“Amy Goodrow,” Mr. Robertson said, continuing past her down the hall. But she heard his footsteps stop, and looking over her shoulder she saw that he had turned and was watching her. He shook his head slowly before he said, “Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair.”
Isabelle, going through the diary months later with hands that were actually shaking, determined, as she sat on the edge of her bed, to find out when this all began, could find nothing more than the innocuous entry for January tenth: Old Dayble fell down the stairs and luckily broke her head.
Chapter
3
THE FANS WHIRRED in the windows of the office room. It was early, the day had just begun. This was always a quiet time, when the women still carried with them the scent of their morning soaps, when, greeting each other, there was still the whiff of toothpaste on their breath; and now they sat at their desks, working more steadily than they would at any other point during the day. Occasionally a metal filing cabinet was heard to click shut, a wastebasket scraped briefly over the floor. Avery Clark rolled up his sleeves and stood in the doorway of his office. “Isabelle,” he said, “may I see you for a few minutes, please?”
And then poor Isabelle, because if she had known that Avery Clark was going to have her take dictation today she would have worn her linen dress. The dress was not pure linen, but it had some linen in it, and it was periwinkle blue. (“Fun to say, fun to wear,” the cheerful sales clerk said.) Isabelle tried not to wear the dress too often. If she looked attractive too often, people might expect it and then notice all the more that, really, she was not.
And certainly she was not today, with her eyes puffy and scratchy from a bad night’s sleep. (She had hesitated at Amy’s door. “But what is Stacy going to do with the baby?” she asked. And Amy said blithely, rolling over on her bed, “Oh, give it away, I guess.”) No, Isabelle had not slept well at all, and in her mind now, as she searched for her shorthand pad, was the thought that she would have to walk past Avery in this dumpy plaid skirt; it was too long and did nothing for her hips.
She couldn’t find the shorthand pad. Papers and manila folders, benign and pale, lay on her desk. But she couldn’t find her shorthand pad, and this was stupid, awful luck; she was an organized person. “Just one second, please,” she said, “I just seem to have misplaced—” She was perspiring, but Avery only nodded indifferently, gazing out over the roomful of women, the backs of his hands placed on his hips. “Silly me,” Isabelle said, slapping her hand down on her shorthand pad, which was there, had been there all along, on top of her desk. “Mrs. Silly,” she said, but Avery seemed not to notice. He stepped back idly to let her by.
The two outer walls of his office were made almost entirely of glass, and this always gave Isabelle an added sense of exposure when she was in his office with him. All that glass was pointless anyway: it was there, supposedly, for him to keep an eye on the women he supervised, but the fact is that Avery Clark did not run a very tight ship. On those rare occasions when he was forced to speak to some recalcitrant employee about the poor quality of her work (there had been a dreadful incident years before when a woman’s body odor was so offensive that the other women plagued him ceaselessly to call her in—an unpleasantness, he had confided to Isabelle, he would never forget), the meeting would be viewed with interest by the other women seated at their desk. “What’s going on in the fishbowl?” they would murmur to each other.
But Isabelle was his secretary, and her presence in his office did not attract attention. No one, she told herself now, was witnessing her discomfort except Avery himself. And he did not seem interested. Shuffling through the papers on his desk, he said simply, without looking up, “Okay, then, shall we start?”
“All set.”
There were many nights over the past years when Isabelle, having trouble falling asleep, would picture herself lying in a hospital bed while Avery Clark sat next to her, a look of worry on his aging face. Sometimes she was hospitalized for mere exhaustion, other times a car had knocked her down as she crossed a street, occasionally she ended up missing a limb. Last night she had been shot in a robbery, the bullet narrowly missing her heart, and Avery’s face was pale with distress as the monitor she was hooked up to made a steady beep.
She was embarrassed to think of this now, almost stunned with shame as she sat across from his desk with the shorthand pad on the lap of her plaid skirt. His face, in the white light of the office, was preoccupied, vague—a slight dot of red on his chin left from his morning shave—separating her from the vast land of detail that made up his life. (She didn’t even know his favorite food. Or if he had a piano in his house. And what was the color, she wondered right now, of the toilet paper that he had blotted his bleeding chin with earlier this morning?)
