the first few days. But not at this point. At this point, she wanted a bath. She wanted to see a street lined with fat-leafed maple trees.
“I miss my bed,” she said. “And a mattress—what a concept! Air-conditioning, a quiet room to myself …”
“But hasn’t this trip been good for you and Amy?” Jill asked.
“Amy wants absolutely nothing to do with me down here.”
Jill didn’t reply, which disappointed Susan, for she’d hoped Jill would have some inside knowledge about Amy’s feelings that would contradict her.
“Amy would rather spend her time with Peter,” Susan said.
“But that’s good, isn’t it? She’s seventeen, after all. Don’t discount the power of peer relationships.”
Peer? thought Susan. He’s twenty-seven.
And he’s always giving her beer, if you haven’t noticed, said the Mother Bitch. If Amy weren’t so fat, you’d think he was trying to take advantage of her.
Susan felt her eyes smart. With two fingers, she reached under her lenses and dabbed at her lower lids.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jill.
Susan smiled ruefully. It was hard for her to put her finger on it. She felt like such an awful mother for thinking the thoughts she had sometimes. But there they were. Perhaps this mother of two from Salt Lake City would understand, down here on the river.
“Did you have a mental image of your children, before they were born?” she asked.
“Sure! They were going to look just like me.”
Susan laughed in spite of herself, for the Compson boys didn’t look anything like Jill, being pink-skinned and blond, as opposed to Jill with her olive complexion and dark, wavy hair.
“Well, I envisioned a little girl with a Dutch cut and bangs,” Susan declared. “She would be able to sing. We would harmonize on long car rides. She would want a horse too.”
“I don’t know about the singing, but I take it the horse didn’t pan out?”
“Or dance, or team sports, or tennis.” Susan wanted suddenly to tell Jill about Amy’s SAT scores. But she was afraid it would sound braggy.
“Still, she’s awfully nice,” said Jill. “I noticed it the first night with the boys—teaching them card tricks and all. And she’s smart. You can tell. She and Peter were talking about Virginia Woolf I was impressed. Does she know where she wants to go to college?”
“Possibly Duke,” Susan said. “Maybe Yale.”
“You see? You should be proud of her!”
“I am. I just …” Susan put her hands over her face. “Nobody tells it like it is,” she cried. “The doctor calls her heavy. Her father calls her large. Everyone tiptoes around the fact that she’s just terribly, terribly overweight. And she never, ever talks to me!”
The water lapped gently against the side of the boat as they began to pick up speed. Jill leaned over and patted water on her arms. “When I was a teenager, I had acne,” she said. “And my parents denied it. They said, Oh, it’s just a pimple here and there. ‘Dab a little makeup on your face; you’re the only one who notices it.’ Which was not true. I looked like I had the chicken pox. And it must be especially hard, with you being so trim and all.”
“Sometimes I think that’s what did it,” sniffed Susan.
“Why?”
“Because I watch my weight. I like eating healthy. I like being thin. So maybe I made too big a deal over it, while Amy was growing up.”
Jill snorted. “Matthew’s sensitive—does that mean I mollycoddled him? And Sam’s a clown—does that mean I didn’t give him enough attention? We mothers certainly blame ourselves too much.”
The boat dipped down into another rapid. Jill and Susan barely noticed. It was too noisy to talk while they were in it.
“So what happened with Mark the other day?” Susan asked, once they were through.
“Oh,” said Jill, and she raised her face to the sun. “Too much togetherness, I guess.”
Susan knew that wasn’t the case.
“Fine,” Jill said. “We bicker about the kids sometimes.”
“He’s Mormon, isn’t he?”
“Right.”
“And you’re not.”
“Right.”
“So how do you deal with that?” And Susan, who usually bent over backward not to pry too much, was able to marvel at her boldness. How long, she asked herself, might it have taken her to ask Jill these things, if they hadn’t been on the river together?
“You mean, am I the lost soul of the tribe? Mostly it’s a problem for his parents,” said Jill. “We get together at holidays, and they want to see my pantry, and I show them my pantry, and they say, ‘That’s not a pantry; we mean a