Where Love Goes

by Joyce Maynard

  “It’s all right,” Claire tells him. “She’s just in the other room. But you know me. I’m Claire.”

  It occurs to her that he may not recognize her with this hat on. She takes it off, and a look of recognition comes over him.

  Claire sits Roland in front of the churn and places his hands on the paddle. She puts her own hands over his and moves them back and forth. “Churn, churn,” she says. She has learned from other times with Roland that repetition is always comforting to him.

  “What’s the matter with that kid?” a boy is asking his mother. “The one with the thick glasses?”

  “Churn, churn,” says Claire. “We’re making butter, Roland. When we’re done, we’ll put some on a piece of bread and give it to your mother. One for your mother, one for you.”

  Up in the loft bed, a bunch of little girls are playing with rag dolls. “My baby’s prettier than your baby,” one of them says. “Nu-uh,” her friend tells her. Now they are debating the question.

  “He’s a re-tard,” another girl says to her mother. “I saw him here one other time. He bites.”

  Roland appears to be totally absorbed now in his butter churning. Claire takes the girl who has called Roland a retard aside. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt his feelings,” she says. “But if you call him that, you will.”

  The girl’s mother shakes her head. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” she tells Claire, “I don’t think it’s right to let kids like him in here with normal kids. He could hurt someone.”

  “This room is supervised at all times,” Claire says. “Many children act inappropriately now and then. We’re here to make sure that everybody treats each other with respect and consideration.”

  “Well, I’m just saying you’d probably do a lot better with this place if you didn’t let the retards in,” the mother says. “Next time maybe we’ll go bowling.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” says Claire. Right now she wishes she could just go sit in the Parent Resource corner herself for an hour or two. Make that a month.

  Roland has begun to emit his high-pitched wail again. Only this time it sounds joyful. When Claire goes over to him, she sees his churn is filled with butter.

  “Look what you made, Roland,” she says, putting her arms around him. Roland is practically singing now, he’s so excited. “Butter,” she tells him. “You made butter. And all by yourself, too.”

  She breaks a piece of bread off the loaf that is sitting on the trestle table and spreads Roland’s butter on it with a round, dull knife. Roland puts his face down on the bread and begins to chew. Now he has buried his face in her skirt.

  She wraps her arms around his head and holds him like that for a couple of minutes, thinking how long it has been since anybody kissed her. Even her own children.

  Over in another corner of the Pioneer Room, Tim and Ursula have been pretending that Ursula is Laura Ingalls, heading out to get a doctor for her mother, who is about to have a baby. Tim is Charles Ingalls, her father, racked by grief and fear for what will become of them all if his wife dies and leaves him with four motherless children, not to mention the new baby and their horse, Star, who is also about to give birth. Outside, a blizzard has left snow so deep it comes almost to Laura’s waist. But what can Charles do? Somebody has to get the doctor or his wife will die.

  “Don’t worry, Pa,” Ursula/Laura tells him. “I can make it to Doctor Baker’s. I won’t let Ma die.”

  “Be sure to carry your lantern, Laura,” Tim/Charles tells her. But the truth is, his attention has wandered from their game. He has been watching this woman in a long pioneer outfit, sitting at the butter churn with a boy who appears to have some kind of mental problem. There’s something about her that makes it difficult for him to concentrate on what his daughter is saying.

  “But, Pa,” Ursula/Laura says. “We have no wood left for the stove. How can we keep Ma and Baby Brother warm while I’m gone searching for Doctor Baker? We may have to burn my doll.”

  “Okay,” he says. The woman is holding the boy and rocking him very gently now. She is whispering something in the boy’s ear. Tim wishes he could hear what she says. Her long skirt covers her hips and legs, but he can tell she’s got a long, lean body, although her breasts are surprisingly round and full, in that bodice-fitting white blouse she’s wearing.

