“What are you trying to tell me here, Vivian?” says Claire “Am I fired?”
“Heavens, no, what would give you that idea?” says Vivian. “I just thought you might want to be particularly careful about the way you conduct yourself at the moment.”
Right. No disreputable-looking teenage boyfriends up in my daughter’s room then, I suppose? No hostile ex-husbands. No questionable graffiti in the sixth-grade boys’ bathroom. No out-of-wedlock Pregnancy. No middle-of-the-night visits to my lover’s apartment. No dirty faxes, definitely.
“Don’t get me wrong,” says Vivian. “The board all agrees you’re doing a super job, especially when we consider the kind of pressure you’re working under at the moment. Some people just wondered if maybe, given all that, you might want to take a leave of absence or something of that nature.”
And what would I do for money? Claire thinks. “Thanks, Vivian,” she says. “But I’m just fine.”
“Well, that’s terrific. That’s what I told them, too. And if you need the name of a good counselor for your son, just let me know. Not that either of my boys ever got into this kind of scrape, knock wood. But I know a gal whose son got into a little trouble a while back dealing cocaine. She took him to this woman over in Brattleboro who straightened him right out. Like a charm.”
“Thanks, Vivian,” says Claire. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Sally Jessy Raphael’s guest this morning is a girl who divorced her parents. Her mother locked her in a dog carrier, she said. Her father sexually abused her from the age of seven. “He used to come into my room after David Letterman,” she said. “He said it got rid of his headaches.”
Ursula pours herself a bowl of cereal. Her dad is out someplace having a job interview. They are almost out of money again. This supermarket job, if he gets it, will only be for a little while, until his grant comes through. Sandy will take care of her nights.
“So how did you go about it?” Sally Jessy asks her.
“You have to file formal charges, of course,” the girl says. She’s only a few years older than Ursula.
“I talked to my counselor at school,” she says. “She helped me get the ball rolling.”
“And how is it for you now?” Sally Jessy asks her. “Do you miss your parents?”
“Well,” says the girl, “I got to see them on a talk show last week. The actress that’s playing my mom in the movie is much nicer than my real mom. She was in that ‘Movie of the Week’ about the grandmother that murdered the kid.”
“Do you feel you have been permanently traumatized by these experiences?” a woman in the audience asks.
“Not really,” says the girl. “My counselor said the important thing is to get it out. The worst thing is holding it in all the time.”
The home pregnancy test has been sitting in the back of Sally’s closet for two weeks now. There just doesn’t seem to be any point in Sally’s taking it anymore, her symptoms are so obvious. Not just the nauseous feeling in the morning, either. She’s also tired all the time. Her chest has actually begun filling out and she’s too bloated to snap the top of her jeans comfortably, so now she mostly wears her overalls. In ballet class last week Madame LaFehr actually told her she should think about cutting down on her calorie intake.
The other day in driver’s ed, when Mr. Wayne showed them this really grisly movie about teenage drunk drivers, Sally had to run out of the room or she would have thrown up right there. She knew from experience, because a couple days before, when she and Travis stopped at a joke shop to try on Halloween masks, Travis showed her this one really gory mask of a face covered with eyeballs, and that’s exactly what happened. After Sally ran out of the store, Travis went back inside and cleaned up the mess, and didn’t even say a thing about it to her afterward. He bought her a Coke to get the bad taste out of her mouth.
Sally told Travis it’s all because she’s so upset about her family. First her dad turns out to be shacking up with Melanie, then her brother gets arrested. Now there’s this horrible news about her mother marrying the dork boyfriend, which means the Kid from Hell will move in with them. As if living with their farting dog wasn’t bad enough, now she’s got to share her house with a creepy eight-year-old who sneaks into her room and tries on her clothes and talks to herself all the time. Not to mention the father, who acts like a dog himself, the way he follows her mom around all the time. When he looks at her sometimes, he practically drools.
