Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  When Linda appeared at last, Robin said, “Hurry up, it’s like a furnace in here.”

  Linda opened the door without answering. She looked very strange, very intense. “Move over,” she said brusquely, and climbed in before Robin could actually do so.

  “Ouch!” Robin yelled. “You sat on my foot!” What was she so mad about now? Just because Robin said she was fat? She didn’t even get like this when Robin called her an asshole back in the Hidden River Motel.

  It was like being in a getaway car, the squealing of brakes and everything. Robin, intimidated by their traveling speed, and by the new hardness of Linda’s profile, groped for the ends of her seat belt and fastened them, something she hardly ever did. She looked at the speedometer and whistled weakly. For the first time, Linda was exceeding the speed limit. She was only doing about 70—Ray used to go way over that—but it felt like 100 after all those days at her usual creepy pace. Robin was thrilled and scared. She looked behind them frequently, wondering if a police car would appear, siren howling, if they would be involved in one of those chases they always have in the movies. Linda gripped the wheel as if she were going to throttle some sense into it. She passed other cars, slipping from lane to lane with nervy maneuvers. Robin saw startled faces at their windows as the Maverick picked up speed. Horns blared and faded in an instant. The Doppler effect, Wolfie had called that. Trees whizzed past, signs.

  Linda kept it up for five or ten minutes. Then gradually she began to slow down. She moved to the right lane again. Other cars passed them. Their car hardly seemed to be moving at all.

  The checkered seat-cover pattern was embossed deeply on Robin’s palms, and she rubbed them together, trying to eradicate it. Whatever had possessed Linda was gone. Robin heard her groan once, softly, and knew intuitively not to ask any questions. She sure was weird.

  Robin looked through the window and began to observe the landscape, now that it had stopped flashing by so fast. She read the road signs: Rest Area 3 Miles Gas Food Comfort. Towanda Next Right. There were hitchhikers at their posts and Robin waved to them, with small furtive flutters of her hand that Linda couldn’t see. One of them waved back. It was Wolfie.

  Robin shouted, “There’s Wolfie! Stop, oh, stop!” and Linda said, “Robin, you can’t keep doing that. I’m not stupid, you know.”

  Robin bounced in her seat, protesting. “But it was him. This time it really was him. Linda, I swear!” Linda kept driving and Robin leaned out the window, precariously, her hips through the frame. “Hey, Wolfie!” she yelled. “Hey, it’s us!”

  Linda pumped the brakes and veered onto the shoulder while she gripped the back of Robin’s shirt with one hand. “Are you crazy, Robin? Do you want to fall out and break your head? Don’t you know the story of the boy who cried wolf …?” Her voice trailed off when she recognized the unfortunate play on words, and then she looked through the rearview mirror and saw a small figure running desperately toward them, churning up a duststorm as he ran. It can’t be, she told herself, and would not turn around, but kept watching in the mirror as the tiny figure grew and grew, becoming life-size. Watching the square tip of the backpack come into focus, and the khaki T-shirt, and the beard, and the sun dancing on something silver around his neck.

  He was gasping when he came alongside the car and skidded to a stop in a billow of dust. He stood for a few moments, hands on hips, his chest working, and stared back at them. Then he opened the back door and threw his pack in, as casual as a commuter husband just off the 6:15. Robin, without being asked, climbed into the backseat, relinquishing her place to him.

  “What took you so long?” he asked Linda as he got in beside her.

  26 They had dinner in a small Chinese restaurant in Guthrie, Oklahoma, called Ah Mee, where packaged rye bread and ketchup were served along with the duck sauce and hot mustard. When the waitress, a large Caucasian woman in a red dress, came to bring the menus, Wolfie asked her what she would recommend. “Not this place,” she said darkly, and walked away. The mimeographed menus were stained and blurred, and the prices were suspiciously low. “I think we’ve fallen into a time warp,” Wolfie said. “Look, isn’t that Rod Serling over there?”