  “No, Dad,” says Ursula, impatient. “That’s not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to say you’ll burn your favorite rocking chair, that your father gave you right before the ox stepped on him. Then you’re supposed to wrap me in these furs and send me out in the night to get the doctor. And you don’t know there’s a raccoon right outside the door that has rabies.”

  Tim has long since stopped trying to follow this. He is mesmerized by the woman. There is a way she tilts her head as the boy nuzzles up against her that seems so wonderfully tender. She is spreading butter on a piece of bread for him now. She gets a little on her fingers and licks it off.

  Over by the butter churn, the woman in the pioneer outfit is stroking the head of the boy, who seems to be singing. Tim has to find out who she is.

  Ursula/Laura has found a baby doll someplace, which she has wrapped in a pillowcase and brought to him. “Here you are, Pa. My new baby brother. But I have very sad news to tell you. Ma died.”

  “Good,” says Tim/Charles.

  Ursula moans. “That’s not what you’d say, Dad. Don’t you get it? You’d be sad. Your heart would be broken.”

  The boy is kissing her wildly on the mouth. Watching him, with his thick glasses and his funny black work boots, Tim feels this crazy jealousy. I want her, he thinks. He imagines what it might be like to kiss her himself. To touch that neck.

  “I give up,” Ursula tells him. “You’re no fun to play with. I’m going to check out the rooms downstairs.” She sets down the baby doll and heads down the stairs.

  So Tim is alone now. Amazingly enough, so is the woman. The strange boy in the thick glasses has also disappeared, carrying his butter-slathered piece of bread. This is Tim’s chance.

  “You dress like this all the time, or do you work here?” Tim asks her.

  “Oh,” she says, putting an odd-looking cap back on her short, boyishly cut head of thick brown hair. “I’m the director here. Big deal, right? Staff of one and a half.”

  “You’ve done a great job,” he says. “My daughter loves it here. We just finished reading Little House in the Big Woods. I’m divorced.”

  She laughs.

  “You think that’s-funny?” he says. “I’d say you’ve got a weird sense of humor.”

  “Not a bit,” she says. “Believe me, I know firsthand. My name’s Claire.”

  She’s divorced too. He feels his heart lift. “Tim,” he says, offering his large hand. With no further deliberation he asks her if she’d like to have dinner with him. Tonight for instance.

  For a moment she just looks at him with a puzzled expression.

  “Believe me, I’m not some nut who goes around picking up women in children’s museums,” he says. “I’m not some butter churn fetishist or anything.”

  “I have kids—” she says.

  “Me too,” he says. “Kid, I mean. One. Seven. I mean one kid, seven years old. She’s in your Mineral Room at the moment most likely. She has this thing about pyrite.”

  “It’s not like mine need sitters anymore,” she says. “I just don’t go out that much.”

  “Me, I’m out playing pool and carousing with loose women every night,” he says.

  She finally smiles. She has a gap between her front teeth. He imagines what it would feel like to place his hand at the back of that long neck of hers.

  “I won’t be finished here till six or six-thirty,” she says. “I guess I could call my children and tell them to order a pizza for themselves tonight.”

  “I’ll get a sitter for mine,” he says. “Pick you up here?”

  Pete is on the phone with Jared when his mother calls to say she won
’t be home for dinner. “Hold on a sec, will you, Mom?” he says. “I’ve got someone on the other line.” It’s Jared, recounting the plot of the new Christopher Pike novel, Bury Me Deep.

  “Guess what?” he tells Jared. “My mom’s not coming home for a while. Why don’t you bring over your dad’s Playboy Playmates video and that pack of Red Man?” The two of them have taken up chewing tobacco in secret lately.

  “So I was thinking you and your sister could send out for a pizza,” his mother tells him. “Unless you need me, of course.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he says. Sally isn’t home. Since Travis got his license, the two of them are off driving all the time.

  “You can rent a video if you want,” she says. “There’s money on my dresser.” This must mean she’s going out on a date. Otherwise she wouldn’t feel so guilty.

  “You haven’t seen Free Willy yet, have you?” she says. “That’s supposed to be terrific.” His mom is always trying to get him to watch these wholesome, family-type movies.

