Amy and Isabelle (26 page)

Amy opened her mouth. They stared at each other until her mother turned and stepped across the hallway into her own room.

Amy looked around confusedly. She should run downstairs and out into the road, because she had to get to Mr. Robertson. She pictured herself stumbling down the road past the pine trees and the swamp, seeing his car coming toward her, waving her arms desperately to him. It filled her with panic to think of him leaving—except he wouldn’t do that without her.

“Look at you.” Her mother was standing in the doorway again. She held the black-handled sewing shears at her side. “Look at you sitting there like that,” her mother said quietly, moving into the room.

Amy thought her mother intended to kill her. She thought her mother was walking toward her to stab her with the shears, because it seemed her mother had gone crazy, become somebody different. A blank, white hatred on the face of her mother coming nearer, her mother’s arm reaching up, Amy’s own arm reaching up, ducking her head (“No, Mommy”), her arm knocked down, a fist grabbing her hair, the sound of cutting, more hair grabbed, her head jerked one way, then another. An avalanche of terror dropped down through Amy, carrying with it a swirling debris of long-forgotten smells, the couch in Esther Hatch’s house, the car rides there, rotting apple cores and gritty sand, the unyielding hardness of a plastic doll’s head, stale radiator heat, and melting crayons.

Leaning forward, half standing, jerked back by each handful of hair her mother grasped, the sharp pain of her scalp as though the skin could be peeled right off, Amy heard her own half-whispered screams, her cries of “Mommy,
don’t
!” “Oh, Mommy, please,” then a sudden deep
guttural sound, “Oh
don’t
.” The scissory sound of the shears cutting again and again (she would remember the sound of the shears perfectly, would experience it in dreams for years to come), a metallic flash in the mirror as the silvery blades briefly caught a shaft of the disappearing sunlight, then the peculiar sense to Amy that she wasn’t balanced right, her head was weighing less.

“Clean it up.” Her mother stepped back, panting. Screeching suddenly:
“Clean up the mess!”

Sobbing, Amy stumbled down the stairs and took a brown grocery bag from where they were folded beneath the kitchen sink. She returned to her room (climbing the stairs on all fours like some intoxicated animal, dragging the brown paper bag with her as it scraped lightly against the wall), where she put the hair into the grocery bag, and in doing so began to scream, because picking up in her fingers the long curls of hair was like picking up some amputated leg with its shoe still on—this stuff was separate from her now (screaming louder)—what was still
her
?

Isabelle, who was sitting on her bed across the hall, rocking forward with her fist to her stomach, kept saying, “Oh please stop making that noise.” Her own room was almost dark by now, the sun having left it some time ago. The thickening dusk that gathered first in the corners and grew steadily until it filled the room enough so that the thin outline of the bluebirds on the wallpaper could no longer be seen, brought with it the sense of something dangerous and final.

Later Isabelle wanted to take the shears and cut her own hair off. She wanted to cut up the bedspread she sat on, and all the clothes in her closet. She wanted to go into the bathroom and cut up the towels, to make cuts in the upholstery coverings downstairs. She wanted to be dead and she wanted her daughter to be dead too so that neither of them would have to face the unbearable business of continuing on. It even went through her head to open the stove and keep the gas running all night while upstairs she held Amy in her arms, rocking her to sleep.

(Who was Amy? Who was the person that man, that stranger, had made such innuendoes about? Who was the girl Isabelle had just found this evening when she came home, sitting before the mirror with her hands folded in some kind of mocking childlike obedience, but with a vividness, a luminosity; the streaky hair all messy and bright, falling over her shoulders and partly in front of her face, that certain look in
her eyes, a certain kind of knowingness? Who was her daughter? Who had she been?)

“Please, God,” Isabelle whispered piteously, kneading her face with her fingers. “Oh God, please.” Please what? She hated God. She
hated
him. In the darkness she actually shook her fist into the air, oh, she was sick to death of God. For years she had been playing some kind of guessing game with him. Is this right, God? Am I doing the right thing? Every decision made on what would please God—and look where it had gotten her: no place. Less than no place at all. “I hate you, God.” She whispered this between gritted teeth, into the darkness of her room.

