Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  It was the strangest sound, one that she would never have associated with Robin. Linda could not have been more surprised if she had heard a cat barking.

  The boys were still at it, too, and the three of them formed a rude chorus of whoops and howls and titters.

  “Stop that!” Linda said. “Will you all just stop it! You’re encouraging them!” she accused Robin.

  But Linda knew she could hardly be heard now over the uproar. And not only that—a current of silliness was charging through her own chest. Oh, no. She tried to suppress it, tried to focus on personal problems, all the bizarre and awful things that had happened. Think of the abortion, she ordered herself, the firebombs. Think about Wright, his lost goodness, his poor homeless ashes sliding around in the trunk of the car. But she couldn’t concentrate on anything serious. All that commotion. Robin’s face. The escaped elephant lumbering madly across Wichita. “The elephant!” she cried, and there were answering trumpets from the backseat, jungle birdcalls, the shrieking of monkeys.

  The craziness spread quickly through her, erupting in her throat like contained sneezes. What am I doing, she thought, and gave in to it wildly and all at once. The others were winding down by then, capable of only brief convulsions. Linda had just begun. Her nose ran, her eyes streamed. She could hardly see the road and had to steer off it finally, and roll onto the graveled shoulder.

  Having started last, she kept at it longest. Robin and the two boys became more and more sober, wiped their eyes, let out a few irregular neighs and bleats, and grew still. Only Linda was laughing now, and wishing that she could stop, too. It was tiring, enervating. Maybe they really would have to look for a place for the night in the heart of the afternoon. And it was different when she was laughing by herself. The giddiness was rapidly evaporating. She felt her mood alter sharply even as she continued giggling and hiccuping like a fool. When she was able to gain some control, she wiped her eyes, too, and pulled slowly out onto the road again. She drove in fits and starts to the next exit, where she stopped to discharge her passengers.

  By then everyone was quiet, each one drawn into private and reflective silence. All the familiar phrases about laughter came into Linda’s head. Laugh and the world laughs with you. He who laughs last laughs best. Laugh, clown, laugh. The laughter of angels. They died laughing.

  The boys walked away from the car, listing toward one another, and without looking back. Robin rested her cheek on the window ledge and watched them go. Linda let the motor idle until it failed. “Well,” she said, feeling immeasurably saddened, “that was a good laugh, wasn’t it?”

  20 Linda woke, dreaming of Wolfie, an erotic dream that made waking a frustration. She had probably been stimulated by Robin’s wrong identification of yesterday’s hitchhikers. The undeniable power of suggestion. Linda looked at the other bed, where Robin, in sleep, managed to look powerless. The promise of the dream and the seeming reality of its pleasures were fading fast.

  They were still in Kansas. Some mornings it was hard to get her bearings. If she slept deeply enough, she might be convinced she was anywhere upon waking: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. That garage mechanic back in Bayonne had warned that much of the country would look like Jersey. It didn’t, really. There was a distinct geographical quality to each state, and even to separate areas within the state. Iowa, for instance, was not as flat as she had supposed. The flourishing cornfields were stretched over a beautiful rolling terrain. Kansas was flat, a place where it was possible to believe the earth isn’t round, after all, and that you could fall right off it if you walked far enough into the horizon.

  The highway’s ribbon was the same, though, and the motels and the fast-food shops and the diners. Linda suspected that the same waitress had stood at their table, pencil poised for their order while she dreamed her own escape, in the last three successive states. Linda wondered why she was dumb enough to expect something new all the time, not just during this trip, but in every aspect of her daily life. Why did something like a snowfall out of season or a benevolent glance from a stranger on a bus make her feel unreasonably hopeful? And why, when that stranger, Wolfie, was only the star of an X-rated dream, did she imagine he’d be very different from Wright, or from Barry King, the lover she’d had before Wright?

