Where Love Goes (33 page)

“In the night when you’re sleeping I’m going to get out my scissors and chop it off.”

“Okay. Okay,” he says, too weary to argue anymore. “At least let me do it, then.”

•   •   •

The haircut he gives her is a terrible mistake. Without her soft halo of strawberry-blond curls, his daughter’s face is a moon. The shearing he has given her is nothing like the wonderful boyish cut of Claire’s hair. On Claire there is something almost heartbreakingly feminine about such short hair. On Ursula what the short cut seems to reveal is not so much skin as it is flesh. It’s his neck she has, of course. He had never realized it so clearly. His thick, short, pink wrestler’s neck. She’s like a baby mouse before the fur grows in. Pink and naked.

Ursula knows this. She studies her round, bespectacled face in the mirror and looks as if she may cry. She chooses mad instead.

“You ruined me, Daddy,” she says. Suddenly she’s pounding his chest. Pulling at his own red hair, longer than hers now. Kicking him in the vicinity of his balls.

“It’ll grow,” he says to her. “You wanted this.”

She’s past words now. Pummeling him. Weeping. Tearing at her head. She throws toys.

“Ursula,” he says. Tim is a large person, but it takes much of his strength to hold her.

She’s in the hall now, still throwing things. He pictures shattered glass. Blood.

“Daddy!” she weeps. “Daddy!”

He picks her up. He would hug her and hold her, only she won’t stop hitting. So he carries her back to her room and sets her on the bed. “You need to calm down,” he says. “I can’t even talk to you like this.” He tries to head for the door—he is going to leave her for a few minutes until they can both catch their breath—but she has grabbed his leg. She’s biting. She has actually broken through his skin.

“Stop it, Urs,” he says. He isn’t yelling. He is not even angry so much as he is just incredibly sad.

“You poop,” she wails. “You peckerhead.”

He grabs hold of her arm and swings her back into the room. He reaches for the doorknob. He is going to simply close the door, stand on the other side holding it shut if necessary. All he’s trying to do is give them time to calm down.

But as the door slams shut, he hears her scream. Her face, with its skullcap of red-blond wisps, is a mask. He has slammed the door on his child’s finger.

At the emergency room they put a splint on Ursula’s finger, which is sprained, not broken. Still, Tim can’t stop shaking over what he’s done. When they get home, he fixes her hot chocolate and reads to her from
Ramona
(who once cut her own hair, but that was funny). He sits on her bed and strokes her forehead. He sings her their song. Twice.

“Parents make terrible mistakes sometimes,” he says.

“It’s okay, Dad,” she says. “It’ll grow.” She thinks he’s just talking about the haircut. “You do the best you can.”

L
ater in the night—he thinks it may be two-thirty, maybe three—Tim wakes up and reaches for Claire. When he remembers that she isn’t here tonight, a panic seizes him and grips him tighter, even, than his daughter did the night before, in the places where he knows, tomorrow, there will be bruises on his skin.

He’s having trouble breathing. He has to see her. He cannot go another minute without it.

He gets out of bed and puts on his jeans. He slips his feet into sneakers without lacing them. He moves into the room of his daughter, who is lying, mouth open, on her side, clutching her doll Phillip. Her breathing that he knows so well tells him she won’t wake up.

He knows he’s behaving like a lunatic, but he doesn’t care. He goes down the steps and out the door. He goes onto the dark street, with its one wailing baby and the sizzling sound end-of-season mosquitoes make hitting someone’s neon blue bug zapper. He heads down the block to her house—walking first, then breaking into a run. The Christmas lights Claire keeps up all year are lit. Otherwise it’s dark.

He turns the knob slowly. She never locks the door. It’s not just her heart Claire leaves out in broad daylight for anyone to take, if they had only noticed. It’s her house, too.

He climbs the steps. One creaks, that he has been meaning to fix for her. Nobody stirs except Jenny, who just thumps her tail softly at the sight of him.

He moves past Sally’s room, and Pete’s. He steps into Claire’s room, where the door is partly open. No need to keep it shut tonight.

