Lights, Camera, Amalee

by Dar Williams

  “I’m sure anything you can tell me would be perfect for my movie,” I said, “if it has to do with endangered species.” I explained how the movie was set up so far.

  “Alrighty,” said Betsy. “So you’ll have these frogs giving us examples of these different aspects of the importance of the natural world. I got it. Good idea! I’m glad people your age are interested in this stuff,” she continued, almost to herself. “It’s important. I’ve seen it firsthand.” She looked at the bags she still had to haul and then suddenly waved them off. “I want to show you something. A couple things.” She nodded toward the back.

  I pulled out the camera and asked if I could turn it on.

  “Absa-toot-ly,” she said. “I don’t get any more presentable than this.”

  As we walked to a greenhouse, she told me that a quarter of the medicines we use come from the rain forest, at least originally. She said there were many rain forests, some of them in the United States as far up as the Pacific Northwest.

  She led me into a tunnel-shaped greenhouse, then stopped in front of a row of white orchids and suggested where I should stand to show as many of them as I could. It all looked beautiful on camera. The art teachers were right when they said repetition was pleasing to the eye, and Betsy must have known this. She went into full expert mode as she stood in front of them, saying, “Most people think of the Amazon rain forest when they think of rain forests, and for good reason. There are thousands of species crammed into every acre. And we use a ton of different plants for our own purposes. There are things like wild yams, which are used for pain relievers and women’s health in general, and then there’s the annatto plant. You can get great red dye from the seeds instead of using chemical dyes. Some cosmetic companies are using annatto in their lipstick.”

  She went on to describe other plants, using long Latin names, that had been used in medicines and things that were used in everyday life. “It’s endless,” she said. “And don’t get me started about the beauty of the rain forest. Obviously, that’s another reason the Amazon rain forest is treasured. It’s not just the beauty of each thing. It’s how it all fits together. Stunning. Ingenious. No artist could have thought of it. We have great ideas. We have beautiful ideas. Nature is the greatest idea, in my humble opinion. Not that we can’t love these plants one by one. Look at this.” She pointed to a single orchid. “Bring your camera closer. This is the real movie star. Isn’t that exquisite?” The camera allowed me to zoom closer and closer to the orchid. “This orchid was almost endangered. Humans were responsible for almost losing it, and my buddies, also humans, were responsible for bringing it back. I don’t want people to feel like a bunch of reckless nature squashers, even though we can be. We are also able to repair our damage.”

  She took me to another greenhouse to film her showing me the wild yam plant and some other orchids. After our interview, she took me back to her office.

  “Here,” she said, pulling down a bright yellow coffee can. She fished around and pulled out a woven bracelet. “They make these in Ecuador. These brown things are seeds from the tangua tree. Girls around your age sell them for about twenty-five cents. Every time I go down there I buy about fifty, and I get about fifty smiles. I’m a sucker for a smile. Do you smile?”

  “Me? Sure I do!” I answered. “I guess I’m just nervous right now. I said I was going to make this movie, and everyone believed me so quickly. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, eighteen years ago, I wasn’t sure I could ride in a hollowed-out tree trunk down the Amazon, but you know, I just jumped in, and here I am to tell the tale. So I must have known something.” She tied the bracelet around my wrist. “This is for a fellow adventurer and planetary healer. Welcome to the club.”

  I admired my bracelet as I biked home. I also thought about Sally. Betsy had done crazy things just like Sally. Betsy had gone down to other countries and had become part of a North and South American Ecuadorian rain forest alliance. She had survived this big adventure she had taken. Would Sally have been like Betsy if she had survived, frazzle-haired but still an actual, responsible grown-up?

  I noticed Kyle’s car in his driveway as I went by, and I straightened my back, as if he was watching and actually noticing my posture. When I got home, I took in the mail, and there was an envelope that said Amalee with no address. It was a girl’s handwriting, I noticed, dismissing the crazy idea that it could be from Kyle.

  I dropped the other letters on the front table, where there was a note from Dad saying that Joyce would be happy to take me to the aquarium the next day. Henry Jeffers had called to say he could see me anytime in the afternoon.