  Linda met Barry shortly after moving to Bayonne. She had taken a bedroom in a walk-up apartment that was a short bus ride from the dance studio. It was convenient and very cheap, and although she valued privacy, Linda thought it might be cozier and safer to share a place. Gayleen Hayes, the other woman who lived there, was not consumed by a compulsion to be tidy. She bathed first in the morning, and when it was Linda’s turn she found the floor puddled and all the towels drenched. Gayleen didn’t bother to wash hair off the soap or from the basin and she often left a magazine on the edge of the tub, its colors running over the side.

  The kitchen fared no better. She never wiped up stove spatters and crumbs, which served as an open invitation to neighborhood roaches. Food aged radically on her side of the refrigerator; it grew the fur of mold and developed the slime and odors of decay. Linda tried to speak to Gayleen about it, but found it difficult. She was an overweight, depressed person who kept all the shades down against whatever light they might have gleaned in their tiny, dark apartment, and she grew sullen and tearful at once when Linda brought up the subject of housekeeping. “I’m not the maid around here,” Gayleen said.

  “Of course not,” Linda agreed.

  “I get hassled by everybody,” Gayleen continued. “My mother hassles me because I’m fat and because I don’t date; my boss hassles me because I make typing errors. I don’t need you to hassle me, too.” Her lip trembled and she crumbled the piece of toast she was holding.

  Linda wanted to put her arms around Gayleen and say that it was all right, she liked her just the way she was. But that wasn’t true. Gayleen fit the old cliché about the fat girl with a nice face; if she lost weight her life would probably be drastically improved. And she wasn’t someone you could hug spontaneously. There was something formidable about her quavering bulk.

  Instead, Linda reasoned that cooking only for herself was a lonely and uninspiring chore. She began to shop for one meal at a time in a local delicatessen, where she bought prepared foods, cold cuts, and salads. That’s where she met Barry, who was working behind the counter.

  He was immediately friendly and advised Linda on her purchases. The sliced turkey breast was far better than the pressed and rolled variety, and well worth the difference in price. The German potato salad won hands down over the kind made with mayonnaise. If his boss was around, Barry would signal a warning when Linda tried to buy anything that wasn’t absolutely fresh. He had such a pleasant air of authority that Linda gladly took his advice. He was also very handsome and reminded her of a movie star she couldn’t quite place.

  As a matter of fact, Barry was aiming for a career in show business, as a singer. He hummed thrillingly in a resonant baritone while he sliced ham and roast beef and cheese. He confided, as he gave Linda her change, squeezing her hand in the transaction, that this job was only a layover on the road to stardom. Was she interested in show business, too? She was awfully good-looking, had such a stunning walk; it knocked him out. He showed her a bandaged finger and explained that he had injured himself on the sheer the day before because he’d been thinking about her. If this kept up, he’d be reduced to human slaw pretty soon. She murmured sympathy and rushed away with the makings of her solitary meal, feeling aroused and expectant.

  One evening, Barry came through. Another clerk was behind the counter with him when Linda entered the delicatessen. And Barry, without his apron, and handsomer than ever in a black turtleneck sweater, had a package ready for her. He announced that it was a picnic supper, for two. Linda laughed in surprise and delight, but pointed out that it was windy and drizzling, hardly the ideal conditions for a picnic. Barry said they could eat in his car if she liked and then go to a movie.

  Of course she in
vited him home. Gayleen was visiting her mother overnight, and Linda and Barry could have some privacy. The condition of the apartment embarrassed her and she raced around wiping off sticky surfaces and stomping roaches as surreptitiously as possible. Barry made her feel relaxed very quickly by keeping up the illusion of a picnic. He said, “Listen, a few ants are inevitable—right?” Then he unpacked the delicate pink slices of Westphalian ham, the imported pâté Linda could never afford, and, for dessert, a selection of sparkling marzipan fruit. They drank beer from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Japan. During supper he sang for her, and she was amused and touched by the fist he held near his face as a microphone. “I’d like to dedicate this next number to a lovely new lady in my life,” he said.

  She was in his arms after the last stirring note, and he smelled sweet and spicy, like the delicatessen. They never even got to the marzipan.

