Amy and Isabelle (29 page)

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lenora, rolling her eyes. “I have never heard such horseshit.”

“Isabelle, what do you think,” demanded Rosie Tanguay.

Isabelle, feeling somewhat alarmed, realized a kind of poll was evidently taking place; teams were getting drawn. “Oh, heavens,” she stammered, attempting to bide her time. “Well, my goodness. Anything’s possible, I suppose.”

“But do you
believe
her,” said Rosie Tanguay, and Isabelle felt all eyes upon her, including Amy’s, which bothered Isabelle the most—she hated having her daughter witness her uncertainty.

“I’ve never known Dottie to lie,” said Isabelle.

“People lie all the time,” Arlene Tucker said. “Honestly, Isabelle. Where have you been?”

Isabelle felt her face grow hot; she must be turning crimson. “I don’t believe people lie all the time,” she retorted. “But if you are forcing me to take a stand”—her voice trembled, and attempting to cover this, she spoke her last line rather loudly—“then I will stand behind Dottie.”

It was the strongest statement Isabelle had been known to make in her many years in the office room, and the toll it took on her was evident in her still-burning face. “Now, if you will excuse me,” she said, rising. “I have work to do.”

She was afraid she might stumble on her way out of the lunchroom. At the last minute, as she moved successfully through the blur of women and chairs, she caught Fat Bev’s eye, and it was a jolt in the midst of chaos, for on the face of this woman she had known for years she saw a look of such clarity and understanding that for the first time in a long while the thought passed through Isabelle’s mind,
I have a friend
.

Chapter

18

AVERY CLARK WAS more concerned with keeping peace in the office room than he was with whether or not Shirley Falls had been visited by a UFO. He tended to think it had not been, although he was experiencing some apprehension about the matter, because Dottie Brown had never in seventeen years shown signs of being prone to hysterics. However, the point was, if she wanted to return to work earlier than planned, then by all means she ought to come back. But it meant the Goodrow girl would have to go. This actually brought Avery a sense of relief; the girl’s presence had been a thorn in his side all summer, but he did not look forward to telling Isabelle, whom in some portion of his heart, he realized now, as he asked her to step into his office, he felt quite sorry for.

She had lost weight. Avery Clark, standing back to let her pass through his doorway, was struck with how Isabelle’s arm looked like a piece of kindling. And he saw as she sat down across from him that her face was unevenly colored; her eyes appeared bald, exposed, as they blinked in what seemed to be self-conscious confusion.

Politely, speaking slowly, he leaned across his desk and presented to her the situation with Dottie Brown and Amy.

She took it well, as he should have known she would. “Of course,” she said simply. “I understand.” It appeared she had nothing more to say, and Avery felt slightly caught off guard to think the job had been so easily accomplished. But then Isabelle added kindly, “I appreciate what you’ve done for Amy already, letting her work here the way you did.”

“Oh, sure.” It made him very nervous to think she might in any way mention what he had witnessed that day.

“The money has been helpful,” Isabelle was saying. “Her paychecks go straight in the bank and then she’ll have it for college when the time comes.”

“Good. That’s good.” He nodded with some tentativeness at the small, complaisant woman sitting before him, her pale hands folded on her lap. She seemed only half there, like a beach ball that had steadily been losing air through some slow, invisible leak. A slackening. Her eyes, small, a little shiny, met his glance briefly, and he saw that behind her ever-present politeness her mind was not fully on him.

“You surviving this hot summer all right, Isabelle?”

She seemed startled by the question, her eyes moving back to his, blinking twice, as though she had come from a dark room into bright sunshine. He saw how she hesitated before answering, and he hoped again she would not mention the business with Amy.

But she said only, “I’m tired, Avery. I feel very tired.”

“Of course,” he said hurriedly. “This weather is perfectly awful. And not a break in sight, I guess, if you’re going to believe the weatherman.”

“Everyone’s upset,” Isabelle said quietly, almost indifferently, indicating with a slight motion of her head that she was referring here to the women in the office room.

