Linda thought that if she were a shy young man buying condoms for the first time, there would probably have been a forbidding matron, the twin of her high-school health teacher, behind the counter.
The pharmacist wore a pristine white coat, and he had gray hair parted in the middle, giving him a paternal/professional aura that confused her. She felt she wanted his approval, which didn’t make any sense. He was a complete stranger; she would never see him again. Linda leaned toward him, clutching the counter’s edge. She had removed her wedding band on the day of Wright’s funeral, and now she wondered if she should be wearing it, the way women used to wear borrowed or dime-store rings when they checked into quickie motels.
Behind her, Robin had paused at a magazine rack against the wall, and was standing there, turning pages.
“Do you have those pregnancy-test kits?” Linda hissed.
The pharmacist reached between them and handed her a small blue box from a prominent pile of small blue boxes. They had been right there all the time, in plain sight, under a sign that said Family Planning Center. And the pharmacist didn’t even seem curious. She might have asked for aspirin or Band-Aids for all he cared. His indifference gave her a rush of courage. She paid for her purchase and marched away, forgetting completely about Robin for the moment. At the doorway, she remembered and turned to see Robin buying something, too. Linda waited for her with concealed impatience.
The kid stayed in the bathroom for what seemed like hours. What was she doing in there? As soon as the door was shut, Linda had pulled the blue box from her purse and scanned the instructions. They were not complicated at all. How civilized life had become when such torturous suspense could be shortened, and when no middleman was necessary to obtain this internal information.
According to the literature, she’d have her answer in two hours. If Robin ever came out of the bathroom. The toilet flushed once, then again; water ran into the sink for the millionth time, and the door opened. Robin, in blue pajamas, was barefoot and pink-faced. Linda rushed past her, closed the door, and locked it.
Robin dropped her discarded clothing on the floor next to the bed that was hers for the night. If she woke first in the morning, which was her intention, she would probably have everything back on again before Linda even stirred. The tattooed place on her back was tender when she lay on it. It was probably still infected. The antibiotic capsules Ray had given her were huge, and she’d always had trouble swallowing pills. When she was little and became ill, her father would crush the baby aspirins and hide them in applesauce.
Asshole Linda had knocked on the door, asking if everything was okay, just when she almost had it down, and she had to spit it out and start all over again. Her belly was bloated with all the water she drank, trying. The capsule kept rising into her mouth no matter how far back she pushed it, no matter how fast she gulped the water. She turned both faucets on all the way so Linda wouldn’t hear her gagging. Robin had to throw two capsules down the toilet because they had become such a gelatinous mess. The third one went down her throat on the first try.
After that, she took two short tokes on one of the joints Ray had given her, and then carefully put it out. She opened the window and waved at the smoke while Linda kept banging on the door.
Now Robin pulled the covers up and lay on her side to think about her mother. Once Robin learned about the man, she had to give up all those soothing fantasies of amnesia and kidnapping by pirates or gypsies. Gradually, since her father’s death, her mind’s image of her mother changed, too. The beauty she believed she remembered became shallow and ordinary. Yet Robin clung to an old idea that the man in the case was handsome and rich, maybe even famous. One day Robin might open a newspaper and find her mother in the act of dining at the White House or attending the Academy Awards. She could only think of Miriam in extravagant circumstances, wealthy in every respect except for peace of mind and true happiness. All the furs and jewels in the world were unable to console her in her regret. And she would be almost unrecognizable now because of the rapid and savage aging process that had left her ruined and undesirable.
When Robin found her, truly ugly and deserted by him, she would tell her how Wright had died. Her mother would cry out in grief and lay apologies like roses at Robin’s feet, too late, too late. Then joy would overtake her at rediscovering her lost child and she would open her arms. Robin would go into them, but only to exact her revenge. Then all of Miriam’s money, and the horrified screams of her servants, couldn’t save her.
