20
AVERY CLARK TOOK a week off. This was something he did every August, renting the same cabin each year on Lake Nattetuck, in the mountains, fishing with his sons, swimming with Emma from a narrow dock, roasting hot dogs, lying on a canvas hammock hung between two Scotch pines. These happy times were recorded yearly in a stack of photographs that, with a certain contained enthusiasm, Avery would show to Isabelle after he picked them up at lunchtime from the pharmacy across the street.
It always broke her heart. Standing at his desk, peering at these pictures (holding them carefully by the edges so as to not place a smudge print on the backsides of Emma stepping from the dock into a canoe), Isabelle would say, “Oh, Avery, this is especially good, I think—this one of you,” and she would smile at a shot of Avery bent over a rowboat, reeling in a fish. A perch. She nodded as he explained how long they had been fishing that day, two full hours without so much as a nibble. “Oh my,” she would say. “Imagine.”
Now, this particular hot and horrible August, with the river lying dead and smelling to high hell and the sky without color, her daughter barely speaking to her, Avery himself saying very little (“Hold the fort down, Isabelle” was all he seemed able to come up with when he left on Friday), she wondered if this year he would show her any pictures of the lake when he got back. She knew, because she had heard Bev ask, that his sons were joining him there again, even though they were both out of college by now. “Oh yes,” he said. “I suspect we’ll have grandchildren there with us someday. Lake Nattetuck’s a family tradition.”
“Isn’t that nice,” Bev had responded, nodding lazily, and Isabelle envied her indifference.
To her there had only been the cheerful “Hold the fort down, Isabelle.” Although in his eyes of course was the brief understanding that such a thing was no easy matter these days, what with new feuds and old ones simmering in the office room, alliances arranged and rearranged. Rosie Tanguay and Lenora Snibbens, who had not been speaking to one another for well over a year, owing ostensibly to Lenora’s public reporting of her dream in which Rosie had done a striptease in the post office lobby (the true offense to Rosie lying not so much in the telling of the dream as in the extreme hilarity displayed by Lenora), had at the beginning of the summer shown signs of putting the matter to rest, agreeing one day—in mild, pleasant tones—that the heat made them both very sleepy. But with the arrival of Dottie Brown’s UFO, the old animosity came back.
It was not only Rosie that Lenora seemed ready to take on. For whatever reasons, Lenora could not abide not only the idea of a UFO in their midst but, apparently, anyone who chose to believe such a thing might exist. If some woman standing in the lunchroom should look around tiredly and say nothing more than, “Where did I put my Pepsi?” Lenora felt compelled to answer with a sarcastic, “Maybe some alien took it.”
While neither Fat Bev nor Isabelle was inclined to believe Dottie’s story, both had aligned themselves on “Dottie’s side.” And both were distressed at Lenora Snibbens for continually rocking the shaky boat. “Why can’t she just shut up?” Bev murmured to Isabelle one day as they left the lunchroom together. Lenora had, in a momentary silence that fell over the stifling lunchroom, said without looking up, “Seen any more spaceships, Dottie?”
It was cruel; there was no way around it. Unnecessary. One might expect this from Arlene; a mean streak was there (some felt) beneath her painted eyebrows, but Lenora—ordinarily good-natured, bucktoothed, and talkative—her insistence about this matter was a surprise.
Dottie Brown turned red, then her face simply crumpled and she began to cry. “Oh, come on, Dottie. Jesum Crow.” Lenora rapped her fingers impatiently on the linoleum tabletop. Probably Lenora was faced here with more than she had bargained for, but in her discomfort she unfortunately added, “Come on, Dottie. Give it up.”
Dottie pushed back her chair and left the room. It was then that Fat Bev, following her, had murmured loudly to Isabelle, tossing her head back in Lenora’s direction, “Why can’t she just shut up?”
And it was true. Lenora ought to just shut up. If Dottie Brown, or any one of them, for that matter, wanted to come in to work and say they had just seen twelve white kangaroos walking over the bridge—well, that was their business. You might think they were nuts, but a decent person would simply keep quiet.
