Amy and Isabelle Read online

  “I didn’t.”

  “Because you didn’t have your ovaries out.” Arlene nodded again— she was a woman who believed what she said. “They yanked the whole business with Dot.”

  “Oh, my mother went crazy with the hot flashes,” somebody said, and thankfully—Amy could feel her heart slow down, her face get cooler in the heat—irritable Wally was left behind; hot flashes and crying jags were talked of instead.

  Isabelle wrapped up the remains of her sandwich and returned it to her lunch bag. “It’s really too warm to eat,” she murmured to Fat Bev, and it was the first time Amy had heard her mother mention the heat.

  “Oh, Jesus, that would be nice.” Bev chuckled, her big chest rising. “Never too hot for me to eat.”

  Isabelle smiled and took a lipstick from her purse.

  Amy yawned. She was suddenly exhausted; she could have put her head on the table right there and fallen asleep.

  “Honey, I’m curious,” Fat Bev was saying. She had just lit a cigarette and was gazing through the smoke at Amy. She picked a piece of tobacco from her lip, glancing at it before she flicked it to the floor. “What was it made you decide to cut your hair?”

  The black line vibrated and hummed. Without wanting to, Amy looked at her mother. Isabelle was applying lipstick in a hand mirror with her head tilted slightly back; her hand with the lipstick stopped.

  “It’s cute,” Bev added. “Cute as could be. I was just curious, is all. With a head full of hair like yours.”

  Amy turned her face toward the window, touching the tip of her ear. Women tossed their lunch bags into the trash, brushing crumbs from their fronts, yawning with fists to their mouths as they stood up.

  “Probably cooler that way,” Fat Bev said.

  “It is. Much cooler.” Amy looked at Bev and then away.

  Fat Bev sighed loudly. “Okay, Isabelle,” she said. “Come on. It’s back to the salt mines we go.”

  Isabelle was pressing her lips together, snapping her pocketbook shut. “That’s right,” she said, not looking at Amy. “There’s no rest for the weary, you know.”

  BUT ISABELLE HAD her story. And years before when she had first shown up in town, renting the old Crane house out on Route 22, installing her few possessions and infant daughter (a serious-looking child with a head of pale, curly hair), there had been some curiosity among the members of the Congregational church, and among the women she joined in the office room at the mill as well.

  But the young Isabelle Goodrow had not been forthcoming. She answered simply that her husband was dead, as well as her parents, and that she had moved down the river to Shirley Falls to have a better chance at earning a living. Really, nobody knew much more. Although a few people noticed that when she had first arrived in town she wore her wedding ring, and that after a while she didn’t wear it anymore.

  She did not seem to make friends. She did not make enemies either, although she was a conscientious worker and as a result went through a series of promotions. Each time there was some grumbling in the office room, this last time in particular, when she had risen well above the others by becoming the personal secretary to Avery Clark, but no one wished her any ill. There were jokes, remarks, made behind her back at times, about how she needed a good roll in the hay to loosen her up, but that kind of thing lessened as the years went by. At this point she was an old-timer. Amy’s fear that her mother was seen as a snob was not particularly warranted. It was true the women gossiped about one another, but Amy was too young to understand that the kind of familial acceptance they had for each other extended to her mother as well.

  Still, no one would claim to know Isabelle. And certainly no one guessed the poor woman right now was going through hell. If she seemed thinner than usual, a little more pale, well, it was dreadfully hot. So hot that even now, at the end of the day, the heat rose up from the tar as Amy and Isabelle walked across the parking lot.

  “Have a good evening, you two,” Fat Bev called out, as she hoisted herself into her car.

  THE GERANIUMS ON the windowsill over the sink had bright red heads of bloom the size of softballs, but two more leaves had turned yellow. Isabelle, dropping her keys on the table, noticed this immediately and went to pluck them off. If she had known the summer was going to be this horrible she would not have bothered to buy any geraniums at all. She would not have filled the front window boxes with lavender petunias, or planted tomatoes and marigolds and Patient Lucys out back. At their slightest drooping now she felt a sense of doom. She pressed her fingers into the potted soil, checking for dampness and finding it too damp, actually, because geraniums needed bright sun, and not this soggy heat. She dropped the leaves into the garbage beneath the sink, stepping back to let Amy get by.

