Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “My God,” Linda said aloud, and Robin wriggled and stretched, showing her sleep-closed face in the other bed.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “It’s late. It’s almost ten o’clock. I don’t know why I’m lying here like a bump on a log. How are you today?”

  “All right, I guess.” She turned over and started to crawl under the covers again.

  “Robin, wait. Don’t go back to sleep.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re going to have to get moving soon. Checkout time is eleven o’clock.”

  “So? I could get ready in two minutes. And nobody’s lined up waiting for rooms in this dump, anyway.”

  “And I wanted to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, about things. Do you know we’re in Arizona already? Before you know it, we’ll be parting company, today probably. There are things we should say to each other.”

  “Like what?” Robin sounded exasperated.

  “Like about the baby I’m going to have.” Linda was sure she had not intended to say that a moment before. It was because of Robin’s surliness and out of a need to have her absolute attention for once.

  She’d certainly accomplished that. Robin was sitting up in bed staring at Linda, all the sleep gone from her eyes. “What?” she said. “What baby?”

  “This one,” Linda said, touching her blanketed belly with both hands.

  “Oh, boy. So why did you …?” She stopped, flustered and pink.

  “You mean, why did I leave Wolfie? It’s not his baby, Robin. It was started before I even knew him. It’s your father’s.”

  Robin lay back again, felled by the news, and Linda continued. “I didn’t realize it myself when we started out. Maybe I really believe it today for the first time. I mean, I’ve been thinking about it since I woke up this morning, about how it would look and everything.”

  Robin was silent.

  “So, say something,” Linda urged her.

  “Congratulations,” Robin said, tonelessly.

  It was not what Linda wanted to hear. She felt grave disappointment. First Wolfie, now Robin. She would have to be her child’s only enthusiast, a one-woman welcoming committee to the world. Yet crossing that border into being was such a daring act. A brass band and skyrockets would not be too much to expect. Linda got out of bed, slowly and laboriously, as if she were already at full term. She began to put things into the suitcase.

  “So that’s why you got fat,” Robin said.

  “Uh-huh. Not actually fat, though.”

  “And you threw up a couple of times, didn’t you?” The girl sounded like a ruthless D.A., determined to get all the facts.

  “Yes, I suppose so. In the beginning.” Was she looking for clinical proof or something? Linda shut the suitcase and practically flung it to the floor. She started to walk toward the bathroom.

  “I won’t be an only child any more, will I?” Robin said, her voice altered by emotion, and Linda stood still.

  “No, you won’t,” she said, after a while. “And neither will I.” She turned and looked at Robin, who was standing now, too. Linda saw that she had never undressed for the night.

  “It will be like a sister or a brother. A stepsister,” Robin said.

  “Half sister, I think. But definitely related. It could even look like you, you know.”

  “By the time it’s my age, I’ll be old.”

  Linda did some fast calculations in her head. “No,” she said, “only twenty-six. Hey, like you and me!” Robin seemed doubtful, even disconsolate, so Linda added, “That’s not so old, you know. I’ve hardly done anything yet.”

  “I won’t ever see it, anyway,” Robin said, “so it doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters,” Linda insisted. “We’ll keep in touch. How far do you think California is from Arizona, anyway? It’s practically next door. And we’ll write to each other and call.” Her argument was only burdening her own heart, and Robin looked so forlorn, standing there in her rumpled clothes. How could her mother have left her forever? Linda put her hands to her belly again, that new, easy gesture, and contemplated the first separation. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  33 Linda could dance, but she certainly couldn’t sing. Her voice traveled aimlessly from key to key and broke like an adolescent boy’s on the high notes. She went for them, anyway, bravely, or as if she couldn’t hear the noise she made. And got the words all wrong, too. “Blackbirds singing in the dead of light …” They had listened to a two-hour program of Beatles numbers and this was the payoff. It was terrible to be stuck in the car with her when she sang, but Robin, who didn’t want to speak or be spoken to, accepted Linda’s singing as a lesser irritation.

  They were finally on their way to Glendale, the last stage in Robin’s journey toward her mother. Thoughts of her mother occupied her entirely now, driving out the still-fresh news of Linda’s pregnancy. She tried to concentrate on that, but couldn’t. And couldn’t work up the fantasies she had found so comforting only yesterday. All she was left with were the grim probabilities of reality, and the fork in her pocket that drew her hand to it again and again. That woman who had gone away eight years before would be a stranger because eight years had happened and because she had chosen to go. But she would still be, with the stubbornness of fact, Robin’s mother, the one who had given birth to her and, before that, carried her everywhere in the sheltering ark of her body. There were these two separate people who became one, who merged into the image you finally see when you adjust the focus on binoculars. Robin, who was set now to reject her, to turn away a belated appeal of love with violence, wondered if she would get the chance. To be rejected twice was unthinkable. In all her dreams of their reunion, it was her mother who experienced joy, and Robin who closed in on that joy with the deadliness of her resolve. But what if there was no welcome, if absence only made the heart grow colder, if it forgot in ways the brain did not?

