This was the moment he kissed her, long and slow, with his hands circling the back of her neck, almost as if he were some weary traveler, finally arrived at a watering hole. They stayed that way, pressed up against each other, neither one of them moving, for a surprisingly long time.
“I know this might sound crazy, but I want to make babies with you. I have this feeling you’d make a wonderful mother” he said. “I want to make a family.”
“I’ve only had sex with one person, ever,” she told him. She did not add that it happened in the front seat of the car of her roommate’s older brother, with her eyes shut and her fingers gripping the seat, waiting for it to be over.
“That other person you were with, before,” he said, “I’m guessing he hurt you. But I won’t.”
That first night, they slept together. It was nothing like what had happened with Matt that summer in Rhode Island. She didn’t want to close her eyes. She wanted to see his face. When they finally fell asleep, Cam’s arms stayed wrapped around her. When she woke up, he was still holding her.
He moved into her house ten days later with two apple crates containing his tools, Opal the goat, a sack of goat feed, the harmonica he intended to learn how to play, and his dog, Sally, who sniffed Charlie’s old dog bed briefly, then settled in. Two months after that Eleanor was pregnant.
When they learned she was going to have a baby, they danced in the kitchen. Cam got down on his knees and kissed her belly—still flat, though by fall it had begun to swell, as her breasts did. Neither one of them cared whether it was a boy or a girl. “Just so long as one of our children learns to play the guitar,” Eleanor said.
She loved almost everything about being pregnant. She didn’t feel sick that much, but when she did, she got under the quilt on their bed with her copy of Spiritual Midwifery by a woman named Ina May Gaskin and her husband, Stephen, who had founded a commune in Tennessee called The Farm, where people came from all over to deliver their babies. Eleanor had the birth stories in the book practically memorized. Sometimes now, driving next to Cam in his truck, she’d read out loud to him from its pages.
“Let me get this straight,” he said, when she read him the part about the most important things a woman’s husband could do when she was in labor. “You’re lying there yelling and screaming and I’m supposed to give you this long, passionate kiss?”
“Stephen says it helps a woman’s cervix dilate,” Eleanor told him. “So the baby can get out easier.”
“Fair enough,” Cam said. “Kissing you always sounds like a good idea.”
They were married that August—a wedding pulled together so fast that the only people in attendance were Patty (still living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, working for an ad agency), and Darla (accompanied by Bobby, who wouldn’t let her attend without him), and Walt and Edith, and a couple of friends of Cam’s who raised goats in Vermont. Cam’s parents, Roger and Roberta, made the drive from Amelia Island, in Florida, arriving the day before the ceremony and taking off the morning after. His brother, Roger Junior, came from Dallas with his wife, Annette—the first time the brothers had seen each other in years, evidently. Darla’s daughter, Kimmie, in her role as flower girl, scattered petals along the path to the makeshift arbor Cam had built, out behind the house, where they said their vows. Cam’s mother sprayed bug repellent wherever she went, and stayed close to Roger Junior and Annette.
Eleanor wore a Gunne Sax dress—unfastened in the back because it didn’t fit over her belly—and a garland of flowers in her hair. Cam wore a white shirt and suspenders and a pair of tuxedo pants she’d found for him at a thrift shop in Keene. A friend of his—one of the goat farmers—played the guitar and sang an Eric Andersen song, “Close the Door Lightly When You Go.” Given that the lyrics were about a couple breaking up, it wasn’t what you could call a wedding song, but Cam had explained that it was one of the few songs whose lyrics Jeremy remembered, so never mind the part about “Fare thee well, sweet love of mine.” The main thing was that he knew all the chords.
They spoke their vows in the field below the house, a few hundred feet from the giant ash tree at the top of the hill. Eleanor read the vows she’d written the afternoon before, on a rock at the waterfall. “I promise my heart will stay open to every single chapter in our lives together, even the hard ones,” she told him. “I know there will be some.”
Cam had a piece of paper, too, that he took from his pocket. She had never seen him cry, but that afternoon, reading the sonnet he’d chosen—Elizabeth Barrett Browning—his voice cracked.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
12.
The Money Part
They made love a lot that summer, and throughout the following fall. In the field behind the house—a mossy patch, their clothes flung on a nearby rock, and under the ash tree, on a blanket Cam laid down for them, and once, around dusk on the kind of drizzly afternoon when nobody was likely to show up for a swim, at the swimming hole below the waterfall. After years of being skinny, she loved the way her body felt as it filled out—as if she were some very ripe piece of fruit.
They kept a record player in their bedroom and put on music every night, a soundtrack to their life. Van Morrison singing “Tupelo Honey.” Cam’s favorites—the Grateful Dead—and Eleanor’s—Emmylou Harris, Buffalo Springfield, Doc Watson. The old albums of sad songs no longer spoke to her as they once had.
“I used to feel sad, even when my parents were still alive, that I wasn’t anybody’s favorite person,” she told Darla. “But I’m Cam’s favorite. I never knew what that felt like before.”
All fall they ate meals of vegetables and grains, healthy food, but she also baked pies and cookies, brownies, poppy seed cake. After the years living alone in the house, it felt good having someone to make meals for. More often than not, they ate naked on the rug by candlelight.
Walt surprised them by stopping by one night with a package that had been delivered to him and Edith by mistake—a gift from Cam’s parents, a mobile featuring Disney characters that played “It’s a Small World.”
Eleanor, when she heard Walt’s truck pulling up, had grabbed her shirt and started pulling on her maternity pants. Cam just sat there, butter from the corncob trickling down his beautiful, freckled skin. But Eleanor buttoned up her shirt as she went to the door.
After Walt gave her the package and drove away, they burst out laughing.
“Maybe he’ll think twice about dropping by unannounced next time,” Cam said later. “Come to think of it, with these breasts of yours, he’ll be stopping by every night now hoping to get a look.” He reached across their shared slice of pie to touch her skin. She felt like the goddess of fertility.
“We should make six babies,” he told her. “Ten.”
“Let’s see how this one goes first,” she said as he pulled her down onto the rug.
Until that winter they had worried surprisingly little about money. Sales of Cam’s burl bowls didn’t bring in much, but he set up his workbench in the barn and turned Eleanor’s writing space into a woodshop while Eleanor moved her desk into the house. Every morning, she worked on the next Bodie book. Every few months she could count on a royalty check showing up in the mailbox from the previous ones. They didn’t live extravagantly, but if she wanted to buy an expensive crib or a pair of earrings or beautiful handmade slippers for Cam, she didn’t think twice about it.