Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  On the way back to the living room, the baby woke up and began to fuss. Linda took her into the little den where Manny had done his paperwork for the store, and sat down on the love seat to nurse her. About fifteen minutes later, one of the daughters who’d turned to look at her during the funeral came into the room and said, “I hope you’re not planning to tell us that’s his child.”

  For a second or two, Linda was confused. “Pardon?” she said, and then, “You mean Manny … your father? No, no, of course not.”

  “Well, thank heaven for small miracles, at least,” the daughter said. After a pause, she continued. “The family is selling the store, as you may have already guessed.”

  Linda hadn’t guessed; she hadn’t really thought about it. But she nodded her head anyway. The daughter bore only a superficial resemblance to Manny—the wiry hair and brown eyes—but she reminded Linda strongly of someone else, someone she couldn’t quite place right then and there.

  “So any arrangements he might have made with you are completely null and void,” the daughter said. “But we’ve decided to give you two weeks’ severance pay.”

  Linda didn’t say anything. For the first time since Manny’s death, she faced its practical implications, not just her sorrow, and Robin’s. She was out of a job. The baby began to squirm and mewl and Linda hoisted her to her shoulder for a burp. “There, there,” she murmured, as she patted the baby’s back, not sure who she was trying to comfort. When she looked up again, the daughter was gone. They hadn’t even introduced themselves.

  Linda put the baby down next to her on the love seat and changed her diaper. “There, there,” she said again, although the baby seemed contented enough, was almost asleep again. Linda began to put her back into the Snugli, eager to get out of there, to just go home. Then she remembered: Marlene! The rental agent at Paradise—that’s who the daughter reminded her of! Poor Manny, she thought. Poor me.

  As she stood up to go, another daughter came to the doorway, the short one who had been so bereft at the cemetery, and who’d touched Linda’s arm on the front steps of the house. “I’m Leslie,” she said, “the middle one. And you must be Linda.”

  “Oh, I am!” Linda said, like an amnesiac who’d suddenly remembered her identity. She held out her hand and Leslie shook it.

  “Dad called and told me all about you,” Leslie said, and she smiled, remembering. “He was so excited, like some high-school kid.”

  “He was really so … so nice,” Linda said, thinking she was as inadequate as the rabbi had been in evoking Manny’s special qualities. And the rabbi, she suspected, had probably never met him.

  “He was, wasn’t he?” Leslie said. “I just wanted to say thank you, you know, for making him so happy.” Her eyes filled with tears, and the two women embraced, with the baby squeezed between them.

  Robin did go to school the morning of Manny’s funeral. She had to, because she knew that Linda was watching the bus stop from the kitchen window. But she sneaked out again right after homeroom and hitched a ride practically all the way home with some guy in a pickup. Linda would have a cow if she knew. She was always warning her about hitchhiking, about all these “disturbed men who prey on young girls like you.” Linda knew every horror story that ever happened, and a few that probably hadn’t, about girls who were never seen or heard from again or were found in too many pieces to count. But Robin wouldn’t get into a vehicle with a weirdo; she had built-in radar for guys like that.

  Funerals were such a sick joke, she thought, as she let herself into the empty apartment. People saying all those great things about somebody they probably hated like poison, who couldn’t hear them anyway. When Robin died, they could just stand her up in a dumpster somewhere, for all she cared. What a neat surprise for some creep scrounging around in there! The only reason she did consider—for about a second—going to Manny’s funeral was to get a look at his daughter, the one born with all that fur on her shoulders, just to see if it ever grew back.

  There was a message blinking on the answering machine. It was for Linda, from the attendance officer at the high school, asking her to call him as soon as possible to arrange an appointment. Robin rewound the tape, erasing the message. Then she wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator; there wasn’t anything good to eat, just healthy stuff like yogurt and fruit. She wasn’t hungry, exactly, but she poked around in there for a few more minutes before she closed the door. She wandered into Linda’s room next and leaned over the empty crib. A sweet baby perfume rose up from the sheet. As she inhaled it, Robin wound up the musical mobile. The fuzzy ducks and rabbits went around in circles, while the lullaby repeated itself over and over again, even after Robin left the room and went down the hallway to her own, smaller bedroom. There she put a Guns N’ Roses tape on the stereo, flopped onto the bed with her arms under her head, and stared up at the ceiling. She was bored to death, that was the problem. She hated the morning shows on TV, and there was nothing else to do.