Isabelle settled herself behind her desk. “I agree, Bev. Completely agree. ”
Bev headed off for the ladies’ room to tend to her friend, and Isabelle began typing a letter, making a number of mistakes along the way. She felt a certain panic flutter through her chest, as though she were a substitute teacher whose classroom had suddenly become unruly, and the principal was away. What if these women went crazy? (And why shouldn’t they, Isabelle thought, her own hand shaking a bit; it was so awfully, awfully hot.) What if they just went bananas and Avery returned to find the place in complete disarray? “Hold the fort down, Isabelle.”
It wasn’t her responsibility, for heaven’s sake! Avery was paid to maintain order in the office room; she was not. Isabelle pulled the sheet of paper from her typewriter and started the letter again.
In the ladies’ room, meanwhile, the unthinkable was taking place: Lenora Snibbens, having followed Dottie Brown into the bathroom with some vague apology forming in her head, was aghast to have Dottie turn from the sink and strike her on the upper portion of her bare arm. The blow was fairly soundless as Dottie used the side of her hand, but there was the immediate shriek from Lenora, who backed away, then suddenly stepped forward again and spit in Dottie’s face. It was not much of a spit. Lenora was too upset to have collected any real quantity of saliva in her mouth, but the gesture was clear, and a few drops sprayed across the air, arriving on Dottie’s cheeks, which Dottie immediately rubbed with great vigor, sobbing, “You disgusting pimple-faced pig!”
This reference to her unfortunate complexion caused Lenora to spit again, resulting, in her frenzy, in little more than her lips buzzing together ferociously in a childish raspberry sound.
Fat Bev, standing by the sink and witnessing all this with horror, roused herself to step between them and bellowed in a voice she had not used since the adolescence of her daughters, “Stop it right now, you two.”
MOMENTS LATER Fat Bev leaned over Isabelle’s desk to inform Isabelle that she would be driving Dottie home, and that she herself might not be back to work that afternoon.
“Certainly,” Isabelle said, alarmed, and having no idea what had precipitated such measures. “Of course, Bev.”
Lenora Snibbens returned to her desk and sat with tears brimming in her eyes, refusing to talk. The office room was very quiet. There was only the whirring of the fans in the windows, although even that sound seemed subdued, as though the fans themselves had become cautious and wary as well. Occasionally a chair squeaked, a filing cabinet clicked shut. Twice Lenora blew her nose.
Isabelle, glancing up, saw Bev in the hallway gesturing to her. She took her pocketbook from the drawer in her desk and walked quietly out into the hall, as though she were simply going to the ladies’ room.
Bev’s car wouldn’t start. It had something to do with the heat, she thought, baking all day in the parking lot. She usually tried to park in the corner beneath the tree, but today the place was taken. None of this mattered, she told Isabelle (a fat hand wiping at her perspiring lip), except that she had Dottie out there in that car right now and Dottie needed to get home. She, personally, thought Dottie was having a breakdown, but the only thing at the moment was to get her home. When she told Dottie that she’d call Wally at work—
Here Isabelle held up her hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
THE HEAT SHIMMERED before them as they drove out of the parking lot, Dottie sitting up front next to Isabelle, docile and expressionless. Fat Bev sat in the back seat, her legs spread, her hand holding a cigarette hanging out the window. Isabelle drove self-consciously, as though all aspects of her driving skills were being judged. It rem
inded her of the few times in Amy’s childhood when she had volunteered to drive on school trips; how monstrously self-conscious she had felt behind the wheel, driving a carload of weary, truculent kids.
“I hit her,” Dottie said tonelessly, turning her face partway to Isabelle.
“Excuse me?” Isabelle put her blinker on. The car behind was following too close; Isabelle hated it when cars followed that close.
“I hit Lenora. In the bathroom. Did Bev tell you?”
“No. Goodness.” Isabelle glanced in the rearview mirror; Bev caught her eye and gave her a look of laconic defeat. “Really? You hit her?” Isabelle turned her head toward Dottie, who nodded.
“Slapped her arm.” Dottie patted her own upper arm to indicate where, then rummaged through her pocketbook for a cigarette.
“Well.” Isabelle thought about this while she turned right at the stop sign. “A person reaches a point,” she said generously, unexpectedly.
“So Lenora spit at her.” Fat Bev offered this from the back seat, as though encouraged by Isabelle’s accommodating attitude.
“Oh, my Lord.”
