The Problem of the Exposition
“Ewwwwww!” screamed Brittany Micheals, splattering her lunch all over the cafeteria table, “I can’t believe you did that, Murphy Gonzalez!”
Murphy Gonzalez stared at Brittany in bewilderment. Well to be more accurate he squinted in Brittany’s direction, because his glasses had been knocked off by Brittany’s flying orange juice carton. “Huh?” he asked. “What did I do now?”
If Brittany answered him he couldn’t hear it, because of the commotion her friends were making. Brittany never traveled alone, always with at least four other girls, Michelle, Ashley, Megan, and Demi, all of whom were now squealing, “Ewwwwwww!”
Murphy felt pretty certain that in a moment or two a cafeteria duty would descend on his table and let him know where he had gone wrong. He shrugged with fatality and went back to practicing his frog dissecting skills.
Amy loved Halloween, and when she had first moved in to her house, she had carved six big pumpkins for Halloween and lined her driveway with them, lit from inside with cheap little flashlights, just as her neighbors with children were doing. Only two alarmingly tall and uncostumed kids, not from the neighborhood, had showed up. In succeeding autumns Amy ramped up her decorations, until the year she actually bought three sets of electrified plastic pumpkins, strewn together like Christmas tree lights, and lit up her shrubs and her palm tree like Broadway; and she had taped silhouettes of witches and werewolves in her living room window, and carved fifteen pumpkins; and this time the little girl who lived across the street actually came to her door, dressed as a Disney creature, some princess or supermodel. But before Amy could greet her, Alphonse did his scourge-of-the-mailman thing, and the child ran down the driveway to her waiting parents. How could anybody, even a little kid, fear Alphonse? It dawned on Amy then that the real bugaboo was Amy Gallup, the Unknown Neighbor. In an age when otherwise reasonable people had their kids’ treats x-rayed for razor blades, and every stranger was a potential pedophile, it didn’t pay to be an Unknown Neighbor. Rather than become Known, Amy basically gave up, although she did continue buying the candy bars, which she always ended up eating herself.
This year, because Fifth Class fell right on Halloween, Amy set out an orange plastic salad bowl full of Mars Bars on her front porch. Maybe if they knew she wasn’t here they’d actually come to her house. When she left for class it was already getting dark, and the littlest goblins were afoot, clinging to their mothers’ hands. One particularly small ghost was crying.
All the Halloweens in Amy’s memory had been thrilling events, where you ran masked and free through magically unfamiliar streets. Amy couldn’t remember this part she was watching now, the first and probably most important part, when you had no idea why they were wrapping you up in a sheet with jagged eyeholes and leading you into the dark void. Outside Amy’s car window normally overprotective adults giggled at their sobbing, spooked children. The crying ghost had probably glimpsed himself in a mirror, and his mother had said, “It’s just you, silly. You’re scared of your own self!” and couldn’t help laughing when this made him cry even harder. Here was the beginning of a story idea: Why is the kid crying? No. Why is his mother laughing?
She was late getting to campus and had to park three lots over, because there was evidently some big lecture or theatrical event next door, so that she needed to jog to class, which just about killed her, and she huffed and puffed her way to the front of the room yelling “I know I’m late, sorry, get your notebooks out, is anybody missing?” She emptied her briefcase on her desk and looked up and said, “Oh, my god.”
Except for Dr. Richard Surtees, they were all wearing masks. Not cheap masks, either, but the pricey latex kind, the kind that high-tech bank robbers wore in caper movies, except that these weren’t Ronald Reagan masks.
“Surprise!” they shouted in unison, their voices a little muffled by the masks.
Amy counted heads. Sure enough, she had thirteen. This was some kind of record: she’d never had a class with such faithful attendance. “I do believe I’ll take roll,” she said.
“Do you mind if we remove these?” someone said. He was wearing a Bart Simpson mask, and he sounded like Chuck. “It smells really terrible inside here.”
“Please wait till I call your name,” said Amy. She preserved for the general amusement her New England Stone Face, as she took roll. “Bart Simpson?”
“Here.” Chuck ripped off his mask. “Jeez, that was slimy.”
“Alice Cooper?”
