Amy and Isabelle (12 page)

“Let me guess.” Mr. Robertson drew his head back, studying her, contemplating this latest addition to the picture. (For Mr. Robertson, it’s true, was a man who enjoyed contemplating things—“an observer of life,” he liked to say, observing now how very thin Amy Goodrow’s arms were, with her hands clasped behind her back.) “I don’t imagine somehow that you’re Catholic. I’d say … a Congregationalist.”

Amy beamed; it was like he was a mind reader. “How did you know?”

“You look it,” he said simply. “You appear it.” He hopped down off the windowsill and walked to the front of the classroom, where he began to erase the blackboard. “Did you know you looked like a Congregationalist?” His arm worked vigorously.

She moved slowly down the aisle and sat in the seat where Flip Rawley always sat. “No,” she said honestly, “because I don’t know what I look like.” She picked up a few strands of hair from her shoulder and examined them for split ends.

“Like a doe.” He dropped the eraser in the chalk tray and dusted off his hands. “A doe in the woods.” (It was her skinny arms and legs.) “But then of course there’s that hair of yours,” he added.

She blushed and peered at him warily, her head ducked down.

“No, really. It’s interesting.” He swung his leg over the chair where Elsie Baxter usually sat, straddling the chair backwards. “I taught sixth grade in Massachusetts for a while, and then three years later I taught ninth grade there, so I had a lot of the same students again. And it’s interesting, girls at that age. Many overnight become bovine.”

“What’s bovine?” Amy was still studying her hair; his observations on the development of girls made her self-conscious.

“Cowlike. Bovine.” He spelled the word. “And then there are others who remain thin and leggy. Like young does.”

“A Congregational doe,” Amy said, speaking to cover up her embarrassment. She tossed her hair back over her shoulder and breathed in deeply, as though in need of air. She clasped her hands together in her lap.

“That’s right. A Congregational doe.”

The pleasant, jokey way he said this made her smile at him.

“Tell me what else you don’t like, Amy,” he said, leaning his arms forward over the back of Elsie Baxter’s chair. “You don’t like cleaning for old ladies. What else?”

“I don’t like snakes. I don’t like snakes so much I can’t even stand to think about them.” This was true. At the thought of a snake she could not bear to keep her feet on the floor out of sight, and so she stood now, walking anxiously to the back of the room and then over to the windows. The clouds had moved in almost completely; just a fragment of setting sunlight showed in one far-off part of the horizon. A few cars driving past had their headlights on.

“All right,” Mr. Robertson said. He had turned in his chair to watch her. “We’ll forget about snakes, then. What is it you
do
like?”

Being here with you, she wanted to say. She ran her hand over the varnished wood of the windowsill. In places it had risen in thin puckers and cracked; other parts were smooth and very shiny with years of reapplied shellac.

“Poems, I guess,” she said after a moment. “The ones I understand, anyway. A lot of poems I don’t understand, and then I feel stupid.”

“You’re not stupid,” he said, still sitting in the same position in Elsie Baxter’s chair. “You shouldn’t worry that you’re stupid.”

“Thank you,” she said sincerely. “But like that Euclid poem. I never knew what that meant until you were talking about triangles that day—you know, the beauty of a triangle or something. I probably still don’t know what it means. Like what does
prate
mean? Let all who
prate
of beauty.”

Mr. Robertson stood up and walked to his desk. “Come here,” he said. He was tapping a dictionary bound in dark green leather; it was the size of a Sears catalogue.

“That’s nice,” said Amy, coming to stand by him.

“I like words,” he told her. “Like ‘chiaroscuro.’ ” He glanced at the window. “No chiar now,” he said playfully, “just scuro, I guess. Have a seat.”

She sat in the chair next to his desk, and when he handed the dictionary to her, telling her to look up the word “prate,” his fingertips accidentally ran across the side of her hand, and for a moment she felt a quick funnel-shaped suction straight down through the middle of her insides, and then they sat together with their heads bent over the
dictionary while the last of the February sun faded from the sky, Mr. Robertson with wrinkles springing around his eyes as Amy whispered quickly, furtively, under her breath, the alphabet in order to find out that
P
came after
O
, and then there were more words to look up, and after a while the janitor’s thumping broom could no longer be heard, and the cheerleaders who had clapped and stomped in the gym went home.

