Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  * * *

  Amy picked up the ringing phone. “It’s two in the morning,” she said.

  “I don’t sleep much anymore.”

  “I was going to call you first thing.”

  “Sure you were.”

  “You know I was.”

  “What’s the deal, babe?”

  Alphonse had given up on Amy ever going to bed and was dreaming about cottontails and coyotes on the rug beneath her computer desk, his stubby legs jerking adorably. “The deal is I don’t fly and I don’t go anywhere without my dog. Otherwise, I’m yours.”

  “Back at you,” said Maxine, and hung up.

  “I’m a shining star,” whispered Amy, waking Alphonse, and together they toddled off to bed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  There’s Your Story

  Amy began the next morning with the assumption that a first-class Amtrak roomette would provide room for both of them, then learned that dogs were not allowed on trains. Unless there actually were a Loretta Lynn lit-fic tour bus, she would have to subject him—and herself and the Crown Vic—to an extended road trip. She was trying to imagine how to manage this when Maxine called.

  “How would you feel about being bipolar?” asked Maxine.

  “Happy and sad. Listen—”

  “It’s either that or clinically depressed or—bad idea—schizophrenic.”

  “Look, they won’t let my dog on the train.”

  “Way ahead of you. Here’s the deal. Alphonse can travel with you everywhere if he’s what they call a service dog. Unless you want to wear dark glasses and bang into walls, which would be fraud anyway, your best bet is some sort of mental disability. You’ll have to get certified, and so will your dog. We can do the whole thing in three weeks. Two. I know people. It’ll cost you a little, though.”

  While Maxine rattled off the Service Dog Plan, Amy watched through her back door as Alphonse rooted around at the base of the birdbath. He did not look particularly excited about the investigation; still, this was his yard, his birdbath, and she felt a stab of guilt about her whimsical decision to drag him across the country. He was aging, like Amy. He needed his rest.

  “Of course, you’ve got phobias up the wazoo,” Maxine was saying, “but those are iffy when it comes to certification. Phobias could get him certified as what they call an Emotional Support Dog, but those aren’t Service and they won’t get him on the train and in the hotel. How about clinical depression, babe?”

  “Look,” said Amy. “I really appreciate it, and I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is going to work out.”

  “I’m emailing you some material right now. Look it over.” She coughed elaborately and hung up.

  Maxine’s first attachment was a color photo of a malamute gazing serenely out a train window. He was sitting on a narrow bed, his owner’s wizened hand resting on the crown of his noble head, and he looked fulfilled. The caption read, “Aurelius guides his partner, a one-hundred-year-old woman suffering from bipolar antisocial personality disorder, across Canada on the fabled Rocky Mountaineer.” Damn Maxine, who knew this would make Amy laugh and weaken her resolve. Amy skimmed electronic brochures. Apparently the basset would have to wear a natty vest of cobalt blue with “Hands Off, I’m On the Job” printed on it in marigold-yellow. There were patches, tags, wallet ID cards, and a certificate suitable for framing. Squinting, she noted that the certificate did not specify the owner’s disability. She called Maxine. “Seriously,” she said. “I’m not disabled. This is fraud any way you look at it.”

  “Now we’re talking,” said Maxine.

  “How would I obtain this thing, this proof that I’m unable to function without him, except by lying my head off to some official?”

  “I know some people,” said Maxine.

  “Mobsters?”

  “Give me a couple weeks. You don’t have to do a thing. Meanwhile, I’ve got you ten bookings already, beginning the third week in August, so bye.”

  Within a week, Maxine had set her up as a certified victim of HPD. Hypervigilant Personality Disorder sufferers were asocial types who upset their fellows and distracted themselves by “constantly searching for hidden meanings in ordinary things.” Apparently this so-called disorder involved both excessive sensory overload, which was silly since Amy had been able to blink away most sensory stimuli since childhood, along with an “unhealthy preoccupation with the inner lives of other people,” which instantly neuroticized every novelist who ever lived. “A typical afflictee is prone to imagine the most outlandish possibilities. Does the man sitting next to me on the commuter train have a bomb in his briefcase? Will the truck I’m passing blow a tire, swerve in front of my car, and kill me?” How was this an affliction? Anyway, wondering wasn’t the same as obsessing. What the websites described was more along the lines of a benign thought experiment, the sort of thing she routinely engaged in to keep from getting bored. To the HPD brigade, it was a symptom of malignant creativity.

