Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  Not long after arriving in California, she had been driving home late from her class, listening to a call-in show, when the radio doctor interrupted the caller: “Hey. Did you feel that?” and the caller said, “Yeah, what was that?” and then, “There’s another one,” and “Whoa. That was serious,” and they went back and forth about “that” for a couple of minutes, and then, without explanation, returned to their topic. “That” turned out to be an earthquake, Amy’s first, and although she went on to experience numerous rattlers and rollers, this first one, which she didn’t feel at all, was the most frightening, as she drove through it alone in the dark. What was that? Other times she had night-driven past mile after mile of fire, flames outlining the contours of the eastern hills, her windows rolled up against acrid smoke, but on her way to teach her regularly scheduled class, knowing that most of them would show up, because it was Fire Season in Southern California and no big deal. And then in 2003, and again four years later, it was a huge deal. On this very freeway she had seen sixty-mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds lob a eucalyptus fireball the size of a garage westward across eight lanes to torch the Miramar scrub and burn halfway to the coast.

  The apocalyptic hum, coupled with awareness of her own aging reflexes, contributed to a tiny sense of dread every time she drove the freeway. Now, on an early January evening, no fires threatened, the last noticeable earthquake had happened months ago, and southbound traffic was almost light, but still she was on edge. Anything could happen. Directly ahead of her, a badly loaded old wood-rail pickup hauling gigantic Mexican planters and garden statuary, its covering tarp half free and waving desperately, swerved to avoid a peeled-off tire tread, and a fist-size chunk of cement bounced out and hit the road in front of Amy, and she had time to do nothing but watch it glance off to the right and become someone else’s fate. She waited for a squeal of brakes that never came, then passed the truck at eighty-five, not slowing until she could no longer see it in her rearview mirror, wondering all the while why she was so panicked. It had been a close call, but she had seen worse, everybody had by the time they reached sixty-two. She was settled down and almost to La Jolla when she realized it wasn’t the truck, or even the near miss, it was what was in the truck. Probably, anyway. “Birdbaths,” said Amy. “I was almost hit by a birdbath.”

  Having named it, the thing that frightened her, she calmed down and spent the rest of the drive noting the title, “Birdbaths,” and spinning the outline of a story she would never write, relaxing into denial, certain she would arrive at Carla’s in one piece. How was it possible, Amy wondered, to know you are in denial and snuggle into the feeling anyway? Anything could happen, any time. Now, for example, as she merged onto Torrey Pines, or now, as she slowed to read street signs in the dark and impatient natives honked and sped around her, or even now, pulling into Carla’s enormous circular driveway. Her heart could explode, her brain wink out, she could trip while focusing on the enormous salad bowl in her arms and die in a pool of blood and Waldorf salad. The earth could open up at her feet.

  Amy paused to look in the living room picture window: the room was too dark for her to make out details, but they were all there, no doubt, waiting for her, with candles and a goddamn birthday cake, because of course Carla had lied, but Amy stayed in the moment anyway. She was safe. She was happy to be anywhere.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Retreat

  Amy hadn’t visited Carla’s place, the Birdhouse, for a full year. Her last visit had been on Boxing Day, a few weeks after the Workshop Sniper, a deranged class member who had terrorized everyone in the workshop, had been identified and locked up. On that occasion, the remaining class members had not been able to refrain from discussing the Sniper, speculating on motivations, going over and over ground that Amy had already buried deep and cemented over. For months, Carla harassed her about turning the incident into gold and jump-starting her career in the process, a suggestion Amy found offensive, even coming from Carla, who never meant harm even though she routinely offended everybody. “That story is not mine to tell,” she told Carla more than once, “especially in a form that will encourage readers to enjoy the deaths of innocent people.” Carla eventually took the hint, calling Amy now and then ostensibly to shoot the breeze but really to demonstrate that she could be trusted never again to bring up “the thing.” Still, Amy had dodged her until the following Christmas, when, in a moment of Yuletide sentimentality, she agreed to come to this small gathering. By now fewer than half of the original thirteen members remained: two had been murdered, one incarcerated, and five had sensibly returned to their lives.

