Hearts

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Where?” Robin asked. They still hadn’t discussed any possible plans.

  But Linda was asleep again.

  The two wastebaskets filled up with junk: half-eaten hamburgers and limp fries, greasy paper bags, candy wrappers, collapsed soft-drink cans. Robin ate and drank twice as much as Linda. She licked ketchup, mustard, chili sauce, salt, and chocolate from her fingers. Her belly felt round and taut, and when she slapped it, it sounded like a small drum. She could burp at will, and often did.

  She hid under the hood of her slicker every time she ran out for new supplies, terrified that she would meet the man from the game room again. As she ran she made up things she would say to him if she did see him. She’d tell him that she was only thirteen years old, jailbait in every state, that her father was the chief of police and intended to kill him. She would burp in his face and then puncture the tires on his car with the fork from her father’s house. She kept it ready in the right-hand pocket of her slicker.

  The swimming pool was deserted. All the webbed lounges were folded and stacked in a corner of the deck. An abandoned towel lay near them, twisted and soaked. Watching the rain hit the surface of the blue water made Robin feel unaccountably anxious and she hurried back to the room. She was going crazy with boredom there. There was nothing to do but watch television, strip the translucent layers of skin from her shoulders where they had begun to peel, and wait for Linda to wake up for good.

  Finally she did. When Robin opened her eyes the next morning, she found that Linda was dressed and packing. She was very cheerful. “Rise and shine, morning glory! The sun is out!” she announced, as if it were a phenomenon for which she was personally responsible. She urged Robin to get moving, to pack up her things so they could get an early start.

  Again, Robin asked where. Linda didn’t answer right away, and Robin said, “You’re going to California. But what about me?”

  Linda sat down on the bed, next to her suitcase. She picked at the lock with one fingernail. “Robin,” she said softly. “Do you ever think about your mother?”

  The southern route Wolfie had suggested seemed sensible and appealing, now that their destination was Arizona. In Des Moines they picked up I-35, which took them quickly in and out of Missouri. Linda remembered further information from those Presidential place mats in the Marriott. Missouri was called the “Show Me” state. It was the birthplace of Harry S. Truman. “Do you know who was born around here?” she asked Robin.

  Robin leaned back and shut her eyes, but Linda suspected she was only pretending to sleep. After they crossed the border into Kansas, Robin sat up and began fiddling with the radio. On one station the Mamas and the Papas were singing that Golden Oldie, “California Dreamin’.” “Oh, leave that!” Linda cried, and she began to hum along and move her shoulders to the music as she drove. She thought: By the time I get there, it will probably have fallen into the ocean.

  There had been a discussion of natural disasters on a television show just last week, while they were still in Illinois. “The fault of the Fault,” one panelist quipped, and a seismologist from UCLA predicted that a major earthquake would probably beat out any process of erosion. The moderator interrupted to ask why these two distinguished scientists continued to live in Southern California, considering their firsthand knowledge of predestined doom. The seismologist said cheerfully that there were all kinds of doom in the wings, everywhere. Tidal waves, drought, Halley’s comet, tornadoes, plagues. “Do you think you’re going to be safe in Westport?” he asked. Killer bees and towering infernos were kids’ stuff. He said that Hollywood apocalypse writers couldn’t dream up some of the real disasters in store for us. Besides, he added, his wife wanted to live near her mother. Everyone had laughed and applauded.

  By the time Linda got there, if it still was there, she wouldn’t even know the latest dance steps. They changed every minute. John Travolta would be as old as Fred Astaire. Maybe she wouldn’t even be able to get a job. Everything was changing. Gas prices had gone up five cents a gallon while she was sleeping off the effects of the abortion in Des Moines. The money was dwindling quickly, and she was still determined to give Robin half of everything left. It would only be fair to Miriam, too, after presenting her with a full-grown, money-eating child, without any warning. The woman was still at that same address in Glendale, Arizona, according to Information. Eight years later; as if time had completely halted. Linda had decided to call ahead and talk to Miriam, straightforwardly, so as not to make the same disastrous mistake she’d made with those people in Iowa.

