“Jeez, Mom,” Ali had said, looking down—her tone one of utter and complete disdain. “Could you be any more of a klutz?”
How could they understand? Not having grown up as Eleanor had, with parents who cared too little rather than too much, it was easy for her children to feel impatient with their mother, and to favor the effortless no-strings affection their father provided. If Cam was less likely to make sacrifices for his children, this was probably, in their eyes, nothing but a relief. When a person gave less, he required less in return.
31.
A Career in Dry-Cleaning
When she started drawing her strip about their life on the farm, Eleanor never pictured anyone actually reading it. (Well, Walt did. And Darla. But that was about it.) Telling her stories had been like having a conversation with herself, a journal that she happened to publish in the local paper.
As the months passed she started tackling tougher topics—the difficulty of getting through Mother’s Day without her mother, the time Cam forgot her birthday. (All day she’d been waiting for something to happen, figuring he must have a surprise in store for her, but it turned out the date had slipped his mind. The drawing she’d made to illustrate that part in the story had shown a lanky man with long curls coming out the sides of his baseball cap, slapping his forehead when he realizes his mistake, with a bubble over his head that read, “Maybe I can get the date tattooed on my forearm before next year.”)
After that strip appeared in the paper, his fellow softball team members had given Cam a hard time. “You made us all look pretty bad, man,” Jerry Henderson told him. At the hardware store, replacing a drill bit, the guy behind the counter had suggested he bring home a gift for his wife along with the drill bit he’d just bought. A hummingbird feeder, maybe? A pair of flower-print gardening gloves?
“You’ve got a lot to make up for with that gal,” he said. “And if you don’t mind the suggestion”—now came a reference to an earlierFamily Treeinstallment—“don’t bring her any more weed whackers.” That had been his birthday present to Eleanor the previous year, later memorialized in her strip.
Until now, it had not occurred to Eleanor that Cam might take issue with her telling stories about their life. The kinds of things shewrote about were the kind that happened to most people. What was the big deal? And anyway, she doubted that Cam read her strip.
She had been drawing herFamily Treestrip for almost five years when she got a call from a newspaper syndicate in New York. Someone there had become aware of the strip and felt Eleanor’s work could reach a broader audience. Would she be interested in having them pitchFamily Treeto papers around the country?
By the time Toby entered nursery school, Eleanor’s stories about Maggie and her family were running each week in over fifty newspapers nationwide—a milestone Eleanor marked by buying herself a real drawing table. Every month now, Eleanor collected a check for a couple of thousand dollars. They weren’t rolling in money, but it was more than she’d made since the days of her Bodie books, long out of print.
No similar breakthrough occurred in the world of hand-crafted burl bowls, but now that Eleanor was making such good money, she didn’t worry about that so much. The hard part was finding time to work. She still got up before sunrise to write and draw, and if she was lucky, and nobody was home sick, and it wasn’t a snow day, she had the hours the children spent at school—just half days for Toby—to work at her drawing table. But she suggested that Cam might pitch in a little more.
“So the idea is, your work is more important than mine now, because they pay you the big bucks?” he said. There was an edge to his voice that she hadn’t heard before, a look that reminded her of times during his parents’ infrequent visits, sitting in the kitchen with Roger and Roberta, as they recounted the accomplishments of his brother out in Texas. Cam would pour himself a glass of Jack Daniel’s then (a rare event) and sit across from them, whittling some piece of wood into no particular shape, saying nothing.
What she heard from him now wasn’t anger so much. He wasn’t disputing her position. Eleanor would never have imagined that Cam was the sort whose ego would be wounded at the idea of his wife supporting the family, but maybe she was wrong about that.
“I’m not saying my work is more important than yours,” Eleanor told him. “I just need a little more help.”
She spoke the words in a quiet, even tone of voice, but she could feel an edge of bitterness creeping in that hadn’t been there before. Later, scrubbing potatoes for dinner, she reflected on how women spoke about domestic responsibilities, compared to the language their husbands employed. Eleanor couldn’t imagine any of the mothers she knew speaking of “helping” their husband with the housework or “babysitting” their own children.
“Did it ever occur to you,” she had asked him, as she was packing the snacks for a night at the softball field to watch her husband play, “that I might like to go off and do something fun, too?”
“I never knew you played softball,” he said. He stood behind her, his arms on her shoulders. He was stroking her neck. “You’d be an improvement on Harry Botts, anyway. And definitely cuter.”
“I wish you wouldn’t make this a joke, Cam,” she told him. “You know what I mean.”
“Listen, Ellie,” he said. “Anytime you want to take up some kind of hobby or pastime, I’ll be a hundred percent behind you.”
“Somebody around here has to earn a living,” she told him.
His face, when she said that, reminded her of Toby’s, the day she sent him to his room for picking every one of the squash blossoms in her garden, before they turned into squash. All she wanted to do, seeing that expression of sorrow and remorse, was reassure him.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We’re fine. You do other things.”
Maybe it was getting to Cam that his father, Roger, off in Florida, still expressed concern about the unlikelihood of his son ever making a decent living selling wooden bowls. Cam’s mother, Roberta, had never had a paying job, though in Eleanor’s estimation, taking care of Cam’s father was a full-time occupation. Roger had recently reminded his son, for the third time, of his willingness to bankroll a business of some kind for Cam to manage in Akersville. A dry-cleaning establishment, possibly. There was good money to be made. Maybe not as much as Roger Junior took in, with his real estate developmentfirm, but enough that he could pull his own weight and sock something away for retirement.
“Thanks, Dad,” Cam told his father. “But dry-cleaning isn’t my thing. Besides, Eleanor and I like the work we do.”
It ended there, but not really.
The only times Eleanor had ever seen, in her husband, evidence of anything like melancholy were these—visits with his parents, and more so, after they left. Sometimes, after one of their rare phone conversations, he’d disappear into the woodshop and be gone for hours. His parents’ annual holiday trip north for Christmas could plunge Cam into a daylong silence.
After his parents had driven away the last time—when Roger had raised the dry-cleaning idea—he’d headed out on a hike. Normally, at least one of the children would have accompanied him, but this time they could all sense it: he didn’t want company.
It was hours later when he returned. The children were watching a video, Eleanor just about to put the lasagna in the oven. One look at his face, as he walked in the door, and she put her arms around him.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I sometimes think I’ve dedicated my whole life to making sure I’m nothing like my dad.”
