Amy and Isabelle (42 page)

And the girl did. Closing her eyes, her lips parting slightly, she fell back into sleep.

THE LIVING ROOM looked vandalized. A bare mattress half covered with a sheet lay in the middle of the floor, the couch had blankets and sheets falling off in a tumbled mass, pillows were knocked about, the lampshade tilted at an angle; a saucer of cigarette butts sat precariously on top of the television set, gray ashes having spilled over onto the floor. Toilet paper stretched from the end of the couch to the coffee table, where a half glass of water was leaving a mark on the mahogany finish.

In the bathroom off the kitchen the toilet flushed and Fat Bev could be heard singing, “You’re yesterday’s doughnuts, love, and I’m moving
onnnn …” The bathroom door opened and Bev greeted Isabelle with a sweep of her hand, indicating the mess before them. “Some party last night.”

Isabelle nodded, moving a pack of cigarettes off the seat of the armchair before sitting down.

“I’m sorry we made a mess,” said Dottie, from where she sat in the corner of the couch, her knees drawn up beneath her chin, smoke from her cigarette rising past her face, spreading into a widening gray haze as it neared the ceiling.

“How’s Amy? She all right?” Fat Bev picked up a roll of toilet paper, wrapping it around itself, then put it back down on the coffee table.

“She slept.” Isabelle nodded. “She’ll probably be down in a minute. She had some bad dreams, I think.”

“Sure. Did you dream, Dottie?”

Dottie shook her head just once, tiredly. “Except everything’s a nightmare. It all feels like a nightmare.”

Bev sat down on the couch and picked up Dottie’s hand. “You take it a day at a time, Dottie.”

“My cousin Cindy Rae,” Isabelle said from the armchair, “used to say the way to eat an elephant was one bite at a time.”

Bev lit a cigarette, using Dottie’s. “I like that. One bite at a time.”

Isabelle’s head ached. Whatever nighttime protection she had had from Avery Clark was gone. He was real once more—a real man who lived down the street, a man who with his wife had forgotten to come to her house. She pictured his mild face moving across the office room and felt a cavernous yearning; she hated him, too, picturing his crooked mouth, his tall thinness (
high heinie
, she suddenly thought). It hurt.

The girl stood in the doorway ducking her head, gazing into the room with a kind of startled tentativeness.

Fat Bev couldn’t help herself. She said, “Amy Goodrow, you come over here and let this fat old woman give you a hug.”

But the girl just looked at her; her expression didn’t change.

“Come on, now,” Bev commanded. “Do it for me. I bet you don’t believe it, but I’ve missed you.” She held her arms out, wagging her wrists, turning to Dottie for confirmation. “Haven’t I, Dot? Haven’t I said every day at work, Dottie, it’s nice to have you back but that Amy Goodrow was one little love?”

“It’s true,” Dottie agreed.

Now the girl smiled, a shy smile, tugging at her mouth self-consciously.

“C’mon now.”

And the girl went to her, bending down awkwardly while Bev squeezed hard with her big, soft arms. Isabelle, watching from the armchair, grimaced inwardly, partly at the girl’s clumsiness, and mostly because the girl, she knew, had terrible breath this morning, which Isabelle had smelled lying next to her on the bed—an unfamiliar, powerful, and pungent accumulation of nighttime fears.

“Thank you,” said Bev, finally releasing Amy. “My girls think they’re too big for hugs” (a lie) “and it’s going to be a few years before I have grandchildren around. God, I hope it’ll be a few years. I worry about Roxie, that she’ll marry the first foolish fellow comes along.”

“No,” said Dottie. “Roxanne has sense.” She moved the afghan so Amy could sit down on the couch. “I bet you wonder why your house is full this morning,” she added apologetically to Amy. “I’m having some problems at home, and your mom was nice enough to let us have a little pajama party here last night.”

Amy nodded tentatively. When she had woken this morning, the second time, her mother had whispered to her of Dottie’s troubles, and in her own cottony state of anguish Amy was comforted to know she was not the only person in the world whose heart had so recently been punched at, broken, pulled.

“Your mom was real kind,” Bev agreed, retrieving a pillow from the floor.

“No,” said Isabelle. “Actually you two were very kind to me.”

