Oh, she felt sick.
“I don’t care if I die,” Dottie said this in the same transcendent voice, still sitting in the car.
“I know.” Bev opened Dottie’s door and took her arm. “But you might care later on. And besides …” Here tears came from Bev’s eyes again as she felt the lightness of Dottie’s weight, the astonishing thinness of her arm, saw the red-rimmed blue eyes of this woman she had known for so long, and it was suddenly Dottie’s death that seemed real and near and possible, not her own. “I would miss you like hell,” Bev finished. “Would miss you like shit, Dottie Brown.”
All of this was awkward for Isabelle. She had no idea if it was intended that she would go inside the house, or if, most likely, Bev would take over from here. Yet it seemed impolite to simply drive away, having witnessed something so personal.
“Isabelle,” said Dottie, outside the car now, standing next to Fat Bev and peering back through the open window to Isabelle. “Come in the house. I’d like you to.”
Bev’s voice overlapped Dottie’s. “Yes, Isabelle. By all means you come on inside too.”
The kitchen confused her; Isabelle’s immediate reactions were confused. On one hand, the room was lovely; the big windows over the sink showed pale fields in the distance, and closer up a row of geraniums sat on the windowsill. A collection of hand-painted mugs on a shelf seemed familiar and homey, and so did the rocking chair that sat near a cluttered bookshelf, where the long vines of philodendron leaves spilled down. The gray cat sleeping in the rocking chair fit the picture as well, and yet Isabelle could not help but be, on some level, put off. For the room smelled “cattish” to her, and sure enough, there was a litter box (a quick glance left the afterimage of brown clumps right there in the gravelly rocks—how could someone live with such a thing in their kitchen?). Almost as disturbing was the fact that the plaster walls of the room had holes in them. And ragged strips of wallpaper showed. Surely they were renovating this room, Isabelle thought, looking around discreetly, though no mention of this was made by either Dottie or Bev.
Dottie had gone straight to the rocking chair and dumped the cat out, and then seated herself with a kind of finality, immediately lighting a cigarette and flicking the match into one of the geranium pots. “Iced tea’s in the fridge,” she murmured, closing her eyes and exhaling.
Fat Bev, clearly at home here (and Isabelle was envious of this, of a friendship so intimate that one moved about someone else’s kitchen as if it were one’s own), produced a glass of iced tea and handed it to Dottie. “Drink,” she commanded. “Drink fluids, Dot. Keep yourself hydrated.” Dottie opened her eyes and took the glass wearily.
“He says think of all the good times we had together.” Dottie looked confused. “But he doesn’t understand. There are no good times now. There are no good memories.”
“Of course,” said Bev, placing a glass of iced tea in front of Isabelle, interrupting herself momentarily to admonish Isabelle with the use of a quick, authoritative expression, that she ought to be drinking fluids as well. “I can see that. Of course. Just like a man not to get it. They’re morons, they really are.”
Isabelle sipped her tea. (It needed sugar but she’d never ask.) After a moment she said slowly, “I can see how it would spoil all your memories.” And she could. She could easily see that. God knew she could see how one’s entire life could be taken apart, and that Dottie’s life was being taken apart right now, almost in front of Isabelle’s eyes. It’s what Isabelle had meant, really, when she said in the car to Dottie, “That’s your whole life.” And that was why Dottie’s blue eyes had been so lucid for a moment in their answer, because it was true. A whole life built together with this man, every year a new layer added—until what?
“You must feel gutted,” Isabelle said quietly, and here Dottie shot her a look of earnest gratitude, but Isabelle was suddenly thinking of something else, picturing something she had not pictured before (not really): a woman, a mother, standing in a kitchen in California on a hot summer day, planning her weekend, perhaps, baking a cake for her husband, living the normal life she had lived for years—the telephone ringing—and then the roof of her life collapsed.
Isabelle touched her mouth, perspiration breaking out over her face, under her arms. She gazed at the stupefied Dottie in her rocking chair and had the sense of visibly witnessing a disaster, a house left in shambles, as though an earthquake had struck.
