Amy and Isabelle (20 page)

BY AFTERNOON AMY was sitting again in a car parked in the rain watching through the streaming windshield as the lilac bush by her front porch wavered and bounced beneath the steady downpour. The new petunias in the window boxes seemed beaten beyond repair, their crepey lavender blossoms smashed closed. Only the marigolds appeared resilient and unperturbed, solid buttons of yellow lining the walkway to the house.

“ ‘Sorrow like a ceaseless rain beats upon my heart,’ ”
Amy recited slowly.

“Really?” Mr. Robertson had turned his back against the car door so that he was facing her.

“Not really,” Amy said, smiling, and he watched with his slow gaze, his eyelids slightly dropped, for he knew of course that she was not sad. They had only now just finished their first kiss of the afternoon, which had begun as soon as Mr. Robertson turned off the engine of his car.

“I wouldn’t want you to be sad,” Mr. Robertson said, almost sleepily, his eyelids still slightly dropped in that knowing, intimate way he had.

Amy turned to watch the rain again, wondering how people lived without this kind of love. Yesterday he had studied her fingertips one by one while she told him about the man who called and said he wanted to lick ice cream—“off my body” is how she put it to Mr. Robertson, because she wasn’t going to say that other word—and Mr. Robertson had said to tell him if it ever happened again.

Turning her face away from the rainy windshield, she was hoping he would kiss her more, touch her hair again. But he stayed where he was, looking sleepy, his back against the car door, running a finger idly along the edge of the steering wheel. “Tell me about your friend Stacy,” he said.

“What do you want to know?”

Mr. Robertson watched his finger trace the steering wheel and said in a lazy, quiet way, “She likes some action, does she?”

Amy shrugged.

“Who’s the boyfriend?” Mr. Robertson asked.

She told him how Paul Bellows used to be a football star and how he pumped gas now at the Sunoco station on Mill Road. “He cried when Stacy broke up with him,” she added, and wished immediately she hadn’t said it. It made Stacy seem very attractive.

“His treasure trove gone.” Mr. Robertson, unsmiling, ran his fingers lightly through Amy’s hair, looking at it with half-closed eyes.

“I shouldn’t have told you that part,” Amy said. “It’s not that Stacy asked me not to—”

He cut her off, taking her wrist. “Your secrets are safe with me.” He put Amy’s finger into his mouth and she did not think about Stacy or Paul anymore.

Chapter

12

MISS DAVINIA DAYBLE, the math teacher whose earlier fall down the cellar stairs had precipitated the hiring of Mr. Robertson, had recovered from the crack to her skull, and having spent a bored and fretful spring cooped up at home, she was looking forward to and planning on the return to teaching high school in the fall. This Robertson fellow would have to move on.

But celebrating her birthday on a windy day in the first week of June, Davinia Dayble coasted down her driveway on a contraption amounting to, in essence, a very large tricycle, and turned over on the blacktop, breaking her hip. Her brother, a pale, startled-looking man of sixty-three, was horrified; the bicycle, or tricycle, really, for it had one very large wheel in front and two smaller ones in back, had been a gift from him; he had thought on summer days she might pedal into town, using the straw basket attached to the handlebars to bring home small items—books from the library perhaps, or a loaf of bread. But there she lay, sprawled on the driveway, her shoes flung into the grape hyacinth bed.

So Emma Clark, Avery’s wife, made a visit to the hospital. Emma Clark was on the Sunshine Committee at the Congregational church, and it was now her duty to call upon the ill. She stood with bored graciousness
at the foot of the hospital bed, commenting on flowers and hospital food; all the while an unpleasant odor was filling the room.

Davinia Dayble appeared overheated; her forehead glistened and her cheeks were red. But she talked without pausing about how she had missed being at school this year, at which point Emma Clark thought to tell her there was a girl who was now attending school well into a pregnancy—the psychologist’s daughter, Emma believed—and the school didn’t seem to be making any fuss about the situation at all.

Davinia shook her head. She had heard about it already, and who could believe such a thing? But the psychologist’s daughter—that was interesting, didn’t Emma think so? (Emma nodded. She thought so.) Amazing, Davinia said, when you thought about it, how times had changed—she found it all disgusting.

