Linda didn’t budge either time. Maybe she’d OD’d on something because of what happened between her and Wolfie. Lots of high-school girls did that after they split up with somebody. One of them at Newark High even died, without meaning to probably, because she’d signed up that same day for cheerleader tryouts. But what would Linda OD on? Tylenol? Vitamin C? That’s all she had in the way of drugs, as far as Robin could see.
The second time Robin went through Linda’s purse, she searched in every pocket and crevice, even cased the lining, looking first for money and then, with a kind of dumb desperation, for pot. She had only that one joint of her own left and she was saving it, thinking she would need it for the encounter with her mother. How could she deal with that if she wasn’t stoned?
When Robin and Montie had danced together at the wedding reception, she had wanted to ask him if he had any grass. But he beat her to it, asking her first, and she’d lied. Robin had been appalled when he practically dragged her from her chair and out onto the floor like that, in front of everybody. She didn’t like dancing in a public place, away from her known friends, who would not judge her, who would hardly even notice her. Robin secretly believed she was a terrible dancer, that she moved like a gorilla. After a few agonizing moments, she realized that no one was looking at her; they were all watching Linda, who was better than anyone Robin had ever seen, even on American Bandstand. Linda’s dancing was the only thing Robin admired about her, or envied.
When Robin told Montie that she didn’t have any grass, he seemed vaguely disappointed, but he didn’t hold her any less tightly in that slow touch-dance number, and something—his hardness, probably—pressed against her with a mind of its own. Even that was not unpleasant. She thought now that Montie would have been someone good to get high with. Ginger and Ray were like remote babies from her long-abandoned childhood.
“Linda!” she said, louder than she’d intended, and Linda sat up, clutching one hand to her breast. “Oh, God, what is it?” she cried, before her eyes were open.
“It’s nothing,” Robin said. “Hey, it’s only me, Robin. I just wanted to talk to you.”
Linda tilted onto one elbow, dazed. Then she said, “Where are we, anyway?”
“How should I know?” Robin answered. “We’re in this sleazy place somewhere.”
Linda brought her alarm clock close to her swollen eyes and she forced them open. “Ohhh,” she moaned. “I just want to sleep. I wish I could sleep forever. Why did you wake me up?” She fell back against the pillow, with her hands over her eyes as if she were shutting out the blinding glare of a searchlight.
Robin considered the question. “I don’t know,” she said, fumbling for an idea. She certainly wasn’t going to admit to a dread of loneliness, or to that stupid vision of straight Linda wasted on drugs. Then her own eyes found the sandwiches, still untouched, on the other bed. “I thought maybe you were getting hungry,” she said, and congratulated herself on such fast thinking. This excuse sounded reasonable, and generous, besides. She watched as Linda came awake in slow stages.
“What do you have?” Linda asked finally.
“Huh?”
“To eat. What did you get to eat?”
“Oh. Tuna fish. Chicken. Turkey. Which do you want?”
“Chicken, I guess, if you don’t want it. Now that I’m up, I’m starving. Did you get anything to drink?”
“They didn’t have anything.”
“I guess we could have water, or some of that coffee.”
Robin went to the other bed and examined the sandwiches and sniffed them, but they withheld the secret of their contents. She chose one at random and brought it back to Linda. Then she went to the bathroom and filled the two Styrofoam cups with water. It looked suspiciously foamy.
Linda bit into her sandwich. “This tastes like tuna,” she said.
“They all do,” Robin allowed, chewing on the white soggy paste of what might have been the turkey. She wondered if she’d be able to tell the difference if she bit off a piece of the cardboard underneath the bread, by accident. Still, she ate the two remaining sandwiches with a real and demanding appetite. Linda had quickly declined half of the second one.
Then they were both thoroughly awake, with nothing to do.
“Maybe there’s something on television,” Linda suggested. “We could keep the sound low.”
“There isn’t,” Robin said. “I tried while you were sleeping.”
“Well, try it again,” Linda urged.