A girl named Bobbi that used to be in Sally’s gym class told her one time last year about this special Chinese tea you can drink that makes you get your period, absolutely no matter what. Finally yesterday Sally got up her courage and asked Bobbi if she could have some. “Not for me or anything,” she said. “Just somebody I know.”
So this morning when she got to school, Bobbi was waiting at her locker for her with a plastic Baggie full of these crumbly brown leaves. “Brew it in boiling water and let it sit twenty minutes,” she told Sally. “Drink five pots a day.”
This is Sally’s third. She’s sitting on the floor of her closet, letting it steep. It’s so disgusting it has to work. She’ll either get her period or else she’ll just die of the taste.
She is just taking her first horrible gulp of the stuff when Travis appears in the doorway. “Listen,” he says. He has his hat on backward and his skateboard under his arm, as usual, and he is holding a bunch of carnations. “I know what’s going on,” he says, “and I want you to know I love you.”
Because he’s a first-time offender, Pete was given a suspended sentence for his shoplifting conviction. The judge has sentenced him to a hundred hours of community service at the soup kitchen and six months of counseling wih the Blue Hills juvenile officer. He will pay back the money he owes Coconuts at the rate of twenty dollars a week—all the money he earns from his paper route. He’s not complaining about any of this. Pete’s style is to be cool and tough. Announcing to his friends the story of his arrest and sentencing, Pete adopts a gangster accent. “Just remember, kids,” he says, chewing on an imaginary cigar. “Crime doesn’t pay.” Only his mother would know how mortified he is.
At the moment, for instance, he is silent and nearly unreachable, but Claire has learned to let him be. After a week and a half of living at his father’s house, Pete has returned home without discussion or explanation. Because he’s grounded, except for the paper route and times when he goes out to perform his community service, he spends most of his time up in his room listening to music and sorting through baseball cards or out in the yard, throwing pitches at the trampoline. It wouldn’t surprise Claire if what her son pictures in the center of the strike zone is the face of Ursula, or Tim, but he doesn’t talk about either of them. Whatever it is he’s picturing when he pitches, it’s working. Now that baseball season’s long past, he’s throwing strikes again.
But today Pete has something else going on. Every October he constructs a Halloween scene in the front yard of their house. One year it was a sea of white hands made from inflated hospital gloves scrabbling up through the dirt as if they were trying to get out of their coffins. Another year he made a ghostly figure from bed-sheets draped over a stepladder, holding in his outstretched ghost-arms a bowl filled with cold spaghetti strands and Ping-Pong balls painted to resemble eyeballs. He set an old doll of Sally’s with matted hair and the eyeballs missing in a chair lit by a single blue lightbulb. He got an old rusty bicycle at the dump and wired a life-sized plastic skeleton on the seat, its bony fingers clutching the handlebars, pedaling through a rat-infested graveyard. Every year children come from all over town to see what Pete has built, in such numbers that Claire always has to stock up on three times the usual amount of Halloween candy for trick or treaters.
Looking out the window sometimes while her son works—painstakingly arranging rubber snakes and rewiring his increasingly complex lighting systems—Claire sees the same intent, focused concentration she remembers in Sam the time he plastered their bedroom at the old house in
preparation for Sally’s birth, and another time, when he built a grape arbor for her birthday. Today it almost takes her breath away, seeing in the face of her well-loved son the face of the man she has worked so hard to let go of over the years. It has taken her a long time to get to the point where she can once again allow herself to remember the things about her children’s father that she loved. Today, oddly enough, she does.
At the kitchen window, Claire studies Pete’s handsome profile and his muscular, widening back as he clambers with the grace of a cat burglar along the edge of their roof wiring a string of papier-mâché bats to the porch. She sees Sam the way he was the day she met him.
She’d bundled herself up in layers of sweaters and taken her skates out onto a lake in Ann Arbor on the coldest morning of that Michigan winter, thinking she’d be the only person at their school who’d get up that early on a Sunday morning to take advantage of the black ice. She was out in the middle of the lake working on the most elementary figures—a three-turn, waltz jump, backward crossover. She executed them clumsily at best.
