Amy and Isabelle (35 page)

“I love doughnuts,” Amy said.

His smiles appeared genuine, boyish, and always a bit disconnected, as though they came a split second late. This seemed true of most of his reactions—a little schism, a tiny pause—and it was this that prevented intimacy. What they had instead was an arrangement, an unspoken acknowledgment that their minds were on other people.

In a doughnut shop at the traffic circle on the outskirts of town, Paul smoked Marlboros and drank coffee and watched with his pleasant, disconnected smile as Amy finished her second doughnut. Because Marlboros were too strong for her (she shuddered as she inhaled), he bought her at the cash register a pack of the kind she used to smoke in the woods with Stacy, and he said Amy could keep them in his cubbyhole since she was afraid to take them home and have them discovered.

“I can pay you back,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.” He touched her back lightly as they walked across the parking lot.

Once in the car he put the key in the ignition and then reached beneath the seat and brought out a box, an old-fashioned cigar box with a top that flipped open. “Look at this,” he said, and she leaned toward him. It was a collection of foreign coins and jewelry, but what caught her eye especially was a pair of women’s earrings; on each gold wire was a small strip of gold, inlaid with pearls and pale green stones, and then at the bottom of this strip a small red stone, so that the earrings looked like a pair of exquisite exclamation marks.

“Oh, those are gorgeous,” Amy said, picking them out of the box, turning them slowly in her hand.

“You want them?” Paul asked. “Take them.”

She shook her head, dropping the earrings back in the cigar box. “Where did you get this stuff?”

When he didn’t answer, when he half-smiled and gazed down at the box, she realized he must have stolen it.

“You know anything about old coins?” he said, picking one of them up. “Or whatever these things are.”

She took it from him to be polite, turning it over in her palm. “No, I don’t know anything about stuff like this.”

He took the coin back, looked at it indifferently, then dropped it in the box. “I thought maybe I could sell them, except who buys this shit?”

“Take it to Boston,” Amy suggested. “Maybe some place down there.”

He stared at the box in his lap. There was fatigue in his face, as though the contents of the cigar box were burdensome. “Sure you don’t want these earrings?” he asked again. “They’d look real nice on you.”

Again she shook her head. “I don’t have pierced ears,” she explained. “Those are for pierced ears.”

“Oh, yeah.” He looked from the earring to her earlobe, leaning forward to look carefully. “How come? You scared it will hurt?” The question was sincere, nonjudging.

“My mother won’t let me.”

“Oh.” Paul put the cigar box back under the seat and started the car. Then he pushed in the cigarette lighter and tapped out one of his Marlboros, so she opened the cubbyhole and took one of the cigarettes from the pack he had bought for her. They sat with cigarettes in their hands waiting for the lighter to pop out. She thought it was wonderful, being able to do that. Just have a cigarette when you felt like it.

He lit her cigarette first, which is what he always did, and then drove out of the parking lot, his own cigarette placed between his full lips. Back on the highway he drove fast.

“She thinks if you get your ears pierced you might as well get your nose pierced too,” Amy said, speaking loudly against the wind. “Something like that—I don’t know.” She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled, the smoke flying from her mouth. “She’s an asshole,” she concluded. “Is your mother an asshole?”

Paul shrugged. “No.” He rested his elbow on the open window and took his cigarette between his thumb and index finger. “She gets on my nerves though.”

Amy held her cigarette the way Paul did, stuck her elbow out the window the way he did.

For a long while they didn’t talk, until Paul said simply, “Stacy has pierced ears.”

When he kissed her she was not sorry. He had pulled into her driveway to drop her off, and she was aware as he leaned toward her (the kindhearted, disconnected smile on his full lips) that she had kissed Mr. Robertson in the very same spot. She experienced a fleeting sense of pride, not unlike when years earlier she had earned her Girl Scout badges—a kind of anxious relief that she had “collected” one more.

So now she was a young woman that men wanted. Not just one man but
another one
too: witness this in the full lips of Paul Bellows moving right now over hers. And witness too how she knew what to do; there was nothing tentative about her as she closed her eyes and accepted his tongue—old pros, both of them.

