Amy and Isabelle (17 page)

“Why not.”

“Oh, honey.” Isabelle started eating again.

“Would you care if I married someone who wasn’t a Protestant?” Amy asked. The question was an idle one, just friendly.

“No, of course not,” Isabelle answered, but even as she said it she felt a tightening within her. “You can marry whomever you choose.”

“Like if I married someone Jewish,” Amy said, spreading butter onto her potato skin.

“Oh, that would be all right,” Isabelle said, relieved. “Jews are very smart. They
think
. They use their heads. They value education.”

“What if I married a Catholic?”

Isabelle cut a small piece of chicken in two. “It would be none of my business.”

“I probably won’t marry a Catholic,” Amy said agreeably. “I think it’s dumb the way they kneel. I’d feel so queer kneeling in church.”

“Well,” Isabelle said. “I happen to agree with you there. Although we should respect the differences of others.”

And so there was that: the pleasant chitchat between mother and daughter. Isabelle felt redeemed. All the hard work of raising this girl on her own, and just look: they had landed on their feet.

“Say,” she said, suddenly remembering, as she cleared away the dishes, that there was something she’d meant to ask Amy about, “that math teacher of yours that took Miss Dayble’s place this year. What’s his name?”

“Robertson.” Amy bent down as though looking for something dropped on the floor. “What about him?” she asked, her head still down, taking her hair from behind her ear so that it fell in front of her face.

“His wife left him.” Isabelle had brought a sponge from the sink and was wiping the table thoroughly.

“Really?” Amy stood up, careful to keep her back to her mother. “I thought a pea dropped on the floor but I guess not.” But her mother wasn’t looking, she was heading back to the sink. “How do you know his wife left him?”

“Becky Tucker took a class with her at the college evidently. Honey, if you think there may be a pea rolling around under there I wish you’d look carefully. I don’t want any mice in this house.”

“She took a class with Mrs. Robertson?”

“According to Arlene. Here, stick this in the refrigerator if you can’t find the pea.” Isabelle held out the leftover chicken wrapped carefully in aluminum foil.

Amy waited until she had opened the refrigerator door and then said, “How come she left?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Had her consciousness raised, I guess.”

Amy poked among the jars of mayonnaise and pickles and ketchup, moved a carton of eggs. “What do you mean?”

“Amy, close that door for heaven’s sake. Just stick the chicken in and close the door.” Isabelle was filling the sink with hot water, tying an apron around her waist.

Amy closed the refrigerator door. “What do you mean, had her consciousness raised?”

“I don’t really know if that’s what happened. But you know how all sorts of women are getting together these days in these groups.”

“But what are they?” Amy sat down at the table and opened her biology book. She still had homework to do.

“As far as I can tell,” Isabelle said, scrubbing a plate vigorously, “women sit around and complain about their husbands and encourage each other to get divorced.”

“Mrs. Robertson was in one of those groups?”

“Oh, Amy, I don’t really know. I just know that Arlene said she’d gone home to live with her parents.”

“But how come?”

“Good heavens, Amy. I really don’t know.” Isabelle rinsed the plates, then wiped at the faucets.

Amy did not ask anything more.

“Anyway.” Isabelle sighed and dried her hands on a towel. “Poor man. To have his wife run off.” (She would remember this later—that she had stood in the kitchen and said
Poor man
.)

“Maybe he doesn’t care,” Amy said, flipping through her biology book. “Maybe he was sick of her.”

“Who knows,” Isabelle said idly, “the way things are today. But it seems to me being sick of each other is not much of a reason to get divorced.” She went into the living room and got out her sewing basket to mend the hem on one of her skirts. It riled her a bit, really, to think of people being so careless with their marriages. “If people remain considerate and kind they don’t get sick of each other,” she said to no one in particular, measuring off an arm’s length of thread.

Amy, sitting at the kitchen table, stared at her biology book. For a while now her homework had not been getting done. Just yesterday she received a poor grade on her biology quiz, and written across the top was a note from the teacher:
Your mind is not on your work
.

