Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  Claire knows better than to laugh. She strokes her daughter’s hair. There’s the tiny bald spot on her scalp—no bigger than a watermelon seed—from when she was very little and she scratched a chicken pox scab. At the time Claire had wept over that. Now it seems like nothing.

  “Love isn’t easy is it?” she says.

  “It sucks, Mom,” Sally says. “You have no idea.”

  FALL

  To Claire, Labor Day always feels like the beginning of a new year much more than January does. The start of the new school year does it. You get a clean slate. Fresh pencils. New shoes. It’s the time of year that makes her feel like starting music lessons and aerobics classes and organizing her cupboards.

  So Claire has made a list for Tim, and this afternoon she has brought it over to him. On her list are the names of two good consignment clothing stores where Tim can find inexpensive but more attractive clothes for Ursula to start third grade. She has typed up the recipe for her low-calorie oatmeal bars. Also on the list is the phone number to call to get Ursula signed up for soccer, as well as the phone numbers of a few of Sally’s friends who are available for babysitting. Nobody’s thinking about asking Pete and Sally to do that job anymore.

  Claire has also brought Tim the name of the therapist she brought Pete to that first year after they moved here when he was so angry. She has already told Tim she would of course be happy to talk with a therapist herself if it would ever be helpful. She thinks Ursula needs counseling.

  She tells Tim that their library has this great system set up where you can check out framed reproductions of artworks for one month at a time. A few of those would help make his apartment a little more cheery. If he would get a bedspread for Ursula’s bed, then he could teach her to make it.

  “I know I seem very anal and compulsive when I talk about getting your apartment organized,” she says. “But I think it’s about something more than housekeeping. It’s about establishing order and consistency in your daughter’s life. Helping her feel things are under control here, and you’re in charge.”

  Ursula has gone downtown this afternoon to watch a free showing of Black Beauty at the library. Tim was actually thinking, when he saw Claire at his door, that maybe they could go for a drive out to the woods. They could have a picnic and make love. But it’s plain now, hearing her voice, that she’s not in the mood for lovemaking.

  “I could fix us a sandwich,” he says. Claire looks over in the direction of his messy kitchen and shakes her head.

  “I guess not today,” she says. “I have a lot of chores to attend to.”

  Today, Tim knows, he was one of them.

  That was the best movie I ever saw in my whole life,” says Ursula when she comes in later that afternoon. Ever since Claire left, Tim has been cleaning, but he hasn’t even made a dent in the mess.

  “You should have seen the part where Beauty runs the race,” Ursula says, reaching for a cookie and pouring herself a glass of milk, which she leaves out on the counter.

  “Forget movies,” Tim explodes. “Look around this place. Our life is a mess. Out of control. A disaster.” This afternoon’s mail brought a final disconnect notice from the phone company and a letter from the bank telling him he bounced three checks last week.

  “You’re a slob!” he yells at Ursula. “We live like pigs. This is hopeless.”

  He’s holding her doll Phillip by the leg as he yells these things at her, waving him over his head.

  “Stop it, Daddy,” Ursula says. “You’re making him dizzy.”

  “You’re eight years old!” he says. “Can’t you even throw away your Cheetos bags?”

  “I’m sorry,” she tells him. “You never told me you wanted me to.”

  “Who would ever want to come over to this dump?” he says. “It’s disgusting.”

  Ursula knows who he is thinking about, naturally. The only one who ever visits their apartment, the only one whose opinion he cares about anymore. The queen. That’s how Ursula thinks of her sometimes. Sometimes she is a good queen. Sometimes she is a mean queen. Sometimes she lets them visit the palace, and sometimes, when she feels like it, she visits them in their hovel. “This place is a hovel,” her dad said to her this afternoon. That’s how Ursula knows what it is.

  Sometimes Ursula loves the queen. She wants to touch the queen’s hair and watch the way her earrings jingle. She breathes in her perfume. One time the queen even squirted her perfume on Ursula’s pillow. “Maybe that will take away the fish stick smell,” she said. From the downstairs neighbors, Sandy and Jeff.

