Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Who is it?” Robin whispered.

  The voice spoke intimately into Linda’s ear. “Woe to you, destroyer, who yourself have not been destroyed,” it said. “You treacherous one, with whom none has dealt treacherously! When you have ceased to destroy, you will be destroyed; and when you have made an end of dealing treacherously, you will be dealt with treacherously.” Click.

  Linda had difficulty breathing. Her hand went to her breast, to her throat. “Hello?” she croaked into the silence of the wires. “Hello?”

  “Who is it?” Robin asked again, sounding cross.

  “Nobody. It was a wrong number. They must have rung the wrong room.” Linda put the light on and rummaged in the drawer. She found the Bible under the local telephone book and the room-service menu.

  Robin groaned. “I can’t sleep with the light on,” she said.

  “I’ll shut it off in a minute,” Linda told her.

  Robin pulled the pillow over her face.

  Linda opened the Bible to the first page of Genesis. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. She felt moved, and awed by all those powers outside herself. Then she turned the pages quickly, but couldn’t remember the number in Isaiah, couldn’t find the quoted passage. She didn’t know why she was looking for it, anyway. Nobody has the right to play God, to tell other people what to do. Cowards who call you up in the middle of the night and put hankies over the mouthpiece so you can never identify them. Who would probably argue in favor of war and the electric chair and nuclear plants sending out death rays everywhere. And who beat the living joy out of born children who were never wanted in the first place. Her father would have been against legalized abortion, too, if he had lived long enough to see it.

  “Shut off the light,” Robin whined from under her pillow. Linda did and of course the darkness was biblical. She lay there stiffly until the telephone rang again. This time she didn’t say hello, or even listen. She put the receiver under her bed, where it wound out its message like the thrown voice of a ventriloquist.

  The pickets were there, walking zealously, chanting. The counterpickets likewise. Linda drove around the block twice before she parked close to the place she had parked the day before. The same cops were on duty, the weather was still gorgeous, hot and clear; everything was the same, except this was the day she was having it done.

  There was a minimum of harassment. She was crowded briefly again and one marcher said, “You murderer,” but in a tone that was almost conversational. The law of the land is in my favor, Linda said to herself as she walked into the building, and she was aware of her lips moving.

  A different receptionist was on duty today, someone older, and wearing wire-rimmed bifocals, which Linda found oddly comforting. This woman was as brisk and professional as a dental hygienist. Linda would not have been surprised if she’d been led to a reclining chair and asked to open wide. Just last month she’d read somewhere that a legal abortion is no more complicated than a tooth extraction.

  She paid the fee, using traveler’s checks for a crisis American Express had probably never considered. The receptionist told her to take a seat with the others; she would be called shortly. The others were the adolescent girl from yesterday, still under her parents’ armed guard, a woman whose face was mostly hidden by large sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat (was she somebody famous?), and the young man who’d held his girlfriend’s hand. This time he was alone, and his empty hands ran back and forth across his knees and then up and down the buttons of his shirt. She was probably inside already, Linda decided, and listened, but there were no sounds at all from that part of the clinic. Painless dentistry. The woman in the sunglasses slouched in her seat and kept her face averted from the light. She began to look familiar. Around the mouth a little, and the chin. A few dark strands of hair escaped from under the hat. Who had cheekbones like that? Linda gasped. Jackie Onassis! That’s who she looked like! But what would she be doing in Iowa? She could buy a whole clinic someplace, in New York, or Switzerland, if she wanted to, and staff it with secret-service men who would send those pickets flying. Besides, Jackie was Catholic. And this woman had legs like tree stumps. I’m going crazy, Linda thought.

  She knew she needed to talk to someone, to make inane conversation about the weather, or serious, pointed conversation about what they were all here for. She looked around the room, but none of the other faces opened to receive her.

