Eleanor: A Novel Read online

  For a time, Eleanor hardly noticed. Marrying while still a student wasn’t so bad: she could work a husband into her routines. Hob cheered at her events, and even liked to come to her practices. He would sit high in the bleachers and watch as she carved through the pool, the water collapsing into her wake behind her. Afterward he would take her to dinner, and then they would go home. That first year was almost magical.

  When Agnes was born, Eleanor left school, one semester shy of graduation. She’d transformed before Hob’s eyes from a girl herself into a mother. Her body changed, responding well to the pregnancy and the early months of breastfeeding and healing. For Hob, there could be nothing better. Eleanor knew that he was the happiest he would ever be, the conquering soldier returned home to build a family from raw materials.

  Eleanor didn’t feel the sea’s quiet tug until Agnes was nearly two. By then, Eleanor had given up her own dreams, almost unaware that she was doing so, and settled contentedly into this unexpected rewrite of her life. Agnes was a lovely child. She picked up words quickly. She furrowed her brow like a small, grumpy old man, reducing Eleanor and Hob to laughter.

  One evening they went to Hob’s sister’s house for dinner, and returned by way of the coast. The sea sparkled under a fat moon, and Eleanor fell into a trance as the waves rolled past the car window. Lying in bed that night, Agnes finally snoring softly in the corner crib, Eleanor nudged Hob and said, “I want to swim again.”

  The college pool had been closed for repairs, and the municipal pool was stuffed with children and teenagers, and Hob had been ready to throw in the towel when Eleanor said, “Let’s go to the beach.” He resisted this at first, muttering about sharks and frigid water and such, but Eleanor pooh-poohed all these excuses. That day, Hob stood on the shore, watching, as Eleanor swam parallel to the land, reveling in the slow suck of the tide at her belly.

  At twenty-four years old, Eleanor was already at a disadvantage. She’d given up two years of training. She hadn’t medaled. She was forgotten. Her peers had practiced while she’d been home, soothing her daughter to sleep or mashing up bananas for lunch. Competitive swimming was a ghost that haunted her. At some point, her life had forked away from the water.

  “You could just swim for the fun of it,” Hob said.

  “I want to win something,” Eleanor answered. She began dreaming of the Olympic qualifying event that she’d missed two years before. She left Agnes with Hob one day and drove to Oregon State to visit her old coach, who confirmed her fears: Eleanor was too far removed from the world of competitive swimming. Motherhood weakened a woman, the coach said. It wasn’t her fault. Women fell beneath the steamroller of real-life obligations every year. Some of the best swimmers he’d ever seen never medaled.

  “I’ve seen a few of them try to come back. It’s not pretty. You’d probably place in the back of the crowd,” he said, patting Eleanor’s hand. “It’s a shame, Els. You were really good.”

  “I can come back,” Eleanor protested.

  “Summer Games are in two years,” her coach said. “You won’t be ready by then. So—what? You train for the next one, in ’68? That’s six years, Eleanor. How old will you be then?”

  Eleanor looked away and didn’t answer.

  “Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”

  “Thirty,” she answered.

  The coach sighed. “Thirty. Well, that’s that, then.”

  Driving home, Eleanor mourned her past life. She pulled the car onto the side of the state highway, and as trucks and buses and station wagons roared by, she put her hands over her eyes and cried.

  But after her good cry, Hob convinced her that she wasn’t through yet.

  “So you’re too old to swim,” he pointed out. “Are you too old to dive?”

  Eleanor leans into each stroke. The waves diminish as she puts distance between herself and the mainland. She can’t hear the horns bellowing in the port lanes anymore. The sound of the water in her ears is too close, too loud. She loves the sound of it. It’s almost a part of her, her momentum stripping molecules of water from the ocean. The water clings to her skin. Her arms break the surface. She turns her head, sucks in a breath, drops her face into the sea again.

  Hob rows a safe distance away, giving the oars a long, lazy pull now and then, matching Eleanor’s pace.

