Amy and Isabelle

  In the far corner Fat Bev and Dottie worked quietly, Bev keeping a cautious eye on her friend, ready to murmur a word of support when she saw tears brim up in Dottie’s eyes. “Hang in there, Dot,” she said now. “It’ll get better. Time helps. Time always helps.”

  Dottie smiled. “The way to eat an elephant,” she said. “But I got some indigestion with this one, I can tell you.”

  “Sure you do.” Bev shook her head in sympathy. “Let’s call Isabelle. See what she’s up to today.”

  But Isabelle wasn’t home. She had taken Amy to get her hair trimmed. “Shaped,” Isabelle was telling the woman at Ansonia’s Hair Salon, “just see if it can’t be shaped a bit.” The woman nodded silently and steered Amy toward the back to get shampooed, while Isabelle sat up front flipping through magazines she found there. In two days Amy would start school again; they were going shopping for clothes after her hair was done. Meanwhile Isabelle held an open magazine on her lap and stared out the window at the people walking by. It always seemed to her odd to be out in the world on a workday; it surprised her each time to see how much life went on outside the office room: people walking into the bank, holding closed their sweaters or jackets on this chilly day; two mothers pushing strollers down the sidewalk; a man stopping to check in his pocket for a slip of paper that he glanced at before starting to walk again. Where were these people headed? What were their different lives like?

  Amy, draped in a plastic cape, was staring straight ahead in the mirror while the woman clipped away. Still wet, her hair looked dark and short, but when the blow-dryer whirred Isabelle could see Amy’s hair begin to fluff out in a curved shape below her ears, the different shades of blond and gold appearing again. She was gratified to notice the momentary pleasure in the girl’s face. The new hairstyle made her look grown-up; startling to see the girlishness gone. The hairdresser, pleased with the outcome, said, “Let’s just put a touch of makeup on.”

  “Oh, go ahead,” Isabelle called out from her chair, seeing Amy’s reticence and knowing that it of course stemmed from the imagined disapproval of her mother. Isabelle smiled and nodded again, then looked out the window once more. Awful to think she was a disapproving mother. Awful to wonder—had she always frightened Amy? Is that why the girl had grown up so fearful, always ducking her head? It was bewildering to Isabelle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious. But it was a terrible feeling. More terrible than having Avery Clark forget to come to her house. Knowing that her child had grown up frightened. Except it was cockeyed, all backwards, because, thought Isabelle, glancing back at her daughter, I’ve been frightened of you.

  Oh, it was sad. It wasn’t right. Her own mother had been frightened too. (Isabelle’s foot was bobbing quickly, in tiny little jerks.) All the love in the world couldn’t prevent the awful truth: You passed on who you were.

  Isabelle put the magazine back in the rack. Dear Evelyn, she composed in her head. Many years have passed, and I hope this letter finds you in good health. May I apologize for once again intruding in your life …

  She looked up, startled at the young woman standing before her, tall and unfamiliar, eyes blinking slowly once, twice. “Okay, Mom,” Amy said. “I’m done.”

  They were shy with each other, uncertain, as they moved down the sidewalk. A nippy wind from the river lifted Isabelle’s skirt for a moment as they stood gazing in the window of a shoe store. “They’re kind of expensive,” Amy said, as her mother indicated a pair in front of them.

  “It’s all right,” Isabelle answered. “Try them on at least.”

  The store was carpeted and empty, quiet as a church. The salesman bowed slightly and disappeared into the back to find a pair in Amy’s size.

  “But do you think she would have told them about me?” Amy blurted out in a whisper, sitting down next to Isabelle. “I know you don’t know, but do you think she did?”

  So it was this that had been on her mind, these busy thoughts about Jake Cunningham’s kids. “Honey, I don’t know.” Isabelle felt she had to whisper too. “I was a child the last time I saw that woman. I don’t know enough about her to know what she would do. I don’t know anything about her at all, really.”

  “But you’ll write?”

  “Yes, soon.” And then as the salesman returned, “Tonight.”

  The man kneeled before Amy as he slipped the shoes on her feet; and then later, when he took them in their box up front to the register, Amy said, “The girl’s name was Callie?”

  “Yes, short for Catherine, I believe.”

