But they were lonely, the two of them, living there like orphans. So that day in May when the magnolia was blooming by the porch and the first bees were banging into the screens, they couldn’t believe how wonderful it was to have Jake Cunningham show up at their door. Her father’s best friend, and they hadn’t seen him since the funeral. He must stay for dinner, Isabelle’s mother said, bringing him into the living room. Sit down, sit down. How were Evelyn and the kids?
Everyone was fine. Jake Cunningham’s eyes were gray, extremely kind. He smiled at Isabelle.
He also fixed the roof. He went to a lumber store and bought tar paper and shingles and climbed up onto the roof and fixed it. Later he sat at the kitchen table while Isabelle and her mother cooked. The bulk of him was lovely; he sat with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his forearms placed across the table. And he smiled whenever Isabelle glanced at him.
Otherwise it was just the two of them, she and her mother, spending quiet evenings together. Her mother was proud of her, really proud that Isabelle was going to be a teacher, that she graduated first in her high school class. She had sewn a white linen dress for Isabelle to wear while she read her valedictory speech on that hot day in June. (And then when they got home Isabelle vomited, ruining the dress forever.)
Isabelle, driving through the dark now along Route 22, was weeping hard. She shook her head back and forth, and ran her arm across her eyes.
The amazing thing was, she had actually thought she’d managed things with Amy. She had actually thought, if the truth be known, that she had been stronger than her mother. Isabelle turned the car into the driveway and sat in the dark, leaning her head in her hands on the steering wheel, shaking her head slowly back and forth. And how had she thought that? Just last winter, when the snow melted and leaked through Amy’s ceiling, she had wrung her hands and carried on, frantically sending Amy down to the kitchen to get the yellow mixing bowl. Hadn’t she known at the time that her reaction was way out of proportion? Hadn’t she seen Amy’s eyes go a little bit dead?
Isabelle rubbed her face and groaned softly in the dark. She thought of what Amy had hurled at her only a few weeks ago: “You don’t know anything about the world.” It was an accusation she could have made against her own mother. (Except she wouldn’t have because of that smooth heavy stone of fear.)
But it was true. Her mother had not known much about the world. Her mother had not been comfortable with much of anything. She had not, for example, told Isabelle anything at all about the mysteries of her body. On the day of her first menstruation, Isabelle assumed that she was dying.
So she had done it differently. She had bought a pink booklet for Amy; she had said, “Let me know if you have any questions.”
Isabelle got out of the car and walked quickly up the steps of the porch. There was a light on in the living room. Her heart beat fast with the need to talk to her daughter, to kiss her daughter’s face.
But Amy had evidently gone to bed; there was no sign of her downstairs. Isabelle went up the stairs to Amy’s room and stopped by the closed door. Tears had started down her face once more. “Amy,” she whispered loudly, “are you asleep?”
She thought she heard Amy turn over in bed. “Amy,” she whispered again; it pained her to think that the girl might be feigning sleep.
Isabelle knocked lightly on the door and when there was no response she pushed it open across the carpet. In the dim light that shone from the hallway she saw her daughter lying on her bed with her face to the wall. “Amy,” she said. “Amy, I need to talk to you.”
From the bed there came the quiet sound of Amy’s voice. “But I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t ever want to talk to you again.”
Chapter
17
THERE WAS ALL sorts of unhappiness in Shirley Falls that night. If Isabelle Goodrow had been able to lift the roof off various houses and peer into their domestic depths she would have found an assortment of human miseries. Barbara Rawley, for one, had discovered in the shower the week before a small lump in her left breast, and was now, as she waited for arrangements in Boston to be made, in a state of panic the proportions of which she had never thought possible; for alongside the dark terror of waiting for the future (was she actually going to die?) was the private realization that she had married the wrong man: her husband, lying next to her in their dark bedroom while she spoke quietly of her fears, had had the audacity to fall asleep.
