By September the hole Bud Hollingsworth had dug for them, at the hopeful start of summer, was nearly filled with water. They had a pond. That winter they skated on it, and the next spring, as if by magic, tadpoles appeared. Cam and Eleanor still brought the children to the waterfall most afternoons to take in the sight and sound of that roaring water, but they swam now in their own family pond. They named it Tadpole Lake and planted lupine along the sunny side from seeds they’d gathered on a camping trip to Maine.
That Labor Day, on the day that would have been their annual softball team potluck, Cam and Eleanor attended Gina Olin’s memorial service. “If there’s anything I can do,” Bonnie Henderson offered, that day at the church. They all knew there wasn’t.
Home again, standing at the kitchen counter, looking out the window at the pond, the tree, the garden below, Eleanor could almost feel her heart expand in her chest. Two sensations came to her. Wild happiness at the sight of her three children, terror at the thought of what it would be to lose one of them. If it was possible to love someone any more than this, she could not imagine how.
30.
Barbie Shoe
Maybe it was knowing all the enormous things outside of her control as a parent that contributed to Eleanor’s obsession with the small ones. Cancer was a rogue villain. But there were problems of a scale Eleanor could handle (and therefore, tried to fix): lost toys, birthday party invitations that failed to arrive, sorrow when the bottom of the box of Cracker Jacks fails to yield the particular miniature whistle your child was hoping for. The look of sorrow on Alison’s face when the ride she loved—small boats going around in circles at the annual Foliage Festival—came to a halt. Another ticket cost a quarter. Who wouldn’t buy it?
Cam, probably. “You worry too much,” he told her. “You can’t make everything right all the time.”
When was the moment her obsession took hold, to spare her children the pain of loss? As if any parent could do that. As if it would be a good thing, if she could.
Eleanor knew the reasons for her own inability to endure her children’s small losses. In her life as a mother, she was rewriting her childhood—creating, for the children she and Cam were raising, the one she didn’t get to have herself. Somewhere along the line—here came trouble—she ceased to notice her own sorrows, she was so busy attempting to protect her children from theirs.
Opening the presents at her sixth birthday party, Ursula received, from Emily Finster, the gift of Crystal Barbie—the one that came with clear plastic shoes like Cinderella’s glass slippers.
“Let’s put those shoes up on the shelf till your guests have gone home,” Eleanor advised her. But Ursula wanted to carry those shoes around with her all afternoon, until the terrible moment (or what used to qualify as a terrible moment, in the world as they knew itthen) when she realized one of the shoes was gone. Somewhere—in a house filled with ripped-up wrapping paper and ribbon, paper plates and half-eaten cake and melted ice cream and candle wax and party favors and three different guests’ allergy medicine and little baskets of M&M’s and melted M&M’s that fell out of the little baskets and Joshie Perrone complaining that Emily got a bigger piece of cake than he did, somewhere a Barbie shoe lay hidden. And here was Ursula, good, patient Ursula, who always wrote thank-you notes and emptied the dishwasher without being asked and looked out for her friends and her siblings before herself and never did anything unkind; here was Ursula, sitting in the middle of her birthday party, weeping inconsolably over the loss of a clear plastic Barbie shoe the size of the nail on her pinky finger.
After the other children went home—the mothers who picked them up lingering less than normal, on account of the birthday girl’s unprecedented meltdown—Eleanor had ripped the house apart to locate the shoe. She took cushions off the furniture, crawled under the table, poured the trash onto the kitchen floor, picking through ketchup-smeared French fries and frosting, in search of the lost shoe. Observing the scene, Cam had put a hand on her shoulder, briefly. “Do you really think this is necessary?” he said, before retreating. There was a game on. The Red Sox vs. the Yankees.
At some point in the afternoon—Eleanor having moved to the children’s bedroom upstairs in her search for the shoe—the balance between sanity and madness shifted as clearly as if the two main characters in the drama sat on opposite sides of a teeter-totter. Ursula had become the calm, reasonable one; it was Eleanor who’d gone crazy—whipping off bedsheets, upending the laundry basket, all in her quest for the Barbie shoe, while Ursula, her tears gone, watched uneasily, offering up soft, gentle supplications.It’s okay, Mom. I didn’t need it after all. I like it when Barbie goes barefoot.
Too late now. Without a single drop of Jack Daniel’s in her, Eleanor had crossed over into that old familiar country of her childhood, Crazyland. She was tearing around the house now, as if the only thing separating her child from heartbreak was whether or not she’d succeed in locating the Barbie shoe.
Door to the liquor cabinet thrown open. Then other cupboard doors. Every one in their kitchen, but she had moved on to the pantry—her father’s voice in her brain: Where did you put the damned olives, Vivian? Is it too much to ask when a man comes home from a long day at the office that there’ll be the makings of a martini waiting for him?
Still no Barbie shoe. An hour after she’d started her search, every room in their house had been ripped apart—the kitchen, also the bathroom, and the porch.
Sometime after dark, Eleanor found the shoe on the windowsill. “Oh, I put it there so it wouldn’t get lost,” Ursula told her—her face revealing a level of fear greater than what might be attributed to the loss of a plastic object. This was about her mother appearing, briefly, to lose her mind.
“I forgot.”
Eleanor placed the shoe in her daughter’s hand and collapsed on the sofa. Off in the doorway, beer in hand, her husband had observed it all unfolding but he kept his eye on the game.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I don’t know what got into me.”
He put his arms around her.
“I couldn’t stand it. Thinking about Ursula being sad on her birthday. When the real thing that probably made her sad was me.”
“You were just trying to make everything perfect,” he said. “But it won’t ever be that way. Our children have to get used to that.”
“If anything really terrible ever happened to one of our children, I couldn’t survive,” Eleanor told him.
“Hard things will happen,” Cam told her. “They always do. It’s called life.”
Eleanor wondered whether there was such a thing as loving your children too much. Maybe her problem was caring too deeply, knowing that because this was so, her love probably felt suffocating and oppressive to them. They might not have said as much, or even acknowledged this to themselves, but she imagined there were times when Alison, at least, probably hated her mother for how much she did, how hard she tried, and above all, how she suffered their pain—sometimes even before they’d had a chance to experience it themselves.
There was an afternoon that fall, at Alison’s T-ball game. Watching her daughter on the bench, waiting her turn at bat, Eleanor had recognized that Alison needed to pee, but wasn’t going to risk missing her turn to do something about it.
Eleanor could tell, even as it was happening, the exact moment when, seated on the bench, awaiting her at-bat, Alison wet her pants. Alison’s back was to her, but Eleanor could imagine the look of horror on her face.
It was her turn now to step up to the plate. There would be a yellow stain on her uniform. Everyone would know.
Eleanor didn’t even need to think about what to do next. She leapt up from her seat on the bleachers, a few feet away, grabbing the Coca-Cola of the mother sitting next to her. She moved toward the bench, crossing directly in front of Alison with the open can—positioned herself, awkwardly, directly in front of her daughter, at which point she appeared to trip, spilling the contents of the can as she went down. She spilled it, with exquisitely precise aim, directly on the crotch of Alison’s pants, so the only stain you could see there now was the one made by the Coke.
