Amy and Isabelle (22 page)

It was June, and in June the world was supposed to be green and firm and vigorous, but this time some element had been left out, as if (thought the dairy farmer’s wife, Mrs. Edna Thompson, as she hung up clothes out back one day) God had forgotten this year to fertilize his great window box of New England; the daisies grew tall but skinny, their heads not much to boast about; the petals ripped easily as children plucked at them, “Loves me, loves me not.” The timothy grass rose in blades of pale green but then bent over wearily, brown at the tips. And the clusters of Queen Anne’s lace that grew throughout the pastures
seemed webby and gray, or not noticeable at all, just blending in with the pale white sky.

Farmers who had been working the land for many years, who had in themselves a stoic ability to endure whatever variations of the seasons Mother Nature brought, now stood in their fields fingering the pole beans that were shriveled on the vines and casting an uneasy eye at the acres of corn a good foot shorter than it should have been; for there were fields of cow fodder that seemed barely able to grow, and this is what disturbed the farmers most of all—how the spontaneous effortlessness of growth seemed gone, or stunted, anyway. In trouble. The earth seemed to be in trouble.

But generations of hardship and survival stood behind these fears. Old gravestones by the river dating back to the 1600s attested to this: mothers who had lost baby after baby, some buried without even receiving a name, though many had lived, and carried throughout their lives the names Reliance, Experience, Patience. There were families in Shirley Falls whose ancestors had been scalped by Indians. (Mrs. Edna Thompson, for example, had a great-great-great grandmother, Molly, who had been kidnapped by the Indians in 1756 and taken on foot to Canada, where she was sold to a Frenchman before her brother came to rescue her.) Homes and crops had been set fire to again and again in the early years of settlement. Such endurance—one headstone showed the name of Endurance Tibbetts—had bred men and women whose Puritan features and pale blue eyes even now remained; they were not alarmists.

Still and all, people were worried that summer, and when rumors spread that UFOs had been sighted in the northern part of the state—that the government had even sent officials up to investigate—there were people in town who refused to discuss this, who only frowned more deeply as they went about their work. Church attendance rose; without exactly forming the thought, people were praying for the appeasement of God. One glance at the river offered proof of a higher displeasure, for it lay in the middle of town like something dead, that putrid yellow foam collecting at its edge, as though a snake lay flattened in the road with its insides seeping out, infected and nasty in the colorless sun. Only the tiger lilies seemed indifferent. These bloomed along the river the way they always had; they rose up next to houses and barns
and along stone walls, their tawny orange petals opened like mouths, speckled and fierce compared to everything else.

So people waited. In spite of their misgivings, the farmers, some of whose progenitors had carried the name of Patience, knew what patience was. Mill workers, too, had long ago learned to tolerate the less tolerable periods of life. It was at the college, actually, where a great deal of the complaining took place. Many of the teachers there—most of them—had not grown up in Shirley Falls; many were not even from New England. What had seemed, under the coating of soft winter snows, the succulence of spring, to be a quaint, provincial place, now, in this particular summer’s stagnant heat, appeared to be only a poor New England mill town with faded brick buildings and a river that stank. So in parts of the Oyster Point section of town a certain impatience took hold. In other areas, however—the outskirts of Shirley Falls, as well as the Basin—an uneasy listlessness had settled in.

The office room at the mill certainly held the unmistakable sense of lassitude. Here large fans whirred steadily on the windowsills while invoices were slowly separated, envelopes slowly addressed. The air was thick, and the invoices, four layers of a tissuelike paper, seemed almost moist as they lay on the desks. Chairs were scraped tiredly over the wooden floor, a box of paper clips got spilled into a filing cabinet’s metal drawer. Fat Bev, sitting at her desk with her legs apart, sharpened a pencil, blew the tip clean, then folded her arms and fell asleep.

Moments later she snored, waking herself, and jerked her head back. “Jesus,” she said, foggy-eyed and startled. “You can get whiplash working here.”

But the girl across from her in Dottie Brown’s place only gazed at her briefly before pushing a number on the adding machine. Fat Bev (constipated now for an astonishing seventy-two hours) considered this and decided she found it rude. The girl had been on the job three days and hadn’t said a word.

“Cat got your tongue?” Bev said loudly, and the girl blushed so hard her eyes watered.