Yes, there had been and still was kindness in this room of shipwrecked women, but secrets remained nevertheless that would have to be borne alone. For Amy, of course, there was the astonishing voice of Mr. Robertson:
“I don’t know who you are.”
For Isabelle, there was the private removal of Avery Clark from a position that no one, including him, ever knew he occupied. And even Dottie had not given all the details of her grief to Bev (recurring thoughts of Althea’s vagina being fingered—a dark moist tunnel that led to her very insides, instead of the dry butchered thing that stopped short, sewn at the top now, in Dottie); and Fat Bev herself had private concerns she could not put into words, some heavy blanket of dread pressing down on her.

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable. Dottie, Bev, Isabelle, in their own ways, knew this. But Amy was young. She didn’t know yet what she could or could not bear, and silently she clung like a dazed child to all three mothers in the room.

“We’ve destroyed your living room,” Fat Bev said to Isabelle. “We might as well make pancakes and wreck your kitchen.”

“Oh, wreck it,” said Isabelle. “It doesn’t matter.” And it didn’t. Something had begun for Isabelle that morning as she lay on her bed with Amy, bright sunlight entering at the edges of the blinds, and that was a sense of giving in, giving up, letting go—what was it, exactly? But she had told Amy straight-out the situation with Dottie in a way she might not have otherwise, might otherwise have hedged—about “personal troubles”—but instead she told Amy about Wally Brown, Althea Tyson. (She ought to tell her now to go brush her teeth, Isabelle thought, glancing at the girl tucked into the corner of the couch; but she said nothing.) There had been, upon waking, some queer, mild flavor of freedom, beginning with the small realization that she would not make her bed today, nor would she go to church. Nor tomorrow would she go to work. She would call Avery Clark and tell him that Amy wasn’t well, that she needed a week off. She had plenty of time coming to her, there would be no problem with that. And what if Avery didn’t believe her, assumed she wasn’t coming in because she was embarrassed to see him after he forgot to come to her house? Or what if he thought she was angry?

It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what he thought.

And it didn’t matter that her house was a mess, that a water stain right now was forming on the mahogany coffee table. No, it did not matter.

“I should go to Mass,” Dottie was saying, directing the statement to Amy, who had no idea what to say and so only smiled back at the woman, shyly, from the other end of the couch.

“I s’pect God would rather see you eat a pancake,” called out Fat Bev from the kitchen, and Isabelle had a sudden, intense desire to be Catholic.

If she were Catholic, she could kneel, kneel and bow her head inside a church with brilliant stained-glass windows and streaks of golden light falling over her. Yes, oh yes, she would kneel and stretch out her arms, holding to her Amy and Dottie and Bev. “Please, God,” she would pray. (What
would
she pray?) She would pray, “Oh please, God. Help us to be merciful to ourselves.”

“I like these skinny and burned, myself,” said Fat Bev. “Need to whack them with the spatula.”

With the smell of coffee and burned pancakes the morning drew itself together, limped along to begin another day, but there was the unspoken presence of death: the specter of a girl’s body stuffed inside a car trunk, an empty house waiting for Dottie Brown to begin her sudden, unclean form of widowhood, and for Isabelle, too, most privately, for what would life look like now without Avery Clark at the center? And Amy, sitting on the end of the couch, unable to eat the pancake Bev had given her.

Isabelle watched the girl’s baffled look, the incoherence on her shiny face, and wondered again what her daughter had been doing driving around the back roads with some boy, wondered again what the different facets were to the girl’s grief, and knew it would take time to learn, that in fact she might never know.

One bite at a time.

Yes, it would take time, of course—all of it. She understood this, standing on the porch waving good-bye to Bev and Dottie as they backed out of the driveway. It would take time to arrange herself, her life, without Avery Clark at its core. Already she could feel the temptation from years of habit tugging at her—what would she wear tomorrow when she went back to work? But no. She would not go back to work, not for a while. No. He had forgotten to come to her house for dessert. She had meant little, or nothing, to him after all.

Except there were still these intermittent sensations of freedom, of clearheaded calmness. And there was Amy, the desire to keep Amy with her, to take care of her. For example, the girl could use a bath.

