“Do you think Ken is going to be there, Jessica?” Ursula/Samantha says. She talks in a high, whispery voice like on makeup commercials on TV.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” says Ursula/Jessica. “I heard he was going out with Tammy.”
“But he said he was in love with me,” says Ursula/Samantha. “We were going to get married Tuesday.”
“You never know with Ken,” says Ursula/Tracy. “He asked me to marry him one time, too.”
Ursula is fastening the buttons on Tracy’s cape as she polishes off the last of her M&M’s. She wishes they weren’t all gone. She wishes her dad would take a break from his writing so he could be Ken. She wishes Jenny could talk.
“Men are shits,” says Ursula/Tracy. She heard her mother say this one time and it made a big impression. Mostly because she hasn’t heard her mother say all that much. Last time she saw her was the week after her sixth birthday, and in three weeks she turns eight.
Ursula’s getting a Bend ’N Stretch Barbie for her birthday. She knows because she’s seen it in her dad’s closet.
Her dad has asked her what she wants to do for her party. “We could take a bunch of your friends bowling,” he said. “Or we could go to Chuck E Cheese.” He said maybe they could even rent Rollerblades, if the weather’s nice. “We should get the invitations out soon,” he told her. “You need to make a list of who to invite.” He says this almost every day. “Have you made your list yet, Ursula?” he says. “We don’t want to leave it to the last minute, otherwise the kids might have plans.”
Her dad is such an idiot. He doesn’t get it. The reason Ursula hasn’t made up her list is there’s nobody to put on it. Tammy maybe, if she knew her phone number, but Ursula doesn’t see how Tammy could go Rollerblading or roll a bowling ball, on account of the cerebral palsy. She’d probably drop a bowling ball on somebody’s foot. Also, she needs someone to help her swallow her food.
Maybe Ursula’s mom will come from New Zealand for her birthday. Maybe the reason Ursula hasn’t heard from her for a while is she’s planning a surprise. Ursula will wake up on her birthday morning and her mom will be standing there in a flowered bathrobe with a tray. On this tray there will be one of those little cereal boxes her father never buys because they’re expensive and they just use up trees in the rainforest. F root Loops. Also that little kitten pitcher they used to have back when her mom still lived with them, where the milk comes out its paw. There will be an orange cut up in slices arranged like a flower the way her mom always did. And many presents, of course, not just Bend ’N Stretch Barbie, but the Town House and a Lite Brite and something else, her magic present, a heart locket that opens up with a picture of Ursula and her mom in it. Her mom has also bought her a party dress with puff sleeves and little jewels like Ashley Carson had on at the spring concert at school. It will not be a Chubbies size, and still it will fit just right. There are patent-leather party shoes to go with it and ruffled socks and even jeweled barrettes that match the jewels on the collar of the dress. Accessories are the kind of thing her dad doesn’t understand. If he was buying socks for a party dress, he’d probably get her crew socks like he wears, with an orange stripe around the top. “Just fold it over so the stripe doesn’t show, Urs,” he’d say. “You look fine.”
He will get up to make some more coffee soon. She could go ask him again how many more minutes till three o’clock, but she knows he will tell her to clean up her room and she’s not in the mood. He never used to be very picky in this department, but ever since he met Claire, he has been after Ursula all the time to clean up her room and put her toys away. He used to say they were just like a couple of hoboes. “A bachelor and a bachelorette,” he said. “That’s us, Urs.” They used to eat their dinner on a TV tray watching “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” and she could leave her M&M wrappers on the floor, and when one of them farted, the other one would fart back. Now he says they should have regular meals at the kitchen table and they have to clean up right away afterward. He told Ursula they need to clean up their act. Last night when they were at the video store and she wanted to rent Dr. Giggles, he said, “You know I’ve been thinking, Urs. I don’t think these are such great movies for a girl your age to be watching.” He made them get this movie called Pollyanna instead, with this idiot kid that keeps telling everybody how much she loves them and doing nice things for everyone.
