Hearts (2 page)

Lights. Camera. Linda thought of taking Wright’s hand, but before she could he took hers, which looked unnaturally ruddy and durable, and tried to squeeze it. She squeezed back, willing the transfer of some of her own unfair portion of health. Before she could speak, the door swung open and, powered by the excitement of his own optimism, the doctor came into the room.

2
Robin was listening to the radio and finishing the fine details on her social studies project—a diorama of the French Revolution. Dr. Fox and his stupid assignments. She had cut his class a lot this marking period and he’d threatened to fail her if she didn’t turn this thing in on time. What a total asshole. On the wall in the girl’s room at school, someone had written:
Do you know Dr. Fox’s wife? Yeah, every night
, someone else had scrawled.

The scene in Robin’s diorama was fixed in a shoebox her father had given her. He always saved stuff like that: shoeboxes, shirt cardboards, frozen-juice cans, in case she’d ever need them for something. Robin had painted in the backdrop of spectators at the beheading of Marie Antoinette. She worried now that they looked too modern, too American, like fans in the bleachers at a Mets game. Any moment they might rise as one and yell, “Play ball!” The rest was wonderful, though. Her father had helped her the night before with the construction of a miniature working guillotine. In fact, he became so excited and so involved that he practically did the whole thing himself. After a demonstration, using a raw carrot that fell in precise golden circles, he insisted on inserting the sharp edge of the razor blade into the wood, for safety’s sake. Too bad. Robin would have loved to see sly old Fox try it out—ca-chunk!—his finger falling like a carrot slice into the provided basket. Now it only contained Marie’s tiny molded clay head. Robin had reluctantly used yellow Plasticine for that, after eliminating the other available colors. Green and blue were out of the question and the red was too blushingly healthy. Marie looked as if she had been strangled first; her clay
eyes popped and her tongue protruded. The rest of her body, dressed in a tattered Kleenex, still knelt in a belated attitude of prayer. Linda the Wimp had said it was certainly a very unusual and creative project, but she’d turned pale when she looked at it and wouldn’t eat any of the carrot slices later.

The Bee Gees were singing “How Deep Is Your Love,” and Robin kept peering quickly into the shoebox, and squinting, to see if a sudden glimpse gave the whole thing more historical reality, if the cotton balls pasted onto the sky-blue sky could easily pass for clouds.

At least Linda wasn’t here now, breathing down her neck, offering dumb advice that nobody asked for. Last night she’d tried to get Robin to put a small purse mirror somewhere in the scene as a frozen lake, with the rest of the cotton fluffed around it for snow. She said that she’d always used a mirror when she made a diorama for school. If you put little cardboard skaters on it, Linda said, they’d be reflected in the mirror. Skaters! While the queen was telling them to go eat cake, and getting her head chopped off for it.

Something was missing, though. Robin stepped back from the kitchen table to get a new perspective, and noticed the printing on the side of the box:
Cordovan Stroller 11D 19.95
. She’d have to cover that with masking tape later. The thing that was missing, she realized, was blood. There had to be plenty of blood. She thought of using ketchup, the way they did in the movies, but from some of the permanent stains on her clothing, she knew it would dry too dark. She could prick her own finger for the real thing. That idea made her feel a little queasy and would bring the same eventual results as the
ketchup. This blood was supposed to be freshly spilled, freshly red. Nail polish! That was it. Linda wore it all the time, even on her toenails; twenty spots of lacquered blood.

Robin went into their bedroom, trying to avoid notice of the bed itself. This was almost impossible to do, since it was king-sized and took up most of the modest room. It was better not to think of what probably went on in here. She looked away to the dresser top, where a few items of Linda’s makeup were scattered: mascara, lip gloss, blusher. No nail polish in sight.

Robin opened the night-table drawer on Linda’s side of the bed, her interest quickening despite her disgust. Who knew what she’d find? Last year, when she and her friend Ginger were sitting for the Firestones, a young couple on the next street, they’d discovered a circular plastic case in the bedroom, with Mrs. Firestone’s diaphragm inside. Robin had only a vague idea of what it was, but it looked shockingly clinical and was the same color and texture as the rubber gloves she’d once seen in the doctor’s office. As she stared at the diaphragm, she thought of cows’ udders and unspeakable examinations, and was confused by the innocent sprinkling of talc across its surface. She and Ginger searched after that for more evidence of the Firestones’ secret nights, but they didn’t find anything else.