  He loves her. She knows that he’s different. She can’t think of a single man in her life who ever demonstrated an interest in a woman’s dreams. In her cooking, yes. In her figure, of course. But what man would insert himself into a woman’s heart and embrace the things that moved her most deeply? Hob is unique, and she supposes this is why she loves him.

  But here, in the ocean, the water sluicing over her face, the scent of the sea filling her nose, she imagines what it might be like to return to a distant time, to the days before she met Hob. Knowing what she knows now—knowing his love, and the sparkle of her daughter’s eyes—would Eleanor make the same decisions? Would she allow herself to fall in love?

  As she swims she glances in Hob’s direction. He’s a good man: quiet and patient and gentle.

  She dives beneath the surface for a few strokes, kicking to a depth at which she knows she cannot be seen. And only there, where the sunlight begins to dim and the warmer surface water turns abruptly cold, does she permit herself to answer the question.

  No. Of course she wouldn’t choose this life.

  Who would?

  Eleanor is not a natural diver. She learned this early, standing atop the island cliff for the first time. The fifty-foot drop was significantly higher than any competitive diving platform. Until her first visit to the island, she had only ever dived from the three-foot board at the municipal pool. The island, called Huffnagle, was, on all sides but one, a disaster zone, its shallows a minefield of broken rock. But if a girl was to go ashore, and if she were to discover the gnarled path that led to the top of the island, she might find that the side of the island that faced the Pacific horizon also overlooked a deep blue cove mostly free of skull-shattering rocks.

  That first day, Hob had rowed the little boat into the cove and drawn close to the cliff, where he waited, craning his neck to see her high above. It had taken her almost an hour to gather her courage and actually dive, and when she did, her dive was formless, like a crumpled origami pattern, and she had hit the water like a child pushed down a flight of stairs.

  “You were never a gymnast,” her coach had cautioned when Eleanor asked about diving. “Swimmers don’t make good divers. Gymnasts and ballerinas, surprisingly enough, do. And you have a swimmer’s build, Eleanor. Do not get your hopes up. Please.”

  But now, a full season later, her dives are precise and fluid. She is no longer rattled by the height, but craves the moment of flight before gravity snatches her out of the sky. She practices for as long as her body can stand it, fancifully throwing herself from the cliff time and time again. After each dive, she swims around the island to the nearest beach, then goes ashore, climbs the path, and repeats the routine. On a good afternoon, when it isn’t too cold, when the water isn’t too hard, she might dive a dozen times.

  Hob has learned to keep his mouth shut. The first few times, he would give her feedback when she surfaced. “You weren’t keeping your knees together,” he would say. “Your shoulders aren’t square to the water.”

  But now he just waits in the boat, reading a book or his newspaper, as though he’s a parent waiting patiently for his daughter to wear herself out on the playground equipment. He has found the right spot to hover in the boat, where the slow ocean swells keep him pinned to the cliff wall. He can turn his pages without worrying that he’ll drift away.

  This day the rain has made reading difficult, so Hob waits beneath his umbrella, watching Eleanor’s dives more carefully than usual. Her first dive is graceful—maybe the best yet. He has advised her that learning to dive from non-regulation height might work against her—after all, a fifty-foot dive provides a woman with more opportunity to adjust her form�
�but Eleanor has only ignored his comments, so he keeps them to himself.

  He huddles in the boat, beneath his raincoat, enjoying the damp smell of the cliff beside him, watching the occasional fish break the surface. A quarter mile out, seven or eight seagulls bob on the water, unconcerned about the rain.

  Eleanor dives again, then smiles at him before swimming around the rocks. It usually takes about seven or eight minutes for her to go ashore and reach the top of the cliff, so this time, when more than ten minutes go by, he feels the first twinge of worry. He tilts his head back and looks up at the cliff, but he can’t see her there. He calls her name, and she answers—but her voice is smaller than it should be.

  Hob grabs the oars and begins to row.

  Eleanor sits in the breakfast nook and watches the rain fall. The tree that Hob and Agnes planted two summers ago bends sideways with the wind. Even from here Eleanor can see the earth around its base beginning to pucker. If the storm gets much worse, the tree won’t survive.

