“Bathroom?” Tanya asked groggily.
Oh, God. “Yes,” Linda said, still walking.
It was the right room and he was awake, waiting. The air mattress was like a life raft. It trembled under their weight and then floated. “Hello, love, my love,” Wolfie said into her skin.
“Will it hold us both?” she asked. Will we drown?
Later she decided, I’ve never been here before. I would surely have remembered. Then she thought about Iola and her plans to retire one day with a vibrator and some mood-inducing music. “I’ll always want the real thing,” Linda said aloud.
“What?” Wolfie sounded drowsy.
She told him what Iola had said.
“What song do you think she had in mind?” he asked. “ ‘It Had to Be You’?”
Linda giggled, and then she said, “ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’?”
Wolfie sang, “He’s just my Bill, an or-di-nary guy …”
They hugged, hushing each other, until they lapsed into seriousness again. The mattress had a slow hissing leak she kept confusing with their breathing. “I’d better go back,” she told Wolfie. “I think I’m falling asleep.”
“No, not yet,” he said.
“We’re sinking,” Linda murmured.
“Let’s get up for a minute,” Wolfie said. “I’ll fix it.”
While he was blowing up the mattress, absurdly and handsomely naked, she put her arms around him and whispered into his ear, “How about ‘Short People’?”
He sputtered and began to laugh loudly, dropping the mattress, and she had to keep one hand over his mouth and the other over her own. “Oh, shhh,” she said. “You’ll wake everybody.”
Then they lay back on the deflating mattress. “Look, it’s getting light,” she said. “I really have to go.”
“I wish you could stay forever,” Wolfie said.
If wishes were horses, Linda thought. As she was leaving, she accidentally brushed against the loom, and something metal moved and rustled. “Shhh,” she said, and tiptoed out.
When she climbed in beside Robin, Tanya’s head appeared near their feet. “Cramps?” she asked sympathetically, and fell back again.
Linda had hardly slept at all when there was an enormous crash, followed by cursing. Montie had fallen between the chairs.
30 Robin didn’t have a suitable costume for strewing flowers, and Elena offered to lend her something. Robin suggested the silk kimono with the birds all over it, but the women talked her out of it. She settled for a long, deep-pink jersey gown. An enormous basket was looped over her arm, and carnations, daisies, and irises were heaped inside.
Linda had been the first one up in the apartment that morning. She had awakened with an unfocused sadness that quickly identified itself. This was the last day. She looked at the sleeping Robin and Tanya, grabbed her clothes, and raced to the bathroom to use it first.
The dress she’d taken with her was her favorite, a pale floral print that seemed perfect for an outdoor wedding. After her bath, Linda stepped out of the tub and turned the shower tap to hot, hoping the steam would erase some of the wrinkles in the dress. It had not been out of the suitcase since she left Newark. The fabric was gauzy and cool and settled around her weightlessly. She couldn’t zip it up, though. Every time she tried, she caught the same tender patch of flesh in the zipper teeth, and she screamed softly. The steam had fogged the mirror, so she shut the shower tap and rubbed the mirror with a towel. She saw that her breasts were straining the bodice of the dress, making her look both uncomfortable and pornographic. Even if she could zip it up, it would never do.
When she went back inside to look for something else in her suitcase, the others were waking, and a line soon formed for the bathroom. Linda dressed in the living room, putting on the blue skirt with the elastic waistband and a blousy white shirt. It looked like an outfit for a school assembly.
Robin came in, dragging pink jersey, and laden with her flower basket. She was barefoot, and someone had put a trace of green eyeshadow on her translucent lids. “Is that what you’re going to wear?” she asked Linda, who wanted to cry.
“Yes,” Linda said. “It’s not my wedding.”
Montie went by in his pajamas, smiling shyly, guarding an erection with a box of Cheerios.
“Here,” Robin said, and she tucked a daisy’s stem through Linda’s damp hair.
Tanya said, “Does anyone have some lipstick that won’t clash with lavender? Mine has too much orange in it.” Linda wondered why she cared: her eyeglasses were still snarled in black tape.
They squeezed in around the kitchen table. Wolfie came in last and had to sit between Elena and Robin, facing Linda. She believed he was evading her glance, or was it she who kept looking away first, in a fluttering panic?
Montie surrendered the Cheerios for their quickie breakfast. “Where’s my favorite new brother-in-law?” he asked, and was told that Vincent had decided not to look at the bride until the ceremony. Linda didn’t blame him. Elena’s beauty was almost unbearable today. As if on cue, the sun came crashing into the kitchen, spilling golden light onto her golden hair, onto her white-organza Victorian dress.
Remembering the mustard stain from the night before, Linda asked, “Shouldn’t you be wearing an apron?” suspicious that her real motive was to extinguish some of that splendor. She saw her own reflection in the toaster and in the black glass door of the wall oven and decided that, even with the daisy in her hair, she looked like a school-crossing guard or like a nun in one of those new progressive orders.
“I’ll only eat white things,” Elena said dreamily, spooning sour cream over her cottage cheese.
