Amy and Isabelle (15 page)

“That April is the cruellest month.” Mr. Robertson put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. He jiggled some change in his pocket.

“Who says that?” Amy asked.

“T. S. Eliot.”

“Who’s that.” She thought Mr. Robertson was kind of a show-off. She scowled and sat back on the windowsill.

“Another poet.”

“Never heard of the guy.” She swung her leg against the radiator screen and was chagrined at the sudden loud metallic reverberation it made. She pressed both legs against it and kept still.

“April is the cruellest month,” Mr. Robertson recited, “mixing memory with desire. Or something. I can’t remember past that.” He walked slowly back to his desk.

Come back, she wanted to say. She got down off the windowsill and followed him. “Tell me that again,” she said. “That April stuff.”

His eyes were tired, kind. “April is the cruellest month, mixing memory with desire.”

She raised her shoulders, dropped them with a sigh.

“What?” Mr. Robertson spoke quietly. The sun had already moved; the bright light in the classroom was gone except for one section of the
windowsill that remained in soft yellow, but the spring air was still warm as it moved through the window.

Amy shook her head and shrugged.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Oh, you know.” Her eyes moved about the room, settling on nothing. “The stuff about April being cruel. It’s good. I mean, I like that.”

“And what else?”

But it wasn’t that she was thinking anything else. It was more that she ached. She ached inside with something and it had to do with the dandelions and the groan of the school bus and the smell of the air and so many things she couldn’t name. And of course with him.

“I’m glad I met you,” she finally said, not looking at him.

“I’m glad I met you, too.”

She looked around for her notebooks, the coat she had put over a chair.

“Could I drive you home today?” Mr. Robertson asked suddenly.

“I guess.” She was surprised.

“Do you think anyone would mind?”

She slipped her arm through the sleeve of her coat, giving him a puzzled look as she pulled her hair out from under the back of her coat.

“For example,” Mr. Robertson went on, “would your mother mind if your math teacher gave you a ride home?”

“Of course not.” But she wouldn’t tell her mother.

“I’ll get my coat then,” said Mr. Robertson, going to a closet behind his desk. They left the room without speaking.

ONCE INSIDE HIS car she was surprised at how close to him she was; the car was smaller than she had thought. When he shifted into reverse leaving the teachers’ parking lot his hand briefly touched her leg. “Sorry,” he said, glancing over at her.

She nodded, turning to look out the window, her elbow pressed against the door, her thumb against her mouth. She said simply: “Turn left at the light,” and then, “The next right,” and after that they drove without speaking. When they passed over the wooden bridge the noise was sudden beneath the tires and then just as suddenly gone. Pussy
willows appeared and disappeared as the car rounded curves near the swamp on Route 22. They drove past an old farmhouse, where a forsythia bush was just beginning to bloom, a scattering of yellow bits. They drove past Larkindale’s field, where patches of brown and light brown mingled in the raggedness of leftover winter. The stone wall rose up a field, weaving into the distance where the spruce trees grew dark as army canvas, their branches bending down as though still encumbered by months of snow. But there was little snow left, really—only dirty hardened drifts by the side of the road—and long strips of the road were dry as the car moved over it, sunlight showing dust on the dashboard in the bright but already fading light.

She was thinking she ought to wear perfume in case she was giving off the same damp-brick odor her mother sometimes had.

“Here on the left,” she said, subdued, and Mr. Robertson turned into the narrow driveway, pulling up to the house and shutting the car off; the engine made a series of small pinging sounds as though a tiny rock were being tossed around inside.

Amy, looking through narrowed eyes at the house she lived in, tried to imagine what it looked like to Mr. Robertson, and she thought the house looked like her mother, small and pale, with the white curtain at the kitchen window apologetic, as though its purpose—to appear cheerful, cozy, clean—had failed. Amy closed her eyes.

For years this had been her secret: She had wanted a different mother. She wanted a mother who was pretty, who greeted people warmly. She wanted a mother who looked like mothers in television ads, who mopped large glistening kitchen floors, kissed husbands returning from work, lived in houses with other houses nearby and neighbors running in and out—she did not want the mother stuck out here in the woods in this little place.

