Lights, Camera, Amalee

by Dar Williams

  I imagined Julie balancing the huge frog head on her shoulders. Carolyn would help make it lighter and attach something to make it fit comfortably.

  “She’ll totally do it. I’ll make her,” Sarah said.

  I was still thinking of the little body with the big head. The smallest, the least helpful, the unimportant. I could feel an enormous sadness coming on. I said I had to go to the bathroom, and once I got there, I buried my head in a towel and just cried. I didn’t know why. I splashed my face and thought about awful Lenore, which made me stop. I started thinking what kind of out-of-the-way job I could give her, like traffic patrol.

  I came out of the bathroom to find Sarah holding a stack of envelopes. “Mail’s here,” she said.

  I opened the envelope from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the first people to send me the information I’d asked for. There were photos of the deformed frogs that had been discovered by the students. The letter said it was still a mystery what had caused the deformities, but one of their first theories was that they were from dioxins, which came from bleaching with chlorine. The letter also mentioned that amphibious populations were down throughout the Great Lakes region, meaning there were fewer and fewer frogs all over the American Midwest.

  Sarah and I looked at the photos. A few frogs had an extra back leg, smaller and sticking out to the side. Some others had deformed legs, and one had only one eye. The other eye simply wasn’t there. “What caused this?” Sarah murmured over my shoulder.

  “They think maybe pollution from a chemical called dioxin.”

  “This is terrible. I’d say it’s gross, but I feel so sorry for them. I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” Sarah put her hand on my back and said, “You’re so cool, Amalee. We’re going to speak for these poor little frogs. There aren’t any actual two-headed frogs, are there?”

  I said I didn’t think so.

  But there could be one in the future. I’m sure no one had predicted a five-legged frog in the past.

  The next day was rainy and perfect for sitting in pajamas and watching all the footage I had shot. I sat down with the remote control in my hand and my big pad of paper in front of me.

  Every person had his or her own particular look and place. I felt bad when I saw a little shadow on Betsy’s face that made her look like she had a bruised forehead, or shadows against a wall that looked like an extension of Gail’s hair. One camera angle made Henry at the aquarium look like he had a dark ostrich egg growing out of his head. “You’d better get that looked at,” I told the television screen.

  Relax and write, I told myself. I had the whole day.

  I was lucky that I’d had good light for everyone. Dad’s friend Phil Novick had warned me that I would probably lose a good chunk of my work to poor lighting or bad sound. I’d made sure everyone put the microphone right up to their mouth, and my headphones let me adjust their volume or tell them to speak up a little. And I’d bought that disk of silver fabric that Joyce had held up to Henry. The silver fabric had reflected light from the ceiling bulbs near the aquarium. Also, the camera was supposed to be able to handle dim light. So, minus the few seconds of bruises and dark eggs, things looked more or less movie-ready.

  I decided to write down the parts of everyone’s interviews I would take for each frog or category. The only problem was that I didn’t want to. So first I ate two bowls of cereal and a peach. Then I made batter for cookies. I sat myself down while the cookies were in the oven, and said I would at least try to create these categories until the cookies were ready.

  I was prepared for the most boring and hardest part of the project, but it was as simple as putting things in different baskets, like the beauty basket, the medicine basket, or the food-chain basket. There were a few moments when I thought a comment fit into more than one category, showing that a plant or animal was both helpful and beautiful, but I just made a question mark next to each of these parts and moved on. Unfortunately, my nose told me the cookies were ready, which meant they were on the crispier side.

  I was done in a few hours, including cookie trips to the kitchen (four of them), a trip to the mailbox (Kyle’s truck wasn’t there), and a few minutes figuring out how to film the deformed-frog pictures (I’d do it outside when the weather cleared up).

  I hoped that cutting and pasting all of the movie would be less scary than I’d imagined, too.

