Hearts (8 page)

After Wright died, Iola visited Linda and said that they
all
die, one way or another. Every relationship she’d ever had ended in pain. Now her body was beginning to retreat from men, a little at a time. She didn’t regret the loss of muscle tone, the sagging. Soon she’d retire from the arena completely, with a vibrator and some
mood-inducing music. “That sounds so lonely,” Linda had said. “Yeah, I suppose,” Iola agreed. “But at least you don’t have to worry about getting involved.” She would probably have something cheering to say now, too, something to make Linda smile and relieve her of this feeling of isolation.

Yet it wasn’t Iola Linda wanted. It was her own mother, with a wanting so strong it surprised her. In that common error of childhood, Linda used to think her mother delivered babies in her nurse’s satchel. What else could make her departures so urgent? A family was always waiting eagerly for its new child. Once Linda held on to her at the door, suspending her weight from the starched skirt. “I wish you didn’t have to go!” she cried. Her mother pried open the clinging hands, first one and then the other. “If wishes were horses,” she said sadly, which confused and distracted Linda long enough for her mother to make her getaway at a steady trot, the newest baby wailing in the satchel.

Even after Linda understood her mother’s real function in those other households, there was a stubborn authority about her connection with human reproduction that stayed. Her mother used to say that she could look into a woman’s eyes and tell immediately if she was pregnant and, if the pregnancy was advanced enough, the sex of the unborn child, too. “What do you see?” a woman once asked, and Linda’s mother said, “The truth,” and would not elaborate. But it was not only for this thrilling authority that Linda missed her now. It was for that staple of early existence, for which she once waited hungrily at windows and doors, the mothering itself.

The contents of the test tube remained the same, a
clear and silent sea. Linda, sitting on the closed toilet and staring, found herself dozing off. She stood and stretched and, glancing into the wastebasket under the sink, saw a bloody sanitary napkin clumsily swathed in an excess of toilet paper. At first she thought it had been left by a former tenant of the room, and she blamed bad housekeeping and ironic coincidence. Then she realized it was Robin’s, a part of
her
secret purchase in the drugstore. Going by in her pajamas before, the girl had seemed half her true age, disaffected and immature. Yet she menstruated, ready or not, more evidence of life’s mindless eternal chain.

Linda opened the door as slowly and quietly as she could. Robin was asleep, with the unguarded innocent face only sleep allowed her. Linda longed to get into the other bed but was afraid she’d fall asleep also, before the two hours were up. Instead, she sat in the one chair in the room, an armless wooden construction with a thin loose pad on its seat. She pulled it over to the wall first, so she could rest her head. All that driving; she was dizzy with fatigue. Haphazard thoughts almost became dreams. A parade of people, in irrelevant order, filed past: Iola, Wright, her father, Simonetti, her mother. She imagined the first man and the first woman ever to recognize the connection between sex and procreation. It was probably before the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, maybe even before the achievement of language. Lovemaking was the one mute comfort they could take without danger in a dark and beginning world. Oh, what a rotten trick!

Linda looked at her watch. It was only 9:20. When she was very young she thought about love a great deal
of the time. She drew hearts pierced by arrows on the pages of her school notebooks, and the beautiful profiles of women and men who were destined to fall in love with one another. She wrote names for them in her best script under their portraits: Diana, Glenda, Jonathan, Brent. The men had cigarettes or pipes clenched between their teeth, and no one existed from the waist down.

She thought about the possibilities of men’s bodies, none of which she had ever seen. Her father had kept himself from her unclothed, as he had clothed. Linda had witnessed her future in her mother’s large, soft shape, and looked forward to her own pendulousness, her own private forests of hair. But of course she wasn’t satisfied; word was out.

There was that dog, Prince, that Mrs. Piner kept chained in the yard. He greeted Linda wildly whenever she came home from school, and one afternoon she sat down next to him on the grass and pulled him onto her lap. His thick white coat ruffled under her fingers, and then shed in an airborne drift, like blown dandelion puffs. As she stroked his ears and belly, his black tongue lolled, he sighed in surrender to pleasure, and a thin red tube emerged from that hair-tipped pinch of flesh with the startling clarity of Linda’s mother’s lipstick.