But it was different. Paul’s mouth was fleshier, softer, than Mr. Robertson’s had been. And there was not the hard urgency of desperate exploration, it was a much more leisurely thing, a friendly “swap of spit.” These words passed through her mind as she sat kissing him, and she wondered where she had heard the phrase. In the hallway of school probably, and then she pictured the hallway at school, the beige metal lockers all lined up; she thought how peculiar it was to be kissing someone while picturing a row of beige metal lockers. (Here she turned her head obligingly as Paul turned his.) And then she thought of those words again, “swapping spit,” and pictured being in the dentist’s chair when all the spit was collecting in her mouth and she was waiting for the dentist to use that little vacuum hose to suction it out. (Paul’s tongue moved back into his own mouth and in a moment they both sat back.)

“Sure you don’t want those earrings?” he asked. “Someday you might get your ears pierced.”

“Okay.” She felt bad she had been thinking about the dentist while kissing him.

IN THE EVENING she sat on the couch watching television and waiting for the evening to go by. She had thought that kissing someone else would be the same as kissing Mr. Robertson. That it would feel the same. She had thought that tongues and teeth and mouths touching
each other would make her feel all dizzy and wonderful again. She had thought that while Mr. Robertson
himself
might not be available right now, at least the fun of making out with someone else could be.

She looked out the window. It was almost dark—the flickering of the television reflected in the windowpane.

“Really and truly,” Isabelle said from where she sat in the armchair, tugging on a ball of yarn, “I’ve never seen things at work this unpleasant before.”

Amy glanced at her briefly, not believing her. But she started thinking about the office room. She missed Fat Bev. She missed the lazy, jokey way the women in the office room had talked with one another.

“How unpleasant can it be?” Amy asked unpleasantly.

A different show came on the television set; Isabelle was allowing more and more TV. When the news was over, instead of turning off the set, as she usually did, she would watch whatever show came on next. Amy would usually sit in a corner of the couch, the way she was now, with her knees tucked up beneath her, a sullen scowl on her face. (“Get your feet off the couch, please,” Isabelle would say, and Amy would move her feet a few inches.)

Isabelle worked on her afghan, knitting needles flying, half-glasses perched on her nose as she stopped occasionally to peer at the magazine on the side table that contained the directions. Her legs were crossed and one foot bobbed constantly. In between glancing at the yarn or the directions in the magazine, she would give the television sidelong looks.

Amy couldn’t stand it. The stupid half-glasses, the bobbing foot, the pretended disdain for the television show when she was clearly watching it.

“I’d say pretty unpleasant,” Isabelle was answering now. “When Dottie Brown and Lenora come to blows in the bathroom. I’d call that pretty unpleasant.”

Amy picked at her toes and cast her mother a wary glance. “What kind of blows.”

Isabelle tugged at her yarn. “Physical blows.”

Amy picked her head up. “You’re kidding.”

“No. I’m not.”

“They were
fighting
in the bathroom?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Like pulling each other’s hair and stuff?”

Isabelle frowned. “Oh, Amy. For heaven’s sake, no.”

“Then what were they doing? Tell me.”

“It was simply unpleasant, that’s all.”

“Oh, come
on
, Mom.” Her mind went over faces from the office room. “I can’t see Lenora slugging anyone,” she said in a moment.

“No one
slugged
anyone,” Isabelle replied. “Dottie felt insulted by Lenora. And Lenora has been pretty nasty about the whole UFO business, I must say. So in the ladies’ room Dottie was apparently beside herself, and slapped Lenora on the arm.”

“A little slap?” Amy was disappointed.

“And then Lenora spit at her.”

“Really?”

Isabelle raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I was told. I didn’t witness it myself. ”

Amy pondered this. “It’s pretty queer,” she concluded, “for a woman to go around slapping the people she works with. You know what I think?”

“What do you think.” Isabelle sounded tired now; the perfunctoriness of her tone insulted her daughter.

“Nothing,” Amy said.

