Amy and Isabelle (34 page)

But Dottie was crying. “It’s okay, really,” she said, tears running down beside her nose. “I don’t care, really.”

“Oh Godfrey, I could kill myself,” Bev said, genuinely distressed at having used the word “spayed”; sweat broke out anew along her neck and face. She sat back, plucking the front of her blouse away from her
skin. “Dottie Brown, you needed that operation. You couldn’t continue your life bleeding to death every month. That cyst in there was the size of a cantaloupe.”

Dottie kept rolling her head against the back of the car seat. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s more than that.”

Bev and Isabelle glanced at each other, then both looked vacantly out the windows, eyed their fingernails, snuck a peek at Dottie again; they waited patiently. Bev, sweating profusely now, did not dare open the car door, did not dare interfere with whatever Dottie might have to say, though Bev’s legs inside her slacks felt drenched, and she suspected when the time came to get out of the car it would look as though she had wet her pants.

“It could have been a dream,” Dottie finally said. “I don’t know if I saw it. I’d just been reading about someone over near Hennecock who said they’d seen a UFO, and then I fell asleep. In the hammock that day. It could have been a dream.”

Bev leaned forward again. “That’s okay,” she said. “Dreams can be awful real.” She was hugely relieved to have Dottie make this confession, but Isabelle, who had a better view of Dottie’s face from where she sat in the driver’s seat, felt a wave of foreboding pass through her.

“It’s all right,” Fat Bev said earnestly, continuing to pat Dottie’s shoulder.

Dottie closed her eyes. The eyelids, to Isabelle, seemed very naked, as though some private part of Dottie was being exposed by their thin fleshiness there on her face. She said, “Nothing’s all right.”

“It’ll blow over,” Bev assured her. “Everyone’s cranky with this heat. Few more weeks no one will mention it again. Those dodos in the office will find something else—”

Isabelle held up her hand, shaking her head to Fat Bev. Dottie’s eyes were still closed; she was rocking her body slowly back and forth. Isabelle exchanged a look of alarm with Bev; then she leaned over and placed her hand around Dottie’s thin wrist.

“Dottie, what is it?” Isabelle whispered this.

Dottie opened her eyes and looked into Isabelle’s face. Her mouth opened, then closed; two gummy white bits of saliva clung to her lips. Again Dottie opened her mouth, again it closed, again she shook her
head. Isabelle moved her hand slowly up and down the distressed woman’s arm.

“It’s okay, Dottie,” Isabelle whispered again. “You’re not alone. We’re right here.” She said this because it was her own greatest fear—to be alone with grief; but why it was she said anything, why, after having known Dottie Brown for years at a polite, unwavering distance, she had now succumbed to a position of such intimacy as to be stroking this poor woman’s arm in a car that was virtually an oven on this workday afternoon, she could hardly have said. But the words seemed to have an effect, some plug in Dottie seemed loosened, for she began to sob softly and instead of shaking her head, she nodded. After a moment she wiped her face with her hand, tears smeared childishly across her fingers. “Do you have any paper?” she asked. “Paper and pen?”

Both Bev and Isabelle immediately rummaged through their purses and in a moment a pen, an old envelope, and a tissue were collectively produced and placed in Dottie’s moist hand.

As Dottie wrote, Isabelle exchanged a surreptitious glance with Bev, and Bev nodded slightly as though to indicate that this was good; this terrible anguish, these labor pains, really, were finally producing … what?

Dottie stopped writing and lit a cigarette, then handed the envelope to Isabelle, who didn’t want to usurp Bev’s position as the “real” friend and so made sure to hold the envelope in a way that Bev could see it also. It did not take long to read.

Bev sucked in her breath; a chill wrapped itself around her sweating body. Isabelle, with her heart beating very quickly, folded the envelope in half and then in half again, as though to hide the offending words. Tears tumbled down Bev’s face. “I hate him,” she said, quietly. “Sorry, Dottie, but I hate him.”

Dottie turned partway around to see Bev.

“I’m sorry,” Bev repeated, when she saw Dottie looking at her. “He’s your husband, and I’ve known him for years, and you’re my best friend so I have no right to say it, no business saying it, but I’m going to say it again. I hate him.”

“It’s okay,” Dottie said. “I do too.” She turned forward in her seat again. “Except I don’t.”

