MADMAN MOE’S (“STOP ME before I sell again!”) Used Car Emporium was on Valencia Boulevard, a few miles south of the airport, and directly in the flight path of incoming planes. As soon as Linda stepped out of Nathan’s Z, with the sleeping baby glued to her chest and the diaper bag hung over her shoulder, a DC-10 came shrieking down through the cloud cover, setting off a frenzy among the plastic banners and threatening to shear off her head. She ducked, and shrieked, too, while Phoebe, who could sleep through anything except Linda’s desire for her to sleep, stayed blissfully unconscious. No wonder Madman Moe screamed that way on his late-night commercials; he was probably deaf by now from all the noise. After the jet was gone, Linda looked up at the billboard above the trailer at the rear of the lot. A giant-sized Moe in his trademark straitjacket looked back at her with a lunatic gaze. Stop me before I sell again! he pleaded. Well, she certainly would if she could.
A moment later, Robin shimmied her way out of the shelflike backseat of the Z, and stood with her back to Linda and Nathan, staring avidly out at the gleaming rows of cars.
Linda sidled up to her and whispered, “Now remember, we’re not made of money!” as a salesman came out of the trailer and strutted toward them. “Howdy, folks,” he called in greeting when he was halfway there, a little middle-aged man in cowboy boots and a white jumpsuit. “Buenos días,” he added when he got closer. “And what is your pleasure today?”
Before Linda could come up with some breezy reply, like “Just browsing, thanks!” or Robin could say God knows what, Nathan said he was looking for a no-frills car for the lady, just something clean with automatic, air, and a fair price tag.
Linda was impressed by the straightforward way he did business, without the digressive, delaying preamble of small talk. She could hardly ask the time of day of a stranger without commenting on the weather first.
“Clean,” she heard Robin mutter. “Give me a break.” Red as fresh blood, she would have said, and faster than a rocket ship in orbit. Something slung so low you’d need limbo music and a shoehorn to get you in and out of it. Something like the Batmobile or Nathan’s own car was probably Robin’s pleasure today. But Robin was a not-quite-fifteen-year-old without a driver’s license or any real money, and Linda was the customer here, even if Nathan was doing the talking. She nodded brightly to back him up, and then they all trailed the salesman across the lot. Robin dragged her feet past the later, slinkier models, the ones with little flames painted delicately on the doors, fancy chrome wheel covers, and finishes that gave back the blazing sun like mirrors.
Linda tried to distract and mollify her by handing Phoebe over. She was just starting to wake up, and would begin reaching for Robin soon, anyway. Phoebe truly worshipped her; Linda was merely a fill-up station on the highway to love. She suspected that Robin sneaked the baby sips of Coca-Cola when she wasn’t looking. Phoebe’s four tiny teeth had barely broken ground and were probably already riddled with holes.
Robin draped the baby across her shoulder and stayed just on the outskirts of their little scouting party. The salesman seemed to have read Nathan clearly; the cars he led them to were definitely sensible in appearance. Dull, matronly-looking sedans, clumsy station wagons, all the shy homely wallflowers of the used-car world. Robin kept making strangling noises, as if she had a slab of steak stuck in her throat, and the salesman glanced anxiously at her from time to time during his spiel, which was peppered with Spanish phrases. “Miren, amigos! Check it out,” he said, patting the stodgy rump of an ’83 Fairlane, and Robin pretended to puke across its hood.
Linda nudged her and hissed, “Stop that!” Then she smiled amicably at the salesman. “Don’t mind her,” she said. “She just wants us to get something … spiffier.”
That adjective only elicited more offensive noises from Robin, and Linda finally grabbed her arm. “Listen,” she said. “I need a car to get me to and from work, not to show off to your little druggy friends.” Maybe she should have just accepted Cynthia’s offer of a loaner car from the studio. But she’d done so much for them already. Only the other day she’d volunteered to take Phoebe for a few hours, while Robin was at the movies, so that Linda could do some housework without any interruptions. Robin wasn’t happy about the arrangement, although the baby was perfectly fine at Cynthia’s, and Linda got a lot done in the apartment, even enjoying the guilty pleasure of a short nap. Robin’s general wariness of others reached new heights with its focus on Cynthia. “How come she gave you this?” she’d asked, referring to the pink jumpsuit Linda had worn home from that first private training session.