ISABELLE SWITCHED ON the radio in her car. The dark clouds worried her; they seemed too dark for snow, and yet what other kind of storm were you going to get this time of year? Once in a blue moon you heard of a tornado coming through, although Isabelle’s understanding of a tornado was limited—she didn’t think it darkened the whole sky: the only story she could recall from her youth was of a man driving down the turnpike when a tornado lifted his car up completely, and not far away the sky stayed blue. She couldn’t recall what happened to the man, and doubted now if the story was true. She fiddled with the dial to catch a weather report. Chances were it would be a heavy snowstorm, and that might start the roof leaking again. This thought depressed her. She would have to call up Mr. Crane if this was to be the case.

“…  family has offered a reward for anyone giving information that leads to an arrest in the case of the missing girl, Deborah Kay Dorne, who disappeared from her home on February tenth. So far no suspects have been named.”

The poor family. Isabelle shook her head slightly. The poor
mother
. Isabelle switched off the radio as she turned into her driveway. But she felt bumped by chilly silence: the house was dark.

“Amy?” she called, unlocking the door. “Amy? Where are you?” She dropped her keys on the kitchen table and the sound was brief, immense.

She switched on the light. “Amy?”

Into the living room; switching on the light there. “Amy?”

She went from room to room, light switch to light switch, up the stairs.
“Amy.”

The bedroom was empty. The bathroom was empty. Her own bedroom was empty. She opened the closet in the upstairs hall. Folded towels sat quietly, three rolls of toilet paper stared out unperturbed.

And now she felt hysterical. Now she felt as though cold water were pouring through her arms, her legs. She went down the stairs, stumbling at the bottom, bracing herself against the wall. This isn’t happening, she thought. This isn’t happening. Because clearly whoever had taken away poor Debby Dorne had come now and taken Amy. “Amy!” she called.

She began again. Every room, every closet, every light. She reached for the telephone. Who would she call? The police. The school. Avery Clark. Most likely they would all tell her to check with Amy’s friends. They would all say, Oh, give her some time, she’ll be home. But she is
never
not home after school, Isabelle wailed silently. I know my daughter, and something is
wrong
. She sat down in a chair and began to sob. Huge, awful sounds erupted from her throat. Amy, Amy, she cried.

And then there she was. First the sound of her boots on the front porch steps, and then the door shoved open quickly. “Mom, are you all right?”

There she was, this daughter. This girl, without whom Isabelle’s insides had become the black, deep water of terror, stood now in the kitchen, her cheeks flushed, her eyes huge. “Are you all right?” she asked again, looking at Isabelle as though she were a ghost.

“Where
were
you?” Isabelle demanded. “My God, Amy, you scared me to death!”

“I stayed after school,” Amy said. “To get help with math.” She turned away from her mother as she unbuttoned her coat. “A bunch of us did. A bunch of us in the class stayed after school.”

And Isabelle, with tears still wet on her cheeks, had some incoherent sense that she had just been made a fool.

Chapter

6

THE DAYS GOT longer. And warmer, too; very slowly the snows softened, leaving slush on steps and sidewalks and alongside the roads. On days when Amy walked home from school after talking to Mr. Robertson—careful now to leave in time to get home before her mother did—the day’s warmth would be over, and though the sun still shone, a white luminescent wafer in the milky sky, she could feel as she walked, holding her books to her chest, coat unzipped, the moist chill that settled over her bare neck and hands and wrists. The late-afternoon sky that spread out above Larkindale’s field, the stone wall disappearing over the white slope, the tree trunks darkened by the melting snow—all this seemed to her to promise spring. Even a small flock of birds far away in the sky promised something, in the absolute silence with which they beat their wings.