  Robin actually spun around to look, and when she saw a bald man sucking on a sparerib at the next table, she only smiled at Wolfie, gently reproving.

  “Do you want to leave, try some other place?” Wolfie asked Linda, who shook her head. She had been lost in reverie for a while, wondering if anyone there had perceived them as a kind of family. The place didn’t matter. And it was too late, anyway. She’d already spread her paper napkin in her lap. They had been drinking the water, and Robin was eating the dry soup noodles, dipped in ketchup.

  How decent that kid’s behavior was now. Linda felt an urge to strangle her for such duplicity. At the same time she was pleased with the prospect of a pleasant meal, one in which the burden of conversation would not fall wholly on her.

  The food was awful. They’d ordered chicken chow mein and it was an almost meatless mélange of limp onions and celery in a bland, watery sauce. Robin would certainly have made a first-class fuss if Wolfie hadn’t been there. She would have said, accurately, that the chow mein had the consistency of worms in the rain. She would have discovered a long, dark hair in her soup and dangled it for Linda’s benefit before disposing of it in the ashtray. But now she even attempted to eat with chopsticks, under Wolfie’s patient instruction, and laughed—that unexpected exotic sound!—when food slipped past her open mouth and landed, slithering, in her lap.

  Linda was like a parent who wishes it was her child’s bedtime, who, if pressed, would confess she wishes she’d never had children in the first place. She willed Robin to be asleep, absent, anywhere but in this place where she now wanted to speak privately to Wolfie.

  They’d driven for hours, taking equal turns at the wheel, and Robin had not once fallen into her customary doze. The first time that Linda did not long for her meager and grudging company, she was right there every minute, leaning forward so that her chin rested companionably on the back ledge of the driver’s seat. She asked Wolfie reasonable questions about where he’d been since they had last seen him, questions Linda had intended to ask, herself, later. He said that the van in which he’d picked up a ride when he left them had broken down almost immediately. There were no more long-distance lifts in the offing, so Wolfie decided to visit some old friends, another silversmith and his wife, in western Ohio, and then a group of men and women who’d started a cooperative truck farm in Illinois. Seduced by good company, nostalgia, and the beauty of the countryside, he had stayed longer than he meant to. That’s why he’d gotten only this far in all that time.

  Silently, Linda blessed the disabled van, and those unnamed friends for their delaying hospitality and goodness.

  “How was Iowa and Grandpa’s farm?” Wolfie asked.

  Linda tried to warn him by shaking her head and making faces as she drove, but Robin coolly answered that it was all right. Then she told him about their experience at the Hidden River Caverns, with an ironic and witty style that amazed Linda. She even did a clever imitation of the guide who’d led them underground. Who asked her to get so charming?

  “You married yet?” Robin had said to Wolfie as soon as Linda had recovered from his presence in the car that morning.

  “Nope,” he said. “How about you?”

  Linda pretended he meant her—who knows? he might have—and said, “I’m not, either,” before Robin could speak.

  After dinner they opened their fortune cookies. Linda’s had one of those pseudo-Confucian sayings about wisdom and laughter that she always got, and that reinforced her doubts about a future worth predicting. Robin’s said, “A happy and romantic evening in store for you.” Wolfie read his aloud. “You will recover quickly from ptomaine poisoning and will live a long and healthy life with many beautiful children and—” Robin tried to grab the little slip of paper from his hand, saying, “Hey, let me see that,” but he held
it out of reach and continued, “—and several gerbils and horses and devoted servants and—” Robin had succeeded in taking the paper from him and squealed, “Oh, you dirty lying rat!” obviously enchanted by his teasing.

  It was a balmy evening. They walked in the small shopping center that held the restaurant and looked into the windows of closed shops at clothing and hardware and furniture. Linda had reduced her worldly holdings to the few things in the Maverick’s trunk, but she believed then that she did not desire anything but this particular evening and its charitable stillness. It was a false peace, she knew, in which dreadful problems were only suspended for a brief and illusory moment. She had a sudden intuition that there only were brief moments of this kind, and that they should be cherished even as their passing is mourned.