  In the afternoon, I went on a bike ride. It was still sprinkling, but I had to get out. There was plenty to think about. Did Kyle really like that girl just because she was pretty? I picked up speed on my bike, but this time I wasn’t scared. It felt good to go fast. Maybe I had some crazy blood. Maybe that would be a problem. Or maybe it was okay.

  I went to John’s restaurant with Joyce that night. Joyce picked us both up on her way, letting herself in to see my progress.

  “That big pad certainly looks full of notes!” Joyce complimented me. “How is it all going?”

  “I think it’s all going fine,” I said truthfully. “There’s just one problem. I don’t have much for Frog X. I don’t have anything, really.”

  “Well, what exactly is Frog X?”

  “Frog X is the frog who we may not need to help us kill mosquitoes or make any miracle medicines, and Frog X isn’t beautiful. Frog X is just out there.”

  Again, I thought of Julie with the giant frog mask, and I felt sad again.

  “Joyce,” I said with alarm, changing the subject, “if Hallie wanted to work on my movie, should I let her?”

  “Isn’t she the one who wasn’t nice to you?” Joyce asked.

  “Yes, but her friend left, and now she doesn’t have any friends.”

  “Was she the meaner of the two?” Joyce asked.

  “No. She definitely wasn’t.”

  “Well, some friendships bring out the worst in a person, so maybe she’s not so bad now,” Joyce observed. “I’d say you could give her a chance, but not a big one. You want allies for this!”

  Joyce clearly wanted to jump-start me into solving my problem. “I want to press you here: What is this Frog X?” she asked. “What do you think is the argument to save Frog X?”

  “Every animal is unique,” I blurted out. “Each is like a work of art.”

  “Good. Is that it?”

  “No. But, but … I don’t know.”

  “Try,” Joyce insisted, driving past John’s restaurant so we could keep talking.

  I was afraid if I tried, I’d start to cry and Joyce would pull over and try to hug me.

  I took many deep breaths and asked myself why. Why? Animals and plants were all unique. We needed them even if we didn’t need them to survive. And how did we know …

  “I know the other reason we need to pay attention to Frog X,” I said. “How do we know something is unimportant? How do we know what plant or animal will help us survive? We should let plants and animals survive no matter what, but what if there’s a snail whose shell is the model for the perfect building of the future? What if mugwort makes you dream, and what if just one person’s way to survive is to dream more? What if there’s some tiny bug that eats pollution or … or a plant that soaks up acid rain? And you know what else? What if Frog X is not beautiful to me, but it’s beautiful to someone else who needs that beauty to survive? Everyone needs different things to survive. Just because something isn’t helpful to me doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful to someone else. Right?”

  “Wow,” Joyce said, finally pulling into the restaurant parking lot. “No wonder you were having a hard time deciding what to say. We preserve a frog because it may be useful to us. But we also preserve a frog even if it isn’t useful to us. And now you’re saying we also need to preserve a frog because there’s such an enormous range of what we need to survive and we shouldn’t presume to know what we need, or will need, or what other people need. Correct?”

  Yes. Why was it so sad that a small, plain frog could be the key to one person’s survival? Suddenly I knew I had to call my English teacher, Mr.
Chapelle, to see if I could use some of the footage of his son with the dolphins. The way his film had shown it, dolphins did something, whether it was the way they moved or some secret language they spoke, that worked like a medicine for some people. Maybe it wouldn’t work for me, but it would work for Mr. Chapelle’s son.

  In the restaurant, John teased me and said he was going to make me frog leg stew. He also asked if he was going to have to wear tights. I said no to the stew and no to the tights. He made me something like macaroni and cheese, but with potatoes. He said I would love it, and I did.

  Things went quickly in the next week. Mr. Chapelle said I could take any part of his film for mine. He was surprised when I asked at first, but when I told him that I was making a film because of his assignment, he seemed pretty excited for me. My dad asked why I needed footage of Mr. Chapelle’s autistic son. I told him to trust me.

