Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  School was consistently “okay.” She never seemed to have any homework, or she claimed to have finished it and put it away moments before Linda asked. She refused to invite any of the kids from school home with her because they were all “wimps” or “fags,” or they hated her for being “wimpy” and “faggy.”

  “You’ve got to give people a chance,” Linda told her. “Friends are very important at your age, at any age. Gosh, when I was in high school, my friend Dee Dee and I were inseparable. That friendship saved my life.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Robin said. “So where is she now?” And Linda couldn’t answer that.

  “I wish we never came out here,” Robin said, echoing Linda’s own unspoken thoughts.

  Turning the Bad Times into Good Times had a chapter called “You’re in Charge!” which was devoted to the importance of a positive attitude in reversing unsatisfactory situations. Linda read aloud from that chapter to Robin, following her from room to room, trying to ignore her bored face and melodramatic sighs. When Linda was finished, Robin said, “I got a positive attitude already. I’m positive that’s bullshit.”

  Linda lost her self-control. “God, what’s wrong with you?” she shouted. “Here I am, practically killing myself to support us and give us a decent home, and all I want in return is some common courtesy and a little affection! Is that too much to ask?” Once she got started she couldn’t stop. She went on and on about Robin never picking up after herself, and that her face wouldn’t break if she smiled once in a blue moon. Then she said, “And what’s that terrible stink in here, miss? Do you want to end up in a reform school with scrambled brains and no future?”

  Robin, who’d managed to seem comatose until then, sprang miraculously back to life. “Yeah, right,” she said. “Like you have a great future, waiting on those losers in that cruddy hole!”

  Linda tried to contain her own anger and get to the heart of the matter, to what she believed was the real source of Robin’s discontent—her unexpressed grief for her father. Wright and Robin had been an intense and enclosed little family unit until Linda showed up in their lives. Miriam had abandoned them before Robin even learned to talk, and Wright had raised her alone, with valor and overbearing love. When he died, it was Linda, who Robin already despised and mistrusted, who had to break the news to her. Robin had acted as if Linda had caused the news. Together, yet apart, they’d watched as Wright’s body was cremated, and then they carried his ashes practically all the way here in the trunk of the Mustang. Believing that they both needed the relief of completion and ceremony, Linda finally scattered them in a lovely gladed rest stop off I-10 on the western edge of Arizona. She delivered a fast, improvised eulogy, while Robin stood there, wordlessly, clutching a tree. Afterward they fled the scene like a couple of litterbugs.

  Cautiously now, Linda approached the subject. “You know, Robin,” she said, “I miss your dad an awful lot.”

  Silence.

  “I know you do, too.”

  More silence, which triggered Linda’s need to keep talking. “He would have really liked it out here, I’ll bet.” What was she saying? Wright would have hated L.A. He’d loved Newark, with its skies darkened by churning industry, not car exhaust, and with its proximity to the lush parks and meadows where he painted his earnest landscapes. Robin’s stubborn, appropriate silence eventually shamed and stilled her.

  Things might have remained at an impasse if their opposing schedules had continued much longer, and if they’d never met Manny Green. But then Linda’s job at Lucky’s was forfeited the night she showed up wearing her first maternity top. Lucky said he was sorry but that real life wasn’t anything like Cheers; if his customers wanted to look at pregnant women, they could stay home and look at their wives. Vicki and the other waitresses stomped around indignantly in their cowgirl boots and hot pants, and urged Linda to sue the bastard for sexual discrimination.

  But Linda was glad to just get out of there, and to get off her swollen feet at her third job in less than three months, as a cashier in a discount liquor store. She’d found this one on her own, through the want ads in the newspaper. It occurred to her, as she went up and down the columns with a red pencil in hand, that in twenty-seven years she had hardly learned to do anything practical. Most of the jobs listed in the paper—accountant, bookkeeper, controller (whatever that was), draftsman, editor, right down through the alphabet to X-ray technician—required skills and specialized training she simply didn’t have. And almost all the ads, even for the most menial kind of work, mentioned a preference for previous experience or a college education.

  Robin watched Linda scan the ads without marking any of them, and she finally volunteered to quit school and get a job herself. What she said, precisely, was, “Who’s going to hire you, anyway, you look like an elephant. I bet I could get something great if I could work full-time.”

  Linda immediately said, “Absolutely not, Robin. That’s out of the question.”

  “Why?” Robin persisted. “Why can’t I?”

  “Because you’re still a child,” Linda said, “and there are laws against children working.”

  “Sure,” Robin said. “They’d much rather torture us by keeping us in school. Well, I’m going to quit the second I turn sixteen. I can, you know. That’s the law, too, you know.”

  “Not without your parents’ permission, you can’t,” Linda told her.

  “I don’t have any parents, remember?” Robin said.

  “Don’t say that,” Linda said. “You have me. And don’t even think about quitting school. If you get a good education, you’ll be able to have a real profession someday. You could be a doctor or a lawyer or even … an astronaut! You won’t ever have to settle for being just a …” She paused and searched the want-ad columns for a suitable example of a compromised life. “A cashier in a discount liquor store,” she said at last. And then, after another thoughtful pause, she circled the ad.

