Hearts (3 page)

4
Linda handled widowhood with surprising efficiency. It had taken her much longer to adjust to marriage. Each day she performed another new task that would lead her back toward single society. She even arranged for the funeral all by herself. How could she ask that poor zombie kid to decide on a service or help to pick her father’s coffin?

The funeral director was a young man who seemed to have centuries of experience. His dark eyes were extraordinarily expressive, and she wondered how he managed to convey so much without actually saying it. It was as if she could read his very thoughts:
You can put him in a plastic lawn bag for all I care, lady. The poor stiff won’t know the difference, even if he did work his balls off for you. It’s between you and God
.

To Linda, who had so much trouble expressing herself aloud, it was a stellar performance. And when he finally did speak, his voice was freighted with judgment. “You know,” he said, with a self-deprecating little chuckle, “it may seem like a strange notion to you, but this is, in a way, the last thing you and your husband will be doing together.”

It certainly did seem like a strange notion. It was only Wright’s last thing to do. And he was going to do it alone.

The choices she was offered were dizzying. It was something like trying to buy an airline ticket, with all the confusing options they gave you these days: Sunday Freedom Fare, Midweek Supersaver Special. Finally, Linda took a package deal, including cremation, that was a little cheaper than the others, and she suffered
only a slight afterthought of guilt. She was convinced that cremation was the right thing to do. It eliminated all those terrible and illogical words—corpse, cadaver, remains—for what was so recently a warm and animated presence. When she could bear to think about it, she imagined she’d want to be cremated, too.

And money was going to matter. She’d gone to the Social Security Office, and the Veterans Administration, and the headquarters of Wright’s union, where she was grilled by clerks who were either indifferent or in a homicidal rage. In the end there weren’t too many benefits. Wright had let his V.A. life-insurance policy lapse after his first wife left him. There was one for fifteen hundred dollars from the union, though, and with unfathomable trust, he had made Linda his sole beneficiary on their wedding day. She intended to split everything with Robin, as Wright must have known she would do: the insurance, their meager savings, and the money received from the couple who were going to take over the apartment with its furniture. It would be a kind of orphan’s dowry to make Robin more attractive to her father’s people in Iowa.

Linda was going to give her door-to-door service there. She was doing it for Wright, seeing that his only daughter was safely situated with blood relatives. Besides, the arrangements with his family were not firmly established. Linda had sent a long telegram explaining everything to Wright’s father and older sister, after finding an address for them among Wright’s papers. She offered to delay the funeral for a few days in case either of them was able to attend. Before they were married, Wright told her he’d had a falling-out with his family
years ago and had lost touch with them. Surely, Linda thought, this tragedy would erase old grudges and hard feelings. But there was no response to her message.

She’d never known any farmers personally, but in books and movies they were practical and taciturn (that’s where Robin probably got it) yet scrupulous about family duty. Maybe they never answered telegrams and letters because they were backbreakingly busy from sunrise to sunset with farm chores. Maybe it was just understood that Robin would come to them, that they were bound to her through some rural code of ethics. Linda did consider telephoning one night. She checked their number and address with the long-distance operator to make sure they had not moved. But at the last minute she was nervous about calling—didn’t farmers go to bed as early as children?—and she hung up without dialing.

Anyway, Iowa was on the way to California, Linda’s ultimate destination. Her mother had spoken of going to California during her last years, “to get away from all this,” with a vague gesture that might have included the house on Roper Street, the harshness of Northeastern winters, and the inexorable downward path of her life.

Everybody
wanted to go to California. Linda believed it was a migratory instinct, apart from the rational arguments for its good weather, geographical beauty, and glamorous movie industry. Yet she was excited by the idea of seeing palm trees and redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, and famous stars pushing shopping carts in those all-night supermarkets. And if happiness is to be found somewhere, isn’t it likely to be at the furthest distance? She imagined herself driving in bluish evening light to
the very edge of the coast, stopping short at a place where small waves would break at the Maverick’s fenders.

