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.
In spite of Arlene Tucker’s remark—delivered a number of years ago with great authority, and Isabelle had never forgotten it—that teenage girls who had sex didn’t enjoy it because they were sexually too young (where would Arlene Tucker get this information from, anyway?), Isabelle knew it was not true.
She knew because the touch of Jake Cunningham’s hands years ago had filled her with desperate sensations. She knew because over the years she had remembered the feeling exactly—the extraordinary joy of it. As she rose from the armchair with agitation, a fleeting knowledge came to her—that she had lived ever after with a sense of continually pressing down, pushing back inside, the billowing bursts of longing she had; that she had been longing, longing, longing for a man, to have those insane, desperate sensations again.
And Amy had had them instead. (To avoid the approaching girl, whose footsteps could be heard on the porch, Isabelle went hurriedly up the stairs.) Amy had so vehemently defended that man. You did not defend a person that way if you had not responded with desperation to the touch of his hands. And then the nasty innuendoes the man made about how Amy hadn’t needed much teaching, or whatever dreadful thing he had said that day in his wretched bare apartment. Implying what? What was he implying? That Amy was a “natural”?
Oh, Isabelle hated her. (She closed her bedroom door, seated herself on the edge of her bed.) It wasn’t fair!
It wasn’t fair either to have to hear about all this free-love business these days, young people living together without marriage, moving on to someone new when they got tired, these filthy, dirty hippie girls with flowers in their hair. Isabelle had read that on some college campuses now they had doctors just handing out the pill to any girl who wanted it; all these girls using their young bodies like they were mere toys.
It pained her.
It pained her to see billboards, television commercials, any advertisement that made use of seductive young women. And it seemed they all did. It seemed that no matter what was being advertised, it all came down to sex. Everyone was having sex—it was there for the asking.
Downstairs the kitchen door could be heard opening and then closing. “Mom?”
Isabelle remained where she was on the bed, listening as Amy’s footsteps came slowly up the stairs.
“Mom?”
“I’m resting,” Isabelle called out from behind the closed door. She could hear Amy stop on the landing.
“I didn’t know if you were home or not,” Amy said.
“I’m home.” Isabelle could hear in the silence that Amy was still there. “Did you have a good time?” Isabelle eventually asked, her face, in the privacy of her room, tight with fury.
“It was okay.” Again there wa
s the silence on the landing, as well as the silence in Isabelle’s bedroom; both poised, waiting. Then Amy crossed the hall and went into her room.
IT WAS TERRIBLY hot up here. Amy closed the door and turned on the fan, aiming it toward her bed, where she lay down with one leg flung over the edge, her foot on the floor. In a way, she had been hoping to talk to her mother. After the strangeness of Stacy’s house, to walk up the driveway and see her mother—it was a relief, almost, to be home.
Except it wasn’t. Forget it. Her mother was still awful. But what had she expected? That her mother would greet her at the door and say, “Sweetheart, I love you, come give me a kiss?” That was not her mother. Even when Amy was small and came to her crying with a skinned knee, Isabelle would tell Amy to stop crying. “Grit your teeth and bear it,” she would say. And now she was lying in her room “resting,” which was a crock of shit because Amy had just seen her at the window a few moments ago.
So there was no point in being glad to be home. She wasn’t glad to be home. Although thinking that made her wonder about Debby Kay Dorne, made her wonder again why the girl had just vanished from her house that day, why she was still missing, why she hadn’t been found. The newspaper hardly bothered mentioning her anymore. On TV last week the guy only said, “The search continues for Debby Kay Dorne”—and that was all. Amy turned over on her stomach. It was pretty creepy, it really was.
And it just showed how stupid Isabelle was being. Anyone else’s mother would be glad to have their daughter around, would be happy to sit and talk right now instead of scuttling off upstairs to “rest.” She might as well have stayed longer with Paul Bellows. Or longer at Stacy’s. Except she had felt really depressed at Stacy’s, especially after the movie, when they went back down to Stacy’s room and Stacy showed her a book about sex that Stacy’s new boyfriend had bought her. Amy hadn’t even known that Stacy had a new boyfriend, but she did, a guy named Joshua who was going to be a senior. He had bought her this book on sex. It had drawings to show you ways to do it, and it made Amy miss Mr. Robertson almost unbearably. The guy in the book had a beard like Mr. Robertson’s, and the woman he was doing it with had long straight hair. It made Amy feel just terribly lonely to see the drawings in the book. (And anxiously curious too, because that’s what Mr. Robertson’s thing must look like—with the bump on the tip of it, and the little pouches at the other end; and the hair.) She told Stacy she had to get home before her mother got mad, but it was really because she wanted to leave and have her cigarettes in the woods, sitting on the stone wall by herself.
And then she’d run into Paul Bellows, which was weird, because she hardly knew him, and he acted like they were friends. He wanted to know about Stacy, of course, since her parents wouldn’t even let him call. Amy didn’t say anything about the new boyfriend; she just said that Stacy was doing okay.
“Good,” Paul said, nodding. “Because I really care about her, you know.”
“Sure,” Amy answered. “I mean, sure you do.”
He took Amy for a ride in his new car. “How do you like it?” he asked, smiling. His teeth, as well as his big eyes, seemed moist, his large hands caressed the gearshift as he drove.
“Oh, it’s great,” Amy said. “It’s nice.” She didn’t know, really, what a person said about a new car. The car was small, a little sports car; it was blue on the outside, gray on the inside. “I like the color,” she added, tentatively, touching the gray vinyl upholstery next to her leg.