  The first wonderful thing was that the Liquor Barn was pretty close to their apartment, and hardly anything in L.A. was close to anywhere else you wanted to go. The store’s owner-manager, Manny Green, was fiftyish and paunchy. He had a pencil stub behind one ear, and his thin wiry gray hair looked as if he’d scribbled it on, himself, with the same pencil. He greeted Linda with a wide smile and dragged a couple of wine cases to one side of the store for them to sit on during the job interview. “Step into my office,” he said, with a grand gesture, and he seated her on an upended case, like the maître d’ in a posh restaurant. “So why would a lovely young lady like you want to work here?” was the first question he asked, after her name, as if she’d had dozens of other, better offers.

  “I don’t have much formal training or education,” Linda admitted. “I’m a dancer—a dance instructor, actually. But I’m pregnant right now.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that,” he said. “What about your husband? What does he do?”

  “Nothing. He died,” she hastily added. “Back in New Jersey. It’s a long story.”

  He looked around the store. It was ten in the morning, and besides a cashier and a stock clerk, there were only two other people: a well-dressed woman loading a shopping cart with bottles of gin, and a scruffy-looking man contemplating a pint of whiskey. “Go ahead,” Manny said. “I have time.”

  The quiet, patient way he said it reminded Linda of Wright. She took a delightfully deep breath and proceeded to tell him everything.

  She gave Robin the good news that afternoon, as soon as she came in from school. “Our lives are about to turn around,” Linda began, although she knew that she often said things like that—“This is our lucky day” was another favorite—and that it really bugged Robin.

  Robin moaned and rolled her eyes up until only the whites showed.

  “Please don’t do that, Robin,” Linda pleaded, and then she said, “I met the nicest man today.”

  Robin looked at her with a bewildered blend of panic and scorn. “Is he your new boyfriend?” she asked.

&nb
sp; “Robin!” Linda exclaimed. “He’s going to be my boss. I’m not looking for any boyfriends right now.” She patted her bulging belly. “The thing is, I’ve got a good day job now, and I’ll always be here for you after school.”

  “Great,” Robin said glumly.

  But that night, when Manny dropped by to give Linda a crash course in cashiering, Robin was instantly taken by the roll of bills and the cigar box filled with silver he’d brought. “The cash registers are computerized,” he told Linda, “but I like my people to be alert. It makes the job more interesting, and even machines can fail sometimes.” He proceeded to put her through a rapid-fire drill of making change. It was something she was perfectly capable of doing, but she was nervous at first, especially with Robin breathing down her neck that way. Why did she have to pick this moment to become so interested in Linda’s life?

  As it turned out, Robin was a whiz at simple arithmetic, something she’d never bothered to reveal before. Now, whenever Linda committed a little error of addition or subtraction, Robin made a grating, buzzerlike noise, and then yelled the correct answer right in Linda’s face, like some obnoxious game-show host. Linda would have been elated by this display of talent at any other time—she often despaired about Robin’s lack of ability and enthusiasm—but now it was driving her crazy. Finally, she jumped up and shouted, “Robin, do you mind? I can’t even think straight with you standing right on top of me!”

  Robin gave her a contemptuous smile, and Manny touched Linda’s shoulder in gentle restraint as he said, “Robin, if you aren’t a famous movie star or a math professor by the time you’re twenty-one, I’ll have a job waiting for you at the Liquor Barn. But in the meantime,” he added with a chummy wink, “let’s give poor old Linda a chance, okay?”

  “Sure,” Robin said, benevolently. “Why not?” And she floated out of the room.

  Linda turned to Manny and said, with true awe, “How did you do that?”

  He laughed and said, “Oh, years of experience, I guess. I have three daughters myself, all grown now, but they were once that age, too, God help me.”

  Then she asked why he was hiring her, pregnant and all, and he said, “Hey, I’m an equal-opportunity employer, that’s why. And I pride myself on being an excellent judge of character.”

  Later, over coffee, he told her that he was widowed, too, for about five years now, and he knew how lonely and difficult it could be. He thought she was very spunky to take care of her little family this way.

  Linda would never have applied that word “spunky” to herself, but when Manny said it, it felt oddly accurate, and like a blessing. She carried it with her all the way to bed that night, and she believed it helped her to relax, and to fall asleep. What she’d missed so much, what she was so achingly homesick for, she supposed as she drifted off, was approval, that small but essential aspect of love.

  4

  Love and Work

  HOW ARE YOU TODAY, my friend?” Manny said in greeting to just about everyone who entered the Liquor Barn: panhandlers counting out their quarters and dimes for pints of Ripple, caterers ordering house brands by the truckload, housewives needing cooking sherry, construction workers thirsty for a cold beer, and even the old ladies who bought only lottery tickets and ginger ale. He took the time to kibitz with all of them, but the wine browsers were his clear favorites. They came in search of treasures, like those hard-to-find vintage years and unadvertised sales on first growths. Manny led them to the enormous rows of wine bins, arranged by country of origin, and helped them make their selections. He removed the pencil from behind his ear and wrote down their orders, without ever losing a beat in the ongoing discussions of “nose,” “fruit,” “tannins,” and “finesse.” Linda’s cash register was close enough to the Australian and Italian sections for eavesdropping, and sometimes it seemed to her that they were speaking a foreign language. Once she heard Manny refer in somber tones to the merits of oak over stainless-steel casks, and thought, for a single morbid moment, that he was talking about coffins.

