In fact, Amy would have slept until noon, had Carla not called her, raving about a FedEx box she’d just gotten from Dot Hieronymus. “Of course I didn’t bring it into the house,” she said. “I’m not even sure it’s safe to leave on the front step.”
Amy, half asleep, didn’t understand how the phone could still be ringing while Carla yammered in her ear. Then she heard Alphonse click down the hall to the front door and realized that the ringing was her doorbell. “Hang on,” she said, and returned in a minute with her own FedEx box. “We’ll open them together,” she told Carla.
Carla said something absurd about a bomb, and also “Happy Thanksgiving, by the way.”
Amy was staring at a 9 × 12 letter-sized cardboard envelope stuffed to a width of perhaps half an inch. “Can you honestly picture Dot horsing around with plastique?”
Carla admitted that she couldn’t. “But then I wouldn’t have pictured her shoving Frank off a cliff, either.”
“I’m opening mine,” said Amy, as she pulled on the cardboard zip-tab. Either kill me now, she thought, or bring me a cup of black coffee.
“What if it’s not a bomb? What if it’s something poisonous, like an asp, or a—”
Amy slid the manuscript out onto her chenille bedspread as Carla said “tarantula.” Actually it slipped out in four discrete layers, one per syllable. Still the cardboard envelope remained distended, certainly from having harbored a manuscript that had to be at least sixty pages long, but Amy went ahead and smashed it with her fist anyway, twice. Of course, in the rational world a tarantula would have been squashed in transit; they weren’t shape-shifters. Except in dreams.
“Oh, my God,” said Carla. “It’s—”
“The Workshop Murders.” Carla and Amy spoke in unison.
“Oh, my God,” said Carla. “Do you realize what this means?”
Amy was staring at the second page.
Dramatis Personae
CLEMENTINE SCRIBNER
writer-in-residence and professor of fiction, Ivy University
JOHNNIE MAGRUDER
young hotshot reporter (secretly working on a gangster roman à clef) at the Daily Eagle
ZIRCONIA CUMMINGS
beautiful young graduate student, working on a doctorate in art history, and toying with a historical novella on Lady Jane Grey
PERSEPHONE DARKSPOON
well-to-do widow, blocked on the third novel in a mystery series
DR. P. T. MERRIWETHER
renowned neurosurgeon, working on a medical thriller
CASSIE BUNCHE
eccentric performance artist, working in multimedia
HESTER SPITZ
owner of a small bookstore, likes to enter short story contests
MELVYN RUMBELOW
retired computer software magnate, working on a screenplay
GEORGIE RUMBELOW
his nephew, working on a science fiction trilogy
FANNY MAKEPEACE
retired Methodist missionary, working on memoirs
JAKE WISEMAN
mob lawyer, playing his cards close to the table
VITO LASAGNA CAPTAIN MANLEY STEWARD
Wiseman’s most important client of the cruise ship Aurora Queen
“Thirteen!” said Carla. “Oh my God! There’s exactly thirteen! And look—”
Amy scanned the names. “Dot’s cleverer than she looks,” she said. “Zirconia. A flashy, worthless pseudogem. So much for Tiffany. And poor Edna’s a missionary. Makepeace!”
“Thackeray!”
“I don’t think so. She’s made Edna the peacemaker, the sexless guardian of the moral order. That’s another way of shooting down the opposition.”
“Okay, Jake Wiseman, the mob lawyer, is obviously Harry B. And Magruder is Ricky Buzza. And Dr. Merriwether, guess who…” There was a sharp intake of breath. “Cassie Bunche!! Oh, man! What a bitch!”
Amy had been waiting for that discovery, and while she was waiting, doped out that Syl was probably Vito. There were no thugs in the writing group, and Syl had the most muscle. And the nephew, Georgie, had to be Pete. He and Ricky were the youngest guys in class. Which left Melvyn Rumbelow, the Captain, and the Steward, to be matched up with Chuck, Marvy, and poor dead Frank. “Marvy” and “Melvyn” sounded an awful lot alike.
Carla agreed, and it was apparent to both, even without saying it, who would play Persephone Darkspoon: Dot Hieronymus, the dark lady herself.
