Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Ginger tried to soothe things. “When she wears her hair back,” she told Ray, “she looks much older. Doesn’t she? You could be a waitress or something, Robin. You’d have to get a fake ID. And maybe stuff your bazooms,” she added, with a sly glance at her brother. “Say, Rob, are you taking your radio?”

  How could she have been friends with them? She thought of all the days of stoned giddiness in Ginger’s floral, smoke-clouded room. She tried to remember what they’d talked about and why they had laughed so much. Had it really been fun? Is it ever fun if you can see yourself working so hard to have it?

  Now they both seemed selfish and unattractive to her. Ray’s neck was flushed with acne and with greed, and his eyes were small and mean-spirited.

  As for Ginger, she was a sex-crazed moron.

  With a plunging sense of loss, Robin realized that they were also her best friends, her only friends. Nothing ever stayed the same for a minute. Everything in the world changed and disappeared. “Yes,” she told Ginger, her voice pitched to a spiteful shriek. “I am taking it.” And she threw the little white portable radio into the suitcase.

  Ginger grabbed her sack and took one last pleased look in the mirror. “Well, I guess we better go, Ray,” she said. Then she hugged Robin and made kissing sounds near her ear. “Oh, shit, I’m gonna miss you, miss you, miss you!”

  Ray gathered everything else up under one arm and walked over to Robin. If he was going to kiss her, too, she would kill him. Instead, he reached into his shirt pocket and removed two crooked, shredding joints. “Here,” he said. “Freebies. Take them with you for the road. Go ahead.” Then he put his free hand firmly on her behind and said, “Keep your sweet ass out of trouble.” And when she merely gaped at him, he added, “And don’t forget to send me a card from I-o-way.”

  Linda heard the murmur of the kids’ voices through the bedroom wall. At least Robin spoke to somebody.

  The girl had only wanted one suitcase for her own use, which surprised Linda. People of Robin’s age usually have a firm attachment to the sentimental trash of childhood. She herself struggled with the choices that had to be made: what to take with them, what to leave behind. There wasn’t that much room in the trunk of the car, but they could put a few things on the floor in back. Something that would take up very little space was the box containing Wright’s ashes. The ashes were a residual Linda hadn’t considered when she decided on cremation. But the day after the services for Wright, the young man from the mortuary telephoned, insinuating himself once more into Linda’s life. And once more there were choices. A plastic box or an Everlasting Urn? The remains could be delivered, picked up by a member of the family, or arrangements could be made for burial. “Burial!” Linda cried. That was exactly what she thought she had so efficiently avoided, and she was ashamed of her own dismay at learning that there were remains, after all, that death and prayer and even fire don’t release you from certain obligations. She chose the plastic box and promised to come by and pick it up. Later she wondered fleetingly what they could do if she left town without keeping her promise. Would she be followed and dunned forever like someone skipping out on car payments? These thoughts produced further shame.

  The next day Linda went down to the mortuary and was given, after signing a receipt, a brown lucite container that resembled a book in its size and shape. Its weight was not significant. She sat in the car for several minutes with the container on her lap, like a magician who has forgotten the magical restorative words. Then she put it into the trunk and drove home. On the way, she decided that this development was too morbid to share with Robin; in fact, too morbid for Linda herself to contemplate right away.

  For weeks, the box of ashes remained in the trunk of the Maverick and Linda only wondered occasionally what she would do with them. She thought of scattering them in one of Wright’s favorite places, the beach for instance, with its constant surf and infinite distance. But she didn’t get around to doing it right away. By the time she thought of it again, and actually drove to the shore, the season had started. It was a hot day and the lifeguards were whistling from their perches. Sun worshippers were tearing off their clothes, and the music from transistor radios was so loud the ocean might have been merely a backup group. Linda stood next to an overflowing trash basket, her shoes filling with sand, and decided that the beach wasn’t the best place for eternal rest, after all.

  She felt it was wrong, even irreverent, to keep Wright’s ashes in the trunk of the car, like a mobster’s hostage, and she knew that she’d have to make a decision about them eventually. When she began to pack for the trip, it occurred to her that she might take the ashes to Iowa, too, and scatter them near Wright’s place of birth, maybe in the cornfields, and her heart was eased.