  It was Amy who made their dinner these nights. In the olden days (which was the phrase that Isabelle used in her mind to refer to their lives before this summer) they used to take turns, but now it was all up to Amy. A tacit understanding: this was the least Amy could do—open a can of beets and fry some hamburgers in a pan. She stood now opening cupboards slowly, poking an idle finger into the hamburger meat. “Wash your hands,” Isabelle said, and moved past her toward the stairs.

  But the telephone, tucked neatly into the corner of the counter, began to ring, and both Isabelle and Amy felt a quickening of alarm. As well as startled hopefulness: sometimes it went for days without making a sound.

  “Hello?” Amy said, and Isabelle stopped with her foot on the stair.

  “Oh, hi,” Amy said. Putting her hand over the phone and not looking at her mother, she said, “It’s for me.”

  Isabelle walked slowly up the stairs. “Yeah,” she heard Amy say. And then in a moment Amy said more quietly, “How’s your dog these days?”

  Isabelle walked softly to her bedroom. Who did Amy know that owned a dog? Her bedroom, tucked under the eaves, was stifling at this time of day, but Isabelle closed the door, and did it noisily, so Amy would hear: See how I give you privacy.

  And Amy, twirling the telephone cord around her arm, heard the door close and understood, but knew her mother only wanted to look good for a moment, score an easy point or two. “I can’t,” Amy said into the phone, pressing her palm over the hamburger meat. And then, in a moment, “No, I haven’t told her yet.”

  Isabelle, leaning against her bedroom door, did not think of herself as eavesdropping. It was more that she was too agitated to go about the business of washing her face or changing her clothes while Amy was still on the phone. But Amy didn’t appear to be saying much, and in a few moments Isabelle heard her hang up. Then there was the clanking sound of pots and pans, and Isabelle went into the bathroom to shower. After that she would say her prayers, and then go down for dinner.

  Although really, Isabelle was getting discouraged with this prayer business. She was aware of the fact that by the time Christ was her age he had already gone bravely to the cross and hung there patiently with vinegar pressed to his lips, having gathered his courage previously while he wandered through the olive groves. But she, living here in Shirley Falls (although she had suffered her own betrayal by her Judas-like daughter, she thought, shaking baby powder over her breasts), had no olive trees to walk through, and no courage to speak of either. Perhaps even no faith. She had doubts these days if God cared about her plight at all. He was an elusive fellow, no matter what anyone said.

  What the Reader’s Digest said was that if you kept on praying, your ability to pray would improve, but Isabelle wondered if the Reader’s Digest might not have a tendency to make things a bit simple. She had enjoyed those articles “I Am Joe’s Brain” or “I Am Joe’s Liver,” but the “Praying: Practice Makes Perfect” was really, when you thought about it, a little mundane.

  After all, she had tried. She had tried for years to pray, and she would try again right now, lying down on her white bedspread, her skin moist from the shower, closing her eyes against the low white ceiling above her, to pray for His love. Ask and you shall receive. This was
tricky business. You didn’t want to ask for the wrong thing, go barking up the wrong tree. You didn’t want God to think you were selfish by asking for things, the way the Catholics did. Arlene Tucker’s husband had gone to Mass specifically to pray for a new car, and to Isabelle this was appalling. If Isabelle was going to get specific she wouldn’t be so vulgar as to ask for a car—she would pray for a husband, or a better daughter. Except she wouldn’t, of course. (Please God, send me a husband, or at least a daughter I can stand.) No, instead she would lie there on her bedspread and pray only for God’s love and guidance, and try to let Him know she was available for these things if He cared to give her a sign. But she felt nothing, only the drops of sweat arriving once more above her lip and beneath her arms in the heat of this small bedroom. She was tired. God was probably tired as well. She sat up and slipped on her bathrobe and went down to the kitchen to eat with her daughter.

  It was difficult.

