“I think I like this one the best,” she said, pointing to number three. Ma Griffe.
“Did you think we were going to buy one just like that?” he asked her. “That’s not how you do it.”
They walked around Harvard Square for a couple of hours. They had a margarita at a Mexican place and shopped for used CDs at a couple of little record stores. Every ten minutes or so he’d reach for one of her arms and sniff one of their test patches. “It’s not just the way the perfume smells when you first put it on,” he told her. “It’s what happens when you live with it. Every woman’s skin is different.”
• • •
They made three separate trips to Colonial Drug before they found her perfume, a scent called II Bacio. Now, Claire sprays herself with perfume even when she knows she will be totally alone for the pure pleasure of smelling herself. Since buying that first bottle she has picked out half a dozen other scents. Il Bacio is still her favorite, but she hardly ever wears it anymore. She has learned that there is nothing—not a photograph, not a piece of music even—that summons a memory more sharply than a scent. There are times when something as simple as a blend of coffee brewing or the smell of baseball glove leather can do it to her, or a soap she realizes he used, or a certain kind of greasy sandwich that they sell outside Fenway Park.
Hearing the news about Mickey and Annalise, Claire no longer needs to throw a pot of soup. She doesn’t crawl into bed. She has no braids left to cut off. If she were a drinker, this is where she would pour herself a double scotch. As it is, she climbs the stairs to her room, puts on a Lucinda Williams CD, takes out her perfume bottle, and bathes herself in Il Bacio.
When do we get to come over to your house again?” Ursula asks Claire when she stops by their apartment with a jar of the leek soup she’s made and a pan of cornbread. This is the same question Ursula asks Claire every time she sees her and it always has the same effect. Claire can almost feel a hand constricting around her heart, a tightening in her throat. Ursula’s question makes it seem to Claire as if Ursula and Tim have no life besides the one she provides them, which is a suffocating notion. And where in the normal course of things she would have pictured Ursula coming over all the time, the child’s perpetual asking has the effect on Claire of wanting to withhold what she knows Ursula wants so badly. Claire despises herself for this. She feels ungenerous and inhospitable. A stern, reproachful, lecturing tone whose sound she hates comes into her voice.
“You know, Ursula,” she says. “Last time you came over, all you did was ask your dad when he was going to take you home again.” This is true: The only time Ursula lets up on asking to come over and play is when she gets to come over, at which point she never plays. She leans against her father, wherever he may be, and whispers to him things Claire is just as glad she doesn’t hear, as well as a number she does hear. Ursula complains that Claire’s kids are being mean to her. She’s bored. She can never speak directly to Sally or Pete, only to her father, directing him to tell them things. He tries to get her to talk for herself, having been instructed in this by Claire, but in the end he usually gives up.
“Ursula wonders if you know that Jenny doesn’t like it when pieces of dog chow get in her water bowl,” Tim tells Pete, as gently as he can.
“Yeah,” says Pete. “We heard already.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Pete,” Tim will say, instantly apologetic, putting a hand on his shoulder (a terrible mistake). “I think you’re doing a great job taking care of Jenny. We’re both incredibly grateful to you.”
“Sure,” Pete says, beating a hasty retreat.
“When are we going to get to come over to your house?” Ursula asks Claire again. The first time she asked, Claire was telling Tim about a meeting she’d had with a woman who wanted to give her collection of antique teddy bears to the museum. And since one of the many things she has expressed to Tim concerning his relationship with Ursula has to do with his willingness to let her interrupt him, she kept talking as if she hadn’t heard. The interrupting issue was one of Mickey’s big things with Claire. “You let your children walk all over your life” he used to tell her.
“You let your child walk all over your life,” she tells Tim. “Which means she’s walking all over mine, too.”
“When do we get—” Ursula begins for the third time.
“Listen, Ursula,” says Claire with a sharpness that startles her own self. “You need to know you aren’t the only person in the world.”
As if she didn’t. What Ursula knows, in fact, is that she is only just barely in the world at all. One more step and she could just fall right off the edge.
Used to be her dad would set a pitcher of apple juice next to her bed every night with a Boston Patriots cup next to it in case she got thirsty in the night. She does get thirsty, too, and though the pitcher would always be there, what she liked was for him to come and pour the juice for her, and he would, too.
