Amy Falls Down Read online

  2. She had this morning decided to venture into her backyard and plant the stupid pine. She remembered deciding this but could not remember why.

  3. True, Carla had given her a holly bush for Christmas, and the others in her remaining writing class had chipped in for a Norfolk pine, but until that morning her intention had definitely been to let both expire on her back steps, along with all her other plants, except for an awesomely neglected, fitfully blooming mess of potted geraniums, the undead of the Southern California plant world.

  4. Still, when she had picked up the Norfolk pine—no mean feat in its ten-gallon plastic pot—and shuffled down her back steps and across her cement patio, she had been headed for a specific spot, one she must have planned for ahead of time: the center of the raised garden in the northeast corner of the yard. The garden was still cluttered with late-summer debris—silvery artichoke plants, giant zucchini carcasses, desiccated yarrow, and still more zombie geraniums—but the center ground was clear, and near enough to a sprinkler head to receive ample water. Directly behind was a concrete birdbath, which would have to come out as the tree got its growth, but for now it could stay.

  5. Because of 1–4, she had had an accident.

  6. Because of 5, she had lost a chunk of memory. She had given an interview to, or at least done something with, a U-T reporter during that missing period of time.

  7. Because she was who she was, she took accidents personally. Also, she hated doctors. So she definitely remembered who she was.

  Other than the physicians who took her fiction writing classes, Amy had not seen a doctor for thirty years. In the first place, she had not trusted them since she was four years old and Dr. Kronkheit told her to “Look out the window, Amy! There’s a pony on Pitman Street,” and though she wasn’t interested in ponies, she had obliged to be polite and been rewarded with a needle-stab in the arm. It wasn’t so much the pain of the shot as the look on his face when she regarded him with mute outrage. His eyes were actually twinkling. She had read about this phenomenon in poems. Old people and leprechauns were always twinkling. What a disgusting thing to do. “You’re a good girl not to cry,” he said then, sounding oddly disappointed, the twinkle fading; Amy dropped the proffered lollipop into his metal wastebasket with an ostentatious clang, which was a mistake. She just got in trouble with her mother, and as she was led out into the waiting room she saw it, the horrible twinkle, brighter than before. If she had it to do all over again—and right now, almost sixty years later, she would have liked nothing more—she would have let the green lollipop slip down her sleeve, soundlessly, into the trash, like Michael Corleone dropping that gun. Maybe the old bastard would have found it later and realized she’d won; maybe he wouldn’t, but she’d have won anyway. Children saw so much more than adults gave them credit for. They didn’t have the words to name what they were seeing, but they saw, all right, and they never forgot. Maybe they remembered so clearly because they didn’t have the words. Maybe there was a file cabinet in the brain for mysterious clusters of unnamed details.

  Amy switched on her bedside lamp and jotted a few lines in her notebook of story ideas. Kronkheit, she scribbled, and malignant twinkle, and observation and hypothesis—child formulates Twinkle Theory— She had started up the journal again last year and it was filling up, though she had yet to expand on any of the listed ideas, all of which looked like gibberish in the daylight. They were often wonderfully soporific: she would use the ideas as bedtime stories, lulling herself to sleep with opening lines. She tried now to do the same with the little girl, the lollipop, the ancient insult, but when she rolled on her side, her head spun. How can your head spin in the pitch dark when you’re lying down with your eyes closed? Did that even make sense? Maybe she should have gone to one of those walk-in clinics. Maybe her brain was leaking. Maybe she was “stroking out.” For the first time since the fall, she allowed herself to consider going to the hospital. Instantly her heart both raced and sank.

  Amy had enjoyed good health throughout her life without effort, eating and drinking as she pleased, exercising only when there was a point to it. She was in terrible shape now, overweight and sedentary, but still she rarely got even a cold. Living like a hermit protected her from germs. Until today she had never injured herself significantly, while all around her slim, gusto-grabbing women keeled over dead during marathons, fainted from salt-deprivation in the checkout lines of Jimbo’s, crippled themselves with shin-splints, got gnawed on by mountain lions and medevaced from wilderness areas, and generally drove up health insurance rates for the chain-smoking obese who had the good sense to stay still. When they weren’t endangering themselves, these medically pious types got whole-body scans and BMI reports and knew their cholesterol and blood pressure numbers by heart. How they must love their doctor visits!

