She kisses his cheek and puts her hand in his pocket. Mike is sending Ursula onto the field now. You couldn’t exactly say she’s running out to her position. Drifting, more like it.
Alex makes his foul kick. A solid clump of Puffballs surrounds the ball. Every Bumblebee but the goalie does, too. Claire had forgotten how it is in soccer for this age group. Swarm play. For Pete, who has always been a cagey, strategic player, this was always infuriating. “It’s sickening, Mom,” he would say in the car on the way home from one of his games. “They play like little kids.”
A thought often comes to Claire at moments like this, sitting on the bench at one or another of her children’s sporting events, surrounded by all the other parents roughly her age—all of them with their eyes fixed on the field and their own particular beloved player. Who could have believed, at sixteen or seventeen, that one day they would all be sitting here—a little bald, a little heavy, in clothes no longer particularly fashionable or flattering, driving cars no longer chosen for their power and speed but because they have airbags? Who would have believed the things they would talk about would be candy bar sales and whose turn it is to bring the Gatorade Friday? Most of all, who would have bought it if you’d told them that all the passion they once felt about things like rock concerts and proms and getting their hands into each other’s clothes and the outcome of sporting events they themselves once participated in would now be poured into a soccer game of eight- and nine-year-olds, Puffballs versus Bumblebees?
“We’re like salmon,” Tim said to her once, in a moment of particular frustration over his child, her children, and the impossibility of conducting their love affair in the face of all that parenthood.
“Salmon?” she said.
“Salmon swim upstream to spawn. Then die.”
Claire wonders if she is the only one sitting on this bench who ever finds herself looking at the other parents and seeing all these roughly forty-year-olds suddenly transformed into a bunch of her high-school classmates. Janet—digging in her bag at the moment for a box of animal crackers and wiping off a pacifier—is the head cheerleader. Theresa is her friend Becky, who taught her how to roll a joint. Mike is her old boyfriend Patrick, who she didn’t go all the way with and later wished she had.
What she thinks is this: We are all the same people that we were when they were young. Claire knows she is, anyway. She still wants so many of the same things she did when she was sixteen, too. Kisses that last through five songs on the radio. A boy’s hand on her thigh and his voice in her ear telling her she’s beautiful. His arm around her shoulders, his hand on the small of her back as they walk into a room. The wonderful feeling—as good as sex—when he leads her into the dim light of the dance floor and the song is “Try a Little Tenderness.”
She knows what these men want, too. They want to play for the NBA, or the NHL, or Cleveland or Toronto, or Boston. They want a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball. They want girls who look at them with not just affection and lust but admiration. “I cant believe that jump shot,” they say. “I worship your cock.”
Claire believes they want love, too. They want a pretty wife who cooks a big roast Sunday nights, with the kids gathered round, and two weeks every summer at a cabin on the Cape, where they go deep-sea fishing and out for lobster with only their wife, and afterward, with the children in bed and the edge taken off in the way a couple of drinks will do, they will make love, still, with less of the desperate hunger of their high-school years, no doubt, but more finesse, and their wife will have multiple orgasms and tell him she loves him more than ever.
They have discovered, by the age of forty, all the ways their own lives fall short of these things. Their wife may cook the roast, but she may no longer be pretty, the two of them may no longer touch. They may eat their meal in silence. They may get that cabin at the Cape, but what they do when they get there may be to give their children money for the arcade and then turn on the large-screen TV until they fall asleep.
Looking across the bench, Claire guesses that a few of these couples actually have a good thing going with each other. There have certainly been plenty of moments over the last five years—and all those years before, when she was married but not truly partnered—when she has watched certain of these couples as they headed off the field to their cars with an envy and longing so acute she thought she should cover her face or wear sunglasses, anyway, to conceal it. When their son is playing, her former husband often attends these games himself, and then there is this particularly grim joke in which the two of them head across the field—their son bouncing alongside whichever parent seems most in need of him that night—to their separate cars and their separate houses, their separate beds.
But even for the ones who have done better than Claire and Sam—and most of them have—this much is still true: Their own possibilities are narrowing. Not a one of these women will ever make love with Kevin Costner or—the dreamboat of their teens—Paul McCartney. Not one of the men will ever play in the NBA.
So now they huddle on the bench, all eyes on their children, the Puffballs and the Bumblebees, in their little striped jerseys and falling-down socks. Swarming over the ball as if it were a piece of honeycomb, the last sweet thing on earth. Nobody has sustained major injury yet. There is still this hopefulness about them. You can still believe, for your children, that anything may be possible.
Mickey is losing his fastball. He has actually managed to hold on to it longer than he had any right to believe he would. Way back when Claire was with him, Mickey injured his rotator cuff. He was still a starter for his team, the Salem Hornets, then, but after every game he needed a full day of ice packs and Ben-Gay. He was saying even then that he was on his last season.
“This is my last season, Slim,” he says to her now as she reaches for her coffee. “I walked three in a row in yesterday’s playoff game. I’m throwing junk. Only thing I have going for me now are my wits.”
