Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Linda fled.

  7 “We’re gonna miss your smiling face around here, kiddo,” Simonetti said, looking everywhere but at her face. Linda had come to the studio for her last paycheck and he held it in one hand and slapped it against the other while he talked to her, but he didn’t hand it over. She had a memory flash of her father doing something like that with a piece of candy; withholding, teasing. Did she ever get it?

  “I’m going to miss you, too,” Linda said with sweet insincerity. She had hated Simonetti from her first day at the Bayonne Fred Astaire’s. He was the one who hired her, on the recommendation of a mutual friend in the midtown New York City branch where she’d worked before. She lost that job when the building went residential and the studio folded.

  Simonetti had looked her over then, too, with the same kind of cruel scrutiny that made her feel graceless and conscious of all her physical flaws. “You’re too tall,” he said, and she slouched and shrank. He wanted to know if she could do something with her hair, go blonde maybe. They already had Iola, who was brunette. When she hesitated he took her on unchanged, indicating that they were desperate.

  Linda wasn’t beautiful. She had good skin and a cleft chin, but her nose was too short and a little broad, and she had an overbite. A favorite two-stepping client often pointed out that her eyes were her best feature and that her smile was nice. Ah, whose smile wasn’t nice?

  Once, when she’d turned down the advances of a drunk who’d wandered in during a get-acquainted open house, he told her that girls like her were a dime a dozen. “You have a cute ass; I’ll give you that,” he said. “But you’re nothing special. What’s your name?” he demanded, even though it was right there on the name badge pinned to her sweater. “Donna? Rhonda?” He was perilously close. “They’re all called Donna or Rhonda,” he said. “They all look like you.”

  When he became noisy and abusive and shouted that he didn’t have to crawl for pussy, Simonetti, convinced that he was not a likely prospect for even the one-month trial offer, threw him out.

  Iola, who was frugging with a sailor from the Naval Station, waved to Linda and rolled her eyes in sympathy. Later she said, “Creeps. Jesus. How do they all find us? We must be in the Yellow Pages under Victims.”

  He was drunk, of course, and he was a creep, but Linda couldn’t help feeling diminished by his account of her. It confirmed what she had always suspected, that she was ordinary in a frightening, anonymous way. Even the word “victim” that Iola had used ironically was accurate. Whenever Linda read an article in the newspaper about the unidentified body of a young woman found in the woods somewhere, or dragged from a river, she felt a disturbing affinity.

  The check had disappeared and Simonetti had his arm around her. “Your regulars will be heartsick,” he said. She wondered which pocket held the check. But she wasn’t going to beg for it; she’d just wait it out. At least he wasn’t dangerous in a sexual sense. When she’d first started working there, she guessed she’d be fighting him off constantly, and would probably get fired for not giving in. But it was all innuendo with Simonetti, and no real action. He leered, patted, threatened, and made funny sucking noises, and that was it.

  Iola tried to figure him out. “I don’t think he’s queer,” she said, “but maybe he’s one of those weirdos that can only get it off against the side of a building or in his mother’s pocketbook.”

  Whatever the reason, they were relieved. There was enough trouble with some of the clients. One of them they’d nicknamed Supercreep, but it was like whistling in the dark. They were really afraid of him. He always came to the studio well-dressed, with slicked-down hair and heavily scented aftershave, and he was polite to the point of formality. He danced like a mechanical man with too few gears for a variety of movement. And he made the same stiff conversation with his instructor during each lesson, as if they had just met for the first time. Sometimes, not always, he spoke with a foreign accent no one could place. If anyone asked where he was from, he only smiled and shut his eyes in a peculiar way, like a lizard.

  Simonetti said that he couldn’t act on their complaints. So the guy wasn’t Robert Redford. As far as he could see, he was still a perfect gent.

  “Maybe you’d better get your eyes checked,” Iola told him.

  “Okay, what does he do?” he asked. “Does he cop feels? Does he use rough language?”