  Amy stopped going to doctors after Max died. She had not yet been accosted by mammogram reminders, so for the first ten years she didn’t think about doctors much, except to dismiss them as useless technicians who lost interest in you once you were officially incurable. She didn’t blame them for not saving Max, who was dying and did not expect to be saved. But they had been careless with his meds and heartless in treating his ratcheting pain. The problem with residents wasn’t that they were overworked. They were over-young. They behaved as though dying people were an alien species, a series of problems and opportunities, and nothing to do with their own corporeal futures. Only the old doctors really saw Max. One night toward the end as she sat beside his bed, two of these old men came to check on the morphine and then just stood there at the foot of the bed, their faces somber in the dark room, and the three of them listened to Max softly moaning. They seemed to Amy to be bearing witness. Here was the enemy, triumphant, and they had failed. Or maybe they were just taking a break, but even so she admired them for their willingness to do it there, on the field of slaughter.

  She was barely forty when Max died; during the next ten years she had remarried and moved from Maine to California and distracted herself with regret over these decisions, both bad. She kept herself busy not writing, not making friends, and not having sex with the stranger she had married, and it wasn’t until her mid-forties that she acknowledged to herself that she was also not getting checkups. She had entered into the mammogram era, the biopsy years, she was formally mortal, but she couldn’t even bring herself to pick up the phone and make an appointment. The one time she did this, in 1993, she had dutifully noted the appointment, three months hence, in her San Diego Zoo calendar under a photo of a lustrous-eyed okapi, and for the next eleven weeks not a day went by without picturing in her mind those eyes, that calendar square, the illegible name of the doctor, the all too legible time of day, 2:15, and she lived each day with the knowledge of the exact number of days remaining before she would have to drive to that office and walk in and wait in a room full of bad magazines and get weighed and measured by chirpy young pretend nurses and then take her clothes off in an empty room and wait forever in a paper gown, and she could already smell the disinfectant and see the posters on the walls, cross-sections of brains and reproductive organs, and that goddamn breast self-exam to-do list, which she had done only once when she was twenty-five and scared herself almost to death, and at some point a total stranger, invested with outrageous rights and privileges, would come into that room and touch her actual mortal body. No. She had canceled the appointment, and blocked out the square with black marker.

  Now she tried again to write herself unconscious, but when she began to reconstruct Dr. Kronkheit’s office she got no further than the oak desk he made her sit on and the big glass jar of tongue depressors, and these faint sketches were immediately blotted out by the garish image of her own brain, a pink corsage blossoming with aneurisms. Though she didn’t know what aneurisms were, she did know that they were very bad, and she pictured them now as flowers of evil, each deepening crimson. Any moment she might be paralyzed, or worse, aphasic.

  She could turn overnight into one of
those people who lose control of their words. This thought was so alarming that Amy rose and woke up her computer, hoping to determine that you can’t get aphasia from a concussion, but it turned out that you could. She could right now be developing any number of different aphasias, each more frightening than the next, and could by dawn be condemned to communicating through expletives and baffling gestures. That she seldom cared to communicate with anyone was really beside the point. Amy had always figured that, given a choice, she would take blindness over deafness; she would take both of these over the loss of words. She had to get help.

