Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Robin’s teeth were bared, the way Prince’s had been that day Mrs. Piner beat him with the broom, and her mouth was quivering. “I didn’t ask you to,” she said evenly. “I didn’t ask you to do anything.”

  Linda became aware of her own mouth’s hard and trembling set. Slowly she relaxed it. “You didn’t,” she admitted. She sat down at the edge of the bed, weary. “Okay, I take that part back. But not the other. Just human decency is all I’m talking about. Why can’t you be pleasant to me? What did I ever do to you?”

  Robin didn’t answer. She turned away again to put on her pajama top. Linda saw what the thing on her back was.

  “Who did that?” she asked. “Was it like a secret initiation? It’s not infected, is it?”

  “No. It’s better.”

  Linda said, “All right, then. Okay.” She went back to the bathroom, which was filled with steam, and she shut off the shower. Her nightgown was damp, but she put it on anyway, and it clung to her breasts and between her legs. She didn’t even brush her teeth. It would have required energy she could not call up.

  When she came into the bedroom, Robin was already under the green blankets. “Do you mind if I shut off the air conditioner?” Linda asked. “I don’t know why, but I’m cold.” Robin mumbled something and Linda pushed the switch. The quiet was profound. She turned off the lamp and got into bed. The drapes were open a little and colored lights from Donnie’s Adventureland were reflected on the wall behind their heads. They lay cautiously apart, acutely aware of one another, like lovers who have quarreled and are still burdened by unused passion.

  It was the caverns that had upset them both, Linda thought. They would probably have been better off going to the winery. In her own interior darkness, cells divided silently and without permission. It was the caverns and their lousy coming attractions of death, their promise of consummate loneliness. Then why did we have to be so lonely while we were still here? Restless, she turned from side to side, but with exquisite care not to touch or jostle Robin, who did not move at all.

  12 “What do we have to stop here for?” Robin asked, as they pulled up to the curb.

  “Because these are my friends,” Linda said. “And I want to visit them. I’d think you’d be glad for a change of scene yourself, glad to be in someone’s home for once, after all this time on the road.”

  “They’re not my friends,” Robin said.

  True enough, Linda supposed, and for that matter, they weren’t actually hers, either. Or hadn’t been for years. She’d first had the idea of looking them up while she and Robin were having lunch in New Carlisle, Indiana. Linda was sipping iced tea and trying to remember if she had packed her high-school yearbook, when she suddenly thought of Sally McKenna, who had graduated with her, and who had married a boy named Rod. They were married on Prom night and then went directly to Indiana, where Rod had a job waiting for him with the telephone company. His uncle, who was a personnel supervisor, had arranged it.

  Linda remembered them mainly because the town they had moved to in Indiana was called La Porte, the same name as the assistant principal’s at Slatesville High. And here Linda was, in Indiana, too. But what was Rod’s last name? Jergen? Justin? Something like that. It started with a J anyway. She opened the Exxon map and found that La Porte wasn’t very far from where they were, less than fifteen miles away. “I’ll be right back,” she told Robin, and went to the telephone books in the rear of the diner. She flipped through the pages. Jaeckel, that was it! The kids used to call him Dr. Jekyll, and his best friend, Bobby Masterson, Mr. Hyde. They did a little routine where Rod pretended to drink a potion and Bobby slowly turned into a monster. Linda never thought it was very funny, but they used to crack everyone else up, including the teachers.

  Sure enough, there he was in the telephone book—Rodney A. Jaeckel, living at 2119 Skylark Lane. Robin was staring at her, so Linda waved and pantomimed that she was going to make a telephone call. The line was busy—it was busy for almost ten minutes. Linda didn’t give up; it would be interesting to see what had happened to Sally and Rod.

  For one thing, they’d had children. When Linda got through at last, a child answered the phone, screaming hello, and a baby could be heard, too. A woman yelled, “Ask who it is, Candy!” Maybe she said Sandy. Or Andy. It was hard to tell because the child was breathing harder than Supercreep used to, right into the receiver.

