Amy and Isabelle

  “You are young adults now,” he continued. “There isn’t anyone in this room”—and here he paused, standing over by the windows, raising his shoulders while his hands jingled change in his corduroy pocket—“who needs to think of himself as a child again.”

  The class was not entirely won over, in spite of the man’s wonderful voice. They had not been thinking of themselves as children for quite some time, and they wondered if they were being patronized—though this was not the word that went through their minds.

  “You’ve arrived at a point in your lives,” he went on, “where you need to be questioning everything.”

  Amy wondered if the man might be a communist. With his beard and long hair, he might be leading up to the topic of marijuana, about to argue they should make it legal.

  “Question everything,” he repeated, moving an empty chair aside. His hands were large, as though nature had intended him to be a taller, bigger man, and there was something exquisitely gentle in the way he moved the chair. “Just for the mere exercise of the mind. That’s all. Just to keep your mind on its toes.”

  He might not be a communist.

  “Was it really Cheerios you wanted for breakfast this morning?” he asked, looking around at the class.

  He might just be weird.

  “Or did you eat those Cheerios simply from habit? Because your mother told you to.”

  Elsie Baxter, seated behind Amy, whispered loudly that she didn’t have Cheerios that morning, but Amy ignored her, and Flip Rawley scowled and rolled his eyes to let Elsie know she should shut up, and in this way votes were cast for Mr. Robertson.

  “Now,” said Mr. Robertson, in a different tone, convivial, friendly again, rubbing his hands together. “Where were we? I was hearing from you. I want to hear from you.”

  Kevin Tompkins thought he might be a lawyer. Stuttering, he said more than anyone could remember him saying before: His cousin had been raped when she was just a little girl and the guy had gotten off scot-free. So he wanted to be a lawyer. Mr. Robertson asked a lot of questions and listened attentively to Kevin, who answered, stuttering and licking his lips. “Isn’t life interesting,” Mr. Robertson finally said. The black hand of the clock on the wall made a tiny click and moved to the next number.

  He pointed his finger at Amy.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. What would you like to be?”

  She was almost dizzy. “I’d like to be a teacher,” she answered, but her voice was tight and might actually have quavered; horrible to hear her distress revealed in front of everyone. In front of him.

  Mr. Robertson looked at her for a long time. She blushed, glancing down at her desk, but when she looked up through her hair he was still gazing at her impassively. “Really?” he finally said.

  A wave of heat washed along her scalp. She saw how he ran his fingers slowly over his beard, a spot that was almost reddish in color, right below his lip. “But now, you see,” he said, holding her gaze thoughtfully, “I would have said an actress.”

  From the corner of her eye Amy felt Flip Rawley watching her with a curious interest. It could be the whole class was watching her that way. Mr. Robertson leaned back against the windowsill, as though he had all the time in the world to consider this. “Or a poet, perhaps.”

  It made her heart beat fast. How did he know about the poetry in the shoebox under her bed? How could he know that she had memorized the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay years ago, that she had walked to school on fall mornings filled with hope—O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!—and then walked home tired, discouraged, her feet scuffing to the words Sorrow like a ceaseless rain beats upon my heart. How could this man know that? And yet he did, for he had not assumed Maryanne Barmble was going to be a poet, had he? Nor Kevin Tompkins, with his stutter.

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Amy.”

  The man cupped his hand behind his ear, raising his eyebrows.

  “Amy,” she repeated, clearing her throat.

  “Amy. Amy what?”

  “Goodrow.”

  “Amy Goodrow.” He turned and walked to the front of the room again, leaning once more against the blackboard, a foot lifted casually behind him touching the wall. She assumed he was through with her now, his eyes were glancing over the classroom. But he suddenly said, “Amy, do you really want to be a teacher?” And she might have confessed that she would rather be a poet, if he hadn’t blundered then, if he hadn’t cocked his head and said, “Or is being a teacher just something your mother thinks is nice?”

