Where Love Goes (15 page)

“Just look at my thighs,” Ursula says. “They’re disgusting.”

“Everybody’s legs look bigger when they’re pressed down against a chair,” says Claire. She’s familiar with these kinds of conversations. She used to have them with Sally.

“Kids call me fat at school,” she says.

“And what do you say?” Claire asks her.

“I tell them they’re idiots,” she says. “I tell them they’re poop heads. Or else I give them a karate kick. Everybody hates me at school. I used to have a friend, but she’s got cerebral palsy and now she goes to a special class.”

Claire is trying to think of a great-looking tall, big-boned woman to use as an example for Ursula. She knows there are many, but at the moment the only one she can think of is Anna Nicole Smith, who recently posed for
Playboy
. She figures this is not a very great example.

So they discuss Barbies—a mutual interest. “What’s the next one you want?” she asks Ursula. It has been five or six years since Sally put hers away. At Wal-Mart Claire still likes to wheel her cart down the Barbie aisle.

Listening to Ursula tell her about Bend ’N Stretch Barbie, Claire can just glimpse the child Tim has told her about, who plays a perfect Natasha while Tim does Boris, and practices karate with her dad. Her voice is very deep and low for a child. Describing the Rollerblades that come with California Stacey—purple wheels and real laces—she has an intensity about her that reminds Claire of Tim. I could love this child, she thinks. And for a moment this wave of feeling so strong it almost makes her dizzy comes over her as she pictures all of them together: her and Tim, Pete and Sally, and Ursula.

Claire knows Tim is thinking that, too, and that he’s watching the two of them: his two favorite women in the world, heads bent toward each other as they discuss Ken. They don’t include him in this conversation and she knows he doesn’t mind.

“You should see Claire’s dollhouse, Urs,” he says. “It has lights that work and everything.”

“You have your own dollhouse?” she says. “Isn’t it your kids’?”

She explains to Ursula that the dollhouse she gave Sally, many years ago, is still at Sally’s dad’s house, where they used to live. Sally kept saying it was too big to move, and finally Claire gave up asking. “So I said to myself, ‘If you want a dollhouse so much, get your own,’ and I did,” she tells Ursula. She keeps it in the bay window in her living room, and when people ask her why she’d have a dollhouse here—knowing Sally’s almost sixteen now, and Pete certainly isn’t into it—she always explains, “It’s for when little girls come to visit.”

She tells this to Ursula now. She tells Ursula that she has missed having a little girl around the house. It has been years since she spent an afternoon making play food out of Fimo. Making doll-sized magazines out of those little stamps of magazine covers that come from Publisher’s Clearinghouse every January. French-braiding a little girl’s hair. Ursula’s is still too short. But maybe by winter.

“I want to come over to your house,” Ursula says. Tim has paid their check by this time. They are leaving the diner. Ursula has taken Claire’s hand. She’s skipping, a little tentatively.

“That would be great,” Claire says. “Have you ever made doll rugs with a Knitting Nancy?”

“My mom doesn’t do things like that,” Ursula tells her. Which Claire knows already.

“I don’t see my mom very much,” Ursula says. “She’s busy with her boyfriend and her artwork. She lives far away.”

“She must miss you a lot,” Claire says. She’s feeling generous.

“Doubtful,” says Ursula. “I get on her nerves.”

“Oh, all kids get on their parents’ nerves sometimes,” says Claire. “Just like parents get on kids’ nerves. It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other a ton.”

“Can we come live at her house, Dad?” Ursula asks Tim in her baby voice, and then she pulls on his arm.
“Canwecanwecanwe?”
It is as if Ursula has watched some TV show where a child talked like that and it was cute, only she doesn’t quite know how to do it.

“Hold your horses, Urs,” he says. “Maybe we should start out with a visit.” They have reached his car by now.

Claire hugs Ursula. Ursula is a little stiff, but that’s okay. Claire feels very sure of herself now. She feels like Annie Sullivan. Like Maria von Trapp as portrayed by Julie Andrews.
Climb every mountain, ford every stream
 … She is overflowing with hopefulness and love. She can do anything, is what she feels. She can make this sad child happy. She can be a mother to her. They will be a happy family.

