Amy and Isabelle (7 page)

Well, it wasn’t natural.

And what was the story with her
hair
? Who in their right mind would cut off a head of such lovely, wavy hair? Oh, girls went through their stages, Bev knew that. Her oldest daughter had dyed her hair red and looked like a fool for a while, and Roxanne was forever getting some terrible perm, moaning about it for weeks. But to cut off that hair. And it looked like hell, not even shaped around her face. Honestly, it made Bev shudder sometimes to look at that spiky hair—like someone who had had chemotherapy or radiation or whatever. Clara Swan’s hair looked like that after she went up to Hanover for those treatments. Well, not really. Amy didn’t have clumps missing from her head. It was just a bad haircut. A terrible case of bad judgment.

Bev lit a cigarette, the thought of cancer making her nervous. Clara Swan was only forty-three; but hers was a brain tumor, not lung cancer. A brain tumor could happen to anyone, you just took your chances. If Bev was headed for a brain tumor, she’d just as soon have enjoyed herself first. She exhaled, waving her fat hand through the smoke. Rosie Tanguay had said in the lunchroom, “I can’t understand why anyone would smoke, with all the studies that have been done.”

Studies. Rosie Tanguay could take the studies and shove them right up her skinny behind. Bev knew why she smoked. She smoked for the same reason she ate: it gave her something to look forward to. It was as simple as that. Life could get dull, and you had to look forward to something. When she was first married she had looked forward to going to bed with her husband, Bill, every night in that hot little apartment on Gangover Street. Boy, they used to have a good time. It made up for everything, all their squabbles over money, dirty socks, drops of pee in front of the toilet—all those little things you had to get used to when you married someone; none of it mattered when you got into bed.

Funny how it could wear off, something that good. But it did. Bev
had kind of lost interest after the first baby was born. She began to resent Bill, how night after night he’d still want to do it, that rigid thing always there. It was because she was exhausted and the baby cried so much. Her breasts were different too after that tiny angry baby had sucked them till the nipples cracked; and she had never lost the weight. Her body seemed to stay swollen, and by God, she was pregnant again. So at a time when her house, her life, was filling up, she had experienced an irrepressible feeling of loss. Oh, maybe it didn’t matter anymore. They still did it once in a while, silently, and always in the dark. (When they were first married they sometimes spent whole weekends in bed, the sun slanting through the window shade.)

She stubbed her cigarette out. She wasn’t going to complain, she wasn’t a kid anymore. But an ache stayed inside her. And a faint reverberating hum of something close to joy lived on the outer edges of her memory, some kind of longing that had been answered once and was simply not answered anymore. She didn’t understand this. She was married to a good man, and so many women weren’t; she’d had the babies she wanted and they were healthy and alive. So what was this ache? A deep red hole she threw Life Savers into and potatoes and hamburgers and chocolate cakes, and anything else. Did people think she
liked
being fat? Jolly Bev. Fat Bev. She didn’t like being fat. But that dark red ache was there, like a swirling vacuum, a terrible hole.

Amy Goodrow sneezed.

“Well, bless you,” Bev said, glad to be able to speak. If you stayed quiet too long you got morbid. She was always telling her girls: Go find someone to talk to when you feel blue.

“Thank you,” Amy said, with a tentative smile.

“You getting a cold? This crazy weather, who knows what bugs are hanging around.”

The poor girl was too shy to answer that.

Well (Bev yawned and looked at the clock), living with Isabelle couldn’t be a lot of fun. The apple never falls far from the tree, Dottie always said that, and Bev agreed. Isabelle Goodrow was odd. A typical Virgo is what she was. Not unpleasant, but pretty uptight. Something there to be pitied, Fat Bev thought, moving the telephone to see if her Life Savers had rolled that way, but, then, no one had ever figured
Isabelle out. Fat Bev felt the familiar tightening of her abdomen, and rose from her chair with a feeling of almost sensual anticipation, because God knows that one of life’s pleasures was successfully moving your bowels.

AMY, GLANCING UP from her stack of orange invoices, had seen her mother in Avery Clark’s office; the slight motion of her mother’s arm, her downcast eyes, meant she was taking dictation. Nothing friendly was going on in there. Amy touched the numbers on the adding machine and felt in the deep part of her stomach a nauseating sensation she barely dared name: her mother was
attracted
to that man.

