Amy and Isabelle (19 page)

The telephone rang again.

Amy stared at where it sat on the kitchen counter: a black snake once more, coiled, rising with its rattle. She was crying when she answered it.

“So guess what,” said Stacy cheerfully, snapping gum. “I’m rolling along at seven months. Can you
believe
I’m pregnant?”

Chapter

11

STACY’S PARENTS CAME to school without her and spent the morning in meetings with the principal and the vice-principal and the guidance counselor, as well as each one of her teachers. Her condition was going to be handled honestly. Amy, having learned this from Stacy’s telephone call, caught a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Burrows in the guidance office as she passed by on her way to study hall, and she was surprised at the perky smile on Mrs. Burrows’s face, the energetic nodding among these adults, as though something had given them cause to celebrate. Later, looking out the window of her English class, she saw the Burrowses leaving school—Mrs. Burrows, very skinny, still smiling and nodding to her husband as they walked across the parking lot, Mr. Burrows with a slump to his shoulders as he opened the car door for his wife, touching her back briefly before she got in. (“My parents are being so nice,” Stacy had said on the telephone. “God, they’re just being so nice.”)

A wasp moved back and forth over the sunny windowsill while old Mrs. Wheelwright, rouge caught in the wrinkles of her cheeks, wrote on the blackboard:
Wordsworth—beauty of the natural world
, and the wasp, making a sudden dart into the classroom, rose up and knocked against
the ceiling with a faint click, then in a slower spiral found the window and flew out. “Isn’t it nice,” Mrs. Wheelwright said (no one was listening; it was the last period before lunch, and the room, on the top floor, was very warm), “to think of daffodils leaning their little heads against the rocks to rest.”

Amy, glancing at her, had to look away. Two thoughts arrived at once: She would never be a teacher, no matter how much her mother wanted her to be, and she would go to Mr. Robertson after school and beg him to be friends again, for this morning in class he had ignored her once more. It had made her panic, and now ordinary details of her day seemed altered: Mrs. Wheelwright was a corpse raised from the dead; her classmates (Maryanne Barmble in the seat next to her writing on her desk in capital letters WORDSWORTH FUCKED HIS SISTER) were a separate species altogether. There seemed little left to Amy except for some all-consuming dread.

But there were people in the town of Shirley Falls who were perfectly happy that day. The Spanish teacher, Miss Lanier, for example, right downstairs from Amy in the teachers’ room was smiling broadly as she filled her coffee cup: the principal, Lenny Mandel, had invited her to have dinner with his mother that night. “You’re both nice people,” he had said. “I’m sure you’ll get along.” And Avery Clark’s wife, Emma, having received the news that morning that her eldest son had been accepted into a graduate program at Harvard, was now—the appropriate calls having all been made—lying on her bed with her arms outstretched, wiggling her toes in their pantyhose. Mrs. Errin, the dentist’s wife, was happy because she had found some shoes on sale, and because her husband—having met with his accountant—was in a cheerful mood.

So there were a variety of joys, large and small, taking place throughout the town, including a hearty laugh between Dottie Brown and Fat Bev as they sat at their desks in the office room, the kind of laugh (in this case regarding Dottie Brown’s mother-in-law) that comes from two women who have known each other for many years, who take comfort and joy in the small, familiar expressions of one another, and who feel, once the laugh has run its course—with an occasional small giggle still left, and a tissued patting of the eyes—a lingering warmth of human connection, the belief that one is not, after all, so very much alone.

•   •   •

SHE WENT TO his classroom after school and discovered Julie LaGuinn standing at the blackboard.

“Amy?” Mr. Robertson said. “Did you want to see me?” She didn’t answer, and he said, “Have a seat. We’re almost through.”

When Julie LaGuinn left, casting an impassive glance in Amy’s direction, Mr. Robertson sighed deeply and sat down in a chair near Amy. “So,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning back, “how are you, Amy Goodrow?”

“Good.”