  “You,” Iola said, disgusted. “If the Boston Strangler boogied in here, you’d think it was Prince Charles.” She convinced Simonetti to at least spread Supercreep’s lessons around, so he wouldn’t get a fix on any one of the girls.

  But he did, anyway, on Linda. He hung around the building for hours until she left, and walked just behind her to the bus stop, saying some more inane things in his robot’s voice. “I believe we are in for bad weather,” he’d say. “Do you enjoy living in New Jersey?”

  After a few days, his conversation became more personal. “I admired your blouse today. Did your boyfriend buy it for you? You must have plenty of boyfriends.” From there it was only a skip and a jump to: “Does your boyfriend put it in you when you are wearing that blouse? I would like to put it in you.” Etc. etc. etc.

  Sometimes, when he wasn’t there, she suspected that he was close by but not making himself known to her. And she began to get telephone calls in the middle of the night. At first there was the usual breathing, and then … humming. Not a tune or anything, just the menacing humming sound an insect might make before diving for the kill. Linda was terrified.

  Simonetti said she read too many books. The guy was harmless, all talk. Iola suspected Simonetti had signed him up for a Lifetime Membership. “Maybe even with a clause for the afterlife,” she said.

  Linda believed she was going to be killed. Unidentified body of young woman between the ages of … Mutilated beyond … Dental charts necessary for … She realized that she had not been to a dentist for over two years.

  Instead of being murdered, she ended up getting married. Not to Supercreep, of course, but to Wright, who was walking past the bus stop one evening when she was sure she was being followed. It was raining and the visibility was very poor. Headlights appeared occasionally in the foggy distance, with the eerie glow of UFO’s. But the bus didn’t come. Did she only imagine she heard a humming sound? Oh, God, were those footsteps? The footsteps grew stronger and closer, and Wright appeared under the streetlight, a reasonable-looking man with his hands in the pockets of his bomber jacket. She rushed over to him and touched his sleeve. “Please,” she said. “Could I walk with you?”

  What she remembers best is that, as she took his arm, he tensed the muscles in it. She thought it was to show off a little, and to assure her of his protection, and that it was a lovely and primitive thing to do.

  Later, in bed one night, he confessed that it had been from the joy of being touched that way. And he reviewed the scene with obvious pleasure. “How did you know I wasn’t a killer, too?” he said, smiling.

  “Well, I’ve got to go,” she told Simonetti. “I have a lot of packing to do.”

  “Am I stopping you?” he asked.

  “Come on,” Linda said, trying to sound equally playful.

  “You know,” Simonetti said. “It’s too bad that you and me never, you know, got together.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Listen, drop me a line when you get there. I’ll send you a letter of recommendation. We got a lot of branches on the Coast. Hey, you’ll probably meet producers, directors, all the stars of stage and screen! Our little Linda.”

  Just as she was about to break down, to ask outright for her money, he lost interest. His eyes went blank and sorrowful, and he put his hand absently into his breast pocket and removed the check.

  Iola hugged Linda and gave her a going-away present. “Open it later,” she said. “It’s only a little something. Just don’t forget to use it.”

  At suppertime, Linda remembered the present and brought it to the kitchen table. There was a box of note-paper inside
, each page imprinted with a floral border and a different saying. Thinkin’ of ya. Better late than never! Just a little love note. I’m blue for you.

  Dear Iola.

  Hi! I really am thinking of you, and I’m glad for a chance to use this adorable stationery. So far we are having a lovely trip, with many side visits to places of interest. Robin and I are enjoying …

  Slowly Linda became aware again of Robin sitting opposite her at the table, stony with contempt. So she picked up her fork and began to eat.

  8 Iowa, which is heavily agricultural, was appropriately colored green on the map in Robin’s old geography book. Linda was pleased to note that California was blue.

  On the Exxon road maps, all the states had been neutralized to a noncommittal white. The mechanic, a stocky man in coveralls, wiped his grease-coated hands on a greasy rag. “You picked this summer to drive to the Coast?” he said. “Oh, lady. What are you, an Arab?”

