Sally is legally prohibited from driving until her eighteenth birthday now. She is also on probation for operating a motor vehicle without a license, reckless endangerment, and a couple of other charges Claire forgets. It will be a very long time if ever before her daughter will sit behind the wheel of a car again.
Even taking rides from her friends seems too much for Sally at the moment. “I guess I’ll let my mother drive me,” Claire heard her say the other day when one of the few girls who still drops by pulled up in front of the house to see if Sally needed a ride to the SATs. She sits in the passenger seat beside Claire now, the way she did when she was little. Buckled, always, with her notebooks in her lap. Claire didn’t realize until after the accident how seldom Sally had ridden with her in recent years. Now with her reluctance to ride the school bus, and her trips to physical therapy, and therapy, and her dad’s house, Sally is a more frequent passenger in Claire’s station wagon than her brother, even. She doesn’t complain when Claire plays her country music station, either.
In fact, she never complains about anything, never shows much emotion, period. She has this impassive look just about all the time now that makes Claire want to scream, “Where are you?” She did once, in fact. Sally didn’t answer.
Sally’s birthday arrives—the date she had circled with red Magic Marker back in January. “I GET MY DRIVER’S LICENSE TODAY!” she had written on her calendar.
Claire makes Sally a cake and lights sixteen candles for her. “Make a wish,” says Pete, and then they all fall silent, knowing what her wish must be, and how impossible. Pete’s present to her is an incense burner in the shape of a teepee. Claire gives her a locket shaped like a heart and a J. Crew sweater. “Thanks a lot, Mom,” she says flatly. “These are great.” She goes back up to her room and closes the door.
Sally comes straight home after school these days, as she never used to. At first while her cast is on she can’t go to ballet class, but even afterward, when Madame LaFehr suggests that she start working at the barre again, Sally stays away. Where, at first, she had got very thin after the accident, now she seems to live on yogurt and M & M’s. Her face is looking puffy and her waist has thickened in a way that the old Sally would never have tolerated. She has taken to watching afternoon talk shows.
One morning, carrying out the trash, Claire finds Sally’s toe shoes stuffed into the bottom of her wastebasket. She starts to retrieve them, then thinks better of it. Claire can still remember the feeling of standing in front of her bathroom mirror that day long ago, holding up the nail scissors as she cut off her long braids in a moment of perfectly exquisite misery. Sometimes, she knows, a person has to give up something she loves to make her own particular bargain for peace. There is no short cut through pain. She buries the toe shoes back in the trash.
By midwinter, long after her arm is healed, Sally’s still spending every afternoon lying on her bed listening to Tori Amos and Cowboy Junkies, or watching the parade of miserable stories on “Oprah” and “Ricki Lake” and “Jerry Springer.” Finally Claire can’t stand it anymore, seeing her daughter living this way. One afternoon in early February she leaves work early. She climbs the steps to Sally’s room and knocks at the door. She waits a moment, then walks in.
“Come on downstairs,” she says. “Do you realize we haven’t made a single Valentine yet?”
When Sally was little, she and Claire would work for weeks, making a card for every member of her class. Pete never had the patience, but Claire and Sally would spend hours making them. They kept their Valentine supplies spread over the dining-room table for weeks: glitter and doilies and red construction paper; seed catalogs for cutting out pictures of flowers; glue sticks, sequins, stickers, buttons. In recent years their Valentines have shifted from a seven-year-old’s idea of prettiness to a fifteen-year-old’s notion of cool—with clippings from the National Enquirer and ads for acne medicine from Sally’s old copies of Seventeen. Last February Sally made Travis a card using a collage of pamphlets some fundamentalist Christian group had left in their mailbox promoting chastity and Bible reading as the answer to the AIDS crisis. Claire made Sally a wooden box that year, with plastic charms and candy message hearts glued all around the sides and a picture of the two of them, mother and daughter, stuck on the top, with Johnny-jump-ups she’d pressed the summer before urethaned around the edges. “For my darling daughter,” she wrote on the front. “Nothing has ever brought me more joy than you and your brother.”
