Amy Falls Down (34 page)

Maxine had arranged for Amy to speak at Colby, where she had earned her undergraduate degree, and in Waterville they were joined at dinner by an old beau of Max’s whom Amy could neither recall nor recognize, who welcomed her “home” and then embraced her, sobbing. She was surprised, even as she extricated herself, at how little this upset her. Six months ago she would have retracted like a turtle. Now she patted his back, murmured the requisite clichés, sent him off, and enjoyed the curious glances of panelists and faculty, who waited in vain for a backstory. She was the featured speaker that night, to a packed audience in Lorimer Chapel. As had become her custom, she talked for a quarter hour and then threw the discussion open to the crowd. They asked questions about her old novels, half of which she couldn’t answer because she had not looked at the books for decades. Apparently she was beginning to be taught.

An improbably tall girl introduced herself as president of the Maine chapter of the American Ephemera Association, and Amy, thinking this was a brilliant put-on, drew her out at great length. One minute she was talking about ticket stubs, 7-11 receipts, and toddlers using magnet letters to spell out immortal gibberish on refrigerator doors, and then next she was asking Amy a paragraph-length question about the role of ephemera in twenty-first-century writing. Apparently the question was serious, so Amy tried to answer without laughing.

Everything everybody wrote was ephemeral as far as anyone knew. Future scholars might regard the whole of all their works—Amy gestured to include her lit-fic colleagues—as no more significant than unearthed pottery shards. Jenny M sprang to her feet, ostensibly to second Amy, but really to burnish her own future shards, allowing Amy to tune out long enough to remember that here, in this place, she and Max had wed. The event had been low-key and last-minute, just the chaplain and a few friends, and she could remember almost nothing of it—not the weather, or what she wore, or whether Max’s hair was still long, or even who the friends were. They had gone to Augusta that morning for the license and planned to marry on the weekend, but then said what the hell. It was a what-the-hell wedding in every sense, and the chapel interior had surely been repainted and updated many times since that day, yet she could suddenly see the chaplain’s sad face as though he stood before her right now, pronouncing them man and wife. How odd memory, to house such tiny drawers, spring-loaded like Chinese puzzle boxes. She had not seen Max clearly in her mind’s eye even once since his death, and here was this man she had not thought of in forty years, sharp as a Kodachrome slide, his long face lined and gray. He had been distracted with grief. His son had just been killed at Quang Tri.

She fled the chapel as soon as she could and took Alphonse for a stroll around Johnson Pond. He liked fresh water. Before the trip neither had known this, since the one time she took him to Moonlight Beach he had been outraged by the surf, the way the water snuck up on him when he was investigating marine curios. He had gotten his big feet wet and blamed it on her. Ponds were different. They probably smelled a lot better without all that decomposing seaweed. Almost every college campus had one, its honest shoreline teeming with items of interest—sushi wrappers, beer cans, neon-colored condoms like radioactive jellyfish. He surely had a stronger sense of the history of this place than Amy did. But for the ghost of Pastor Swanson, the campus stirred up no memories for her. She could vaguely recall her old dormitory sitting room and the library coffee lounge; she remembered ten-foot snowdrifts, beer keg races, panty raids, and one drunken sophomore night when everybody, even Amy, sledded on cafeteria trays down the icy terraced hill in center campus. She could, if she tried hard enough, recall the scent of wet wool, the awful stab of chilblains on her exposed fingers. But she could not recall a single person or conversation, or indeed any significant event. Her life had certainly not begun here. If anywhere.

She sank down in the grass, fished out her cell, and called Maxine. “This is getting old,” she said.

“As soon as you do Manhattan, you can dump the panel and go wherever you want.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind? Is this going to make you look bad?”

“What do I care? Anyway, you lasted longer than I thought you would. Where do you want to go? I can book you straight home from Penn Station.”

Amy imagined trudging through her front door. She saw the waiting computer, the blinking answering machine. “I’ve never been to the Great Northwest,” she said.

“I’m on it,” said Maxine. Her voice was stronger than usual. Maybe she was taking some new meds.

“No more colleges,” said Amy. “No more kids.”

Maxine promised bookstores and libraries, and hung up.

“We’re going to take Manhattan,” she said to him.

