Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  By this point—close to midnight—all the hardbacks were on the floor, with man, woman, and dog happily swimming among them, clearing out spaces for kneeling or starting a new category or, in Alphonse’s case, for lying on his back licking pizza sauce off his teeth. In the beginning there had been just two categories, fiction and non. Now castles began to form: Reference books. History. Poetry. Humor. Literary Analysis. Science. Ricky could not persuade her to divide fiction into subcategories.

  In the Reference pile were three editions of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, three visual dictionaries, books of synonyms and antonyms, and a ragged pamphlet entitled World’s Worst Metaphors, which distracted Amy for a quarter hour, so happy was she to have rediscovered it. There were useless but entertaining single-volume encyclopedias. There were four copies of Fowler’s, one of which she set aside for Ricky, who wanted to know the point of visual dictionaries. “They’re indispensible,” she explained. “For instance, you’re in the middle of a scene, and you need to show an angry, disappointed man, alone in his house, deserted by his wife and children, taking stock of his life, noticing the shabbiness of the furnishings, the ugliness of the prints on the wall, and he’s trudging up the staircase and sees that termites are actually eating away at one of the posts that support the handrail.”

  “Wait—there are termites inside the house? Why would there be termites inside the house?”

  “I don’t know. The point is, you need to find the word for ‘post that supports the handrail.’ So you get out your trusty visual dictionary—”

  “Sweet,” said Ricky.

  “And you find a picture of a staircase, with arrows and labels for the parts—and there it is: baluster.”

  Ricky thought for a moment. “Realistically, though, how many readers know what a baluster is?”

  “Not the writer’s problem. They’ll either figure it out from context or just make something up and keep going.”

  “I’m totally getting one,” he said. Amy put one of her visual dictionaries in a grocery bag along with the Fowler’s, to send home with him.

  The Reference castle developed its own surrounding villages, with guides to reptiles, birds, butterflies, spiders and insects, mammals, plants, seashells and fish, and books on carpentry tools, masonry for hobbyists, chicken-sexing, how-to manuals. Build That Gazebo! Renovate That Stoop! There was a locksmith’s bible. There was a series called Peeps at Many Lands, written near the turn of the previous century, offering simple-minded glimpses of Egypt, Australia, and Italy.

  The oddest book in the pile, if Ricky’s goggling reaction to it was anything to go by, was a huge primeval medical text entitled Constipation in Adults and Children, published in 1897. Someone had found it in his attic and shown it to Max, who thought it so amusing that he often read from it at parties. Max taught Romance languages, but his hobby was the history of Western medicine, or the Cavalcade of Quacks. He and Amy may have shared a phobia of hospitals and doctors, but he eased his fears with investigation and ridicule, whereas Amy was way too squeamish to comfort herself in this way. She had kept the book for sentimental reasons, which now struck her as inadequate. As Ricky opened the book Amy said, “Don’t. You’ll be sorry if you do.”

  “Why?” Ricky glanced down at what Amy was sure was one of the book’s copious illustrations. “Oh my god. What was wrong with these people?”

  “I told you not to look.”

  “What is all this? There are all these exercises and instruments. Here’s the Atzperger Apparatus. Listen to this: ‘I have seen very good results in building up a broken-down nervous system, from a properly arranged hot-air bath of very short duration, followed by the cold rain-bath or the Scotch douche.’ What’s a Scotch douche? Didn’t they have Ex-lax? What was the big deal about constipation? Oh my god. The self-acting clysopump. There’s a whole chapter on ‘flatus.’ What’s flatus?”

  “Look it up. You’re sitting right next to a dictionary.” Amy had located her old copy of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and was thumbing through it, remembering how, as a child, curious about sex but unwilling to sacrifice her privacy, let alone her dignity, by consulting an adult, she had discovered this tome in the desk drawer of a maternal uncle and swiped it, staying up nights to school herself in the ways of love. It was a miracle, she later realized, that she hadn’t been ruined for life. Assuming that she had not. The case histories alone implied that the human race, with which the child Amy was not familiar, was unredeemable. It had been published a few years prior to the constipation book. What a jolly age that must have been.

