Eleanor (2 page)

“Hob,” she says once more, and he meets her eyes briefly, then looks away, trying to focus his gaze on something distant, something through the window. Tears fill the bowl of his eyelids and threaten to spill over, and in embarrassment, he stops breathing, focusing all his body’s energy on evaporating those humiliating tears.
 

“Hob,” she says again. She sets her cup of tea aside and slides her hands over his own, feeling the knobs of his knuckles like vertebrae beneath her fingers. His hands are warm and unyielding, as if his skin sheathes bones of iron. Her thumbs find the softer part of his hands, the part between his own thumbs and index fingers, and she rubs lightly, willing his body to relax.
 

She had, eventually, convinced Hob to see someone. She offered to join him, but Hob, proud even in moments of weakness, refused. So Eleanor had stood in the hallway of the clinic, her ear pressed to the door, listening to the doctor’s sonorous murmur, and to Hob’s reluctant, gravelly replies.
 

“Shortness of breath?” the doctor had asked. “Muscle tension? Mental distraction?”

She couldn’t hear Hob’s reply, but took it for an affirmative.
 

“Can you describe what you’re feeling? Not medically,” the doctor clarified. “Just—tell me like you’re telling a child. Close your eyes. What do you feel when it happens?”

Eleanor listened to the long pause, and when Hob finally answered, she bit her lip.

“I carry the world,” he said, his words muffled by the office door. “Sometimes it’s just too heavy.”

She strokes Hob’s hands now, and reminds him to breathe, and he nods and hears her. His tears spill over and fall onto the table and onto his hands, his hard hands, and she can feel him try to shake her loose so that he can wipe them away, as if they’re evidence of a crime he is ashamed to have committed. Eleanor lets him, wondering at this man who loves her so, and yet who cannot find the strength to simply be himself in her presence.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is thick, the voice of someone trying not to betray his emotions. “I’m sorry, it’s—”

“Hush,” Eleanor says softly. “You’ve nothing to apologize for.”

He blinks rapidly to clear his eyes, then takes a deep, restorative breath. She still finds him handsome, though she must admit to herself that his anxiety—for that is what the doctor told him he was feeling—was taking its toll on him. He’d put on weight in the last few months, and had taken to shopping for his clothes alone, as if he could hide the changes he was going through. But she watched the numbers on the tags of his pants, and they kept climbing. She felt terrible for wishing that she knew how to fix him, as if she harbored resentment toward his condition—not for his sake, but for how it affected her. They slept together rarely now. Hob often drifted off in front of the television, in the recliner that she gave him for his birthday last fall, and she would sometimes creep downstairs and find him awash in the light of dead air, static or an off-the-air program card on the screen.
 

“Rough out,” Hob says again, as if nothing has happened.
 

“Indeed,” Eleanor answers. She almost tells him that she loves him, then thinks better of it.
 

From the doorway comes the sound of small feet, and they both turn and smile at the little girl standing there, dark hair in need of a brush, too-large nightgown floating around her like a halo.
 

“Good morning,” their daughter says in her sing-song way. She crosses the kitchen and clambers up onto the bench beside her mother, just small enough to squeeze in.
 

“Morning, Ags,” Hob says. “Breakfast?”

“Cinnamon toast!” Agnes says, patting her palms on the little tabletop.
 

“Oh, Hob, I’ll take care of it,” Eleanor says, but he shakes his head and waves her off, and goes to the breadbox and the spice rack and stands there, assembling his daughter’s breakfast, his back to them both. The three of them settle back into Hob’s stage play, everybody back on script, the world firmly upon his shoulders once again.

“Mama,” Agnes says, drumming on the table with her little fingers. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going swimming with you today.”

“Oh?” Eleanor says. “What about that?”

Agnes follows her mother’s pointed finger to the rain outside. “Oh,” she says, crestfallen. Then she brightens. “I’ll just swim under the water instead.”

“There you go,” Eleanor says. “It’s all just water.”