  She picked up a magazine. Newsweek; it was a month old. She read the same sentence three times. The black citizens of Rhodesia have voted for the first time on the basis of a universal franchise (one person, one vote). What did that mean? It didn’t seem to make any sense. It didn’t even seem like a real sentence. And now Linda had cramps. Was it possible to miss your turn by going to the bathroom? She’d just tell the receptionist where she was going and that she’d be right back. But before she could stand, the cramps had passed. Well, this is only nerves, she told herself. Even the real Jackie Onassis would be nervous here, now.

  Then Linda’s name was called and she stood up. A nurse took her to a cubicle, where she removed her clothes and put on a paper gown, a white one this time. “Dentures?” the nurse asked. “Removable bridges?” Linda shook her head and the nurse hurried out.

  “Help me,” Linda whispered when she was alone.

  A few minutes later the nurse returned and walked with Linda to the operating room. Dr. Lamb came in, said good morning in her no-nonsense manner, and immediately began to explain the procedure again. There was to be an injection to induce sleep, but not a deep or lasting sleep. Linda would feel very relaxed and would not experience pain during the surgery. A suctioning process would be used to extract the uterine tissue. Afterward, Linda might feel mildly crampy—this varied with different women—and there would be some bleeding, but it was not expected to be excessive. Was she ready? Any questions? No? Good. Then why didn’t she climb up onto the table and they’d get started.

  “Help me,” Linda said, and the nurse laughed and said, “Why, just step on that little stool and then lie down. That’s right.” She eased Linda’s bare feet into the stirrups.

  The doctor wore a mask now, and gloves, like a Sunday gardener. Linda tried to think of Wright before this mortal bond with him was severed. Suctioned. When had it all begun?

  When Linda was very young she believed you conceived a baby by kissing someone. Not just a friendly peck on the lips, but extraordinary kissing, powerful as commercial vacuum cleaners, hard as matches struck against stone. And when she was older, old enough to know better, she believed it happened only during the high moments of sexual feeling and love. Which would leave children born in loveless marriages, and pregnancies due to rape, completely unaccounted for. And what about this one? As she reached for sexual memory, it quickly evaporated. It was impossible to imagine the simplest embrace.

  Two other masked figures came into the room. They spoke to one another in what sounded like a foreign language, but probably wasn’t. One of them lifted Linda’s arm in a gentle grasp and placed it on a narrow board, like the one her mother had used for ironing sleeves. He raised a hypodermic. “Okay, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “Soon you will be in my power.”

  Linda shut her eyes, inviting, willing, nothingness. She felt the prick of the needle and then the room lifted with a violent noise, and there were alternate spasms of blackness and brilliance. She sat up and clutched the edges of the trembling table. “Don’t begin!” she shouted. “I’m not asleep yet!” Then there was another bang, louder than the first one. She fell back and felt a sudden, blunt pain in her belly, as if she’d been elbowed there. “Ow!” Linda cried, but no one paid any attention. It seemed to be raining, and the room was filling with clouds through which the masked figures disappeared. She heard screaming in the distance and in her own throat. “Bastards!” a woman yelled. “Oh, God, evacuate t
he building! Get them out!”

  Footsteps thundered and glass shattered and came ringing down. Linda slid off the table, pitching with vertigo. Someone emerged from the clouds and took her arm. “Let’s go!” he commanded.

  “Is it over?” Linda asked. “Was that it?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Come on!”

  “My clothes,” she said, resisting. “My keys.”

  “The hell with them! Move! Let’s got out of here!”

  But Linda broke away and found herself in the smaller room where she’d undressed. There was less smoke in here, but still she gagged and coughed as she struggled to put her things back on. Now there were sirens outscreaming the human screamers. She didn’t buckle her shoes, but shuffled away in them, the ankle straps flapping and tripping her every few steps. There was an open door through which she saw an amazing rectangle of sky. She stepped toward it and then wandered until she came to a small patch of lawn. All the chaos was behind her. This was somebody’s back yard, orderly and domestic. Three plastic garbage pails with the number 18 painted on their lids. Sheets and towels dangling from a nylon clothesline. A small herd of people who didn’t appear to notice her ran past, in the direction of the clinic. Linda went the opposite way, cutting down a narrow path, between two houses, that led to the sidewalk. She walked a few blocks, in a circle maybe, to the street where the Maverick was parked. She wept when she recognized it.