  On the positive side, these old books assumed an impressive level of erudition from their readership. Krafft-Ebing, apparently out of concern for propriety, would break into Latin at the drop of a hat. “Listen to this,” she said. “‘He would often stuff long gloves with wool or some such material to make them resemble arms and hands. Them he would make tritus member inter brachia talia artificiala until he had achieved his object.’” While reading Amy saw that she chose this passage precisely because she figured Ricky wouldn’t understand Latin. She and Ricky did not know each other that well, nor would they ever.

  Still she had to explain the book to Ricky, who, half listening, continued to pore over the one he was holding. She did not explain how she had come upon the book, or why. Max had adored it. She remembered him reading out the Latin passages, gravely and with perfect pronunciation, as though reciting the Odes of Horace, and everybody laughing, including her, secure in their derision, enjoying their twentieth-century superiority. What was wrong with these people? Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t wrong with us. Now, reading with fresh eyes, she was diverted by the idea of homemade sex toys, since that’s what the stuffed gloves must have been: the last resort of the Victorian deviate, who had no recourse to specialty shops and catalogs, no support groups, no one to lobby for deviant rights.

  On the one hand, the lonely perch of Mr. Z of Case Study 122 (a clinically diagnosed “kid-glove-fetichist”) was pitiful. Imagine if your therapist was kindly Dr. Krafft-Ebing, who described almost all of his patients as witless perverts of heavily tainted ancestry. Still, she admired the patient’s ingenuity, his can-do spirit. When, at the age of twelve, she had read about Mr. Z, she had fixated only on his “fetich,” trying to figure out what in the world he was doing with those stuffed gloves, and why whatever it was “brought him to the verge of despair and even insanity.” Now she noted with pride that Mr. Z, unlike most of the patients, was American. Of course he was! Mr. Z saw a problem and devised a solution.

  “Listen to this,” said Ricky, still reading. “The Kammigriff. The Application of the Wet Sheet. The Psychrophor. The Row Boat of Ewer. Goodyear’s Pocket Gymnasium. What the hell?”

  “‘A man had an inamorata,’” countered Amy, “‘who allowed him to blacken her hands with coal or soot. She then had to sit before a mirror in such a way that he could see her hands in it. While conversing with her, which was often for a long time, he looked constantly at her mirrored hands.’” Amy had had childhood nightmares about severed hands. She tried to remember whether they started before or after she rifled through her uncle’s desk drawer.

  Ricky burst out laughing, though not at the mirrored hands story. “This guy thinks it’s a fatal mistake to read in the bathroom. He calls it a pernicious habit. He says we shouldn’t try to do two things at once. What’s a Cloacina?”

  “Cloacina was the Roman goddess of sewer drains.”

  “He says, ‘Cloacina is very exacting, and demands the full concentration of the mind.’”

  Amy was about to retort with Max’s favorite case study, the one about the man for whom sexual performance was possible only in the presence of an ugly old woman wearing a nightcap, but again her thoughts wandered, Ricky’s words reminding her how, as a child, even while being terrorized by Krafft-Ebing, what frightened her most about the sexual act was the probability that she would not be able to read while it was going on. Again, she de
clined to share so intimate a fact with her visitor.

  “Can you picture,” said Ricky, “what life must have been like for these people?”

  “With ease,” she replied, rising to place Psychopathia Sexualis on an outlying Reference pile.

  “Amy?” Ricky closed his book with reluctance. “I know it’s weird, but could I borrow this constipation thing? I think I could use it with Caligula. The gross names of those devices—”

  “Ricky, you can’t borrow it, because I don’t want it back. It’s yours.” Amy placed it in the grocery bag.

  “Is it strange,” he asked, blushing a little, “to want to use this stuff in my book?”

  “Why do you think I’m drowning in all these books, you silly person? We write fiction to make sense of the world. That requires research.”

