Some people, Amy is quoted as saying next, underestimate their abilities.
A second, smaller picture on page A4, where the story is continued, shows Amy sitting cross-legged with all her books for the semester piled up on her lap: Antigone, Anna Karenina, Introduction to Marine Biology, and a bunch more whose titles are hidden by the ones on top. Her head is bowed as though she’s reading.
Amy is described as reserved but articulate and not exactly shy. Physically, she could easily pass for seventeen.
When Amy reads this she wonders if it’s true.
The article explains that Amy has been homeschooled for the past six years. Amy is quoted as saying, My sister had a brain tumor, and that made it difficult for her to go to school of any kind. I think my parents ultimately decided they might as well keep me at home, too.
Their mom is quoted as saying, We knew what we were doing was best for her. If anything this is the proof of that. We have raised Amy to be a strong and independent thinker, passionate about her interests, dedicated to achieving her future. At home she was able to focus in a way we knew she would never have been able to at school.
The article concludes with another quote from the Dean of Admissions: You just have to be very careful. If you go out trying to recruit younger kids, you can be doing a dis-service to the students. It’s got to be the right situation. We had a battery of campus personnel, ranging from admissions staff to faculty to housing staff, meeting with Amy and her parents. We’ll see how things go. We certainly all wish her the best of luck.
If you stop and think of all the different things that could befall a living being—besides the modern shibboleths, besides more and more tornados, there are famines and tsunamis and shootings every day—you realize it’s a miracle a single one of us lives for a single fraction of a second.
Zoe and their parents pick her up at six to celebrate
Amy skips out of the Honors House keeping her eyes on the car. When she opens the door and leans down to peer in at her sister, Zoe’s strained face loosens, and then it opens up into a smile. Amy gets in.
Their grandparents always get everywhere early to be seated in the smoking section before their mom can say no. As they wind their way between tables Amy looks at boys and men. Their mom tries to speak Spanish with their guide; Amy and Zoe exchange a glance and roll their eyes as if on cue. But their mother sees, and blushes, and sinks down into her seat defeated, looking off into the distance at what must be nothing.
Their grandma, on the other hand, is ecstatic, halfway through a margarita, and she takes Amy’s face in her hands and gives her a quick wet kiss on the lips. She keeps repeating the word Wonderkid even after they’ve placed their order. She starts to tell stories the girls have never heard, about when they were too little to remember and Amy was always figuring things out on her own. Their grandma’s cigarette floats above a basket of tortilla chips, perfectly parallel to the table, half ash, and Amy can’t not watch it, waiting for it to snap in half and spoil the chips, knowing just what their mom will do when that happens. But it doesn’t snap, it lingers, as if by magic, and then as she starts a new story their grandma takes it down and taps at the ashtray, and Amy breathes out. There was the time the crazy neighbor climbed the tree in the backyard, says their grandma, and Zoe and their mom were watching the TV. And Amy had been instructed, she was not to move, and yet regardless, just when everything seemed over, and out the window the ambulance drove off, slow, and then the fire truck, just then: bam!
Their grandma claps her wrinkled hands together; Amy jumps. Their dad is smiling like he wants to laugh; their mom is still looking off into the distance like she’s not listening. Zoe looks at Amy. Amy looks back at their grandma, who beams. Amy’d slid right out from underneath that bed and crept around the side of it and grabbed that gun. Their mom always claimed it was an accident, but they had always known different, because it could hardly have been accidental, because Amy was just that kind of kid.
And Amy is left to wonder what kind of kid she’d been, and whether or not she is the same kind now. Their grandma stabs out her cigarette and says, Shot clean through the window! And she turns to look Amy square in the face, looking like she might cry from happiness, clasping Amy’s hand and holding it high above the guacamole.
Amy tries one last time to catch her mother’s eye. Their mother, who is the one they’ve heard this story from so many times, is the only one who has the power to make this total overhaul make sense. Amy with a gun? Amy shooting out a window? What if she had shot her sister? What if she’d killed Zoe? How could she have known what she was doing when she was only four years old, when even now, at the age of fifteen, she has no clue?