  Robin closed her eyes and reviewed some of her own behavior, long past and recent, for which she might have invited punishment. Once, she stood on the dropped dime of a bereft classmate and pretended to help him look for it while the day darkened and his mother called him home. There was that other time when she was small and pinched the finger of someone much smaller until it was shocked into bloodlessness. And the waking dreams in which she foretold her own father’s death. Didn’t she deserve retribution for that, and for flushing a Modess and its cardboard container down a motel toilet in Pennsylvania? A polite sign had urged her to use the provided receptacle. And for writing on the walls of ladies’ rooms everywhere that Linda Reismann sucks/does it for a nickel/writes on walls. If she’d only admit it, Robin was guilty of a thousand secret crimes, even those against harmless strangers, whom she imagined squashed by cars as they crossed the street, obliterated by sudden outbreaks of war, by hostile interplanetary invasion. Teachers she had hated were detained forever in the rooms of torture behind her eyes. Even friends. Bad thoughts about good friends in the very act of friendship. She loved no one, then, was incapable of loving, thereby earning with justice her status of being unloved.

  Next to Linda, Robin was asleep again, sitting up, her body vibrating as the Maverick rode the rough-textured streets. On other occasions, Linda had observed the girl’s talent for making herself smaller or larger at will. In times of stubborn perversity, she blew up with argument and righteousness. She took up too much room in motels or in the car. When she did not want to speak at all, when she was melancholy, she retreated into the private smallness of her bones and could not be reached. Now, when they were almost there, Linda saw that Robin was growing smaller again. What if she disappeared completely before she could be delivered to her mother? Linda saw herself pulling up to Miriam’s house and running inside breathlessly to explain that she meant well, had almost brought off this family reunion, had traveled 2,804 miles by the speedometer. There was proof of her good intentions in the car—look!—that p
uddle of clothing on the front seat, those long strands of blond hair still clinging to the headrest, the impression in the cushion where Robin had recently been sleeping, warm as life. She knew she was being sentimental, the quality that Robin found most disgusting in her, but she couldn’t help it. It was her own loss she contemplated. Where was Cornelia Street anyway? They could both melt in this heat.

  Linda pulled into a gas station to ask directions and Robin came awake drenched, and with rubbery limbs. She banged her helpless hands against each other and grunted. “What’s this?” she demanded in a troll’s voice.

  “I’m only stopping for directions. Do you want to use the bathroom?”

  Robin shook her head.

  “I mean, to freshen up or something. You’re not going to wear that, are you?” She gestured at Robin’s creased and stained T-shirt and shorts.

  Robin made a growling noise and threw herself back against the hot plastic.

  “All right, all right,” Linda said. “I was only asking.” She pulled her own wet shirt away from her body and went to speak to the attendant. She learned that Cornelia Street was only a few blocks east of the station. Linda looked at her watch. “Good,” she announced after she got back into the car. “Perfect timing.”

  34 Someone was home, Robin guessed, because a sleek yellow sportscar slouched in the shade of the carport. It was exactly two o’clock in the afternoon, and it was Sunday. Linda had calculated their appearance carefully, explaining to Robin that the most important thing was not to start off on the wrong foot, psychologically speaking, by showing up at the wrong time. It would be no good to arrive during breakfast, for instance, or dinner, or after Miriam and Anthony had gone to sleep. She called them that—Miriam and Anthony—as if suggestion of intimacy creates intimacy.

  They parked on the street and walked to the front door. After Linda rang the bell, they waited in the clamoring of chimes for a response. Robin closed her eyes but her lids trembled open again. There was a chance she would be blinded by the first sight of her mother, and that her mother would make some move toward her against which she would have no defense. Her hand went automatically to the pocketed fork, and it comforted her. Thy rod and thy fork.

  The man who came to the door was wearing a short bathrobe, hastily tied. There was a tangle of chains in the gray springy hairs of his chest, and several turquoise rings on his fingers. He looked sweaty and confused, as if he’d just been awakened from a nap. “I hope we didn’t interrupt… disturb you,” Linda said.

  Robin stared hard at the man. This was probably him. She was surprised, even disappointed, by her own cool assessment. He looked like an actor she had seen in an old movie on TV, the one who played a gangster in love with the cop’s sister.

  He eyed them, pushing his rumpled hair back with one hand and squinting at the intrusion of sunlight. “Forget it, sisters,” he said. “We’re already saved.” He started to close the door.

  “Oh, no,” Linda told him. “We’re not here to save anybody or anything like that. This is a personal call, Mr. Hausner.”

  Robin tried to look past him into the house, where her mother was surely waiting, maybe hiding. But the man’s broad shoulders blocked most of her view, and the dimness in there made it difficult to see much of anything. But she could hear distant music; amazingly, the same music that she and Linda had been listening to a few minutes ago on the car radio.