“How about a bath?” Isabelle said, and Amy shrugged, then shook her head. She was beyond a bath. “Okay,” Isabelle said. “But in a little while. A bath will help.” She opened the back door and the kitchen
door to air the place out, then sat down by Amy on the couch. “We’re not going to church,” she said.

Amy nodded.

Birds could be heard singing in the trees out back.

OUTSIDE: A SOFT, almost-autumn day. The sun falling through the windows of the Congregational church was soft in the way it fell over the deep red carpet, over the backs of the white pews. The breeze was soft, too, as it moved the leaves lightly on the elm trees, so that inside the church was the slight flickering of light against the wall and the altar where the shadows from the leaves played. The congregation stood and sang slowly in a low, collective voice,
Praise God from Whom all blessings flow
, a background to the pipe organ, whose full notes pealed and tumbled from the choir balcony.
Praise Him all creatures here below
. The ushers in their gray suits and heavy shoes placed the collection plates on the table at the front of the church, and, touching their ties, serious and self-conscious (Avery Clark was one of them), returned quietly to their seats.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Ahh-men
. The congregation sat down, an occasional knee knocking into the back of a pew, a hymnal with a soft thump falling to the floor, a pocketbook clicked open, shut, the soft blowing of a nose. (Emma Clark, furious with her husband, was pretending to listen to the Scripture reading and wondering if Isabelle Goodrow was seated somewhere behind them, carrying her affront with righteous dignity.)

Pots of white and wine-colored chrysanthemums lined the steps of the altar. The black robe of the minister moved as he raised his arm over the pulpit, slowly turning a page of the large Bible spread there before him.
And Jesus stood up and said to them, Let him who is without sin …
From the back of the church came the faint sweet smell of grape juice, for it was communion Sunday and waiting up back, alongside the silver plates of tiny squares of bread, were the round trays that carried the minuscule separate glasses of grape juice. (Timmy Thompson’s eyelids drooped until his wife’s stomach growled loud enough to waken him.)

The organ played again, the minister backing away from the pulpit, bowing his head, while above him the choir director, Miriam Langley, stood, faced the congregation in her own black robe and holding before
her the black folder of music, a certain pious agony overtaking her small, plain features while she swayed slightly, and then began her solo. (Peg Dunlap, seated next to her husband, pictured the face of Gerald Burrows between her legs, felt a corresponding warmth, fixed her eyes steadily on a pot of white chrysanthemums.)

Soft flickers of sunlight across the pulpit, muted sounds of traffic on Main Street, the drawn-out, swaying
amens
of Miriam Langley’s solo, a persistent muffled cough from somewhere in the balcony, brief crinkling sounds of a piece of hard candy being unwrapped, and then a burst of joyful organ music, as though perhaps the organist was glad Miriam Langley’s solo was finally done; the minister moving back to the pulpit, getting ready to give his sermon (titled in the program “To Peel a Sour Grape”), and the congregation arranging themselves in little ways, a quiet sigh here and there, settling in for the long haul now.

A crying baby was taken outside by a father who was not unhappy to sit in his car in the sunny parking lot and miss the sermon; Clara Wilcox, having gone as usual to the early service, was cleaning up in the activities room with Barbara Rawley from the earlier coffee hour and looking away with embarrassment at the number of times Barbara Rawley was putting a doughnut hole into her mouth. Sunlight came through the window and made the coffee urn twinkle before it was carried off and stored in the back room.

And back inside the church when the minister concluded his sermon (briefer than usual, because communion needed to be served), the ushers rose again, this time to pass out the communion trays; the minister turned again the large pages of the Bible on the pulpit before him,
Let all who eat of my body remember me …
There was one more hymn to sing, the congregation rising with some relief now the end was in sight, and then finally there was the benediction, the minister standing in the back of the church with his hand raised over his dearly loved congregation (is how it appeared to those who peeked, the man standing solemnly in his black robe, eyes closed, blessing all),
May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord
, at the very same moment that Isabelle Goodrow, in her tiny living room still filled with the lingerings of cigarette smoke, was telling Amy quietly the ending of the tale of Jake and Evelyn Cunningham and the three children they had raised in California, saying finally
and softly that she had been wrong not to tell Amy all of this a long time ago.