But it wasn’t any earthquake, it wasn’t any “act of God.” No, you couldn’t blame these things on God. It was people, just ordinary, regular people, who did this to each other. People ruined other people’s lives. People simply took what they wanted, just as this Althea who worked at Acme Tire Company wanted Wally Brown and got him.
Isabelle uncrossed her legs so quickly the chair beside her almost fell over, and she lunged forward to grab it, steadying it with both hands, giving a quick apologetic look to the two women. Althea was twenty-eight years old, Isabelle told herself—a fully matured woman, old enough to know what wreckage her actions could leave. Didn’t that make a difference?
“Wally and I were friends,” Dottie was saying, with bewilderment. “I said that to him. I said, Wally, I know we’ve had our differences over the years, but I always thought we were friends.”
“What did he say?” Bev wanted to know. She was drinking a beer herself, straight from the can. She leaned her head back to drink again, then placed the beer on the table, turning it slowly in her hand.
“He said I was right, that we were friends.” Here Dottie looked beseechingly at Isabelle and Bev. “But friends don’t do that to each other.”
“No,” Bev said.
“No,” Isabelle said, more quietly than Bev.
“So then we weren’t friends.”
“I don’t know,” Isabelle said. “I don’t know anything.”
“I don’t know anything either,” Dottie said.
Then you’re both stupid, Bev wanted to say. Because there’s no mystery to this. Some men, and some women (picturing the tall, sallow-faced Althea), are simply pieces of shit. Bev didn’t say this; she finished her beer and lit a cigarette.
Chapter
21
IT WAS STILL hot, and everything still seemed colorless, or at least not colorful the way it was supposed to be. Goldenrod growing alongside the road looked dirty and bent over, not yellow at all, more a soggy orange in the nubbliness of the drooping stems. Fields filled with black-eyed Susans had a blighted look where the petals of these plants had not grown to their full size, or in some cases not even unfolded, leaving only a brown eye on a hairy stalk. Vegetable stands by the road competed with each other by advertising WE HAVE CORN!!! on hand-painted signs, though actually the ears of corn tossed into weathered bushel baskets were often the size of slim garlic pickles, and customers who had pulled over feeling hopeful stood fingering the small ears uneasily. There was something vaguely obscene and disquieting about the inability of these ears of corn, wrapped tightly in their pale green husks, to reach the fullness that was meant to be. People either bought them or didn’t, though; the farmers’ wives either commented or didn’t; life was either going to continue or not; people were awfully tired of it by now. Tired and hot.
But sometimes, with all the windows rolled down, a breeze could be felt passing through the front seat of Paul Bellows’s new car, especially when Amy was riding down narrow, out-of-the-way roads with him, where the spruce trees and pines pressed in from both sides; then there might actually be a breath of cool dampness, a quick pungent smell of earth and pine needles that gave Amy a queer thrill straight down into her middle. It was Mr. Robertson she wanted of course.
But what impressed her about Paul was the freedom he brought, the way he drove around without any plans. And he was kind to her. “You like doughnuts?” he asked her one day.
“I love doughnuts,” Amy said.
His smiles appeared genuine, boyish, and always a bit disconnected, as though they came a split s
econd late. This seemed true of most of his reactions—a little schism, a tiny pause—and it was this that prevented intimacy. What they had instead was an arrangement, an unspoken acknowledgment that their minds were on other people.
In a doughnut shop at the traffic circle on the outskirts of town, Paul smoked Marlboros and drank coffee and watched with his pleasant, disconnected smile as Amy finished her second doughnut. Because Marlboros were too strong for her (she shuddered as she inhaled), he bought her at the cash register a pack of the kind she used to smoke in the woods with Stacy, and he said Amy could keep them in his cubbyhole since she was afraid to take them home and have them discovered.
“I can pay you back,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it.” He touched her back lightly as they walked across the parking lot.
