Amy and Isabelle (3 page)

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 love 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.

Isabelle rose and wrapped the leftover part of her hamburger in wax paper and put it in the refrigerator. She washed the plates, red-stained water from the beets swirling into the white sink. Only when the dishes were done and put away did she wash the Belleek china creamer. She washed it carefully, and dried it carefully, then put it far back in the cupboard, where it couldn’t be seen.

She heard Amy come out of her bedroom and move to the top of the stairs. Just as Isabelle was about to say that she didn’t want the Belleek creamer used anymore, that it was too special a thing and too apt to get broken, Amy called down the stairs, “Mom, Stacy’s pregnant. I just wanted you to know.”

Chapter

2

THE RIVER DIVIDED the town in two. On the east side Main Street was pleasant and wide, curving past the post office and town hall until it came to a place where the river was only a quarter mile wide. There the street became a bridge that had a spacious sidewalk along each side. If you drove or walked west over the bridge and looked up the river, you could see the back end of the mill and part of its dark underbelly as well, built out over the granite slabs of foam-sprayed rocks. When you came off the bridge there was a small park at the river’s edge, and it was here the sun could set so stridently in wintertime, slicing pinkish golds along the horizon, with the bare elms at the edge of the bank seeming austere and dark, emboldened. But hardly anyone went into the park for long. The park itself was nothing much to look at, having little more than a broken swing set and a few scattered benches, many of them missing a slat from their seats. Mostly it was teenagers that you’d find there, perching themselves tensely on the edge of the benches, hunching their shoulders against the cold, cupping bare hands around cigarettes; sometimes in the dusk you could find a small group passing a joint to each other, inhaling, throwing surreptitious glances up toward Mill Road.

Mill Road was what Main Street became once it crossed over the
bridge, and while Mill Road did lead eventually to the mill, it first wound itself through a section of stores that included an old A&P with sawdust on its floors, a furniture outlet with faded couches in the windows, a few clothing stores and coffee shops, a pharmacy that for years had had the same display of a dusty plastic African violet sitting in the middle of a bedpan.

The mill was just beyond. Even though the river there was at its ugliest—churning and yellow and sudsy—the mill itself, built in red brick a century before, had a certain complacent elegance to the way it sat, as though it had long ago accepted itself as the center of this town. For the workers whose families had come down from Canada a generation before, the mill was in fact the center of the town; it was the center of their lives, and their houses were not far away, scattered in neighborhoods on narrow roads where small grocery stores advertised beer in the windows with blinking blue lights.

This part of town was known as the Basin, though no one seemed to remember why anymore, and the houses here were often loose-looking and large, with three stories, one apartment to each floor, and usually a tilting front porch. But there were some single-family homes as well, shingled and small, with garage doors left always open, showing a confluence of tires, bicycles, fishing rods. A number of these houses were painted turquoise or lavender or even pink, and there might be a statue of the Virgin Mary in a front yard, or a bathtub filled with petunias and dirt, becoming in winter a serene mound of snow. In winter, some people put plastic reindeer or angels in the snow and decorated them with blinking lights. A dog, chained outside in the cold, sometimes barked at the reindeer all night, but no one thought to call the owner or the police, as they would certainly have done across the river, where people expected, or demanded, a good night’s sleep.

This other side of the river, known as Oyster Point, was where the few doctors and dentists and lawyers of Shirley Falls lived. The public school was here, and the community college, built fifteen years earlier out toward Larkindale’s field, and the Congregational church was here as well. A simple white church with a simple white steeple, very different from the huge Catholic church with its stained-glass windows, in the Basin up on a hill. It was on this Protestant, Oyster Point side of the river that Isabelle Goodrow had very deliberately chosen to live. Had
she been forced, for whatever reason, to consider moving into the top-floor apartment of some lavender house with the Virgin Mary standing blank-eyed out front, Isabelle would have refused. She would simply have gone back up the river to the town she had left. But luck (she had sometimes at first thought God) had seen to it that the carriage house of the old Crane estate had been available to rent, and so it was there, on the outskirts of Oyster Point, beneath the woody hills and fields out on Route 22, that she had brought her small daughter to live.