Hearts (22 page)

Linda looked at Robin, who smirked, and then she nodded vigorously. The man informed the hostess of their new status and they were seated within a few minutes.

The man and his wife had the sweetest faces. They sat close to one another in the booth, sharing a menu.

Linda hardly had to look at hers. She knew most of the offerings by heart and could even predict the Daily Specials. But how was she going to convey her order to the waitress without speaking? This nice couple would think she was rude, or peculiar, if she didn’t speak to them, either. The whole business was idiotic. Yet she said nothing and pretended to examine the Technicolor illustrations of fried clams and cheeseburgers.

Robin slid out of the booth to use the ladies’ room. She glanced at Linda as if to say,
Dare
to speak while I’m gone! Linda stared back, intimating her outrage at such a suggestion.

The two strangers spoke to one another in gentle, considerate tones. “The ham salad looks good, dearest,” he said. “What do you think?” She was thinking of the fish fillet on a bun. They decided to order one of each and share them. Their intimacy was so natural that Linda believed they shared everything. The mystery of love’s beginning was nothing compared to the miracle of its endurance.

Inevitably, the couple turned their attention to Linda. “Have you decided yet, dear?” the woman asked.
And Linda nodded and pointed to the photograph of the grilled-cheese sandwich. It was a special that included potato salad and pickles, a choice of beverage, and one scoop of ice cream. The man and his wife exchanged a look of deep understanding and sympathy. Why, they think I
can’t
speak, Linda realized, and was horrified.

“May I order for you?” the man asked. His eyes were watery with kindness. This was the appropriate time to end all this nonsense, and she would have, or would have cheated, whispering a fast explanation, if Robin hadn’t come back to the table at that very moment.

“
Your sister is having the grilled-cheese special
,” the woman said to Robin, after she was seated. Every word was enunciated with excruciating care.
“Would you like the same thing?”

Robin shrugged, the international language that always worked for her.

“Good! Fine!” the man cried, in a jovial outburst. He snapped his fingers for the waitress, like a flamenco dancer, and she whirled to their table.

It all went like that. Even the choice of beverage was easy. The woman read them off until she was stopped by a show of hands. Linda thought: This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. When she was a child, she and a couple of friends liked to pretend they were blind. They would link arms and, with their eyes squeezed shut, walk downtown, careening into people and shop windows. Her father caught them once, and she was beaten for being disrespectful of the less fortunate. But she had not done it to ridicule anyone, only to test the terror of possibility. She remembered disabled beggars in Newark,
and Simonetti saying bitterly that they were all fakes; the blind could see, the amputees were contortionists; the world was full of phonies and crooks. Maybe he was right. Her face flamed. She could barely chew her sandwich. And it was much too late to undo this situation now, not without humiliating these strangers, too. The man and his wife were overwhelmingly solicitous. They discreetly asked questions that could be answered easily with a gesture or a nod. They told about their son, who was a plastic surgeon in Amarillo, and about their daughter, who was a librarian and raised basenji puppies, a rare breed that was barkless. After she said this, the woman looked dismayed, and her husband patted her hand to reassure her. Linda took some comfort from seeing that Robin was suffering as well, and had let her ice cream melt into a soup in which she drowned her spoon.

Of course the couple insisted on paying for everyone. “It’s a pleasure!” the woman shouted. Her voice had doubled in volume since they sat down together. “And a privilege!” her husband added. “We don’t often get to have lunch with such charming young ladies.” They both shook hands with Linda and Robin. Linda felt hers being pressed fiercely. Courage, was the message,
courage
.

In the parking lot she looked upward, feeling faintly religious and expecting retribution. But the atmosphere was cloudless and forgiving. The elderly couple waved from their blue Pinto and drove away.

Robin climbed into the front seat next to Linda. They went slowly down the service road and then merged with the highway traffic. Still, neither of them spoke.

Maybe we can’t any more, Linda thought, and put one hand against her own throat. It throbbed with contained language. Everywhere in the world, people were speaking civilly to one another. Good evening. Goodbye. It certainly looks like rain. Would you care for a cheese puff? In French, in Chinese, in that African click-talk that sounds like wooden beads being strung together across the vocal cords.

