Amy Falls Down (15 page)

Amy didn’t mind criticism but bristled at being misconstrued. This particular list had been culled from one of her old workshop teaching notebooks, and it was supposed to be all about a perennial workshop issue: real life vs. fiction. When beginners were criticized for unconvincing plots, they often objected, “But this is based on a totally true story! This really happened!” As though facts trumped anything. She would explain that it was the writer’s job to make the events plausible, which, in their case, the writers had not done. We don’t read fiction to learn facts; we read it to make sense. While their eyes glazed over, she would talk about the fictional universe as opposed to the actual one, becoming caught up in ideas that evidently fascinated only her. The fictional universe is
knowable,
she would say. The fiction writer is god. She creates people whose lives actually
cohere.
But what if the writer is an existentialist? a wise guy would ask. What a terrific question! Well, then, that fictional world is meaningless, and the reader can
know
that, because that’s how the writer has set it up. Amy herself wasn’t sure what this last claim actually meant.

To aid in her lectures she had worked up a series of models for her students—plot lines that no publisher would buy into, for stories no one would want to read, and for a variety of reasons, none of which was because such things never happened in the real world. The last one in the list—the one about the happy couple who die in a fire—was the one she most often revised. She used various smoothly flowing plots, dramas, romances, comedies, and abrupted them with plane crashes and natural disasters.

One alternate was about a young girl’s fraught relationship with her mother and how that relationship deepens in complexity over the whole of the girl’s life, as she comes to know her mother as a person as mysterious as any other. Through years of misunderstandings and estrangements they have always loved each other; toward the story’s end, they begin to
like
each other, the daughter particularly admiring her mother’s refusal to go soft in old age. (The residents and keepers at her nursing home peg her as “negative.”) The daughter makes arrangements to bring her mother home with her, renovating her own small house to accommodate them both. A few days before the mother is to be transferred, a serial killer, posing as the cable installer, attacks and strangles the daughter. The end.

Perversely, Amy added this particular variation to her blog list, prompting more outcries. The fact that these plots never worked well as pedagogical tools probably should have dissuaded her from airing them on the Internet, but she dug in her heels. She didn’t have a large blog readership, but it was much larger than the average class, so somebody was bound to understand her. One in a hundred was all she needed to set her mind at rest. Toward that end, she added an example with an ending that was not depressing or horrific.

A young girl is killed (murdered, perhaps; or slain by a hit-and-run driver), and her older brother becomes obsessed with finding out who killed her. Police leads peter out; years go by; he joins the Air Force, intending to make a career out of it, but, haunted by his sister’s death, resigns his commission, returns to college, and becomes a crime scene investigator in Cincinnati, his hometown. He marries and begins a family, but his spare time is mostly spent investigating the murder/accidental death of his sister. He narrows down the suspect pool to three men, one dead, all local. He doesn’t yet have enough information to get the attention of the local prosecuting attorney, but signs are that with continued persistence he will prevail. His wife, who has been patient with his obsession, gets pregnant for a third time and, faced with an overload of domestic worries, sits Peter down and explains that things have to change: that if he values his life with her and his daughters, he must let go of the past and devote his attention to them. They stay up all night talking. He agrees reluctantly to try. He finds this difficult at first but surprisingly not impossible. He has, he sees, a hope of happiness. After awhile, he no longer glances toward the file cabinet where he keeps all his carefully gleaned evidence. He never finds out who killed his sister and eventually stops wondering about it. The end.

The day after the NPR interview aired, Amy checked in on her blog and found ten full pages of comments, some from well-wishers weighing in on the interview, but most in furious response to the list that nobody liked, which she now retitled “THE LIST THAT NOBODY LIKES.” There were new voices among the comments, some loutish, some learned, and as usual everybody misunderstood her. She was particularly disheartened by a comment from SamLWeiss, who obviously knew something about how fiction was constructed:

These plots are ridiculous. I see your point, but no writer worth his salt would, for example, junk up a lit-fic novel—a book about a man finally understanding what his wife means to him—with all that crap about crime scene analysis and suspect lists. I mean, you might mention the early trauma and his obsession with his sister, but you’d do this in the context of the larger story, the story about his growth. This is a character-driven novel derailed by a cheap plot device.

