Hearts (26 page)

It was another one of those million dumb questions she was always asking that didn’t require an answer. When Robin looked at Wolfie, he winked at her, and she felt the thrill of collusion.

But soon he and Linda were off to one side, sitting in the sparse grass, and whispering together the way Ginger and Ray sometimes did, shutting Robin out. Wolfie and Linda were pulling up pieces of grass and tossing them at each other. They acted as dumb as the dumb cows, who stared mindlessly while they chewed and made deep lowing sounds in their throats. Robin
felt she had been rudely excluded from all levels of society. “Are we going to hang around here all day?” she demanded.

Linda looked up as if she was startled to see Robin there, and then she stood, brushing the grass from her skirt, pulling a whole handful of it from the neck of her blouse. Wolfie made her stand still while he picked a few more blades from her hair. Well, at least Linda wasn’t bugging him yet.

They drove a few miles to a general store, like the one on
The Waltons
. It was jam-packed with every kind of item: food, tools, cigarettes, magazines, patent medicines, and even a few articles of clothing. Linda tried on a couple of sun hats, bending to look at her skewed reflection in a giant-sized cracker tin. Dolly Parton was singing “Here You Come Again” on a radio behind the counter and a man wearing a cowboy hat and a string tie waited on them. Wolfie said he was starving, and they bought bread and cheese and peanut butter and ham and fruit and beer. As they were paying for everything, there was a booming sound nearby, and Linda jumped.

“What was that, a gun?” Robin asked.

“Don’t you know what today is?” Wolfie said. “It’s the Fourth of July. Somebody’s just celebrating early in the day, that’s all.” He asked the man in the cowboy hat if he had any fireworks for sale, and added half a dozen sparklers to their package.

They took their picnic to a wooded spot near a stream. As soon as they parked, two huge dogs came bounding out from somewhere, barking furiously and circling the car. Robin quickly rolled up her window and shut her eyes. She felt herself grow rigid, the way she
used to when her father would drag some reluctant dog up to her and say, “Look, he
likes
you, he wants to make friends. He wants to lick your hand, Bobolink. Daddy wouldn’t let him hurt you. Feel how soft his fur is.”

Now she heard the car doors slam and Wolfie said, “Hello, boys. You the welcoming committee?” And Linda cooed, “Good doggies. You’re so glad to see us, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

Robin was almost afraid to look, but when she did, she saw Linda and Wolfie heading in the direction of the stream, carrying their supplies and a blanket, and the two dogs walking courteously behind them, their heads down. Linda stopped to pet one of them, and she looked like what’s-his-name, that saint in Robin’s old Bible picture book, who was always hanging around with animals, and had birds and squirrels sitting on his shoulders and on top of his head.

Robin opened her door and stepped out, too. Immediately the dogs turned and approached her. She stood completely still while they sniffed around her legs, their tags jangling and their tails churning. She was faint with terror and yet she had a mad impulse to touch their large silvery heads. But she listened to their frantic panting, observed the fangs set into the dark jagged gums, and dismissed the impulse. Her ankles glistened with saliva. How was she ever going to get past them?

“You okay, Robin?” Linda called.

“Sure,” she said, hoarsely.

“Well, then come on!” Wolfie yelled.

The dogs must have thought he meant them, because they leaped away toward Wolfie, and then past him, into the woods, liberating Robin.

Linda had spread the blanket in a cleared space and
she and Wolfie laid out the food. They all ate piggishly, as if they were breaking a long fast. Over Linda’s protests, Wolfie let Robin sip some of his beer. “I’m only giving her a little,” he said. “It’s a holiday. And nobody’s going to card her out here.”

The beer was deliriously cold and a little bitter, but it tasted nicer than gin. She took a deep swig, then another, and Wolfie said, “Hey!” and took the can back. Robin wanted to light the sparklers, but he said they had to wait until dark.

After lunch they lay three abreast on the blanket to take a nap. Robin kept sitting up, thinking she’d heard something, the dogs returning maybe, or other animals, but finally she lay back and slept, too.

Later they got onto a major highway and drove steadily until sundown. The towers of oil wells were black against the rosy sky. They stopped at a motel called The Western Star, and took the last two available rooms, at opposite ends of the place.