Emma Clark, tired of nodding, got ready to leave.

Oh, then—Davinia wondered if on her way out she could please find a nurse. She gave Emma a triumphant nod. “I’m finished with this bedpan now,” she said.

Driving home, Emma Clark could not prevent certain unpleasant images from coming into her mind regarding the now obvious fact that Davinia Dayble had been using a bedpan full force throughout their entire conversation. Emma frowned into the clear June light; it riled her how Avery expected her to do these churchy things. She was going to drive home and tell him in no uncertain terms that she was
damned
sick and tired of the Sunshine Club.

BUT THE WEATHER was perfect. “Perfect weather,” people said to each other, shaking their heads. The sky was vast and blue, lawns vibrant with their tender shoots of grass. Barbecue grills got rolled out of garages, and people ate supper on their front porches; there were the summer sounds of screen doors banging and ice cubes clinking, while children called out as they rode their bicycles in zigzags on the street.

Isabelle, living in her little house beneath the pines, heard the peepers in the marsh nearby and loved how long the evenings were. Poking through her window boxes, or crouching pensively as she tended the marigolds that lined the front walk, she often found herself thinking of Avery Clark’s long and slightly crooked mouth, and what it would feel
like, with great tenderness, to press her mouth against it. She was certain that Emma Clark had not kissed her husband tenderly in years. (Older people tended not to, she thought, just as Amy yelled out the window, “Mom, have you seen my yellow blouse? The one with the buttons in the back?”) Perhaps, Isabelle considered uncharitably, Emma wore dentures that produced an awful smell. In addition to the fact, of course, that she was simply a cold fish. (“In the ironing basket,” Isabelle answered. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t shout.”) She stood, brushing a few loose strands of hair from her face, listening to the peepers and smelling the fragrance of the crushed marigolds still on her fingers. Gifts from God, she thought, picturing again the tender mouth of Avery—all these gifts from God.

But that night she had a bad dream. She dreamed that Amy took off her clothes in a field filled with hippies and walked into a muddy pond, where a man with filthy long hair embraced her, laughing. In the dream Isabelle ran through the field and frantically called her daughter’s name.

Waking, she continued calling out, and found Amy standing in her nightgown by her bed. “Oh, honey,” Isabelle said, confused, embarrassed, still distressed.

“You’re dreaming,” Amy told her, and from the light in the hallway Isabelle could see the face of her daughter, her long body in its pale nightgown leaning over the bed. “You scared me, Mom.”

Isabelle sat up. “I had a terrible dream.”

Amy was nice; she went into the bathroom and got her mother a glass of water.

Isabelle tightened the sheet around herself, thinking it was good to know she had a nice girl like Amy and not the dirty hippie in the dream. And to know that a mile down the road Avery Clark lay sleeping. Still, it took her a while to get back to sleep. There was a queer, unpleasant feeling that wouldn’t go away, as though something lay undigested right below her ribs.

It took Amy a while to get back to sleep, too, but for her it was okay, because in the dark she smiled slightly, thinking of Mr. Robertson. They went into the woods each day now, leaving his car parked beneath the trees on the old lumber road. After the part where they walked down the path, sometimes holding hands, and after the part where Mr. Robertson talked, they would sit with their backs against the big gray
rock and he would kiss her face, or sometimes after studying her lips he would kiss her hard and strong right away in the mouth, and then, rather soon, because there was never the taking-off of any clothes, they would be lying down, him moving on top of her, clothing rumpled and pressed together, while she, filled with some inner singing, damp between her legs and at the roots of her long hair, would look at the blue sky laced above the pine boughs; or if her head was turned to the side, the yellow, dancing spots of buttercups.

All this was happiness—to run her open mouth across his face, to have his dark curly hair mingled with her own, to sometimes slip her skinny fingers into his mouth and press her fingertips against his gums; oh, it was joyful heaven, to have this man
so near
.

A FEW NIGHTS later the weather turned muggy, and by morning it was very hot. The next day was hotter and even more muggy. The following day was worse. In a few more days the river smelled. The sky was pale white, indifferent. Yellow jackets hung over garbage bins in the hazy air as though too stunned to land. This was the start to what was to be one of the hottest summers in the history of Shirley Falls, but nobody knew it then. Nobody gave it much thought, except to pluck at their shirts and say, “It’s the humidity that gets you, I think.” It was still early in the season; people had their minds on other things.