On the morning of the funeral, Linda woke thinking she had forgotten something critical. Whatever it was rose almost to the surface of consciousness and then sank, like the content of a dream. She had to wake Robin by shaking her, and the girl sprang up in bed gasping as if she’d been attacked. They dressed in silence and sat down to breakfast in continuing silence. Linda was forced into chattiness and an explosion of platitudes in order to break it. Did Robin want orange juice, grapefruit juice, tomato juice, or V-8? At least it wasn’t raining; rain made everything more depressing, didn’t it? How about Raisin Bran? Total? Cocoa Puffs? She was treated to that now familiar little shrug, as automatic as a tic. How would they ride all the way to Iowa together, only the two of them alone in the car?

Even at the mortuary, Robin was impassive, except when the furnace door was opened to receive the coffin, releasing a rushing sound like the very winds of Hell, and her eyes widened and her hands jerked to her face.

Several men from the surgical-instruments plant were there to pay last respects, and they watched and listened with solemn faces in which Linda thought she detected a faint underglow of relief. Not me! Not me! Hallelujah, not me!

The organ was played with crashing fervor and then an unbearable softness, and whoosh! it was over, and everyone hurried into sunlight.

5
Robin had been cutting classes more and more frequently as the term went on. After her father died, she hardly went to any at all.

One morning, Linda announced that she would drive Robin to school every day from now on, on her way to work. It was actually
out
of her way, as Robin pointed out, but Linda insisted she needed all the driving practice she could get before the big trip. They wouldn’t leave for almost another month, until late in June, because she wanted Robin to finish the term with her classmates.

What a pain. As soon as Linda let her off on the school corner, and waved and zigzagged back down the street, Robin started walking home. It was a mile and a half away. She put her thumb out whenever a car approached, but no one stopped for her. By the time she got to the apartment, she was flushed with heat and very thirsty. She drank two Cokes and then sat on the front step to wait for the mailman.

As she expected, there was another letter from the principal of the junior high school, for her father, urgently requesting that he come in for a conference about Robin’s truancy. The language was a little stronger than in the last letter, and there was an undercurrent of sarcasm. “I know you are a busy man,” the principal wrote, “but the time taken now to deal with our youngsters’ ‘small’ problems will work as insurance against future large ones.” Robin ripped the letter into tiny pieces and dropped them down a sewer grating on the way to Ginger and Ray Smith’s.

“What took you so long?” Ginger asked. Her breasts
looked enormous, even under her pajamas, and Robin glanced away before answering.

“Asshole made me ride to school with her, and I had to walk all the way back.”

Ginger laughed. “Oh, shit, that’s good. Well, come on in.”

Robin could hear the usual whine of the vacuum cleaner from another part of the split-level house. The Smiths’ maid, a grizzled old woman, seemed always to be vacuuming. She vacuumed everything: walls, windows, ceilings, bathroom. Robin believed she left the machine on whether she was using it or not. The good thing was that she minded her own business, even when they took the second family car, a cream-colored Camaro, out of the garage for a neighborhood spin. And she never went near Ginger’s room when they were in there.

Ray, his sister’s elder by less than a year, was propped against the floral pillows, surrounded by Ginger’s stuffed animals and her doll collection, sipping a glass of gin. He raised it in languid greeting.

The elder Smiths suspected the maid of drinking and watering their gin, so Ray devised an ingenious network of very fine thread around the liquor bottles in the bar server, a booby trap that his father bragged about at the office, and that Ray had to snip off with his mother’s manicuring scissors and replace each time he drank.

With the door shut behind them, and the stereo blasting Aerosmith’s “Come Together,” the vacuum sounded as distant as the traffic on the turnpike a half mile away.

Ginger sat cross-legged next to Ray, and they joggled and nudged each other until some of the gin spilled.
“Pig,” she said, but without animosity. Then she rolled a joint from materials stashed in the pouch of a gingham kangaroo, and handed it to Robin. “Let Ray know when you start to feel good, Rob,” she said, “so we can do it.”

Robin hit and passed it on to Ray. “I don’t know if I want to …” she began.

“You’re not chickenshit, are you?” Ginger asked, and Ray smirked and rolled his eyes.

