She was thinking she ought to wear perfume in case she was giving off the same damp-brick odor her mother sometimes had.
“Here on the left,” she said, subdued, and Mr. Robertson turned into the narrow driveway, pulling up to the house and shutting the car off; the engine made a series of small pinging sounds as though a tiny rock were being tossed around inside.
Amy, looking through narrowed eyes at the house she lived in, tried to imagine what it looked like to Mr. Robertson, and she thought the house looked like her mother, small and pale, with the white curtain at the kitchen window apologetic, as though its purpose—to appear cheerful, cozy, clean—had failed. Amy closed her eyes.
For years this had been her secret: She had wanted a different mother. She wanted a mother who was pretty, who greeted people warmly. She wanted a mother who looked like mothers in television ads, who mopped large glistening kitchen floors, kissed husbands returning from work, lived in houses with other houses nearby and neighbors running in and out—she did not want the mother stuck out here in the woods in this little place.
“I was brought up in a white house not much bigger than this one,” Mr. Robertson said, and Amy, startled, opened her eyes. He was sitting back against his seat, one hand comfortably placed on the steering wheel, the other raised to his chin. “There was a vacant lot nearby.” He nodded. “Where kids used to play ball.”
To Amy that part sounded like a television ad. She pictured his mother, pretty, wearing an apron and baking cookies in the kitchen.
“But I didn’t play ball there much.”
Amy pressed her thumb against the dashboard. “How come?”
“I didn’t especially fit with the other kids.” Mr. Robertson glanced at her briefly. “My mother drank. She was an alcoholic. I used to take long bike rides to get away from home.”
An alcoholic. Amy stopped pushing her thumb against the dashboard. His mother had not been baking cookies. Probably she had been upstairs drinking gin from a bottle stored under the bed. Amy didn’t have a clear idea of what a woman alcoholic (a mother alcoholic) would be like, but her own mother had told her once that such women got very sneaky, hiding bottles under their bed.
“Jeez,” said Amy. “That’s too bad.”
“Yeah. Well.” Mr. Robertson sighed and moved down just a little in his seat, spreading his hand over his knee.
Looking sideways through her hair she studied his hand carefully. It was a big hand—a substantial, grown-up man’s hand with two veins the size of earthworms running over the top. The fingernails were broad and flat and clean. She minded the thought of his past including a mother hiding gin bottles under her bed. And yet the sight of his hand reassured her. The cleanliness of his fingernails made her admire him, because as a child his fingernails most likely had been dirty. It would be like that if your mother was an alcoholic, Amy thought. But look how strong he was now, so smart, quoting poets and philosophers, his mind full of mathematical theorems, his fingernails clean and trim.
“Tell me more,” she said, leaning partly against the car door so she could be facing him.
He raised an eyebrow. “More of the life and trials of Thomas Robertson?”
She nodded.
“I flunked out of college.”
That flicker again of almost not liking him, maybe a drop of fear. “You did?” She also felt embarrassed for him—that he would admit to such a thing.
“Freshman year.” He thrust out his lower lip, tugged on the reddish patch of beard right underneath. “There were too many things on my mind. So then I worked with handicapped kids for a while, and later on flew out to the West Coast and finished college there.” He raised his eyebrows. “With honors, even.”
And so he was restored. Handicapped kids; he was even nicer than she had known before. She watched him admiringly, and when he looked at her, she smiled.
“I was going to go on for graduate work in psychology—what a beautiful smile you have” (she blushed) “—but I had a friend who was a brilliant mathematician and through him I got interested in that.”
“You mean in college you studied psychology?”
He nodded. “Minored in economics, so I had some knowledge of math.”
“My mother says psychology people are crazy.” She blurted this out without thinking and then blushed when he burst into a laugh. It was a full laugh, with his head back; she could see the dark fillings in his molars. She felt again that she might not like him as she once had, but when he stopped laughing he said to her sincerely, “I’ll tell you something, Amy. Your mother is no dope.”
After that it seemed cozy in the car. He rolled his window all the way up and she felt sealed in a bubble with him. Their talking seemed relaxed and sweet, and finally seeing from his watch that her mother would be home in twenty minutes, she gathered her books in one arm, about to open the car door with the other, when she suddenly leaned over and very quickly kissed him on his bearded cheek.
Chapter
8
ARLENE TUCKER’S COUSIN’S son was arrested for selling marijuana. “Fifteen years old and they found him with three hundred dollars’ worth.” Arlene delivered this with her usual authority, raising one of her penciled eyebrows and leaving it there while the news sunk in.
“Is that so,” said Lenora Snibbens. “Fifteen years old. Holy Crow.”
“But three hundred dollars’ worth,” said Fat Bev. “Where’d he get three hundred dollars to buy it in the first place?”
Arlene nodded like a pleased teacher. “He’s been selling the stuff. Dealing it. Turns out this has been going on for a number of months.”
Isabelle glanced up from her book. “Where do they live, your cousins?”
Arlene eyed the cover of Madame Bovary. “Kingswood. About an hour from here.”