Dottie Brown, for example, lying in her hospital bed (one flight up from Miss Dayble), staring blankly at the television set hanging from the ceiling, had survived her hysterectomy and was grateful—privately she had feared she would die. But she felt odd. On a tray beside her sat her dinner: a warm can of 7-Up, a melting scoop of lemon ice, and a Styrofoam bowl of beef broth that looked like day-old dishwater and whose smell made poor Dottie almost gag. She wondered where her husband was. The doctor said she could go home in a few days—as soon as she had a BM.

And Barbara Rawley, the deacon’s wife who had annoyed Isabelle at church, and later in the A&P, was now annoyed herself. Her best friend, another deacon’s wife, named Peg Dunlap, was having a disgusting affair with the psychologist Gerald Burrows, and Barbara was forced to hear about it more and more. On the phone this afternoon the woman
had gone so far as to imply that their adulterous lovemaking was even better in this heat. “When his daughter got pregnant I was afraid he might call it quits with me. But, no”—a happy sigh. “
Quite
the opposite, if you get what I mean.”

Barbara said she had chicken to defrost and hung up the telephone. It offended her profoundly. She knew marriage wasn’t perfect; life wasn’t perfect. But she wanted it to be.

THE LAST DAY of school was a Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June. Because dismissal was early and because the weather was terribly hot, the students had been told they could wear shorts if they wanted to, and now the school was filled with an anxious, festive feeling, teenagers moving about the hallways in long T-shirts and cutoff dungarees, many wearing baseball caps, or floppy denim things covering an eye. The effect was odd, as though it were a Saturday and the school building had been opened only to accommodate an overflow of the town’s exuberant youth. Some students left the building and draped themselves along the front steps, or sat on the lawn, leaning back on their elbows with their faces tipped toward the sun, which baked down through a white sky.

Amy was not wearing shorts, because Isabelle that morning had not allowed her to leave the house in cutoff jeans. Only a navy-blue pair of shorts from Sears would meet with her approval, and Amy had refused them. She wore a plain white blouse and a lavender skirt and felt miserably foolish, while her classmates appeared more confident than ever, even insolent. When old Mrs. Wheelwright wished the class a very pleasant summer, few people bothered to answer. Instead students snapped gum with abandon and called out loudly to each other. To Amy it seemed that everyone had a party to go to as soon as they were released, and so it was a good thing when Mr. Robertson confirmed, murmuring to her on the way out of their final class, “I’ll see you after school?”

At lunchtime she went with Stacy to their spot in the woods. Stacy, squinting into her pocketbook for the cigarette pack, said, “Shit, am I glad this year is over. What a stupid, fucking school.”

Amy held a cigarette in her lips and twisted her hair off the back of
her hot neck. “It’s probably better than working with those farty old ladies all day in the mill,” she said. “I start on Monday, you know.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Stacy. “What a drag.” But Stacy didn’t seem particularly concerned with Amy’s prospects for the summer. Instead she tilted her head back, blowing up a great stream of smoke, and said, “My father’s being a prick again. He was nice for a while, but now he’s a prick again.”

“How come?” The air was motionless, hot as an oven.

Stacy shrugged. “Made that way, I think. Who knows.” She tried fanning her neck with the cigarette pack. “When you’re pregnant, your body temperature rises ten degrees.” With her other hand she wiped at her face. “He’s always writing papers for these stupid journals and stuff.”

Amy nodded, although she did not know what journals or papers Stacy meant.

“He should write one called Why I Am a Prick: A Psychological Study by Gerald Burrows, Pukehead, Ph.D.” Stacy held her hair off her neck. “It is
so
fucking hot. You’re lucky your hair looks pretty in this heat. Mine looks like something tacked onto the rump of a circus horse.”

Amy wished she could invite Stacy to come to her house some Saturday during the summer, but what would they do at Amy’s stupid, small house? Look at her mother’s marigolds?

Stacy opened her carton of milk and leaned her head back. She swallowed a number of times and then said, “I met Maryanne Barmble in the store the other day with her mother. Ever seen her mother?”