Amy and Isabelle (30 page)

It took some doing to get everything arranged—Stacy needed more salt on her popcorn, which Mrs. Burrows hurriedly brought her; the children had to be sent downstairs, the blinds on the huge windows drawn—but eventually Mrs. Burrows settled onto the couch next to Amy, and the movie whirred away in black and white, blurry at first; a pregnant woman walked into a hospital while a male narrator spoke about the miracle of life.

Amy did not like popcorn. Years before, sick with a stomach virus, she had noticed how similar the taste of her vomit was to the taste of popcorn. Even her burps had tasted that way, and she sat now on the ocean of this leather couch with a large mixing bowl of popcorn placed on her lap, the inside edges of her mouth every few moments breaking out with a watery secretion that she knew often came right before upchucking. Her palms were moist from the fear of being sick on the Burrowses’ leather couch. “Try not to get butter on the leather,” Mrs. Burrows had said to the girls just moments before, handing them both a napkin.

On the screen now was a diagram; little tadpole-looking things moving toward an “egg,” which in this case was a smiley face with eyelashes blinking flirtatiously at the tadpoles.

“How’s the popcorn?” Mrs. Burrows asked.

“Good.” Amy blushed and put a piece of popcorn tentatively into her mouth.

“More salt?”

“No, thank you.”

Without moving her head Amy tried to survey her surroundings. The ceiling of the living room was so high it could have been a church, and on the white walls hung an assortment of carved masks, the expressions on some of them fierce and foreign-looking. It surprised Amy that people would want faces like that on their walls.

The pregnant woman was lying down now on a bed, her stomach rising
in a fearsome mound under the hospital cloth, her eyes, it seemed to Amy, flickering with terror, while the male voice of the narrator continued, speaking calmly and knowingly of cervical dilation.

Amy shut her eyes, praying not to vomit. She thought of daffodils, fields of daffodils. Blue sky, green grass, yellow daffodils.

“Gross,”
Stacy exclaimed. “God.”

Amy opened her eyes: the woman’s water had broken. A dark wet head was emerging from an opening that Amy could not imagine was actually between the woman’s legs. The camera moved to the woman’s face—her contorted, sweating, horrible-looking face; it embarrassed Amy far more to see this woman’s face than to see between her legs, where, according to the camera now, shoulders were emerging, a body, tiny arms and legs tucked up like a turkey packaged in a grocery store.

“Ugly,”
Stacy said. “God, is that baby
ugly
.”

“All babies look that way at first,” Mrs. Burrows said cheerfully. “They have to get washed off. Mother cats lick their babies clean. They lick all the mucus and blood right off—the afterbirth, it’s called.”

A wave of nausea rolled up from the back of Amy’s throat. Daffodils, she thought. Blue sky. She put the bowl of popcorn onto the floor by her feet.

“Thank God I’m not expected to lick the baby clean,” Stacy said, rearranging herself on the couch, tucking a leg up under her, stuffing a handful of popcorn into her mouth.

“It’s supposed to be high in protein—isn’t that right, Gerald?” Stacy’s mother directed this question to her husband, who was scowling at the projector again; the film was coming to an end, with the baby being placed in the mother’s arms.

“Protein. Yes. I had a patient who cooked the placenta in a soup afterward, and she and her husband and friends ate it—a celebratory event, I believe, is how they viewed it.”

Amy pressed her lips together.

“Oh,
gross
,” Stacy said. “That is really fucking gross. Your patients are
so
crazy, Dad.”

Mr. Burrows was trying to rewind the film without tearing it; it kept coming unthreaded, and he felt everyone was watching him. “Stacy,” he
said. “The language has got to stop. It has simply got to stop. And it’s entirely inappropriate to refer to neurotic people as ‘crazy.’ We’ve been through this before.”

Stacy rolled her eyes at Amy while Mrs. Burrows said, “Well, that was a very interesting film. That was
very
helpful. Now Stacy will know what to expect.”

“I expect to die,” Stacy answered. “Did you see that woman’s face?”

