But Robin didn’t feel betrayed, at least not by Linda.
“And Wright?” Miriam asked.
“Gone,” Linda told her. “I mean dead. He died.”
“Died? How?”
“Heart attack.”
“Oh,” Miriam said.
“Mim, Mini,” Anthony murmured, squeezing her hand, pumping it, the way Robin’s father used to squeeze the Test-Your-Grip handles at the penny arcade. She remembered how the machine registered his strength in ascending lights: Puny, 90-Pound Weakling, Getting There, Strong Man, Musclebound, Popeye! Her mother’s hand fell back lifelessly into her lap when Anthony let go, and it registered nothing.
“I’ll make some coffee,” he said, and still modestly holding his bathrobe shut, he stood.
Miriam was looking at Robin and didn’t reply.
“I’ll help you,” Linda said, and after one backward glance, she followed him across the shadowed tile floor and out of the room.
Linda imagined that leaving a child in school for the first time would be something like this. Knowing how good education was for the child would not diminish the pain of parting.
In the kitchen she watched as Anthony set the table with thoughtful care. He folded a yellow paper napkin neatly at each place. There was a large bakery box on the table, and when he cut the string the box fell open to reveal four golden and sugared pastries. Linda guessed that this was the celebratory snack they’d planned to share after making love. It was probably a ritual. She imagined Anthony, still naked and flushed, bounding inside with the pastries on a tray, and how Miriam would smooth a place in the bed for him, and how their sticky fingers would sparkle later with crumbs. The nude photos of Miriam flickered through her head. That overexposed pallor and the dark lipstick. Wright’s triumphant and breathless smile, his arm circling her waist. It should be easier to separate people into heroes and villains. But Linda pitied everyone. And then, without warning, Wolfie entered her thoughts, and she grieved for all their forfeited greedy Sundays like this one.
Anthony plugged in the coffee maker and sacrificed the pastries to a communal platter. He seemed distressed that there was nothing else to do. “You really should have called,” he told Linda again.
“It’s hard to discuss certain things over the phone,” Linda said, thinking briefly of Supercreep, his impassioned and wordless messages.
“Yeah,” he said. “But this is quite a shock.”
“What happened to your family?” she asked, surprised that she really wanted to know. She remembered the postcard he had written to his son, the picture of the giant saguaro cactus. It was like catching up with the lives of the characters in a soap opera she had not seen in years.
Anthony didn’t question her curiosity or her right to know. “My wife got married again,” he said. “The boy joined the army right after high school. He’s married, too, to a Hawaiian girl. She’s very nice, religious. My daughter’s still at home. She does ceramics.” They both pondered this synopsis, and then, as if he had just come to his senses, Anthony asked, “What does she want? To come live with us?”
“I guess,” Linda said. “It’s between them.”
In the living room, Robin and her mother had remained in a silent tableau for a few moments. Then, surprisingly, Miriam laughed, a short, anxious trill of laughter. She said, “You’re thirteen now, aren’t you?”
The laughter and the question both startled Robin, and she found herself recalling bitterly the missed birthdays. Her own birthdays and her father’s, the imposed solitude of all their celebrations. On New Year’s Eve, he always woke her at midnight and brought her, in her pajamas, to the living room, where they both donned silly hats and blew a short discordant duet through tin horns.
“Yes,” she said.
Miriam’s hands raised, opened. “Your hair … You look exactly like your father. Exactly.” Her tone was slightly accusing, as if Robin had chosen to look like Wright or he had used undue influence over her in Miriam’s absence.
“It’s hard to know … what to say,” Miriam said. “I suppose you hate me.” She paused expectantly.
But Robin didn’t answer. Hate. Love. They were such puny, useless words. She touched the fork, counted the tines.
Miriam moved from her sofa to Robin’s. “I was only twenty-one when you were born,” she said. “I guess that seems old to you, but it wasn’t. Girls were different then, more innocent. I didn’t know up from down.” She sighed. “Wright was older, like Tony. My fatal weakness.” She laughed again. “Did he ever tell you I called? Twice?”
