Amy and Isabelle

  “Poor thing,” Stacy mused as the school bell rang and they gathered themselves together. “Someone really ought to tell her about that static cling.”

  TUCKED INTO BED at night, the lamp throwing a yellow pool across her quilt and the paperback Hamlet propped up before her, Isabelle struggled with Shakespeare. The struggle was primarily physical, for her eyelids felt glued together; really, she could barely keep them open. She tried sitting up straighter in bed, and still she couldn’t make it through the second page. It was remarkable how her eyes would just flip shut. When she felt sure that Amy was asleep, she got out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen, where she sat at the table with a cup of tea, housecoat tucked around her, her foot with its terry-cloth slipper rocking up and down as she read the lines again and again.

  It was hard. Very, very difficult stuff. She hadn’t expected it would be this difficult, and she had to fight a sensation of panic. “Which he stood seiz’d of, to the conqueror: Against the which, a moity competent Was gaged by our King; which had return’d To the inheritance of Fortinbras, Had he been vanquisher …” Now what was she to make of that? The kitchen was very quiet.

  She sipped her tea and glanced at the window. Where the white curtains parted slightly she could see the blackness of the windowpane, and she got up to tug the curtains together. She was not used to being down here alone at this hour. She sat at the table again, sipped her tea, and skimmed over the lines in her book. “How weary, stale, flat & unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!”

  Well, look at that. She could understand that. Isabelle put her finger on the page; it was Hamlet himself speaking. “How weary, stale and flat … seem all the uses of the world.” Lord knew there were times when she felt the world to be stale and weary, and the way Hamlet said it—it was very nicely put. She felt a genuine prick of delight, as though she and Hamlet were suddenly friends.

  Feeling awake now, she whispered the words that began his speech. “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw …” (Fleetingly she pictured a rump steak not taken out of the freezer in time for Sunday dinner.) She pursed her lips, sipped some tea, began again. “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt …” (Hamlet was a solid, muscular man, no doubt. In a moment she’d check the drawing of him on the cover of this book.) “Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.”

  So far, so good; Isabelle nodded. She had certainly experienced in her own lifetime the desire to melt, to disappear. She had never longed to become dew, but it was a lovely idea when you thought about it, which was exactly why, after all, she was reading Shakespeare. Because he was a genius and could express things in a way the rest of us would never have thought to. She felt immensely pleased by all of this, and sat up straighter in her chair. “Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!”

  She read this over a few times. Because “Everlasting” was capitalized she assumed that Shakespeare was referring to God here, and the business of the canon of self-slaughter must be a reference to suicide: Hamlet wanted to commit suicide but he knew God had a rule against this.

  Well. Isabelle looked up. Gazing at her refrigerator she wondered if Hamlet wasn’t being a little melodramatic. He was certainly distraught, and of course he had reason to be. But she had been distraught herself, God knew, any number of times, and had never thought she would like to kill herself. She peered back at the book. The tea was causing a pressure on her bladder, but she would try and finish the scene. Apparently Hamlet was very sorry his father was dead. His parents had loved each other … but within a month his mother got over it and married Hamlet’s uncle.

  Isabelle touched her lips; she could see how this would be disturbing. But that line “Frailty, thy name is woman!” She didn’t like that particularly; and he was talking to his mother. For heaven’s sake. What did Hamlet know about being a single parent, losing the man you loved? Isabelle frowned and pushed on the cuticle of her thumb. Hamlet was pretty offensive there, frankly. Certainly those women down in Boston who had just burned their undergarments on the front steps of some court building (Isabelle had seen this on the news) wouldn’t take very kindly to such a line: Frailty, thy name is woman! Isabelle tugged on her robe. Honestly, it did rile her a bit. Men had a lot to learn. There was nothing frail about women. For heaven’s sake, women had been keeping things going from time in memoriam. And there was nothing frail about her. Nothing frail about a woman who raised her daughter alone through bleak New England winters with the roof leaking, the car needing oil.

