Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  “Oh, Amy, you’re so funny!”

  “I’m not kidding,” Amy said sharply. “Put them in chairs.”

  Carla, chastened, did her best, and soon Amy was facing a line of hunched, frightened people. Under normal circumstances, this tableau would have cracked her up and lifted the mood. Half of them were sitting on fake tree stumps, the fake brook was babbling robotically, and they were all looking at her as though she might go off, which was absurd. Amy never went off. But Amy, like Hester Lipp, was not amused. “Why do you want to write?” she asked them, sounding, even to her own ears, like an angry mother pointing to a mess and asking who did it.

  She had given very mild versions of this speech many times before, often during first class, the object being to make students confront their own expectations and preconceptions and to enter into the spirit of a workshop with a reasonable attitude. She had often touched on the difficulties of getting published, the heartache of rejection, the letdown if and when you do get something in print. But now she piled it on thick. “Everybody knows someone who brags about papering her walls with rejection slips, or keeping them in a scrapbook, or displaying them under glass like matchbook covers, or making them into a hat. That’s nothing to brag about. That’s not admirable bravado. It’s foolish. If you’re getting lots of rejections, that just means you’re sending your stuff out there. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Get over it.” When she had finished blunting their keenness for the task at hand, she moved on to the publishing industry, the superabundance of books, her old song about how we should all stop writing and read instead. She described in obscene detail how out-of-print books get pulped. Some of these people had heard this before, but she made them listen to it again.

  She ranted to drown out her thoughts about Hester Lipp and Jenny Marzen and the shameful pleasure with which she had prodded and poked at them, lobbing spitballs like a little kid. She had never acted like that in her life. Hermits don’t engage. She could have made exactly the same points in a civilized manner, but no, she’d wised off about Moleskine and fruit cellars. She continued hectoring and simultaneously heard the echo of that last speech, her national radio swan song, prattling about leaving your mark and “communication is all,” for god’s sake, she’d sounded like a moron. Maxine was going to kill her. “One more thing,” she said at last, reaching into her bag for notebook and pen. “We’re here to discuss writing. Not publication. Do not ask me about agents. Are there any questions?”

  Amy’s cell phone crowed wildly. She must have nudged it back on when she grabbed the notebook. Amy reached into her bag and shut it down without looking, keeping her own expression stony, daring anybody to laugh. Kurt Robetussien took her up on it. “You got chickens in there?” he asked, pointing to the bag, and Ricky said, “Or are you just glad to see us?” and the rest held their breath while Amy decided how she felt about that. “I’m always glad to see you,” she said, and to her surprise, she was.

  She would have been much gladder to be home alone with her dog, but she was calm now. For the next hour she let them talk a little about their six projects and then give one another feedback on what they’d read so far. They had by now shown one another the chapters Amy had read (during the “rigorous admissions process”). Amy planned to devote twenty minutes to each piece but got some extra time from Tiffany, who admitted that she hadn’t submitted enough material for them to chew on and bowed out of the discussion. No one, not even Ricky, disagreed with her, so they moved on to Dr. Surtees and his Obamacare thriller. If he had hoped for a pass from his fellow physician, he must have been disappointed, since Kurt R shredded the first chapter of Womb to Tomb while the rest watched. “What you’re describing here,” said Kurt, “is medical malpractice. It has nothing to do with socialized medicine. The old lady’s cardiologist is such a jerk that he doesn’t catch the pacemaker snafu, doesn’t take her family’s calls, and basically ignores her to death. She wouldn’t be circling the drain in the first place if he had done his job.” Dr. Surtees attempted to laugh off the criticism in a collegial way, as though it were all about politics rather than aesthetics, and had Amy been teaching a real class she would have called him on it, but she let it pass.

  Grahame Troy, the blonde in yoga pants, did a five-minute paean to Kurt’s novel, the brilliance of the scene between the oncology nurse and the dying kid, how enlightened it was that a doctor was writing from the point of view of a nurse. Surtees asked him why he made that choice, and Kurt said nurses were more interesting than doctors. “I see,” said Dr. Surtees, who seemed more annoyed by the general praise of Kurt’s chapter than the drubbing his own had gotten.

