Where Love Goes Read online

  You had to hand it to Sam; he was never one to dish out the kind of easy compliments that might have bought her off. “You wanted to have a kid,” he told her. Not many young women just graduating from art school did, back in the late seventies. And though Claire would have wanted to have children eventually, regardless, it’s also plain to her what fueled the particular urgency to have one back in 1976. That was the year her father’s liver finally gave out from years of living on straight vodka and not a whole lot else. Her brother joined a religious cult in Washington State and hasn’t been heard from since. Her mother sold their old house outside Portland, had their black lab put to sleep, and went off to San Miguel de Allende to study painting. More than anything, what Claire wanted was to be part of a happy, normal-seeming family. So did Sam evidently.

  They met in Michigan, but that spring they made a road trip to see the old house in Vermont Sam’s grandfather had left him, and they ended up staying. Three months later Claire got pregnant and they were married by a justice of the peace.

  She gained fifty pounds with Sally but she didn’t care. She thrilled to the sight of her huge belly. She read every book on pregnancy and childbirth and checked her reflection in every store window she passed. She gloried in her swollen breasts. Nothing in her whole life had ever felt as real to her as the feeling of her baby’s kick from deep in her own body.

  She loved childbirth. Finally her body was overtaken by sensations so intense and enormous, as the sex in her marriage never was, they obliterated all other feeling. To her, giving birth was like surfing this enormous and terrifying wave. It could have knocked her down and pulled her under, but she rode it right in to shore.

  From the moment Sally’s head emerged—ripping the skin around her perineum as it did, landing in Sam’s outstretched hands on their bed—Claire knew she was free of her parents’ family. Now Sally was her family—and Sam, of course. And eventually Pete, when he came along three years later.

  Claire loved nursing her babies. She loved how full her breasts became and how ripe and bountiful it made her feel having milk in them, and how sweet the milk was. She loved her amazing, cartoonlike profile, in the size-forty brassiere she briefly wore, and the way she practically burst out of her bathing suit the summer after Sally’s birth. She had never felt so womanly. Nothing she had ever done in her life had been so real.

  Sometimes simply hearing her baby cry would be enough to make milk squirt from her nipple. Sometimes, as she settled in to feed one of her babies and pulled down her bra to expose a breast, her baby would forage against her skin looking for the nipple, and her milk would begin to shoot out on his head or his cheek, and he would get this look on his face that Claire believed could only be amusement, followed by this other look: total contentment. Taking him off her nipple to put him on the other side, she would see him become, very briefly, frantic. The suction his lips would make, small as they were, was so great she’d have to slide her little finger underneath his mouth just to detach him, and for the split second that separated the moment she took him off one breast and the moment she put him on the other one, he would sputter and pant, flailing his arms, moving his little fish’s mouth, searching.

  She had friends nursing babies at the same time she was who kept their infants on schedules. Every four hours and never in between. “Their stomachs adjust,” one woman told her. “You wouldn’t believe how quickly they learn.”

  Who needs to learn such a lesson? she wanted to ask. Your child will learn soon enough about doing without. What she wanted her babies to learn was what it felt like to have everything, absolutely everything, a child could need or want. Hers did.

  Sally nursed for thirteen months and then weaned herself. Pete lived on her breast for a year and kept nursing another year after that, until Sam said it seemed to him that once a child was undoing the buttons of his mother’s shirt, it was probably time for her to stop breast-feeding. Regretfully she agreed he was probably right.

  For Sam, after that, Claire’s breasts might as well have been radioactive for all he touched them. Breast-feeding had wrecked them, but it went beyond that. He practically recoiled when his hand touched her body now. It was as if once she became a mother there was something forbidden about wanting her.