Mrs. Piner, who had been sweeping the porch steps, flew down them, a white fury, and beat the dog on the rump and head with the broom. “Bad dog!” she cried, and Prince growled at her.

When a friend’s baby brother was diapered, Linda saw his miniature parts, still wrinkled from passage, as they were quickly powdered and covered again from
view. And sometimes she watched from the stairs as old Mr. Botts came from the bathroom, his pajamas askew, for a glimpse of his poor, broken-necked sex.

It was almost ten o’clock and she was tempted to look at the test tube in advance, but suffered a superstitious fear of disobeying those printed instructions. In her sleep, Robin made unintelligible sounds that were almost words, and Linda said, “Shhh. Shhh.” Then she took a flashlight from her purse and opened one of the Exxon maps across her bed. With her finger she found their approximate location and then traced the continuation of their journey over the yellow line. The next state was Ohio, the state of Presidents. Linda couldn’t remember where she had heard that. Or why she thought of it now. She was so tired. Maybe if she slept for a few minutes. You could set yourself like an alarm clock to wake at a particular time if you wanted to. She could lie down on the covers, not get too comfortable or settled. Under her arm, the map crackled and she pushed it away, gently, so as not to tear it. Her flash of intuition in the car that morning could have been nothing, a false alarm. She didn’t feel different, really. There were supposed to be other signs, weren’t there? Breast soreness and swelling, weight gain, and whatever her mother saw in other women’s eyes. Cars went by on the road outside. There were people who traveled all night to get someplace. Trucks carried milk and eggs into Ohio for the breakfasts of future Presidents. In her mind’s eye, Linda followed them down the real double line of the highway until they disappeared into the darkness.

When she woke, she was conscious first of the continuing traffic. She peered and squinted until her eyes
adjusted, and she saw that it was almost two o’clock. Robin had flung off the covers and was lying spread-eagled and open-mouthed. Linda went into the bathroom and put on the light. A roach ran crazily for cover behind the toilet. Even before she saw the ring in the test tube, she felt the stunning blow of truth.

10
The hitchhikers were everywhere. You’d never know it was against the law. There was at least one contender at each entrance to the parkway, arm raised like the starter’s in a demolition derby.

They were mostly young people, probably recently sprung from college, and setting out to see the world on this glorious June day. Some of them held signs:
Chicago. Phoenix. Anywhere!
Maybe the state troopers were looking the other way, given the gasoline shortage. Linda knew better than to pick anyone up, no matter how innocent he might seem. In their newspaper photos, captured murderers and rapists didn’t always appear sinister or different, either. When a criminal was handcuffed to a detective, Linda often had to read the caption to see who was who. Not that she worried so much about her own safety; she was too miserable by now to care. In some respects, the worst had already happened. But she was still responsible for Robin, who sat or lay in the backseat as if Linda were the chauffeur and there was a wall of glass between them.

There was a new joyless refrain in Linda’s head: What will I do? What will I do? When they crossed the border into Ohio and were welcomed by the governor’s sign, she could not work up the enthusiasm to share it with Robin, who was looking the other way.

As they approached Youngstown, Linda felt a slight change in the car’s movement that she ignored, and even when it seemed to limp and there was a strange plopping noise, she attributed it to the uneven surface of the road. When a trucker passed to her left and blasted his horn and gestured downward, she finally understood that
she had a flat tire. She signaled and pulled over too quickly onto the graveled shoulder, and stopped at the end of a skid. Before she could open the door, a bearded man in a khaki T-shirt and chinos ran up to the car and yelled breathlessly, “Hey, thanks!”

Linda stepped out, clutching the keys in her fist. “For what?” she asked, and saw that he had a backpack with a bedroll attached, and knew that he was the last hitchhiker she’d watched to the diminishing point in the rear-view mirror. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t stop for … I wasn’t …” Her hands fluttered, but the man was already squatting at the deflated tire, his backpack flung to one side.

He changed the tire for them in relentless sunlight, after urging Linda and Robin into the sparse, dappled shade of a single young oak just off the shoulder. By the time he was done, the khaki shirt was dark with perspiration and he had wrapped his forehead in a gypsy’s bandanna. He came over and collapsed at their feet, the backpack under his head. “Now that flat is your spare,” he told Linda. “You’d better get it fixed soon. You might need it.”