She sees all of this as the two of them, Tim and Ursula, drive away. As she pulls out of the parking lot, she can see Tim’s car stopped at a red light down the block. Ursula’s face is staring out the back window like a deer in the headlights.

T
im calls Claire very early the next morning. “She loved you,” he tells her. “I knew she would.”

“She’s a very dear little girl,” Claire says. “I just wanted to scoop her up and take her home with me.”

“How about me?” he says. “You want to take me home with you?”

“You know what I want to do with you,” she says.

T
he next call is Mickey. It’s almost always Claire who calls him, but he hasn’t heard from her in a few days and he wonders what’s up. “So, Slim, what have you got?” he says, same as he always does.

“This one might be a keeper,” she tells him. She reaches for her coffee cup and settles into her chair.

“No kidding,” he says. “That’s great, Slim.” He has a recording of Timbuk 3 playing, one she has heard often. Like so many bands, this one has become inextricably linked with thoughts of Mickey. She can’t even listen to the Beatles anymore, clean.

“He’s crazy about me,” she says.

“Well, why wouldn’t he be?” Mickey says. “And how about you?”

“I think I might love him,” she tells him. She doesn’t say she’s “in love.” That one’s harder to figure.

“Sex good?” he asked her. This is all familiar stuff for them. He always wants to know if she’s had an orgasm. He always inquires about a new lover’s attitudes concerning oral sex.

“If you don’t mind,” she says, “I think I’ll keep that private.”

“Oh,” he says, with a sudden faint coolness in his tone only Claire would recognize.
“I see.”

She asks him something about the Red Sox. He mentions a new player the Sox have brought up from Pawtucket and a Pat Metheny recording he’s just heard. She mentions that Pete wants to go to baseball camp this summer, but Sam won’t contribute any money, although she and Mickey both know Claire will find a way to send him, anyway. Sally’s taking driver’s ed this summer. If she does well she’ll get her license in the fall, when she turns sixteen.

“What does he look like anyway?” Mickey asks her. He’s talking about Tim.

“Big. Football player build. Friendly kind of face. Red haired,” she says.

“No fun at the beach,” Mickey tells her.

M
ickey took Claire into the recording studio in his barn this one time. “We’re going to record your single,” he said. “What’s it going to be?”

She knew right off. It was a Townes Van Zandt song called “If I Needed You.” She has a recording of Emmylou Harris singing it as a duet with Don Williams. She wanted to sing the song with Mickey
.

This was not really Mickey’s kind of song, but Mickey can sing anything. She wrote down the words for him. She hummed the tune. “You were almost on key that time, Slim,” he said
.

First he laid down the lead guitar track for her. Then the bass. He set up his drum machine and laid down a rhythm track at this one place near the end. Then he picked up his banjo and threw a little of that in as if it were jalapeño. Mickey has all sorts of odd, gourdlike Brazilian instruments whose names Claire didn’t know. He ran through the song using a couple of those
.

“Okay, Slim,” he said. “You’re on.”

He put the headphones on her. He adjusted the microphone
.

“Give me something to test your sound levels,” he said
.

“I adore you, Mickey,” she said. She couldn’t think of anything funny or silly at the moment. Just that
.

“Slim singing. ‘If I Needed You,’ ” said Mickey into the machine. “Take one. Rolling.” She leaned into the microphone
.

“If I needed you,” she sang. “Would you come to me? Would you come to me and ease my pain?” Singing these words, she looked into his broad freckled face that she knew so well and at his hands on the guitar strings, hands that had touched every inch of her skin. Could a person ever feel more love?

“If you needed me I would come to you,” Mickey sang back to her. “I would swim the seas to ease your pain.” And he would, too. She never questioned that for a moment. He looked into her face, too, as he sang
.

“In the nights forlorn, the morning’s born,” Claire sang. “And the morning’s born with the lights of love.” Claire was almost beyond singing, she was so overcome with love. For all the times in her life she has wished she could sing like Emmylou Harris, she never wished it more than she did right then. She wished there were more notes, more words, more places to put all the things she wanted to give him, all the things she had to say
.