  “Who is it?” the child shrieked.

  “Linda. Linda Reis—Linda Camisko.”

  “Who is it now?” the woman called from a distance.

  “Nabisco!” the child answered, again at glass-shattering volume, and then dropped or threw the phone to the floor.

  Sally picked it up. She sounded angry. “Who is this?” she demanded.

  At first she didn’t remember Linda. How could she, after all these years? And Linda had been pretty quiet in high school, not very outgoing. But after a while Sally said, “Wait a minute. Did you have reddish hair?”

  “No,” Linda said. “Sort of a medium brown.”

  “I think I know who you are,” Sally insisted. “Did you have Pearsall for Home Ec?”

  “Yes!” Linda said. “I did!”

  Sally laughed. “Do you remember when that jerk, Laura Hopewell, set fire to the dish towel?”

  Linda didn’t—she could hardly place Laura Hopewell—but she laughed also and said, “I think so.”

  They talked for a while after that about other kids who’d graduated with them, finding no common ground. There was an uneasy pause and then Sally asked what Linda was doing in Indiana.

  “Driving through, actually,” Linda said. “The amazing thing is, I’m not very far away right now.”

  There was another pause, and finally Sally said, “I guess you can come over for a little while, if you want to.”

  Linda thanked her for the invitation, and accepted.

  When she came back to the table, she saw that Robin had made confetti out of several paper napkins. She had also been lighting matches in Linda’s absence. About ten burnt ones were lying in the ashtray and there was a hovering stench of sulphur. “Are you playing with matches, Robin?” Linda asked.

  “No,” Robin answered, avoiding eye contact. “They were here from before.”

  Since one match was still smoking, Linda knew she had a strong argument, but decided not to use it. She was looking forward to visiting Sally and wanted to persuade Robin into some degree of conviviality. It would be marvelous to talk to someone her own age again. Although she and Sally had not had an intimate friendship in high school, there was a natural intimacy among all women these days, and Linda eagerly considered the luxury of having a confidante. Sally was married, and had a family, the experience that Linda always imagined would confer automatic wisdom. She herself had not been married long enough to find out. Maybe Sally could tell her what to do. At least she would listen with a sympathetic ear.

  Skylark Lane was a street of identical hi-ranch houses. There was a Chevy station wagon in the driveway at 2119, and the front lawn was littered with toys.

  Linda would not have recognized Sally. She had gained thirty or forty pounds during the last eight years. She greeted Linda speculatively, as if she had never seen her before. Linda wondered if she had changed radically, too.

  There were more toys in the living room, in direct counterpoint to the three rifles mounted on the wall above the fireplace. Were they loaded? Linda remembered that Rod had been a moody, short-tempered boy.

  The baby had a cold. It lay in a playpen in the middle of the room, inhaling and exhaling the same green globule of snot, and stared at the strangers. It was bald and naked, except for a diaper and rubber pants. There was a faint rash across its tiny tapered chest, and the visible ribs pulsed as steadily as a digital clock. Linda couldn’t decide if the baby was a boy or a girl. She suspected that Sally would be insulted if she asked. People usually were if you didn’t recognize the sex of their children. “Don’t you just love them when they’re little
like that?” Linda said to Robin, who snorted and went to the fireplace to gaze up at the rifles. “Well, hello there,” Linda said to the baby. “What’s your name?” hoping someone else would answer and give her a clue.

  “It’s my baby,” the older child said from the doorway. She was a girl and her name was Bambi. Her piercing voice on the telephone had not prepared Linda for her astonishing beauty. Her eyes were huge and so heavily fringed she appeared drugged. Her face was small, even for that delicate neck, and it had the sweet, soft-chinned shape of a cat’s. Who did she look like? Linda pictured Rod, a kind of bird-faced teenager, with ears like a loving cup’s. And Sally wasn’t pretty, not now, or back in high school when she was younger and slim. “My baby,” Bambi said again, coming closer. She pinched Linda’s leg and ran out of the room.

