Hearts Read online

  Robin quickly covered the polish and shoved the bottle into one of the cabinets. She turned the volume up on the radio to drown out the blood rushing in her ears, and looked around for something to eat.

  3 Linda opened the door to their garden apartment, using Wright’s keys. They were heavier than hers, and the ring was attached to a thick leather strap. She sniffed at it and thought she detected his own particular smell, something like machine oil and bread. There were other, unfamiliar keys on the ring and she wondered what doors they opened. Maybe they were to another apartment, somewhere he had once lived with his first wife.

  Robin, the product of that marriage, was doing something at the sink, with her narrow, hunched back to the door. It was Linda’s responsibility to tell her that her father was dead. There should have been someone closer to the girl to give her such terrible and personal news. But the only one truly close to her had been Wright. Despite all of Linda’s efforts at friendship these past weeks, Robin had hardly talked to her, or looked right at her, for that matter.

  The radio on top of the refrigerator was tuned to a rock station, and playing loudly. If Linda spoke she might not be heard. She coughed for attention and Robin started and turned, as if she’d been caught in some forbidden act. But she had only been eating chocolate cake. A few crumbs were scattered on the drainboard and others clung to her fuzzy, pale yellow shirt. Her blondness, everything matching—skin, hair, shirt—gave her a hazy, unfocused look. The white lashes, as usual, were lowered, so that it was difficult to read her mood. For the first time, Linda recognized that Robin had noticeable breasts, and hips that flared in her jeans like a bell. Unwatched, she’d emerged suddenly and strikingly female from that other small neuter figure. Stepdaughter. Orphan.

  They looked at one another in the din of music, and Linda hoped the message could somehow be transmitted this way, with just an exchange of allusive glances, or that a telephone call from the hospital had preceded her arrival home, and that Robin already knew. But that was stupid. Would she be eating cake, enjoying it, if she’d just heard of her father’s death? Linda waited until the girl finished chewing and swallowing. Then she said, “I have to tell you something, Robin. Something bad.”

  After she said that, Linda’s gaze wandered anxiously, and for the first time since she’d come in, she noticed the diorama and its latest gory embellishments. “Oh, God,” she whispered, and turned back to Robin, who only squinted and appeared puzzled. She didn’t even bother to lower the volume on the radio.

  Linda raised her voice. “Your daddy!” she shouted, and the title was heartbreaking to her, with far more tragic meaning than “husband” could ever have.

  Fortunately, she didn’t have to go any further. A rapid series of expressions moved across Robin’s face, and then she swallowed deeply, as if one crumb of cake had not gone down properly. “He died,” she said, at last, “didn’t he?”

  Linda nodded, relieved. “Yes. That’s what happened.”

  A frantic frog pulse leaped in Robin’s throat. She went haltingly to the table and sat down. Her movements jostled the shoebox and the little clay head rolled in its basket and settled.

  Linda shut her eyes, but she was compelled by Robin’s silence to open them and go on. “Heart,” she said, and heard in her own enunciation of the word derision for the easy mortal surrender of that organ.

  The girl continued to sit, her hands opened palms-up on the table, as if she expected to have her fortune read. Well, that wouldn’t be hard to do. There was definitely a long journey in her near future. She’d have to be sent, or taken, to her father’s people in Iowa, or Idaho, wherever it was that they lived. But this wasn’t the time to discuss that. This was a time for grieving. If only Robin would say something, express her grief, or her anger. Then Linda would be able to quit talking. But Robin didn’t, and Linda said, flushing, “He went to sleep and that’s all.” Oh, shut up, she told herself, and continued, “He didn’t wake up or get scared.” An instant picture of Wright’s dying came into her head, followed by a wake of tenderness for his child. She felt an urge to embrace Robin, even though they had never touched one another before, even if it would be awkward. But Robin had to indicate that she would accept an embrace. Robin had to make the first move, and it was hard to tell if she was even breathing.