  For the most part they avoided each other’s eyes, and Amy did not seem to find it necessary to take on the responsibility of a conversation. This stranger, my daughter. It could be a title for something in the Reader’s Digest, if it hadn’t already been done, and maybe it had, because it sounded familiar to Isabelle. Well, she wasn’t going to think anymore, couldn’t stand to think anymore. She fingered the Belleek china creamer sitting on the table in front of her, the delicate, shell-like, shimmering creamer that had belonged to her mother. Amy had filled it for Isabelle’s tea; Isabelle liked tea with her meals when the weather was hot.

  Isabelle, unable to contain her curiosity and telling herself that all things considered she had every right to know, said finally, “Who were you talking to on the telephone?”

  “Stacy Burrows.” This was said flatly, right before hamburger meat was pushed into Amy’s mouth.

  Isabelle sliced one of the canned beets on her plate, trying to place this Stacy girl’s face.

  “Blue eyes?”

  “What?”

  “Is she the girl with the big blue eyes and red hair?”

  “I guess so.” Amy frowned slightly. She was annoyed at the way her mother’s face was tilted on the end of her long neck, like some kind of garter snake. And she hated the smell of baby powder.

  “You guess so?”

  “I mean, yeah, that’s her.”

  There was the faint sound of silverware touching the plates; they both chewed so quietly their mouths barely moved.

  “What is it her father does for a living?” Isabelle eventually asked. “Is he connected to the college somehow?” She knew he was certainly not connected to the mill.

  Amy shrugged with food in her mouth. “Mmm-know.”

  “Well you must have some idea what the man does for a living.”

  Amy took a swallow of milk and wiped her mouth with her hand.

  “Please.” Isabelle dropped her eyelids with disgust, and Amy wiped with a napkin this time.

  “He teaches there, I guess,” Amy acknowledged.

  “Teaches what.”

  “Psychology. I think.”

  There was nothing to say to that. If it was true, then to Isabelle it meant simply that the man was crazy. She did not know why Amy needed to choose the daughter of a crazy man to be friends with. She pictured him with a beard, and then remembered that the Mr. Robertson horror had had a beard as well, and her heart began to beat so fast she became almost breathless. The scent of baby powder rose from her chest.

  “What,” said Amy, looking up, although her head was still bent forward over her plate, a piece of toast, the inner edge soggy and bloodied with meat, about to go into her mouth.

  Isabelle shook her head and gazed past her at the white curtain that billowed slightly in the window. It was like a car accident, she thought. How afterward you kept saying to yourself, If only the truck had already gone through the intersection by the time I got there. If only Mr. Robertson had passed through town before Amy got to high school. But you get into your car, your mind on other things, and all the while the truck is rumbling off the exit ramp, pulling into town, and you are pulling into town. And then it’s over and your life will never be the same.

  Isabelle rubbed crumbs from her fingertips. Already it seemed hard to remember what their lives had been like before this summer. There had been anxieties—Isabelle could certainly remember that. There was never enough money, and it seemed she always had a run in her stocking (Isabelle never wore stockings that had a run, except when she lied about it and said it had just happened), and Amy had school projects due, some foolish relief map requiring clay and foam rubber, a sewing project in home ec class—those things cost money too. But now, eating her hamburger and toast across from her daughter (this stranger) while the hazy early evening sunlight fell against the stove and across the floor, Isabelle was filled with longing for those days, for the privilege of worrying about ordinary things.

  She said, because the silence of their eating was oppressive, and because she did not dare, somehow, return to the subject of Stacy, “That Bev. She really smokes too much. And she eats too much too.”

  “I know,” Amy answered.

  “Use your napkin, please.” She couldn’t help it: the sight of Amy licking ketchup from her fingers made her almost insane. Just like that, anger reared its ready head and filled Isabelle’s voice with coldness. Only there might have been more than coldness, to be honest. To be really honest, you might say there had been the edge of hatred in her voice. And now Isabelle hated herself as well. She would take the remark back if she could, except it was too late, and poking at a sliced beet with her fork, she saw how Amy rolled her paper napkin beneath her palm, then put it on her plate.

