Where Love Goes (2 page)

“Maybe we could go one on one sometime,” says Sam. “Of course, you’d probably whip my butt. I’m out of shape at the moment.” He bounds out the door carrying Sally’s bag.

“Can you believe my dad?” says Sally to her friend, who Claire suddenly realizes is a girl she’s seen dozens of times. Valerie. Only the last time Claire laid eyes on Valerie she didn’t have blue hair and a nose ring.

“You should see his stomach. It’s like a washboard,” Sally tells Valerie. Claire is a slim person herself, but her own stomach is mottled with stretch marks.

“Your dad’s hot, all right,” says Valerie. “Cuter than any of the guys in our class, that’s for sure. Present company excluded, of course, Travis.”

“Sam was telling me about this book he read that has these hallucinogenic mushrooms and this shaman-type guy called Don Juan,” says Travis. “I can’t believe you’ve got a dad that actually reads books about tripping on mushrooms. All mine ever does is check the stock reports.”

“Not only that,” says Sally. “You should see him on a skateboard.”

Claire is still unpacking groceries through all this. Broccoli, pears, grapes. Spaghetti sauce, frozen pizza, Honey Nut Cheerios. Two gallons of milk. More Popsicles. Sally lives on those. Moving back and forth between the cupboards and the refrigerator and the pantry, she feels practically invisible, except for the one time when Valerie’s leg is blocking the door to their cereal cupboard and she moves it.

“Eat some real food over at your dad’s, okay?” Claire says to Sally.
“Protein.”

“Jeez, Mom,” Sally says. “Can’t you ever let up on being such a
mother
all the time?”

“Mine is the same way,” Valerie says. “I ate a slice of turkey this morning and I thought she was going to have an orgasm, she was so happy.”

Sam comes back into the kitchen and drapes his arm around his daughter. He evidently knows the words to this particular Beastie Boys song. He always plays the hippest radio stations when he goes out on framing jobs.

“Before you go, Sam,” says Claire, “I need to talk with you a second.”

“So,” Sam says to Sally, ignoring Claire, “you got your stuff all packed? What do you say we hit the road?” He punches Travis on the upper arm and gives one of Valerie’s dreadlocks a gentle tug. “Catch you later, huh guys?” he says.

Pete re-enters the kitchen. “You coming, Dad?” he says.

“Just a second, Pete,” says Claire. One of the eggs she was putting in the egg tray of their refrigerator has just broken in her hand. She wipes a bit of yolk off on a towel. “I needed to remind your dad about the money for your cleats.”

“Coming, Pete,” says Sam.

“Wait,” says Claire. “The cleats cost fifty-eight dollars. I need to know if you’re going to come through with your half. Not like Sally’s trip to Quebec City last month and the snowboard boots you told the kids you’d help pay for.” Claire always manages to provide these things for her kids, but it’s a stretch on her museum director’s salary.

“This isn’t the time or the place for that kind of talk, Claire,” Sam tells her. “You know we both agreed we wouldn’t have money discussions in front of the children.”

“Believe me, I wish we didn’t have to do this,” says Claire. “But every time I call you up to talk about it, you’re busy. When I send you bills, you don’t respond.”

“Really now, Claire,” he says. His voice is a whisper almost, a hiss. “You should be ashamed of yourself, doing this to our children.”

Claire breathes deep, the way she has learned in yoga class. “What am I supposed to do, then?” she says quietly. “What do I tell Pete about the shoes?”

Sam bends so he’s eye-level with his son and puts a hand on each of his shoulders, the way a dad would in a TV show. A dad like Bill Cosby maybe, or Robert Young on “Father Knows Best.” “You shouldn’t have to worry about this money nonsense, son,” Sam tells Pete. “I’m sorry you had to hear this crap. Of course you can have the cleats.”

“You always tell them that,” says Claire. She still has an egg in her hand. She wants to throw it at him. “But you never end up paying.”

“You and I both know I give you money every month, Claire,” he says. He speaks slowly, with exaggerated enunciation, as if he were talking to a very young child, or a person who is slightly retarded. And what is Claire supposed to do, stand there on their back porch explaining to their children that Sam’s two hundred and thirty dollars a month hardly covers Popsicles and cereal these days, much less cleats? Ask him how much that motorcycle helmet cost that he bought last month, or the new mountain bike that Pete was bragging about the other day?

