Once, when Linda was a young girl, a neighbor adopted a dog from the local pound. The dog was about five years old and was named Rusty, which the neighbor decided didn’t suit him. She wanted to call him Prince instead, but she knew that a mature dog wouldn’t answer to a new name just like that. So she changed his name a little bit every few days. She called him “Dusty” first, which was so similar to “Rusty” he came running without hesitation. A couple of days later he became “Dustin,” and then, after that, “Justin.” Linda couldn’t remember exactly how they ever got to Prince, but she was positive it took weeks, and that soon afterward the dog was hit by a bus and killed while running across the road in response to his final name. There really wasn’t any connection between that awful story and what Cynthia had called the baby, although Linda was sure Robin would have thought of one, and, somehow, recalling it now made her unreasonably uneasy.
Robin had circumnavigated the parking lot so many times Linda was getting a little carsick. She’d memorized all the specials in the supermarket window and had completely forgotten her own shopping list. The Caprice was still stuck in orbit, too, and its horn tooted a little melodic greeting when it went by this time. “Honk back,” Linda told Robin. “It’s only friendly.”
“That dweeb,” Robin said, without complying. “He’s the one I told you about, the one that collects stamps or dead butterflies or something.” She had never told her anything of the sort. “I think his dad just got out of jail,” she added, with a shifty little side-glance at Linda.
Linda refused to take the bait. “Why don’t you just concentrate on what you’re doing?” she said.
“Why don’t you?” Robin said, one of her typically empty and insolent responses.
“Don’t be fresh,” Linda told her.
“Don’t you be fresh,” Robin retorted. And then, murmuring so low Linda could barely hear her, she said, “Slut.”
“That’s it, Robin,” Linda announced. “Pull over. Let’s go! Right now!”
“What did I do?” Robin said. “I didn’t do anything!”
She went right on driving, and Linda wished the 88 was equipped with dual controls, like the cars they’d used back at the Ben Hur Driving School in Newark. When she’d taken her own futile lessons there, the instructor kept slamming on his set of brakes to keep their car from colliding with other cars and lampposts and trees. Now Linda wanted to put an end to this monotonous ride and to Robin’s assumed command of the car and their lives. She pumped her foot furiously against the floor mat, but Robin only speeded up a little in defiance. “Slow down!” Linda said. “Do you hear me?”
“Did somebody say something?” Robin said.
“Young lady, you are in deep trouble!” Linda cried.
“Blah, blah, blah,” said Robin, leaning forward as she stepped up the speed even more.
“You are grounded!” Linda shouted, thinking what an odd thing it was to say when they appeared to be flying. Now things were truly whizzing by, and she felt the same sort of panic she’d felt watching the whirl and plunge of those terrible amusement-park rides. When Robin careened around a corner of the lot, the whole car shook and seemed to lean perilously to one side. Linda kept yelling for her to stop, and when that didn’t work she began to simply scream. Each time they sped past the other car, its driver and passenger blurred into a single two-headed, openmouthed creature. Her screams might have been coming from them, or from one or both of the cars’ horns, or from the overwrought engine of the 88 as Robin took it to its limits. But over all the compounded noise, Linda could distinctly hear Robin yelling, “Linda, I can’t! It’s stuck! Oh, shit, fuck! Linda, help me! Help!” Linda looked down and saw Robin’s black-painted toenails splayed against the accelerator. “The brake, the brake! Use the brake!” she cried, and when she looked up again, Mike, Dan, the man in the Caprice, was zooming toward her, staring with an intensity she had only seen before in the face of a lover closing in for a kiss. And as if he were a lover, she shut her eyes against the exquisite moment of impact.
The world seemed to come back into focus as suddenly as it had vanished. Linda was lying alone across the front seat of the car, with her feet through the open door, and the dashboard hanging above her head, which ached fiercely. The radio was still playing—some heavy-metal number pulsed diligently near her ear—but whoever was screaming had considerately moved away, so that sound, at least, was muted and bearable. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she heard someone say. “Don’t move,” someone else warned, and she almost laughed at the notion of moving, bringing a searing pain to her ribs. “Robin?” she inquired.
