Chapter 17 Eloise #2
mid-December. The main event was a toboggan ride on the hill down from Arch Rock. Guests would draw their partner’s name from
a hat. It would be rigged, naturally, so Gus would select Deirdre. Cozied up on the sled as the toboggan shot downhill, their
bond would be cemented for life. This plan was foiled when Gus declined the invitation, citing basketball practice, though
two other boys on the team attended. (Gus was quite the jock; he would have played football and soccer too, but the school
was too small to field the teams.)
Deirdre enlisted help with plan B. And so Eloise found herself asking Alice, who was a substitute teacher, to tutor Gus.
Everyone at school knew Principal Anderson had told Gus he’d be suspended from the basketball team if he didn’t get his math scores up.
It was the only threat that might work on Gus, and work it did.
He began meeting with Alice every Wednesday after school, at Eloise’s house.
Deirdre would invite herself over and sit in on the sessions, pretending she, too, struggled with calculating the volume of
a sphere.
“He’s almost in love,” Deirdre told Eloise and Paula repeatedly, emphatically. “I can see it in his eyes.”
Eloise wanted it to be true so Deirdre might start acting halfway sane again, but Gus seemed in a bad mood whenever Deirdre
appeared. Eloise supposed that was what boys did when they liked you. Pretended not to.
Then one day near the end of the school year, Gus showed up at Eloise’s house on a Thursday, not a Wednesday. Alice was at
church setting up for a Bible retreat.
“My mom’s not home today,” Eloise told Gus, standing before him in the doorway.
“That’s okay.” Gus ran a hand through his dark curls, which were already growing out for summer.
“Deirdre’s not here either.”
“Good,” he said. “I came for you.”
That was the moment, Eloise would note afterward. The moment it all shifted.
“You can’t come in,” Eloise said.
“I didn’t ask to.” His smile was the tangy sort of thing that made her think of orange soda and how she wasn’t allowed to
have it. “Let’s go to the bluffs,” he said. “There’s good cliff jumping.”
Eloise had never been cliff jumping. Her parents had never forbidden it, probably because they’d known Eloise wouldn’t be
tempted by it.
Eloise always did the right thing. Being an only child was a weight she carried, stowed dutifully in her pocket.
It was made heavier by the fact that Eloise was supposed to enter the world with a companion.
Her twin sister, Penelope. A stillborn. For the past fifteen years, they’d visited the cemetery every Sunday after church, laying fresh sunflowers and lilies at the little grave.
The loss was alive the way her sister never would be.
Eloise tried to compensate by being doubly good, doubly lovable.
But she was tired. Tired of trying to make her parents happy, Deirdre happy.
She wanted to do something just for her.
She wanted to go cliff jumping with Gus Jenkins.
“The water’s too cold,” she told him, her rule-abiding habits making her resist.
“I’ll buy you coffee after. Or hot chocolate. I work at the dock, you know. They pay real good.”
“My dad gets home at six.”
“We’ll be back by five forty-five. Promise.”
She didn’t come home till six twenty, but Eloise’s father wasn’t fazed. He was sipping whiskey after a long day on the construction
site, watching a staticky game on the antenna TV.
“We went in the lake.” Eloise didn’t explain the we and he didn’t ask. Lying terrified Eloise, but it turned out omitting the truth wasn’t so bad.
“You’re not allowed in the water without me,” Alice scolded later when she saw Eloise’s one-piece hanging on the drying rack.
“You know that.”
“I’m sorry,” Eloise said, but she was actually the opposite of sorry. She carried her family’s record player into her bedroom
and twirled to a Fleetwood Mac album long after she was supposed to be asleep, turning it over and resetting the needle once
it finished.
Gus hadn’t kissed her or asked her to be his girlfriend. He’d just held her hand as they jumped from the rock, then took it
once more as they scrambled back up to jump again.
The entropy of it, the ecstasy of it! Even then, Eloise knew she’d never be able to quit him.
Skull Cave became their meeting place. Eloise would dash there breathless after whizzing through homework and chores.
“Like this wasn’t your plan all along,” Deirdre said after Eloise confessed the budding relationship. “Pretending like you cared about me, just trying to get Gus for yourself.”
Deirdre didn’t speak to Eloise again for four months and twenty-three days. She finally broke the silence to ask Eloise if
Gus’s basketball teammate Howie might ask Deirdre to the homecoming dance.
***
Eloise stood in front of her closet, once again searching for something date-worthy to wear. Not that the cruise was a date
with Clyde—certainly not.
Her closet was where she felt closest to Gus. A few scraps of his clothes were still there, though they’d long lost his outdoorsy
scent. When he moved out the first time, he didn’t take his clothes with him and Eloise didn’t mail them. (Where should she
send them? He was always on the move.) Not long after he left, she bagged them up, intending to add everything to the church’s
donation pile. Then Gus called saying he missed her, that he was coming to visit. She’d carefully returned all the items to
the correct hangers and shelves so he’d never suspect how close she’d been to throwing them out, throwing him out.
Over the years Gus wore the clothes when he visited and Eloise had liked knowing having them there meant he could swing by
spontaneously. He didn’t need to pack anything except a toothbrush. She had spares of those too, in case he forgot.
