Lights, Camera, Amalee

by Dar Williams

  I’d told him that it wasn’t his fault that the newspaper had been playing in the street without watching for cars. And then he laughed, and I saw the wrinkles around his eyes, and I was done for.

  Suddenly I realized we were in the middle of a silence.

  “Oh! Well, to answer your question, I know they count paper money for you at the bank,” I said. “And I think I’ve seen them counting coins in those paper rolls, but you shouldn’t do this.” I’d come to my senses. This was way too much to ask.

  “I’ll get my truck and bring it down here,” Kyle offered, already jogging away.

  I watched Kyle disappear into his house and come out again, then slowly pull his pickup truck out of the garage and drive up to our curb.

  We — mostly Kyle — used my dad’s cart to heave the crate into the back of the truck. It was a small truck. We watched the whole thing sag.

  Kyle bit his lip. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. We got in the front.

  “So, you just finished sixth grade?” he asked pleasantly.

  Stabbed with a rusty dagger! “Seventh grade,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, right. How was it?” he asked. We were driving through town now, which suddenly seemed like an exciting place where teenagers drove around and hung out.

  I told him how I really liked English and history and that I found out I liked science class, too.

  “I would have liked science,” Kyle told me, “but I was so bad at those experiments! We had to burn down a walnut and then do this equation about how many calories it had, and I came up with, like, a thousand calories.”

  “That was a hard one,” I agreed. “I think I came up with a thousand, too, but so did the rest of the class.”

  “Really?” he asked. “That’s amazing. I just remember thinking ‘Okay, I’m just not good at science.’ Maybe I gave up too early.” He didn’t sound upset. He sounded amused. “Girls who like science are cool,” he added.

  He couldn’t have said anything nicer. I looked out the window and saw myself as a scientist with a lab coat and really cool glasses. I was explaining something to Kyle as he looked into a microscope.

  Kyle found a space right in front of the bank. I told myself this was proof that going to the bank with him was the right thing to do. Kyle found an old sweatshirt in the back and we used it to drag the crate back onto the cart.

  “Thanks, Kyle,” I said, trying to sound close to sixteen.

  “What are you going to do? Don’t you need a ride home?” he asked.

  “No, I’m fine. I can walk. And someone can come back for the bottle,” I assured him, thinking that I could call Phyllis or Joyce or just walk down to John’s restaurant for some help.

  “I’ll wait for you,” Kyle said. “This is the first time I’ve driven since I passed my test. I mean, as soon as I got my license, I drove down to New Paltz and got a new wallet.” He looked embarrassed that he had just admitted this. “I’ll wait,” he insisted, and stood at the back of the bank.

  As I stood in front of the teller, I realized I hadn’t come up with a way to explain myself to her. “I got some money,” I started. “I inherited it —”

  “You have a check?” she interrupted me. I’d seen her before. She was always very businesslike, not especially mean, just All Work. Her name plaque said MONICA HAZLETT.

  “No, I don’t have a check.”

  “Do you have an account here? Did you want to open one?”

  “No — I mean, yes. I have an account here, so I don’t need to open one.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Amalee Everly.” The scientist, I thought. Environmental scientist. I hoped I was handling this well, with Kyle just standing there. “That’s what I got,” I explained, pointing to the coin bottle, which Kyle had stood up so we could see what was in the crate. I saw Leslie Scott’s mother enter the bank as I turned. Leslie and I had been in a few of the same classes.

  “Hi, Amalee,” Mrs. Scott called. She looked at the bottle and then she nodded to Kyle, who nodded back. “What’s up?”

  “How did you get that in here?” Ms. Hazlett asked.

  “I guess we dragged it in,” I said. The sweatshirt, still between the crate and the cart, looked like the crushed witch from The Wizard of Oz.

  “Oh, no,” Ms. Hazlett said with a sigh. “You’ll have to take that home and count the coins yourselves. Here, I’ll give you some coin sleeves.” She leaned down to get them from behind the counter, then called, “What is it, mostly? Nickels? Pennies?”

