Where Love Goes (27 page)

“I saw your mom at the supermarket,” she says.

“Oh yeah?” he says. “Hot news flash.”

“She was kissing some guy,” Sarah says. “I never saw a mom making out before.”

“You’re nuts,” Pete says. He knows she isn’t.

“He your dad?” she asks him. “The red-haired guy?”

“Are you kidding?” Pete says. “My dad is nothing like him.”

“My parents are divorced, too,” she says. “You should see some of the losers my mom’s brought home. You just have to hope they won’t marry any of them.”

“Yeah, well, my mom would never do something like that,” he says, though the truth is, he is not sure of anything anymore. “If she did, I’d be out of here so fast. Back to my dad’s house.”

“Yeah, but he’s probably got somebody really gross, too,” she says.

Pete says nothing.

“Parents are totally insane,” she says. “Believe me, I know.”

A
lthough Claire sleeps over at Tim’s apartment fairly often when her kids are at their father’s, she has never felt comfortable having him stay over at her own house when they’re around.

“You know they’ve figured out by now that we have sex,” he tells her.

Maybe that’s why she can’t do it so openly, she says. Ursula’s young enough that she can walk into Tim’s bedroom in the morning, weekends when Claire stays over, and see her father and Claire in bed together. She may even climb in between the two of them. They may even read a chapter of
A Little Princess
together. But with kids Pete and Sally’s age, you know they understand what goes on in the night. If her lovemaking with Tim were less explosive maybe she’d feel differently, but as it is she knows that she either couldn’t let herself go at the thought of them hearing every creak in the bed, or she would go ahead and make noise anyway, and then in the morning she would imagine them looking at her as she fixed the bagels and knowing what she’d done.

Tim thinks this is crazy. “You’re making too big a deal of it,” he says. “They’re just kids.” In fact, he says, it’s a lot healthier for them to have their mother in the house with them than it is having her sneak out every night or two and be off screwing her brains out at his apartment between midnight and four
A.M
.

“They’re going to have to get used to it sooner or later,” he tells her. Claire says nothing.

B
ut tonight, Ursula has been invited to a sleepover at the house of a girl in her class named Brianne. Pete’s sleeping over at his dad’s house and Sally’s away at a weekend dance workshop. So Tim is sleeping over at Claire’s for once.

He feels almost shy as he stands on her doorstep, he’s so full of anticipation and hunger for her. They made love at his apartment last night actually. But it’s different in her bed. Not just because of the thick down comforter, the flowered sheets, the high wooden posts at the head and footboard where he tied her wrists that time with the silk scarves she had laid out. Not just because she keeps a box next to her bed with three different pairs of gloves: elbow-length white kid, black lace, red satin like a hooker. Not just because she keeps a feather boa under one pillow that she likes to wind around her neck sometimes, or other places on her skin or his.

The first time Tim laid eyes on Claire’s bedroom he thought it must be her daughter’s, the way she’s fixed it up. There are dried roses hanging from the ceiling and silk scarves draped over the bed like the roof of some Moroccan tent, mirrors in unlikely places, stuffed animals from her childhood. Her favorite dresses—twenties evening gowns and velvet cloaks, silk camisoles and a bowling shirt with the name
CLAIRE
stitched on the back under the team insignia
JIMMY’S MUFFLER
—hang like crazy laundry from the walls, in between photographs of her children and school art projects and a shelf of bronze baby shoes that she buys at yard sales, just because she loves babies, and she hates the thought that any of their shoes would end up in the wrong hands.

“I want you,” he says, reaching for her. So many words have spilled out of him on this subject, sometimes he just gets tired of the sound of his own voice telling her.

She climbs the steps. He follows her soundlessly. She closes the door behind them. Nobody’s home besides the two of them; this is just habit. She sits on the bed like a schoolgirl, with her hands folded in her lap and her knees touching. “I’m yours,” she says.

He can’t move right away. He has to just look at her awhile.
She’s a still life. She is a garden of flowers you can’t bear to pick. She’s the most glorious meal anybody ever set on a table. Where to begin?

His finger traces her eyelid. He bends to kiss her neck. He breathes in the smell of her. He touches his lips to the hollow place at the base of her neck that he loves so much. He feels the rise of her breasts under his face—also her heartbeat—but he doesn’t want to move, not even to undress her.