  Isabelle had to close her eyes for just a moment; she was very tired. And, in fact, she did feel frail. That was the truth, if you really wanted to know it. She sat for a moment, running her finger along the edge of the book, and then she got up and washed out her teacup in the sink, glad enough to go to bed.

  BUT A FEW days later she was back at the bookstore. She was not a quitter; it’s just that Shakespeare was not the way to begin. She would find other books to read in the section called Classics. This time the bookstore seemed familiar. The young clerk with his facial hair seemed to give her a nod. She perused the shelves for quite a while before deciding on Madame Bovary, attracted by its cover. She studied the picture of the dark-eyed woman whose hair was pulled back into a lovely French twist and whose face revealed some inner knowledge, Isabelle decided finally, of the secret sorrows of feminine life.

  A SPRINKLING OF burglaries took place in Shirley Falls that last week in March. They were daytime break-ins, all occurring in the Oyster Point section of town. A collection of old coins disappeared from the home of a history professor. Mrs. Errin, the dentist’s wife, discovered jewelry missing from her bureau, and in another case—in a rather lovely home down by the river—a number of silver pieces, candlesticks and sugar bowls, were found to be gone; the back door had been jimmied open. There were no witnesses, no clues except for a few footprints in the snow that were muddied by rain before the police could determine anything more definite than the fact that they were probably made by a man of average height and weight; no clues at all, really—no reports of any suspicious characters roaming around, no sense that it was the work of anyone professional, the way it had been a number of years earlier, when two men came up from Boston and emptied out two houses into moving vans before they were finally caught a week later when they came back to try for a third. No, these pilferings had a lighter touch, and before the police could do much more than scratch their heads and file reports, the break-ins seemed to stop.

  But Emma Clark, arriving home one afternoon (exhausted, for she had just had an unpleasant altercation at the upholstery store regarding the shoddy job recently done on her living-room couch), found the garage door partly raised, and having heard through acquaintances about the silver taken from the home down on the riverbank, she did not get out of her car but drove straight back into town and called Avery to come home at once.

  All his tools were gone, and a spare tire he kept in the garage as well, but the house itself had apparently not been touched. Nevertheless Avery took the rest of the day off from work and had a locksmith come put a double bolt on every door. “I should let Isabelle know about this,” Avery said to his wife, distracted by the mud the locksmith was traipsing across the kitchen floor, and Emma nodded. It was true; Isabelle Goodrow lived just a mile down the road, and she ought to be told that someone had come snooping around, stealing tires and tools.

  But Emma and Avery had other things to do at the moment, and so Isabelle, sitting in the lunchroom on her coffee break, engrossed in Madame Bovary, remained oblivious of anything that was going on out past Route 22. Nor was she aware, as she turned the page, that across town the last school bell had just rung, and that her daughter, Amy, moving through the crowded hallways, was making her way to the girls’ room on the second floor to prepare herself for Mr. Robertson.

  Chapter

  7

  WHAT EXCITEMENT! TO stand alone in the girls’ room, its green walls to
uched by the milky light that filtered through the frosted window … Never mind the sinks were stained and a faucet dripped, for Amy on these afternoons there was an exotic hush, a thrill. But fear, too; remarkable, how it gripped her way down, as though a hand squeezed her tailbone, making her buttocks almost tingle; her hands could have been taken from a refrigerator, they were so cold. She imagined herself a child-bride princess being made ready for presentation to some king.

  And it was her hair that seemed most princesslike, falling over her shoulders in long twisted curls, various colors of yellow, light brown, a tendril running alongside her face so blond it seemed almost white. Staring into the mirror with her mouth half parted, she thought she might be beautiful. Then a cramping in her abdomen, a tightening near the tailbone—she had to go into a stall and use the toilet, and when she emerged, checking in the mirror again, she was dismayed to find a plain girl whose lips were pale and dry. She chewed on them and pinched her cheeks, and pulled open the heavy door that had written across it in red ink: My sister likes her left tit sucked.