“All right,” he said dryly. “To the Heathwell Lentex Corporation. Three copies. Dear Sir. Not sir. Look it up in the file and see who this goes to exactly.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, scratching this on her pad and then tapping the pen on her knee. “That will be easy enough.”
She had tried over time to imagine it all, the jumbled compilation of details that made up this man. She had even imagined what he looked like as a child. (That moved her heart tremendously because he must have been tall and awkward.) She had imagined him on his wedding day, formal and stiff in his suit, his hair combed down. (He must have had his secret fears, all men secretly did.) And what was his life like now? She had pictured his closet, the shirts hanging in a row, his bureau, with a drawer for his pajamas …
“The contract stated explicitly that assumption of the risk would be with the buyer. See Clause Four, third line.” Here Avery Clark paused, peering closely at a paper on his desk.
Isabelle pressed her lips together. Her lipstick felt gummy.
“Read that back to me, please, Isabelle.”
She read it back.
“Hold on while I check this out.”
She sat while he glanced through different papers. But she was terribly hurt, because it used to be that she would take her coffee breaks with him. It used to be that she would sit right there and tell him how the snow had sent water down under the eaves, or how the refrigerator sometimes made ice form in the milk, and almost always he would say, whatever the problem had been, “Well, I think you handled that well, Isabelle.”
Now he said, “New paragraph,” and only glanced at her. “Please note that in the last week of June of this year …”
Dear God.
The last week in June, not even a full month ago, was when her life had fallen apart. Disintegrated. As though her hands, her feet, her legs in their careful pantyhose all these years, had been nothing more than sand. And Avery Clark had witnessed it, which was the most unspeakable part of all. When she had gone into his office the very next morning blushing so hard her eyes watered, and said to him directly, “Please tell me, Avery. Should Amy still start here on Monday?” he had replied without looking up, “Of course.” Because what else, Isabelle supposed, could he possibly do?
But they had not shared a coffee break since then. They had not shared a conversation since then, except for the most meaningless aspects of business.
His chair creaked now as he sat forward. “… three weeks to notify of undelivered goods.”
But if only he would say something to her. A simple, “Isabelle, how are you?”
“Standard disclaimer attached. Please sign.”
She closed her shorthand pad, thinking of a day last fall when she had told him how Barbara Rawley, the deacon’s wife, had hurt her feelings so much by saying that to decorate the altar with bittersweet and autumn leaves was not appropriate, after Isabelle, being in charge of flowers for the month of October, had done so.
“But the leaves were beautiful,” Avery had assured her. “Both Emma and I remarked that to each other.”
That was all it took, that nod of his head. (Although she’d just as soon not hear about Emma—un
friendly Emma Clark, who stood around after church in her expensive clothes looking like she had a bad smell up her nose.)
“If you would get that out this morning then,” Avery said.
“Yes, of course.” Isabelle stood up.
He had spread his fingers across his cheek and was leaning back in his chair gazing through the glass at the desultory comings and goings of the women in his office room. Isabelle rose and moved quickly to the door so that her shapeless backside in this awful plaid skirt would not be exposed to him for long.
“Isabelle.” The word was spoken quietly. She was almost out the door. She might have missed it altogether, that quiet incantation of her name.
“Yes,” she said softly, matching her tone to his, turning. But he was glancing through the top drawer, his head bent slightly, showing the thin top of his gray hair.
“Did I say three copies?” He pulled the drawer out further. “You’d better make it four.”
FAT BEV, TOSSING her empty orange-juice carton into the metal wastebasket, where it landed with a dull clunk in the quiet room, wiped the back of her hand against her mouth and glanced across the desk at Amy Goodrow. She felt sorry for the girl. Bev had raised three girls herself, and she thought Amy was strange—there was some lack of commotion in her face. Not that it wasn’t dull as a doorknob working in a hot room with a bunch of middle-aged women. (She fanned herself with the magazine Rosie Tanguay had dropped on her desk that morning, saying lightly, “An article in here, Bev, on multiple addictions.” Jackass Rosie, who ate carrots for lunch.) But there was something about this Amy, Bev thought, gazing discreetly while she fanned herself, that wasn’t quite right, went further than just a dull job in a hot room.
