• • •
“COOL,” SAID STACY. “But it might be boring. Relatives are usually boring.”
Amy smoked her cigarette. She hadn’t told Stacy that these were more than relatives, these were brothers and sisters. She didn’t know why she hadn’t told Stacy that, but she hadn’t, and she didn’t know how she could do it now. She had only said they were going that weekend to visit some long lost relatives of her father. She added, “I think my mother’s afraid they won’t like her.”
“Why wouldn’t they like her?” Stacy was not really interested, but who could blame her.
Amy shrugged. “My mother’s kind of shy.” Leaving it at that.
They smoked in silence; it was cold, overcast, autumnal. Most of the red leaves had fallen by now, scattered thickly on the ground, covering rocks and cold-looking ferns. Some trees were completely bare, brown twiggy outlines against the barren sky, though there were still a number of trees that had yellow leaves clinging to their branches, leaves that rattled crisply in the small bursts of autumn breeze.
The baby that Amy had glimpsed in the hospital’s nursery that summer was never mentioned out here in the woods. Nor was Paul Bellows, or the body of Debby Kay Dorne. There remained a deep affection between the girls, a familiarity that allowed them long moments of silence, but the urgent unhappiness of Stacy seemed gone, and her thoughts often appeared to be elsewhere as they smoked in the woods. Amy’s thoughts were elsewhere too. As though to compensate for this, they touched each other frequently, sometimes stroking for a moment the other’s hand, huddling their shoulders against each other as they leaned against the log, and when the bell rang, they packed away their cigarettes, then paused to press their faces together in a brief kiss.
(“Godfrey,” Fat Bev was murmuring to Isabelle in the hallway at the mill, “I hope you have a good trip down there.”)
IT WAS THE last day of daylight saving time. Here and there throughout the town different lights went on in different kitchens. Emma Clark had brought a cup of coffee back to bed, while Avery read the paper. Ned Rawley, having risen to urinate moments before, was now reaching for his wife, Barbara. Across the river Dottie Brown lay sleeping, relaxed by her thoughts in the middle of the night of how she would spend the day shopping with Bev; she would not have to be alone. Isabelle Goodrow sat at her kitchen table, listening to the sound of Amy in the shower upstairs, and watching the light arrive on the yellow ginkgo leaves outside the side window (seeing one, then another, then another of the leaves fall, knowing that when she returned the leaves would all be gone because ginkgoes did that—lost all their leaves almost at once).
For the rest of her life she would remember this day the way one remembers the last moments spent with a loved one, for in Isabelle’s memory, somehow, it seemed to her to be privately and profoundly the last day she “had” Amy. Always in her memory the leaves would be golden, the turnpike lined with golden-leaved trees, showered in the sunlight of morning, stiff with autumn.
Stepping out of the car to use a rest-stop bathroom, the sharp unrelenting air of autumn packed around them as they moved side by side without speaking; taking turns in the filthy toilet, one standing guard outside the blue door. Walking across the parking lot, Isabelle said, “Are you hungry, Amy? Would you like something to eat?” And Amy simply shook her head, not able to speak because of some swift, unarticulated compassion for her mother. But Isabelle in her memory, for the rest of her life, saw Amy’s indifferent shake of her head as proof that already the girl had been lost to her; already Isabelle’s basic attempts to mother (for what was more basic than feeding?) were being dismissed; already the girl felt herself handed over, already the girl was eager to go.
Although later, as they drew closer to the place they were going, Amy said she felt sick, and maybe they should stop to get some food. So it was in Howard Johnson’s that a man, paying at the cash register, glanced at Amy and continued to watch her as he was handed his change. Amy noticed, and watched as the man left the restaurant, watched as he turned his head at the door to glance at her again. She met his eye through the restaurant window, and in that fraction of a second Amy Goodrow’s life changed once more, for she had recognized her attractiveness to men, to older men, for this particular stranger had the faint beginnings of gray at his hairline. It was here, in a Howard Johnson’s on Route 93, that desire rose in her again, desire, and the power of her own desirability, and the half-formed knowledge that Mr. Robertson might be (in fact was) ultimately replaceable. Beneath her turtleneck Amy was conscious of her breasts tucked into their Sears bra, breasts that had been offered and would be offered again to men whose eyes became unfocused with longing. This power sent a thrill straight down her middle as she sat across from Isabelle, who was squinting at the menu and saying, “Honey, maybe you need a scrambled egg.”
Back in the car Amy and Isabelle looked at each other. Amy raised both eyebrows and drew her breath in sharply as she smiled, as though to say, “Okay, let’s go,” and for a moment they were united, as if they had both agreed to blast off in a rocket and it was countdown time. For years Isabelle would remember that moment and wish she had spoken, had told the girl she loved her and always would, because for Isabelle, as she pulled out onto the highway, it began to feel more and more that it was Amy who was blasting off, Amy who was leaving forever, that Isabelle was only there now to pilot the ship, deliver the girl into the lap of her family, of siblings, of relatives who were hers, not Isabelle’s.
They did not speak, but drove staring straight ahead.
Yes, Isabelle would remember this drive, the yellow leaves, the autumn goldenness. Long after Avery Clark had died of a heart attack sitting behind his desk in the fishbowl, long after Barbara Rawley had been arrested for shoplifting fourteen dollars’ worth of cosmetics from a local drugstore, years after Wally Brown had moved back in with Dottie, when Isabelle herself had been married to the kindly pharmacist for some time, she would remember this drive with Amy. It marked to her the endless days of Amy’s solitary childhood, and those endless hot days of that terrible summer. All that had once been endless would by then have ended, and Isabelle, at different places and moments in the years to come, would sometimes be surrounded by silence and find in herself only the repeated word “Amy.” “Amy, Amy”—for this was it, her heart’s call, her prayer. “Amy,” she would think, “Amy,” remembering this day’s chilly, golden air.
Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle
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