Lights, Camera, Amalee

by Dar Williams

  Before I went to bed, I looked at myself again. I didn’t look so bad. Then I saw Marin’s drawing of my mom. The hair clips and the sneakers. Did she want to sparkle so she wouldn’t look like a boy? Did she like the combination of rhinestones and gym shorts? There weren’t a lot of pictures of her, but come to think of it, I looked like her. And I’d always thought she was beautiful.

  I woke up feeling better about everything, which was fortunate, because Sarah came by unannounced while I was having breakfast.

  We sat out on the lawn to eat some fresh peaches that John had brought by. “My mom and I were just at my sister’s dance class,” Sarah said. Lydia had dropped her off while she did errands. “I want you to come with us when we go pick my sister up. I told the teacher about your film, and she said I gave her a brainstorm. She wants to create dances that show different kinds of endangered species.”

  “No way!” I said.

  “Waaaay,” Sarah replied. “She said there was the ocelot, which is a small, like, bobcat, and there’s the Karner blue butterfly, which is bright blue, and something called the swamp panther, which is black and lives in the Florida Everglades. She’s always trying to come up with ideas that let the kids in my sister’s dance class use their imaginations, since they’re all around six or seven years old. They’ll have a performance in four weeks, whenever that is.”

  “That sounds beautiful.”

  “Totally beautiful. She makes the kids go home and get stuff for costumes, but she’s really into the environment, so she asks them not to buy anything new. Last year, they were comets and shooting stars, and she made them go home and save up all the tinfoil and pie plates they were going to put in the recycling bins, and, I swear, the whole theater smelled like fried chicken.” She checked her watch and said, “Lydia’s going to be here in about ten minutes. You want to walk up the street and stare at that Kyle guy again?”

  I tried to sound very calm and casual as I told her, “Okay, but he’s going to be my boyfriend. I’ll find you another one, if you’d like.”

  Sarah didn’t look horrified, which was a huge relief, since I thought I sounded more ridiculous than I’d expected. “Oh, please,” she said, laughing, as she stood up and wiped her hands on her shorts. “He’s too old for either of us.”

  “I know,” I lied. “Actually, can you come in and help me pack up my camera?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” she said, proving that she wasn’t as obsessed with Kyle as I was. I looked down the street. His truck wasn’t there, anyway.

  “Do you have any ideas about who could be the other frogs?” I asked.

  “I almost forgot to tell you!” she said, happy that I’d reminded her. “How about Curt Harrison? He’s hilarious.” I agreed. “He could be Medicine Frog,” she went on.

  “Would he treat this like a joke?” I asked, remembering his fake opera in English class.

  “No, I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’s a good guy.”

  We looked at the phone and phone book next to it. Sarah was the first to move. “It’ll take two minutes,” she said, scanning the phone book for his name. I noticed her long thin fingers and felt another completely annoying pang of jealousy.

  We can be two girls with poise and beauty, I thought to myself. Two girls, not just one. Look at how she was helping me! She believed in me! She hooked her great hair over her ear as she dialed. Two girls can be pretty, can have their own style. If I couldn’t beat this jealousy, I’d have to use some of my money for an appointment on the therapist’s couch with Joyce. I was sure she’d be thrilled.

  Curt was home.

  “Hiya,” Sarah said a little nervously, “this is Sarah Smythe…. Hi. Would you like to be in a movie? Amalee Everly’s making it. You’d play a frog…. No, it’s not a horror film.” She smirked at the phone. “It’s like a documentary, but fun. It should be fun. We really want you to do it. We think you’d be great. You’d just come in and do your part, in, like, three weeks. Right, Amalee?” I nodded.

  There was a long pause as Curt considered. Sarah added something: “I think you should have been cast as Tevye in the play, just so you know. I liked working with Jordan, but your audition was hilarious.”

  Sarah got off the phone as Lydia pulled up. “He’ll do it!” Sarah said excitedly. “This is going to be awesome!”

  We jumped in the car and sped off to dance school in time to catch the end of her sister Julie’s class.