  Since Linda quit work, near the end of her pregnancy, Robin hardly ever had the place to herself like this. Now she wished she had a joint or something, so she could enjoy being alone for once. She jumped off the bed and opened her closet. Not really expecting to find anything, she went through the pockets of a few pairs of jeans that were tangled together on the floor. That’s when she discovered the bottle of champagne. “Oh,” she said, and she could feel her heart beating.

  There was gold foil covering the top of the bottle, and after she peeled it off, using her teeth and a pair of scissors, she sat down on the edge of the bed, with the bottle clamped between her knees, and contemplated the wire cage surrounding the cork. It took her only a couple of seconds to figure out how to untwist the wire, and a few more seconds to actually do it. As soon as the cage was released, the cork shot up with a bang that made her scream and then laugh, while the warm foam spilled over onto her hands and down her legs. She licked some of it off her fingers and knees before she lifted the bottle to her mouth and took a drink. It tasted like beer a little, and also something like the pale, bubbly ginger ale her father always gave her after she threw up.

  Linda used to sing this prehistoric song that started “I get no kick from champagne,” and Robin wondered if that might be true of her, too. She took another, longer drink after shaking the bottle vigorously with her thumb pressed over the top, to liven up the foam again. She liked the way it stung her tongue and palate as it went down. Axl Rose was still going strong, but Robin was humming that champagne song to herself as she lifted the bottle to her mouth again, and again. When Manny brought it over that night, he said they would open it in January and drink to the little fishie. Well, it was January, wasn’t it, and Phoebe was here, even if he wasn’t.

  She wondered if any of his daughters were going to name one of their kids after him. Robin hadn’t been named for anybody, dead or alive. It was just a name her mother and father had liked. She was never going to have any children herself, but if she ever did, she wouldn’t call them anything some retardo could turn into “Robin Redbreast,” which had happened to her in the sixth grade. She held the bottle up and saw with surprise that it was almost half gone. Phoebe Ann, she thought, and then she had this amazing flash, the kind of thing other people always said happened to them when they were stoned, but had never happened to her. The name “Ann” was inside the name “Manny”! Wait until she told Linda—she’d probably croak, too. “Fishie,” she said aloud, in a sort of toast, before she lifted the bottle again.

  Linda let herself into the house. “Robin?” she called. “Yoo-hoo, we’re home!” She went down the hallway with the baby in her arms and knocked on Robin’s bedroom door, behind which she heard the stereo blasting away. “Anybody in there?” she shouted, knocking harder. “Hello?” Asleep, no doubt, Linda decided, or finally deaf from all that noise. Why didn’t she ever listen to music that was mellow and melodic, something to soften her outlook? Something by Kenny Loggins, for instance, or Elton John, Linda’s
own favorite when she was a teen. She took the baby back to their room, and hummed “Your Song,” sadly, under her breath, while she undressed her and gave her a sponge bath. Robin hadn’t made an appearance yet, so Linda put Phoebe in her crib and went down the hall and knocked on her door again, still competing with that so-called music. When there was no answer, she announced, “Ready or not, here I come!” and opened the door. The blinds were shut, as usual—it was always twilight in Robin’s room—and Linda saw in the shadows that things were in their normal disarray. It stank in there, but not of pot. It smelled more like one of Lucky’s rest rooms after a busy Saturday night, of stale alcohol and vomit. Once or twice a few months ago she’d been sure she detected beer on Robin’s breath, although Robin vehemently denied it, swore it was only cough medicine, or Linda’s wild imagination. She hoped this wasn’t another occasion for a serious lecture; she was much too tired and heavyhearted for that right now, and she had to feed the baby pretty soon, besides.