The pot was finally starting to take. Robin felt good now, easy. Her thoughts became random and before long she allowed herself to dissolve into sleep. What! She jerked awake and sat up, confused. She was in a dim room, lighted briefly by passing cars. It was a motel room, somewhere in Pennsylvania. Linda was in the bathroom doing something in absolute silence, and Robin’s father was dead.
She lay down again and under the covers her hands came together between her thighs in irreverent prayer. She clenched her teeth until they ground against each other, forbidding the escape of careless speech, and then she gave herself up again to sleep.
There were two glasses on the shelf above the sink. Linda took the one still wrapped in a bag marked Sanitized For Your Protection, unwrapped it, and urinated into it. The diagrammed instructions were unfolded and propped against the faucet. After she glanced at them once more, she took an eyedropper from the kit and put just three drops of urine into the provided test tube. Soon this magical fluid from her own body would reveal its mystery.
She removed a plastic vial from the kit and added its contents to the test tube and then shook it. There was a little stand in the box and she placed it on the edge of the sink and balanced the test tube in it. A mad scientist in the bathroom laboratory of a third-rate motel.
Linda stared as the frothy liquid settled and grew still. If a dark ring formed near the bottom in two hours, the test was positive and she was pregnant. If nothing happened, she was not. It was nine o’clock. At eleven, the results would be in. Watched pots. She couldn’t simply sit in that claustrophobic space and wait. Linda wished she had someone there to share the time and suspense with. She thought of Iola back in Bayonne shaking her hips right now to amplified music.
After Wright died, Iola visited Linda and said that they all die, one way or another. Every relationship she’d ever had ended in pain. Now her body was beginning to retreat from men, a little at a time. She didn’t regret the loss of muscle tone, the sagging. Soon she’d retire from the arena completely, with a vibrator and some mood-inducing music. “That sounds so lonely,” Linda had said. “Yeah, I suppose,” Iola agreed. “But at least you don’t have to worry about getting involved.” She would probably have something cheering to say now, too, something to make Linda smile and relieve her of this feeling of isolation.
Yet it wasn’t Iola Linda wanted. It was her own mother, with a wanting so strong it surprised her. In that common error of childhood, Linda used to think her mother delivered babies in her nurse’s satchel. What else could make her departures so urgent? A family was always waiting eagerly for its new child. Once Linda held on to her at the door, suspending her weight from the starched skirt. “I wish you didn’t have to go!” she cried. Her mother pried open the clinging hands, first one and then the other. “If wishes were horses,” she said sadly, which confused and distracted Linda long enough for her mother to make her getaway at a steady trot, the newest baby wailing in the satchel.
Even after Linda understood her mother’s real function in those other households, there was a stubborn authority about her connection with human reproduction that stayed. Her mother used to say that she could look into a woman’s eyes and tell immediately if she was pregnant and, if the pregnancy was advanced enough, the sex of the unborn child, too. “What do you see?” a woman once asked, and Linda’s mother said, “The truth,” and would not elaborate. But it was not only for this thrilling authority that Linda missed her now. It was for that staple of early ex
istence, for which she once waited hungrily at windows and doors, the mothering itself.
The contents of the test tube remained the same, a clear and silent sea. Linda, sitting on the closed toilet and staring, found herself dozing off. She stood and stretched and, glancing into the wastebasket under the sink, saw a bloody sanitary napkin clumsily swathed in an excess of toilet paper. At first she thought it had been left by a former tenant of the room, and she blamed bad housekeeping and ironic coincidence. Then she realized it was Robin’s, a part of her secret purchase in the drugstore. Going by in her pajamas before, the girl had seemed half her true age, disaffected and immature. Yet she menstruated, ready or not, more evidence of life’s mindless eternal chain.