  “Good idea, Mom,” he says. He and Jared have watched the Playmate video three or four times already, but they’re usually so worried about one of their parents walking in on them they just fast-forward to Miss September. They haven’t ever had a chance to see the whole thing straight through.

  “Can I talk to Sally?” his mother asks.

  He tells her she’s out. She and Travis probably drove over to the post office to buy a stamp. They won’t be heard from for hours.

  “Well, at least I’ve still got my boy,” she says. “For a few more years anyway, right, honey? I’ll be home before bedtime,” she tells him.

  Over Spanish omelettes at the Two Brothers Diner, Tim tells Claire he’s a biologist, teaching at the college and working on a book about the effect of fluctuating saline levels in estuaries on the mussel population. He has full custody of his daughter; she’s with him nearly all the time, except on the rare occasions when his parents take her, but they live in Ohio and they don’t have a lot of patience with kids anymore. Claire tells him her kids go to their father’s almost every weekend, but that isn’t always easy, either.

  “The pickup times are hard,” she says, “but going to get them Sundays at our old house is the worst. They’re always in a weird mood when I pick them up—grouchy and hypercritical. On the drive home they always seem to need to find fault with me for a million little things. It’s as if they’ve swallowed some kind of toxic substance and they have to vomit up all this bile before they can be okay again.”

  Tim tells Claire about what it was like with Joan, and over the year since he’s been on his own with Ursula. “I can handle the laundry and the cooking and my job at the college and all that,” he says. “The part that gets to me is no matter what I do, I can’t be a mother for my little girl. And she never stops wanting one.”

  A couple months back, he says, Joan called Ursula at seven o’clock on a Sunday night—the first time they’d heard from her in half a year. Since then, Ursula won’t go anyplace on a Sunday night, even though that’s when they show free movies at the library. She and Tim used to go every week and walk over to Friendly’s for ice creams afterward.

  “Now they could be giving away Barbies down at Wal-Mart and it wouldn’t matter, if it was a Sunday night,” he tells Claire. “Ursula would have to stay in that chair of hers next to the phone. ‘I think this is the night, for sure, Dad,’ she says. ‘Any minute now she’s going to call.’ Only she doesn’t. Usually I just let Ursula stay there in the chair until she falls asleep. Then I carry her up to bed and she doesn’t talk about Joan again until the next Sunday.”

  Long after Claire and Tim have finished their omelettes they’re still sitting in the restaurant. She’s surprised to hear herself telling him about that last terrible winter of her marriage, when she seemed to have lost the ability to sleep. She might lie down for a couple of hours in the bed she shared with Sam, listening to him snoring at the far end, and sometimes she’d cry in this soundless way she had. Sometimes he’d wake up complaining that her crying was making the mattress shake. “Take the boohooing someplace else would you babe?” he’d tell her. “If I don’t get some sleep, I’ll be no good on the job tomorrow.”

  So she’d get up. She might do a load of laundry or bake bread. She alphabetized the spices and polished the silverware. Sometimes she’d creep into her children’s rooms and sit there on the floor sorting Legos into bins according to colors or lining up Pete’s Matchbox cars on the shelf.

  Three o’clock, maybe four, she’d feel bone-weary, but she knew if she went back to bed with Sam, it would start all over again: She’d reach for him. He’d push her away. She’d cry. The bed would shake. He’d tell her to take it someplace else. So this time she’d go lie down in one of her children’s narrow single beds, under Pete’s He-Man quilt or Sally’s with the ballerinas. Then finally she could sleep.

  Years later, when Sam decided to fight for custody, this was one of the things he told in court as evidence that she’s an unfit mother. “I never had any evidence that she, you know, touched them inappropriately,” he told the Marital Master. “But you have to wonder. The state she was in, there was no telling.”

  There on the stand, in the same blue blazer he wore on their wedding day, Sam recounted the story of the time she had stood in the bathroom holding a pair of scissors to one of her braids. “What can I say?” he told the judge, shaking his head regretfully. “She was hysterical.”