  Getting them to talk about Brie Spangler’s stuff was difficult, perhaps because it was already so polished, but more likely because Brie had apparently made up a whole world rather than confining herself to home base, as had the two physicians and Tiffany. Amy admired Brie’s ambition and reach: she wasn’t writing about a female journalist. She was dealing with an uneducated petty criminal who accidentally helps murder somebody, and it was clear from the tone of just the first chapter that the novel would be dark and tragic. Amy made a promise to herself that she would, in the coming weeks, pay special attention to Brie.

  Sighing, Amy announced it was time to discuss Skinny White Bitch. “That’s ‘Chick,’” said Yoga Pants, clearly put out, and Amy apologized, but she went on to make the same mistake twice more in the ensuing discussion, so that by the end of the segment Yoga Pants plainly disliked her with Lippesque intensity. If this had been a real workshop, rather than workshop-lite, Amy would have bent over backward to assure her that the fault was her own. (Actually if Yoga Pants hadn’t made such a big deal out of the mistake, Amy wouldn’t have kept making it.) She would have joked about her aging brain and failing eyesight. She would have stopped Ricky from riffing on chick vs. bitch and “Seriously, what difference does it make?” She would have reined in the class, not one of whom had anything positive to say about the stupid thing. Even Carla was dismissive: “I’m really sorry,” she said, “but if this isn’t chick-lit, I don’t know what is.”

  Amy left the discussion of Caligula’s Scalpel until the very end, figuring its lurid subject matter would generate a lot of talk just at the point where class energy is apt to flag, but even she was impressed by the general surge of enthusiasm. Carla and Tiffany, who usually disagreed about everything, both said it was brilliant and creepy. The doctors found it entertaining; even though Caligula’s plan to create serial killers through brain surgery was science fiction, it was fun science fiction. This surprised Amy, as she had thought the plot was just silly, but as she listened to them talk, she found herself agreeing, at least about the entertaining part. Ricky’s language was still rather self-conscious and stilted, but even in this early chapter he was loosening up, enjoying his absurd creation. Only Yoga Pants disliked it, calling it “formulaic,” prompting a mass eye-roll so spontaneous that it seemed synchronized like a wave cheer, and Amy had to look away to keep from laughing. This was a good group; she was almost sorry that her involvement with them would not run very deep. Again she felt that pinprick, that odd pang that had accompanied Ricky’s leavetaking the other night, and now could begin to narrow it down; it was some form of sorrow. Again she put it away.

  * * *

  For the next hour she walked around the lagoon, balancing a plate of food, touching base with the people she knew, acknowledging a wave from Brie Spangler, who was locked in a phone call across the room, listening politely as Yoga Pants, who probably thought Kurt Robetussien was single, bragged to him about how she had folded all her rejection slips into origami swans. She remembered then that the fictional skinny white bitch chick had also plastered her walls with rejection slips. No wonder Yoga Pants resented her. Amy had unwittingly singled her out when she was ranting at them for wanting to be writers. She would never have done such a cruel thing on purpose. She was not a cruel person. Not before today anyway.

  “It comes in a kit
,” said Carla passing by, spooning pineapple chunks on her plate, and Amy was just fine with not having a clue what she meant. A half hour later she was back with a mug of hot green tea, plain, just as Amy liked it. “The inside is styrofoam, and when you get it in the house, it’s glued in layers, but you can’t see the seams.”

  “The boulder,” said Amy. “That’s how you got it in here.”

  “You can get kits for anything,” said Carla.

  Amy reached up and patted Carla’s shoulder, surprising herself with voluntary human contact. “I’m tired,” she said. “I think I’ll go home.”