  “She’s nice, though,” Amy said. “I think Fat Bev is nice.”

  “No one said she wasn’t nice.”

  The evening stretched before them interminably; the hazy, muted sunlight had barely moved across the floor. Amy sat with her hands in her lap, her neck thrust forward like one of those foolish toy dogs you could sometimes see in the back of a car, whose head wagged back and forth at stop signs. “Oh, sit up straight,” Isabelle wanted to say, but instead she said wearily, “You may be excused. I’ll do the dishes tonight.”

  Amy seemed to hesitate.

  In the olden days one would not leave the table until the other one was through. This practice, this courtesy, dated back to when Amy was a toddler, a slow eater always, perched on top of two Sears catalogues placed on her chair, her skinny legs dangling down. “Mommy,” she would say anxiously, seeing that Isabelle was done with her meal, “will you still sit with me?” And Isabelle always sat. Many nights Isabelle was tired and restless, and frankly, she would have preferred to spend the time flipping through a magazine to relax, or at least to get up and get started on the dishes. And yet she would not tell the child to hurry, she did not want to upset that small digestive tract. It was their time together. She sat.

  Those days Amy had stayed at Esther Hatch’s house while Isabelle was at work. An awful place, that Hatch house was—a run-down farmhouse on the outskirts of town, filled with babies and cats and the smell of cat urine. But it was the only arrangement Isabelle could afford. What was she supposed to do? She hated leaving Amy there, though, hated how Amy never said good-bye, how she would go immediately to the front window instead, climbing up on the couch to watch her mother drive away. Sometimes Isabelle would wave without looking as she backed down the driveway, because she couldn’t bear to look. It was like something had been pushed down her throat to see Amy at the window like that, with her pale, unsmiling face. Esther Hatch said she never cried.

  But there was one period of time when Amy would do nothing except sit in a chair, and Esther Hatch complained that it gave her the willies, that if Amy couldn’t get up and run around like a normal child she wasn’t sure she could keep taking her in. This made Isabelle panic. She bought Amy a doll at Woolworth’s, a plastic thing with springy, coarse platinum hair. The head fell off right away, but Amy seemed to l
ove it. Not the doll so much as the head of the doll. She carried the head everywhere she went, and colored the plastic lips red. And apparently she stopped confining herself to a chair at Esther Hatch’s house, because the woman did not complain to Isabelle again.

  But it was clear, then, why Isabelle would sit with the girl each night at their table in the kitchen. “Sing Itty Bitty Spider?” Amy might ask sweetly, squeezing a lima bean between her small fingers. And Isabelle—it was horrible—would say no. She would say no, she was too tired. But Amy was such a sweet little thing—she was so happy to have her mother right there, a mere arm’s length across the table. Her legs would swing with happiness, her small wet mouth open in a smile, tiny teeth like white pebbles set in her pink gums.

  Isabelle closed her eyes, a familiar ache beginning in the center of her breastbone. But she had sat there, hadn’t she? She had done that.

  “Please,” she said now, opening her eyes. “You may be excused.” Amy got up and left the room.

  THE CURTAIN MOVED again. This was a good sign, if Isabelle had been able to think about it that way, the evening air moving enough to move the curtain, a breeze strong enough to ripple the curtain lightly, holding itself out from the sill for a moment as though it were the dress of a pregnant woman, and then, just as quickly, silently falling back in its place, a few of its folds touching the screen. But Isabelle did not think that at least there was a breeze. She thought instead that the curtains needed to be washed, that they had not been washed in quite some time.

  Casting her eye about the kitchen, she was glad to see that at least the faucets shone, and the counters did not seem streaky, as they sometimes did, with the dried remains of cleanser. And there was the Belleek china creamer that had belonged to her mother, the delicate, shell-like, shimmering thing. Amy was the one who had brought it down from the cupboard a few months before and suggested they use it each night. “It was your mother’s,” Amy said, “and you like it so much.” Isabelle had said all right. But now, suddenly, it seemed dangerous; a thing so easily to be swept by a sleeve, a bare arm, and smashed to bits on the floor.