Amy and Isabelle

  “Of course,” he said hurriedly. “This weather is perfectly awful. And not a break in sight, I guess, if you’re going to believe the weatherman.”

  “Everyone’s upset,” Isabelle said quietly, almost indifferently, indicating with a slight motion of her head that she was referring here to the women in the office room.

  “Yes.” Avery sighed through his nose, giving Isabelle a grim smile of acknowledgment which included in it some degree of camaraderie: they were parents faced with a roomful of unruly, petulant children and would have to do the best they could. “We’ll get through it, I suppose.” Avery placed his hands down flat on the desk in his characteristic, conclusive way. “But listen, Isabelle. I appreciate your cooperation. With everything. I most certainly do.”

  She nodded and stood up, returning silently to her desk in the stifling office room.

  • • •

  THE CAR SMELLED. Left in the parking lot all day with its windows rolled up, it turned into a kind of vile hothouse, a nasty implosion of unseen fungi or bacteria, and Isabelle always opened all four windows and all four doors for a few minutes before stepping inside to take her place behind the steering wheel; a procedure Amy found profoundly embarrassing. She didn’t know why her mother couldn’t be like most people, who simply left their cars unlocked with the windows down. But to Isabelle, who had been raised in a very small town, Shirley Falls appeared to be a city, and so she locked her car up every day, and every day now it needed airing out, sitting on the tar like some mechanical bird with wings extended while Isabelle made ineffectual waving motions with her pocketbook and Amy sat slumped in the front seat, a hand to her forehead.

  Today Isabelle proceeded with listlessness, opening the back doors for only a moment, and soon they were driving home.

  “You don’t believe the UFO thing, do you,” Amy finally said.

  Isabelle glanced at her briefly. “No.”

  They drove in silence past the trailer park, the swamp, past the old logging road where Amy had been discovered with Mr. Robertson.

  “It could be true, though,” Amy said, squinting slightly in the heat, her elbow resting on the open window, her fingers tugging compulsively at her hair. When her mother didn’t respond to this, Amy added, “I think it is true.”

  Still, Isabelle didn’t answer.

  “Why wouldn’t it be true?” Amy persisted. “We’re not the only stupid little planet, you know.”

  Isabelle simply kept driving.

  “So why couldn’t there be life on some other planet?”

  “I suppose there could be,” Isabelle answered.

  “Well, don’t you even care? You sound like you don’t even care.”

  For a moment it appeared that Isabelle wasn’t going to bother to answer this, but then she said with little expression, “I have other things on my mind.”

  Amy slumped further down into her seat and rolled her eyes with disgust.

  Awful, Isabelle thought, feeling lightheaded—everything is awful. “Anyway.” She drove carefully with both hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead through the windshield. “Dottie Brown is returning to work on Monday, so you’re out of a job.”

  She turned to glance at her daughter, who seemed to have nothing to say to this.

  Isabelle added, “Avery told me this afternoon. With Dottie coming back there’s not enough work to keep you busy. And not enough money to pay you. Apparently.”

  Amy remained silent, turning her head to look out the open window beside her. Isabelle, glancing at her again, could not see her face.

  “What will I do?” Amy eventually asked. The question seemed genuine and Isabelle could not guess her daughter’s thoughts. Was she worried about being lonely, bored? (Was she thinking of running away?)

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I’ll get lucky and be kidnapped by a UFO,” Amy suggested, with real nastiness, as they pulled into the driveway.

  Isabelle turned the car engine off and simply closed her eyes. “Who knows,” she said. “Maybe you will.”

  Still, there were things that had to be said. If they couldn’t immediately decide upon the rest of the summer for Amy, Isabelle at least needed to know what time on Saturday Amy was expected to be at Stacy Burrows’s house, whether or not she was to have dinner there, and how she would get home.

  To all these inquiries Amy responded that she didn’t know. Isabelle found this irritating, which in turn irritated Amy, and the outcome was that Amy, late Saturday morning, took off on foot, telling Isabelle if she was going to be later than five she would call. “I’d be happy to drive you there,” Isabelle offered one more time, following Amy out the door.

  Without turning around, Amy said loudly, “No.”