Suddenly there he was, slashing across the ice so swiftly his blades left a spray of fine white powder as he flew past her. He moved with such effortless beauty he actually took her breath away. It was always what she loved about Sam, she realizes. Never the way he was to her, but simply, the way he was.
Like his father, too, her darling, precious son is more often than not elusive as a moth, as beautiful and untouchable as a deer in the forest. She catches him on the run now and then—with the kisses she insists he give her on his way to school or a ball game; the talks they manage every now and then, when she’s sitting on the edge of his bed at night and he’s too tired to fight it. He’s toughest when he’s most hurt, she knows, and most accessible and tender when he’s most secure and happy.
Except for two hours he spent mopping floors at the soup kitchen this afternoon, Pete has spent the entire day working on his Halloween scene. He’s still out there working as the last of the daylight disappears. Finally, at six-thirty, Claire steps outside to call him in to dinner. She actually gasps when she stands back and sees what he has built in their front yard.
The scene he has constructed this year is unlike any Pete has ever made—not so much grisly or comical this time as it is hauntingly beautiful.
He has constructed an entire forest in front of the house, made from actual birch branches he dragged in from the landfill, strung with a cobwebby tangle of thread and filmy shreds of torn fabric and unraveled panty hose that drip down like Spanish moss. In among the branches he has strung not only bats but tiny white fairy-like ghosts made from pocket handkerchiefs. He has set up a fan on the front porch that blows them in such a way that they appear to be dancing. Dangling from the largest of the birch branches is the figure of a man hanging from a noose. The dead man is made of old clothes stuffed with straw, but instead of the usual rubber mask or Magic-Markered pillowcase for his face, Pete has given the man a head molded from chicken wire wrapped with bandages. His expression is as agonized as anything Edvard Munch ever painted. The head droops to one side and the legs hang down limply, but Pete must have inserted stiff wire poles into the arms—Claire’s tomato stakes, maybe. They reach out toward her so beseechingly, Claire actually shivers.
“This is a work of art, Pete,” she says. She puts an arm around his stiff, bony shoulders.
“Wait a second,” he says, kicking straw over the extension cord. He bends to push a button on his tape recorder, which is propped up to one side, under the porch.
It’s that organ adagio by Albinoni. The piece of music Claire sometimes listens to late at night when she always supposed her son was sleeping. She thinks it’s the loneliest-sounding piece of music she’s ever heard.
Up in Ursula’s room, Ursula and Brianne are working on their costumes. Brianne’s mother has bought her a costume: one of those sets they sell at Woolworth’s for $4.99—a polyester tunic that says BARBIE FOREVER on the front and a stiff plastic mask with red lips and a blond flip hairdo and holes for your eyes. But Ursula has told her this costume is really dumb, and Brianne isn’t arguing. She is used to things about herself being dumb. She knows Ursula is lots smarter than she is, and whatever Ursula tells her must be so.
Ursula says they can make Brianne look like a real Barbie doll. She happens to have a very fancy purple bra Brianne can put on. Ursula has safety-pinned the back to fit Brianne’s skinny chest and stuffed socks in the front. Now she is applying lipstick to Brianne’s lips. Not real lipstick, unfortunately. Claire never leaves that over at her dad’s house. Ursula has to use a red Magic Marker on Brianne’s lips.
Brianne is thinking it might get cold, trick or treating in nothing but this purple bra and the black stretch pants Ursula has told her to put on, but she doesn’t say anything.
“If you get cold, you can put this on,” Ursula tells her. She hands Brianne a long pink feathery thing she found in Claire’s bedroom. Also some white-lace leather gloves. She wishes they had some high heels for Brianne, but Claire didn’t have any, or Sally either.
“What are you going to be?” Brianne says. Ursula says it’s a surprise.
Trick or treating isn’t for five more days, but Ursula wanted Brianne to come over after school today so they could get everything all set up. She has a secret plan.
