“Some tree,” he said, shaking his head.
4.
Fixer-Upper
In the spring of the year Eleanor turned twenty, she bought a secondhand Toyota Corolla and set out on the road to buy a house. It was late May the first time she laid eyes on the farm.
She’d driven a couple of hundred miles that day—that day, and a dozen before it. There was something comforting about all that driving. Put a person in a car with a full tank of gas, give her a road map, and never mind if she can’t think of one hopeful thing to look forward to. She can listen to the radio and keep driving.
The Watergate hearings were in full swing, though Eleanor had only the vaguest idea of what any of that was about. A year had gone by since the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. The first issue ofMs. Magazine.Title IX. All around her, women were making it clear, for good reason no doubt, that they no longer wanted to be defined by life in the home. But for Eleanor, it was home that mattered more than any of the rest. She’d gone looking for hers.
Eleanor put a thousand miles on the Toyota in those days she spent on the road, driving around Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire. She didn’t listen to the news much. She kept a mixtape playing, of songs she loved, most of them sad. George Jones fit the bill, as did old Irish ballads about love gone wrong, and, equally, certain old R&B singers, but only the ballads. Otis Redding singing “These Arms of Mine” got to her every time, as did Edith Piaf. The heartfelt lyrics of James Taylor songs never really spoke to her, but Joni Mitchell’s did—her yearning for love, her endless disappointments, and the realization she seemed to have acquired, young as she was, that for all her handsome rock star boyfriends, she might be alone forever. Alone on a two-lane highway, Eleanor sang along with Dolly Parton.In my Tennessee mountain home / Life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh.Andwith Joni. She playedBlueon repeat all the way from upstate New York to the New Hampshire border.
There had been nothing particularly distinctive about Akersville when she stopped there. No cute coffee shops. No traffic light even. Most cars that passed this way drove on through.
It had been a random choice on Eleanor’s part, pulling into this town. For close to two weeks she’d been staying at a different motel every night, living on handfuls of raw almonds and bags of carrots and Dannon boysenberry yogurt, picking up real estate flyers at rest stops with one idea in her head: to find a safe landing place.
Eleanor had pulled up in front of Abercrombie’s Realty, with its row of straggly pansies and the faded wooden sign “Where Dreams Come Home.” The agent on duty was a man in his late sixties, from the looks of it, nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Ed Abercrombie,” he told her, extending a hand.
Not many people Eleanor’s age went real estate shopping. Even if they had the means, they wouldn’t have possessed the inclination. But if Ed Abercrombie felt surprise or curiosity about any of this, he concealed it well.
More often than not, when Eleanor had stopped at some Realtor’s office on her odd, solitary road trip, they didn’t take her seriously. Maybe they detected a certain sense of melancholy desperation tucked under the surface of her greeting as she entered their offices—her tight smile, her unnaturally vigorous handshake. She probably appeared too eager (she usually did), her needs too urgent. A person might sense, meeting Eleanor that spring, that her desire to buy a piece of property suggested a hunger deeper than that of the ordinary client.
Ed’s only question concerned her employment. Not a whole lot of jobs in this area, he told her. That might be a problem.
Only it wasn’t.
“I make books for children,” she said. (Did he notice her fingernails, bitten down below the quick? The very slight trembling of her hand as she brushed her hair out of her eyes?)
“You make a living doing that?” he said. “Don’t like to pry, but the bank’s going to ask you. Taxes aren’t cheap around here.”
“It won’t be a problem,” she told him. To the surprise of no one more than Eleanor herself, her first book, published the previous year, had sold almost a hundred thousand copies. She’d be getting to work on the fourth one soon.
“I write about a little girl without any parents who travels around the world having adventures.”
“A writer,” he said. “What do you know? My wife used to write poetry.”
Actually, Eleanor explained to him, she was more of an artist. She made pictures with stories attached. She could have gone on to explain to Ed that since she was five years old—younger maybe, an only child left to her own devices for long stretches—she’d seldom found herself without a pencil in her hand. She’d spent her childhood making up characters to keep her company and stories about the things that happened in their lives, things that never in a million years would have happened in Eleanor’s. Some of these stories featured a girl named Bodie whose parents had died in a car wreck, who headed out to explore the world in search of a mysterious great-aunt she’d always heard about but never met, who was an archaeologist. Eleanor’s English teacher at boarding school had suggested she send one of her Bodie stories to a publisher, along with the illustrations she’d made.
She had not yet graduated when the editors at Applewood Press had invited her to their offices to meet them. One week later, not yet in possession of a car, she had ridden the bus to New York City to meet with them. Now, in addition toBodie Under the Sea,there wasBodie Goes to the Potato Chip Factoryand, soon,Bodie in Zanzibar.Just before setting out on her epic journey in search of real estate, Eleanor had signed a contract to deliverBodie, Queen of the Desert.She hadn’t collected the check yet, but when it came, it would be a large one.
She had tried for a while there to do the things other young people did. Go to college. Fall in love. More than publishing children’s books, what Eleanor had hungered for was a normal life, or something resembling that.
Only Eleanor never did well at normal life. She had lasted at collegeexactly one month shy of finishing her sophomore year. That was when she moved out of her dorm, packed up her mixtapes and albums, bought the Toyota, set out on the road.
She had thirty-seven thousand dollars in her checking account—the advance from her publisher forBodie in Zanzibar,along with royalties from her first two Bodie books. Plenty of money, no place to live. This was when she decided to buy a house. Maybe, if she had a house, all the other parts that came with that—the things that happened in people’s houses, in people’s lives, so absent in her own—might also be within reach.
There was nobody to tell her this wasn’t a good idea. This was the problem, in fact. Apart from her editor, who just reminded her when her next manuscript was due, and her agent, who read over the contracts, there was nobody to tell Eleanor anything.
Now here she was in Akersville, New Hampshire, listening to Ed Abercrombie talking about a log home he’d just listed, with vinyl siding and a mother-in-law unit out back.
Eleanor didn’t know much, but one part was clear: the place Eleanor was looking for didn’t have to be very large, but it would have land around it, and be far enough from town that you could see the stars. She needed good light, she told Ed, for making artwork. She’d never had a garden before, but she wanted to grow tomatoes and maybe peas, lettuce for salad. Zinnias.
Close to water would be nice, Eleanor told Ed. If not on the property itself, nearby.
Well, there was this one place, he said. Right down the road from a swimming hole and a waterfall. The owners hadn’t actually put it on the market yet, but he could show her.
“This one’s a real fixer-upper,” he told her.