  Other times Ursula wishes the queen was dead. She has even tried casting a spell on her. She has figured out, of course, that the purple jewel ring her dad got was for the queen, not her. She has ripped that letter the queen gave her into a million pieces. Ursula stuck the point of her scissors in the knee of the purple tights the queen gave her. She’s sorry about that, actually. She never had purple tights before and now all she has is the crew socks her dad buys, but she doesn’t care. The queen just wanted her to look like other little girls. Hers, for instance. And Ursula knows she never will.

  Claire buys Ursula a back-to-school dress: a pinwale corduroy with a Provençal print and an Empire waist with deep pockets and piping. Not one of those shapeless fat-girl dresses, but a flattering cut for Ursula. “It’s important for her to feel cute and self-confident on her first day of third grade,” Claire tells Tim. So she buys this dress, even though it costs fifty-two dollars. “Now all she needs is a little pair of pumps,” she tells him. She has noticed that all Ursula owns in the way of shoes are sneakers and a pair of heavy, awkward-looking loafers.

  Tim takes Ursula shoe shopping. He comes home with a pair of Michael Jordan pump-style sneakers. It should be funny, only it’s not to Claire. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says to him. “I think it’s great that you teach her wrestling moves and karate kicks. Nobody’s going to call me a sexist. But I also think it’s important for a little girl to learn stuff that will help her fit in with other kids at school. Girls in particular. Which includes things like what sort of shoes you wear with a dress.” Nobody can be crueler than a clique of third-grade girls, Claire tells him, as if he doesn’t know.

  So Claire explains to Tim what pumps are. She even draws him a picture. And since he has already spent more money than he should have on the Air Jordans, she suggests that he take Ursula to Fayva, where the shoes may not be the best quality, but they’re cheap. It isn’t that important how long these pumps last, she figures. Just so she’ll have them for the first day, when all the girls are looking around and figuring out who to be friends with.

  “I hate what you’re telling me,” Tim says. “You’re telling me Ursula should just play their game. You think I should try and turn her into some kind of little doll?”

  “I think right now the most important thing for Ursula is to feel she fits in,” Claire says. “We can change the world tomorrow. Today, why don’t we just go for making her happy?”

  “And a pair of Fayva pumps is her ticket, huh?” he asks Claire. If he didn’t love her so much, he would be offended. As it is he and Ursula go off to the shoe store.

  When they pull up to Claire’s house an hour later, Ursula is dancing. “Look at my new shoes,” she says.

  “Aren’t they perfect?” Ursula asks Claire. “I’m going to wear them every single day.”

  “That’s what you bought?” Claire says to Tim, who has been standing a few feet back, a little anxious looking, waiting for her verdict. “Those?”

  Telling Mickey the shoe story over the phone, Claire actually begins to cry.

  “Let me get this straight,” he says. “You’re crying because the guy bought his kid a crummy pair of shoes?”

  “You don’t understand,” she says. “Tim and Ursula found the most inappropriate pair of shoes in the whole store. Pointy-toed black ankle-height boots with little heels and fake lizard-skin straps with a rhinestone. Hooker shoes. If she wears those shoes with her
new school dress, the reasonable girls will have nothing to do with her. The only ones who will are the really rough crowd.”

  A hundred and twenty miles away, she can see Mickey shaking his head. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, Slim,” he says, his voice thick with regret. “But I don’t think it’s working.”

  She tells Tim the shoes are a disaster. Her voice as she tells him this is withering, ruthless almost. She knows it, and she actually hopes he will get angry at her, but he doesn’t. He tells her he’s sorry, in fact. “I’m such an idiot,” he says. “I can’t even buy my daughter a pair of shoes. No wonder she has so much trouble at school.”