“My things were all sweaty,” Linda explained. “And Cynthia was going to give it away, anyway.”
“Why? It looks brand-new to me.”
“I guess she didn’t like it anymore,” Linda said.
“I wouldn’t take anybody’s disgusting old hand-me-downs,” Robin said. “I wouldn’t take charity.”
“You just said it looks brand-new,” Linda said. “And it’s not charity, it’s a gift. You take gifts, don’t you?” But Robin only gave Linda a pitying look.
Now she made a similar face, and yanked the diaper bag from Linda’s shoulder. “Come on,” she said to Phoebe, “let’s you and me look at some cars.” In moments she was tailing another salesman and his customers, an androgynous young couple who seemed to be welded together at the hip, and were into much flashier models. Their confused salesman began holding car doors open for Robin and Phoebe, who slid right in, while the Siamese twins circled them, casing the exteriors.
Linda knew that Nathan was only being practical, but she couldn’t help glancing wistfully at Robin, with Phoebe on her lap, wildly turning the wheel of a bronze, bullet-shaped Camaro, like the heroine of a car-chase movie. At the same time, Nathan urged Linda behind the wheel of a tan Delta 88, while he went off to tinker under its hood. It was a hot day, and ten times hotter inside the car. Linda left her door wide open, and she bounced around on the blistering vinyl seat so she wouldn’t become bonded to it.
When Nathan finally banged down the hood, she jumped out. A few other salesmen and customers dotted the expansive field, but in a quick survey she couldn’t locate Robin and Phoebe. Nathan and their salesman were going back and forth about cylinders and pistons and sparks. Linda cleared her throat and the salesman turned to her. “Want to give her a spin?” he asked, and Nathan shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?”
When the salesman headed back toward the trailer for the keys, Linda said, worriedly, “I don’t see them anywhere, Nathan, do you?”
“Who, the kids?” Nathan asked. He hooked one arm around her neck and reeled her in. “They’re probably closing a deal on a Vette.” When Linda didn’t even smile, he said, “Maybe they went to the trailer to use the ladies’ room. Or across the street to get some ice cream. Don’t worry, they’re around here someplace.”
“Why don’t you take the car out yourself,” Linda suggested, disengaging herself. “You know more about it, anyway, and I want to look for the girls.”
“Come on,” he said. “Robin is almost fifteen, and we’ll be right back. This is gonna be your baby, Linda, so you’d better see how it handles.”
But Linda’s attention was divided, and it didn’t really matter how the car handled. They were all lethal weapons she had not been properly trained to use, and the freeways were all minefields of disaster. Back in Newark, before Wright had taught her to drive, with such loving patience, on five of the last precious Sundays of his life, she’d taken buses or he’d driven her wherever she had to go. If she hadn’t followed her instincts, like some poor dumb lemming, all the way to California, she might never have had to drive again. But it was impossible to live here without a car. Robin (where was that girl?) was right about that, at least.
The salesman came back and swung the keys to the 88 in front of her face like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. “Las llaves, senorita,” he said with painstaking enunciation.
“She speaks English,” Nathan reminded him, and he grabbed the swinging keys and opened the driver’s door. “Let’s go,” he said to Linda as he hustled her in. Then he dropped the registration to the Z into the salesman’s waiting hand and got in beside her. The car was still an inferno. Linda had to pat the steering wheel several times before she could bear to grip it, and seat belts were completely out of the question. They rolled down their windows and let in more hot air, and then Linda turned on the ignition with a grinding screech.
“Let go of the damn key!” Nathan yelled at her.
The salesman waved to them as they pulled away. “Vayan con Dios!” he called gaily.
“Same to you, gringo prick!” Nathan called back, but his words were lost in the roar of the exhaust.
Linda drove slowly out of the lot and then around the block three times. “How is it?” Nathan kept asking her, and she kept repeating, “Fine, just fine,” although the car felt exactly like the treacherous stranger it was. After their third rotation, Nathan motioned for her to pull over, and they switched places. He drove back to the lot, testing the air conditioner, the windshield wipers, the lights, the signals, and the radio on the way.