Robin shook her head, disbelieving.
“Well, I did. The first time right after we came here. I offered to take you, but he said no.”
Offered. Take. One by one the words were losing meaning, slipping away.
“The second time was about a year later. You answered the phone.”
Robin searched frantically for the event and couldn’t find it.
“I didn’t say who I was,” Miriam said. “You couldn’t possibly know.” She touched her brow, pushed her fingers through her hair. “He acted crazy that time. He said he’d kill me if I ever called again, if I ever tried to contact you. I wrote a couple of letters to him, to you, and then I tore them up. Time went by, like it does.” That laugh again. Then she leaned forward, clutching her own arms. “Listen, I thought about you. Every time I saw a little girl in the street … God, the nights … Tony wanted to have you kidnapped and brought here. Can you imagine?”
Robin could barely pay attention. She was much too busy trying to remember that phone call, her father’s murderous impulse. She imagined him hanging up, beating his fists against the wall, and then going to look for her, Robin. What was she doing? Watching television? Getting ready for bed? She pictured one of those suffocating embraces, Wright’s passion, her own wriggling impatience to be free.
“You believe me, don’t you?” Miriam asked.
Robin attempted a shrug, but couldn’t bring it off. One shoulder kept twitching involuntarily.
“I know I’m not the best mother in the world, but I’m not the worst, either,” Miriam said. “When I was there, we were very close. You probably don’t remember it, but I used to brush your hair all the time.” She laughed.
Robin thought that if her mother had never left she would have grown up listening to that laugh, that it would have become as casual and familiar as language. But now she despised its sound, its inappropriate punctuation of Miriam’s narrative. Robin knew it was an evasive technique, that it replaced the truth that could only be told through language. Unreasonably, she was disturbed in the same way by the eyeglasses. They seemed to make it impossible for their eyes to be engaged for more than a glance. They were a disguise, another evasion, and Robin could kill her mother for that alone. Her hand crept into her pocket and held the fork.
“Talk about mothers. My mother was the worst,” Miriam continued. “She stayed home and made everybody miserable and guilty. She didn’t believe in normal feelings. Since she missed her chance in life, she wanted everybody else to miss theirs. I wasn’t even allowed to talk to men until I was eighteen. And do you know what she used to do, Robin? She used to smell me when I came home. She pretended it was to see if I’d been smoking or drinking, but it wasn’t, take my word for it. She wanted to see if … well … if I had experienced anything she didn’t want me to experience. Do you wonder I took off with your father when I was only nineteen? And you know what he was like.”
Robin’s whole body prickled, and her grip tightened on the fork’s handle. “His heart …” she began.
“I know,” Miriam said. “I know. It’s hard to believe. He was so healthy. He bowled and he worked out. But what I meant to say was, he was so nice. At first I really liked it. Everything I did pleased him. I could burn the roast and he’d say he liked it that way. He’d chew on it until he choked. No roast and he’d say he wasn’t hungry anyway.” Miriam laughed. “He used to say he wanted to make it up to me, that I h
ad this unhappy childhood, that my mother was so strict. He said he wanted me to feel free. But he was always asking me if I was happy, he was always hugging me.” She hesitated. “And I didn’t feel certain things for him that I wanted to, that a wife is supposed to feel for her husband. In some ways I might as well have been back with my mother; you know, trapped, and being good.”
Robin began to draw the fork from her pocket. She was furious that Miriam had spoken against her dead father, and that what she had said was undeniably true. She was furious that she had understood all the other implications when she wasn’t ready to understand them. This woman who had eloped with Robin’s childhood was forcing her now into sudden adult knowledge she didn’t want.
Miriam slid nearer to Robin. “Then there was Tony,” she said softly, earnestly. “Sometimes you don’t meet the right people at the right time. It’s not always convenient.” She was close to Robin, leaning closer. Robin felt as rigid and tense as she had that day when the beautiful silver dogs had circled her feet, panted against her skin. She half closed her eyes and tried not to inhale her mother’s scent.