  The truth of this offended her. It was, in fact, Isabelle’s idea that Amy be a teacher. Isabelle had wanted to be a teacher herself. There was nothing wrong with being a teacher, though. Amy had pictured herself doing this for most of her life.

  “I want to be a teacher,” she said quietly, and she could feel how he dismissed her then, with his casual “All right.”

  Sarah Jennings wanted to join the circus and become a clown. Mr. Robertson tilted his head in a friendly way and declared such yearnings noble.

  SHE BEGAN TO hate him. She hated how he would sit on his desk, one foot placed on his chair, rolling his shirtsleeves up. After that first day he never wore his jacket. Instead he loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves and tilted his head in what seemed a cocky way. She hated how he would run his chalk-dusted hand over the top of his curly hair, how he would hop down from his desk and walk quickly to the blackboard, writing numbers, drawing triangles, tapping the chalk so hard against the blackboard as he made his point that it would sometimes break in half, a piece flying to the floor, and sometimes he left it there, as though what he had to say was too important, too exciting, to bother with a silly piece of broken chalk.

  And she hated how her classmates liked him, how excited they got when he would suddenly ask a stupid, personal question. (Leaning over his desk, he stared at Elsie Baxter one day and said, “Do you sometimes get depressed?”) She hated how they fell for all of this. “Mr. Robertson,” she heard them say, “—yeah, he’s all right. He’s cool.” She thought he was probably a hypocrite.

  “He thinks he’s something special,” she complained to Stacy Burrows, as they lit their cigarettes at lunchtime out behind the school. Stacy was indifferent. She didn’t have Mr. Robertson—she was in the “dumb class,” with Mrs. Weatherby—but Stacy might have been indifferent anyway.

  “All men are rat-fucks,” she answered, blowing smoke through her nose.

  Amy told her mother that the substitute for Miss Dayble was a strange man with a beard.

  “Short?” her mother asked, washing out pantyhose in the bathroom sink.

  “You’ve seen him?” The thought was disconcerting.

  “No.” Her mother shook her head, draping the pantyhose over the shower nozzle to dry. “But short men often wear beards. It makes them feel more manly.” Amy liked how her mother could be smart about things. “Just do your work,” Isabelle advised. “That’s all that counts.”

  And she did, bending her head over her desk in the stuffy classroom, the radiators clanking in the corner, Flip Rawley next to her, no longer looking at her as though she might be some future actress, but instead rolling his large eyes sideways trying to copy her paper, and she tried to ignore it all, writing her equations neatly, her long, wavy hair managing to cover most of her face as she sat at her desk and worked.

  Until Mr. Robertson said one day, “Amy. Why do you hide behind your hair?”

  A pinprick of heat stabbed her armpit.

  He was leaning against the wall in a familiar pose: his arms crossed, one leg bent behind him with his foot pressed to the wall so that his barrel-like chest was thrust forward. The radiator in the corner made a knocking sound. Someone dropped a pencil.

  “You have a perfectly glorious head of hair,” Mr. Robertson said. “It’s the first thing anyone notices about you. But you hide behind it. We hardly ever get to see your face. Are you aware of that?”

  Of course she
was aware of it.

  “You’re like a turtle, Amy.” He was moving away from the wall. “Only instead of a shell, you have this carapace of hair.” The class laughed lightly at this, as though he had said something obscene (although none of them, including Amy, knew what the word “carapace” meant).

  “I saw a cartoon in a magazine recently,” Mr. Robertson continued, walking down the aisle toward his desk. “I saw this cartoon, Amy, and I thought of you.”

  A dull, nauseating ache filled her head.

  “Two turtles. One turtle has his neck out in a friendly way, the other turtle is all tucked up in his shell. And the friendly turtle is saying, Oh, come on out, everyone’s been asking about you.”

  The class laughed again. Mr. Robertson rapped his knuckles on his desk. “So come on out, Amy Goodrow. Everyone’s been asking about you.”

