Amy and Isabelle (11 page)

“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.”

Triumphant, successful, she was filled with shame. She thought Flip
Rawley glanced at her. Amy Goodrow staying after school? When the bell rang, she kept her head down as she left the room.

INSUFFERABLE CLASSES: HISTORY as dull as death; Spanish pale and endless. There was no meaning to anything except for the fact that after school she would sit in Mr. Robertson’s classroom. And when the final bell rang she was exhausted, as though she had gone for a very long time without food. In the girls’ room she studied herself in the mirror above the row of sinks. This was her? This was what people saw when they looked at her? Her hair was nice but her face seemed without expression, and how could it be when so much was going on inside her? She pulled open the door of the girls’ room and it swung shut behind her, a tired
thunk
.

The hallway was empty. She had never stayed after school before and it was a different place this time of day. The sun falling over the classroom floors seemed a deeper shade of yellow; the large windowsills and dusty blackboards had a friendly, worn-out feeling to them, the way her clothes sometimes felt at the end of the day. Around her was the silence of an empty hallway, although she could hear in the distance the echo of cheerleaders practicing in the gym.

Mr. Robertson was sitting at his desk in the back of the room, writing, when she came in. “Have a seat,” he said, without looking up.

She chose a desk up near the blackboard instead of her usual place, and sat down quietly, unsure of what to do. She squinted toward the window; dust particles hung suspended in the afternoon air, lit by a shaft of sunlight. Down the hall was the metallic sound of a locker being slammed shut and, closer by, the janitor’s broom bumping against the stairwell.

She heard Mr. Robertson drop a pencil onto his desk. “Get started on your homework,” he said mildly, “if you want to.”

“I don’t want to,” she answered, shaking her head; and then, like that, there were tears in her eyes. Such terrible sadness! Such a sudden collapse; she was worn down by her afternoon of anticipation. She sat with her hands in her lap, away from him. Her hair hung down on either side of her face, and squeezing her eyes she felt warm tears drop on her hands.

“Amy.” He had gotten up from his desk and was walking over to her. “Amy,” he said again, appearing beside her. He spoke her name gently, his voice a soft strumming, so grave, serious. Had anyone ever spoken to her this seriously before? “I understand, Amy,” he said. “It’s okay.”

He must have understood something, because the tears did not seem to alarm him, or even puzzle him. He sat down at the desk beside her and simply handed her his handkerchief. It was a red bandanna, big as a place mat, and she took it, rubbed her eyes, blew her nose. It should have been excruciating to be crying in front of this man, but it was not. And that must have had to do with his lack of surprise, with the kind weariness she saw in his eyes. She gave him back his handkerchief.

“I know this poem,” she finally said, and he smiled at the way she said
poyme
, at the way she sat simply, like a child, her eyes still wet and slightly red. She struck him as something entirely innocent, and bruised.

“It’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay,” she explained, tucking her hair back behind her ear, “and one time in class I thought of it. The first line is, uhm—is ‘Euclid alone looked on beauty bare,’ I think that’s it.”

He nodded slowly, his gingery eyebrows raised. “ ‘Let all who prate of beauty hold their peace.’ ”

“You
know
it,” she said, amazed.

He nodded again, his eyebrows drawn together thoughtfully, as though he was considering something he had not thought he would be called upon to consider.

“You know it,” Amy repeated. “I can’t believe you know that poem.” For her it was as though some bird had just flown free after being kept in a cardboard box. “Do you know any others?” She turned in her chair so that she was facing him, their knees not far apart. “By Millay, I mean. Do you know any others?”

Mr. Robertson spread his fingers over his mouth, contemplating her. Then he answered, “Yes, I know others. Her sonnets. ‘Time does not bring relief; you all have lied …’ ”

“ ‘Who told me time would ease me of my pain,’ ” Amy finished, bouncing slightly in her chair, and her hair, tucked behind her ear, slipped loose, catching the slice of sunlight that fell through the window, so that she saw him through a golden haze; she saw the surprise and interest on his face, and then she saw something else, something she
would remember for a very long time: a motion deep within his eyes, as though something had just shifted underneath.