  Maybe she was in shock. And what was it you were supposed to do about that? Slap her? Raise her feet and lower her head? Throw on warm blankets, or was it cold water? Why did they give that first-aid course in high school, anyway? No one had ever drowned in Linda’s presence, or broken a leg, or bled recklessly and needed a tourniquet made from a shoelace and a ball-point pen. Except for her father, they had all died in bed, quietly, irrevocably.

  Almost everything you were taught turned out to be useless: capitals of foreign countries, major crops and imports, climate, population. All that information and Linda had become a teacher of social dancing for adults, a purveyor of the newest craze—the Hustle, the Worm, the Vegetable, and the Freak.

  Still, facts stuck and once in a while, in the nervous clutch of some Freaking fool, she’d suddenly and unaccountably think of the monsoons of Jakarta, or about the thin mountain air of Machu Picchu that made visitors giddy and necessitated longer baking schedules for breads and cakes. And sometimes she imagined the wonderful breathkiss of resuscitation given or received on a moonlit beach.

  “I was right there,” she told Robin, desperately. What was wrong with this girl that she didn’t cry for her father, who loved her and whom she loved? When Linda’s father died sixteen years ago, she’d quickly become hysterical. Neighbors had to shake her and force her to drink burning whiskey. They begged her to stop crying before she made herself sick. She’d wailed and rocked all night, although she had secretly and fiercely wished for a long time that he would die, and in agony, if possible. Of course the circumstances of her father’s death were different, were bizarre, and the agony far more extravagant than Linda’s worst imaginings, yet seemingly there at her own bidding.

  But she had wept for Wright, too, albeit more calmly. After the dreadful frenzy of activity in the hospital room, the nurses took her to a small alcove behind their station, patted her shoulder, and then went off to do whatever it is they do to the dead. A little while before, Linda had been unable to concentrate on being married, and now, perversely, she felt utterly forsaken. The tears that came first were for herself.

  Very soon she remembered Wright, who had been taken by surprise like that, actually ambushed by death, and was even more forsaken than she the moment his spirit rose like a turncoat from his body. And the thought of the body itself brought fresh weeping: that thinning blond crown checked so often for recent losses, the small paunch he quickly inhaled when he caught her looking, and his penis that once led him, rosy and exuberant, to their bed, and was now doomed to an eternity of melancholy decline. Poor Wright. Only forty-two years old, an age that had seemed biblically ancient only weeks ago, and was obviously an outrageous gyp as a whole lifetime.

  She thought, too, of his Sunday hobby, those earnestly realistic landscapes he painted indoors, of lavish streams and mountains, without even looking once through the window at the miserable clump of birch in the courtyard, or the perpetually overcast patch of Newark sky.

  This time she wept only for him, and when she was finished she went out to the parking lot and found everything there new and shimmering in her tear-dazzled vision. The car in front of the Maverick was gone, giving her plenty of room to maneuver. It was evening and the windows of the hospital were cool rectangles of light. But where was the light switch on the dashboard? She turned on the windshield wipers and the emergency blinkers and the radio before she found it. Then she gunned the motor and backed up by mistake, hitting the car behind her. After drying her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater, Linda looked through the rearview mirror; there was no visible damage. With determination and a grinding of gears, she went forward this time, out into traffic and the world.

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bsp; 4 Linda handled widowhood with surprising efficiency. It had taken her much longer to adjust to marriage. Each day she performed another new task that would lead her back toward single society. She even arranged for the funeral all by herself. How could she ask that poor zombie kid to decide on a service or help to pick her father’s coffin?

  The funeral director was a young man who seemed to have centuries of experience. His dark eyes were extraordinarily expressive, and she wondered how he managed to convey so much without actually saying it. It was as if she could read his very thoughts: You can put him in a plastic lawn bag for all I care, lady. The poor stiff won’t know the difference, even if he did work his balls off for you. It’s between you and God.