  Robin took what was left of the started joint from the foil packet hidden in her blue sock. She lit it and drew in twice, then a third time, reducing it to a tiny roach. As soon as it was cool, she rehid it in the sock. The sunburn was terrible, worse than it had been outside. Robin took off her bathing suit, moaning a little, and sprinkled talc over the tightening redness, but it didn’t soothe her. She couldn’t stop shaking. Linda seemed to be gone forever. What was she always shopping for, anyway?

  Robin tried to put her bathrobe on and couldn’t bear it against her skin. She turned the air conditioner all the way up, although she realized that her heat had become internal, and the blasting chill only caused her to shiver harder. She closed the green drapes, making the room green-shadowed, turned on the television set, and got into bed. There was a little kids’ program on—cartoons—and it squealed with frenzy.

  The telephone rang. It was a woman’s voice. She sounded funny, as if she had a bad cold. “Listen,” she said. “Are you satisfied now? Suffer, as He suffers the little children to come unto Him. You only got what you deserve, bitch.”

  Robin was too stunned to speak. But it didn’t matter. The woman had hung up already and now there was only the steady monotony of the dial tone. Robin hung up, too, slowly.

  Was it that man’s wife, talking about Debbie and their other children? What did she mean about suffering? Robin hadn’t done anything. Maybe it was the man himself, disguising his voice. Was the sunburn what she deserved? Her father’s death? This endless trip that didn’t go anywhere? There were no reasonable answers to any of her questions. She thought about Steve and his family in their camper trailer on their way to Texas. They probably sang asshole rounds in the car, like Linda. Robin and Ginger and Ray would have laughed their heads off if a kid like Steve ever showed up in Newark, smiling all the time and saying “neat” and other words like that. He was probably a fag. When she got out of bed again, she would tear up his address and flush the pieces down the toilet. Meanwhile, she watched as Popeye rescued Olive Oyl one more time, and then she fell asleep.

  Driving back, Linda caught a glimpse of her own disordered face in the rearview mirror, and immediately prepared a story about falling into a hole at a construction site. When she opened the door to number 24, she saw that Robin was lying on her bed in the darkened room. Linda was grateful for the pulled drapes, for the calming voice of the television set, for Robin’s usual lack of interest. The kid seemed groggy, and Linda was able to tiptoe quickly past her into the bathroom and examine herself in fluorescent light. She looked terrible, as if somebody had tried to murder her. Somebody had. Her blouse was filthy and she had ripped it groping for the armhole that way. There was a black smear on her forehead, and another that looked like a painted mustache on her upper lip. Her hair was raised in a crown of spikes and it glittered with tiny fragments of glass. No wonder that man in the Marriott parking lot had turned to stare at her.

  She tried to remember what had happened. The last thing was the needle, before the explosion, which she’d imagined at first to be a dream, a dreadful, punitive narcotic dream. Her teeth were still clacking and her heart had not quieted. She lifted her skirt, tentative and fearful, and saw that she had forgotten her underpants, and that there was some dried blood on the insides of her thighs. Then she remembered that significant pain in her belly. So it had been done, after all.

  There would be a police investigation, of course, and her underpants would probably be found in the debris and taken as evidence. Against whom? She imagined them in the trouser pocket of one of those two lounging policemen. Maybe he’d forget to turn them in—they would be so slight in the depths of his uniform pocket—and he’d find them weeks later, a silken surprise to his callused hand. Or his wife would find them … Why was she having such strange and stupid thoughts? It must be because of the injection, and the trauma.

