Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  It was true that they were just about scraping by on her salary, that there wasn’t enough left over for any sort of luxury or minor indulgence. And Robin, like all teenagers, was always wanting something: new clothes, tapes, Nintendo games, junk food, money in her pocket. Linda wanted certain things that she couldn’t have, either, and before she knew it, Phoebe, too, would have desires beyond mere milk and affection. It was never enough to say you couldn’t afford something, and that it was because of bad luck, even if it was the honest truth. God knows it wasn’t Linda’s fault that she couldn’t properly support these two arrogant albino beauties. It wasn’t her fault that the cost of living was so high, and that the Mustang needed so many expensive repairs. There were other people besides Robin who would say it was, though.

  A few nights before, Vicki had come for supper, and they’d watched the evening news afterward. There was Vice President Quayle on the screen, blaming the L.A. riots on a breakdown of family structure, and saying that Murphy Brown mocked the importance of fathers by calling single motherhood just another life choice. “You’d better listen up there, Linda,” Vicki said. “He’s talking about you.”

  “He is not,” Linda said.

  “Oh, no? You’re a single mother, aren’t you?” Vicki asked. She glanced at Robin, supine on the floor, inches from the TV, with the sleeping baby sprawled across her chest. “This homey little scene sure doesn’t look like Life with Father to me.”

  “But I was married,” Linda said, indignantly. “Wright died, remember?”

  “Please, please, Ms. Reismann. No excuses now.”

  Robin looked up. “Quayle’s a real asshole,” she said.

  “Robin!” Linda exclaimed. “He’s the Vice President of the United States!”

  “Well, don’t blame me,” Robin said. “I didn’t vote for him.”

  “Neither did I!” Linda said.

  “You voted for Dukakis?” Vicki asked. “I did, too.”

  “No,” Linda said, sheepishly, “not exactly. I mean, I didn’t vote for anybody. I was moving around a lot that year and I never registered.” In fact, she had never registered to vote in any election. Voting had always seemed to her like something only bona fide members of families and communities, of society itself, did. Nobody she would have voted for ever won, anyway—or ever lost by just one vote.

  “So are you registered now?” Vicki asked.

  “Not yet,” Linda admitted.

  Robin reached for the remote control, aimed it at the Vice President’s heart, and in a moment they were watching The Simpsons instead.

  Vicki was only teasing Linda about her single motherhood, but she hated having to defend herself when she hadn’t done anything wrong. After all, she’d never planned on becoming anyone’s widow at twenty-seven, or anyone’s mother either, for that matter. She had always recoiled at the sight of those harried women in supermarkets and shopping malls, women driven by their own misery to jerk their children’s arms right out of their sockets and scream some variation of “Shut up! I didn’t ask you to be born!” But they had asked, or at least invited the possibility in some wanton, molten moment, when they probably would have agreed to quintuplets. Linda had blindly agreed to her own situation, too, in the quick, glad confusion of love—such an enormous return on such a small investment.

  And now here she was, on the defensive again, and with Robin, of all people. “I didn’t do anything to her,” Linda said, about Phoebe. “She bit me. Here, look,” she said, aware that she sounded more like a competitive child than a loving mother.

  It didn’t matter; Robin only muttered, “Sure, right,” and carted Phoebe off without a backward glance. Faithless Phoebe began trying zealously to latch herself onto one of Robin’s tiny breasts, which made Robin cry, “Ooh! Gross!” She flipped the baby upside down, holding her by the ankles with one hand as she strode away.

  “Hey, watch it!” Linda yelled after her. “She’s a person, remember?” Then the refrigerator door slammed shut, and Phoebe’s wailing abruptly ceased, as if she’d been corked, and Linda knew that Robin was finishing the feeding with a bottle. Linda touched her wounded nipple and sighed. Maybe she’d have to think about weaning Phoebe completely soon, before she turned into a vampire. It would probably be a lot easier, anyway, with her own crazy schedule. She sighed again, more deeply, and glanced at the clock. It was seven already, almost time for Robin’s bus, and for Linda to get Phoebe to Kiddie Kare and then go to work.