  To Linda, who had so much trouble expressing herself aloud, it was a stellar performance. And when he finally did speak, his voice was freighted with judgment. “You know,” he said, with a self-deprecating little chuckle, “it may seem like a strange notion to you, but this is, in a way, the last thing you and your husband will be doing together.”

  It certainly did seem like a strange notion. It was only Wright’s last thing to do. And he was going to do it alone.

  The choices she was offered were dizzying. It was something like trying to buy an airline ticket, with all the confusing options they gave you these days: Sunday Freedom Fare, Midweek Supersaver Special. Finally, Linda took a package deal, including cremation, that was a little cheaper than the others, and she suffered only a slight afterthought of guilt. She was convinced that cremation was the right thing to do. It eliminated all those terrible and illogical words—corpse, cadaver, remains—for what was so recently a warm and animated presence. When she could bear to think about it, she imagined she’d want to be cremated, too.

  And money was going to matter. She’d gone to the Social Security Office, and the Veterans Administration, and the headquarters of Wright’s union, where she was grilled by clerks who were either indifferent or in a homicidal rage. In the end there weren’t too many benefits. Wright had let his V.A. life-insurance policy lapse after his first wife left him. There was one for fifteen hundred dollars from the union, though, and with unfathomable trust, he had made Linda his sole beneficiary on their wedding day. She intended to split everything with Robin, as Wright must have known she would do: the insurance, their meager savings, and the money received from the couple who were going to take over the apartment with its furniture. It would be a kind of orphan’s dowry to make Robin more attractive to her father’s people in Iowa.

  Linda was going to give her door-to-door service there. She was doing it for Wright, seeing that his only daughter was safely situated with blood relatives. Besides, the arrangements with his family were not firmly established. Linda had sent a long telegram explaining everything to Wright’s father and older sister, after finding an address for them among Wright’s papers. She offered to delay the funeral for a few days in case either of them was able to attend. Before they were married, Wright told her he’d had a falling-out with his family years ago and had lost touch with them. Surely, Linda thought, this tragedy would erase old grudges and hard feelings. But there was no response to her message.

  She’d never known any farmers personally, but in books and movies they were practical and taciturn (that’s where Robin probably got it) yet scrupulous about family duty. Maybe they never answered telegrams and letters because they were backbreakingly busy from sunrise to sunset with farm chores. Maybe it was just understood that Robin would come to them, that they were bound to her through some rural code of ethics. Linda did consider telephoning one night. She checked their number and address with the long-distance operator to make sure they had not moved. But at the last minute she was nervous about calling—didn’t farmers go to bed as early as children?—and she hung up without dialing.

  Anyway, Iowa was on the way to California, Linda’s ultimate destination. Her mother had spoken of going to California during her last years, “to get away from all this,” with a vague gesture that might have included the house on Roper Street, the harshness of Northeastern winters, and the inexorable downward path of her life.

  Everybody wanted to go to California. Linda believed it was a migratory instinct, apart from the rational arguments for its good weather, geographical beauty, and glamorous movie industry. Yet she was excited by the idea of seeing palm trees and redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, and famous stars pushing shopping carts in those all-night supermarkets. And if happiness is to be found somewhere, isn’t it likely to be at the furthest distance? She imagined herself driving in bluish evening light to the very edge of the coast, stopping short at a place where small waves would break at the Maverick’s fenders.

  On the morning of the funeral, Linda woke thinking she had forgotten something critical. Whatever it was rose almost to the surface of consciousness and then sank, like the content of a dream. She had to wake Robin by shaking her, and the girl sprang up in bed gasping as if she’d been attacked. They dressed in silence and sat down to breakfast in continuing silence. Linda was forced into chattiness and an explosion of platitudes in order to break it. Did Robin want orange juice, grapefruit juice, tomato juice, or V-8? At least it wasn’t raining; rain made everything more depressing, didn’t it? How about Raisin Bran? Total? Cocoa Puffs? She was treated to that now familiar little shrug, as automatic as a tic. How would they ride all the way to Iowa together, only the two of them alone in the car?

