Hearts (13 page)

“What’s that?” Verna asked, pointing to the painting Linda held close to her breast.

“It’s a painting,” Linda said, and she flashed it like a crucifix in the face of a vampire. “By a friend of mine!”

“I could use a painting for my new place,” Verna said, ready to strike a compromise.

“Not for sale!” Linda shouted. “Not for sale!” She lurched to the hallway, to the kitchen door. “Come on!” she bellowed at Robin. “Let’s go! Do you think we have all night?”

They ran to the Maverick holding hands.

15
Most of the large houses in the area had been converted for other purposes. Driving along slowly, looking for the address, Linda saw lawyers’ offices and insurance offices, a group dental practice and a travel agency.

Then there it was—511 S. Allison Street. This one could have been a VFW hall, had there been a flag flying out front, or an Elks lodge, if there’d been a BPOE sign on the porch. Instead, there was a small, discreet shingle:
May F. Livingston Women’s Center
, and a parade of demonstrators pounding their sidewalk beat.

Linda had to park a block away. As she walked toward the clinic, she saw there were actually two parades, both composed almost entirely of women. The group closer to the house was marching clockwise, and they chanted and carried signs that proclaimed them
Mothers Against Death
. Other signs said:
Abortion is Homicide. Life is a Gift. Save Our Future Presidents
. A couple of marchers pushed strollers festooned with banners, and with fat, gorgeous babies inside. One woman held a huge photograph of a human finger. When Linda came closer she saw the photo also showed a shrimp-curled fetus, its oddly shaped head no bigger than the finger’s nail. And the chanting became clearer. “Stamp out death! Stamp out murder!” God.

Across the street, moving counterclockwise, the opposition held their signs:
Our Bodies—Our Choice. The Right to Decide. Stamp Out Stampers
. They had a blown-up photograph, too, this one of a horribly battered infant.
Born to Die Like This!
the caption read. They were singing “We Shall Overcome” in sweet, high-pitched voices, slightly off-key.

A few hecklers loitered on the sidelines, including some small boys who threw pebbles alternately at each group. A police car was parked against the curb in front of the house, its call box squawking, and two policemen lounged against the hood, their arms folded. One of them was smiling.

Linda stared at them and had her first conscious feminist thought. This was a civil war, women against women, and the policemen were out of it, non-partisan, merely keepers of the law. But they were men and therefore, in their own language, the alleged perpetrators.

She walked quickly through an opening in the line of demonstrators in front of the house. “Don’t be a killer,” someone hissed, intimately, almost in her ear. One of the thrown pebbles glanced off her shoulder. “Hey,” the smiling policeman called to the small boys.

The vestibule was cool and dim. The Venetian blinds were drawn tightly against the action outside, and the air conditioner was going at top speed, to block the noise as much as the heat, probably.

Almost all the chairs in the waiting room were taken. A receptionist was typing at an old oak desk. “I’ll be with you in a sec,” she said, without looking up.

Linda waited, clearing her throat in preparation for speech.

When the woman did look up, her face was encouraging, friendly. “Hello. May I help you?” she said.

“Linda Reismann, I called last night?”

“Oh, yes, Ms. Reismann. You have a ten o’clock with Dr. Lamb. We’re a little behind schedule this morning, so will you have a seat, please, and we’ll call you as soon as we’re ready. You can fill out this card for me while you’re waiting.”

The other people were not all women. An elderly couple flanked an adolescent girl, as if they were her armed guards. A young man held the hand of a young woman, and two women who seemed to be in their thirties had babies on their laps. Linda noticed a playpen and a little jump seat in the opposite corner.

The receptionist’s phone kept ringing. She made appointments with callers for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It was a pleasant room, shabbily genteel, with a few landscapes, like Wright’s, hanging on the walls. In what kind of rooms had all the loving taken place?

Linda tried to picture their apartment bedroom in Newark, but it was already dissipating in memory, replaced by that recent series of motel rooms, so vivid in all their plastic glory. You remember best what happened last. And what happened first. When she was a very little girl she’d found a box of wooden matches and spilled them onto the kitchen table. They were lovely, uniform, the heads a white-tipped brilliant blue. She pushed them around, experimenting, and began to make the rudimentary outline of a house, when her father came into the room. “See?” she said, pride overwhelming timidity. He picked her up swiftly, and she was astonished by the anticipation of an embrace, until he carried her to the stove. There he opened a gas jet and held each finger over it briefly to teach her the dangers of playing with fire.