“Here.” It was rather wonderful to watch Ginger Nicklow, thrift-shop sophisticate, whip the ridiculous face of Alice Cooper off her head like a flapper’s turban. She shook out her long chestnut hair and fanned her face. “This wasn’t my idea,” she said, “although it was fun.”
“Let me guess,” said Amy. “This was Carla’s doing?”
“You got it.” Carla’s mask was stunning, a shiny gray replica of the Alien, complete with dual mouths dripping latex acid. She looked like she was balancing a huge phallus on her head.
“That couldn’t have been cheap,” Amy said.
“Five hundred bucks, actually,” said Carla.
Leona Helmsley gasped, “Good lord.”
“Edna, is that you?”
Edna Wentworth had trouble removing her mask, which eventually popped off with her glasses inside it. She extricated them and wiped the lenses with a small white handkerchief. “Young woman,” she said to Carla, “this little masquerade must have cost you an absurd amount of money.”
Carla, who had apparently brought all the masks and passed them out at the beginning of class, declared that she had a walk-in closet full of them. “I’m a collector, sort of.”
“So we can’t keep them?” This from a giant bloodshot eyeball, a.k.a. Pete Purvis, whom Amy had already recognized by his green hooded sweatshirt, which she had never seen him without. “I love this thing,” he said to Carla, and she told him to go ahead and keep it. Pete was probably the same age as Ricky Buzza, but he seemed younger. Pete worked at a guitar store and lived with his dad. Amy knew this because he had appended to his “Murphy Gonzalez and the Frog’s Leg” a touching one-paragraph author’s bio, in which he mentioned these living arrangements (with an exclamation point!) and claimed that his favorite activity besides writing was playing bass in his garage band, Visibly Shaken.
That left eight (another list!): a gorilla, a fluorescent skull, Jimmy Carter, Mr. Spock, Bozo the Clown, Cher, Leatherface, and Dr. Richard Surtees, upon whose desk lay an empty mask of Saddam Hussein. “Did you choose that one?” Amy asked Surtees.
He bestowed upon her a tolerant smile. “Actually, it was thrust upon me,” he said.
“Like greatness itself,” said the man with the fluorescent skull.
“Is that you, Frank?”
“I’ll never tell.”
Amy was having a very good time, for Amy. They liked her. She had been popular with a few writing groups before, but never so soon in the quarter. The nicest thing about all this fooling around was that they were at ease with one another, which was essential to a productive workshop. But fifteen minutes had gone by, and she had to get the class started. In short order she unmasked Frank Waasted, Syl Reyes (Leatherface), Tiffany Zuniga (Mr. Spock), and Ricky “Cher” Buzza. Most improbably, and therefore happily, Dot Hieronymus was the male silverback gorilla. Dot was smiling when she took it off. “I’ve never felt so empowered,” she said.
“All right, you guys,” said Amy, regarding Jimmy Carter and Bozo the Clown, who had to be Harry B. and Marvy, sitting side by side in the back row. Amy couldn’t recall seeing Harry Blasbalg in jeans before—he always looked as though he drove to class straight from the office—but Jimmy Carter and Bozo were both wearing denim, so obviously Harry must be dressing down tonight. “We’ve got to get started on ‘Murphy Gonzalez and the Frog’s Leg’ now, and we’re not doing it incognito.” She extended her arms toward them, like a choir director. “Get ’em off, you two.”
Only Amy saw what happened next, the whole tableau, because only she was facing the back wall. The first thing that happened was that Jimmy Carter put his left arm around Bozo and raised his right hand over his head. Almost immediately, the second thing happened, which was that Bozo the Clown collapsed sideways, toward Jimmy Carter, and slipped bonelessly through his embrace and down onto the floor, as Jimmy Carter cried “Oh, no!” with the voice of Marvy Stokes. At this cue the door opened and Harry Blasbalg walked in and announced, “Houston, we have a problem.”
Amy’s reaction time for each event was nightmarishly slow. Each image carried with it such a host of flapping red flags that by the time she had recovered from the first, the next one had already whizzed by, leaving its own afterimage flashing, so that she could not very well step over it to address the impossible sight of Harry Blasbalg in mufti, standing in the doorway with a dead serious expression on his unmasked face. How could Harry be standing there, when he was over here, being embraced by Marvy, and why? Or was Harry embracing Marvy? Why the upraised hand? What was wrong with Harry-Marvy, and who was responsible? Was something in the upraised hand? How could Harry be in two places at once? Was it a knife? What did he mean by “Houston, we have a problem”? Could this all be an elaborate prank? And who the hell was Bozo the Clown?