  “It’s okay,” says Claire. “I shouldn’t make such a big deal of this stuff.” Then they make a plan to hide the hooker shoes and tell Ursula they must have been lost. Claire says she will pick up a pair of pumps for Ursula in Brattleboro. “I know a shop that sells those little velvet Chinese slippers,” she says. “Those will be perfect.” She is losing her grip and she knows it, but she does it anyway.

  September 15, the six-month anniversary of their meeting last March, Tim takes Claire out to dinner—not to the diner this time, but to a restaurant with linen tablecloths and Kind of Blue playing on the stereo and a three-page wine list. He is wearing a jacket and tie tonight—the first time she’s ever seen him in one. In his pocket is a velvet box with the ring inside, amethyst, surrounded by tiny pearls. He has pawned his stereo to buy it, although he doesn’t have a clue how he’s going to come up with next month’s rent money.

  When Claire gets up from the table to say hello to someone she knows from the museum, Tim sets the velvet box down at her place. The candle on their table is flickering, so he asks the waitress for another one. He draws in his breath, smoothes the tablecloth, pours a little more wine in Claire’s glass. He studies her back as she bends to say something to her acquaintance at the other table. It still surprises him the way just the sound of her voice arouses him this way.

  Claire returns to the table, shaking her head. “Evidently someone at the board meeting the other night actually suggested that we hold a Power Rangers Day at the museum to boost attendance,” she says. She hasn’t noticed the velvet box. Tim just watches her, the woman he loves more than he ever thought possible.

  “Next thing you know they’ll want me out front selling French fries and Frostees,” she says. She reaches for her wine.

  “Claire,” he says. “I want to give you something.” The truth is he wants to give her everything. He just couldn’t fit it all into a box.

  She doesn’t open it right away. They have both known for a while that they were heading toward combining their households, eventually. But there’s something about seeing that velvet box in front of her that makes it more real.

  “I want to marry you,” he says after she’s opened it. “I want to live with you. And something else. I want us to have a child.”

  She stares at the ring, not touching it. She hasn’t said a word yet.

  “I want us to be a family,” he says. “I need to know you want the same things.”

  Claire used to assume she wanted that too. In her original vision they were all going to spend a couple of months getting used to each other. They would have dinner together two or three times a week—not so much that her kids, or his, would feel crowded in, but enough that they could begin to get used to the idea of being a family. Sally would bring Ursula up to her room and help her put together outfits with some of her old clothes. Tim and Pete would play catch in the backyard evenings, and Tim would show Pete how to place his fingers on the stitching of a baseball to throw a knuckle ball. Sometimes the four of them—not Sally maybe, unless Travis was there, in which case they could ask him to join them—would play Scattergories or Pit or Uno. She might walk them back to their house. Go upstairs with Tim and help him tuck Ursula in. Read her a chapter of Ramona. Kiss her good night.

  When it became clear to her that her children couldn’t stand Tim, Claire’s thinking changed some. “I get to have a life,” she reminds herself. But she also knows it will not be a good one for her if Pete and Sally are miserable and resentful. Better to go slow, give them more time to accept the situation. This is what she tells Tim as he places the ring on her finger, his own hand shaking as he does.

  Claire stopped picturing a fall wedding some time ago. She no longer envisions games of Scattergories around the fireplace with their children. What she thinks now is, In a few years my children will be off on their own anyway, and the only one we’ll have to deal with is Ursula. And who knows, maybe a baby, although she’s not as clear as Tim is, that they could pull off that part. Claire is thirty-nine years old. Tim too; their birthdays are just days apart. (“Poking forty with a short sticky” Mickey says.) She doesn’t feel old now, but she wonders what it would feel like to be attending soccer games still at fifty.

  She bends over the table and kisses Tim. She strokes his hair.

  “The ring is beautiful,” she says, as she sets it back in the velvet box and puts the box into her pocket. “But I don’t feel ready quite yet. We just need to hold off a little longer.”

  “I love you so much you have no idea,” he tells her. “You don’t know what it’s like to feel this much love.”

  “Yes I do,” she tells him.

