He can’t do anything about that. In fact, on the rare occasions when somebody has shown up to whisk his mother off (usually just to the movies, or some restaurant in town), the guy was nothing like a prince. Pete knows he is never very polite to these men. He knows his mother wishes he would be more pleasant. But they’re just such geeks. Why does she need to go out on dates, anyway?
But it’s no good when she stays home all the time either. She gets grouchy and mad. She’s always yelling at him to pick up his room and mop the kitchen floor, but really, he figures, she’s just sad about other stuff. Money for instance.
When Pete hears his mother cry, he would do anything to make her stop. He has been listening to these ads they have on the radio about the Mega Bucks lottery. Every week the jackpot keeps getting bigger. Somebody’s got to win soon.
“Imagine the feeling,” the song goes, on the radio. “Imagine it was you.”
So he does. He imagines it was his mom, because he would give all the money to her. All except a couple hundred dollars for a dirt bike, or maybe a Jet Ski.
They would go to Club Med, the one his friend Jared has told him about where you get to ride go-karts and learn to fly on the trapeze. There would be yoga classes for his mom, and drinks with parasols in them, and scuba diving.
They would buy a Range Rover and a jukebox and a CD-ROM. His mom would hire a cleaning person to wash all the dishes and do the vacuuming. She would never have to look at another maggot again. Anytime something broke she wouldn’t even think about trying to fix it. She’d just call a handyman. Maybe she’d even keep one on staff, full time.
Once they won the lottery she wouldn’t be so mad at his dad anymore for not giving her enough money. His dad could come into the house without her getting mad, and Pete could show his dad his room that he’s fixed up with this Nike poster of Michael Jordan’s arms stretched out from one end of the room to the other. He could go to that baseball camp where they make videos of you and analyze your motion and get all the practice with his pitching he needs. They would teach him a slider, and when the Cubs announced that they were making Pete their starting pitcher, Bobby Arnold could just eat his heart out.
“Listen to the latest,” he hears his mom saying into the late-night phone—to Nancy, most likely. “Sally gets this eye infection, so I send her back to the eye doctor. Eye doctor sends her to a specialist. Specialist says she’s developed an allergy to her contact lenses and she needs this special gas-permeable kind that cost four hundred and twenty-five dollars. Naturally my insurance doesn’t cover it. And of course you know Sam will be no help. He just tells me he thinks she looks fine in her glasses.”
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Pete wants to scream.
“Sometimes,” his mother says into the telephone, “I just want to fold up my tent and give up.”
Pete can’t bear listening to this anymore. So he goes back to his dream, where the announcer on Megabucks Minute is calling out the winning numbers for this week’s six-million-dollar jackpot.
Pete is holding his ticket and checking the numbers off as the announcer calls them out, and amazingly enough every one has matched so far. It’s down to the last number. His.
“I got it, Mom,” he tells her. “I won the six million dollars.”
“Oh, son,” she says, crying again, but happy tears this time. “Everything’s going to be all right now.”
Claire and Nancy walk together almost every day before Claire’s kids get up. They have covered a lot of ground on this road. Each of them knows the awkward, agonizing circumstances under which the other relinquished her virginity. Nancy knows the story of how Sam asked Claire to marry him a few days after they met. Claire knows about the years Nancy spent trying to have a baby with her husband, and her current position, which is “Thank God I didn’t.” Claire doesn’t push this any further, and Nancy doesn’t pursue her belief that Claire should give up talking on the phone with Mickey and use all the money she saves to buy herself a ticket to Hawaii next winter. “When will you get it about him?” she says. “He hardly ever even pays for the calls. Let it go.”
Claire no longer tries to explain, because Nancy doesn’t understand. In all other areas, though, she’s such a good friend. They can tell each other anything.
It’s on this road that the two of them analyzed the data concerning whether or not Nancy’s husband was having an affair with his paralegal. This goes back three years now, and he was. Their divorce became final shortly after Claire’s, but without the long and costly legal battle. “There’s a lot less blood if no children are involved,” says Nancy. “As in all areas of life.”