He stood and moved to the window, his hands in the pockets of his corduroy pants. “Come look at this sky,” he said, nodding his head toward the window. “I bet it’s going to snow tonight.” He turned in her direction, then back to the window. “Come look,” he said again.

Obediently she went to the window. The sky had turned fierce and poignant, dark clouds moving in, and the harsh winter sun, golden at this time of day, as though it had been gathering force since morning, now lit a bank of clouds in the west so that a part of their darkness was rimmed in an almost electrical light.

“Oh, I love it when it’s like that,” Amy said. “Look.” She pointed at the funneled rays of sun splayed down over the snow-crusted street. “I just love that. In real life, I mean. I don’t like it in pictures so much.”

He watched her, biting down on his mustachy lip.

“This old woman I used to have to clean house for when I was in seventh grade—this old lady from the church,” Amy explained, “—she had these ugly old-fashioned paintings in her living room. This girl who looked embalmed. Like a pincushion. Do you know the kind of painting I mean?”

He kept watching her carefully. “Perhaps. Go on.”

“It gave me the willies,” Amy said. “Dusting the chairs and having that girl stare down at me.”

Mr. Robertson moved to lean against the windowsill, facing her, his ankles crossed. He ran two fingers lightly over his mustache. “I had no idea you could talk so much,” he mused.

“Me either.” Her answer was ingenuous. She looked past him out the window again. The clouds were darker, still competing with the sun; light and dark on the spread-out wintry sky. “Anyways,” Amy said (such a tangled bunch of words hopping and bumping inside her), “there was this other picture in the old lady’s house that was old-fashioned too, where the sky is all dark but there’s bright rays of sun cutting through. And some battle with horses or something—you know, little figures—going on underneath. That kind of picture.”

Mr. Robertson nodded. She spoke “picture” as
pitcher
, and he was careful not to smile. Plus how she said
anyways
. “Yes?”

“Well, I don’t like that kind of pitcher.”

“I see. ”

“The sky looks so fake and dramatic. But in real life”—Amy indicated with her hand the sky out the window—“it’s a different story. Then I love it when it looks that way.”

Mr. Robertson nodded again. “Chiaroscuro,” he said in a teacherly way.

She glanced at him and looked away, disappointed he would suddenly speak in a foreign phrase. It fuddled her head, made her feel simple and stupid.

“Chiaroscuro,” Mr. Robertson repeated. “It’s Italian. Lightness and dark. Lightness obscured.” He turned to look at the sky. “Like that.”

If earlier Amy had had the image of a bird let out of a box, the bird began to falter now. But Mr. Robertson looked at her kindly. “So you no longer clean house for the old woman?”

“No,” Amy said. “She got sick and she’s in a nursing home somewhere. ”

“I see.” Mr. Robertson sat back on the wide windowsill, a hand on either side of him, his torso thrust forward. “How come you didn’t like to clean her house?” The way he asked the question made her feel like he actually wanted to know.

She considered this. “Because it was lonely,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “Tell me.”

“The place was all sterile and icky. Like a museum. I don’t know why she had me come once a week, because nothing was ever dirty.”

“You did a good job, then,” he said, smiling, but she was interrupting him already.

“Like the fireplace. It was never used. She had these birch logs all stacked up in it and she had me wash the logs every week with Lestoil and warm water. Washing those logs.” Amy shook her head. “It was weird.”

“It sounds depressing.” Mr. Robertson nodded.

“It was depressing. That’s exactly what it was.” Amy nodded quickly. (He understood so
much
.)

“And how did this job come about?” He tilted his head with curiosity.

“An announcement in the church program.” Amy held her hands together behind her back and turned slightly to and fro as she talked. It
was like drinking fresh water to be able to talk like this. “That she needed someone to help out, so my mother thought it would be nice if I did it. My mother likes to make a good impression at the church.”