  “Callie Cunningham,” said Amy, running her fingers through her newly shaped hair. “Boy, that’s just so cute.”

  ISABELLE REWROTE THE letter many times that night, and mailed it the next day. After that there was nothing to do but wait. A terrible thing to wait for a letter; each day formed around the morning of hopefulness and the evening’s fog of disappointment. It was a wound, the disappointment, inflicted every afternoon at the same time. The scant containings of a mailbox pulled open by Amy on her way up the driveway from school provided only a bill or two, a reminder from the dentist that Isabelle needed a cleaning. How dreary the world was when all that greeted one was the promise of a new set of luggage if you filled out a certain sweepstake form. How oddly silent this kind of rejection, a simple emptiness of space, a persistent arrival of quiet, a disk of “nothingness” surrounded by vapors of speculation. Perhaps Evelyn Cunningham didn’t live there anymore. (But the letter would be returned—Isabelle’s return address was there on the envelope.) Perhaps the letter got lost in a post office or on the street, or was collecting dust right now beneath some Californian stairwell.

  They stopped mentioning it after a while.

  It rained a lot that fall. The rains were harsh and strong and steady, as though in a hurry to make up for the long pause of the stultifying summer. Now the river seemed immense, churning, roiling, thundering over the slabs of granite, its muddy darkness rushing beneath the bridge. It was tempting to stand and watch, and sometimes on the morning after a heavy rain a pedestrian or two could be seen leaning over the railing on the sidewalk of the bridge, staring down, as though mesmerized by the power of this river.

  Isabelle, driving over the bridge on her way to work, would wonder fleetingly if the person was thinking of jumping. Even knowing that such a thing was unlikely (only once while she had been living in Shirley Falls had a person jumped off the bridge, a poor drunken man, late one night), she would watch for a moment in her rearview mirror, for Isabelle’s habit of expecting disaster had not left her—nor would it ever, entirely. No, Isabelle was still Isabelle.

  And yet she was different, of course. She had to be: there were people in Shirley Falls now—Bev, Dottie, Amy—who knew that she had never been married, that she had become pregnant at the age of seventeen by her father’s best friend. It was like removing some dark undergarment that had been pressed to her middle for years; she felt exposed, but cleaner. Both Dottie and Bev, and Amy as well, had said they wouldn’t tell anyone, but Isabelle had only responded, “That’s up to you.” She didn’t want them bearing the burden of secretiveness—although she could not help wondering who, if anyone, they had told. Still, it was amazing after years of sitting tightly on this shame, how little she cared now if other people knew. Partly because Dottie and Bev, and even Amy, had not seemed to judge her the way she thought they would, but mostly Isabelle had other things on her mind.

  Like Amy. She hurt for Amy. It was searing, at times terrible, when she saw the quiet anxiety in Amy’s eyes. Having spent the long hot summer reeling from Amy’s betrayal, Isabelle entered the shortened days of autumn with a sickening sense sometimes that Amy had only narrowly missed some very grave danger, and that far from Amy’s having “betrayed” Isabelle, it was closer to the truth the other way around. The memory of the evening she had cut off Amy’s hair rose in her mind at times now with an increased sense of dismay; th
at she had done it was irrevocable, and it was the starkness of that fact which bothered her the most. What we do matters is a thought Isabelle had again and again, as though just now, well into adult years, she was figuring this out.

  But there were times, too, when Amy’s face was clear, her eyes steady in their gaze, the new hair shaped around her chin, and Isabelle caught a glimpse of who Amy might become, who she might already be, and it was reassuring, comforting.

  And then of course there was Avery Clark, and of course that was weird. He had not mentioned again the forgotten invitation, and she had no idea if he thought of it. But when he returned to work after being laid up with a bad cold toward the end of September, Isabelle brought him a basket of oranges.

  “Look at that,” Avery said, when she put the basket down on his desk. “Isn’t that nice.” His nose was flaky, and very red.

  “Well,” said Isabelle. “I thought you could use the vitamin C.”

  “I certainly can,” he agreed.

  She could not tell if this gift made him uncomfortable or not. But it seemed to her a necessary thing to do. For her, the gesture signified, somehow, a tidying-up of messy things, as though being able to give him these oranges had now swept something clean.

