Amy and Isabelle

  • • •

  BUT ON MONDAY Mr. Robertson said he liked her dress, and how things changed after that! So much for Debby Dorne (who might not be dead—Isabelle and Arlene Tucker didn’t know everything), and how gorgeous the gold February sun was that came through the kitchen window as Amy sat at the table doing her homework that afternoon! His intimate, wonderful voice: “A woman should learn to take a compliment gracefully.” Amy watched out the window as a chickadee hopped along a pine branch. A woman. That was the best part, the lovely femaleness of it implied in the way Mr. Robertson spoke the word; a woman was a lovely thing, and this included her.

  It changed everything, in a way. She traced her finger along the edge of the table. Her bra was not some stupid thing from Sears. It was lingerie, a brassiere. And her period, maybe, was not such a gross thought. Every woman had one. (Pretty Barbara Rawley.) A woman was a lovely thing to be. Mr. Robertson, his voice gentle and all-knowing, was teaching her. He thought she was worth teaching.

  A woman should learn to take a compliment gracefully. She left her homework and went upstairs to her bedroom to practice in front of the mirror. “Thank you,” she said (gracefully). “Thank you very much.” She brushed her wavy hair back over her shoulders, turning her face one way then the other. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s very kind.”

  A rap on her bedroom door. “Are you all right?” Isabelle called. “Who are you talking to?”

  “No one,” said Amy. “I didn’t hear you come home.”

  “I’m taking a shower,” Isabelle said through the door. “Then I’ll start dinner. ”

  Amy waited until she heard her mother go into the bathroom. Only she was careful now, she mouthed the words instead. Through her window came the call of a cardinal. A shaft of late-day sunlight fell across her bed. She smiled gracefully into the mirror. Thank you, yes. That’s very kind. Dropping her eyelids slowly, Well, that’s very kind, what you just said.

  Chapter

  5

  IT HAD LEFT Isabelle considerably distressed to bump into Barbara Rawley at the grocery store, and she had spent the evening that Saturday fretfully imagining a dinner party in Barbara Rawley’s home: wine goblets shimmering in candlelight, soft sounds of laughter—and the horrid thought that her name might be coming up. (“I saw Isabelle Goodrow in the A&P today. She’s so odd, I think.” And someone poking at an olive with a toothpick would respond, “Decorating the altar with autumn leaves like that.” Laughter, the tinkling of glasses. “Didn’t the place look like a barn.”)

  Awful.

  And all made worse by the fact that on the next day, Sunday, Avery Clark did not show up for church. This was unusual: on most Sundays Avery sat with his wife, Emma, in the third row of pews. Isabelle, who had been taught by her mother years ago that to settle oneself in a front pew meant you were simply in church to be seen, sat discreetly toward the back, peeking past dandruff-flaked shoulders and heads to see if she could find Avery; but she could not.

  On the drive home it began to snow. Small flakes, stingy-seeming and gray, spotted the windshield, making the day seem interminable, dull as the road before her. Perhaps the Clarks had gone to a dinner party themselves and had such a merry time that this morning they didn’t find it worthwhile to get out of bed. All day Isabelle pondered this, moving through her house. The rooms were dark as evening—even at midday—from the heavy, leaden sky outside, and the snow at one point turned to rain, an uneven wetness dribbling down the windowpanes.

  By the time Isabelle stood in her kitchen later that afternoon ironing a pillowcase, the rain having turned to a freezing drizzle and making small shivering sounds against the window, she had found another thought to entertain: Avery Clark was out of town. She ironed the lace edge of the pillowcase carefully and wondered if Avery and his wife had gone to Boston. There were people in Shirley Falls who sometimes went to Boston to see a ballet or visit a museum. There were people who went to Boston simply to shop. Barbara Rawley, for one. And some of the other deacons’ wives. They made the trip a few times a year, staying overnight in a hotel and returning the next day with new blouses and skirts and strings of beads. To wear to their dinner parties, no doubt.