  Excellent news. Again, I imagined mentioning to Kyle that I was doing some research at the aquarium. I opened the envelope and unfolded a picture by Marin. It was a watercolor of a pretty teenager with braces, wavy hair, red sparkling barrettes, white socks, pink sneakers, and a pink T-shirt that said MYSTERY GIRL. At the bottom, Marin wrote, Your mom! I didn’t have a picture, so I made her look like you. My eyes shot up as I saw the small nose and eyes and the wide smile. My mother, who looked like me.

  I decided that when I set out with Joyce for the aquarium the next day, I would get Henry to tell me about Myrtle the sea turtle, and Joyce to tell me more about Sally.

  Joyce started to knock on the screen door, then just shouted as she let herself in, “Yoo-hoo! Is there a filmmaker in residence?”

  “Not yet,” I groaned, double-checking my canvas bag for my camera, film, money, notepad, tape recorder, and lunch. Did I have everything? Tripod! I grabbed the tripod out of the closet.

  “Not yet a filmmaker, or not yet ready to leave because you haven’t had your coffee yet?” Joyce asked, laughing. “Just kidding about the coffee. Wait a few years for that.” She wandered into the kitchen and poured herself some lemonade. Then we headed to the car. “Hey, you notice my safari outfit?” She was wearing light canvas sneakers and khaki shorts with lots of pockets. And she had on a pink shirt with lace around the sleeves.

  “Your shorts say ‘safari’, but your shirt says ‘meeting the girls for lunch’,” I told her.

  “Well, perfect,” she answered, “because today I’m doing both, smarty-pants.” As we put on our seat belts in the car, she said, “You know, people tell me I’m awfully calm for a mother-to-be, but I explain that I’ve helped raise a child before, and I’ve even managed to be friends with a preadolescent. Then they understand.”

  We were ten miles into the trip when I found a good time to look at the dashboard and ask, “Was my mother as wild as Phyllis and Carolyn say?”

  “Ummm, yeah, pretty much,” Joyce said, not sounding overly sympathetic or even surprised. It seemed like a good start. “In a very sweet, loving way. She was like a child, and people liked her, so she got away with it.”

  “She didn’t get away with it with Phyllis,” I pointed out.

  “That’s true. She annoyed Phyllis. Well, to be entirely truthful, her behavior was exasperating sometimes, especially if you believe that everybody has to grow up eventually and learn how to do the laundry and cook and clean. If you don’t, that means somebody else is doing it for you.” Joyce was reasoning it out to herself now, it seemed. “It’s important to keep your childlike self alive, but she was more like an actual child, and your dad didn’t mind cleaning up after her.”

  “He did her laundry?”

  “Yes, he did most of the housework, but he also talked with their boss — they worked at the same restaurant — when she kept being late, and convinced the boss not to fire her. Before you were born, he would try to get the shift before hers so if she was late, he could cover for her.”

  “Why?” I felt like I could ask this without Joyce clamming up. I would never ask my dad something so out-in-the-open curious.

  “Well, there are words for it in psychotherapy. I think he believed she wasn’t capable of changing. I’m guessing that he wanted to protect her from finding out how weak her
weak spots were.”

  “He felt bad for her?”

  “He protected her as if she was fragile.”

  “It sounds like she was fragile,” I said.

  “I’d say no, and yes, and hmm …” Joyce thought out loud again. “Yes, she was fragile like a child. She had big butterflies on her shirts, and there was this way she opened her eyes very wide when you talked to her, because she thought everything was fascinating and wonderful. But no, she wasn’t fragile, because she went to college for two years, she loved to read, and she was perfectly capable of acting like an adult if she wanted to. So, in a way, she wasn’t doing the work you need to do to grow up, and she needed to. If you’re late, you get fired. If you don’t do the laundry, you wear dirty clothes. I felt sorry for her, since no one was there when she was growing up to notice her success or help her past her failures. Her parents were older when they had her … well, my age, actually, but I’m much hipper.” She thought about this for a minute.