“I was brought up in a white house not much bigger than this one,” Mr. Robertson said, and Amy, startled, opened her eyes. He was sitting back against his seat, one hand comfortably placed on the steering wheel, the other raised to his chin. “There was a vacant lot nearby.” He nodded. “Where kids used to play ball.”

To Amy that part sounded like a television ad. She pictured his mother, pretty, wearing an apron and baking cookies in the kitchen.

“But I didn’t play ball there much.”

Amy pressed her thumb against the dashboard. “How come?”

“I didn’t especially fit with the other kids.” Mr. Robertson glanced at her briefly. “My mother drank. She was an alcoholic. I used to take long bike rides to get away from home.”

An
alcoholic
. Amy stopped pushing her thumb against the dashboard. His mother had not been baking cookies. Probably she had been upstairs drinking gin from a bottle stored under the bed. Amy didn’t have a clear idea of what a woman alcoholic (a mother alcoholic) would be like, but her own mother had told her once that such women got very sneaky, hiding bottles under their bed.

“Jeez,” said Amy. “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah. Well.” Mr. Robertson sighed and moved down just a little in his seat, spreading his hand over his knee.

Looking sideways through her hair she studied his hand carefully. It was a big hand—a substantial, grown-up man’s hand with two veins the size of earthworms running over the top. The fingernails were broad and flat and clean. She minded the thought of his past including a mother hiding gin bottles under her bed. And yet the sight of his hand reassured her. The cleanliness of his fingernails made her admire him, because as a child his fingernails most likely had been dirty. It would be like that if your mother was an alcoholic, Amy thought. But look how strong he was now, so smart, quoting poets and philosophers, his mind full of mathematical theorems, his fingernails clean and trim.

“Tell me more,” she said, leaning partly against the car door so she could be facing him.

He raised an eyebrow. “More of the life and trials of Thomas Robertson?”

She nodded.

“I flunked out of college.”

That flicker again of almost not liking him, maybe a drop of fear. “You did?” She also felt embarrassed for him—that he would admit to such a thing.

“Freshman year.” He thrust out his lower lip, tugged on the reddish patch of beard right underneath. “There were too many things on my mind. So then I worked with handicapped kids for a while, and later on flew out to the West Coast and finished college there.” He raised his eyebrows. “With honors, even.”

And so he was restored. Handicapped kids; he was even nicer than she had known before. She watched him admiringly, and when he looked at her, she smiled.

“I was going to go on for graduate work in psychology—what a beautiful smile you have” (she blushed) “—but I had a friend who was a brilliant mathematician and through him I got interested in that.”

“You mean in college you studied psychology?”

He nodded. “Minored in economics, so I had some knowledge of math.”

“My mother says psychology people are crazy.” She blurted this out without thinking and then blushed when he burst into a laugh. It was a full laugh, with his head back; she could see the dark fillings in his molars. She felt again that she might not like him as she once had, but when he stopped laughing he said to her sincerely, “I’ll tell you something, Amy. Your mother is no dope.”

After that it seemed cozy in the car. He rolled his window all the way up and she felt sealed in a bubble with him. Their talking seemed relaxed and sweet, and finally seeing from his watch that her mother would be home in twenty minutes, she gathered her books in one arm, about to open the car door with the other, when she suddenly leaned over and very quickly kissed him on his bearded cheek.

Chapter

8

ARLENE TUCKER’S COUSIN’S son was arrested for selling marijuana. “Fifteen years old and they found him with three hundred dollars’ worth.” Arlene delivered this with her usual authority, raising one of her penciled eyebrows and leaving it there while the news sunk in.

“Is that so,” said Lenora Snibbens. “Fifteen years old. Holy Crow.”

“But three hundred dollars’ worth,” said Fat Bev. “Where’d he get three hundred dollars to buy it in the first place?”

Arlene nodded like a pleased teacher. “He’s been selling the stuff. Dealing it. Turns out this has been going on for a number of months.”

Isabelle glanced up from her book. “Where do they live, your cousins?”

Arlene eyed the cover of
Madame Bovary
. “Kingswood. About an hour from here.”

