Hearts (21 page)

Linda had an instant image of expressionless robots moving across the room. Then she thought of all the vending machines Robin had punched to release Milky Ways and Mounds bars, Yodels and Orange Crush, and how, after the coins dropped into the slot, there was that mechanical whirring and then the dull thud of delivery. “How do you mean?” Linda asked in a hushed, serious voice.

Robin hesitated.

“No, go ahead,” Linda urged. “I really want to know.”

“You sound like you’re always saying proverbs, or something,” Robin said.

Linda groped for her slippers, and put on the light.
“You mean, basically, that I’m not … spontaneous, don’t you?” she asked.

“I guess so. Shut off the light. I don’t know what I mean. I was just mad before. And this is dumb.”

Linda shut off the light. “It’s not,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed, Robin. Criticism can be extremely constructive, you know. Helpful.” She swallowed deeply, and lay down again. “And there shouldn’t be any hard feelings between us about things blurted out in the heat of anger. So let’s forget everything we said to each other tonight, okay? And start all over again with a fresh new day tomorrow, okay?”

Robin mumbled something.

“Good night to you, too,” Linda said. “And pleasant dreams.”

Of course it would be some job to get to sleep now. Robin was quickly gone; Linda could hear that faint snoring, the grinding teeth. Wright was able to go off like that, too. It was a gift.

The dog was walking around above them, his toenails clicking on a bare floor. Somewhere else in the house, a man struggled to clear his throat. Then bedsprings moved and moved. Linda tried to concentrate on water, on floating, and it almost worked. She dozed off and then came back with a jolt, as if she’d been falling and had barely saved herself. She’d been dreaming about blood, she realized, something bloody. That was probably only natural. She had not bled at all after that first day, though, and had not suffered a sense of loss. She’d expected to and had braced herself for it.

She folded her pillow in half, and moved from her side to her back. If she could only relax, she would be
able to go right back to sleep. Her quarrel with Robin wasn’t keeping her awake anymore. What Robin had said could have come largely from hurt, from anger, or even fatigue. And it wasn’t anything Linda didn’t know about herself in the first place. It was just that confirmation from others always made things worse. But it was possible to change, to alter your life at any time. Effie Borden had said so, the one thing she’d said that was sensible and true.

Linda crossed her hands and cupped her breasts. In the bathtub this evening, they had seemed exceptionally white and full, really beautiful, with their pale tracing of veins. Now she brushed her nipples lightly with her fingertips. The nipples rose in idiot response. These were only her own fingers. She remembered married nights and lying against Wright’s breathing. But it wasn’t marriage she missed, or even Wright. She knew that the mindless body itself could experience loneliness, without memory, without thought. Even when she was a child, it had this same blind desire for touch. What if it never went away?

23
In the morning, Linda propped one of Wright’s landscapes against Effie Borden’s door, and tiptoed away. She and Robin were going to make an early start, before anyone else at Applegate Arms was up.

Linda had awakened with Robin’s words of ridicule inside her head and the previous night’s unhappiness was instantly revived. It was very disturbing to be told you were like a machine, an automatic dispenser of boring and useless words. She could not stop thinking about it, as they packed the car, as they drove away.

In an effort to become more interesting, she found herself pushed further and further into silence. Everything she intended to say seemed wrong before she said it, seemed self-conscious or silly. And how could you become a spontaneous person if you reviewed every thought and idea before you expressed it?

When they drove close to the airport in Emporia, and a low-flying plane threatened to skim off the roof of the Maverick, Linda ducked and her hand moved from the wheel to point out the window, and then lowered again, slowly. She realized she was always primed to indicate the obvious on the road. A sudden field of yellow flowers was hardly a private vision. And a vapor of skywriting to advertise cutworm killer could be seen for miles and miles. Even the cutworms probably saw it.

To make things more difficult, Robin had chosen to lie in the back again, a real regression in their shaky relationship. Now, once more, she was merely a passenger being sped to her destination; well, maybe not sped exactly, but getting there nonetheless. With all the
windows open like this, Linda believed her voice would be carried right out and sail, unheard by anyone, over the flat landscape.

