Al left, his limp seemingly worsened, and Beverly had each guest write her name on a slip of paper. These were gathered and placed into a bowl, for a door-prize drawing to be held at the end of the evening. A blond woman sitting near Linda lit one cigarette from another and said bitterly, “I never won anything in my life.”
“Oh, me neither,” Linda said, coughing into the smoke screen and trying to smile in empathy at the same time.
Beverly placed a pile of order blanks on the coffee table, next to the onion dip, and then walked over to the bridge table, where she stood holding one end of the drop cloth, like a politician about to unveil a war monument. She waited, and the noise in the room rose a little before it died away. “This is a truly amazing line of merchandise,” Beverly announced into the silence. “And I’m really proud to be associated with it. I’m really proud to be a woman, too, an American woman, who is modern enough to want to make my marriage an exciting and lasting relationship. Things have changed since our mother’s and grandmother’s day. Women are equal with men in many ways. We hold high-paying jobs; we are actively involved in politics and sports, science and industry. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no libber, but I am for equal rights, for freedom of choice in certain areas of life.” There was a murmur among the other women that sounded half nervous, half approving. What in the world was she talking about?
“Your grandmother was chained to a hot stove all day,” Beverly continued. “Now you can choose to be chained to your bed, instead, ha-ha. Seriously, it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to these marvelous products, and to say that I hope they change your life as happily as they’ve changed mine!” With that, she yanked off the drop cloth, and there was a unified gasp. Linda, who had just dipped a chip into the sour-cream mixture, let it drip onto her blouse as she stared at the bridge table. At first she wasn’t certain what she was seeing, but then everything came into sudden and sharp focus. There were a few dozen penises on the table, in a variety of shapes and sizes and colors, and they were all as erect as soldiers called to attention.
A couple of the women cheered. Some of them giggled. “No need to get up for me, boys,” Iola said, her inflection like Mae West’s. And she poked Linda so hard that the dip-laden potato chip dropped into her lap.
Beverly was talking as smoothly and quickly as a sideshow barker now. “Battery-operated, safe, waterproof, rubber, plastic, lifelike, purse-size, expandable.” It was impossible to really follow her, and soon she was leaning down to pull a couple of large cartons out from under the table. “Feel free,” she said, from her kneeling position. “Examine, touch, guaranteed, batteries not included.”
One by one, the women were slowly rising and walking to the display. They were shy and giddy at first, but soon they were holding the samples with critical and solemn interest, turning them over and hefting them, like wives at the market choosing the best fruits and vegetables for their families.
Linda stood up, too, to avoid being conspicuous by her solitary presence on the sofa. She was something like a wallflower, she realized. What was going on around here? Where was the Tupperware, those handy storage containers with the famous vacuum seal? Where were the colanders and Jell-O molds, the butter keepers and the ice-cube trays?
Beverly was adding new merchandise to the table, still maintaining her non-stop spiel: “Three-inch extenders, stud buds, Spanish fly, massage creams, pussy cushions.” Or did she say cushy push-ins? Linda saw an inflatable Playgal, “Great for gifts!”; Big-Potency Vitamins, “Move him up to four a day!” And on and on until the bridge table wobbled and Beverly was out of breath.
Iola picked up a plastic dildo. It was both bigger and more real than life, with a ruddy flexible tip and an incredible network of swollen blue veins. “Get a load of this,” she said. “The guy they cut this off probably bled to death in a second.”
After a while, everyone was reseated and the order slips were distributed. “Think of birthdays,” Beverly advised. “Think of Christmas.” It was early April. “There’s a ten-percent discount on all bulk orders,” she told them.
Some of the women were starting to write on their order slips. Linda felt the way she used to during essay tests in high school, when her mind and paper were still blank and the students around her were scribbling away. She supposed she would have to order something, despite Beverly’s earlier admonition not to feel obligated. She had eaten some of the potato chips, and contributed to taking up Beverly and Al’s time. And all those handicapped people in one family. But what would she buy? She glanced at the order blank in her hand. Free Rubber Penis With Every Purchase! it said across the top. But the prices were so high. Sexual freedom was really expensive. Finally, Linda checked off the Big-Potency Vitamins. She was somewhat reassured by a printed promise of plain brown wrappers, but she wrote in the studio address, anyway.