  Kyle spoke up, “It’s okay. We’ll just take it home to your house. I’ll help you get it inside.”

  That’s when I started to feel desperate, watching all this happen in front of Kyle and even Mrs. Scott.

  “So,” I stammered, “you don’t have a machine or something that counts coins?”

  “No. We don’t.” She pushed the pile of sleeves in my direction. Then she looked over my shoulder and asked Mrs. Scott, “Can I help you?”

  So mean.

  “Yes, I’m curious,” Mrs. Scott said. “Haven’t I seen those machines that count coins here? I’m sure I have.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ms. Hazlett answered, “the bank doesn’t count coins. We offered those machines as part of a promotion.”

  “But I saw them recently, didn’t I? Don’t you have some left over that we could borrow? Maybe I could count a pile for Amalee here. I’ve got a half hour before Leslie’s soccer practice ends.”

  “We’ve got a few machines,” Ms. Hazlett said, looking like she felt bad for being so impatient with me. “I guess I could count a pile, too. It’s been a slow day.”

  “That’s a good idea. I can do that, too,” Kyle said. “If you’ve got an extra one for me to use, I mean.” So polite.

  Ms. Hazlett dropped the whole business look. “I don’t think it will take long if we’re all using the counters,” she confided. “We could get at least part of the job done so you don’t have to drag that whole thing back. What if the bottle broke? It’s so beautiful, so old. I’ll be right back.” She went to a back room and brought back a cardboard box from which she plunked three coin counters on her desk. She took a pad of paper out of her drawer. “Shall we have a contest to see who gets closest to the actual contents of the bottle?” she asked, smiling. “I’m guessing one thousand three hundred twelve.”

  “One thousand three hundred twelve coins?” I asked, not believing what I was hearing.

  “One thousand three hundred twelve dollars,” she answered calmly.

  Wow.

  “This is really nice of you,” I said, looking at everyone, though less at Kyle in case I blushed.

  “It’s no problem,” Mrs. Scott said. “This is a little project. It should be fun!”

  I thought Mrs. Scott should be friends with Phyllis.

  Kyle hauled the bottle over to the desk, introduced himself, tipped the bottle on its side, and dumped out the first coins on the carpet. I started separating them.

  “No need to do that,” Ms. Hazlett said. “The machines will separate the coins, but since we only have three counters, you can be the one who puts the piles on the desk and clears the finished rolls away.”

  I put a pile next to her. “Here we go,” she said, feeding coins into the top of the counter, which immediately started spewing them into different sleeves.

  Mrs. Scott did the same, and Kyle started in on his own pile and said, “Cool.” The sound of coins bouncing on hard plastic was soon echoing through the bank. I had plenty to do just dumping, piling, clearing out, and replacing. Within minutes I was making piles that looked like miniature truckloads of lumber.

  We were already up to about thirty-five dollars … and we’d barely begun to empty the bottle. If this bottle of champagne once filled a hundred glasses, we’d only gone through about three!

  Someone came in, and Ms. Hazlett jumped up to help him, but soon she joined us again.

  “I love counting money,” she confessed.

&n
bsp; “Me, too!” said Mrs. Scott.

  “I still feel like a kid when I’m adding up money from other countries,” Ms. Hazlett added. “It’s so colorful. I really like Australian money.”

  Kyle lifted up the end of the bottle and spilled a melting mountain of coins onto the carpet. There were a few dollars, folded around slips of paper. I unfolded the dollars and the slips of paper, which turned out to be old receipts.

  They were all in computer printout mode, very clear. The first was Caldman’s Pharmacy, June 20, 1999: prescription, prescription, cotton balls, knee brace. I started flashing on my grandmother in her house, pulling cotton balls from the medicine cabinet and keeping medications in the kitchen cabinet. What did she need them for? How long had she been sick?