“My dad’s bike has twenty-one speeds,” Pete told Jared. “But he can ride up Mount Lowell and he doesn’t even have to use the highest gear.”

“Do you think I’m magic?” says Claire. “And whatever our children need that you can’t see your way to providing, you figure I’ll always come up with it, anyway?”

“What I think is, you need to get a grip, Claire,” says Sam. “I hope you’re still talking with that therapist.”

“Give me a break,” Claire says. “Maybe I wouldn’t get this way if you didn’t leave it to me to take care of everything. Sally’s friends might think I was pretty cool too, if I could just breeze in off the basketball court and sit around with them listening to tapes.” She got up at five-thirty this morning to go over to the museum and whitewash the walls of the one-room schoolhouse so she could be back home in time to wake the kids and get them off to school.

“Why do you have to bring my friends into this, Mother?” Sally says. “Why do you always have to make a scene? Just once can’t you lighten up?”

“Come on, kids,” says Sam. “Let’s get into the car. Your mother’s just a little hysterical right now, but she’ll calm down. What do you say we pick up some Chinese food?”

They hurry into his pickup, with its Grateful Dead sticker on the back window—a row of rainbow-colored dancing bears. As he opens the door on his side, Sam looks back at Claire one last time as she stands on the sidewalk. He shakes his head with a look of pity. He gets into the driver’s seat and turns the key.

“Hold on a second, Pete,” Claire says, through the open truck window. “I wanted to remind you about your President report. It’s due Monday, right?”

“Just the oral part,” he says. He starts to tell her something else, about the diorama of Teddy Roosevelt hunting in South America, but the truck is pulling away while he’s still talking. Pete calls out something to Claire. She can’t hear what.

“Love you,” Claire calls out. Not that they’ll hear her. As the truck disappears down the street, she can see her son stick his baseball cap on his father’s head. She sees her daughter’s long, slim leg outstretched on the dashboard, and Travis, hoisting his skateboard under his arm and loping down the sidewalk with Valerie. Her blue dreadlocks blow in the wind.

Claire goes inside.

S
am told Claire the night they met that he couldn’t wait to have kids. He asked her to marry him within a couple of days. She said yes. Years later, when it had long since become plain to her how little real enthusiasm or interest he felt for her, she would sometimes ask him, “Why did you marry me, anyway?”

You had to hand it to Sam; he was never one to dish out the kind of easy compliments that might have bought her off. “You wanted to have a kid,” he told her. Not many young women just graduating from art school did, back in the late seventies. And though Claire would have wanted to have children eventually, regardless, it’s also plain to her what fueled the particular urgency to have one back in 1976. That was the year her father’s liver finally gave out from years of living on straight vodka and not a whole lot else. Her brother joined a religious cult in Washington State and hasn’t been heard from since. Her mother sold their old house outside Portland, had their black lab put to sleep, and went off to San Miguel de Allende to study painting. More than anything, what Claire wanted was to be part of a happy, normal-seeming family. So did Sam evidently.

They met in Michigan, but that spring they made a road trip to see the old house in Vermont Sam’s grandfather had left him, and they ended up staying. Three months later Claire got pregnant and they were married by a justice of the peace.

She gained fifty pounds with Sally but she didn’t care. She thrilled to the sight of her huge belly. She read every book on pregnancy and childbirth and checked her reflection in every store window she passed. She gloried in her swollen breasts. Nothing in her whole life had ever felt as real to her as the feeling of her baby’s kick from deep in her own body.

She loved childbirth. Finally her body was overtaken by sensations so intense and enormous, as the sex in her marriage never was, they obliterated all other feeling. To her, giving birth was like surfing this enormous and terrifying wave. It could have knocked her down and pulled her under, but she rode it right in to shore.

From the moment Sally’s head emerged—ripping the skin around her perineum as it did, landing in Sam’s outstretched hands on their bed—Claire knew she was free of her parents’ family. Now Sally was her family—and Sam, of course. And eventually Pete, when he came along three years later.