And the principal of Amy’s school, Len Mandel (whom the students called Puddy because of his pockmarked face), was sitting right now in the half-darkened living room of the Spanish teacher, Linda Lanier, feeling absolutely miserable himself. His mother, having invited Linda to dinner weeks ago, had kept postponing the date. Tonight the event had finally taken place, and it had not gone well. Linda’s dress was too pink and too short; his mother had not approved. You could see it on her face as soon as Linda walked in. And now, having driven Linda home, he knew that in her smiling anxiety she was waiting for a kiss. And that his mother at home was waiting also, glancing at the clock while she cleaned up the kitchen, imagining that he had succumbed like some schoolboy. He touched Linda’s shoulder and left, but the image of her stayed with him as he drove—standing by the door in her bright pink dress, smiling gamely through her disappointment and surprise, blinking her small, contact-laden eyes.
And there was more: Across the river in a sprawling old house past the outskirts of the Basin, Dottie Brown sat in the dark in her kitchen, smoking cigarettes and listening to the intermittent leak of a dripping faucet. One hand rested on her abdomen; the incision from her hysterectomy was no longer sore, but the skin along each side of it was queerly numb; even through her cotton nightgown she could feel the oddness of it. The cigarettes were a comfort. She was surprised to remember what a comfort they could be. When she gave up smoking, seven years earlier, she had not been able to conceive of a situation that might cause her to start up again. But here she was. Icing on the cake, she thought, salt in the wound.
Half a mile away, unnoticed, the river moved slowly; on the languid, brownish surface, twigs and small sticks turned in slow circles. In the deeper parts the water moved more quickly, dark currents swirling in silence around unseen rocks. The moon, indistinct behind the night clouds, gave off a round spread of some ill-defined lightness in the murky sky, and part of this came through the window of Amy’s room, where poor Amy right now lay awake in her bed.
She would never have thought that he’d go. She never would have thought it.
When Isabelle had driven off earlier in the evening to go to the meeting at church, Amy went to the telephone and dialed Mr. Robertson’s number. But a recorded voice said the number had been disconnected, and when Amy dialed it again, and again, the same thing happened each time. Finally she had looked up the number for the gym teacher at school because Mr. Robertson had kind of been friends with him. She told the gym teacher she had one of Mr. Robertson’s books and wanted to get it back to him, but the gym teacher said he didn’t know exactly where Mr. Robertson was. He’d gone back to Massachusetts, the gym teacher thought, and Amy said, When? Oh, back in June sometime, right after school got out.
Amy could not believe it. She could not believe he would leave town without letting her know.
She walked into the living room, and then back into the kitchen. Then she went upstairs and got into bed with her clothes on. Her mother had done it. This presented itself suddenly with a new clarity. Her mother had said, “He’s leaving town tomorrow. He ought to be thrown in jail.” And she had meant what she said. How could Amy have thought otherwise? How could Amy have missed that her mother was more powerful than Mr. Robertson?
WHEN ISABELLE VENTURED out to the bathroom in the morning, passing Amy in the hall, she saw that her daughter’s face was already set in its immovable manner, there was only the veil of contemptuous anger to trail behind her in the hall, and Isabelle realized that she could not mention the words spoken last night, I don’t ever want to t
alk to you again, that things had changed that much. She could not say, “Amy, you should apologize for speaking to me that way.”
They dressed for work in silence, and neither of them ate anything.
In the car Amy said, “Stacy Burrows wants to know if I can come over on Saturday.” They were driving into the parking lot of the mill.
“All right,” Isabelle said, simply. And then self-consciously, “When is her baby due?”
“Soon.” Amy had expected resistance from her mother, and she had been prepared to fight, to tell her mother she was going to Stacy’s house whether she wanted her to or not.
Turning the car slowly into a parking space, Isabelle asked, “She’s giving the baby up for adoption?”
Amy nodded.
“Yes?” Isabelle turned the car off and looked at her daughter.
Amy scowled. “Well, what is she supposed to do?”