  “You are definitely more cool,” I agreed, hoping she would get back to Sally.

  “Yeah,” she murmured as she returned to the story. “Sally’s father was a very busy guy, an international banker. He was basically never home. And her mother was just angry.”

  “Angry at what?”

  “There are big therapy words for her, too, but basically she had big ideas about her own importance, but they didn’t match reality. She was very smart, graduated with all sorts of honors from college. Sally called them fancy prizes. So she had all these fancy prizes and not much to do with them. She was interested in music and — what was it? — chemistry. No, biology. She once told Sally she’d wanted to be a marine biologist.”

  I imagined a woman who looked like Betsy from the plant nursery standing knee-deep in ocean water, sunburned shoulders, hair blowing in the wind. Not my grandmother.

  “Hey, what a coincidence!” Joyce exclaimed, giving me a jolt. “You’re a bit like her, aren’t you? Look where we’re heading! By the way, do you have questions for this man we’re going to see?”

  I decided I’d learned as much as I could about Sally without opening the box of Joyce’s therapy questions about how I felt hearing all this information. I knew how I felt. I loved hearing it, even though it felt a little funny to hear she could be “exasperating.”

  “I have questions for Mr. Jeffers,” I said. “But hopefully he’ll just want to talk about Myrtle.”

  “Myrtle the turtle?”

  “Yeah. He says her name like she’s his girlfriend.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like a stereotype about scientists,” Joyce objected. “Just because they love their work doesn’t mean they confuse their passion for science with their ability to have a social life. Look at Robert. Before he and I were together, everyone thought he was all about work.”

  Ah, that was why Joyce was touchy. I still refused to call her husband Robert. He was still Dr. Nurstrom to me. Joyce had a point about him, though: Before she swept into his life with her lavender perfume and rose-colored scarves (not to mention her rose perfume and lavender-colored scarves), his biggest love outside of medicine seemed to have been jogging and looking nervous. Joyce saw something we hadn’t seen. He even wore a pink tie at their wedding.

  “You know,” she went on, not looking in my direction, “if you start dating someone, you could always talk to me about it. Therapists are very good at respecting privacy.” She whispered the word privacy. I said nothing. Phyllis had made the same offer while drilling me on geography, out of the blue explaining that school employees were bound by confidentiality rules. And Carolyn had said, simply, “Nothing shocks me. And I can keep a secret.”

  It felt right to tell no one about Kyle. I didn’t have the urge to tell anyone. Joyce jumped into the silence of the car and said, “Rest stop! Time for a rest stop!”

  We got to the aquarium by twelve thirty, after four rest stops. Joyce called Henry Jeffers from her cell phone when we were a mile away, and he was waiting for us at the main entrance. He had said he was “a tall black man in a red plaid shirt.” He looked about ten years older than my dad’s students.

  “You look like you’re shooting a film!” he said, seeing my camera bag. Actually, it was an old canvas bag with lots of outside pockets that I’d found in the hall closet, only to find out later that it had once been used as my diaper bag. I blurted this out.

  He laughed and said, “Maybe you’ll start a trend. C’mon in. I’ll introduce you to some of the sea life, and then you can meet Myrtle.” He flashed his pass in front and brought us in for free, which made the whole thing feel official.

  The first thing I saw in the dark aquarium was a beach party of penguins. I almost didn’t see the glassed-in rail that held them, so they looked like they were just hanging out. Beyond them was obviously the main attraction of the aquarium, the three-story tank with a ramp spiraling all the way up to the top.

  Henry could tell from how still I was standing that I’d never been here before. He told me this was called the Giant Ocean Tank.

  “Pretty awesome, huh?” he asked.

  He identified some of the fish for me. “Those ones with the low eyes that look like they’re up to no good, those are called permits. And there’s a moray eel. And a southern stingray. Sand tiger shark …”

  “Shark?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh. They don’t attack the other fish or the divers.”

  “You have people diving down into this tank?” I asked. Then I felt embarrassed. I could just feel Joyce looking pleased at my excitement.

  “Would you like to see some rain forest frogs?” Henry asked.

