Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

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  For Edward T. Kornhauser, Jr.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Hearty Handclasps

  Epigraphs

  Chapter 1: Accident

  Chapter 2: Not Drowning

  Chapter 3: But Waving

  Chapter 4: Unnamed Details

  Chapter 5: Hell’s Anteroom

  Chapter 6: Imagine That

  Chapter 7: I Know Where You Live

  Chapter 8: Maxine

  Chapter 9: Gravitas

  Chapter 10: Birdbath II

  Chapter 11: Retreat

  Chapter 12: Waking Up

  Chapter 13: Walkies

  Chapter 14: Hypothetical Promises

  Chapter 15: Blind Submission

  Chapter 16: Croatoan

  Chapter 17: The Wheel of Tide

  Chapter 18: Case Studies

  Chapter 19: Molluskeena

  Chapter 20: The Great Wazoo

  Chapter 21: No Goggling

  Chapter 22: The Road to Shambala

  Chapter 23: Ants

  Chapter 24: Storyteller

  Chapter 25: Veal Piccata

  Chapter 26: Dead Zone

  Chapter 27: Star

  Chapter 28: There’s Your Story

  Chapter 29: How I Write

  Also by Jincy Willett

  About the Author

  Copyright

  HEARTY HANDCLASPS

  To:

  M. J. Andersen

  Tony DiBasio

  Billy Frolick

  Tom Hartley

  Alisa Williams Willett

  Ward and Joanne Willett

  And to:

  The Hurt Feelings Book Club

  featuring

  Meagan Jennifer Knepp

  Karen Worley

  Kristen Amicone

  Kristin Nielsen

  June Snedecor

  And especially to:

  The Coven

  ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’

  —E.M. FORSTER

  “God damn it,” said Lewis, “I told you. I’m not in the business of exposing things. I’m a novelist. I write novels. I don’t go around—”

  —H. ALLEN SMITH

  CHAPTER ONE

  Accident

  Because the Norfolk pine was heavy, and also because she was wearing house slippers, having not yet dressed for the day, Amy took her time getting to the raised garden. Her house slippers were fuzzy, oversized, and floppy, and if she moved too fast, she would walk right out of them.

  She was not yet dressed for the day because she had no reason to dress until much later, at which time she’d have to dress uncomfortably, and she was in no hurry to do that. At three o’clock a reporter from The San Diego Union-Tribune was coming to interview Amy as part of some bogus series about local writers. Although she’d specified no current events and especially no photographs, she didn’t trust a reporter who sounded on the phone as though she were eight years old and couldn’t think of anything funnier than not wanting your face on public display. Imagine, her laughter implied, denying the world the chance to gaze upon you. So Amy dreaded the interview but was not actively doing so, or thinking about it at all, as she shuffled toward the raised garden with the Norfolk pine.

  She shuffled past her mimosa tree, where three goldfinches clung to a thistle-seed feeder, and past her green plastic pseudo-Adirondack chairs, covered with two seasons’ worth of dirt, seeds, and leaves, which she really must hose off one of these days. She shuffled closer to the raised garden, as the screen door banged behind her and Alphonse jingled past and up ahead of her, his great basset nose zeroing in on the very spot where she planned to dig, as though her trail had magically preceded her. James Thurber said that his bloodhound always seemed more interested in where he’d been than where he was; Alphonse had an uncanny fascination with where she planned to be, and a genius for thwarting her: ordinarily a sedate plodder, he could materialize in a chair just as she was about to sit down; if she suddenly felt peckish at two in the morning, he’d be waiting in front of the refrigerator, his eyes glowing red in the dark kitchen. Now he sniffed round and round the digging spot. “No!” she shouted. “Desist, you miscreant!” Alphonse feigned deafness, as though so anxious to relieve himself that he could think of nothing else, which was mendacious, as he usually slept in until midmorning and even then typically put off his bathroom break until noon. He was just messing with her head.

  So she shuffled a little faster, intent on reaching her goal before Alphonse fully committed himself to his, and when she came to the raised garden, her eyes fixed on Alphonse, and lifted her right foot to step onto the low brick wall, she misjudged its elevation by perhaps a quarter inch, not enough to stub her toes and trip, just enough to throw her very slightly off-balance, the sole of her foot catching and scraping on the rough brick rather than coming straight down to meet it, and still she rose, her attention now divided between Alphonse and the heavy potted pine, her center of gravity higher than usual as she clutched it to her midriff, and then the slipper on her left foot did flop off and she did stub her left toes, or rather skinned the tops of them on the harsh edge of the brick, which really shouldn’t have been catastrophic, but was, because now she was thinking about three different things, Alphonse, her toes, and the Norfolk pine, so that somehow her balance shifted forward, and certain physical forces, inertia and momentum, began to announce themselves, clearing their throats politely. All was not lost at this point, they said, but a fall was possible, and Amy, over-thinking as usual, realizing that in such a fall the pine might suffer irreparably, focused on cradling it in such a way that it would not suffer, as though she were sixteen years old and lithe and presented with a smorgasbord of landing-position selections, none of which would injure her in the slightest, whereas what she should have done was jettison the damn plant and save herself, but no, and then she had actually lost balance and was pitching forward, her legs and feet heroically striving to catch up with her upper body, so that, still falling, she gathered speed, and, seeing that all was lost, she began to twist around in order to land on her back, and then her bare left heel slammed down on a sprinkler head and she heard her ankle crunch, but felt nothing because within the time it would have taken for the pain message to arrive in her brain, she had knocked herself out on the birdbath.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not Drowning