ISABELLE HAD FOUND herself so absorbed in the world of Madame Bovary that she long ago stopped congratulating herself for reading the book. When the women in the office room began calling her Madame Ovary (“Here’s Madame Ovary,” someone might say as Isabelle walked into the lunchroom), she was distressed not so much by
the teasing but because she no longer felt comfortable reading the book at work and had to delay the pleasure until she was home. But she kept the paperback with her in her pocketbook, and finding the weather to be once again clear and warm, she slipped quietly out one day at lunchtime and sat in her car in the parking lot, where she chewed her thumbnail till it bled while poor Emma Bovary finally died horribly on her bed.

Isabelle wept. She looked through the cubbyhole for a napkin to dab at her eyes and thought what a mess Emma Bovary had made of her life. Isabelle even spoke it aloud. “What a
mess
,” she said, and blew her nose. She was glad it was Emma who had suffered all this and not herself. She was very glad of that. Isabelle took a deep breath and looked through the windshield at the parking lot, where bits of gravel glinted in the sun. It seemed both a relief and just a little bit boring to be in the parking lot of a shoe mill in Shirley Falls in the twentieth century when most of her mind still held the sponginess of the awful mess that had just taken place in a French village a century before: she pictured the small room, bees at the window, Emma’s last cries of poisonous pain.… Awful, awful, awful. She felt so sorry for Emma. Tears welled in Isabelle’s eyes again.

But still. Still and all. (Isabelle took one last look at Emma Bovary and put her in the cubbyhole.) She had brought it on herself. She really had, she just really, really had. Emma had a perfectly decent husband in Charles. If she had been loving to him she would have found that he was capable of growing into a strong and interesting man. Isabelle believed this. As a matter of fact, Isabelle had not been able to shake the feeling that she herself would have been very pleased with a husband like Charles, and so she had some difficulty, of course, seeing things from Emma’s point of view.

But it was complicated. Because deep in Isabelle’s heart she understood the terrible longings Emma had. There was not a person in Shirley Falls who would have believed this of Isabelle, but she held within her the memories of a devastating physical love with a man, and these memories danced inside her at times like a living thing. It had been wrong, though—as wrong as a thing can be—and her heart bounced furiously now inside her chest; she felt she would suffocate in this car.

She calmed herself by walking along the edge of the parking lot and gazing at two hawks gliding high in the blue sky, and then down at the river, the sudsy, roiling water spewing out from under the mill over the granite rocks. Emma Bovary had been selfish, Isabelle told herself, selfish and unloving, and proof of this was not merely in her indifference to her husband but in the dreadful neglect of her child. No, Emma Bovary was far more evil than Isabelle Goodrow ever had been or ever could be, and if in the end she died a loathsome death, well, she had no one to blame but herself.

Isabelle pulled open the heavy back door of the mill, grateful for the familiar smell of leather and glue, the loud clanking from the machine room she passed, the whirring sound of the elevator as it brought her up and deposited her into the quiet hallway outside the office room. She stopped in the ladies’ room to freshen her lipstick and comb her hair, considering as she did these things that she might not read another book for a while, that life was difficult enough without bringing someone else’s sorrows to crash down about your head.

“GOING TO STOP by and see me this afternoon?” Mr. Robertson would say quietly to Amy as she left his class, or if he met her during the day in the hallway, and then Amy would go to his classroom after school and they would stand by the windows talking, or they might sit on top of the desks. “Going to let me drive you home again?” he would ask, and so it became a pattern: their walk out to the teachers’ parking lot, their drive along Route 22, and then sitting in her driveway in his car.

She had not intended to kiss him again, but the very next time he drove her home, as she prepared to get out of the car, he had said teasingly, “No kiss today?” and leaned toward her, offering his cheek. So that became part of the pattern as well, her lips lightly touching his bearded cheek.

One day he turned his head and kissed her on the mouth. “Have a good evening,” he said afterward, with a brief nod of his head.

That night she did not do any homework again. She did not do much of anything except move restlessly about the house, thinking of his deliberate kiss to her mouth. Isabelle felt her forehead to see if she was sick.