The two women chatted, and the lovers whispered urgently. The elderly couple did not speak to one another or to the girl braced between them, who couldn’t have been much older than Robin.

I’ll remember this, too, Linda promised, committing to memory a ceiling stain, the pattern of bluebirds on the
girl’s blouse, the ping of the typewriter’s carriage bell, and the refrain of the ringing telephone.

She took a pen from her purse and began to fill out the card. There was the usual stuff: name, address, age, occupation, allergies. And the more pertinent items: number of pregnancies, number of living children, date of last menstrual period. She had still not been able to recall that, and put in a carefully drawn question mark.

Other particulars stumped her as well. Who to contact in an emergency, for instance. Certainly not Robin, a mile away in the Marriott Motor Inn, which Linda had given as her address. And to Robin she’d said, not untruthfully, that morning, “We need some time away from each other, I think. Everybody needs privacy once in a while. Why don’t you stay here and I’ll go out for a couple of hours and go shopping, and do some other things.”

She had especially chosen the Marriott for this pause in their journey because it had a swimming pool and a coffee shop; and they were given a large room, where Robin would not feel trapped while Linda was away. First there had been the call to the local medical society to get the name of a registered abortion clinic that would treat non-residents. It would be ironic and awful if she had to go all the way back to New Jersey to undo what had been done there in the first place.

What kind of emergency did they have in mind? Just the word on the page implied danger. She tried to assess if she could ask without humiliation if there actually was any danger, say even a tiny incidence of death. They’d have to cart the bodies out through a secret passageway, or the demonstrators would be on them like vultures.

She finally wrote Iola’s name and distant address in the provided space.

The receptionist called the young girl, and her parents hesitated, then leaned away a little, releasing her. After a few minutes, one of the women went in, depositing her baby in the jump seat first. The baby began to cry and the other woman walked over and rattled keys in its face until it stopped.

Finally it was Linda’s turn. The room she was taken to was an ordinary examining room. It had a table with stirrups, a little curtained enclosure for undressing, and a sink with the usual medical paraphernalia alongside it. A nurse came in and gave her a specimen bottle. “You can go in there,” she said, indicating an adjoining bathroom. “And leave it on the counter. I’ll get it later.”

Linda wondered if they ever mixed up the specimens, giving the wrong people the good/bad news. She undressed from the waist down, as instructed, and put on the yellow paper gown.

Dr. Lamb, a sturdy middle-aged woman, came into the room. She shook hands with Linda and then she scrubbed her own.

Then Linda was in the stirrups, the gown billowed at her waist, and Dr. Lamb was saying, “Oh, yes. Oh,
yes, indeed
. When was your last period?”

“I’m not sure,” Linda said. “They’ve always been irregular … And then my husband died, and I really lost track … I’ve been traveling with his daughter …” She thought she sounded like a nitwit or a liar.

“I’d say twelve weeks, maybe thirteen.”

“It’s not too late, is it?”

“To abort? No, not at all. It can be legally done until the twenty-fourth week. Do you use contraception?”

“An IUD,” Linda said.

The doctor’s hand disappeared again and she probed and poked. “When was it checked last?” she asked.

“I can’t remember.”

“Well, you may have passed it.”

“Does that happen?”

“Sometimes. Do you wear contact lenses?”

What had she found in there? “No, I don’t. Why?”

“Try and relax, please. It’s just that this reminds me a little of searching for one that’s lost. You know, a blind exploration.” She washed her hands again and told Linda to sit up. “The IUD isn’t there any more. No pain? Bleeding? So we can suppose it hasn’t wandered off and lodged itself where it doesn’t belong. And you certainly are pregnant. But we’ll test your urine anyway. Do you want to terminate this pregnancy?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, get dressed and Mrs. LeRoy will set up an appointment.”

“Will I be asleep?” Linda asked. Will I die?

“You’ll get an injection of a light anesthetic, so you’ll be asleep during the actual procedure, which will be a vacuum aspiration. But you’ll come back very quickly and you can rest here until you’re ready to go home.”

“Why did it fall out?” Linda asked.

The doctor shrugged. “It happens. The body rejects it, just as the IUD rejects the sperm. The bouncer is bounced.” She opened the door and then turned back. “Did you know that in ancient Egypt, camel drivers setting out on long journeys would insert pebbles in the vaginas of their animals to create an unwelcome atmosphere for the sperm. That’s probably the earliest predecessor of the IUD.”