  “That kid needs to be murdered,” Sally said. Then she sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. Linda sat next to her, and Robin collapsed into a chair. “Do you want some coffee or anything?” Sally asked.

  Linda would have liked a cup of coffee, but she felt the offer was perfunctory, so she said, “No, thank you, we just had lunch. We’re stuffed to the gills.” After that she sat there, searching her head for something casual to say, something that would lead them into a mood of familiarity. Robin, slumped and sullen, was certainly not going to help. “How’s Rod?” Linda asked.

  “He’s okay,” Sally said.

  “Still with the telephone company?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you ever hear from Bobby Masterson, Sally? He and Rod were such a riot when they did that routine. You would have loved it, Robin. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Rod swallowed the potion and Bobby turned into the monster.” Linda did a fast takeoff on Bobby’s part of the act.

  “He was killed in Vietnam,” Sally said, when Linda was all fangs and claws.

  “Oh,” Linda said, and sat back on the couch. She felt guilty for never having really thought Bobby was funny. And compounding her guilt, she thought longingly at that moment of the hitchhiker, of Wolfie.

  Sally relieved the silence by asking if Linda was married. She had introduced Robin by name only. Stepdaughter sounded like a wicked designation, and didn’t even seem true. When Linda said that she was a widow, Sally was awestruck. She said that Linda was the first widow from their graduating class as far as she knew, although a couple of people besides Bobby were dead. Linda tried to change the subject, looking significantly at Robin, but Sally was into a roll call of fatalities: “Joan Kowalski, leukemia, Artie Hammond, auto wreck, Catherine Johnson, illegal abortion. The family let out that it was pneumonia,” Sally said. “But nobody dies of pneumonia any more.”

  Linda felt weak. She could see no real potential for intimacy here, and she wanted to leave. Before she could say anything, the baby began to cry, and Sally looked at her watch. “Oh, terrific,” she said. “What timing. Look, could you do me a favor and feed it? I have to make a few phone calls.” She stood and swooped over the playpen, coming up with the baby, who had worked itself into a screaming rage by then. Sally dumped it into Linda’s lap and went to get the bottle. Bambi appeared suddenly and dug her little fingers into Linda’s arm, and then more fiercely into the baby’s. The screaming elevated in pitch as Sally came back. “I’ll break your neck, Bambi,” she said wearily, without affect, and gave the bottle to Linda, who offered it to the baby.

  It was as abrupt and easy as shutting off a radio. The baby stopped crying instantly. It pulled at the nipple with savage concentration and made a frantic effort to breathe through its clogged nose at the same time. Bambi made faces and jeering noises and went out again. Linda could hear Sally dialing in the next room. “Hello,” she said. “Is this Mrs. Alexander? Hi! I’m doing a survey for the Best Brand Home Improvement Corporation? We’re calling people in your area to see if they have proper insul—” Sally dialed again. “Hello. Is this Mrs. Allman? Hi! I’m doing a survey for the Best—” She slammed the phone down. “And the same to you, bitch!” she said, and started dialing again. No wonder the line had been so busy when Linda tried to call from New Carlisle.

  The baby’s head wobbled against Linda’s arm. She couldn’t believe how heavy it was, compared to the rest of the body; like the surprising weight of a beanbag. This one looked like Rod, poor thing. Still, it had a kind of beauty. The clarity of eye, the poreless texture of skin. It squirmed in her lap and siphoned the milk with a steady hard sucking. It was amazing and terrible.

  Linda pulled the front of the diaper away and tried to peer inside. There was a dark smelly mess in there and she replaced the diaper quickly without determining the baby’s sex. Whatever it was, she was glad it wasn’t hers.

  Sally came back into the room and took the baby from Linda’s arms. She handled it roughly, distractedly, as if it wasn’t hers, either.

  Linda and Robin stood at the same time. “This was really great, Sally,” Linda said. “Like old times.”

  “Wait till I tell Rod about you dropping in like this,” Sally said. “He’ll get a real kick out of it.”

  He’ll probably shoot you, Linda thought.

  “Listen, take care,” Sally said. “And keep in touch.”