Miriam’s hand reached out in the milky light to touch Robin’s hair. “You loved when I brushed it,” she said. “You used to close your eyes just like that. Your hair was like corn silk. It still is. I thought it would be so much darker by now.” She stroked Robin’s head and Robin grew sleepy. She had to force herself to stay awake, not to lose her fierce and precious guard. Her hand relaxed and almost released the fork, the way it let go of the pillow at night the moment before sleep.
Miriam whispered, “I would dream about the old apartment in Newark and wake up, hearing you. Once or twice it was really Nicky, Tony’s son. He came to stay with us for a while because he didn’t get along with his stepfather. But he got into trouble here. Fights at school, and he set little fires.”
Robin came awake abruptly, gripping the fork. “You could have taken me,” she said, meaning to sound condemning, rather than the way she did, pleading and sad.
Miriam withdrew her stroking hand. “But I couldn’t,” she said. “Not then. When you run away like that, you’re a little crazy. I hardly took anything, clothes, anything. I don’t know, I thought he’d let me have you later … I didn’t think …” Her hand rose up again.
Robin moved away, out of reach, and saw that Anthony had come back into the room. Miriam didn’t seem to notice him. “But you’re here now,” she told Robin. “It’s sort of like a miracle. You can stay and we can make up for it …?”
“Coffee, Mim,” Anthony announced in his firm baritone.
Linda looked closely at Robin’s face to see if she could figure out what had taken place in the other room. Robin looked back at her with that old warring expression, as if nothing had changed, nothing was about to change.
They all took their places around the table. Miriam sat next to Anthony. She gave some signal in the shorthand of habit, and he proceeded to pour the coffee.
Linda put cream and sugar in hers, even as her throat closed against the possibility of food or drink or speech. She looked politely, brightly at Anthony, the other minor player in this drama, who might provide some necessary comic relief.
But he didn’t. With serious attention he served the coffee and passed the plate of pastries to Linda, who simply took it from him and held it. Then he got up and stood behind his wife and gripped her shoulders with his large beringed hands. In their plush matching robes, Miriam and Anthony reminded Linda of pictures she’d seen of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, exiled forever from the kingdom of real privilege.
Miriam tried to laugh, but achieved only a small, failed sound. “I’d like Robin to stay,” she said, “to live with us?” It was definitely a question.
Linda saw Anthony flinch at this threat to their obsessive privacy. “Well, sure,” he managed. “If that’s what you—”
“Why, that’s wonderful!” Linda interjected. “It’s exactly what we’d hoped.” She turned to smile or grimace at Miriam, who was holding her teaspoon up, seeking her own tiny inverted reflection in its bowl. Then Linda looked at Robin and saw that she had risen in her place, clutching a fork in her hand. It was an elaborate, heavy, old-fashioned fork, very different from the severe stainless steel flatware that Anthony had arranged in perfect symmetry. Linda had seen that fork somewhere before. Robin held it as if it were a weapon, and she looked from one of them to the other, taking deep, desperate breaths like a silent-film vamp simulating ecstasy.
“Arizona,” Linda said, standing, too, still holding the platter. “The climate alone—”
“Shut up!” Robin bellowed, and she raised the blanched fist that held the fork, over her head. “Shut up,” she said again, this time to her mother and Anthony, who had not spoken or moved at all. Her face was deeply flushed and her hair was a crackling halo of light. “Why don’t you ask me?” she demanded. “Why don’t you ask me if I want to stay?”
“I’m asking you, Robin,” Miriam said weakly.
“No, you’re not! You’re asking him. You never asked me anything! And you never called up! You’re a liar and a murderer!”
“Hey, hey,” Tony warned.
Linda was mesmerized. Never in all their time together, during vocal battles or battling silences, had the girl looked quite like this, so violent, so thrillingly beautiful. “Oh, Robin honey,” Linda said, and she stepped back from the table and walked slowly toward her.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Robin said in a calm, even a reasonable, voice. “I wouldn’t stay here for a hundred million dollars.” Her back was curved like an archer’s extended bow. Her eyes were clear and brilliant with intention. As Linda reached her side, the hand holding the fork came down in one swift and stabbing plunge.