  She can hear the rain lashing against the house with each gust of wind. Up above, the attic moans like a Coke bottle as the wind whistles through the rafters.

  “No swimming today,” Eleanor says aloud.

  She’s surprised to have spoken the words, but more surprised that they crossed her mind at all. She and Hob haven’t gone to the ocean since the accident, which was minor enough. A misstep on the island path, a twisted ankle. Normally that sort of thing would have kept her out of the water for a couple of days, no more.

  But Eleanor had turned up pregnant again. And that, according to her doctor, made swimming in the ocean a no-no.

  “And no throwing yourself off cliffs, either,” he advised, upon learning why Eleanor was swimming in the first place. “I’m surprised you’re still pregnant, to be quite honest. That kind of physical abuse can terminate a pregnancy in a heartbeat.”

  Hob had babbled on the way home about having a son, but Eleanor barely heard him.

  Pregnant.

  Again.

  As if Eleanor didn’t already feel that her life was being written by someone else’s hand.

  She sips her tea now and sighs. She sighs an awful lot now, the air pushed out of her lungs by the weight of her thoughts. Dark, awful thoughts. A few nights before, she dreamed about a man who bothered her at the grocery store. He had been holding a clipboard and a pen, and instinctively she had tried to step past him. He’d said, “I’ll see you on the way out,” and let her pass, and she had forgotten about him. But he was there when she finished shopping, and this time as she tried to slide by, he said, “Vote for Eleanor,” and she stopped.

  “Excuse me?” the dream version of herself asked.

  “Eleanor,” the man repeated. “The town is voting on her issue.”

  “What issue?” Eleanor asked.

  “It’s simple,” the man said, folding back one of the pages on the clipboard and holding it up for her to see. There were two big words on the page: Yes and No. Below each word was a list of names, some scrawled illegibly, some in neat cursive. “Either Eleanor can start over, or Eleanor can stay in prison.”

  “In prison?”

  “Right,” the man said, without explaining further.

  “I’m Eleanor,” Eleanor said.

  “Oh!” the man said. “Well, then you definitely should consider voting. Right now it’s a tie. You’ll be the tiebreaker!”

  “Isn’t voting a private affair? This looks like a petition to me.”

  “Not at all,” the man said. “But bananas eat for free on Thursday afternoons.”

  “What?” Eleanor asked.

  “I said, you better hurry and vote, because I think you’re about to wake up.”

  But she had woken from the dream before she’d had time to cast her vote. The dream has remained with her since, her brain working on the question of her vote—while she makes dinner for Hob and Agnes, while she washes dishes, while she sits in the bathtub, the deepest water she’s been in for months.

  What vote would she have cast?

  Eleanor rubs her belly idly as the storm worsens. She’s showing now—not much, but enough that strangers have begun complimenting her when she goes to town. She and Hob haven’t made love since they found out. She hasn’t been in the mood, and he’s been worried about hurting the baby, something she thought he’d figured out during her first pregnancy.

  She’s grateful that this new baby seems to have distracted him from his worries, though.

  At least one of them is excited.

  She slips out of the house before Hob or Agnes wake. The sky is dim but growing lighter. She sits behind the wheel of the Ford and stares up at the clouds, leaning forward to see them through the windshield. They’re ominous and dark, almost black. She wonders what the view from above the clouds is like. She thinks that it’s probably all blue skies and sunshine up there, the absolute opposite of life down here in Anchor Bend.

  The rain pounds on the Ford like a bag of rocks in a tumble dryer. Eleanor drives slowly, both hands tight on the wheel. She rolls through town, the only thing moving for miles. None of the shops are yet open. There are no pedestrians on the sidewalks. Days like this feel a bit like the end of the world. Everything is still and murky and slow.

