The sadness came to her, in a rush, every time she placed Alison on her nipple to nurse. Some hormone must have released itself into her bloodstream, she figured, but knowing it was her own body chemistry playing tricks didn’t make any less real the feeling that she was plummeting down some bottomless well.
For Cam, none of the same hormones came into play, but he felt the effects of Eleanor’s. Her breasts, that had been, for Cam, a source of seemingly endless pleasure—never more so than during her pregnancy—were vessels of milk now, whose sole function was to feed their child. One night, in bed, not so long after the birth of their daughter, he had reached over to touch them, and she recoiled as swiftly as if she’d received an electric shock.
Afterward, she apologized. “It just doesn’t feel right anymore, you touching me there,” she told him.
They were having sex again by this point—not so often as before, or as energetically. It was disconcerting to Eleanor that more often than not, when they made love—no matter how quietly—Alison would wake from her sleep in the little basket they put her in at the side of their bed, and cry out—as if she knew something was going on that wasn’t about her, and she didn’t like it. Here came the reminder: she was the center of their universe now.
“You don’t have to pick her up right this second,” Cam whispered. “She’s okay.”
But the mood was broken.
Alison was six weeks old when Eleanor returned to her desk. In the absence of a new book contract, she was drawing illustrations for a series of elementary school reading textbooks. The work didn’t bring in much money, and it was unexciting, but it provided regular checks, and they needed those.
She figured out a way to hold her daughter—nurse her, even—while she was drawing. She had figured out a way to sit with her legs folded in a kind of modified lotus position, with Alison cradled against her mother’s thigh, and propped against her nursing breast.
There had been a time when Eleanor would visit Cam in the barn almost every afternoon when their work was winding down, with a beer for them both, and more often than not they would peel off each other’s clothes and lie down on the foam mat he kept out there, for just this purpose.
This happened less frequently now. One day, when she’d come out to the woodshop—she needed his signature on their tax return—Cam mentioned that he couldn’t even remember the last time they’d made love.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m just so tired.” These days, if there was ever a half hour when the baby was sleeping and there was no laundry to wash, all she’d want to do with it was to be alone.
They no longer spoke about the old dream of ten children, or six, or even four. They’d catch sight of each other across the room, like two people who had met once, long ago, but couldn’t remember where.
One time, out on the road, when she was driving into town—a grocery run, a trip to the dump—Eleanor had passed Cam, driving the opposite direction, at the wheel of his old green truck they’d finally managed to get running again. And for a split second, catching sight of her husband, she actually failed to recognize him. For a moment there, seeing his face, she thought, What a handsome man. Then she remembered: she was married to him.
Ships passing in the night. It sometimes felt that way. And yet it was also true that having made this baby together—this person—and sharing in the strange and mysterious adventure of these early days with her had brought them closer.
Days went by that Eleanor didn’t get out of her sweatpants. Some nights, all they could manage to throw together for dinner was a bowl of canned soup. But sometime in early September—just when the leaves were starting to turn and the first frost hit their tomato plants—Eleanor decided to make a special dinner for the two of them—spaghetti carbonara, with the last of their garden greens on the side, and homemade brownies for dessert. She picked up a bottle of Chianti at the liquor store. (Candles, they always kept on hand.) She waited until they had Alison in her crib, then changed into the one nice dress she owned that she could still fit into. She put on her Al Green album. Then lipstick.
Cam, when he came in from his run, looked around the darkened room—just three candles and an oil lamp burning—with puzzlement. It had been that long.
“What’s the occasion?” he asked her. “Did I miss something?”
“Nothing in particular,” she said. “I just thought we should remind ourselves where all this baby stuff came from in the first place. You and me.”
They ate by the fire, the way they had in the old days. (Not so old. It hadn’t even been two years since they’d met.) At one point during the meal, Cam had reached across the table to take her hand and brought it to his lips. “You’re still a beautiful woman,” he told her.
“I don’t feel that way.”
After, they brought the candles into the bedroom. Since Alison’s birth, Eleanor had been undressing in the dark, mostly, and sleeping in a nightgown, unbuttoned in the front to make it easier when the baby came into bed with them to nurse.
“Let me see you,” he said, holding out the oil lamp.
Six weeks later, her period was late.
“I didn’t think you could get pregnant while you were nursing,” she said, when she told him. She had worried that Cam might be upset. She wasn’t sure herself how she felt about the idea of another baby, so soon after the first. But he threw his arms around her and let out a whoop.
“I have no idea how we’ll pay for this,” she said.
“There you go again.” He grinned. “It’s only money.”
16.
A First Baseman’s Wife
I joined a softball team,” Cam told her, hopping out of the truck after a Saturday morning run to the town dump. “They’re called the Yellow Jackets.”
To Eleanor, this seemed like an odd moment for her husband to take on a commitment to play ball three nights a week. It was April, six weeks past Alison’s first birthday, with three months to go before the new baby came. He was already headed to the garage to look for his old glove.
“They made me first baseman,” he said. “Long-armed lefty. How can I go wrong?”
That Tuesday night, he went alone to his game, but when he came home he told her how all the players’ wives liked coming to the games. “It’s a great group of guys,” Cam said. “I bet you’ll like the women, too. Everybody’s got little kids and babies on the way. You’re always saying you wished you knew more people in town.”
After that, Eleanor never missed a game. Cam was right: it was fun sitting on the bleachers at the dusty ball field with Alison in her arms or on a blanket next to her on cool spring evenings (and, later, warm summer nights). Half watching the players, but mostly (always with an eye on the older children, playing in the dirt a little ways from the field) talking with the other wives—an experience she’d never had before—about all the small, seemingly insignificant details of their children’s lives that, at the time, consumed them: whether to use a pacifier, when to start solid food, what to do if you observed your four-year-old masturbating. They talked about other things besides the children, too. Recipes, for sure. But also, particularly after a beer—and there was always beer—the conversation came around to sex. Who was having it. Who wasn’t. Who still cared about it.