Eleanor finished off the last of her cone and walked the five blocks home. But home had a whole different meaning now. Home was aneat, bland condo in Brookline with Corian countertops and vinyl tile floors. No dog. No hooting owl. No stars. No small warm bodies climbing in next to her in the middle of the night. When she woke in the morning, with nobody there but her own self, the bed felt vast as the ocean.
57.
Crazyland Dead Ahead
She had always been careful about drinking. She never wanted to be like her parents. But one time, she’d bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s—the brand her father had favored. She had four shots that night. Pouring herself another, she dialed Cam’s number.
“You alone? Or is your girlfriend there? Maybe she’s babysitting?” She spoke the word as if it were an obscenity.
Crazyland, dead ahead.
“Stop it, Eleanor. You don’t want to do this.”
“So when are you planning to tell them the truth?” she asked him. “Maybe you’re waiting for Coco’s twenty-first birthday? If so... that’s a long time.”
“The children have gone through a lot of changes,” Cam said. He spoke in the calm, even tones of the narrator on a nature video, or Mister Rogers.
“It’s pretty convenient, from your perspective,” Eleanor told him. “Keeping them in the dark about the reason for the divorce. Leaving them with the impression that I’m the one who bailed on our family.”
“Nobody bailed on our family,” Cam said. (Mister Rogers again. Soft music—Kate Bush, she thought—in the background.) “We just grew in different directions.”
“And yours led you straight to an eighteen-year-old girl.” She was gripping the phone so tightly that if it were a kitten, it would be dead. Her heart was beating hard. “How do you think your old friends Evan and Betsy might feel, if they knew?”
“I wish you didn’t have to be so bitter, Eleanor. It’s not good for our children. It’s not good for you, either.”
“And you’re so damned concerned about me, aren’t you, Cam?High on the list of your priorities, right after getting a new mattress and family trips toDisney on Icewith Coco.”
The sound of her voice, speaking to him, had a new, hard edge. Not unlike what was happening to Al, it occurred to Eleanor. Even Ursula. Maybe this was what divorce did to people. It made them mean.
“I guess you occupy the high ground here,” she said.
“I’m going to hang up now.”
“Namaste.”The way she spoke the word was nothing like how a yoga teacher would say it.
58.
Code of Silence
The children moved into the Brookline condo with Eleanor that June, the weekend after school let out. That night she took them out to dinner in downtown Boston—to a Chinese restaurant where the paper place mats let you figure out what animal year you’d been born in. Alison was the year of the snake. Ursula was—a happy discovery—the year of the horse. Toby, year of the monkey. Eleanor, to her chagrin, was also born in the year of the snake.
They got a pupu platter and drinks with paper umbrellas, and after, walking home, they stopped for ice cream. Eleanor felt like a tour guide, pointing out all the stops. Here was the Y where they could go swimming—even in winter, imagine. Here was the craft supply store and the funny little store, on a side street, run by a man who sold comic books and action figures.Look at this, Toby. Castle Grayskull in the window.
They stopped to look at the posters at the movie theater. A movie calledFerris Bueller’s Day Offlooked like something Al would like. She was the choosy one. Ursula liked everything. Or used to.
“Oh, boy,” Eleanor said, studying the poster. “This one looks really funny.” There was an unnatural brightness in her voice as she spoke to them, a false air of gaiety. She was like a person on a first date, but with her own children.
Slowly, things got more like regular life around their house. New regular life. The children started school. They got to know other kids. Al joined the basketball team. Mornings, the bus picked Toby up for the school Eleanor had enrolled him in for children with cognitive issues, and twice a week he worked with a tutor who helped him with reading—an expense Cam’s parents had offered to cover.Toby had a friend, a boy named Jacob with Down syndrome. One day he came over and the two of them spent all afternoon looking at Toby’s rock collection.
But the children were different now. They were older. Part of it was that. But they displayed an unfamiliar self-protectiveness around Eleanor, a wary distance. They didn’t climb into bed with her anymore at the new house—and maybe, she considered, that old tradition would have died out by now even if she and Cam had stayed together. But in other ways, too, she could feel them pulling away. Carrying their clothes in brown paper bags (Eleanor had provided them with small suitcases, but they seemed to prefer the paper bags), they moved back and forth between the houses of their parents as if they were navigating a demilitarized zone between enemy territories, the only constant in their lives now each other.
Maybe this had been a formal decision on their part, though more likely, it was instinct that told them to behave this way: the three of them (Eleanor chose to include Toby here) adhered to a strict code of silence with one parent, where the activities of the other were concerned. What happened at one house was never reported in the other.
Or at least—maybe this was more accurate—they hardly ever told Eleanor about what went on in her old house with Cam. What they told Cam about life in their mother’s condo was unknown to her, though there was little to tell.
Now and then they’d mention a visit from Coco, times she came home from school for the weekend—an outing, a dinner—but nothing Eleanor observed suggested they viewed her as anything more than a family friend who liked to stop by and play Monopoly or go ice-skating with them on the pond.
Eleanor didn’t see Darla as much as she had when she’d lived in Akersville, but they talked a lot on the phone, though at odd hours, never when Bobby was home—Bobby being Darla’s primary topic of discussion. One night when he was drunk he’d yanked her arm so hard it came out of the socket, and she ended up in the emergency room, again, though when the nurses asked her how it happened, she’d lied. Another time, when Eleanor stopped by Darla’s house onher way back from delivering the children to Cam’s for the weekend, she’d seen a bruise on Darla’s arm. Darla had put foundation over it, but the purple showed through. To Eleanor, anyway.