A man leaned in over her. “It’s okay, they’re coming,” he said mysteriously. And then the screaming turned out to be a siren that kept growing louder before it stopped abruptly on an agonized high note, as if someone had strangled the screamer.
In the emergency room, they crowded around her and asked her name, and did she know where she was and who the President was. Linda confessed that she hadn’t voted for him, but that wasn’t what they wanted to know. Her left leg had fallen asleep, and her mouth tasted as if she’d been sucking on pennies. When she tried to tell them that, they pricked her with needles and set up an IV. And when they turned her head to one side, she saw that the man from the Caprice was lying on an adjacent gurney, looking back at her with his crinkly green eyes—well, one eye, anyway, since the other one was swollen shut. “Listen … sorry, so sorry …” she murmured.
“You stupid bitch, I’m going to sue your ass off,” he said loudly and clearly, just before someone yanked a curtain closed between them.
Linda woke again in the recovery room, to somebody else’s moaning. Her own pain was everywhere, but it was blunted, like a memory of pain. A nurse told her where she was and that she was doing just fine. The leg had needed surgery, but the arm was a clean break and easy to set. Linda saw the casts then—right arm, left leg—and felt their onerous weight. With her free hand, she traced her inflated mouth; her nose, which seemed stuffed but intact; and the tightly taped ribs. “Robin?” she said thickly, and the nurse said, “Uh-uh, dearie, I’m Paula.” It was much too much trouble to explain, so Linda croaked, “Hi. Linda,” right before she faded out again.
And then she was in another, smaller room, with an old woman lying in a bed across from her, watching television. Robin was there, too, her round pale face hovering above Linda’s like a full moon. “You okay, Linda?” she whispered. “I’m really, really sorry. But it wasn’t my fault, I swear. It was an accident.”
“How are you?” Linda asked through her rubber lips.
“Huh? Fine, I guess,” Robin said. “Like my knees and elbows are scraped and stuff, that’s all. I got thrown out of the car the minute we hit.”
“Seat belt,” Linda said.
“Yeah, I guess I wasn’t wearing mine.”
“The other car?”
“Totaled, just like ours. But you were hurt the worst.” She said it almost proudly. “You know, your leg and your arm and everything. They think your head’s okay, though.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Late. Like almost nighttime.”
“Phoebe!” Linda gasped.
“It’s okay, don’t worry. I called Ms. Rich … I called Cynthia and told her. She’s coming right over.”
Before Cynthia showed up, though, Nathan did. He was supposed to be in San Diego, wasn’t he? Linda wondered how he knew what had happened. She was sure Robin wouldn’t have bothered to inform him, and she did seem as surprised to see him as Linda was. As Robin retreated to a corner of the room, Nathan came to Linda’s bedside and stared down at her. “Holy shit,” he said softly. Then he bent and kissed her forehead and her fingers, arching his body carefully away from hers. Linda attempted something like a smile. “Right,” she said.
“What?” Nathan asked. “No, don’t try and talk now, mi vida. Just rest.”
“You were right,” she said.
“Yeah, I know, but wh
o wants to be right all the time?”
“You,” she said.
“Shhh,” he told her.
“Supposed to be … in San Diego.”
“I missed you, so I came home early.”
“But how did you …”
“You mean, how did I find out? I got worried about the two of you, so I drove over to the market where you said you were going.”
He was probably planning to heckle her a little, to give unsolicited advice, to take over.
“I got there maybe twenty minutes after it happened,” he said. “It looked like a war zone—glass, oil, foam, the works. The tow trucks were trying to separate the cars and hook them up. One of the guys called on his radio to find out where they took you. I figured the morgue, myself. I’ve been downstairs for hours, they wouldn’t let me up here until now.” He turned toward Robin, “So, how are you doing there, Andretti?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Robin mumbled.
“I’ll bet,” Nathan said.
“Nobody asked you—” Robin began belligerently, and then stopped when she saw that Linda’s eyes had filled with tears.