For example, she didn’t chew gum. Bev’s girls had chewed gum constantly, moving great wads through their mouths, snapping it, popping it, driving everyone nuts. Roxanne, the youngest, now twenty-one, still did. Bev never saw her without gum in her mouth when she came over on Saturdays to use the washing machine, her eye makeup smudged and bleary from some party the night before.
That was something else, come to think of it. Amy Goodrow didn’t wear makeup. She should. She might turn some heads if she put a little shadow on, darkened her lashes some. She wouldn’t want to turn heads though, Bev mused, looking for her cigarettes; the girl was awful shy, ducking her head down all the time like a dog about to get whacked on the nose. It was too bad. But she didn’t even seem interested in nail polish or perfume, and what teenage girl wasn’t interested in those things? She never flipped through a magazine at her desk, never talked about clothes, never once used the phone to call up a friend. “Call somebody up,” Fat Bev had said to her one particularly hot day when she could tell the girl was bored, but Amy shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said.
Well, it wasn’t natural.
And what was the story with her hair? Who in their right mind would cut off a head of such lovely, wavy hair? Oh, girls went through their stages, Bev knew that. Her oldest daughter had dyed her hair red and looked like a fool for a while, and Roxanne was forever getting some terrible perm, moaning about it for weeks. But to cut off that hair. And it looked like hell, not even shaped around her face. Honestly, it made Bev shudder sometimes to look at that spiky hair—like someone who had had chemotherapy or radiation or whatever. Clara Swan’s hair looked like that after she went up to Hanover for those treatments. Well, not really. Amy didn’t have clumps missing from her head. It was just a bad haircut. A terrible case of bad judgment.
Bev lit a cigarette, the thought of cancer making her nervous. Clara Swan was only forty-three; but hers was a brain tumor, not lung cancer. A brain tumor could happen to anyone, you just took your chances. If Bev was headed for a brain tumor, she’d just as soon have enjoyed herself first. She exhaled, waving her fat hand through the smoke. Rosie Tanguay had said in the lunchroom, “I can’t understand why anyone would smoke, with all the studies that have been done.”
Studies. Rosie Tanguay could take the studies and shove them right up her skinny behind. Bev knew why she smoked. She smoked for the same reason she ate: it gave her something to look forward to. It was as simple as that. Life could get dull, and you had to look forward to something. When she was first married she had looked forward to going to bed with her husband, Bill, every night in that hot little apartment on Gangover Street. Boy, they used to have a good time. It made up for everything, all their squabbles over money, dirty socks, drops of pee in front of the toilet—all those little things you had to get used to when you married someone; none of it mattered when you got into bed.
Funny how it could wear off, something that good. But it did. Bev had kind of lost interest after the first baby was born. She began to resent Bill, how night after night he’d still want to do it, that rigid thing always there. It was because she was exhausted and the baby cried so much. Her breasts were different too after that tiny angry baby had sucked them till the nipples cracked; and she had never lost the weight. Her body seemed to stay swollen, and by God, she was pregnant again. So at a time when her house, her life, was filling up, she had experienced an irrepressible feeling of loss. Oh, maybe it didn’t matter anymore. They still did it once in a while, silently, and always in the dark. (When they were first married they sometimes spent whole weekends in bed, the sun slanting through the window shade.)
She stubbed her cigarette out. She wasn’t going to complain, she wasn’t a kid anymore. But an ache stayed inside her. And a faint reverberating hum of something close to joy lived on the outer edges of her memory, some kind of longing that had been answered once and was simply not answered anymore. She didn’t understand this. She was married to a good man, and so many women weren’t; she’d had the babies she wanted and they were healthy and alive. So what was this ache? A deep red hole she threw Life Savers into and potatoes and hamburgers and chocolate cakes, and anything else. Did people think she liked being fat? Jolly Bev. Fat Bev. She didn’t like being fat. But that dark red ache was there, like a swirling vacuum, a terrible hole.
Amy Goodrow sneezed.