  Ms. Farraday, wearing tangerine tights, a tangerine leotard, and a black dance skirt, a tall pile of black hair balanced on her head, winked at us when we came in.

  “Children,” she said in a light Irish accent, “let’s take the last ten minutes to try something new. What animal would you like to be?”

  One boy immediately said, “Monkey!” and all the other kids agreed.

  “Lovely,” Ms. Farraday said. “All right, we are in the jungle, and you are very young monkeys practicing your jumping skills. You know that soon you’ll be called upon to climb the trees and pick the bananas, so you want to show your families that you will be ready for the task.” She didn’t even say “Go!” but the little dancers were already in flight, screeching and somersaulting and, of course, jumping straight up in the air.

  In a few minutes, Ms. Farraday said, “There will be no shortage of bananas this year, not with this group of jumpers! But now, shhhh, it is starting to rain, and you must find shelter under the low-lying broad banana leaves, huddling against one another, trying to stay warm and dry. And remember, you are not like monkeys. You are monkeys.”

  Sarah, Lydia, and I all widened our eyes. The jumping and screeching had been very monkeylike, but it was amazing to see these little kids really become monkeys, creeping under invisible leaves, shaking raindrops off their fur, gazing up from under leaves to look for a sign of the sun, and crouching against one another.

  Ms. Farraday told them to, as monkeys, gather their things to go home. Then she turned to us.

  “Children are inspired by nature,” she said, as if to explain why the dancers were so hypnotizing. “I will bring in some videos of endangered animals and point out the movements that make these animals unique. I think I will also tell them that these animals could become extinct. Children have a remarkable sympathy for other living creatures. I don’t want to scare them, but I think this will encourage performances that honor these animals.”

  “I would love to film the performance,” I said.

  “I’m so glad. I think there’s nothing so persuasive as poetry to spur us into saving the environment. In this case it’s the poetry of movement.”

  “This is incredibly nice of you,” I said. “And you,” I added, turning to Sarah.

  “Yes,” Ms. Farraday said to Sarah, “thank you for letting me know about this project. I’m new in the area. It will be fun to be involved with something.”

  “Did you come here from Ireland?” Lydia asked.

  “Oh, no — I just got married, and we moved up here from Brooklyn, hopefully to raise some nice Irish-Jewish children.”

  Lydia let Julie continue to be a monkey in the car as long as she wore her seat belt. We stopped for ice cream, and Julie got a banana split.

  “I guess you’re not such an evil stepmother after all,” Sarah said as we ate our ice cream. I thought Lydia was great, mother or stepmother. She laughed, so this must have been an ongoing joke.

  She turned to me and said, “I found my calling as a stepmother.”

  “And my mother is very grateful,” Sarah added. I knew Sarah’s mother lived and worked in New York City, and that Sarah would go to visit her sometimes. Lydia worked at a natural food store called Green Pastures.

  “Of course, I couldn’t be a stepmother to just anyone,” Lydia said. Was this really what Sarah wanted? She seemed happy with the arrangement. I felt sad that I didn’t have a mother off to the side, just to have lunch in the city every once in a while, just to check in. I could have been happy with that, too. But I didn’t have that, and I rem
inded myself that what I had was fine.

  Fine? My dad had to pay Joyce a dollar every time he used that word. How did I really feel? Joyce would ask me that. I felt sad, but I knew I shouldn’t want something I couldn’t have.

  Lydia was talking to me. She was telling me the dates for Julie’s dance concert. I started nodding as if I’d heard every word.

  When we got home, I went online and found the phone number for the Museum of Natural History in New York City. I called and, after punching a lot of numbers, was connected to the Hall of Biodiversity.

  “Hallofbiodiversity,” a busy-sounding voice said.

  “Hi,” I said weakly. “I’m making a film about endangered species, and I was wondering if I could talk to someone about food chains.”

  “Food chains? What kind of food chains?”

  I followed Joyce’s advice: Relax and speak. “The idea of food chains,” I said.