  On her way to the door, Kurt Robetussien startled her, stepping out from behind an adolescent Norfolk pine, which she identified as such at the same moment he spoke her name. She was so distracted by the plant that she missed what he was saying. What was so riveting about a Norfolk pine, she wondered, then recalling the small one she had been carrying when she brained herself on the birdbath, eventually resulting in an encounter with this very doctor. A doctor with whom she was now forced to have a cringeworthy word about medical discretion. Coincidences, she told her students, must occur much more sparingly in fiction than in the real world. He was smiling at her, awaiting a response. “You’re doing good work,” she told him, hoping that answered his question. She didn’t want to seem dotty or scattered to a man who had stuck a stethoscope down her blouse and listened to her heartbeat: a man who had seen behind those blue privacy curtains. If he asked her if she’d scheduled a mammogram yet, she would lie.

  “So are you,” he said, and she smiled back and reached for the doorknob. “You were fantastic this morning. I was rolling on the floor. Don’t worry, it’s my day off, I wasn’t rolling on the floor of the ER!” Again, she was wrong-footed. Even allowing for hyperbole, he hadn’t laughed helplessly during class, and in any event Amy had never been less hilarious in her life. “I didn’t know,” he continued, “that you were a radio personality.”

  Oh god, she thought. “Neither did I,” said Amy, attempting a smooth recovery, horrified to realize that people, at least one person, had actually heard the broadcast. She hadn’t thought of that. Assuring him that she’d see him in a month, reminding him that he could email her anytime about his fiction, she turned to get away before he could inquire about her colon, breast, or brain, or worse, about her radio hijinks. But then she remembered: she couldn’t make her getaway just yet.

  She leaned in a few inches and lowered her voice. “A word,” she said, “about the…” About the what? Birdbath? Last night she had tried rehearsing this moment and had found even the rehearsals too uncomfortable to pursue. With the careless confidence of a child, she had imagined the phrasing would come to her. This extremely rare coin was minted in 1949.

  “Novel?” asked Kurt. “Don’t worry. I can take criticism. I’m not even sure I’m serious about the thing. This is my wife’s fault, really—she insists it’s pretty good. She’s a writer herself, actually—”

  “Birdbath,” said Amy.

  “What?”

  “The accident. My accident. The ER. The MRI.” She had to keep feeding him clues, because obviously he’d forgotten about the whole thing, and great, she had now managed to remind him. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was just worried about … you know…”

  “Have you had any more episodes of amnesia?” His expression had changed instantly to one of professional concern, tinged with just a hint of disappointment.

  She had managed not only to remind him of the accident but also to present herself as a freeloader, one of those people who sidle up to physicians at parties to ask them if a skin tag on their underarm is anything to worry about. “No, no, no,” she said, “I’m so sorry, no. Completely different issue.”

  “What are your symptoms?”

  “I don’t have any symptoms,” she said. “I’m talking about my … Listen. That silly accident I had, the one I met you about—” Amy had not been this inarticulate since she was eight years old, if then. For what seemed like hours she explained about the accident’s aftermath, and the fact that she was getting critical attention from which she was continuing to benefit and hoped to continue benefiting. He kept looking at her closely, quizzically, no longer annoyed but also not getting her point, which forced her into a vivacity which probably looked as grotesque as it felt. She laughed, she gestured airily, she actually touched him lightly on the arm, as if she were the type of woman who touched people, and still he waited for her to come out with it. “Look,” she said. “You’re the only person in the world who knows that I gave that interview non compos mentis.”

  His face relaxed. “Got it,” he said. “Hey, no worries. Your secret is safe with me. Everybody’s secrets are safe with me. I’m a doctor.”

  “Except now I’ve insulted you by implication,” she said, “and I am so sorry.”

  “Tell me honestly,” he said. “Is my stuff as awful as Womb to Tomb? I thought I’d be the only doctor here.”

  So much for Amy’s Shameful Secret. Kurt’s was that he wasn’t there just because his wife pushed him into it. “Are you kidding?” asked Amy. “I never met a doctor who didn’t want to be a novelist. But you’re the first one,” she was happy to tell him, “that could actually make it. Just don’t tell that to Surtees.”

  She left him smiling, happy, oblivious to the gimlet-eyed approach of Yoga Pants.

  * * *

  Amy was just getting into her car when Brie ran out of the house. “Is your phone off? Because Tom Maudine has been trying to get you for hours.”

  “Who’s Tom Maudine?”

  “The interviewer!”