Amy, though childless, had always imagined herself in a vaguely parental role, however distant, with her classes, and she had more than once entertained the fantasy of rising to the occasion of some outlandish classroom threat, masterfully evoking calm through billows of black smoke, negotiating with terrorists, taking a bullet for her most gifted student writer, or for the most inept, depending on her fantasy mood. She had concocted heroic daydreams since early childhood, and they had persisted all through her promising youth, her marriages, her screwups, and on into the present day. In broken-down middle age she yearned more than ever to be a hero; to be presented, as on Christmas morning, with a grand melodramatic opportunity to redeem her life. It would be, she often thought, like winning a moral lottery. Just last night, as she was trying to sleep, she had imagined herself weaponless, as usual, when some dangerous guy (the Workshop Sniper? Herman U. Ticks?) burst in a door identical to that occupied by Harry Blasbalg. The miscreant was heavily armed and bent on mayhem, but resourceful Amy saved the day by upending a metal wastebasket over his head and whanging on it with a chair.
Now, resourceful Amy stood rooted, mouth agape, as everyone else in the class behaved, if not heroically, at least like rational adults. They made way for Dr. Surtees to see to the stricken clown, over whom even Harry was bending solicitously. Amy found her voice. “Wait!” she shouted. Everyone looked at her. “We don’t know who that is!” Everyone looked at her like she was crazy.
Well, of course, they didn’t know about the Sniper! The Sniper, Amy was beginning to understand, was somehow involved, and she looked at Carla for support, but Carla was kneeling by the clown, and Surtees was grabbing the mask by its tuft of red hair and yanking it off, and out sprang a thick blond mane as frizzy as Bozo’s. “God,” said Carla, “look at her face!”
Marvy, Jimmy Carter balanced on top of his head, shook the stricken clown gently. “Sweetie, are you all right?”
“She’s coming around,” said Surtees. “It looks like an allergic reaction.”
Amy finally moved, brushing past Chuck and Tiffany to stand behind the kneeling doctor. The woman lying on her back, wedged between two desk chairs, looked as though she might be attractive, in an athletic, no-makeup sort of way, when her face wasn’t upside-down and ballooning with hives. “Excuse me,” said Amy. “Would someone please tell me who this poor woman is?”
“Hello, there,” said the woman, looking up from the floor. “I’m Cindy Stokes.”
At last Amy, the Class Dunce, understood at least the first part of the tableau. “You’re Marvy’s wife,” she said. And everybody had known this but Amy.
“I wanted her to meet everybody,” said Marvy.
“I’m so sorry,” Cindy said, slowly sitting up. “I’ve never done that before.”
“Was it the latex?” someone asked.
“Probably,” said Surtees. “Are you having any airway obstruction? Trouble breathing?”
“Nope. My lips and my cheeks just got incredibly hot and itchy and then I passed out, like a wimp.”
“Scared me half to death,” said Marvy, helping her to her feet. “I was just going to introduce you to Amy, and then, boom.”
Which explained the upraised, knifeless hand.
All that remained was Harry’s cryptic warning. Once she’d gotten to the bottom of that, Amy planned to go off somewhere and jump into a well. She had never been so embarrassed.
After Cindy had returned from the bathroom, hives apparently subsiding, to sit beside her husband, and the excitement had fallen off, a thick quiet came over the class, which gazed at Amy, with what expectation she didn’t know. Chuck always looked at her speculatively, as though he were trying to figure her out. Now she felt like something on a microscope slide. An apology was in order, but how could she word it? Folks, I know it looks bad, but, see, one of you, and I don’t know even which one it is, is a real nasty piece of work, possibly mentally unhinged, and when the Mystery Clown dropped to the floor, why, naturally I… “Ladies and gentlemen,” she began, “there’s something I have to tell you.” It was all over. She was going to lose them, and her miserable little job too.
“Yes,” said Carla. “There’s something important you don’t know about Amy.”
Yes. I’m an ineffectual, irresponsible, paranoid dolt. “When I saw the—when I saw Ms. Stokes pass out, I—”
“It was the Bozo!” said Carla.