“You can’t blame her,” Dottie eventually said, sighing. “I did hit her.”
“It’s different though,” Isabelle responded, still feeling nervous about her driving skills, particularly since thinking of grown women hitting and spitting left her somewhat shaky. (Good Lord, she thought.) “Hitting seems slightly different somehow. Of course it’s wrong to hit,” Isabelle added quickly, the image of driving small children again going through her head as she turned down the road that would lead to Dottie’s house. “But at least”—she hesitated, searching for the words—“at least it’s clean. But spitting. My word.”
“Dottie called her a pimple-face,” Bev reported from the back seat, and Dottie, without looking at Isabelle, nodded glumly to confirm this.
“A ‘disgusting pimpled-faced pig,’ ” Dottie said, as though to make the record accurate. She dragged deeply on her cigarette.
“Oh dear,” Isabelle said. “Oh my.” She steered carefully down the narrow, rural road. “Oh my,” she said again.
“Next left,” Dottie directed.
The driveway was long, winding its way down toward the river. It was a nice spot, really, with the fields all around and the clusters of maple trees before the house. The place had been in the family, Isabelle knew; Dottie couldn’t afford a house like this now. It needed some work, she saw, pulling up toward the front door. The porch railing on one side was actually falling down; the gray paint had been blistering long before this summer. That disturbed Isabelle, as did the sight of a rusty truck that appeared not to have moved in years, settled in among the weeds further down beyond the house.
“Let’s just sit for a moment,” Dottie said, with a shy, questioning look at Isabelle.
“Sure,” said Isabelle. She turned the car off.
They sat quietly in the baking, colorless heat. Sweat beaded on Dottie’s face, and Isabelle, glancing at her cautiously, said suddenly, “Dottie, you’ve lost weight.” It was herself she recognized as she said this, the way Dottie’s arm took up so little space coming from the sleeve of her blouse; Isabelle had noticed this about her own arm recently in the reflection of the window of the A&P.
Dottie nodded indifferently.
“I thought people gained weight after a hysterectomy,” Bev said, from where she sat confined in the back seat. “When Chippie got spayed, she blew up big as a table.”
Dottie leaned her head far back on the car seat, as though she were in a dentist’s chair and resigned to it. “I’ve been spayed,” she said. “Oh God.” She began to rock her head slowly back and forth.
“Dottie. I’m awful sorry.” Bev tossed her cigarette out the window onto the gravelly driveway and leaned forward to touch her friend’s shoulder. “Shit,” she said, “the stupid things people say.” And then to Isabelle: “Pardon my French.”
Isabelle gave a tiny shake of her head, a little tightening of her lips to indicate, Don’t be silly, Bev—for heaven’s sake, say whatever words you like. (Though she did somehow, really, not like the word “shit.”)
But Dottie was crying. “It’s okay, really,” she said, tears running down beside her nose. “I don’t care, really.”
“Oh Godfrey, I could kill myself,” Bev said, genuinely distressed at having used the word “spayed”; sweat broke out anew along her neck and face. She sat back, plucking the front of her blouse away from her skin. “Dottie Brown, you needed that operation. You couldn’t continue your life bleeding to death every month. That cyst in there was the size of a cantaloupe.”
Dottie kept rolling her head against the back of the car seat. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s more than that.”
Bev and Isabelle glanced at each other, then both looked vacantly out the windows, eyed their fingernails, snuck a peek at Dottie again; they waited patiently. Bev, sweating profusely now, did not dare open the car door, did not dare interfere with whatever Dottie might have to say, though Bev’s legs inside her slacks felt drenched, and she suspected when the time came to get out of the car it would look as though she had wet her pants.
“It could have been a dream,” Dottie finally said. “I don’t know if I saw it. I’d just been reading about someone over near Hennecock who said they’d seen a UFO, and then I fell asleep. In the hammock that day. It could have been a dream.”
Bev leaned forward again. “That’s okay,” she said. “Dreams can be awful real.” She was hugely relieved to have Dottie make this confession, but Isabelle, who had a better view of Dottie’s face from where she sat in the driver’s seat, felt a wave of foreboding pass through her.
“It’s all right,” Fat Bev said earnestly, continuing to pat Dottie’s shoulder.