Isabelle nodded. There was marijuana everywhere these days, it seemed. With the college here in Shirley Falls, Isabelle knew her own town was probably not safe. But Kingswood, just a little spot of a place, and a fifteen-year-old selling it. She closed her book, no longer able to concentrate.
“And I’m telling you,” Arlene was saying, picking something from her eye, then blinking the eye furiously. “He’s the nicest boy you ever knew.”
“See, I just don’t buy that,” said Fat Bev. She shook her head slowly, unwrapping a sandwich from a great deal of wax paper. “When you’ve got a fifteen-year-old kid selling drugs like that, something’s wrong.”
“Well, of course something’s wrong,” Arlene replied. “I’m not saying something’s not wrong. I’m not saying his head is screwed on straight. I’m saying you can never tell. Appearances can be deceiving.”
“That’s true,” offered Rosie Tanguay. “I was reading just the other day about some boy in Texas. Good-looking, perfect student, popular, smart—the whole nine yards. Went home one night after a basketball game and stabbed his mother with a fork.”
Lenora Snibbens glanced sideways at her. “A fork?” she said dryly.
Rosie ignored this, but further down the table Fat Bev rumbled with laughter. “Really, Rosie. How much damage did this fork do?”
Rosie looked offended. “I believe she was in critical condition.”
Lenora turned her face away. “Some forks they have in Texas,” she said mildly.
“I guess so,” responded Fat Bev, thrusting her head forward to take a bite from her sandwich. A piece of mayonnaisey lettuce slipped onto her large bosom; she plucked it off and ate it, then, frowning, rubbed hard at her blouse with a napkin.
Isabelle winced. It was right on the tip of her tongue to say, Bev, hot water fast. But Arlene spoke up and said she understood the point Rosie was making, that you could never tell who was going to do something nuts. “That’s what makes it so scary to live in this world,” she said, directing this, for some reason, to Isabelle.
“That’s right.” Isabelle nodded. She had seen the wary look Arlene gave Madame Bovary, and she knew that by bringing such a book to work she might be th
ought of as a snob. She did not want to be thought of as a snob. She wanted to remain on an even keel with everyone and avoid being involved in any kind of unpleasantness, so she said to Arlene, “Very scary to live in this world.” After all, she believed it.
But Isabelle did not believe these incidents simply fell straight out of the blue. She did not believe that the mother of this drug dealer in Kingswood had no warning that her son was behaving in a criminal manner. And as for the perfect boy in Texas, Isabelle was sure there were more facts to the case than Rosie of course knew. “Perfect student,” for example. What did that mean? Maybe it meant his homework was very, very neat. Isabelle had gone to high school with a girl like that—her name was Abbie Mattison—and she had copied her homework over three or four times every night until the margins and handwriting were perfect. Everything with Abbie Mattison had to be perfect: hair, clothes, smile. Then she got married and had a baby boy, and Abbie’s husband came home one day to find her stark naked, singing, out on the back lawn, hanging up clothes. They took her to Augusta for a while, but according to the latest (Isabelle’s cousin Cindy Rae scribbled news at the bottom of her Christmas card), Abbie was negligent about taking her medication and it was a kind of on-again, off-again thing.
Anyway. Isabelle always remembered the way Abbie copied over homework. A little crazy even then. “I’m not sure these things are ever quite the surprise they’re made out to be at the time,” Isabelle said to Arlene, thinking that by reading Madame Bovary all week she had been going too far and ought to display some friendliness now.
Arlene turned her lips down and raised her eyebrows, indicating indifference to what Isabelle had said, and Isabelle considered sharing the story of Abbie Mattison to substantiate her point, but a sense of discretion stopped her. It didn’t seem fair to Abbie—wherever she was these days, in the funny farm or out—to have her story gossiped about just so Isabelle could curry favor with her cohorts in the office room.
“I agree,” said Fat Bev. “Any parent who’s paying attention knows if their kid is smoking marijuana or not. It has a certain smell. And their eyes get red, and they eat like a horse.”
Isabelle, who knew of course that Amy would never smoke marijuana, was still pleased to be able to privately acknowledge that her daughter did not have a certain smell, or red eyes, or the appetite of a horse.
“Whenever my girls went to a party,” Bev was saying, “Bill and I always stayed up till they came in. One night I remember Roxanne went out with some friends and first thing she did when she came home was to go straight in the bathroom and piss like a bull.”
Isabelle tried to smile pleasantly.
“I smelled her breath, and sure enough. We didn’t let her out again for a month.”
Lenora Snibbens stood up and walked to the vending machine. “I think you were right, Bev,” she said, pushing the button for a chocolate bar. “Your girls all turned out good.”
“You reap what you sow,” Isabelle said. “I’ve always believed that.”
“Probably.” Bev nodded vaguely, watching Lenora unwrap her candy bar.
“It’s not that simple,” Arlene declared. “My cousin didn’t know about her son. His eyes were never red and he never smelled funny. He never smoked the stuff.”
“Well, obviously he smoked the stuff.” Fat Bev tapped her pink-painted fingernail on the table near Lenora. “That kind of chocolate is sixty percent paraffin wax. I read it somewhere.”
“No,” said Arlene, “he sold the stuff. He never smoked it at all. Just sold it.”