“Thank your father for bringing home the film, please. It wasn’t easy to get the projector here from the college.” Mrs. Burrows was smiling as she stood up; she took Amy’s bowl of popcorn from the floor and returned it to the kitchen without saying anything about its still being full, and Amy, relieved at this, said boldly, “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Oh, yes. You’re welcome.” Mr. Burrows, still scowling, with his head bent over the projector, did not look up at her. In fact Amy wasn’t sure he had looked at her once since she arrived. He seemed to her a nervous man with a wide, flat bottom. Amy, glancing with private disgust, remembered Stacy’s report on his “fleshy white stupid-looking ass.” Amy did not miss having a father when she saw fathers like that.

“Yeah, thanks, Dad.” Stacy sounded subdued. “I’m scared,” she finally said.

Amy, her nausea subsiding, looked carefully at her friend. “It’ll be okay,” she said, lamely. “I guess.”

“Oh, it will be fine,” Mrs. Burrows said, emerging from the kitchen. “They’ll give you an epidural, sweetheart. You won’t feel a thing.”

“What’s that?” Stacy looked confused.

“A big injection in the spine,” Mr. Burrows responded, with ill-concealed impatience. “They just discussed it in the film.”

AMY WALKED HOME through the woods by the river. It was muggy and horrible, as though cobwebs pressed against her, not at all what she had imagined—saved herself with—sitting on Stacy’s brown couch. Here the sky was not blue, there was no green grass, there were no daffodils. The pine needles were tired and spongy, the sky, what could be seen of it through the trees, just an everlasting white. She sat down on an old stone wall that seemed to rise up gradually from the pine needles until a number of yards later it disappeared again.

The woods were full of stone walls like this one, moss-covered rocks falling away from each other, making way here and there for a tree trunk that had fallen in a storm and now lay rotting, covered in vines; beyond, the granite stones emerged in a line again, no longer the property boundaries they once were but only faint reminders of a time when other people (not Amy or Stacy) had lived there, a time presumably so difficult that merely withstanding the seasons and surviving childbirth were triumphs in themselves.

None of this occurred to Amy now. When she was younger she would walk through the woods imagining Indian girls and men, white settlers frightened in their log homes, closing their thick shutters at night; it had interested her then: how women lived in long skirts without toilets or running water, how they baked bread in the large Dutch ovens. Amy didn’t care about it now. She just wanted to have her cigarette, to try to get rid of what the popcorn had started, what had turned since into some queasiness of her heart. Stacy, with her swollen stomach and her leather couch, and her queer parents—Stacy seemed gone.

And Mr. Robertson was gone. This of course made her the sickest, the dull pain always with her. Where had he gone to?

Later, crossing Main Street, she heard someone call her name. Amy was not used to having her name called out in public, and because the man who called to her was handsome, and looked genuinely glad to see her, it took her some moments to figure out that he had not mistaken her for somebody else.

It was Paul Bellows. Stacy’s old boyfriend.

Chapter

19

ALONE.

Isabelle sat in the armchair by the living-room window, watching the sparrows that hopped and darted by the bird feeder, every one of their motions seeming compact, nimble, deliberate, but also the mere result of being startled. If this was the case, their existence was a tense one, Isabelle considered. Still, they had each other. Hadn’t she heard that birds mated for life? She watched as one sparrow hopped from the feeder to a small branch in the spruce tree; in a moment the other followed, the branch bouncing slightly beneath their delicate double weight. Birds of a feather.

And people, too—lots of people were together right now. Her own daughter visiting her pregnant friend … (Briefly Isabelle closed her eyes.) Women from church—Barbara Rawley, Peg Dunlap. Perhaps they were out shopping together right now. On the other side of town, across the river, Fat Bev might be sitting on Dottie Brown’s porch, sharing a laugh about Arlene Tucker. Birds of a feather flock together.
Why am I alone?

But what about Avery Clark? Here Isabelle shifted slightly in her chair and rested her chin on her fist, as though she had something to contemplate that could take a very long time. Was Avery Clark alone
right now as well? She preferred to think he was, but he did have a wife; Isabelle necessarily had to consider that. Perhaps Avery was doing yard work out behind his house, Emma rapping on the window, calling out that whatever he was doing wasn’t being done right.