Amy was eager to get back to a new story idea of her own, but she could see that NPR was bringing out the torches and pitchforks, and she was afraid that if she didn’t stop and explain herself, things would get out of hand. As Maxine said, and whether intentionally or not, she was building “a base.” She posted a frigid response to SamLWeiss:

I’m not sure you see my point at all, which is my fault, as I neglected to signal with a festive “LOL” or smiley face that I was joking. My point was pretty much the one you’ve just made: that successful fiction isn’t junked up with ill-fitting events. On the other hand, actual lives are. Ask any biographer. Part of his job is to ignore or somehow morph the stuff that doesn’t fit. Our narratives are incoherent, at least until we recollect them in story form. The lives of many of us, most of us, do not follow classic narrative arcs, SamLWeiss. Some have competing arcs, going off in all directions, like bad flower arrangements. My own arc probably looks like a polygraph readout. So far, I guess, I’m character-driven, but I’m pretty sure I don’t lead a genre life—not even a lit-fic life. Do you? And I know, and so should you, that at some time in the future my arc, and your own, will be derailed by a cheap plot device. Perhaps I’ll put that on my tombstone.

After a pause, she decided to change the name of the list once more, and for the final time, to:

THE ACCIDENT-DRIVEN LIFE

A week later, as Amy was wrangling with Carla by email about setting a date for her first retreat appearance, Maxine called. “You’ve really done it now,” she said. “You’ve teed off the Christers. This is brilliant, babe.”

At her urging, Amy checked out GO AWAY, now teeming with hundreds of comments, most of which actually said (or boiled down to) “You are not an accident!” In fact, so many said just that, no more, no less, that Amy suspected they had been assigned by an organized cabal of pastors. “Accident” and “luck,” Amy learned, were the dirtiest words in the Fundamentalist lexicon. The Anti-Accident Brigade wrote to cheer Amy up, to assure her that everything happens for a reason. They often said just that: “Everything happens for a reason!” The Brigade was divided into two general schools: those who allowed that terrible, inexplicable things (“things
we
call accidents”) happen in real life, but they’re all part of God’s mysterious plan; and those who claimed, against all evidence, that God would never allow for such terrible things in the first place, at least not the way Amy had described them. One of them, Betty1986, wrote:

You’ve left out the most important parts of these “plots.” That loving bride and groom perish together, their arms around each other, uplifted by the certain hope of heaven. The murdered daughter has time to show her faith to her murderer: to face her martyrdom with joy. Who knows, she may have started this lost soul on the path to his own redemption! None of these plots are accident-driven. They are purpose-driven, and the purpose is often not ours to know.

Some of the lengthiest comments came in the form of testimonies, personal true stories of “so-called accidents” that had enlightened their lives, or turned their lost lambs from the crooked path. They wrote about being “blessed” with cancer, heart attacks, paralyzing strokes; worse, of never experiencing the fullness of God’s love until their own children were taken from them by some ghastly—and literal—deus ex machina.

Jackinthepulpit91 posted the entire first verse of an old hymn, “It Is Well with My Soul,” famously written by Horatio Spafford, a businessman who, upon learning that his four daughters had perished together in a winter crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, penned the undying words

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,

It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Refrain:

It is well, with my soul,

It is well, with my soul,

It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Apparently he had written the hymn as he voyaged east to join his grieving wife, when his ship’s captain pointed out that they were sailing over the very spot where the
Ville du Havre
had gone down, at which point Spafford had (in Amy’s imagination) dashed in unseemly haste to his stateroom, inked a pen, and started to write. Jackinthepulpit91 also included a link to a page where Amy could actually hear his own entire family singing this hymn, along with many other favorites.