Robin clicked the tuner impatiently from channel to channel.
“Wait!” Linda cried. “Leave that, Robin!”
“What, this? It’s only a commercial. And there’s a jerky movie on this channel.”
“No, look! That man in the commercial. It’s Barry King, someone I used to know back in Bayonne.”
On screen, one man in a locker room was telling another that his trouble was that his smile was too dim.
“That’s not his trouble,” Linda murmured.
“What?”
“He’s still handsome, though, isn’t he?”
The guy in the commercial brushed his teeth with some crap and was smiling again. Now his teeth shone like the brights of an oncoming car, and two girls were hanging around his neck. “He looks like a fag to me,” Robin said.
“Maybe that was it,” Linda said.
“Maybe that was what?”
“Nothing,” Linda said. The commercial was over and the movie came on again. People were still killing each other all over the place.
“You can shut it off now,” Linda said, and Robin did.
After a moment, Linda moaned. “Now what? And I don’t even have anything to read,” she said. She sounded desperate. “How will I ever be able to get back to sleep? I’ll have to take a couple of Tylenol and see what happens. Maybe they’ll relax me a little.”
Robin snorted. “Why don’t you try Vitamin C while you’re at it?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You said something, Robin, don’t deny it. You woke me up in the middle of the night to eat a sandwich that I’ll probably get botulism from, after I drove all day and am half dead. And I don’t want to be conscious, much less fully awake, so there is to be no muttering, no sarcasm, and no back talk! Do you understand me? Oh, God, what am I going to do?” She flung herself face down into the pillow as she said these last words, so that they came up muffled and indistinct.
“I know something you could do,” Robin said.
Linda turned over. “What?”
“I mean to relax you, to make you sleepy again.”
“What is it, meditation? I can’t do things like that, Robin. If a car went by on a highway three miles away, I’d hear it and lose my concentration. I’m too easily distracted.”
“I didn’t mean meditation,” Robin said. “I was thinking maybe you … maybe we could smoke.”
Linda stared at her. “You don’t mean regular cigarettes, like Viceroy and Marlboro, do you?”
“No.”
“Well, where are you going to get …?” Linda’s voice faded. Robin saw that she understood at last what was being offered. And Robin was reflecting on the mad impulsiveness of her offer. She’d been saving that last joint for an important purpose, and now she’d practically promised it for no good reason. She wanted to back out, but something in Linda’s face held her. It was genuine grief, and the fevered desire to escape from it. Robin knew about that. Maybe they could only smoke half the joint tonight, just enough to ease them both into sleep. Robin would still have the rest for the time she’d really need it.
“You’re not a pothead or anything, are you?” Linda asked.
Robin didn’t even deign to answer that one. Where did Linda think she would get the money for a full-time habit? She took out the blue sock and removed the foil packet from the toe as Linda watched, fascinated. “I only have this one joint,” Robin said, “and I don’t want to use it all up this time, okay?”
&
nbsp; “Okay,” Linda said. She paused and added, “But I don’t think I should really be doing this, Robin. I think it may be something like impairing the morals of a minor. Or vice versa.”
“Look,” Robin said. “Do you want to relax? Do you want to feel better or don’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Well, so there,” Robin said. She sat down on the edge of the metal bed and tried to light matches from the Des Moines Marriott. They had gotten a little wet somehow and she had to strike three of them before one took.
“Robin?” Linda said. “This isn’t my first time, you know. I once had what you’d probably call a bad trip. What if that happens again?”
“Don’t worry. It won’t. This is good stuff.” She inhaled deeply, holding her breath in and shutting her eyes. Then she opened them and passed the joint to Linda, who took it delicately between her second and third fingers and looked at it.
“Don’t let it burn down like that!” Robin said. “You’re wasting it. You have to take a hit right away.”
Linda did, and let the smoke out again almost immediately, through her nostrils.
“No, no!” Robin said, regretting everything. “Swallow the smoke. Hold it in!” she ordered.