They sat silently, not looking at each other. The large clock on the wall made a tick. Through the open window a school bus groaned, and the breeze brought with it the smell of lilacs that were now blooming grandly by the school’s front door. Finally Mr. Robertson said quietly, “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

And when it seemed that all in fact was probably lost—that whatever had changed between them was going to stay that way—Mr. Robertson had pulled the car off the road and parked beneath some trees. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

They walked down the faint imprint of what had once been a lumber road, both keeping their eyes on the groove of a tire track now overgrown with weedy vines, until Mr. Robertson said, “To kiss you like that, Amy, was not a good idea.”

“You mean because you’re married?” (She had come here with her mother. They had looked for wildflowers each spring when she was little; hepaticas, trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit. Once they found lady’s slippers, which Isabelle said should be kept a secret, since people might come and pick them—they were that rare.)

Mr. Robertson was shaking his head, poking at a small rock with the tip of his shoe. “No, we’ve separated. My wife’s gone back to live with her folks.”

Amy fingered the sides of her dress; she wasn’t going to tell him this was something she already knew.

“No.” Mr. Robertson walked again, and she followed. “It’s because if people found out we were kissing each other they wouldn’t really understand.”

“But why would anyone find out?”

He turned his head and glanced at her briefly, carefully.

“How could anyone find out?” she asked again, looking at him through her long coils of hair. “I would never tell anyone.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You might.”

They stopped walking. Amy stood silently while a whippoorwill called. Mr. Robertson crossed his arms and gazed through half-closed eyes at his young protégée.

AFTER THAT IT rained for three days—a steady, unpleasant rain that beat against rooftops and cars and sidewalks; pools of water gathered in parking lots, their surfaces breaking continually from water landing on water so they seemed like small ponds filled with fish in a biting frenzy. A torrent of water fell from the edge of the school building where a gutter pipe was broken, and the ground beneath it was no longer grassy, or even muddy; all its color had been beaten away, and there was only the collection of soggy wetness where that part of the lawn had been.

Stacy came out of the building quickly, then stopped, saying “Shit,” and touched Amy’s sleeve. “Just run for it,” she directed, and they ran, splashing across the lawn and then the parking lot, getting their shoes soaked, the front of their thighs and shoulders drenched, until they reached the car they were headed for and piled into the back seat, saying with reckless laughter “Oh shit, oh Christ, oh my God, am I wet!”

The car, a dented yellow Volkswagen, belonged to a senior named Jane Monroe who was letting them smoke in it these rainy days. The girls moved to the center of the seat to avoid the water that slid in and dripped down, and lit their cigarettes. Stacy’s parents had given her money to buy little “treats”: makeup, jewelry—whatever, they said, would help make her feel better about herself. She bought two cartons of cigarettes, one to keep at school, one stored beneath her bed, as well as a big bag of candy bars. Now the girls smoked with one hand, eating candy with the other, while the rain smashed against the windshield. “I’m happy,” Amy said, and they smiled at each other.

“Oh, yeah,” Stacy said, “this is great. If this car had a bathroom things would be fucking perfect.”

“You sure Jane doesn’t mind her car getting all wet and smoky.” Amy peered through the bag of candy and poked around.

“Doesn’t give a shit,” Stacy said. “She’s out in some truck getting stoned with her boyfriend.”

Stacy had become a celebrity. The school, having been presented with the situation in such a straightforward manner, was anxious to appear modern, enlightened, accommodating. Even the teachers indifferent to these qualities possessed compassion in their hearts for such a young girl (only fifteen!), who, they decided, had clearly been taken advantage of. Among the older teachers (kindly Mrs. Wheelwright) there was talk in the teachers’ room of how this always happened to the “nice girls,” meaning that any girl capable of cold-bloodedly taking precautions must be a whore.

But something else was involved here, an element of the situation that was left unsaid but that played a big role in the accommodating attitude of the school. And this was the fact that Stacy Burrows lived in the Oyster Point section of town. Stacy did not live in the Basin, her parents did not work at the mill, or run a gas station, or live on a farm. Stacy’s father was a college professor, a psychologist; her parents were “intellectuals,” and they lived in one of those new homes with a mansard roof to prove it. True enough that eyebrows were raised in some parts of town, but the fact remained: Stacy’s father had a certain kind of status, and if he and his wife were going to be breezy and upfront about their daughter’s pregnancy, no one wanted to be caught looking down their nose.