  But Robin had extracted Linda’s promise, had made her swear not to announce their arrival beforehand. She was practically hysterical about it. And Linda had given in, crossed her heart, hoped to die, and all the rest, if she ever betrayed that promise. She did telephone, though, from a gas station in Bethany, Missouri, using a ton of change to get through, to make sure Miriam was really still there, still alive. The phone rang for a long time before she answered. As Linda fed nickels and quarters into the slot, she pictured a beautiful dark-haired woman in a white tennis dress, running in from the garden.

  From the phone booth she could see Robin sitting on the hood of the Maverick parked in the shade, killing another Coke.

  It may have been Linda’s imagination, but Miriam’s voice sounded eerily long-distance, like the voices of the dead in movies about zombies and ghosts. “Hell-ooo?” she said.

  “Just one moment. That will be fifteen cents more, please,” the operator said.

  The telephone booth was like a furnace and Linda’s hands were sweating, making the coins stick, but she finally found and separated a dime and a nickel and dropped them in.

  “Go ahead. Here’s your party,” the operator said.

  “Hell-ooo?” the ghost called again, impatiently this time.

  “Miriam … Miriam … Hausner?” Linda asked. Robin was bouncing on the hood of the car, like a three-year-old. Why am I so nervous, Linda wondered. It’s not my mother.

  “Speaking.”

  Now what? It seemed rude to simply hang up. Linda had had her share of anonymous phone calls. They always left her feeling faintly anxious for days after. And she had just dumped more than two dollars into that telephone. “Mrs. Hausner? This is a survey,” she said. “We were wondering if you’re listening to your radio.”

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” Miriam asked.

  And Linda lost heart. “Yes,” she said, and hung up.

  Now they were on their way. As she drove, she glanced from time to time at Robin’s profile. She had not meant to spring her plans on the poor girl like that, but Robin had asked with such persistence, and she certainly had a right to know. Linda never expected the reaction she got, though. Robin was usually so passive about everything, so secretive. And memories of her mother had to be baby-vague now, no matter how grave the loss must have felt, once.

  Wright had told Linda that he’d worked very hard to make up to Robin for Miriam’s disappearance, that he’d been mother and father all by himself. You name it: dollhouses, sports, handicrafts, school projects; he really got involved. They were as close as that. He’d held up knotted fingers. And Robin stopped asking for her mother in a very short time. Time had eased his own anguish, too, and he had prepared a generous, watered-down version of the truth, in case adolescence brought new curiosity. Linda thought he’d arranged to make Miriam sound like an innocent and suggestible kid, someone who fell in with bad companions, sort of a middle-class Patty Hearst. Luckily, Robin seemed to have forgotten all about her mother, and never mentioned her to him again.

  Still, he was grateful for Linda’s appearance in his daughter’s life at this delicate period of growth and change. He may have been successful as a parental one-man band, but he was respectful, in awe of woman’s special mysteries, among them her need for the company and confidence of other females, after a certain age. Linda and Robin were going to be close, too. Like that. He just knew it.

  In the motel room that mo
rning, when Linda said, “Robin, do you ever think about your mother?” the girl had been stunned. Her mouth opened into a perfect cartoon O and her eyelids batted with shock. For once she was incapable of hiding behind her disguise of indifference, those trouble-shedding little shrugs. She actually staggered before she sat down on the other bed.

  “You’re not going to cry, are you?” Linda said, although Robin considered it a source of pride that she never did, and Linda believed it would be consoling if she could. “Oh, boy, I’ve really upset you, haven’t I?” Linda continued. “I didn’t mean to. I only thought … it seemed like the natural answer. I mean, I’m not even sure she’s still there; I was going to check it all out first, but you kept asking … Robin?”

  It was worse than when she had told her about Wright’s dying, because it was so much easier now to gauge her pain. “Listen,” Linda said. “You don’t have to go. We’ll figure something else out if we have to …”

  “No!” Robin shrieked that one syllable. Then she said, more calmly, “I want to.”

