Amy and Isabelle

  Anyway, that seemed a long time ago. Amy did not feel like the same person she had been back then, and now she could not suppress the knowledge that while her mother certainly hadn’t been “doing it,” she was, had been, attracted to her boss, that dreadful, dried-up man. It was the way his name used to come up at home, back in the days when Amy and Isabelle were talking. “Avery says I should trade the car; he knows a dealer he’ll talk to for me.” It was the way her mother would apply lipstick in the morning, rolling her lips together and saying, “Poor Avery is so overworked these days.”

  But Avery Clark was old and homely, and how could anyone possibly have a thing for someone like that? He and his wife looked like two dead sticks sitting in the church pew every Sunday. They hadn’t done it in the last hundred years, you could be sure of that.

  Amy sneezed (“Bless you,” said Fat Bev) and glanced at the fishbowl again. Her mother was standing up, one hand holding her shorthand pad, the other smoothing the back of her skirt. Avery Clark was nodding his head, his stupid bald head that he combed his few greasy hairs over like nobody would know. Amy pushed a button on the adding machine, picturing the long, sloppy mouth of Avery Clark, his stained teeth, the dry breath she had smelled when he passed the collection plate in church. And those stupid old-man shoes he wore with the decorative little holes. He made Amy sick.

  He might have spoken her mother’s name, because Isabelle stopped in his door; Amy, glancing up again, saw the submissive hopefulness that lit her mother’s pale face, and then saw it disappear. A hole opened in Amy’s stomach: it was terrible what she had just seen, the nakedness of her mother’s face. She loved her. On the black line connecting them a furious ball of love flashed across to her mother, but her mother had returned to her desk now, was rolling a sheet of paper into the typewriter. And immediately Amy felt that loathing at her mother’s awkward, long neck, the wisps of moist hair stuck to it. But this loathing also seemed to increase some desperate love, and the black line trembled with the weight of it.

  “So now, listen,” Fat Bev said, popping a red Life Saver into her mouth. “What’re your friends up to this summer? Didn’t I see Karen Keane behind the register at Mac’s?”

  Amy nodded.

  “Isn’t she a friend of yours?”

  Amy nodded again and pushed the Total button on the adding machine. Behind her eyes swirled the gray tears of some inexplicable anxiety and sadness. Once more she glanced at her mother, who was typing now, the begonia plant she had rescued from the windowsill jiggling on her desk. Amy saw a pale blossom drop into its leaves.

  “Kids should have summer jobs,” Fat Bev was saying, the Life Saver clicking against her teeth. “My kids all had jobs starting when they were about twelve, I think.”

  Amy nodded vaguely. She wanted Fat Bev to keep talking because she liked the sound of her voice, but she didn’t want to answer any questions. She especially didn’t want to answer any questions about Karen Keane. The thought of Karen Keane quickened the anxiety behind her eyes. They had been friends back when they were small. They had played hopscotch on the playground and run from the yellow jackets that swarmed around the garbage bin. One time Amy had slept over at Karen’s house, a big white house on Valentine Drive with maple trees out front. The house was bright and sunny and full of noise; boys played out back, and Karen’s sister talked on the telephone as she dried her hair with a towel. But Amy had been homesick, she had gone into the bathroom and cried during dinner because of the thought of her mother eating her own dinner in the kitchen alone. There had been good times too, though. Like when Karen came to her house and Isabelle let them make cookies. The girls had sat on the back steps eating them while Isabelle weeded her garden; Amy could still remember that.

  “Everything changes when you get to junior high school,” Amy suddenly said to Fat Bev, but the Life Savers had rolled off her desk and Fat Bev was leaning down to retrieve them.

  “What’s that, hon?” Bev asked, her face red from the effort, but her telephone started to ring, and, holding up a finger in Amy’s direction, she said into the phone, “What’d your awful mother-in-law do now?”