Even now she would say that. Never more joy. Or more pain, either.
So now they sit at the dining-room table making Valentines again. Surprisingly enough, Sally didn’t fight the suggestion. She isn’t making a joke card, either, from the looks of it.
For Pete, Claire makes a Valentine featuring her son’s face glued on a baseball card of Mike Piazza and the words “Most Valuable Player” written in gold glitter across the top. For Sally this year Claire can think of no words or pictures sufficient to say what she wants.
All those years she spent sewing doll clothes and baking elaborate birthday cakes, searching for lost toys and driving through blizzards to pick up some friend of Sally’s for a sleepover—all so her precious firstborn child should be spared pain. She might as well have been some character in a fairy tale trying to rid the kingdom of every poisoned apple, every spinning wheel. That’s how impossible it is, she knows now, for a parent to protect or rescue her child.
She starts to make Sally a mirror encrusted with sequins, then sets it aside. She draws a picture of her daughter in the middle of a flower garden, her daughter dancing, then rips them up. She copies out a poem she has always loved, that Anne Sexton wrote for her daughter Linda. “O Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman.” Also no good. Beautiful as the poem is, the woman who wrote it ultimately killed herself, leaving two motherless daughters. What’s the message in that one, Claire would like to know.
In the end, she gives Sally the simplest Valentine. A plain red heart—nothing more. Sally has made a gorgeous Valentine herself, with lace and ribbons and fake jewels, but she puts it away.
“What are you doing?” Claire asks her. “That’s one of the most beautiful Valentines you ever made.”
“The dumb thing is,” she says, “I don’t have anyone to give this to.”
“You will,” Claire tells her. “It won’t always be like this. I promise. Even though right now, I know, it feels like your heart is broken forever.”
Sally looks up at her suddenly, and at first Claire thinks she’s going to make some angry, cynical remark of the sort she has gotten so good at lately. Only she doesn’t. What happens is, Sally’s eyes, which have looked blank and hollow for three and a half months, slowly fill with tears. First just a couple, then a downpour. She falls into Claire’s arms and lays her head against Claire’s shoulders, weeping so desperately and long that when Pete walks in from basketball practice and the two of them finally look up, they realize they’re sitting in total darkness.
“Jeez, what’s been going on here, anyway?” he says, surveying the wild mess of sequins, glitter, and weeping women.
“We’re going to be all right,” Claire says. For the first time in ages she knows that’s true.
SPRING
After a long hard winter the snow finally begins to melt. Claire goes out to clear the leaves off her flower beds. The ground is hard and covered with ice crystals, so she decides to soften the soil a little to make it easier for the shoots of her daffodils and crocuses to push through.
Her trowel hits something hard deep in the dirt. At first she thinks it’s a rock, but when she starts to dig it up, she sees it’s actually a cigar box tied with dental floss. Something Pete buried long ago in a game of pirates maybe. She opens it.
Inside is a collection of objects tucked into a tangle of twigs and straw like the contents of an Easter basket or the nest of a magpie. There’s a cheap metal cigarette lighter and a dog’s rabies tag. There’s a shell and a Brownie pin and a ba
seball card Claire recognizes as Pete’s treasured Electric Diamond Frank Thomas Tribute card that he was looking for months ago. There are a couple of baby teeth and pieces of fingernail with the last remnants of red polish still showing. There’s a tampon and an old agate marble that looks as if it came from the children’s museum. A dried rose that must have been picked from the collection on Claire’s ceiling. A crude drawing of a naked man and a naked woman, with the penis and breasts exaggerated. There’s a Barbie head with all the hair cut off short as Ken’s, and a horrible smile drawn on in ballpoint pen. There’s a feather and a dried animal turd and the blue ribbon off of Pete’s bear that he keeps hidden under his pillow. Claire thought she was the only one who knew that. There’s a tiny doll, no bigger than a ten-week-old fetus, made out of corn husks, with a tiny red heart sticker on its chest and a needle pierced through the center.
