Amy and Isabelle (44 page)

“I certainly can,” he agreed.

She could not tell if this gift made him uncomfortable or not. But it seemed to her a necessary thing to do. For her, the gesture signified, somehow, a tidying-up of messy things, as though being able to give him these oranges had now swept something clean.

“And I liked their color,” she added, because this was true—the vivid, tightly packed skin of these small globes.

“Oh, yes,” Avery said. “Very nice. Thank you, Isabelle.”

So who was this man, anyhow? A tall figure, shuffling through papers as he stood at his desk. His eyes, when she glanced into them, seemed only watery, small, and old. When she tried now to imagine what food he ate for dinner, what sort of underwear he wore … well, she could not.

But at night, sometimes, in the dark, she still yearned for him, remembering him as he had been to her: important, kind, someone to love.

She had wanted someone to love, so there was this sensation of something central missing from her life, and she knew that if he should suddenly encourage her, lean forward and whisper a long suppressed endearment in her ear, fix his watery eyes on her with longing, she
would respond immediately. But of course Avery Clark did not encourage her, and the air between them in the office room (or church) remained stale, dull, uncharged.

Once or twice, oddly, she had even sat behind her typewriter and simply felt free—there was no simpler way to put it. It was like after a thunderstorm when the air seemed suddenly relieved of a headache. Such a feeling, such clarity, took her by surprise. How different not to have life oppressive! To not be frightened by the sight of Barbara Rawley in the hardware store. (“Hello, Barbara,” moving past her easily.) To not feel that every little thing was a burden. The begonia on her desk at work, for example. Instead of something that would dry up and die without her care, she saw it now as a pretty thing, a little plant with blossoms. And her love for Dottie and Bev, along with a tender enough affection for the rest of the women, made the office room thick with human detail, not a barren place at all.

Isabelle would leave. She saw this in these moments of clarity, recognized how her warmth for those around her stemmed partly from a growing distance.

But she didn’t know yet what she would do, or when it was she would leave this office room where she had been sitting for fifteen years. She knew she would have to leave before the routine of these days caused her desk, her work, the lunchroom, Avery Clark, to take on significance once more. There was going to come a day when she would have to hoist herself up and out, she was aware of that, but right now as she stood up and moved to Avery’s fishbowl with a letter for him to sign, she felt her legs in their pantyhose, the comfortable slight tilt of her black pumps as they stepped against the wooden floor, the simple, un-exalted feeling of coherence.

And then it would disappear, and she would worry about Amy again and wonder why Evelyn Cunningham had never answered her letter, and she would long, again, for Avery Clark. And sometimes then she would think about praying, because she had not prayed for a very long time, not since earlier in the hot summer when she would come home from work and lie on her bed and pray for God’s love and guidance. She could not do that now. It had seemed phony even back then, but she hadn’t known what else to do. So now she did nothing. It was not that she had given up
on God (no, no) or that she thought God had given up on her (no …), it was more that she was aware of some large and fundamental ignorance deep within her, a bafflement that lived, not uncomfortably, with whatever else she might be feeling; and she accepted this.

AT SCHOOL AMY’S new hairstyle and a certain edge to her face, a quiet defiance as she moved through the hallways, brought attention that surprised her. She was invited to a party and Isabelle let her go. (“Parties suck,” Stacy warned her, puffing on a cigarette in their spot in the woods. “I don’t think I’ll go. Josh and I will probably just hang out at his house that night.”

And what did that mean, Amy wondered, remembering the book on sex that Josh had bought Stacy last summer. What did you do when you hung out at your boyfriend’s house?)

The party, held at the home of a boy whose parents had gone to Boston for the weekend, appalled her. People lay sprawled on couches, beds, floors, drinking bottles of beer, their expressions ironic, almost bored. Cigarette smoke filled the rooms as Amy, holding a beer someone handed her, moved cautiously through the house pretending to look for a bathroom. What surprised her most were the people making out, how many of them were not the couples seen walking together in the hallways at school but appeared instead to be a random matching-up of this person with that. Stepping out the back door she saw Sally Pringle, the deacon’s daughter, French-kissing the pimply-faced Alan Stewart, a bottle of liquor protruding from the pocket of Sally’s leather jacket. And further away from the house, on the edge of the lawn, she saw other couples, some lying down, boys moving on top of girls the way Mr. Robertson in the woods had moved on top of her. But she loved him! Did these people love each other? Alan Stewart now was pressing Sally Pringle against the side of the house, her leg lifted around his waist—no, they couldn’t love each other, groping madly right there for anyone to see.

