She was eleven years old when they’d traveled to New York City to take in the World’s Fair—riding an escalator past the Pietà, flown in from Italy; taking in water-skiers and a parrot at the Florida pavilion and the World’s Biggest Cheese at the Wisconsin pavilion. Later that afternoon, her parents drank so many mai tais at the Hawaii pavilion (seven, based on Eleanor’s count of the paper umbrellas) that they had trouble making their way back to the parking lot.
The next day, after a breakfast involving a large pitcher of Bloody Marys, as they were walking along Fifth Avenue—Eleanor a few steps behind the two of them, as usual—she had decided to simply stop walking. Just stand still on the sidewalk and see how long it took before they noticed.
Her parents had gone more than a block before they looked back, and even when they did, they did so with an unnerving measure of calm.
Oh, there you are, her mother said. Her speech was only very slightly slurred. Nobody would have noticed but Eleanor.
The last time she’d seen her parents, Eleanor had told her mother she didn’t plan on going skiing with the two of them over break.
Did it ever occur to you to ask my opinion about what I’d like to do instead of making all these plans and then letting me know? Did it ever occur to you that I might have my own ideas about what I’d want to do, besides tagging along after the two of you, watching you order cocktails and stare into each other’s eyes? Cleaning up the broken glass in the morning?
That Christmas they’d given her a pair of warm gloves and a parka, a watch, an art kit of the sort best suited for a child around eight years old who may or may not have expressed an interest in painting, and a gift certificate for Filene’s. Eleanor was in her room, packing her suitcase, her face still hot from the argument with her parents. Her mother appeared in the doorway, without a drink.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come skiing with us?” her mother asked, again. She put her hand on Eleanor’s shoulder. She seemed relieved when Eleanor said no thanks, she was going to visit her school roommate, Patty, over winter vacation.
At the funeral, someone who’d seen Martin and Vivian at the mountain the day of the accident had told her how great the conditions had been. How happy the two of them had looked, sitting in the lodge after their last run, sipping their Irish coffees.
“In a way, it’s sort of perfect that they died together,” a friend of her father’s had suggested. Imagine either one of those two without the other.
They’d ended their lives side by side in the front seat of their Oldsmobile, with their only child at school a few hundred miles away. Once again, Eleanor had been left out, and though this time it was a good thing, it seemed to her that really, she’d been on her own forever anyway.
Who else did Eleanor know who—as she discovered, cleaning out their kitchen, after—had one whole cupboard devoted to swizzle sticks? And another containing two dozen jars of maraschino cherries?
7.
One Small Step for Man
Patty’s parents, the Hallinans, invited Eleanor to spend her summer vacation with their family in Rhode Island. Patty was going to be away working as a camp counselor for most of the summer, but Alice Hallinan said that only made them all even more eager to have another teenage girl around, so they wouldn’t miss Patty so much.
Jim Hallinan found Eleanor a job doing daytime kitchen prep at a restaurant owned by a golfing buddy of his. And the best part was, their son, Matt, would be home from college, retaking a class he’d flunked the year before and studying for the law boards, so he could drive her to work and look out for her.
An older brother. Eleanor had envied Patty for having one. It was her Anthony dream in real life.
She moved into Patty’s room, with its twin canopy beds and the poster of Donovan on the wall, along with Patty’s swim team medals and a collage of pictures from family trips to the Cape. Alice—who’d told Eleanor to call her Mom, not that she did—had cleared out half of the drawers for her clothes, though she didn’t have that many. Their dog, Buddy, licked her shin. She’d always wanted a dog, but that wasn’t her parents’ style.
“We all want you to consider yourself one of the family,” Alice said.
On the ride over to her first day of work at DiNuccio’s, Patty’s brother, Matt, turned on the radio. Eleanor recognized the warbly strains of “Crimson and Clover.”
“My sister goes for all this sugar crap,” he told her. “But I’m thinking you might appreciate Led Zeppelin.” He changed the station.
He was back at the restaurant at four to bring her home, and every day after that, he drove her. Both ways.
“This must mess up your plans,” Eleanor said. “Having to go back and forth to DiNuccio’s all the time.”
“I have no plans,” he told Eleanor. “My dad’s got me on a short leash on account of my grades. He basically laid down the law: if I don’t pass this stupid Spanish class I need to graduate and get a decent score on the LSATs, he’s taking back the car. The good thing about driving you is I get an excuse to bust out of the coop twice a day.”
Eleanor liked sitting in the front seat with Matt, listening to the radio. Sometimes they rode without speaking—Matt pounding on the steering wheel when a good song came on, Eleanor looking out the window—but more and more, he talked with her. She felt special and grown-up, that a boy as old as Matt would pay attention to her this way. It was almost like having a real brother.
One day he handed her a joint. “You smoke?”
She never had, but she didn’t want to seem like a goody-goody.
“Sometimes.”
She inhaled, more than a person should. She started coughing.
“Not much I guess, huh?” he said. His laughter sounded like some kind of animal. A hyena, or the way hyenas sounded in cartoons anyway.
“What do you figure the story was with this guy Billie Joe McAllister?” he asked her. “Ode to Billie Joe” had come on. “Like, why did the guy jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge?”
Eleanor didn’t know what to say, so she kept quiet. Something about “Ode to Billie Joe” always made her uncomfortable. Nobody ever explained what they threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
“You have a boyfriend?” he asked her.
“No.”
“You ever have a boyfriend?”
For a minute, she thought she’d lie, but she figured he wouldn’t believe her anyway. “Not really.”
“Any guy ever kiss you?”
She shook her head.
They were at the point in the road where, if he went left, they’d be back at the Hallinans’ in around two minutes. There was another road, off to the right. Smaller. No sign of houses. She’d never been down that one.
That’s where he took her. Not saying anything, he pulled the car over.
He leaned over to her side of the wide bench seat and put his hands on her shoulders. He pressed his face against hers. At first the kiss was the normal kind, as much as Eleanor had imagined. Then his tongue was in her mouth.
After that, he always turned down the other road when he picked her up after work. They didn’t talk about it. This was just something he did, and Eleanor let him. It usually lasted only a few minutes. Then they went back to the house.