Their salesman was waiting to welcome them back. “Have you seen my stepdaughter and my baby?” Linda asked him. She held her hand up to approximate Robin’s height. “Long blond hair, wearing cutoffs and an ‘I’ve Seen Elvis’ T-shirt?” It made her uneasy, describing Robin that way, as if she were actually missing and Linda was reporting her disappearance to the police.
The salesman looked blank for a moment, but then he said, “Oh, yeah. The blond kid, right?” He glanced around. “She was here a minute ago, I think. Maybe she’s waiting for you in the trailer.” He herded them in that direction, crooning a sales pitch, while Nathan recited a counterpoint of complaints about the car. Linda wondered if the salesman had actually seen Robin and Phoebe, or if he’d just said that to lure them inside. She wondered if Madman Moe would be waiting there, strapped into his straitjacket, ready to scream his insane slogan at them. She tried to bring up the matter of the girls again with Nathan, but another jet roared overhead, and he put his finger to her lips, probably afraid she was about to spoil his negotiations for the 88.
He’d warned her earlier that day, right after he’d picked them up, to let him handle the whole thing. He knew about cars and he knew about car salesmen, who, he seemed eager to inform her, were “the stinking bottom of the human shitpile.” He’d worked briefly as a mechanic’s helper at a lot in El Monte, so he knew. They all turned back odometers, he said, painted over rust and scuffed tires, and even fished out flood cars, polished them up, and sold them for new. “But isn’t that against the law?” Linda asked, and Nathan whooped with laughter.
After the furious heat outside, the trailer was as cold as a meat locker. Robin and Phoebe were nowhere in sight, and no one in there resembled Madman Moe, either. A couple of salesmen played cards at a desk, while another one murmured into a phone, and a hard-looking woman with towering orange hair was speed-writing a contract for an elderly man.
Linda whispered, “Excuse me a minute,” and ran to the door marked REST ROOM at the back of the trailer. She knocked and then opened the door, but there was no one inside. The faucet dripped into the rusted sink in a steady, ominous beat.
As soon as Linda returned, their salesman ushered them to a desk in the far corner, on which there was only a pad, a ballpoint pen, and one photograph, in a chipped plastic frame, of himself standing next to a big Cadillac. “Sit down, sit down,” he said, taking his own seat. “Make yourselves comfortable.” He patted his glistening brow with a handkerchief. “Boy, some scorcher, isn’t it?”
“So how much?” Nathan asked, getting right down to business again, while Linda sat next to him, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap.
“For you, my friend, only one sixty-five per month,” the salesman said.
“The price, man,” Nathan said impatiently, “I’m talking about the price.”
“I told you, amigo, one sixty-five per month, and believe me, you won’t get a better deal anywhere in the state.”
“This guy’s a riot, isn’t he?” Nathan asked grimly, and Linda offered him a tentative smile.
The salesman began diddling with the pen and pad, making mysterious little markings and then crossing them out and making new ones. Finally he wrote something with a flourish on a fresh page and slid the pad across the desk to Nathan. “You look like really nice people, so I’m giving you a fantastic break,” he said.
Nathan lifted his sunglasses, glanced at the pad, and slid it back, hard, across the desk. The corner of the pad caught the salesman in the gut, and he let out a little “Oof.” “Hey, man,” Nathan said, “I came here to do business, so don’t jerk me around, okay?”
“That’s an insider’s price,” the salesman protested, but Nathan stood up, and after a beat Linda took his cue and stood, too.
“Listen, amigo,” the salesman said. “It’s Sunday, right? The day of rest, right? I want to get home to my family, and I’m sure you want to get home with yours. Lovely family, by the way. I had a really good week, moved a lot of vehicles, so if I have to top it off with a cost-price deal, so be it.” He wrote a new figure on the pad and this time he handed it to Nathan, who handed it right back.
“Get serious, amigo,” Nathan said. “I didn’t swim here yesterday, you know. We need brakes, we need springs, maybe we need a whole new car.”