  Farther down was a dollar with a receipt from the same pharmacy from 1995: reading glasses, magazines, and tissues. Which magazines? I saw her sitting in the sunlit corner of the living room reading a ladies’ magazine.

  In fifth grade, an archeologist visited our school and showed us how archeologists carefully dig through layers of dirt, and how sometimes they’ll find one whole history on top of another. There will be pots and broken plates from the early twentieth century in one layer and arrowheads in a layer farther down.

  Here I was finding history buried in layers of money instead of dirt. There was a bookstore receipt, receipts from a couple of different supermarkets, and lots of pharmacy receipts.

  “Hey!” Ms. Hazlett called out. “More dimes and quarter sleeves, and snap to it!’

  “More quarters and nickels here,” Mrs. Scott added. They laughed at my expression when I saw how many rolls had built up since I’d last looked.

  “Sorry, I was reading these old receipts,” I explained.

  “Really?” Ms. Hazlett stopped for a moment. “That seems so … personal.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “But it was my grandmother, so do you think it’s okay?”

  “It’s absolutely fine,” Mrs. Scott jumped in. “This is all yours. She left you a bottle, not a check. This is much more exciting, more romantic.”

  My face felt hot. She’d said “romantic” in front of Kyle. Luckily he was busy at his counter.

  Mrs. Scott was still talking. “I think she wanted you to know about her. That’s why she left you a thing instead of a dollar amount.”

  I thought again about the note. Mrs. Scott was absolutely right. The bottle made me think of my grandmother’s life, about how she wanted to take the big bottle of coins and escape on her boat. Looking at the bottle made me think of her, and her dreams, and even about how she wanted me to have my own adventures. You couldn’t do that just by writing a check.

  “How much do you have so far?” Kyle asked.

  I counted the piles, putting the rolls in groups of five. We had a little over four hundred dollars! Everyone got a little giddy over my report.

  And we were down to 1981. The 1981 receipt was for the pharmacy again: magazines, toothpaste (three tubes), a toothbrush, and “sparkle hair clips.” Sparkle hair clips? My grandmother was born in 1930. I did the math. She wanted sparkle hair clips when she was fifty-one? She didn’t seem the type.

  Who would she get them for if not herself? Suddenly my hand went weak. My mother. Sally would want them. Sally was eleven years old in 1981, almost my age now.

  August 31, 1981, just before school was starting, right? Had my grandmother put up a fight? Were they red or blue? Maybe they were my grandmother’s idea. Was my mother a tomboy?

  I knew almost nothing about Sally. She was “a little wild,” she had brown hair like mine, and she was not a mean person, according to Carolyn. John said she was “a friendly soul.” I had secretly stored up everything anyone had ever said about her, but now I realized how little that was. She started college and meant to finish but never did. She had long hair. She was wearing a big sweater and a blue hat in the only picture I had of her. She left before I was a year old, but for some weird reason, no one was angry at her for it, maybe because she had died soon after.

  Before everyone noticed I was out of commission again, I reloaded the coin sleeves and put a big pile of coins in front of each of them.

  Ms. Hazlett had put the four hundred dollars aside so I wouldn’t recount it. The new rolls were lining up again.

  A long receipt from Grand Union, 1978, had a few standouts: a chocolate bar (for my mother?), cornflakes, bananas, peanut butter, and flowers. The receipt was from early April. Were the flowers daffodils? Were they my mother’s idea? Did my grandmother buy them because she was in a good mood?

  Farther down, in 1977, there was a receipt for a brush and shampoo from the pharmacy, but I saw something that I was almost too scared to read, handwriting on the back. It was a child’s handwriting. Sally’s handwriting. It had to be. She’d written a list of words: Flower, Power, Shower.

  She’d crossed out Mower, having obviously realized that words with the same spelled endings don’t all rhyme. She wrote Sour and Tower, followed by Chowder and Powder in EMERJUNSEES. I guess if a person was having a poem emergency, she could go to the words that didn’t exactly rhyme. I imagined Sally camped out in the car, waiting for her mother, playing a game with herself. Did she want to write a poem? I could imagine a sweet seven-year-old kid. Was she?

