of the Pouliot brothers.
“That was some catch Ray made,” Cam offered.
“That girlfriend Timmy brought to the game has an amazing body,” Eleanor said. She had not yet lost the weight from having Alison when she’d gotten pregnant again. “Mandy,” Eleanor said. “The blonde.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” he told her.
17.
Black Ice
Afew miles down the road from where they lived, there was a lake where they’d skated, that first winter before Alison’s birth. Eleanor’s center of gravity was off, due to her large and growing belly, but she’d managed to get across the ice, with Cam’s arm around her for support. The ice was uneven, though, and Eleanor’s back hurt. They only stayed out for a few minutes. But it was a good day.
A year later, newly pregnant with Ursula, with a baby to care for now, it had been harder to get out on her skates. Then came one of those rare and precious days (sometimes whole years went by between them) when the perfect combination of meteorological events took place: A hard freeze. No snow. Rain maybe, followed by frigid temperatures that left a layer of black ice over everything. Perfect skating conditions.
They discovered this on a night they’d been at the movies—a rare evening out, Darla babysitting for Alison. Eleanor and Cam had pulled over by the side of the frozen lake to take in the full moon.
“You know what we need to do,” Cam said to Eleanor, as they stood on the embankment, looking out.
They kept their skates in the back seat for moments like this. Now they laced them up and stepped out onto the ice. With no light but what the moon provided, they took off across the lake, just the two of them.
That night the ice was glass—Eleanor’s skate blades newly sharpened, her husband’s arm around her waist, one of her mittened hands in his. A sensation came over her—she could still summon it—as close to flight as Eleanor would ever know.Remember this moment,she thought.
They’d heard a strange groaning sound under their skate bladesthen, like an ancient sea creature waking from a long sleep to find himself trapped under the ice and pushing to escape. Eleanor had thought the frozen lake was giving way, but Cam told her it was just the ice expanding.