Passing back through the kitchen, Amy saw Karen Keane, hair mussed, cheeks bright, buttoning her blouse and saying with a deep giggle, “Guess who just had oral sex three times.”

Amy called Paul Bellows and he came right away and drove her home.

OH, SHIRLEY FALLS—the darkness coming sooner, one more season passing, one more summer gone; nothing was forever, nothing. Poor Peg Dunlap, rushing down the sidewalk to meet her lover, rushing, rushing, thinking of her big-boned ten-year-old daughter, who had quit Girl Scouts because she had no friends, thinking of her nine-year-old son, who had friends but failing scores on every single math test, and her husband, who said there was no problem, they were normal kids, just let them be. Rushing, rushing, as though to press her nakedness against another’s flesh were the only comfort left. But why, thought Peg Dunlap, rushing down the street, should love be so hard?

And love was hard. Barbara Rawley believed her husband when he said he didn’t care about the scar running from beneath her arm across the flattened breastbone; but then why wasn’t it comforting to lie next to him at night? Life is what mattered, and love. But she felt angry, and she was ashamed of feeling angry. Still, she was privately sickened by herself every time she undressed; she was not what she used to be.

And why did it have to be agony for Puddy Mandel to love Linda Lanier? Because he loved his mother, too, and she did not love Linda. (But dear Linda would bear this patiently—taking him for the next thirty years into her heart, her bed, she would forgo the children she had always dreamed of, to live out her old age with this man, would mother him when, old himself, he was finally motherless.)

Most of them did the best they could. Is that fair to say? Most of them did the best they could, the people of Shirley Falls.
I have no regrets
, you could sometimes hear a person say at one of those ritual gatherings—a birthday celebration, a retirement party at the mill—but who was it that had no regrets? Certainly not Dottie Brown, lying in bed at night, remembering times when her husband had needed love, and she had not given love to him. Certainly not Wally himself, who lay next to Althea Tyson in their white trailer, afraid to fall asleep sometimes because of the dreams that came to him.

And not Isabelle Goodrow either, who, in spite of moments of coherence
and hope, watched her daughter’s anxious face in the evenings and knew that she had failed the girl in numerous ways; who, in driving to a small cemetery in Hennecock and hunting out a small girl’s grave, knew that she was placing flowers there not only for the murdered child, but somehow for her own child, too, and for the mother of Debby Kay Dorne, who Isabelle imagined was living her own lifetime of private, ravaging regrets.

AND THEN NEAR the end of October, a letter came. It was a Saturday and Isabelle, having just returned from the A&P, stood in the kitchen with her coat on and read the letter immediately. Amy sat with her eyes closed, until her mother said, “Amy, your sister wants to meet you.”

Evelyn Cunningham apologized for not having answered Isabelle’s letter sooner. She had been in the hospital with pleurisy and only received the letter recently. She hoped Isabelle hadn’t felt “snubbed” as a result of the delay. Isabelle, reading this again over Amy’s shoulder, felt tears come to her eyes at this (she felt) undeserved openheartedness. The three Cunningham children, now grown, of course, had been told a few years ago of the existence of “the baby.” They were eager, particularly Catherine, the oldest, to meet their half-sister. Catherine was married and lived back in New England, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and she’d just had a new baby. The boys were still in California. (“They don’t call her Callie anymore?” Amy asked. “I guess not,” Isabelle said, and together they kept reading.) On the last weekend in October the whole family would be meeting in Stockbridge for the baptism of Catherine’s baby, and would Isabelle care to bring Amy down for a visit one day on that weekend? She knew it was short notice, and Evelyn ended the letter with an apology: She had often thought of Isabelle and “the baby girl” over the years, but her feelings had been “raw” for some time. For this she apologized. Time changes things, she wrote. Water over the dam. She and her children wanted to extend warm greetings to Isabelle and “Jake’s daughter.” She hoped Isabelle would agree to visit Catherine on that Saturday, and that they would all meet each other soon. She enclosed Catherine’s telephone number.

•   •   •

“COOL,” SAID STACY. “But it might be boring. Relatives are usually boring.”