She takes out a cigar box she has been keeping in her jammy drawer. “Think about a person you don’t like,” she says to Brianne. “Now you got to get something that belongs to them and bring it to me. You think you could handle that?”
Brianne nods. She wishes they could just do the candy part. That’s her favorite. But even though she isn’t very smart, she has a person in mind.
Kid or no kid,” Tim’s landlord has told him. “If you don’t come up with the rent you owe me by the thirtieth, I’m putting you out on the street like a goddamn pumpkin.” So Tim’s been working practically nonstop for two days now, proofreading a computer programming manual. If he finishes tomorrow and Express Mails it to New York, he could conceivably have a check by Friday. Otherwise God knows what he’ll do. Stick up a 7-Eleven, maybe.
Tim’s just so grateful to be getting some uninterrupted time at his desk for a change that he hasn’t been paying a lot of attention to what Ursula and Brianne have been up to. As soon as they were finished with their hamburgers—Ursula finished, anyway; Brianne never eats anything—they hurried back into Ursula’s room, where he has heard them whispering and giggling all evening. He should send Brianne home, he knows. It’s a school night, and Ursula should be taking her bath. But he’s so glad his daughter has a friend, and glad that he’s finally getting some work done, he’s decided to let them play for a while longer.
He’s just about to go check on them when they appear at his desk. They are wrapped in sheets and wearing makeup. Ursula has on the black fright wig she insisted he buy for her at Wool-worth’s, that used up one of his last ten-dollar bills. She wants fifty cents to run to the convenience store at the end of the block for a Snickers, a trip he now lets her make on her own. “It’s not for me,” she tells him, knowing his new policy on candy bars. “It’s for Brianne. She’s hungry on account of she didn’t eat dinner.”
He hands the girls a couple of quarters.
“Be back in ten minutes, no more,” he tells them.
Just as Travis comes whizzing up to Sally’s house on his skateboard, a pair of small figures tear across the street directly in front of his path. He’s so startled, he almost crashes into them, but he does a one-eighty instead and they hustle off like mice. They have a sheet or something over their heads, so all he can make out is their shadow. He doesn’t pay much attention, truthfully—to the sheet people, or the Halloween stuff Pete has evidently set up in the front yard. All he can think about is Sally.
He leans his skateboard against the porch steps and rings the bell. Through the front window he spots Sally coming down the stairs sucking on a Popsicle. She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ev
er seen.
“What are you doing here?” she says. “I told you I didn’t want to see you.”
“I wanted to show you something,” he says. Somewhere in the yard he hears noises, like a small animal rustling in the bushes. He’s so excited he doesn’t even turn around to look.
“What now?” she says. Sally’s period is now six weeks late.
He pulls his shirt off, though it’s a chilly night.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Great bod. Fantastic muscles. Now get lost, would you? I already told you I don’t want to see you. This isn’t your problem.”
“Will you look?” he says. He steps into the light. He stands there motionless, bare chested and shivering. He holds out his long, sinewy arm.
Now she sees it: Just at the place where his bicep meets his tricep, Travis has got himself a tattoo. It’s a heart with doves flying out one side and a rose at the other. In the center is Sally’s name.
Huddled under a Raggedy Ann and Andy bedsheet, Ursula and Brianne scurry down the street clutching the magic box. They have to be quick on account of Ursula’s dad told them to be back in ten minutes. Brianne doesn’t have a bedtime but it’s way past Ursula’s. Plus it’s cold out, and dark.
Some big kid on a skateboard nearly smashes into them as they cross the road, but he swerves and misses them. “It’s here,” Ursula tells Brianne. Claire’s house.
Only Claire’s house has never looked like this before. There’s a forest of strange, spindly trees growing in front that never used to be there, and all these little white creatures flying around among the branches. It’s a still night, but just in this spot, with its weird blue light and ghostly forest, a strong wind blows. Ursula can’t tell where it’s coming from, but there’s music like you’d hear at somebody’s funeral.
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