Once in the car he put the key in the ignition and then reached beneath the seat and brought out a box, an old-fashioned cigar box with a top that flipped open. “Look at this,” he said, and she leaned toward him. It was a collection of foreign coins and jewelry, but what caught her eye especially was a pair of women’s earrings; on each gold wire was a small strip of gold, inlaid with pearls and pale green stones, and then at the bottom of this strip a small red stone, so that the earrings looked like a pair of exquisite exclamation marks.
“Oh, those are gorgeous,” Amy said, picking them out of the box, turning them slowly in her hand.
“You want them?” Paul asked. “Take them.”
She shook her head, dropping the earrings back in the cigar box. “Where did you get this stuff?”
When he didn’t answer, when he half-smiled and gazed down at the box, she realized he must have stolen it.
“You know anything about old coins?” he said, picking one of them up. “Or whatever these things are.”
She took it from him to be polite, turning it over in her palm. “No, I don’t know anything about stuff like this.”
He took the coin back, looked at it indifferently, then dropped it in the box. “I thought maybe I could sell them, except who buys this shit?”
“Take it to Boston,” Amy suggested. “Maybe some place down there.”
He stared at the box in his lap. There was fatigue in his face, as though the contents of the cigar box were burdensome. “Sure you don’t want these earrings?” he asked again. “They’d look real nice on you.”
Again she shook her head. “I don’t have pierced ears,” she explained. “Those are for pierced ears.”
“Oh, yeah.” He looked from the earring to her earlobe, leaning forward to look carefully. “How come? You scared it will hurt?” The question was sincere, nonjudging.
“My mother won’t let me.”
“Oh.” Paul put the cigar box back under the seat and started the car. Then he pushed in the cigarette lighter and tapped out one of his Marlboros, so she opened the cubbyhole and took one of the cigarettes from the pack he had bought for her. They sat with cigarettes in their hands waiting for the lighter to pop out. She thought it was wonderful, being able to do that. Just have a cigarette when you felt like it.
He lit her cigarette first, which is what he always did, and then drove out of the parking lot, his own cigarette placed between his full lips. Back on the highway he drove fast.
“She thinks if you get your ears pierced you might as well get your nose pierced too,” Amy said, speaking loudly against the wind. “Something like that—I don’t know.” She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled, the smoke flying from her mouth. “She’s an asshole,” she concluded. “Is your mother an asshole?”
Paul shrugged. “No.” He rested his elbow on the open window and took his cigarette between his thumb and index finger. “She gets on my nerves though.”
Amy held her cigarette the way Paul did, stuck her elbow out the window the way he did.
For a long while they didn’t talk, until Paul said simply, “Stacy has pierced ears.”
When he kissed her she was not sorry. He had pulled into her driveway to drop her off, and she was aware as he leaned toward her (the kindhearted, disconnected smile on his full lips) that she had kissed Mr. Robertson in the very same spot. She experienced a fleeting sense of pride, not unlike when years earlier she had earned her Girl Scout badges—a kind of anxious relief that she had “collected” one more.
So now she was a young woman that men wanted. Not just one man but another one too: witness this in the full lips of Paul Bellows moving right now over hers. And witness too how she knew what to do; there was nothing tentative about her as she closed her eyes and accepted his tongue—old pros, both of them.
But it was different. Paul’s mouth was fleshier, softer, than Mr. Robertson’s had been. And there was not the hard urgency of desperate exploration, it was a much more leisurely thing, a friendly “swap of spit.” These words passed through her mind as she sat kissing him, and she wondered where she had heard the phrase. In the hallway of school probably, and then she pictured the hallway at school, the beige metal lockers all lined up; she thought how peculiar it was to be kissing someone while picturing a row of beige metal lockers. (Here she turned her head obligingly as Paul turned his.) And then she thought of those words again, “swapping spit,” and pictured being in the dentist’s chair when all the spit was collecting in her mouth and she was waiting for the dentist to use that little vacuum hose to suction it out. (Paul’s tongue moved back into his own mouth and in a moment they both sat back.)
“Sure you don’t want those earrings?” he asked. “Someday you might get your ears pierced.”