“I’m sorry.” The girl almost whispered. “I never know what to say to anyone.” She looked at Fat Bev with plaintive eyes, tears brimming at their red edges, and Bev felt alarmed.

“It’s okay. Hell.” Bev stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit a match.
“You haven’t got anything to say—nothing wrong with that.” The cigarette bobbed between her lips. “I’d be a lot more pleasant myself,” she added, “if I could manage a crap.”

This caused the girl to blush again, and Fat Bev watched her cautiously. What a skinny-necked, big-eyed thing she was, sitting there like some weirdo bird, her hair cropped off at her ears, tufts sticking out this way and that. “Long as you don’t mind me talking like a magpie,” Fat Bev told her. “I can’t shut up for five minutes, unless I’m asleep.”

“But I
like
that,” the girl said, with such spontaneous feeling that she seemed surprised at herself and so blushed again.

“Well, good. Then we’re all set.” And it was somehow understood they were now friends.

Isabelle, walking back from the large metal filing cabinet, could not keep herself from glancing toward her daughter, and so happened to witness a smile passing between Amy and Fat Bev. She looked away quickly, but not quickly enough; Amy, mid-smile, glanced across at Isabelle and let her eyes go dead.

AT LUNCHTIME ROSIE Tanguay said she really should go to the optometrist with the prescription for ironing glasses she had been given by her doctor, but it was too darn hot to move.

Fat Bev hiccuped and pushed aside the celery sticks she had brought from home wrapped in wax paper, hoping no one would bother to respond to Rosie’s remark, spoken as it was with that tone of self-importance. Bev didn’t give a damn if Rosie’s doctor had prescribed horse pills or eyeglasses, but Arlene Tucker said, “What do you mean ironing glasses, Rosie?”

So Rosie explained how every time she ironed for more than five minutes she got a terrible headache, and when she reported this to her doctor he said he had heard of it before, although it was very uncommon, and it had a name. What Rosie suffered from, she said, nodding and raising her eyebrows with a gesture of resignation, was an eye disease called “spasmodic accommodation.”

Fat Bev groaned as Arlene Tucker said loudly, “What?”

“Spasmodic accommodation—a condition whereas a person’s eyes switch from farsightedness to nearsightedness about every three seconds.”

A few of the women exchanged puzzled glances (Lenora Snibbens rolled her eyes and didn’t glance at anyone), and Arlene said, “What do they want to do that for?”

“They don’t
want
to,” Rosie said. “They just do that on their own, switch back and forth like that.”

People seemed to lose interest. Isabelle Goodrow was smiling in her odd, vague way, taking a delicate bite from her sandwich with a look of embarrassed apology, as though to be caught eating was very shameful. Arlene Tucker (whose interest Rosie had been counting on) was rummaging through her purse now for change, evidently with the vending machine in mind, and Fat Bev was turning a celery stick in her fingers, as though considering whether such a thing was worth eating or not.

“I’ve always had perfect vision,” Rosie continued, “so it came as some surprise.” The young Goodrow girl was gazing at her with those very large eyes, and Rosie ended up delivering this last comment in her direction, but the girl looked away quickly, ducking her head.

Crunch.
Crunch
. An enormous sound, really, as Fat Bev devoured the celery stick.
Crunch
, crunch. She chewed slowly and swallowed with deliberation. “I don’t get it,” Bev finally said.

Arlene was peering into her purse. “Who has change for a dollar?”

“The machine will give you change.” Lenora Snibbens yawned loudly and blinked her eyes.

“Supposed to but it doesn’t.”

“Five minutes ago,” Lenora said, “it gave me change.”

“Then you must have the touch. I don’t have the touch. Vending machines hate me and I hate them.” Arlene cast a wary eye at the large contraption looming silently against the wall. “Hears me talking like this, you watch, it won’t give me
nothing
.”

“Here.” Rosie reached around for the pocketbook that hung on the back of her chair. “How much do you need?”

“I don’t get it,” Fat Bev said again. “I don’t get why your eyes suddenly do that over the ironing board if they don’t do that flippy-flop stuff right here at work.”

“They probably do,” Rosie said, coloring slightly and looking through her purse. “But it has something to do with the distance from things. Up close, for reading or whatever, they’re okay, I guess. Ironing,
it’s a little further away and they go all funny. So he’s given me ironing glasses. Don’t ask me, that’s all I know.” Rosie handed Arlene some change and then touched her forehead with a paper napkin.