  Linda also decided to keep a carton of Wright’s smaller paintings. She didn’t know whether they were good or not, in a critical sense, but they contained his particular vision of things. Perhaps art, even bad art, was the only thing you could leave after death that would continue your consciousness in the living world.

  Iola once said she was going to have a talking headstone installed on her own grave. Anyone who wanted to know what she was like could step on a little switch that would activate a taped recording of her voice. “Hi, there! Thanks for stopping by. My name was Iola Behnke …”

  A few days before, Linda went through Wright’s belongings while Robin was in school. She packed his clothing in two big cartons for a Goodwill pickup: shirts, suits, underwear, even the bomber jacket he was wearing the day they’d met. For some reason the sight of his shoes touched her the most. Maybe because they took on the particular shape of each human foot, or because shoes without feet inside to move them were so poignantly inanimate. She gave his bowling ball to a coworker at the plant, who thanked her with tears in his eyes and said he’d have to have the finger holes enlarged, if she didn’t mind.

  Still, there was plenty of junk, and she had to hurry before Robin came home. In the very back of the bedroom closet, behind a box of barbells, she found a smaller box, and it was sealed with heavy gummed tape and tied with rope. Linda opened it with a straight-edged razor and the fearsome instinct that she had found treasure.

  She wasn’t really wrong. Inside were things Wright’s first wife, Miriam, had left behind when she abandoned him and Robin. Maybe he’d kept them at first because he had hopes she would return, and then later because their disposal would have required a ceremony he couldn’t bear. Sealed up like that, and hidden, they were obviously not relics he browsed through and brooded over on solitary evenings. There was a hairbrush with a silver-plated back and nylon bristles that still held long strands of brown hair. There was a much-folded note, and as she opened it, Linda knew this was an invasion of unguarded privacy, but that didn’t stop her.

  It wasn’t even a love letter. It just told Wright that there was some cold chicken for dinner in a blue bowl in the refrigerator, and that the cleaners didn’t have his slacks ready. “See you later. Love, M.,” it said, so it wasn’t the farewell note, either, if there had ever been one. He’d probably saved it because it was written in her hand.

  There was a pharmacist’s vial of small pink pills prescribed for Mrs. W. Reismann (that was herself now!) by Dr. Victor Klein. One tablet after meals and before bedtime. There was a deck of Tarot cards bound with a rubber band. Did Miriam lay out her own future and discover the other man in the cards? Finally, there were two manila envelopes, one large and one small, and they were both as thoroughly sealed as the carton had been. The smaller one felt as if it might have photographs in it. Linda thought of wedding pictures, and she wondered if there would be anything suitable for Robin. But when she opened the envelope, only a half-dozen faded brown Polaroid prints fell out. Someone had forgotten to put that stuff on them to fix the images. Five of them were of the same woman, nude, in various poses. Her face had faded the most, but, because of dark lipstick, it was clear she had been smiling. Two dark smudges of hair, above and below. She
was lounging across a bed, surrounded by rumpled bedclothes and other things. Peering closely, Linda could make out magazines and cigarettes and what was probably the case of the camera. Then she began to recognize other, unfocused details. It was this bedroom, the same bed, night table, lamp. In the last photo, Wright, blurred, but obviously clothed, appeared beside the woman. He must have had one of those timers. He was smiling, too, his arm around her waist, and Linda thought he looked breathless and happy, like a man who has boarded a train just as it was pulling out of the station.

  She tore open the larger envelope. There was a stapled sheaf of papers inside. The top one read: Report on Mrs. Miriam Reismann, nee Diamond—April 2 thru April 11, 1971. Albert J. Lapozzi Agency, Detection and Protection. There was an address in downtown Newark.

  Linda sat down on the bed and read quickly through the pages. It was like reading the outline for a detective novel about a missing person. All the characters, major and minor, had been sketched in; the plot was implied.

  Miriam’s Newark friends claimed they had no knowledge of her whereabouts, but hinted at her friendship with a man named Tony.

