Amy Falls Down (2 page)

For a full minute she hovered over the puddle with her eyes clamped shut, imagining her own reflection in a scarlet pool. She had a fractured skull, or a subdural hematoma, whatever the hell that was, and she was going to bleed out all alone in her backyard, an aging fat woman wearing a ratty chenille bathrobe and one fuzzy slipper. Then a far-off jingle reminded her she wasn’t actually alone, and, heartened, she opened her eyes. Not blood at all, but basset saliva. He must have stood drooling over her inert form, waiting for her to take her last ragged breath. He was probably off gathering firewood for the hibachi, bless his heart. “Tough luck, kiddo,” she called, softly, to spare her head. “Not this time.”

*   *   *

Amy took one full hour to make it back indoors. For a while, fearful of the pain in her ankle, she crawled on hands and knees. Midway, she heard the Blaines, her neighbors, in their backyard, calling their cats and sprinkling their camellias. She opened her mouth to shout to them and then stopped. They were nice people—she fed the cats when they visited their grandchildren—and they’d be eager to help, but Amy got stuck, as she so often did, on what words she would actually use.

When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn’t come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. “Help!” was such a cliché. By the time she was willing to scream, she had no breath left, and it was just blind luck that somebody saw her gasping and floundering and pulled her to shore. “Why didn’t you say something?” they wanted to know, and she said, “I’m not a screamer.” “Jesus,” said one of them, “couldn’t you have made an exception this one time?” “Apparently not,” she said.

Now she began to rehearse.
Hi there! Hello, Blaines! Say, I’m terribly sorry, but have you got a minute?
What then? The Blaines were short, small-boned people. Between them they couldn’t possibly pull her to her feet, and she’d feel funny about leaning on them—or, indeed, on anyone else. In the end she kept her mouth shut and just sat up on the cement and listened to them argue about a misplaced coupon in the Pennysaver and whether they should feed their mandarins now or in February.

Above her head the goldfinches returned to their feeder, having decided she couldn’t rise up and bother them. Her head, she realized, had stopped throbbing, and she felt suddenly optimistic. Gingerly she probed the back of her skull, which didn’t feel particularly mushy; in fact, it was beginning to numb up. Her ankle was swollen and blue but didn’t seem broken, at least not in a spectacular way. Now was as good a time as any to find out how bad it was. She crawled over to where she kept the garden tools, selected the sturdiest rake, and used it to push herself up. With the upended rake as a crutch, she took a step and put just enough weight on the bad foot to learn that walking, though terribly hurtful, was possible.

By the time she got inside a curious thing had happened. She felt energized, instead of fatigued, by the morning’s experiences, and she was instantly giddy. She should definitely call somebody—Carla, maybe, or Harry B, since he’d given her the fatal Norfolk pine in the first place. She’d call Harry and they’d have a good laugh about it. She started to hobble toward the phone in the living room and noticed happily that the upended rake was unnecessary: she could hop almost nimbly from place to place, so cluttered was her house with chairs and tables and bookcases to right herself on. By the time she reached the sofa, though, she was terrifically sleepy, and lay down for a brief nap before calling Harry.

When she opened her eyes, the light was blinding and so was her headache, as though a migraine had joined forces with the pain from the crack on her head, which it probably had, and then Alphonse clambered up on the sofa and stood on top of her stomach, barking out the window at what had to be the postman, which was odd, because he never came before two p.m. It couldn’t possibly be that late, but she had to wait for Alphonse to jump down before she could see the Kit-Kat clock on the far wall and verify that it was midmorning. It wasn’t.

Something was wrong. Amy never napped. She had a hard enough time sleeping through the night. Worse, there was an important thing she was supposed to do at three o’clock. She couldn’t remember what, but it definitely involved getting dressed. By the time she had hopped into the bedroom, she remembered: the damn reporter, Holly Something, and how could she conduct an interview in her present state? The thought of drawing even the loosest trousers over her swollen ankle was too daunting, and in the end she had to settle for a multicolored flowing caftan, a shapeless billowing thing she had bought without trying on and then shoved in the back of a closet crammed with other similarly unworn monstrosities. Why did they assume that women of a certain age and weight wanted to dress like circus clowns? Forcing a brief glance in the mirror, she was even more alarmed by her face and hair than by the hideous dress. She could fix her face, but her white-blond hair was long and wild, as it always was when she got up in the morning, and when she tried to comb it through, it pulled torturously at her scalp. After much hopping and drawer-rifling she located an old crimson turban she had bought for a Halloween costume thirty years ago. (Amy never threw anything away.) Once again she regarded herself in the mirror. She looked like that creature in
The Nutcracker,
the one with all the little kids under her dress. Mother Ginger, on chemo. It was 2:55.