  “You have frogs here?”

  “Yes, when you said the frogs would be narrating the movie, I forgot to tell you we have some here. They’re exquisite.”

  He was right. They were extraordinary, super-small frogs from Central and South America, like swirly, poisonous gumdrops. We’d passed some sea tanks on the way to the frogs’ terrarium. They, too, were all works of art. Henry talked about the different worlds in the reefs off of Australia and Asia, going too quickly for me to turn this into an example of a food chain. If nothing else, I could see how each tank really was like a separate planet. I also laughed when I saw a piranha, one of the world’s most dangerous fish, in its own dark tank as if it had been put there on a permanent time-out. “I’d love to see that guy at feeding time,” I muttered.

  Henry said the frogs lost their toxicity in captivity, but that the aquarium had lots of information about the different uses for the poison on their skins. During one pause, as we were admiring a bright blue and black frog, Henry said, “Want to see Myrtle now?”

  Henry led me to one of her favorite spots, around the ledges at the bottom of the giant ocean tank. A school of fish caught my eye, but Henry tapped my shoulder and pointed. Joyce and I both gasped. A giant turtle took up most of the view. She swam placidly past the fish, almost nodding to them politely. Then she parked her head between two rocks as if she was trying to hide. I could spend an afternoon just admiring her rough, pebbly, webbed foot slowly waving behind her.

  “That’s my girl,” Henry said, then pointed up to a diver who was descending with a late lunch, I guessed, for the sea creatures. I had been filming Myrtle for a few minutes (it took a while to remember to get the camera out), and I watched as Myrtle backed out of the rocks and joined the party. The diver was looking at the other fish, but when Myrtle emerged, he stroked her back with his flipper. I could do that for a living, feed the fish and pet sea turtles with my foot. A minute later, Myrtle decided to take a trip to the top of the tank. Her feet rippled in the water and she seemed weightless as she swam, belly to us, up past her younger friends (including the diver, who was probably half her age). Finally, I turned off the camera and asked if we could go to a place where I could film Henry answering the questions I’d brought.

  Henry looked at the camera, surprised. “Sure,” he answered nervously. He stepped away off of the ramp so people
could get by. “How’s this? Enough light?”

  I noticed that when he stood near the big tank, he had a watery green ripple pattern on half his face. I liked the color but not the blotchiness. Joyce agreed to hold the reflective silver fabric to catch some more light and bounce it onto his face, and it worked perfectly.

  “What would you say is one of the most important reasons to protect endangered species?” I asked first.

  “Well, our survival depends on the survival of all the other species on the planet. I guess that’s the number one reason … but I think, for me, I just want to live in a world with an infinite variety of flora and fauna — and rocks, for that matter. I want to be on a planet with countless life-forms. What would happen in a world without sea turtles? Myrtle swims up and down in the tank like a prehistoric angel,” he said, swishing the air with his hands to demonstrate. “And their carapaces, their shells, look like ancient mountain ranges. I think that’s one of the reasons so many mythologies say the Earth is actually the back of a great big mother turtle. Don’t get me wrong — there are many ways in which sea turtles are essential to the health and vitality of the planet. But they’re also just amazing. I want animals like sea turtles to be here on the planet, where they belong.”

  Suddenly Henry looked down. Then he looked up and said, “Okay, take two! Sorry. Do you want to erase that?”

  I was dumbstruck. I loved what he had said. Joyce put down the silver reflector to dab her eyes.

  “Allergies,” she lied, blowing her nose.

  I said, “It’s digital. You can just keep going.”

  “All right.” Henry cleared his throat. “Look at all the things we can learn from sea turtles. Not only do they form an essential link in a food chain that runs from plankton to humans, we can also use their movement as a model for our own aquatic locomotion, we can synthesize materials inspired by the leathery skin on their carapaces, and we can even learn about climate change from alterations in their migrations. The most important reason we should be concerned about extinction is that we’re only scratching the surface of what we can learn from every species. If they disappear, who knows what may disappear with them? That’s it.” Henry looked happy and relieved to be finished.