Where Love Goes (20 page)

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?”

C
laire 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.”

T
hey 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.

O
nce 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.

“I’m bored,” says Ursula.

“Oh, come on now,” he says. “There’s a million things to do here.”

“There would be. If you’d play with me.”

“I will,” he says. “Later.” There is that supplicating tone to his voice again that always makes this tight place in Claire’s throat when she hears it. “Stop it!” she wants to say.

“I’m hot,” Ursula says. “I want a drink.”

“We’ll get some Cokes at the snack bar a little later,” he tells her. “If you’re thirsty now, you can have a nectarine.”

Claire turns her page. Tim picks up his book too. She squeezes his hand.

“I hate this bathing suit,” she says. She is examining the folds of skin around her belly. “It makes me look fat.”

“That happens to everybody when they sit down in a bathing suit,” Tim says. “Even Claire probably has a fold or two, right, Claire?”

“Right,” she says.

“Not to mention your old dad.”

“You have tons of fat, Daddy,” she says. “You should see my dad’s love handles,” she tells Claire, almost proudly. Then she realizes that Claire has seen them, of course. Ursula is no longer the sole possessor of his secrets.

Another minute passes. “This place sucks,” she says.

“Oh, come on, sweetheart,” he says. The pleading tone is worse now. “Go play.”

“You hate me,” she says.

“You know that’s not true,” he says, desperate now.

This is so ridiculous, Claire wants to scream. Now you are arguing with your daughter about whether or not you hate her
.

“See those kids over there?” she says. “There’s a little girl just your age working on a sand castle. I bet she’d love some help.”

“I don’t know her,” Ursula says.

“Here’s what you do,” Claire says. She has gone through this fifty times with her own children, though by the time they were Ursula’s age they had long since figured out how to do it for themselves.

“You bring your pail and shovel over and say, ‘Hi. What’s your name?’ She says, ‘My name is such and such’—”

“Poop head,” says Ursula.

“Right. She says, ‘My name is Poop head.’ You say, ‘Pleased to meet you, Poop head. My name is Ursula, although you are welcome to call me Silly Goose if you want. Can we work on your sand castle together?’ ”

“She called me a silly goose, Daddy,” says Ursula. That whining tone. The worst.

“You listen to Claire,” Tim says, sounding like a doomed man. “She’s trying to help you make friends.”

“You want me to come with you?” says Claire. When Ursula gives no answer she puts her book down and rises from the towel. She brushes herself off and takes Ursula’s hand firmly. She hopes she is managing to conceal her irritation as she says, “I sometimes feel shy too. But you’ll see. This will be easy. You’ll have fun.”

“Hi,” says Claire. “What’s your name?”

The little girl looks up from her digging. “Meredith,” she says. “What’s you two’s?”

“I’m Claire. This is Ursula. We wondered if you wanted help with your castle.”

“Sure,” says Meredith. She points to a pile of stones. “We got to build the wall before the waves come up,” she says to Ursula. “You can help.”

Ursula just sits there. Claire reaches for a handful of stones.

“Maybe we could make a moat,” she says. “What do you think, Ursula?”

“The waves are just going to wash it away anyways,” Ursula says. “This is a dumb castle.” After a minute she gets up and wanders back to the towel.

“Lucky I got you to help,” Meredith tells Claire. “Or we’d never get this wall made in time.”

T
hey leave the beach a little after lunch. Ursula says she’s getting sun poisoning. When she says this, Tim looks like a cornered animal.

“It’s okay,” Claire says. “I think it’s going to cloud over soon, anyway.”

They go for ice creams. Ursula says she doesn’t want any. Then she says she does. Then she says she doesn’t. Claire and Tim are licking their cones out on the patio of Barnacle Billy’s when Ursula decides she does want an ice cream after all. A sundae.

Walking through Ogunquit looking in shops, Ursula is briefly cheerful, holding each of their hands and skipping. “This is fun isn’t it Daddy?” she says in the TV commercial kid voice Claire heard the night she met Ursula.

“I bet her kids are jealous they didn’t get to come, aren’t they?” Ursula says to Tim.

“If you have something to say to me, say it to me,” Claire tells Ursula, as she has many times.

“If you have something to say to Claire, say it to Claire,” Tim tells her.

“Can we go bowling?” she says.
“Canwecanwecanwe? Please-pleasepleaseplease?”

It is as if a cold wind has blown across Claire’s heart, so bitter and sudden it has not simply frozen, it has cracked. Ursula lets go of Claire’s hand and stands there on the sidewalk, looking her dead straight in the eye.

“I know just what you’re thinking,” she says, not in the baby voice or anything close. “And I like you anyways.”

W
hile they were away on their vacation and Tim’s downstairs neighbors were taking care of Jenny, she got into the garbage at their apartment house. Now the landlord says the dog has to go.

Tim tries reasoning with the guy. “You don’t understand,” he says. “Ursula’s had Jenny her whole life.”

“Tough luck,” the guy tells him. “You weren’t supposed to have a dog here in the first place. Tenants before you had their mutt put to sleep when they moved in. It’s the rule.”

Ursula is inside setting up her collection of motel shampoos when Tim gets the word about Jenny. “What am I supposed to tell my daughter?” he says. “You don’t understand what this dog means to her.”

“Yeah,” says the landlord. “And I guess you don’t understand what my trash bin means to me. No pooch. No budge.”

“She doesn’t have any brothers and sisters,” Tim is saying. “And her mother’s sort of abandoned her. She counts on the dog. This is going to sound crazy, but she talks to it. It’s like therapy for her.”

“Sad story, bub,” says the landlord. “But I ain’t letting you keep no canine.”

Hearing this, Claire tells Tim she and her kids will take Jenny at their house. “Pete’s been begging for a dog, anyway,” she tells him.

“Sweetheart,” Tim says. “Are you sure you can handle it?”

“She was going to end up in our house soon enough, right?” says Claire. They have talked about Tim’s moving in with Claire and her kids a little further down the line. “Your dog is just getting to move in with us a little sooner than you.”