“Crazy,” Rosie said. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”
“What happens to him now?” Lenora wanted to know. “Do they send a kid like that to jail?”
“The judge put him on probation for three years. Has to keep his nose clean for three years.” Arlene glanced at her watch and began to gather up the remains of her lunch, pressing down the top of her Tupperware container where the milky shapes of macaroni salad could be seen near the bottom. “And counseling. The judge said he wants him to have some counseling, so the kid goes off each week to talk to a priest.”
Isabelle looked at the cover of her book, where the dark-eyed Madame Bovary gazed back impassively. She was awfully curious about whether the greedy Emma was going to be rejected by her lover. (Isabelle hoped so.)
“Then the priest calls up the parents and tells them what the kid says. He’s lonely at school. His mother yells at him.” Arlene gave a shrug.
“Like all that hogwash means he can go out and sell marijuana,” Rosie said.
Lenora was frowning. “That doesn’t seem right,” she mused, moving the candy bar with her wrist across the table to Fat Bev.
“Of course it’s not right,” Arlene said. “What about a little responsibility? Your mother yells at you so you go out and commit a crime? What mother doesn’t yell at their kid?”
“Well,” said Isabelle, drawing her attention away from her book and considering this point of Arlene’s. “I doubt it’s because his mother yells, although that’s a handy thing to tell the priest. But there’s something more than that. Children learn things, I think, don’t you? He must have learned something that makes him think it’s acceptable to take that route. Selling drugs, I mean.”
Arlene stopped packing up her things and squinted at Isabelle. “What are you saying, Madame Ovary? That my cousin taught her son to go and sell marijuana on the streets?”
“Oh, heavens no.” Isabelle flushed furiously. “I only mean our values seem to be disintegrating these days. And that … well, when children see their parents cheat on income tax, and things like that …”
“My cousin doesn’t cheat on her income tax.”
“No, no, of course not.” Sweat broke out above Isabelle’s lip just as the lunch buzzer rang.
“What I was saying,” Lenora Snibbens said to no one in particular, standing up, “is that it doesn’t seem right for the priest to be repeating what the kid tells him. Aren’t those talks supposed to be private? Makes me nervous to go to confession. Bev, I think you’re right, there’s not much chocolate in that,” pointing to the candy bar as she passed by.
“I certainly didn’t mean to offend your cousin,” Isabelle said quietly to Arlene.
“Oh, it’s all right.” Arlene waved a hand tiredly as she left the room.
Isabelle, still a bit shaken from having suddenly found herself on the verge of an altercation, said to Bev, “I just believe you reap what you sow. As I said.”
“Oh, sure. I agree.”
“When you get home tonight,” Isabelle said, “try soaking that spot in hot water.”
IN THE EARLY morning it snowed. A sudden April snowstorm that dropped two inches of perfect white snow onto everything; cars, sidewalks, trees, steps—everything seemed rounded and white and edgeless. Just as suddenly the sky became completely blue, and the sun shone so brilliantly that when Stacy and Amy emerged from the back door of the school at lunchtime the brightness was blinding and they both squinted, ducking their heads, holding their hands before their eyes as though to ward off blows.
The snow was melting quickly, making the path in the woods difficult. Neither girl wore boots and they stepped cautiously through rivulets of melting snow and mud, while above them water fell off the trees so steadily that except for the dazzling sunshine it could have been raining instead.
“My father’s fucking someone,” Stacy said, as soon as they got to their spot. She put a chocolate-covered marshmallow into her mouth and chewed, her jaw working vigorously. “Shit,” she added, glancing down, “my feet are so wet.”
Their feet were muddy as well, dark edges of mud rising up the sides of their shoes. “Let them dry before you try and clean them,” Amy said, but she was worried. Her shoes were suede and Isabelle had made a big deal about how much money they cost.
“Yeah,” Stacy said, bringing out the cigarettes. “Well, I don’t really give a shit.”
Amy watched the melting snow as it ran down the darke
ned bark of a tree trunk, and then she asked, “How come you think that about your father?” turning back toward Stacy.
“Oh …” Stacy sounded like she had forgotten she’d said anything about him at all. “I could be wrong. I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I have. And I dreamt about it too. Yeah, that’s right.” She lit both cigarettes and handed one to Amy. “I forgot about that, but I dreamt it. Yeah.” She chewed her lip, gazing at her cigarette.
Amy inhaled deeply. “Weird.”
“I was in the water or something and my father was on shore with some woman or something.” Stacy smoked her cigarette. “Who knows.” She shrugged. “Fuck it.”
“Those are great.” Amy pointed with her cigarette at the half-empty box of chocolate-covered marshmallows balanced on the log. Stacy’s mother had bought them for Stacy’s little twin brothers’ birthday party, but Stacy stole them and brought them to school.
“Help yourself.” Stacy waved a hand. “You know, my father gets paid a lot of money to analyze dreams, but whenever I have a dream he couldn’t care less.”
“You didn’t tell him this one, did you?”
“No. But Jesus, what a great idea. I’ll wait until we’re all eating dinner, then I’ll say, Dad, I had a dream you’ve been fucking some woman other than Mom. Could you tell me what that means?”