  Linda’s jazzercize classes at the Bod were supposed to be fun as well as beneficial, but her fitness-crazed clients didn’t seem to care much about the fun part, and the early birds were the worst. They could hardly wait to get started every morning. When she got to the club, she’d find them warming up, climbing the StairMasters or running on the treadmills as if they were being chased. And when the class began, they would ignore her frequent pleas to “Smile, everybody!” and “Come on now, relax!” Instead, they glared at their own repeated reflections in the mirrored walls as they moved, and later demanded a heavier concentration on the “abs” or “pecs” or “glutes.” It was like learning some repulsive new language. Once in a while, Linda felt a slight nostalgia for the male clients she’d gladly left behind at both Fred Astaire’s. Some of them had been real creeps, of course, with roving hands and other parts, but she could almost forgive them now. At least their needs were familiar, and more or less human. Most of her regulars at the Bod were like those one-celled animals that reproduce by dividing. Her fantasy was to make them look at each other—just once—and then willingly take partners and glide together across the floor. There was nothing lovelier, to Linda’s mind, than the physical teamwork of social dancing, except maybe the teamwork of lovemaking, both of which she and Nathan did together with uncommon success.

  She took her own, quick shower and retrieved Phoebe from Robin, who, it appeared, had had a Coke and a doughnut for breakfast again. Linda followed her around as she gathered some schoolbooks and loose papers and walked her way into her sneakers. “Your shoelaces are untied,” Linda said. “You’re going to break your neck one of these days.”

  Robin ignored her. She paused in her preparations only long enough to make a monster face at the baby, who rewarded her with a drooly smile and a joyful squirming of her whole self, reminiscent of a puppy wagging its tail.

  Linda picked up the empty Coke can. “All that sugar!” she called after Robin as she was running out the door. “You are destroying your precious body!”

  Robin didn’t even pretend to have heard her. “Bye, Feeb!” she called back. “See you later!”

  “See you later, honey!” Linda answered, as if Robin had really meant to include her in her farewell.

  Well, at least her awful behavior was countered by her love for the baby. And the baby, who loved everyone, seemed to have chosen Robin as her favorite, also. There could actually be something genetic that bound them. Perhaps that’s what Linda’s mother used to mean when she’d say, mysteriously, “Blood will tell.” Linda had never had any brothers or sisters of her own. But when she was a child, and left to amuse herself while her mother was working, she pretended to have a little sister she named Allergina, a variation of the name on the label of one of her mother’s medicine bottles. Oh, all the mischief Allergina got them into! And all the sacred secrets Linda whispered only into her discreet, invisible ear: how much she missed her mother, away somewhere in her white uniform, caring for someone else’s child; how much she feared her father, who had no patience with children, real or imagined. It was Allergina who joined Linda in her banishment to the dark closet or her lonely bed, and who murmured, “Never mind, never mind, never mind,” until the punishment was over or Linda fell asleep. She was glad that Robin had the small but steady comfort of a real sister in her uncomfortable life.

  When Linda was younger, with both parents dead, she had sometimes used men in an effort to fill the absence of family in her own life. She would try to fall head-over-heels in love, so that sh
e’d become consumed by passion, the way other women she knew were consumed by their husbands and children, by the daily demands and pleasures of their households. Nothing so heartily willed ever lasted very long, though, and she began to look for something less thrilling, something more stable and permanent. Wright flowed conveniently into her life about then, into her modified needs. It wasn’t settling for less, she told herself, it was settling down. And they were happy, in a reliable and quiet way, during their brief time together.

  Linda had hoped that Robin would be a dividend of that solid union, that eventually she would come around to accepting Linda and even loving her. And maybe she would have, if Wright had lived. Even now, there were occasional moments of near-affection between them, when Robin was caught off her rigid guard by circumstance or Linda’s dogged determination. She tried to recall these rare instances at other times, when Robin was at her angry, insolent worst.

