“Well. Mrs. Goodrow. I’m afraid you take a dim view of the situation. Amy may very well be underage, and in that I’m not without some respect for your position, but I’m afraid you’ve been a tad naive about the nature of your passionate and unusually attractive daughter.”
“What is it you’re saying?” Isabelle asked, her heart thumping ferociously.
He paused, his eyes moving about the room. “Mrs. Goodrow, Amy did not need a good deal of teaching, shall we say.”
“Oh,” said Isabelle. “Oh, you are horrible. You really are a horrible man. I’m going to report you—you’re loathsome. Do you know that about yourself?” She leaned forward peering at him, asking this question with her voice raspy, tears in her eyes. “A loathsome man. I’m going to report you to the superintendent, the principal, the police.”
He was more than willing to hold her gaze, and she saw no indication in the brown eyes, seeming all the more impenetrable behind the lenses of his glasses, that her threat had intimidated him at all; it was her own eyes that glanced aside—she had never, even as a child, lasted more than two seconds in any kind of confrontation that required a stare-down with another person—and it was then she saw the books on the shelf beneath the moribund spider plant. The Works of Plato, she read, and next to that a white book with a circular coffee stain over the title On Being and Nothingness. Right before she looked away she saw Yeats: The Collected Works.
Thomas Robertson watched her glancing at the books, and when she met his eyes she read in them his final victory, for in a moment he said, “I think it would be best if you didn’t report anything. I’ll be gone tomorrow.”
At the door she turned and said, “I find you contemptible.”
He nodded just slightly. “I understand you do.” He closed the door slowly; it clicked.
AS SHE DROVE home Isabelle thought she ought not to be operating a motor vehicle. These were the words that came into her mind, as though lifted in fine print from the back of a box of decongestant tablets—Do not operate a motor vehicle—for it seemed her ability to judge distances, curbs, stop signs, was greatly impaired. There was no sense, as there had been on the way over, of having power, control, over the car. There was barely a sense of the car at all. There was only the image of Thomas Robertson, his eyelids blinking slowly, the stinging echo of his words, “I understand you do.”
She hated that he was smart. He was smarter than she was and she hated that. He was some kind of smart hippie, had undoubtedly been a hippie, had probably lived in a commune at some point along the way, smoking marijuana, taking anyone he cared to into his bed.
(What was worst of all, of course, was what he had said about Amy, what he had implied about Amy.)
And they had discussed her. She realized that driving back home, that they had discussed her at times during their horrid little rendezvous. Because that was there in the slow lowering of his eyes (Is it Mrs. Goodrow?). That he knew things about her. But what would he know? That she was strict? That she had few friends? That she worked in the mill? That she had said Yeets instead of Yeats? (Yes, he probably did know that, and her face burned.)
What she felt, turning into the driveway, was a fury and pain so deep that she would never have believed a person could feel it and still remain alive. Walking up the porch steps, she wondered seriously, briefly, if in fact she would die, right here, right now, opening the kitchen door. Perhaps dying was like this, those final moments of being rushed along by some powerful wave, so that at the very end one did not actually care, there was no reason to care: it was just over, the end was there.
Except she wasn’t dying. Tossing the keys onto the kitchen table, she felt the everydayness of life reappear. This was hers to bear. She felt she could not bear it, and so anger pulsed through her; her legs were shaking as she climbed the stairs.
Chapter
15
AMY HAD—JUST as Isabelle later surmised—telephoned Mr. Robertson, once her mother left the house. Standing by the kitchen window, she had watched to make sure her mother’s car did not suddenly return. It did not, and Amy, beginning to cry as soon as Mr. Robertson answered the telephone, told him what had happened since her mother came home. “I hate her,” she finished. “I hate her so much.” She squeezed her wet nose with her fingers.
There was a long pause on the other end of the telephone, and Amy, wiping her nose again, asked, “Are you still there?”
“I’m still here,” Mr. Robertson said, though surprisingly he said no more.