“Well, yes.” Amy stared at Carla, who stared right back in a very meaningful way.
“Which is totally my bad,” said Carla, “because when I was picking out the masks I completely forgot about it.”
“About what?” asked Amy.
“Your coulrophobia.”
“Her what?”
Carla turned and addressed the class. “Amy has been clinically diagnosed as a clown phobic. To an absolutely crippling degree.”
Dot raised her hand. “Oh, I’ve got that too. I didn’t know it had a name.”
Amy struggled not to laugh. What a clever girl. To her amazement they seemed to be buying it, or at least willing to entertain the possibility. What was “crippling clown phobia”? Fear of being clotheslined by Emmett Kelly? Even Surtees didn’t look skeptical. Now they were all chiming in about how scary clowns were—apparently all the world did not love a clown—and offering their own individual phobic variations. Ginger said she had a morbid fear of mimes. Ricky Buzza looked puzzled for a while, but then perked up. “I get it now,” he said. “You were able to control yourself until the clown started acting weird.”
“Exactly,” said Amy. “That’s when I lost it, and I just want to apologize, to all of you, and especially to Cindy.” She was starting to feel at ease, and then she remembered Harry, and Houston. Amy sighed. “Harry, what did you mean when you walked in? You said, ‘Houston, we have a—’”
“Serious parking problem! And we shouldn’t stand for it. These classes cost a lot of money, and tonight I had to park half a mile away…”
Amy was suddenly happier than she had been in years. “Harry, you’re absolutely right,” she said, “and if you want to sue the bastards, count me in. Meanwhile, let’s do Murphy Gonzalez.”
Dealing with juvenile fiction was always hard. Workshop students were apt to give a pass to everything, on the unexamined theory that kids weren’t as discriminating in their reading habits as adults, and any old thing would do, as long as it was sufficiently simpleminded and optimistic. Of course this was false. As far as Amy was concerned, the standards for writing good fiction were the same no matter the age of your target audience. But typically, when dealing in workshop with juvenile fiction, someone would drag in the notions of “age-specific vocabulary,” “short, punchy chapters,” and “appropriate themes,” and tonight was no exception.
Pete had written a likable piece about a sweet quirky kid whose social problems, though predictable, were presented and handled with energy and imagination. Murphy Gonzalez could have just been that staple of modern kids’ books, the weird-looking nerd who trips over some convenient plot device and achieves popularity. But Pete’s Murphy never gets to the popular part: he’s as out of it at the end of the story as he is on the first page. He even loses his semi-girlfriend, another science geek, who forms a middle school chapter of PETA and drops Murphy when he goes to the state regional science fair with his frog-dissection slide show (“To Pith or Double-Pith”). Most remarkably, Murphy never undergoes a change of heart about his frogs, which do not visit him in dreams or crack wise at him from the lab bench; but he does have an African Grey parrot named Margaret whose cryptic advice he values.
Nothing climactic happened in the course of Pete Purvis’s twenty-page story, through which Murphy floated from home to school and back again, in and out of scenes, continually distracted by his own thoughts. The writing needed some polish, but Amy loved the piece. To her annoyance, everyone else, with the shining exception of Edna Wentworth, either hated or were indifferent to it.
Dot Hieronymus led the charge against the story’s various “age-inappropriate” qualities, and in this she was joined by Marvy and Mrs. Marvy, who also had kids (Dot’s two were grown), and Tiffany, who had apparently taken some stupid course in child development. The rest were just lazy. Amy was particularly disappointed in Chuck and Frank, whom she had begun to count on for intelligent in-class feedback. Their few comments were so general in nature that Amy suspected neither had read beyond the first few pages. She was tempted to blast them, and the class in general, for giving Pete less than his due. But she was still so relieved about the identity of “the Bozo” and Harry’s anticlimactic announcement that she let the matter slide.
Instead, she allowed Edna the floor. Edna Wentworth must have been a hell of a high school teacher, because she hit a number of complex points right on the head. She praised Pete for avoiding clichés, for his lovely list of girls’ names (Brittany, Ashley, Michelle, Megan, Demi), and for the care he had taken to get the details of frog dissection correct. She explained to him the distinction between fatality and fatalism, and that “Micheals” wasn’t as likely a spelling as “Michaels.” She did all of Amy’s work for her, including solving the mystery of how a “cafeteria duty” could do anything at all, much less descend on a table.
