25.
Sex in the Air
Now that the children were getting older, Eleanor was taking on more freelance jobs. She missed spending days at her desk, making up stories and drawing pictures to illustrate them, but it had become clear, after her publisher declined to renew her contract, that she had better come up with a new way of meeting their expenses. Bodie’s adventures traveling around the world, an orphan with a pet pig and a red suitcase, had got them a house, paid for Cam’s woodshop, allowed her to stay at home, able to work in her pajamas all those years surrounded by her colored pencils. Once Eleanor had supposed she could keep doing that forever.
Now she just wanted to be sure the bills got paid every month. When there was something left over, she could buy Alison the insect book she wanted or take a trip to Santa’s Land—a place Ursula had seen in a brochure and was crazy to visit. The truth was, most of their best times took place right here on the farm—putting on plays, making valentines, building snow forts in winter, sailing their boats with their homemade cork people every spring, and when it got warm enough, walking down to the falls every afternoon to jump in the swimming hole. You didn’t need a lot of money for any of that.
By the time Alison reached first grade, and Ursula was enrolled in kindergarten, their lives had fallen into something resembling a routine. Toby went to day care four mornings a week (the fifth, Fridays, he stayed home with Eleanor). Friday nights, in winter, they went out for pizza, and on rare occasions—fewer and fewer of these—they left the children with Coco and took in a movie. Three nights a week, in softball season, they headed to the ball field.
Cam still had his woodworking projects, but, with strong encouragement from Eleanor, he had added a sideline: making hand-carvedspoons. Four different craft shops carried them now, and though the income from sales never came to much, for the first time in their married life he had become a legitimate financial contributor.
But the primary responsibility for making the mortgage and taxes on their property still fell to Eleanor. She got to work most mornings by eight, as soon as the children left for school and day care, and she stayed focused on that till four, when the children got home. Then it was time to hear about everyone’s day and get dinner on the stove while the girls worked on their homework and Toby stretched out on the floor, building tepees or showing her a new rock he’d found for his collection or teaching Sally a trick.
Standing at the stove, listening to the radio and the hum of children’s voices around her, Eleanor could let the worries of her day evaporate, and not even the news that their house needed a new roof, or a letter from Toby’s day care informing them of his most recent escapade, not even Cam’s increasingly long absences at craft fairs as far as Portland, Maine, could shake her feeling about their life. Darla would talk forever about leaving Bobby. Patty, back in New York (her love affair with a sportscaster in Boston finished), was stressed out about not being made a partner in her ad agency, when so many less-qualified men had accomplished that. The women on the bleachers at Cam’s softball games fantasized about a getaway to Hawaii or Florida, with or very possibly without their husbands: but for Eleanor, there was no other place she’d rather be than this one.
Before they ate, everyone held hands and sang grace—a Shaker song Eleanor had taught them, “Simple Gifts.” But once it was over the meal took on the air of a happy free-for-all—Ursula offering up the news that Gina Olin had thrown up on the bus and some interesting fact she’d learned about her current passion, Iceland, or describing the outfit her glamorous kindergarten teacher, Miss Thibeault, had worn that day. (A purple velvet pantsuit! A monkey-print skirt with a shirt to match! Earrings shaped like unicorns!)
At this point Alison, who never had any patience for Ursula’s fashion commentary, might lay out her options for an experiment she wanted to replicate that she’d read about in a book. Invariably one of them would spill their milk, at which point Cam might jump upfrom the table to suggest that maybe instead of refilling the glass, he should fix everyone a root beer float. Was it possible that Toby had never experienced one of those?
“Not until he finishes his dinner,” Eleanor said. And then to Toby, “I don’t want to see one single piece of broccoli on your plate, mister.” At which point Toby would stick a piece into his ear.
“Broccoli all gone, Mama,” he told her. Cam reached for the root beer.
Eleanor looked across the table to Cam. No need to say anything. Here was the one person on the planet who understood what they were doing here, what they had made. If, a minute later, Toby spilled his float, or stuck the straw into his nostril, or blew into it so hard that root beer poured out onto the table, as, very likely, he would, they might shake their heads in a kind of mock despair, but the truth was, they’d wanted this—this six-year-old daughter, bent over her Mandarin vocabulary book, her younger sister, drawing a picture of Miss Thibeault’s amazing shoes, in this too-small kitchen with a too-large dog who invariably planted herself directly in the center of traffic where a wild red-headed boy now flung himself on top of her to bury his face in her fur.
Toby worshipped his sisters. Strong-minded as he was, he remained ready to submit to anything they wanted so long as they included him—dressing him up, pulling him in the wagon, assigning him roles in the plays they put on. His performances were wild, exuberant, anarchic. Even when caught in the act of doing something he’d been forbidden to do, as was true at this particular moment, when he upended a bowl of rice over his head, announcing a snowstorm, it was almost impossible for any of them to speak sternly to Toby. You tried to be mad, but ended up laughing.
