Amy Falls Down (16 page)

“I know the one you mean. She got on
Oprah
.”

Amy took a deep breath. “Maxine, I’m not going on
Oprah
.”

“You are a very eccentric person,” said Maxine.

“Because I don’t want to be on
Oprah
?”

“This is what I’m trying to tell you. You’re what my pop used to call an oddball. You’ve got talent and smarts and you’re funny and you’re not like anybody else out there. And you’re not afraid of anything. You can do radio. You’re a natural. Who knows, maybe you could do Charlie Rose.”

“Heck, why not?” said Amy. “Let’s schedule that while I’m convalescing from my lobotomy.”

“What I’m suggesting just for now,” said Maxine, “is that you let this blog discussion do its thing. Nudge it along. Give it its own page, its own subtitle. Make it all about them and you. Get a little back-and-forth going with these people. You don’t have to rain on their parade unless you want to. Pick out the letters that interest you; there must be some. You could set it up as a kind of advice column—”

“Absolutely not!”

“Not advice, then, but a dialogue. If you disagree with somebody, go ahead and explain yourself—your own ideas. You’re good at that.”

“But then I’ll have one of those wretched opinion blogs. They’re a dime a dozen, Maxine. Everybody’s online disgorging about politics and animal abuse and their innermost fears and what they just had for breakfast.”

“Yes, and they’re all talking to themselves, or to their own circle of friends. But you’re not. Not anymore.”

Amy was silent. She was certain Maxine was wrong, but if she went along with the gag for a week or so and nothing happened, and all the unwanted visitors drifted off, then Maxine would get off her back. “I’m not going to spend any real time doing this,” she said. “Just a few minutes here and there. All right? All right? Can we just not talk about this anymore?”

“You got it, babe,” said Maxine. “I’ll call you in a few.”

“Maxine?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve got me all wrong, you know. I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid of spiders, and planes, and doctors. You name it. I’m afraid of the dark. The dark, Maxine.”

Maxine laughed and coughed. “Yeah,” she said, “but you’re not afraid of failure, and you’re not afraid of success. You really don’t care much either way. I’ve never met another one like you. We’re gonna use it. You’ll see.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Case Studies

After a couple of days of sulking, Amy took Maxine’s advice and set up a separate page on her site, entitled I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I? and tried to fix it so she could organize combative comments and appropriate responses according to topic, alphabetically. But she couldn’t figure out how to inform blog visitors of this new page or what system to use when they got there. Ricky Buzza had, she remembered, learned from his brother how to monkey with websites and was picking up extra cash freelancing, so she called him for advice, hoping he could talk her through the steps on the phone, but the process was too complicated for that. He showed up at her house with a pizza and ended up camping out for most of the night. If Amy had known this was going to happen, she would have stopped it, which would have been a shame. Instead the night unfolded quietly, beginning with an awkward chat, proceeding through an efficient rehaul of her website, and from that to the sort of occasion Amy hadn’t experienced in thirty years: a pleasant evening spent in the company of another human being.

Carla had of course told him that he had been “selected” to attend her retreat. Although he scrupulously avoided thanking Amy for the selection or discussing
Caligula’s Scalpel
directly, he talked about how much he was looking forward to April, when he could spend his days doing nothing but writing. Amy couldn’t resist asking why he wasn’t already doing that, since he had been out of work for most of the previous year.

“Steady work, yeah,” he said. “The
North County Times
cut me loose. But I’ve been doing stuff like this, picking up odd jobs, to help my dad with the mortgage. He never asks for it, but I know he didn’t plan on me moving back home. When I’m living at Carla’s, I can just hand the stipend over to Dad.”

Amy didn’t ask how much the “stipend” was. Knowing Carla, it was generous.

Amy had not had a visitor since Holly Antoon, and before Holly, since the last class meeting of her final non-virtual workshop, which had famously ended in mayhem. Visitors—even cable guys and computer repair people—always brought out a stillness in her house, as though it were holding its breath until they left. With no other model to go by, it seemed to impersonate some decrepit roadside museum, like
The Thing?
Having Ricky there made her conscious of its drabness and clutter, a state with which she was ordinarily comfortable.

