“You are,” he told her.
“You know the truth?” Eleanor said. “Until tonight I completely forgot. I never actually liked Patty.”
34.
You Have to Make Compromises
There had been a time when Eleanor had told people, if they asked, that she was a writer and an artist, but over the years—and even now, with herFamily Treestrip gaining traction—she had put that part of herself away. Exhausted as she was at the end of each day, Eleanor would not have traded places with Patty—off in New York City, working at her ad agency, and flying to London four times a year. She didn’t envy the writers she knew from back in the day when she went on book tours to promote her Bodie books. Some of them were still out there promoting new books and signing big contracts. But if she were doing those things, she figured, she couldn’t be home with her children, rolling out cookie dough or planting radish seeds or curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn watching a show about penguins.
Eleanor knew she was out of step with women like Patty and her New York friends—determined to let no man, and no child, get in the way of their careers. She had the thing she’d wanted most, a family. Still, the other part—earning a living—was always on her mind.
There was nothing glamorous about Eleanor’s work life now. She has her non-comic strip of course but, in her spare time, she created company logos, textbook illustrations, the wedding invitations of a wealthy summer resident who wanted a pen-and-ink drawing of the bride and groom, framed by a heart. She hardly ever turned down work. It didn’t matter if the job she was hired to do failed to inspire her. She found her inspiration in herFamily Treestrip. And in the family that inspired it.
One time, a Harvard graduate student, working on a thesis aboutthe difficulties of women artists raising young children, tracked Eleanor down. The young woman had been a fan of the Bodie books when she was growing up. Nothing else could have explained why Eleanor’s name would have made it to her list.
The graduate student, Ashley, had driven up to the farm from Cambridge to interview her. Eleanor was hanging out the laundry when her car pulled up.
“I didn’t know anybody still did things like this,” Ashley said.
“Here comes the crazy part,” Eleanor told her. “I love hanging out the laundry. You know how much better clothes smell when they’ve been hung out in the fresh air to dry?”
Ashley appeared unconvinced. “But your husband participates, too, right?” she said. No way was this young woman going to use the term “helps out.”
Eleanor laughed. “Cam may or may not know what a clothespin is,” she said. “Butnois probably the safer bet.”
“Doesn’t it make you mad?” Ashley said. “The double standard? All the things women artists put up with that men never would?”
It was funny. Eleanor knew there were all kinds of things she could feel angry about, if she started thinking about them. She chose not to. Or maybe she actually was angry, and she just hadn’t admitted it to herself.
Thebûche de Noëlsmashed in the garbage pail. Cam heading off on his mountain bike. Her words as he headed out the door: “When do I get to take a Saturday morning off to go on an adventure?”
“I’m not angry,” she said. “Where would it get me if I were?”
“I mean, it’s got to deplete your creative energy,” Ashley went on. “Housework. Childcare.” She didn’t even know the other part. The part about who earned most of the money.
“You know where my creative energy comes from?” Eleanor told the young woman. “Them.” She gestured in the direction of the field where, at that moment, her three children were engaged in a game that seemed to involve an old tennis ball and a flyswatter. “In one way or another, all the best things I’ve ever done come out of the things I’ve learned raising my children.”
She fixed the two of them a lunch of broccoli quiche and salad that they ate on the porch—the children racing in on occasion, and then back out to play.
“Do you ever, you know, imagine what you could be doing, if you didn’t have all these kids?” Ashley had asked her. From the way she said it, Eleanor got the impression that she found it a sad and possibly even tragic turn of events that Eleanor had gone from bestselling children’s book author to carpool-driving mother working freelance and cutting the crusts off Toby’s bread.
“It’s true,” she said. “Taking care of my children means I have a lot less time to put anything down on paper. But when I finally get to my desk, I have a lot more to say.”
She was speaking about her non-comic strip, of course, though the truth was that until recently the majority of Eleanor’s time at her desk was spent drawing logos for plumbers and insurance companies. Not that she’d mention that part to this young woman who had started out their visit by telling her how the Bodie books had changed her life.
Even without knowing that part, Ashley looked dubious. “I get it,” she said. “But you have to feel angry sometimes, right? At all the things that are expected of women that men take for granted? Wouldn’t you like to have a room of your own to work in? Instead of a kitchen table?”
“I don’t think about that much, actually,” Eleanor said. “For me, being a feminist means manifesting the strength and confidence and tenacity to pursue whatever it is you most want to do with your life. In my case, the goal was having a family. I’m doing that. If I don’t get to make art that much at the moment, I can live with it. Nobody gets everything in life. You have to make compromises.”
Ashley left in the middle of the afternoon. After, standing at the sink, washing the dishes, Eleanor thought again of the younger woman’s question. Maybe she was angrier than she knew. Maybe she just didn’t allow herself to admit it.
And maybe she just didn’t have time to think about it. Eleanor woke early to get to her desk—piled high with school papers andgrocery store coupons—before the children got up. She had bought an extra-long cord for their phone so if a client called, she could stretch the cord and take the call in the downstairs closet without the sound of children’s voices in the background. She was trying to give the impression, to anyone on the other end of the line, that she was a professional person sitting in an office somewhere, instead of a woman in a pair of stretched-out sweatpants with a naked four-year-old banging on the other side of the door, wanting to show her his poop.
She hadn’t bought new underwear since her last pregnancy. But she wasn’t a martyr, she told herself. She had her family. She had made this choice.
Sometimes, standing at the counter, stirring cheese into the macaroni, Eleanor would listen to the sounds of her children’s voices coming from different corners of the house—Ursula’s Barbies having conversations with each other about fashion; Alison teaching herself Mandarin from a tape she’d checked out of the library; Toby, in the bathroom, at work on the Wieniawski; even Sally, asleep in front of the woodstove, making noises that suggested she was dreaming of chasing squirrels.
“This ismyradical act,” she had told the young Harvard woman. “Raising three human beings who will go out and change the world.”
