Amy and Isabelle (6 page)

“Are you kidding?”

Stacy shrugged and pushed up the sleeve of her navy-blue pea coat. “My mother’s a fucking lunatic.” She spoke with the cigarette in her mouth, squinting carefully at the reddish bruise on her wrist before she let the sleeve slip back down.

“Boy, Stacy.” Amy tapped an ash from her cigarette onto the snow and stepped on it with her boot.

Stacy breathed out smoke. “These days I feel like puking all the time.”

A headache was better than that, even if it lasted all day, the way Amy’s headaches were starting to do, so that she still had it when she got home from school, sitting at the kitchen table, doing her homework in the chilly house. She got into the habit of doing her math homework first, and then before her mother got home she would go to her room and stare at herself in the mirror. She could not figure out what she looked like. Sitting on the vanity stool (it was an old barrel, actually—Isabelle had sewn a pink ruffled drape around it and put a cushion on top), Amy could not get her looks figured out.

Her eyes were far apart and her forehead was high, and Isabelle said these were both signs of intelligence, but that didn’t matter to Amy. She wanted to look pretty, and she thought it would help to be short and have small feet. And even if it was good that her eyes were far apart, there was nothing special about them; they weren’t a vibrant blue, or mysterious brown; they were just a murky green, and her skin was pale, especially in winter, when the skin beneath her eyes seemed transparent, almost blue.

Her hair, at least, was good. She knew this partly because people had told her so all her life. “Where did she get that hair?” strangers would say to her mother in the grocery store when Amy was still small enough
to be riding in the wire seat of the shopping cart. “Look at that
hair
,” they would say, sometimes reaching for it, running their finger over a curl, giving it a tug.

But Amy had known, the way children know things (know everything, Mr. Robertson would later argue), that her mother didn’t care for strangers touching her daughter, commenting on her daughter’s hair. It might have been Amy’s earliest memory of guilt, because she had loved it when someone reached for her; she would turn her face in the direction of the hand, ducking her head to feel the cupped fingers of the stranger linger as the kind voice said, “Pretty girl, where did you get that hair?”

Not from Isabelle. Even the strangers could guess that. One glance at Isabelle’s thin dark hair pulled back into a twist told them that. This was her father’s hair. And here was the reason for Isabelle’s tight-lipped disapproval—Amy had figured that out long ago. She could only guess that it stemmed from the fact that her father had died so soon after her birth; he’d had a heart attack on a golf course in California. “What was he doing in California?” Amy had asked, but the answer was always “Business,” and Amy never learned a whole lot more. But she had inherited his hair, whoever he was, and she was grateful for that as she brushed it those winter afternoons in front of her mirror, different shades of yellow falling past her shoulders.

And then one day, leaving the lunchroom early (Stacy had not come to school), Amy bumped into Mr. Robertson as he was coming out of the teachers’ room. “Hi,” Amy said, only the sound did not come out, just her dry lips parting before she ducked her head.

“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—unfriendly 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.