Linda opened the door as slowly and quietly as she could. Robin was asleep, with the unguarded innocent face only sleep allowed her. Linda longed to get into the other bed but was afraid she’d fall asleep also, before the two hours were up. Instead, she sat in the one chair in the room, an armless wooden construction with a thin loose pad on its seat. She pulled it over to the wall first, so she could rest her head. All that driving; she was dizzy with fatigue. Haphazard thoughts almost became dreams. A parade of people, in irrelevant order, filed past: Iola, Wright, her father, Simonetti, her mother. She imagined the first man and the first woman ever to recognize the connection between sex and procreation. It was probably before the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, maybe even before the achievement of language. Lovemaking was the one mute comfort they could take without danger in a dark and beginning world. Oh, what a rotten trick!
Linda looked at her watch. It was only 9:20. When she was very young she thought about love a great deal of the time. She drew hearts pierced by arrows on the pages of her school notebooks, and the beautiful profiles of women and men who were destined to fall in love with one another. She wrote names for them in her best script under their portraits: Diana, Glenda, Jonathan, Brent. The men had cigarettes or pipes clenched between their teeth, and no one existed from the waist down.
She thought about the possibilities of men’s bodies, none of which she had ever seen. Her father had kept himself from her unclothed, as he had clothed. Linda had witnessed her future in her mother’s large, soft shape, and looked forward to her own pendulousness, her own private forests of hair. But of course she wasn’t satisfied; word was out.
There was that dog, Prince, that Mrs. Piner kept chained in the yard. He greeted Linda wildly whenever she came home from school, and one afternoon she sat down next to him on the grass and pulled him onto her lap. His thick white coat ruffled under her fingers, and then shed in an airborne drift, like blown dandelion puffs. As she stroked his ears and belly, his black tongue lolled, he sighed in surrender to pleasure, and a thin red tube emerged from that hair-tipped pinch of flesh with the startling clarity of Linda’s mother’s lipstick.
Mrs. Piner, who had been sweeping the porch steps, flew down them, a white fury, and beat the dog on the rump and head with the broom. “Bad dog!” she cried, and Prince growled at her.
When a friend’s baby brother was diapered, Linda saw his miniature parts, still wrinkled from passage, as they were quickly powdered and covered again from view. And sometimes she watched from the stairs as old Mr. Botts came from the bathroom, his pajamas askew, for a glimpse of his poor, broken-necked sex.
It was almost ten o’clock and she was tempted to look at the test tube in advance, but suffered a superstitious fear of disobeying those printed instructions. In her sleep, Robin made unintelligible sounds that were almost words, and Linda said, “Shhh. Shhh.” Then she took a flashlight from her purse and opened one of the Exxon maps across her bed. With her finger she found their approximate location and then traced the continuation of their journey over the yellow line. The next state was Ohio, the state of Presidents. Linda couldn’t remember where she had heard that. Or why she thought of it now. She was so tired. Maybe if she slept for a few minutes. You could set yourself like an alarm clock to wake at a particular time if you wanted to. She could lie down on the covers, not get too comfortable or settled. Under her arm, the map crackled and she pushed it away, gently, so as not to tear it. Her flash of intuition in the car that morning could have been nothing, a false alarm. She didn’t feel different, really. There were supposed to be other signs, weren’t there? Breast soreness and swelling, weight gain, and whatever her mother saw in other women’s eyes. Cars went by on the road outside. There were people who traveled all night to get someplace. Trucks carried milk and eggs into Ohio for the breakfasts of future Presidents. In her mind’s eye, Linda followed them down the real double line of the highway until they disappeared into the darkness.
When she woke, she was conscious first of the continuing traffic. She peered and squinted until her eyes adjusted, and she saw that it was almost two o’clock. Robin had flung off the covers and was lying spread-eagled and open-mouthed. Linda went into the bathroom and put on the light. A roach ran crazily for cover behind the toilet. Even before she saw the ring in the test tube, she felt the stunning blow of truth.
10 The hitchhikers were everywhere. You’d never know it was against the law. There was at least one contender at each entrance to the parkway, arm raised like the starter’s in a demolition derby.