  I filmed the pictures of the deformed frogs, only to find out, when Gail sent me tons of pictures over the computer, that I could edit computer photos right into the film. I was learning two huge things at once: One was about endangered species, and the other was about how many cool things I could do to make a movie, even though I had to concentrate hard to make all the little details fit together.

  I found a room next to Sarah’s sister’s dance class where they said I could film the narrator frogs. And every night, I worked on the script, reminding myself that it was easier than homework.

  At the end of the week, I made my first trip with my dad to New York. I slept all the way in on the train while he read a mystery novel. I took a groggy look at the constellations on the ceiling of Grand Central Station when we arrived. “Hello, animals,” I greeted.

  We took the subway downtown. My dad’s old student, Phil Novick, had reddish-blond hair and a wild, scraggly look that made him look like he spent more time awake at night than during the day, like a New York City slender loris.

  After introducing us, Dad told us he was “going out to shop for a few things.” That meant he was heading up to the Strand bookstore about ten blocks away. The Strand was crammed top to bottom with every kind of book, old and new, that could fit on its miles of shelves. For something very specific, you’d probably be up a creek trying to find what you wanted, but for a sense of the everythingness of everything — like we’d felt in the Hall of Biodiversity — it was a great place to be.

  Phil and I worked quickly. We put everything up on his office computer and started cutting and pasting in the same way you’d cut and paste words on a computer, except we did it with pictures and sound. Phil looked like he’d been born doing it. I felt like I hadn’t been born so lucky. I had a hard time making the sound and pictures go together, and my edits came up too quickly or too late. Phil told me I’d get used to it, calling it a “learning curve.” He went out for a cup of coffee and told me to edit two pieces together all by myself. He talked me through it, then left me alone. It almost worked, didn’t work, totally didn’t work, looked as if the computer was about to crash, and then it worked! One image practically flowed into another. Since Phil still wasn’t back, I tried another edit, and it worked, too! I enjoyed the challenge of it, making the pieces fit together the way he’d shown me. I was officially interested in film. In my mind, I was showing Kyle footage I’d taken in the Ecuadorian rain forest, pointing out the important features of this or that unique ecosystem. I laughed out loud at myself and went back to editing. Phil walked in and nodded at my progress.

  When Dad appeared a few hours later, he had a bag of lunch for me and a bag of books for himself. “The Strand?” I asked.

  Dad turned the bag so I could see it. It said THE STRAND.

  Phil told Dad I was “a natural.” I pretended to let the compliment bounce right off me, but it went right in.

  On the train ride home, I drew a little calendar for myself. It was already June 28. I could start filming the frogs in the first weeks of July. I’d work around John’s schedule.

  Dad looked up from a book called Tough Guys Don’t Dance and said, “I’m sorry about the way you found out that your mom had a drinking problem. And I feel uncomfortable about what you think of the fact that she’d been driving drunk when she died.”

  What? I was far away in movie land, wondering if John should wear green pants or green shorts (definitely pants, I decided). There were a lot of details to figure out.

  I put down my notes. I had planned to ask Dad for more of the story at some point, but I’d also wanted to let him take his time, considering how sad he’d looked when Phyllis had finally told me the truth. Somebody had to bring it up sometime, however, and so it was Dad, and the time was now. I closed my calendar.

  “It was totally fine the way she told me,” I said. “It explained a lot.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, it explains why everyone always looked so uncomfortable when you’d say she was a little crazy. You were all wondering how and when you’d spill the beans to me, right?”

  “Yeah,” Dad confessed. “But no, it’s more than that. Now that she’s gone,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “I don’t want to make everything simple. I don’t want you to think that every part of her personality came from the fact that she was an alcoholic.”

  I thought of the note at the bottom of the supermarket receipt with the words flower, power, tower, sour, shower. I saw a girl who liked to play with words and who probably roamed around her big house with no one to talk to. I saw a girl with long hair and a basketball, making her mom buy flowers at the store.