  “You do?”

  “Where is she?” Robin asked.

  “Arizona. Glendale. It’s near Phoenix. At least I think that’s where she is.”

  “How do you know? How did you find …?”

  Linda contemplated the details of her discovery among Wright’s things: the private investigation itself, the B-movie prose of the detective’s report. It all made Wright seem mean-spirited and vindictive instead of the way he probably was—tortured and lonely. Robin wouldn’t want to know all that junk, anyway. It would be like altering her history.

  “Just by chance,” Linda said. “I found a slip of paper with an old address. But I’ll call first and be sure.”

  “Don’t!” Robin said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell her about me.”

  “Robin, I don’t understand. A minute ago you said—”

  The girl was pulling at her fingertips as if they were gloves she was having difficulty removing. “I—I want to surprise her,” she said.

  “It would be more like a shock than a surprise,” Linda said. “She could have a heart atta—”

  “Please,” Robin begged, with more passion than Linda would have believed possible. “Linda, please! You have to swear!”

  And Linda had given her foolish promise.

  19 “There’s Wolfie!” Robin yelled, and Linda’s heart lunged. She applied the brakes so swiftly and hard that at least three cars traveling at a safe distance behind them had to do the same. And it wasn’t Wolfie at all, of course. Just a couple of wild-haired teenagers who ran up eagerly for the ride. One of them wore a lavender satin jacket with the word Killer embroidered across the right breast.

  “Oh, great,” Linda said, but she had to let them in, and then endure the curses of the other drivers as they went past in a fury of exhaust. “You two-headed cock-sucking moron!” the last one yelled, as the teenagers jumped into the back, slamming both doors.

  “There’s no need for that language!” Linda called out her window.

  “Home, James,” one of the hitchhikers said, and the other one jerked around, cackling with laughter.

  Linda, after she’d suffered the first moments of utter disappointment, thought of Bonnie and Clyde and those other two, those men who murdered a whole family in Kansas. This was Kansas.

  She signaled cautiously before she reentered the highway. “I hope you guys aren’t going too far,” she told them. “We’ll be stopping for the night pretty soon ourselves.”

  Robin gaped at her. It was not even one o’clock in the afternoon, and they’d overslept and gotten a late start that morning, besides.

  The backseat passengers merely giggled. They were high on something; Linda could see that right away. They laughed at everything, even when she asked a civil question about their ultimate destination. “Oh-ul-ultimate!” one of them cried, and his partner sounded as if he had swallowed his tongue and was choking to death. He finally stopped long enough to say, “We’re going to Florida, man.”

  “Florida!” Linda said. “Why, that’s the other w—,” before she caught on and stopped herself. But it was too late. They were off again, and pummeling each other hard while they laughed.

  Linda glared at Robin, who turned the other way. Linda took one hand from the wheel and pinched Robin’s sleeve. “Now see what you’ve done,” she whispered, hardly moving her lips.

  Robin was outraged with innocence. “One of them looked like him,” she said, not bothering to lower her voice. “It’s not my fault. He even has the same kind of shirt.”

  How did she have the nerve to say that? Linda observed her passengers in the rearview mirror. They were nothing like Wolfie. They were only adolescents, at that strange midpoint of formation when boys becoming men appear strikingly awkward, when their hands, feet, noses, and ears develop suddenly, before the rest of them. Maybe, Linda thought, it should all take place in darkness and secrecy, like the transformation of caterpillars inside cocoons.

  Robin had obviously wanted one of them to be Wolfie, and she’d bestowed his likeness on a mere kid. Linda understood the lure of such magical thinking, but knew they could have been killed, stopping like that. “We could have been killed,” she said. “And look what we—” She had glanced again at Robin and saw the familiar eye-narrowing and jaw-clenching that usually preceded hostilities between them. The last thing she needed was a quarrel with Robin in the confinement of the car, with these two maniacs behind them.

