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.
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.