  When the Looney Tunes characters of her childhood got knocked out, hallucinated birds always twittered about their heads. Now as Amy began to come to, she lay still with her eyes closed and waited for the twittering to stop. She knew where she was and recalled the twisting fall but not cracking her head on the birdbath, probably because during the event-filled fall itself she’d been so fixated on Alphonse (who had regarded her sardonically, as though Amy windmilling through the air were a daily spectacle) that she’d neglected to consider the birdbath, so that the actual impact must have been an unidentified surprise. But she remembered it now, and pictured the back of her throbbing skull as an ancient crazed vase which at the slightest touch would subside into shards. The throbbing by itself might accomplish this. Not so immediate w
as the throbbing in her left ankle, which was actually more painful but easier to ignore, as it was so far away. As she lay still, Amy became more and more herself, except that the birds still twittered. She opened her eyes: a quartet of juncos, assembled in a line on the ground in front of her face, lifted up and out of sight, apparently spooked by the flick of her eyelids. Imagine being that tiny. Sunlight pierced her skull. She squeezed her eyes shut and began to move, rising on her elbows and twisting at the waist so she could push herself up, and her right hand encountered a puddle of warm, viscous liquid where her head had lain. Amy froze, afraid to look at so much blood.

  For a full minute she hovered over the puddle with her eyes clamped shut, imagining her own reflection in a scarlet pool. She had a fractured skull, or a subdural hematoma, whatever the hell that was, and she was going to bleed out all alone in her backyard, an aging fat woman wearing a ratty chenille bathrobe and one fuzzy slipper. Then a far-off jingle reminded her she wasn’t actually alone, and, heartened, she opened her eyes. Not blood at all, but basset saliva. He must have stood drooling over her inert form, waiting for her to take her last ragged breath. He was probably off gathering firewood for the hibachi, bless his heart. “Tough luck, kiddo,” she called, softly, to spare her head. “Not this time.”

  * * *

  Amy took one full hour to make it back indoors. For a while, fearful of the pain in her ankle, she crawled on hands and knees. Midway, she heard the Blaines, her neighbors, in their backyard, calling their cats and sprinkling their camellias. She opened her mouth to shout to them and then stopped. They were nice people—she fed the cats when they visited their grandchildren—and they’d be eager to help, but Amy got stuck, as she so often did, on what words she would actually use.

  When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn’t come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. “Help!” was such a cliché. By the time she was willing to scream, she had no breath left, and it was just blind luck that somebody saw her gasping and floundering and pulled her to shore. “Why didn’t you say something?” they wanted to know, and she said, “I’m not a screamer.” “Jesus,” said one of them, “couldn’t you have made an exception this one time?” “Apparently not,” she said.

  Now she began to rehearse. Hi there! Hello, Blaines! Say, I’m terribly sorry, but have you got a minute? What then? The Blaines were short, small-boned people. Between them they couldn’t possibly pull her to her feet, and she’d feel funny about leaning on them—or, indeed, on anyone else. In the end she kept her mouth shut and just sat up on the cement and listened to them argue about a misplaced coupon in the Pennysaver and whether they should feed their mandarins now or in February.

  Above her head the goldfinches returned to their feeder, having decided she couldn’t rise up and bother them. Her head, she realized, had stopped throbbing, and she felt suddenly optimistic. Gingerly she probed the back of her skull, which didn’t feel particularly mushy; in fact, it was beginning to numb up. Her ankle was swollen and blue but didn’t seem broken, at least not in a spectacular way. Now was as good a time as any to find out how bad it was. She crawled over to where she kept the garden tools, selected the sturdiest rake, and used it to push herself up. With the upended rake as a crutch, she took a step and put just enough weight on the bad foot to learn that walking, though terribly hurtful, was possible.

  By the time she got inside a curious thing had happened. She felt energized, instead of fatigued, by the morning’s experiences, and she was instantly giddy. She should definitely call somebody—Carla, maybe, or Harry B, since he’d given her the fatal Norfolk pine in the first place. She’d call Harry and they’d have a good laugh about it. She started to hobble toward the phone in the living room and noticed happily that the upended rake was unnecessary: she could hop almost nimbly from place to place, so cluttered was her house with chairs and tables and bookcases to right herself on. By the time she reached the sofa, though, she was terrifically sleepy, and lay down for a brief nap before calling Harry.