  Why, the dentist’s wife went to Boston just to get her hair done! Isabelle remembered this as she folded the pillowcase and started on another. She had learned that news in the dentist’s waiting room one day, and it had made her root canal all the more insufferable: lying openmouthed in the vinyl chair, with that little hose vacuuming up her spit while the dentist’s stomach growled beside her head—to suffer such indignity, to stand there afterward in front of the receptionist with a numb and swollen lip (you could never tell if you were dribbling saliva or not) and write out a check for an astonishing sum, knowing that some of it, anyway, was going to pay for Mrs. Errin’s next trip to Boston. Just to get her hair done. It irritated Isabelle, and made her sad, too, as she unplugged the iron and emptied the water over the sink, to think of Emma Clark and Avery pulling into their driveway now and unloading their car—he would carry in their suitcases and Emma would follow with a shopping bag of new clothes, expensive perfume, a tasteful pair of pumps.

  BUT IT WAS all fruitless conjecture, hours of wasted thought. For when Isabelle arrived at work the next morning and went into Avery’s office to inquire brightly, “And did you have a nice weekend, Avery?” the answer was no, he had not.

  He had been seized with some kind of “belly bug,” he confided to Isabelle, shaking his head, going on to describe how he woke on Saturday morning with excruciating cramps. “Quite nasty,” he said, sitting back in his chair, arms clasped behind his head, looking perfectly normal now.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Isabelle said, hugely relieved to think that Avery Clark had not been gallivanting around Boston, or going to some dinner party here in town, but stuck inside his house bent over a toilet bowl instead, a tepid glass of ginger ale left next to his bed. “I hope you’re feeling better,” she added. “You’re looking wonderfully well. ”

  If this hadn’t been true, she probably would have said it anyway. She believed men were more susceptible to flattery than women, particularly as they aged; she had read in magazines about the private difficulties men often had in later years of life. She doubted Emma Clark was sensitive to this. Emma seemed pretty interested in Emma, and Avery probably suffered. “It can be miserable, can’t it,” Isabelle said, “that sort of little bug. It can leave one feeling flat. A bit depressed.”

  “Yes,” Avery responded, as though this effect of his belly bug was something he might not have considered. “I’m glad to have it over with.” He smiled, clapping his hands down lightly onto his desk. “Glad to be all in one piece.”

  “Well, nice to know you’re feeling better,” Isabelle said, “and now I’m going to start my day.” She returned to her desk, where she sat tapping some papers together to make their edges even and doubting that really and truly he was very happy with his wife.

  Now, if she were married to Avery (rolling a sheet of paper into the typewriter and getting rid of Emma Clark with a heart attack that would carry only a few brief moments of panic and pain), Avery might say in response to someone’s asking, A nasty bug, but Isabelle took wonderful care of me. Because she would take wonderful care of him, making him Jell-O and wiping his brow, arranging magazines for him on the bed. (Here she made a typo and looked around for her whiteout.) She would sit and talk to him about the hyacinth bulbs to be ordered, how the shower curtain ought to be replaced, she had seen one on sale and what did he think … And he would put his hand on hers and say, “I think I’m lucky to be married to you.” Yes, Isabelle thought, finding the whiteout and unscrewing the cap, she could make him a happy man.

  Amy was in a happy mood herself; Isabelle noticed this as soon as she got home. Her daughter’s youthful face was flushed and lovely as she moved about the kitchen helping Isabelle make dinner. The girl’s looks could at times be startling; like now, when she positively
glowed, when carrying a plate to the table her limbs were graceful and light.

  “Today I wore the dress I made in home ec class,” Amy reminded her mother as they sat down to eat. “And I got a compliment.”

  “How nice,” Isabelle said. “And from whom did you receive this compliment?” (It pleased her that she knew proper grammar.)

  “Oh,” said Amy, “you know. Just people.” She put meat loaf into her mouth and chewed, her face shiny as she smiled out the window at the last glow of February evening sun. “Everyone liked it,” she added. “Everyone.”

  BUT STILL, THE moodiness of the girl. Because just a few nights later she was querulous and unpleasant when Isabelle came in. “And how was your day?” Isabelle said, dropping her keys on the table, removing her coat.

  “All right,” Amy said flatly, closing her schoolbooks, pushing back her chair, preparing to leave the room.