  “I don’t know you, do I?” the man said.

  “No, you don’t,” Linda admitted. “It’s Miri—It’s your wife.”

  The sun on Robin’s back and neck was fiery. She shook her hair to loosen it into a protective veil, while the man hesitated and looked them over. “Who should I say?” he asked finally.

  “I think I should say myself,” Linda told him. She spoke with astonishing confidence, even nerve, like a door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias who knows that only aggression will get you anywhere in this world.

  And it worked. The man stepped back to let them in. As Robin went past him, she noticed that he was barefoot and that he emitted a strange perfume. Then she was inside her mother’s house.

  There were no dogs or cats or children here. All the shades were down against the midday heat, and the dark, cool quiet seemed religious to Robin, who had not been to church for years. She remembered that it felt something like this, though. Or maybe it was because of what he’d said when he opened the door. She had the giddy notion that she and Linda had come to save the sinners who lived here.

  Two facing sofas in the living room were white, ghostlike. No one had sat recently on the smooth, plump cushions, and the polished floors bore no witness to human traffic. The heavy outer door clanged shut behind them, like the door of a safe.

  “Who was that, Tony?” a woman’s voice called. “Come on back to bed.”

  The man smiled nervously at Linda. He shifted on his silly, naked legs. “You’d better come out, Mim,” he called back. “We’ve got company.”

  They were both napping, Robin thought. So much for Linda’s great strategy. And then she understood, in an avalanche of knowledge and memory, that that wasn’t what they had been doing at all. The smell on the man was the smell of her mother, an ancient clue from childhood, from bedclothes, from the first intimation of adult conspiracy. It made her dizzy now as it had made her manic then. The whole place stinks of it, she thought, I can hardly breathe, and then footsteps came from the back of the house.

  Robin looked and looked at the woman, at her mother, who came into the room like an ordinary person entering a room. Oh, she was beautiful and terrible at once. How could she be shorter than Robin, look so old and so young, so familiar and so unknown? Her bathrobe matched the man’s, and she was wearing glasses. Glasses!

  Robin had meant to go right for the fork, to be ready for anything, but instead her hands came together in a kind of involuntary applause, and then clutched one another.

  If this was actually her mother, then maybe she was actually a lost Robin, someone reduced to early needs, to early speech and gestures. If she could move, if she were not stuck in place like this, she might pitch around the room in some old attention-getting dance, and then lie on the floor to be small, to be at the feet of grownups, under a table, worshipping feet, smelling shoes and dust and the cheesy scent of speckled linoleum. She felt a mad thrill of hunger, real belly-hunger for milk and bread, and eggs fixed a special way on a special blue-rimmed plate. If she could speak, she would say, “Feed me!” or something else crazy like that.

  But Robin was as voiceless as she had been on that day when she and Linda had their contest of silence. Maybe Linda was stricken again, too, because her mouth was open in a kind of dumb declaration. And she was tilted toward Miriam, as if the two women would soon meet in an embrace. They were all frozen that way for a moment, and then Robin’s mother glanced at the man for an explanation. Who are these people? He only raised his eyebrows and shoulders at the same time. Nobody he knew would come out of the blue like this at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon when people are in bed together doing it. Miriam exhaled, exasperated, her heart’s action visible under the yellow velour of the robe.

  Robin, her power of movement restored, reached into her pocket for the fork. With one hand, she deftly removed the rubber band, the soft layers of Kleenex, until the cold metal of the tines burned her fingers. But it was Linda she most wanted to stab now, in the arm or the leg, so that she would find her voice again and speak for both of them.

  Linda’s enchantment seemed to lift at the same moment. “Maybe we should all sit down,” she said. “I have news. I have something important to tell you.”

  Robin looked at the impeccable white furniture.

  “Are you sure you have the right place?” Miriam asked.

  “Yes,” Linda said. “I think I would know you anywhere. I’m Linda Reismann. I was married to Wright after you were. And this … and this is Robin.”

  Before she even said this last, though, Miriam had already turned to
gawk at Robin, not as if she knew her, but as if she were someone famous, a movie star seen for the first time off the silver screen. “Robin,” Miriam said faintly, and Robin believed she was being named then, being christened in this cool desert house a million miles from home. “Robin,” Miriam said again, in absolute wonder.

  “Maybe we should sit down,” Linda urged once more, and they moved in a cautious ballet to the white sofas. Robin and Linda sat together, and the single cushion they shared sighed gently under their combined weight and took them in. Miriam and Anthony faced them. The seats were too wide and deep for this tense encounter. There was no way to sit on edge and lean forward, and they all sank into false attitudes of relaxation.

  “This is my … this is Robin,” Miriam said to Anthony, and she laughed excitedly.

  He took her hand in his. “Maybe you should have called,” he told Linda, and clutched the bathrobe over his knees with the other hand.

  “I tried to,” Linda said, and looked to Robin as if to measure her own sin of betrayal.