There’s one more object in the box, but this one is wrapped in many layers of toilet paper, which Claire unwinds.
Inside is the amethyst and pearl ring.
The year the space shuttle Challenger was launched with Christa McAuliffe inside Pete was five years old. Young as he was, something about that mission had captivated him for weeks before the countdown, maybe because there was a mother on board who had children about his age. Pete and his family had attended a parade in New Hampshire the fall before in which Christa and her kids had ridden in an open convertible and Pete got her autograph. Her picture hung on his bedroom wall after that, and on the day of the launch he went off to school wearing the spacesuit they’d ordered from the Air and Space Museum for a Christmas present. The whole school had gathered in the auditorium to watch the launch together. Three hundred children had counted down in unison and watched as the Challenger lifted off. When it exploded, nobody realized what had happened at first, so they had cheered, thinking this was just an additional blast of rocket fuel propelling Christa higher into space. It took a few seconds before everyone began to realize that something had gone wrong.
When Claire heard what happened, she rushed right down to Pete’s school to get him, knowing he’d take the news hard. She ran to his classroom, where the teacher had hurriedly distributed mimeographed dot-to-dot pictures of Valentine hearts. If you hadn’t known Pete, you might have thought he was okay, bent over his dot-to-dot, but Claire knew better.
It was weeks before he slept through the night again. “I dreamed you fell into a giant hole and we couldn’t get you out,” he would tell his mother. “I dreamed I came home after school and everyone was gone. I couldn’t find you anyplace.”
He kept thinking their appliances were going to blow up. He made her unplug the toaster every time she was finished using it. Also the washing machine and the dryer. He thought if you counted backward bad things would happen.
Gradually he got better. He started watching TV again and he didn’t run in and check on her every twenty minutes when he was playing in the yard. But one thing that didn’t go away was his wondering about the explosion itself. He had heard that fragments of the spacecraft showed up on beaches all over Florida, and he knew NASA was gathering them up and piecing them together. What Pete wanted to know was what happened to the people in the spacecraft? Where did they end up? Where did they go?
Claire had wondered this same thing, and she never did come up with a satisfactory answer for him. She thought it might be more comforting to think of the astronauts and Christa up in space somewhere as some kind of glittering celestial dust, reflecting the light of the stars. Pete didn’t want to think of them landing on beaches in pieces, that was for sure. Or vaporized completely.
“They’re inside everybody who remembers them,” she told him. “Inside you. Inside me. Inside their families. Every time we remember them, it means they’re not completely gone.”
Memory is a funny thing, Claire thinks. So long as you have it, you never totally lose hold of a person. And they never quite release you.
When memory fades—and it does—things that used to be almost unbearably sad to you become tolerable. Life no longer seems so heartbreakingly poignant. But the price of being freed from painful memory runs high. It’s a little like what Nancy told Claire back when her doctor put her on Valium. “I don’t feel so depressed anymore,” she said. “But then, I don’t feel so much, period.”
Who would have believed Claire would ever find herself at a Red Sox game without glancing even once at the seats near third base where Mickey always sits? Who would have believed she could invite a man over for dinner, as she did last Saturday—a casual date, nothing serious—and that when he spotted her Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane CD, she’d say, “Here, let me play it for you. Wait till you hear the way he sings ‘My One and Only You’ ”? No big deal.
Who would have believed the day would come when Claire could run into her daughter’s old boyfriend, Travis, inching slowly past the Bagel Works in a wheelchair—Travis, the same boy who just last September used to sail up to their house on his magic carpet of a skateboard with the grace of a dancer or a magician? Last fall he seemed so bitter and angry she thought he’d never get out of that bed and turn off those snowboarding videos. When Claire saw him on the street yesterday he told her he was going to a rehab center in Burlington where they thought they’d have him using a cane by summer. “Say hi to Sally for me, okay?” he said.
Once Claire would have told you it could never happen that when she’d attend her son’s baseball game on a Saturday and run into their former babysitter Melanie, she’d actually wave to the young woman from across the field. Melanie is her children’s stepmother now, nine months pregnant with Sam’s child.