“Yes.” Avery sighed through his nose, giving Isabelle a grim smile of acknowledgment which included in it some degree of camaraderie: they were parents faced with a roomful of unruly, petulant children and would have to do the best they could. “We’ll get through it, I suppose.” Avery placed his hands down flat on the desk in his characteristic, conclusive way. “But listen, Isabelle. I appreciate your cooperation. With everything. I most certainly do.”

She nodded and stood up, returning silently to her desk in the stifling office room.

•   •   •

THE CAR SMELLED. Left in the parking lot all day with its windows rolled up, it turned into a kind of vile hothouse, a nasty implosion of unseen fungi or bacteria, and Isabelle always opened all four windows and all four doors for a few minutes before stepping inside to take her place behind the steering wheel; a procedure Amy found profoundly embarrassing. She didn’t know why her mother couldn’t be like most people, who simply left their cars unlocked with the windows down. But to Isabelle, who had been raised in a very small town, Shirley Falls appeared to be a city, and so she locked her car up every day, and every day now it needed airing out, sitting on the tar like some mechanical bird with wings extended while Isabelle made ineffectual waving motions with her pocketbook and Amy sat slumped in the front seat, a hand to her forehead.

Today Isabelle proceeded with listlessness, opening the back doors for only a moment, and soon they were driving home.

“You don’t believe the UFO thing, do you,” Amy finally said.

Isabelle glanced at her briefly. “No.”

They drove in silence past the trailer park, the swamp, past the old logging road where Amy had been discovered with Mr. Robertson.

“It could be true, though,” Amy said, squinting slightly in the heat, her elbow resting on the open window, her fingers tugging compulsively at her hair. When her mother didn’t respond to this, Amy added, “I think it
is
true.”

Still, Isabelle didn’t answer.

“Why wouldn’t it be true?” Amy persisted. “We’re not the only stupid little planet, you know.”

Isabelle simply kept driving.

“So why couldn’t there be life on some other planet?”

“I suppose there could be,” Isabelle answered.

“Well, don’t you even
care
? You sound like you don’t even
care
.”

For a moment it appeared that Isabelle wasn’t going to bother to answer this, but then she said with little expression, “I have other things on my mind.”

Amy slumped further down into her seat and rolled her eyes with disgust.

Awful, Isabelle thought, feeling lightheaded—everything is awful. “Anyway.” She drove carefully with both hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead through the windshield. “Dottie Brown is returning to work on Monday, so you’re out of a job.”

She turned to glance at her daughter, who seemed to have nothing to say to this.

Isabelle added, “Avery told me this afternoon. With Dottie coming back there’s not enough work to keep you busy. And not enough money to pay you. Apparently.”

Amy remained silent, turning her head to look out the open window beside her. Isabelle, glancing at her again, could not see her face.

“What will I do?” Amy eventually asked. The question seemed genuine and Isabelle could not guess her daughter’s thoughts. Was she worried about being lonely, bored? (Was she thinking of running away?)

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe I’ll get lucky and be kidnapped by a UFO,” Amy suggested, with real nastiness, as they pulled into the driveway.

Isabelle turned the car engine off and simply closed her eyes. “Who knows,” she said. “Maybe you will.”

Still, there were things that had to be said. If they couldn’t immediately decide upon the rest of the summer for Amy, Isabelle at least needed to know what time on Saturday Amy was expected to be at Stacy Burrows’s house, whether or not she was to have dinner there, and how she would get home.

To all these inquiries Amy responded that she didn’t know. Isabelle found this irritating, which in turn irritated Amy, and the outcome was that Amy, late Saturday morning, took off on foot, telling Isabelle if she was going to be later than five she would call. “I’d be happy to drive you there,” Isabelle offered one more time, following Amy out the door.

Without turning around, Amy said loudly, “No.”

In order to walk into town she had to pass by the logging road where she had gone with Mr. Robertson, and she turned her head away now, as she did every time she passed by. (Driving with her mother she would simply close her eyes.) In her head she told this to Mr. Robertson. In her head she imagined his kind eyes watching her. Only it was somewhat different now, ever since she found his number disconnected, found out that he had
gone away
; she could not stop her inner trembling.