  Sam had been a runner when she met him, and in the later years he trained for marathons. He was out of bed before dawn, earlier even than a person has to get up for a baby, and he was in bed again by eight-thirty or nine most nights. Where Claire’s body softened gradually over the years of their marriage, Sam’s became like chiseled stone. He slept flat on his back—no pillow, far away from Claire. When they had sex it was rough, athletic and cursory. Feeling the hardness of him, she felt shame at her own soft over-ripeness. She knows he must have kissed her sometimes, but she has no memory of his lips, only the part where he thrust himself into her, and afterward, when he would roll over to his side of the bed and fall asleep.

  She seldom asks herself anymore, as she used to, did he ever love her? All those years of his unremitting coolness have turned her own feelings for him into a frozen lake, with only the smallest patch of water left at one end that she wouldn’t safely skate on. At one time long ago she remembers loving him.

  Mostly she remembers other things. At first she had been happy to give up her artwork to care for the children while Sam worked as a carpenter, but when the building boom slowed and they needed a second income, there were endless battles between them over money and child care. Especially after she got her job at the ad agency and it became clear that Claire was going to be the major breadwinner, she would tell him she needed more help from him with the children and the house. She was tired all the time. “Maybe I’d help you more if you didn’t nag so much,” he said. One time he picked up their video camera and pointed it at her face while she was weeping. “If you could see yourself,” he said. He shook his head and went to the TV room to sleep on the couch. When she followed him and tried to talk some more, he turned on the set.

  After she got her job she started getting up earlier and earlier to draw, and by the time the children woke there would be the cheerful sound of laundry tumbling in the dryer and the smell of blueberry muffins about to come out of the oven, fresh-squeezed juice, flowers on the table, a “Sesame Street” record playing, a second pot of coffee on the stove. Then she’d pour the cereal into the bowls. Take off the nighttime diaper, powder the bottom, pull the T-shirt over the head. In the car on the way to day care and preschool they’d sing all the verses to The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night and play Grandmother’s Trunk. Pete liked her to recite the words to Goodnight Moon in the car. Sometimes they stopped at Woolworth’s on the way and had a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream or a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins, even though they’d had breakfast at home already.

  They seem so distant now: all those years when her children were little and she was always scrambling to get to work, get to day care, get home, with never enough time—as she used to complain to Sam—to go to the bathroom. Whatever she did, it never felt like enough. It’s as if I’m pouring water in a sieve, she used to think. No matter how much I pour, it never stays filled.

  Above all, what Claire wanted was to spare her children pain and disappointment—even small pain and minor disappointment. Especially those, in fact. The large pain—her bitter arguments with Sam and her tears in the night—felt out of her control.

  She always baked the children’s birthday cakes from scratch, with elaborate frosting designs in whatever theme occupied their fantasies that year: maybe He-Man, maybe Ninja Turtles, maybe trolls, or—Sally’s passion briefly—duckbill platypuses. For Christmas she always baked a gingerbread house and let Pete and Sally stick on the Halloween candy they’d collected a couple of months before that she didn’t like them to eat. She sewed clothes for Sally’s Barbie and flannel pajamas for Pete’s bear just like the ones she made Pete. One time Claire crocheted a hat for Sally that fitted over her head like a helmet, in bl
ack and yellow striped yarn, with stiff black antennae that stuck straight up. It was Sally’s favorite, but one day when Sally was mad she threw it out the car window and then didn’t tell Claire until they’d driven a few miles down the road. Claire drove back and forth over the same stretch of highway for half an hour until they found it.

  Even now, from a distance of all those years, Claire can remember in the pit of her stomach the feeling she had then, of grief and loss and dread over the lost hat, the same way she felt when they visited the National Zoo in Washington and Pete dropped his special blue ribbon that he liked to wrap around his index finger and twirl inside his ear while he sucked his thumb. Sam told her she was crazy, they could get another, but Claire ran through six different pavilions at the zoo, trying to find that ribbon before closing time. When she finally spotted it in the monkey house and came panting back to the bench where Sam was waiting with Pete and Sally, Pete had simply reached out his hand for it. He wasn’t surprised his mother had found the ribbon. She always did.