*   *   *

Alphonse loved the Spalding, an eccentric hotel near the West Village catering to creative types and their pets. Per its brochure, from the minute he swept through its old-fashioned revolving doors, he was home. Here he didn’t need to be a service dog, nor did Amy have to pretend to be unusually vigilant. He was walked, fed, and massaged, all on someone else’s dime. The brochure also offered psychic basset readings for an extra charge, which didn’t sound at all East Coast to Amy, but apparently California was winning in certain culture skirmishes.

She spent three days without him, being shuttled between radio and TV stations. She met too many people and stared into too many white lights. Everyone was courteous and friendly—she did not have a single Chaz Molloy moment—but she was never able to figure out what any of these people wanted from her.

Really, her whole life had been like that.

Because of Arab uprisings and the tanking economy there was no room for her on Charlie Rose, but she had no time to be grateful because she was instantly booked on four talk shows as well as another C-SPAN snooze festival, this time an interview with a man she probably should have recognized, who spent most of his on-screen time with her fielding telephone questions. Apparently C-SPAN had learned not to tweet.

The talk shows were marginally more interesting. She met some famous actors and actresses, most tiny and thin with outsize heads. They looked like beautiful balloons on sticks, and they were mostly quite pleasant. She met a nasty comedian with terrible manners and a handler who circled him in a cartoon whirlwind, supplying coffee and drugs; she met an old woman from Tallahassee who crocheted with her feet. “I learned when I was a kid,” she told Amy while they were waiting in the green room. “My sister had no hands and could do everything with her feet. I was very competitive.” Amy watched her performance on the monitor. The audience loved her, not so much for the crocheting, which was impressive but grotesque, but for her offhand explanation: “I was bored,” she said, when asked why she cultivated this talent, then shrugged elaborately and twinkled for the cameras. She did not mention her handless sister, whose mention would surely have dampened the crowd’s enjoyment of the trick. She really
was
competitive.

Amy wrote “handless” in her notebook but expected nothing from it. Her story ideas were drying up, not because she was fresh out, but because she wasn’t built for writing on the road. She missed her dog. She yanked him from the canine masseuse and brought him with her to the last show; they let him out onstage with her, where he amused everyone inordinately. You would think they had never seen a basset hound in their lives.

*   *   *

Three days later Amy and Alphonse bridged the Mississippi at LaCrosse, Wisconsin, racketing toward the Northern Pacific through farmland and forest and the long, somber prairies of North Dakota and Montana. After a dutiful trudge through megastores in Minneapolis and St. Paul, they visited only little independent bookstores. Portage, Winona, Devil’s Lake, Minot. They took their time, disembarking for a day or two at each stop, staying at Motel 6s and local B and Bs. Finally all Maxine’s preparations were paying off: Amy actually had to explain about her HPD more than once to justify rooming with her service dog. In the big city hotels, they knew, more or less, who she was and never asked. In the heartland, she was mostly unknown. Amy liked it here.

She autographed her old out-of-prints but read from her new stories, all scheduled for publication, but this was the first time she had shared them. Though crowds were small, she never spoke to an empty house. The most alert, intelligent audience for the whole trip was in a tiny store and coffee stop in Wolf Point, Montana, where it seemed every member was anxious and ready to argue either with her or with one another over the issues raised in her fiction. They listened closely, seriously, and they related what they heard to their own experiences and perceptions. They were better than sophisticated. They showed no interest in her private life; they wanted no writing tips or publication advice. One elderly woman hated “Shadow,” the one about the hospital chapel and the river of suffering; another, who seemed to be her older sister, defended it with passion. The first, Betty, said the story made the suffering man out to be some kind of martyr. “What he’s going through is nothing unusual,” she said, and her sister said, “That’s exactly the point.” They all disliked the bus plunge story. She could tell, not because any of them said so, but because of their tolerant smiles. She decided she didn’t much like it either.