“She makes me want to puke,” Ursula said after they’d been watching the movie about ten minutes. “I bet her farts smell like perfume.” Normally this would have made her dad laugh, but all he said was, “Come on, Urs. Give it a chance. Seven-year-old girls are supposed to love this stuff.”
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that it was her that gave him that idea. Her and her perfect daughter that probably has every movie Hayley Mills ever made memorized. If she came in here now Ursula would give her a karate kick straight to her stomach like her dad taught her. One more thing he hardly ever does with her anymore.
“Men are shits,” says Ursula/Tracy. “They always leave you in the end. You can never count on them when you need them.”
“But you don’t understand,” says Ursula/Samantha. “I love him. I can’t live without him. He’s all I’ve got.”
“Then I hate to break it to you,” says Ursula/Tracy. “But you’ve got nothing. Nada. Zip.”
This is when Ursula’s dad walks in. He used to hang around the house in just his boxers. Now he’s got sweatpants on.
“Turkey or tuna fish for lunch, Urs?” he asks her. He hardly ever offers peanut butter and jelly anymore, and Ursula knows why. Too fattening.
“Tuna,” she says. She doesn’t look up. Just see if she kisses him. Ha.
“And listen, Urs,” he says. “After lunch I want you to do something about this room.”
They have come to Twinkle-town—one of Pete’s favorite places in the universe, he says—for an evening of miniature golf: Tim, Claire, Pete, Ursula, Sally, and even Travis. Claire was very surprised that the two teenagers would have agreed to join this gathering, but amazingly enough, Sally evidently decided there was something cute about it. “The dysfunctional family goes golfing,” she says. “Should be wild.”
They are at the sixth hole now: a windmill whose blades turn slowly in such a way that they block the opening for a person’s golf ball every time they reach a certain point in their rotation. The object is timing your shot just right to get your ball through the hole at a moment when it isn’t blocked.
Tim has made the hole in three strokes, which is par. Travis got the same score. Claire took four. Sally, who has the disconcerting trait of giggling and utterly falling apart in all even vaguely athletic endeavors whenever her boyfriend is around, has taken six shots without success or apparent concern.
The surprise of the night is Ursula, who turns out to have an almost uncanny talent for miniature golf. So far she has shot par or less on every hole, with a hole in one at one of the toughest spots on the course. She is practically dancing, she’s so excited. “I never even did this before,” she says again. “This is just my first time. And I’m the youngest one, too.”
Sally isn’t bothered by this sort of thing but Pete is going nuts. The first time Ursula made a great shot he just shrugged, but when she got the hole in one Claire thought he might actually throw his ball at her. On the fourth hole, when her club tapped her ball as she was setting up her shot—something Ursula does with enormous care—Pete protested that the tap should count as her first shot.
“Oh, come on, ease up,” Claire said, rubbing his shoulders. “It’s just a game.”
“I just don’t like to see people not taking the rules seriously,” he said.
“Pete’s got a point there,” said Tim. “What do you say, Urs? I think we’d better count that as a shot. You’ve still got most of us beat.”
But Pete’s not the only one who’s playing for blood tonight. Ursula has spotted an enormous stuffed gorilla at the refreshment stand, for the player with the best
score of the evening. She wants it.
“The ball didn’t even move, Daddy,” she says. “He’s just mad because I’m better than him.” Claire has talked to Tim about Ursula’s habit of addressing all her remarks to her father, rather than speaking directly to the other people around her. Also the way she seldom speaks about any of these people by name.
“Well, okay,” Tim says. “But then I’m going to take one stroke off Pete’s score too.” Claire knows Pete will hate this even more. The last thing he wants is to be babied.
They have reached a little suspension bridge Ursula thinks is the cutest hole yet. “I could bring my Barbies here,” she says, her voice a low hush. “I can’t believe I never knew there were places like this.”
“We can come here lots,” Claire tells her. Just never again with Pete is all.