  When she opened her eyes, the light was blinding and so was her headache, as though a migraine had joined forces with the pain from the crack on her head, which it probably had, and then Alphonse clambered up on the sofa and stood on top of her stomach, barking out the window at what had to be the postman, which was odd, because he never came before two p.m. It couldn’t possibly be that late, but she had to wait for Alphonse to jump down before she could see the Kit-Kat clock on the far wall and verify that it was midmorning. It wasn’t.

  Something was wrong. Amy never napped. She had a hard enough time sleeping through the night. Worse, there was an important thing she was supposed to do at three o’clock. She couldn’t remember what, but it definitely involved getting dressed. By the time she had hopped into the bedroom, she remembered: the damn reporter, Holly Something, and how could she conduct an interview in her present state? The thought of drawing even the loosest trousers over her swollen ankle was too daunting, and in the end she had to settle for a multicolored flowing caftan, a shapeless billowing thing she had bought without trying on and then shoved in the back of a closet crammed with other similarly unworn monstrosities. Why did they assume that women of a certain age and weight wanted to dress like circus clowns? Forcing a brief glance in the mirror, she was even more alarmed by her face and hair than by the hideous dress. She could fix her face, but her white-blond hair was long and wild, as it always was when she got up in the morning, and when she tried to comb it through, it pulled torturously at her scalp. After much hopping and drawer-rifling she located an old crimson turban she had bought for a Halloween costume thirty years ago. (Amy never threw anything away.) Once again she regarded herself in the mirror. She looked like that creature in The Nutcracker, the one with all the little kids under her dress. Mother Ginger, on chemo. It was 2:55.

  She pictured herself greeting Holly Gigglepuss, whose name she’d written down somewhere, at the door and drawing her into her messy house, hopping pathetically, explaining that she’d fallen down, exhibiting her own sad state, and knew that this would be worse than flailing in the Kennebec. No. With dignified mien she would greet the woman outdoors, in her own front yard. Under no circumstances would she gain access to Amy’s house. Amy would be waiting for her when she arrived, and she wouldn’t move. She’d look very odd, but at least not pitiful, and there wasn’t going to be a picture anyway.

  She had a scare getting out the door when Alphonse, who as a matter of principle always tried to escape when the door opened, came very close to successfully achieving this pointless goal (he never went anywhere but across the street), almost knocking her over backward as she scrambled to close the screen between them. She had planned to position herself on the lawn in front of the dwarf apricot, but she had left the rake crutch on the other side of the door, and there wasn’t time to get it. She maneuvered so she was standing at the railing at the top of the steps, and waited. She could lean against the railing if she had to. Her headache had winked out for the moment, and she was feeling positive again. This should, she knew, have frightened her, as she had no rational reason to feel positive. For one thing, now she could not remember why the reporter was coming. She felt like a cigar-store Indian. There was definitely something wrong with her head, and she’d have to deal with it later.

  CHAPTER THREE

  But Waving

  Then, or rather now, it was later. The winter sun had descended, the shadow of her little jacaranda tree had moved, reaching toward the driveway, where a natty blue SUV driven by a young woman she had never seen before began to back down into the street. The woman rolled down her window. “That was really amazing!” she said, waving and smiling broadly. “I’ll email you the pictures!” Even from this distance her teeth were impossibly white. Amy waved her off. “Help,” she said softly, waving back.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Unnamed Details

  Amy
hobbled back indoors. After much Internet searching she diagnosed herself with a “simple concussion.” Many websites offered checklists; she didn’t have nausea or slurred speech (although God knew what she had actually sounded like during the interview), but she certainly had headaches; ditto “mood and cognitive disturbances,” the latter in spades, since she was missing a serious chunk of time. Actually, the more reputable websites, like the one for the Mayo Clinic, strongly implied that this kind of amnesia meant that the concussion was “severe.” Still, she was able to juggle incoming information to make it come out the way she wanted: namely, that she would not have to go to a doctor’s office and get herself looked at. Amy was aware that she was being extremely foolish, but one of the great advantages to living alone was that you didn’t have to justify yourself, except to a basset. She fixed a late dinner, which she didn’t eat, went to bed early, and lay awake mistrusting her own brain, a new and unsettling experience, since the object of mistrust was also its agent.

  Instead of counting sheep, she tried counting the things of which she was sure: to tease out and disentangle all of the causal threads.

  1. It was New Year’s Day. She was sure of that. Because Amy’s birthday was New Year’s Eve, and because she was no longer a child, she loathed New Year’s—both the Eve and the Day. Not only was it not worth celebrating: it was eminently worthy, in the Carrollian mode, of uncelebration. Sixty-plus years ago she had been a gullible toddler with doting parents and the whole world had sung drunken songs and set off fireworks displays in her honor; now it did the same things to piss her off. Amy didn’t at all mind getting older, homelier, and simultaneously bulkier and less visible, but she was disinclined to memorialize the process with noisemakers. (Once, in her mid-twenties, she and Max had, at her instigation, supplied New Year’s Eve party guests with air horns, on the careless theory that if anything, including deliberate noisemaking, was worth doing, it was worth doing well. The results were much more hilarious in anticipation than in actual experience, or even distant recollection. People had screamed in pain.)