“Daddy,” she would call. And just like that there he’d be. Pouring.
Then Claire told her dad kids shouldn’t have fruit juice in the night. The sugar sits on their teeth all night, she told him, and they get cavities. Plus apple juice has calories. Why not water?
So then he would get up and pour her the water. And then Claire said, “She’s in third grade. Don’t you think she can pour her own glass of water? And you shouldn’t be naked like that when you come in to her, either.” So now he wears a bathrobe.
“Daddy,” she would call. “I need to go potty.”
“When my children were her age they went by themselves in the night. If they needed to go at all, which was rare—and would be for yours too if you didn’t leave that stupid pitcher next to her bed.”
Like a dog he obeys. She has him by the balls. Her dad taught Ursula that expression. Now he’s the one it’s happened to.
So Ursula gets up by herself at night now. Here in their cold, miserable little apartment that smells of the downstairs tenants’ cigarette smoke and a hundred ancient meals of fish sticks, Ursula makes her way alone down the dark hallway, past the door he now keeps not only shut but locked, to their horrible stinky bathroom that now has things like Tampax in it and a tube of something she once thought was toothpaste, only it tasted terrible, so she knows it wasn’t. Now Ursula has to pull up her Garfield nightie herself as she sits her too-big butt on the chilly toilet seat, with nobody there to hand her the toilet paper, folded like a flower the way he used to.
“Here you are, miss,” he used to say. “Your rose.”
He would wipe Claire’s butt, Ursula bets. He would scatter rose petals wherever she walked. He would bring her quarts of apple juice one spoonful at a time if she wanted it and brush her teeth for her. He has sold their stereo to buy jewels for her. What will he do next?
She makes her way back to her bedroom. In the old days, Jenny would have been there waiting for her, snuggled up beside her on the bed. Not now.
He has somebody snuggled up beside him, Ursula knows, although Claire is never there in the morning, and her dad never says she’s been there in the night. Ursula hears her crying out in the night, though. Only it’s not like when Ursula cries if she’s had a bad dream. This crying is different.
Ursula tucks herself back under the covers. She holds Phillip, the anatomically correct boy doll. She doesn’t like to think about his penis but she does anyways.
She just lies there that way. After a long time she can hear noises from her father’s room again, and then whispering, and then Claire’s feet on the steps. Finally the sun comes up.
Claire hates the woman she sees herself becoming. She hates the way she treats Ursula these days, and then she resents Ursula all over again for making her feel that way.
“Listen,” she tells Ursula, “I have an idea.” Her favorite church rummage sale is this Saturday. She used to bring Sally, but Sally wouldn’t be caught dead shopping with her mother on a Saturday morning anymore. So why doesn’t Ursula come with her? “You won’t believe t
he buys,” Claire tells her. “We can get a whole new wardrobe for a dollar.”
Pulling up to Tim’s apartment to pick up Ursula, Claire’s feeling happy and relaxed at the thought of having a little girl to take to the St. James sale again. When she sees Ursula, in her too-tight boy’s parka and her Little Mermaid pocketbook, she feels tenderness and hope.
“Have you had breakfast yet?” she says. “I was thinking we could go out for a bagel.”
Buckling her seat belt next to Claire, with her purse in her lap and her hands folded on her purse, Ursula nods. “I got three quarters my dad gave me for dusting the shelves,” she tells Claire. “Plus I can use the silver dollar I got from the tooth fairy if there’s something really special. Maybe I’ll get a present for my mom.”
She discusses the baby, Keith, who lives downstairs. “I’m worried about him,” she says. “I don’t think Sandy and Jeff should put Snapple in his bottle. Even if it is a hundred percent natural.”
Ursula is teaching Keith how to play peekaboo. She also sings to him the songs they’ve been learning in third grade. “I think he’s very smart,” she says. “Yesterday I asked him where his mommy was and he pointed to the kitchen.”
“It sounds like you’re a very good babysitter,” Claire says.
“I’m very careful with Keith,” Ursula says. “I would never let anything happen to him. If a car was coming and he was in the road, I would save him even if it meant I’d get squished.”