Over at the schoolhouse hole, Travis has his hand up the back of Sally’s shirt.
“It’s her turn,” Ursula says, pointing to Sally. “Doesn’t she want to hit her ball?”
“I don’t think she’d mind if you went ahead and took your turn,” Claire tells her. You couldn’t exactly describe Sally as being into the game. Travis either.
Ursula lines up her shot again—careful not to hold her club anywhere near the ball as she studies it from ground level, like a professional golfer.
“Jeez-um,” Pete groans. “We’re going to be here all night.”
She gets another hole in one. “Did you see that one, Dad?” she says. “Aren’t I good?”
“You’re something else all right, honey,” Tim tells her.
“We just won’t say what,” Pete mumbles under his breath.
“Stop that,” Claire snaps. She looks at the scorecard. Ten holes to go. The tinny sound system is playing a Garth Brooks tape. Every few seconds there’s the sizzling sound of another insect hitting the blue bulbs of the bug zappers.
“He’s mean,” Ursula says to Tim. Tim looks at Claire helplessly. Pete throws his ball into a miniature pond. Water splashes all over Ursula.
“Go sit in the car,” Claire tells Pete. “You’re done.”
Pete strides off the artificial turf swinging his club like a walking stick, without a word. No batting cages tonight.
“I don’t want to do this anymore, either,” Sally says. “Travis and I can walk home.”
So it’s just Tim and Claire and Ursula on the last stretch of the course. Ursula wins. She takes their hands triumphantly as they head back to the refreshment stand to turn in their clubs. “I love this place,” she whispers, even though she doesn’t get the gorilla. “Can we come here again tomorrow?” She says she’s going to keep her scorecard forever.
Claire buys her a push-up pop. She gets one for Pete, too—it’s their tradition. Only when they get back to the car he’s gone, and he’s not over at the batting cages, either. Eventually, when they give up looking for him and head toward home, they spot him on the highway. He’s scuffing his feet in the dirt and digging his hands deep in his pockets. When Tim pulls the car over and Claire gets out to talk to her son, he won’t even look at her. She can see he’s been crying.
“That was always our place,” he says. “Why’d you have to go and bring her?”
Claire goes to New York for her first conference on fund-raising for small local nonprofits, leaving Nancy in charge back at her house. Vivian has told Claire that unless she can start generating some more substantial corporate donations for the museum she may have to recommend terminating her position and using the money allocated for her salary to hire a professional fund-raiser instead. “Not that I want you to feel pressure or anything,” she tells Claire. “Just a word to the wise.”
Claire is gone a total of thirty-six hours on this trip. This period of time knowing he is not simply apart from Claire, but that she is also across state lines, is nearly unbearable to Tim. Partly to get himself through it, he writes her one of his letters, and though their usual arrangement is that Tim should fax these letters to Claire only when she’s around to take them off the machine right away, he sends it anyway. Just having his words scrolling through the machine will make him feel more connected to her, he believes. So he writes:
“I know it’s a good thing for you to be developing your professional skills and all that.
“But every time I think how important it is for you to do something like this trip, my cock moves in direct defiance to what I think. It makes me uncomfortable wherever I am. Making breakfast. In my office. In my car. Driving Ursula to the library and picking up groceries. My cock insists I listen to its nonstop throbs.
“It’s not easy being a guy. Your own son is destined for it, so you might as well know. The thing that bothers me the most is that I don’t think you can register a cock to vote, considering that I can’t imagine one pulling the curtain shut at a voting booth. So why does this blood-filled appendage have so much to say about how I feel toward you? It has no respect for authority. No idea of how important this trip is for you. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t even speak English. It just argues with me all the time in this kind of tom-tom-like manner. You know, Robert Bly bullshit. From my own cock, as if his book weren’t bad enough. And I know my own cock hasn’t read his book, because I suspect my cock is a terribly stupid thing. Lovable perhaps, but not respectable.