  “And I liked their color,” she added, because this was true—the vivid, tightly packed skin of these small globes.

  “Oh, yes,” Avery said. “Very nice. Thank you, Isabelle.”

  So who was this man, anyhow? A tall figure, shuffling through papers as he stood at his desk. His eyes, when she glanced into them, seemed only watery, small, and old. When she tried now to imagine what food he ate for dinner, what sort of underwear he wore … well, she could not.

  But at night, sometimes, in the dark, she still yearned for him, remembering him as he had been to her: important, kind, someone to love.

  She had wanted someone to love, so there was this sensation of something central missing from her life, and she knew that if he should suddenly encourage her, lean forward and whisper a long suppressed endearment in her ear, fix his watery eyes on her with longing, she would respond immediately. But of course Avery Clark did not encourage her, and the air between them in the office room (or church) remained stale, dull, uncharged.

  Once or twice, oddly, she had even sat behind her typewriter and simply felt free—there was no simpler way to put it. It was like after a thunderstorm when the air seemed suddenly relieved of a headache. Such a feeling, such clarity, took her by surprise. How different not to have life oppressive! To not be frightened by the sight of Barbara Rawley in the hardware store. (“Hello, Barbara,” moving past her easily.) To not feel that every little thing was a burden. The begonia on her desk at work, for example. Instead of something that would dry up and die without her care, she saw it now as a pretty thing, a little plant with blossoms. And her love for Dottie and Bev, along with a tender enough affection for the rest of the women, made the office room thick with human detail, not a barren place at all.

  Isabelle would leave. She saw this in these moments of clarity, recognized how her warmth for those around her stemmed partly from a growing distance.

  But she didn’t know yet what she would do, or when it was she would leave this office room where she had been sitting for fifteen years. She knew she would have to leave before the routine of these days caused her desk, her work, the lunchroom, Avery Clark, to take on significance once more. There was going to come a day when she would have to hoist herself up and out, she was aware of that, but right now as she stood up and moved to Avery’s fishbowl with a letter for him to sign, she felt her legs in their pantyhose, the comfortable slight tilt of her black pumps as they stepped against the wooden floor, the simple, un-exalted feeling of coherence.

  And then it would disappear, and she would worry about Amy again and wonder why Evelyn Cunningham had never answered her letter, and she would long, again, for Avery Clark. And sometimes then she would think about praying, because she had not prayed for a very long time, not since earlier in the hot summer when she would come home from work and lie on her bed and pray for God’s love and guidance. She could not do that now. It had seemed phony even back then, but she hadn’t known what else to do. So now she did nothing. It was not that she had given up on God (no, no) or that she thought God had given up on her (no …), it was more that she was aware of some large and fundamental ignorance deep within her, a bafflement that lived, not uncomfortably, with whatever else she might be feeling; and she accepted this.

  AT SCHOOL AMY’S new hairstyle and a certain edge to her face, a quiet defiance as she moved through the hallways, brought attention that surprised her. She was invited to a party and Isabelle let her go. (“Parties suck,” Stacy warned her, puffing on a cigarette in their spot in the woods. “I don’t think I’ll go. Josh and I will probably just hang out at his house that night.”

  And what did that mean, Amy wondered, remembering the book on sex that Josh had bought Stacy last summer. What did you do when you hung out at your boyfriend’s house?)

  The party, held at the home of a boy whose parents had gone to Boston for the weekend, appalled her. People lay sprawled on couches, beds, floors, drinking bottles of beer, their expressions ironic, almost bored. Cigarette smoke filled the rooms as Amy, holding a beer someone handed her, moved cautiously through the house pretending to look for a bathroom. What surprised her most were the people making out, how many of them were not the couples seen walking together in the hallways at school but appeared instead to be a random matching-up of this person with that. Stepping out the back door she saw Sally Pringle, the deacon’s daughter, French-kissing the pimply-faced Alan Stewart, a bottle of liquor protruding from the pocket of Sally’s leather jacket. And further away from the house, on the edge of the lawn, she saw other couples, some lying down, boys moving on top of girls the way Mr. Robertson in the woods had moved on top of her. But she loved him! Did these people love each other? Alan Stewart now was pressing Sally Pringle against the side of the house, her leg lifted around his waist—no, they couldn’t love each other, groping madly right there for anyone to see.