Beverly collected the order slips and then drew from the bowl for the door prize. Linda prayed fervently that her own bad luck would hold. It didn’t, though. Her name was announced, and the chain-smoking blonde said, “I knew it,” as Linda rose, blushing madly, to receive her prize.
Beverly handed her a gift-wrapped package. At least it was small, and a conventional square shape. “Congratulations, Wanda,” Beverly said. “You’ve won a valuable set of Chinese bells.” There was some grudging applause, and Linda held the box to her ear and shook it, but there was no answering ring.
On the way home, she offered the prize to Iola, unopened. “Whatever it is,” Linda said, “I don’t think I want it.”
“You looked close to death all night,” Iola said, and Linda confessed that she had been, that some of the sexual equipment seemed lethal to her, and that the whole experience was very embarrassing.
“Well, why did you go in the first place?” Iola asked.
“Because,” Linda said. She hesitated. “Because,” she began again, “I thought Rosalie said it was a Tupperware party.”
“Oh, no,” Iola said. “Oh, no. Oh, you poor little dummy. That was Rosalie’s idea of a joke. And she said, Shtupperware, didn’t you hear her?”
Linda shook her burning head. She had never even heard of Shtupperware, but there was something about the word that immediately conveyed its meaning.
When she got home that night, Wright nuzzled her neck in welcome. “You feel like a furnace,” he said. “Did you have fun?” He and Robin had had a great time at the bowling alley. She had beaten him by fifteen points. “Did you get what you need?” Wright asked, setting up new flares in her bloodstream. She assured him that she had. The stuff had to be ordered and would be sent to her in about two weeks. At least that part was the truth. And it would be easy to pick up some refrigerator jars at the store in a couple of weeks and pass them off as genuine Tupperware.
Linda watched anxiously for the arrival of the mail at the studio each day. She did so for a week or two, anyway. Then she forgot all about it. One day, Simonetti called her into his office. “This came for you, sweetheart,” he said, and handed her a small brown package. “Got a secret admirer?”
When the ladies’ room was free, Linda took the package there and opened it. The Big-Potency Vitamins looked just like the regular ones she and Wright took every morning with their orange juice. That was a relief. But there was something else in the package. It was the free rubber penis promised with every purchase. It was a ghastly violet color, and it flopped in her hand like a wilted flower. Iola came into the ladies’ room. “What’s that?” she asked, and when Linda told her, she said, “The guy they cut that off probably won’t even miss it.”
On a sudden impulse to economize, Linda mixed the Big-Potency Vitamins in with the regular ones at home. She observed Wright nervously for a few days, but their sexual routine never altered.
Now Linda picked the paper, the pen, and the Bible up from the floor, and arranged them all in her lap again. She reread what she had written before, and then she added, “and so much I wish I could ask you …” She tapped her raised knee with t
he cap of the pen, lay back to think, and was quickly asleep.
14 They would reach Valeria by late afternoon, if there were no unforeseen problems. When she watched Robin climb into the car, Linda began to feel an anxiety she couldn’t identify. As she drove, she kept thinking ahead to the time when she’d be traveling alone. She had been alone before. And Robin had become slightly more human, but was still not a sparkling companion. So it wasn’t a separation anxiety in the usual sense.
Of course each day, each mile, brought her closer to the abortion. Her decision to have one, once she’d left Robin, had become firm, irrevocable. She couldn’t have a baby, didn’t want a baby. She was all alone and had to support herself and have freedom of movement. Sometimes, in moments of extreme self-pity, she would reason that she was too young to be a mother, knowing that, biologically at least, she was in her prime. For a few days she thought about having the baby and then giving it up for adoption, but that seemed impossible, like the romantic conclusion of a teenage novel that tries to deal with real-life problems.