“Hey,” Nathan said, “hey, we’re not really fighting.” He reached out and grabbed Robin and pulled her against his side. She struggled to get away, but he held her firmly by the shoulder. “See?” Nathan said. “Pals!”
“It’s not th-that,” Linda said, starting to sob.
“Are you in pain, Lindy?” he asked. “I’ll go get the nurse.”
“No,” she blubbered, “no!” even though the pain was asserting itself again.
“Is it the car, then?” he said. “But you’ve got insurance, right? And you never liked that old heap, anyway, remember? Listen, sweetheart, everything’s going to be okay, I promise you.”
How could he say that? Everything in the world was wrong. The pain was becoming more and more demanding, and an itch was starting to crawl somewhere under the cast on her leg. How was she going to dance or walk, or do anything at all? How was she going to earn a living? And Robin’s school was going to reopen before long—who would take care of Phoebe? God, when had she nursed her last? She realized that her swollen breasts were making their own minor contribution to her body’s major discomfort.
A nurse came into the room and hustled Nathan and Robin out. She gave Linda a shot for the pain, checked her IV and her catheter, and left. The woman in the other bed spoke for the first time since Linda arrived. “Is that your husband?” she asked.
“No,” Linda said. “Just a friend.”
“Some friend,” the woman said. “He looks exactly like Rudolph Valentino. You wouldn’t remember him.”
“Not personally,” Linda said.
“He died young. In a hospital,” the woman told her.
“Mmm,” Linda said, politely. She was glad when Nathan, and then Robin, came in again. A moment later, Cynthia arrived, too, with an armful of flowers.
“Oh, my,” she said as she approached Linda’s bed. “How does the other guy look?”
“Well, his eye was a little swollen—” Linda began, but Cynthia waved the flowers at Robin, and said, “Be a love and get a vase for these, will you?”
Robin gave Cynthia her darkest look, but she grabbed the flowers, shaking a few petals loose in the process, and marched out of the room.
“For I am born to tame you, Kate!” Cynthia called after her.
“It’s Robin,” Linda said. By then Cynthia and Nathan were eyeing one another critically across Linda’s bed, and the woman in the other bed had shut off her television set and was observing them all, as if they were a spin-off of the show she’d been watching.
“Where’s the baby?” Linda asked Cynthia.
“Off in dreamland, where you should probably be, too.”
“Linda needs to feed her,” Nathan said.
“She’s been fed,” Cynthia answered. “She’s perfectly safe and sound and happy. Listen, Linda, we’ll get you a breast pump, and you’ll feel a lot more comfortable. I’m going to see someone in charge and find out what’s going on with you, anyway. Maybe we can get you transferred to Cedars. I know the chief of orthopedics there.”
“Maybe she wants to stay here,” Nathan said.
“I beg your pardon,” Cynthia said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Oh, sorry,” Linda said, as if she were a negligent hostess at a cocktail party. “Cynthia … Nathan.” The painkiller was starting to take effect and she was too woozy to deal with their last names. She could hardly remember them anyway. Robin came in and took a neutral position at the foot of the bed, clutching a urinal crammed with Cynthia’s flowers, and Linda felt like Snow White in her glass coffin, surrounded by the grieving dwarfs. Except that the people around her bed seemed more irritable than sad. A bell began chiming for visitors to leave. Linda heard it dimly, but gratefully, through the cotton batting of her brain.
After the goodbyes, Nathan said, “Come on, Robin, I’ll drive you home,” and Cynthia said, “I’ll do it. She’s sleeping at my place tonight.” “I am not,” Robin said. Cynthia said something back, and Nathan answered her, and then they all shuffled out, murmuring disagreeably among themselves.
Linda was almost asleep when she felt a presence nearby. She opened her eyes and saw Cynthia leaning over her. “Good God, Linda,” she said, “where did you find macho man—at a border check?” Linda was still trying to make proper sense of that when Cynthia added, “Don’t you worry about anything, sweetie. Just concentrate on getting well. Little Bebe is in good hands.”
Linda struggled to stay conscious long enough to answer. “The name … is … Rusty,” she said, and then gave herself back to the darkness.
