“If your dad contributed,” she said, “you could go to summer camp.” “If your father contributed, we could get you a new bike.” “If your dad contributed, I wouldn’t have to work so hard all the time.”
If their dad contributed, maybe she’d be a nicer person.
They tuned her out, like a radio station playing music from the fifties.
More and more now, Al stayed in her room. Even Ursula—sunny, cheerful, pliant, chatty Ursula, the peacemaker, though she still presented herself in the world as the easiest, most trouble-free of any child anybody ever met—seemed to have acquired an unfamiliar edge, a way of responding to whatever Eleanor said or asked that met the requirements of civility with little left over in the way of warmth.
At the house Cam shared with Coco now, everything was different, a whole other life. Things happened there that Eleanor would never hear about.
Goats, camping trips, yoga, the death of the family dog. A baby brother. A child she had never laid eyes on, about whom she knew nothing because that’s as much as they said about him.
Whatever it was they felt about this new character in their lives, Eleanor could only guess. Her children were becoming mysterious to her, like someone you went to school with once who you meet up with at a reunion twenty years later and barely recognize.
She saw, in her mind, those boats they used to make that they brought to the brook every March. The ones that disappeared in the culvert, the cork people who drifted away. This was where her children were now. Not quite out of sight, but heading there. Even Toby, doing his sun salutations and downward dog, lying on his yoga mat in happy baby pose, barely registered her presence sometimes when she came in the room. When she picked him up after a weekend with his father, his eyes stayed locked on his Game Boy. Al, bent over her homework or her computer programming manual, answered her questions with the fewest syllables necessary. Even Ursula seemed to be playing a role now when she got in the car—her smile tight, her brisk hug like the greeting a candidate might offer up on the campaign trail.
Now Eleanor wondered if all of Ursula’s old sweetness had ever been real. Maybe she had been quietly resentful all along. Maybe her famous goodness had been her clever tactic. It was easier to be very good than troublesome. Maybe her cheerful demeanor had been an effective way for a girl to keep her mother out of her hair. All that time Eleanor had spent worrying about Alison, worrying about Toby, when all along, maybe the one she should have been focused on had been her perfect middle child—her compliance a strategy for keeping her mother at bay.Keep smiling, and they’ll never know what’s really going on.
“What do you say we go for a bike ride?” Eleanor said to Ursula one time in April, a precious Saturday when the children were with her, not Cam (he was attending a workshop on spinal issues), and the whole day stretched before them. Precious now, in a way they never used to be.
“Thanks, but I better do my homework,” Ursula said—her politeness more chilling than anger might have been.
She still put her dishes in the dishwasher without being asked and read Toby his beloved truck book five times in a row without complaint, still cleaned out the crisper drawer, still brought home perfect report cards. But when her official responsibilities in the family had been met she disappeared into her room, much as Al did. When Eleanorasked about school, or friends, her answers were clipped and monosyllabic, like her sister’s. Mostly she avoided her mother’s gaze, but when their eyes met, hers betrayed nothing of what went on behind them.
Even before the divorce, Al had announced that she would no longer answer to her old name. But only after the divorce had she insisted on the buzz cut. Now she wore nothing but jeans and army boots and baggy shirts meant to conceal her small but developing breasts. The year after Eleanor brought the children to live with her in Brookline, Al got her period—a piece of news she delivered to Eleanor with a determined brusqueness, the week after the event took place.
“You don’t need to give me some big talk or anything,” she said. “I know everything. I’m taking care of it.”
70.
The Reason for Every Single Bad Thing
Ayear or so after Eleanor moved out, she had received a call from the counselor at school expressing concern about Al. “Of course, we might also see this kind of behavior even in a child from an intact family,” she said. “But we need to consider closely the detrimental impact of recent changes in your family dynamic.”
The counselor quoted an expert, a psychologist named Dr. Judith Wallerstein, who’d conducted an in-depth study of children of divorce. The findings weren’t good. Name virtually any psychological issue a person might suffer from, down the line; according to Dr. Judith Wallerstein, the children of divorce were more likely to suffer from it.
“Alison resists having anything to do with the other girls at school,” the counselor told her. “She wants to play sports with the boys, but they don’t want to include her. She doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t seem to want them.”
“Al,” Eleanor corrected her. “Our daughter goes by Al now.”
When they’d done a square-dancing unit in gym, the counselor told Eleanor, Alison—Al—had refused to participate. For women’s history month, when the girls were supposed to choose a famous woman from the past and dress up as that woman to deliver a report on her, Al had requested that she be excused. “I don’t like putting on dresses,” she said, though in the end she agreed to portray Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Eleanor sat in the counselor’s office, trying to take in what she was saying, though her mind kept wandering to a plant on the windowsill, desperately in need of water, and the photograph on her desk displaying a smiling husband and two happy-looking children. An “intact family.”
Did Al exhibit evidence of distress around issues of her gender before the divorce, the counselor wanted to know? The implication was clear enough: It had been Eleanor and Cam’s decision to end their marriage that triggered their daughter’s current struggles. Eleanor’s decision, from the sound of it. (There it was again. A reminder, from the counselor, that it had been Eleanor who’d moved out of the family home. Al had told her as much.)
It was a terrible thought for a parent: that she might have ruined her child’s life not just in the present, but far into the future, as Judith Wallerstein’s findings seemed to predict they would.
Did divorce have to be the reason for every single bad thing that went on in your child’s life? Didn’t the children of those “intact” families the counselor was talking about have problems, too, now and then? And if she and Cam had subjected their children to irreversible trauma by their failure to stay married, what were they supposed to do about that now?
So Al was depressed. Ursula was polite, but wary—like a distant relative come to visit, on her best behavior. Then there was Toby. Gentle, loving Toby, who could sit on the floor for a few hours making a ball out of rubber bands or examining a Rubik’s Cube with no particular goal of lining up the colors. Toby, who liked drawing rows of parallel lines and untying his shoelaces and humming songs from theirMusic Mansoundtrack. The old Toby had loved Michael Jackson, but when they showed him the “Thriller” video now, it just scared him.
He spoke more now—short sentences, constructed like telegrams—and thanks no doubt to all the work Cam did with him, he could run, in his funny, lurching way. And he seemed, if not precisely happy, content anyway. He loved his sisters and most of all he loved his new baby brother, Elijah.
Before the accident, Toby had a dislike of clothes with buttons. After, he appeared to have forgotten about that, as if he had forgotten who he was: A boy who played the violin once. A boy who danced naked and peed outdoors in winter so he could spell his name in thesnow. A boy who reported on his conversations with God and said once that he loved Eleanor’s toes so much, he wanted to marry them.
One day, when Toby was nine—having lived almost as long with the damaged brain as he had with his healthy one—something had possessed Eleanor to put on their old recording of the Wieniawski Polonaise that he had loved.
The record was all scratched up from all the times his four-year-old self had played it. Maybe she held out the crazy idea that after all these years some old synapse gone dormant after his time in the pond would have regenerated itself. Did Eleanor really believe this might be possible? Maybe she just wanted to hear that piece of music again, herself, and summon the memory of the child who used to play it. The first twelve measures, anyway.