“Ze doctor has performed zis operation many time,” he said.

“Listen, I bought the pen already,” Ginger said. “It cost a buck. And I got my mother’s ink. She probably measures it like they do the gin.”

It had seemed like such a terrific idea yesterday when she and Ginger looked at the photographs in that magazine. The tattoos on the models were delicate and pretty: tiny birds, teardrops, flowers, hearts. She and Ginger chose favorite designs, and Robin’s was the heart.

Why was she so hesitant now? It wasn’t the thought of pain. She even welcomed that idea a little; it would be another test of her endurance. For days, weepy Linda had been urging Robin to cry, too, to “get it all out and go on with life.” Another one of her brilliant sayings. Well, one of the many things Linda didn’t know about Robin was that she
never
cried. It was her greatest pride, and she would lie in bed at night and devise brutal tortures and sorrows to see how much she could stand without cracking. Often, these inventions involved dark, oiled men in loincloths who tied her to a bedpost and took turns beating her. They promised to do worse things, later, if she didn’t break down. Of course she didn’t.

Once or twice, while her father was still alive, she had even imagined his death. She saw the waxy color of his skin, and the black dirt filling the hole in the ground, and the worms lying curled in the dirt ready to do their dirty job. These morbid fantasies made her tremble feverishly, but she remained dry-eyed. And when they proved insufficient, she reviewed the hard facts of eternal separation. She had plenty of experience with that, ever since her mother, Miriam, left home when Robin was five years old.

Now Robin lay on her side on Ginger’s shag rug and thought about her mother. She forgot about testing herself and simply reached back in time, wanting only to improvise on memory and be comforted. Her mother had dark hair and was gorgeous. Well, very pretty, anyway. She had a purple dress and a watch with a small, round face. The instant Robin was born, she saw her mother smile.

“Hey, Robin,” Ginger said. “What’s happening?”

“Shhh,” Robin said, severely. “I’m doing something.”

This made Ginger and Ray laugh. “Oh, shit, she’s
doing
something,” Ginger said, and they collapsed against each other.

Her mother left on a Friday, and for months and months all Fridays were terrible anniversaries. Even if he had been cheerful on Thursday, Robin’s father would be freshly abandoned on Friday and come home from work stunned with despair.

No one really explained anything to Robin. She was very young, and when she whined for her mother and asked her father when she was coming back, his tough-guy face would crumble and he would moan and crush
Robin to him. When she questioned her various babysitters, she was told, “Mommy went away for a while,” or “You must have been a very naughty girl,” or “Don’t you want to watch television?”

A frequent sitter was an elderly, palsied neighbor who watched a particular soap opera every afternoon and talked aloud to the characters, advising them in their conflicts. In one episode a woman awoke in a hospital room suffering from amnesia. Her eyelids fluttered and she murmured, “Where am I?” The babysitter said, “Where are you? You’re in Central General Hospital, suffering from amnesia. You got knocked on the head and everybody thinks you was killed.”

Robin, whose attention had wavered between the screen and a toy she’d been playing with on the floor, was alerted, as if she’d been given a private signal.

The woman in the soap opera had been hit by a car and now she couldn’t remember who she was or where she lived or the fact that she had two children whom she had once loved dearly. Her head ached every time she tried to think of their names.

So for a while Robin’s mother, too, wandered dazed and headachy with amnesia. It was only a matter of time before everything came back in a thunderbolt of recollection, the way it happened on
Our Precious Days
.

When Robin was almost nine, she heard about the man for the first time.

The Aerosmith record ended and Ginger got up to go to the bathroom. She didn’t close the door all the way and they could hear the dreamy flow of her urine. Ray smiled at Robin and she attempted to smile back. She didn’t feel high in a good way and wondered if
there was something wrong with the stuff. Ray seemed happy, though, and when Ginger came back into the room, still hiking up her pajama bottoms, he looked at her with a kind of dopey, but more than casual, interest. She’d once told Robin that they undressed in front of each other sometimes, and Robin suspected they did even more than that when she wasn’t around. It was disgusting between a brother and a sister. It was disgusting between anybody.