“It’s like I’m dating my own children,” she told Darla. “And it’s always a first date.”
One spring vacation, she rented a cottage on a beach in the Bahamas for the four of them, making the flight out of Boston in a blizzard and arriving to torrential rain and an infestation of sand flies. They spent the week playing card games and going out to eata lot. Except for one day, it rained all week, and when the sun came out, Toby and Ursula got sunburned. When they went home, everyone seemed relieved.
“I miss my brother and my goats,” Toby said, in the car on the way back from the airport. “I want to go home.”
Home meaning the farm. That part never changed.
79.
What It Meant to Be Real
She read the news in the paper: Harry Botts died. No mention of his cause of death. “At home... following a short illness... survived by his mother... a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs... formerly a proud member of Akersville’s long-standing softball team, the Yellow Jackets.”
The old team, disbanded now, all showed up for the funeral: Cam and Coco were there, of course. Also Sal Perrone (long divorced now from Lucinda, who’d moved to Arizona with their children), Peggy and Bob Olin with their very young daughter (a strawberry blonde), Bonnie and Jerry Henderson, the Pouliot brothers.
Eleanor was past forty now. It had been a few months since Timmy Pouliot had taken Eleanor out on the Harley that last time. Catching sight of him in the pew a few rows ahead of her, she could hardly remember what it felt like, stepping into his dark little apartment, letting him peel off her clothes, lowering herself into the tub he’d run for her. No man had seen her body in a few years now.
Harry’s mother sat in the front row—a well-dressed woman, wearing gloves and the kind of hat that identified her as definitely not from New Hampshire, her face ravaged. In the row behind her were a couple of men Harry had evidently known from a group of amateur Gilbert and Sullivan performers he was part of in Boston. One of them looked almost as thin as Harry had that day Eleanor ran into him at the supermarket. Everyone in the church knew what that meant.
Harry had asked that a friend of his from Chicago read the poem “Casey at the Bat.” A Unitarian minister read out loud fromThe Velveteen Rabbit—a passage Eleanor remembered from back when she’d read that book out loud to her children. Toby in particular had lovedthis one—about what it meant to be real, and how it didn’t matter how beat-up you looked, or if your ear fell off, if you were loved.
Harry had definitely looked pretty beat-up that time Eleanor saw him buying groceries, and he probably looked even worse by the end. She hoped he had felt loved. It made her sad that she didn’t know if he had, or anything about what that part of his story had looked like.
They ended the service with the hymn “Morning Has Broken,” that most of them probably knew from the Cat Stevens version. Eleanor remembered an end-of-season softball party at the farm—buffalo wings, potato skins, homemade cider and doughnuts—and how she and Harry had danced to a Cat Stevens record,Tea for the Tillerman. What a good dancer he’d been.
“You and Cam are so lucky,” he’d told her. “You’ve got this beautiful farm, those beautiful kids.”
He had grown up in Oak Park, he told her. His parents had a huge house, right down the street from one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. “But they were never happy,” he told Eleanor. “And I could never tell them who I really was. They don’t even know me.”
Maybe his mother did now, finally. A little late.
She thought about her own children. She used to say she knew every inch of their bodies. But more and more, they were a mystery to her. What had it meant that Ursula had seemed so relentlessly happy and hopeful all the time—until she wasn’t anymore? Why did Al stay in her room, all the time, and why was she so angry? Who were these people she’d given birth to? What if, like Harry Botts’s mother, it turned out she never really understood who they were?
She didn’t stay around for the reception. She didn’t feel like catching up with all those wives she used to know from their days together on the bleachers, didn’t feel up for the uncomfortable looks married women give to the single—part pity, part fear. There had been a time when they had shared the most intimate details of their lives (marriage, sex, childbirth, the hunger for a life beyond the kitchen and the bleachers, the death of a child) but they were strangers now, or something worse. For the women who had stayed married—and so far, all of the other women in this room had—someone like Eleanor, whose marriage had ended, was as threatening a presence as aman with AIDS had been. Her face might as well have been covered by Kaposi’s sarcoma. She was that untouchable.
To many of those at the church that morning, anyway, but not all. As Eleanor was heading out to her car, Timmy Pouliot approached her. She had thought she’d make a swift getaway without seeing him—what could either of them say in this place?—but he ran up and put his arms around her. What did it matter who saw them? On that day it didn’t.
Much had changed, but not those blue eyes of his.
“I miss you,” he told her.
“I miss myself,” she said.
80.
The Cork People
Long ago, when she was growing up—only child of two parents so involved with each other they frequently seemed inconvenienced by her presence—she had acquired the habit of finding escape in the pictures she made.
Something happened when Eleanor began to draw. She left the world for a while and stepped into a new one. Again, that fall, she took out her pencils. Two decades had passed since Eleanor had worked on a children’s book, or any story at all. Now this one consumed her. Alone at her drawing table with no children to look after, most days, she plunged so completely into the lives of her characters that she almost forgot her own.
At first she started with drawings—random images of a young mother and her children, the three of them closely modeled on her own. She drew them on one of their walks to the falls, drew a small boy looking out over a bridge as his cowboy hat got blown into the water, and another boy—an older one—standing on the banks of that same brook with a fishing pole, a little farther downstream. There was a dog who looked a lot like Sally, and a girl, like Al, who had cut her hair very short and only wore pants, and another girl who loved ruffled dresses and hair ornaments. The images of the children were never the problem. It was bringing the parents to life that got in Eleanor’s way, so she left them out of it.
In the story that came to Eleanor, the parents were off somewhere, doing their jobs, probably. It was that time of year that’s not quite spring yet, but you know it’s coming. (Snow melting. Runoff.) So the children decided to make some boats, and some cork people.
Once she had that part, the story came easily. But it wasn’t really about the children. It was about the cork people, attached by rubberbands to their various small boats, launched into the dangerous waters that looked a great deal, in Eleanor’s drawings, like Hopewell Falls.
From then on, the story was about the adventures they had, the places their boats took them, from the brook to a small river, to a larger river, all the way to the ocean and beyond. The cork people made it to Africa, and to the South Sea Islands, New Zealand, and the Maldives. They faced dangers, of course—sharks, oil tankers, cruise ships, giant waves, even a spoiled child who found one of them washed up on a beach in Florida and wanted to bring him home with her as a toy. (Imagine a cork person, shut up in a fancy dollhouse!) But he’d escaped. The cork people in Eleanor’s story—as the months passed, a whole collection of stories—always made it through.