“Purrs like a baby, doesn’t it,” Paul said.
She nodded, seeing how his mouth was like Stacy’s, full in the same way, his lips blooming outward, his cheek smooth with an inner dark glow, his wet teeth very white.
He drove out onto Route 4 to show her how the car had great “pickup,” which evidently meant it could go very fast, for he tapped the speedometer for her to look as the car went seventy miles an hour, then eighty, then ninety. It was the blacktop of the road that seemed to be moving as she stared terrified through the windshield, some ferocious conveyor belt gone out of control, hurtling beneath them.
“There we go,” Paul said, grinning at the speedometer that now showed the needle shaking over the number one hundred. “It’s a beauty, this baby.”
He slowed. “You ever go that fast in a car before?”
Amy shook her head.
“Scare you?”
Amy nodded.
“I won’t do it again.” He seemed genuinely sorry. “Just showing off,” he said, and the color in his cheek seemed to deepen.
“It’s okay,” Amy said, her relief at going slower making her loquacious. “It’s a new car and stuff. Whenever I get new stuff I always like to, you know, play around with it.”
He glanced at her as he drove down an exit ramp, heading back to town. “You’re nice,” he told her simply. “I want to buy you something.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said, embarrassed. “No, that’s okay.”
But he really did want to, she could see that, and in a few moments they went into a drugstore, where he bought her lip gloss and mascara. The lip gloss was the expensive kind. “Jeez,” she said. “Thank you.”
Back on the sidewalk she stood self-consciously, looking around to see if, God forbid, her mother might be driving by. “I’ll walk home from here,” she said. “I need the exercise.”
But Paul seemed happy, excited. “Hold on one minute,” he told her, and he disappeared into the florist shop that was there next to the drugstore. In a moment he walked out with a bunch of daisies wrapped in a big paper cone. “For you,” he said, beaming at her with his white teeth. “Because you’ve been so nice to Stacy. And to me. You’re a nice person, Amy. ”
Here Amy sat up and put her perspiring face directly in front of the fan. It was nice to have someone say you were a nice person. It really was. She didn’t know why the whole thing made her sad in a way. Amy closed her eyes against the fan. Her bedroom was hot and smelled like an attic; where her scalp was moist at the roots of her hair, she felt a faint chill.
What she had done was to walk to the high school, and finding the back door open by the gym, she had moved through the silent hallway and left the daisies by Mr. Robertson’s door.
AUGUST ARRIVED. THE sky was pale and seemed higher each day, some increasing sense of a domelike membrane swelling with its own exhaustion.
Peg Dunlap, the woman from church who was on the Christmas Committee and who was having an affair with Stacy’s father, spent one of these hot afternoons in the A&P, where it was cooler, and where she could follow the unsuspecting Mrs. Burrows as she pushed a cart up one aisle and down another. Wearing sunglasses, Peg Dunlap peeked around the lettuce and watched the wife of her lover study the jars of jellies and jams. She could not have said why doing this filled her with such excitement, and an excruciating pain.
In a top-floor apartment a few miles away was Linda Lanier, the Spanish teacher, who at that very moment of the monstrously hot August afternoon was in her bed naked with Lenny Mandel, the two of them grunting and sweating vigorously as they moved about the twisted sheets; daisies discovered in the corridor of the school by a surprised Lenny Mandel now jiggled in a milk jug next to the bed. (Mrs. Mandel, calling her son at the high school to ask him to bring mustard on his way home from work, was told he was already gone for the day.)
Across the river in the office room Fat Bev was having trouble with her stomach, her digestion. Right after she got to work these days she would start to cramp and then have terrible gas. Walking carefully through the office room, squeezing her sphincter to save her life, she sometimes felt as though her entire lower region was about to explode—only to land finally and safely on a toilet seat and find there was nothing to emit but a loud blast of air. Absolutely nothing more.
At least it gave her something to talk to Dottie about. She sure wasn’t going to talk about UFOs. “Honest to God,” she said now, settling herself back in behind her desk. “So much rumbling in my innards down below.”<
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Dottie Brown looked up, her forehead furrowed. “Really?” she asked, and Bev saw that Dottie had not absorbed what was just said, that something stood between Dottie and the rest of the world; the distance flickered there in her eye, which did not quite land on Bev; it was there in the slight overexpressiveness of her response “Really?”
It made Bev tired, as though she had been swimming after someone, as though she herself needed to talk louder, faster, more expressively, in order to keep Dottie afloat. Typing, Bev watched her friend from the corner of her eye. Dottie’s face held the expression of someone in physical pain; this is what dawned on Bev as she watched and typed. A memory from years ago came to her—an aunt who had died of cancer had the same expression that Dottie had now, as though something behind the eyes were getting tugged back, a bit on a horse’s mouth, something like that.… Bev was alarmed.
“Dottie,” she said. She stopped typing and squinted at her friend.
Dottie looked up, surprised.
“Dottie Brown, are you okay?”
Irritation seemed to flicker briefly on Dottie’s face. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you seem different,” Bev said forthrightly. “I’ve known you a long time and you seem different to me.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Dottie answered softly. “If some spaceship had landed in your backyard you’d seem different too.”
This put them in choppy waters; Bev’s stomach cramped. She didn’t believe Dottie’s UFO story and she thought probably Dottie knew that. But when Dottie was faced with a disbeliever (Lenora Snibbens was the worst, being as vocal about it as she was), her eyes would fill with indignant tears, and she would say quietly that no one could understand anything in this world until they had actually experienced it themselves. “True enough,” Fat Bev would say in support of her friend, and there the matter would drop.