Miriam screamed and Robin pulled her hand back. She looked in wonderment at the fork, and at the quivering, crumbling pastry impaled on its points.
35 They were twenty-five miles out of Glendale and Robin had not cried yet, or spoken one unsolicited word.
Linda ventured careful questions. “Shall I put the radio on? Should we stop soon to have something to eat?”
And Robin said yes automatically, without deliberation or affect.
Even back in Miriam’s house, after the stabbing of the pastry, Robin had moved in a kind of trance, and displayed almost no emotion. Linda had quickly taken charge. Miriam and Anthony were still frozen in their royal pose, obviously too stunned or confused to act. “It’s all right,” Linda told Robin. She took the girl’s arm and led her into the living room. Robin was like the victim of a street accident, a hit-and-run. There was no blood or other evidence of injury, but she seemed to be in shock, and who knew what damage was unseen.
Linda spoke clearly and loudly, as if she had to penetrate an invisible barrier. “It’s all right,” she repeated. “Nobody will make you stay. I’ll take you with me.”
“You don’t have to,” Robin muttered.
“I know that, Robin,” Linda said. “I want to.” Then she went back to the kitchen, where Anthony and Miriam huddled in their robes. “I’m sorry,” Linda said, trying to avoid Miriam’s stricken glance. “I really thought it would work out. But I guess it’s just too late. Or maybe it’s too early.”
“Could I ask you … Would you please …” Miriam began. And Linda said she would write and let her know how Robin was getting along. Then she and Robin left the house.
As she drove, Linda glanced at the girl from time to time and saw the same pale, impassive face. She was convinced now that Robin had to cry in order to avoid the greater consequences of denied grief. Linda felt a responsibility to make her cry, if necessary. But first she had to get her attention. “Robin?” she said. “Remember when you asked about my father? About how he died?”
There was no answer.
“And remember I said he died in a household accident? Well, it wasn’t because I left my skates on the stairs. And he wasn’t smoking in bed, either. He was electrocuted.”
Rob
in turned to look at her for the first time. “You mean in the electric chair?”
“Oh, no, no. It really was a household accident. Bad wiring, and he was standing in a lot of water. The basement was flooded. And I saw it happen.”
Robin was facing forward again, staring ahead at the road.
“I hated my father,” Linda said. “He used to hurt me when I was a child, and I used to wish that he would die. I prayed for it. But still I cried when he did.”
Robin had turned completely away, was curling up, for an escape into sleep, probably.
Linda kept driving and she began to see signs for cities in California, even though they were pretty far from the border. And there were more and more California license plates. Many of them had names or phrases instead of random letters and numbers. NICE GUY, CLASSY, LOVER, CINDI B. Well, at least they seemed to know who they were.
Robin hadn’t moved for an hour or more. She was remarkably stubborn, but Linda was, too, and would not be swayed from her mission. Everyone has to be a mourner sometime. The very nature of human life demands that. Why did Robin think she could escape it?
Linda saw a sign for a rest area ahead, and she signaled and slowed down. It was one of those wooded places, with a few redwood tables and benches, a couple of telephones, and toilets. After so many miles of open, sun-bleached landscape, it was a real oasis. There was only one other car there, a station wagon with bicycles and a baby stroller tied to the roof rack. As Linda pulled in and parked, the family sitting at one of the tables gathered their belongings and started to leave. The children distributed their garbage among the four trash baskets, each labeled with a sign: Thank You For Not Littering. A beautiful and lively Irish setter was called from its hideout in the woods. When they were gone, Linda touched Robin’s shoulder. “Robin, wake up,” she said.
“Are we in California?” She rubbed her eyes.
“No, almost. I needed to rest for a while. And I wanted to show you something.”
“What?”
“Come out.” Linda opened the door and walked to the rear of the Maverick, where she waited for Robin.
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