She pictured herself greeting Holly Gigglepuss, whose name she’d written down somewhere, at the door and drawing her into her messy house, hopping pathetically, explaining that she’d fallen down, exhibiting her own sad state, and knew that this would be worse than flailing in the Kennebec. No. With dignified mien she would greet the woman outdoors, in her own front yard. Under no circumstances would she gain access to Amy’s house. Amy would be waiting for her when she arrived, and she wouldn’t move. She’d look very odd, but at least not pitiful, and there wasn’t going to be a picture anyway.

She had a scare getting out the door when Alphonse, who as a matter of principle always tried to escape when the door opened, came very close to successfully achieving this pointless goal (he never went anywhere but across the street), almost knocking her over backward as she scrambled to close the screen between them. She had planned to position herself on the lawn in front of the dwarf apricot, but she had left the rake crutch on the other side of the door, and there wasn’t time to get it. She maneuvered so she was standing at the railing at the top of the steps, and waited. She could lean against the railing if she had to. Her headache had winked out for the moment, and she was feeling positive again. This should, she knew, have frightened her, as she had no rational reason to feel positive. For one thing, now she could not remember why the reporter was coming. She felt like a cigar-store Indian. There was definitely something wrong with her head, and she’d have to deal with it later.

CHAPTER THREE

But Waving

Then, or rather now, it
was
later. The winter sun had descended, the shadow of her little jacaranda tree had moved, reaching toward the driveway, where a natty blue SUV driven by a young woman
she had never seen before
began to back down into the street. The woman rolled down her window. “That was really amazing!” she said, waving and smiling broadly. “I’ll email you the pictures!” Even from this distance her teeth were impossibly white. Amy waved her off. “Help,” she said softly, waving back.

CHAPTER FOUR

Unnamed Details

Amy hobbled back indoors. After much Internet searching she diagnosed herself with a “simple concussion.” Many websites offered checklists; she didn’t have nausea or slurred speech (although God knew what she had actually sounded like during the interview), but she certainly had headaches; ditto “mood and cognitive disturbances,” the latter in spades, since she was missing a serious chunk of time. Actually, the more reputable websites, like the one for the Mayo Clinic, strongly implied that this kind of amnesia meant that the concussion was “severe.” Still, she was able to juggle incoming information to make it come out the way she wanted: namely, that she would not have to go to a doctor’s office and get herself looked at. Amy was aware that she was being extremely foolish, but one of the great advantages to living alone was that you didn’t have to justify yourself, except to a basset. She fixed a late dinner, which she didn’t eat, went to bed early, and lay awake mistrusting her own brain, a new and unsettling experience, since the object of mistrust was also its agent.

Instead of counting sheep, she tried counting the things of which she was sure: to tease out and disentangle all of the causal threads.

1. It was New Year’s Day. She was sure of that. Because Amy’s birthday was New Year’s Eve, and because she was no longer a child, she loathed New Year’s—both the Eve and the Day. Not only was it not worth celebrating: it was eminently worthy, in the Carrollian mode, of uncelebration. Sixty-plus years ago she had been a gullible toddler with doting parents and the whole world had sung drunken songs and set off fireworks displays in her honor; now it did the same things to piss her off. Amy didn’t at all mind getting older, homelier, and simultaneously bulkier and less visible, but she was disinclined to memorialize the process with noisemakers. (Once, in her mid-twenties, she and Max had, at her instigation, supplied New Year’s Eve party guests with air horns, on the careless theory that if anything, including deliberate noisemaking, was worth doing, it was worth doing well. The results were much more hilarious in anticipation than in actual experience, or even distant recollection. People had screamed in pain.)

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!