Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307787620
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-01T23:00:00+00:00

Sometimes when she and Mickey were out together buying groceries or walking around the North End or heading toward Kenmore Square for a ball game, they’d pass some couple pushing a stroller. Or she’d see a man holding the hand of a pregnant woman—with his other hand resting gently on the small of her back, maybe—and Claire would experience a wave of this sad, hollow feeling, as if she were an empty pod, a dry and brittle stalk in a windy field surrounded by green, bending grasses. She knew there would be no babies for her and Mickey, knew he would never lay his hand on her pregnant belly feeling for a kick. Before he had his vasectomy, Mickey lived in horror of a pregnancy. Claire would never see his face on any child of theirs, she knew that much. Not those freckles. Not that pitcher’s butt. They would never be parents together, only lovers, and as much as she loved the untouchable intimacy that came from it being just the two of them, every now and then that fact of their relationship left her with an odd feeling of pointlessness. Claire has always liked making things—meals, perennial beds, dresses, children. With Mickey, the only thing she ever made was love. They never even had a pet together. Never even a garden.

Partly she knew this feeling of hers was an old habit, a carryover from her marriage, when it had made more sense. For all the years she and Sam were together, she had found pleasure in the bounty of her own ripe fertility. In the arid territory of her marriage, she drew comfort from the knowledge that she might at any moment be pregnant—though even this hopefulness diminished in the last couple of years, their lovemaking was so infrequent. There was a reason why Claire was never as exacting as she should have been about birth control. The Russian roulette she played with her sketchy combination of a too-old diaphragm, not always accompanied by spermicide, and the rhythm method allowed for a certain constant state of hopefulness in a situation that would have otherwise seemed unbearably bleak. Chance conception was her one wild card.

With Mickey there was no such prospect. So there were these moments with him when Claire felt old, used up, withered. They’d be at a movie and a baby would cry, forcing its parents to rise from their seats and hurry out of the theater, and even as she could sense Mickey’s relief that it was somebody else’s baby and not theirs, what she was feeling was the opposite. What was a movie compared to a small and perfect person, made by them?

But now that Claire’s with Tim, and knowing how much he wants to have a child with her, this other set of images have come to her.

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