  In order to walk into town she had to pass by the logging road where she had gone with Mr. Robertson, and she turned her head away now, as she did every time she passed by. (Driving with her mother she would simply close her eyes.) In her head she told this to Mr. Robertson. In her head she imagined his kind eyes watching her. Only it was somewhat different now, ever since she found his number disconnected, found out that he had gone away; she could not stop her inner trembling.

  She was glad when she came to the center of town—the cars, the shops, the people on the sidewalk. She crossed Main Street, then cut through the parking lot of the post office and came out onto a sidewalk that led eventually to the neighborhood where Stacy lived. The street names were wonderful: Maple Street, Valentine Road, Harmony Drive, Appleby’s Circle. Nothing plain and ugly like Route 22. The houses were pretty and clean-looking too; some were gray, others white, a few maroon. They had bay windows in their living rooms and curtains hanging in their upstairs rooms. There were front lawns, side lawns, sometimes a white picket fence.

  Stacy’s house was different. It was part of a new development built down by Oyster Point, where the houses were bigger than in other parts of town. Stacy’s house was the biggest of all. It had huge windows and a mansard roof. The driveway was glinty with white chipped rock that crunched beneath Amy’s sneakers. Amy had never been in Stacy’s house before. Without admitting it, Amy shared her mother’s distaste for modern architecture; she liked houses to look traditional. And this one, in addition to the queer slope of the roof, had a front door painted bright yellow, which made Amy feel uneasy, and which seemed fleetingly in her mind connected to the fact that Stacy’s father was a psychologist. But she was uneasy anyway: Stacy had invited her over so they could watch a film on childbirth that her father had gotten from the college. Amy had not told that to Isabelle.

  She hesitated, then rapped on the door.

  From inside came the muffled sound of motion, then Stacy’s voice as she approached the door—“Get out, you little buggers. Stay away”—and then the door opened and there was Stacy, red-haired and beautiful and very, very pregnant. “Hi,” Stacy said, raising both hands as though she might be going to take Amy’s face between them. And then: “Jesus, what happened to your hair?”

  Amy, stepping through the door, looked down at the straw mat under her feet and tried to smile, but her mouth could not seem to manage; the corners turned down jerkily.

  A child partly hidden behind a closet door peered at Amy, and Amy turned her back, wiping her nose quickly with her arm. “Get out of here, you little pieces of shit,” Stacy said. A scuffling sound by the closet, a wail.

  “Mom,” cried the boy, running off down the hallway, “Stacy hit me and called me a piece of shit.” Another little boy dashed out and ran after him, calling out, “Stacy hit us!”

  “Cockroaches!” Stacy called after him. “You are little pieces of shit. Quit spying on my friends or next time I’ll kill you.” She took Amy’s arm. “Come on.” And Amy followed her down a flight of stairs into Stacy’s bedroom. It had never occurred to Amy that people might speak to one another this way in their home, and the sense of foreignness brought on by the yellow front door increased as she went into Stacy’s bedroom and Stacy slammed
the bedroom door.

  “So what happened?” Stacy asked cautiously, once they were seated on her bed. It was a double bed and seemed huge to Amy, with its four high posts of dark wood and tumbled, unmade flowered sheets.

  “This is a great room,” said Amy, looking around. Next to the bed was a large window that went almost to the floor; trees were visible, sloping downhill toward Oyster Creek.

  “It’s okay,” Stacy said, indifferently.

  Amy pulled at her hair and shrugged with embarrassment. “Uhm. My mom. She got mad at me.”

  She dropped her eyes, fingered the flowered sheets. She was afraid of having to explain, but Stacy only said after a while, “Don’t you just hate parents?”

  Amy looked up, and Stacy held out both arms. “I love you,” Stacy said simply, and Amy, too embarrassed to answer, closed her eyes briefly against the smooth, slightly warm feel of Stacy’s hair.

  MR. BURROWS FUSSED a great deal with the film projector. “It’s going to take me a few moments here,” he told his wife, a scowl causing ridges to rise across his forehead. Mrs. Burrows, recognizing vaguely that some aspect of his manhood seemed at stake here (he was a person who liked to “run the show”), went into the kitchen and made popcorn, the smell soon wafting into the living room, where Amy and Stacy sat waiting—with some degree of anxiety themselves—on the living-room couch.