  But what would Amy have said, anyway? She wasn’t really going to tell Fat Bev how junior high had changed things, how her breasts had grown so much earlier than the other girls’, how she had slept on her stomach to try and keep it from happening but it happened anyway, and how her mother, pretending to be casual about this, had wrapped a tape measure around her chest and ordered a bra from Sears. And when the bra came it made her breasts look bigger, stupidly grown-up. There had been some kind of game at school where the boys would sneeze when they walked by her. “Anyone have a Kleenex?” they’d say.

  “Oh, forget them,” her mother said. “Just forget them, who cares.”

  But she cared.

  And then the frightening morning she had woken to find a dark stain the size of a quarter on her underpants. She took the underpants to her mother in the kitchen. “Amy,” her mother said. “Oh, Amy. Honey, my word.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, Amy,” her mother said sadly. “This is a very exciting day.”

  She felt loathsome and frightened as she walked to school, her abdomen heavy, odd pains in her thighs, and an extra sanitary napkin packed in a brown lunch bag. (None of the girls had started bringing pocketbooks to school yet.) And she had been asked to stand in front of the classroom to diagram a sentence on the blackboard. She thought she would faint standing there, pass out from shame, as if the whole class could see through her corduroy skirt to the bulky monstrous thing pressed between her legs.

  At the suggestion of her mother she had recorded the event in a notebook; Isabelle felt it was a good idea to keep track of dates so that your period wouldn’t take you by surprise (but Amy’s period had a mind of its own and was even now always taking her by surprise). And when Karen Keane came over one Saturday, Amy, just returning from the bathroom, had walked into her room to find Karen Keane sitting on her bed, closing the notebook quickly. “Sorry,” Karen said, twisting a piece of hair around her finger. “I won’t tell anyone. Honest.”

  But she had. She had told. And there were whispers and notes passed, and Elsie Baxter had even said, “So Amy, what’s in your lunch bag today?” It was like she was a freak. And even later, when one by one the other girls grew their breasts and started their periods too, it was still hard for Amy not to think of herself as some freak, some queerish kind of ghoul.

  “I asked my sister-in-law,” Fat Bev was saying matter-of-factly into the telephone, “and she bled for six full weeks. Not gushing or anything, you know. Just a dribble, dribble, drip.” She caught Amy’s eye and held out the roll of Life Savers.

  Amy smiled and shook her head. It could be there was nobody she had ever loved the way she loved Fat Bev right now. Big old Fat Bev, who could talk about bowels and menstrual blood without batting an eye, as if they were the most ordinary things in the world. And Bev, listening to Dottie Brown go on, was surprised to see a flicker of motion passing over the girl’s thin face, some momentary tremor of longing.

  • • •

  BUT MR. ROBERTSON had taught her some things about pride, about dignity, about graciousness. He really, really had. He said to her one day (it was February by then, and the light was changing, holding some extra fullness of yellow, some hint of promise), walking down an aisle of desks, “That’s a pretty dress.”

  Amy, bent over her desk with her hair falling past her face, hadn’t even known at first that he was talking to her.

  “Amy,” he said. “That’s a pretty dress.”

  She looked up.

  “Very nice,” he said, walking up the aisle toward her, nodding his head, raising his gingery eyebrows in a gesture of approval.

  “She made it,” said Elsie Baxter, eager to have a part in this. “Amy made the whole thing by herself.”

  And this was true; it had been a project for home ec class. Amy had gone to the fabric store with Isabelle, the t
wo of them flipping through the Simplicity catalogue until they found the tent dress pattern. “Put the zipper in by hand,” Isabelle cautioned. “Always put a zipper in by hand, it never looks messy that way.”

  But the home ec teacher with the bumpy knees said Amy must sew the zipper in using the machine, and seated at a sewing machine by the window, Amy struggled severely. The cloth puckered, the zipper slipped. Other girls, seated at their own sewing machines, laughed and talked and whispered swearwords at the mistakes they made, but Amy worked silently, her face pink with effort, her fingers sweaty as she took the crooked line of stitching out again and again. But she got it finally. And when the dress was done it was completely wearable. Some of the girls’ dresses were not.