Linda had lots of junk in her bedside drawer, but nothing that could ever be construed as sexual. There were check stubs, a single brown shoelace, a stick of gum, and supermarket coupons for room deodorant and dog food. They didn’t even have a dog. The drawer had a pungent domestic smell, like camphor or laundry bleach.
Robin’s mother must have kept other, more exotic things here. Robin wasn’t sure what they were, but she knew they had to have been intimate and delicate, the small private treasures of a beautiful woman. She slammed the drawer shut and went into the bathroom. The nail polish was right there, next to the spare roll of tissue, on top of the toilet tank. The color was Frosted Fire, and it was perfect.

Robin carried the bottle back to the kitchen, where, humming with concentration, she dipped the little brush over and over again, and applied the final scarifying details to the diorama. It was a veritable bloodbath when she was done. There were generous drops of red polish on the divided sections of the queen’s neck, more on her dress and on the guillotine’s dull blade. There was a thick, glazed puddle at the bottom of the basket and, after Robin’s hand faltered, a few splatters on the cotton clouds and across the faces of the cheering crowd in the backdrop.

She was thrilled with the dramatic results, and as she moved back to admire them from a distance, a car door slammed outside. Wait till her father saw
this!
She ran to the window, but it was only Linda, walking slowly from the Maverick toward the front stairs.

Robin quickly covered the polish and shoved the bottle into one of the cabinets. She turned the volume up on the radio to drown out the blood rushing in her ears, and looked around for something to eat.

3
Linda opened the door to their garden apartment, using Wright’s keys. They were heavier than hers, and the ring was attached to a thick leather strap. She sniffed at it and thought she detected his own particular smell, something like machine oil and bread. There were other, unfamiliar keys on the ring and she wondered what doors they opened. Maybe they were to another apartment, somewhere he had once lived with his first wife.

Robin, the product of that marriage, was doing something at the sink, with her narrow, hunched back to the door. It was Linda’s responsibility to tell her that her father was dead. There should have been someone closer to the girl to give her such terrible and personal news. But the only one truly close to her had been Wright. Despite all of Linda’s efforts at friendship these past weeks, Robin had hardly talked to her, or looked right at her, for that matter.

The radio on top of the refrigerator was tuned to a rock station, and playing loudly. If Linda spoke she might not be heard. She coughed for attention and Robin started and turned, as if she’d been caught in some forbidden act. But she had only been eating chocolate cake. A few crumbs were scattered on the drainboard and others clung to her fuzzy, pale yellow shirt. Her blondness, everything matching—skin, hair, shirt—gave her a hazy, unfocused look. The white lashes, as usual, were lowered, so that it was difficult to read her mood. For the first time, Linda recognized that Robin had noticeable breasts, and hips that flared in her jeans like a bell. Unwatched, she’d emerged suddenly and strikingly female from that other small neuter figure. Stepdaughter. Orphan.

They looked at one another in the din of music, and Linda hoped the message could somehow be transmitted this way, with just an exchange of allusive glances, or that a telephone call from the hospital had preceded her arrival home, and that Robin already knew. But that was stupid. Would she be eating cake,
enjoying
it, if she’d just heard of her father’s death? Linda waited until the girl finished chewing and swallowing. Then she said, “I have to tell you something, Robin. Something bad.”

After she said that, Linda’s gaze wandered anxiously, and for the first time since she’d come in, she noticed the diorama and its latest gory embellishments. “Oh, God,” she whispered, and turned back to Robin, who only squinted and appeared puzzled. She didn’t even bother to lower the volume on the radio.

Linda raised her voice. “Your daddy!” she shouted, and the title was heartbreaking to her, with far more tragic meaning than “husband” could ever have.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to go any further. A rapid series of expressions moved across Robin’s face, and then she swallowed deeply, as if one crumb of cake had not gone down properly. “He died,” she said, at last, “didn’t he?”

Linda nodded, relieved. “Yes. That’s what happened.”

A frantic frog pulse leaped in Robin’s throat. She went haltingly to the table and sat down. Her movements jostled the shoebox and the little clay head rolled in its basket and settled.