“Why didn’t they just keep the camels apart?”

“Ahhhh,” said the doctor. “
Why?
” And she left the room.

They had a cancellation for the following morning at nine-thirty. “A light supper,” the receptionist said. “Nothing by mouth after 10 p.m. The fee is two hundred dollars, payable before surgery.”

The marchers crowded her when she stepped outside. “Thou shalt not kill,” they said, and then opened ranks to let her pass.

16
Robin floated on her back in the turquoise-tinted Marriott pool. Just ahead at all times was the subtle topography of her own body: new breasts peaking gently in the blue bra of her bathing suit, and past them the small white field of her belly with its silly puffed button. “Ring-a-ling, anybody home?” her father used to ask when she was little, pushing it in with one finger. You were once attached to your mother there. If the cord was never cut and tied, you could not be lost from one another. But then everybody would be attached, wouldn’t they? And what about all the dead people? Only Adam in the whole universe would ever have been truly alone, while Eve strolled in Paradise strung to her children, and to their children, and to their children … Robin tried to keep her gaze skyward, but the glare was brilliant, and there was so much activity near her in the water. Small children splashed and screamed hoarsely for the attention of parents who lay on webbed lounges and frowned into the sunlight, while water from their dripping suits darkened the shadows beneath them. “Look at me! Look at me!” the children insisted. “Watch me dive, Dad! Are you watching? Here I go!”

“Very good, Seth,” the parents said. “I’m watching, Roger. Betsy. Dougie. Felice. Don’t scream like that. Don’t get chilled. Are your lips blue?” And they never looked at all, never moved their forearms or towels or straw hats from across their eyes.

Robin wished they’d all be quiet, that they’d disappear, so she could think without distraction. She had never behaved like these kids herself, even when she was their age. She certainly never shouted, “Look at me!”
to her father, mainly because he usually
was
looking at her. When he took her to the town pool in Newark, he expected her to demonstrate everything she had learned that morning in the Minnows Club. “Show me how you kick,” he would say. “Show Daddy the breathing.” His interest was anxious and it encumbered her. She wished he’d stay with the other adults and have adult conversation that couldn’t be interrupted unless you pretended to be drowning.

Later he always wanted to know if she’d had fun, and she learned to say yes, even on the days she’d been ducked and tortured by bullies, even when her throat was raw from the chlorinated water she swallowed. Then he would sigh, with a kind of sad satisfaction, and finally leave her alone.

But he rarely went into the pool himself, and when he did, he’d hang around the shin-deep kiddies’ end, looking pink-skinned and oversized, offering Robin rides on his back, wanting to be her whale, her sailing ship. He called her his fishie or his mermaid. “Had enough, little fishie?” he’d say, as if she had been clamoring for more, and then he’d rise, like Gulliver, from the water. “Had fun?”

These children in the Marriott pool demanded more attention than they would ever get. But at least they had one another, and the harmless illusion of a parental audience. Robin let the water carry her and she stared directly into the sun, wondering dreamily if you could really go blind this way.

She wanted to concentrate, to make plans. Somehow she’d have to get Linda to give her some of the insurance money. As soon as they’d checked into the motel the
day before, Robin had suggested to Linda that she be allowed to carry half their fortune. Linda had looked puzzled. “Why?” she asked. “For safekeeping,” Robin answered. “You know, in case of crooks or pickpockets.” Linda had smiled. “Oh, Robin,” she said. “This isn’t Newark. They don’t have pickpockets in Iowa. Besides, I want you to just relax and have a good time. Let me worry about things.” But Linda seemed unable to contemplate the future. Since their visit to the farm, she hadn’t mentioned a word about alternate plans. All she had said afterward was that she had to think things over, that she needed a few days to clear her brain. She told Robin they were both entitled to a little fun, anyway, after all they’d been through. That’s why they were staying at this place, which was kind of expensive, but look at the terrific pool, the attractive and convenient coffee shop. “There is nothing better in this world than a big, hearty breakfast while you’re on the road,” Linda said two days ago. Since then she’d hardly eaten anything at all, and never went near the pool. She spent most of her time in the bathroom, running water into the tub. Once Robin put her ear against the door and heard Linda talking to herself, but she couldn’t make out the words.