  Linda found Barry so charming, so lovable, that she didn’t acknowledge at first that he wasn’t a total success in bed, and then she consoled herself by making excuses for him. He was tired, he was shy, he was new.

  Their picnics continued. On evenings when Gayleen was there, Barry and Linda took their supplies to bed, where he would lick a last crumb from the corner of her mouth and whisper that he was now going to bang her ears off. He made lots of promises like that, exciting himself to a state of near-delirium by the time their clothes were flung across the room. Despite herself, Linda grew excited, too, and when Barry came too quickly she wondered if she was somehow to blame. She knew it sounded as if they were having a wonderful time, though: his singing and shouting, the crazed voice of the bed-springs. Linda hoped that Gayleen wasn’t listening through the thin plasterboard walls of the apartment and feeling left out. It seemed unnecessarily brutal to make so many joyful noises when loveless people might be in earshot. She thought of asking Barry if he knew anyone to introduce to Gayleen.

  He went into New York City from time to time to audition for plays, movies, and television commercials, and he often rehearsed at the foot of Linda’s bed, singing advertising jingles for coffee, margarine, and drain cleaners, or bellowing lines from Stanley’s role in A Streetcar Named Desire. Linda thought he was terrific, very talented, but he didn’t land any jobs and only had occasional callbacks.

  Iola hated Barry on first sight. He came to pick Linda up at the studio and later Iola pointed out that he had looked in the mirror behind her the entire time they were being introduced. She said he was too much in love with himself to ever really care about a woman. Linda denied that, and began telling all the endearing and thoughtful things Barry did: the little love notes he tucked into sandwiches he brought, the songs he wrote and sang for her alone, the way he bothered to brighten Gayleen’s day by offering her compliments when they passed each other in the hallway. Iola said she’d bet her last dollar that he was a dud in the sack, anyway. Linda blushed but didn’t admit anything. Their relationship was still far too new for such damning conclusions. Barry said that himself. He had to get used to her. They had to get used to each other. Performance was his thing in and out of bed. And he was usually dynamite. The trouble was, she turned him on too much. They’d fall into a better rhythm when the heat died down a little.

  Once, when Gayleen wasn’t there, they took a shower together and Barry sang into the loofah mitt while Linda knelt in the tub and lathered him into a frenzy.

  Back in the bedroom, he announced into his fist that this next number was for his favorite shut-in, a bedridden gal in Bayonne, who was in bed at that very moment waiting to be ridden. Then he laughed maniacally and pounced on her. “Ohhh,” he moaned moments later. “Why do you have to move like that?”

  But nothing changed, even when she simply lay there and played dead. This became the pattern of their lovemaking and Linda quickly grew tired of it, although she continued defending Barry to Iola.

  “Here comes Narcissus,” Iola would say when Barry appeared at the studio. “Here comes God’s gift to starving women.”

  The sad thing was that Barry thought she liked him. He’d pause in the doorway, put his fist under his chin, and say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like to dedicate this next beautiful song to a very beautiful and special girl.” Then he’d start to sing a familiar old song, “Dolores,” or “Tangerine,” and substitute Iola’s name in all the appropriate places. “How I love the kisses of Iola,” Barry sang. “Ay-ay-ay-I-ola!”

  It might have gone on like that forever. Linda was practicing how to say that she wasn’t totally satisfied, but she couldn’t find the right words to convey something so painful without inflicting any pain.

  Barry took the matter out of her hands. One day she went home from the studio very early because she had a stomachache. She heard his voice as she walked up the three flights of stairs to the apartment, but told herself it was only the radio, that it just proved Barry was as good as anyone on the radio. And maybe after he had the success he truly deserved, his sexual energy would be recharged. She told herself all sorts of things as she went up the stairs and knew that her heart was thudding as much from terrible knowledge as it was from physical exertion. Outside the door to the apartment, she paused, holding the key in her shaking hand, and heard him say, “And this one is for gorgeous Gayleen of Bayonne, New Jersey, folks, who is out there in Radioland just waiting to be fucked to death.”