Linda had tried to read the salesman’s latest figure, but the transaction had been too rapid. Their dickering was getting on her nerves; she felt like a spectator at some sporting event whose rules she only vaguely understood. She didn’t even want that stupid car in the first place, and her mind kept wandering back to the children. Where could they be in this heat? She tapped Nathan’s arm. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and hurried away before he could respond.
The torrid air slapped her as soon as she opened the door, and she had to shield her eyes with both hands to deflect the dazzling glare. The field of cars stretched and dissolved before her into a shimmering, multicolored lake. “Robin!” she called loudly across it, but there was no answering call. Linda’s belly clutched and cramped. The down side of having people to love, of course, was the ever-present possibility of loss, a sorry lesson she had learned and relearned.
Sometimes, when Linda woke during the night in a state of dread, she got up to look at the two girls as they slept. Phoebe, spread-eagled in her crib, as if she’d landed safely there after falling from some great height, and Robin, disarmed by sleep, with a silvery web of drool in one corner of her open mouth. Both of them breathing, in and out. Linda would inscribe them once again on the credit side of her heart, and Wright and Manny on the debit side.
Standing in the middle of the used-car lot, revolving slowly, like a lighthouse beam, she suddenly remembered that name Robin had once called her: the kiss of death. How could she have said such a thing! It certainly wasn’t true in a literal sense. She wasn’t anywhere near the liquor store when Manny was shot and killed in the holdup, an event so alien and horrific she still couldn’t fully imagine it. And although she’d been at Wright’s hospital bedside when he slipped from his life, and hers, in what seemed like a trick conjured by the doctor, she had never associated his death with her presence on the scene. The kiss of death. A spasm of shudders rode her spine as she thought of all those kisses freely given and taken in love, the fevered, wet, urgent, sucking pleasure of them. Could you draw out someone’s life force that way, leaving him vulnerable to speeding bullets or stray embolisms? But that was ridiculous. Superstitious. Completely crazy! Afterward, the doctor told her that Wright’s heart had probably been a ticking time bomb for years. And Manny had said only weeks before his murder how lucky he was to have found her.
When the baby allowed Linda to vent her maternal passion in a feast of kisses up and down her luscious self, Linda understood that it was a privilege, and a finite one. But she had never dared to examine exactly what she meant by that. Robin, of course, refused to suffer any demonstration of Linda’s affection; she could barely stand her company. Yet Linda was sometimes compelled to kiss her, too, quickly and lightly on the forehead or cheek while she slept. If Robin ever found out, she’d have a fit. “Robin,” she quietly implored, “where are you?” She began to jog up and down the aisles between the rows of cars, the hysteria rising from her belly to her throat, which threatened to close around it. They couldn’t be in the sealed microwave of one of the cars all this time. Robin was headstrong and careless, but she wasn’t stupid.
Then Linda remembered that odd-looking couple Robin had been shadowing when she and Phoebe disappeared. Some kind of perverts, maybe. Drugs, sadism, cults, sacrifices. There were so many maniacs out there waiting for a fatal connection with someone innocent. The papers were full of stories. But would Robin go off with strangers after all the lectures she had endured on the subject, all the milk cartons at all the breakfasts of her life, with the faces of other peoples missing children smiling their waxy, helpless smiles? And would she ever put Phoebe in real jeopardy?
Oh, why had she ever kissed them!
In Newark, once, just after she’d gotten her driver’s license, Linda drove alone to the Garden State Mall to buy Wright a birthday present. Delighted by her success at getting there in one piece, she resolved not to think about driving back until she had to. Instead, she succumbed to the pleasure of planning a little surprise party for Wright that evening. She would try to get Robin involved, too, although the girl still barely acknowledged her, almost four weeks after the wedding. Maybe doing something nice together for their mutual beloved would draw them closer.
Shopping malls tended to be a natural backdrop for Linda’s anxiety—all that space and all those people were so confusing and intimidating. And this one featured a parrot jungle and an artificial waterfall that would make anyone nervous. But that day Linda was propelled by her joyful errand and felt perfectly relaxed. She went from store to store, buying gifts and balloons and funny paper hats and birthday candles you couldn’t blow out. She chose a handsome blue sweater for Wright, and a pair of silk pajamas she would present him with privately. On an extravagant but inspired impulse she bought something for Robin, too, a little tree-shaped lamp, with spaghetti-like branches that quivered with red liquid light when you plugged it in. Linda would have loved something like that at Robin’s age.
