But this summer there was, of course, no accompanying sense of pleasure in the jigsawed rearrangement of Isabelle’s memories. The feeling was one of breathlessness. Those dinners in the kitchen together as the days had grown longer—“So what’s new with you?” she had said smilingly to her daughter, unfolding her napkin on her lap.
“Nothing really, I guess. Some of us stayed after school for math help.” A shrug. “He’s teaching us new stuff.” The sweet face, the luminous eyes.
Oh my God. Isabelle wanted to cry.
THERE REALLY WAS, when you thought about it, an awful lot for Isabelle to take in. Not only had all the memories of that happy spring now become pernicious and sly as her mind flashed before her scenes of what in truth had actually been occurring, but there also seemed no resting place from them. For example, doing the laundry, Isabelle might stare in wonder as she pulled her daughter’s undergarments from the washing machine. Was this a bra the loathsome man had touched? This pair of pink panties she now held in her hand? Was this a blouse the man’s head had leaned against in some embrace, his fingers on these buttons? If there had been any way of knowing exactly what pieces of clothing the odious creature had touched, Isabelle would have thrown them right away. But there was no way of knowing, and so the clothes, the panties, remained in her house, contaminated, in the laundry basket, the bureau drawers; her home was invaded.
But everything was invaded—that was the thing. Her workplace certainly was. She was stuck in the same room with her daughter—and Isabelle felt the presence of Amy seated at Dottie Brown’s desk every single minute of the day—but also Avery Clark, the one part of Isabelle’s life that had seemed sweetly and privately hers, had now been removed, for Avery in his embarrassment would not look at her.
She knew, at least, that he would be discreet. He was that sort of man. And she was hugely grateful that the women working with her, eating lunch with her right now, did not know of the events that had transpired. She sat nibbling on her peach. But when Fat Bev, squinting at an Avon magazine, said, “Two lipsticks and a face cream; I need a pen to do this, I’ve always been a dunce in math,” Isabelle’s lunch was through. She couldn’t eat anything more. “A dunce in math” was all it took. Isabelle, hit in the stomach with the mere word “math,” began remembering that winter night she had arrived home to an empty house, had searched through it frantically, thinking her daughter had been kidnapped, like Debby Kay Dorne. And to see now that her daughter had been lying! (Hadn’t Amy said, “Some of us stayed after school because we’re good in math”? And hadn’t Isabelle said another time, chatting like some idiot, “My father was good in math, maybe that’s where you got it from”?) To think Amy had lied to Isabelle not that once, but many times. It was stunning. Isabelle was stunned. She put the peach into her lunch bag and threw the bag away.
“Hey,” Lenora Snibbens said to Arlene, as the women glanced at their watches and began in a desultory way to tidy up their things. “How’s your cousin’s boy doing? The one selling all that marijuana. He still talking to the priest?”
“Far’s I know,” Arlene answered. Isabelle quietly excused herself, squeezing past Arlene’s chair with an apologetic smile. She remembered too well the day Arlene had reported on her cousin’s son. Isabelle had said these things didn’t happen right out of the blue. She remembered the confidence with which she had said this, and the memory lapped inside her stomach like a dark, oily wave.
Seating herself at her desk she tucked at her hair, returning some fallen strands to the flattened French twist. It was true. If Arlene Tucker had chomped on a carrot stick and said, “You know, my cousin up in Orono has this teenage daughter who for months and months it seems was carrying on with her teacher,” Isabelle would have thought to herself: And where was that girl’s mother? How could that mother not have known? They all would have thought that most probably. All the women would have sipped their sodas and shaken their heads and said with a certain knowingness, Of course these things don’t happen in a vacuum. If the mother had wanted to look …
Now Isabelle wanted to run back into the lunchroom and cry out: You really can not know!