  The hallway was empty. The classrooms she passed by seemed gaping in their silence, waiting, chairs vacant, to be filled again tomorrow. In the distance came the faint sound of a trumpet from the music room; descending the stairs, she heard the echo of cheerleaders practicing in the gym.

  And then she was there, standing in his doorway. An odd shrinking of her vision made the scene pale and small, a pencil sketch (her large moist hands clutching her notebook were leaving imprints on the cover), but when Mr. Robertson glanced up from his desk his eyebrows rose and his face brightened, and immediately the heaviest part of Amy’s anxiety was gone. No one, it seemed, had ever been this happy to see her, unless when she was very small and her mother had sometimes taken her to the mill; then the women would lean toward her and someone like Fat Bev would say, “How’s my precious girl?”

  Mr. Robertson said nothing, only watched her as she stood in the afternoon sunlight that fell across the floor. “Hi,” Amy said, waving a hand just slightly, ducking her head with a quick, self-conscious smile.

  “Hi.” Mr. Robertson waved back, imitating her gesture so exactly it appeared that he was shy as well. “Come in,” he said. “Please, come in.”

  She walked toward him through the sunny room. To be watched made her uneasy, as though she had to compete with every other person he might gaze upon, and she had known for quite some time that competing was not what she did best. Even as a child this had been true; the game of musical chairs had filled her with panic—that dreadful, icy knowledge that when the music stopped someone would be “out.” It was better when she stopped trying. Because there were so many things a young person was required to endure: spelling bees, endless games in gym class; in all these things she had stopped trying, or if she tried, she did so with little expectation of herself, so was not disappointed to misspell “glacier” in a fourth-grade spelling bee, or to strike out in softball because she never swung the bat. It became a habit, not trying, and in junior high, when the biggest prize of course was to be popular among the right friends, Amy found she lacked the fortitude once more to get in there and swing. Arriving at the point where she felt almost invisible, she was aware that her solitude was something she might have brought upon herself.

  But here was Mr. Robertson and she was not invisible to him. Not when he looked at her like that—she couldn’t be. (Still, there was her inner tendency to flee, the recrudescence of self-doubt.) But his hand came forward and touched her elbow. “I have something for you,” he said, and he nodded toward the chair beside his desk.

  She sat down, tucking her large feet as far back under the chair as they would go. He had copied a poem for her by Yeats called “To a Young Girl,” and she read it in confusion. She had never seen so much of his handwriting before.

  I know what makes your heart beat so …

  She felt he had written her a letter. “I love it,” she told him. “I really, really do.” She looked from the paper to him. “Can I keep it?”

  “Of course. It’s for you.”

  She had to look away because now she knew she loved him, and this changed things.

  Before, she had been drawn to him, as though he were a large, dark magnet pulling the nail of herself slowly across a vast room. But here she was, with a soft, imperceptible click; nowhere further to be drawn to. She had arrived and now she loved him.

  She slipped the poem inside her notebook. “Well, thank you,” she said, and she got up and walked over to the window and saw how the sidewalk was bare and dry in the sun. Through the partly opened window came the sound of a last school bus pulling away, the weary groan of its cumbersome self as it turned into the street. Beyond she could see a smattering of yellow on the south lawn of the school, dandelions growing sturdy and close to the ground. The air coming through the window had a sweetness to it that seemed to cause her physical pain, and looking again at the sidewalk, at the dry parts of it where small flecks on the surface glinted in the sun, she recalled easily the excitement she had felt as a child on such a day as this one. For there had been more, evidently, than the terror of musical chairs—there had been days like this when winter was finally over, and her feet in new sneakers felt buoyantly free as they touched the dry sidewalk. She recalled the weightlessness, the spring in her legs as she walked in her sneakers down a dry sunny sidewalk, and it seemed to her, remembering this, that happiness had been available to her then after all, in the new sneakers, in dandelions to pick (she’d had to be careful though, Isabelle had hated how they could stain her clothes), wearing a sweater instead of a bulky coat—all this had made her happy as a child, had filled her up with hope.