Isabelle was silent. She stared at the dashboard, at the radio dial. Dottie, she knew, had three sons. They must be in their twenties by now; she knew they no longer lived at home. One of them, she remembered, had gone down to Boston and was thinking of marrying some girl. Isabelle gazed through the windshield at the house spread out before her and pictured Dottie as a young wife and mother many years ago, a home full of noise and activity, Christmas mornings with the five of them (no, six of them at least—she supposed that Bea Brown was present quite often), Dottie busy, always so much to do.

“That’s your whole life,” Isabelle said to Dottie.

Dottie looked at her sadly, and in her moist blue eyes there seemed to be something extraordinarily lucid as she gazed at Isabelle. “That’s right,” she said.

“And while you were in the hospital,” Bev said with quiet awe. “Oh, Dottie. That’s awful.”

“Yes.” Dottie’s voice sounded vague and transcendent now; although most likely it was simply fatigue.

Bev herself felt ill. “Let’s go in,” she said, opening the car door. (Finally.) “Sitting in this heat we might die.” She meant it; she was fully aware of certain facts regarding her health: she was fat and she smoked; she never exercised; she was not exactly young anymore; and she had just in this terrible heat suffered a shock. It would not be any great surprise to the universe if she did keel over and die right now, and if she did, she thought bitterly, heaving herself from the car and seeing little black dots swim before her eyes (her pants were indeed wet) she would blame it entirely and exactly on Wally Brown.

Oh, she felt sick.

“I don’t care if I die,” Dottie said this in the same transcendent voice, still sitting in the car.

“I know.” Bev opened Dottie’s door and took her arm. “But you might care later on. And besides …” Here tears came from Bev’s eyes again as she felt the lightness of Dottie’s weight, the astonishing thinness of her arm, saw the red-rimmed blue eyes of this woman she had known for so long, and it was suddenly Dottie’s death that seemed real and near and possible, not her own. “I would miss you like hell,” Bev finished. “Would miss you like shit, Dottie Brown.”

All of this was awkward for Isabelle. She had no idea if it was intended
that she would go inside the house, or if, most likely, Bev would take over from here. Yet it seemed impolite to simply drive away, having witnessed something so personal.

“Isabelle,” said Dottie, outside the car now, standing next to Fat Bev and peering back through the open window to Isabelle. “Come in the house. I’d like you to.”

Bev’s voice overlapped Dottie’s. “Yes, Isabelle. By all means you come on inside too.”

The kitchen confused her; Isabelle’s immediate reactions were confused. On one hand, the room was lovely; the big windows over the sink showed pale fields in the distance, and closer up a row of geraniums sat on the windowsill. A collection of hand-painted mugs on a shelf seemed familiar and homey, and so did the rocking chair that sat near a cluttered bookshelf, where the long vines of philodendron leaves spilled down. The gray cat sleeping in the rocking chair fit the picture as well, and yet Isabelle could not help but be, on some level, put off. For the room smelled “cattish” to her, and sure enough, there was a litter box (a quick glance left the afterimage of brown clumps right there in the gravelly rocks—how could someone
live
with such a thing in their kitchen?). Almost as disturbing was the fact that the plaster walls of the room had holes in them. And ragged strips of wallpaper showed. Surely they were renovating this room, Isabelle thought, looking around discreetly, though no mention of this was made by either Dottie or Bev.

Dottie had gone straight to the rocking chair and dumped the cat out, and then seated herself with a kind of finality, immediately lighting a cigarette and flicking the match into one of the geranium pots. “Iced tea’s in the fridge,” she murmured, closing her eyes and exhaling.

Fat Bev, clearly at home here (and Isabelle was envious of this, of a friendship so intimate that one moved about someone else’s kitchen as if it were one’s own), produced a glass of iced tea and handed it to Dottie. “Drink,” she commanded. “Drink fluids, Dot. Keep yourself hydrated.” Dottie opened her eyes and took the glass wearily.

“He says think of all the good times we had together.” Dottie looked confused. “But he doesn’t understand. There are no good times now. There are no
good memories
.”

“Of course,” said Bev, placing a glass of iced tea in front of Isabelle, interrupting herself momentarily to admonish Isabelle with the use of a
quick, authoritative expression, that she ought to be drinking fluids as well. “I can see that. Of course. Just like a man not to get it. They’re morons, they really are.”