Amy had been raised in a Congregational church and could remember singing this very hymn, a pretty one, without knowing its history—a history which she now could not help finding less than inspirational. What father, beholding his children’s watery grave, is immediately moved to assess the health of his own soul? How about giving a thought to them? How were their souls doing there, in the freezing water, as their heavy garments tugged them down? She did some quick research on H. Spafford and found that the posted facts were true though incomplete. Spafford was no stranger to what heathens call “accidents.” He lost his infant son to illness and then all his money in the Great Chicago Fire. Spafford’s hymn was set to music by Philip Bliss, a gospel singer and composer, who himself died three years later, along with his wife, in a catastrophe trifecta (bridge collapse–train crash–fire), which the spectacularly terrible poet Julia Moore memorialized as the “Ashtabula Bridge Disaster”:

Have you heard of the dreadful fate

Of Mr. P. P. Bliss and wife?

Of their death I will relate,

And also others lost their life;

Ashtabula Bridge disaster,

Where so many people died

Without a thought that destruction

Would plunge them ’neath the wheel of tide.

Amy pasted this stanza into her posted reply to Jackinthepulpit91, without explanation and attribution. Let him figure it out.

She called Maxine back. “Why is this
brilliant
?” she asked. “I don’t have time to argue with these people. And I don’t want to be mean to them. If their faith sustains them, it’s not my business. I just want them to go away. Hence the title of my blog.”

Maxine coughed up a lung. “Don’t you see what you’ve got going here?”

“Where? On the Internet? It’s an amusement, Maxine, mostly to me, and to a few other people. That’s it. That’s the only reason I started it.”

“Not anymore,” said Maxine. “You’re getting attention. What did I tell you? They’re coming out of the woodwork.”

“That’s supposed to
excite
me? Is this my new readership category? Things that come out of the woodwork?”

“Settle down,” said Maxine. “We’re not just talking readership anymore. Mostly readers, okay, but you’re on the radio now. Who knows what’s gonna happen next? It’s a new world, babe.”

“I was on the radio
once
.”

“Trust me, that was just the start. They’re interested in doing another one next month. Maybe a regular thing.”

“A regular thing about me?” Amy’s heart began to race. “I can’t be a regular thing, Maxine. I don’t have that much to say. This isn’t funny.”

“Of course not just you. You and a couple other writers. You know. Shooting off your mouths about stuff.”

“Maxine, I’m not sure I like this.” Things were happening too fast. Amy felt buffeted.

“Which is why I wasn’t going to tell you until we worked out the kinks. Forget it for now, okay? Don’t worry about it. Have a drink.”

Amy put the phone down to pour herself some wine. “Back to the blog,” she said. “Tell me again why it’s a good thing to be attracting woodwork creatures to a site devoted to idle reflection, most of it of interest mainly to me.”

“Give me a second.” Amy could hear the click of a lighter. Maxine took a drag.

“Are you still smoking?” asked Amy. “With those lungs?”

“Here’s the deal. You’re not gonna understand it, but you are gonna have to trust me. You’re not just a writer now. You’re a package. In case you haven’t noticed, writers don’t just write, babe. They package themselves, or they have people do it for them. People like yours truly.”

Amy held her tongue.

“Shut up,” said Maxine. “You think Charles Dickens wasn’t a package? You think Mark Twain wasn’t a package? Edith Wharton? Hemingway? Fitzgerald, there was a package! They were all great writers, sure, but they were also commodities. They spent as much time in the spotlight as they did staring at the old blank page. The only difference today is every idiot who writes a book expects to be a brand name.”

“Like Jenny Marzen,” said Amy, in spite of herself.

“Exactamento.”

“Maxine, tell me something I don’t know. I’ve looked at their stupid websites. I’ve seen their head shots. I’ve watched them on C-SPAN. Hell, I was trapped one time in an elevator with some silly girl who thought I should know who she was because she had written some excrescence about saving your marriage with sex toys.”