She gets up. Claire keeps a portable boom box in her bedroom, wanting music to follow her wherever she goes—that theory of hers that life should have a soundtrack. Here in her bedroom tonight it’s
Nina Simone in Paris
.

She slides one hand under his sweater and his shirt. Then the other. The sounds she makes aren’t words.

“I want a little sugar in my bowl,”
Nina sings. Very tenderly, as if he were unwrapping a package of rare lady’s slippers in the botany lab, he begins to unbutton her blouse. The thought flashes in his mind of Barbie. Her nurse’s uniform that always gives him so much trouble.

The turquoise bra. He tries to remember whether this is one of the ones that fastens in the front, or the back-fastening kind. Front.

Her breasts tumble out. He still experiences a momentary shock every time he sees them again. Not only for the fullness of them, the darkness of her nipples, the smoothness of her skin. Claire has nursed two babies; hers are not the perky, upward-tilted breasts of a twenty-year-old. But even the way they droop is something he loves about Claire’s breasts, as if they are bearing testimony to all the ravages of marriage and parenthood, all the ways that life takes its toll on a person. He pictures one of her babies suckling her. Pictures a baby of their own.

She has bought raspberries, though they aren’t in season. She has laid them in a blue ceramic bowl next to the bed. This is Claire for you. She attends to the tiny details of lovemaking the way she attends to the details of her children’s field trips and soccer games.

Naked now, stretched out on her flower garden sheets, she holds a handful of raspberries in her fingers, pressed against her nipples. She doesn’t need to tell him what to do.

He is sucking the juice. Impossible to distinguish which is berry, which is breast. He is making a meal of her.

With raspberries still in his mouth he kisses her. She reaches for more. There are raspberries on her neck now, raspberries on her belly. Raspberries tumbling between her legs. His face is there, too. When he lifts his head his mouth is red and dripping.

•   •   •

Her husband would never have touched her that way. Times when she was bleeding, he wouldn’t want to come near her. One time when she didn’t know she was having her period and they were finished fucking, he caught sight of blood on his cock and actually recoiled like a man hit by sniper fire. She remembers the sound of him in the bathroom afterward. Not simply washing himself off but taking a shower.

Tim is all over her, kissing her, devouring her. By the time they fall asleep—she has no idea of the time, but it’s no longer night; she hears birds—there’s red everywhere.

A
fter Ursula and Brianne finish their SpaghettiOs—which Brianne’s mother serves in the can, to cut down on dishes—they get to go outside. Ursula has suggested a game where they’re poor girls. Their parents left them in the woods and now they have to dig for worms for supper.

“I’m so hungry, sister. If we don’t find some soon, I think I’ll go into a coma,” Ursula tells Brianne. She has learned about comas from “Live and Let Live,” because Veronica is in one.

“What do I say?” Brianne asks her. Brianne is not very good at pretend, or anything else, actually. The good thing about her is she’s not a member of the club of girls that aren’t inviting Ursula to their birthday. She hasn’t left snot on Ursula’s seat.

“You say, ‘Don’t worry, sister. I just know we’ll find some soon,’ ” says Ursula.

“Don’t worry, sister,” says Brianne. This is as much as she can remember.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if somebody rich adopted us?” says Ursula. “Like Princess Diana?” She gets the feeling that Brianne doesn’t know who Princess Diana is, but never mind. “Or Madonna.” Brianne has to know that one, and it looks like she does. She brightens, anyway. Just a little.

They dig some more. Sure enough, Ursula has located a worm, a nice fat one. Ursula has done lots of nature things with her dad. She knows where to find crayfish and what kind of places have frog’s eggs. She isn’t scared of bugs, like most girls. She even has a collection she and her dad made, of animal poop. Only you don’t call it poop. You call it scat.

“Here, sister. You take this one. You need it more than me. You’re weaker,” Ursula says to Brianne.

Brianne looks worried. She is wondering if she really has to eat the worm. She would but she is happy when Ursula whispers to her, “Just pretend.”

They dig some more. “Look,” says Brianne. She has uncovered something she thinks is a balloon, but Ursula knows it’s not.

“Leave that,” says Ursula.

A ladybug lands on her shoe. “Look,” whispers Ursula. “She’s magic. We get to have three wishes.”