  “I have to go,” Mrs. Scott groaned. “Rats! I wanted to finish the job!” I counted up the total so far. The second pile of money was two hundred ninety dollars, which I added to the other pile and got six hundred ninety-eight dollars and fifty cents. This was already more money than I’d ever had, and there was no end in sight.

  “That’s amazing,” Mrs. Scott marveled. “What are you going to do with all this loot, Amalee?”

  “I’m making a movie,” I said.

  “Really?” Kyle asked. He knew I had no idea before now what kind of money I was going to get.

  I was very surprised, and then excited, that this was my answer. I knew that when I saw Mr. Chapelle’s movie, I had wished I had a movie camera. “Yeah, I’m making a movie,” I repeated. It would be my first project as an environmental scientist. “Not a big one. Just a little one.”

  “I’ll tell Leslie, if you like,” Mrs. Scott said. “She’s going on a canoe trip in July, but she loves making costumes and clothes on my old sewing machine. It’s her latest thing.”

  “Excellent,” I said. Leslie had been one of the first girls in our class to have a real boyfriend — one in the eighth grade. I decided not to mention that this was her latest thing, too.

  Mrs. Scott left after Ms. Hazlett promised she’d tell her if she won the guessing contest.

  I had guessed three hundred and ten dollars.

  I replaced Mrs. Scott at her coin counter and thought about my film while I watched the coins fly into their various coin-sleeve homes.

  An hour later, the bottle was empty and Ms. Hazlett was counting everything up and putting the money into my account for me.

  She handed me a receipt, which I added to the pile of receipts from the bottle. So this was what the day had brought: I was going to make a film. It would be about endangered species, I decided. And I had two thousand eight hundred eighty-one dollars and thirty-two cents to make it.

  Would somebody look at that receipt and wonder what it felt like to be a twelve-year-old with that much money? They couldn’t know about how Mrs. Scott saved me from embarrassment or that Kyle had been sitting next to me after she left and that it felt like there was a wave of electricity between our arms. But they’d know something important had happened.

  Maybe everything changed the day that Sally got those sparkle hair clips instead of plain ones. And maybe this piece of paper, dated June 8, would be the record of the day my whole life would change, too.

  Kyle drove me home. The empty bottle was easy for him to lift now. I tried to give him twenty dollars as a thank you, but he said I should keep everything for the movie.

  “You gave up your whole afternoon!” I protested.

  “
It was fun,” he said. “I had my last exam today and I had nothing to do before we go partying tonight. What else was I going to do — celebrate with an ice-cream cone?”

  I laughed with him at this ridiculous idea. That’s exactly what I would have done. I stared out the window.

  How could I tell Dad about what happened in a way that would surprise him the most? It wasn’t Dad at the end of the driveway when Kyle dropped me off, though. It was Joyce, jogging out slowly in her soft pink shoes. She was a therapist for teenagers, and she often had a look that said, “I’m listening. I care.” It used to drive me crazy, but I’d gotten used to her perfumed, flowery, friendly ways. I had to admit that her therapy language and even her tricks had helped me when my dad was sick.

  “Amalee!” she cried. “Where have you been? I saw your bike was still here, and … hello.” The last word was directed at Kyle.

  “Hi,” Kyle responded shyly.

  “What’s your name?” Joyce asked sweetly but not very nicely.

  “This is Kyle,” I broke in. “He lives down the street. He drove me to the bank.”

  Joyce wasn’t smiling.

  “I just got my license,” Kyle reassured her. “I’m a legal driver.”

  “Ohhh.” Joyce looked relieved. “That explains it.”

  Explains what? I was too embarrassed to ask.

  I got out of the car. Joyce and I watched Kyle slowly back out of the driveway, craning his neck to make sure there were no cars coming.

  “You’re fine!” Joyce shouted helpfully.