18
Dioramas
ROBIN GOT AWAY WITH sleeping at the apartment alone the first night after the accident. She had told that witch, who’d won the tug of war with Nathan over who would drive her home from the hospital, that she was going to stay with her best friend, Lucy Thompson, that it was all arranged. Cynthia wasn’t as gullible as Linda, though. She asked a lot of nosy questions, and she made Robin take a card with her telephone number printed on it, in the event of a change of plans. Then, after watching Robin pack an overnight bag, she insisted on driving her to the Thompsons’, too. Robin had to think of a way to keep Cynthia from walking her inside, like a police escort, because she’d given her a phony address a couple of blocks from Lucy’s house. When they got there, Robin ran out of the car, yelling, “Thanks a lot! Goodbye!” But Cynthia didn’t drive away, as Robin had counted on her doing. She stayed right there with her headlights on and the motor running, and Robin could feel those eagle eyes on her back as she went up the walkway of a strange house and knocked lightly on the front door. Somebody on the other side started fumbling with the locks, calling out in a high, shaky voice, “Who’s there? Who is it? What do you want?” Robin waved Cynthia away, muttering, “Go, just go already,” but the car didn’t move, and when the door of the house finally opened, revealing a little old lady in a pink bathrobe, Robin pushed her way inside, slamming the door shut behind her.
“Help! Police!” the old lady screeched, backing up against a wall, where a shelf filled with knickknacks shook and clattered. “Go away! I have no money! Don’t hurt me, don’t kill me!”
“Take it easy, will you,” Robin said, peeking through the Venetian blind at Cynthia’s departing Porsche. “I’m leaving right now, okay? I made a mistake, okay? This is the wrong house.”
But the old bag was still going like a siren as Robin fled through the same door she’d come in. Without looking back, she walked swiftly away from the house and around the corner. There was no one out on the street, but she slowed down, trying to look nonchalant, as if she belonged there, as if she was an ordinary person on her way home. Before she knew it, she was in front of the Thompsons’ house. All the lights were on inside, and the station wagon was in the driveway. Without thinking about it, Robin crept up the little strip of side lawn and, standing on ti
ptoe between two bottlebrush trees, looked in through the kitchen window. She was instantly reminded of those dioramas she used to make in elementary school, to show how the Pilgrims or the Indians used to live. Making a scene inside a shoebox stood on its side had been one of the few school assignments Robin ever willingly did. It was kind of fun gathering up pieces of her old doll-house furniture, and tearing bits of tinfoil for mirrors, or red cellophane for the flames in a fireplace or campfire. Once she even went so far as to make a little cardboard book for the father of the Pilgrim family to read by candlelight as he sat at the table, smoking his cardboard pipe. And now there was Mr. Thompson, in the blue-white flourescent glow of his kitchen, sitting alone at the table. He wasn’t reading a book or smoking a pipe, though. He sat very still, with his head in his hands, staring at the floral pattern of the plastic tablecloth. While Robin watched, as raptly as she usually watched television, he removed one of his shoes, rubbed his foot as if it ached, and then put the shoe back on and rested his head in his hands again. The second hand on the wall clock crawled slowly around the numbers. Robin wished Lucy would come into the room. She had seen her only once since school let out, at the mall, surrounded by other kids. She’d looked in Robin’s direction, and Robin could swear Lucy saw her, but then she turned quickly away and led her new pack of buddies into a store. Who cares? Robin had told herself. Good riddance. She didn’t need a friend who blamed her for every stupid thing that happened in the world. Robin hung out sometimes with other kids, too, from a much faster crowd. Most of them were having sex, or said they were, and Robin didn’t let on that she was a virgin, a freak who’d never even made out with anybody except, once in a while, herself. But she didn’t get a lot of their private references and jokes, and she began to feel like an outsider again. One night she went to a party where there were no parents around and plenty of pot and booze, and where an older boy named Richie, who she and Lucy used to drool over in the halls at school, massaged her breasts and swabbed out her mouth with his tongue. It felt surprisingly good, but then he got sick and passed out, and she had no one to tell about any of it afterward, which made it seem sort of pointless.
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