Historically, Nancy has been the more adventurous of the two of them, romantically or at least sexually speaking—although Nancy would say that nothing she’s ever done is as brave as having kids. This hill is where Nancy described to Claire how she made love on horseback that time with Billy, the deaf horseshoer she met pumping gas at a self-serve. Here’s where Claire told Nancy about her uncharacteristic decision to go to bed with a man she met at a museum design conference, and her shock when he took out a reusable goatskin condom. “Better for the environment,” he said. “I don’t want to go littering these things all over the place, right?”
“My date told me he couldn’t bear to wear one, because it created a wall between us,” Nancy told Claire about Victor, the investment banker. “I told him, ‘You want to talk about walls, I’ll talk about the door. It’s over there.’ ”
“He showed me a photograph of his mother,” Claire told Nancy the morning after a blind date with a never-married bassoon player named Lionel. No second date necessary.
“Not a good sign,” Nancy told Claire when Claire described the way Arthur, the urban planner, had asked her for a copy of that snapshot he had taken with her camera of Sally’s friend Kim in her shorts and halter top, with her legs stretched out in the back of the station wagon. Kim was fourteen at the time.
“He only likes oral sex if he’s smoked marijuana first,” Nancy told Claire about Richard, the anesthesiologist.
“Not exactly unconditional love,” Claire says.
“He’s the best man I ever met,” Nancy told Claire about Frank, an accountant who sent her flowers every Friday and cooked wonderful Italian meals for her. Frank wanted to marry Nancy, and was planning to go on Weight Watchers just as soon as he got through tax season. “He would do anything, absolutely anything, for me,” she told Claire. “I’d be crazy to leave him.” Claire could tell from the sound of Nancy’s voice that Frank was history. She had said the same thing about Boyd, the single father she met at Pete’s soccer tournament that time, who changed her oil on their second date. He was too nice.
“I didn’t like his smell,” Claire said. “Not that he’s dirty, you know. It’s just the wrong body chemistry, you know?” No arguing with that one.
Claire and Nancy know that some women they’re acquainted with—married ones—regard certain aspects of their way of life as romantic and exciting. It has probably been quite a while since the husband of Jared’s mother, Cassie Walters, made love to his wife on a sailboat in the middle of Buzzard’s Bay or spent a weekend with her at a twenty-dollar-a-night motel in Maine. It’s doubtful that many of these women keep massage oil in the back of their medicine chests. They have not felt the need to take an AIDS test on the way to the soccer game.
There was this one time when Claire was taking a whole carload of Pete’s friends to Taco Bell after baseball, and when she reached into her purse for a handful of loose dollars and coins, what scattered out onto the counter along with the money was a Trojan-enz packet. The boys didn’t seem to notice, but the girl behind the counter did all right.
Even Sally, who is pretty preoccupied with her own life these days, notices the difference between the mothers who are married and the ones who aren’t. “Divorced mom, definitely,” she said one time, nodding in the direction of a woman eating dinner with a girl about her own age at the next booth at the
diner where they’d stopped for dinner on the way home from shopping.
“How do you know?” Claire asked her. “Maybe her husband’s just home with the other kids tonight.” The truth was, she was pretty sure Sally was right, and interested in how her daughter had arrived at the same conclusion she had.
“Check out her outfit,” Sally said. “Also the hair.”
Divorced women are more likely to wear theirs long, probably layered, and permed. Their skirts are shorter, if they can get away with it, and sometimes even if they can’t. They belong to a gym. They hardly ever leave the house without their makeup on. The ones who haven’t thrown in the towel utterly, that is. The others may put on a lot of weight and join some choir.
• • •
“Your life is so incredibly exciting,” Cassie said to Claire one time when she stopped over to pick UP her son on an afternoon when Claire’s kids were going to spend the weekend with Sam and Claire was packing to go away for a couple of days with Mark, the lawyer she had gone out with for a few months, a couple of years after Mickey.