  Even at the mortuary, Robin was impassive, except when the furnace door was opened to receive the coffin, releasing a rushing sound like the very winds of Hell, and her eyes widened and her hands jerked to her face.

  Several men from the surgical-instruments plant were there to pay last respects, and they watched and listened with solemn faces in which Linda thought she detected a faint underglow of relief. Not me! Not me! Hallelujah, not me!

  The organ was played with crashing fervor and then an unbearable softness, and whoosh! it was over, and everyone hurried into sunlight.

  5 Robin had been cutting classes more and more frequently as the term went on. After her father died, she hardly went to any at all.

  One morning, Linda announced that she would drive Robin to school every day from now on, on her way to work. It was actually out of her way, as Robin pointed out, but Linda insisted she needed all the driving practice she could get before the big trip. They wouldn’t leave for almost another month, until late in June, because she wanted Robin to finish the term with her classmates.

  What a pain. As soon as Linda let her off on the school corner, and waved and zigzagged back down the street, Robin started walking home. It was a mile and a half away. She put her thumb out whenever a car approached, but no one stopped for her. By the time she got to the apartment, she was flushed with heat and very thirsty. She drank two Cokes and then sat on the front step to wait for the mailman.

  As she expected, there was another letter from the principal of the junior high school, for her father, urgently requesting that he come in for a conference about Robin’s truancy. The language was a little stronger than in the last letter, and there was an undercurrent of sarcasm. “I know you are a busy man,” the principal wrote, “but the time taken now to deal with our youngsters’ ‘small’ problems will work as insurance against future large ones.” Robin ripped the letter into tiny pieces and dropped them down a sewer grating on the way to Ginger and Ray Smith’s.

  “What took you so long?” Ginger asked. Her breasts looked enormous, even under her pajamas, and Robin glanced away before answering.

  “Asshole made me ride to school with her, and I had to walk all the way back.”

  Ginger laughed. “Oh, shit, that’s good. Well, come on in.”

  Robin could hear the usual whine of the vacuum cleaner from another part of the split-level house. The Smiths’ maid, a grizzled old woman, seemed always to be vacuuming. She vacuumed everything: walls, windows, ceilings, bathroom. Robin believed she left the machine on whether she was using it or not. T
he good thing was that she minded her own business, even when they took the second family car, a cream-colored Camaro, out of the garage for a neighborhood spin. And she never went near Ginger’s room when they were in there.

  Ray, his sister’s elder by less than a year, was propped against the floral pillows, surrounded by Ginger’s stuffed animals and her doll collection, sipping a glass of gin. He raised it in languid greeting.

  The elder Smiths suspected the maid of drinking and watering their gin, so Ray devised an ingenious network of very fine thread around the liquor bottles in the bar server, a booby trap that his father bragged about at the office, and that Ray had to snip off with his mother’s manicuring scissors and replace each time he drank.

  With the door shut behind them, and the stereo blasting Aerosmith’s “Come Together,” the vacuum sounded as distant as the traffic on the turnpike a half mile away.

  Ginger sat cross-legged next to Ray, and they joggled and nudged each other until some of the gin spilled. “Pig,” she said, but without animosity. Then she rolled a joint from materials stashed in the pouch of a gingham kangaroo, and handed it to Robin. “Let Ray know when you start to feel good, Rob,” she said, “so we can do it.”

  Robin hit and passed it on to Ray. “I don’t know if I want to …” she began.

  “You’re not chickenshit, are you?” Ginger asked, and Ray smirked and rolled his eyes.

  “Ze doctor has performed zis operation many time,” he said.

  “Listen, I bought the pen already,” Ginger said. “It cost a buck. And I got my mother’s ink. She probably measures it like they do the gin.”

  It had seemed like such a terrific idea yesterday when she and Ginger looked at the photographs in that magazine. The tattoos on the models were delicate and pretty: tiny birds, teardrops, flowers, hearts. She and Ginger chose favorite designs, and Robin’s was the heart.