“Honest to God,” he said. “You looked great even when you were popping out all those babies. That’s my opinion, anyway.”
“Your girlfriend’s really something,” Eleanor said. “None of the guys can take their eyes off of her.”
“You know how it is,” he said. “Show a bunch of guys a girl in a tight getup and they all go nuts. We’re all like a bunch of dogs with our tongues hanging out, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Don’t you know I’ve always been in love with you?” His voice sounded different. Huskier. He set down the tray of glasses. One by one, he arranged them on the counter, as if he were setting up chess pieces on a board. As if he wanted to take as much time as possible.
“How much have you had to drink tonight?” she said.
“You think I’m joking?”
She had been scrubbing hard, but now she turned around. Timmystood there, holding the empty tray—a soft, sad expression on his face. Later, she would remember this—the sound of the children calling out “red light, green light” in the darkness, the smell of the meat on the grill, Debbie Harry singing “Heart of Glass.” Timmy Pouliot, just standing there with those blue eyes of his. Not even Cam, in their first days together, had ever looked at Eleanor the way Timmy Pouliot did at that moment.
22.
My Body Keeps Wanting to Be Bad
Except for her father’s periodic visits to Crazyland—the fights when her parents got not simply drunk but plastered, and the cries of their lovemaking in the night—Eleanor’s childhood home had been eerily quiet. She spent a lot of time in her room, with her colored pencils. There was conversation at meals, but it seldom involved Eleanor. The house was immaculate, mostly because so little went on there.
The house they lived in now, at the end of the dead-end road, in the shade of Old Ashworthy, was almost never even close to tidy, and except for the nights, never quiet, but to Eleanor that suggested only good things. Life happened here. Children played. Walk in the door from the porch and there’d be art projects on the kitchen table. Bug collections on the windowsill. Neon-colored shoes and action figures and mateless socks and experiments, pictures and magnet alphabet letters on the refrigerator, sprouting avocado seeds, skates, crayons, swords, naked Barbies with their hair chopped off, half-finished Fruit Roll-Ups, Smurfs, rocks. There was a dog underfoot, a chart on the refrigerator awarding stars for peeing in the toilet (for Toby, though once he abandoned diapers, he preferred to pee outdoors, even in winter. Whooping and laughing, he pulled down his pants if he wasn’t naked already and squirted yellow designs in the snow).
Where Ursula maintained a virtually perpetual air of steadiness and good spirits, Toby was, from the first, a child of wildly fluctuating emotions, big passions, and large feelings—ecstasy or despair. Unlike Alison’s frequent dark moods, which often lingered for days, then disappeared as mysteriously as they’d arrived, Toby’s moments of sorrow—from when he was just a few months old—toucheddown like a tornado, swift, powerful, then gone, all within the space of a few minutes.
He spoke earlier than either of his sisters, and even before he was two, he was offering up all these surprising revelations. “I hear music in my head all the time,” he said, in that deep voice of his. He hummed a lot, sometimes even when he was sleeping. He danced, whether or not a record was playing.
It had been Ali, though, with whom Toby made up his own language, which only the two of them understood. Sometimes, sitting at her desk, drawing, Eleanor could hear their strange, unknowable conversations, made of sounds unlike any in the English language. Though when he chose to communicate in words the rest of them understood, what he said was almost equally otherworldly.
“I was talking to God the other day,” he’d begin. He was not yet three when he said this.
“Did you know I used to be a buffalo? Before I came to live in our family?”
He was a boy now, he conceded. But a boy like no other. His rock collection was lined up five deep along the wall of the borning room, where they’d set a mattress on the floor for his bed, and he could tell you what patch of ground, what spot in the woods, every one of them had come from. He knew things without anybody explaining them, and regularly offered up observations about life and the world that seemed to indicate he’d been around a few hundred years before the rest of them. All day long, he barely stopped running—or dancing, or leaping—but when bedtime came, and they all curled up together on the couch with the most recent haul of books from the library, it was Toby who pressed up alongside Eleanor the closest, stroking her arm with a look of reverence as he held on to a piece of ribbon he’d had since he was very small—once pink, now gray—that he twirled around one finger and liked to brush against the inside of his ear. “I want us to be like this forever,” he said.
