Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  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.

  Now Ray went into the bathroom and came out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a roll of absorbent cotton. “Is ze patient ready for ze operation?” he asked, and he and Ginger laughed again.

  “Sure,” Robin said, pushing up the sleeve of her T-shirt, and thinking, My father used to do it with asshole Linda. Probably a hundred times a night.

  “Ze heart,” Ray said, “is not belong on ze arm.”

  “She’ll see it there and give you a hard time,” Ginger said.

  Who cares? Who cares? “So do it on my leg,” Robin told them.

  “But then you won’t be able to wear shorts,” Ginger said, with exasperating logic.

  They finally decided on a spot slightly to the left of her spine, and just above the waist. The skin there was smooth and hairless. Ginger swabbed the designated place with alcohol; it was shockingly cold and it stank. Then she took a red Magic Marker and carefully drew the outline of a heart. Robin could feel Ginger’s soft breath on her back as she worked, and the light, pleasant pressure of the marker.

  “There!” Ginger said in triumph, and Robin moved backward to the mirror, holding her shirt up behind her so she could see. The drawing seemed insignificant, not much larger than the tiny raspberry birthmark she had inside her right thigh, that proof of herself. And the heart was neatly and symmetrically made, with the innocent charm of a valentine.

  She sat down near the center of the bed with her knees raised and her arms folded across them. Then she put her head down, too, letting her hair fall forward in a pale, translucent screen. She felt so relaxed now, yet powerful with resistance and control. Even if it hurt terribly, she would not cry. Other girls she knew cried at everything, cried with a kind of delirious joy at stupid movies, sad books, lost football games, and bad grades. Robin amazed them all by failing to be moved even by the television rerun of Ali MacGraw’s death in Love Story.

  “I’m gonna start,” Ray said in a serious voice, and Robin nodded assent.

  She jumped at the first puncture and cried out.

  “Oh, shit, does it hurt a lot, Robbie?” Ginger asked. She raised the curtain of Robin’s hair and poked a new joint inside.

  Robin toked and shook her head. The moment the pain subsided, leaving only a mild residual sting, she felt peaceful again. The vacuum whined and Ginger and Ray quarreled in loud whispers behind her. “Look what you did, fuckup. You smeared the whole outline.”

  “Well, it was bleeding, prick. Do you want to get it all over my bed?”

  They were her friends, and they were funny, and good. Even the thought of her own blood, something that usually made Robin uneasy, didn’t bother her now. It was possible to hypnotize yourself, she knew with sudden wisdom. You could do that, go outside your own body and give orders. In India, or somewhere, they could walk on fire or razor blades! Robin made tight fists and let the stubs of her fingernails bite into her palms, manufacturing new pain to distract from the old one.

  This hurt all right; each jab of the pen brought a fresh surprise of pain. Ginger murmured sympathy and stroked Robin’s hair. But she was in no danger of crying. She had not cried when her father died, either. And she had loved him, although that love was tempered by intolerable pity. She pitied him in his long loneliness, which was like her own, and again in his brief foolish happiness with Linda.

  Ow! The pen point piercing her skin hurt. The pain radiated up the curve of her back and traveled around to her chest, where her real heart thumped.

  His heart had killed him all right, but not in the way that Linda said. He died of a broken heart that had suffered its fatal fracture eight years before and never healed. It just cracked slowly, slowly, the way the crust of the earth does. He was murdered.

  She could hear her own breath, and it was a harsh sound, like the wind at night after her mother was gone. Like the wind that blew D
orothy and Toto from Kansas. Like the wind when that door opened and took him inside.

  6 Linda’s driving improved greatly during those weeks before their departure for Iowa. It was due partly to experience and partly to an extreme mustering of will. After parallel parking, entering major highways was the greatest challenge; to come suddenly abreast of all those other vehicles moving at suicidal speed, and to have to find one’s place without breaking stride!

  She tried to think of it in terms of dancing, how she always managed to place her foot between her partner’s feet for the briefest moment, without hesitation or loss of beat. But that didn’t work. Driving was not like dancing.