Linda shut her eyes, but she was compelled by Robin’s silence to open them and go on. “Heart,” she said, and heard in her own enunciation of the word derision for the easy mortal surrender of that organ.

The girl continued to sit, her hands opened palms-up on the table, as if she expected to have her fortune read. Well, that wouldn’t be hard to do. There was definitely a long journey in her near future. She’d have to be sent, or taken, to her father’s people in Iowa, or Idaho, wherever it was that they lived. But this wasn’t the time to discuss that. This was a time for grieving. If only Robin would say something, express her grief, or her anger. Then Linda would be able to quit talking. But Robin didn’t, and Linda said, flushing, “He went to sleep and that’s all.” Oh, shut up, she told herself, and continued, “He didn’t wake up or get scared.” An instant picture of Wright’s dying came into her head, followed by a wake of tenderness for his child. She felt an urge to embrace Robin, even though they had never touched one another before, even if it would be awkward. But Robin had to indicate that she would accept an embrace. Robin had to make the first move, and it was hard to tell if she was even breathing.

Maybe she was in shock. And what was it you were supposed to do about that? Slap her? Raise her feet and lower her head? Throw on warm blankets, or was it cold water? Why did they give that first-aid course in high school, anyway? No one had ever drowned in Linda’s presence, or broken a leg, or bled recklessly and needed a tourniquet made from a shoelace and a ball-point pen. Except for her father, they had all died in bed, quietly, irrevocably.

Almost everything you were taught turned out to be useless: capitals of foreign countries, major crops and imports, climate, population. All that information and Linda had become a teacher of social dancing for adults,
a purveyor of the newest craze—the Hustle, the Worm, the Vegetable, and the Freak.

Still, facts stuck and once in a while, in the nervous clutch of some Freaking fool, she’d suddenly and unaccountably think of the monsoons of Jakarta, or about the thin mountain air of Machu Picchu that made visitors giddy and necessitated longer baking schedules for breads and cakes. And sometimes she imagined the wonderful breathkiss of resuscitation given or received on a moonlit beach.

“I was right
there
,” she told Robin, desperately. What was wrong with this girl that she didn’t cry for her father, who loved her and whom she loved? When Linda’s father died sixteen years ago, she’d quickly become hysterical. Neighbors had to shake her and force her to drink burning whiskey. They begged her to stop crying before she made herself sick. She’d wailed and rocked all night, although she had secretly and fiercely wished for a long time that he would die, and in agony, if possible. Of course the circumstances of her father’s death were different, were bizarre, and the agony far more extravagant than Linda’s worst imaginings, yet seemingly there at her own bidding.

But she had wept for Wright, too, albeit more calmly. After the dreadful frenzy of activity in the hospital room, the nurses took her to a small alcove behind their station, patted her shoulder, and then went off to do whatever it is they do to the dead. A little while before, Linda had been unable to concentrate on being married, and now, perversely, she felt utterly forsaken. The tears that came first were for herself.

Very soon she remembered Wright, who had been
taken by surprise like that, actually ambushed by death, and was even more forsaken than she the moment his spirit rose like a turncoat from his body. And the thought of the body itself brought fresh weeping: that thinning blond crown checked so often for recent losses, the small paunch he quickly inhaled when he caught her looking, and his penis that once led him, rosy and exuberant, to their bed, and was now doomed to an eternity of melancholy decline. Poor Wright. Only forty-two years old, an age that had seemed biblically ancient only weeks ago, and was obviously an outrageous gyp as a whole lifetime.

She thought, too, of his Sunday hobby, those earnestly realistic landscapes he painted indoors, of lavish streams and mountains, without even looking once through the window at the miserable clump of birch in the courtyard, or the perpetually overcast patch of Newark sky.

This time she wept only for him, and when she was finished she went out to the parking lot and found everything there new and shimmering in her tear-dazzled vision. The car in front of the Maverick was gone, giving her plenty of room to maneuver. It was evening and the windows of the hospital were cool rectangles of light. But where was the light switch on the dashboard? She turned on the windshield wipers and the emergency blinkers and the radio before she found it. Then she gunned the motor and backed up by mistake, hitting the car behind her. After drying her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater, Linda looked through the rearview mirror; there was no visible damage. With determination and a grinding of gears, she went forward this time, out into traffic and the world.