“I’m fine,” Amy said. “Really.”

But it was hard, this whole business of lying to her mother. She said now, sitting down on the edge of the couch and holding some hair up in front of her face, as though checking for split ends. “Tomorrow I’ll probably be staying a little bit after school again.”

“English Club?”

“Math,” Amy said. (There was no English Club. She had made that up on the spur of the moment one day.) “Math help. Well, not
help
. A few of us are really good in math and the teacher’s been giving us this trigonometry stuff. Practically college stuff. He said he’ll work extra with us sometimes after school.”

“Oh, really,” said Isabelle, completely fooled. “Isn’t that nice. Interesting, too.”

“Why interesting?” Amy kept squinting at the hair she held before her face; her eyes were almost crossed.

“Because my father was very good with numbers. Maybe you inherited it from him.”

Amy wasn’t so good in math. When she saw Mr. Robertson after school they never talked about math. “I like English better,” she said, dropping her hair, and thinking again about Mr. Robertson’s wife and why she had left him. He must have asked her to leave.

“I finished that book I was reading,” Isabelle was saying. “
Madame Bovary
, by that French writer.” (She was afraid she would mispronounce his name.) “Really very good. A classic.”

“So anyways,” Amy said, “if I have to stay after school I’ll call you so you won’t get worried if you call and I’m not here.”

“Yes,” said Isabelle, “do that. Please. I would worry myself sick.”

Mr. Robertson, meanwhile, seemed no different—with a wife, or without. He still drove her home. They still sat in his car. To the side of the house the tulip bed blazed in yellow and red. He kissed her every day now, comfortably, briefly, on the mouth. But one warm day in May, even though he had just said, “Well, my dear, you’d best be getting out,” Amy thought she saw a fleeting difference in his eyes and in the slow way he leaned toward her while looking at her mouth.

Chapter

10

DR. GERALD BURROWS fingered a button on his suit jacket and gazed steadily at the patient before him, a man only slightly younger than Dr. Burrows himself, who, in recounting a childhood fishing trip with his recalcitrant father, was quietly ripping to shreds the Kleenex tissue in his hands. When the man glanced out the window for a distracted moment, Dr. Burrows let his eyes move fleetingly to the clock—a small, gray, discreet clock placed on a table a little to the left and behind the patient’s chair.

Dr. Burrows, who prided himself on the meticulous attention he gave to his patients, was having difficulty concentrating on the tale unfolding before him of this sorrowful fishing trip some thirty years ago. While he believed himself to be adequately accustomed to the periods of discouragement his line of work brought with it, Dr. Burrows was particularly aware these days of a pervasive sense of futility. No one got well—almost no one, anyway. The disabilities of the people who came to him were established so young, in such delicate years, that their tender agonies were, by the time they arrived in his office, thickened into a stunned arrangement of expressions, deflections, and shrewd manipulations. No, they did not get well. They came because they were lonely, and because their pain genuinely confused them. At best, he thought,
still fingering the button on his jacket, he could provide a refuge from judgment, a moment of collection, of repose.

He could not provide this for himself. Behind the implacable expression on his face right now was the continued, nagging thought of his daughter. Stacy hated him. He could see it in her silent, sneering glances, could detect it in the arrogant slump of her body at the breakfast table each morning. It was frightening how in her momentary, insolent glance at him before she left the kitchen he saw, or felt he saw, a hardened look of knowingness.

Where such acrimony came from he was not altogether certain. But it indicated (it had to, didn’t it?) that she had not been raised as gracefully as she might have been. He had been firm about adopting a baby at birth rather than an older child, precisely to avoid this dark imprint of damage—as though
he
could raise the squalling, red-faced baby damage-free! She had been angry even then. Weeks old, she had squinted at them furiously in between her cries; in moments of repose she stared at them with baleful eyes. A difficult birth, they had found out later—she had been stuck in the birth canal with the umbilical cord tightening around her neck. Was it this—the shadowy knowledge, the remnants of this trauma—that the girl rebelled against?