IN THE EARLY morning, as the sky against her window was whitening and the birds increased their noise, Amy woke from where she had fallen asleep on the floor, her hand wet from saliva that had been seeping from her mouth. She sat up and almost immediately began to cry, and then stopped soon, because what she was feeling was so much worse than that; the tears, the crunching of her face, seemed futile and insignificant.

“Amy.” Her mother was standing in the doorway.

But it went no further. Amy did not look into her mother’s face. She only glanced in her direction long enough to see that her mother had apparently spent all night in her clothes. And she didn’t care. She didn’t care what words might be stuck right now in her mother’s throat; they were as futile as the puny tears she herself had just shed. She and her mother were stuck together, sick and exhausted with their stupid lives.

On Monday Amy started her job at the mill.

Chapter

16

MORNING BREAK, AND Arlene Tucker was saying, “There was a fountain in the middle of the cake.”

“Charlene had a bridge,” another woman joined in, referring to a daughter whose wedding and divorce had been discussed in the lunchroom now for a number of years. “I said at the time, Charlene, are you sure? But she was set on that bridge.”

“This one had a bridge.” Arlene nodded. “Wide enough for the little bride and bridegroom figures. The bride had a parasol. I thought it was nice. ”

“Who’s this again?” Lenora Snibbens took a compact from her bag, and squinted at a blemish on her chin.

“A cousin. One of Danny’s up in Hebron.”

“You’ve got more cousins,” said Lenora, powdering her red-ended nose.

“Do you have any idea,” Fat Bev said, entering the lunchroom, “how
awful
that river smells?”

“It’s awful,” Lenora agreed, moving her chair forward to make room for Amy Goodrow, who had wandered into the lunchroom and was gazing vaguely at the candy in the vending machine.

“It does seem worse this year,” Isabelle said, from the far end of the
table, where she sat stirring her coffee with a plastic straw. She shook her head at Lenora. “Does seem to be worse,” she repeated, her eyes following the exit of her daughter, for Amy, having glanced at the vending machine, was now wandering back out of the lunchroom.

“Oh, it’s something.” Lenora let out a fast sigh.

“It really is.” This remark seemed to require Isabelle to nod her head after having just shaken it back and forth, and the switching of the motion made her feel spastic, unhinged. She disliked these morning breaks that she no longer shared with Avery Clark in his fishbowl of an office. And she didn’t care if the river smelled; she barely noticed. What she noticed was how Avery never looked up from his desk anymore when the buzzer for morning break bleated throughout the building. She noticed how he never caught her eye anymore when he passed by her desk, and she wondered if the other women noticed too.

“It’s never made sense to me,” said the woman who was the mother of the much-discussed Charlene, “spending all that money on a wedding.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Arlene Tucker gave a pouty shrug. “It makes sense to me.”

“Why?” Charlene’s mother blinked once her almost lashless eyes, looking for that moment something like a toad.

“It’s the most important day in a girl’s life,” Arlene said. “That’s why.” She added (unnecessarily, most of the women present later agreed), “It’s
supposed
to last forever.”

“Was Charlene
supposed
to get slapped around by her husband? Was she
supposed
to put up with that?” The poor mother of Charlene had gone pink in the face, her lashless eyes blinking rapidly now. Clearly, umbrage had been taken.

“Relax, please.” Arlene Tucker looked embarrassed and resentful at finding herself the recipient of these charged statements.

Tensions had been rising for some time now. All the women (except for Isabelle) had been increasingly aware of that. It was the heat, of course, the stagnant, awful, cloying heat. Still, they did seem unable to help themselves, for suddenly Arlene Tucker said, “Well, the
pope
would say that in the eyes of God, Charlene is married forever.”

“Damn the pope.”

This was astonishing. Rosie Tanguay, just back from the ladies’ room, actually had to cross herself. To make things worse, Charlene’s mother,
having damned the pope, now began to laugh. She laughed and laughed, red in the face, and just as she seemed to slow down she started up again, until tears ran down her face and she had to blow her nose. Still she laughed.

