The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (42 page)

When Lynnie looks out the window of the room she shares with Frank, she can see Isobel’s large, arched window, and if the light is just right she can see Isobel’s bed, too, with its white flounces, and a heavenly blue haze into which, at this distance, the flowers of Isobel’s wallpaper melt.

One day, doing errands for her mother in town, Lynnie sees the woman from the stone house coming out of the bakery with the children, each of whom carefully holds a large, icing-covered cookie. The woman bends down and picks up one of the children, smiling—unaware, Lynnie observes, that people are noticing her.

Lynnie sees the woman several times, and then one day she sees the man.

She has anticipated his face exactly. But when he smiles at her, the little frown line between his eyes stays. And the marvelousness of this surprise causes a sensation across the entire surface of her skin, like the rippling of leaves that demonstrates a subtle shift of air.

When Lynnie sees Isobel she can’t help talking about the people from the stone house. She describes variations in their clothing or demeanor, compiling a detailed body of knowledge while Isobel lies on her bed, her eyes closed. “Should we give them names?” Lynnie says one afternoon.

“No,” Isobel says.

But Lynnie can’t stop. “Why not?” she says, after a moment.

“‘Why not?’” Isobel says.

“Don’t, Isobel,” Lynnie pleads.

“‘Don’t, Isobel,’” Isobel says, making her hands into a tube to speak through. Her voice is hollow and terrifying.

Lynnie breathes heavily through her mouth. “Why not?” she says.

“Why
not
,” Isobel says, sitting up and sighing, “is because they already have names.”

“I know,” Lynnie says, mystified.

“Their names,” Isobel says, “are Ross and Claire.”

Lynnie stares at her.

“They had dinner at Cissy Haddad’s house one night,” Isobel says. “Ross is going to be teaching medieval literature at the college. He’s in Cissy’s father’s department.”

“‘Department’?” Lynnie says.

“Yes,” Isobel says.

Lynnie frowns. “How do you know?” she asks. How
long
has Isobel known?

Isobel shrugs. “I’m just telling you what Cissy said.” She looks at Lynnie. “I think Cissy has a crush on him.”

“What else did Cissy say?” Lynnie asks unhappily.

“Nothing,” Isobel says. “Oh. Except that he’s thirty-five and Claire’s only twenty-three. She used to be one of his students.”

“One of his students?” Lynnie says.

“‘One of his—’” Isobel begins, and then flops down on the bed again. “Oh, Lynnie.”

One day Lynnie sees Cissy Haddad in the drugstore. Lynnie hurries to select the items on her mother’s list, then waits until Cissy goes to the counter. “Hi,” she says, getting into line behind Cissy. She feels herself turning red.

“Oh, hi, Lynnie,” Cissy says, and smiles wonderfully. “Are you having a fun summer?”

“Yes,” Lynnie says.

“What’re you doing?” Cissy says.

“Just mostly looking after my brothers,” Lynnie says. She feels bewildered by Cissy’s dazzling smile, her pretty sundress. “And riding around and things with Isobel.”

“That’s good,” Cissy says. And then, instead of saying something useful about Isobel, which might lead to Ross and Claire, she asks, “Are you coming to high school this year? I can’t remember.”

“No,” Lynnie says. “Isobel is.”

Cissy peers into Lynnie’s basket of embarrassing purchases.

“What are you getting?” she asks.

“Things for my mother,” Lynnie says, squirming. “What about you?”

“Oh,” Cissy says. “Just lipstick.”

One fall day when Lynnie gets home from school, her mother summons her over the noise from the TV. “You got a phone call,” she says shortly. “The lady wants you to call her back.” And Lynnie knows, while her mother is still speaking, whom the call was from.

Lynnie dials, and the soft, dark shadow of Claire’s voice answers. She is looking for someone to help with the children on a regular basis, she explains, several afternoons a week. She got Lynnie’s name from Tom Haddad’s daughter. She knows that Lynnie is very young, but this is nothing difficult—just playing with the children upstairs or outside so that she can have a couple of hours to paint. “I thought I would be able to do so much here,” she says, as though Lynnie were an old friend, someone her own age, “but there’s never enough time, is there?”

“I’ll need you just as much with the boys,” Lynnie’s mother says later. “And you’d better remember your homework.”

“I will,” Lynnie says, though, actually, beyond a certain point, it scarcely matters; however hard she tries, she lags far behind in school, and her teachers no longer try to stifle their exclamations of impatience. “I’ll do my homework.” And her mother makes no further objections; Lynnie will be earning money.

Claire leads Lynnie around in the house that used to be Lynnie and Isobel’s. Now it is all filled up with the lives of these people.

Everywhere there is a regal disorder of books, and in the biggest room downstairs, with its immense fireplace, there are sofas and, at one end, a vast table. A thicket of canvases and brushes has sprung up in a corner, and Lynnie sees pictures of the table on whose surface objects are tensely balanced, and sketch after sketch of Ross and the children. “What do you think?” Claire says, and it is a moment before Lynnie realizes what Claire is asking her.

“I like them,” Lynnie says. But in fact they frighten her—the figures seem caught, glowing in a webby dimness.

In the kitchen huge pots and pans flash, and a great loaf of brown bread lies out on a counter. Claire opens the door to Ross’s study; stacks and stacks of paper, more books than Lynnie has ever seen breed from its light-shot core.

Upstairs Bo and Emily are engrossed in a sprawling project of blocks. Emily explains the dreamlike construction to Lynnie, gracefully accepting Bo’s effortful elaborations, and when Lynnie leaves both children reach up to her with their tanned little arms.

Twice a week Lynnie goes to the stone house. Bo and Emily have big, bright, smooth wooden toys, some of which were made by Ross. Lynnie strokes the toys; she runs her hand over them like a blind person; she runs her hand over the pictures in Bo and Emily’s beautiful storybooks. But then Claire counts out Lynnie’s money, and Lynnie is to go. And at the first sight of her own house she is slightly sickened, as upon disembarkation—not by the firm ground underfoot but by a ghostly rocking of water.

When Claire finishes painting for the afternoon, she calls Lynnie and Bo and Emily into the kitchen. For a while, although Bo and Emily chatter and nuzzle against her, Claire seems hardly to know where she is. But gradually she returns, and makes for herself and Lynnie a dense, sweet coffee in a little copper pot, which must be brought to the boil three times. They drink it from identical tiny cups, and Lynnie marvels, looking at Claire, that she herself is there.

Some afternoons Ross is around. He announces that he will be in his study, working, but sooner or later he always appears in the kitchen, and talks about things he is reading for his book.

“What do you think, Lynnie?” he asks once. He has just proposed an idea for a new chapter, to which Claire’s response was merely “Possible.”

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.