  “Just all right?” Isabelle felt a flicker of dread. “What’s wrong?” It was impossible to feel any semblance of peace if something was wrong with her daughter; and Isabelle’s own day had merely been average, Avery Clark having been busy and distracted.

  Amy made a grunting noise and started up the stairs. Isabelle followed her to the doorway. “What’s wrong?” she asked again, watching the long thin legs of her daughter in their black tights moving up the stairs.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Amy said tensely.

  “Amy Goodrow, stop right where you are.”

  Amy turned, gazing at her mother from the stair landing, her face closed off, expressionless, half hidden by her voluminous hair.

  “I am your mother,” Isabelle said, with sudden despair, “and there is absolutely no reason for you to speak to me that way. Whether you like it or not we share the same house, and I work hard all day at a stupid job I am vastly overqualified for simply to keep food in your mouth.” She hated herself, saying this. To say she was vastly overqualified for her job was foolishness and they both knew it. Isabelle had never finished college. She could hardly expect a better job than the one she had now. Still—she had not finished college because her mother had died and there was no one to take care of the baby. So really it was because of Amy, this very person who was now staring down the staircase at her with disdain. “And take that look off your face,” Isabelle said. “I would appreciate it if you could be pleasant to me. I would appreciate a little common decency in the way you look at me and the way you speak to me, too.”

  Silence.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Spoken carefully—enough coolness to leave no mistake that she found her mother detestable, but not so cool as to allow her mother to continue her accusations of rudeness, and so Isabelle turned away, hanging her coat in the front hall closet and hearing the door to Amy’s room shut.

  Such moments alarmed Isabelle. It alarmed her that anger could erupt in her so easily, provoked by a simple glance from her adolescent daughter. Adolescents were going to be moody, after all; there was all that business with their hormones.

  Isabelle sat down at the kitchen table, holding her hands to her face; such an unpleasant way to begin the evening. She should not have lost her temper. She should have been patient, as the Reader’s Digest suggested in their occasional articles on teenagers. And then Amy might have told her what was wrong. She wanted to be a patient mother, of course. But it did irritate her to work all day and come home tired and have Amy grumpy. It did irritate her sometimes to think of the enormous sacrifices she had made (really, enormous) for this girl, and so of course it made her angry to have Amy close her books and leave the room just because Isabelle had walked in. Was she a shrew simply because she would like a pleasant hello from her daughter? Was she some beast because she longed for a pleasant “Hi, Mom, how was your day?” from a girl who virtually owned her life? And then Isabelle heard her daughter’s bedroom door open and she breathed more easily, knowing an apology was coming, and grateful that it had not taken too long.

  For it was true that Amy could not bear to have her mother angry with her. It frightened her profoundly; she had nothing to stand on, it was like swaying in darkness. She walked down the stairs silently in her stockinged feet. “I’m sorry,” Amy said. “I’m sorry.” Sometimes her mother would say, “Sorry isn’t enough.”

  Tonight, though, she only said, “Okay. Thank you very much.” But she did not ask again what was wrong with her daughter, and if she had, Amy would not have told.

  IT WAS MR. Robertson. So he had complimented her dress, but after that—nothing. And now it was like a bug, some infection, this terrible craving to be noticed by him. Every day she brushed her hair before class, pinched her cheeks right before walking into the room. Every day she took her seat carefully, heart beating with hope. And every day when the bell rang and his eyes had not once passed over hers, she would leave the classroom with a disappointment bigger than any she could remember.

  “I hate school,” she told Stacy in the woods. “I hate my life, I hate everything.”

  Stacy, puffing dryly on a cigarette, would squint against the smoke and nod. “I hate everything, too,” she said.

  “But why?” Amy finally asked her. It was the end of February now; the day was colorless but warm; the crusty snow had softened and Stacy’s leather boots had stains of wet. “Why do you hate everything?” Amy asked. “I mean, you’re pretty, and you have lots of friends, and you have a boyfriend. How come you’re miserable like me?”

  Stacy looked carefully at the end of her cigarette. “Because my parents are rat-fucks and my friends are morons. Except for you.”