“But what are we going to do?” Amy asked. “I mean what are we going to tell her?” She turned the mouthpiece upward so he wouldn’t hear her crying; tears slipped down her face.
“Don’t tell her anything else,” Mr. Robertson advised. “Leave the rest to me. I’ll handle it. When she comes home don’t tell her anything more.” His voice, though, was oddly expressionless; he could have been talking in his sleep. Even when he said, “It’ll work out, Amy. It will all get worked out in the end.”
A new kind of fear spread through her as she hung up. In her mind now was the brief image of a huge, black sea; she and Mr. Robertson bobbing separately on black waves in a black night.
But no. When he said it would get worked out, he meant he loved her. And that he would stand by her. He had said that just today: “You know you’ll always be loved, don’t you?” He loved her. He had told her so. She ought to have told her mother this, because her mother didn’t understand.
Amy walked up the stairs. Maybe Mr. Robertson would tell her mother, “I love your daughter and we want to be together.” Would he say that to Isabelle? And what words, exactly, would he use? Anyway, he was a grown-up and he would know what to do, Amy reasoned, tripping suddenly on the last stair; thinking there was one more stair, she had put her foot down too quickly. She steadied herself against the wall and went into her bedroom.
She sat waiting for her mother to return. She sat on the skirted vanity stool in front of her mirror, and after a while she began to brush her hair, and the thought even occurred to her that Mr. Robertson might return here with her mother. The early-evening sun, which at that time in June always passed for a few minutes through Amy’s room, sent through the window a haze of pale light that touched Amy’s hair, so it seemed at that moment like spun gold from a fairy tale. (She thought this as she gazed at herself.) But she felt unwell. She felt like she had just thrown up, with more left back inside her.
And it was so odd: the white hairbrush she was holding, a school notebook tossed onto the bed—these familiar things seemed to belong to a life she could now only faintly remember. Now that Isabelle had found out that some man loved her, everything was different.
He did love her. He had said, “You know you’ll always be loved, don’t you?” She could tell by the way he smiled whenever she walked into his classroom after school, but especially from the way he had touched her today in the car, from the things they had done. It was indescribably private what they had done. When people did that kind of thing … well, they loved each other incredibly. You had to be together after that.
Mr. Robertson would tell her mother it couldn’t be helped: people fell in love. Maybe he would even tell Isabelle that in a few years—his wife had left him, after all—he would like to marry Amy. (She pictured living with him, how he would empty out some bureau drawers for her to put her clothes in, how on their first day he would hand her a clean towel and washcloth and say, “Here, Amy. These are for you.”)
The kitchen door slammed; car keys flung onto the counter; then her mother’s footsteps on the stairs.
Amy put the brush down quietly, as though by merely holding it she had been doing something wrong. The sun, just now leaving the room, touched Amy’s hair one final time as she turned to see her mother, appearing out of breath, standing in the doorway. “He’s leaving town tomorrow,” Isabelle said, her chest rising and falling, rising and falling. “He should be thrown in jail.”
Amy opened her mouth. They stare
d at each other until her mother turned and stepped across the hallway into her own room.
Amy looked around confusedly. She should run downstairs and out into the road, because she had to get to Mr. Robertson. She pictured herself stumbling down the road past the pine trees and the swamp, seeing his car coming toward her, waving her arms desperately to him. It filled her with panic to think of him leaving—except he wouldn’t do that without her.
“Look at you.” Her mother was standing in the doorway again. She held the black-handled sewing shears at her side. “Look at you sitting there like that,” her mother said quietly, moving into the room.
Amy thought her mother intended to kill her. She thought her mother was walking toward her to stab her with the shears, because it seemed her mother had gone crazy, become somebody different. A blank, white hatred on the face of her mother coming nearer, her mother’s arm reaching up, Amy’s own arm reaching up, ducking her head (“No, Mommy”), her arm knocked down, a fist grabbing her hair, the sound of cutting, more hair grabbed, her head jerked one way, then another. An avalanche of terror dropped down through Amy, carrying with it a swirling debris of long-forgotten smells, the couch in Esther Hatch’s house, the car rides there, rotting apple cores and gritty sand, the unyielding hardness of a plastic doll’s head, stale radiator heat, and melting crayons.