“I love Tom to pieces, of course,” she told Claire. “But sometimes you wish you could just take a vacation from your marriage for a month or two.”
It hasn’t been just a month or two for Claire, though. In Cassie’s fantasy version of Claire’s life the part of the blind date is played by Harrison Ford or Mel Gibson, conversation scripted by Woody Allen. In real life, it is likely to revolve more on the unfair child-support settlement the guy ended up with from his divorce or the particulars of his sex life with his ex-wife. He may talk about other women he has dated in recent months and his sex life with them. He is probably carrying around an extra twenty pounds, although she knows that if she were equally overweight, he would probably not have asked her out, and it is unlikely that he still has more than half of his hair. He may drink too much. When he puts a tape into the cassette player of his car, it may turn out to be Barry Manilow. He may mention that he’ll be getting a bite to eat on his way over to pick her up, thereby avoiding the issue of whether or not they split the tab at dinner. There was one man who shared with her, on their first date, the details of his recent bout with kidney stones, and what he went through before passing them. A guy Nancy went out with once spent an entire dinner describing in detail the dental work he was having done. Every year since her divorce—every year since ending things with Mickey, that is—she has gone out less, and with fewer men, than she did the year before. So has Nancy, who has had sex only seven times, as she pointed out to Claire recently, for the entire duration of the Clinton administration. “I guess I used it all up during Bush,” she said, shaking her head. “But then, so did Bill Clinton, evidently.”
Sometimes, when Claire is talking with one of the married mothers of her children’s friends, one of them will complain that her husband has been out of town on a business trip for five days and she’s going crazy. Not for sex. What’s pushing her over the edge has to do with the responsibilities of driving kids and dealing with car repairs, normally shared, that suddenly fall to the wife alone.
“He’s been away six nights now,” this woman may say. Or maybe he was away when the hose on their washing machine broke, or when her son fell off a slide and had to be rushed to the emergency room with bruised ribs. He was away during the chicken pox. She had to prepare their tax return alone, because he was preparing a big annual report. She had to get their boat in for the winter while he was at a convention. She reports these facts as if they were on a par with living through Hurricane Andrew.
“If Rich doesn’t make it home by the weekend, I’m filing divorce papers,” Beth Donnelly told Claire the other day when they ran into each other at the food co-op. Claire could’ve pointed out, of course, that filing for divorce was one way Beth could ensure a great many more weeks and weekends of partnerless homemaking, but she didn’t. She knew the next thing Beth would say was that they should have dinner together while Rich was out of town. Most of her dinner invitations come this way. It must’ve been three years since anybody invited her to a dinner party of couples, but she is regularly invited to join female acquaintances whose husbands are away.
“Thanks but I’m busy that night,” she says. It’s her yoga night with Nancy. It’s not that she dislikes these women. They just inhabit different continents, is all. And the handful of times Claire has had the experience of being kissed in the front seat of a car as few husbands she’s observed kiss their wives, are nothing compared to the miles she’s navigated behind the wheel, driving home from someplace late at night with her children asleep in the backseat, and nobody next to her checking the road map.
The morning after Tim and Ursula finished reading Little House in the Big Woods, Tim sees in the paper that the children’s museum has opened a new exhibit with a Pioneer Room. He really should spend his day off working on his research paper about the effects of fluctuating saline levels in estuaries on inland ecosystems, but he can’t bear watching his daughter spend another Saturday glued to the shopping channel.
He turns off his computer and goes downstairs to their TV room, where, sure enough, Ursula is curled up with her blanket, listening to a couple of women demonstrating the Thighmaster.
“You should get me that,” Ursula says. “My thighs are lots chubbier than hers.”
“Your thighs are just perfect,” Tim says. “I should get you a Brainmaster, is all. To put some sense into your silly head.”
“Guess where we’re going today, Urs?” he says.