“Nonetheless, I don’t want to get rid of it. I’ve lived with it all my life, it’s just never been as obnoxious as it has been in these last few months. It even looks more stupid when I think of you, rather than being this polite little trouser mouse it should be. You should see it at this very moment, for instance, standing at attention as if this was West Point and some four-star general was performing inspection.
“God, it’s lucky your children never read your faxes.”
They never have before, actually, since the fax machine is up in Claire’s third-floor office, where they never go because you might run into bats. Only as it turns out, Sally has been trying to reach Travis on the phone, and Pete has been tying up their regular line forever, in some assinine conversation with Jared about the new Christopher Pike book, Cheerleaders: The First Evil. So for the first time in at least a year Sally has just stepped into her mother’s office, where the fax is located, with the plan of switching it off for a moment and using the fax phone to make her call. At just this moment Tim’s fax scrolls through the machine, and even then she wouldn’t have given it a second look except there is this drawing on the bottom of the page which is, unmistakably, a picture of a penis. She knows this from recent dealings with Travis. With whom she is not having sex. Just everything but.
So she reads it, not every disgusting word, of course. But enough to leave Sally with the feeling that everything is going crazy, and everything she used to think was real isn’t. Her own mother is acting like a teenager. Her mother’s boyfriend is acting like one of Pete’s friends. Next thing you know, one of them will announce they have AIDS. They will go on “Oprah.” They will French-kiss at her graduation.
A blood-filled appendage. Polite little trouser mouse. Sally feels she has been sexually violated, even though nobody has laid a hand on her. Who would have guessed a bunch of words on a piece of fax paper could do that to a person? Her mother has some nerve telling Sally to take it slow with Travis, considering what she’s up to herself.
Once baseball season’s over, Pete and Sally go to their father’s house for two weeks. Tim and Claire and Ursula drive to Maine. They check into a motel, the cheapest they can find—a little cabin with beds so soft they sag in the middle. Ursula has never stayed in a motel before. She’s very excited.
“Look at the little shampoo bottle!” she calls to Tim from the bathroom. “There’s even a shower cap.”
“The sleeping arrangements here could get frustrating,” Tim whispers to Claire, setting his overnight bag on the bed. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through a night in the bed next to you this way without screwing you.”
“You’ll live,” she says. �
��I’m not all that irresistible.”
Ursula comes out of the bathroom. She bounces on the bed. “This is the best place,” she says. “I want to stay here forever.”
“Wait till you see the ocean,” says Claire. “You can jump in the waves and slide on the sand dunes. There’s sure to be tons of kids making castles.” Claire’s children have always loved this beach, and one of the things Claire has always liked best about it is the way they find other children to entertain themselves with so she can just stretch out on the sand and read.
Ursula’s still bouncing. “I want to do whatever you guys do,” she says.
• • •
They have slathered her with number 45 sunblock, the highest number. Tim is also wearing it. Even now, with all the talk of UV rays, Claire doesn’t worry much about her own dark skin, but because of Ursula’s and Tim’s coloring, they have bought an umbrella.
They find a good spot a little way down the beach, close to several families with children the right age for Ursula. Tim spreads out their blanket. Claire sets out the pail and digging implements she has picked up, and the kite. She sets them next to Ursula.
Claire takes out her book and a stack of exhibit proposals for the museum. She mounds up a pile of sand the way she likes, to support her neck. She places herself so her foot touches Tim’s. It’s a perfect day.
Tim has also brought a book, but he has not opened his. He is looking at Ursula, who sits on her towel with her sweatshirt still on. “Aren’t you going to play with me, Daddy?” she says.
Claire watches his face. They are both watching his face, actually. “A little later I will,” he says carefully. “Right now I think I’ll just stretch out here and relax.” Claire has won the point, and they all know it.
Ursula is silent for about a minute. Claire rereads her paragraph. Her hand strokes Tim’s thigh. She can feel his tension.
Where Love Goes Page 15