  “I didn’t pick it, actually,” Linda said. “It just worked out that way.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, good luck to you, then. You may have to sell a pint of blood to get a gallon of gas on the way. You may end up living in Timbuktu.”

  “Oh, no. I have to—”

  “So, why don’t you fly?”

  “I guess I’ll need a car once I get there, won’t I? And as long as I’m going, I thought I ought to see America on the way. Maybe this will be my last chance.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t be disappointed. An awful lot of it looks like Jersey,” he said. Then he bent to the maps opened across the desk in the station office and pointed with one blackened finger to the route she would take.

  Linda had a notebook and pen ready. She was prepared for an onslaught of highway numbers and city names she would have to scribble quickly in a makeshift shorthand.

  The mechanic picked up a yellow highlighting marker and began to trace a crawling line across the states. “You pick up Interstate 80 right here, and you take it all the way through,” he said. “If you don’t get off, you can’t get lost. You could drive this baby blindfolded.”

  Was that it? Linda looked at him and then back at her notebook. She had written the number 80 at the top of the page, and nothing else under it. The road he’d indicated was practically a straight horizontal line. They would shoot across America like a guided missile, without seeing anything of beauty or interest. She felt very disappointed, and wondered if this was the best way to go, or simply the fastest. But she was too shy to ask him. Outside, another man pumped gas, and behind him, in the garage, two cars were elevated on pneumatic lifts. She was probably keeping the mechanic from his real work. She wrote a series of diminishing 80’s down the whole page. Finally she closed the notebook and, looking over his shoulder again, read the wonderful names of cities she’d never visited: Sandusky, Toledo, Elkhart … They were going to see the country. They’d only travel by daylight, and as soon as she was tired of driving they’d stop at a motel and rest for the night. While she was packing that morning, she’d asked Robin if there was anything special she’d like to see en route. Blink. Shrug.

  Linda had never taken any trips when she was a child, but a few people she knew did, and other children came to school with accordion folders that opened at a finger flip into a cascade of picture postcards that reached the floor. Lake views, mountain views, historical battle sites, and museum villages. Wineries, breweries, glass-blowing plants, and caverns. The last intrigued Linda the most. Those stalagmites and stalactites, and the little boat you traveled in underground, like the one in the Tunnel of Love at the Slatesville amusement park. She’d get a guidebook or two to places of interest and see if she and Robin could visit any caverns on their way west.

  “Say, Interstate 80 goes through Davenport,” the mechanic said. “I have a brother-in-law there with a Gulf station. Stop in, why don’t you, and say hello from Don and Mickey.”

  She was opening her notebook again to write it down, but he had gone back to marking her route and she realized that he’d only been kidding.

  But now she knew his name was Don, and Mickey was probably his wife. At night he went home and made love to her, leaving indelible hand prints all over her body and the sheets.

  Linda often imagined the intimacy that took place between people she hardly knew. She wondered if they fell on each other with joyous shouts or only ground out a sad little spiral of desire. This was not mere curiosity, or the restlessness of her own unsatisfied lust, although that was part of it. Wright had been ardent, and she had responded. Afterward he often said, “That was good, wasn’t it?” She always answered, “Yes,” without thinking. Was there another possible answer to that question? She suspected that there was much more to sex, though, or should be, some glorious epiphany she had never experienced with Wright, or the few lovers she’d had before him. Maybe it was a rare privilege, like beauty or great wealth, and given only to certain chosen people. Once, she read a novel in which the heroine cried out in the throes of passion, “Oh, dear God! Oh, love, oh, murder me!” Linda believed instantly in such extremes of ardor; no one could have made that up.

  The mechanic folded the road maps and gave her the bill for the tuneup on the Maverick. He said it was shipshape now, with new sparks and brake linings, and he wished her a good trip, if she ever got there, and a nice day.