  “What are you thinking?” Mr. Robertson asked, and Amy turned from the window.

  “I don’t know,” she answered, because she did not know how to explain about the glinting, dry sidewalk, or about the smell of the air. “I’m glad it’s finally spring and everything.” She shrugged and looked out the window again. “But it makes me feel weird.”

  “You know what they say.”

  She could hear him walking up behind her.

  “What do they say?” She turned. He was very close to her and this made her nervous, afraid he would find her unattractive. It was different when you saw a person up close—they sometimes had goopy things in their eyes, or blackheads in their chins. People smelled different up close too. Her mother, for example, sometimes gave off the faint odor of a damp brick when she leaned close to Amy to straighten her collar or to remove something caught in her hair.

  “That April is the cruellest month.” Mr. Robertson put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. He jiggled some change in his pocket.

  “Who says that?” Amy asked.

  “T. S. Eliot.”

  “Who’s that.” She thought Mr. Robertson was kind of a show-off. She scowled and sat back on the windowsill.

  “Another poet.”

  “Never heard of the guy.” She swung her leg against the radiator screen and was chagrined at the sudden loud metallic reverberation it made. She pressed both legs against it and kept still.

  “April is the cruellest month,” Mr. Robertson recited, “mixing memory with desire. Or something. I can’t remember past that.” He walked slowly back to his desk.

  Come back, she wanted to say. She got down off the windowsill and followed him. “Tell me that again,” she said. “That April stuff.”

  His eyes were tired, kind. “April is the cruellest month, mixing memory with desire.”

  She raised her shoulders, dropped them with a sigh.

  “What?” Mr. Robertson spoke quietly. The sun had already moved; the bright light in the classroom was gone except for one section of the windowsill that remained in soft yellow, but the spring air was still warm as it moved through the window.

  Amy shook her head and shrugged.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “Oh, you know.” Her eyes moved about the roo
m, settling on nothing. “The stuff about April being cruel. It’s good. I mean, I like that.”

  “And what else?”

  But it wasn’t that she was thinking anything else. It was more that she ached. She ached inside with something and it had to do with the dandelions and the groan of the school bus and the smell of the air and so many things she couldn’t name. And of course with him.

  “I’m glad I met you,” she finally said, not looking at him.

  “I’m glad I met you, too.”

  She looked around for her notebooks, the coat she had put over a chair.

  “Could I drive you home today?” Mr. Robertson asked suddenly.

  “I guess.” She was surprised.

  “Do you think anyone would mind?”

  She slipped her arm through the sleeve of her coat, giving him a puzzled look as she pulled her hair out from under the back of her coat.

  “For example,” Mr. Robertson went on, “would your mother mind if your math teacher gave you a ride home?”

  “Of course not.” But she wouldn’t tell her mother.

  “I’ll get my coat then,” said Mr. Robertson, going to a closet behind his desk. They left the room without speaking.

  ONCE INSIDE HIS car she was surprised at how close to him she was; the car was smaller than she had thought. When he shifted into reverse leaving the teachers’ parking lot his hand briefly touched her leg. “Sorry,” he said, glancing over at her.

  She nodded, turning to look out the window, her elbow pressed against the door, her thumb against her mouth. She said simply: “Turn left at the light,” and then, “The next right,” and after that they drove without speaking. When they passed over the wooden bridge the noise was sudden beneath the tires and then just as suddenly gone. Pussy willows appeared and disappeared as the car rounded curves near the swamp on Route 22. They drove past an old farmhouse, where a forsythia bush was just beginning to bloom, a scattering of yellow bits. They drove past Larkindale’s field, where patches of brown and light brown mingled in the raggedness of leftover winter. The stone wall rose up a field, weaving into the distance where the spruce trees grew dark as army canvas, their branches bending down as though still encumbered by months of snow. But there was little snow left, really—only dirty hardened drifts by the side of the road—and long strips of the road were dry as the car moved over it, sunlight showing dust on the dashboard in the bright but already fading light.