Labor day again. Cam and Eleanor’s annual potluck. The Hendersons came, and Sal and Lucinda Perrone with their son, Josh, the Olins with their two girls, Katie and Gina. Harry Botts—always alone. Ray and Timmy Pouliot, on their motorcycles.
Walt and Edith came, of course—Walt bearing his cider press and a bushel of Cortlands for the children to run through the press. Coco’s parents, Evan and Betsy, showed up, and their neighbors Simon and Tilda, who lived in the geodesic dome down the road, though like every other Buckminster Fuller follower they knew who’d constructed one, they’d had a “For Sale by Owner” sign out front almost since they’d built it.
“You know how hard it is to put furniture or hang pictures in a house with no right angles and no normal walls?” Tilda said. They were hoping to move to Oregon, but nobody wanted to live in a geodesic dome anymore.
Darla came without Bobby, which was fine with Eleanor. She still couldn’t understand why Darla stayed with her husband.
That night she showed up with a black eye, which she told everyone came from walking into a door.
“I’m just waiting for the right moment,” Darla told Eleanor. The familiar line. “I just need a little more housecleaning money in the kitty to make my getaway.”
Eleanor no longer made any comment when Darla said this.
The Labor Day blowout was a potluck—everyone bringing a casserole or a pan full of grilled potato skins or a pot of chili, buffalo wings, tacos, and in Edith’s case, a deadly-looking meat loaf made with Hamburger Helper. After everyone went home, Eleanor set it out for Sally, but she wasn’t interested.
That year, Eleanor had taken her party theme inspiration from a feature inFamily Circle,“Aloha! How to Throw Your Own Backyard Luau.” She hung paper lanterns with white lights across the yard and followed the recipes for coconut shrimp and pineapple upside-down cake, and though Cam told her that really, the guys would just as soon have beer, she mixed piña coladas in the blender. Toby had got his hands on the mix and downed a whole blender full—before they’d added the liquor, fortunately.
She had checked a record out of the library—Don Ho,Hawaii-Ho!When the sun went down, the garden was illuminated with tiki lights. Still carrying an extra ten pounds of the baby weight from Toby, she chose a loose, muumuu-style dress. Cam went shirtless that night, looking as fit as he had been the night she first went back to his little cabin in Brattleboro. Lucinda Perrone—with her husband, Sal, the only ones among their guests who appeared to have noted the Hawaiian theme—had shown up wearing a grass skirt and a bikini top. Sal wore a shirt he’d bought at a Jimmy Buffett show.
At some point in the evening, Eleanor observed Lucinda, piña colada in hand, laughing with Ray Pouliot by the big ash tree. She was demonstrating her hula moves, tossing her hair, touching his arm. Eleanor found Sal, in his too-bright parrot and hibiscus shirt, sitting by himself at the edge of the field, studying the moon. He’d probably consumed more than a few beers. He sat hunched with another cold one in his hand.
“You tell me,” he said when she approached him. “What do women want these days, anyway? I try to be a good husband, but I can never please my wife.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“We hardly ever talk to each other, except about who’s going to pick up the kids. All we do is watch TV.”
Eleanor didn’t know what to say, so she just sat there. Sometimes the only thing you could do was listen.
“I try to make her happy,” Sal said. “She had her heart set on Disney, so we took the kids. The middle of July when it was a hundreddegrees in Florida, standing in line at some ride so you can sit in a boat watching mechanical pirates. I’ll be working overtime all year to pay for it. And every night, back at the hotel, she was telling me all the ways I disappoint her. I’m not exciting enough. I should go to the gym.”
Eleanor knew all about the Disney trip. Lucinda had sent her a postcard from Orlando. “Joshie threw up on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad,” she wrote. “Greta pitched a fit because we wouldn’t buy her a Snow White costume that cost sixty dollars. Goofy gave Jessica a hug and she burst into tears. Sal and I aren’t speaking to each other.”
“She says I’m not romantic,” Sal said. “One of her girlfriends’ husbands gave her a diamond pendant for her birthday. Nothing I do ever surprises her.”
“It’s a different kind of romantic, being dependable,” Eleanor said. Her voice was quiet.
“Lu and I hardly ever have sex anymore,” he told her. “She’s always too tired.”
“It’s not so easy, after a long day with the kids.” The picture came to Eleanor of Cam, reaching for her as he had a couple of nights back. How she had pretended she was sleeping. “I understand where she’s coming from.”
“You know how I would have liked to spend that vacation?” he said. “In a tent in Maine, cooking over a fire. Sleeping under the stars with my wife next to me.”
The two of them sat on the grass, far enough from the pit where Cam was grilling lamb kebabs that the smoke wouldn’t get in their eyes. Eleanor and Lucinda Perrone had a superficial kind of friendship, from years of having each other’s children over to play, and softball nights, but the truth was that Eleanor had never liked Lucinda. Still, she understood how easy it could be, when you had kids, for two people to lose track of each other. There they’d been, all of them, back in their twenties, going to Grateful Dead shows in Vermont and readingThe Joy of Sex,or just having a lot of it. There was a time when even Lamaze classes had felt sexy.
Now there were all these children to show for it. And they’d forgotten what got them there in the first place.
Eleanor and Sal sat there for a while, looking out at the old ash tree and the field beyond it, taking in the night peepers, the distant sound of Don Ho singing “Tiny Bubbles” and Coco teaching the dance that was Toby’s current obsession, the Moonwalk, to the younger children. (When had her body filled out this way? All those Friday nights, paying her for babysitting, Eleanor hadn’t noticed, but suddenly, in addition to those long legs of hers they’d all observed, softball summers, cartwheeling along the perimeter of the ball field, she had these breasts. Now Eleanor found herself staring at them.)
There was a full moon that night. The children who were still awake were roasting marshmallows, Evan had taken out his guitar. To anyone dropping by, this could look like a perfect scene—the kind Eleanor used to imagine other families besides hers engaged in, back when she was growing up, the kind she had wanted to create with Cam. Only there was Sal’s wife, whispering something to Ray Pouliot, Ray nodding his head as if she’d made the most amazing observation ever, and here was Sal Perrone confessing to Eleanor (as he never would have if he hadn’t drunk all those beers) that sometimes, late at night, he sat out in the garage smoking pot and looking at old issues ofPenthouse.
“That’s my sex life,” he said. “Sitting on a camp chair, fantasizing about some Miss November from 1968.”
Eleanor felt no attraction to Sal, but she could see how easy it might be, at a moment like this one, to imagine that some person other than the one you were married to might provide the answer to your difficulties. There was Sal, doggedly bringing home the paycheck, as Cam never had. There was Lucinda, hanging on the words of Ray Pouliot. There was Walt, cranking the mill on the cider press and Edith telling him he was doing it wrong—Walt, so often there when Cam was not.
And once again, Eleanor didn’t know where Cam was. No place in sight.
Off in the field, where Coco had organized a game of moonlight tag, she heard Toby’s voice rising above those of the others. Something about dog poop, followed by the sound of another child—Joshie Perrone, maybe, who was always a crybaby and a tattletale. She figured she had better investigate. Toby could get into trouble faster than any child she’d ever known. She found him on a branch in Old Ashworthy. He said he was pretending he was an owl.