The minister arrived on a bicycle at eight o’clock. He was from a local Unitarian Universalist church. His bicycle had an unoccupied baby seat on its rear, and a No Nukes banner. Other guests, thirty in all, gathered in the shaded area of the courtyard, where assorted chairs had been arranged, and they were ready to begin by 8:45.
The music was provided by a student string quartet from the university. They tuned up and began to play a medley of sprightly love songs as if it were the overture to a musical comedy. Wolfie and Vincent and the minister stood together waiting, all looking in the same direction, like men at a bus stop.
The door leading from the building to the courtyard was stuck. The knob rattled and spun impatiently and then the door flew open and Robin stepped out. Earlier, Linda had thought that Robin looked like a child dressed up in her mother’s clothing and makeup. From this short distance, Linda had a new perspective. She now recognized the girl’s exquisite potential and was suffused with pride, as if she had raised her from infancy and not just brought her these two thousand miles.
Robin went forward in half-time to a zingy rendition of “Ain’t She Sweet,” dropping flowers on either side of her like the leaves from a deciduous tree in a strong autumn wind. They were almost all gone before she was halfway there. The last carnation was sent like a hand grenade into the audience, and it struck Montie beneath his left ear. Linda saw him rub the place in astonishment and then bend to retrieve the flower.
The quartet began to play “If Ever I Should Leave You,” to announce the bride’s entrance. Linda thought it was an odd alternative to the more conventional Wedding March. The various kitchen, folding, and upholstered chairs scraped in the gravel as the door opened again. Still, Vincent could be heard moaning when Elena appeared. Behind her a telephone started ringing in one of the apartments. It rang on and off throughout the ceremony.
Vincent wept, of course. Wolfie turned over a fresh handkerchief along with the matching rings. Tanya, seated in front of Linda, tipped her chair back precariously. “For my money,” she whispered, “I’ll take a sentimental man any time.”
Unwatched, Linda watched Wolfie watching Elena.
It was a fairly traditional wedding service, except toward the end, when the minister spoke about Vincent and Elena as people who had grown to know one another in every way, mingling like the be
autiful threads in a weaving, and whose solemn choice today was based on that knowledge. He wished them a peaceful world in which to live and love, and an end to loneliness forever, amen.
The real wedding breakfast was held in a small local restaurant. Linda found that she was famished and yet unable to eat. She drank too much champagne, which made her feel giddy and desperate. When the string quartet fell to their omelets, someone played a disco number on the jukebox, and Linda, who was just returning from the ladies’ room, moved in time to the music on the way back to her table. Montie intercepted her and they began to dance together.
The kid was terrific. Any inhibitions imposed by his youth dropped away. He knew all the steps Linda used to teach at Fred Astaire’s and a few she’d never seen. She caught on fast, and some of the wedding guests left their seats and stood in a circle around them, applauding. It was like a scene in one of those carefree college movies of the forties. Except Montie was only sixteen. And Linda was three and a half months pregnant.
She was out of breath when she was passed to Vincent, a stoop-shouldered twirler, and then to another man, with sweaty hands and long muscular arms, who propelled her with the determination of a forklift.
At last the number ended and another, slower one began. Montie took Robin from her seat, and other dancing couples wandered into the small space that wasn’t really a dance floor. Linda turned and Wolfie had his arms out. She had just been considering how soon she could leave without being discourteous, and now she began to wonder how long you had to love someone before the sexual shock diminished. It did diminish eventually, she was sure of that, or almost everyone would die in the prime of their lives.
Dancing was something she knew, and could do without premeditation or fear. Even touching like this, which aroused the memory of more intimate touching, didn’t make her falter. She was a good dancer. At the studio she used to listen to the stories of men whose wives, mothers, and girlfriends had just died or left them, who thought the fox-trot or the frug would be a first step on their road to recovery. The men breathed hard and she could smell fear and lust and whiskey and Old Spice after-shave without ever losing a beat.
Wolfie did not speak, as if the true business between them was this slow dancing. At least I’m getting out while the getting’s good, Linda thought, but it was hardly a comfort. It was something like dying in the prime of your life.
As soon as the wedding cake was served and eaten, she signaled to Robin that it was time to leave. They had to go back to the apartment to return Elena’s dress and pick up their own belongings. Vincent lent Linda a key and kissed her wetly. Elena, Tanya, and Montie were affectionate in their farewell also, as if they had all passed a dangerous night together, binding them forever.
Wolfie said he would go back with them and keep them company until they were ready to leave. She wished he wouldn’t, but didn’t know how to say so.
As she entered the apartment, Linda imagined a matinee burglar might feel like this, entering strange homes in midday, when the people who live there are away. Maybe that’s why they really did it, not for the loot but for the vicarious sense of family, for the evidence of meals shared and books left open to certain passages, for the tumble of unmade beds and the minutiae of shaved hairs in the washbasin.
She and Robin were not taking anything that didn’t belong to them. They folded the Hide-a-Bed and left one of Wright’s paintings propped against it as a wedding present. Linda’s arms ached from the slight exertion of folding and repacking her flowered dress.