“We can only hope,” said Amy, “that Hester Spitz is a throw-away part, because Ginger’s long gone.”
“Yeah. What?” Carla quit rattling her pages. “We’re not going to put this thing on, are we?”
“Where? In the old barn? No, but I did tell Dot to mail these out, and the only way I can see to deal with it in class is to read through it as a group.”
“What!?”
“I know, it breaks the rule. But plays are meant to be spoken. It won’t be like reading a short story out loud. Besides, it’s likely to be the least painful way to get through it.”
“Amy, how are we supposed to get together like nothing’s happened, with Dot right there, and put on this stupid play, when—”
Amy lay back and closed her eyes. All this from the Carla, the cheerleader who had bullied Amy into continuing the group privately, against all her instincts. “Carla, I don’t expect we’ll ever meet again, at least not outside a police station or a court of law. I was just thinking like a teacher. Excuse me all to hell.” Carla started to apologize, or maybe argue, but Amy cut her off and hung up. She wanted very much to pull the phone jack out of the wall, but didn’t, because the police would surely call, and she had to be responsible.
Two days went by, and the police never called once. At least they never called Amy. Another thing that didn’t happen was the wearing off of shock. In time Amy understood that she hadn’t actually been in shock at all. She could no more feel Frank’s death than she could experience, in depth, her own unanchored solitude. All she could feel were hurt and anger, both of which were absurd under the circumstances. She felt abandoned. This was an unpleasant surprise, as was a breakfast phone call, on the third day, Saturday, from Dot Hieronymus, who wanted to know where and when the next meeting would take place. “I’ve e-mailed everybody,” she said, “but no one has replied as yet. Am I to assume,” she continued querulously, “that we’re not meeting on our regular night? Any information would be very much appreciated.”
“I just assumed…,” began Amy, and then realized that she hadn’t assumed anything. She had just cut them all loose before they could formally do the same to her. “Dot, after what happened to Frank, I assumed no one would be interested in meeting again.”
Dot was silent for a beat. “Of course I read about the accident,” she said, “and of course I feel badly about it. But I don’t understand what this has to do with the group. I went to a great deal of trouble and expense, not to mention writing out all those addresses on the envelopes, and the FedEx expense. This is…not acceptable.”
Amy began to remonstrate with Dot, pointing out that it wasn’t grief that shut the class down, but rather fear and anxiety over personal safety. Dot interrupted, saying, with some asperity, that “this Sniper character” was obviously just a prankster, and people were being silly, and it just wasn’t acceptable. Every time she used the word “acceptable” it seemed to gather resonance, as though she’d never used it before, at least not in this way, and was learning to enjoy it.
As Dot picked up steam, Amy tried very hard to imagine that she was listening to the rantings of a murderer. In person, Dot had always spoken softly, but now she achieved the old-fashioned, high-pitched singing voice of a movie matron. Amy pictured Spring Byington, December Bride, swathed in flowery chiffon, hard-charging Frank Waasted and shoving him off the edge of a cliff; Spring Byington inviting Frank to peer over the side, and then kneeing him in the rear. No, Spring would never knee or shove. Perhaps she had pretended to take his picture and simply asked him to take a couple of steps back. Frank, way too young to have seen Auntie Mame at an impressionable age…Amy interrupted Dot. “I’ll get back to you,” she said.
From: “Amy Gallup” <gallopingamy@cox.net
To: Writers
Subject: What do we do now
Date Sent: November 24, 2007
Hello. This is Really Me. I’ve got a new e-mail address, as you can see. It shouldn’t be as easy to break into as the Hotmail one. If you have any doubts, call me up to verify.
I need to hear from all of you, either by e-mail, or phone, or in person. I need two questions answered:
It was no doubt stupid to ask about Frank in an e-mail. E-mails were apparently immortal and could be retrieved and used as evidence. But of what? Amy had tried and tried and failed to come up with a serious legal misstep on her part. She’d given the damn cops her name and phone number. She’d been standing right there in front of them. She had found the body, for God’s sake. And she’d been as inconsequential that night as she was to her own self, and now to her class.