  The hatred she felt for him was so pure it was almost a relief, as though she might have been hating someone like that for years. She stared at her desk, tracing the numbers written on her paper and picturing her mother’s long neck, and she wanted to cry to think she was the offspring of a turtlelike creature, she wanted to cry that the same man who had seen the poet (the actress) in her had now compared her to a turtle.

  The bell rang, rattling through the room and ringing through the corridor, and the sound of classroom doors opening could be heard, banging against the walls. Chairs scraped, books dropped. He stopped her going out the door. “Amy,” he said, beckoning with his head, “I’d like to speak with you a minute.” She stopped obediently, her books held tightly to her chest. Students moved past her, some glancing briefly from her to Mr. Robertson.

  Mr. Robertson waited until the classroom was empty, and then he said quietly, so seriously that he might have been telling her a grave secret, “I’m afraid I offended you. It was not my intention and I extend apologies. I’m very sorry.”

  She looked past him, her head tilted. They were almost the same height. She rocked on the side of her foot so as to not seem so tall, but she was tall, she was as tall as he was short, and so there they were, their faces inches apart.

  “Friends?” he said, tilting his own head a bit as though to match the angle of hers.

  If only she were someone else. Karen Keane, let’s say. If she were Karen Keane she could make a playful face and say, “Oh, sure we’re friends,” and he would like her then; they could make a joke. But Amy said nothing. Even her expression didn’t change. She could feel how her face just hung there without moving, half hidden by her hair.

  “Okay,” he said, “we’re not friends, I see.” She heard the smallest glint of something hard, chrome-edged, in his voice. He turned and walked away.

  In the girls’ room she wrote an obscenity on the wall. She had never written anything on a wall before, and as the pen made gritty, wobbly lines, she felt an affinity for whoever it was that had vandalized the gym the year before, as though she were capable of breaking windows now herself, this one right here in the bathroom with wet snow sticking to its pane.

  The second bell rang. She was late for home ec class, and she had never been late to class before. But she wrote one more thing on the bathroom wall, because when you thought about it, the home ec teacher was an asshole too.

  HE LEFT HER alone after that, but math class made her anxious. For one thing, she began to understand math in a way she never had, and sometimes during those bleak January days, when the sky outside the classroom was an unrelenting gray, the twiggy black branches of the frozen lilac tree tapping on the window, it would occur to Amy to raise her hand to answer some question Mr. Robertson asked, although she never did. But it made her anxious, particularly when those students who raised their hands would get the answer wrong, and Mr. Robertson, waiting by the blackboard, a nub of chalk in his hand, would say, “Anyone else care to give it a try?” His eye might catch hers briefly, and at those times she longed to raise her hand, but she was afraid she would be wrong.

  She would not have been wrong. Mr. Robertson, turning back to the chalkboard, would go through the problem another time, or many times if he needed to, until he finally elicited from someone the answer that Amy would have given had she only dared.

  And he could be strict when he felt like it. Poor Alan Stewart, a pimply-faced, sullen boy who sat in the back, was kept after school one day simply for clicking his pen. Elsie Baxter, big and boisterous, with grease by her nose, was threatened with detention as well, after blowing huge bubbles of purple gum and having them pop all over her face. But she apologized and threw the gum away, and Mr. Robertson, becoming kind, made a gentle joke. Anyone could see from the color rising in her face that she had a crush on him. (“Elsie doesn’t come from much,” Amy’s mother said.)

  No one wanted to anger him. He was popular because he was different, and if his energy was somewhat capricious, it was worth the air of uncertainty just to sit in a classroom and not feel dead. Even Amy, who continued to hate him, had a hard time not feeling that. One day, explaining a certain theorem near the end of class, Mr. Robertson banged the blackboard with his fist. “Can’t you see the beauty of this?” he demanded of Alan Stewart who was yawning in the back row. “I’m telling you people, if you had any sensitivity, you would look at this and weep.”

