Free Hearts by Hilma Wolitzer

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, aclear 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 dealof 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 fromview. 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