She lies there on the flower garden sheets, in the faint pink glow of her Nautilus shell nightlight. She wears a flannel nightgown. She’s hugging herself.

He touches the edge of her sheet. “One thing about me,” Claire has always told him, “I’m a good sleeper.” Though she always woke instantly at the first sound of a child in the night, back when hers made sounds like that, and she does now when his child cries out, she sleeps like a baby otherwise.
“Not like a baby at all, actually” she said. “Babies don’t sleep half as well as I do.”

He stands over her now, just watching. How long he stands there he could never tell you. He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t speak. He just wanted to see her. He bends over her to feel her breath on his face. Then he goes home.

U
sually Ursula only wakes in the middle of the night if she needs to go pee, but she doesn’t need to pee and she wakes up anyway. The first thing she does is feel her head and remember her hair is gone. The next thing she does is reach for Phillip. She wants her dad, but she’s not allowed to go into his bedroom in the middle of the night in case she might be there. Claire.

Then it comes to her that her dad isn’t in their apartment now anyways. She can feel it. He has gone over to Claire’s house. Ursula’s alone.

She lies there shivering. After a very long time she hears her dad’s footsteps on the stairs, and a long, heavy sigh. Wherever he went to—and she thinks she knows—he has returned. Tonight he only left her for a few minutes. But there’s no telling when the day will come that he will leave and just never come back.

I
n morning now, their children off at school, and Tim has come to have coffee with Claire before work. He’s surprised when he walks in by how loud she has the music turned up. “If you needed me I would come to you,” an oddly familiar voice is singing. “I’d swim the seas to ease your pain.” Something about the way Claire is just sitting there, still in her bathrobe though it’s past nine o’clock, worries Tim. Or would, if he didn’t already have so much on his mind. It took all he had just getting Ursula to school this morning, she was so upset about her hair.

“I can’t believe you still haven’t gotten her to a therapist,” Claire says sharply when she sees the bruises on his wrist. He isn’t ignoring her when he remains silent. There is just nothing he can say.

“Did you ever call the number I gave you about Parent Effectiveness Training?” she asks him. “Did you even buy a garbage can for your kitchen so those cereal boxes aren’t spilling out all over the place all the time?” Even as she raises this last question she knows how ridiculous it is talking with him about garbage cans at the moment.

“I won’t stop loving you,” she says, still not looking at him. “But it could be that I simply can’t be with you. Your daughter wants to destroy us, and if you let her, she will.”

She has more to say, too. About Ursula pinching kids at school. About Ursula going into Sally’s closet and trying on her underwear. About something she found in her dollhouse: the mother’s head broken off and set inside the toilet. She knows it was Ursula that did it. Who else?

Cassie, the mother of Petes friend Jared, called her this morning to say that Ursula has been spreading a rumor around school. She has been telling kids that Pete and Sarah McAdam had sex in the boys’ bathroom. Ursula says she knows this because her father is going to marry Pete’s mother. “Is that true?” Cassie had asked Claire. The marrying part, she meant. She knows the part about Pete couldn’t be, although Jared had come home saying that all the kids were talking about it
.

“I hadn’t even discussed the idea of getting married with my own kids,” Claire says to Tim. “And now Ursula’s spread it all over the school.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, so softly Claire can barely hear him. “She’s just a kid.”

“When will you stop making excuses for your child?” Claire yells. “She’s an incredibly destructive kid.”

“Please,” Tim says, holding up his hands as if to ward off blows. “Please stop. I can’t bear to hear any more right now.”

“I thought we could be a family,” Claire says. “Instead I feel I’m losing the family I had.”

“No more now, please,” he says. “All I wanted was to love you.” He’s backing out the door.

“You have a few things to learn about how to care for a person you love,” says Claire. “I feel like you’ve dumped this toxic garbage all over our lives.” She’s still pelting him with more words as he stumbles, hunched and beaten, down her walk and crawls into his car.