“You might want to get new bumpers for that old crib in the attic if that’s the one you’re going to be using,” Claire tells her. “The bars aren’t spaced as close together as they should be.” She has even given Sam and Melanie the box of the kids’ old baby clothes she had been holding on to all these years thinking she might need them herself. She won’t.
She hands Melanie Pete’s overnight bag. He’s going to his father’s house for the weekend. “He’s going to try to convince you he doesn’t have any homework,” she tells Melanie. “But he’d better get started on his Famous American report or he’ll be in trouble later.”
“I’m psyched to give him a hand,” Melanie says pleasantly, looking over the mimeographed sheet sticking out of his bag. “Buckminster Fuller was so cool.”
“If I don’t see you before you go into labor, good luck,” Claire says. “They tell you the pain is terrible and maybe it is, but you know something? Once it’s over you won’t even remember.”
It still astonishes Claire sometimes that a woman who loves the touch of a man as much as she does should find herself sleeping alone every night. As the years have passed in which her life has continued in this unattached way, it’s the sleeping together part more than the sex she misses most. Sex she can find. Passion even. It’s not an impossible task finding an agreeable man to kiss her wildly in the middle of the night. The rarest thing would be waking up with a man beside her in bed and having coffee together in her ratty bathrobe with her glasses on instead of contact lenses and no makeup. The rarest thing would be a night in which she slept in the arms of a man. Just slept with him.
When her children were small and she was still living with her husband and sleeping with him in their chilly bed, she used to get up in the middle of the night sometimes and wander through their house. Often she would go into her children’s rooms and lie down beside them, curl herself around their hot little bodies as they slept, just listening to their breath. Her children have always been sound sleepers; they never woke when she did this, although they might shift in their sleep, adjusting themselves to her presence in the bed. If she wrapped her arms around Pete he might let out a small sigh. One time after a particularly terrible fight with Sam, when she climbed in with her daughter, Sally had spoken in her sleep. “The dolphins are coming,” she said.
These days Claire
stays in her own bed, with its canopy of printed scarves from Florida and California and Niagara Falls draped overhead and her piles of feather pillows and the garden of upside-down dried roses shooting out from the ceiling like a storm of arrows. She still keeps a CD player beside the bed and listens to music as she drifts into sleep: Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Steve Earle singing “My Old Friend the Blues,” Mark Knopfler’s movie soundtracks, with that heartbreaking guitar of his, the melancholy trumpet and vocals of the beautiful and doomed Chet Baker. “There’s someone I’m longing to see,” he sings. “I hope that she turns out to be someone to watch over me.”
Claire takes various men to bed with her, but only in her mind. Lying there with no light but the faint glow of her Nautilus shell and the music playing faintly, she runs through her list and chooses one. Sometimes it’s a lover she has known. More often it’s not. She may choose her son’s basketball coach one night and the man behind the fish counter at the supermarket some other time. If she’s seen one of their movies recently she may choose Tommy Lee Jones or Sean Connery. She went to bed with Dwight Yoakam once. Another time it was Andre Dawson, her favorite player on the Red Sox, before he got traded to the Marlins.
One man she never takes out and makes love with this way is Tim. Another one is Mickey. Another is Sam.
She is not crazy. She’s just getting by, is all, and this is one of the ways she has learned to do it. Now his hand is running through my hair, she thinks, and then she follows his touch as his fingers make their way down her neck and spine. Making love this way, with an invisible lover, it takes a lot of concentration not to lose your place. It’s like a game she sometimes plays with Pete when a song they both know very well comes on the radio and she turns off the volume for thirty seconds or so, but she and Pete keep singing. The idea is to discover, when you turn the volume up again, that you’re at just the right point in the song still. They are so good at this with certain songs (R.E.M., for instance, singing “Everybody Hurts”), Claire has joked to Pete that they might as well sell his boom box and all his CDs. “We can just imagine the whole album now,” she says. “Kind of a virtual-reality thing.”
Where Love Goes Page 34