Amy and Isabelle

  Amy considered this, eating one of the crackers herself, sweet with the pungent taste of jelly; the first cracker always made her ravenous. After she had another cigarette she wouldn’t be hungry anymore.

  “I sure wasn’t. Were you?” Stacy cocked her head upward as a crow darted from a spruce tree whose branches were weighted down with frozen snow.

  “No.”

  Stacy suddenly pushed Amy’s arm. “Car. Duck.”

  The girls crouched to the ground. The sound of the car passing over the gravelly frozen road increased as it got nearer. Amy stared at the flattened cigarette butt in the snow and waited. Now that there were only the frozen branches of pines and spruce trees for cover, they were not as hidden from the road as they used to be. A person driving by could see them if the person happened to look. In the fall, when the girls first discovered the place, the autumn leaves were thick and breeze-lifted and private; the fallen log, waist-high and dry, a perfect place to sit.

  The car was blue. “Shit, that might be Puddy,” said Stacy, peeking sideways and referring to the school’s principal. “It’s okay, he didn’t look.”

  They stood up again, leaning against the fallen log. “Was it Puddy?” Amy asked. If they were caught smoking they would be suspended from school; it was inconceivable to think of Isabelle getting such a phone call while she sat at her typewriter in the office room at the mill.

  Stacy shook her head. “Couldn’t really see. Anyway, he’s not going to recognize you. No one would suspect Amy Goodrow of shit. Still, put your hood up,” Stacy advised, squinting at Amy critically. “You’ve got all that fucking hair.” But she did it herself before Amy had a chance, tugging the hood over Amy’s head while she held the cracker in her teeth. Her cold fingertips briefly touched Amy’s cheek.

  “I bet Karen Keane was happy when she was twelve,” Amy said, remembering the white house on Valentine Drive.

  Stacy took a cigarette from the plastic Tampax holder she always hid their cigarettes in. “Karen Keane would fuck a rock if there was a snake underneath it. I can’t believe I’m smoking when I feel so crappy. This is really sick.” She shook her head, dropping her heavy, pale eyelids with an indifferent show of self-disgust, eyeliner smudged in the corner of one eye. “We’re really a couple of sick rat-fucks to tromp out here in this freezing cold.”

  Amy blurted out, “Do people think you’re weird spending your lunchtime with me?” The question, which she had not planned on asking, was paid for with an anxious thumping in her chest.

  Flicking a piece of tobacco off the arm of her coat, Stacy looked up, surprised. “What people?”

  “You know, your friends. Karen Keane and those guys.”

  Stacy squinted at her. “No,” she said. “Not at all.” A patch of frozen snow fell from a branch, landing on the ground with a clump. They watched for a moment as the crow darted to another tree. “No one thinks I’m weird because I spend lunchtime with you,” Stacy said. “You have a really bad self-image, Amy.”

  “I guess.” With her boot Amy knocked snow off a granite rock that rose up from the ground. Her boots were made of a plastic that was supposed to look like leather. She hated them; hated how they never got scuffed even when she scraped them over a rock, hated how they didn’t fit tightly around her foot, the way Stacy’s real leather ones did, how they stayed graceless and stiff, indestructible.

  “People pay my father tons of money because they have bad self-images.” Stacy started to put both cigarettes in her mouth, then laughed. “Can you imagine going to my father to feel better about yourself? I mean, that’s really funny.” She shook her head and lit the two cigarettes, then handed one to Amy. “What a crock of shit. Everything’s a crock of shit.” Stacy blew smoke through her nose. “You want to know something about those people?”

  “What people?” Amy asked. Her fingertips seemed to be burning with the cold.

  “Karen Keane and all the rest. They’re twits.” Stacy closed one eye against the smoke that drifted past her face and gazed with the other one at Amy. “They’re twits. Morons. And you’re not. You’re the only person I know who’s not a goddamn moron twit.”