Amy smoked her cigarette. She hadn’t told Stacy that these were more than relatives, these were brothers and sisters. She didn’t know why she hadn’t told Stacy that, but she hadn’t, and she didn’t know how she could do it now. She had only said they were going that weekend to visit some long lost relatives of her father. She added, “I think my mother’s afraid they won’t like her.”

“Why wouldn’t they like her?” Stacy was not really interested, but who could blame her.

Amy shrugged. “My mother’s kind of shy.” Leaving it at that.

They smoked in silence; it was cold, overcast, autumnal. Most of the red leaves had fallen by now, scattered thickly on the ground, covering rocks and cold-looking ferns. Some trees were completely bare, brown twiggy outlines against the barren sky, though there were still a number of trees that had yellow leaves clinging to their branches, leaves that rattled crisply in the small bursts of autumn breeze.

The baby that Amy had glimpsed in the hospital’s nursery that summer was never mentioned out here in the woods. Nor was Paul Bellows, or the body of Debby Kay Dorne. There remained a deep affection between the girls, a familiarity that allowed them long moments of silence, but the urgent unhappiness of Stacy seemed gone, and her thoughts often appeared to be elsewhere as they smoked in the woods. Amy’s thoughts were elsewhere too. As though to compensate for this, they touched each other frequently, sometimes stroking for a moment the other’s hand, huddling their shoulders against each other as they leaned against the log, and when the bell rang, they packed away their cigarettes, then paused to press their faces together in a brief kiss.

(“Godfrey,” Fat Bev was murmuring to Isabelle in the hallway at the mill, “I hope you have a good trip down there.”)

IT WAS THE last day of daylight saving time. Here and there throughout the town different lights went on in different kitchens. Emma Clark had brought a cup of coffee back to bed, while Avery read
the paper. Ned Rawley, having risen to urinate moments before, was now reaching for his wife, Barbara. Across the river Dottie Brown lay sleeping, relaxed by her thoughts in the middle of the night of how she would spend the day shopping with Bev; she would not have to be alone. Isabelle Goodrow sat at her kitchen table, listening to the sound of Amy in the shower upstairs, and watching the light arrive on the yellow ginkgo leaves outside the side window (seeing one, then another, then another of the leaves fall, knowing that when she returned the leaves would all be gone because ginkgoes did that—lost all their leaves almost at once).

For the rest of her life she would remember this day the way one remembers the last moments spent with a loved one, for in Isabelle’s memory, somehow, it seemed to her to be privately and profoundly the last day she “had” Amy. Always in her memory the leaves would be golden, the turnpike lined with golden-leaved trees, showered in the sunlight of morning, stiff with autumn.

Stepping out of the car to use a rest-stop bathroom, the sharp unrelenting air of autumn packed around them as they moved side by side without speaking; taking turns in the filthy toilet, one standing guard outside the blue door. Walking across the parking lot, Isabelle said, “Are you hungry, Amy? Would you like something to eat?” And Amy simply shook her head, not able to speak because of some swift, unarticulated compassion for her mother. But Isabelle in her memory, for the rest of her life, saw Amy’s indifferent shake of her head as proof that already the girl had been lost to her; already Isabelle’s basic attempts to mother (for what was more basic than feeding?) were being dismissed; already the girl felt herself handed over, already the girl was eager to go.

Although later, as they drew closer to the place they were going, Amy said she felt sick, and maybe they should stop to get some food. So it was in Howard Johnson’s that a man, paying at the cash register, glanced at Amy and continued to watch her as he was handed his change. Amy noticed, and watched as the man left the restaurant, watched as he turned his head at the door to glance at her again. She met his eye through the restaurant window, and in that fraction of a second Amy Goodrow’s life changed once more, for she had recognized her attractiveness to men, to older men, for this particular stranger had the faint beginnings of gray at his hairline. It was here, in a Howard Johnson’s on
Route 93, that desire rose in her again, desire, and the power of her own desirability, and the half-formed knowledge that Mr. Robertson might be (in fact was) ultimately replaceable. Beneath her turtleneck Amy was conscious of her breasts tucked into their Sears bra, breasts that had been offered and would be offered again to men whose eyes became unfocused with longing. This power sent a thrill straight down her middle as she sat across from Isabelle, who was squinting at the menu and saying, “Honey, maybe you need a scrambled egg.”