  By tacit consent, they turned back to their task, pausing now and then just to check out a cover, or retrieve something that had drifted out of the books and onto the carpet. No love notes, pressed flowers, or faded ribbons slipped from these pages, but over the next hour they found four letter envelopes, which Ricky discreetly handed to Amy without reading, and which she set aside for later examination.

  By one thirty they both had wine headaches, and Amy was particularly fatigued, but the castles and villages were all complete, and all that remained was to place each category and subcategory into an appropriately sized case or shelf. Into the bedroom bookcases went all the fiction, novels separated from short stories and both separated from dramas. She included her own books with them, alphabetically filed, between Lisa Fugard and John Gardner. One narrow maple bookcase was just the right size for her poetry collection. History, ancient and modern, lined one wall in her office, with a surprising number of biographies—she had not realized that she owned so many—filling up a row of pine shelving against the other wall, along with her disaster books, about the Hartford circus fire, the Mount Pelée Volcano, the San Francisco Earthquake. “Wow, you really like this stuff,” said Ricky, and indeed she did, if by “stuff” he meant “cautionary tales about things that can go terribly wrong and could actually happen to me,” because underneath the Disasters was a shelf quickly bursting with true crime books, five of them on Lizzie Borden alone.

  The handsomest shelves she owned, a set of antique oak bookcases with glass doors, she and Ricky dragged from storeroom to parlor and filled with humor, mythology, philosophy, essays, fairy tales, and the children’s books she had inherited from her mother and father and of which, of all the books she owned, she had actually taken good care, so that their faded covers were intact. To these books she gave pride of place, eye-level center. The very last book she shelved was her father’s Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, with the Arthur Rackham checkerboard cover, a sinister Mother Goose wearing a black hat and riding the goose as though it were a broomstick.

  Ricky offered to help with the remaining mess, but she made him drink a mug of coffee and bundled him out her front door. “Thanks for these,” he said, hugging the full grocery bag. He would not let her pay him for anything—not the blog work, nor his heroic labors in her Augean stables. “I know,” he said, as he backed down the porch steps, “that Carla strong-armed you into teaching us at the retreat.”

  “Just once a month,” she said, “and I wasn’t strong-armed.”

  “Hey, I know Carla, and I also know you have your own work to do, and your own life. This was my pleasure.”

  “Watch out,” she called to him, “for the self-acting clysopump.”

  “And Winternitz’s Device!” he called back.

  What a good boy, she thought as he drove away. And he hadn’t asked her once what she thought about Caligula, or what his chances were of selling the book. She felt a pang, tiny but sharp, as the rear lights of the car disappeared around the corner. She felt as though their good-bye had weight. This was odd. It must have been that phrase, “good boy,” popping up stupidly, as though she could take pride in him, as though he were hers to let go. As though he were her son. She had never felt that way about anyone. She must be getting sentimental in her dotage.

  She closed and locked the door and wandered from room to room. How pleasant to have them all arrayed like that, bundled up and spiffy. Tomorrow she would visit them in daylight. Tomorrow, and the day after that, she would spend a little time with some old friends. She turned out all the lamps except for the two in the parlor, where she sat and looked through those letters that had floated free. There were an ancient bill from Calvary Hospital and an equally old letter of inquiry from her French translators. There was that obnoxious letter the extension people had sent her last year, letting her know she would work for them again when hell froze over. The only treasure in the bunch was an unopened letter from “Bob,” postmarked in August of 1991, telling her he was sure he had left his Cornell class ring next to the bathroom sink and enclosing two dollars worth of twenty-nine-cent tulip stamps. She kept the stamps and threw the rest in the trash, and then, for no reason she could imagine, fished out the old hospital bill, folded it twice, and stuck it in her notebook, where she also scribbled three additions:

  “Calvary”

  “A Time of Great Conformity”

  “The Drawer”

  The only real mess she and Ricky had left behind was a litter of tiny scraps on the parlor carpet. The oldest books had shed the most, brittle shards of yellowed paper arrayed in little mounds, like the chips of winter leaves. She would vacuum in the morning. Amy turned out the lamps and shuffled off to bed. Just like leaves, they crunched beneath her feet.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Molluskeena

  A month later, on the first of April, Amy awoke to exactly the sort of day she despised: a day with appointments, not just one but two, the sort where she had had to use a calendar and pencil in events, each for a particular time and place. This was how most of the world lived. Most people planned meals, outfits, leave-takings, homecomings. Penciled in reminders to drop off or pick up dry cleaning. Most people thought nothing of leaving their dog alone for hours. She didn’t know how most people stood it.