“The Laundromat?” she says. This is their usual Saturday excursion. That or B.J.’s Bargain Warehouse, where the cereal comes in plain boxes with no pictures on the back, but it’s lots cheaper. Now that Ursula’s learning to read, Tim pushes the cart and she carries the coupons, watching for the special bargains. At the Laundromat, she’s in charge of sorting. He could never handle all the jobs without her.
“Nope,” he says. “We’re going to the Ingalls’ house.”
“Who?” she says. She and her dad don’t get invited to people’s houses much.
“Little House in the Big Woods, remember?” he says. “The Ingalls family? It says in the paper the children’s museum’s got a special room now where it’s all set up like in pioneer times.”
“I wish I had a olden-days dress to wear,” Ursula says. “And those lace-up boots like in the American Girl catalog.”
“Never mind,” he says. “We can pretend.”
“I bet there’s going to be lots of kids there,” she says. “Not like the kids in my class. Nice ones.”
He says they’ll put in a load of wash at the Laundromat on the way. Maybe he’ll take her out to McDonald’s after. Either that or he might just bring along his twenty-two and rustle up a wild turkey or two for their vittles.
In the one-room schoolhouse, a little girl asks her mother if this was the kind of classroom she attended in the olden days. At the front of the room, an older child—eight years old, maybe nine—holds a pointer in the direction of a map of the United States as it would have looked in the year 1843, when Laura Ingalls Wilder attended a school like this. Then he waves it at his friend. Watching him, Claire makes a note to herself to replace the pointer with a less sharp implement. How could she have forgotten what happens when you give a little boy a long pointed stick?
They’ve got a good turnout at the museum today, and they needed it, too. The United Way decided to take the children’s museum off its list this year, which has left Claire thirty-eight thousand dollars short in meeting her budget. Already she has had to let her part-time secretary go, and her only full-time staffer. These days she has to rely on volunteers and Veronica, her half-time clerical person, to help her run the place. For the construction of the pioneer exhibit that has been unveiled today she hired a couple of carpenters and a designer, but that still left a lot of loose ends Claire had to handle herself. Last night, for instance, she was up until three preparing the materials for one of the activities in the Try It Room:
simplified samplers for kids to stitch and bring home. Now she leans against the rough-hewn boards forming the walls of the Pioneer Room, wearing her long calico skirt and a high-collared blouse and a gingham mop cap. It is one of those rare moments when she gets to stand back for a moment and simply survey what she does here, and she’s feeling good about it. All around her are happy-looking children and parents.
A boy she knows well, Roland, is rubbing his face in the sampler supplies at the moment. Claire has never asked Roland’s mother what his problem is, but she assumes he’s autistic. Sometimes when he comes here he is animated and friendly, other times he may not respond at all when Claire speaks to him. He may even bite. His mother is a taut, frantic-looking woman who brings him here almost every day. She always comes in carrying a People magazine and a thermos of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and sits in the Parent Resource corner, reading, while Roland careens around the museum. At various times Claire’s volunteers will comment to her that somebody really should say something to Roland’s mother about this. “We’re just not set up to provide babysitting services for kids like him,” one of them said to her just the other day, on an occasion when Roland had been emitting a strange, high wail for a good hour.
“She looks exhausted,” Claire said. “Let’s leave her alone.”
Today when Claire sits down beside Roland he is evidently in one of his affectionate moods. He climbs into her lap and begins to nuzzle against her breasts as if he wanted to nurse. Roland is probably ten years old, although it’s hard to tell. One thing’s for sure: He’s not stitching any sampler.
“Tell you what, Roland,” she says to him. “Let’s go churn some butter.” She takes his hand and leads him into the pioneer kitchen, where there’s a butter churn set up, and a pitcher of cream. She pours some in.
Often the museum is practically empty when he comes here, but there are many other children in the Pioneer Room today, on account of the unveiling. Roland looks anxious. He can’t see his mother.
Where Love Goes Page 7