Mickey’s playing has always depended more on intelligence than speed, Claire points out to him. That and his ability to intimidate batters, who know he’s not averse to picking one of them off now and then. “Lean over the plate and you’re going to get hit,” he says. The Don Drysdale approach.
“No,” he says, “this is different. I used to have a good imitation of a fastball, anyway. Now I can’t even fool them.” Nolan Ryan knew when to get out, he says. So will he.
“So now you’ll have all that additional time to get to know Annalise’s kids,” she says. “Maybe take them to the circus.” There is a sharpness to the way Claire talks with him now. The way they talk with each other.
“Talk about inside pitches,” he says. “That was mean.”
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“The terrible thing is,” he says, “there isn’t one thing I do now that I didn’t do better ten years ago. I used to be a better guitar player. I’ve lost my lip for trumpet. I’m probably as funny as I ever was, I’m just not in the mood.”
“I bet you’re still just as good at one thing,” she says.
“Well, sure,” he says. “It’s just not the same as having a fastball.”
Sally and her mother always get their period at the same time. It’s how Sally knows she’s about to get hers, actually. She sees her mom’s box of Tampax out in the morning, and by afternoon she knows she’ll be needing it herself. “This is what I call a close mother-daughter bond,” her mom joked one time. “We do everything together. We even get our cramps on the same day.”
Only this month Sally didn’t get her period, and evidently her mom didn’t even notice that she was the only one taking Tampax out of the box. If her mother paid more attention, she’d also notice that Sally’s been throwing up, not every morning, but many. Five o’clock, five-thirty, it comes over her—this sick, nauseating feeling first, worse than any period she ever had. Just thinking about something like pizza at a moment like this would be enough to make her throw up on the spot. As it is, she can usually
hold it in just long enough to make it to the bathroom if she holds on to her belly and concentrates on something like a geometry equation or the Tori Amos poster on her wall. As soon as she gets to the toilet, though, it’s all over.
Sally’s been putting off taking her home pregnancy test. At this point it’s pretty obvious what the results will be, but until the moment when she actually sees it on the test results she can hold on to this thin hope that maybe the whole thing’s a mistake. Well it is, of course. Just a different kind.
Probably the reason her mother hasn’t noticed how messed up Sally’s been lately is because she’s always up in her office, reading those dumb faxes her wimp boyfriend sends her. Her mom doesn’t go over to his house in the night as often as she used to, but he still writes to her every day. Mornings, when Sally finally makes it downstairs for the dry toast that is all she can bear anymore, her mother will be sitting there with her coffee with a piece of folded-up fax paper sticking out of the pocket of her bathrobe. If Sally hadn’t puked already, that sight would be enough to do it to her.
She tries to imagine the fax Travis would send her, if he was into sending faxes. “Love humping you, Sal.” “When can I hump you again?” Or maybe for variation, “You want to hump me?”
She hasn’t told him about this pregnancy mess. What’s the point? It’s not like they’re going to get married. Not like she’s even going to have it. Sally can never believe it when some girl gets knocked up at school and people ask, “Who’s the father?” A father is a person that holds on to the back of your bike after he takes the training wheels off. Fathers drive you to ballet if they aren’t divorced from your mom and help you with your science fair project. A father is not some person with dreadlocks and an earring, that’s saving up to get a set of competition-quality skateboard wheels. Sally may be a moron that didn’t know you could still get pregnant after screwing three times on the same night with a rubber if you didn’t use it the fourth time, but she knows that much at least.
She wishes there was a way she could take care of this without telling her mom, but there is no way on earth Sally can come up with the two hundred and fifty dollars for the abortion, even if you didn’t have to get the parental consent form signed. And not only that, she realizes. There’s something else.
As ridiculous an idea as it would be to go to the Women’s Health Center with Travis, she also can’t imagine going there alone. Sally has plenty of friends, but it’s not her friends she’d want to sit with her in the waiting room or take her home afterward.
She wants her mom, who always used to tuck her under this special quilt of her grandmother’s that she saves for times when Sally or Pete is sick. When she had scarlet fever that time in fourth grade and she was out of school a week, her mom made her a tray of Jell-O and cinnamon toast every day. The first few days Sally was too sick to do anything but sleep, but after she was well enough, Claire would sit on the bed next to her and read library books. They went through the whole of Wolves of Willoughby Chase that week, and Anastasia Krupnik. They made a paper doll of Sally and drew all her real outfits in colored pencil, along with a lot of other ones Sally wished she had. They rented the video of Gone With the Wind and spent one whole afternoon on the couch watching it together.
“If only he could hear her,” her mother said that time after Scarlett fell down the stairs, when she was calling for Rhett. “Nobody will ever love her the way he does. She will never love anybody the way she loves him, either” They were both crying by this point.
“It’s just too sad,” Claire said when the movie was finally over. “What do they do with all their love in a situation like that? Where does it go?”
What Sally is wondering right now is something else. What do they do with the thing? She can’t even say the word fetus.
Where do they put it after they take it out of you? Do they flush it down the toilet? Do they have some kind of container they put it in that they dump in some river? Is this one more kind of horrible pollution that’s going on that nobody tells you about?