Isabelle’s face went blank; she sat motionless a moment, her hand still on the key in the ignition. “Nothing,” she finally said, with a genuineness that surprised Amy. “I’m just wondering if someday she’ll be sorry.”
“She won’t be sorry.” Amy opened the car door and got out. Walking across the parking lot next to her mother, she felt compelled to add, “The social worker said she has a nice couple lined up. They like the outdoors. They like to hike.”
“Hike?” Isabelle looked at Amy as if she had never heard the word.
“Climb mountains and stuff,” Amy said irritably. She had experienced a strange jealousy when Stacy told her this, had pictured a man looking like Mr. Robertson, a couple active with their child, not living isolated the way Amy and Isabelle did. “They really want a baby,” Amy added. “So they’ll be really nice.”
She stepped in front of her mother to pass through the door; without expecting to, she briefly caught her mother’s reflection in the glass and was so struck with how awful her mother looked—her face seemed actually old—that Amy wondered fleetingly if her mother might not be seriously ill.
BUT THINGS WERE hopping in the office room that day. A great deal of commotion was caused by an announcement from Avery Clark: Dottie Brown was coming back to work. The women sat in the lunchroom discussing this in detail, going over the reports that had come in from Fat Bev and Rosie Tanguay, both of whom had spoken to Dottie Brown on the telephone that morning. While Avery Clark, as everyone knew, had generously given Dottie the entire summer to get over her hysterectomy, she wanted to come back earlier than planned. She wanted to come back the very next week. She didn’t want to be home alone anymore while her husband was at work. She had seen a UFO.
This caused some real turbulence among the women, and they became divided rather quickly between those who believed her and those who did not. Why this split of opinion should cause such bitter discord no one seemed to care or know, but Fat Bev found herself in a difficult position. Being Dottie Brown’s best friend for almost thirty years, she was forced to defend her with vigor. But she herself believed the story was a puzzling fabrication, that it couldn’t be true.
The story went like this: Dottie Brown, sick to death of soap operas, had gone out on her back porch to lie in the hammock. It was the middle of the afternoon and she brought with her a glass of pink lemonade, which she held listlessly against her stomach. She may have dozed off. In fact she was rather certain that she had dozed off, the heat being what it was, but she woke to see the lemonade trembling in the glass and right away this puzzled her. She didn’t know why the lemonade should be moving like that when the glass, propped up there on her stomach, wasn’t moving at all.
Suddenly the glass broke. She hadn’t knocked it over, it simply broke. As she sat up, confused, of course, and frightened, she saw this thing in the sky. This “thing” was big and silver and shaped like a flying saucer and it was coming closer and closer, moving in over the back field until it was right there in her backyard. (What was she doing all this time, different women demanded.) She was simply watching, unable to move, half sitting, half lying, in the hammock her husband had bought for her earlier this summer, soaked in pink lemonade and broken glass, her heart beating so fast she fully expected to die.
When the spaceship landed on her back lawn—taking up the entire area—a door on the spaceship opened, and a figure, olive-skinned with a very large head (no hair or clothes to speak of), came out onto the ground and walked toward her. He-she-it didn’t speak but rather “put thoughts into her head.” Like: They didn’t want to hurt her, they needed to study her, they had come from a planet far away to research what was going on with the earth.
She didn’t remember anything after that. (Oh, that’s convenient, the nonbelievers said, shooting Fat Bev a look of disgust, as though she might be the one responsible for this.) When her husband got home from work about five-thirty, there she was, just lying on the hammock, still covered with lemonade. But. Her wristwatch, a nice little Timex she got from Sears at last year’s Christmas sale, had stopped at exactly three-thirty, which she thought was just about the time she had woken up to find the lemonade slopping about in the glass.
“Well, maybe,” said Lenora Snibbens loudly and slowly, and not altogether nicely, “she forgot to wind it.”