At the Bagel Works, Claire orders a sesame seed bagel, toasted, and coffee. Ursula looks at Claire as she places her order. “I’ll have mine plain, I guess,” she says. “No butter.”
“Are you sure?” Claire asks her. “Don’t you want butter or cream cheese?” Is this what I’ve done to her? Claire thinks.
“Butter, I guess,” says Ursula. Then she changes her mind. “No, cream cheese, I guess. No, butter.”
“Why don’t we get a little cream cheese on the side?” Claire suggests. “Just in case.”
They get a table by the window. Ursula is telling her about the book she and her dad are reading now, Charlotte’s Web. “It’s so sad you can hardly bear to turn the page sometimes,” she says, spreading a thick smear of cream cheese on her bagel and munching. “But you have to find out what happens next. You can’t stand it one more second.”
“I love to read chapter books, too,” says Claire. “I will read to you” she wants to say. “I will be good to you. I’m sorry I ever wasn’t. What was I thinking of?”
Leaving the bagel store, Ursula reaches for her hand, and Claire holds hers tight. “Do you like to skip?” Ursula asks her. So they do.
They find treasures at the St. James rummage sale. A denim Oshkosh jumper that would cost thirty-five dollars new. A Polly Flinders dress. A purple mohair sweater, just the right shade for Ursula’s hair. A pleated kilt that might make Ursula look a little thick in the waist, only Claire thinks they can fix that if she wears a cardigan with it. They find one of those, too.
They assemble a pile of stuff for Ursula to try on later, because it’s important, Claire explains, not to waste precious grabbing time during the first half hour of a sale like this. Ursula has included several items in the pile that wouldn’t be Claire’s choice—a sweatshirt with pictures of kittens on it and a pale pink shirtwaist that looks small—but Claire keeps her opinion of these items to herself. On her own, Ursula has also located a hat she wants to buy for her father, a plaid cap of the style golfers wear, and a dress for her mother.
She looks good in the jumper, as Claire knew she would. She wants to wear the mohair sweater with the kilt, tucked in, but Claire figures there will be time later for working that out.
“Show this to your mommy, honey,” one of the church women wearing a sales apron says to Ursula, handing her a pair of overalls that Claire would not, in fact, have chosen. “I bet she might like to get it for you.”
“She thinks you’re my mom,” Ursula whispers to Claire.
“If I were your mom I’d be proud,” says Claire.
“You’re like my mom,” says Ursula.
“Really?” says Claire. She’s surprised of course.
“No,” says Ursula. “I don’t mean you’re like my mom. I mean you’re like a mom. The kind of person you think a mom is going to be.”
Claire brushes the hair out of Ursula’s eyes.
“My mom isn’t that kind of person at all,” Ursula says.
While Ursula is out shopping with Claire, the guidance counselor from her school calls wanting to speak with Tim. Ursula’s having problems socializing with her third-grade classmates, Mr. Hogue tells him. “I’d like to recommend that your daughter join a group I meet with Tuesday afternoons for children who may need some help with their social skills,” he says. Tim guesses that would be all right. He tells Mr. Hogue that as soon as he gets a little money together, he plans on taking Ursula to a therapist, as Claire has suggested.
Tim hasn’t told Claire the full extent of his money problems because he figures she has enough on her mind, but the truth is it’s getting harder not to feel panicked about his financial situation. His course load at the community college was reduced this fall, which meant a thousand-dollar pay cut. He has received an enthusiastic response to his preliminary application for the second estuarial research grant, but the Woods Hole Foundation has informed him that they can’t offer additional money until he’s ready to present more detailed data, which will take months.
Meanwhile, Tim has to come up with something else. Some proofreading work for the short term, maybe, but eventually he has got to find a better job. He longs to have a child with Claire, but how can he ask her when at the moment it’s all he can do taking care of the one child he’s got?
Still, in spite of everything, Tim feels this abiding hopefulness that he and Claire can work things out. Sitting on the couch in his apartment now, as his daughter and the woman he loves show off their purchases from the rummage sale, he feels his heart bursting with happiness. Ursula has placed the plaid golfer’s hat on his head and he’s wearing a velvet smoking jacket Claire found for him, whose sleeves are too short. Ursula’s dancing around in her kitten sweatshirt. “And just look at the dress we picked out for my mom,” she says: pink and white gingham, with a full skirt and rickrack around the pockets.