  Carla shared ownership of the Birdhouse with her horrible mother, and the first thing Amy noticed was how radically the interior of Carla’s half had changed. Once a deep-red Aladdin-themed living area with keyhole-shaped alcoves and maroon velvet walls, the main room was now a jungle choked with gigantic potted plants, so that at first Amy couldn’t tell who was there. Eventually she discerned Dr. Surtees and Ricky Buzza standing and chatting behind a cluster of bamboo palms. As her eyes adjusted to the low light, she eventually saw Harry B on the other side of the conversation pit, nestled among some boisterous ferns. If there was furniture in here, and there must be unless he was sitting on a stump, it had evidently been chosen to blend in with the vegetation. The room was soporifically humid. Amy set her salad bowl down underneath a Norfolk pine, no doubt kin to the one that had contributed to her recent near-death experience, and advanced toward Harry. Behind her, Carla screamed.

  “No! Amy! Don’t move!”

  Amy obliged, not alarmed, as Carla was pretty high-strung, and this was probably her way of “surprising” the birthday girl. She braced herself against the onslaught of blazing cake and obnoxious song. Then Carla or somebody flicked a light switch, and the conversation pit lit up like a Disneyland lagoon, which essentially it was. The floor on which she had been about to step was an oval pool of black water, across which arched a narrow bamboo bridge, its rails entwined with ivy. “Check it out,” shouted Carla, flicking another switch, and the water’s surface began to roll in neat waves, uniformly spaced. “It’s my combination lap pool and hot tub!”

  “And lawsuit!” said Harry B, Esquire. Harry Blasbalg had once dreamed of writing horror fiction but now seemed content to offer free legal counsel to his workshop friends, especially Carla, who needed all the counseling she could get.

  “We’ve all told her that somebody’s going to drown,” said Tiffany. “She won’t pay any attention to us.” Tiffany Zuniga stood next to Carla, holding a tray of tropical drinks.

  She led Amy around the pool, ignoring Carla’s entreaties that they take the bridge (“It’s quicker!”), to an area way in the back of the room, cordoned off by man-eating vines, which housed high-end porch furniture, including a long wicker coffee table gussied up with a grass skirt. Amy sat down in a rattan easy chair so low and deep that she knew she was stuck there for the duration. She accepted one of the tropical drinks, served in a small hollowed-out pineapple whose skin scraped her palms, and within a minute the rest were arrayed around the table with her, except for Carla, who had returned to the kitchen and was yelling back something unintelligible.

  “I’ve decided,” said Tiffany, “that she’s bipolar.” Tiffany was a bright girl but still way too sure of herself.

  “She’s just a kid,” said Amy.

  “She’s thirty-four!”

  And you’re in your twenties, and still living with your dad, Amy didn’t say. “How much do you know about Carla?”

  Tiffany sat back and knitted her unlined brow. “Just that she hates her mother and she has horrible taste.”

  Carla appeared at Tiffany’s elbow, her approach apparently muffled by the rushing waters. “True and true,” Carla said cheerfully, waving away Tiffany’s flustered embarrassment. She set down a tray of mango-dotted mini-pizzas and sat down across from Amy. “Which brings us to the purpose of tonight’s gathering.” Carla had lost weight. She was still plump, b
ut no longer obese; she still wore inappropriately stretchy clothing, in this case a clingy floor-length jersey thing, peach-colored and long-sleeved. Unusually, there were no sequins on the dress, but this was made up for by a gold lion pendant, the lion head the size of an alarm clock, its mouth gaping in a toothy roar. Carla was sweating profusely in the overheated room, but the shine became her. She looked happy. Amy, who liked Carla, was happy for her, but once again braced herself against the inevitable announcement of her own belated birthday.

  “Ma’s gone!” announced Carla. “Ta-da!”

  Dr. Surtees, the first to recover from this announcement, said, “I’m so sorry, Carla. I had no idea Mrs. Karolak was ill.”

  “Crazy as a fruit bat!”

  If not, strictly speaking, crazy, Amy thought, she certainly was a bat. If the fruit bat had ever loved her daughter, which was unlikely, any maternal feelings had dried up when she realized that her bouncy, precocious child could act and was naturally camera-friendly. Carla had once entertained Amy for a full evening with stories of her acting exploits, all of which she had loathed. Her mother made “a pantload” in a divorce from a father Carla could not even remember, and compounded that pantload with her daughter’s earnings, mostly from long-running commercials, so that by the time Carla was emancipated (sort of) and ready for psychoanalysis, she had millions with which to pay for it. That she had continued to live with the woman, allowing her to occupy the east half of the Birdhouse, was a mystery to Amy.