“You’re lucky your mother’s not married,” Stacy had said to her one day out in the woods when the weather had first turned cold. “You don’t have to picture her doing it.”

“Oh, please.” Amy said, choking briefly on her cigarette.

Stacy rolled her eyes, eyeliner curving on her heavy, pale lids as they half closed for a moment. “I ever tell you I saw my parents naked once?”

“No,” Amy said. “Gross.”

“It was gross. One Saturday I walk by their bedroom and the door’s partly open and they’re asleep on the bed, both naked.” Stacy put her cigarette out on the bark of the tree. “My father has this white, fleshy, stupid-looking ass.”

“God,” Amy said.

“Yeah, so be glad you don’t have a father. You don’t have to imagine him doing it.”

To be truthful, at that point in her life, Amy could not really imagine anyone doing it. She lacked a clear sense of what “it” actually was. Living with the watchful Isabelle, she had never been able to sneak into an X-rated movie the way some of her peers had. (Stacy, for example, had done that, reporting back to Amy a scene where a white man and a Negro woman did it in a bathtub.) And lacking an older sibling or two who might have kept dirty magazines under the bed, Amy knew very little at all.

She knew about her period, of course. She knew it was normal to have one, but she wasn’t completely sure of the intricacies involved; Isabelle,
a few years before, had talked briefly about eggs and a great deal about odor. (“Stay away from dogs,” she advised. “They can always tell.”) And she’d given her a pink booklet with a diagram. Amy thought she understood.

And then scrawled on the wall of the girls’ room one day, in thick black Magic Marker, were the words
A man’s dick inside a woman’s hole for five minutes makes her pregnant
, and to Amy this made sense. But the gym teacher told the girls gathered in the locker room that information had been written on the bathroom wall which was incorrect, and the school had decided, as a result, to begin a sex education program that would take place in home ec class. Amy couldn’t figure out what part of the bathroom-wall business was incorrect, and home ec class had proved to be no help.

The home ec teacher was a nervous woman, who lasted only a year, and whose long feet and knees that bumped out like two oranges had been a source of some hilarity among the class. “All right, girls,” she said, “I thought we’d begin our sex education with a session on good grooming.” She rummaged through her pocketbook. “The quality of your hairbrush,” she said, “is connected to the quality of your hair.” This had gone on for weeks. The teacher described different methods of filing one’s nails, how to clean the toes, and then one day wrote a recipe on the board for underarm deodorant. “In case of some emergency, girls, and you find that you’re out.” They copied the recipe down: a mixture of talcum powder and baking soda and a little salted water. Later she gave them a recipe for toothpaste that was almost the same (minus the talcum powder) and lectured them on the use of the word “perspiration” as opposed to the coarser term “sweat.” The girls scratched their ankles and looked at the clock, and Elsie Baxter was sent to the principal’s office for saying out loud that it was all boring shit.

Anyway, that seemed a long time ago. Amy did not feel like the same person she had been back then, and now she could not suppress the knowledge that while her mother certainly hadn’t been “doing it,” she was, had been,
attracted
to her boss, that dreadful, dried-up man. It was the way his name used to come up at home, back in the days when Amy and Isabelle were talking. “Avery says I should trade the car; he knows a dealer he’ll talk to for me.” It was the way her mother would apply
lipstick in the morning, rolling her lips together and saying, “Poor Avery is so overworked these days.”

But Avery Clark was old and homely, and how could anyone possibly have a thing for someone like that? He and his wife looked like two dead sticks sitting in the church pew every Sunday.
They
hadn’t done it in the last hundred years, you could be sure of that.

Amy sneezed (“Bless you,” said Fat Bev) and glanced at the fishbowl again. Her mother was standing up, one hand holding her shorthand pad, the other smoothing the back of her skirt. Avery Clark was nodding his head, his stupid bald head that he combed his few greasy hairs over like nobody would know. Amy pushed a button on the adding machine, picturing the long, sloppy mouth of Avery Clark, his stained teeth, the dry breath she had smelled when he passed the collection plate in church. And those stupid old-man shoes he wore with the decorative little holes. He made Amy sick.

