Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [185]
But Isabel! Even on medications, she drank anything, she took anything, she went anywhere at night; she seemed to have no home place except the deep nothingness that she sought out. In Squirrel, those traits had been charming, for a while—they looked good on a boy—but with Isabel they were as charmless as her scowling face. There was really something demonic about her, almost bestial. Estelle imagined her as she saw her back then: twisted up with injuries, avoiding eye contact, the blond hair matted and unwashed, her jeans caked with dirt, her fierce young woman’s sexuality attracting the worst of the boys who gleefully hovered around her waiting for her next bold move.
One night, one of many late nights, Isabel had come home at three in the morning. Estelle had awakened out of a shallow and dream-infected sleep and gone into Isabel’s room, where Isabel had thrown herself on the bed in the dark. She was muttering, and after Estelle switched on the lamp, she noticed that the pillow where her daughter rested her head had turned gray at the indentation. Isabel never showered anymore, and she smelled like a feral child.
“Where have you been?” Estelle asked her, trying not to yell.
“I’ve been inside and outside,” Isabel said. “I’ve covered the world.” She giggled. “Like that paint? That covers the world? I’ve done that.”
“Jesus. What am I going to do with you?” Estelle said to herself, to the walls. “At least get undressed. At least get some sleep. And you’re grounded,” she said, automatically.
“Undressed?” Isabel asked. Every facial expression she gave her mother indicated that any and all requests were, at that moment, preposterous. “You want me undressed, Mom? Like those nine-to-five people who are undressed? Who go to sleep?”
“Yes,” Isabel said. “Like those people.”
Isabel glanced up at her mother. Picking herself up, she stood next to the bed, then lowered her jeans. “See?” she said. “I can do this.” She swayed and laughed at herself. “Wanna see something?” She laughed again. “I’m a magician. I can do this amazing trick. Just watch. You’ve never seen this before in your life. I can make my panties stick to the ceiling.”
“What?” Estelle said.
After stomping her blue jeans to the floor, Isabel lowered her underwear and clumsily stepped free. She bent down and picked up her underpants—pink, Estelle noticed, her heart breaking—and then threw them up at the ceiling. They fluttered back down to the floor.
Isabel gazed upward and said wonderingly, “I thought it would work. I had such a good time.”
Estelle was staring, too. Her mind moved slowly. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, poor Mom,” Isabel said. “You’re so sheltered. Can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“Well,” Isabel said, putting her hand on her mother’s shoulder to keep herself from swaying, “I was with a boy tonight. And we … you know. And, Mommy, did you know that after you do it, I mean when you do it with a boy, it drains out of you? Later? Onto what you’re wearing? And it makes your clothes … sticky. And that’s why I thought my underwear would be up there on the ceiling!” she concluded, triumphantly. “Except it isn’t.”
Of course Isabel would become pregnant. There was no such thing as safe sex with Isabel. Of course she would have a baby and give it to her mother to raise after naming the baby Frederick (who came out of his mother brown, so his father must have been African-American, or something), and of course she would disappear quickly afterward, leaving no known address.
Poor crazy Isabel. Poor Freddie, her son. It wasn’t about individuals anymore; it was about the generations, and what they handed down. The courtrooms, the hospitals, the doctor’s offices, the classrooms, the jails where they had put Izzy overnight: sometimes, sitting on the back stoop with her coffee cup, Estelle felt all those places descending over her, as if another person had lived that part of her life and had not