When it was all over—and the children had had their baths, and the chapter from whatever book they were reading at the moment, or a game of Uno, and they were in bed, finally, the dog snoring by the woodstove—the two of them could stumble off to bed themselves, peel off their clothes, and drop onto the bed. If Cam no longer reached for Eleanor, or Eleanor for Cam—was that what mattered most anymore? They were lucky, Eleanor reminded herself. Theyloved each other. They lived on a beautiful farm at the end of a long dirt road near a waterfall. They had three healthy children. That most of all.
There was a rhythm to their lives now, marked by the seasons in part, and by everyone’s ages—who needed naps, who needed diaper changes. (And then the great moment: nobody did anymore.) In winter, they stoked the woodstove and shoveled the car out, made valentines, stayed in their pajamas all day with a stack of library books. At the first sign of spring they made cork people. Then came softball season.
Eleanor looked forward to those games. Not so much for the games as for all the things that went along with the actual play—the pleasure in watching other people’s children and how they’d grown since last year’s season, the company of other women, the cold beer on a warm night. Three nights a week Eleanor packed sandwiches and drinks and Tupperware containers of Goldfish and animal crackers and headed out in the station wagon to the ball field. She never got tired of watching her husband standing out there on first base, his red curls spilling out from under his cap, his long arm reaching out for the ball with his lefty glove, the graceful way he ran when he made a hit, as he could usually be counted on to do. There were more powerful hitters on the team, but nobody could run like Cam.
Eleanor had been surprised to see Walt at the ball field that first night. He wasn’t a player anymore, but he served as umpire for games. He knew the rules of softball better than the Pledge of Allegiance. He brought folding chairs for himself and Edith, when he could persuade her to get out of the car. Mostly she stayed in the front seat reading a magazine, or knitting.
And there was more going on than what took place on the field. High school girls selling hot dogs, a summer fundraiser for next year’s class trip to Washington, D.C., and the boys who came to hang out there, talking about their cars and trying to impress the hot dog girls. Younger boys on lowrider bikes lolling by the fence, spitting in the dirt and passing around the headphones to somebody’s Walkman. Older women of the town, selling Avon products or just cometo watch the game. Maybe they used to be married to someone who played softball here once, but if so it was long ago.
From where Eleanor sat in the stands with the other players’ wives, she could hear the crack of the bat against the ball, the men calling out to each other, sometimes approval, sometimes trash talk. The wives called out to them, too, sometimes:Way to go, Rich. You’ve got this one, Timmy. See the ball, Bob.
Then there was Coco, their neighbors Evan and Betsy’s daughter—now their occasional babysitter, a long-legged teenager with golden skin and a ponytail that bobbed when she ran. Warm summer evenings in softball season, she and her girlfriends had taken to riding their bikes to games. Maybe in part because she was an only child of older parents, she liked spending time with Eleanor and Cam’s family.
Eleanor had first met Coco on the night of Alison’s birth, when she’d stopped by with her mother during the early stages of Eleanor’s labor, bearing banana bread. Even back then, young as she was, there had always been something about Coco. When she showed up at the field, all the younger children looked up from playing in the dirt and clustered around her. They knew that she would do something thrilling—organize a play, or teach them cat’s cradle or gymnastics moves. When Coco got into position to execute a cartwheel, all eyes on the stands moved from the ball game to the girl on the grass. The children worshipped Coco, of course, and the mothers loved how she kept the children entertained. “That girl’s going to drive men crazy someday,” Peggy Olin observed, watching her.
“Someday?” Bonnie Henderson said. “Try now.”
That was the summer Coco taught Alison and Gina—daughter of Peggy and Bob—how to execute a cartwheel. Neither of them had been able to pull off the move the way Coco did, but they spent all July and August trying.
It seemed to Eleanor that Coco must have the longest legs of any fifteen-year-old ever. There was a glorious effortlessness to the way she tumbled across the field, one turn of her long, lithe body spinning into the next, with Alison and Gina alongside her, executing their own floppy versions of the move, and the younger childrenfollowing behind like ducklings—leaping and tumbling—the sound of their voices high and joyful out beyond the third-base line.
“Have you ever seen a more amazing pair of legs?” Peggy said.
In the beginning of the season, Coco had only shown up at games now and then, but more and more as it progressed, she had become a nightly presence on the field, her ponytail whipping behind her when she ran.
“I think Coco’s got a crush on you,” Eleanor told Cam one evening as they pulled up to the ball field to see her standing next to her bike waiting for them. She appeared to be wearing mascara, which was new.
It had not escaped Eleanor’s attention that every time Cam came up to bat, Coco stopped what she was doing to watch him.
“You’re reading too much into it,” Cam said. “She’s just a lonely kid. Only child. You know the story.”