  Linda was ready to leave the house soon after Robin. She put the baby into her car seat in the back of the Mustang, and climbed in front and turned on the ignition. The car stalled, and one of the lights on the dashboard—the one marked “oil”—flickered on and off a few times before the engine finally turned over and the light went out. Now what? She’d just added a can of motor oil about a week ago, when she stopped at the service station to get gas, and the mechanic had poured some carburetor cleaner into the tank, to stop the backfiring. Maybe this was only a loose connection. She would have to ask Nathan about it later, if she remembered, but to be on the safe side she left the motor running while she carried Phoebe into the day-care center.

  At the club, Linda called out a cheery good morning to her impatient first class, and then put a Technotronic tape on, turning the volume way up. She preferred mellower music, played more softly, so that her instructions could be heard without her having to scream or bark them out. But the women only wanted this hard-driving stuff, and they were always after her to make it louder, as if they might be driven to further extremes of exertion by the mere magnitude of sound. “Let’s go, ladies! Burn it up, burn it out!” she cried over the frantic rhythms of “Pump up the Jam.” Linda did short stretches of the workout herself, to demonstrate both the moves and her oneness with her straining, grunting students. In between, she went from woman to woman to correct flaws of posture or form, or just to offer praise. It amazed her to realize that she could never work them too hard, that even when they seemed on the verge of collapse, they wanted more and more and more.

  At the end of this first session of the day, Linda was worn-out. The baby had been fretful during the night, probably because she was teething, and the only thing that seemed to calm her, for short stretches, was being nursed. Linda was still suffering the effects of that interrupted sleep. She retrieved her tape and wrapped a towel around her damp neck. She had a twenty-minute break between classes, and she decided to forgo a restorative shower in favor of looking for Nathan to ask him about that flickering light on her dashboard. But as she was leaving the exercise room, one of her students stopped her. She was probably the oldest woman in the group, a talent agent in her early fifties named Claire Winston, who never spoke above a stage whisper. It gave everything she said dramatic significance. “That was simply fabulous, Linda,” she breathed. “I really mean that.”

  “Thank you,” Linda said. She meant it, too; it was so rare that any of the women took the time to say something nice to her. It wasn’t because they weren’t perfectly nice themselves, but they were always in such a hurry—rushing off to their next physical torment or gratification, or to the locker room and then their own jobs.

  “Do you have a minute?” Claire Winston asked.

  “Sure,” Linda said, trying not to whisper back.

  “I have a friend, someone very big in the industry, who desperately needs a personal trainer.” She looked around her at the empty room, and lowered her voice even further. “I’d rather not mention her name around here. The thing is, I told her how fabulous you are, and she could see for herself what you’ve done for me, and well … you’re the one!”

  The woman said it as if Linda had just won the California lottery. Linda knew that one-on-one training paid very well, especially if you did it independently, off the Bod’s premises, but she could hardly handle her current workload and still be a rational, functioning mother. She didn’t want to burden Robin with extra babysitting, or be away from Phoebe any more than she already was. “I’m really flattered that you asked me, Mrs. Winston …” Linda began.

  “Please, it’s Claire,” Mrs. Winston said.

  “But I’m pretty overextended right now,” Linda continued. “Claire,” she added, after a beat, to soften her refusal.

  “She’s somebody special, Linda,” Mrs. Winston said in her urgent whisper. “And, strictly entre nous, she’s been through a very rough time recently. Very rough.” She waited a couple of seconds for that to sink in.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Linda said.

  “I knew you would be,” Mrs. Winston told her. “Look, let me just get a pencil and scribble her name and number down for you. The money would be fabulous, I assure you. You have a family, don’t you? A baby, somebody said? And you’d be making a real contribution.”

  Linda was trying to think of some other gracious way to say no when Claire Winston headed for the front desk to borrow paper and a pencil. And by the time Linda got around to looking for Nathan afterward, he was in the middle of teaching his salsa workout. Their schedules overlapped after that until the end of the day, when Linda had to rush off and pick Phoebe up at day care. She and Nathan only had time to wave at each other and blow kisses. And an old friend of his was coming in from out of town that night, so she wouldn’t see him then, either.