  The woman’s voice sounded like it was getting irritated. “What do you mean? Have you been to our Web site? There’s plenty of information there.”

  I tried one of Phyllis’s tricks, even though I wanted to hang up. “Is there a supervisor I can speak with?”

  No luck. “He’s not here. And there’s nothing he can help you with if all you can say is that you want to talk about food chains.” So this was the person Ellen would be when she grew up. Her voice could wilt a head of lettuce.

  “Okay, thank you,” I said, hating that I was thanking her for nothing. I tried one more time. “So there’s no one I could speak with if I came in?”

  The voice sighed and said quickly, “Just a minute.” Off the phone, she asked someone, “Is Gail here today?”

  The other voice asked, “Which one?”

  The woman I was talking to said, “She’s researching the reserve for biodiversity.”

  And the other voice said, “No, but she’s here all tomorrow.”

  Back on the phone, the woman said to me, “There’s no one here.” Whatever you say, Ellen. We both hung up.

  I went to a corner of the big sheet of paper that said The Web of Life/Food Chains and wrote Gail and a smiley face.

  Phyllis had said that if I wanted to go to New York, she’d come with me. I called her and asked if she could go tomorrow.

  “It’s pretty late notice,” she said, “but, yeah, sure. We have to be home by five thirty so I can run the numbers at John’s. And it’s chicken potpie night. That’s really why I want to get home.”

  I said I took that very seriously, and she thanked me.

  That night I biked past Kyle’s house — his truck wasn’t there — and over to the tai chi people. As Kevin, the curly-haired man, had told me, they went through the poses of five animals: the crane, the tiger, the bear, the serpent, and the monkey. I filmed a few minutes of every pose.

  After they were done, Kevin came over again and explained how each pose allowed them to feel the energy of different animals, and that each energy helped them to feel balance in their own lives.

  “If I have to help a friend move and I have to lift a lot of boxes, I think of the bear with its enormous strength, how he anchors his legs and yet also moves with ease and playfulness. That helps me move gracefully as I carry the burden to help my friend.”

  I peeked from behind the camera. “Cool,” I said.

  Kevin smiled. “I was also thinking about endangered species. I like that you are including tai chi in your movie. We don’t just need animals so that we can eat them or tame them or whatever we do to use them. We need them to inspire us, right? I was thinking about how we just need their energy. We need tigers and bears and cranes, and yet they are all endangered.”

  “What?” I asked. Had I heard him correctly?

  “Well, not every one, but certain species. Like panda bears. We’re breeding them in captivity just to keep them in the world. And do you know how many tigers there are left in the whole world? About seven thousand. There are over six billion people in the world and only seven thousand tigers. We breed them in captivity, too, just to help them survive. And in a country near India called Bhutan, the black-necked crane has a sacred history to the Bhutanese people and is important in their literature. They’re endangered. You can’t put your finger on why they’re so important, but if you lost them, you’d lose a piece of history and a feeling of being close to God.”

  I loved how this camera made people talk. Adults had never spoken to me like this before.

  Kevin invited me to do tai chi with his group any morning or evening, explaining that some people thought it could only be done in the morning, but his group loved the light and the feeling at the end of the day. Plus, he added, it meant they didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn. I told him I’d try.

  On my way home, I looked over, as always, at Kyle’s house. It was getting dark and shadowy, but I thought I saw someone on the doorstep. Kyle. But it wasn’t just Kyle. As my bike swung past, I could see that it was Kyle making out with a brown-haired girl with long legs who was almost as tall as he was. I was able to stay silent as I rode, and I didn’t fall off the bicycle, either. But I kept riding and riding, past my house and into the dark. I couldn’t go fast enough.

  This was against all the rules. I was never allowed to go out at night without wearing the orange reflective stripes that Phyllis had bought for me. But I kept going. I knew there was a long hill coming up. As I went over, I lifted my legs off the pedals and felt myself going almost as fast as I wanted.