Linda obeyed, eyes bulging with the effort, and she coughed and retched a little. “Sorry,” she gasped.
Robin grabbed the joint and toked again. She wasn’t high yet, of course, but she felt fine, in command and hopeful, as if she had just absorbed a secret that was going to change her life. She let her own nostrils flare, smokeless, and noted Linda’s admiring observation.
The next time, Linda did it right, too, although Robin didn’t offer approval. She took the joint back and examined it. It was considerably smaller. Maybe neither of them would get high and there wouldn’t be enough left for Glendale, either. “I’m going to put it out soon,” she warned, and Linda nodded, accepting with ease their reversal of roles. Robin felt gloriously powerful, and that sense of power led to a reckless generosity. Instead of putting the roach out, she drew on it once again and then gave it back to Linda. I’ll think of something later, she told herself.
In the meantime, old Linda was becoming a pro, doing everything in careful mimicry of Robin: narrowing her eyes, shaking her hair back, sucking the smoke in hard and holding it.
Robin went to Linda’s purse and reached into the bottom for the tweezers to use as a roach holder. She expected Linda to say something about this casual invasion of her property, but Linda only smiled. Robin smiled back.
“It’s so quiet in here,” Linda said. “Quieter than before, I think. Is that part of it?”
“We need music,” Robin told her. “You’re supposed to have music.” She took the keys from the dressertop and went outside to get her portable radio from the trunk of the car. She carried it carefully, with a rare sensation of sentimental possession. This was one of the last gifts from her father. How glad she was now that she had not given it to Ginger that day.
Robin didn’t feel like going back into the room yet. The air was cool and fragrant with summer. She turned the radio on and lingered in the parking lot, in the meager traffic of fireflies, listening to music.
While Robin was gone, Linda took a last drag in front of the mirror, thinking she looked quite natural, and then she dropped the crumbling, sparking stub, and the tweezers, into the ashtray next to her bed. Well, she thought as she lay down, I must be pretty desperate to be doing this. I am desperate. She was beginning to feel cautiously different, not relaxed exactly, but removed from the immediacy of her despair. Thoughts of Wolfie wandered in and out, and when they did, she longed for him with a good imitation of the pain she’d felt on leaving. She even said his name aloud once, testing her threatened tolerance further.
Robin came back with the radio playing. She was hugging it close to her and the disco tune seemed to be emanating from her chest.
“Shhh,” Linda said, and she giggled.
Robin laughed, too, companionably, and she lowered the volume. “So,” she said, as if she were continuing an interrupted conversation. “What’s been happening?”
Linda shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. What’s been happening with you?”
“Nothing. What’s been happening with you?”
“Hey, you just asked me th—Oh, I get it.”
“You do? You must be getting real cool, Linda.”
Linda got out of bed and started moving around the room in time to the music. How she loved to dance. Whenever she heard music, she readied herself like an orchestra at the conductor’s warning tap. Maybe it began in her blood, a simmering, a kind of dancing there. Then the message spilled quickly over to nerves, bone, muscles, everywhere. Sometimes she heard nothing; her body, needing to dance, invented music, the baton’s strike only her own heart.
Linda learned to walk early, her mother once confided, way before she learned to talk, and had never had that typical flat-footed baby’s lurch. From the beginning she went forward on toe, arms out and fluttering for balance. Linda couldn’t actually remember that far back, but as she snapped her fingers and danced loosely in her long white nightgown, she sensed an echo of that first joyous venture into space.
Robin leaned against the door and watched. “You’re really a good dancer,” she said.
“I know,” Linda admitted. “It’s the only thing I’m good at.”
“I’m a rotten dancer,” Robin said.
“No, you’re not. I mean, you have such a nice body and everything. You should be good. Come on, I’ll teach you. I’ll give you a free trial lesson.”
“What? With those dumb footprints you have to follow?”
“No, silly. Of course not. Come on, just come here.”