Leaning forward, half standing, jerked back by each handful of hair her mother grasped, the sharp pain of her scalp as though the skin could be peeled right off, Amy heard her own half-whispered screams, her cries of “Mommy, don’t!” “Oh, Mommy, please,” then a sudden deep guttural sound, “Oh don’t.” The scissory sound of the shears cutting again and again (she would remember the sound of the shears perfectly, would experience it in dreams for years to come), a metallic flash in the mirror as the silvery blades briefly caught a shaft of the disappearing sunlight, then the peculiar sense to Amy that she wasn’t balanced right, her head was weighing less.
“Clean it up.” Her mother stepped back, panting. Screeching suddenly: “Clean up the mess!”
Sobbing, Amy stumbled down the stairs and took a brown grocery bag from where they were folded beneath the kitchen sink. She returned to her room (climbing the stairs on all fours like some intoxicated animal, dragging the brown paper bag with her as it scraped lightly against the wall), where she put the hair into the grocery bag, and in doing so began to scream, because picking up in her fingers the long curls of hair was like picking up some amputated leg with its shoe still on—this stuff was separate from her now (screaming louder)—what was still her?
Isabelle, who was sitting on her bed across the hall, rocking forward with her fist to her stomach, kept saying, “Oh please stop making that noise.” Her own room was almost dark by now, the sun having left it some time ago. The thickening dusk that gathered first in the corners and grew steadily until it filled the room enough so that the thin outline of the bluebirds on the wallpaper could no longer be seen, brought with it the sense of something dangerous and final.
Later Isabelle wanted to take the shears and cut her own hair off. She wanted to cut up the bedspread she sat on, and all the clothes in her closet. She wanted to go into the bathroom and cut up the towels, to make cuts in the upholstery coverings downstairs. She wanted to be dead and she wanted her daughter to be dead too so that neither of them would have to face the unbearable business of continuing on. It even went through her head to open the stove and keep the gas running all night while upstairs she held Amy in her arms, rocking her to sleep.
(Who was Amy? Who was the person that man, that stranger, had made such innuendoes about? Who was the girl Isabelle had just found this evening when she came home, sitting before the mirror with her hands folded in some kind of mocking childlike obedience, but with a vividness, a luminosity; the streaky hair all messy and bright, falling over her shoulders and partly in front of her face, that certain look in her eyes, a certain kind of knowingness? Who was her daughter? Who had she been?)
“Please, God,” Isabelle whispered piteously, kneading her face with her fingers. “Oh God, please.” Please what? She hated God. She hated him. In the darkness she actually shook her fist into the air, oh, she was sick to death of God. For years she had been playing some kind of guessing game with him. Is this right, God? Am I doing the right thing? Every decision made on what would please God—and look where it had gotten her: no place. Less than no place at all. “I hate you, God.” She whispered this between gritted teeth, into the darkness of her room.
IN THE EARLY morning, as the sky against her window was whitening and the birds increased their noise, Amy woke from where she had fallen asleep on the floor, her hand wet from saliva that had been seeping from her mouth. She sat up and almost immediately began to cry, and then stopped soon, because what she was feeling was so much worse than that; the tears, the crunching of her face, seemed futile and insignificant.
“Amy.” Her mother was standing in the doorway.
But it went no further. Amy did not look into her mother’s face. She only glanced in her direction long enough to see that her mother had apparently spent all night in her clothes. And she didn’t care. She didn’t care what words might be stuck right now in her mother’s throat; they were as futile as the puny tears she herself had just shed. She and her mother were stuck together, sick and exhausted with their stupid lives.
On Monday Amy started her job at the mill.
Chapter
16
MORNING BREAK, AND Arlene Tucker was saying, “There was a fountain in the middle of the cake.”