“If you close your eyes, you miss the sunrise,” he sang, reading off the paper. “And that would break my heart in two.” Then they sang it one time through together and she felt as if they were making love
.

They did it in two takes. Mickey recorded a harmony part after that and another track with a wailing harmonica coming in at one point. Claire said she couldn’t do good enough harmony, but Mickey said no, it’ll sound good if it’s a little off-key. “Just hum.”

Remember this, she thought as she hummed her part on that last track. Remember this room and this man singing into the microphone and that fiddle line
.

Remember the plucking of the mandolin, and the way it feels right now, at this precise instant, which will never come again
.

How it felt was as if this wasn’t a mandolin at all he was plucking
but her heartstrings—as if his hand had reached deep into her chest and plucked them
.

It felt as if no moment she would experience would ever be so perfectly happy as this one. She was right too
.

B
ecause she didn’t want to make too big a deal of this, Claire decided on hamburgers for dinner, although she has also made potato salad and grilled vegetables and strawberry shortcake with homemade biscuits. It’s the first time all year that she’s barbecuing, and she has asked Pete to set out plates on their patio. “Two extra,” she told him. “Tim and Ursula are coming.”

So far her children have never laid eyes on Ursula, and they have only met Tim in passing. The first time their dad was picking them up for the weekend. Sam was just loading their bikes in the back of his truck and Tim was getting out of his car, carrying his overnight bag. “This is my friend Tim,” she told them.
What is she supposed to say, “This is my lover”? “This is the man who makes love to me virtually without interruption from ten minutes after you leave Fridays till ten minutes before I head out to pick you up on Sundays”? “This man treats me well, unlike your father”?

A few of the men she has gone out with over the years shook hands with Sam when they met him. One or two actually struck up a conversation. “How do you like those Celtics?” That sort of thing. Claire loves it about Tim that he didn’t do that. He has heard what Sam said about her on the witness stand during their custody hearing.
“Her father was an alcoholic, you know. Perhaps you’re familiar with the ACOA personality type …?”
Tim knows about Sam’s affair with Melanie, the babysitter, and his attempts during their divorce negotiations to get a half-interest in the money her father left her in his will, and the accusation he made, after she slapped Pete one time, that she was a child abuser.
“Of course my former wife loves the children,” he told the judge. “She just doesn’t have the emotional stability to care for them.”

Claire knows Tim would like to pin Sam against the door of his truck and choke him for those things. She knows he would like to kick him in the balls for that remark he made, make him get down on his knees and apologize to her, but he doesn’t. For the children’s sake and nothing more, he nodded in Sam’s direction when they met, but they didn’t speak.

Pete and Sally have seen her talking on the phone with Tim. They’ve seen the flowers and the windchimes he brought her that hang on their front porch now. One time when Pete was home on a Saturday he had suggested that they shoot some hoops at the school down the street. “I guess not,” Pete said. “My dad’s coming by soon.” Tim told Sally, who has her learner’s permit now, he’d be available to take her driving sometime.

She looked at him blankly, almost witheringly. “My parents do that stuff,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Tim told Claire. “I can take it. They don’t know me yet. They’ll come round.”

Y
ou weren’t thinking we were going to hang around all night entertaining his kid, were you, Mom?” Sally asks her now as Claire’s chopping the onions. “I mean, playing Candyland with some eight-year-old is not exactly my idea of a fun time.”

“I was thinking you’d stick around awhile and get to know her, if that’s what you mean,” Claire says. “She’s a shy, insecure little girl who has had a lot of hard things to deal with in her life. This is your territory she’s coming into. You have your brother and all your friends around. She’s all by herself. I’d like you to show a little interest and compassion, yes.”

“Sounds like fun,” says Sally grimly. Over by the sink, Pete has begun to sing the theme song from “The Brady Bunch” in a high, awful voice.

“You’re also almost ten years older than she is,” says Claire. “You’re supposed to be the mature ones. If you don’t want to do it for Ursula, you could do it for me.” She hopes there isn’t a note of desperation in her voice.