  Yet there seemed to be a kind of music that everyone else heard and drove to. If she could only relax a little, she might hear it also. Real, car-radio music didn’t help. Everyone could be tuned to a different station. It was more like an inner song, like those rounds you sang in school. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the … And you had to enter at the precise moment … merrily, merrily … so that the rhythm was flawless and the music endless.

  Other drivers honked and cursed at her less, she thought, and her own physical responses were less dramatic. She wasn’t always sweaty anymore, and she didn’t feel like throwing up or have tachycardia after a fifteen-minute ride on the Jersey Turnpike, or a round trip through the Holland Tunnel. But she knew that none of these minor excursions really prepared her for the long-distance journey. How about endurance? And what about consistency?

  One morning, after she dropped Robin at school, Linda headed for the highway and drove more than one hundred miles to Slatesville, Pennsylvania, where she’d been born and where she had lived until she was eighteen. She had not been back there since 1974, when her mother died. There was no reason to go back, no family or friendly attachments. It was the sort of place you left right after high school, so that the population slowly diminished, even during the post-World War II baby boom. And among those who stayed, Linda couldn’t think of anyone now with whom she’d had more than a glancing relationship. Slatesville was simply an arbitrary choice for this trial run.

  The trip was eventless, except for a close call with a tractor trailer near the Interstate entrance at Lebanon, and she arrived in the center of town before eleven o’clock. It looked the same, yet somewhat altered in a tricky way. Had they moved the railroad tracks slightly to the north? Of course, some of the signs over the double row of shops showed change of ownership, and the face of the bank had been sandblasted to a snowy brilliance.

  Linda parked in front of the Station Diner and went inside for coffee. She didn’t know anyone there, not the middle-aged woman behind the counter, who was carefully building a pyramid of pastries, or the two men bent in conversation at the only occupied booth. She was relieved. What if someone said, “Linda Marie Camisko! What in the world are you doing back here?”

  She drank her coffee and got into the car again. Then, just to test her memory and her sense of direction, she drove down Sweetwater Avenue, past the high school, past the mills, to Roper Street, in search of her old house. It was a gray wooden structure, built in the late twenties, with a circular wooden porch and a monumental tree in the yard that used to cast all the front rooms in darkness and keep the porch railings sticky with sap and bird droppings.

  There it was, just as remembered, except for a sign on a pole that announced it as The Maple Inn. Guests. TV. Meals.

  The landlady had been a practical nurse, like Linda’s mother, and they had rented four rooms on the second floor from her. Her name was Piner, Mrs. Loretta, and her husband, like Linda’s father, worked at the asbestos spinning mill a mile away. They had no children, but there used to be a frenetic white dog they kept chained outdoors. Mrs. Piner did her practical nursing at home, taking in the elderly and giving them dinner and baths and all the other things they could no longer manage for themselves. Linda recalled those frightened and frightening wraiths in bathrobes, encountered on the stairs, and the moans that came from the large hall bathroom, where Mrs. Piner was cutting someone’s toenails. She would have gone right to the quick.

  She wore white uniforms and nurse’s shoes even though she worked in her own home. A long time before that, though, she’d been a baby nurse, like Linda’s mother, who stayed for a few weeks at a time in the homes of wealthy Harrisburg families to care for newborn infants.

  Linda parked the car and went up the porch steps, sounding herself for nostalgia. There wasn’t any. Of course she had been miserably unhappy much of the time here: that sad parade of displaced persons, her mother’s frequent absences, her father’s constant raging presence after the emphysema kept him housebound. And then his terrible death. There had been some private moments of ecstasy, but they had occurred in the palace of the imagination rather than in the narrow perimeters of the house. She had only dreamed here.

  No one was sitting on the green-painted porch chairs, and peering through the rippled panel of yellow glass in the door, she saw a dim distortion of the front hall, unbroken by human shadow. As a child, she’d had a habit of scaring herself. What if it was Frankenstein who really had the room next to the downstairs kitchen instead of poor Mr. Botts, who was so frail and confused? What if those heavy footsteps on the stairs were not Mr. Piner’s but the monster’s, whose unholy mission was to get her, Linda, where she shivered exquisitely in bed?