  A few students laughed, but it was a mistake because Mr. Robertson scowled and said, “I’m serious, for God’s sake. You have three lines here. Three mere lines.” He retraced them with his chalk. “And yet look at the beauty they hold.” He seemed suddenly deflated then, and those students who had laughed now shifted in their seats.

  But Amy, gazing at what he had drawn on the board, had a thought slip into her head, a line of poetry she had once read: Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.

  Mr. Robertson, glancing over the class, rested his eyes for a moment on her. “What?” he said, tilting his chin in her direction—but he was tired, and the word was spoken sternly. Amy looked down and shook her head. “All right, then,” he sighed. “Class dismissed.”

  Amy’s head would be aching when she had her lunchtime cigarettes. The cigarettes made her dizzy, and she leaned against the fallen log watching as Stacy rummaged through her pockets for a match. “You okay?” Stacy squinted as she lit their second one.

  “I hate school.”

  Stacy nodded. “I hate school too. I puked this morning and I wanted to stay home, but my mother sent me anyway.”

  “You puked?”

  Stacy nodded again. “My mom didn’t give a shit. She hit me on the arm with a hairbrush.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Stacy shrugged and pushed up the sleeve of her navy-blue pea coat. “My mother’s a fucking lunatic.” She spoke with the cigarette in her mouth, squinting carefully at the reddish bruise on her wrist before she let the sleeve slip back down.

  “Boy, Stacy.” Amy tapped an ash from her cigarette onto the snow and stepped on it with her boot.

  Stacy breathed out smoke. “These days I feel like puking all the time.”

  A headache was better than that, even if it lasted all day, the way Amy’s headaches were starting to do, so that she still had it when she got home from school, sitting at the kitchen table, doing her homework in the chilly house. She got into the habit of doing her math homework first, and then before her mother got home she would go to her room and stare at herself in the mirror. She could not figure out what she looked like. Sitting on the vanity stool (it was an old barrel, actually—Isabelle had sewn a pink ruffled drape around it and put a cushion on top), Amy could not get her looks figured out.

  Her eyes were far apart and her forehead was high, and Isabelle said these were both signs of intelligence, but that didn’t matter to Amy. She wanted to look pretty, and she thought it would help to be short and have small feet. And even if it was good that her eyes were far apart, there was nothing special about them; they weren’t a vibrant blue, or mysterious brown; they were just a murky green, and her skin was pale, especially in winter, when the s
kin beneath her eyes seemed transparent, almost blue.

  Her hair, at least, was good. She knew this partly because people had told her so all her life. “Where did she get that hair?” strangers would say to her mother in the grocery store when Amy was still small enough to be riding in the wire seat of the shopping cart. “Look at that hair,” they would say, sometimes reaching for it, running their finger over a curl, giving it a tug.

  But Amy had known, the way children know things (know everything, Mr. Robertson would later argue), that her mother didn’t care for strangers touching her daughter, commenting on her daughter’s hair. It might have been Amy’s earliest memory of guilt, because she had loved it when someone reached for her; she would turn her face in the direction of the hand, ducking her head to feel the cupped fingers of the stranger linger as the kind voice said, “Pretty girl, where did you get that hair?”

  Not from Isabelle. Even the strangers could guess that. One glance at Isabelle’s thin dark hair pulled back into a twist told them that. This was her father’s hair. And here was the reason for Isabelle’s tight-lipped disapproval—Amy had figured that out long ago. She could only guess that it stemmed from the fact that her father had died so soon after her birth; he’d had a heart attack on a golf course in California. “What was he doing in California?” Amy had asked, but the answer was always “Business,” and Amy never learned a whole lot more. But she had inherited his hair, whoever he was, and she was grateful for that as she brushed it those winter afternoons in front of her mirror, different shades of yellow falling past her shoulders.

  And then one day, leaving the lunchroom early (Stacy had not come to school), Amy bumped into Mr. Robertson as he was coming out of the teachers’ room. “Hi,” Amy said, only the sound did not come out, just her dry lips parting before she ducked her head.