But who would believe her? She had become pitiable, and sometimes it exhausted her too much. The hideous jolt as each little jigsaw piece took its place in the puzzle—what did it all matter now? The whole arranged jigsaw of her life had been swept to the floor. She wished she could stop the part of her mind where the hidden pieces about Amy lay. She wished she could stop picturing certain things. Sometimes sitting at her typewriter she would squeeze her eyes closed and pray.
She felt in some real way (though it was an odd, bewildering sensation, one she would not have been able to explain to anybody even if she had allowed herself to try) that she had died. Her body of course stupidly lived on, because she ate—not much—and slept—at times curiously well—and rose and went to the mill each day. Her “life” went on. But she felt little connection to anything, except for the queasiness of panic and grief. And increasingly she realized that what lay beneath this “incident” went back years and years, to a mendacity at her very core. What she faced, really, she sometimes thought, was a crisis of almost a spiritual nature for which she understood herself to be profoundly unprepared.
AMY SAT AT Dottie Brown’s desk continuously fighting tears. It was an exhausting physical battle, like trying not to throw up in the back seat of a car, managing to suppress one swelling of nausea only to swerve around a corner and feel another surge roll up; or like trying not to cough in church, clamping one’s throat hard against the fiendish tickle.
Once or twice Amy got up to go to the ladies’ room, but she suffered from excruciating self-consciousness each time she left her desk. Should she announce to Fat Bev that she was going to the bathroom? Murmuring, she got up from her seat and blushed. Walking through the large room between the rows of desks, she sensed the women’s eyes upon her and felt ten feet tall, and naked.
Once in the stall, she sat on the toilet seat weeping silently, frightened that any moment someone might walk in (the click, click, click of Rosie Tanguay’s beige pumps, the locking of the stall next to hers, the whispering sounds of a skirt being hiked up, the momentary pause before the spray of urine). Amy would blow her nose hard and return to her desk, and within minutes the urge to weep, to bawl loudly, would rise up in her again.
And her hand, with some reflexive tenacity of its own, would rise to touch her hair over and over again. Each time bewilderment poured through her at the bluntness that stopped now right below her ears. She was hideous. This had been confirmed once more in the ladies’ room, no matter how quickly she had looked away from the mirror. She wanted to claw her cheeks, to disfigure herself completely. She imagined using a razor blade to cut long streaks across her face so that her face would be covered with blood, and maimed.
They sent you to Augusta, though, if you did things like that. To the funny farm. Her mother used to talk about some old woman, Lillian, who’d been sent off to the funny farm; the people who worked there weren’t nice because they didn’t get paid much, and Isabelle said sometimes Lillian sat in her own feces because no one felt like cleaning her up. That she just sat there, staring at a wall.
“Yoo-hoo. Earth to Amy. Yoo-hoo.”
Amy glanced at Fat Bev quickly.
“You all right?” Bev asked. “You look like your battery’s gone dead.”
“How do you know if you’re crazy?” Amy blurted, leaning forward over her desk.
“You’re not,” Bev answered calmly, as though the question were completely expected, “as long as you think you might be.”
Amy considered this, chewing slowly on the tender skin inside her cheek. “So crazy people think they’re normal?”
“That’s what they say.” Fat Bev held out a roll of Life Savers toward Amy. “I’ll tell you”—Fat Bev sighed, raising her eyebrows with a kind of tender and complete exhaustion—“sometimes I think I’m nuts. Or awfully close to it.”
“You don’t seem crazy to me,” Amy said. “You seem incredibly normal.”
Fat Bev smiled, but almost sadly. “Nice girl.” And then she said, “Oh, we’re all nuts, probably.”
Amy chewed her Life Saver hard between her molars; it made a sound Isabelle could not stand, and remembering this, Amy stopped, putting her hand to her mouth apologetically. But Fat Bev gave no indication of having heard it at all. “Except if we’re all crazy,” Amy persisted, still leaning forward over her desk—Dottie Brown’s desk—“then how come some people get sent to the funny farm and other people don’t?”