  Linda moved out the following week. A couple of months later she met Wright. And they were married. And he died. And she was in Kansas with Robin, who was just starting to wake up.

  21 There was a flea market in early progress on the outskirts of Homewood, a small farm community west of Olathe. Tables were spread across the roadside area of a vast meadow. In the far distance, animals were feeding and a yellow tractor moved slowly over the landscape.

  It was only nine o’clock in the morning, and some of the vendors were still setting up from the backs of trucks and vans and station wagons, handing down cartons and pieces of furniture, shaking out oilcloth to cover the tables. There were a few customers walking around, and others stepped from their cars, drawn forward by leashed dogs and small children.

  Linda pulled the Maverick in under a large elm tree and leaned back in its dappled shade, her arms folded behind her head.

  “What are we stopping for now?” Robin asked.

  “I have to rest sometime,” Linda said. “And don’t you want to stretch your legs? We can walk around and browse a little.”

  “I thought we were broke.”

  “Not broke. Far from broke. I only said that we have to be a little more frugal from now on. With money going out all the time and nothing coming in. No more fancy motels, for instance.” No more abortions.

  “So we shouldn’t go shopping, either,” Robin said. “We don’t need anything.”

  Linda sighed. At the beginning of their trip, she’d suffered terribly from Robin’s silence, and longed for the girl to speak to her, to say anything. Now Robin was finally loosening up a little, but it seemed that every time she spoke, she argued or complained about something. “This is not shopping,” Linda said firmly. “I said we’ll browse, that’s all. We don’t have to buy anything. It will still be fun.”

  Robin was doubtful. “It looks like a bunch of junk to me,” she said, as they approached the first table. “I can drive for a while if you’re getting tired,” she offered in a more pleasant tone.

  “No thank you. And besides, this is another good way of seeing the country, of getting the sense of a place.” Linda had once read an article in a travel magazine that said something like that. “Just look at all these tools,” she said, squatting at a display of heavily rusted farm implements. There were huge clippers, double-bladed axes, a mammoth scythe, and something she didn’t recognize, with a broad, cracked wooden handle and jagged cutting teeth. She tried to lift it, but her wrist bent easily under its weight, and it dropped with a resounding clang across the other tools. “I’ll bet you never saw anything like this in Newark,” she told Robin.

>   “I wouldn’t want to,” Robin said.

  The vendor, who looked like a farmer himself, in overalls and a weathered felt hat, realigned the tools. “Morning,” he said. “Anything special in mind today, ma’am?”

  “It’s all so interesting,” Linda said. “I was just telling my … I was just saying …” She glanced up and saw Robin walking away.

  “Got some real nice barbed wire,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Got several good hard-to-find patterns here. Got some Nadelhoffer U-Shape, Scutt Double Clip, some Vosburgh Clinch.”

  Linda felt vaguely pleased. Did he think she was a farmer?

  The vendor lifted a large frame from the back of his truck and placed it on the grass at her feet.

  “Oh, my,” she said, staring at it. A dozen two-foot-long strips of barbed wire were stapled to a Masonite board, and the whole thing was set crudely into the frame. The wire was as rusted as the tools had been. Each strip was different from the others and all of them looked thorny and lethal. Yet they were beautiful in a way; the spiral twist of one, the even plaiting of another. Perhaps everything had beauty, if someone put a frame around it and made you see it.

  Who would actually buy this, though? She imagined an elderly farmer, retired, whose sons and grandsons have taken over the hard labor, sitting idle now in his farmhouse. He could hang this up and really look at it, something he couldn’t ever take the time to do when he was busy tilling and reaping. Maybe gazing through the rows of wire, the way he had once gazed through them into the fields, he’d be able to see back into the scenes of his early life, with his own father, his grandfather …

  “I can let you have this for seventy-five dollars,” the vendor said. “That’s a special price, for being such an early bird.”

  Linda stood up slowly, her knees stiff from crouching so long. “Thank you,” she said. “I think we’ll look around for a little while.”