  “You’re a natural, babe,” said Maxine, and Amy agreed that if called upon she could probably fake it.

  * * *

  She spent two weeks packing and preparing. The vet pronounced Alphonse hale and in remarkably good shape for a nine-year-old basset, “especially the spine,” which looked youthful on the x-ray. There were no shadows there, no fog either, she was pleased to see. She thought about closing down the house but decided instead to hire a sitter. Ricky Buzza, only fitfully employed and still living with his dad, was delighted. On the strength of five chapters and an outline, he had attracted the curiosity of an agent (a good one, Maxine said) to flog his serial killer novel. “She’s not on board yet. She says Caligula’s Scalpel is a mouthful, and I can see that. Plus nobody would name their kid Caligula anyway. I’m calling it Tiberius.”

  Carla and the gang wanted to throw her a bon voyage party, but she put them off, dealing with their latest submissions electronically. Patrice Garrotte, she was happy to see, had been welcomed into the Birdhouse Retreat—he was actually living on the premises and writing fiction, not memoir. He wrote a story not about his mother, not quite, but about aging sisters, one a writer who lives in a Nantucket beach house with a long white porch. The architectural similarity to her plane-dream, the one at the Lake George cottage, was startling. Not much happened in the story, which was mostly atmospheric, but the women were sharply drawn. She could not see herself full-on in either of them, but she was somehow there in it. When she was young, she had taught graduate students in Orono and had watched workshop writers cannibalize one another in their fiction, stealing names, faces, biographies, social quirks, ostensibly all in fun, but really to diminish their competitors, to pin them to the page, and she had found this an ugly practice, particularly as most of them had no idea of their real motives. Now here was Patrice, and she did not feel pinned. Only taken in. Good for him.

  * * *

  On the 12th of August, Amy and Alphonse set off in a stretch limo for Union Station, Los Angeles. Amy didn’t even argue about the limo this time, which was free anyway, directly paid for by somebody, not Maxine. She had hoped he would snooze on the floor, but car travel had always made him uneasy, and he spent most of the trip pacing the long floor in desperate search for a scent other than artificial new car. Once again she became anxious. How would he survive two full days on a train to Chicago? But five minutes after the Chief began its eastward slide, he clambered up on the opposite seat in their little roomette and, after a cursory glance out the window, fell fast asleep. The rocking of the train was as soothing to him as to Amy.

  She did wonder at the outset whether her HPD would cause conductors and porters (now for some reason called “car attendants”) to look at her funny, readying themselves for outbursts of irrational vigilance, but they did not seem apprehensive, and they all smiled at Alphonse. Apparently all the world loved a basset.

  Next she fretted about his bathroom breaks, which would require leaping off the train at various stops (she had packed a box of ziploc
k bags) and frantically searching for a patch of green. The Amtrak people had warned that stops were of an unpredictable length. But the porters looked out for her, letting her know the best stations and longest stops, and the procedure was much less fraught that she had anticipated. By the time they got to Kansas, two Japanese teens in the next roomette, having discovered Alphonse, were attending to his every whim. Before she reached Chicago, Amy realized that she had run out of anxiety triggers. She had nothing to worry about, and for the first time in her life found herself enjoying a journey.

  She was having an adventure. She was at home on the road.