And afterward, after your insides are cleaned out, and nobody even knows it was ever there, what happens to your brain? There is this big thing that happened to you that doesn’t even show on your face. You don’t have stretch marks like Sally’s mom or big tits like that girl at school, Vanessa, that kept her baby. It’s like the whole thing never happened—not just the baby but everything that went on between you and the boy, too. Only you know it did. And what are you supposed to do now?
Annalise and her two sons are moving in with Mickey. “You think I’ve spent too much time standing in front of the microwave, Slim?” he asks her. “I can’t believe I’d do something like this. I just have this crazy feeling we’ll be able to handle it.”
Hearing Mickey talking about “we,” and knowing it’s somebody else who makes him plural, as she was never able to, Claire feels as though she’s been stabbed.
“My goodness,” she says. “That’s really great.”
He’s saying some other things now, too. Annalise has found a job in a public-relations firm outside of Boston. One of her sons has gotten into a special program for gifted and talented students. The younger one and Gabe seem to be getting along pretty well. “We just give them a whole lot of quarters and send them off to the arcade,” Mickey says. “Five bucks buys us an hour.”
Claire isn’t really taking this in. She is picturing Mickey’s house, which she knows so well, every inch. She’s picturing where Annalise’s children will sleep. She guesses that the older boy, the gifted one, will go in Mickey’s old study, where he keeps his autographed baseball collection and his bootleg Beatles recordings. There’s a bed in there already—she knows that part well—and a picture of Mickey from back in the days when he wore bell-bottoms and a Nehru jacket and played bass in a band called Naked Truth, along with a framed check for three hundred dollars from a club date in 1969. It bounced.
They must be planning to have Gabe share his room with the younger boy, in the room with the Nolan Ryan sheets. Who knows if he even has those Nolan Ryan sheets anymore? It’s probably Ken Griffey Jr. now, or maybe just stripes. Another kid—Pete, for instance—would probably run away from home at the idea of giving up half his room to the son of his father’s lover. Knowing Gabe, he will probably just grin and ask the kid whether he wants the top bunk or the bottom one.
She moves mentally down the hallway of Mickey’s house, past the bathroom where he bathed her once as her tears fell into the water. She moves past the window where he leaned out and called to her one time as she pulled up after her long drive. She was so happy to see his face she ran her car into the fence. She passes the chair where he leaves his trumpet out, to keep his lip in shape, and the closet where she used to keep her bathrobe. She never took it back.
She moves through the kitchen. She sees the cutting board where he chopped his jalapeños and beef jerky, a bulletin board with a clipping about the Texas Rangers game where Nolan threw his five thousandth strikeout and the baby footprint from the day Gabe was born. “You make so much mess,” he’d say, sponging off the coffee that had dripped through onto the counter while she was pouring herself a cup. It was a joke between them, but she also knew he was very particular about that sort of thing. In the year that she was with him, she never saw any of his possessions change place. He likes his house just so.
Where will Annalise put her clothes? she wonders. What if one of her sons likes rap music? Will he tell her who gave him the bonsai tree and his collection of china dogs?
Claire did. Every time she came to see him she brought one: sometimes a Dalmatian, sometimes a beagle, sometimes a Boston terrier, whatever she’d spotted in a yard sale recently. Every Sunday night, in the awful final moments before leaving his house, she’d hide one for him someplace. Under his pillow first, folded inside the sports page, in his baseball glove, the bell of his trumpet, an empty spot in an egg carton inside the refrigerator. By the time she left that last time, he must’ve ha
d thirty or forty.
In her mental tour of Mickey’s house, Claire has reached his bedroom that he will share with Annalise now. She sees the quilt his grandmother made, Double Wedding Ring, the CD player by the bed, and the portable TV where he likes to watch the Red Sox. He has a special kind of light he can turn on just by clapping his hands; it responds to vibrations. Making love in this room sometimes, they’d make the light flash like the Citgo sign over Fenway.
“I will never love anyone again the way I love you now,” he said. “Anytime you need me, all you have to do is dial my number.”
“You still there, Slim?” Mickey is asking her. Claire has been sitting at her kitchen counter through all of this, with a cup of untouched coffee in her hand. The chips in her linoleum floor made so long ago are no longer so obvious, now that the tiles have been worn down some. She isn’t about to throw a pan this time. She is very still. Tears stream down her face, but you wouldn’t know it if you were on the other end of the phone, because she’s barely breathing.
“You always told me you couldn’t live with a woman who had children,” she says when she is able to speak again. “Now it turns out you just couldn’t live with me.” She’s gasping for breath.
“Hey,” Mickey says, with the calm of a pitcher who has just thrown a couple of balls and needs to collect himself. And he will too.
“Time out,” he says. “Get a grip on yourself, Slim.” He speaks in the same voice he’d use with Gabe on the rare occasions when his son would misbehave at a jazz concert or in the backseat on the way to a ball game.
“All these years I believed what you told me,” she says. “I thought you were going to love me forever.”
“Oh, baby,” he says. “What you and I had we’ll never have with anyone again. But it was different with us. It was too strong a dose to drink every morning, that’s all. It had to end. And when it did we had to get on with our lives.”
Where Love Goes Page 25