For instance, the maple bookcase that Alphonse had knocked over during the Antoon interview two months ago had not been righted, nor had its spilled books even been picked up and piled on the floor or coffee table, since Amy never spent time in the parlor. While Ricky finished with her website, Amy raised the bookcase and began to shove the books back inside, all the while annoyed with herself for being shamed into doing it.

“Can I give you a hand?” he called.

“I’m fine,” she said, but he asked more than once, and then, magically, by two o’clock in the morning, they had polished off almost two bottles of Syrah and rearranged Amy’s entire library. Either Ricky had grown up a lot over the last year or Amy had not paid him enough attention in the past to get an accurate read. She had basically dismissed him as a juvenile lead, born to pine after Tiffany Zuniga and curse his fate when she shooed him away. He was actually a bright and funny guy who knew more about the world than she had at his age, probably because of his experience as a reporter. He had worked for only five years, but he was wise to the ways of school boards and other low-level politicos. Before he was let go, he had finally gotten some experience on the crime beat. As the two blew away dust and began to set up category stations on the coffee table, he entertained Amy with the Double Bubble Laundromat Murders, which took place in Rancho Bernardo and involved a trapezoid of wife-swappers, a violation of ground rules, lots of hurt feelings, and a dead patent attorney stuffed into an industrial-size clothes dryer.

“His body was discovered by a divorced dad who’d come in after midnight to do his kids’ laundry. He called the cops and then hung around. When I interviewed him, he wouldn’t shut up. He told me that when he opened up the dryer and saw the guy in there, ‘Right then,’ he says, ‘I suspected foul play.’”

She had very few books that had been published in the last ten or fifteen years. She almost never bought them, and when sent review copies, she donated them to the Escondido Public Library, even when she had liked them, because she knew she would never look at them again. Most of her books were old and seriously bunged up, some of them missing a front or back cover. There were few first editions, most of them gifts from Max’s friends. She had once chanced upon an underpriced first edition of the
Spoon River Anthology
at an AAUW book sale and for a short while been excited by the find, but really, it was a book, like any other book. A good book, readable, in one piece. She didn’t understand the allure of first editions.

“You’re a collector,” said Ricky, surveying a four-foot pile. “I’ve never heard of most of this stuff.”

“No reason you should have,” she said. “They just mean something to me, or most of them do, or they did once. I’ve never seen the point of collecting things, especially books. If you collect things, you have to worry about them and put them in boxes or covers or behind glass, and you never actually use them.”

Ricky doled out morsels of pizza crust to Alphonse, who would shadow him throughout the evening, never taking his eyes from his right hand. Dogs, Amy had discovered, made an intense study of human hands. The only way Amy could ever convince him she had no food cruelly secreted about her person was to show him her empty palms.

“My granddad has this one,” Ricky said, holding up a copy of
The Handbook of Skits and Stunts.
“I never understood why. It’s not like we ever did anything with it. It’s got the lamest bunch of party games in it.” He thumbed through the book, which Amy hadn’t opened since she was in her twenties, having inherited it from Max’s father. “Listen to this stunt: ‘
See the Weenie
. Raise your hands up to eye level, put the tips of your forefingers only nearly together, and focus on a distant object. An illusion of a frankfurter, floating in space, is created.’ Can you imagine what would happen now if you walked up to a kid and asked him if he wanted to play See the Weenie?”

“In the first place, these games were intended for adults. Also the handbook was published in more innocent times,” said Amy, as she tried to see the weenie through her own forefingers. It didn’t work. “What’s the publication date?”

“Nineteen fifty-three.”

“We were still saying ‘only nearly together’ in 1953. It sounds so much older, like something from
Little Women
. Now we would say ‘close together.’”

“So why,” asked Ricky, still laughing about the weenie, “did your father-in-law and my grandfather have the same silly book?”

“Probably everybody had it. Probably it was a moneymaker in 1953. I can remember lots of books like that, books that everybody had.
By Love Possessed. Kon-Tiki. Power of Positive Thinking. The Egg and I.
”

“The fifties,” said Ricky, nodding sagely as he opened a new bottle, “were a time of great conformity.”