Eloise had never been good at holding on to anger. It hit her hard but crumbled quickly. Soft like limestone, not the granite
of other people’s grudges. What could she say? She was a Mackinac Island girl through and through.
Gus’s side of the closet had become sparser over the years.
Bit by bit, he’d taken anything he actually wanted.
The rejects remained. A few pairs of frayed jeans, button-downs that he complained choked his neck, winter boots and scuffed belts.
The skeleton of the life they’d had together.
But that was all it was anymore. A skeleton.
Bones didn’t keep her warm. Eloise was tired of rubbing against them as if they might.
***
It had been a few months since Eloise had heard from Gus. He’d told her he’d give her a call to “plot out the summer” when
he was back in the country. Probably mid-May, he’d said. It was now late June.
He was out traversing the globe while she was here, reserving space for him. Space he didn’t want. Space that still felt mostly
empty even when he occupied it. The loneliness of one-sided devotion.
From her closet, Eloise plucked a red polka-dot sundress. The dress she’d worn the day Gus proposed. He’d prepared a beach
picnic shortly after high school graduation. Barbecue chips, Hershey’s Bars, and a six-pack of Coors, all pilfered from his
parents’ pantry. When he’d dropped to his knee with his grandmother’s ring, Eloise had never been so surprised.
“But I’m leaving for college,” she’d said.
She’d been accepted into Northern Michigan University in the Upper Peninsula. They would do long-distance while Gus worked
for Eloise’s father’s construction company, then marry afterward. They’d talked about it, mapped it all out.
“I know you’ve been down in the dumps about moving,” Gus said. “Now you don’t have to.”
It was true that Eloise was sad about leaving the island, leaving Gus, leaving her parents. But the prospect thrilled her
too. Stepping outside of herself, into herself. It was just that she’d been trying to hide the excitement from Gus since he
wasn’t coming too.
“What’s wrong?” Gus asked. “Aren’t you happy?”
“Of course I am.” And she meant it. She accepted the ring. It was slightly loose but not enough to pay to have it adjusted.
Fingers swelled with age. She would grow into it.
Girls went to college to find husbands, Eloise reminded herself. She had already found hers. It was a small compromise to make for a life with the man of her dreams.
Eloise’s parents were overjoyed with the match, relieved Eloise was no longer venturing off the island. And they now had an
heir—an islander from a reputable family, no less—to the construction business. Eloise felt embarrassed to admit it, but she
would have married Gus even if her parents didn’t approve. She would have eloped. Gone with him to Indiana or Iceland, wherever
he wanted.
That was the saddest part, she often thought later. How ready she was to move for him, mold to him. She would have followed
Gus anywhere then, if only he’d asked. And by the time he did, they had other factors to consider: the girls, their aging
parents, income stability, retirement funds.
Gus resented Eloise’s sense of duty. She resented his shortage of it.
Things worsened when Gus’s father passed. A heart attack in the shower. Only fifty-four years old. Gus coped by drinking and
riding his Harley on the mainland. “I need to live,” he kept saying.
When he announced he wanted to go on a weeklong ride through the Rockies, Eloise encouraged him. He would work out his grief,
his existential crisis, then come back refreshed and ready to hunker down for the winter. Play backgammon with the girls and
put on those little puppet shows he did so well.
Instead, he’d called from fuzzy pay phone after fuzzy pay phone to tell her the trip was extending a few days, then a few
more. In the end, he’d made her be the one to say it.
“You’re not coming back, are you?”
There was a pause long enough for Eloise to wonder if the line had disconnected. “Not yet, Ellie. I’m sorry.”
Even the way he’d broken her heart had been exquisite. Doling out the pain in increments, giving her only the portion she
could handle one day, then more the next once she’d acclimated.
“What should I tell the girls?” she’d asked, as if he might provide a sufficient script.
“Tell them I’ll be back to take them trick-or-treating.”
He hadn’t been, but when he came at Christmas, he brought a whole bag of Beanie Babies, toting them in a sack like Santa.
Five-year-old Rebecca was uninterested; eight-year-old Georgiana was infatuated. She slept with the stuffed animals every
night and took turns toting them along with her to school, telling her classmates they were from her dad, that he was a professional
race car driver.
Eloise should have hated Gus. She should have punished him. Yet she was glad she hadn’t, grateful she wasn’t stronger. A life
with Gus in it, in whatever capacity, was so much better than one without him. And the girls needed their father. So she’d
let up on the pressure, the questions, and allowed him to ebb and flow in his own tide. And when Eloise broke down, she was
the only witness, her cries muffled by the mattress they used to share.
It had never felt like she was giving anything up by letting Gus come in and out of her life. There was no opportunity lost,
no one else she wanted to be with.
At least there hadn’t been.
There was something about Clyde. It wasn’t altogether dissimilar from how Gus made her feel when they’d first started dating.
But Eloise didn’t have the excuse of youth or raging hormones to explain this... this what, exactly? This crush? It was
such a juvenile word.
“Closing means opening.” She heard Georgiana’s words, turned them over like Petoskey stones.
Eloise removed the red sundress from its hanger and laid it on the bed. She prided herself on still fitting into her high
school clothes. Her wallet thanked her for it too.
This was the dress for the Lilac Festival cruise. She would iron it and spritz it with a new scent. See if there might be
some life left in it.