“Charlene had a bridge,” another woman joined in, referring to a daughter whose wedding and divorce had been discussed in the lunchroom now for a number of years. “I said at the time, Charlene, are you sure? But she was set on that bridge.”
“This one had a bridge.” Arlene nodded. “Wide enough for the little bride and bridegroom figures. The bride had a parasol. I thought it was nice. ”
“Who’s this again?” Lenora Snibbens took a compact from her bag, and squinted at a blemish on her chin.
“A cousin. One of Danny’s up in Hebron.”
“You’ve got more cousins,” said Lenora, powdering her red-ended nose.
“Do you have any idea,” Fat Bev said, entering the lunchroom, “how awful that river smells?”
“It’s awful,” Lenora agreed, moving her chair forward to make room for Amy Goodrow, who had wandered into the lunchroom and was gazing vaguely at the candy in the vending machine.
“It does seem worse this year,” Isabelle said, from the far end of the table, where she sat stirring her coffee with a plastic straw. She shook her head at Lenora. “Does seem to be worse,” she repeated, her eyes following the exit of her daughter, for Amy, having glanced at the vending machine, was now wandering back out of the lunchroom.
“Oh, it’s something.” Lenora let out a fast sigh.
“It really is.” This remark seemed to require Isabelle to nod her head after having just shaken it back and forth, and the switching of the motion made her feel spastic, unhinged. She disliked these morning breaks that she no longer shared with Avery Clark in his fishbowl of an office. And she didn’t care if the river smelled; she barely noticed. What she noticed was how Avery never looked up from his desk anymore when the buzzer for morning break bleated throughout the building. She noticed how he never caught her eye anymore when he passed by her desk, and she wondered if the other women noticed too.
“It’s never made sense to me,” said the woman who was the mother of the much-discussed Charlene, “spending all that money on a wedding.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Arlene Tucker gave a pouty shrug. “It makes sense to me.”
“Why?” Charlene’s mother blinked once her almost lashless eyes, looking for that moment something like a toad.
“It’s the most important day in a girl’s life,” Arlene said. “That’s why.” She added (unnecessarily, most of the women present later agreed), “It’s su
pposed to last forever.”
“Was Charlene supposed to get slapped around by her husband? Was she supposed to put up with that?” The poor mother of Charlene had gone pink in the face, her lashless eyes blinking rapidly now. Clearly, umbrage had been taken.
“Relax, please.” Arlene Tucker looked embarrassed and resentful at finding herself the recipient of these charged statements.
Tensions had been rising for some time now. All the women (except for Isabelle) had been increasingly aware of that. It was the heat, of course, the stagnant, awful, cloying heat. Still, they did seem unable to help themselves, for suddenly Arlene Tucker said, “Well, the pope would say that in the eyes of God, Charlene is married forever.”
“Damn the pope.”
This was astonishing. Rosie Tanguay, just back from the ladies’ room, actually had to cross herself. To make things worse, Charlene’s mother, having damned the pope, now began to laugh. She laughed and laughed, red in the face, and just as she seemed to slow down she started up again, until tears ran down her face and she had to blow her nose. Still she laughed.
The women exchanged looks of concern, and Lenora Snibbens finally said, “Maybe get some cold water and throw it in her face.” Rosie Tanguay, with a look of self-importance, took her empty coffee mug to go fill at the water fountain, but the gasping mother of Charlene held up her hand. “No,” she said, winding down, mopping at her face, “I’m okay.”
“It’s not funny, you know.” Arlene Tucker delivered this flatly.
“Oh, Arlene, shut up.” Fat Bev rapped her fingernails on the table as she spoke, and seeing Arlene’s mouth opening indignantly in her direction, Bev cut in again, “Keep it shut, Arlene. Just this once.”
Arlene stood up. “You can go to hell,” she said, apparently to Fat Bev, but her eyes flickered briefly to include the mother of Charlene. “And you know you will, too,” she added, leaving the room.