When it was dark, Robin reminded Wolfie about the sparklers. He brought them from the car and gave one to each of them. A little boy, barefoot and wearing pajamas, came to the door of his room and watched them with shy interest. Wolfie handed him a sparkler, too, and then he set a match to all of them. They hissed and flared, illuminating each face in turn. Linda said, “Ooooh!” and held hers solemnly at arm’s length. Robin ran around the parking lot, waving hers over her head, so that brief sparks rained down and disappeared in her hair.

Someone took the little boy back inside his room. Wolfie and Robin lit the two remaining sparklers, joining
them for maximum effect, and after those went out they heard the boom! boom! of fireworks somewhere else, and then the answering yelps of dogs at a safe distance.

28
With Wolfie driving again, they would probably reach Albuquerque by late morning, one day before his friend’s wedding. That was where she and Robin would leave him before going on to Glendale. Linda tried frantically not to think ahead to their separation. Riding next to him in the flying landscape, she distracted herself with silly and secret games. Predicted red cars or white ones. While they were still in farm and ranch country, she made God-bargains that would change the inevitable outcome of events if a barn would appear next instead of a silo. Realizing that barns usually outnumbered silos, and that she wasn’t sure she believed in God.

The changes in the landscape were gradual and then dramatic. The vegetation in New Mexico was sparser than it had been a little further east, in Texas. And what did grow was tougher-looking, spiky and aggressive, defiant of the dry, penetrating heat. Linda pulled down the sun visor and looked at herself in the little mirror to see if she, too, was toughening to accommodate the altering climate of her life.

Last night she had gone again, shy and audacious, to his room. As they began to make love, she fleetingly considered the risks. They were awesome, but that didn’t stop her, or make her cautiously decline in ardor or in daring. “I love you!” she cried once, regretful to be first in declaration, and maybe last as well.

“Ah,” Wolfie said. “You don’t even know me. This is only my good side.” Afterward he added, “
You
bring out the good in me. It’s your special gift, I think. I’m a moody guy sometimes, Linda. And a little selfish.”

She would not abandon him to the isolation of guilt. “Oh, me, too!” she said. “Who isn’t?”

No one had spoken for several miles. As he drove, Wolfie would remove one hand from the wheel, absently it seemed, and touch it to some part of Linda that was out of Robin’s sight. Earlier, when Linda drove, she was so conscious of his closeness that her steering regressed. Horns bawled, larger cars bullied her into line. “What’s everyone’s hurry?” Linda asked. “Where are they all going?”

Wolfie said, “Listen, you must be tired, babe. Let me drive for a while.” He paid for the gas when they stopped.

Robin, contributing to the silence, had apparently given up both her roles. She was neither difficult adolescent nor transformed charmer. Linda believed that Robin’s quietude was like her own, was contemplative and sad.

After a sign indicating they were only fifty miles from Albuquerque, Wolfie said he had an idea. How would they like to go to his friend’s wedding with him?

“
I
would,” Robin said immediately. “I never went to a wedding.”

Linda was astounded. “Why, Robin Reismann,” she said. “How can you say that? You went to mine!”

Robin blinked and tossed her hair back and Linda didn’t pursue the argument. What was the use? It was more of Robin’s magical thinking at work. Without her approval or consent, Wright and Linda’s wedding had never taken place. Even the groom, that staple of wedding evidence, was gone. She certainly managed to work up enthusiasm for the union of two complete strangers. And what had happened to her imperative need to get to her mother’s?

“So, can we?” Robin persisted.

Linda didn’t answer right away. She knew she had been indulging her own magical thinking. Because she had not acknowledged her pregnancy to Wolfie, she was able to put it aside for a few days. The logistics were fine. Dr. Lamb had said abortions were legal and safe until the twenty-fourth week. She had time. Except that the changes in her body continued with the dogged obstinancy of nature. She was blooming, or was her notice of it exaggerated? Wolfie hadn’t remarked on it. Robin didn’t either, not since the time in Buddy’s Siesta when she said that Linda was getting fat. And she was probably inspired then by defensiveness and malice.

If Linda went with Wolfie now, it would only be a delaying tactic against the certainty of leaving him later. But so what? Wasn’t living only a delaying tactic against death? Look what’s happening, she marveled. Jokes! Philosophy!

“Well,
can
we?” Robin’s voice had reached that treacherous pitch.

