Where Love Goes

T
here’s this game Claire plays now and then when she goes to the supermarket. Wheeling her cart through the aisles, lifting the one-percent milk down off the shelf in the dairy case, she entertains herself with the idea that one of these days a man might wheel his cart up alongside hers and kiss her so passionately she would toss her coupons into the middle of the frozen foods. “Come away with me,” he says, snatching her up like the most wonderful delicacy in the gourmet section
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Her too-full cart could be discouraging to these men, so when she plays the game, Claire takes care to include among her family-size packages of English muffins and ground beef a few items that say other things about her besides that she’s a mother. Things that are also true: That she is a lover of garlic and goat cheese for instance. That while she doesn’t need expensive wine, she doesn’t get the cheapest stuff either. That the color she favors is red
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She always checks their ring finger first. And she is always careful to keep her own ringless fingers plainly visible. If there’s a man who really interests her at the seafood counter she may buy calamari, She always buys herself flowers and kiwi fruit, or a mango. Smoked trout. Jalapeños. Never Little Debbie cakes. Never Vaseline or toilet bowl cleaner. If an old Beatles or Dylan song comes on the Muzak, as they do so often these days, she sometimes finds herself singing a few bars under her breath. She might stand there picking through the strawberries while he chooses a melon. She may hold a bunch of rosemary to her face and breathe deep. Nothing more than that
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Only three times in all the years since her divorce has Claire actually struck up a conversation with one of these bachelor shoppers. Of those three, one invited her to share the steak he was buying at his backyard hibachi later that evening. She could tell the minute he opened his mouth that it wasn’t a good idea. One man asked her what you did with Jerusalem artichokes, then explained that his mother had asked him to pick some up. One of these men pointed to the mussels and said, “I hear they’re an aphrodisiac.”

Still, Claire plays the game. It’s just one of the ways she gets through her days, allowing herself the hope that a man who would love her wildly might be just one more aisle away
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The funny thing is that today just such a person has come to this same supermarket with a shopping list of his own. His list does, in fact, include Little Debbie cakes, because he has an eight-year-old daughter who likes them in her school lunches. A daughter but no wife. And sometimes, as he picks out the groceries for another long week of caring for her alone, he plays the same game Claire does. Only in his game the person who comes along somewhere between Produce and Frozen Foods is a woman. A woman who looks, in his fantasies, like Claire
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He walks in the electric-eye doors at just the moment she is pushing her cart out to the parking lot, in fact. Maybe he sees her in passing, but her cart is full of bags, so even if he does, he’d probably assume she’s married. They just miss each other
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A
rms full of groceries, Claire kicks open the back door of her house to find her ex-husband, Sam, in his painter’s pants and sleeveless T-shirt sitting at the kitchen counter sucking a Popsicle. Their daughter Sally has her leg up against the sink doing one of her ballet stretches. Travis, Sally’s boyfriend, is braiding her hair. There’s an unfamiliar-looking girl perched on the counter—also eating a Popsicle. The Beastie Boys are turned up loud. Somebody must have said something funny right before Claire came in; they are all laughing. Nobody makes a move to take one of the grocery bags, although when a container of yogurt falls out the bottom of the bag that has been giving way, Sally picks it up, opens it, and reaches for a spoon. “Thank God you finally got a little decent stuff to eat, Mom,” she says. “I was starting to think we were living in Rwanda or someplace.”

Claire drops the bags on the floor, unable to make it one more step to the pantry. She wishes she’d taken the time to put on her eyeliner before she left for the store this afternoon. Claire has been working at the children’s museum even longer hours than usual this week, in the final stages of getting the Pioneer Room ready for next Saturday’s opening. Her hair’s a mess.

Even now—five years since she and Sam parted—she still likes to look her best when he sees her. He had predicted when she left that she’d eventually realize how lucky she had been to have him, and come back on her knees. “I mean, no offense, but you’re not exactly Cindy Crawford,” he told her.

“I know that,” she said. Hadn’t he commented once that her breasts had started to look like udders?

“That’s what breast-feeding does to a person,” she told him. Breastfeeding and gravity
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Why should it be that having children should cause such wreckage to a woman’s body while a man can father those same children and still possess the body of a twenty-year-old? Still, it didn’t seem like too much to ask that the man with you shared your bed might look up now and then when you pulled your dress over your head. Even if you had been married twelve years
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“One of these days after you’ve finally left you’re going to wake up and realize you had a good thing going,” he used to tell her. “Nice house. Great kids. A husband who doesn’t drink or smoke or hang around in bars.…”

“I need to feel there’s somebody on the face of this earth who just plain adores me,” she told him
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“You know your problem, babe?” he said. “You listen to too many songs on the radio. You still believe every single thing you heard the Beatles sing on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ when you were ten.”

Now here he is, five years later, sitting in the kitchen of the house she bought when she moved out, come to collect their children for the weekend. The last time Claire came home from work to find him sitting in her kitchen this way, she asked him to please wait outside while the kids gathered up their stuff.

“Why do you have to be so unfriendly to Dad?” Sally said to her. “You think it feels good to him, standing out on the steps like that?”

“I never go inside our old house when I pick you up at your dad’s,” Claire wanted to say. “You think it’s pleasant for me, parked in the driveway, studying my old perennial beds where his girlfriend has planted all those dumb chrysanthemums?” She doesn’t say these things because, among other reasons, as far as Sally’s concerned, Melanie’s just the cool college girl who used to babysit for them and still comes by to say hi when she’s home from college for vacations. From what they say, it appears that Pete and Sally believe their father hasn’t had a girlfriend in five years
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Sally returns to the kitchen carrying her overnight bag and her Walkman. Sam crumples up his Popsicle wrapper and pitches it at the trash can.

“Good shot, man,” says Travis.

“You play hoops?” Sam asks him. Travis says he used to be on the high-school team but he quit on account of his skateboarding.