Lynnie can feel herself blush. “I don’t know,” she says.
Amusement begins to spread from behind his eyes. “Do you think it’s a good idea?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says, wary.
“Why?” he says.
“Because you just said it was,” Lynnie says, turning a deeper red.
He laughs happily and gives Lynnie a little hug. “You see?” he says to Claire.
When the snow lies in great drifts around the stone house, students begin to come, too, and sit around the kitchen. They drink beer, and the girls exclaim over Bo and Emily while the boys shyly answer Claire’s gentle questions and Lynnie holds her coffee cup tightly in misery. Now and again, as he talks to them, Ross touches the students lightly on the wrist or shoulder.
Late one Saturday afternoon, Lynnie is washing dishes in her own house when her mother walks in with several large grocery bags. “I was just in town,” she announces unnecessarily, and grins an odd, questioning grin at Lynnie. “Now, who do you think I saw there?”
“I don’t know who you saw,” Lynnie says, reaching for a dishcloth.
“The man you work for,” her mother says.
“How do you know who he is?” Lynnie says.
“Everybody knows who he is,” her mother says. “He was in the stationery store. I just went in to get some tape, but I stuck around to watch. Muriel Furman was waiting on him. She almost went into a trance. That poor thing.” Lynnie’s mother shakes her head and begins to unload groceries. “Homeliest white woman I ever saw.”
“Mother,” Lynnie says. She stares unhappily out the little window over the sink.
“I’ve seen the wife around a few times, too,” Lynnie’s mother says. “She’s a pretty girl, but I wish her luck with him.”
Lynnie has not been to Isobel’s house once this year. Isobel comes and goes with Cissy Haddad and other high-school friends. From across the street Lynnie can sometimes see their shapes behind the film of Isobel’s window. At night, when Isobel’s light is on and her window is transparent, Lynnie watches Isobel moving back and forth until the curtain closes.
One afternoon as Lynnie is arriving home, she almost walks into Isobel. “Wake up, Lynnie,” Isobel says. And then, “Want to come over?”
“Lynnie, dear,” Isobel’s mother says as Lynnie and Isobel go upstairs. “How nice to see you.”
It has been so long since Lynnie has been in Isobel’s room that Isobel’s things—the flouncy bed and the china figurines and the stuffed animals she used to see so often—have a new, melancholy luster. “How’s high school?” she asks.
“It’s hard,” Isobel says. “You won’t believe it.”
But Lynnie will. She does. Almost every day she remembers that that is where she is going next fall—to the immense, tentacled building that looks like a factory. She has reason to suspect that she will be divided from most of her classmates there, and put into the classes for people who won’t be going on to college—the stupid people—with all the meanest teachers. No one has threatened her with this, but everybody knows how it works. Everybody knows what goes on in that building.
Lynnie picks up a stuffed turtle and strokes its furry shell.
“How’s school?” Isobel asks. “How’s old Miss Fisher?”
“She doesn’t like me,” Lynnie says. “Miss Fish Face.”
“Oh, well,” Isobel says. “So what? Soon you’ll never have to see her again.” She looks at Lynnie and smiles. “What else have you been up to?”
Lynnie feels slightly weak because of what she is about to tell Isobel. She has been saving it up, she realizes, a long time. “Well,” she says slowly, “I’ve been babysitting for the kids at the stone house.”
“Have you?” Isobel says, but as she says it Lynnie understands that Isobel already knew, and although Isobel is waiting, Lynnie cannot speak.
“You know what—” Isobel says after a moment. “Lynnie, what are you doing to that poor turtle? But do you know what Cissy’s father said about that man, Ross? Cissy’s father said he’s an arrogant son of a bitch.” She looks at Lynnie, hugging her pillow expectantly. “I heard him.”
Lynnie and Claire and three students watch as Ross describes various arguments concerning a matter that has come up in class. The students look at him with hazy, hopeful smiles. But not Lynnie—she is ashamed to have heard what Isobel said to her.
Ross glances down at her unhappy face. “Apparently Lynnie disagrees,” he says, stroking a strand of her pale, flossy hair behind her ear. “Apparently Lynnie feels that Heineman fails to account for the Church’s influence over the emerging class of tradesmen.”