Dottie closed her eyes. The eyelids, to Isabelle, seemed very naked, as though some private part of Dottie was being exposed by their thin fleshiness there on her face. She said, “Nothing’s all right.”
“It’ll blow over,” Bev assured her. “Everyone’s cranky with this heat. Few more weeks no one will mention it again. Those dodos in the office will find something else—”
Isabelle held up her hand, shaking her head to Fat Bev. Dottie’s eyes were still closed; she was rocking her body slowly back and forth. Isabelle exchanged a look of alarm with Bev; then she leaned over and placed her hand around Dottie’s thin wrist.
“Dottie, what is it?” Isabelle whispered this.
Dottie opened her eyes and looked into Isabelle’s face. Her mouth opened, then closed; two gummy white bits of saliva clung to her lips. Again Dottie opened her mouth, again it closed, again she shook her head. Isabelle moved her hand slowly up and down the distressed woman’s arm.
“It’s okay, Dottie,” Isabelle whispered again. “You’re not alone. We’re right here.” She said this because it was her own greatest fear—to be alone with grief; but why it was she said anything, why, after having known Dottie Brown for years at a polite, unwavering distance, she had now succumbed to a position of such intimacy as to be stroking this poor woman’s arm in a car that was virtually an oven on this workday afternoon, she could hardly have said. But the words seemed to have an effect, some plug in Dottie seemed loosened, for she began to sob softly and instead of shaking her head, she nodded. After a moment she wiped her face with her hand, tears smeared childishly across her fingers. “Do you have any paper?” she asked. “Paper and pen?”
Both Bev and Isabelle immediately rummaged through their purses and in a moment a pen, an old envelope, and a tissue were collectively produced and placed in Dottie’s moist hand.
As Dottie wrote, Isabelle exchanged a surreptitious glance with Bev, and Bev nodded slightly as though to indicate that this was good; this terrible anguish, these labor pains, really, were finally producing … what?
Dottie stopped writing and lit a cigarette, then handed the envelope to Isabelle, who didn’t want to usurp Bev’s position as the “real” friend and so made s
ure to hold the envelope in a way that Bev could see it also. It did not take long to read.
Bev sucked in her breath; a chill wrapped itself around her sweating body. Isabelle, with her heart beating very quickly, folded the envelope in half and then in half again, as though to hide the offending words. Tears tumbled down Bev’s face. “I hate him,” she said, quietly. “Sorry, Dottie, but I hate him.”
Dottie turned partway around to see Bev.
“I’m sorry,” Bev repeated, when she saw Dottie looking at her. “He’s your husband, and I’ve known him for years, and you’re my best friend so I have no right to say it, no business saying it, but I’m going to say it again. I hate him.”
“It’s okay,” Dottie said. “I do too.” She turned forward in her seat again. “Except I don’t.”
Isabelle was silent. She stared at the dashboard, at the radio dial. Dottie, she knew, had three sons. They must be in their twenties by now; she knew they no longer lived at home. One of them, she remembered, had gone down to Boston and was thinking of marrying some girl. Isabelle gazed through the windshield at the house spread out before her and pictured Dottie as a young wife and mother many years ago, a home full of noise and activity, Christmas mornings with the five of them (no, six of them at least—she supposed that Bea Brown was present quite often), Dottie busy, always so much to do.
“That’s your whole life,” Isabelle said to Dottie.
Dottie looked at her sadly, and in her moist blue eyes there seemed to be something extraordinarily lucid as she gazed at Isabelle. “That’s right,” she said.
“And while you were in the hospital,” Bev said with quiet awe. “Oh, Dottie. That’s awful.”
“Yes.” Dottie’s voice sounded vague and transcendent now; although most likely it was simply fatigue.
Bev herself felt ill. “Let’s go in,” she said, opening the car door. (Finally.) “Sitting in this heat we might die.” She meant it; she was fully aware of certain facts regarding her health: she was fat and she smoked; she never exercised; she was not exactly young anymore; and she had just in this terrible heat suffered a shock. It would not be any great surprise to the universe if she did keel over and die right now, and if she did, she thought bitterly, heaving herself from the car and seeing little black dots swim before her eyes (her pants were indeed wet) she would blame it entirely and exactly on Wally Brown.