  Within three days she had done a radio interview, two bookstore appearances, and the first lit-fic panel, joining Jenny M, some poet, and a Booker longlister with a terrible head cold. Amy tuned out of most of it, a series of cliché lamentations on the general illiteracy. Late in the hour, when prodded by the student moderator, she launched into a defense of libraries real and virtual, reassuring the audience that whether books are read or not, they are no longer in danger of disappearing forever. The only way the modern-day Library of Alexandria could burn was if the world ended, in which case illiteracy would be the least of our problems. The poet, who had been silent for the whole hour, countered with something cryptic about the looming Age of Darkness, at which point they all congratulated themselves and broke for prosecco and brie.

  This was to be the default script of the traveling lit-fic show as they hopscotched through the heartland through late summer and into the fall, most of the panel discussions set down in university commons rooms, lecture halls, and libraries. They hit DePaul, Case Western, Ohio State, Beloit, and everything in between. All the campuses were green, all of the older buildings Early American Greek. On Columbus Day they crossed the border into Ontario and did York in Toronto, then on to McGill in Montreal. The panel personnel were as interchangeable as the undergraduates who ushered them around.

  Maxine had arranged for Amy to speak at Colby, where she had earned her undergraduate degree, and in Waterville they were joined at dinner by an old beau of Max’s whom Amy could neither recall nor recognize, who welcomed her “home” and then embraced her, sobbing. She was surprised, even as she extricated herself, at how little this upset her. Six months ago she would have retracted like a turtle. Now she patted his back, murmured the requisite clichés, sent him off, and enjoyed the curious glances of panelists and faculty, who waited in vain for a backstory. She was the featured speaker that night, to a packed audience in Lorimer Chapel. As had become her custom, she talked for a quarter hour and then threw the discussion open to the crowd. They asked questions about her old novels, half of which she couldn’t answer because she had not looked at the books for decades. Apparently she was beginning to be taught.

  An improbably tall girl introduced herself as president of the Maine chapter of the American Ephemera Association, and Amy, thinking this was a brilliant put-on, drew her out at great length. One minute she was talking about ticket stubs, 7-11 receipts, and toddlers using magnet letters to spell out immortal gibberish on refrigerator doors, and then next she was asking Amy a paragraph-length question about the role of ephemera in twenty-first-century writing. Apparently the question was serious, so Amy tried to answer without laughing.

  Everything everybody wrote was ephemeral as far as anyone knew. Future scholars might regard the whole of all their works—Amy gestured to include her lit-fic colleagues—as no more significant than unearthed pottery shards. Jenny M sprang to her feet, ostensibly to second Amy, but really to burnish her own future shards, allowing Amy to tune out long enough to remember that here, in this place, she and Max had wed. The event had been low-key and last-minute, just the chaplain and a few friends, and she could remember almost nothing of it—not the weather, or what she wore, or whether Max’s hair was still long, or even who the friends were. They had gone to Augusta that morning for the license and planned to marry on the weekend, but then said what the hell. It was a what-the-hell wedding in every sense, and the chapel interior had surely been repainted and updated many times since that day, yet she could suddenly see the chaplain’s sad face as though he stood before her right now, pronouncing them man and wife. How odd memory, to house such tiny drawers, spring-loaded like Chinese puzzle boxes. She had not seen Max clearly in her mind’s eye even once since his death, and here was this man she had not thought of in forty years, sharp as a Kodachrome slide, his long face lined and gray. He had been distracted with grief. His son had just been killed at Quang Tri.

  She fled the chapel as soon as she could and took Alphonse for a stroll around Johnson Pond. He liked fresh water. Before the trip neither had known this, since the one time she took him to Moonlight Beach he had been outraged by the surf, the way the water snuck up on him when he was investigating marine curios. He had gotten his big feet wet and blamed it on her. Ponds were different. They probably smelled a lot better without all that decomposing seaweed. Almost every college campus had one, its honest shoreline teeming with items of interest—sushi wrappers, beer cans, neon-colored condoms like radioactive jellyfish. He surely had a stronger sense of the history of this place than Amy did. But for the ghost of Pastor Swanson, the campus stirred up no memories for her. She could vaguely recall her old dormitory sitting room and the library coffee lounge; she remembered ten-foot snowdrifts, beer keg races, panty raids, and one drunken sophomore night when everybody, even Amy, sledded on cafeteria trays down the icy terraced hill in center campus. She could, if she tried hard enough, recall the scent of wet wool, the awful stab of chilblains on her exposed fingers. But she could not recall a single person or conversation, or indeed any significant event. Her life had certainly not begun here. If anywhere.