Isabelle nodded. There was marijuana everywhere these days, it seemed. With the college here in Shirley Falls, Isabelle knew her own town was probably not safe. But Kingswood, just a little spot of a place, and a fifteen-year-old selling it. She closed her book, no longer able to concentrate.

“And I’m telling you,” Arlene was saying, picking something from her eye, then blinking the eye furiously. “He’s the nicest boy you ever knew.”

“See, I just don’t buy that,” said Fat Bev. She shook her head slowly, unwrapping a sandwich from a great deal of wax paper. “When you’ve got a fifteen-year-old kid selling drugs like that, something’s wrong.”

“Well, of course something’s wrong,” Arlene replied. “I’m not saying something’s not wrong. I’m not saying his head is screwed on straight. I’m
saying
you can never tell. Appearances can be deceiving.”

“That’s true,” offered Rosie Tanguay. “I was reading just the other day about some boy in Texas. Good-looking, perfect student, popular, smart—the whole nine yards. Went home one night after a basketball game and stabbed his mother with a fork.”

Lenora Snibbens glanced sideways at her. “A fork?” she said dryly.

Rosie ignored this, but further down the table Fat Bev rumbled with laughter. “Really, Rosie. How much damage did this fork do?”

Rosie looked offended. “I believe she was in critical condition.”

Lenora turned her face away. “Some forks they have in Texas,” she said mildly.

“I guess so,” responded Fat Bev, thrusting her head forward to take a bite from her sandwich. A piece of mayonnaisey lettuce slipped onto her large bosom; she plucked it off and ate it, then, frowning, rubbed hard at her blouse with a napkin.

Isabelle winced. It was right on the tip of her tongue to say, Bev, hot water fast. But Arlene spoke up and said she understood the point Rosie was making, that you could never tell who was going to do something nuts. “That’s what makes it so scary to live in this world,” she said, directing this, for some reason, to Isabelle.

“That’s right.” Isabelle nodded. She had seen the wary look Arlene gave
Madame Bovary
, and she knew that by bringing such a book to work she might be thought of as a snob. She did not want to be thought of as a snob. She wanted to remain on an even keel with everyone and avoid being involved in any kind of unpleasantness, so she said to Arlene, “Very scary to live in this world.” After all, she believed it.

But Isabelle did not believe these incidents simply fell straight out of the blue. She did not believe that the mother of this drug dealer in Kingswood had no warning that her son was behaving in a criminal manner. And as for the perfect boy in Texas, Isabelle was sure there were more facts to the case than Rosie of course knew. “Perfect student,” for
example. What did that mean? Maybe it meant his homework was very, very neat. Isabelle had gone to high school with a girl like that—her name was Abbie Mattison—and she had copied her homework over three or four times every night until the margins and handwriting were perfect. Everything with Abbie Mattison had to be perfect: hair, clothes, smile. Then she got married and had a baby boy, and Abbie’s husband came home one day to find her stark naked, singing, out on the back lawn, hanging up clothes. They took her to Augusta for a while, but according to the latest (Isabelle’s cousin Cindy Rae scribbled news at the bottom of her Christmas card), Abbie was negligent about taking her medication and it was a kind of on-again, off-again thing.

Anyway. Isabelle always remembered the way Abbie copied over homework. A little crazy even then. “I’m not sure these things are ever quite the surprise they’re made out to be at the time,” Isabelle said to Arlene, thinking that by reading
Madame Bovary
all week she had been going too far and ought to display some friendliness now.

Arlene turned her lips down and raised her eyebrows, indicating indifference to what Isabelle had said, and Isabelle considered sharing the story of Abbie Mattison to substantiate her point, but a sense of discretion stopped her. It didn’t seem fair to Abbie—wherever she was these days, in the funny farm or out—to have her story gossiped about just so Isabelle could curry favor with her cohorts in the office room.

“I agree,” said Fat Bev. “Any parent who’s paying attention knows if their kid is smoking marijuana or not. It has a certain smell. And their eyes get red, and they eat like a horse.”

Isabelle, who knew of course that Amy would never smoke marijuana, was still pleased to be able to privately acknowledge that her daughter did not have a certain smell, or red eyes, or the appetite of a horse.