They were mostly young people, probably recently sprung from college, and setting out to see the world on this glorious June day. Some of them held signs: Chicago. Phoenix. Anywhere! Maybe the state troopers were looking the other way, given the gasoline shortage. Linda knew better than to pick anyone up, no matter how innocent he might seem. In their newspaper photos, captured murderers and rapists didn’t always appear sinister or different, either. When a criminal was handcuffed to a detective, Linda often had to read the caption to see who was who. Not that she worried so much about her own safety; she was too miserable by now to care. In some respects, the worst had already happened. But she was still responsible for Robin, who sat or lay in the backseat as if Linda were the chauffeur and there was a wall of glass between them.
There was a new joyless refrain in Linda’s head: What will I do? What will I do? When they crossed the border into Ohio and were welcomed by the governor’s sign, she could not work up the enthusiasm to share it with Robin, who was looking the other way.
As they approached Youngstown, Linda felt a slight change in the car’s movement that she ignored, and even when it seemed to limp and there was a strange plopping noise, she attributed it to the uneven surface of the road. When a trucker passed to her left and blasted his horn and gestured downward, she finally understood that she had a flat tire. She signaled and pulled over too quickly onto the graveled shoulder, and stopped at the end of a skid. Before she could open the door, a bearded man in a khaki T-shirt and chinos ran up to the car and yelled breathlessly, “Hey, thanks!”
Linda stepped out, clutching the keys in her fist. “For what?” she asked, and saw that he had a backpack with a bedroll attached, and knew that he was the last hitchhiker she’d watched to the diminishing point in the rear-view mirror. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t stop for … I wasn’t …” Her hands fluttered, but the man was already squatting at the deflated tire, his backpack flung to one side.
He changed the tire for them in relentless sunlight, after urging Linda and Robin into the sparse, dappled shade of a single young oak just off the shoulder. By the time he was done, the khaki shirt was dark with perspiration and he had wrapped his forehead in a gypsy’s bandanna. He came over and collapsed at their feet, the backpack under his head. “Now that flat is your spare,” he told Linda. “You’d better get it fixed soon. You might need it.”
“I will,” she promised, and opened her purse.
He held up his hand. “No, no, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m independently wealthy.” When she fumbled with her wallet, he said, “Listen, outdoor work is terrific for the health. I try to do a couple of these a day. I’m lucky you came along.”
“Thank you, then,” Linda said,
her hands at a loss. “Thanks a lot.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Robin echoed, her first voluntary civility of the trip. Linda wanted to shake her and perhaps loosen other pleasant contained words, like change stuck in a slot machine.
They walked back to the car, Robin lagging and turning to look back at the man under the tree. Linda turned, too, and his arm was half raised in a lazy farewell salute. “Well, come on!” she yelled.
How could she not offer him a ride? It would have to be premeditated murder for him to go through all that work first just to do them in later. Besides, he looked as if he would no longer have the energy, if he ever had the inclination.
He was handsome, in the current way that young men were handsome: Christlike and sinful at once, just down from the cross or out of a neighbor’s warm bed. He put his pack beside Robin in the back and got into the front passenger seat. When he did, there was the sudden heady fragrance of sweat and sunlight. His thigh, resting at least six inches from Linda’s, seemed swollen and confined by the chinos, and she felt an erotic impulse that shocked and appalled her. Now, of all times. It could have something to do with a hormonal imbalance; so many things were going on inside her that she could not discern or control.
In the meantime, the hitchhiker turned to smile at Robin, who smiled back! Maybe he was a hypnotist, or a magician. Maybe a flock of doves would rise from his bedroll and fill the car with the beating of wings.
He asked their names and told them that his was John Wolfe Blaise, usually known as Wolfie, and that he was on his way to a wedding in New Mexico. Linda said his name to herself a few times, trying it out.
Hearts Page 6