  The couch was made of brown leather and to Amy it seemed enormous. If she leaned back it was almost as though she were lying down. And yet sitting up straight she looked like a jerk, she was sure—as though she had never been invited to someone’s house before. Stacy herself sat cross-legged, her bulbous stomach before her, squinting her eyes furiously at her little brothers whenever the children came into the room. “I’m warning you, rat-fucks,” she murmured.

  It took some doing to get everything arranged—Stacy needed more salt on her popcorn, which Mrs. Burrows hurriedly brought her; the children had to be sent downstairs, the blinds on the huge windows drawn—but eventually Mrs. Burrows settled onto the couch next to Amy, and the movie whirred away in black and white, blurry at first; a pregnant woman walked into a hospital while a male narrator spoke about the miracle of life.

  Amy did not like popcorn. Years before, sick with a stomach virus, she had noticed how similar the taste of her vomit was to the taste of popcorn. Even her burps had tasted that way, and she sat now on the ocean of this leather couch with a large mixing bowl of popcorn placed on her lap, the inside edges of her mouth every few moments breaking out with a watery secretion that she knew often came right before upchucking. Her palms were moist from the fear of being sick on the Burrowses’ leather couch. “Try not to get butter on the leather,” Mrs. Burrows had said to the girls just moments before, handing them both a napkin.

  On the screen now was a diagram; little tadpole-looking things moving toward an “egg,” which in this case was a smiley face with eyelashes blinking flirtatiously at the tadpoles.

  “How’s the popcorn?” Mrs. Burrows asked.

  “Good.” Amy blushed and put a piece of popcorn tentatively into her mouth.

  “More salt?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Without moving her head Amy tried to survey her surroundings. The ceiling of the living room was so high it could have been a church, and on the white walls hung an assortment of carved masks, the expressions on some of them fierce and foreign-looking. It surprised Amy that people would want faces like that on their walls.

  The pregnant woman was lying down now on a bed, her stomach rising in a fearsome mound under the hospital cloth, her eyes, it seemed to Amy, flickering with terror, while the male voice of the narrator continued, speaking calmly and knowingly of cervical dilation.

  Amy shut her eyes, praying not to vomit. She thought of daffodils, fields of daffodils. Blue sky, green grass, yellow daffodils.

  “Gross,” Stacy exclaimed. “God.”

  Amy opened her eyes: the woman’s water had broken. A dark wet head was emerging from an opening that Amy could not imagine was actually between the woman’s legs. The camera moved to the woman’s face—her contorted, sweating, horrible-looking face; it embarrassed Amy far more to see this woman’s face than to see between her legs, where, according to the camera now, shoulders were emerging, a body, tiny arms and legs tucked up like a turkey packaged in a grocery store.

  “Ugly,” Stacy said. “God, is that baby ugly.”

  “All babies look that way at first,” Mrs. Burrows said cheerfully. “They have to get washed off. Mother cats lick their babies clean. They lick all the mucus and blood right off—the afterbirth, it’s called.”

  A wave of nausea rolled up from the back of Amy’s throat. Daffodils, she thought. Blue sky. She put the bowl of popcorn onto the floor by her feet.

  “Thank God I’m not expected to lick the baby clean,” Stacy said, rearranging herself on the couch, tucking a leg up under her, stuffing a handful of popcorn into her mouth.

  “It’s supposed to be high in protein—isn’t that right, Gerald?” Stacy’s mother directed this question to her husband, who was scowling at the projector again; the film was coming to an end, with the baby being placed in the mother’s arms.

  “Protein. Yes. I had a patient who cooked the placenta in a soup afterward, and she and her husband and friends ate it—a celebratory event, I believe, is how they viewed it.”

  Amy pressed her lips together.

  “Oh, gross,” Stacy said. “That is really fucking gross. Your patients are so crazy, Dad.”

  Mr. Burrows was trying to rewind the film without tearing it; it kept coming unthreaded, and he felt everyone was watching him. “Stacy,” he said. “The language has got to stop. It has simply got to stop. And it’s entirely inappropriate to refer to neurotic people as ‘crazy.’ We’ve been through this before.”