  Robin and Linda got into the car. “Cat got your tongue?” Linda asked. As she drove away, a handful of small pebbles scattered against the windshield, making her flinch. Bambi could be seen racing across the lawn and into the house.

  13 I’m blue for you

  Dear Iola,

  I certainly am blue for you. We have been on the road for several days now. You won’t believe all the crazy things that have happened …

  Just a little love note

  Dear Iola,

  As it says above, this is just a little love note to let you know that yours truly has not forgotten her old friends. So much has happened since I saw you last that I don’t know where to begin …

  Better late than never!

  Dear Iola,

  Remember me? This letter certainly is late! I can’t believe we’re in Illinois! There is so much I have to tell you …

  Linda let the paper and pen, and the Bible she was leaning on, slip down the side of the bed to the floor. She had started several letters to Iola during the trip, using the stationery Iola had given her, but she never finished writing any of them. She would fall asleep in the middle, or put the page aside to watch television with Robin, or go out to supper and forget about it. The longer she put off writing, the more difficult a chore it seemed. Her adventures were getting too complicated to convey on a mere piece of paper. It made her tired just to think about it. Yet Linda often thought of Iola herself and how much she missed her, missed that ironic good humor, her special wisdom, and her tough and enduring attitude toward almost everything. Linda wished now that she could be something like that, too—sophisticated and worldly, if not world-weary. Iola could always make her laugh, could always make her see the funny side of even grim or embarrassing situations.

  Once, when they’d gone together for lunch at the sandwich shop next door to the studio, they were invited to a Tupperware party, by Rosalie, the cashier. What she had said was, “I’m having a Tupperware party at my house Friday night. Are you girls into that stuff?”

  Linda had been married only two weeks and was trying very hard to ease into domesticity. It wasn’t that simple. There was Robin, of course, acting sullen and hostile all the time. And Linda had not replaced any of the household items Wright had shared with Miriam, despite his encouragement to do so. Another woman’s touch and taste were everywhere, and Linda began to long for things of her own. Why not start with Tupperware, with those little plastic containers in which she could begin ordering the details of her new life? The party itself would be enjoyable, and she would be in the company she craved, those other wives who might take her in as a member of their secret society. “Yes,” she told Rosalie. “I’m definitely into it. And I’d love to go.”

  Iola had glanced at Linda quizzically, and then she said, “Count me in, too.
I’ll try anything once.”

  Wright was pleased with her plans. “Spend as much as you like, honey,” he said. “And have a good time.” He was going to take Robin bowling, and he kissed Linda goodbye the way he always did, as if they might be separated for years.

  Rosalie lived in an apartment house in Bayonne, and when Iola and Linda arrived, the other women, about a dozen of them, were already there. The Tupperware people, a man and his wife, had set up their samples on a bridge table in the living room, and covered them with a drop cloth. They were going to make a grand presentation, Linda realized, the way car manufacturers do with the new models each year. She thought it was a pretty silly and dramatic fuss over small kitchen goods, but she tried to withhold judgment and get into the proper spirit of things. Rosalie’s husband wasn’t home, but her two small children were there, running wildly through the house in their pajamas. Rosalie kept shouting, “Bedtime! Bedtime!” which only appeared to excite the children to a greater frenzy. Finally they were threatened and bribed into submission, and were sent off to bed. Rosalie put out some Cokes and beer and a bowl of onion dip surrounded by potato chips.

  The Tupperware woman, Beverly, introduced herself and her husband, Al, who hobbled around with a serious limp. She explained that they had only recently gone into the house-party business, after Al suffered an on-the-job accident that left him permanently disabled. He had to leave construction work for good, just when their financial needs were at a peak. They had one child with a congenital kidney ailment and another with severe emotional problems. But—hey!—they wanted everyone to relax and have fun—this was a party, remember? And nobody had to feel obligated to buy anything, either. Then Beverly said that Al was going to leave now because he believed they would have a better time, this time, without a man around. That brought a little laughter, and although Linda wasn’t sure why, she joined in.