Robin’s profile was cool and inscrutable. Her fine light hair blew wildly around it. I’ll give in, Linda decided.
She
never will. “Is there too much of a draft for you?” she asked. “Shall I close my window?” Had her voice always been this musical? It was thrilling to speak again, like opening one’s body willingly to love. Not really giving in at all.

Robin’s eyes were astonished, and her skin blossomed with blood. “Yes!” she said. “Oh, yes!”

24
“So now tell me about him,” Robin said, as they were settling in for the night at a place called Buddy’s Siesta.

“Who?” Linda asked, already on guard. Robin often didn’t seem to listen to anything Linda said. And then days later, without warning, she would gather up the strings of a failed conversation, and begin again. It startled Linda and made her feel uneasy, like a courtroom witness about to be caught in a lie.

“Your
father
,” Robin said.

“What about him?” Linda was stalling for time in which to invent history, or a further, convincing stall.

“Anything,”
Robin said, her voice stretched with impatience, a cranky child demanding a new bedtime story.

“Well,” Linda said. “He was a mill worker and he had a lung disease. It’s called emphysema.”

Robin nodded as if she had received the most pertinent facts.

Linda took that moment to shut the light and position herself for sleep. Maybe she could if Robin stopped talking and she didn’t start thinking. “Good night,” she called, with faint optimism and even less authority.

“What happened to him?” Robin asked.

“He died.”

“Of what? The lung stuff?”

“No, not exactly … It was more of an accident.”

“In a car?”

“No,” Linda said. “I don’t know about you, Robin, but I’d better go to sleep before I drop.” By now she was as tightly coiled as a runner before a race.

“In a plane?”

“Uh-uh. It was a household accident. And I don’t want to talk any more, okay?”

“That’s the fourth biggest killer in America,” Robin said. “After heart, cancer, and strokes. This insurance guy came to school last year and told us all this junk about not leaving your skates on the stairs and everything.”

Linda was quiet, hoping that if she didn’t answer, Robin would simply wind herself out.

“And not smoking in bed,” Robin said. “Are you sleeping?”

Maybe never again, Linda thought.

“He came for career week,” Robin said, yawning. “He was a real asshole.”

“Mmmm,” Linda dared, and then held her breath. She realized after a while that Robin had diverted herself, and that the inquiry was over, at least for now. Linda was grateful, if not quickly relaxed. Her father’s death was something she was still unable to discuss with dispassionate calm. And everyone said it could never have happened exactly the way she remembered it, anyway. On a date last year with a rescue-squad paramedic, she’d tried to describe it, and he thought she was only kidding. He said she must have a terrific imagination and how about using a little of it on him? But she wasn’t kidding and she didn’t hold her imagination responsible, either. She believed, with valiant resolution, that it really had happened that way.

She’d had many fantasies about her father dying, before the actual event. Mostly they involved major catastrophes. What if the great maple out front finally collapsed under its burden of branches and fell on him? What about fire? Her chest would knock with alarm and
excitement. She would have to go looking for him, then, to see that he was still alive, to reassure herself of her own impotence. And when she found him, it would all begin again—the abuse, the fantasies.

Linda would wonder sometimes about her mother and father together. Even before she knew about sex, or
knew
she knew, she’d try to think of them falling in love and agreeing to marry and have a child. She wished much later, too late, that she had asked her mother why she had chosen someone so darkly moody and cruel, and what she, Linda, had done right from the beginning to attract that cruelty. With others he was taciturn and gruff, but he seemed to reserve the center, the very eye, of his furious storm for her. One day, when Linda’s mother came home from a job and found her crying in the sticky shade of the porch and rubbing the red places on her arms where he had gripped them, she didn’t even ask what had happened. She knelt to embrace Linda, tried to erase those fingermarks with her own hands, and said, “He had a very hard life.”