He might have spoken her mother’s name, because Isabelle stopped in his door; Amy, glancing up again, saw the submissive hopefulness that lit her mother’s pale face, and then saw it disappear. A hole opened in Amy’s stomach: it was terrible what she had just seen, the
nakedness
of her mother’s face. She loved her. On the black line connecting them a furious ball of love flashed across to her mother, but her mother had returned to her desk now, was rolling a sheet of paper into the typewriter. And immediately Amy felt that loathing at her mother’s awkward, long neck, the wisps of moist hair stuck to it. But this loathing also seemed to increase some desperate love, and the black line trembled with the weight of it.

“So now, listen,” Fat Bev said, popping a red Life Saver into her mouth. “What’re your friends up to this summer? Didn’t I see Karen Keane behind the register at Mac’s?”

Amy nodded.

“Isn’t she a friend of yours?”

Amy nodded again and pushed the Total button on the adding machine. Behind her eyes swirled the gray tears of some inexplicable anxiety and sadness. Once more she glanced at her mother, who was typing now, the begonia plant she had rescued from the windowsill jiggling on her desk. Amy saw a pale blossom drop into its leaves.

“Kids should have summer jobs,” Fat Bev was saying, the Life Saver
clicking against her teeth. “My kids all had jobs starting when they were about twelve, I think.”

Amy nodded vaguely. She wanted Fat Bev to keep talking because she liked the sound of her voice, but she didn’t want to answer any questions. She especially didn’t want to answer any questions about Karen Keane. The thought of Karen Keane quickened the anxiety behind her eyes. They had been friends back when they were small. They had played hopscotch on the playground and run from the yellow jackets that swarmed around the garbage bin. One time Amy had slept over at Karen’s house, a big white house on Valentine Drive with maple trees out front. The house was bright and sunny and full of noise; boys played out back, and Karen’s sister talked on the telephone as she dried her hair with a towel. But Amy had been homesick, she had gone into the bathroom and cried during dinner because of the thought of her mother eating her own dinner in the kitchen alone. There had been good times too, though. Like when Karen came to her house and Isabelle let them make cookies. The girls had sat on the back steps eating them while Isabelle weeded her garden; Amy could still remember that.

“Everything changes when you get to junior high school,” Amy suddenly said to Fat Bev, but the Life Savers had rolled off her desk and Fat Bev was leaning down to retrieve them.

“What’s that, hon?” Bev asked, her face red from the effort, but her telephone started to ring, and, holding up a finger in Amy’s direction, she said into the phone, “What’d your awful mother-in-law do now?”

But what would Amy have said, anyway? She wasn’t
really
going to tell Fat Bev how junior high had changed things, how her breasts had grown so much earlier than the other girls’, how she had slept on her stomach to try and keep it from happening but it happened anyway, and how her mother, pretending to be casual about this, had wrapped a tape measure around her chest and ordered a bra from Sears. And when the bra came it made her breasts look bigger, stupidly grown-up. There had been some kind of game at school where the boys would sneeze when they walked by her. “Anyone have a Kleenex?” they’d say.

“Oh, forget them,” her mother said. “Just forget them, who cares.”

But she cared.

And then the frightening morning she had woken to find a dark stain the size of a quarter on her underpants. She took the underpants to her
mother in the kitchen.
“Amy,”
her mother said. “Oh, Amy. Honey, my word.”

“What?”

“Oh, Amy,” her mother said sadly. “This is a very exciting day.”

She felt loathsome and frightened as she walked to school, her abdomen heavy, odd pains in her thighs, and an extra sanitary napkin packed in a brown lunch bag. (None of the girls had started bringing pocketbooks to school yet.) And she had been asked to stand in front of the classroom to diagram a sentence on the blackboard. She thought she would faint standing there, pass out from shame, as if the whole class could see through her corduroy skirt to the bulky monstrous thing pressed between her legs.

At the suggestion of her mother she had recorded the event in a notebook; Isabelle felt it was a good idea to keep track of dates so that your period wouldn’t take you by surprise (but Amy’s period had a mind of its own and was even now always taking her by surprise). And when Karen Keane came over one Saturday, Amy, just returning from the bathroom, had walked into her room to find Karen Keane sitting on her bed, closing the notebook quickly. “Sorry,” Karen said, twisting a piece of hair around her finger. “I won’t tell anyone. Honest.”