  At the bottom of the hill the road swerved off to the left. That’s why I didn’t see the car coming. It sped around the corner and up the hill when I was almost at the bottom. I jerked the handlebars just in time to turn away, but my front wheel hit something, a log or a rock, and I flew off the bike and bashed my shoulder into the fence in front of someone’s house. The car kept on going, and I took a minute in the silence to make sure I was still alive.

  I swung my arm. I stood up. I walked my bicycle up the hill, just relieved that I could do it. If I had been three feet farther down the hill, I probably wouldn’t be alive. I felt absolutely sure about one thing: I knew that this was how my mother had died. She wasn’t like Betsy, jumping into a tree trunk canoe down the Amazon. She didn’t lose control on purpose like Betsy did. She was out of control. I felt it in my blood, my mother’s blood pounding in my heart as I walked up the hill, panting and shaking.

  My dad and Phyllis were both at the house, standing at the end of the driveway.

  “Where were you?” Dad called out.

  “Where were you?” Phyllis repeated.

  I looked down at Kyle’s house out of habit. Could he see them yelling for me? The lights in his house were out at nine o’clock, and his car was in the garage. So he was in the dark with that girl.

  Phyllis was still holding her doggie bag from dinner at John’s restaurant. “Where are your reflective stripes? What were you doing out after dark without your stripes?”

  I lied quickly and completely. “I’m so sorry. It was darker than I thought. Then my bike flipped on a stick that I didn’t see, and I fell, and I walked for a while. Sorry.”

  Phyllis and Dad changed from questions to comfort.

  “Where?” Phyllis asked. “Are you all right? Should we call Dr. Nurstrom?”

  “I’m fine.” That was a lie, too.

  Dad took my bike to the garage and told me dinner was waiting inside. Phyllis walked me in. Was my wild mother such a good liar, too? If you were going to spend a lot of time out of control, you’d have to be good at lying to cover your tracks. I could already feel the ability to cover my bumpy, dangerous tracks.

  But why? Because Phyllis and Dad would kill me if they knew what had happened. And I was embarrassed, too.

  But then I realized they wouldn’t kill me. In sixth grade, I had pushed a not-so-good friend, Lenore Nielson, down the stairs, because she told me my father, who was sick, was “dying.” I didn’t mean to hurt her or even to push her, let alone push her down the stairs, but
that’s what happened, and it was a horrific event. It felt like the whole school rose up against me. My dad’s friends had been sympathetic, understanding, and helpful. They stuck up for me more than I felt I deserved.

  But this was different. I really was out of control this time. I didn’t want to tell Phyllis and Dad how upset I was, or why, but they didn’t deserve to live with a person who lied all the time when all they ever did was let me know I could tell them the truth.

  There was no good way to bring the truth up. We were already sitting down to dinner. The subject had been changed to my dad wondering where his own reflective stripes were. I decided to ask a few questions about my mother.

  “That was really scary, flying through the dark like that. It actually made me think of Sally’s accident.” I was now even more careful not to call her my mother. “Didn’t her car hit a tree? That must have been awful.”

  I looked up from my spinach lasagna. Phyllis and Dad looked up from theirs, too, and Phyllis had an I told you this would come up someday look on her face.

  “She hit a tree,” Dad said. Phyllis stared harder. “Unfortunately, there had been a few accidents there. It was a bad curve.”

  “Yes, it was a dangerous curve,” Phyllis echoed, but with a funny look on her face. “Especially when … it was so dark.”

  Dad said, “Oh, yes, it was very dark. It was after midnight. They say that one of her headlights was out.”

  “Among other things,” Phyllis said.

  “It’s so scary that it could have happened to anyone,” I said. “You just never know.” I could tell that there was something they weren’t saying. The fact that my mother was “crazy” and “a child” had nothing to do with it?

  “I guess so,” Dad mumbled, quickly taking his plate to the kitchen.

  He returned with ice cream. “You know what?” he said to Phyllis. “You tell her. It’s fine with me, but I’d rather you told her. I’ll just try to sugarcoat it, and I know you won’t.”