  Lapozzi had gone to the ex-wife of the man, Anthony Bernard Hausner. Mrs. Hausner had not seen her husband for more than a year, but he called his children on the telephone occasionally, and sent them birthday gifts. He had not been in touch with them since March 15, the suspected time of his departure with Mrs. Reismann. Mrs. Hausner gave the names of two male friends of her ex-husband’s who might have knowledge of his whereabouts. They didn’t, but one of them remembered Tony mentioning the possibility of a good job with an electronics firm in Sarasota, Florida. A check with a Florida agency contact proved negative. No Hausner or anyone fitting his description had applied for employment at any of the large electronics firms in that area. April 5 to 9 was a dead end. Hausner’s mother in Milwaukee said she didn’t know where he was, and what’s more, she didn’t care. He had not tried to contact his brothers or old army buddies. Mrs. Reismann had not visited her hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio, since 1964. Both parents dead, no siblings. Then, on April 10, Mrs. Hausner’s twelve-year-old son received a postcard from his father postmarked Glendale, Arizona. It was stapled to the last page of the report. There was a picture of a giant saguaro cactus on the front. “Hello,” Hausner had written. “Here I am in the wild, wild west. There are lots of Indians here. It is 108 in the shade. Take care. Love, Dad.”

  On April 11, Lapozzi had an address.

  Linda threw it all out, after she’d reduced to shreds everything shreddable: note, photos, postcard, everything. But first she’d copied the address onto a scrap of paper, without knowing why she did it. She wondered if Wright had acted on the report, had tried to contact his wife and beg her to come back to him and his child. It was something she’d never know.

  Robin’s friends were leaving. Linda poked her head out and said, “Bye, bye!” Robin saw her look at the lamp sculpture Ray was carting off, with a mixture of bewilderment and pain.

  9 They were a few miles out of Jacksonville, Pennsylvania, when Linda realized she might be pregnant. “Oh!” she said, and the car swerved, almost changing lanes before she righted it.

  “Whuzzat?” Robin sat up in the back seat, jolted from a nap.

  “Nothing,” Linda told her. “Just a little bump in the road,” and Robin lay down again. Then Linda’s memory gathered the clues to her revelation. The nausea she had blamed on the anxiety of driving, the sudden sleepy peace of late afternoons, and the pressing knowledge that would not rise into her consciousness on the morning of Wright’s funeral, or any time since, until now. It was something only her body knew, and wasn’t broadcasting.

  Her periods had always been irregular. It wasn’t unusual for her to skip one or even two months. Since her late teens, Linda had kept a careful record of her own cycle, but in the turmoil of the past weeks she’d forgotten about it. When was her last period? She hadn’t been careless about contraception, though, and she tried to recall a magazine chart that evaluated the success rate of different methods. Wasn’t an IUD right up there with the best of them?

  A doctor she’d consulted when she was twenty prescribed birth-control pills to establish an artificial regularity her system might adopt. But she began to throw up and have violent headaches, and the pills were discontinued. She remembered how the doctor said not to worry, it would probably straighten itself out in a few years and that her only problem might be in conceiving a baby, since it would be difficult to pinpoint ovulation. Had ovulation somehow been pinpointed, without her knowledge or her consent?

  For the first time, Linda found herself driving without thinking about driving, without that fierce concentration that left her hands almost arthritically cramped when she stopped to rest. She knew she had better pay attention or they’d wander onto Highway 144; she had recently seen signs warning of its impending junction with I-80. And pretty soon she’d have to start looking for a motel for the night. One with a drugstore close by.

  Of course she might be mistaken; she wasn’t married any more, wasn’t even sleeping with anybody. Just yesterday she had contemplated Wright’s paintings in terms of his immortality, and now there might be this other, further proof that he’d been here, and recently. Please, don’t let it be, she thought, and I promise I’ll be good. Although she had no idea in what direction sacrificial goodness lay.

  Robin didn’t wake up again until they pulled in at the office of the Dutchboy Motel. As Linda had guessed, the rates were reasonable, and they had a vacancy. The place was close to the main road, and it didn’t have a restaurant or a coffee shop. It had a look of slight disrepair—the V and N weren’t lit on the vacancy sign—but small things like that probably held the price down.