  At eleven she was due at the Birdhouse for her first class with Carla’s retreat people. She would have to keep them occupied for the entire afternoon, at the end of which they’d sit down to eat together. Getting together with Ricky, Tiffany, and Dr. Surtees would probably be pleasant enough, but she was not looking forward to meeting Grahame “Skinny White Bitch” Troy, and she had no idea what it would be like to make small talk with Brie Spangler. Then there was Kurt Robetussien.

  Even worse, before the retreat marathon, at nine in the morning, she had to be back at the KPBS studios for an NPR hookup. Maxine had given her the news in stages: first it was just the date and time and place of the interview; then the fact that she wouldn’t be the only writer talking. That it would be some sort of “round table discussion.” When Amy had resigned herself to that, Maxine had made a third call, a Babe, I forgot to mention call, and what she had forgotten to mention was that there would be an assigned topic: Writing as Ritual. Amy hadn’t picked up a Maxine call for two full days after that. Maxine tried to leave a message on her machine, telling her who the other three round table writers were, but she erased each message before the names. If she knew who they were, she wouldn’t be able to resist looking them up, and she really didn’t want to get bogged down doing that.

  The KPBS parking lot had only two cars in it besides Amy’s Crown Vic, which Amy thought was odd, until she was once again alone in that wonderful quiet room with the ethereal microphone and the comfy office chair and realized that the others weren’t coming. Apparently they were scattered all over the country in different PBS stations, and she would not have to deal with them in person. Her mood lightened. Brie Spangler popped in, offering Amy a cup of coffee, explaining that, with her headphones on, she would hear some sort of lead music and then the interviewer’s voice, and it would be clear when it was her time to speak. As soon as Amy had the headset on, Brie waved good-bye
and popped out again.

  Once again the music was “If They Asked Me, I Could Write a Book,” this time sung by Peggy Lee. The invisible interviewer, whose name was Tom, began by reading a passage from Susan Cheever’s book about her father, who would leave the family apartment every day dressed in a suit and tie as though on his way to the office, and journey by elevator to a storage room in the basement to spend the workday in a dark, airless room alone with his typewriter. Tom then threw open the discussion to his panel of writers, including, along with Amy, Hester Lipp, Constance Lent, and Jenny Marzen.

  Well, of course, thought Amy, and no wonder Maxine had tried to prepare her. Marzen, who had nominated Amy for Best Washed-Up Writer in that ARB feature that had yet to run, had probably suggested her as a fourth for today’s round table. Disinclined by nature and principle to compare herself to other people, Amy was uncomfortably aware, for just a moment, of her low rung on the hierarchy of this small group. Constance Lent, whom she had actually read, was a popular, literate writer of mysteries, the sort that focus more on the why of crimes than on the who; many of her books had been turned into movies or BBC TV series, and while she wasn’t a household word like Marzen, she was, as they say, ensconced. Amy couldn’t place Hester Lipp, but she must be well-known, since Amy knew instantly that her name was spelled with two Ps. A memoirist, apparently, as that’s how Tom described her, at which point Amy tuned out, doodling Ms, large and small, all over one page of her notepad. Amy was the last to be introduced. To her dismay, Tom did this by reading from that haunting old London Times review, the one that had threatened her with destiny: “One of the few writers destined to ignore, outshine, and outlive her own booming, blustering, disappointingly conformist generation.” Two seconds of dead air followed Tom’s pronouncement, before Amy cleared her throat and rasped, “Hello.”