  By three o’clock in the morning she had frightened herself to the verge of a panic attack, with her two biggest fears—death and doctors—pinging back and forth in counterpoint, so that if she turned away from one she was faced with the other, with no respite. As a last-ditch effort to calm down, she switched on the television, immersion in someone else’s narrative her only hope, and when forced to choose between Eraserhead and some horror thing involving torture and dismemberment, she unwisely chose the David Lynch movie. Twenty minutes later, clothed in her flannel nightgown and chenille robe, she drove herself to Palomar Hospital.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hell’s Anteroom

  The sky was still dark when Amy got to the emergency room, which was full of seated patients, many of whom had apparently grown up there. Their savvy parents had stockpiled toys and food. “How long?” she wanted to ask, but they weren’t speaking English and she spoke no other language but French. None of them sported an obvious wound; they seemed not so much unwell as profoundly patient, condemned to dwell forever in Hell’s anteroom. Amy chose a seat in a corner and settled in for a long wait. Two hours? Three? She had brought her notebook along and a copy of Tristram Shandy, on the off-chance that she would be able to stop obsessing long enough to focus on something besides her own mortality. Already she envied her fellow sufferers their apparent ease in this awful place, especially one grade-school girl, sound asleep on her feet with her head flung back on her father’s shoulder, her long fine blue-black hair tumbling down his shirt like a waterfall.

  At first the newness of the place distracted in a positive way. She focused on the passage of time, playing games with the wall clock. Fifteen pages of Shandy should correspond to about fifteen minutes, provided she didn’t read very carefully, which she was in any event not in the mood to do. She would check the clock every sixty pages, and the time would fly by.

  But she couldn’t sink into the novel, which famously began with the conception and birth of T. Shandy. Right away she related this to her own shortcomings as a writer and a human being. Conception and birth! Enormous events, and she’d never written about either of them, nor accomplished them in life, nor even thought seriously about doing so. She could never have had a child with Max, and she could not imagine making a new person with a different man.

  A poet friend had once argued that childless people remained children themselves until death, never crossing over into adult country. As though, Amy had scoffed, there were some river. Exactly, the poet replied, smiling through Amy’s scorn. Poets confounded Amy: they were anarchists, never happier than when disassembling the same kinds of structure that fiction writers labored to build. Where was the joy in that? And the worst part was, the poets usually hove nearer to the truth. It had taken Amy years to figure out what her friend had meant by “aging children.” He wasn’t talking about narcissism, second-class citizenship, unripe intellect. He was talking about mortality. Amy had seen firsthand how people with children aged differently than people without, as they pushed their expanding babies uphill like great lumpy boulders. Of course they dreaded death, everyone does, but their dread was mixed with acceptance and calculation. In their new minds there was an age earlier than which they must not die and after which they could. As soon as Jason finishes college, whenever Kate stops screwing around and figures out what she wants to do, the minute Sandy’s kid gets into rehab, then I can check out.

  They aged more quickly, the mothers and fathers. They claimed it was because of constant worry, lack of deep sleep, endless drudgery, but Amy thought it was that incessant recalculation, an ongoing process she could glimpse behind their eyes. A part of their brain was always humming, gathering data, assessing probabilities, all in the service of determining when it would be all right for them to die. Their humility was frightening.

  Amy was humble about her looks, her talent, her place in the world, but not about her mortality. It would never be all right for her to die, especially not as the result of whatever malignant shadow she would soon fail to discern on an X-ray and be forced to take on faith. After Max was diagnosed, the whitecoats were always slapping films up on those viewing boxes. “As you can see,” they’d say, pointing to something visible only to them, “there’s a shadow.” Just to be pleasant, Max and Amy would pretend they could see it too. Sometimes Amy thought she saw it, except it looked more like fog than shadow, like something they ought to be able to just blow away.

  Would she be polite now? She imagined magnetic resonance images of her own brain, a fluorescent cauliflower in stop-action bloom. “As you can see,” the bored, white-coated child would say, and she’d say, “I can’t see a damn thing, and neither can you.” She’d say, “Never mind that. How long have I got?” She’d say, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  At ten o’clock in the morning sun sliced across her eyes, and she closed her useless book. There seemed to be different people waiting now; the standing child had apparently been attended to. Or perhaps she was the one sitting in the corner with her baby brother. Amy couldn’t be sure; all she’d really noticed was her hair, and Amy was the only blond person in the room. Any minute now, they’d call her name.