  “And what did she do then, Sam?” his lawyer had asked him. A woman.

  “She said she was going to cut off her hair if I didn’t talk to her,” he answered. “It was very frightening to the children, but I tried to put their minds at ease. I told them, ‘Mommy was just having one of those days.’ ”

  “I have primary custody of the children now,” Claire tells Tim. She also explains that she has never got over the feeling that was left with her from the experience of going to court, that she is always being watched and judged as a mother. She can’t ever afford to let her guard down. She has to be perfect or it could all happen again.

  Claire doesn’t weep, telling Tim about her marriage and divorce, but Tim’s eyes become moist as he listens. Though she knows there are people—Sam for instance—who would look with disdain at a grown man sitting across from her in the diner brushing the tears from his eyes with his napkin, for Claire there’s something wonderfully comforting and tender about him.

  “He’s very big,” she will tell Mickey tomorrow when she calls him. “He looks like he just came in off the football field.” But there is also something almost feminine about him. Once she had supposed there was safety in attaching herself to a strong, tough-seeming man. Now she knows there’s more safety in softness.

  • • •

  “Partly I hate your husband for doing these things,” Tim says. “But I also feel sorry for him, that he has to live the rest of his life knowing he’s lost you.”

  “If he had ever treasured me that way he wouldn’t have lost me in the first place,” she tells him. “That was the point.”

  “How could he let you go?” Tim says. “If it was me that had had you and lost you, I don’t think I’d ever get over it.”

  Up Until this moment Tim hasn’t touched her. Mostly because if he started he could never stop. He hasn’t taken his eyes off her though. He has missed nothing. Not the way she runs her hand over her eyebrows sometimes as if she were smoothing a sheet, or the way she runs her fingers down her neck as she talks about this man, Mickey, she tells him about—as if she’s feeling his touch at that moment in just that spot. He loves her Hopalong Cassidy watch and the surprising heartiness of her laughter. He notices a small scar under her chin and knows he will ask her about it later. He sees that she has a few gray hairs, and when she looks up to see the Special Coffee of the Day he can tell from the very slight narrowing of her eyes that she must be nearsighted. Some dentists would probably tell her to fix that gap between her front teeth, but he wou
ld like to put his tongue there. There, and on her neck, and in her ear, and all over her.

  Partly he knows it’s the way she looks that has such an effect on him, but it’s something else, too. Although she has told him she’ll be forty on her next birthday, there is this startlingly playful, girlish quality about her. But there is this other thing about Claire: It’s so clear to Tim what a good mother she is, and he loves that. Same thing Mickey hated about her.

  She’s stroking the handle on her mug and looking into the bottom of it as if there were tea leaves with a message there. “I can’t believe we’ve been here three and a half hours,” she says. “My children will think I’ve been murdered and thrown in the basement of some madman. Either that or they will have rented a video.”

  Mine will be in bed, he knows. It’s been over a year since he’s hired a sitter for his daughter, and until now the thought of her hasn’t crossed his mind all evening. Ursula. For a moment there it was as if he’d forgotten her name.

  He reaches his hand across the table and touches her palm. Just that.

  “I could look at you for a long time,” he says.

  On the steps to the museum where he drops her off, because this is where her car is parked, he tells Claire he wants her to write a letter. It turns out they both have fax machines. Claire’s is in the little attic office she’s set up at home for her fund-raising work and grant proposals.

  “Sometimes it’s easier for me to say what I’m really thinking on paper,” he says. “Talk is cheap.”

  To Claire—who has been spending at least an hour a day on the telephone with a man she’s still in love with, who lives a hundred and twenty miles away, that she hasn’t seen in over three years—this is not necessarily so. Although it occurs to her that in all the years she has been talking with Mickey, missing Mickey, aching over losing Mickey, the only piece of mail she’s ever gotten from him was the form letter he keeps on his computer to send to the women who answer his ad in the personals.