Isabelle sipped her tea. (It needed sugar but she’d never ask.) After a moment she said slowly, “I can see how it would spoil all your memories.” And she could. She could easily see that. God knew she could see how one’s entire life could be taken apart, and that Dottie’s life was being taken apart right now, almost in front of Isabelle’s eyes. It’s what Isabelle had meant, really, when she said in the car to Dottie, “That’s your whole life.” And that was why Dottie’s blue eyes had been so lucid for a moment in their answer, because it was true. A whole life built together with this man, every year a new layer added—until what?

“You must feel gutted,” Isabelle said quietly, and here Dottie shot her a look of earnest gratitude, but Isabelle was suddenly thinking of something else, picturing something she had not pictured before (not really): a woman, a mother, standing in a kitchen in California on a hot summer day, planning her weekend, perhaps, baking a cake for her husband, living the normal life she had lived for years—the telephone ringing—and then the roof of her life collapsed.

Isabelle touched her mouth, perspiration breaking out over her face, under her arms. She gazed at the stupefied Dottie in her rocking chair and had the sense of visibly witnessing a disaster, a house left in shambles, as though an earthquake had struck.

But it wasn’t any earthquake, it wasn’t any “act of God.” No, you couldn’t blame these things on God. It was people, just ordinary, regular people, who did this to each other. People ruined other people’s lives. People simply took what they wanted, just as this Althea who worked at Acme Tire Company wanted Wally Brown and got him.

Isabelle uncrossed her legs so quickly the chair beside her almost fell over, and she lunged forward to grab it, steadying it with both hands, giving a quick apologetic look to the two women. Althea was twenty-eight years old, Isabelle told herself—a fully matured woman, old enough to know what wreckage her actions could leave. Didn’t that make a difference?

“Wally and I were friends,” Dottie was saying, with bewilderment. “I said that to him. I said, Wally, I know we’ve had our differences over the years, but I always thought we were friends.”

“What did he say?” Bev wanted to know. She was drinking a beer herself, straight from the can. She leaned her head back to drink again, then placed the beer on the table, turning it slowly in her hand.

“He said I was right, that we
were
friends.” Here Dottie looked beseechingly at Isabelle and Bev. “But friends don’t do that to each other.”

“No,” Bev said.

“No,” Isabelle said, more quietly than Bev.

“So then we weren’t friends.”

“I don’t know,” Isabelle said. “I don’t know anything.”

“I don’t know anything either,” Dottie said.

Then you’re both stupid, Bev wanted to say. Because there’s no mystery to this. Some men, and some women (picturing the tall, sallow-faced Althea), are simply pieces of shit. Bev didn’t say this; she finished her beer and lit a cigarette.

Chapter

21

IT WAS STILL hot, and everything still seemed colorless, or at least not colorful the way it was supposed to be. Goldenrod growing alongside the road looked dirty and bent over, not yellow at all, more a soggy orange in the nubbliness of the drooping stems. Fields filled with black-eyed Susans had a blighted look where the petals of these plants had not grown to their full size, or in some cases not even unfolded, leaving only a brown eye on a hairy stalk. Vegetable stands by the road competed with each other by advertising WE HAVE CORN!!! on hand-painted signs, though actually the ears of corn tossed into weathered bushel baskets were often the size of slim garlic pickles, and customers who had pulled over feeling hopeful stood fingering the small ears uneasily. There was something vaguely obscene and disquieting about the inability of these ears of corn, wrapped tightly in their pale green husks, to reach the fullness that was meant to be. People either bought them or didn’t, though; the farmers’ wives either commented or didn’t; life was either going to continue or not; people were awfully tired of it by now. Tired and hot.

But sometimes, with all the windows rolled down, a breeze could be felt passing through the front seat of Paul Bellows’s new car, especially when Amy was riding down narrow, out-of-the-way roads with him,
where the spruce trees and pines pressed in from both sides; then there might actually be a breath of cool dampness, a quick pungent smell of earth and pine needles that gave Amy a queer thrill straight down into her middle. It was Mr. Robertson she wanted of course.

But what impressed her about Paul was the freedom he brought, the way he drove around without any plans. And he was kind to her. “You like doughnuts?” he asked her one day.