  An old man came in, pushing his wife in a wheelchair. “She’s having a heart attack,” he shouted to the woman behind the glass. Within a minute the two were ushered into another room, behind swinging doors. What must that room be like? Carpeted wall-to-wall in deep-piled burgundy, appointed like a palace. Why was a heart attack more exciting to these people than a bleeding brain? And why hadn’t Amy made more of a fuss when she came in? Well, because, if she’d run in yelling “I’ve got a subdural hematoma,” they would have taken her for a crackpot.

  Amy realized she was feeling a tad better. Wretched from sleep loss, but steadier. She hadn’t lost any time for at least twelve hours, she wasn’t dizzy, and her head hurt in a normal-seeming way, without that scary numb feeling, as though it were someone else’s head. She could go home. In fact, she’d better get moving, because if they called out her name now it would be embarrassing, and she might have to pay some sort of cancellation fee. They’d taken her name and Social Security number, but surely they couldn’t charge her for nothing. And the waiting room was beginning to fill up in earnest with brand-new diseased families. There was coughing and bleeding.

  As Amy gathered herself, a magical shopping cart full of blankets, newspapers, and empty cans and bottles pushed through the glass doors and rumbled toward her. As the cart drew closer, a very old woman emerged from behind it, parked the cart to Amy’s left, and clambered up on the seat to Amy’s right, grinning toothlessly. “That’s okay,” said Amy, “I was just leaving. Why don’t you sit right here.”

  The woman stared at Amy, her grin freezing while she tried to figure out God knew what, and then slid down off the chair and began to rummage through her newspapers, breathing in a labored and rusty way, as though her lungs were cluttered with refuse, which they probably were. “You’re that lady,” muttered the old woman. She spread a Union-Tribune out on her chair and began turning pages, her spidery, blackened fingers surprisingly delicate. “I know you,” she said, glancing up at Amy, and back down at an ad for Cal Worthington’s Mile of Cars. Amy began slowly to rise and inch away. This was just a sad little homeless person, except that she reminded Amy of an old childhood nightmare: Baba Yaga, that Russian folktale hag who had haunted Amy something fierce, not be
cause she kidnapped little kids and ate them—Amy had always had a strong stomach for grim tales—but because of that awful name, Yaga, its ugly shape on the page, the awful yawning sound it made. What a hideous word. “You’re that lady,” crowed Baba Yaga, “there you are!” snatching up the newspaper and presenting it to Amy like a bouquet of paper flowers, the largest of which bloomed, horribly, with a likeness of Amy herself, standing on her own front porch in that circus-tent caftan and turban, looking exactly like Mother Ginger on chemo, smiling for the camera and holding on to her open front door, and above the picture the headline, “Enchanted in Escondido.”

  “I’m that lady,” said Amy, sinking back down.

  ENCHANTED IN ESCONDIDO

  Holly Mary Antoon

  Longtime Escondido resident Amy Gallup, acclaimed novelist and writing teacher, patiently waits atop a shady porch swathed in bougainvillea. “Take your time,” she calls to me, as I make my way to the steps of her modest gray house, from which emanate deep, throaty growls. “That’s Alphonse,” she announces cheerfully, then adds,“We’re harmless.”

  A year ago, an actual murder mystery unraveled inside this unprepossessing little house. Two members of Gallup’s private course on fiction writing had already died suddenly under suspicious circumstances, and after the final class, held at Gallup’s home, the killer, a class member, was unmasked, drugging another class member and attacking Gallup with a knife.

  “It was a filleting knife,” said Gallup, in a previous correspondence, “not a butcher knife or switchblade, which I understand is why this person wasn’t charged with attempted murder, but with the legal equivalent of attempted filleting.” The attacker, whom Gallup insisted upon not naming in this interview although the identity is a matter of public record, was arrested on two counts of felonious assault, is presently incarcerated at the California Correctional Institution in Chino, and will be tried later this year for the two murders. “Apparently there are jurisdictional issues,” wrote Gallup.