“It’s an interesting word usage,” Edna explained, “which apparently derives from grade school. I never encountered it until about ten years ago. In grade school, kids picked up on the general notion of ‘duty,’ as in yard, cafeteria, or kitchen duty, but personified it. This must have begun with one child and taken off from there.”
“So a ‘duty’ is a person?” asked Amy, and the other parents nodded that yes, this was true. Cindy Stokes said her son always complained about the yard duty picking on him.
“And I really appreciate seeing this in print,” continued Edna, “since it captures what I hope will prove to be an ephemeral, and possibly regional, linguistic anomaly.”
Amy went on to heap praises on Pete, who blushed happily, at which point Amy collected all critiques for inspection before handing them to him (this being her new routine) and called a short recess.
After the break, and after Tiffany’s and Ricky Buzza’s stories had been passed around for the following week’s critique, Amy opened discussion on Dot’s story, “Gone But Not Forgotten.” Amy couldn’t help wishing that Dot had been wearing the empowering gorilla mask when she wrote it, an emotionally gruesome Wronged Wife thing which Amy hoped did not correspond in any way with the circumstances of Dot’s actual life.
“Here we have an adult story,” said Amy, “as opposed to a story for kids. So I expect that those of you who didn’t exactly overexert yourselves—”
Tiffany Zuniga actually snorted. “Excuse me,” she said, “but in what sense is this an ‘adult story’?”
“In the sense,” Amy said, “that children probably hear enough about marital discord in their homes without reading bedtime stories about it.” She should have realized that Tiffany was going to hate this piece. Tiffany was the anti-Dot.
Clarissa had arrayed the linen-cloaked dining table with their best china, the Royal Doulton she had selected twenty years ago, when she had been a young bride-to-be. Two wine glasses sparkled in the light of her tall, finely tapered natural beeswax candles, and the air was redolent with the robust, manly scent of bourbon-roasted pork, Jeremy’s favorite dish.
It was eight o’clock, past time for Jeremy to return from the office, but then he was frequently late, and Clarissa hadn’t really expected him before 8:30, even on this, their twentieth anniversary. Clarissa smiled to herself as she pictured him running for a taxi, cursing the lateness of the hour, anxious to get to her. She wondered what he had gotten her for a present. Whatever it was, or even if it was nothing, it didn’t matter to Clarissa. His real present to her, and hers to him, would be unwrapped upstairs, in their satin-slippered bed, after their sumptuously sensuous repast.
Suddenly the front door opened, and quietly closed again. Clarissa smiled once more, this time the smile was for him, showing her fine white teeth. “I’m waiting, Darling,” she called to him.
There was no answer for a long time, and then she could just make out, “I’ll be in in a minute.” Jeremy sounded tired, distracted, and Clarissa’s heart went out to him.
“Whatever you had to do so late this evening,” she sang out, “could certainly have been accomplished by your other senior partner, Herb Warminster.” When Jeremy didn’t respond, she added, “He takes advantage of you, Darling. They all do, just because you’re the senior member of the most prestigious law firm in Philadelphia. You really ought to—”
Suddenly Jeremy was standing in the dining room doorway, and he was not alone. Behind him, over his left shoulder, she could see a shiny blonde head.
“Why Jeremy,” Clarissa asked, “who’s that with you?”
As if in a dream the blonde head materialized in front of Jeremy, attached to the body of Clarissa’s younger sister, Rose, who had been a brunette the last time Clarissa had seen her, ten years ago, at an occasion Clarissa could scarcely have forgotten, during which, as a Christmas guest in Clarissa’s home, she had thrown herself at her own sister’s husband in the master bath.
“Hello, Sis,” Rose said, smiling unpleasantly.
Clarissa was dumbstruck. She glanced at Jeremy, whose face was grim, almost metallic, not the face she loved. This wasn’t a dream, Clarissa thought to herself. This was a nightmare.
“Clarissa,” Jeremy finally spoke, “I want a divorce.”