  She bathed her face and the place where she had bled, and inserted a tampon. Her teeth still clattered like castanets, and her reflection in the basin mirror was blurred by all the trembling. She brushed her hair over the wastebasket until all the glass showered down. Then she took several deep breaths, urging herself to become tranquil before she went back into the bedroom.

  Robin was sitting up in bed, like an invalid, watching an old movie. “What time is it?” she asked.

  Linda looked at her watch, surprised to see that it was still intact on her wrist. “Eleven o’clock,” she said. Was that all? She held it to her ear. “Eleven o’clock,” she said again, disbelieving. Why wasn’t that girl outside somewhere having fun? Linda pulled back the stubbornly tight covers on her bed and climbed into it. Her body was settling down a little now. It was all over. Everything was all right. There had hardly been any blood.

  On screen, Glenda Farrell was lounging in white, fur-trimmed pajamas in a white room. The light was unnatural, dazzling. Linda had always loved movies like this one, and she wondered if Robin did, too, or just watched with the same dispassionate attention she gave the landscape when they drove. “You have a little sunburn,” Linda said. At least she hadn’t been in the room all morning.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Glenda Farrell played with a white kitten and turned the pages of a magazine.

  “What’s this about?” Linda asked.

  “I don’t know,” Robin said. “I was sleeping before, when you came in.”

  “Mmmmm,” Linda said. “That sounds like a good idea.” She moved further down between the sheets. They felt so clean and cool. She had not died, after all.

  A newscaster appeared on the screen in startling color. “This just into the newsroom,” he announced. “A Des Moines abortion clinic was heavily damaged by two firebombs a short time ago as three abortions were taking place inside. In the panic and confusion that followed the attack, patients, doctors, and nurses ran from the smoking building on South Allison Street. No one seems to have been severely injured, although two patients are as yet unaccounted for. It is believed they may have fled the scene. Many of the clinic’s files were destroyed by the blasts, and property damage is estimated at over thirty thousand dollars. Placard-carrying demonstrators from a group called MAD, or Mothers Against Death, who have been picketing the site for more than three weeks now, have denied responsibility for the bombing. A young man, wearing a bathrobe and bedroom slippers, who shouted obscenities at the fleeing women, has been taken into custody for questioning. A police spokesman says that the subject appears to be incoherent. More on the six o’clock news.”

  Robin stared at the screen, apparently unmoved, disinterest
ed. How could she be otherwise? There were bulletins like this one, and worse, all the time. The other day a man in Moline, Illinois, shot a gas-station attendant three times because the lines at the pumps were too long. The world was full of assorted lunacy and sorrow, most of it readied for instant publicity. God knows what else would show up on the six o’clock news.

  Linda wondered if that was new blood pulsing down there, or just an echo of her still erratic heartbeat. She lifted the covers to look and saw only the reassuring, pristine string of the tampon. “Did you have a nice morning?” she asked Robin.

  “It was okay.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. I went swimming. I hung around.”

  “Oh. Well, that sounds nice.”

  “Did you get anything?”

  “Pardon?”

  “When you went shopping. Did you buy anything?”

  Linda sighed. “No, I just looked. Walked around.”

  Someone knocked on Glenda Farrell’s door. “Who is it?” she called, her voice sweet with expectancy.

  18 They didn’t get back on the road again for two days because Linda couldn’t seem to stay awake. Whenever she would rouse herself, she’d only go to the bathroom. Then she would pad back to the bedroom, where she’d look down through the window at the parking lot before collapsing into bed again.

  The weather had changed suddenly, due to a warm front moving up from the Southwest, the man on television said, and it had been raining steadily for a day and a half. Robin kept going out to the coffee shop to bring in food for both of them.

  Linda had turned the maid away at the door yesterday, and again today. “Sick,” she’d said, without removing the chain.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Robin asked. “You’re sleeping an awful lot.”

  “Spinning wheel,” Linda mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I think it’s all that driving we’ve done so far, all this rain. I’m just exhausted, that’s all. A few more hours and I’ll probably be raring to go.”