Linda thought she recalled some days of careless peace, herself in the doorway watching him asleep on the sofa, his afternoon snoring a steamboat’s benign whistle. He didn’t look so bad then, though she knew it had to do with the small charge of power she exerted by being the unseen observer. But maybe he’d once been a tamed and loving man, a daddy who played cards with her and carried her gently from an infant sickbed to the toilet. Or was that someone else with cool strong arms and a thundering heartbeat against hers? All the real witnesses were gone, and who could trust the unreliable witness of memory?

Yet she clearly remembered her parents walking up the stairs to the second floor, him following her like some large faithful dog, panting after the white stockings, almost nipping at the white hem. They’d go to their bed and Linda to hers, where she would count and hoard those latest miseries, all the prickly wounds of spirit and flesh. How he had locked her in her mother’s closet for three hours because she had been found rummaging there, how he would not acknowledge her apologies after she was released, would not speak to her at all. How she had been awakened in the middle of the night to be held accountable for sins she was too confused to remember, but confessed to finally for the promised solace of bed. Where she would rock in a tight circle of herself until she gasped and could be delivered again to sleep.

It was early in March, about a month after her tenth birthday. Her mother had left for a new job, and Linda was instantly bereft. In those days her imagination ran to fear as much as it did to dreams of wish fulfillment. And she was always afraid her mother wouldn’t come back. It was raining hard; Linda was positive of that detail. The rain fell through the trees with the noisy urgency of plumbing, and it intensified her bereavement. It also confined her to the house that Saturday, sealing her in with her father and Mrs. Piner and Mr. Botts and a new old lady who cried soundlessly most of the time, as if she were separated from them by a thick pane of glass. Linda couldn’t remember the old lady’s name now, but everything else was sharp and immediate—the way the rain sounded, the way the house smelled of trapped dampness and breath. Her mother was already miles
away, powdering the newest baby, holding its little wrinkled legs up and patting on clouds of talc—the way she floured a chicken.

The game was to stay out of her father’s notice for as much of the day as possible, to listen for his footsteps and his wheezing and to always go the other way. It was a large house, at least, with plenty of places to hide. She spent considerable time in the pantry, carefully examining the labels on cans. There was one for green peas, with a picture of a rainbow arcing over a sunny meadow. A chimney with a single spiral of smoke could be seen in the distance, and a giant pod, in which the pearly and perfect peas nestled, was superimposed across the scene. That label always filled Linda with an illogical surge of splendor and longing.

Sometimes she even hid upstairs in the more treacherous territory of her mother’s closet, because there was consolation in the company of her clothes left behind, dresses and shoes that waited unmistakably for future days of celebration.

This time, though, Linda was downstairs, wandering. The radio played, with fitful bursts of static, in the kitchen. It was a religious program: God this and God that. She hated God that year and He hated her back. Elsewhere, the Hoover was droning, sucking up dust; Mrs. Piner always vacuumed when Mr. Botts was sleeping. Linda’s father could be heard walking heavily overhead. The old lady was stationed in her wheelchair near the kitchen and, as usual, her face was wet. How did she manage to weep like that without bawling? Her eyes were squeezed shut, her mouth was stretched wide by despair. Linda wondered what sad thing she remembered
or what people she yearned after. Maybe her own family, lost somewhere beyond the front door. Couldn’t she just get up if she wanted to and go after them? She was that close. And she had legs. They were supposed to be paralyzed. They were as thin as canes and covered with ulcerous sores, but still they were legs. Helpless herself, Linda could not bear to comprehend that much helplessness. Maybe it was only her loss of will the woman mourned. Linda went closer and watched the intricate passage of tears through the maze of wrinkles. “What?” she whispered. “What is it?” She was thrilled by the remote possibility of a response, but of course there wasn’t any, only more of that silent crying. “Walk,” Linda said, high-pitched, conspiratorial. “Go ahead.
Do
it.” Her cheeks smoldered. She was much too old for such overwrought pretending, and even if the old lady didn’t know what was going on, Linda suspected the savagery inside herself that wrestled with the desire to be good.