  Stacy rolled her eyes at Amy while Mrs. Burrows said, “Well, that was a very interesting film. That was very helpful. Now Stacy will know what to expect.”

  “I expect to die,” Stacy answered. “Did you see that woman’s face?”

  “Thank your father for bringing home the film, please. It wasn’t easy to get the projector here from the college.” Mrs. Burrows was smiling as she stood up; she took Amy’s bowl of popcorn from the floor and returned it to the kitchen without saying anything about its still being full, and Amy, relieved at this, said boldly, “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “Oh, yes. You’re welcome.” Mr. Burrows, still scowling, with his head bent over the projector, did not look up at her. In fact Amy wasn’t sure he had looked at her once since she arrived. He seemed to her a nervous man with a wide, flat bottom. Amy, glancing with private disgust, remembered Stacy’s report on his “fleshy white stupid-looking ass.” Amy did not miss having a father when she saw fathers like that.

  “Yeah, thanks, Dad.” Stacy sounded subdued. “I’m scared,” she finally said.

  Amy, her nausea subsiding, looked carefully at her friend. “It’ll be okay,” she said, lamely. “I guess.”

  “Oh, it will be fine,” Mrs. Burrows said, emerging from the kitchen. “They’ll give you an epidural, sweetheart. You won’t feel a thing.”

  “What’s that?” Stacy looked confused.

  “A big injection in the spine,” Mr. Burrows responded, with ill-concealed impatience. “They just discussed it in the film.”

  AMY WALKED HOME through the woods by the river. It was muggy and horrible, as though cobwebs pressed against her, not at all what she had imagined—saved herself with—sitting on Stacy’s brown couch. Here the sky was not blue, there was no green grass, there were no daffodils. The pine needles were tired and spongy, the sky, what could be seen of it through the trees, just an everlasting white. She sat down on an old stone wall that seemed to rise up gradually from the pine needles until a number of yards later it disappeared again.

  The woods were full of stone walls like this one, moss-covered rocks falling away from each other, making way here and the
re for a tree trunk that had fallen in a storm and now lay rotting, covered in vines; beyond, the granite stones emerged in a line again, no longer the property boundaries they once were but only faint reminders of a time when other people (not Amy or Stacy) had lived there, a time presumably so difficult that merely withstanding the seasons and surviving childbirth were triumphs in themselves.

  None of this occurred to Amy now. When she was younger she would walk through the woods imagining Indian girls and men, white settlers frightened in their log homes, closing their thick shutters at night; it had interested her then: how women lived in long skirts without toilets or running water, how they baked bread in the large Dutch ovens. Amy didn’t care about it now. She just wanted to have her cigarette, to try to get rid of what the popcorn had started, what had turned since into some queasiness of her heart. Stacy, with her swollen stomach and her leather couch, and her queer parents—Stacy seemed gone.

  And Mr. Robertson was gone. This of course made her the sickest, the dull pain always with her. Where had he gone to?

  Later, crossing Main Street, she heard someone call her name. Amy was not used to having her name called out in public, and because the man who called to her was handsome, and looked genuinely glad to see her, it took her some moments to figure out that he had not mistaken her for somebody else.

  It was Paul Bellows. Stacy’s old boyfriend.

  Chapter

  19

  ALONE.

  Isabelle sat in the armchair by the living-room window, watching the sparrows that hopped and darted by the bird feeder, every one of their motions seeming compact, nimble, deliberate, but also the mere result of being startled. If this was the case, their existence was a tense one, Isabelle considered. Still, they had each other. Hadn’t she heard that birds mated for life? She watched as one sparrow hopped from the feeder to a small branch in the spruce tree; in a moment the other followed, the branch bouncing slightly beneath their delicate double weight. Birds of a feather.

  And people, too—lots of people were together right now. Her own daughter visiting her pregnant friend … (Briefly Isabelle closed her eyes.) Women from church—Barbara Rawley, Peg Dunlap. Perhaps they were out shopping together right now. On the other side of town, across the river, Fat Bev might be sitting on Dottie Brown’s porch, sharing a laugh about Arlene Tucker. Birds of a feather flock together. Why am I alone?