Robin removed the pink jersey and was reduced to cinders in the shorts and T-shirt Linda handed her. She lay down on the cot and began to read Tanya’s novel, while Linda finished gathering their things.
There was something hard in the pocket of Robin’s jeans. Linda put her hand inside and withdrew a fork, its tines neatly bound in Kleenex. She glanced over at Robin, who read and twirled a strand of blond hair around and around one finger.
Where in the world did this fork come from, and why was she keeping it? With drugs, wasn’t it a bent spoon they used? Linda imagined a long history of kleptomania. If she searched through Robin’s things, would she find the other useless items those people took, for their own dark and unfathomable reasons? One earring. Gloves in the wrong size. A pair of left-handed pinking shears. The fork was definitely not a souvenir of their apartment in Newark. The silver-plated flatware they’d used there was the remains of one of Wright and Miriam’s wedding gifts, Community’s Morning Star pattern, service for eight. Wright had told Linda that she could discard or replace anything from that first marriage that made her feel uncomfortable in any way. The only thing that came to mind then was Robin.
Now she replaced the fork in the pocket of Robin’s jeans, deciding not to say anything, that she was probably exaggerating its significance. It could be some new teenage craze, for all she knew.
Linda went into the bathroom to get their toothbrushes. Wolfie followed her. “I’m getting good at this,” she said.
“At what?” He lifted her hair and kissed the back of her neck as his hands defined the outer curves of her breasts.
She slipped out of his reach. “At finding all our junk, not forgetting a toothbrush, or sunglasses, or anything.”
“What about me?”
“Pardon?”
He smiled. “You’re forgetting me, babe.” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I want to go with you, Linda. I want to stay with you.”
“Oh.”
“Now, how am I supposed to read that?” Wolfie asked.
Linda sat down on the edge of the bathtub. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said, and didn’t continue.
“So serious,” Wolfie said, touching her chin. And then he leaned against the wall and waited. He was not going to lead her all the way into confession.
“We’re always in the bathroom together, aren’t we?” Linda said, remembering the sweeter time the night before and envying it. “The thing is, I’m pregnant.”
“Hey!” he said. “You can’t be. How …?”
“It’s not yours. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Well, then whose?”
“Mine,” she said.
“Now it’s my turn. Oh.”
“It’s all right. You don’t have to say anything else. I just figured you’d want to know.”
“How long have you known, Linda?”
“A long time. Since Pennsylvania.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before this?”
Linda shrugged, her first dividend from all this time with Robin.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to have it.”
“I sort of figured that. But why, Linda?”
“I don’t know.” He waited and she laughed, to quickly plug up the hole of silence. “Because I’m a little crazy, I guess. Because I’ve decided I want to.”
“You didn’t want to all along?”
“No, never. I tried to have an abortion in Des Moines, and it was foiled by someone even crazier than me. Somebody who was willing to murder me and a few other people, in the name of life. That has nothing to do with my decision, though. If I could go back to that time, to the way I was then, I’d still have it, the abortion, I mean.”
“So what changed your mind?”
She realized that he expected her to say that it was because of him—he needed to hear it—but she could not. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe partly because of the wedding ceremony today. You know, when the minister said about an end to loneliness? And after we were together last night and I went back to bed, I thought about how lovely it was, but how random, I mean our ever meeting in the first place. In the second place. Do you remember those trees you told me about, coming up by themselves through sidewalk cracks? And this whole planet from a broken piece of sun, imagine!” Linda inhaled deeply, and she shuddered. “And the sperm and the egg getting together like that, by total chance, like two nervous stra
ngers in a singles bar. I started to wish them well …” She lifted her hands. “I don’t even know what I’m saying any more. And I have to go.” She pushed away from the tub and stood up.
“I still want to go with you,” he said, his voice cleared of seduction, his hands to himself.
“Wolfie, you don’t,” Linda said. Why was it always up to her to declare the truth? Now she could stand here for a hundred years before he’d deny it. She waited, anyway, in the beating silence.
Then Wolfie said, “This morning, before I was even awake, I reached for you. It was like we’d been together for a long, long time.”
“Yes.”
“And I kept thinking how much I wanted to find you there, every morning.”
“But this changes everything, doesn’t it?”
“Well, it makes it harder, that’s all. More complicated.” Wolfie sighed. “I wish …” he began.
“Oh, don’t!” she said. “Wishing never does any good.”
They looked at one another until the fervor of Wolfie’s gaze softened. “No,” he conceded then. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“So, I’d better go now,” Linda said, not moving.
“But how will you take care of yourself?” he asked.
“I have a little money. I can still work for a while now, and after …”
“At what? Will you dance?”
Linda considered the question thoughtfully. “No,” she answered. “No, only for myself.” She saw his face change and before he could construct a new case, she said, “I’m healthy, and willing. There are other things I can learn to do.”
“What about the baby?”
“I don’t know. A day-care center, I guess.”
“You’re such a good person, Linda. But you’re very romantic. And with everything that’s happened to you, you’re still kind of … inexperienced. What I’m trying to say is that it won’t be easy.”
“I know that. I never thought it would be easy.”
“Have you ever really thought?”
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