“I will,” she promised, and opened her purse.

He held up his hand. “No, no, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m independently wealthy.” When she fumbled with her wallet, he said, “Listen, outdoor work is terrific for the health. I try to do a couple of these a day. I’m lucky you came along.”

“Thank you, then,” Linda said, her hands at a loss. “Thanks a lot.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Robin echoed, her first voluntary civility of the trip. Linda wanted to shake her and perhaps
loosen other pleasant contained words, like change stuck in a slot machine.

They walked back to the car, Robin lagging and turning to look back at the man under the tree. Linda turned, too, and his arm was half raised in a lazy farewell salute. “Well, come on!” she yelled.

How could she not offer him a ride? It would have to be premeditated murder for him to go through all that work first just to do them in later. Besides, he looked as if he would no longer have the energy, if he ever had the inclination.

He was handsome, in the current way that young men were handsome: Christlike and sinful at once, just down from the cross or out of a neighbor’s warm bed. He put his pack beside Robin in the back and got into the front passenger seat. When he did, there was the sudden heady fragrance of sweat and sunlight. His thigh, resting at least six inches from Linda’s, seemed swollen and confined by the chinos, and she felt an erotic impulse that shocked and appalled her. Now, of all times. It could have something to do with a hormonal imbalance; so many things were going on inside her that she could not discern or control.

In the meantime, the hitchhiker turned to smile at Robin, who
smiled back!
Maybe he was a hypnotist, or a magician. Maybe a flock of doves would rise from his bedroll and fill the car with the beating of wings.

He asked their names and told them that his was John Wolfe Blaise, usually known as Wolfie, and that he was on his way to a wedding in New Mexico. Linda said his name to herself a few times, trying it out.

“Jesus,” he said softly when she pulled onto the road
again, with a hairsbreadth between the Maverick and a roaring semi. When they were in the mainstream of traffic, he looked from one of them to the other. “Are you two sisters?” he asked. “I think I see a family resemblance. Something about the eyes.”

Linda began to suspect that he was only a con man. She and Robin might be considered physical
opposites
, if anything. She said, “Related by marriage,” and left it at that.

“You married?” he asked Robin, a question guaranteed to win her disdain. Ho-ho, Linda thought, but Robin only smiled again and shook her head.

“Ah,” Wolfie said. “Me, neither,” as if they shared a conspiracy of wisdom.

Me, neither, Linda wanted to shout. “Whose wedding?” she asked, pretending it wasn’t unusual for guests to hitchhike to one.

“A friend’s,” Wolfie answered, in a way that closed the subject. Then he turned his attention to the landscape. He observed it hungrily and began to point things out to Robin. She usually ignored Linda’s shared observations, but she listened carefully to his, and even asked questions. What did they call those clouds, and those trees? What caused the pools of “water” on the highway that disappeared as you approached them? He named the white, blooming clouds cumulus, and those small fringed trees they saw everywhere ailanthus, or trees of heaven. They just come up, he told them, even in the sidewalk cracks of big cities. Light waves bouncing off the hot air near the pavement give the illusion of water from a distance. The angle changes as you approach and the mirage vanishes.

Linda listened, too, and when she tailgated the car in front of them and had to stop short, Wolfie’s foot braced against an imaginary brake, and he apologized for taking her mind off the road. Later, when he asked where they were heading, she wanted to tell him everything, and ask what he thought she should do, and what states had legalized abortion, and if she might die of one simply because no one would be waiting for her not to.

“Our next real destination is Valeria, Iowa,” she said, “where Robin’s grandfather and aunt live,” and she knew she sounded as carefree as one of the Bobbsey Twins on the way to Grandpa’s farm. After that, she told him, she would continue on alone to California, to Los Angeles maybe, or San Francisco, she wasn’t sure. He asked what route she planned to take from Iowa, and she showed him the map with its prescribed yellow line. “That’s the fastest, I guess,” he said. “But the southern route’s prettier, I think, if you’re not in a big hurry to get there.” She asked if he would write it down, and he drew a new penciled line across the country.