  Once inside their room, Linda knew that other factors contributed to the low rates, too. The room was tiny, and except for a mammoth color television set, the furniture seemed scaled to children or dwarfs. Well, thank goodness for the television set, anyway. It would give Robin something to do, and introduce the variety of other human voices. She offered the girl first choice of beds, although they were exactly the same. Linda lay back on hers and massaged her hands. They were still curled from steering, and looked like the hands of Snow White’s stepmother when she was cackling over the poisoned apple. In the other bed, Snow White herself lay, pale and bored.

  Robin was very upset, but with her gift for self-control, Linda would never know about it. It hadn’t occurred to Robin that they would have to share a room on the road. Now she was worried about having to undress in front of Linda. She would sleep in her clothes, if necessary. But she supposed she could use the bathroom or do it under the covers, and she hoped Linda would do the same. Robin’s other fear was that she might talk in her sleep and give away secret thoughts. Once, when Ginger slept over, she said that Robin had not shut up all night. “What did I say?” Robin asked anxiously, and Ginger only smiled and said, “Oh, lots of things. Wouldn’t you like to know?” Of course, she was well known for her lying and exaggerating.

  She could feel Linda’s eyes on her. Linda was always looking at her and talking at her, even in the car, pointing out everything as if Robin had never seen a tree or a cow before. And she was such a rotten driver. A few times, Robin was sure they were going to be killed. Linda sighed and Robin knew she was about to speak again. She often gave little warnings like that: sighs, throat clearing, an introductory cough.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Robin shrugged.

  “Me, too,” Linda said. “Let’s wash up and find a nice place for supper.”

  In the tiny bathroom, Linda shut her eyes as she sat down on the toilet. “Please,” she whispered, but when she opened her eyes again, her peach-colored bikini panties were still unsoiled.

  In the diner, they sat in a booth that had an individual selector of taped music mounted to the wall. Robin kept turning the wheel that flipped the song titles, click, click, until Linda wanted to grab her hand to make her stop. L
inda’s need to talk, so as not to have to think about herself, was enormous. Questions demanded answers, and she was determined to provoke some of them and begin a volley of conversation. “Have you ever stayed on a farm before, Robin?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I haven’t either,” Linda confessed, “but it sounds nice and healthy, doesn’t it?”

  That was definitely a wrong move. She could tell by Robin’s little curling sneer. Health is of no interest to teenagers, anyway. Most of the time they seem bent on destroying their health. Right now, Robin was eating a meal almost entirely composed of starches: spaghetti, french fries, and a buttered soft roll. An accompanying salad lay untouched. Well, she wouldn’t compound her error by saying anything about that. She wasn’t the girl’s mother, she wasn’t anyone’s mother. “Ohhhh,” she moaned, remembering, and Robin was so startled she said, “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” Linda said. “I guess I must be full.” She looked down at her plate, at the revolting pink edge of her half-eaten hamburger.

  Linda excused herself to go to the bathroom. As soon as she left the table, Robin went right to the local telephone books on a stand near the rest rooms. She turned quickly to the R’s: Reich, Reilly, Reinhart. But there was no Miriam Reismann listed. She slammed the book shut and hurried back to the booth as Linda came through the door marked with the silhouette of a woman.

  They walked a short distance to a small shopping center that reminded Linda of the one in Slatesville. She pointed out the five-and-dime next door to the drugstore, and she gave Robin two dollars in case she wanted to buy something. But Robin trailed just behind her into the drugstore.

  There was a lot of junk on the counters, but not what Linda wanted. “Look at this!” she cried, at a display of soap miniatures she hoped would distract Robin while she made discreet inquiries. Robin ignored the soaps and tailed Linda as if she were suddenly scared of being separated. Linda pretended to browse. She even took off her shoes and tried on six pairs of those Japanese rubber beach thongs. The Child’s Large, the Man’s Small, and the Woman’s Medium all fit her. The pharmacist called from behind his counter: “May I help someone?” Linda looked around; they were the only customers in the store. She fixed a smile and ambled up to him, sensing Robin right behind her.