“Okay.” She felt bad she had been thinking about the dentist while kissing him.
IN THE EVENING she sat on the couch watching television and waiting for the evening to go by. She had thought that kissing someone else would be the same as kissing Mr. Robertson. That it would feel the same. She had thought that tongues and teeth and mouths touching each other would make her feel all dizzy and wonderful again. She had thought that while Mr. Robertson himself might not be available right now, at least the fun of making out with someone else could be.
She looked out the window. It was almost dark—the flickering of the television reflected in the windowpane.
“Really and truly,” Isabelle said from where she sat in the armchair, tugging on a ball of yarn, “I’ve never seen things at work this unpleasant before.”
Amy glanced at her briefly, not believing her. But she started thinking about the office room. She missed Fat Bev. She missed the lazy, jokey way the women in the office room had talked with one another.
“How unpleasant can it be?” Amy asked unpleasantly.
A different show came on the television set; Isabelle was allowing more and more TV. When the news was over, instead of turning off the set, as she usually did, she would watch whatever show came on next. Amy would usually sit in a corner of the couch, the way she was now, with her knees tucked up beneath her, a sullen scowl on her face. (“Get your feet off the couch, please,” Isabelle would say, and Amy would move her feet a few inches.)
Isabelle worked on her afghan, knitting needles flying, half-glasses perched on her nose as she stopped occasionally to peer at the magazine on the side table that contained the directions. Her legs were crossed and one foot bobbed constantly. In between glancing at the yarn or the directions in the magazine, she would give the television sidelong looks.
Amy couldn’t stand it. The stupid half-glasses, the bobbing foot, the pretended disdain for the television show when she was clearly watching it.
“I’d say pretty unpleasant,” Isabelle was answering now. “When Dottie Brown and Lenora come to blows in the bathroom. I’d call that pretty unpleasant.”
Amy picked at her toes and cast her mother a wary glance. “What kind of blows.”
Isabelle tugged at her yarn. “Physical blows.”
Amy picked her head up. “You’re kidding.”
“No. I’m not.”
“They were fighting in the bathroom???
?
“I’m afraid so.”
“Like pulling each other’s hair and stuff?”
Isabelle frowned. “Oh, Amy. For heaven’s sake, no.”
“Then what were they doing? Tell me.”
“It was simply unpleasant, that’s all.”
“Oh, come on, Mom.” Her mind went over faces from the office room. “I can’t see Lenora slugging anyone,” she said in a moment.
“No one slugged anyone,” Isabelle replied. “Dottie felt insulted by Lenora. And Lenora has been pretty nasty about the whole UFO business, I must say. So in the ladies’ room Dottie was apparently beside herself, and slapped Lenora on the arm.”
“A little slap?” Amy was disappointed.
“And then Lenora spit at her.”
“Really?”
Isabelle raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I was told. I didn’t witness it myself. ”
Amy pondered this. “It’s pretty queer,” she concluded, “for a woman to go around slapping the people she works with. You know what I think?”
“What do you think.” Isabelle sounded tired now; the perfunctoriness of her tone insulted her daughter.
“Nothing,” Amy said.
THE RAIN BEGAN during the night. It began softly; so softly that at first it did not seem to be falling from the sky as much as simply appearing in the darkened air. A man lurching from the doorway of a hotel bar on Mill Road swatted his hand in front of his face a few times as though finding himself in a cobweb. By the early hours of morning, though, the rain was tapping gently and steadily onto the open leaves of maples and oaks and birch trees, and those people—particularly the elderly, and the anxious—who each night woke about three, and often stayed awake until the sky began to lighten, found themselves wondering at first what that sound was; raising themselves onto an elbow, sitting up against the headboard of the bed, why it was rain, of course, and they lay back down, expectant and pleased, or fearful, depending on how they felt about thunderstorms, for it promised to be grand, this storm, huge, climatically complete after a summer as stultifying and humid as this one had been. The sky would crack and split and thunderous crashes would rearrange huge blocks of air as though the universe itself were in the throes of some vast quake.