  She drives for a little while, eventually leaving the heart of the little town behind. Like a magnet, she is drawn to the ocean. She parks the truck in the small lot beside the beach and kills the engine and turns off the wipers. Rain courses down the windshield in waves. She can see little blips and plops on the hood, one for every drop of rain that lands on the car. In the distance she can see the shape of Huffnagle, blurred by the rain until it’s only a cottony shadow.

  Eleanor closes her eyes and lets out another long, weary sigh. She listens to the pounding rain on the roof. Hears the slap of it against the asphalt outside. The ocean has some life today, every wave a low roar as it breaks on the beach.

  When she opens her eyes again, she has made up her mind. She leaves the keys in the ignition, opens the door, and steps out into the rain. In an instant, she is soaking wet, her nightgown and housecoat clinging to her swollen body.

  There is a pickup truck parked at the opposite end of the small lot. The only other person in the world arrived at the beach while Eleanor’s eyes were closed. She can see the shape of a person inside, perhaps enjoying the weather. She doesn’t wave, doesn’t care.

  The beach stones are black and wet and shiny. Eleanor crosses them slowly, but she isn’t worried about slipping and falling down. There are two sandpipers pattering around, dipping their beaks into the sand after each receding wave. The clouds in the distance are pulling apart like taffeta, black feathery tendrils separating from their bodies. More rain. Harder rain.

  Eleanor walks to the edge of the beach and stands there a moment in her heavy wet housecoat. The waves are needle-sharp as they smack her ankles and feet. She closes her eyes again, hands deep in her pockets, and thinks of Hob and his pleasant smile and his broad shoulders and secrets and his carefully parted slick hair and his deep, sad, true eyes. She thinks of Agnes and her knotted hair and the wrinkle lines around her little dark eyes when she smiles and her cute small earlobes and her favorite song.

  They’ll be all right, she knows.

  Eleanor pulls her housecoat off, sleeve by sleeve. It grabs at her skin as if resisting, but she casts it onto the beach. She bends over and grasps the hem of her nightgown, the wet flannel squishy between her fingers. She gathers it into her fists, lifts it up and over her head. Naked, she faces the ocean calmly. The rain is bitingly cold, the wind worse.

  Behind her she hears the muffled sound of a car door opening, and then a distant male voice shouts something.

  She doesn’t answer or look back.

  Eleanor steps into the ocean and strides forward, the water reaching her knees, then her hips. When she’s waded in waist deep, she spreads her arms wide behind her and lunges forward into the water, and she begins to swim, and swim, and swim.


  The twins are six years old—just weeks away from their shared birthday—when it happens.

  Agnes rushes about the house, looking for her rain boots.

  “Esme,” Agnes huffs as she climbs the stairs. “Ellie—have either of you seen my galoshes?”

  “They’re called rain boots, Mom,” Esmerelda shouts. “Galoshes are the things you wear over your shoes.”

  “Those are called overshoes,” Agnes says.

  “No, they’re—”

  “Just—” Agnes pauses on the landing, breathing hard. “Stop. Just stop.”

  Esmerelda stands in the doorway of the girls’ bedroom. She shrugs, then squeezes past her mother and walks to the bathroom.

  “Where’s your sister?” Agnes asks.

  “Attic,” Esmerelda says, and shuts the bathroom door.

  Agnes sighs irritably and raps on the door with her knuckle. “Make it fast in there,” she says. “Your father’s going to be waiting at the airport for us.”

  “Whatever,” Esmerelda says, her voice muffled by the door.

  Agnes pounds the door sharply with her fist. “Young lady, you’re too young for ‘whatever,’” she snaps. “Save it until you’re thirteen. What are you doing in there?”

  Esmerelda doesn’t answer. Agnes turns and leans against the wall and presses her fists against her eyes and drops her mouth open in a hushed scream. Then she straightens up, pushes off the wall, and unclenches her hands slowly, stretching her narrow fingers wide until they tingle slightly. She takes a deep breath, exhales.

  “One thing at a time,” she says softly. “One thing, one thing.”

  She stands there for a moment, almost swaying on her feet, eyes still closed.

  Then she opens them, and goes to the attic door and opens it.