  Sometimes when she and Mickey were out together buying groceries or walking around the North End or heading toward Kenmore Square for a ball game, they’d pass some couple pushing a stroller. Or she’d see a man holding the hand of a pregnant woman—with his other hand resting gently on the small of her back, maybe—and Claire would experience a wave of this sad, hollow feeling, as if she were an empty pod, a dry and brittle stalk in a windy field surrounded by green, bending grasses. She knew there would be no babies for her and Mickey, knew he would never lay his hand on her pregnant belly feeling for a kick. Before he had his vasectomy, Mickey lived in horror of a pregnancy. Claire would never see his face on any child of theirs, she knew that much. Not those freckles. Not that pitcher’s butt. They would never be parents together, only lovers, and as much as she loved the untouchable intimacy that came from it being just the two of them, every now and then that fact of their relationship left her with an odd feeling of pointlessness. Claire has always liked making things—meals, perennial beds, dresses, children. With Mickey, the only thing she ever made was love. They never even had a pet together. Never even a garden.

  Partly she knew this feeling of hers was an old habit, a carryover from her marriage, when it had made more sense. For all the years she and Sam were together, she had found pleasure in the bounty of her own ripe fertility. In the arid territory of her marriage, she drew comfort from the knowledge that she might at any moment be pregnant—though even this hopefulness diminished in the last couple of years, their lovemaking was so infrequent. There was a reason why Claire was never as exacting as she should have been about birth control. The Russian roulette she played with her sketchy combination of a too-old diaphragm, not always accompanied by spermicide, and the rhythm method allowed for a certain constant state of hopefulness in a situation that would have otherwise seemed unbearably bleak. Chance conception was her one wild card.

  With Mickey there was no such prospect. So there were these moments with him when Claire felt old, used up, withered. They’d be at a movie and a baby would cry, forcing its parents to rise from their seats and hurry out of the theater, and even as she could sense Mickey’s relief that it was somebody else’s baby and not theirs, what she was feeling was the opposite. What was a movie compared to a small and perfect person, made by them?

  But now that Claire’s with Tim, and knowing how much he wants to have a child with her, this other set of images have come to her.

  She and Tim are walking down a street and she is vastly pregnant. Her breasts are almost indecently swollen and her belly enormous. Her angles have thickened and her hips have spread. Her face is full and blotchy. She has to be careful not to laugh too ha
rd or she will lose bladder control.

  The Claire in this dream has developed a fascination for brands of baby strollers. She talks with Tim, who used to be her lover and is now her husband, about when to introduce solids into their child’s diet and how long to let the baby cry at night before picking her up. Her breasts, once the object of his adoration and awe, have a certain sexless utility to them now. Once the baby is born she will pop them out of her shirt at regular intervals, no longer caring much if her nipple is exposed. She wears a brassiere that resembles something her grandmother would have worn.

  When they crawl into bed at night—she and Tim—they are too weary to make love. Once it would have driven him crazy to lie so close to her without being inside her. Now he is simply grateful for sleep.

  • • •

  It is this transformed and desexed Claire who she sees in her new and terrible fantasy, which is more depressing than the empty pod thoughts ever were.

  They’re walking through Harvard Square together—Tim supporting her aching back, Ursula pedaling her pink two-wheeler alongside them, in her thick glasses, with her helmet on, Pete and Sally walking a few feet ahead, pretending not to know them. They are heading someplace like a baby furnishings store, or maybe she is having her urine tested for sugar levels. Suddenly she sees Mickey.

  He is striding on the opposite side of the street, in the opposite direction, with a beautiful woman. (Elegant calf muscle. Porcelain skin.) If he were simply holding her hand it wouldn’t be so bad, but he is stroking her wrist and whispering something into her ear. She knows from the location of the street where they are walking which jazz club they have just emerged from. She also knows where they are going and what they will do when they get there.

  Claire’s knees buckle so dramatically at this point that Tim supposes she has gone into labor. “Children!” he calls out. “We have to get Mom to the hospital.” Mom. That’s what he has called her.