“Too hot for ironing,” Fat Bev said, feeling slightly ashamed of her mean-spiritedness now that she had managed, as she intended, to get Rosie upset. “What’re you doing ironing in this heat anyway? Stupid as me eating celery sticks.”

“They’re very healthy for you,” Rosie responded.

“Roughage,” Bev said. “Good God, do I need roughage.” She rolled her eyes meaningfully and dumped the contents of her lunch bag onto the scratched linoleum tabletop just as Arlene Tucker slammed her palm against the vending machine and shouted, “Goddamn it to hell!”

The women all turned to look at Arlene. “Hey,” a few admonished, raising their eyebrows toward the Goodrow girl.

Arlene held up a hand in Amy’s direction. “Pardon my French,” she said.

IT WAS HOT, and stayed hot. The sky stayed white. July arrived with a sense that it had always been July and always would be. Even Fat Bev’s Fourth of July barbecue (which Isabelle for the first time in years did not attend) lacked its usual boisterous luster; all afternoon people drank beer that seemed warm in spite of its being packed in two large garbage bins of ice, then went home early with headaches. Back in the office room a sense of being hungover lingered; even women like Rosie Tanguay who had drunk nothing but Pepsi appeared exhausted, almost queasy, from the continual humidity and heat.

Isabelle herself was stunned. She remained stunned as the colorless days rolled by. The same mugginess that hung in the air seemed to be inside her head; there was the sense of being suspended above the earth, unrealness, disbelief. If at times in the lunchroom it seemed to the women, munching tiredly on their sandwiches, that a spasm of pain was suddenly running across Isabelle’s face, making the pale features tighten and shiver (“Are you all right?” Arlene Tucker wanted to ask more than once, but she refrained; one didn’t ask Isabelle Goodrow that question), it was, in fact, that one more detail, one more lie told to her that spring by her duplicitous daughter, had suddenly slipped into place.

For Isabelle it was like a jigsaw puzzle. Her mother had derived real enjoyment from doing jigsaw puzzles, and Isabelle’s childhood had included a card table in the corner of their living room that more often than not held a spread-out puzzle on its top. Her mother worked slowly; sometimes the haphazard skeleton of a puzzle would remain on the table for months, and Isabelle, who lacked her mother’s interest in this pastime, would nevertheless occasionally stand at the card table and idly hold up different pieces—part of a blue sky, the tip of a dog’s ear, the petal of a daisy (her mother had been partial to pastoral scenes)—and sometimes find the piece’s proper place.

Even in her halfheartedness Isabelle had been struck with the pleasure of this; had been especially interested in the fact that often what appeared to be one thing was actually another. For example, the tip of the dog’s ear had been thought in many attempts to be part of the bark of a tree. But once it was correctly placed in a whole different part of the puzzle—to the left of the dog’s face—once it was seen in this context, then of course it all made sense. One could see that it didn’t belong on the tree trunk at all, that in fact it wasn’t even the same color.

But this summer there was, of course, no accompanying sense of pleasure in the jigsawed rearrangement of Isabelle’s memories. The feeling was one of breathlessness. Those dinners in the kitchen together as the days had grown longer—“So what’s new with you?” she had said smilingly to her daughter, unfolding her napkin on her lap.

“Nothing really, I guess. Some of us stayed after school for math help.” A shrug. “He’s teaching us new stuff.” The sweet face, the luminous eyes.

Oh my God
. Isabelle wanted to cry.

THERE REALLY WAS, when you thought about it, an awful lot for Isabelle to take in. Not only had all the memories of that happy spring now become pernicious and sly as her mind flashed before her scenes of what in truth had actually been occurring, but there also seemed no resting place from them. For example, doing the laundry, Isabelle might stare in wonder as she pulled her daughter’s undergarments from the washing machine. Was this a bra the loathsome man had touched? This pair of pink panties she now held in her hand? Was this a blouse the
man’s head had leaned against in some embrace, his fingers on these buttons? If there had been any way of knowing exactly what pieces of clothing the odious creature had touched, Isabelle would have thrown them right away. But there was no way of knowing, and so the clothes, the panties, remained in her house, contaminated, in the laundry basket, the bureau drawers; her home was invaded.