The family had only recently celebrated Toby’s second birthday when he explained to them all, at dinner, “My brain keeps wantingto be good. But my body keeps wanting to be bad.” That was the day when Toby’s day care teacher had called Eleanor and Cam to come down to the school (not the first time) because he was in trouble again. He’d taken a pair of craft scissors handed out for a project in which he had no interest and cut off a piece of Amanda Dunfey’s hair. He just thought it was so beautiful, he told Eleanor in the car on the way home—his low, husky voice (almost a man’s voice, coming out of a two-year-old) rueful, but baffled. She could grow it back! He just wanted to have that tip of her ponytail—well, maybe more than just the tip—to take home and put in his special box, with all his other treasures.
“Amanda has the softest hair, Mama,” he told her. “I wanted to brush it on my cheek.”
23.
A Non-Comic Strip
Early in her marriage, after the sting of her book publisher’s rejection had faded—and with no particular belief that anything would come of it—Eleanor had started drawing a comic strip about their life on the farm. For reasons still unclear to herself—perhaps because it was too fragile, and maybe too precious to bring out into the light—she kept this project a secret. She hadn’t even shared it with Cam.
This wasn’t the kind of strip that featured jokes, or made you laugh out loud. What she liked to do in her panels was to give an honest, loving, but unsentimental picture of the life of a family. She never saw the strip as providing income or becoming any kind of career. It was the thing she did at her desk—early in the morning, generally, before anyone else woke up—for the pure joy of it. Years earlier, before her marriage, she had often known the feeling of such pleasure in her work. With the strip she found that she was able to reawaken a part of herself that might otherwise have disappeared during those long, tiring, and occasionally mind-numbing days of caring for a young child, and then another one, and another after that.
As the years passed, the cast of characters in Eleanor’s strip expanded—a fictional family, but one that bore a strong resemblance to her own. The central character was the mother, Maggie, a librarian who played ukulele in a local rock and roll band—a woman who was always trying without success to get in better shape (she did the Jane Fonda workout, but followed up every session with a brownie). Maggie’s hair, like Eleanor’s, usually looked untidy (except in the strip about the time Maggie gave herself a disastrous perm). The father, Bo, was a handsome potter who was part of a local men’sbasketball team and made beautiful mugs that hardly anybody ever bought.
Eleanor’s non-comic-strip family featured two older girls—Jessie and Kate—and a younger son named Jasper, who collected rocks and got into trouble a lot. With all the other characters in the strip, Eleanor had taken pains to insert fictional details into the story that distinguished them from the real people who’d inspired them. But when she got to the character of Jasper, she felt a need to model him more closely on her real son.
Most of the themes she explored in what she called her non-comic strip stayed close to her experience. There were all those peaches to puree, all those Legos and Playmobil people to pick up.
She wanted to tell stories, but ones that were about real, hard things in a person’s life—about a mother who drove back and forth over the same stretch of road for an hour, looking for a lost Playmobil Pirate sword, or a very young son who stuck his face in a bowl of jello to see what it felt like.
My brain keeps wanting to be good. But my body keeps wanting to be bad.Eleanor had included that observation—made by the Jasper character, of course—in the last panel of an early strip.
Eleanor wanted to present a picture of parenthood that went deeper and truer than the kinds of things she saw in the women’s magazines—an ongoing look at family life and parenthood that didn’t soften the edges or ignore the hard parts. Her passion for the job of raising children would be at the center of every strip, but she would look squarely, unblinkingly, at the other part of the story: how difficult it was, and frustrating, and lonely; the stress it put on a person’s marriage. She wanted to explore how it might be possible to be both a stay-at-home mother with childrenanda feminist of her generation, all within the same twenty-four-hour day. She wanted to portray all those hours spent lying on the rug with a baby readingThe Very Hungry Caterpillarseven times in a row or playing Candy Land, her most hated game, and the one Ursula loved best. (More,she used to cry out.More. More.) She wanted to share the humor and boredom and love in those moments—and the lessons they taught her. Also—andmaybe this explained why, for a long time, she showed her strip to no one—she wanted to explore the complexities of making a marriage, and the ongoing struggle between her love for her husband and the many aspects of being married that frustrated her.