T
his was hardly the first time that Claire told Tim Ursula is screwed up. It has become her major theme with him. That and the messiness of their apartment. He has just never gotten angry before. But suddenly it explodes out of him like a fist. When he was younger he got into fights a lot at school, and with Joan he would sometimes feel a rage so terrible he actually put his hand through a window one time. But he has never felt this kind of fury toward Claire. A fury almost as powerful as his love for her. There is a connection in fact. His rage has something to do with the terrible sinking sense he has that he’s losing her, and that there is nothing he can do about it. He hates Claire for the thoughts he knows she has about leaving him. He hates her for not loving his daughter. He hates her for the way she has almost made him stop loving his daughter himself.

He would never stop loving Ursula. But lately he has had these dreams that she goes away. Her mother takes her. And how he feels isn’t bereft and heartbroken as he would have been once, just at the thought of losing his child. When he thinks about her going away, his chief feeling is relief.
Now I can have Claire
. His love for her is sickening.

“I have this perpetual sense of how I disappoint you,” he writes in his fax, which scrolls through her machine an hour later, just as she is finally gathering up her folders and heading out to the museum
.

You don’t need to tell me any more than you already have how inadequate and fucked up I am. You don’t need to list all the ways I fall short of your ideal of a man and a parent, all the ways my child fails to match the image in your mind’s eye of the eight-year-old girl of your dreams. And I know that in three hours and a trip to Kmart you could transform my living room, and that in ten therapy sessions and a few weeks of low-calorie meals you’d have Ursula whipped into shape too. I know you would do a better job than I can about every single aspect of my poor, miserable, failed life. Except for one area. You do not do a better job of loving me than I do of loving you
.

Do you understand—did you ever bother to try?—that completing this grant proposal is the only thing that offers me the remotest possibility of financial stability? Do you even know who I am or what I do, or what it might be I give my daughter besides a tidy living room? I can dress Ursula up, down, or in between. Get her hair screwed up or fixed up. Buy her sandals or pumps or Converse high-tops or fucking army boots. Get her therapists, and therapists for the therapists. I could come up with a little grant of a grand or two from some foundation and a cute little storage room full of matching furniture and rugs and the board games to play on them and turn this dump of mine into a dollhouse, and if I did I guess maybe you could love me. Accept me, anyway. But that is not the man I am, not the man you said you loved
.

I never claimed to be the wonder parent you are—the
Miracle Dad to your Miracle Mom, Ward Cleaver to your Martha Stewart. It seems to me that I presented myself as a confused parent. So you tell me to go to the parents’ garage in the form of some therapist’s office for the old behavioral overhaul. And I will go there. But I am running out of money, in case you hadn’t noticed, and the only way I could avoid having the phone service disconnected that allows me to send you my testimonials of undying love was to let a few things slide for a little while and do my work. You just don’t have the patience or the constancy to wait
.

There is a jugular-ripping quality to your criticism of me that I decided this morning I don’t need and can’t bear to hear anymore. Even as I backed out your door this morning, you kept laying barbs on me, from this incredibly cold spot in the Antarctica of your heart. For the first time since meeting you, I could imagine what it must have been like to be your former husband. I sympathized with him
.

So once again it seems you have found another human being with a dick who has set out to methodically disappoint you. How could it be that so many men require this of you? An entire half of the species set out to prove they are utterly stupid, lazy, or incompetent
.

I will not wait my turn in the deli line to disappoint you in love yet again. Somebody else can take my place. I am not going to live one more day in the land of belittlement—a mutt and his mongrel child who have somehow wandered into your thoroughbred world
.

Ah yes, it’s beautiful all right, where you live, in Twinkle Town. You have let me visit you there, on your amazing eighteen-hole course of interesting obstacles, novelty pleasures, your exquisitely groomed putting green. But woe to a lover who steps off the artificial turf and enters the trenches surrounding your compound
.

You love the impossible, and come to despise the attainable. The only man you believe in reveals himself every day in your life in the form of two or three chips missing from your kitchen floor tiles and a ridiculously high phone bill. You will live forever with the illusion that only he could have given you
what you need, if he had only been willing to give it to you
.