  AND SO FEBRUARY continued. Many days were dull and white and cold. Often the sky was the same color as the fields of tired snow that lay on the outskirts of town, so that the whole world stretched out, interminable and pale, broken only by the dark frozen trees that lined the horizon, or by a sagging roof of an old red barn. And then would come a sudden thaw; a day of brilliance: blue skies and sunlight bouncing off the dripping trees, a sparkling world where the sounds of shoe heels could be heard clicking along the sidewalk of Main Street and the melting snow caused small rivulets to run alongside the road.

  “The kind of day,” Isabelle said, “when some poor soul commits suicide.” She said this confidently, sitting up straight in the booth, her spoon clicking against the saucer. It was a Saturday afternoon and they were in Leo’s coffee shop, next to the foot of the bridge. Sunlight fell through the window, folding itself over the blue linoleum of their tabletop and bouncing off the metal creamer in Isabelle’s hand.

  “Statistics show,” Isabelle went on, pausing to pour more milk into her coffee, “that most suicides occur right after a cold snap. On the first bright sunny day after.”

  Amy wanted another doughnut. She was eating this one slowly in case her mother said no.

  “I knew a man once, when I was growing up.” Isabelle nodded thoughtfully. “Very quiet man. His wife taught school. One day when she came home, she found him dead in the hallway. He had shot himself, poor thing.”

  Amy glanced from her doughnut to her mother. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. Very sad.”

  “How come he did that?”

  “Well, honey, I don’t know.” Isabelle stirred her coffee. “Made a mess in the hall, though—that’s what I heard. A wall had to be repainted.”

  Amy sucked crumbs off her fingers. “I’ve never seen a dead person,” she said.

  On Isabelle’s plate was a brown doughnut, and she cut it now with a knife, then picked up a piece delicately with the tips of her fingers.

  “Do dead people just look like they’re sleeping?” Amy asked.

  Isabelle shook her head, chewing. She touched a paper napkin to her lips. “No. Dead people look like they’re dead.”

  “But how is that different from looking asleep? Stacy Burrows’s grandfather died in bed and her grandmother left him there all morning because she thought he was asleep.”

  “Her grandmother needs a new pair of glasses, I’d say,” Isabelle responded. “A dead person looks gone, not just asleep. Get your finger out of your mouth, please. One should not be picking any orifice in public.”

  But Amy was happy with the winter sunlight and the taste of her doughnut and the steam on the window and the smell of coffee in the air. She thought her mother might be happy too: the perpetual crease that lay between her eyebrows like the small tracing of a seagull in flight was smooth now, and when Amy asked for another doughnut her mother agreed.

  “Have some milk though,” Isabelle warned. “Two doughnuts is a lot of grease.”

  They were silent, eating and gazing around the coffee shop and through the big window at the people passing by on Main Street. What Amy liked about Leo’s coffee shop was that it made her feel normal. Both of them seemed normal: a mother and daughter out on a Saturday afternoon. It made Amy feel like one of those girls in a Sears catalogue. And spring was really in the air. The cars parked next to the coffee shop had sunlight bouncing off their fenders and the snow was wet and slushy. Isabelle sat back, fingering her napkin.

  “Why would she answer the door?” Amy finally said, finished with her second doughnut now, and pushing back the plate. “If her mother told her not to.”

  Isabelle nodded. “Well, this is the thing, isn’t it. I’ve told you never to answer the door, but let’s say you were home alone and Avery Clark telephoned and said I’d been in an accident, and he was stoppi
ng by to pick you up to take you to the hospital. Something like that. You’d go with him, wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Avery would never hurt you,” Isabelle said. “Avery would never hurt a fly. I was simply giving an example.” She tucked some change under the lip of her saucer; she never cared to leave a tip in plain view. “All set?”

  They walked down the sidewalk slowly (so normal!), a mother and daughter peering in shop windows, their heads tilted toward each other, a finger raised to point out a pair of shoes, a handbag, a dress they agreed they would never wear. Oh, such moments for Amy were heaven.

  And they were rare.

  By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could feel it go. Perhaps it was nothing more than the two doughnuts expanding in her stomach full of milk, but Amy felt a heaviness begin, a familiar turning of some inward tide. As they drove over the bridge the sun seemed to move from a cheerful daytime yellow to an early-evening gold; painful how the gold light hit the riverbanks, rich and sorrowful, drawing from Amy some longing, a craving for joy.