After the reading, the older sister came up to Amy to apologize. “Betty always looks at the sunny side,” she said. “It’s a religion with her. With all of us up here, really. The nights are so long. Throw shadows at your peril.” They talked about
The Old Curiosity Shop
and
Vanity Fair,
and she admired Alphonse, who snored beneath the signing table. “He’s wearing some sort of outfit,” she said delicately. “He’s a service dog,” said Amy. She opened her mouth to explain about the HPD and how of course she didn’t really have it, then decided not to waste the lady’s time. Her name was Emily. Emily waved good-bye at the door. It was snowing, a full two weeks before Halloween. “Never seen anything like it,” said Emily, and went out to join Betty on the cold sidewalk.

*   *   *

On the train, most evenings Amy had eaten with Alphonse in the roomette, but since that energized crowd at Wolf Point had habituated her to conversation, she missed, just a little, the company of her own kind. That evening Amy decided to take supper in the dining car. The maître d’, a magenta-coiffed young woman whose job it apparently was to segregate diners according to age, seated her with Thelma Schoon, a hearty old dame who hailed from Lincoln, Nebraska and was thinking of writing a book about it. She recognized Amy from TV and asked where she got her ideas, but soon turned the conversation to her own story.

Thelma could still remember things that had happened when she was barely two years old. She must have been born in the middle of the Depression, as she had clear memories of men coming to the back door of her house, asking her mother if she had any old shirts. “They were trying to get jobs, and they needed white shirts. We never threw out any of Daddy’s, in case someone could use them.” Thelma’s parents had been academics, teaching “at the U.” Tenure had fed and housed them. She talked about family sabbaticals, summers in Puget and Long Island Sound, and about her mother teaching Arapaho children before she got married. It was the mother who told Thelma she was a “born storyteller.” This was false. She had phenomenal recollection of detail—what any true writer could have done with that!—but no sense of what made a story worth telling. As they waded through baked trout, artichoke hearts, and a not-bad Chablis, Thelma rambled through a childhood recorded but not really taken in. Listening to her was like viewing someone’s vacation slides. Of course, Thelma had a story—everyone has a story—but she did not seem to know what it was, and didn’t know she didn’t know. Knowing what your story is, Amy was fond of telling her classes, was what separated writers from everybody else.

Amy prodded her now again with questions.
Did you ever attend your father’s lectures? Did your mother miss the Arapaho?
But none touched off a true narrative. Amy found her mildly interesting despite the chaos, the one-damn-thing-after-anotherness, of her memory stores. Her hair was iron gray and collected at her nape in an intricate bun. She wore no wedding ring and never mentioned children, and as she spoke, her eyes took in the dining car, the diners, Amy, the crossing lights outside their window, filing it all away with care. When they finished, Thelma headed off to the observation deck and Amy back to her roomette. Perhaps, said Thelma, they could breakfast together. She was a hoarder, Amy thought as she bedded down. She never threw anything away. Amy would have suffocated in all that clutter. “Hoarding,” she wrote in her notebook, and instantly slept.

*   *   *

The crash impact did not wake her. Rather the sharp pain in her right side, pinned against the wall as she was by some fixture that had come loose and lodged in her ribcage. In the pitch dark, she knew she was no longer in bed but couldn’t tell where she was. The basset’s toenails clicked frantically—not a walking rhythm, but as though he were fumbling with some metal object, and then he slid into her lap. He was shivering. She felt him all over for bumps and wounds but could find none, and at her touch he quieted down and licked her hand, so assiduously that she wondered if
she
were bleeding, but no. Outside was dead quiet and then shouts, screams, and, from some distance, an explosion, and her window lit up yellow, so she could see the compartment interior and find the door latch. She stood, leashed Alphonse, and opened the door, expecting smoke and flames, but the narrow corridor was silent, the air still, and they found their way outside without incident.

The second she stepped off the train Amy came to herself, fully understanding that they had somehow crashed, and she turned to go back in, to check the other roomettes, to call out to anybody trapped inside, but three men were already ahead of her. She recognized a porter; the other two looked like passengers. Again she checked Alphonse. He was fine, quite chipper, straining at the leash to move down the line, to follow the jumble of cars, a few, like hers, still more or less on the rails, others jackknifed, and one far up ahead horribly mounting the trailer of a semi which apparently had crossed its path. She could tell it was a semi only because the cab was not on fire. The rest of the truck and surrounding train was engulfed. She could not see beyond the fire to the front passenger cars and engines.