  One year there was a blizzard on the day of Sally’s birthday party. All the mothers called to say their children couldn’t make it, and Claire went to pick them all up in the four-wheel drive. There was that time Pete got a coffee bean stuck up his nostril. The time Sally lost the shoe to her Crystal Barbie and Claire tore apart the whole house before finding it lodged in a heating grate. She remembers waiting with the kids for Sam to cross the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and Pete breaking out of her arms when he saw his dad, and the feeling Claire had at that moment, that whatever was missing between her husband and herself didn’t matter so long as her son had a father who would be there with open arms when he came running.

  Claire can still see the photograph on their annual photo Christmas card: the four of them posed under the tree and smiling a little tensely, Sam with his arm resting on the shoulder of the holly shirt he’d given Claire one Christmas that she wore every year, but only for this picture. He always set their camera on the tripod with the shutter on the self-timer before leaping over the coffee table to get into the picture on time. Pete would be clutching that blue ribbon he never wanted to relinquish long enough for Claire to wash it. Sally would have this smile on her face, as if someone was awarding prizes for the most exposed teeth. If they weren’t really such a happy family, they looked like one anyway.

  She remembers a morning—early spring, the brook still high from melted snow—when she snapped at Sam as he was getting ready to take off for some 5K race up a mountain. “Don’t I ever get a Saturday morning off?” she asked him. She had been putting in extra hours every night that week on a presentation for a radio station and making favors for Pete’s birthday party: pirate hats. For this particular party she had also made treasure maps and individual treasure chests filled with chocolate coins that she had hidden around the house.

  Sam looked her up and down, not unpleasantly. “You know, Claire,” he said. “You wouldn’t know what to do with a morning to yourself if you had one.”

  She opened her mouth to answer but stopped. What he said was true. She’d been listening so intently to the sounds of small voices calling out their needs for so long by then, she no longer heard her own.

  It had been catching up with her, though. More and more, in those last few years, Claire would watch herself lose control of her temper as if she were observing some other woman in a movie, not her self. Mostly she was keeping up her Perfect Mom routine, but there was an infrequent visitor at their house now, a woman who looked like Claire but acted like nobody she’d ever known, except maybe her father, only when he acted that way he was drunk, and Claire was stone sober. Just tired.

  “Nobody takes me seriously,” she would cry, coming into the kitchen to find Sam reading the sports page while Pete sat fingerpainting with instant chocolate pudding and Sally drew unicorns on the back of her advertising presentation for a new condominium complex. “All I am around here is a servant.” Then she would get down on her knees and begin to scrub the floor, still weeping.

  “I’m jumping out of this car,” she said to Sam one time as they were driving home from a party. He had just finished telling her that she had monopolized the conversation at dinner. She actually opened the car door that time, and he grabbed her arm to pull her back in. She hit her chin on the edge of the door. She still has the scar.

  Christmas morning, the year Pete turned two: They had just opened their presents. This was the year Sam had given Claire an electric knife sharpener and the holly berry shirt. Wrapping paper and pamphlets printed with the directions for putting toys together were scattered everywhere. Claire was trying to get the turkey in the oven and construct the Bûche de Noël with butter-cream frosting and meringue mushrooms. Sam and his brother had turned on the set to watch the football game. “Later, babe,” he told her when she said she needed help.

  “That’s it. Christmas is over!” she yelled. She stood over the garbage disposal, smashing their Yule log down the hole. Like a drunk. Now she was stuffing the holly berry shirt into a trash bag while the children clutched her legs and begged her to stop.

  “What is this, PMS again?” Sam said.

  Claire read a novel once whose author had dedicated her book to her husband. “Essential as air,” the woman had written about him. Claire has forgotten the name of the novel; it was that dedication that stayed with her. She was thirty-five when she realized she’d rather be alone with at least the possibility that someday she might feel that way about some man who might feel that way about her, than stay one more winter in the chilly bed she shared with Sam. So she moved out.

  Ursula was four and a half when her mother left. Her name is Joan, and she liked Ursula to call her that, although sometimes Ursula forgot and called her Mommy.