  “Yeah, still.” Amy leaned against the log and crossed her arms. Who cared if parents were jerks and friends were jerks as long as you had a boyfriend. Stacy had such a great boyfriend, too. He wasn’t mentioned a lot out here in the woods, but Amy knew who Paul Bellows was, that he lived in his own apartment now, over a bakery on Main Street, that when he was in high school he’d been a football champion. The cheerleaders had a special cheer for him. One time he had broken his leg during a game and there were people who actually cried when he got hauled off on a stretcher. He was tall and big and had brown eyes.

  “He’s stupid,” Stacy said, after considering things awhile.

  “He has nice eyes.”

  Stacy ignored this. She tossed her cigarette into the woods and gazed vacantly after it. “He’s boring,” she added. “All he ever wants to do is go to bed.”

  This made Amy feel queer. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette.

  “He’s all right, though,” Stacy decided. “He’s nice to me. He bought me eyeshadow the other day.” Her face cheered as she thought of this. “A gorgeous turquoise color.”

  “That’s nice,” Amy said. She stood up; the back of her coat was damp. A scooped-out impression was left in the snow where she had been leaning against the log.

  “It’s the expensive kind,” Stacy added. “It doesn’t cake up. I’ll bring it to school tomorrow. I bet it would look nice on you.”

  Amy stepped on her cigarette. “My mother would kill me if I wore makeup.”

  “Yeah, well—all parents are rat-fucks,” Stacy said sympathetically, as behind them the school bell rang.

  ON FRIDAY MR. Robertson said he would see her after school. Amy had maneuvered this. She had become desperate, crazy, somebody else. She had started to wonder, as the days went by, why Alan Stewart, simply by clicking his pen after Mr. Robertson asked him to stop, should be allowed the magnificent event of sitting with Mr. Robertson in his classroom for an hour after school. Why not her? Terrence Landry had been kept after school for blowing up a lunch bag and popping it loudly on his way out of class. Amy could not imagine blowing up a lunch bag and then smashing it (a muffled whoomph, as though someone wrapped up in a quilt had been shot), nor did she think she could even keep on clicking a pen, but Maryanne Barmble had been threatened with detention once after whispering to the person next to her. “Maryanne,” Mr. Robertson had said crossly, “if I
have to ask you to quiet down one more time, you will be kept after school.”

  So Amy began to whisper to Elsie Baxter behind her. It took courage, it was not her style. But Elsie, so uncontained and boisterous, was cooperative. Amy whispered that the homework last night was boring, real crap. Elsie said it was pus-colored pee. Mr. Robertson said, “Girls, be quiet please.”

  The tension got exhausting. Amy’s face was moist, her armpits prickled. She turned to Elsie again. “At least it’s not home ec class,” she whispered, “with that knock-kneed pinhead.” Elsie let loose a full-throated giggle. Mr. Robertson stopped the class and stared at them both without speaking. Amy’s face burned; she looked down at her desk.

  But when it was clear that nothing was to come of this, when Mr. Robertson proceeded with his figures on the blackboard, disappointment made Amy feel crazy again. She turned and rolled her eyes at Elsie. “Amy,” came Mr. Robertson’s deep voice, “one more time and you’ll be staying after school.”

  The dangers in this! Not the least being that he might keep Elsie as well as herself. But the promise of one more time was too great to pass up. Amy glanced at the clock—twenty minutes left. Her heart bounced around inside her chest; the figures on her worksheet were almost a blur. Beside her, Flip Rawley tapped his eraser to his cheek, oblivious. The clock make a click. Amy felt something inside her collapse with despair, and she might have given up on her endeavor completely if Mr. Robertson hadn’t at that very moment complimented Julie LaGuinn in the front row for answering some question he had just asked.

  “Good for you,” he said to Julie, rapping his piece of chalk on her desk. “That was very, very good. I’m throwing out something new and you’re able to follow.”

  It made Amy feel crazy. All the times she had sat there knowing the right answer but being too shy to raise her hand, and there was Julie LaGuinn with a pukey, self-satisfied grin on her face, soaking up this stupid man’s praise. Amy turned to Elsie. “I guess the rest of us are stupid,” and then it happened. His voice: “All right, Amy. I’ll see you after school.”