To Amy it seemed a ceiling had been lifted, that the sky was higher than before, and sometimes—if no car was passing by—she would raise an arm and move it through the air. A mass of joy was in her from the squinting, humorous eyes of Mr. Robertson, and a jumbled, rushing sense from all the things she had wanted to tell him and had forgotten to. But there were small squares of sadness inside her as well, as though something dark and wobbly sat deep within her chest, and sometimes
she would stop as she reached the overpass to gaze down at the cars that rushed by on the highway, puzzled by a sense of losing things, and only vaguely knowing this was connected somehow to the thought of her mother. And then Amy would hurry home, anxious to see in the empty house signs of her mother: the pantyhose hanging over the shower nozzle, the baby powder on her mother’s bureau—these things would reassure her, as would the sound of her mother’s car turning into the gravelly driveway. It was all right. Her mother was home.

And yet the actual presence of her mother provided disappointment—the small, anxious eyes as she came through the door, the pale hand fluttering to tuck up the brown strands of hair that escaped from the tired French twist. It was hard for Amy to match this woman to the mother she had just missed. Guilty, she sometimes ran the risk of being too solicitous. “That blouse looks really nice, Mom,” she might say, and then inwardly flinch at the brief wariness in her mother’s eye, a wariness so fleeting that even Isabelle was not conscious of having felt it; months would go by before Isabelle recalled those drops of warning that glinted for a moment on the outer edges of her mind.

“I really like poetry,” Amy announced to Isabelle a few weeks after the dreadful night Isabelle had come home to find the house empty and had believed for those terrible minutes that her daughter had been taken away like poor Debby Kay Dorne. “I really, really like poetry.”

“Well, I think that’s very nice,” Isabelle said, distracted by the run she had just discovered in her pantyhose.

“I got this book.” Amy stood in the doorway to the living room, holding a book carefully in both hands, her face hidden by her hair as she gazed down at what she held.

Isabelle hung her coat in the front hall closet and turned to examine the back of her leg again. “I have no idea when that happened,” she mused. “For all I know I’ve been running around like this half the day.” She stepped past Amy to go up the stairs. “What book is that, honey?” she said.

Amy held the book out in front of Isabelle, still holding it with both hands, and Isabelle peered at it as she passed by. “Oh, Yeats,” she said, pronouncing it
Yeets
, “Yes, of course. I’ve heard of him. He wrote some lovely things, I believe.”

She was halfway up the stairs when behind her Amy said quietly, “It’s Yeats, Mom. Not Yeets.”

Isabelle turned. “What’s that?” she asked, embarrassment already spreading throughout her throat, her chest.

“Yeats,” Amy answered. “You probably just got it mixed up with Keats, which is spelled the same way almost.”

If her daughter had spoken this sardonically, with an adolescent disdain, it would have been easier to bear. But the girl had said it gently, with hesitant politeness, and Isabelle was suffering as she stood, half-turned, a run in her pantyhose, awkwardly on the stairs.

“Keats was English,” Amy said, as though trying to be helpful, “and Yeats was Irish. Keats died when he was really young, of TB.”

“Oh yes. Well, I see.” The shame was like a too-tight sweater pressed to her; the moistness of perspiration sprang out on her face, beneath her arms. Here was something new to fear—her daughter’s pity for her ignorance. “That’s very interesting, Amy,” she said, continuing up the stairs. “I want to hear more about it.”

That night Isabelle lay in bed with her eyes open. For years she had pictured this: Amy off at college. Not the community college here in Shirley Falls, but a real college somewhere. She had pictured Amy walking on an autumn day, holding notebooks against a navy-blue sweater, a plaid skirt swinging at her knees. Never mind that nowadays there were such grubby-looking girls running around, their unharnessed breasts flopping beneath some T-shirt above a filthy pair of jeans. There were still lovely girls to be seen on college campuses, Isabelle was sure; serious, intelligent girls who read Plato and Shakespeare and Yeats. Or Keats. She sat up, rearranged her pillow, then lay down again.

In all the times she had imagined Amy on some college campus, she had never imagined what she saw now: her daughter would be ashamed of her. Amy, walking across a leafy lawn, laughing with her new, intelligent friends, was not going to say
My mother works in a mill
. She was not going to invite these girls home on weekends or holidays, and neither would she share with Isabelle the wonderful things she was learning, because in her eyes Isabelle was a small-town dummy who worked in a mill. A person to be careful with, the way Amy had been careful with her that evening. It was some time before Isabelle was able to fall asleep.