  Linda confessed one day that she didn’t know anything about wine, that aside from the obvious differences between the reds and the whites, they all seemed pretty much the same to her. Manny promised to give her a mini tasting course after the baby was born. He admitted that wine connoisseurship could be a little narrow and pretentious, but the thing he loved most about the people who haunted those bins was their passion. Passion about anything that moved you, he often told her—baseball, poetry, gardening, members of the opposite sex, members of the same sex—was the greatest saving grace. But he was only preaching to the converted. Passion, it seemed to Linda, was the quality Robin most conspicuously lacked, the deficiency that kept her at an emotional distance from everyone and everything around her. Passionate was the way Linda remembered feeling about dancing before she’d turned into the Goodyear Blimp. And, she suspected, it was the way Manny was starting to feel about her.

  They had been going out together sometimes after work, to supper or the movies, usually accompanied by Robin, who sat between them in the movie theater like a chaperone, passing the popcorn and Milk Duds back and forth. And when Manny dropped by the apartment on the weekend to visit Linda or to do some small household repairs, Robin hung around listening to their conversations, and putting her own two cents in every chance she got. Manny was consistently sweet and funny with Robin, but he’d look over her head at Linda once in a while with what she soon recognized, with mixed emotions, as a lovesick smile.

  One Sunday night, he suggested they leave Robin home this time, and he made reservations for just the two of them at a waterfront cafe in Marina del Rey. As he took Linda’s hand across the table, in the festive glow of the patio lights, she understood his intentions without his having to say a word. They had already fallen into the habit of friendly good-night hugs and kisses, and she felt genuine affection for Manny—how could she not? Now it was only a matter of going on to the next logical step in their friendship. If she didn’t match his ardor right away, she could always blame it on shyness, on her pregnancy, on the sadness she still felt about Wright, released forever to the elements in his roadside resting place. Linda’s mother used to say that you could learn to love any man, if he had a good heart and a good income, and that passion will fly out the same window it flew in. Linda had certainly loved Wright, but even when they were newlyweds their passion was quickly spent, as if they had gone to bed with the window left carelessly open.

  After their dinner in Marina del Rey, Manny and Linda drove to his house, where she’d never been before, and where he had lived all those years with his wife and their daughters. Linda was touched to see that he had been optimistic enough to prepare for her arrival. Everything was strikingly neat; you would swear someone had fussed with it only moments before she stepped in. The living-room rug still wore the tracks of a vacuum cleaner in its pile, and the sofa cushions were plump with expectancy. The bathroom was as pristine as a motel’s, with a fresh bar of soap in the soap dish and fluffy white towels hanging side by side in perfect alignment. The only thing missing, as far as Linda could see, was one of those paper banners across the toilet seat.

  She was nervous and couldn’t stop talking, fixing on every artifact in his living room as a point of interest, from the numerous photographs of his family to a spindly, waterlogged philodendron. “This is so nice. I keep thinking I have to fix our place up more,” she chattered. “I saw some really cute ideas in a magazine. Like using wallpaper samples to line your dresser drawers? And making a collage of colorful food labels for the kitchen?”

  Manny put some music on the stereo and held out his arms to her. She hadn’t danced with anyone since her days at the Whittier Fred Astaire’s. When she went into Manny’s arms, their bellies bumped, and they both said, “Oops, pardon me!” at the same time, and then laughed. Manny patted his gut and tried to suck it in. “At least you’ve got a good excuse,” he said ruefully, before placing his hand again where her waist used to be. The music
was from the big-band era, all yearning saxophones and the slow, sliding plaint of trombones. Manny was from somewhere around that era, too, the kind of dancer who bends to dance cheek-to-cheek and executes extravagant twirls and dips. She could see the excited pulse in his neck and hear his humming breath in her ear. He smelled so good, a mixture of floral fabric softener and minty after-shave. As he led her into his bedroom, she slipped her wedding band off and transferred it to the ring finger of her other hand. Despite what she was about to do, she was still married to Wright in some abstract but final way.

  Yet it was surprisingly easy after that, except for the awkward instant when she first saw Manny naked, and he saw her. Linda had not consciously intended to take a lover during her pregnancy; she couldn’t imagine anyone finding her attractive now. But Manny was in awe of her stretched and rounded splendor, and as grateful as a starving man called to a banquet. “Oh, God, oh, God,” he kept saying, worshipful and irreverent at once. He paused only long enough to worry about hurting her or the baby, but she assured him that it was fine, that it was lovely, as in fact it was. Only the week before, the doctor at the clinic had said, out of the blue, that intercourse was permissible until the final two weeks of gestation. As if she had asked him, as if he didn’t know that she was widowed, and big beyond anyone’s wanting. Now, the lonely places on her body that Manny touched and kissed responded like flowers to sunlight.