  Robin was out like a light on the bed, although it took Linda a moment to locate her in the snarl of bedding. Oh, it was definitely beer this time! How could anyone sell it to a minor? Linda punched the power button on the stereo, and in the abrupt silence she said sternly, “Wake up, miss, I want to talk to you!” There was only a hoarse answering groan from the bed.

  Linda went to the window and yanked up the Venetian blind, and sunlight crashed into the room. More groans from the bed. Linda was about to really lose her temper when she saw the cork on the floor, next to the dresser, and a twist of silver wire a few feet away. The bottle, she discovered, had rolled under the bed. Linda fetched it out and then knelt there, holding it tightly with both of her hands. Oh, God.

  Robin tried to sit up, floundered, and fell back again. “Ohhh,” she moaned, “I’m sick …”

  “I’ll bet you are,” Linda said, and she put the bottle down and stroked the girl’s damp hair back from her brow. Her hand might have been a sledgehammer, given the violent reaction that gentle gesture evoked. Robin cried, “No! Don’t!” and wrenched herself away, out of reach.

  Linda got up and went back down the hallway to the bathroom, where she filled a basin with warm water and dropped her own brand-new pink bath sponge into it. With a towel draped over one arm, she carried the basin to Robin’s room. There she knelt by the bed again and slowly, carefully ran the warm, wet sponge over Robin’s face and neck and arms. The same way she had bathed Phoebe a little while ago. “Robin?” she whispered. “We’re not going to talk about this today. Someday we’ll have to, but not right now, okay?”

  Robin didn’t answer, but she gave her body over limply to Linda’s ministrations.

  “Do you feel like talking about anything else?” Linda asked. “About something that’s on your mind?”

  After a long pause, Robin said, “No,” in a small voice.

  “Okay, then,” Linda told her. “You just lie there and rest, and I’ll go into the kitchen and get you a nice cold, refreshing glass of ginger ale.”

  Robin looked up at her with stricken eyes. Now what have I said, Linda wondered.

  7

  Two Kinds of Men

  THEN IT RAINED, AND rained. Not the standard seasonal showers Linda remembered from Newark, which might be broken by spells of simple cloudiness, or even glimmers of sunlight, but rain of such intensity and duration she began to believe it was divine punishment, and that it might never stop. What am I doing here? she’d think. And when the baby cried incessantly at night, or Robin whined and complained, she would ask herself, Who are these people, and what do they want from me? It wasn’t like that happy rhetorical question she used to ask when she looked into the baby’s fathomless new eyes. Now she felt cranky and bewildered, and she needed some real answers.

  To make matters worse, Robin seemed to hold Linda accountable for the weather. “I thought this was the land of sunshine,” she’d say accusingly, or “You said it was going to let up!”

  Linda didn’t know why, but she felt guilty, and unable to resist the urge to offer further false hope. “Maybe it will be nice tomorrow,” she told Robin during breakfast one Saturday morning, raising her voice over the battering noise of the rain. “And don’t forget, all that gorgeous greenery out there needs a drink once in a while.”

  “Yeah, right,” Robin said, staring gloomily through the window. “So why don’t they just pour the whole stupid Pacific Ocean on it?”

  There was no talking to her, really, about anything. The only time Robin displayed normal human responses was when she was with the baby. They looked so much alike, with their pale hair, invisible eyebrows, and opalescent skin, they seemed to be the true mother and child, and brown-haired Linda merely a caretaker, of another, lesser species. Robin’s affinity for Phoebe was what Manny would have called her saving grace.

  But Linda, too, was saved by the baby. When she lay under the shelter of the double-wedding-ring quilt, nursing Phoebe, her various tensions gradually unwound until she fell into a mindless state of rapture. She didn’t bother herself then about who any of them were, or why they were all here, on this planet, in Los Angeles, in the same household. Riddles about existence and more urgent concerns about poverty and loneliness didn’t exactly disappear, but they receded into the fuzzy distance as she and the baby became one and the same again, milk and pulse and flesh and spirit.