  She remembers the day because Halloween was coming and she was trying on her fairy costume when they came in her room and said they had something to tell her. She knew what it was going to be. She had been casting spells that whole day while they yelled at each other. Her magic wasn’t working.

  “Come sit on my lap, Urs,” her dad said. His name is Tim, but Ursula calls him Dad. “Come sit on my lap.” Her mother was standing in the doorway wearing that velvet dress she had that had to be dry-cleaned, so you couldn’t touch it. She was very beautiful.

  “I’m busy,” she said. “I’m making potions.” She knew how bad things must be since her mother wasn’t saying anything about the smell in her room. Ursula had taken a bottle of her perfume and poured the whole thing into an old aspirin bottle and mixed it with some baking soda and toothpaste.

  Her dad picked her up. She wasn’t fat then. Her fairy costume was pink, see-through, with layers of lace billowing like wings. She and her dad got it at the Salvation Army.

  “You know Mommy and I aren’t getting along with each other, don’t you Ursi?” he said. “I know you hear us yelling a lot, and I bet it worries you, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s fine.” She was polishing her glasses on his shirt.

  “Well, it worries us,” he said. “It isn’t good for kids to grow up with their parents yelling all the time.”

  Ursula knew she had to do something. She wished she was bigger so she would have a good idea. She was trying so hard to think she thought her head might pop. “A-B-C-D-E-F-G,” she sang.

  “Urs,” he said. “Listen to me.” He put his hands on her cheeks and turned her face around. She closed her eyes.

  “Ursi. Ursi.”

  Why wasn’t her mother doing anything? All she ever did was stand there rubbing her hands on her forehead. She had the thinnest fingers. Ursula’s are like her dad’s: chubby sausages.

  “But we both love you so much,” he was saying.

  “Q-R-S-T-U-V-W,” she sang. “N-J-R-T-C-X-W.” She thought maybe if she pulled on his earlobes that would make him laugh. If she put her hands over his mouth he would stop talking. His cheeks were wet.

  “Sunny day!” she yelled. “Chasing the clouds
away.” She didn’t even like “Sesame Street.”

  “Ursula!” her mother yelled. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it. Just shut up for once, okay?”

  “What are you doing, Joan?” he said to her. “Can’t you let up on her, even now?”

  “It’s always my fault, isn’t it, Tim?” her mother shouted. “You always side with her. You have no idea in the world what it’s like to be me!”

  “Please, Joan,” he said.

  “Always Mr. Reasonable. Always Mr. Parent. Always Mr. Fuck-head,” she screamed.

  Ursula knew it was impossible then. There was nothing she was going to be able to do. “Okay,” she said. “I get it.” She climbed down off his lap and picked up Jenny’s chew bone. “Here, Jenny,” she called to her. “Here girl.”

  “That was just great,” her father was saying to her mother. “You must feel really proud of yourself.”

  “She’s fine,” her mother said, quiet again. “She’ll be better.”

  “Listen,” he said. “You can do what you want to do. Just don’t kid yourself.”

  Ursula’s mother moved away the next day. She went to New Zealand with a man named Elliot. She sent Ursula a postcard. “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is here,” she said. “I’m thinking a lot about art.” Ursula couldn’t read back then, of course. Her dad read it to her. There was another part in there about how much she missed Ursula. Her dad was probably making that part up. Or her mother was.

  Ursula decided to be a ghost that Halloween. She and her dad trick-or-treated at every house on their street, all the way past the gas station to the bridge. She never saw so much candy.

  Her mother would have told her she could only have one piece a day. Her dad just dumped it in a big bowl in her room where she could have some any time she wanted.

  It’s been just the two of them living here in Blue Hills for a long time now—Ursula and her dad. They’re doing fine too.

  School days she wakes him up and he makes her eggs. She puts out the silverware and pours him his juice. Sometimes she pretends she’s a waitress and he’s the customer. “What can I get for you, sir?” she asks him in this voice she has that sounds like a grown-up.