The women exchanged looks of concern, and Lenora Snibbens finally said, “Maybe get some cold water and throw it in her face.” Rosie Tanguay, with a look of self-importance, took her empty coffee mug to go fill at the water fountain, but the gasping mother of Charlene held up her hand. “No,” she said, winding down, mopping at her face, “I’m okay.”

“It’s not funny, you know.” Arlene Tucker delivered this flatly.

“Oh, Arlene, shut up.” Fat Bev rapped her fingernails on the table as she spoke, and seeing Arlene’s mouth opening indignantly in her direction, Bev cut in again, “Keep it shut, Arlene. Just this once.”

Arlene stood up. “You can go to hell,” she said, apparently to Fat Bev, but her eyes flickered briefly to include the mother of Charlene. “And you know you will, too,” she added, leaving the room.

Fat Bev waved a hand lazily through the air. “Hell, I’m in hell,” she said, and this started Charlene’s mother laughing again. Rosie Tanguay reached for the coffee cup of water, but Fat Bev shook her head; the woman had run out of energy and didn’t laugh for long this time. When she had settled down, an uncomfortable silence fell over the room as the women looked at one another cautiously, uncertain what lines had been drawn and where.

“So,” Fat Bev said, slapping her hand down onto the table. “Happy day. ”

“What about you, Isabelle?” Lenora Snibbens suddenly asked. “Did you have a big wedding?”

Isabelle shook her head in a rapid, dismissive way. “Small. Just family.” She stood and walked to the trash can by the door, pretending she found it necessary to throw the plastic straw away, but she was really checking on Amy, to see if she had overheard this. The girl was far across the room, however, by her desk, running her hand along the windowsill.

AMY DID NOT believe that Mr. Robertson had actually left town. She knew he was still around. She could feel it. What he was doing, she
had concluded, was biding his time, waiting for the right opportunity to get in touch with her. And so she was waiting for a sign from him. Even standing in the office room right now, her eyes searched the parking lot below, half expecting to see him sitting in his red car, his own eyes covered with sunglasses, looking toward the building for some glimpse of her.

He wasn’t there.

The fan blew hot wind over the side of Amy’s face. She had thought he might call her here at the mill. Or at home even, where he could tell her to pretend it was a wrong number if her mother was standing there. When he did not call, she realized that of course he could not. There was no way he could get a message to her without her mother knowing. He would have to wait and so would she.

For how long? She imagined it all the time: Her hair would be grown out just enough so she looked like herself again, and he would run his hand through it, saying, “Oh, poor Amy, how you suffered.” He would kiss her, and she could undress and feel that flood of warmth that came from having his wet mouth attached to her breast. Standing here in the stifling office room, she could close her eyes and almost feel that feeling again as it streamed up through her body, remembering the particular look in his eyes as he bent his head over her that last day together in his car.

The buzzer suddenly blared through the office room, and Amy’s eyes flew open. She looked over her shoulder toward the fishbowl and watched Avery Clark bending over his desk; the hair that he combed across his bald spot had parted slightly in the middle, one side of it moving away from his head.

He glanced up and saw her. For a startled minute they held each other’s gaze, and then it was Avery Clark who looked away.

“So, ho,” said Fat Bev, who was just taking her seat. “The winds begin to blow.”

“What do you mean?” Amy sat down.

“The winds in here,” Bev said, leaning forward, wagging her head once to indicate the women behind her. “Some discord in our happy little family.” Bev hit the desk with her fist. “Left my soda.” She rolled her eyes at Amy and heaved herself up again, moving back off to the lunchroom, her huge heart-shaped bottom rocking up and back, up and back
as she lumbered down the aisle between the desks. Watching her, Amy was seized with love for her very massiveness. She could picture men and children clinging to this woman, pressing their heads against her solid bulk.

And she wondered, too, where Fat Bev got her underwear. Amy had never seen in stores underwear that would fit someone who was the size of Fat Bev. Before, she would have asked her mother, because it was the kind of thing that Isabelle would know. Now, however, she wouldn’t even glance in the direction of her mother’s desk, but instead punched numbers onto the adding machine and let her mind return to Mr. Robertson.