Brianne looks at her. She has never played such a hard game before.

“You go first,” says Ursula.

Brianne is silent. She figures if she picks her scab, that will give her time to think. She just doesn’t know what she’s supposed to think about.

“What do you wish for?” says Ursula, very slowly, and a little louder than usual, as if she were talking to somebody from another country or someone very old.

“Sega Genesis?” says Brianne.

“Okay,” says Ursula, sighing faintly. “My sister wishes for Sega Genesis,” she tells the ladybug. “Now it’s my turn.”

“I wish a beautiful woman would appear, and she’s driving a convertible and she has an evening dress on and she says she wants to be our mother. Her name is”—Ursula thinks for a second—“Dolly Parton.”

This is a new idea for Ursula, and she likes it. She has seen Dolly Parton on TV and she thinks Dolly’s beautiful. Not skinny like Vanna White, and also funnier. She has her own amusement park, called Dollywood, where she would probably let Ursula and Brianne play for free. Plus Ursula knows from a time she heard Dolly on “Oprah” that Dolly has no children of her own.

They don’t get to their third wish. Brianne’s mother has stuck her head out the window and now she is yelling at them.

“What do you kids think you’re doing?” she yells. “Get the hell out of that street and come on in and watch TV.”

L
ate at night—snuggled up together in Brianne’s single bed, which only smells slightly of pee—they hear the fight begin. Brianne’s apartment is very small and the walls are so thin that when Brianne’s father throws something at the wall that backs up against Brianne’s room, her kitten calendar flaps.

“Bitch!” Brianne’s father yells. He is not Brianne’s real father, Ursula has learned. Not from Brianne, but from Brianne’s little brother, Kyle, who said, when he threw his beans at Kyle during dinner, “You aren’t my real dad.”

“No kidding,” said the fake dad, whose name is Ernie. “You think I’d have a twerp like you for a kid?”

Kyle didn’t say anything after that. A second later Ernie pitched his cigarette lighter straight at Kyle’s head.

“Bingo,” he said when it hit Kyle in the eye. Nobody said anything. Not even Brianne’s mom.

It turns out the reason Ernie’s mad now is Brianne’s mother smoked all his cigarettes. “Go get me some more,” he says. Not
please
, either.

“Get them yourself,” she says.

“Like hell I will,” he says. “You get them, bitch.”

For a minute there the girls can’t hear any words, except Brianne’s mother saying, “Ernie. Ernie.”

“You heard me,” he says. “Who do you think pays the rent, anyway?”

She says she can’t leave the kids. “You’re shitfaced,” she says.

Pressed up against Brianne, Ursula is thinking about her own dad. She thinks about his big arms and how strong they are. Even now that she weighs seventy-nine pounds, he still carries her inside without waking her when she falls asleep in the car. Her dad would never throw a cigarette lighter at the wall. Her dad doesn’t even smoke.

“Stick them up your ass,” Brianne’s mother yells at the man who is not Brianne’s real dad.

“Cunt,” he says. Ursula doesn’t know what this word means, but just the way he says it, she knows it can’t be good.

“They always do this,” says Brianne. “It only lasts a little while.”

“I want to go home,” says Ursula. “I want my dad.”

“You can’t,” says Brianne. “We have to stay in bed. Ernie gets pissed if we get up.”

“I don’t care,” says Ursula. “I have to go home now. My dad wouldn’t want me to be here. I’ve got to call him.”

“The phone doesn’t work anymore,” Brianne tells her. “Besides, Ernie gets wicked pissed.”

Something else hits the wall, heavier than the first thing. The calendar falls on the bed. Also Brianne’s My Little Pony that was on the shelf.

“We had a wish left,” Ursula says. “Remember?”

Brianne is asleep again. Her eyes are shut, anyway.

I wish Dolly would come over, Ursula thinks. She knows this won’t happen, but she thinks it might help if she could picture it. Dolly would bust in the apartment and grab Ernie by the belt buckle and tell him to lay off of Brianne’s mother. Then she would come into Brianne’s bedroom and sing them that song Ursula likes so much, “Coat of Many Colors.”

Maybe if she sings to herself, Ursula thinks, it will be almost the same. She wishes she could remember how it starts, but all she can hear is the TV set.