How Al looked at that moment was beautiful. Her voice—Eleanor still knew no other way of speaking of this—was firm, but for once, there was no anger as she spoke.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Al said. “This is the opposite of a tragedy. I know the next stage will be hard, but I’m clear about my decision. I’m getting on with my life, and when I do I’ll be a lot happier.”
Al stood very straight as she spoke. Studying her face, Eleanor felt the shift come over her. Al was not beautiful. She was handsome.
“Got to go,” Al said.
“When will we see you again?” Eleanor asked.
“I don’t really know,” Al told her. “When you do, I’ll be different.”
“That’s true of us all, all the time,” Eleanor told her.
Her daughter turned to the door.Daughter.A word that would not apply much longer.
“One thing stays the same,” Eleanor called out. “I’ll always love you.”
“Same here,” Al called back.
88.
Happy, or Close Enough
Two years into the hormone treatment that ultimately led to the final surgery and Al’s gender reassignment, he sent an email to the family (his siblings, including Elijah, as well as Cam and Eleanor, also Coco) informing them that from here on out, the pronouns employed to speak of the person he was—the person he had always been, he was just claiming it fully at long last—should be “he,” “him,” and “his.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” he wrote. “I’m happy. I have a great job at a start-up in Seattle that pays a ridiculous amount of money, and I’m learning how to sail. I met a great woman, Teresa. We’re in love.”
But he didn’t come home—not to Brookline, and not to the farm, either.
“It’ll happen,” he wrote. “I miss you all. This just isn’t the right time.”
As sad as it made Eleanor to think of Al disappearing from their lives for an unspecified period of time—a long one, from the sound of it—she recognized something in Al’s voice (a deeper voice, but recognizable) that hadn’t been there for as long as she could remember: a firmness, but a lightness, too. This was a long time coming, and no doubt a lonely struggle, but he had made his decision.
It was an adjustment, but Eleanor had experienced plenty of those. And it had come to her, taking in the words in Al’s letter, that this was what good news looked like. What did a parent want more than for her children to be their true selves, live their fullest lives? Al was doing that, finally.
Not long after Al sent out his email to the family, Ursula sent an announcement of her marriage to Jake—her high school sweetheart,the first boy she ever kissed—shortly after her graduation from UVM. “It was either put on a big wedding, or put the money toward the down payment on a house,” she told Eleanor. “We chose the down payment.”
Eleanor called her right away. “I would have paid for a wedding,” she told Ursula. “Consider it going to the down payment fund.”
The house they found was just outside of Burlington, Vermont, where Ursula worked at a day care center and Jake coached soccer at a high school within biking range. It seemed to Eleanor that the experience of making a home together had the effect of softening the faint air of disapproval she’d felt from Ursula ever since the divorce from Cam. Maybe the wound of seeing her family broken up as it had been, back when she was seven, no longer seemed so raw to Ursula, now that she was in the process of building a family of her own.
Ursula called Eleanor more often now—a big improvement on how things had gone in the years before this. Most Sunday afternoons, she’d call—to talk about work, or her garden, or one of the home renovation projects she and Jake were undertaking on their place, an old cape not so different from the one in which she’d been raised.
At least once every six weeks, Eleanor made the drive to Burlington to see Ursula and Jake. After all those years in which Eleanor had walked on eggshells with her younger daughter, it felt as though she’d gotten her back—not the old, relentlessly sunny Ursula, but a more authentic version, probably, a young woman who stayed up late with her mother as she wept over the murder of her best friend, and talked with her about the lessons she’d learned from clients at the center where she worked who were going through gender reassignment surgery similar to Al’s. Eleanor could talk with Ursula about her times with Toby at the center in Baltimore, and about her experiences in the strange, alien world of Hollywood. One topic only remained off-limits—Eleanor could feel this without Ursula’s saying it. They never mentioned Cam, or Coco, or the divorce. Ursula had witnessed way too much of her mother’s bitterness toward her father. They both understood it was best to steer clear of that territory.
89.
No Big Drama, No Sleepless Nights
TheCork PeopleTV series was a hit. The network ordered thirteen episodes and hired Eleanor to come on as a story consultant. She still lived in Brookline, mostly, but she sublet an apartment in Silver Lake and flew out to L.A. every six weeks to advise on the show.
At a gallery opening Eleanor attended in Santa Monica a few months after she’d taken on the television work, she met an art dealer in his late sixties, Peter, who invited her for a drink, which led to dinner. The next time she came to California, he invited her to go to Ojai with him for the weekend. Then, even more incongruously for a person like Eleanor, she accompanied him on a trip to Hawaii.
None of this bore any resemblance to how she had spent the first five decades of her life, but Peter was a smart and interesting man who seemed to appreciate her company and, unlike many other men his age in Los Angeles, did not set his sights on some twenty-five-year-old. He expressed affection for her drawings. In addition to art (mid-twentieth century prints and photography his specialty) he knew a lot about wine and architecture and Irish wolfhounds. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that they only saw each other once every six weeks. It suited them both.
Peter did not move Eleanor the way Cam had, or Timmy Pouliot. But he was good company, and kind, which at this point in Eleanor’s life mattered more than the qualities of being handsome, sexy, exciting, or wildly romantic. His business took him regularly to London, and he invited her to come with him. With the exception of one brief trip to promote the British edition of her book a couple of years back, she’d never spent any time exploring there, but she had loved visiting the Tate and going to the theater every night.
After London, they flew to Venice. Then Paris. She thought about Darla, how much she would have loved hearing about their trip—Darla, who had never traveled farther from northern Maine and New Hampshire than Boston. Once, and once only, she had started telling Peter about her friendship with Darla—how she’d sold her motorcycle to buy a double-wide trailer, and hidden away her earnings from cleaning people’s houses to save up for mortuary school. She could see, on Peter’s face, as she talked about her friend, a blankness. He had no frame of reference for a person like Darla, or a place like the one Eleanor had lived all those years and still missed. It was best to keep that part of her life separate from her California world.