THE RAIN BEGAN during the night. It began softly; so softly that at first it did not seem to be falling from the sky as much as simply appearing in the darkened air. A man lurching from the doorway of a hotel bar on Mill Road swatted his hand in front of his face a few times as though finding himself in a cobweb. By the early hours of morning, though, the rain was tapping gently and steadily onto the open leaves of maples and oaks and birch trees, and those people—particularly the elderly, and the anxious—who each night woke about three, and often stayed awake until the sky began to lighten, found themselves wondering at first what that sound was; raising themselves onto an elbow, sitting up against the headboard of the bed, why it was
rain
, of course, and they lay back down, expectant and pleased, or fearful, depending on how they felt about thunderstorms, for it promised to be grand, this storm, huge, climatically complete after a summer as stultifying and
humid as this one had been. The sky would crack and split and thunderous crashes would rearrange huge blocks of air as though the universe itself were in the throes of some vast quake.

But instead the rain simply fell more steadily, tapping down now on rooftops and cars and pavement, and those people who had woken in the night fell back asleep and slept deeply, for the sky did not lighten the way it usually did; it became only as light as evening. By morning there were puddles beneath gutter pipes, small pools in gravel driveways. The rain was dark and heavy and rattled down onto porch railings, front steps. People ate their breakfasts by lamplight, or in the kitchen light of overhead fluorescent bulbs. For some it was reminiscent of times when they had woken early to travel somewhere far that day; it held that same kind of anticipatory air, although they were not going anywhere but to work on this dark August morning.

Isabelle, having been one of those who woke briefly in the night, had slept again deeply and soothingly. Though now awake in the kitchen with the windowpanes a darkened wet, she felt phlegmy and stunned, as though she had taken sleep medication that had not worn off yet. She sat with her fingers lightly placed around her coffee cup, thinking how strange it was that she had slept soundly when she had gone to bed with disturbing thoughts shooting across her mind. How strange to have been sitting in her baking car yesterday with Dottie and Bev, and then in Dottie’s kitchen—how strange that had been. Strange to think of Avery Clark waking in a cabin right now on Lake Nattetuck. Strange, in fact, to think that both her mother and father were dead, that perhaps this very rain was pelting down on their graves, which were only two hours away; that the small farmhouse she had been raised in belonged to another family, had belonged to them for years.

Strange to think her daughter lay upstairs right now in bed, her full-grown limbs sprawled across the sheet, when for so many, many mornings (it had seemed) little Amy had woken before Isabelle, padding across the hall in her pajamas with their plastic-soled feet, the snapped waistband moist from the diaper that sagged soggily beneath; she would stand patiently, so little that her head was even with the bed, and wait for Isabelle’s eyes to open. How strange when you were not beautiful yourself to have a beautiful daughter.

Here Isabelle drank her coffee down quickly. She needed to wake herself
up, get to work. Carrying her cup to the sink, seeing through the window the dark trunks of the pine trees glistening with rain, she was aware of anticipation making its way through the blank odd “strangeness” that had enveloped her since getting up this morning.

What was it? she wondered, placing her coffee cup carefully in the sink, tightening the cloth belt of her bathrobe. It was not that she was looking forward to going back to work (why would she, when everyone there was losing her mind, and Avery was still away?), but there was some—well, “eagerness” was too strong a word—but some desire to bathe and dress and leave the house, as though another place waited where she belonged.

AND THERE WAS no doubt about it: Bev and Dottie were her friends. Every time Dottie walked by Isabelle’s desk she would reach down and lightly touch Isabelle’s arm. At lunchtime Fat Bev saved Isabelle a seat in the lunchroom, indicating with a nod that Isabelle should sit in this particular chair; and once seated, with Dottie on her other side, Isabelle found herself offered a stunning assortment of foods.

“Got to fatten you two up,” Fat Bev murmured. “So pretend we’re having a picnic.” And she spread out on the table an array of hardboiled eggs, pickles, carrot sticks, fried chicken, two small packages of cookies, and three brownies in a wax-paper bag.

Isabelle looked from the food to Fat Bev.
“Eat,”
Bev said.

Isabelle ate a drumstick and a pickle. Dottie eyed one of the hardboiled eggs and said she might be able to manage that. “Be good if you could,” Fat Bev said, peeling it for her.