“Yes,” Linda said. “I guess so. I mean, if you think it will be all right with your friend, Wolfie. He doesn’t even know us.”

“
She
,” Wolfie said. “And it will definitely be all right. It’s not going to be a formal wedding. She’s not even sure I’m going to show up. And any friends of mine …” He curled the fingers of his right hand around her unprepared left one, and Linda celebrated her decision.

Who did they think they were fooling? Did they suppose she was an idiot or a baby? She knew what was going on and she only grudgingly blessed it.

Last night Robin had dreamed of swimming in a
race through a dark, gelatinous fluid, and woke needing to pee. She sat up, disoriented. There had been so many different places, so many rooms. Then she noticed that Linda wasn’t there, that her bed was empty and the pillow had slipped to the floor.

They had gone to bed at the same time. She remembered that Linda kept yawning, and she’d said, “I’m
so
tired, Robin, aren’t you?” It wasn’t that late yet. “Wolfie says we have to travel early in the desert, so we’d better get to sleep early, too. I can hardly keep my eyes open, anyway.”

Thinking the bathroom was occupied made Robin’s need to use it more urgent. She pressed her lower abdomen and it was tender and full. “Come on,” she whispered at the closed bathroom door. “Hurry up.” Gradually she became aware of the silence. What was she doing in there
now?

While she waited, Robin’s eyes adjusted to the room’s dimness, and she saw that Linda’s pocketbook was on the dresser, openmouthed. She tiptoed quickly across the room. There was so much junk inside: keys, a flashlight that was still on, burning faintly, tampons, tweezers, a paperback
Guide to Nature’s Playgrounds, U.S.A
., crushed and lip-printed tissues, a thick envelope stuffed with papers and secured with a red rubber band. Where was her stupid wallet?

It was at the very bottom, under everything else, and it was bulging. Maybe Robin’s whole inheritance was in there. When she opened it, she found it was jammed with more papers, notes, scrawled addresses and telephone numbers, photos. One of these was an overexposed Polaroid shot of Linda and Wright and Robin.
Linda was wearing a drooping corsage and a broad-brimmed white hat that almost covered her eyes. She and Wright were smiling directly into the camera, and Robin, with a forkful of spaghetti halfway to her mouth, was scowling at them. How different and strange she looked, so chubby and babyish. A Chinese waiter could be seen in the background, clearing another table. Everyone was as pale as death. The spaghetti sauce was only slightly pink.

On one rumpled piece of paper it said,
Miriam Reismann? Hausner? 1418 Cornelia Street, Glendale, Arizona
. Robin thought she heard a sound from the bathroom and she dropped everything hastily back into the pocketbook and closed the clasp painfully over her fingers. She sucked on them, listening anxiously, and it was quiet. She opened the pocketbook again and looked at her mother’s name. It was shocking to see it written out like that in Linda’s familiar spastic script. And who was Hausner? Was that
him?
Robin had to pee so badly now that she pressed her thighs together and bit the inside of her mouth. There was hardly any money in the wallet. She counted the soft wrinkled bills and the handful of coins. Thirty-two dollars and sixty-three cents. Linda probably hid the rest of it somewhere else. Maybe she started doing that after Robin warned her about pickpockets, back in Des Moines.

She pulled the papers out of the envelope, breaking the rubber band, but there was no money, just some official-looking documents. A birth certificate from the Hall of Records in Slatesville, Pennsylvania, for Baby Camisko, Female, Feb. 13, 1953. There was a letter from an insurance company about an enclosed check. Robin shook the envelope, but no check fell out. What
good would a check do her, anyway? No one would cash it for a kid, without proof.

There was a marriage license with what seemed like stern language in it, considering the occasion. It bound Wright Henry Reismann and Linda Marie Camisko in the eyes of the state of New Jersey, city of Jersey City, county of Hudson. The last paper was Robin’s father’s death certificate. What did they need something like that for? If you were dead, why did you have to prove it? You just weren’t there any more. Robin could not pronounce the typed words after
Cause of Death
, but she believed she understood their code. She took the wedding photo out again. He looked peculiar, an impostor who only resembled her father. The headlights of a passing car scanned the ceiling and walls of the room. Maybe Linda had fainted in there. Maybe she had died. There were lots of singles in the wallet. Robin took three of them. It would have to be done like this, a little at a time. She wished she had started earlier.