She held out her arms and Robin took a few steps toward her and then stopped. When she was still a couple of feet away, she began dancing, too, clearly attempting to repeat Linda’s gestures. Robin’s were too broad, though, and jerkily nervous.
“Wow!” Linda said. “See? But don’t move your shoulders so much. And let your joints loosen up. That’s right. That’s good.”
Linda circled Robin, dancing nearer and nearer until she was able to reach out and put her arm around the girl’s waist. Then she began to guide her, using the old studio trick of gentle force that always made the client feel he was the terrific dancer, he was the one responsible for all that smooth, synchronized motion.
Robin was so serious about it, so earnest. Linda grabbed her and spun her swiftly out.
“Ohhhh,” Robin said, looking flushed and dizzy. When she was reeled in again, she leaned heavily against Linda, who welcomed her weight. They danced slowly then, Robin’s breath against Linda’s throat. That blond hair smelled oddly sweet, with its mingling of perspiration and smoke and the scent of strawberry shampoo. The flesh of her narrow waist was solid under Linda’s right hand. The left hand held Robin’s, and steered her easily around the furniture.
They had not been this physically close before and it was thrilling in a way that Linda had never experienced. I have tamed the beast, she thought. Her eyes filled with tears as they turned and turned in the feeble light of the room.
When the music ended, they were next to Linda’s bed. If they had been lovers, they would surely have lain down together then to extend the pleasure of their contact. Instead, they went to separate beds and lay on their sides, facing one another. Linda could still feel the heat of Robin’s hand in hers, and the pulse of music that had caused them to converge. She was stung with happiness.
32 The next day Linda acknowledged that one more proverbial truth was really a lie. Things didn’t look brighter in the morning. She felt physically well when she woke, but faintly embarrassed and no less burdened with misery than she’d been the day before.
While Robin slept on, burrowed so deep under the covers it looked as though she might suffocate, Linda recalled the events of the previous night with astonishment. There was no way to hold the marijuana accountable for everything. Wolfie
was right; she did love Robin. Maybe the resemblance he’d claimed to see in their eyes that first time was there, too, and she and Robin were kindred in more ways than their limited chance relationship allowed.
Oh, fine. One by one, she was being severed from each connection that mattered, almost as soon as it began to matter. Except, of course, for the one she kept inside her body, the one who was still a total and untried stranger. And why did she think that would work out? Aside from everything else, there was the practical business of food, clothing, and shelter. The confidence she had demonstrated with such bravado yesterday—day care! job training!—faded now. She had invented it on the spot to ward off the hurt of Wolfie’s qualified love for her. It cost a fortune to raise a child nowadays. There had been an article in the paper about it recently. They all seemed to require corrective dentistry, ten-speed Italian bicycles, and a college education. The final figure was staggering, more like the National Debt than the living expenses for one measly human being.
Who’s in there, she wondered, with more curiosity than she had felt so far. Would the baby be fair like Wright and Robin, or would it look like her? She could not imagine her own genes as dominant, although she thought she remembered from high-school biology that dark hair and eyes were. Would it be a good dancer, or inherit Wright’s ability to draw and paint? Would it be secure or uncertain? Cheerful or morose? Imagining the baby in its earnest work of formation, Linda felt great tenderness. But was this only another hormonal trick? Perhaps she, Linda, had inherited her father’s compulsion to be cruel, and it would lay dormant in her until the first moment of parenting. Maybe there is no antidote once you’ve had a wounding, poisonous childhood, only the desire to make it up to, or inflict the same horror on, a new child. It was truly scary and yet this pregnancy was an undying commitment, one she could not simply drive away from if it didn’t seem to be working out. She had decided to give this unknown person life. At the same time she’d also bequested death. How is it possible that we keep doing it, knowing what we know? And why aren’t all the sane and conscious people in the world busy dashing their brains out against rocks because of that knowledge, instead of locking themselves in rooms, two by torrid two, to make frantic love and new creatures in their own perishable image?
Hearts Page 24