Amy had given some thought to how she would open up discussion. Dot was, on the surface anyway, the most emotionally vulnerable workshop member. She always claimed to love every workshop contribution, even Pete’s, which she had actually criticized (a first for her). Somewhere along the line, probably at a young age, she had gotten the idea that you shouldn’t say anything at all if you couldn’t say something complimentary. Amy had taught workshops full of people like Dot, and these classes were always a waste of everyone’s time, especially hers. But here Dot was all alone and exposed. True, Marvy was a very pleasant, look-on-the-bright-side sort, as was Ricky Buzza, but they were guys. Men did not tend to take these sessions personally. Dot would be another story.
So Amy, who could not in good conscience find a single thing to praise in “Gone,” had intended to concentrate on stylistic problems and go easy on the more substantial ones. But Tiffany wasn’t going to let this happen. “First off,” she was saying, “what planet does this woman live on?” Amy hoped she was referring to the hapless Clarissa, not the author. “She’s a full-time housewife with a kid in college. She does nothing all day except shop and do lunch and plan candlelight dinners for Jeremy. She has no interests outside her marriage. What does she read? We don’t know. What are her politics? We don’t know.”
“What difference does it make?” Chuck Heston, of all people, rose to Dot’s defense. “She’s a fictional character, for Pete’s sake. You don’t have to approve of her.”
“It’s not a question of approving. I just don’t believe in her. She isn’t possible.”
Now something very interesting began to happen. The class, as one, gathered around Dot Hieronymus, figuratively speaking, and piled on Tiffany Zuniga. Even Ricky Buzza argued with her. Amy would bet the ranch that not one of these people had enjoyed Dot’s story, but they didn’t want to see the woman hurt. Or maybe they were just annoyed with Tiffany. Or both. “Look,” said Frank, “can’t we just talk about the story now? So what if it isn’t politically correct—”
“Politics,” said Tiffany, “has nothing to do with it! It’s the woman herself! She’s just this pathetic, doormatty, classic passive-aggressive—”
“Excuse me,” said Dr. Richard Surtees, raising his finger. “If she’s classic anything, then she can’t very well be ‘impossible.’”
Tiffany looked at the back of his head with loathing. “I never said she was impossible,” she said.
“Yes you did,” said Pete.
“Hold it,” said Amy, glancing at Dot. Dot looked intense, but not alarmed, or hurt; not yet anyway. In fact she seemed to be smiling to herself, just a little. “You’re all jumping the gun. Let’s first agree upon exactly what we’re arguing about. Would someone please tell us what happens in this story?”
“What I said was, or I meant, that I don’t want to read about these women any more, the ones who just buy into their own second-class lives.”
“Tiffany, please,” said Amy.
Carla saved the moment. “A woman, Clarissa, learns that her husband is going to leave her and run off with her younger sister. There’s a big flashback, where we see Clarissa and Jeremy on their honeymoon, and we see the birth of their daughter, and all that, but basically the whole thing takes place on the night of the dinner. It ends with Clarissa insisting that they sit down for supper before they leave—”
“How disgusting is that!” said Tiffany.
“—and then she goes into the kitchen and sees that the sink is all backed up, and she takes out this can of Drano. And she just stands there, and her husband says, ‘How long is this going to take? We’ve got a plane to catch,’ and she’s just standing there crying and wiping her eyes and she says, ‘Not long, my darling.’”
“The End,” said Syl Reyes. “I thought it was kind of sad.”
“Kind of convenient, you mean,” said Tiffany. “The pig won’t even have to pay alimony! She’s going to off herself in the most horrible way possible—”
Dot Hieronymus laughed, instantly silencing the room. It was delighted laughter, unforced, almost but not quite contagious. It was also pretty alarming. Amy tried to make eye contact with her, but Dot kept her head down, and when she stopped laughing she sighed a little and went quiet.
Amy thought fast. “Dot has brilliantly circumvented the ‘no talking’ rule. While we may not, of course, ask her what she finds so funny, we could take the opportunity to pause here and reflect.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Marvy, “but did everybody think Clarissa was going to commit suicide? Because I didn’t.”
At this Dot raised her head and smiled back at Marvy. Her color was high, her cheeks redder than when defending Code Black.