  Dr. Surtees was eyeing Carla closely. “What happened to Mrs. Karolak, Carla?”

  “Monistat,” corrected Amy. “Her name was Monistat.” Amy knew this only because the old crone once told her that she hadn’t kept “that bastard’s name.”

  “Oh, SNAP!” Carla shrieked, bumping the table and spilling the pineapple drinks. “Amy, you’re so funny!”

  Maybe Tiffany was right. Maybe Carla actually was bipolar. Now she was laughing uncontrollably. Amy was growing tired of people telling her she was funny. “Carla, seriously. What have you done with your mother?”

  “Nothing,” said Carla, hiccupping. “She’s gonna outlive me. But she’s gonna do it somewhere else. How fabulous is that!”

  Where had she put the woman? In a vault?

  “Has Mrs. Monistat gone into an assisted-living facility?” asked Harry B, prompting Carla, who had begun to settle down, into another outburst of hilarity.

  “Stop it, you’re killing me! It’s not Monistat, Harry. Amy was joking. It’s Massengill. Elsie Mae Massengill.”

  Now everyone else laughed, except for Amy, who had not been joking at all. The goof should have amused her, but she was distracted by a pinprick of alarm. Was her brain truly unhurt? How reliable were MRIs, anyway?

  “Are you guys related to the Massengill feminine hygiene people?” asked Ricky. “They must have made millions.”

  “I used to kid Ma about that, whenever she got all up in my face about family tradition,” said Carla. “I used to tell people we were the West Coast douche-bags, as opposed to the Park Avenue douche-bags. Drove her berserk. But no, no relation at all.”

  It turned out that Mother Massengill, the dragon lady who had haunted the Birdhouse, screeching constantly about slammed doors and car alarms, had moved back to Pittsburgh. Carla had bought out her half of the house. “Is that your announcement?” asked Amy, greatly relieved to learn that Carla hadn’t done anything unspeakable to her mother. She tried a mango-mini-pizza. It was awful. When had people started putting fruit on pizza?

  “It’s what I’m going to do with Ma’s half of the house is why I called this meeting.” Carla, master of dramatic pauses, paused dramatically. When nobody guessed, she said, “I’m going to turn it into a writer’s retreat!”

  Silence greeted Carla, as they all turned this news over in their minds. “What does that mean?” asked Ricky.

  “I’m setting up a foundation, with scholarships or fellowships, something like that, so that writers can come here and live for a while—six weeks, maybe—and do nothing but write.”

  “Who’s handling this for you?” asked Harry B.

  “You are,” said Carla. “If you’re interested. You do that sort of stuff, don’t you?”

  Harry said it would make a nice change for him. “I’ve been doing nonstop bankruptcies for a year.” Business was booming for lawyers, if for no one else.

  At this point, the rest chimed in with their financial woes. Ricky Buzza had been downsized from the North County Times, which, like all newspapers, was desperate just to stay afloat. Tiffany had lost her part-time job as a church secretary. “The assistant pastor claims she can do my job on her own computer, which is probably right. But really it’s because I’m an atheist.” Dr. Surtees complained that no, medicine was not recession-proof, and began to pontificate darkly about Obama and the looming healthcare apocalypse. Carla cut him off.

  “People! You’re not paying attention. Depending on what my accountant and Harry say, I can maybe offer these six-week deals year ’round. So you can live here and write and not worry about money.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Harry B. “A non-profit foundation, which is what I’m assuming you’re talking about, isn’t the same thing as just throwing money at your friends. That’s a gift. The tax consequences—”

  “I’m not just going to be supporting my friends.” Carla looked hurt. “There will be a rigorous admissions process. Which I’m sure you’ll all pass with flying colors.”

  Amy fished her notebook from her purse and jotted down the title, “A Rigorous Admissions Process.”

  “Look,” said Carla, “it’ll just be room and board. You can rent out your houses and sublet your apartments.”