Claire loved nursing her babies. She loved how full her breasts became and how ripe and bountiful it made her feel having milk in them, and how sweet the milk was. She loved her amazing, cartoonlike profile, in the size-forty brassiere she briefly wore, and the way she practically burst out of her bathing suit the summer after Sally’s birth. She had never felt so womanly. Nothing she had ever done in her life had been so real.

Sometimes simply hearing her baby cry would be enough to make milk squirt from her nipple. Sometimes, as she settled in to feed one of her babies and pulled down her bra to expose a breast, her baby would forage against her skin looking for the nipple, and her milk would begin to shoot out on his head or his cheek, and he would get this look on his face that Claire believed could only be amusement, followed by this other look: total contentment. Taking him off her nipple to put him on the other side, she would see him become, very briefly, frantic. The suction his lips would make, small as they were, was so great she’d have to slide her little finger underneath his mouth just to detach him, and for the split second that separated the moment she took him off one breast and the moment she put him on the other one, he would sputter and pant, flailing his arms, moving his little fish’s mouth, searching.

She had friends nursing babies at the same time she was who kept their infants on schedules. Every four hours and never in between. “Their stomachs adjust,” one woman told her. “You wouldn’t believe how quickly they learn.”

Who needs to learn such a lesson? she wanted to ask. Your child will learn soon enough about doing without. What she wanted her babies to learn was what it felt like to have everything, absolutely everything, a child could need or want. Hers did.

Sally nursed for thirteen months and then weaned herself. Pete lived on her breast for a year and kept nursing another year after that, until Sam said it seemed to him that once a child was undoing the buttons of his mother’s shirt, it was probably time for her to stop breast-feeding. Regretfully she agreed he was probably right.

For Sam, after that, Claire’s breasts might as well have been radioactive for all he touched them. Breast-feeding had wrecked them, but it went beyond that. He practically recoiled when his hand touched her body now. It was as if once she became a mother there was something forbidden about wanting her.

Sam had been a runner when she met him, and in the later years he trained for marathons. He was out of bed before dawn, earlier even than a person has to get up for a baby, and he was in bed again by eight-thirty or nine most nights. Where Claire’s body softened gradually over the years of their marriage, Sam’s became like chiseled stone. He slept flat on his back—no pillow, far away from Claire. When they had sex it was rough, athletic and cursory. Feeling the hardness of him, she felt shame at her own soft over-ripeness. She knows he must have kissed her sometimes, but she has no memory of his lips, only the part where he thrust himself into her, and afterward, when he would roll over to his side of the bed and fall asleep.

She seldom asks herself anymore, as she used to, did he ever love her? All those years of his unremitting coolness have turned her own feelings for him into a frozen lake, with only the smallest patch of water left at one end that she wouldn’t safely skate on. At one time long ago she remembers loving him.

Mostly she remembers other things. At first she had been happy to give up her artwork to care for the children while Sam worked as a carpenter, but when the building boom slowed and they needed a second income, there were endless battles between them over money and child care. Especially after she got her job at the ad agency and it became clear that Claire was going to be the major breadwinner, she would tell him she needed more help from him with the children and the house. She was tired all the time. “Maybe I’d help you more if you didn’t nag so much,” he said. One time he picked up their video camera and pointed it at her face while she was weeping. “If you could see yourself,” he said. He shook his head and went to the TV room to sleep on the couch. When she followed him and tried to talk some more, he turned on the set.

After she got her job she started getting up earlier and earlier to draw, and by the time the children woke there would be the cheerful sound of laundry tumbling in the dryer and the smell of blueberry muffins about to come out of the oven, fresh-squeezed juice, flowers on the table, a “Sesame Street” record playing, a second pot of coffee on the stove. Then she’d pour the cereal into the bowls. Take off the nighttime diaper, powder the bottom, pull the T-shirt over the head. In the car on the way to day care and preschool they’d sing all the verses to
The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night
and play Grandmother’s Trunk. Pete liked her to recite the words to
Goodnight Moon
in the car. Sometimes they stopped at Woolworth’s on the way and had a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream or a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins, even though they’d had breakfast at home already.