Yes, this was where Isabelle’s mind wanted to be. She pictured Avery in his back garden, wearing gardening gloves, a rumpled canvas hat on his head. Weeding, perhaps—tugging out weeds from the rock garden (she had no idea if he had a rock garden), then raking the weeds up. She pictured him leaning for a moment on the rake, wiping his brow.… Oh, how Isabelle longed to reach out and take his hand, to press his hand to her cheek. But he didn’t see her, didn’t know she was there, and he moved past her into his house, the afternoon stillness hanging over the heavy dining-room furniture, the carpeted staircase, the overstuffed living-room couch. He would go to the kitchen and pour himself something cold to drink, then take it to the window, where he would stand looking out.

Sitting in her armchair, Isabelle sighed deeply. It surprised her sometimes how absorbed she could become in something that was not happening. (What
was
happening? Nothing. She was sitting in a chair in a silent house and had been sitting there for quite some time.) But he had been so kind the other day in his office, so concerned as he sat at his desk. “You surviving this hot summer all right, Isabelle?” So she let herself continue to picture him leaning against the windowsill, drinking something cold. He would stand gazing through the window, looking past the rake he had left propped against the garden wall, and then he would return the glass to the kitchen sink and climb the stairs, because he would have to take a shower after gardening.

His secret parts—oh, the incredible privacy of them, moist and warm at the very inner tops of his legs. There were times when Isabelle pictured this part of him as it would be in a state of excitement; but now she saw it in its complacency, moist and warm and pale tucked up there in his undershorts. She loved him, and it moved her that he carried with him this private, intimate aspect of himself.

How terrible, how ironic, that someone existed in this world (she, Isabelle Goodrow) who would, given the chance, gladly touch with extraordinary delicacy and love these aging parts of this aging man. Surely every man longed to be touched that way, with tender, tender love, and
surely that stiff Emma, who walked around like she had a bad smell in her nose, and who lived with no regard for the privacy of people’s sorrows (spreading gossip about Amy to Peg Dunlap), was not a woman who would love a man with delicacy and tenderness.

The way she would, the way Isabelle would.

So that was life. You lived down the road from a man for years, worked with him daily, sat behind him in church, loved him with an almost perfect love … and nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Through the trees there was a motion, a person walking on the road. Isabelle watched as the girl—it was Amy—moving slowly and with her head down, came up the gravel driveway. The sight of her pained Isabelle. It pained her terribly to see her, but why?

Because she looked unhappy, her shoulders slumped like that, her neck thrust forward, walking slowly, just about dragging her feet. This was Isabelle’s daughter; this was Isabelle’s fault. She hadn’t done it right, being a mother, and this youthful desolation walking up the driveway was exactly proof of that. But then Amy straightened up, glancing toward the house with a wary squint, and she seemed transformed to Isabelle, suddenly a presence to be reckoned with. Her limbs were long and even, her breasts beneath her T-shirt seemed round and right, neither large or small, only part of some pleasing symmetry; her face looked intelligent and shrewd. Isabelle, sitting motionless in her chair, felt intimidated.

And angry. The anger arrived in one quick thrust. It was the sight of her daughter’s body that angered her. It was not the girl’s unpleasantness, or even the fact that she had been lying to Isabelle for so many months, nor did Isabelle hate Amy for having taken up all the space in her life. She hated Amy because the girl had been enjoying the sexual pleasures of a man, while she herself had not.

It was awful how it rolled up to her: the memory of that day in June when Avery, averting his eyes, told her he had discovered in the woods her daughter “partly undressed.” And here Avery’s face had become terribly red as he added, “Completely so, on top. Beyond that, I didn’t see.” (Which was not true, Avery Clark had seen the bunched-up skirt, the long pale expanse of thin white thighs, the patch of hair, had seen how, upon being discovered, the girl’s hand scrambled to her lap—details that Avery often dwelled upon and that he had not mentioned
to Isabelle, or even to his wife.) And then he had said to Isabelle, “The man was having his pleasure there. Above her waist, I’m referring to.”

Oh, poor Avery! His face so red as he stammered these words.

But it made Isabelle sick; it made her want to vomit. Amy exposed like that, offering her breasts like that … enjoying it,
liking
it. Not that it would have been better if the girl had not enjoyed it—but that wasn’t the case. Isabelle was quite certain somehow that Amy had been actively, happily involved, and it made her want to cry.