There was the persistent irrational terror that she would die during an abortion. They were thoroughly safe and legal now, she knew, not the way they were in the old days when she’d overhear her mother and Mrs. Piner discussing girls who were condemned by ambitious druggists and rusty hangers. Clinics were popping up all over the country, like those trees of heaven Wolfie had pointed out alongside the highway, and there would be sympathetic and strictly hygienic care. Her funds would be depleted a little and the goal of reaching California somewhat delayed, but that wasn’t so important.
It began to rain, and the windshield wipers established their rhythm and repeated it resolutely. There must have been an electrical storm close by, because when Robin turned the radio on, static crackled on every station. She turned it off and they listened to the wipers and the run of rain on the Maverick’s roof.
“Well, this is really farm country,” Linda said, as if all the fields of wheat and corn, and all the barns and pigs and cows they’d passed for hundreds of miles were only a rehearsal for this, the genuine article. She wished they could have driven this last stretch in the gorgeous weather in which they had started out. There wasn’t a cow in sight now, and the fields were flattened and dismal with rain.
“Maybe they’ll give you an attic room with a slanted ceiling,” she said. “You’ll hear sounds you won’t believe—goat bells, and roosters crowing in the morning. There’ll be mooing and neighing! You’ll be able to pour your own milk right from the cow.”
“That’s not pasteurized,” Robin said. “You could get sick and die.”
“Oh. Right, right. But you could gather some eggs for breakfast, still warm from the hen.”
“I hate eggs,” Robin said, which Linda remembered was true. Still, the girl sounded childishly petulant, and Linda could not promise her a garden where Sugar Pops and Cocoa Puffs could be picked fresh daily. What she had tried to convey, but could not articulate, was the illusion of safety in the countryside, in the perfect order of nature, that she’d held since childhood when she read Heidi for the first time. There was much human cruelty in the story, the way there was in life, but goodness and justice had triumphed in the end.
The storm was getting closer. The sky was brilliantly lit by a sizzling wire of lightning, and the rain was drumming down now. The atmosphere was more like that in a mystery novel than in a wholesome children’s book. Linda’s anxiety increased, the way it had in the caverns, and she began to feel faint. “I think,” she said, “that we shouldn’t be driving in this.” Her armpits and forehead were wet and her heartbeat was erratic. She knew it was dangerous to pull off the road when visibility was so poor, but there was hardly any traffic, and the other, intangible danger she sensed was far worse, inescapable.
They were away from the main highway, on a paved, two-lane road with a narrow dirt shoulder. We’ll get stuck in the mud, Linda thought. And we’re under trees, the most treacherous place during an electrical storm—one more unshakable fact from her early education. She shut off the engine, turned the emergency blinkers on, and leaned back against the headrest. “What’s the matter with you?” Robin asked. “You’re all white.”
“I am?” Linda peered into the rearview mirror at her floury complexion, her frightened eyes. She fell back again. “I’m sick,” she told Robin.
“What should I do?” Robin whispered. She was on her knees, hovering. Her hand grazed Linda’s shoulder, and then her forehead, with a touch that was tentative with inexperience. Linda was washed with tenderness before she passed out.
When she came to, they were in motion. The sun was out, cruelly bright after that darkness, the way it is after you leave a movie theater in the afternoon. Linda was in the front passenger seat, slumped against the door, with a pillow doubled behind her head. Her neck was stiff and she had a headache, but otherwise she felt much better. Robin was driving.
After Linda took the wheel again, she asked, “Did your father teach you?”
“No,” Robin said. “My friend Ray did. Ginger’s brother. He taught both of us.”
“When? Where?”
“Oh, sometimes. Just around.”
“But he’s only …” Linda’s voice trailed off. What was the use? Of course he was only fourteen, and the girls even younger. Of course it was illegal, and outrageous, but she really drove quite well, although a little fast. And if they had stayed there much longer, they might have been mired in the mud. They were going to separate very soon, anyway, and Robin’s discipline would become the responsibility of her real family.