  “You made it?” Mr. Robertson asked. He had reached her desk; she could see the brown corduroy of his slacks from the corner of her eye. Quietly, in his deep voice: “It’s really very nice.”

  Amy bent over her desk, hair falling to conceal her face. She didn’t know if he meant what he said or not. It could be that in some indistinguishable, adult way, he was making fun of her. Or maybe he was being nice. She really didn’t know. And so she kept her face down.

  Mr. Robertson finally said, “All right, class. Get started on the second problem, and then someone can put it on the board.” But he didn’t walk away. She heard him sit down at the empty desk next to her, and she pulled her hair back cautiously. He was watching her, leaning back in the chair with his arms crossed. His face was serious and kind; she saw he wasn’t making fun. He spoke softly, his head bent forward with concern. “A woman should learn to take a compliment gracefully,” he said.

  A LOUD BUZZER sounded in the office room. It rang throughout the mill eight times a day, and now it was morning break; in fifteen minutes the buzzer would blast again, signaling the women to return to their desks, but for now they could roam the hallway, go to the ladies’, or go into the lunchroom if they cared to, to buy crackers or cookies from the vending machine and flip open cans of soda or iced tea. Rosie Tanguay would eat carrot sticks from a wax-paper bag, and Arlene Tucker had brought half a chocolate cake from home whose frosting in this heat had slipped down over its sides and was mostly stuck into the moist crevices of its plastic wrap, where it would be removed by fingerfuls as Fat Bev filled Arlene in on Dottie Brown’s continuous bleeding.

  Amy stayed where she was, at her desk, gazing vacantly at the fans whirring in the windows, thinking of Mr. Robertson. Isabelle, almost nauseous from her lack of sleep, stood in the ladies’ room, pressing a wet paper towel to her face, and was unable to think of anything except for the words her daughter had spoken last night when Isabelle asked what Stacy would do with the baby: Oh, give it away, I guess.

  Chapter

  4

  BUT SOMETHING ELSE had happened that year. Back in February, a twelve-year-old girl had been kidnapped from her home. It happened in Hennecock, two towns away, and Amy and Isabelle were so intrigued by this that for three days they had eaten their dinner off TV trays. “Ssshhh,” they said to each other as soon as the news came on.

  “The search continues for Debby Kay Dorne.” The newscaster’s face was solemn; he might have had children of his own. “Police report no new findings in the case of the twelve-year-old girl who disappeared from her home sometime between two o’clock and five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon.” Amy and Isabelle leaned forward on the couch.

  “Sweet,” Isabelle murmured, as a picture of the girl came on the television. The same picture had been shown the night before and in the newspaper that morning: the girl’s broad face, curly hair tucked behind her ears, her eyes squinting, as though the camera had caught her on the verge of a giggle. “Very sweet,” Isabelle said, and then more slowly, “very, very sweet,” and Amy moved closer to her mother on the couch. “Sssshh,” Isabelle said, “I want to hear what he has to say.”

  Only what they had heard before. Debby Kay Dorne had started for school on the morning of February tenth, when she slipped on some ice in her driveway. The fall was not especially serious but she had stayed home anyway, and because both parents worked, she had stayed alone. At two o’clock the mother called and spoke with her, but when the mother arrived home at five o’clock the girl was gone. Her jacket was gone, and the house was locked. Nothing was missing and the family dog appeared calm. These were the facts that led the police to believe that whoever had taken Debby Dorne from her home was someone that she knew.

  “Oh, boy,” said Isabelle, sighing as she got up to turn the TV off. “When it’s like that, there’s nothing you can do.” But for a number of nights she put a chair against the door.

  And Amy could not stop thinking about it. Lying in bed, waiting for sleep, moonlight touching the frost on her window, she pictured the scene again and again: the girl in a green winter jacket falling on her driveway, notebook and lunch bag sent flying, skidding across the ice; the mother coming out of the house quickly. “Honey, are you all right?” The mother would be tired-looking, but pretty, Amy thought, and she would help the girl inside, help her take off the green winter jacket, hang it on a hook by the door. Amy pictured Debby lying down on the couch while her mother brought in the quilt from her bed, kissing the girl’s broad forehead, brushing back the curly hair. Perhaps she said, “Don’t answer the door.”