  Passing back through the kitchen, Amy saw Karen Keane, hair mussed, cheeks bright, buttoning her blouse and saying with a deep giggle, “Guess who just had oral sex three times.”

  Amy called Paul Bellows and he came right away and drove her home.

  OH, SHIRLEY FALLS—the darkness coming sooner, one more season passing, one more summer gone; nothing was forever, nothing. Poor Peg Dunlap, rushing down the sidewalk to meet her lover, rushing, rushing, thinking of her big-boned ten-year-old daughter, who had quit Girl Scouts because she had no friends, thinking of her nine-year-old son, who had friends but failing scores on every single math test, and her husband, who said there was no problem, they were normal kids, just let them be. Rushing, rushing, as though to press her nakedness against another’s flesh were the only comfort left. But why, thought Peg Dunlap, rushing down the street, should love be so hard?

  And love was hard. Barbara Rawley believed her husband when he said he didn’t care about the scar running from beneath her arm across the flattened breastbone; but then why wasn’t it comforting to lie next to him at night? Life is what mattered, and love. But she felt angry, and she was ashamed of feeling angry. Still, she was privately sickened by herself every time she undressed; she was not what she used to be.

  And why did it have to be agony for Puddy Mandel to love Linda Lanier? Because he loved his mother, too, and she did not love Linda. (But dear Linda would bear this patiently—taking him for the next thirty years into her heart, her bed, she would forgo the children she had always dreamed of, to live out her old age with this man, would mother him when, old himself, he was finally motherless.)

  Most of them did the best they could. Is that fair to say? Most of them did the best they could, the people of Shirley Falls. I have no regrets, you could sometimes hear a person say at one of those ritual gatherings—a birthday celebration, a retirement party at
the mill—but who was it that had no regrets? Certainly not Dottie Brown, lying in bed at night, remembering times when her husband had needed love, and she had not given love to him. Certainly not Wally himself, who lay next to Althea Tyson in their white trailer, afraid to fall asleep sometimes because of the dreams that came to him.

  And not Isabelle Goodrow either, who, in spite of moments of coherence and hope, watched her daughter’s anxious face in the evenings and knew that she had failed the girl in numerous ways; who, in driving to a small cemetery in Hennecock and hunting out a small girl’s grave, knew that she was placing flowers there not only for the murdered child, but somehow for her own child, too, and for the mother of Debby Kay Dorne, who Isabelle imagined was living her own lifetime of private, ravaging regrets.

  AND THEN NEAR the end of October, a letter came. It was a Saturday and Isabelle, having just returned from the A&P, stood in the kitchen with her coat on and read the letter immediately. Amy sat with her eyes closed, until her mother said, “Amy, your sister wants to meet you.”

  Evelyn Cunningham apologized for not having answered Isabelle’s letter sooner. She had been in the hospital with pleurisy and only received the letter recently. She hoped Isabelle hadn’t felt “snubbed” as a result of the delay. Isabelle, reading this again over Amy’s shoulder, felt tears come to her eyes at this (she felt) undeserved openheartedness. The three Cunningham children, now grown, of course, had been told a few years ago of the existence of “the baby.” They were eager, particularly Catherine, the oldest, to meet their half-sister. Catherine was married and lived back in New England, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and she’d just had a new baby. The boys were still in California. (“They don’t call her Callie anymore?” Amy asked. “I guess not,” Isabelle said, and together they kept reading.) On the last weekend in October the whole family would be meeting in Stockbridge for the baptism of Catherine’s baby, and would Isabelle care to bring Amy down for a visit one day on that weekend? She knew it was short notice, and Evelyn ended the letter with an apology: She had often thought of Isabelle and “the baby girl” over the years, but her feelings had been “raw” for some time. For this she apologized. Time changes things, she wrote. Water over the dam. She and her children wanted to extend warm greetings to Isabelle and “Jake’s daughter.” She hoped Isabelle would agree to visit Catherine on that Saturday, and that they would all meet each other soon. She enclosed Catherine’s telephone number.