Fat Bev nodded, as though she had already given thought to this as well. “They act crazy.” She nodded again. “Doesn’t matter if you feel crazy. Long as you don’t act crazy.” She rapped her pink fingernails on the desktop as a kind of punctuation. “Don’t talk to yourself in public. Take baths once in a while. Get up in the morning, get dressed. That’s the way I see it. You keep jumpin’ through the hoops, you’re all right. Nobody’s going to cart you off long as you’re still jumpin’ through the hoops like you’re supposed to.”
Amy nodded slowly. What occurred to her was that she ought to avoid, these days, seeing her reflection. She pictured herself after work standing in the parking lot next to the car waiting for her mother to unlock the doors: she would turn her head and gaze out over the dead brown river rather than glimpse herself in the car window. And in the morning she would get up and get dressed and come to work again. She would do that every day until enough time passed to make it different. Until she and Mr. Robertson were together again. She smiled tentatively at Fat Bev.
“Another thing,” Bev said, turning back to her typewriter but stopping a moment to raise a hand instructively. “Never get lipstick on your teeth. If I see a woman with lipstick on her teeth, I always think to myself, She’s probably crazy. Probably nuts.”
Amy nodded seriously. “Well,” she said finally, with a sigh, “I don’t wear lipstick all that often.”
“You should,” Fat Bev said, her fingers with their colorful nails tapping comfortably on the typewriter keys. “Could be lovely, you know.”
AVERY CLARK DID not like coming to work now that Amy Goodrow was there. It was awkward. For example, just that morning he was walking through the hall to take the elevator down to Shipment, when Amy emerged from the ladies’ room and there they were, alone in the hallway, walking silently toward each other. He might have felt compassion for her—in fact he did feel the faint stirrings of this as she blushed and ducked her head (her hair was strange, he thought, she looked almost ill)—except for the fact that as she neared him, raising her eyes and speaking an almost silent “Hello,” he saw, or thought he saw, a flicker of a sneer in the midst of her discomfort, and this angered him.
“Hello,” he responded stiffly, and when he reached the elevator he banged the button with his fist.
Nasty girl. Filthy thing.
When he thought of her, of what he had seen that day (and he tried hard not to think of this, but it would come to him again and again), he felt the same anger. At times with his wife in bed he felt that anger too. It seemed to him that he was old and much in life was denied him.
He had thoughts that included vulgar language, and he knew if he were a different sort of man he would have told his men friends what he had seen that day in the car parked out in the woods. “A terrific set of knockers,” he might have said. “A great pair of tits.” But he was not that kind of man, and he did not say those things to anyone.
When he told his wife, he told what he had seen in careful, general terms. They had shaken their heads all evening, discussing the little they knew of Isabelle’s life. Avery Clark cautioned Emma: “For the sake of Isabelle we won’t repeat this,” and Emma said of course not, it was really such a shame.
Chapter
14
SO FOR AMY and Isabelle—their lives had changed completely. When they spoke to one another, their words seemed pushed through the air like blocks of wood. If by chance their eyes should meet—while stepping out of the car, or leaving the lunchroom—they glanced away as quickly as they could. In the small house they moved past each other carefully, as though being near one another was a dangerous thing. But this only made them more aware of each other, joining them in a perverse intimacy of watchfulness, so that they learned more accurately the sounds of the other’s quiet chewing, noticed more astutely the moist smell of the bathroom after use, were aware even of when the other was or wasn’t sleeping by the quiet turning over in their beds at night, separated only by the thin Sheetrock wall.
Isabelle was not sure how long this could go on. It seemed ludicrous that they should eat a meal across from each other every night, should live together, work together, arrive at church together on Sundays, sitting in a pew so close that when they rose and sang the Doxology they could smell each other’s breath. It had crossed Isabelle’s mind to send the girl up the river to live with Isabelle’s cousin, Cindy Rae, but such an act would require an explanation to others that Isabelle was not prepared to give, and, more important, she was not prepared, even now, to release her daughter from her.