  The light on the dashboard didn’t flicker again on the way home, or the next morning as she drove to work. She was still going to mention it to Nathan, though, and she also wanted to tell him about the extra new job she’d agreed to take, against her original judgment. The night before, Robin had begun to nag her about a great TV she’d seen at the mall. Their set had been bought secondhand soon after they took the apartment, and it had played pretty well until recently, when everything, sound and picture, would suddenly sizzle and disappear in a field of staticky snow. Robin would bang on the set and fiddle with the indoor antenna until it all came back. But then it would happen again, usually in the middle of the same show. And when Nathan offered to look at it the other day, saying he’d once done a little TV repair on the side, he wasn’t able to fix it.

  “You could just charge it,” Robin advised Linda about the new set she’d seen. It was useless to try to explain to her that even charged purchases had to be paid for eventually, and with the added expense of compounded interest. “If you watched less TV, maybe it wouldn’t have burned out so fast,” Linda told her. “And maybe your grades would be a lot better, too.” That line of reasoning didn’t go over very well, any more than her follow-up argument that they might both be better off without television. Robin just growled something back, and jiggled the antenna harder until a piece of it broke off in her hand. Linda couldn’t help admitting, at least to herself, that the set was “crappy and old,” and that she, too, would miss the pleasant distraction from real life that it provided. She decided to call the woman Claire Winston had told her about, and see exactly what she had in mind.

  Someone with a heavy Spanish accent answered the phone, and soon after, Linda was connected with Cynthia Sterling. Unlike her friend, she spoke in a clear, vibrant voice, and she didn’t sound at all like someone in severe distress. Yes, she was looking for a trainer whose emphasis was on dance movement. But she was a very busy television producer with neither the time nor the inclination to come to a club. She was hoping for evening or weekend sessions at her own home, which she was sure could be arranged at their mutual convenience. And she was prepared to pay more than the going rate.

  “The problem is,” Linda said, in the wake of all that informat
ion, “I have a baby.”

  “I think Claire mentioned that. Is it a boy or a girl? How old?”

  “Actually,” Linda said, “I have two children, but one of them … well, it’s kind of complicated …” She trailed off and then began again. “Anyway, it’s, she’s a girl. Five months old, and I don’t have anyone to leave her with.”

  “Well, then bring her along,” Cynthia Sterling said. “She can’t take up too much room, can she?”

  As usual, Linda got the joke too late, and said, “Oh, no, she’s real little, and—”

  The other woman cut in. “It’ll be fine. Lupe, my housekeeper, will look after her for us. Shall we try this Saturday, at eleven?”

  And so it was settled. She wasn’t crazy about leaving Robin to her own devices any more than she had to, but maybe a new television set would keep her out of trouble while Linda and Phoebe were gone, the set they could only afford with Linda’s moonlighting. As she drove toward the Bod the next day, she allowed herself to dream of other things besides a working TV that some additional income could provide. She envisioned new summer wardrobes for herself and Robin. Dinner out together at a restaurant you didn’t have to drive through. And an assortment of those expensive, educational toys for the baby. She was still lost in her reverie of spending when she glanced at the dashboard and saw that the same red light, the one with the symbol for oil on it, was flickering again. This time it stayed on. If she tried to find a garage now, she’d be late for her eight o’clock class, and they probably couldn’t even do anything about it right away. She wished she had mentioned the problem to Nathan yesterday. Well, she would do it this morning, for sure.

  He was in the lobby of the club when she got there, leaning on the desk, talking to one of the blond receptionists, making her laugh. Linda had hardly ever seen her smile before. When Linda went up to them and told Nathan about the car, he said, “You didn’t keep on driving it, did you?” She nodded miserably and then followed him out to the parking lot, where they discovered together that the car wouldn’t start at all.