The students laugh, understanding his various points, and Ross smiles at Lynnie. But Lynnie is ashamed again—doubly ashamed—and leans for comfort into the treacherous hand that still strokes her hair.
Lynnie has two Rosses who blend together and diverge unpredictably. Many mornings begin drowsily encircled in the fleecy protection of one, but sometimes, as Lynnie continues to wake, the one is assumed into the other. He strokes Lynnie’s hair, inflicting injury and healing it in this one motion, and she opens her eyes to see her own room, and Frank curled up in the other bed, breathing laboriously, susceptible himself to the devious assaults of dreams.
In the fall, Lynnie is put, as she had feared, into the classes for the slowest students. Had anyone entertained hopes for her, this would have been the end of them.
A few of her old schoolmates are confined to her classes, but most have sailed into classes from which they will sail out again into college, then marriage and careers. She sees them only in the halls and the lunchroom and on the athletic fields. Every day they look taller, more powerful, more like strangers.
Most of those in her classes really are strangers. But in some ways they are as familiar as cousins met for the first time. Their clothes, for instance, are not right, and they are the worst students from all the elementary schools in the area. The boys are rough or sly or helpless, or all three, like her brothers, and the girls are ungainly and bland-looking. They stand in clumps in the halls, watching girls like Isobel and Cissy Haddad with a beleaguered envy, and trading accounts of the shocking things such girls have been known to do.
Oddly, Isobel is friendlier to Lynnie at school, in full view of everyone, than she is out of school, despite Lynnie’s stigma. “Hi, Lynnie,” she calls out with a dewy showpiece of a smile, not too different from her mother’s.
“Hi,” Lynnie answers, facing a squadron of Isobel’s friends.
One afternoon as Lynnie approaches her house a silence reaches for her like a suction. Her brothers are not outside, and the television is not on. No one is in the kitchen or upstairs. She sits without moving while the winter sky goes dark. Across the street Isobel turns on the light in her room and sits down at her little desk. After a while she leaves, turning off the light, but Lynnie continues to stare at the blank window. By the time Lynnie hears her mother’s car, her arms and legs feel stiff. She waits for a moment before going downstairs to be told what has happened.
Frank is in the hospital with a ruptured appendix, her mother says; her face has a terrible jellylike look. If she could see her own face, Lynnie wonders, would it look like that?
There will be no more going to the stone house; she will be needed at home, her mother is saying, staring at Lynnie as though Lynnie were shrinking into a past of no meaning—the way a dying person might look at an enemy.
The next day, Lynnie seeks out Isobel in the lunchroom. “A ruptured appendix,” Isobel says. “That’s really dangerous, you know.”
“My mother says Frank is going to be all right,” Lynnie says doggedly.
“Poor Lynnie,” Isobel says. “So what are you going to do if Ross and Claire hire someone else?”
Lynnie puts her head down on the lunch table and closes her eyes. The sweet, unpleasant smell of the lunchroom rises up, and the din of the students, talking and laughing, folds around her.
“Poor Ly
nnie,” Isobel says again.
Later that week, Lynnie brings Isobel to the stone house. Claire makes coffee, and when she brings out a third tiny china cup, Lynnie is unable to hear anything for several seconds.
Ross comes in, whistling, and lets the door slam behind him. “What’s this?” he asks, indicating Isobel. “Invader or captive?”
“Friendly native,” Claire says. “Isobel’s going to be our new Lynnie.”
“What’s the matter with our old Lynnie?” Ross says. He looks at Isobel for a moment. “Our old Lynnie’s fine with me.”
“Oh, Ross.” Claire sighs. “I told you. Lynnie’s brother is sick.”
“Hmm,” Ross says.
“He’s in the hospital, Ross,” Claire says.
“Oh, God,” Ross says. “Yes, I’m sorry to hear that, Lynnie.”
“First day of the new semester,” Claire says to Lynnie. “He’s always disgusting the first day. How are your new students, my love?”
“Unspeakable,” Ross says.