So they were stuck with each other. Each felt her suffering was greater than the other’s. In fact, each felt at times that perhaps her suffering was greater than the suffering of anyone, and so when it was reported on the news one night that a kneesock belonging to Debby Kay Dorne had been recovered in a field by a farm dog, and that the girl was now officially presumed to be dead, both Amy and Isabelle—not looking at each other, watching the television silently—actually allowed themselves the indulgence of thinking their own situation was somehow worse.
Amy thought: At least Debby’s mother loved her. At least everyone feels sorry. At least the girl is dead and doesn’t feel things anymore. (And everyone felt sorry.)
Isabelle, who was old enough to know better, to know, really, that what the mother was feeling must be the worst feeling of all, could nevertheless not stop herself from thinking: At least the girl was sweet. At least the girl hadn’t been cold-bloodedly lying to her mother for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Isabelle got up and turned off the television. “I’m going to bed,” she said.
Amy stretched her feet out in front of her, putting her hands behind her head. “Night,” she answered, staring straight ahead.
ISABELLE, LYING ON her bed in the summer darkness, a darkness that seemed porous and soft and something you could almost put your hand into, found it necessary, as she did on some of these nights, to go over it all once more in her head, as though this dreadful and wearying process of repetition was the only way she could absorb her—and her daughter’s—present state.
The day Avery Clark had discovered Mr. Robertson and Amy in the car parked in the woods, Isabelle had driven home from the mill believing it was not true. Her mind had been oddly lucid, although her body gave all the signs of having come upon a crisis: a tingling in her chin and fingertips, a shaking in her legs so marked that she had trouble driving, her breathing accelerated and shallow. Still her mind said: There has been some mistake, and this is not true.
But when she stepped through the door calling “Amy!” and found her daughter sitting on the edge of the living-room couch with her knees pressed together, Isabelle saw in the paleness of Amy’s face, particularly in the girl’s lips, which were absolutely drained of color, that what had just been so bizarrely reported to her by Avery was, in fact, all true.
Still, Isabelle didn’t get it right away. She didn’t get the whole thing right away. In her mind something terrible had happened to Amy that day. Isabelle did not comprehend the full implication of what must have happened in the days before, or even thoughts of what might still happen in the days to come; she was filled with the queasiness of the moment.
The midafternoon light that filtered through the window seemed to hang suspended in a living room vaguely unfamiliar—they were not used to being together there this time of day except on wee
kends, and that was very different. So right off the scene carried with it the oppressive feeling of a sickroom; and four o’clock had always been the saddest time of day for Isabelle anyway, even in the spring, or especially in spring.
She had walked slowly to Amy and knelt down so that she could look into the girl’s pale face. “Amy,” she had said, “this is very serious. What Avery Clark has just told me is very, very serious.”
Amy stared straight ahead, her eyes vacant, almost flat.
“When a man drives a girl out into the woods and makes her—when he makes her do certain things.”
“He didn’t.” Amy turned her head to her mother quickly, and then away.
Isabelle stood up. “Avery wasn’t …” She saw Amy’s eyes begin to travel sideways, and then return to their vacant stare. “You mean he didn’t make you,” Isabelle said.
Amy didn’t answer, didn’t move.
“Is that what you mean?”
Just slightly Amy’s face tilted upward.
“Amy, answer me. ”
“No, he didn’t make me, Mom.”
Isabelle sat down on the arm of the couch, an indication that they had found themselves in a genuine state of emergency; she never sat on the arms of furniture.
“Amy.”
But she could not now, weeks later, actually remember it all; there were only particular images that stayed with her: herself sitting, temporarily, on the arm of the couch, the sickroom pall of the afternoon light, the dreadfully pale face of Amy, her closed-off expression, the terror in the room.