But their mother suddenly recoils. That man over there is looking at your legs, she says, looking off still but jerking her head in Amy’s direction. Amy sees that her face has turned bright red. I’m going to go over there, she says, and her voice is thick. You’re fifteen years old. That’s called statutory rape.
Their mother is rising from her chair. The girls glance together, stricken. Their dad reaches out and says, Leslie, but she shakes off his hand and has launched. There is a little pause like everyone’s lurched forward. Oh forget it, says their grandma then. Let’s order more margaritas.
The girls gaze down at the remnants of tortilla chips in tiny triangles that slip into the scratches in the thick, glistening wood. They try to keep from hearing their mother’s voice across the room.
Oh Zoe. Remember the copper roofs in Copenhagen that Dad had in his atlas, that pretty green they turn?
Back in her room Amy peers out the window listening to the music that resounds from downstairs
It is the moments between day and night, when things are pink.
Because their grandma insisted, Amy has had a little bit of alcohol—her first. There is a slight warmth to her now, as though time were a ball to be kicked around.
And then she is going to the party, hand in hand with the girl from across the hall, who seems to know how everything works. Amy is wearing her own jeans but a tank top that belongs to her new friend, satin spaghetti straps like a bra’s and lace along the top, trying not to look down to make sure her breasts don’t show because she’ll get dizzy if she does.
When they walk into the Lambda Chi house they are greeted by the boys like old friends and presented with red plastic cups that foam over in their hands. Amy looks at Katie and takes a sip. Inside the Lambda Chi house the music is so loud you can feel it in your feet. Amy’s heart adjusts to it, beats in time. The smoke obscures the slow shapes she can make out in the low light, but Katie seems to see better, and Amy lets her lead her into the middle of the room.
The music is the music Amy’s always listened to, with Zoe, and now she notices in a rush of pride and pleasure that she feels just like she feels at home, and Amy and Katie dance, drinking foam from their red cups, and when their cups get empty, as if by magic, they get refilled. Never before today has Amy been the beneficiary of so much kindness, and she stumbles over thank yous now, unable to convey her appreciation. But the boys don’t mind. The boys just smile. Amy rocks her hips and sips at the beer and thinks it’s like she’s been whisked off by a tornado and set down in Oz: the rules are different, or there are no rules. She smiles and turns to Zoe about to say so, knowing Zoe will nod a bunch of times like whenever she gets excited, an enthusiasm that reveals even the silver fillings in her back bottom teeth, but then she sees that it is Katie, not Zoe, and she takes another drink.
Boys come, one for each, and Amy feels swallowed up, vanished, safe. Although she must have been held as a baby by someone, she has no recollection of it, no conscious knowledge of what it feels like to be inside of an embrace. Except for Sasha, heaving, crying, and she finishes her drink. The boy she is dancing with takes her by the hand to go and get another. She drinks another, dances, drinks. Why did Sasha take her that time on his lap, and why did he hug her, and why and how had she not seen? Amy drinks. Amy drinks
and drinks and dissolves and is happy, being held.
Katie comes and takes her hand and guides her down some stairs. In the basement are more people, other music, bottles instead of cups. Amy is given a bottle and says thank you with tears in her eyes. Oz is amazing; ever since she grew up she has been happy, Amy thinks. Next she will be a woman who lives in Europe, with Zoe, and they will buy a boat and visit all the islands. Katie is talking to someone now, and Amy can’t hear, so she looks around. There is a semicircle of girls with bottles on the other side of the room, and Amy looks at each of them, having never been a part of a crowd like this before. She knows she must be imagining it, but she thinks they are looking at her, too. A jolt and her eyes dart down to Katie’s tank top, strap to strap, but it’s fine, that isn’t it, and she looks up again, relieved. But now it’s spread. Now there are girls and boys just watching her, talking to each other leaning in like telling secrets and glancing at Amy in the pauses.