  “Oh. Tom.” Was she supposed to call him back so he could yell at her? Maybe she should. Maybe that would make her feel better.

  “Also Constance Lent called a couple of times, and also Eliot Riyad.” She handed Amy a piece of paper with numbers on it. “He’s one of the producers. Of NPR. In Washington.”

  She was such a nice girl. She kept adding information in discrete dribs, careful not to insult Amy’s intelligence, just as Amy had done with Kurt. Brie needn’t have worried. “Producers of what?” asked Amy.

  “NPR. They have a million of them.”

  Amy sat down in the driver’s seat, staring dully at the piece of paper. “Am I supposed to call these people?”

  Brie leaned down, propping her elbows on the car door. “They’d like it if you did,” she said, “but if you want to call them back tomorrow, that’s fine too. And if you don’t, I’ll bet they keep trying.”

  Amy looked up at her. “Why?” she asked.

  “You were good,” said Brie, smiling. Then she grinned. “Boy, Jenny Marzen made an ass out of herself, didn’t she?”

  “Is that why I was good? Was I good at making other people look bad?”

  Brie thought for a minute. “Only in comparison,” she said. “Not on purpose.” She closed the door gently. “See you in a month!” she said, running back into the house.

  Amy drove down to the cove and parked, rolling down the window, just listening to the cries of the terns and gulls. There were no bathers today. Out in the water she could see a fin. A dolphin maybe, or a shark, depending on your mood. If Brie was right, whatever Amy’s fall had set in motion back in January was still steaming along. She hadn’t derailed it. Not that she had meant to. She had left her house today almost looking forward to that radio interview, that quiet room.

  Max was wrong about her being dead set on failure. She wasn’t dead set on anything, and all her life she had been content with that. She had regarded ambition as a flaw, or something close to it. Ambitious people thought they could see into the future, and worse, loved what they saw. They called it “potential.” They drew up blueprints, laid foundations, planned expansions. They were deluded, of course, and if they lucked out, they never admitted their luck. Their success had been foreordained. Their visions realized. Now Amy for the first time could sense the future, that sleeping monster, stirring, waking, lumbering upr
ight. Looking straight at her.

  Before leaving for home, she got out her notebook and wrote the titles

  “Rituals”

  “You Can Get Kits For Anything”

  “Privacy Curtains”

  “Your Intact Boundaries”

  There was plenty of daylight left, and she needed to write, to clear her head, to put the rest away. She would not be calling anyone back today.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  No Goggling

  Amy became a weekly fixture on Maudine’s show, driving down to the KPBS station each Friday morning for a new “round table.” She had agreed to do this providing that no topic be set ahead of time. She and the rest of the writers would come up with something spontaneously. Maxine said they were worried about dead air. “So the worst thing that could happen is a few seconds of silence?” said Amy. “Tell them to take the long view.” “What are you,” asked Maxine, “a Buddhist?” But Amy prevailed, and although some weeks were better than others, the discussions were lively and often very funny. Whenever a writer would get momentarily self-conscious, Amy would say, “Nobody’s listening anyway. It’s just us,” and the speaker’s tongue would get untied. Maudine sputtered about this a few times but before long decided to go with it, and the title of the show, which had been “Writers Speak!” became “Just Us.”

  “Everything you touch,” complained Maxine, “turns to bronze.” Maxine had called with news. “The Munster piece is running this Sunday.”

  “Munsterpiece!” Startling herself into a laugh, Amy choked on an apple slice, holding the phone away from her ear, and when she put it back, Maxine was saying something about Constance Lent. “Maxine, I thought the ARB story was dead in the water, what with my radio antics with Jenny Marzen. Wasn’t she the one who put me up for the list in the first place?”

  “You don’t listen,” said Maxine. “I just said.” Maxine really sounded put out. “Not only is Marzen still in your corner, but there’s a bunch more, including half the writers you’ve been talking with on the radio. Munster’s cutting the list from ten to five, giving the five writers-to-rediscover more space, and you’re going to lead off the list, so you’ll get top billing and more space than everybody else. This is huge.” When had people started using “huge” like this?