  Later they looked for a place to spend the night. Wolfie said he would splurge on a room, too, if it wasn’t too grand, and if they wouldn’t mind his company again the next day.

  They found a motel called Lincoln’s Log Cabins a few miles from the restaurant. The logs were only a thin façade, and except for the motel office, there weren’t any separate cabins—only one long building with twelve numbered doors.

  “This gives me a weird feeling,” Wolfie said. “When I was a kid, my favorite toy was a set of Lincoln Logs. I used to build cabins and forts that looked something like this. I’d put my soldiers inside and they’d shoot each other dead from the windows and doorways.”

  Linda was delighted to have this small bit of boyhood news. “I thought you were a pacifist,” she said.

  “Not in those days,” Wolfie told her. “No kids really are, I think. Their little hearts are full of murder until they realize they’re mortal, too. Oh, man, that’s a terrible shock.”

  Lincoln’s Log Cabins had some of the usual failings of motels in its class: dangerous proximity to a major highway, so that you had to dream of traffic noises to protect your sleep, and those soft mattresses into which you sank like so much boneless flesh.

  It had an extra added attraction, a miniature golf course, just behind and adjacent to the rooms. At Robin’s urging, they went to look at it. A Lincoln motif had been used, so that each of the nine holes represented another fact or accomplishment in the life of the sixteenth President. Hole number 1, for instance, was a tiny birthplace cabin, probably similar to the ones Wolfie had built as a child. The golf ball could be putted directly through its two parallel doorways and into the hole. Hole number 5 was protected by crossed rifles topped by military hats, one for the Union, one for the Confederacy. Number 9 was a replica of Ford’s Theater, complete with a little marquee announcing a showing of Our American Cousin. The hole was inside the structure, a small hidden grave through which the ball would sink, and then travel down a pipe tunnel that ended in the motel office. They probably didn’t lose too many balls that way. The whole place was lighted like a used-car lot and was that startling painted green of frozen peas. “Jesus,” Wolfie said softly. “America. Love it or leave it.”

  There were a few players, like actors under the lights. Of course, Robin wanted to play, too. “Please?” she said, still aiming to be congenial. “One tiny little game?”

  Linda was exhausted and she had not had a minute alone with Wolfie. She was afraid she would not be able to stay awake long enough to tell him anything. But she was also afraid to unleash the real Robin by not letting her have her way.

  “Tomorrow, first thing in the morning,” Wolfie said. “I’ll challenge you to the first annual John Wilkes Booth Open. Okay? Now we’ve got to hit the sack.”

  Robin gave in easily. She was probably growing tired, too, at last.

  They were given rooms next door to each other, and stood for an awkward moment examining their keys. Linda felt lonely and hopeful, erotic and sleepy.

  Robin was losing the tenuous control of her new, pleasant personality. When Linda opened the door to number 8, Robin said, “It’s so small. I want the bed near the window. Why are these places always green?”

  Linda and Wolfie exchanged smiles as she shut the door to her room and Robin’s. She wondered if she was supposed to say something, to give a signal of some kind that she was not finished with him or with the evening.

  While Robin was using the bathroom, Linda could hear Wolfie moving around next door in number 9. She pressed her ear to the wall and listened hard. A drawer opened and closed. She thought she heard the thump of a dropped shoe and the twang of bedsprings accepting weight. “Don’t go to sleep yet,” she whispered. “Wait. Please wait.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Robin asked. She was wearing pink shortie pajamas and carrying her discarded clothing in a crushed heap. A sock wafted to the floor as she crossed the room. Linda retrieved it and put it on top of the pile in Robin’s arms as Robin let it all fall and scatter between the beds. “Who?” she insisted.

  “Nobody,” Linda said. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “You can’t think out loud,” Robin told her. “There’s no such thing. If it’s out loud, it’s talking. If it’s thinking, it’s inside your head and it’s quiet. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have two different words for it, would they?”