  The dog Amy pictured as something small, the kind that got excited when strangers came to the house, racing back and forth, scattering rugs, maybe knocking over a plant or two, but a dog that lay around quietly when he knew everything was fine. And maybe that morning he had been lying on the couch with Debby while she scratched his head and watched a game show on TV. But she must have gotten hungry, Amy thought—it wasn’t like she had stayed home sick—and so she saw Debby getting off the couch, going into the kitchen and rummaging through cupboards, finding graham crackers and potato chips, returning to eat them on the couch while the winter morning sun fell through the window, making the TV screen light.

  By now she was probably dead.

  Arlene Tucker had a brother-in-law who used to work for the state police, and according to Arlene, most kidnappers killed their victims within the first twenty-four hours. Isabelle had reported this to Amy as soon as she got home from the mill.

  So Debby Kay Dorne was probably dead. Amy couldn’t get over this. She didn’t know the girl, or know anyone who did know the girl, but she could not get over the fact that the girl might be dead. That she had dressed for school that morning, had walked out of the house hugging a notebook to her chest (probably covered with penciled doodlings of flowers and hearts and telephone numbers, Amy imagined, turning over once more in bed), thinking it was one more boring old Tuesday in winter, and having no idea at all—of course—that she was going to be kidnapped that day. Ordinary girls in small towns with curly hair and potato chips in their lunch bags didn’t get kidnapped from home while they watched TV with their dog. Except they did, because this is what had just happened in Hennecock, two towns away.

  “They formed a search party,” Amy told Stacy in the woods the next day. It was terribly cold and their breath danced in front of them as they stood hunch-shouldered in their coats, fists jammed deep in their pockets. “They formed a search party of volunteers. My mother said it could even be that the kidnapper is in the search party. Isn’t that kind of weird?”

  But Stacy wasn’t interested in Debby Dorne. Her full lips trembled with the cold as she gazed at the pine trees, whose needles were stiff with frozen snow. “I wish someone would kidnap me,” she mused.

  “But she might be dead,” Amy said.

  “Maybe she got sick of everything and ran off.” Stacy kicked lightly at the base of a tree.

  “They don’t think so,” Amy answered seriously. “Twelve-year-olds don’t usually run away.”

  “Yeah, they do. She could hitch a ride to Boston.”

  “What would she do in Boston?” Amy had been to Boston on a class trip in seventh grade. She had seen, staring out the window o
f the bus, men sprawled on the steps of buildings, sleeping on benches in the park, filthy men with caked hair, newspapers tied around their feet. When she got home that night Isabelle had said, “Am I glad to see you! I was afraid you might be shot.”

  “She could prostitute. Sleep in the bus station, I don’t know. Whatever runaways do.” Stacy seated herself carefully on the edge of the snow-covered log, tossing her straight red hair away from her face. “Myself, I’d just keep running.” She looked at Amy and frowned. “I can’t tell if I’m hungry, or not.”

  Amy took the package of crackers out of her pocket. It was their lunch; salted crackers with peanut butter and pink jam. Her fingers unwrapping them hurt from the cold.

  Stacy dropped her cigarette and stepped on it, then ate a cracker in tiny bites, the way she always did, her full dry lips touching together lightly.

  “Well, anyway,” Amy continued, unable to stop thinking about Debby Dorne, “they checked with all her relatives and people like that—people you check with—and they say they’re pretty sure it’s not a runaway. The police said it right out. They suspect foul play. That she got kidnapped. She didn’t have problems at school or anything, she was a happy kid. ”

  “Bullshit.” Stacy held the collar of her navy-blue pea coat tightly around her throat as she ate the cracker with her other hand. “No twelve-year-old is happy.”