“It’s all just water,” Agnes repeats, singing the words. “But really, I want to come!”

“I know,” Eleanor says. “Maybe we’ll go to the city pool after. What do you say?”

“No, no, no,” Agnes says. “The ocean!”

“Ocean’s too dangerous for little girls,” Hob says, turning to show Agnes a plate with three slices of bread. “How’s this?”

Agnes inspects the buttered bread and the fine layer of cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top. She points at one of the slices. “This one is sad,” she says. “It only has a little cinnamon.”

Eleanor smiles and watches Hob swirl back into the kitchen, a fresh and changed man around his daughter. With a flourish, he dashes more cinnamon onto the impoverished piece of bread, and then Agnes leaps up to help him arrange the bread on the oven pan and slide it into the broiler. Eleanor turns back to the rain, musing for a moment on the father that Hob has become—a cheerful entertainer of their daughter—and wonders if, years from now, Agnes will remember him as a man who hid his feelings from her. He certainly tries to hide them from his wife, and perhaps fails only because Eleanor is older, and more perceptive, than their little girl.
 

She thinks about this for a moment, but the rain takes her attention away again.

Despite the steady rain, the sea is warmer in the early afternoon. This is a relative term;
warmer
does not mean that the water is warm, only a few degrees less cold. Eleanor stands in the shallows, wearing the thermal wetsuit that Hob ordered for her. She always feels restricted in the suit, at least until she’s submerged and it begins to flex with her movements.
 

Each afternoon, at two o’clock, Eleanor and Hob drive down to the ocean shore. The Pacific spreads wide and gray before them like a rippling, dark parachute. Behind them, their little town of Anchor Bend goes about its own routines. The first wave of fishing trawlers returns at this time, chugging into port a few miles up the coast, trailing inky belches of oily black smoke. The fishing lanes are crowded, and the patchwork sound of collision horns is nearly constant.

It is Eleanor’s favorite time of day.
 

Hob says, “Hold up a second, there,” as if Eleanor is about to plunge into the sea and leave him far behind. She looks over her shoulder at him, holding her hand up to her eyes to block the glare of the bright gray sky, and watches him cross the gravelly beach on unsteady feet. He is fully dressed and carries a waterproof duffel bag, inside which are Eleanor’s clothes and a short stack of fat, fluffy towels. Hob’s boots echo on the short pier, heavy and hollow sounds that she has come to love dearly.
 

She crouches and inspects the water at her feet. It’s clearer than usual, even with the rain dancing on the surface. She watches a tiny crab pick its way over the pebbles, its delicate shell wobbling on its back. It passes her toes, almost touching her, and then moves along into deeper water.
 

Eleanor flexes her toes, digging deep into the sand beneath the layer of smooth stones. She’s ready to go.
 

“Come on now, Hob,” she calls.

“All right, already,” comes his faint reply.

She squints and watches as he pulls at the lashes that keep the old rowboat moored to the dock. It isn’t their boat, but it’s been there for as long as either of them can remember. It belongs to the town now, which means that sometimes when the two of them come to the beach, the boat isn’t there, and Hob cancels the afternoon swim altogether.
 

She doesn’t like it when Hob takes charge.
 

“Come on,” she shouts again.
 

But he’s got it. He throws the duffel down into the boat, then steps aboard himself. By the time he settles in and grips the oars, Eleanor is already away, fifty yards off the shore, stroking hard against the current.

In her younger days, Eleanor was a competitive swimmer. As the star member of the high school swim team, she set district and state records in freestyle events. Her achievements carried her to college, where she swam alongside equally strong women, yet still claimed record after record. Her coach at Oregon State registered her for an Olympic qualifying event, but Eleanor never made it. At twenty-two years old, she had already met and fallen in love with Hob, despite their age difference. They married between her junior and senior years of college, and then Agnes arrived—a slow and steady swell that began small and built into a wave that swamped Eleanor’s dream.
 

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.”