To Amy’s surprise, the class was about evenly split between Clarissa the Suicide and Clarissa the Cold-Blooded Poisoner. Amy was shocked that even one person, even Tiffany, believed that Clarissa was about to ingest the Drano herself. For Amy, the ending, however melodramatic, was the best thing about the story. Now they all had a fine time wrangling about it. Tiffany scoffed at the idea of a doormat wife suddenly standing up for herself; Syl, Pete, and Harry argued that Clarissa was a killer, but that there should have been some sort of foundation laid earlier in the story. Harry complained that this was a surprise ending, and no fair. And Chuck, to Amy’s delight, wondered if Clarissa’s character shift, from victim to murderer, hadn’t been willed instead of imagined. Moments like this made Amy believe she wasn’t wasting her time after all. “It’s like the writer wants her to change, so, presto!”
In the end there wasn’t time for Amy to discuss stylistic problems. She had all of three minutes left to touch on Dot’s stilted dialogue, and specifically why dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. “When you’re writing lines,” she told them, as they started packing up, “you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never explain our terms. We don’t say, ‘Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich’?”
“I would never say that,” said Chuck, “because I’ve never been to Germany.”
“What would we say instead?” asked Marvy.
“You tell me.”
“And we’d never say,” said Carla, “Sweetie, your senior partner, Herb Warbucks—”
“Warminster,” said Dot pleasantly. She appeared to be extremely pleased with the discussion. Amy had no idea why.
“Gimme the sugar,” said Cindy to her husband. “That’s what you’d say.”
“So what do you do,” asked Ginger, already on her feet, “if the fact that the sugar bowl comes from Munich is important to your story?”
They were all, spiritually, out the door. Even Carla was busy stuffing masks into a rucksack. Amy sighed. “I’ll tell you next week. So long, folks, and Happy Halloween.”
As usual she nosed around the empty room, looking for articles left behind. Often students forgot the next week’s stories, accidentally-on-purpose, and sometimes jackets, or scarves, and once she found an unsigned three-hundred-page novel, never to be claimed, but tonight there were only a few empty coffee cups for her to throw away. Amy gathered up the two stories for next week, put one in her briefcase and the other on top of it, and started out the door, and there was Tiffany, looking crestfallen.
“I really pissed you off tonight,” Tiffany said.
Was this really an apology, or the beginning of an argument? Amy didn’t have the energy for either. “Everybody got worked up,” Amy said. “A lot of it was just pent-up steam from the Bozo fiasco.” To Amy’s surprise, Tiffany giggled. “What’s so funny?”
“The Bozo Fiasco. Sounds like one of those Robert Ludlum things.”
“I can’t picture you,” said Amy, “reading thrillers.”
“My mom,” said Tiffany. “Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, all those guys. Sometimes she’d have two going at once.” She looked down at her feet. “Look, I know I went over the top tonight. I’m sorry. That Dot lady, that story, it just got to me, but that’s my problem, I know.”
“Want to walk me to my car?” Amy was sympathetic, even intrigued, but more than that she was exhausted. Together they walked, slowly, down the ramp from the modular classroom building, up the long curving path toward the road that would lead, eventually, to the lot where Amy and most of the others had been forced to park. It was a cool, fragrant night, with a hint of salt breeze, and Amy and Tiffany had it all to themselves.
Tiffany told Amy about her parents, and how her mother had died four years before, and how, armed with a master’s degree in Women’s Studies, Tiffany hadn’t even been able to land a full-time job as a clerical worker. She still lived at home, with her father and her younger sister, and was part-time copyeditor at the North Country Times.
“And here I pictured you out there in the corporate jungle, bursting through glass ceilings, right into a corner office with a view.”
“That was the plan.”
They strolled uphill in silence, past two huge lots still more than half-filled with cars. It always amazed Amy how even this late at night there were so many cars, and so few humans. They hadn’t passed a single one on foot. By now Amy was glad of the company. “I hate this walk at night,” she said out loud, surprising herself.
“It’s creepy, all right.” Now they descended into the last lot, where only two cars remained. Tiffany’s Saturn was closest. “You should take self-defense classes,” she said, digging into her pants pocket. “I’ve taken tae kwon do and kickboxing, and I don’t worry anymore.” She stopped and searched her other pockets. “My keys,” she said.
“Maybe they’re in the ignition,” said Amy.