“Of course she thought of that,” Rosie Tanguay retorted. “But she wound it first thing that morning. That’s what she does every morning. And furthermore,” Rosie went on, growing red in the face, having for whatever reasons become an immediate and ardent defender of the Dottie Brown cause, “the watch doesn’t work anymore. Ka-put.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lenora, rolling her eyes. “I have never heard such horseshit.”
“Isabelle, what do you think,” demanded Rosie Tanguay.
Isabelle, feeling somewhat alarmed, realized a kind of poll was evidently taking place; teams were getting drawn. “Oh, heavens,” she stammered, attempting to bide her time. “Well, my goodness. Anything’s possible, I suppose.”
“But do you believe her,” said Rosie Tanguay, and Isabelle felt all eyes upon her, including Amy’s, which bothered Isabelle the most—she hated having her daughter witness her uncertainty.
“I’ve never known Dottie to lie,” said Isabelle.
“People lie all the time,” Arlene Tucker said. “Honestly, Isabelle. Where have you been?”
Isabelle felt her face grow hot; she must be turning crimson. “I don’t believe people lie all the time,” she retorted. “But if you are forcing me to take a stand”—her voice trembled, and attempting to cover this, she spoke her last line rather loudly—“then I will stand behind Dottie.”
It was the strongest statement Isabelle had been known to make in her many years in the office room, and the toll it took on her was evident in her still-burning face. “Now, if you will excuse me,” she said, rising. “I have work to do.”
She was afraid she might stumble on her way out of the lunchroom. At the last minute, as she moved successfully through the blur of women and chairs, she caught Fat Bev’s eye, and it was a jolt in the midst of chaos, for on the face of this woman she had known for years she saw a look of such clarity and understanding that for the first time in a long while the thought passed through Isabelle’s mind, I have a friend.
Chapter
18
AVERY CLARK WAS more concerned with keeping peace in the office room than he was with whether or not Shirley Falls had been visited by a UFO. He tended to think it had not been, although he was experiencing some apprehension about the matter, because Dottie Brown had never in seventeen years shown signs of being prone to hysterics. However, the point was, if she wanted to return to work earlier than planned, then by all means she ought to come back. But it meant the Goodrow girl would have to go. This actually brought Avery a sense of relief; the girl’s presence had been a thorn in his side all summer, but he did not look forward to telling Isabelle, whom in some portion of his heart, he realized now, as he asked her to step into his office, he felt quite sorry for.
She h
ad lost weight. Avery Clark, standing back to let her pass through his doorway, was struck with how Isabelle’s arm looked like a piece of kindling. And he saw as she sat down across from him that her face was unevenly colored; her eyes appeared bald, exposed, as they blinked in what seemed to be self-conscious confusion.
Politely, speaking slowly, he leaned across his desk and presented to her the situation with Dottie Brown and Amy.
She took it well, as he should have known she would. “Of course,” she said simply. “I understand.” It appeared she had nothing more to say, and Avery felt slightly caught off guard to think the job had been so easily accomplished. But then Isabelle added kindly, “I appreciate what you’ve done for Amy already, letting her work here the way you did.”
“Oh, sure.” It made him very nervous to think she might in any way mention what he had witnessed that day.
“The money has been helpful,” Isabelle was saying. “Her paychecks go straight in the bank and then she’ll have it for college when the time comes.”
“Good. That’s good.” He nodded with some tentativeness at the small, complaisant woman sitting before him, her pale hands folded on her lap. She seemed only half there, like a beach ball that had steadily been losing air through some slow, invisible leak. A slackening. Her eyes, small, a little shiny, met his glance briefly, and he saw that behind her ever-present politeness her mind was not fully on him.
“You surviving this hot summer all right, Isabelle?”
She seemed startled by the question, her eyes moving back to his, blinking twice, as though she had come from a dark room into bright sunshine. He saw how she hesitated before answering, and he hoped again she would not mention the business with Amy.
But she said only, “I’m tired, Avery. I feel very tired.”