Burdened with her bulky purchases, but feeling lavishly happy, she made her way back to the mammoth parking field, where she soon realized she had no memory of where she had parked the car. She walked up and down a couple of aisles, and then began to zigzag around like a cornered animal, murmuring, “Where? Where?” It started to rain about ten minutes into her panic-ridden search, and by the time she found the Mustang, crouched in a row of similar cars, she was soaking wet and sobbing uncontrollably.
Later, Wright laughed fondly at her—why, you couldn’t lose that one-ton pile of metal and rubber if you tried! All she had to do was get one of the mall’s security guards to drive her around on his scooter until she found it. And everything was fine, now—why was she still so upset? He stuck a party hat on her head and locked his arms around her. Linda submitted to his embrace, but she couldn’t explain herself or completely shake that feeling of doom. As if to give her nameless anxiety meaning and substance, Wright died a couple of weeks later. And a few weeks after that, when she and Robin were cleaning out the apartment in preparation for their trip West, Linda watched sadly as Robin tossed the little tree lamp into the trash.
That day at the mall was just a dress rehearsal for this day at Madman Moe’s. Here she was, running again, with the stench of her own fear rising in a mist around her. But all her other losses were nothing now; she was cured of them, completely relieved of them, as in a revival tent-show miracle. There was only this in the world, only this new, raw, impossible absence. “Robin!” she bleated. “My Phoebe!”
It was getting late. There wasn’t anybody else out on the lot. The latest jet that thundered over, drowning out her voice with its own, and casting her in its long shadow, had visible lights, like rubies and emeralds. It was carrying people home in time for supper with their families, for blessed sleep in their own beds. Without meaning to, Linda thought of all those lonesome nights when Robin had segregated her with spiteful silence, and the baby had screamed non-stop, because of colic or teething or some other wordless baby misery, until Linda was driven to fling herself facedown on her bed and whisper into the white darkness of the pillow, “Stop it, go away, why don’t you both just go away and leave me alone!” And she remembered looking forward to leaving Robin in Glendale, and the brief but grave consideration she’d given to ending her pregnancy when she first learned about it.
Now she wished that she could turn off her restless thoughts, that she could simply pray instead. But she’d given up on God after Wright’s death, as both saviour and scapegoat of her puny, scattered life. He was only a makeshift, pickup God, anyway, the kind invented by children without religious training, a white-bearded cross between Santa Claus and Charlton Heston playing Moses. But maybe she should try praying, even without the license of faith, just in case. Before she could carry that thought any further, she glimpsed a distant figure through the blurred vision of her despair. “Robin!” she cried again, but she saw in a moment that it was only Nathan, running toward her and calling her name. By the time he got to her, she couldn’t speak at all, only gesture at him in a jerky pantomime.
Nathan grasped her arms and shouted, “Linda! Calm down! Is it Robin? You still can’t find her? Dios mio!” Then, quietly, “Listen, it’s okay. She’s only playing a little trick on you, hiding out someplace. Come on, we’ll find them.”
He took long, athletic strides, pulling her along with him, so that she hardly had to move her feet, like Ginger Rogers being carried by Fred Astaire through an intricate dance routine. Linda felt as if she were flying, as if she were unraveling. Nathan had put a terrifying new idea into her head. Maybe Robin had just taken off with the baby so they could live somewhere else without her. It was something she had casually threatened to do. Sometimes when she spoke to Phoebe as though Linda wasn’t there, she said things like “Maybe you and me should split, Feeble, before we get wimpy like her.” Linda remembered now that Robin had grabbed the diaper bag from her shoulder before. There was a bottle of apple juice in there, a few toys, and a stack of diapers. And Linda’s wallet.
