Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  After a pause, she decided to change the name of the list once more, and for the final time, to:

  THE ACCIDENT-DRIVEN LIFE

  A week later, as Amy was wrangling with Carla by email about setting a date for her first retreat appearance, Maxine called. “You’ve really done it now,” she said. “You’ve teed off the Christers. This is brilliant, babe.”

  At her urging, Amy checked out GO AWAY, now teeming with hundreds of comments, most of which actually said (or boiled down to) “You are not an accident!” In fact, so many said just that, no more, no less, that Amy suspected they had been assigned by an organized cabal of pastors. “Accident” and “luck,” Amy learned, were the dirtiest words in the Fundamentalist lexicon. The Anti-Accident Brigade wrote to cheer Amy up, to assure her that everything happens for a reason. They often said just that: “Everything happens for a reason!” The Brigade was divided into two general schools: those who allowed that terrible, inexplicable things (“things we call accidents”) happen in real life, but they’re all part of God’s mysterious plan; and those who claimed, against all evidence, that God would never allow for such terrible things in the first place, at least not the way Amy had described them. One of them, Betty1986, wrote:

  You’ve left out the most important parts of these “plots.” That loving bride and groom perish together, their arms around each other, uplifted by the certain hope of heaven. The murdered daughter has time to show her faith to her murderer: to face her martyrdom with joy. Who knows, she may have started this lost soul on the path to his own redemption! None of these plots are accident-driven. They are purpose-driven, and the purpose is often not ours to know.

  Some of the lengthiest comments came in the form of testimonies, personal true stories of “so-called accidents” that had enlightened their lives, or turned their lost lambs from the crooked path. They wrote about being “blessed” with cancer, heart attacks, paralyzing strokes; worse, of never experiencing the fullness of God’s love until their own children were taken from them by some ghastly—and literal—deus ex machina.

  Jackinthepulpit91 posted the entire first verse of an old hymn, “It Is Well with My Soul,” famously written by Horatio Spafford, a businessman who, upon learning that his four daughters had perished together in a winter crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, penned the undying words

  When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

  When sorrows like sea billows roll;

  Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,

  It is well, it is well, with my soul.

  Refrain:

  It is well, with my soul,

  It is well, with my soul,

  It is well, it is well, with my soul.

  Apparently he had written the hymn as he voyaged east to join his grieving wife, when his ship’s captain pointed out that they were sailing over the very spot where the Ville du Havre had gone down, at which point Spafford had (in Amy’s imagination) dashed in unseemly haste to his stateroom, inked a pen, and started to write. Jackinthepulpit91 also included a link to a page where Amy could actually hear his own entire family singing this hymn, along with many other favorites.

  Amy had been raised in a Congregational church and could remember singing this very hymn, a pretty one, without knowing its history—a history which she now could not help finding less than inspirational. What father, beholding his children’s watery grave, is immediately moved to assess the health of his own soul? How about giving a thought to them? How were their souls doing there, in the freezing water, as their heavy garments tugged them down? She did some quick research on H. Spafford and found that the posted facts were true though incomplete. Spafford was no stranger to what heathens call “accidents.” He lost his infant son to illness and then all his money in the Great Chicago Fire. Spafford’s hymn was set to music by Philip Bliss, a gospel singer and composer, who himself died three years later, along with his wife, in a catastrophe trifecta (bridge collapse–train crash–fire), which the spectacularly terrible poet Julia Moore memorialized as the “Ashtabula Bridge Disaster”:

  Have you heard of the dreadful fate

  Of Mr. P. P. Bliss and wife?

  Of their death I will relate,

  And also others lost their life;

  Ashtabula Bridge disaster,

  Where so many people died

  Without a thought that destruction

  Would plunge them ’neath the wheel of tide.

  Amy pasted this stanza into her posted reply to Jackinthepulpit91, without explanation and attribution. Let him figure it out.

  She called Maxine back. “Why is this brilliant?” she asked. “I don’t have time to argue with these people. And I don’t want to be mean to them. If their faith sustains them, it’s not my business. I just want them to go away. Hence the title of my blog.”

  Maxine coughed up a lung. “Don’t you see what you’ve got going here?”

  “Where? On the Internet? It’s an amusement, Maxine, mostly to me, and to a few other people. That’s it. That’s the only reason I started it.”

  “Not anymore,” said Maxine. “You’re getting attention. What did I tell you? They’re coming out of the woodwork.”

  “That’s supposed to excite me? Is this my new readership category? Things that come out of the woodwork?”

  “Settle down,” said Maxine. “We’re not just talking readership anymore. Mostly readers, okay, but you’re on the radio now. Who knows what’s gonna happen next? It’s a new world, babe.”

  “I was on the radio once.”

  “Trust me, that was just the start. They’re interested in doing another one next month. Maybe a regular thing.”

  “A regular thing about me?” Amy’s heart began to race. “I can’t be a regular thing, Maxine. I don’t have that much to say. This isn’t funny.”

  “Of course not just you. You and a couple other writers. You know. Shooting off your mouths about stuff.”

  “Maxine, I’m not sure I like this.” Things were happening too fast. Amy felt buffeted.

  “Which is why I wasn’t going to tell you until we worked out the kinks. Forget it for now, okay? Don’t worry about it. Have a drink.”

  Amy put the phone down to pour herself some wine. “Back to the blog,” she said. “Tell me again why it’s a good thing to be attracting woodwork creatures to a site devoted to idle reflection, most of it of interest mainly to me.”

  “Give me a second.” Amy could hear the click of a lighter. Maxine took a drag.

  “Are you still smoking?” asked Amy. “With those lungs?”

  “Here’s the deal. You’re not gonna understand it, but you are gonna have to trust me. You’re not just a writer now. You’re a package. In case you haven’t noticed, writers don’t just write, babe. They package themselves, or they have people do it for them. People like yours truly.”

  Amy held her tongue.

  “Shut up,” said Maxine. “You think Charles Dickens wasn’t a package? You think Mark Twain wasn’t a package? Edith Wharton? Hemingway? Fitzgerald, there was a package! They were all great writers, sure, but they were also commodities. They spent as much time in the spotlight as they did staring at the old blank page. The only difference today is every idiot who writes a book expects to be a brand name.”

  “Like Jenny Marzen,” said Amy, in spite of herself.

  “Exactamento.”

  “Maxine, tell me something I don’t know. I’ve looked at their stupid websites. I’ve seen their head shots. I’ve watched them on C-SPAN. Hell, I was trapped one time in an elevator with some silly girl who thought I should know who she was because she had written some excrescence about saving your marriage with sex toys.”

  “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 tel
l 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 Ma
x’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?”