This feeling extended to her classmates as well. Far from having to endure whispers or sneers, Stacy was treated like a hero. Kids looked kindly at her in the hallway, standing back as she moved to her locker, saying, “Hey, Stacy, how you doing these days?” Older girls befriended her—Jane Monroe, generous with her car. And one of the snobbiest girls in the senior class, whose father was head deacon of the Congregational church, spoke with Stacy at great length one morning in the girls’ room, confessing that she herself had had not one but two abortions in New York, and still owed money for them.

Stacy glowed beatifically through all of this. She also looked suddenly and absolutely pregnant, as though her body, with the acknowledgment of its condition, had finally been released; her spine swayed backward
to accommodate the protrusion, round as a basketball, that showed its outline beneath her baggy sweaters.

The sweaters belonged to her father. On warm days she wore her father’s shirts, which came almost to her knees, so that at times she looked like an innocent redheaded milkmaid wearing a cotton frock. Beneath these capacious tops, however, she had the same pair of old jeans on every day and simply left the fly unzipped; her parents, in spite of their gift of cash for little treats, had decided they would not be buying their daughter any maternity clothes. Stacy didn’t seem to find this odd, and moved contentedly through the rainy days with the bottom inches of her jeans soaking wet; they were bell-bottoms, and the torn hems flapped across the wet pavement.

In the car with Stacy’s leg draped over hers, Amy pulled at a thick wet thread falling from the jeans and listened while Stacy reported on the people who had been nice to her that day. “Puddy Mandel fell over trying to get the door for me in the gym. He blushes whenever he sees me.” Stacy paused to drag on her cigarette. “A kick about Sally, isn’t it.” (Sally being the deacon’s daughter who had two abortions under her belt.) Stacy leaned forward to toss her cigarette out the car window and then broke open the carton of her milk, which she was drinking every day at lunch now. “Walks around like a little Girl Scout and she’s out there spreading her legs.” Stacy leaned her head back, drinking and laughing silently, so that milk spilled down her chin.

“Don’t laugh when you drink—it can come out your nose.”

Stacy nodded. “One time I was chewing on a Tootsie Roll lying down—” Amy wiggled her fingers to indicate Stacy had told that story before, and Stacy swallowed her milk and said, “Hurt like a motherfucker. One of the guys that knocked Sally up was a black man she met hanging out at the college. I told you that, right?”

Amy nodded. It was amazing, really, the secret, busy underworld of the school. It would have depressed her if her own life did not include Mr. Robertson, but it did, and while she did not confide this to Stacy, the fact was like a pillow right next to her in the car whose casing was soft and warm and redolent of the scent of skin.

“The black guy took her on a Greyhound bus to New York. She told her parents she was at Denise’s, and then she had cramps all the way back. Is there any gum in there?”

Amy peered into the bag of candy bars and shook her head.

Stacy lit another cigarette and dropped the match out the window. “What would your mother do if you got pregnant?”

Amy looked at her. “
My
mother?”

“You’re not going to get pregnant. But let’s just say you did. You know. What would your mother do?” Stacy spread her fingers over the ball of her stomach and blew a flattened stream of smoke from between her pressed lips.

“Send me away.”

“Yeah?” Stacy raised an eyebrow.

“She’d send me away.” Amy nodded. She could not explain the certainty she felt about this, but she knew such a crime would result in banishment.

“I don’t think your mother would send you away,” Stacy said, dismissively, evidently bored already by the question she had raised, and by the vast unlikeliness of Amy Goodrow’s getting pregnant. “I’m sleepy,” she added, closing her eyes comfortably, leaning her head against the back of the seat.

“Me too.” But through the sound of the rain beating on the car came the resolute drill of the school bell.

“Shit.” Stacy opened her eyes and inhaled twice, intensely, before dropping the cigarette through the crack in the window. They packed themselves together, rolled up the windows, then ran back across the rain-soaked parking lot.

“Did I tell you about the vitamin pills I have to take?” Stacy shouted, leaning against a gust of wind that was blowing the rain straight into their faces. Amy shook her head. “They’re huge,” Stacy called out. “Big as fucking footballs.” She started to jump over a puddle, thought better of it, and simply walked through, dragging the wet bottoms of her jeans.