Amy and Isabelle (41 page)

The Cunninghams had moved to California. Jake joined a roofing business out there, and apparently it went well—Isabelle couldn’t really remember. They got Christmas cards.

Then, when Isabelle was twelve, her father died (“Is that so,” murmured Bev. “I had no idea”), sitting in his car at a gas station while his tank got filled. (“I’m so sorry,” Dottie said, blowing her nose.) Yes, it was hard. You don’t think when you’re a kid how awful something is, you just take it as it comes, but you stay in shock at first; the funeral was beautiful, she always remembered that. A lot of people showed up. Jake Cunningham came from California—Evelyn couldn’t come with all the kids to take care of, of course—and people were very nice to Isabelle. She felt special on the day of the funeral. And they played “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which was still Isabelle’s favorite hymn—she took such comfort in the words of that hymn—but she was getting off the track; it wasn’t really her father she meant to dwell on.

So. She took a deep breath. So anyway. After the funeral was when it got hard. The months after, when people stopped calling, when people didn’t mention it anymore. (“Yes,” said Bev, nodding, “it’s always that way, isn’t it.”) She took care of her mother, and her mother took care of her. But they didn’t go many places—to church, of course, and her cousins lived up the road. Isabelle worked hard at school and got good grades. She wanted to be a teacher. First grade, because that was the year children learned to read, and a good teacher could make a difference, you know. Her mother was proud of her. Oh, she and her mother loved each other very much, Isabelle said, her voice rising slightly, her eyes blinking again, and yet to tell the truth, to tell the sad real truth, in her
memory those years stretched out like one long dreary Sunday afternoon, and she didn’t know why, because she would give anything to be with her mother again. It wouldn’t seem dreary at all.

She had broken her mother’s Belleek china creamer tonight, hitting it off the kitchen counter by mistake. (“What’s that, hon?” Fat Bev leaned forward. “Broke what, hon?”) It had always been like having a piece of her mother tucked away safe in the kitchen cabinet, and now it was gone. (Tears were rolling down Isabelle’s face.) She’d always thought Amy would have it someday in her own home, but now it was gone. (“Better pass that toilet paper around,” Bev said, reaching an arm toward Dottie, and Dottie obeyed, unwinding a long strip of it for Isabelle.)

Well, so anyway. Isabelle blew her nose hard, wiped at her eyes. So anyway, she got good grades and ended up valedictorian of her class, actually, which made her mother proud. (“As it well should,” said Dottie generously, handing over another strip of toilet paper in case it was needed.) There were only thirty-three people in the class, though—a small school. (“Doesn’t matter,” Bev said firmly. “Everyone knows you’re smart. You should be proud.”)

Her mother liked to sew. Her mother made her a beautiful white linen dress for graduation day. Except she was getting ahead of herself here. Because six weeks earlier, on a nice day in May (the magnolia had been blooming by the front door—she remembered that—and bees were knocking into the porch screens), Jake Cunningham showed up out of the blue. He’d come east on business and stopped by to visit Isabelle and her mother, and oh, they were happy to see him. Come in, come in, her mother had said. How are Evelyn and the kids? Fine, all fine. Jake Cunningham’s eyes were gray and extremely kind. He smiled each time he looked at Isabelle. And he fixed the roof. He went off to a lumber store and came back with supplies and climbed up a ladder and fixed the leaks in the roof. It was wonderful to have a man in the house.

He sat in the kitchen while they made dinner, his arms there on the table, big arms covered with blond curly hair, and Isabelle, popping rolls from the oven into a basket, was happy. She hadn’t known until that day how unhappy she had been, and now she wasn’t unhappy, and his eyes, she thought, were a little bit sad, and very, very kind. He still smiled every time she looked at him.

Her mother was tired from all the excitement and went to bed early that night. Isabelle and Jake sat in the living room. She would always remember that. That time of year, the evenings were getting long, and it had just been getting dark when her mother went to bed. “Turn on the lamp,” her mother said to them innocently, as she left the room.

But they didn’t. They sat there on the couch facing each other, their elbows hanging over the back, talking quietly to each other, smiling, looking down, glancing out the window, as the room filled with that soft, springtime darkness. Jake was wearing a striped shirt—well, that didn’t matter, she supposed; it’s just that she couldn’t help remembering. Anyway, there was a full moon that night, and the night sky through the open living-room window had a wonderful, hazy glow.