  Robin packed her things in a tan imitation-leather suitcase that had belonged to her father. It was frayed white at all its corners. He might have used this same suitcase on the honeymoon he’d taken with her mother. They went to Niagara Falls, where it had rained all the time.

  She was packing as little as possible, in preparation for the other, real trip. She had no intention of staying too long with her father’s family in Iowa. They had not spoken to him for years. It had something to do with her mother and herself, but he was unable or unwilling to discuss the details with her, and referred to the situation as a falling-out.

  When she was a little younger, Robin wondered if the estrangement came about because she had been born a girl. Her father’s family were farmers who raised corn and oats, and farmers counted on male children to work the fields. She guessed they were like those Spartans in her social studies book last year, who were bitterly disappointed at the births of females. But at least the farm country was low and flat, without mountain peaks from which men in overalls and straw hats could hurl helpless baby girls.

  Once they got to Iowa, she’d have to get Linda to give her some of that money she kept talking about leaving in trust for Robin with her grandfather and aunt. Then she would be able to start out on her mission to find her mother, and avenge her father.

  While Robin was still packing, Linda came home from the gas station, foaming at the mouth about reconstructed Quaker villages and underground caves, and how it was really important to see America first. What an asshole.

  A few minutes later Ginger and Ray came over to take what they wanted from the stuff Robin was going to leave behind. Ray brought her some of the antibiotic capsules he’d been given by a dermatologist because of his acne. The place where he’d tattooed her had become infected, despite their careful prophylactic use of alcohol. At night she felt slightly feverish and the heart oozed and festered. It was so misshapen now, it might have been drawn by a very little kid with an unsteady hand, and it appeared to be much larger than the day they’d done it.

  Linda went to the door to let them in. “Your friends are here, Robin!” she called out cheerfully, as if they were all characters on The Brady Bunch.

  Robin didn’t answer. She had made two piles of discards at the foot of her bed. They were mostly records and clothing that she still liked but could not bring with her if she intended to travel light later on. Now she looked at them and tried to harden herself against forfeiture.

  Ginger and Ray came in and went right to the booty. Ray began shuffling through the albums as if this was Disco Discounts, and Ginger moved to the mirror, holding a pink plaid shirt against her ample chest. When she smiled at
her own reflection, Robin felt instant remorse. It was a nice shirt, and in good condition. It was probably her favorite shirt. But Ginger was already stuffing it into a paper sack she had brought with her. Then she took off her own blouse to try on another one of Robin’s. She was wearing a deeply cut, flesh-colored bra.

  Robin was glad that she didn’t have breasts like Ginger’s. Her own development had been much slower and less ambitious, and she regretted even that modest growth, and mourned her old flat and uncomplicated body.

  Ray took all the records for himself, and Ginger most of the clothing, and they quarreled over a strange electrical sculpture Linda had bought for Robin as a thirteenth-birthday present a couple of months before. It looked like a little tree of limp plastic spaghetti, but when you plugged it in, it lit up and colored liquid light moved through the branches in theatrical spasms.

  Ray teased Robin about going to Iowa. He kept calling it I-o-way, with an inflection and twang that got on her nerves. She finally said, “Just shut up about it, okay? I’m not staying there. I’m not staying with them.”

  “So what will you do?” Ginger asked, combing her hair with her fingers. She had put her own blouse into the sack and was wearing Robin’s.

  “I don’t know,” Robin said, her secret plan as bright and burning inside her as the liquid in the tree lamp. For the first time she felt desperately eager to share it with someone. But wisdom quickly overcame impulse. Saying it aloud might diminish it, turn it into melodrama or simple childish fantasy. And she didn’t trust Ray very much, or Ginger either, for that matter. In dumb-eyed reverence, she always told him everything.

  “I’ll go somewhere,” Robin said. “I’ll get a job.”

  Ray hooted. “Who’d hire you?” he said, and she wished she could take her records back. They were worth plenty of money. Her father had been generous with money; he gave her anything she wanted.