“Truly,” Claire says. She smiles at Isobel.
“Worse than ever,” Ross says, taking a beer from the refrigerator. “There isn’t one. Well, one, maybe. A possibility. A real savage, but she has an interesting quality. Potential, at least.”
“I used to have potential,” Claire says, “but look at me now.”
Ross raises his beer to her. “Look at you now,” he says.
Ross holds the door as Lynnie and Isobel leave. “I’ve seen you in town,” he says to Isobel. “You’re older than I thought.”
She glances up at him and then turns back to Claire. “Goodbye,” she says. “See you soon.”
“See you soon,” Claire says, coming to join them at the door. “I do appreciate this. I’m going to have another baby, and I want to get in as much painting as I can first.”
“You’re going to have another baby?” Lynnie says, staring.
“We’re going to have hundreds of babies,” Ross says, putting his arms around Claire from behind. “We’re going to have hundreds and hundreds of babies.”
Afterward, Lynnie would become heavy and slow whenever she even thought of the time when Frank was sick. Their room was desolate while he was in the hospital; when he returned she felt how cramped it had always been before. Frank was testy all the time then, and cried easily. Her family deserved their troubles, she thought. Other people looked down on them, looked down and looked down, and then when they got tired of it they went back to their own business. But her family—and she—were the same whether anyone was looking or not.
Isobel’s mother stops Lynnie on the sidewalk to ask after Frank. The special, kind voice she uses makes Lynnie’s skin jump now. How could she ever have thought she adored Isobel’s mother, Lynnie wonders, shuddering with an old, sugared hatred.
At night Lynnie can see Isobel in her room, brushing her hair, or sometimes, even, curled up against her big white pillows, reading. Has Isobel seen Ross and Claire that day? Lynnie always wonders. Did they talk about anything in particular? What did they do?
At school, Isobel sends her display of cheery waves and smiles in Lynnie’s direction, and it is as though Ross and Claire had never existed. But once in a while she and Isobel meet on the sidewalk, and then they stop to talk in their ordinary way, without any smiles or fuss at all. “Claire’s in a good mood,” Isobel tells Lynnie one afternoon. “She loves being pregnant.”
Pregnant. What a word. “How’s Ross?” Lynnie says.
“He’s all right.” Isobel shrugs. “He’s got an assistant now, some student of his. Mary Katherine. She’s always around.”
Lynnie feels herself beginning to blush. “Don’t you like him?”
“I like him.” Isobel shrugs again. “He lends me books.”
“Oh.” Lynnie looks at Isobel wonderingly. “What books?” she says without thinking.
“Just books he tells me to read,” Isobel says.
“Oh,” Lynnie says.
It is spring when Lynnie returns to the stone house. She is hugged and exclaimed over, and Emily and Bo perform for her, but she looks around as though it were she who had just come out of a long illness. The big, smooth toys, the wonderful picture books no longer inspire her longing, or even her interest.
“We’ve missed you,” Claire says. Lynnie rests her head against the window frame, and the pale hills outside wobble.
But Claire has asked Isobel to sit for a portrait, so Isobel is at the stone house all the time now. The house is full of people—Lynnie upstairs with Emily and Bo, and Ross in his study with Mary Katherine, and Isobel and Claire in the big room among Claire’s canvases.
In the afternoons they all gather in the kitchen. Sometimes Mary Katherine’s boyfriend, Derek, joins them and watches Mary Katherine with large, mournful eyes while she smokes cigarette after cigarette and talks cleverly with Ross about his work. “Doesn’t he drive you crazy?” Mary Katherine says once to Claire. “He’s so opinionated.”
“Is he?” Claire says, smiling.
“Oh, Claire,” Mary Katherine says. “I wish I were like you. You’re serene. And you can do everything. You can paint, you can cook…”
“Claire can do everything,” Ross says. “Claire can paint, Claire can cook, Claire can fix a carburetor…”
“What a useful person to be married to,” Mary Katherine says.
Claire laughs, but Derek looks up at Mary Katherine unhappily.
“I can’t do anything,” Mary Katherine says. “I’m hopeless. Aren’t I, Ross?”