  Harry regarded Carla with fond exasperation. “And who is going to be in charge of the rigorous admissions process?”

  Carla looked at Amy. At least she had the good sense to blush.

  A writer’s retreat, Max used to kid Amy, sounds like a bugle call. They would giggle over the imagined rout, Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Virginia Woolf in black-and-white uniforms, galloping frantically away from a horde of armed Thuggees as Sam Jaffe sounds the alarm. In her writing days, Amy had never benefited from peace and quiet. She had done her best writing in chaotic, noisy settings—parties, cafes, even softball games, putting down her notebook only to rise and strike out. She had written the final chapter of Ambassador of Loss by penlight during a Lewiston Community Theater production of Waiting for Godot. (Thus annoying Max, whose friend-of-the-month was playing Vladimir.) In those days, there were only a few, mostly venerable, writer’s retreats; she had actually turned down an invitation to Sewanee and a residency at the Moose Watch Colony in Jackman. She was unlured by the prospect of month-long serenity, repulsed by snapshots of cloistered rooms, simple oak desks awash in pearly sunlight from a single uncurtained window, where writers were “free to inhabit and explore the quietest of spaces.” This to Amy amounted to the freedom to congeal inside a Vermeer.

  But she was in the minority there, and over the years, retreats, colonies, conferences, and weekend workshops had multiplied, keeping pace with a terrifying growth in the population of writers, both real and would-be. And now here came another one: the Birdhouse, in affluent, sun-blind La Jolla. Amy could actually picture the brochure, an aerial view of the house itself, whose two curved, sweeping wings mimicked a bird in flight. What did Carla want her to do? Write the brochure?

  “I know you probably wouldn’t want to be our Writer in Residence,” said Carla.

  “I have a residence in Escondido.”

  “Right. But this could be a permanent teaching place for you.”

  “I have one of those too. My home. I teach online.”

  “Well, will you think about it?” Carla looked so hopeful, so vulnerable, that Amy relented.

  “Okay,” she said. “But no promises.”

  “Also,” said Carla, without a pause, “I’d like to hire you to vet the applicants. I’ll pay top dollar!”


  Ricky’s face fell. “There goes that dream,” he said, as if Amy weren’t in the room. There had been a couple of promising writers in Amy’s last workshop, but Ricky Buzza wasn’t one of them. In fact, one of them was in prison.

  Tiffany asked, “You were thinking of doing it?”

  “Well, yeah, what have I got to lose? I’ve started working on something. It’s not serious fiction, though.”

  Everybody started talking at once. Tiffany, also unemployed, was interested too. Dr. Surtees wanted in, which was ridiculous, but he said he’d like a room of his own. He was working on a new novel, another medical thriller. Amy interrupted him before he could spill the plot.

  “Look, I’ll do this, but only with blind submissions.” No one knew what that meant. “I’ll read the samples, provided that the writers’ names aren’t on them.” Blind submissions, at least as far as this crew were concerned, were a forlorn hope: she’d be able to identify any of these writers at fifty paces. But the principle was important to Amy. There was precious little blind reviewing going on in the publishing world, which was why so much that got published was mediocre.

  Amy’s concession ultimately made everybody happy but Harry B, with whom she exchanged shrugs and knowing looks. Amy wasn’t worried. Carla being Carla, the whole retreat idea would probably vaporize in a month or two when she was faced with legal hurdles and administrative minutiae. And even if she went ahead with it, chances are she’d just get these three “writers,” and after awhile they’d give it up. Meanwhile Amy could make a few extra dollars without leaving her own home.

  A few hours later, after the doctor’s mojitos, Tiffany’s cornbread, Carla’s spectacular shrimp moqueca, and Ricky Buzza’s store-bought pie, and a fair amount of pleasant non-retreat-focused conversation, Amy took her leave. Carla, obviously concerned with Amy’s feelings, begged to be allowed to keep the Waldorf salad, which was “so scrumptious”—so scrumptious that nobody had actually eaten it, including Amy, who realized after one bite that she had either overdone the salt or substituted it for sugar. Just toss it, Amy said, I’ll pick up the bowl some other time. Carla waved good-bye, smiling gaily, no doubt because of the phrase “some other time.”