Still, she tried to think of something funny or original or necessary to say. Hey, Robin, did you hear the one about the midget and the new Pope?

Her own silence troubled Linda, not only because it stressed her inadequacy as a social being, but because human exchange was so essential to survival. That lovely volley of words across pillows, and into sleep. The first man she ever slept with had taken her to his room at his married brother’s house and had held one hand over her mouth throughout the act, in case she cried out in pain and happiness and woke his niece and nephew. Later she learned that other people were often boisterous in bed, and even shouted, like storm-tossed sailors sighting land.

Robin understood that she had hurt Linda’s feelings by what she’d said the night before. And now Linda was getting even by not speaking to her at all. If Robin spoke first, it would be a kind of apology, and she could not bring herself to do it. Anyway, Linda had started the whole thing, had picked on her first, said that about Robin whining. And then hadn’t she made fun of everything important and serious that Effie Borden said? She
was
a real fortune-teller. She knew things she couldn’t possibly know without secret and special powers. The light man and the dark man. About Robin’s father. About traveling and a mysterious disappearance. She even knew about the fork and did not betray Robin to Linda by being more specific. And that was one of the
things Linda had criticized, that Effie Borden was vague, that what she said could mean anything.

Robin was lying on the backseat again, looking at some old comic books she’d read a million times. Reading in motion always made her feel sick, so she just looked at the pictures and watched the colors jump whenever the car hit a rut in the road. Archie and Jughead and Veronica and Betty, their words vibrating in blurred balloons.

Linda’s big purse had been on the front passenger seat this morning when Robin got to the car. Well, she could take a hint. She didn’t have to go where she wasn’t wanted. And if Linda thought she could be broken down by silence, she picked the wrong person to break. Robin could go a thousand miles without speaking, a
million
miles. She would not speak to
anyone
, something Linda was unable to manage. “Fill it with regular, please. Am I close enough to the pump? I think we’re in for another scorcher. Could I please have the key to the rest room?” She’d said all that already to the man at the gas station, her voice peculiar at first from disuse. If it had been Robin driving, she’d have stopped at a self-service island, and when the man came out and said, “Check your oil, lady?” or “Have a nice day,” she would have simply stepped on the gas and zoomed away.

If you didn’t use your voice for ten, or twenty years, could you lose it? What about those monks and nuns who take a vow of silence, and eat all their meals together without ever saying, “Pass the potatoes” or “This chicken needs salt”? What if one of them started choking on a fishbone? Or saw a mad strangler come up behind another monk?

Big deal, Linda told herself. Even the President of the United States is not a spontaneous person. Somebody else has to write all of his speeches. And the whole world listens, as if he were a great poet talking off the cuff and straight from the heart.

Robin was not speaking to her at all, that old punishment for unintentional crimes. The girl had not even shrugged for a long time; perhaps it was difficult to do effectively while lying down. When the gas-station attendant wiped the back window and said, “Hot enough for you in there, kid?” she had shut her eyes and pretended to sleep, with a comic book spread across her face.

Once, Linda read an article about a couple who had stayed married for fifty years without speaking. It had all started with an argument on their honeymoon about the wrong eggs ordered for breakfast. During the years that followed, they had children, bought a house and cars, took trips, without exchanging a word, and now they were having a golden wedding anniversary party. That’s why they were in the newspaper. The caption, under the picture of a grim, white-haired couple holding champagne glasses, read:
Weehawken Pair Prove Silence Is Golden
. Maybe she should tell Robin about that. Or about the woman in an iron lung who had memorized the entire Bible. What made me think of that, Linda wondered. Anyway, Robin was really asleep now. The comic book had slipped off her face, leaving a small tattoo of color on her left cheek.

Robin woke and thought: What if the monastery caught on fire? But then they would have a special bell to ring, wouldn’t they? She sat up and looked through the window. She wondered how long it was since she’d
last spoken. And what was the world’s record? She didn’t have a watch and she certainly wasn’t going to ask Linda the time and spoil her own record, whatever it was. In the
Guinness Book
, she remembered, a man in Australia had showered non-stop for 336 hours.