  Now, after she’d banged the boar’s-head knocker twice, she felt some of the old chilling expectancy. What if it was her father who came to the door, breathing his furious dragon’s breath, or the tired ghost of her mother, uniformly white, satchel in hand, ready to leave once more for a job?

  Then there was movement inside—someone broke the wavy still-life of her view—and the door opened. It was Mrs. Piner, wearing a green print housedress. Her shoes were white and rubber-soled.

  She had aged remarkably in those few years, and was wearing eyeglasses as dense as paperweights. She didn’t recognize Linda at first and thought she had come about a room. But even after Linda prodded her memory—“Alma and George Camisko’s daughter? My hair was longer? Upstairs?”—Mrs. Piner’s expression didn’t alter. It’s her bad vision, Linda thought. She’s probably almost blind.

  Linda explained that she was driving through and just dropped in to say hello. It was the most unlikely thing she’d ever said in her life. No one drove through Slatesville. It didn’t lead anywhere else. But Mrs. Piner didn’t take notice of the lie.

  Linda looked past her into the parlor, where Mr. Piner was sitting in an armchair, watching television. He was wearing a cardigan sweater over his blue work shirt, and corduroy slippers on his feet. He must have retired from the mill.

  At last, Mrs. Piner gestured Linda inside, and she found herself on the sofa, facing the screen. It was the only source of light in the long, tree-darkened room. She received a grunted acknowledgment of her greeting to Mr. Piner. He was busy with the remote-control panel for the television set, pushing the button with a steady click, so that cartoons, commercials, and movies went by with the speed of an express train. He finally settled on a quiz program that was in progress.

  Mrs. Piner sat next to Linda and folded her hands in her lap. Nobody said anything. A contestant on the quiz program had to decide if she was going to risk an accumulation of prizes valued at over three thousand dollars for the possible win of a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville. “Oh, wow,” she kept saying, and the emcee moved the microphone under her chin each time she said it. The audience was screaming as if the studio were on fire and they were all trapped inside.

  What am I doing here, Linda wondered, but she also felt oddly comfortable, even sleepy. The Piners didn’t ask her to explain herself. They hardly paid any attention to her at all. She could have been their grown child enjoying a cozy daily ritual. “Oh, wow,” the contestant said again, and Linda slumped a little and yawned. She might have stayed there, forgetting Iowa and Robin and everything in their recent past, if Mr. Piner had not suddenly pushed his bu
tton one more time, throwing the room into darkness and silence.

  “Well,” Linda said. She decided to forgo asking about the rooming-house business, if it was profitable and pleasant. There wasn’t a sign of a tenant anywhere, and it might be an indelicate subject. Instead, she said, “It’s been over five years since my mother died.”

  Mrs. Piner came to life. She moved conspiratorially close on the sofa and said, “She died from the babies, you know.”

  “Pardon?” Linda said, although she had heard perfectly. Her mother had died of a stroke, of a rapid series of strokes, each one taking another faculty, another measure of hope. Linda looked to old Mr. Piner for help, but he appeared to be fast asleep. Old people dropped off like that.

  “From those tiny rooms they gave you,” Mrs. Piner continued, “and the babies used up all the air.”

  “Nursing is a difficult profession,” Linda said, and bit her tongue so she would not add, “but a rewarding one.”

  “The families sat around eating lamb chops,” Mrs. Piner said with bitter intensity, “and you got this tainted luncheon meat.”

  “It was a long drive just to drop in like this,” Linda said, forgetting her original story. “And I really have to get going.” She stood and walked to the doorway. “Say so long to Mr. Piner for me, please. I’d hate to disturb him; he looks so peaceful.”

  Mrs. Piner walked behind her, soundlessly. “They gave you a corner in the closet to hang your clothes,” she said. “Next to the folding bridge chairs and the ironing board.”

  Linda walked rapidly to the front door. As she did, it opened and a man carrying two shopping bags hurried past her and up the stairs. Did he live in one of their old rooms? Mrs. Piner didn’t seem to see him. She took Linda’s arm with the grasp of an arresting officer, and her voice fell into an ominous whisper. “And do you think those young couples ever waited six weeks, postpartum? You could hear them going at it all night, through the walls.”