  “I don’t see her that way,” I said.

  “Good. Thank you. It’s very rare for a twelve-year-old to know that people are very complicated.” He still didn’t know that I knew more about her than he thought I did.

  “Do you think you’d be with Sally if you met her today?” I asked.

  “Maybe not — not if she didn’t get help. I’ve seen this kind of stuff with students. I can get a pretty good hit on which kids are having trouble with drugs. They write papers that kind of wander into space, they fall asleep in class, and then they only show up for tests. Their skin is clammy and their eyes are unfocused. Your mom never looked unhealthy, but there were plenty of indicators that she was an addict from the way she acted.”

  “She wasn’t an addict. She was an alcoholic,” I said.

  “An alcoholic is someone who’s addicted to alcohol,” Dad explained.

  Now I felt like Dad was giving up on Sally before he’d given her a chance.

  “But don’t addicts need our help?” I asked.

  Dad looked at the ceiling and said, “Oh, Sally, Sally, why have you put me in this position?” Then he looked at me and said, “We did the best we could, Amalee. After a while, it’s only when you don’t help them when they can finally get help. Real help to stop.”

  “I’m sorry. I believe you.” Suddenly I remembered that this was Sally, a person I never knew, a friend that we all felt sorry for, didn’t dislike, but also didn’t know. I changed the subject for both of us.

  “I like editing,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure it could get boring, but I like how I got a computer to do something I told it to do.”

  “Much easier than a person, or even a dog,” Dad said, smiling. “Think of all the people who get to work with computers after they realize they can’t deal with people.”

  “Phil seems like he can deal with people.”

  “Oh, yeah, he’s great with computers, but he also loves people. He’s a real ladies’ man, from what I hear.”

  I wouldn’t go that far. All that unbrushed, scruffy hair!

  Dad looked like he wanted to say something else, but then went back to reading his book. I went back to my schedule.

  Dad did look up then. “You can ask me about Sally anytime you want,” he said finally. He didn’t sound like he wanted to talk about it, but it was still nice of him to offer.

  Later that night, John burst through the doors of the restaurant kitc
hen to find me.

  “I have something for you!” he exclaimed, pulling out a pair of green flippers from behind his back. “I can get you four other pairs, too. They have them at my health club. I just joined — I’m sure you can tell.” He turned to the side. He still had a big belly.

  Carolyn was picking dead leaves off the plants and spraying some of them with water. I asked her to come over and give me advice about costumes.

  “Keep it simple,” she stated. “The head masks are really elaborate. Just tell everyone to wear the same colors as their masks. It doesn’t have to match perfectly or anything.” She saw the flippers John was holding. “Oh, and those. Those are good.”

  “Thank you, darling,” John said. I guessed what everyone’s shoe sizes were, and John said he’d get us all flippers.

  Carolyn left and reappeared as Dad and I were eating our salads. “You know what? I’ll get you some old gardening gloves that we can paint green.”

  “That sounds great,” I said, hoping that Marin would like to help me paint them.

  The next day, I called all the people who would be frogs and told them the costume idea. Marin said she would wear a green shirt over blue tights for her red-eyed tree frog. Sarah had brown leggings and a green shirt for her two-headed leopard frog, and she said they would have Julie wear her light green tights and dark green leotard for Frog X. Curt had a yellow shirt and light brown pants for his golden poison frog, and John had dark green pants and a green shirt for his bullfrog. “And don’t worry, even though I’ve joined a gym, I’ll probably still have my paunchy tummy for the film shoot, just like a bullfrog,” he added.

  I realized I needed to write out cue cards for people to read their lines from. Sarah said she would memorize hers and try to get Julie to do the same, but I decided to give everyone the chance to read them if they wanted.

  I leafed through the script so far and groaned. How would I write all of this out by hand? I thought of setting Lenore on the case, making her write everything out on poster board with a smelly marker.