Nathan kept on talking. “When we find her, you can break her neck, okay? That brat. I give you permission. I’ll even help you, okay?” He pulled her skimming body through the lot and across the wide road, between moving cars, to the ice-cream parlor, but it was closed and shuttered for the day. She didn’t even remember going back across the road, but now they were running up and down the aisles of the lot, peering into car windows and knocking on roofs and hoods. My life should be passing in front of me, Linda thought, but all she saw were those endless flanks of cars, flaunting their coyly false, seductive signs. Take Me Home! Creampuff! One Owner! Easy Payments! And high above them the looming, leering gaze of Madman Moe, still bound and imprisoned on his billboard. Linda found herself praying silently to him as if he were the demented but all-powerful god of this automotive kingdom. Oh, merciful Prince of Pontiacs! she prayed. Stop me before I kill again! Finder of lost Mustangs! Help me now to find my children!
Near the end of her pregnancy, when she was so frightened, Manny had said how spunky she was to go through with a thing like that alone. As if she had a choice! One man put the baby inside her and another one pulled it out. But of course that wasn’t exactly true, either. It was just that she’d made her choices from limited experience and a dumb trust in ordinary luck. It wasn’t spunky, it was irresponsible to give someone the terrible twin gifts of life and death. This was the finite condition of human love, the thought she’d refused to think when she was planting those delicious kisses along the baby’s silky flesh. She looked across the aisle at Nathan, another mortal she had recently kissed—only last night!—and with such reckless rapture. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, she wanted to say, but only her shallow, panting breath came out.
They found them a few minutes later, lying curled together across the seat of a shiny, red classic Thunderbird. Dreamboat! proclaimed the Thunderbird’s sign, and Mad Moe cackled from his heavenly perch. The windows of the Thunderbird had been sensibly lowered, but Robin and Phoebe were pasted to the white leather. Their platinum hair was darkened by sweat and their natural pallor painted with an unnatural flush. They slept deeply and earnestly, like the good, artless children they were. The baby had her thumb jammed down her throat and the empty juice bottle clutched in her other hand. Robin was heat-drugged and bewildered and it was difficult for Nathan to wake her. “What?” she said groggily. “What?” She didn’t recognize either of them for a moment.
The baby was so limp Linda’s blood staggered and slowed. But when she lifted her, there was a fresh puddle of pee on the white upholstery, a thrilling circular stain of life. At any other time, Linda would have tried to mop it up with shredding Kleenex, and then hurried inside to confess the damage and make amends. Now she kicked the door of the Thunderbird shut and stood there unbuttoning her blouse. She lowered the flap of her nursing bra, and prodded and coaxed the baby until she fastened herself and began to weakly suck.
Robin slumped against Nathan in a way she never would if she were wholly conscious. She was reduced to pure animal need for once, without the usual, maddening argument of reason. Nathan lifted her as if she were an infant, too, and carried her, unresisting, back to the trailer, where he bathed her hot face with wet paper towels while the tough-looking saleswoman fed her sips of 7-Up from her own personal mug. “World’s Greatest Mom,” it said in bold black letters.
Linda sank into one of the chairs near their salesman’s desk. The men tried to avert their eyes as she continued to nurse the baby, whose sucking had become loud and vigorous. Linda kissed and kissed her heavy, fragrant head, then lifted one tiny, drooping hand and kissed that, too.
“About the car, we’ll come back another time …” Nathan began, but Linda said, “No, I want to get it today.” She had never been this assertive before, and he looked at her with a cautious mixture of admiration and alarm. “Write it up,” she instructed the salesman. “But we need the best possible price. I have these two children to support.”
Not that Linda was kidding herself. A used-car salesman might be moved by her story, but only, she knew, within his particular limits. And no matter what price they settled on, the car would reveal its own hard-luck story before too long. All the things that could go wrong with it would start to go wrong, one after the other. There would be daily wear and tear, accidents, the mysterious machinery of fate. Who was to say how anything really happened, or why?
Robin, who’d recovered her sullen, controlled demeanor, scowled at Linda. “So what kind of faggy car did you pick out anyway?” she demanded.
I’d like to kill you, Linda thought, I really would. Even her teeth ached with restrained rage. She reached across the baby and grabbed that unpleasant pink face and glared at it.
Robin glared back. “Hey!” she said.
But before she could squirm away or say anything else, Linda leaned forward and kissed her fully and ruthlessly on the mouth.