It was late when the last of the guests left—sleeping children in their arms, most of them—leaving a mountain of dishes to wash, the leftovers to wrap up and put away. To Eleanor, the best part always came after, when they got to take off their clothes and climb into bed. Eight years into marriage, they might not have sex so often anymore, but they pressed up next to each other.
“Lucinda Perrone is going to leave Sal,” Eleanor said.
“She told you that?”
“I can just tell.”
“Let’s never let that happen to us,” Cam said. He pulled her toward him. “The children would never get over it.” He put a hand on her breast.
“Remember what these used to look like?” she said. “This is what nursing three babies does.”
“I don’t care about that,” he told her. She took note of the fact that he didn’t contradict her assessment of her breasts. Just said it didn’t matter, what had become of them.
“They fed our children,” he said. “That’s the important thing.”
A wave of sadness passed over Eleanor. But something else, too. Acceptance, maybe. This was what happened. What had happened to them, at least. Some things disappeared, but in their absence, there was this strange and deep bond that came in part, probably, from the knowledge of their mutual disappointments.Here we are,she thought. Under this roof, at the end of this road, living this life.
The rest of the world fell away then, and it was just the two of them on the bed. Just the two of them, until sometime in the middle of the night when one or another or even all three of their children padded into the room to climb in next to them.
But for this one middle-of-the-night moment, they could be alone together in the dark, nothing but the sound of an owl—a real one this time, perched in the high branches of the giant tree, just beyond the window. Out the window, that long, mournful cry. A moment later, from some other tree, some other owl—his mate, perhaps—called back in response.
28.
The No-Cry Pledge
Winters were hard at the end of their long dirt road. Cold mornings, car battery dead. Icy roads. Short days. The long process, every time you left the house with the children, of zipping up the snowsuits, finding mittens, hats, scarves, boots. It was a safe bet that by the time they were all dressed, someonewould need to go to the bathroom, and all the gear would have to come off again. Then came the task of hanging up the wet clothes, drying out the boots, mopping. “Sometimes it feels like all I do, from November through March, is mop the floor,” Eleanor told Darla. Times like these, she allowed herself to dream, briefly, of what it might be like to live in a place like California. Only briefly. She knew she would never leave the farm.
When the weather was on their side—cold temperatures, no snow—Eleanor loaded the children into the car and went looking for a pond, then laced up the children’s skates. They put a low wooden chair on the ice for Toby to push, and sometimes Ursula set him in the chair and pushed him around the ice. One time Eleanor brought out a boom box and put on a cassette of old Beatles songs, but the cold must have affected the batteries, so the songs started playing slower and slower, turning Paul McCartney’s voice very low, and the guitars weirdly off-key. Cam was a beautiful skater, whipping past them on the ice with his hockey stick, scooping Ursula up in his arms and taking her for a spin. “I’m flying,” she cried out, her arms spread wide, as if she were embracing the whole sky. She knew her father would never drop her.
For Eleanor, there was little opportunity for tearing across the ice, if she even managed to get out there. She would no sooner have everyone’s hats and mittens assembled and skates laced up than Toby would need to go to the bathroom or Alison would say she was too cold. They’d head back to the house for popcorn and hot chocolate then, and reruns ofThe Love Boator a movie on their newly acquired VCR—Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. Old Yeller. Disney in your own living room! Imagine.
Even with the stove cranked up, it was hard keeping the house warm, especially upstairs where the children slept. Every night, twenty minutes before she put them to bed, Eleanor filled three hot water bottles to put under the covers so no matter how cold the room was, it would be warm when they climbed into bed. In bed—seldom late; most nights they were worn out by nine thirty—she wrapped her arms around Cam’s hard, firm chest, felt his heart beating. Now was the time—the only one, often—when they could talk about their day.
“Do you think we should be worried about how much time Toby spends lining up rocks in his room?” she’d say. “Sometimes when I talk to him while he’s playing, he doesn’t even hear me. You don’t think he could be autistic, do you?”
“I think you’re worrying too much,” Cam said. “Get some sleep.”
“What do you think it means that Alison threw out that dress your mother sent for her birthday?”
“You have to admit, it was a pretty ugly dress,” he told her. He was not prone to analyzing every aspect of what went on in their children’s world the way Eleanor did.
“How about we focus on you and me for a change?” he said, pulling her close.
“The dress wasn’t really that ugly,” Eleanor told him.
They worked on craft projects a lot, in winter, and baked—cookies, muffins, bread. When they started to go stir-crazy, Eleanor piled the children in the station wagon and headed for the bowling alley, the one big attraction in town, other than the dump. A couple of games for the four of them—plus shoe rentals—wasn’t cheap, but sometimes, particularly when the temperature had been hovering around zero for three days straight, they all just needed to get out of the house.
The one problem with bowling was Toby. As the youngest andsmallest, it was not surprising that he had a harder time than his sisters knocking the pins over. But his pride made it unacceptable for him—even at age four, even at three—to accept the idea of using bumpers to keep his ball from ending up in the gutter every time his turn came up.
Inevitably, he’d end up the low scorer. Then came the heartache. More than once, a happy afternoon at the bowling alley would conclude with Toby flinging his body on the floor in the spot they’d just tallied up their points, like a mourner on a funeral pyre. Inconsolable.
In the end, Eleanor had instituted a tradition in which each of them was required to recite what she called the No-Cry Pledge—a two-sentence promise to stay calm, whatever the outcome of the game, written on the sun visor of her station wagon, which she’d flip down for the occasion before they entered the bowling alley. Of the four of them, only Toby was at risk of falling apart over a losing score (and it was Toby who lost every time). But all of them, including Eleanor, recited the pledge. Toby took his vow seriously. He never had another tantrum at the bowling alley.
There was one good thing about winters, particularly the hardest ones. When the cold finally lifted, and spring came, you’d be left with a greater sense of joy than any resident of California or Florida could understand or appreciate. Then it was time to make cork people. Then the leaves on the ash tree unfurled and the lady’s slippers pushed up through the soil and burst out their strange, vaguely sexual, purselike blossoms. The air filled with the smell of lilac, which always reminded Eleanor of the first time she’d driven down this road. Ursula picked a basketful of blossoms and laid them on her pillow, so she could breathe in the smell all night long. Toby dug for earthworms and tried teaching them tricks. They launched their boats. Home again, after, they grieved the losses of the cork people who didn’t make it all the way down the brook and set the survivors on a high shelf until next year’s launch. A reminder that hard as winter might be, spring always came. Just when you reached your limit.
Then it was time to plant the peas. Then it was softball season again.
29.