  “Oh, be still,” Linda said, and miraculously, she soon was. Oh, faithful and glorious sleep.

  Linda took off her own clothes and folded them neatly across the chair. She did not have the courage to look in the mirror again. Instead, she showered quickly and put on her favorite nightgown, the white cotton one with chains of embroidered violets as straps.

  She pulled back the covers on the other bed and climbed into it. The traffic moved steadily and an abbreviated cheer came from the miniature golf course. A hole in one at Gettysburg, maybe. But there was no sound from the room next door.

  Linda was oppressed by all her contained secrets. She had looked forward so much to being alone with Wolfie, and yet she hardly knew him, and had no reasonable claim on his attention. It wasn’t fair for her to expect an urgent response to her own urgency on such short acquaintance.

  She told herself it was only because he was another adult, after all this claustrophobic time with Robin, that he was merely someone she could tell things to who would not judge her, who would not whine or shrug or argue. There was no reason in the world why she couldn’t just get up now while it was still early and knock on his door and say casually that she felt like talking—did he?

  Except that he might give her the same gentle brush-off he’d given Robin. See you first thing in the morning, kid. We’ll have a nice little talk at breakfast, okay? And she couldn’t bear that, not the disappointment or the humiliation. So she lay there until she gave in to the heaviness that was drawing her eyelids down.

  She didn’t sleep long. It was the kind of doze you fall into on buses and trains, from which you can always wake yourself in time for your stop. She had dreamed knocking and knew quickly that it had been a dream. Still, she listened for a moment to be sure. Then she rose from the bed and put on her robe. Robin was sprawled in sleep, looking as if she’d been mugged.

  Linda opened the door with infinite care, and stepped outside. The Maverick was parked right in front of their room. For a moment she indulged in the childhood fantasy that allowed nocturnal life to inanimate objects. She felt affection for the car, and gratitude for having been taken this far in safety on her journey. She imagined a giant map of the United States, and the yellow state of Oklahoma as a vast moonlit area on which she and the Maverick stood absolutely alone.

  Then she heard the other door open, and Wolfie, still in the clothes he’d worn all day, came outside, too.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Linda said, positive as she said it that it was a line from a famous movie, one that everyone else has heard and would instantly recognize.

  Wolfie only said, “I know. Me, too.” He had a drink in his hand.

  Linda shivered with nervousness and tried to remember the way she had spoken to men on the job at Fred Astaire’s. What had she ever said to all those strangers in who
se damp embrace she’d moved so easily across the dance floor? What does anyone ever say?

  “Cold?” Wolfie asked, and when she nodded, teeth chattering, he opened his door and she went inside. She sat down in the chair near the window and Wolfie sat on the edge of his bed. He looked at her without speaking and Linda glanced away and said, “You have a very nice room.” It was exactly like hers, dismal and tiny.

  Wolfie smiled, relentlessly engaging her eyes.

  “So,” Linda said. “What are you going to do? Love it or leave it?”

  “What? Oh, love it, I guess. The way you love Robin. Hoping all the time it will change.”

  Did she love Robin?

  “As soon as I crossed the border, I felt friendly toward the country again,” Wolfie said. “Once, in Montreal, a Yugoslavian poet showed up to visit a guy I knew. He’d been a really well-known poet in Europe and then I guess he got too political. First there was a little censorship, and then they started shoving him around, and his books disappeared from the stores, from the libraries. He was even arrested, and they only released him because some bigwig American poets started making noises. Yet he was going back. We couldn’t believe it. But he laughed. He said, ‘Well, you know, I live there. It’s my country.’ ”

  And what about your woman, the one you were so happy with up there? Linda wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  “Now,” Wolfie said. “Tell me about you.”

  Linda began her story. She told him about Wright, their first meeting, the marriage, his death. She realized that she now remembered Wright longer than she had known him.

  Wolfie listened with an intensity that matched her telling, and he passed the glass to her. It was a sweetish wine, but as she drank from it, she felt like an obedient child taking medicine at bedtime because she has faith that it will make her well.