So.

They went for a walk. They walked through the neighboring potato fields, and there was that earthy smell of a greenhouse. The full moon was low in the sky, like it weighed a great deal.

She wished she could say she didn’t know … but she couldn’t say that. She knew it was wrong. And she didn’t even care—that was the thing. Well, she did, but she didn’t. Because she was so happy! She didn’t care what it cost! She was happier than she had ever been.

The next night they went for a walk again. Afterward, he kissed her on the forehead and said that no one must ever know. She loved him. Oh, goodness, did she love him! She wanted to tell him how much she loved him, and she thought in the morning she would tell him that, but in the morning he was gone.

(Toilet paper was passed around; all three women blew their noses.)

She didn’t tell anyone. Who was she going to tell? But then she was valedictorian and she had to give her little speech, which she did, standing on the school lawn on a hot day in June, wearing her white linen dress. When she got home she vomited, upchucked right down the front of that white linen dress, ruining it forever. Her mother thought it was nerves and was nice about the dress. Her mother was very nice. (More toilet paper was passed to Isabelle.)

But she vomited again the next day, and the next, and finally confessed the whole sorry business to her mother, both of them crying, sitting in the living room holding hands. The next afternoon she and her mother went to see the minister, sitting on his plaid couch while the sun
fell over a gray carpet that Isabelle always remembered was remarkably dirty—isn’t it funny how you remembered certain things? In the middle of everything she wondered why no one had vacuumed the minister’s rug. The minister walked back and forth with his hands in the pockets of his seersucker trousers. God worked in mysterious ways, he said, and His will would be done.

Her mother took care of the baby while Isabelle drove each day to the teachers’ college in Gorham. And that was strange, too, because after class when some classmate asked if she wanted to have coffee, she always said no and just hurried home. No one at the college knew she had a baby. (“Did Jake Cunningham ever know?” Bev asked. “Yes,” said Dottie, who was completely sitting up now, “did Jake Cunningham ever know?”)

He knew. Her mother had called him in California. Evelyn answered the telephone. Imagine Evelyn that day.

She
had never
really imagined—that was the thing. But imagine it now, standing in your kitchen, wondering what to make for dinner that night, checking the refrigerator—and the telephone rings. One minute your world is one way, the next minute it’s all caved in. (“But what did this Jake fellow say?” demanded Bev. “What did the creep have to say?”)

He was sorry. Oh, he was terribly sorry, of course. If money was ever a problem they should please let him know. But they weren’t going to take money from him. (“Of course not,” said Dottie, looking wide-awake and lucid, as though the tranquilizer had perked her up instead of sedating her. “Bullshit,” said Bev. “I would have taken every dime.”)

No, it was her responsibility—Isabelle’s. And her mother’s, which didn’t seem fair. None of this was fair to her mother; she hadn’t done anything to deserve it. (“Well, life isn’t fair,” observed Dottie.) But that January her mother died. She went to bed one night not feeling quite right in her stomach—a little queasy, she had said—and then she passed away in her sleep from a heart attack. Isabelle always thought it was the stress that had killed her. (“People with worse stress live to be a hundred,” Fat Bev assured her.)

And so she had dropped out of college. She panicked, is what she did. She had a baby to take care of, and she really wanted a husband. There were no husbands available in her small town, so she sold her mother’s house and moved down the river to Shirley Falls. Even the minister had
told her not to do it. But she thought she had a better chance of finding a husband in Shirley Falls.

It was a mistake, though. She got nervous and bought a wedding band at Woolworth’s; she did that on the spur of the moment, but then she ended up wearing it for almost a year—and when anyone asked, she said she was a widow. (Dottie and Bev both nodded. They remembered this.) It really was a terrible mistake to lie like that. But once you’re in the middle of a lie it’s hard to get out of, even if you want to. (Dottie nodded again, more quickly.) Growing up, she had always thought she’d get married and have a nice little family. It was still strange sometimes to think it hadn’t happened that way.

But that was it.

That was her story.

The three of them sat in thoughtful silence, nodding almost imperceptibly to one another and to the floor. In the distance a car could be heard passing by on Route 22. “Jake died right before I moved to Shirley Falls,” Isabelle added, as an afterthought.