  She sank down in the grass, fished out her cell, and called Maxine. “This is getting old,” she said.

  “As soon as you do Manhattan, you can dump the panel and go wherever you want.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind? Is this going to make you look bad?”

  “What do I care? Anyway, you lasted longer than I thought you would. Where do you want to go? I can book you straight home from Penn Station.”

  Amy imagined trudging through her front door. She saw the waiting computer, the blinking answering machine. “I’ve never been to the Great Northwest,” she said.

  “I’m on it,” said Maxine. Her voice was stronger than usual. Maybe she was taking some new meds.

  “No more colleges,” said Amy. “No more kids.”

  Maxine promised bookstores and libraries, and hung up.

  “We’re going to take Manhattan,” she said to him.

  * * *

  Alphonse loved the Spalding, an eccentric hotel near the West Village catering to creative types and their pets. Per its brochure, from the minute he swept through its old-fashioned revolving doors, he was home. Here he didn’t need to be a service dog, nor did Amy have to pretend to be unusually vigilant. He was walked, fed, and massaged, all on someone else’s dime. The brochure also offered psychic basset readings for an extra charge, which didn’t sound at all East Coast to Amy, but apparently California was winning in certain culture skirmishes.

  She spent three days without him, being shuttled between radio and TV stations. She met too many people and stared into too many white lights. Everyone was courteous and friendly—she did not have a single Chaz Molloy moment—but she was never able to figure out what any of these people wanted from her.

  Really, her whole life had been like that.

  Because of Arab uprisings and the tanking economy there was no room for her on Charlie Rose, but she had no time to be grateful because she was instantly booked on four talk shows as well as another C-SPAN snooze festival, this time an interview with a man she probably should have recognized, who spent most of his on-screen time with her fielding telephone questions. Apparently C-SPAN had learned not to tweet.

  The talk shows were marginally more interesting. She met some famous actors and actresses, most tiny
and thin with outsize heads. They looked like beautiful balloons on sticks, and they were mostly quite pleasant. She met a nasty comedian with terrible manners and a handler who circled him in a cartoon whirlwind, supplying coffee and drugs; she met an old woman from Tallahassee who crocheted with her feet. “I learned when I was a kid,” she told Amy while they were waiting in the green room. “My sister had no hands and could do everything with her feet. I was very competitive.” Amy watched her performance on the monitor. The audience loved her, not so much for the crocheting, which was impressive but grotesque, but for her offhand explanation: “I was bored,” she said, when asked why she cultivated this talent, then shrugged elaborately and twinkled for the cameras. She did not mention her handless sister, whose mention would surely have dampened the crowd’s enjoyment of the trick. She really was competitive.

  Amy wrote “handless” in her notebook but expected nothing from it. Her story ideas were drying up, not because she was fresh out, but because she wasn’t built for writing on the road. She missed her dog. She yanked him from the canine masseuse and brought him with her to the last show; they let him out onstage with her, where he amused everyone inordinately. You would think they had never seen a basset hound in their lives.

  * * *

  Three days later Amy and Alphonse bridged the Mississippi at LaCrosse, Wisconsin, racketing toward the Northern Pacific through farmland and forest and the long, somber prairies of North Dakota and Montana. After a dutiful trudge through megastores in Minneapolis and St. Paul, they visited only little independent bookstores. Portage, Winona, Devil’s Lake, Minot. They took their time, disembarking for a day or two at each stop, staying at Motel 6s and local B and Bs. Finally all Maxine’s preparations were paying off: Amy actually had to explain about her HPD more than once to justify rooming with her service dog. In the big city hotels, they knew, more or less, who she was and never asked. In the heartland, she was mostly unknown. Amy liked it here.