  Linda turned her attention back to the road. She would have liked to stop and let them out, but she had fallen into traffic again. The boys were so spacey they were liable to go tripping across the divider into the path of a trailer truck and get flattened like those poor dogs and chipmunks she kept passing. And they had to be some mothers’ children. The moment Linda picked them up, responsibility for their safety had been subtly transferred to her hands, almost as if she’d agreed to adopt them.

  She looked at the next green sign. There wasn’t going to be another exit for eight miles. Maybe if she ignored them, they’d stop carrying on. How could anyone laugh like that, anyway, especially when nothing was actually funny? It occurred to her that she and Robin had not laughed together once during this entire trip. The closest was when Wolfie was with them and there had been a few rounds of smiling. But he had been the instigator, the ambassador of all that good will. How could Robin have mistaken these hopheaded babies for him?

  Linda decided she wasn’t going to say another word to set them off, but she didn’t have to; there was plenty of other stimulation. Through the mirror she saw them point helplessly at something out the window—what? there were only road signs, cars, a few trees—and then collapse against each other in another seizure of hysterics.

  Once in a while, gasping, slobbering spittle, they’d interject things like, “Oh, man. Oh, my side. Oh, oh!”

  You could go crazy listening to them. She put on the radio, hoping to drown them out with music. But it was exactly one o’clock and the news was on every station she tried. It was mostly bad news, as usual. And it seemed familiar, as if it was also old bad news being replayed. They were still talking about that leaking nuclear plant. It wasn’t very far from Slatesville. Linda wondered if the Piners had been contaminated and were sitting now, glowing, in front of their glowing Zenith. That is, if the asbestos dust hadn’t gotten them yet, or ordinary death. Mideast, blah, blah, blah, Rhodesia, Canada, gasoline supply, blah, blah, blah. An elephant had escaped from the zoo in Wichita and had not yet been located. More rain was predicted for the Central Plains area. Even the sports news was bad; all the local teams had been disgraced.

  Linda shut off the radio and listened to the laughter behind her, which had not stopped for any of those bulletins of world crisis. She wondered what they were on.

  She had smoked marijuana a few times with Iola and had had too much beer once or twice with Wright. But she hadn’t ever been this way. Stimulants never brought her
past a certain edge of promise. She almost relaxed fully, almost became giddy, but didn’t quite cross the threshold to that other place. After alcohol, she slept, and usually woke later with a headache. Once, after smoking pot, she threw up, and then felt anxious for hours.

  They’ll probably be miserable later, she told herself, but without much conviction. She hoped their false gaiety would not influence Robin and give her any ideas about drugs, make her think you had to depend on artificial means to have a good time.

  She glanced at Robin furtively to see how she was taking all this. The girl’s silvery profile was as cool as a queen’s struck onto a coin. “What’s the matter with them?” Linda said. When Robin didn’t answer, Linda raised her voice. “What’s so funny back there?” she asked. “How can you laugh like that after hearing the news?” She was rewarded with stifled sputters, a few squeals. “Oh, boy,” Linda told Robin. “They must be really stoned, or crazy. I mean, there’s probably radiation everywhere, not just in Pennsylvania. We’d probably be better off if we just breathed out all the time. And who knows what’s coming next? Tidal waves, maybe. Or killer bees!”

  “Zzzzzzzz,” buzzed one of the madmen in the backseat.

  “Raid! Raid!” his partner screamed in a Looney Tunes soprano. In the mirror, Linda saw them shrivel and die in each other’s arms.

  “Well, the Mideast crisis is no joke!” she shouted. Then she turned to Robin again, for confirmation, and was astonished. The girl’s face was crumpled, like a glove, and her shoulders were shaking violently. A few tiny, anguished sounds escaped her distorted mouth. Why, she was crying! Those white lashes were spilling tears and her face was pink with emotion.

  “Robin!” Linda said. “What is it?”

  Robin’s hands flew up like demented birds, and more noises escaped her. “Hee,” she said. “Hee-hee!” And Linda finally understood that she was laughing.