“Well, bless you,” Bev said, glad to be able to speak. If you stayed quiet too long you got morbid. She was always telling her girls: Go find someone to talk to when you feel blue.
“Thank you,” Amy said, with a tentative smile.
“You getting a cold? This crazy weather, who knows what bugs are hanging around.”
The poor girl was too shy to answer that.
Well (Bev yawned and looked at the clock), living with Isabelle couldn’t be a lot of fun. The apple never falls far from the tree, Dottie always said that, and Bev agreed. Isabelle Goodrow was odd. A typical Virgo is what she was. Not unpleasant, but pretty uptight. Something there to be pitied, Fat Bev thought, moving the telephone to see if her Life Savers had rolled that way, but, then, no one had ever figured Isabelle out. Fat Bev felt the familiar tightening of her abdomen, and rose from her chair with a feeling of almost sensual anticipation, because God knows that one of life’s pleasures was successfully moving your bowels.
AMY, GLANCING UP from her stack of orange invoices, had seen her mother in Avery Clark’s office; the slight motion of her mother’s arm, her downcast eyes, meant she was taking dictation. Nothing friendly was going on in there. Amy touched the numbers on the adding machine and felt in the deep part of her stomach a nauseating sensation she barely dared name: her mother was attracted to that man.
“You’re lucky your mother’s not married,” Stacy had said to her one day out in the woods when the weather had first turned cold. “You don’t have to picture her doing it.”
“Oh, please.” Amy said, choking briefly on her cigarette.
Stacy rolled her eyes, eyeliner curving on her heavy, pale lids as they half closed for a moment. “I ever tell you I saw my parents naked once?”
“No,” Amy said. “Gross.”
“It was gross. One Saturday I walk by their bedroom and the door’s partly open and they’re asleep on the bed, both
naked.” Stacy put her cigarette out on the bark of the tree. “My father has this white, fleshy, stupid-looking ass.”
“God,” Amy said.
“Yeah, so be glad you don’t have a father. You don’t have to imagine him doing it.”
To be truthful, at that point in her life, Amy could not really imagine anyone doing it. She lacked a clear sense of what “it” actually was. Living with the watchful Isabelle, she had never been able to sneak into an X-rated movie the way some of her peers had. (Stacy, for example, had done that, reporting back to Amy a scene where a white man and a Negro woman did it in a bathtub.) And lacking an older sibling or two who might have kept dirty magazines under the bed, Amy knew very little at all.
She knew about her period, of course. She knew it was normal to have one, but she wasn’t completely sure of the intricacies involved; Isabelle, a few years before, had talked briefly about eggs and a great deal about odor. (“Stay away from dogs,” she advised. “They can always tell.”) And she’d given her a pink booklet with a diagram. Amy thought she understood.
And then scrawled on the wall of the girls’ room one day, in thick black Magic Marker, were the words A man’s dick inside a woman’s hole for five minutes makes her pregnant, and to Amy this made sense. But the gym teacher told the girls gathered in the locker room that information had been written on the bathroom wall which was incorrect, and the school had decided, as a result, to begin a sex education program that would take place in home ec class. Amy couldn’t figure out what part of the bathroom-wall business was incorrect, and home ec class had proved to be no help.
The home ec teacher was a nervous woman, who lasted only a year, and whose long feet and knees that bumped out like two oranges had been a source of some hilarity among the class. “All right, girls,” she said, “I thought we’d begin our sex education with a session on good grooming.” She rummaged through her pocketbook. “The quality of your hairbrush,” she said, “is connected to the quality of your hair.” This had gone on for weeks. The teacher described different methods of filing one’s nails, how to clean the toes, and then one day wrote a recipe on the board for underarm deodorant. “In case of some emergency, girls, and you find that you’re out.” They copied the recipe down: a mixture of talcum powder and baking soda and a little salted water. Later she gave them a recipe for toothpaste that was almost the same (minus the talcum powder) and lectured them on the use of the word “perspiration” as opposed to the coarser term “sweat.” The girls scratched their ankles and looked at the clock, and Elsie Baxter was sent to the principal’s office for saying out loud that it was all boring shit.