She was glad when she came to the center of town—the cars, the shops, the people on the sidewalk. She crossed Main Street, then cut through the parking lot of the post office and came out onto a sidewalk that led eventually to the neighborhood where Stacy lived. The street names were wonderful: Maple Street, Valentine Road, Harmony Drive, Appleby’s Circle. Nothing plain and ugly like Route 22. The houses were pretty and clean-looking too; some were gray, others white, a few maroon. They had bay windows in their living rooms and curtains hanging in their upstairs rooms. There were front lawns, side lawns, sometimes a white picket fence.

Stacy’s house was different. It was part of a new development built down by Oyster Point, where the houses were bigger than in other parts of town. Stacy’s house was the biggest of all. It had huge windows and a mansard roof. The driveway was glinty with white chipped rock that crunched beneath Amy’s sneakers. Amy had never been in Stacy’s house before. Without admitting it, Amy shared her mother’s distaste for modern architecture; she liked houses to look traditional. And this one, in addition to the queer slope of the roof, had a front door painted bright yellow, which made Amy feel uneasy, and which seemed fleetingly in her mind connected to the fact that Stacy’s father was a psychologist. But she was uneasy anyway: Stacy had invited her over so they could watch a film on childbirth that her father had gotten from the college. Amy had not told that to Isabelle.

She hesitated, then rapped on the door.

From inside came the muffled sound of motion, then Stacy’s voice as she approached the door—“Get out, you little buggers. Stay away”—and then the door opened and there was Stacy, red-haired and beautiful and very, very pregnant.
“Hi,”
Stacy said, raising both hands as though she might be going to take Amy’s face between them. And then: “Jesus, what happened to your hair?”

Amy, stepping through the door, looked down at the straw mat under her feet and tried to smile, but her mouth could not seem to manage; the corners turned down jerkily.

A child partly hidden behind a closet door peered at Amy, and Amy turned her back, wiping her nose quickly with her arm. “Get out of here, you little pieces of shit,” Stacy said. A scuffling sound by the closet, a wail.

“Mom,” cried the boy, running off down the hallway, “Stacy hit me and called me a piece of shit.” Another little boy dashed out and ran after him, calling out, “Stacy hit us!”

“Cockroaches!” Stacy called after him. “You
are
little pieces of shit. Quit spying on my friends or next time I’ll kill you.” She took Amy’s arm. “Come on.” And Amy followed her down a flight of stairs into Stacy’s bedroom. It had never occurred to Amy that people might speak to one another this way in their home, and the sense of foreignness brought on by the yellow front door increased as she went into Stacy’s bedroom and Stacy slammed the bedroom door.

“So what happened?” Stacy asked cautiously, once they were seated on her bed. It was a double bed and seemed huge to Amy, with its four high posts of dark wood and tumbled, unmade flowered sheets.

“This is a great room,” said Amy, looking around. Next to the bed was a large window that went almost to the floor; trees were visible, sloping downhill toward Oyster Creek.

“It’s okay,” Stacy said, indifferently.

Amy pulled at her hair and shrugged with embarrassment. “Uhm. My mom. She got mad at me.”

She dropped her eyes, fingered the flowered sheets. She was afraid of having to explain, but Stacy only said after a while, “Don’t you just hate parents?”

Amy looked up, and Stacy held out both arms. “I love you,” Stacy said simply, and Amy, too embarrassed to answer, closed her eyes briefly against the smooth, slightly warm feel of Stacy’s hair.

MR. BURROWS FUSSED a great deal with the film projector. “It’s going to take me a few moments here,” he told his wife, a scowl causing ridges to rise across his forehead. Mrs. Burrows, recognizing vaguely that some aspect of his manhood seemed at stake here (he was a person who liked to “run the show”), went into the kitchen and made popcorn, the smell soon wafting into the living room, where Amy and Stacy sat waiting—with some degree of anxiety themselves—on the living-room couch.

The couch was made of brown leather and to Amy it seemed enormous. If she leaned back it was almost as though she were lying down.
And yet sitting up straight she looked like a jerk, she was sure—as though she had never been invited to someone’s house before. Stacy herself sat cross-legged, her bulbous stomach before her, squinting her eyes furiously at her little brothers whenever the children came into the room. “I’m warning you, rat-fucks,” she murmured.