  “Remind me to wash out some pantyhose,” Isabelle said.

  The A&P had sawdust on the floor, wet and dirty-looking up by the door from the slushy tracks of people walking in. Amy pushed a shopping cart and one of the front wheels wobbled at an angle, making the cart shake and tremble over the sawdusty floor. “Let’s get this over with,” Isabelle sighed, squinting at the list in her hand. Her mother’s mood had changed as well, and Amy felt responsible, as though this sinking of their spirits was somehow her doing. As though having two doughnuts had done them both in.

  The grocery store made her want to cry: a strange hope and hopelessness collided here—the hope of all those brightly lit kitchens out there with telephones ringing on the wall, silverware clattering down on tables, steam rising from pots on the stove, and then the hopelessness of these rows and rows of canned beets and canned corn. The tired, unsmiling people pushing their carts.

  “Oh, Godfrey,” said Isabelle quietly, staring intently at the tunafish can in her hand. “Here comes that dreadful woman.”

  And there was Barbara Rawley, tall in her long winter coat as she surveyed the salad dressings, a gloved finger to her chin. To Isabelle she resembled a garter snake standing on its tail, to Amy she seemed beautiful; her eyes were large and brown as she turned to them, hair as shiny as a shampoo ad. She wore pearl earrings in her pinkened lobes, and her maroon lipstick made her teeth look very white as she opened her mouth in a smile.

  It was not a real smile though, she didn’t mean it. Both Isabelle and Amy could tell that. It was the smile of a deacon’s wife who had come upon some members of the church, that’s all; and some cautious curiosity, perhaps. “Oh, hello,” she said, slowly.

  “Hello there, Barbara. How are you?” Isabelle’s words were noticeably clipped.

  “I’m just fine, thanks.” Barbara Rawley answered slowly, as if speaking of something particularly meaningful. Her eyes moved from Isabelle to Amy. “I’m sorry. Your name is?”

  “Amy.”

  “Of course. Amy.” The smile was still there around the white teeth. “Aren’t you in school with my son, Flip?”

  “He’s in my math class.” Amy looked down at the jar of olives Barbara Rawley was holding in her gloved hand.

  “And so what do you two ladies have planned for this evening?” Barbara Rawley raised her eyebrows rather extravagantly as she asked this question.

  Both Amy and Isabelle felt chided, almost slapped by this inquiry into their evening, and they looked at each other helplessly. For it must have been some kind of slap—how could it be anything else, this woman with her perfect lips, holding a jar of olives as though to taunt them?

  “Oh,” Isabelle said, “odds and ends—you know.”

  There was a pause. It was uncomfortable, it really was. And it was their fault. Amy was sure Barbara Rawley could have talked more easily to almost anyone else.

  “Well,” said Isabelle, “you have a pleasant evening,” and she took the carriage from Amy and moved down the aisle.

  Following her mother, Amy said, “She’s really pretty,” taking from a shelf the package of peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich crackers that she and Stacy would have for lunch.

  Isabelle didn’t reply.

  “Don’t you think she’s pretty, though?” Amy pursued.

  Isabelle put a package of bloody hamburger meat into the carriage seat. She turned down another aisle. “I suppose,” she said mildly, “if one cares for a false, made-up look, one might find her pretty. Personally, I don’t.”

  Amy stood awkwardly while her mother dropped a can of sliced beets into the carriage. She liked makeup, herself. She wanted to wear it, lots of it. Perfume, too—she wanted to be one of those women you could smell when you walked by.

  “I just meant she could be pretty if she didn’t wear all that makeup,” Amy said, made anxious by the way Isabelle was frowning at the Raisin Bran.

  “She’s probably having a dinner party tonight,” Isabelle said, squinting at the cereal. “She’ll serve those olives in a little silver dish. She can tell her guests how she saw Isabelle Goodrow this afternoon, and they can all have a little laugh about how I decorated the church with autumn leaves and not chrysanthemums.”