“Not another heart attack, I hope,” said Fat Bev.

Isabelle nodded. “On a golf course.”

“Jesum Crow, Isabelle,” said Dottie. “Don’t you know anyone who gets hit by a car? Drinks poison? Falls out of a boat and drowns?”

They all looked at each other; Bev widened her eyes.

“But I never thought of Evelyn,” Isabelle continued after a moment. “I never
really
thought of her.” She looked at Dottie apologetically.

“Well,” said Fat Bev, lighting a cigarette finally, “it’s Amy you’d better think of now.”

ISABELLE ENDED UP being the only person in the house that night not on Valium. Bev, at the last minute, decided too many things had transpired over the course of the evening for her fuddled mind to ever manage to fall asleep naturally, particularly in this itsy-bitsy living room of Isabelle’s, and so when Isabelle finally said good night, cheeks coloring because both women had leaned forward to give her a kiss, and leaving behind the bottle of pills next to the couch where Dottie sat, Bev helped herself to one of them. And then, thinking that she and Dottie would whisper—very softly, of course—for a few moments
about what Isabelle had just told them, Bev came out of the bathroom to find Dottie so deeply asleep you’d have thought she’d been hit on the head. She was still sitting up, in fact, and didn’t bat an eye when Bev tugged her down gently on the couch, sticking a pillow beneath her head, pulling the afghan over her.

Bev got herself arranged on the mattress that Isabelle had brought down earlier from Amy’s room—there in the middle of the living-room floor—and found herself surprisingly comfortable. Within minutes it seemed she could feel the lull of Valium at work; God, it’s a good thing she didn’t get her hands on these things too often. They constipate you, though. Who would have thought Isabelle Goodrow—life was a funny thing. Wally Brown after all these years. Making such a fool of himself.

Upstairs, Isabelle lay awake on the bed next to Amy, listening to her breathe. The smell of cigarette smoke that lingered from downstairs, reminded her, not unhappily, of church suppers she had attended with her parents as a child, when after eating at card tables in the church basement the men would gather and smoke their cigarettes, talking of crops, of tractors, while the women made coffee in the big silver urns and laid out the different cookies and cakes. These were the same women who a few years later would bring casseroles for her mother in the days following the funeral. That had been kind of them, Isabelle thought now. It seemed to her (What was that sound? Only Fat Bev snoring) that kindness was one of God’s greatest gifts: the fact that people, so many people, held within themselves the ability to be kind, really, was the work of God. How kind those women downstairs had been to her tonight! How kind the policemen had been earlier, the doctor on the telephone, the silent pharmacist (remembering only a large, white-coated bulk of a man). Yes, how kind people could be.

She would not let herself think right now of Avery, his wife, Emma—she could not bear right now the scraping harshness of those thoughts. She would think about her friends downstairs, how at one point tonight they had
wept with her
as she told of her love for Jake Cunningham. Isabelle could not get over this. These women had wept with her. They had heard her story of a life falsely lived, of other lives hurt by her own actions, and they had then with tender kindness kissed her good night.

She did not deserve it. For years, after all, she had held herself apart
from them, thinking she was better, thinking she ought, really, to be with the likes of Barbara Rawley and Peg Dunlap and Emma Clark.
Who did I think I was?
she asked herself, bewildered.
Who did I think I was?

She slept lightly but smoothly, as though she were not lying on a bed but on warm air, as though through some peculiar osmosis she had partially absorbed from the other bodies in the house the remnants of Valium doing its job. At times during the night Amy twitched, jerked a leg, called out, and Isabelle would wake without a sense of having been asleep. “I’m right here,” she said each time, touching the girl’s arm. “I’m right here, Amy. Everything’s all right.”

She opened her eyes one time and it was light, early-morning light moving into the room. Amy, lying on her side facing Isabelle, was looking at her with large, lucid eyes, an expression in them impossible to read. And it was so like when the girl had been little, when Isabelle had lain in this bed with her for an afternoon nap, trying to get her to sleep. But now her body was longer than Isabelle’s, blackheads were pressed in the crevices of her chin and nose, an angry pimple had pushed itself out on the top of her cheek. Still, her eyes contained the same enigma that Isabelle had seen there when the child was less than two years old.
Amy
, Isabelle wanted to say,
Amy, who are you?
Instead she said quietly, “Sleep.”