She carried the boom box out of the room, into her own bedroom, and threw the machine in the closet.
Al had followed her mother into her bedroom. “Fuck you!” she screamed. “Bitch!”
Eleanor turned around to face her daughter. She could feel her own blood pumping and her heart beating fast. She had never struck one of her children, but now she raised her hand, palm open, and slapped her daughter across the face.
The two of them just stood there then, facing each other. In her daughter’s eyes, she could see no trace of anything resembling affection. Eleanor could barely breathe, but there was an eerie calm to Al as she crossed the room, picked up the telephone extension, and dialed.
“I thought you should know, Dad,” she said. “My mother just hit me.”
He was there in under two hours. By that time, Al had packed a bag full of her things (not the brown paper she used on weekends, but an actual suitcase this time). Also the boom box Eleanor had briefly confiscated, herIntroduction to Algorithmsbook and her Mandarin tapes and all her CDs, her Commodore 64 and her precious Doc Martens. By the time Cam’s truck pulled up, she was out on the sidewalk with her things, waiting for him.
Cam did not get out of his truck, but Eleanor could see from the window how he embraced their daughter when he reached her. He held her that way for at least a minute. Then they were gone.
She left a message on his machine. (“We need to talk. I was wrong. But Al was out of line, too. It’s important, when things like this come up, that we can still present a unified front...”)
He did not return the call.
There was school the next day. Eleanor figured Cam would bring Al there, but sometime in the morning a call came from the office.
“Your daughter didn’t show up. We just wanted to make sure you knew.”
“You’d better call my children’s father,” she said.
The next night Cam called her: “Al has chosen to remain here at the farm,” he said, in the way of speaking he’d adopted with her since the divorce. Quiet, calm, betraying no evidence of emotion. “She’d like to go back to her old school. You can make an issue of it if you choose, but we’re hoping you won’t turn this into a battle. She’s old enough to make her own decisions.”
Crying was never a good idea with Cam. Neither was yelling into the phone, or slamming the receiver down. At times like these she always ended up sounding like a crazy woman.
“I hope you get help, Eleanor,” he said. “I pray you find peace.”
It always worked this way, that after she hung up, she thought of all the things she wished she’d said to him, instead of what she did. Which was nothing.
It was May when Ursula made her decision to leave Eleanor’s house and go live on the farm, too, with her brother and sister. She waiteduntil seventh-grade graduation. Once Al made the move, it was probably inevitable that Ursula would follow.
“Toby needs me,” she said. “Plus, Coco needs help with the baby.” And Betsy was teaching her how to sew.
By the time school started in the fall—eighth grade for Ursula, ninth for Alison—the visitation schedule had been flipped. The parent they visited on weekends was Eleanor now, but more and more, their activities got in the way of those visits, too. Field hockey and basketball games, soccer and 4-H. Ursula was helping Toby raise rabbits, along with the goats. Then Cam’s old friend Jeremy gave them an old horse he’d bought in the classifieds, before it occurred to him he had no place to put her. Once Midnight showed up, and the chickens, the children hardly ever came to Eleanor’s anymore. There was always some job to take care of back on the farm.
She called them up most nights, but often, when she did, they’d be in the middle of some game with Elijah, or tending to the animals.
“Can we call you back later, Mom?” Ursula would say.
Sometimes they did. More often they didn’t.
There had been a time when Eleanor craved quiet so much she had sent Toby to the borning room for ten minutes of peace. Now her house felt like a tomb. Toby’s Legos and rock collection were gone, along with Ursula’s Judy Blume books and hair products, the glitter she tossed in the air every morning as she walked out the door to school to make herself sparkle, the bottles of nail polish lining the bathroom sink. She missed Al’s wardrobe—black shirts, black pants, black socks—scattered on the floor of her room, her collection of underground comic books, along with odd Japanese snack foods, exotic fly-eating plants. Weirdly, Eleanor even missed the sound of Guns N’ Roses blasting from Al’s bedroom.
Eleanor hadn’t played her old vinyl records in years, but now she set up the turntable again and took out theBluealbum. It felt almost as if she were back where she’d started (same sad songs, the same Boston suburb, even).
I wish I had a river I could skate away on.It was almost as though that other whole life—her real one—had never happened.
73.
Perfect Christmas
Cam used to say Eleanor became a crazy person for the entire month of December, and she probably did, though in the scale of problems, going overboard for your children at the holidays didn’t seem like the worst problem a person could suffer from. It didn’t take a great therapist to recognize the origins of this particular obsession. All you had to do was look at the photograph albums from Eleanor’s childhood—the stiff, formal annual Christmas card portrait of Eleanor and her parents in front of a tree covered with one color of ornaments only (blue one year, gold the next). Martin and Vivian always had a drink in their hands, even in the pictures. Eleanor, in that year’s holiday dress, sat soberly on her stool, not so much smiling as turning the corners of her mouth up. Her mother didn’t like giving her paints because they were messy, so she got dolls and ski equipment. Never the dog she asked for every year.
Eleanor had spent her children’s whole childhood obsessed with doing Christmas differently. Ever since they were very little—but old enough to understand the concept of the gift inside the wrapping paper, and not just the wrapping paper—Eleanor had seen the presents she chose for her children as a way of acknowledging to them the things she loved and valued about them, all the aspects of who they were that only someone who knew them as well as she did would recognize. The best presents were the ones that only someone who paid as close attention as she did would know to put under the tree.
For Alison, one year, it had been a pogo stick. She never asked for one, but Eleanor remembered a time, in Boston, when they’d watched a subway busker perform an act on a pogo stick, and Alison, not yet six years old, had stood transfixed, watching him. Veryshyly, and only once, Ursula had expressed the dream of becoming a fashion designer. That was the year Eleanor drove three hours to a department store in western Massachusetts that was going out of business and getting rid of its mannequins. She’d bought one, the same size as Ursula. Driving home in a snowstorm with the naked, bald-headed child mannequin stretched across the back seat, she pictured how her daughter would dress up the mannequin—the wonderful, crazy outfits Ursula would create for her. She wasn’t wrong about that.