Amy wants to run away but can’t without Katie: she isn’t sure she can find the front door from here, and she also isn’t sure she isn’t too drunk to go anywhere because suddenly her legs can barely hold her, and in terror she drinks more. She reaches out and taps at Katie’s shoulder, a light, polite tap, and then when Katie doesn’t answer she yanks her to her by the wrist. Katie tells her it’s just the paper thing and that they’ll get over it, and then she twists her arm away and returns to her conversation.
Everyone understands everything except for her. Amy strains to decipher Katie’s words. The paper thing? Amy thinks of their grandma’s story. How could she have known what she was doing when she was only four years old? She doesn’t even know now. Now she doesn’t even know what is happening right in front of her face. How can it be too late? thinks Amy, but then the same boy who spoke for her at the Honors House meeting comes up out of nowhere and says, Hey, you’re famous.
She blinks at him and then remembers. People are worried the cops are going to come, says the boy, and she thinks his name is Tommy. Tommy leans in very close to her face. Now some other boys come slowly towards them, smiling, asking all kinds of questions like how does it feel to be a genius and will she help them with their homework and won’t her parents get upset with her for hanging out at parties.
Amy answers what she can: her parents won’t care.
The boys ask if Amy has a boyfriend. After she says no Amy wishes she’d said yes. Then some girls come up and say shoo, and the boys dart off in all directions like flicked flies, looking back over their shoulders now and then. The girls ask if she’s okay or if she wants to go home. Amy thinks. She says she’s fine, but then she thinks because she does want to go home, but then she also wants to dance again with a boy and get held. But then she thinks that maybe now she’s famous she’ll be too watched to dance, and she’ll feel like a fish in an empty aquarium. Plus now, if they know who she is, she can’t pretend she isn’t who she is, and who she is is a person who shoots out windows and brings everyone bad luck. Who she is is a person whose sister gets sick, whose heroine’s perfectly healthy husband has a heart attack at the age of twenty-eight, and whose—but who was Sasha? What was Sasha to her?
How can it be too late?
So she says goodnight to Katie and lets the girls take her back up the stairs. Tommy comes up again—out of nowhere, again—and announces he can take her from there because he lives in the Honors House, and he knows which room is Amy’s. The girls look at each other, but now Amy needs to throw up, and she starts out the door without waiting.
Once in a while there is a word with no translation.
Amy doesn’t know exactly how to be in class
Her memories of before her sister got sick, when they still went to school, are unreachable, tiny dots on the horizon of her mind. She is not exactly daunted; she has reason to believe she will be good at these things. All she has to do is sit like the other kids sit and always scribble in her notebook so no one calls on her. It’s just it is the opposite of teaching Zoe all those years.
Some of the other kids sit up straight and smile when smiled at, while others slump back in their seats and look serious or neglected or sleepy, or something—Amy’s not sure what. Amy cycles through the different postures, trying them on. She is so unused to being exposed to people’s eyes around the table that there’s no way she can listen to her teachers. It takes up all her energy just to sit.
Russian, which was the reason Amy came here in the first place, now sounds like screaming into a hole gaping into the ground.
People go in packs to the cafeteria, where you can pick whatever you want to eat and eat as much as you want. All of this is included in Amy’s scholarship. For a while she eats only desserts and drinks only fruit punch mixed with Mountain Dew, but then Katie says she needs to eat something resembling real food or she’ll give herself diabetes.
There are five of them from the Honors House who do everything together: Amy, Katie, Tommy, Vijay, and Hoffman, which is a last name, but for some reason everybody uses it instead, like they do sometimes on TV. Vijay is majoring in pre-med, and Hoffman in petroleum engineering. Like Amy, Katie is undeclared.