“We’ll mail it off to New Zealand tomorrow,” Claire tells her. How did Tim ever get so lucky? If nothing more good ever happens to him, he things, this is enough.
It’s been over a week since Claire talked with Mickey. A record, she thinks. Now that he’s going down to Rhode Island all the time to see Annalise, it’s been hard tracking him down. Finally Mickey calls Claire.
“So, Slim,” he says. “What have you got? Tim do any more shoe shopping lately?”
She reaches for her coffee. “He’s such a good man,” she sighs. “He loves me so much and he’s so good to me, and I treat him like shit.”
“So don’t,” Mickey tells her. “The guy sounds like a saint if you ask me. You wouldn’t catch me trying to help Pete with his math homework.” As if she didn’t know.
“I just wish it wasn’t so complicated,” she says. “When it’s just the two of us, it’s so good.”
“Big surprise,” he tells her. “Haven’t you heard one thing I’ve been telling you these last few years?”
“Every time I try to have a conversation with him on the phone, Ursula interrupts,” Claire says. “He becomes a different person when she’s around.”
Claire imagines where Mickey is sitting at this moment. On his porch swing with the cordless probably, sipping a margarita. In the backyard, where she planted a dwarf cherry tree. Gabe will be quietly tossing a baseball in the air and catching it. She hears Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo back in the house. The only woman, he told her once, he would leave Claire for.
“So how’s Annalise?” Claire asks.
Something in Mickey’s voice always changes when he’s talking about a woman. A woman he�
��s in love with that is, as opposed to somebody like Mother Teresa or Janet Reno.
“She has this way of tossing her hair,” he says in that hushed tone of his, as if he were talking about Ella, and what he was saying was, “She has this way of forming a note.…”
“We heard Dylan at the Garden the other night,” he says. “He had this great pedal steel guitar player, but old Bob himself isn’t what he used to be.”
“You said that the last time,” she tells him. Bob Dylan has played Boston three times now since she went to hear him with Mickey—just one more way Claire measures the passage of time since she last laid eyes on this man. Mickey said the same thing then.
“Well, this time I mean it,” he says. “We had great Mexican food, though. Annalise is an amazing cook.”
Claire realizes she doesn’t want to hear this. “I have to go,” she says in a voice she knows he will recognize as very faintly hurt. “I have to take Sally driving.”
“You know I’ll always adore you, Slim,” he tells her.
“I love you, too, Mickey,” she says.
“Just don’t panic over this kid stuff, okay?” Mickey says—her coach again. “Subtle recalibrations, remember. Don’t lose your balance.”
Claire can hear the horn honking in the driveway. Sally. And she has promised to take Pete shopping for jeans after that. Out the window she sees the helmeted figure of Ursula on her pink bicycle pedaling toward her house. Who she reminds Claire of, at this moment, is Margaret Hamilton as the witch in The Wizard of Oz. “Her and her little dog, too,” she is cackling. Where to run?
Back when she was married to Sam, Claire longed for the excitement and passion of an affair, of knowing she had a lover somewhere who loved her wildly. Now that she has one, it’s that other thing she misses. Having a man around.
The people in her town she looks at with most envy are the most domesticated of couples, people who would be amazed to know the time she has spent, alone in her bed, obsessing about them. Lovers she has had. It’s this other thing that seems so irresistible and elusive: a man who doesn’t go away. A man she doesn’t have to leave. A man who would be at her side not only in bed but at her son’s soccer games and in the hospital waiting room, where she has taken him to get stitches again. Someone who would have helped her clean up the terrible mess in the road outside their house the time Sally’s cat got hit by a car last year. Little things other women don’t even think about, like being able to move a heavy table without calling a neighbor are what she misses. Hearing the door slam followed by that old line, “Honey, I’m home.” Sound of the radio broadcasting a baseball game as she plants her zinnias. A hand reaching for hers when they call Sally’s name at graduation.
Where Love Goes Page 20