  Linda had been officially out of work for two weeks now—the two long weeks of the deluge, and the two short weeks of her severance pay from the Liquor Barn. She’d glanced through the want ads without applying for anything, and she had investigated a few day-care centers without making any decisions about them, either. She was frightened of ending up on welfare, or even out on the street, but she couldn’t seem to make a definite move. It was as if she needed someone to snap their fingers in her face and say, “Wake up! Do something!” Her friends tried to perk her up. Rosalia, who had taken a part-time job in a plastics factory, dealt privately with her own grief about Manny, and became a surrogate of Linda’s mother, saying things like “Life goes on,” and “You have to think of the children.” Vicki tried to make her feel better by reading worse stories aloud from the newspaper, about the victims of a terrorist’s bomb in Peru and a tidal wave in Japan. Of course, that only made Linda feel worse, but she appreciated Vicki’s good intentions. Robin didn’t even attempt to lift the dreary mood of their household. One morning, Linda found that the girl had left a gallon of milk out on the counter all night, where it had soured. “Do you think we have money to throw away, Robin?” she said. “You are totally irresponsible!”

  Robin narrowed her eyes and said, “Oh, yeah? Well, you’re the kiss of death.”

  Robin had called her plenty of other names in the short time they’d known one another—wimp, jerk, bitch, and asshole were only a few that came to mind—but nothing she’d ever said had given Linda such an acute sense of horror and recognition. “What do you mean by that?” she demanded when she could find her voice, and Robin hadn’t backed down the way she usually did. Instead, she stood her ground and said, through a cruelly curling mouth, “Everybody you love dies on you, don’t they?”

  “That’s not true!” Linda cried.

  “Oh, no?” Robin said. “What about my father, huh? What about Manny?”

  “But I loved them!” Linda exclaimed, and at Robin’s instant, twisted smile, “I mean, I never did anything to hurt them. They just died, that’s all! It was just very bad luck!”

  “Yeah, right,” Robin said.

  Linda sighed. Maybe someone like Robin, whose father had been taken against his will, and whose mother had abandoned her by heartless choice, could never believe in anything as random as luck. Why did Linda feel so stricken with guilt, though? “I love you and Phoebe, too,” she persisted, “and you’re not going anywhere.” But Robin only shrank back at those words. And Linda shrank back into her shell.

  But then, yesterday, for no apparent reason, she started to come back to herself. Right after breakfa
st, she prepared a complicated casserole for dinner, and in the afternoon she called to answer a want ad, for a dental assistant. The remarkable thing was that the ad said, “Will train, no experience necessary.” Not only that, the dentist, who answered his phone himself, sounded so friendly, and he agreed to interview her the very next morning, on a Saturday, when the office was officially closed. That meant that Robin could babysit while she was gone. And it meant that Linda was going to get out of the house by herself for a couple of hours. Even the rain seemed less oppressive as she finished breakfast and got dressed. She’d been wearing blue jeans around the apartment, with one of several milk-stained T-shirts, and she either went barefoot or wore a pair of floppy flowered house slippers. Now she put stockings on, and the one wool skirt that still fit, and she eased her feet into the silky leather of her good black pumps. After peering at herself critically in the mirror, she pulled her ponytail from its rubber band and brushed her hair into submission and shine.

  She gave Robin instructions about defrosting the packets of expressed breast milk in the freezer, and about checking the baby from time to time while she slept. “When you change her diaper, try not to let the tape stick to her skin, Robin, okay?” Linda said. “And when you put her back down, see that she isn’t lying on her face.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Robin said, wearily. “Just go, already, will you?”

  Then Linda was out of there, running under the drumming umbrella through the flooded street to her car. It had been giving her all sorts of trouble lately, stalling and backfiring, scaring her half to death. And now the wires had to be soaked. But the engine turned over smoothly after only the second or third try, which Linda took as a good omen for the day, maybe for her entire future. She would get the job, the rain would stop, their lives would start to turn around.