Robin often dreamed that she could not speak in moments of crisis. Sometimes she was in danger; sometimes she recognized her mother in a huge crowd that pressed around her and wouldn’t let Robin through. In the dream, she saw her own wordless mouth working, and would come awake, breathless and frightened.

She touched the fork in her pocket. At the Marriott in Iowa, she’d wrapped the tines in some of the free Kleenex they had in the bathroom wall, so that they wouldn’t leave scratches across her hip any more. What if she said absolutely nothing when she saw her mother, became as mute as the dream Robin, except that her voicelessness then would be deliberate, controlled? What if she simply stared with burning eyes and took the fork from her pocket and plunged it in before her mother could speak, either, or scream? If Robin had had more time that day on the farm in Iowa, she would have stolen a real weapon, a sharp and shining knife. She thought of those three rifles on the wall of Linda’s friend’s house in Indiana. If they had been smaller, if they had been revolvers or pistols. If her father had really been the chief of police. The fork would have to do. She must remember to remove the Kleenex first, that’s all.

An unspoken (ha!) contest had been started between them. Linda wasn’t sure how, or even why. It was just that neither of them was speaking. If it came to it,
she knew she could endure much longer than Robin. But she was the adult here, the one to set the proper tone for their behavior. And it was childish to continue this competition with a child. Her mouth began to shape Robin’s name, and then shut again, with a defiance of its own. Anyway, what would she say?

They were going to have to stop soon for lunch. She thought, with a passing tremor of guilt, that it would be interesting to just drive and drive and see how long Robin could hold out without food or water or going to the bathroom. Linda had used the one at the Shell station while Robin pretended to sleep, and she had taken a long drink when she’d filled the thermos there. As far as hunger went, she could get by for hours on the Tropical Fruits Life Savers in the change tray on the dashboard. Linda saw with spiteful satisfaction that Robin’s favorite, tangerine, was coming up next.

But the center line of the road was starting to have that hypnotic effect. At each rise, Linda worried that she would be carried over it into sleep, without warning. And using the radio to stay awake had to be a violation of the rules of whatever stupid game they were playing. How did this craziness begin? How would it end?

If you never spoke, would that increase your ability to send telepathic messages? In science last year, Oxhorn told them that the loss of one sense often led to the sharpening of another. Compensation, he called it. Robin sent a swift trial message to Linda, commanding her to shut the front window. It was blowing Robin’s hair around, anyway.
Linda Close The Window
. She stared at the back of Linda’s head. Nothing happened.
It was probably Linda’s fault. She was just a lousy receiver. You probably couldn’t send a message through her brain with a poisoned dart.

Robin had ESP. She and Ginger tested themselves once with a deck of cards, according to instructions in a magazine, and Robin had come out Above Average in Telepathy and Clairvoyance. Sometimes she knew when the telephone was going to ring right before it happened. She’d get this tingling in her neck, and she would know. LINDA YOU DUMB ASSHOLE CLOSE THAT WINDOW.

There was a chartered bus at Howard Johnson’s and another one pulling in. They were carrying a convention of insurance underwriters from the Plains states. Inside the restaurant, all the tables and counter stools were taken, and there was a considerable line of people waiting to be seated. They buzzed and trilled with conversation. The hostess occasionally held up three fingers or four. Feeling foolish, but enterprising, Linda raised two fingers herself when asked how many, and thought she perceived surprise on Robin’s face. But the smaller tables had all been recently assigned, and Linda could see they weren’t going to waste a whole booth on two diners. She was thinking of heading for the next Howard Johnson’s, at least fifteen miles away on I-35, when a stranger spoke to her. He was a tall, handsome, elderly man who was holding an immaculate panama hat against his breast. Linda was so startled, and the conventioneers were making such a din, she didn’t understand him. She almost said, “Pardon?” but checked herself in time. Instead, she moved her head inquiringly, and touched her
ear, and the man obliged by repeating himself. He and his wife were wondering if she and the other young lady would mind sharing a table, so that they could all be seated sooner as a party of four.