They stopped at a general store to ask directions and discovered they were very close, less than two miles away. “I’m getting a little excited,” Linda said. “Aren’t you?”
Shrug.
The house was set far back from the road, like most of the farmhouses they had passed. There was a barn a few hundred yards to the west and acres and acres of land, but nothing seemed to be growing in them. It had not rained here, apparently, and everything had a parched and barren look. Linda tried to remember some of the main causes of crop failure. Drought? Locusts? No wonder they hadn’t answered her telegram. Maybe she’d have to turn over all the money, except what she needed for the abortion and the rest of her journey, out of simple charity. Maybe she and Robin would discover skeletons in overalls huddled around a dead fireplace.
They went through a gate marked Reismann, and again Linda experienced the surprise of that shared name. It was Robin’s too, she reminded herself, their last fragile connection.
There was no neighing or mooing here; whatever animals they had must have been killed off by whatever took the crops. And there was no sign of house occupancy, either. “Wait a minute, Robin,” Linda said, after they got out of the car. Robin hadn’t moved. Linda opened the trunk. She looked at the plastic container that held Wright’s ashes and silently promised imminent release. Then she selected one of Wright’s paintings, a peace offering from beyond this world, she thought, and tucked it under her arm.
They walked up the front steps together and Linda rang the bell. The door was solid and the shades were drawn. She remembered standing on the porch of the house on Roper Street and this same sensation of suspense. Robin’s fingers worked against one another, as if she were knitting.
Suddenly the door opened and dreaming Linda almost fell inside. The woman standing there looked familiar. Like James Cagney, Linda decided at last, and realized that Wright had also, only not so distinctly. This had to be his older sister, Verna, although she did not look like a farmer’s daughter, especially like the unmarried drudge on an impoverished farm. She was dressed smartly in a beige linen suit, was heavily made up, and her arms jangled with gold bracelets, a cacophony that could never be mistaken for goat’s bells.
“Yes?”
“I’m Linda,” Linda said. “Your …? I sent the telegram. And this is Robin.” She tried to push the girl forward, but she had rooted herself to the porch, like a weed. Lind
a wished that Robin would step out of character for once, just this time, and make some attempt to charm, to be ingratiating. Her presence alone should speak for her, of course. She and this woman, her aunt, shared genes, ancestors, history.
“Well, come in, I guess,” Verna said. It was not the warmest of receptions, and when Robin continued to stand there, Linda yanked her arm, and they were inside.
Some of the furniture looked new, and shockingly modern in the old house. A ruddy, heavy-lidded man in a gray suit was sitting on a low sofa, part of a modular grouping, and drinking a martini. He was much too young to be Wright’s father. Linda peeked through a rear window behind him to see if any surviving livestock were out back, but only two cars, a Continental and a long silver Buick, grazed there, nose to nose.
Wright’s sister said, “Lewis, this is my brother’s wife, and his daughter.” She didn’t go any further, didn’t say their names, or who the man was.
Linda sank to the armless unit opposite him. Her knees almost brushed her chin, and she tried to arrange herself to look comfortable and relaxed. Robin stood in the doorway.
“You know, it’s not really what I expected,” Linda said.
Verna raised an eyebrow; the man, Lewis, his glass to his lips.
“I had a kind of romantic fairy-tale vision of farms. I guess I didn’t account for modern technology.” Yet where was the corn growing? Underground?
“The place is sold,” Verna said. “They fought with us to put I-80 through here for years. I wanted to, but my father held out. Now it’s all going for housing development. The whole area’s being rezoned for half-acre tracts. Lewis is the builder.”
The glass went up again. That wasn’t all Lewis was to Verna. Linda would have bet on it. She saw them lying locked together in one of those burnt-out fields, and the noise of the bracelets was deafening.
Hearts Page 9