  Amy had forgotten. Her mother had been really hurt by Barbara Rawley’s remarks that day after church, as she stood at coffee hour in the activities room with two bright spots of pink on her cheeks. Her mother had the same bright spots of pink on her cheeks right now as she reached for a jar of applesauce.

  “Stand up straight,” Isabelle said, scowling at the label on the applesauce jar. “It’s terrible the way you slouch. And go up front and get another carriage. This wobbly wheel is driving me nuts.”

  It was dark out now, the store windows were black except for the square sheets of white paper that advertised products and prices, the automatic swinging doors were humming as people passed through them; boys in their red A&P coats pushed loaded shopping carts over the rubbery mats. Amy took an empty cart, the plastic-coated bar still warm from someone else’s hands, and saw Barbara Rawley in the checkout line, her face pleasant and calm as she stared into space, holding the olive jar to her chest as though lost in happy prayer.

  Was she having a dinner party tonight? Amy supposed it could be true. Her mother never had dinner parties—and then a thought slipped through Amy’s stomach like a hook: Her mother was hardly ever invited anywhere. What are you two ladies doing tonight? Nothing. Other people in Shirley Falls would be doing things; Barbara Rawley with a glittering table of china, Stacy out with a boyfriend, maybe off to a party somewhere. (There were references to these sometimes on Mondays in the school, some boy clapping another boy on the shoulder with a laugh, “Guess who puked all over my car.”)

  Oh, it made Amy sad. Her mother had almost no social life. Here was a fact: Her mother, lonely and alone, with a face earnest and pale, her winter coat shapeless, was bent over the milk, checking the dates on the cartons. “Mom,” said Amy, wheeling the new cart up. “You’re pretty too.” And that was the stupidest thing of all to do, because the words with their awkward falseness seemed to repeat in the silence that followed.

  Isabelle, checking her list, finally said, “Go see if you can track down toilet paper, would you?”

  The car was cold as they drove home through the back streets. As they got further out of town the houses got smaller and further apart, some of them were dark. They passed a house with a light on over its garage door, the snow-patched driveway in an arc of yellow light, and it made Amy think of Debby Dorne. She pictured the girl falling on her driveway, staying home from school, lying on the couch watching television. Her mother calling at two o’clock, Debby going into the kitchen to pick up the phone.

  Amy shifted her feet in the car; the heater was finally making it warm. She thought how Debby had maybe started back into the living room when
she heard a car coming up the driveway; maybe she had gone to the window to peek out. Maybe her heart beat fast until she recognized the car, or the person getting out. Maybe she thought, “Oh, phew, it’s just him,” and opened the door.

  Amy stared through the windshield at the dark. A car came toward them, headlights growing bigger, passed them, and was gone. It would have been light out when Debby left her house, but it wouldn’t have stayed light for long. Whoever took her away must have taken her in a car; had they been driving in the dark? There were so many back roads, you could drive for miles without seeing a house. Amy chewed her fingernail. Debby would have realized that something was wrong, that she wasn’t going wherever the person said they were going. That she wasn’t going home. Amy shivered as the heater blew warm on her legs. Maybe Debby had been in the front seat crying. Because she would have finally started to cry, Amy thought. She would have finally pressed her hands to her eyes and cried, “Oh, please, I want my mother.”

  Amy tapped her fingernail quickly to her teeth. It didn’t matter if it was Saturday night and Barbara Rawley was having a party. It only mattered that she was with her mother. It was all that mattered in the whole world—that they were together and safe.

  “Stop chewing your fingernail,” Isabelle said.

  “I was wondering about Debby Kay Dorne,” Amy told her, obediently taking her finger out of her mouth and putting her hand in her lap. “I was wondering what she was thinking right now.”

  “Nothing,” said Isabelle, putting on the blinker and turning into their driveway.

  The house was cold when they stepped inside. Amy moved through the kitchen with a brown grocery bag held to her hip, the way people sometimes held a small child. There had been times in the past when she pretended that the grocery bag was in fact a child, her child, and she would jostle it gently on her hip, but now she simply set it down on the kitchen counter. She was tired, even slightly dazed.

  Isabelle looked at her as she tugged on a sweater. “You need some food,” she said.