“Never. Never, ever, ever. I’ve never done that in my life.” Tiffany looked stricken, as well she might. By now the classroom—the only place she’d been tonight—was locked up and the custodian gone.
“Have you ever left them sticking in the trunk?”
They were close enough to the car now to see the keys, glinting yellow in the lamplight. Tiffany laughed in delighted relief. “You know what? I even remember doing it! I got my pile of manuscripts from the trunk, and I was really excited about passing them out, and I slammed the top down, and I even thought, Now, don’t forget the keys, Stupid!”
Amy stood with her for a moment, as she put her bag in the trunk. “So, you were excited, huh? Does this mean you like what you’ve written?”
Tiffany smiled. “I like the fact that I wrote anything at all.”
Amy smiled back, waved good night, and walked off toward her own car. After a few seconds she turned. “You know,” she called to Tiffany, “there are worse things than falling on your face right out of college.”
“Like what?”
“Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.”
Tiffany laughed. “You’re breaking my heart!”
“Later,” said Amy, turning back.
Well, this was nice. Tiffany was a decent girl after all. Tonight even Surtees had been almost likable. Amy loved it when someone turned out not to be a jerk. She often wondered if this trait prevented her from being a better writer. Once she’d gotten a story rejected by the New Yorker with the comment, “People simply aren’t this noble.” But they were, she thought now, on this lovely night, after an absurd and invigorating evening among people who just wanted to get their stories down on paper, leave some little mark, make themselves distinct. They were all, potentially, noble. In the distance, Tiffany’s car started up and drove off. And essentially kind, Amy thought. Maybe not always, especially if you gave them a chance to think about it first, but look at what happened tonight, with Cindy Stokes, and then with Dot’s foolish story, which could have been a disaster, with indignation, hurt feelings, God knows what all, but instead look what happened. Everybody went home happy.
She heard, off in the distance, the hysterical squeal of brakes, and then the gunning of an engine, and she looked back to see if it could be Tiffany’s car. At first all she could make out was a small car entering the far end of the lot at an unsafe speed, at least for speed bumps, and sure enough it hit three of them, bottoming out each time in a pitchless bang, the third time with an attendant rattle that sounded like a dislodged oil pan, and still it careened forward, coming straight for Amy.
Resourceful Amy did not, of course, move an inch. She was paralyzed, but her mind was humming right along, and what she was thinking was that even if she could move she’d never be able to get out of the way in time. Perhaps, when she was younger. Not now. Oh, well.
The car was close enough so that she could see it was that Saturn, it was Tiffany, and then it swerved to Amy’s left, and braked so hard that she could smell the rubber burning twenty feet away. In the abrupt quiet Amy heard a funny, muffled, high-pitched eeeeeee, like a cartoon falsetto, and then Tiffany opened her door and tumbled out on the asphalt, and it was a scream, EEEEEEEE, but still so thin a sound and so odd that Amy felt like she had all the time in the world, how bad could it be? And then Tiffany got on her feet and slammed the car door and, without looking in Amy’s direction, pointed at her own backseat window and began to scream full-throated, with all the overtones, a scream to wake the dead. She stood stiff, jackknifed forward at the waist, and pointed and screamed and screamed as if she were trying to kill the whole car with her voice alone.
Amy, taking all this in, suddenly realized that she wasn’t afraid yet. She would be soon, but right now she was feeling good, strong, charged with the electric joy of not having been run over. She wasn’t afraid, and she could move again, and she was, being a human being, potentially noble. Amy ran to Tiffany’s side and embraced the poor shrieking girl. “I’m here,” she said. “It’s all right. I’m here, and it’s going to be all right.” She repeated this many, many times, until Tiffany stopped screaming, and just cried, shuddering and coughing; until at last she managed to say, still pointing, “Look.”
Amy looked at the car window, but she could see only the reflection of an overhead streetlamp. She opened the driver-side door and peered inside, but all she could see was a pile of books on the passenger seat and deep shadow in the back. She would have to open the rear door to look back there, and so resourceful Amy, still unafraid, sat in the driver’s seat, and it smelled like cough drops in there, overwhelming, like the nightbloomer only different, and she turned and reached around back to pull up the lock, and there, on the backseat directly behind her, she could finally see, eye level, impaled, and propped straight up on a eucalyptus branch, the head of Ted Bundy.