“Hopeless,” Ross says, and Lynnie’s eyes cloud mysteriously. “Truly hopeless.”
Now and again Ross asks Isobel’s opinion about something he has given her to read. She looks straight ahead as she answers, as though she were remembering, and Ross nods soberly. Once Lynnie sees Ross look at Mary Katherine during Isobel’s recitation. For a moment Mary Katherine looks back at him from narrow gray eyes, then makes her red mouth into an O from which blossoms a series of wavering smoke rings.
One day in April, when several students have dropped by, the temperature plummets and the sky turns into a white, billowing cloth that hides the trees and farmhouses. “We’d better go now,” one of the students says, “or we’ll be snowed in forever.”
“Can you give me and Lynnie a lift?” Isobel asks. “We’re on bikes.”
“Stay for the show,” Ross says to her. “It’s going to be sensational up here.”
“Coming?” the student says to Isobel. “Staying? Well, O.K., then.” Lynnie sees the student raise her eyebrows to Mary Katherine before, holding her coat closed, she goes out with her friends into the blowing wildness.
“We should go, too,” Derek says to Mary Katherine.
“Why?” Mary Katherine says. “We’ve got four-wheel drive.”
“Stick around,” Ross says. “If you feel like it.” Mary Katherine stares at him for a moment, but he goes to the door, squinting into the swarming snow where the students are disappearing. Behind him a silence has fallen.
“Yes,” Claire says suddenly. “Everybody stay. There’s plenty of food—we could live for months. Besides, I want to celebrate. I finished Isobel today.”
Isobel frowns. “You finished?”
“With your part, at least,” Claire says. “The rest I can do on my own. So you’re liberated. And we should have a magnificent ceremonial dinner, don’t you think, everybody? For the snow.” She stands, her hands together as though she has just clapped, looking at each of them in turn. Claire has a fever, Lynnie thinks.
“Why not?” Mary Katherine says. She closes her eyes. “We can give you two a ride home later, Isobel.”
Bo and Emily are put to bed, and Lynnie, Isobel, Ross, Claire, Mary Katherine, and Derek set about making dinner. Although night has come, the kitchen glimmers with the snow’s busy whiteness.
Ross opens a bottle of wine and everyone except Claire drinks. “This is delicious!” Lynnie says, dazed with happiness, and the others smile at her, as
though she has said something original and charming.
Even when they must chop and measure, no one turns on the lights. Claire finds candles, and Lynnie holds her glass up near a flame. A clear patch of red shivers on the wall. “Feel,” Claire says, taking Lynnie’s hand and putting it against her hard, round stomach, and Lynnie feels the baby kick.
“Why are we whispering?” Ross whispers, and then laughs. Claire moves vaporously within the globe of smeary candlelight.
Claire and Derek make a fire in the huge fireplace while Ross gets out the heavy, deep-colored Mexican dishes and opens another bottle of wine. “Ross,” Claire says. But Ross fills the glasses again.
Lynnie wanders out into the big room to look at Claire’s portrait of Isobel. Isobel stares back from the painting, not at her. At what? Staring out, Isobel recedes, drowning, into the darkness behind her.
What a meal they have produced! Chickens and platters of vegetables and a marvelously silly-looking peaked and scroll-rimmed pie. They sit at the big table eating quietly and appreciatively while the fire snaps and breathes. Outside, the brilliant white earth curves against a black sky, and black shadows of the snow-laden trees and telephone wires lie across it; there is light everywhere—a great, white moon, and stars flung out, winking.
Derek leans back in his chair, closing his eyes and letting one arm fall around Mary Katherine’s chair. She casts a ruminating, regretful glance over him; when she looks away again it is as though he has been covered with a sheet.
Isobel gets up from the table and stretches. A silence falls around her like petals. She goes to the rug in front of the fire and lies down, her hair fanning out around her. Lynnie follows groggily and curls up on one of the sofas.
“That was perfect,” Claire says. “Ideal. And now I’m going upstairs.” She burns feverishly for a moment as she pauses in the doorway, but then subsides into her usual smoky softness.
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 38