The boys call Amy Wonderkid, and it is the first time she has ever had a nickname. Having a nickname makes her feel like she is part of something too big for her to be able to see, and the resulting sense of smallness reassures her. And besides, the way they say Wonderkid makes it sound like they are proud of her, like she’s their little sister. It’s fun to be a little sister because you don’t even have to make decisions, you just get taken wherever everybody else is going or watch whatever everyone else is watching. They get to watch TV until as late as they want. Amy watches them watch TV, and when it’s something scary, Tommy covers her eyes at the worst parts, or Vijay does, if he’s sitting closer.
She talks to Zoe on the phone every day before they go to dinner and tells her what her homework is for tomorrow and if she saw anything funny and age-appropriate for Zoe on TV the night before. Zoe tells Amy about the stupid stuff their parents say and says she wants to go to college, too. She keeps on saying she might be coming down with something because her body hurts like when you’re getting the flu, but then she never actually does get sick, so Amy doesn’t know. She’s worried their parents can’t know how to care for her, and she wishes Zoe could just come and live on campus, too, although she knows she is too young. And she does have faith in Zoe’s doctors, who have encountered nothing new in any of her test results.
The pack goes to parties whenever there are parties, which is Thursday and Friday and Saturday for sure and sometimes other days. Protected by the pack, Amy is immune to her fame, and the initial flood of questions about the article in the Tulsa World dwindles down to a trickle, then dries up. They dance and talk and mostly drink till late. If the next day is a weekday Amy likes to look around the classroom and see who all she saw the night before, and when she sees someone she tries to exchange a glance with them like they are in a fellowship of red plastic cups, and it pleases Amy, too, that now the tables have turned, and it’s the adults who aren’t in on it: for all their teachers know they stay in studying, when in fact they are all only pretending because actually everyone is hungover, secretly miserable, just like her.
Such untranslatables may be my favorites—although, at the same time, with their bridges always drawn, they also make me feel (to use a word you used to use) forlorn.
One of Amy’s classes is Photography I
It has been a long time since she last took a picture. Now she rediscovers the world.
She takes walks and takes pictures. The University of Tulsa campus is mostly sandstone with a little limestone and slate. Amy photographs it at night, using walls and benches as tripods. During the day she goes up 11th Street and photographs the gas station and the Taco Bell and the Taco Bueno, the pizza places, the Coney I-Lander—her grandpa’s favorite hot dog place—and the Arby’s, with its gigantic cowboy hat sign that says Arby’s ROAST BEEF Sandwich IS DELICIOUS. She
does the Metro Diner, which is so easy to photograph Amy later almost wishes she hadn’t: the neon sign that says ELVIS EATS HERE, the turquoise padding on the booths, the cherry-red vinyl on the chairs at the tables. The checker-print wallpaper, the jukebox, the silver Art Deco M on the door. When she shows these in class she knows it seems like she is making some kind of statement, something in between attack and affection, and she feels uncomfortable.
She keeps going down 11th Street. She photographs the dumpsters in between the drive-thrus and the restaurants’ wood fences, the American flags in all the parking lots, and the cars, and the semis. She tries to catch the contrails of the planes that pass overhead, but often they elude her. She wonders what it might be like to take pictures in a place like Moscow, or Paris. She can’t imagine it, though, and she keeps going, down the cracked streets, Florence Place, Florence Avenue, photographing the compact one-story houses, many white or robin’s-egg blue, with lengthy driveways and ample, screened-in porches, the maple trees and the dogwoods and the Roses of Sharon, but since it’s already getting to be winter, there isn’t anything in bloom.
Right around campus there isn’t a whole lot more than this, so she gets Tommy to drive her around to other neighborhoods. They drive down Cherry Street and visit Swan Lake, Philbrook, even Gilcrease. They go downtown; they go to Weber’s Root Beer Stand; he buys her a root beer float. Amy feels uncomfortable, because she doesn’t have enough money to buy him anything later on. Instead she helps him with his German vocab every time he has a test. Then again this doesn’t really count because Amy enjoys learning new words in any language, and she sometimes does the same for Katie, before her Spanish tests.
Homesick Page 8