“The fifties,” said Amy, “were a time when they weren’t publishing two hundred thousand books a year. If you were a reader, you didn’t have that many choices. Are you saying we don’t live in a time of great conformity right now?”

Ricky, his back up, retorted with lists of choices—pop music, TV channels, movies, blogs—arguing that there can hardly be
widespread conformity
with so many niches from which to choose. Amy replied that
niche
was a marketing term: that the whole point of a niche was the
fit.
“If you
fit,
” she said, “what difference does it make whether you’re fitting into an alcove or an auditorium?”

By this point—close to midnight—all the hardbacks were on the floor, with man, woman, and dog happily swimming among them, clearing out spaces for kneeling or starting a new category or, in Alphonse’s case, for lying on his back licking pizza sauce off his teeth. In the beginning there had been just two categories, fiction and non. Now castles began to form: Reference books. History. Poetry. Humor. Literary Analysis. Science. Ricky could not persuade her to divide fiction into subcategories.

In the Reference pile were three editions of
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate,
three visual dictionaries, books of synonyms and antonyms, and a ragged pamphlet entitled
World’s Worst Metaphors,
which distracted Amy for a quarter hour, so happy was she to have rediscovered it. There were useless but entertaining single-volume encyclopedias. There were four copies of
Fowler’s,
one of which she set aside for Ricky, who wanted to know the point of visual dictionaries. “They’re indispensible,” she explained. “For instance, you’re in the middle of a scene, and you need to show an angry, disappointed man, alone in his house, deserted by his wife and children, taking stock of his life, noticing the shabbiness of the furnishings, the ugliness of the prints on the wall, and he’s trudging up the staircase and sees that termites are actually eating away at one of the posts that support the handrail.”

“Wait—there are termites
inside
the house? Why would there be termites inside the house?”

“I don’t know. The point is, you need to find the word for ‘post that supports the handrail.’ So you get out your trusty visual dictionary—”

“Sweet,” said Ricky.

“And you find a picture of a staircase, with arrows and labels for the parts—and there it is:
baluster
.”

Ricky thought for a moment. “Realistically, though, how many readers know what a baluster is?”

“Not the writer’s problem. They’ll either figure it out from context or just make something up and keep going.”

“I’m totally getting one,” he said. Amy put one of her visual dictionaries in a grocery bag along with the
Fowler’s
, to send home with him.

The Reference castle developed its own surrounding villages, with guides to reptiles, birds, butterflies, spiders and insects, mammals, plants, seashells and fish, and books on carpentry tools, masonry for hobbyists, chicken-sexing, how-to manuals.
Build That Gazebo! Renovate That Stoop!
There was a locksmith’s bible. There was a series called
Peeps at Many Lands,
written near the turn of the previous century, offering simple-minded glimpses of Egypt, Australia, and Italy.

The oddest book in the pile, if Ricky’s goggling reaction to it was anything to go by, was a huge primeval medical text entitled
Constipation in Adults and Children,
published in 1897. Someone had found it in his attic and shown it to Max, who thought it so amusing that he often read from it at parties. Max taught Romance languages, but his hobby was the history of Western medicine, or the Cavalcade of Quacks. He and Amy may have shared a phobia of hospitals and doctors, but he eased his fears with investigation and ridicule, whereas Amy was way too squeamish to comfort herself in this way. She had kept the book for sentimental reasons, which now struck her as inadequate. As Ricky opened the book Amy said, “Don’t. You’ll be sorry if you do.”

“Why?” Ricky glanced down at what Amy was sure was one of the book’s copious illustrations. “Oh my god. What was wrong with these people?”

“I told you not to look.”

“What
is
all this? There are all these exercises and instruments. Here’s
the Atzperger Apparatus.
Listen to this: ‘I have seen very good results in building up a broken-down nervous system, from a properly arranged hot-air bath of very short duration, followed by the cold rain-bath or the Scotch douche.’ What’s a Scotch douche? Didn’t they have Ex-lax? What was the big deal about constipation? Oh my god.
The self-acting clysopump
. There’s a whole chapter on ‘flatus.’ What’s flatus?”