Amy took Alphonse for a walk. She hadn’t walked him since spring. Summers were impossibly hot and fall often more so, since fall was Fire Season, when the Southern California scrubland, usually with the aid of arsonists or lost hunters with flare guns, would ignite, and Santa Anas would blow the flames westward through canyons and Indian reservations and hillside developments, and the sky would swirl with the colors of an old bruise. Sometimes ash floated down like snow. But Fire Season was probably over now, and evenings were cool. Amy fixed Alphonse to his long red leash and dragged him outside and up the hill, past the well-kept oleander bushes and green gravel lawns of her neighbors. Amy hated to walk even more than Alphonse did, but she couldn’t take another day alone in the house.
Alphonse enjoyed the smells and disregarded everything else—the cats, the Rottweilers, even the Gomezes’ insane grass-mowing goat, which they had inherited when they bought their house, a former meth lab. (In San Diego County, Amy had learned, even the nicest neighborhoods included meth labs.) Amy yanked Alphonse across the street just as the satanic goat lunged at them, stopped short by his chain. By the time she had reached the top of the first hill she was wheezing, her calves cramped solid, and she had to stop to get her breath. It was nice, actually, to be distracted with pain, and so she determined to keep climbing, and after a half hour she and Alphonse sat panting on a flat rock at the top of the last hill. From there they could see for a mile all around—strip malls to the north and west, clusters of dirt-colored roofs, sixteen steepled churches, and all of it dotted with eucalyptus and pepper and fruit trees.
The last time she had been up here, Amy realized, she had been with “Bob,” her second husband, on the day they had decided to buy the house. They had been half in the bag, both of them, at the time, and “Bob,” surveying the view, had told Amy that joke about Christ on the cross shouting down to Simon Peter, “I can see your house from here,” and even though she had heard it twice already, and both times from “Bob,” she had actually laughed out loud. It had been June and jacarandas tall as elms were in splendid bloom, the landscape studded with little bursts of periwinkle blue, her favorite Crayola color. Amy, never before or since a tree lover, had been seduced by those very jacarandas and the pincushion pink blossoms on the silk trees, which grew everywhere like weeds and smelled like cotton candy, and by the cough-drop eucalyptuses, into believing that Southern California was indeed an enchanted place. Too bad it hadn’t been Fire Season.
Robert Johanssen had been Max’s attorney, as well as the lawyer for two of Max’s friends and, in the last year of Max’s life, a frequent visitor to their house, helping with “will and estate stuff,” according to Max. Max had more than once tried to explain, and Amy refused to hear about it. Denial at that time was like a gently swaying hammock, comfy and hypnotic. Of course Max was dying, she knew that, but the house was so lively with laughter and music and people going in and out, and she kept herself busy feeding everybody and pouring wine. She even became a decent cook by figuring out how to coax Max into finishing a meal. Robert Johanssen took to hanging around more and more during the last year, silently helping Amy with the dishes and the cleanup, sharing late-night vigils when Max’s health went into sharp decline. Amy hardly noticed him. She assumed he was there for Max.
Which was odd, as Max paid little direct attention to him, and always referred to him, behind his back, as “Bob,” acting out the quotes with voice and eyebrows, as in, “What have you been up to with ‘Bob’?” “Why,” Amy finally asked, “do you say his name like that?” “Because he asked me to call him ‘Bob,’” said Max, “and, as you know, I’m an amiable human.” As it turned out, “Bob” wasn’t there for Max—he was there for Amy. “He’s in awe of you,” Max said, grinning evilly, “and your creative genius.” But why, Amy had wanted to ask, did Max find him so ridiculous, but at that point Max began to cough, and they never picked up the thread of that particular conversation. Max only mentioned him to Amy one more time, in the latter days. “He’s got piles of money,” said Max, “does our ‘Bob.’” He made Amy look at him. “You could do worse,” he said.
She had married him six months after Max died, for no good reason except she had to get away. “Bob” wasn’t sexy, and he wasn’t funny, and he wasn’t smart, and he wasn’t even particularly attractive, in addition to which Amy had never aspired to wealth. But she went with him anyway, because he offered her a quick way out of her empty house and her paralyzed life. “Bob” was hell-bent on real-estate investment in Southern California, which was pretty far away from Maine. They’d buy a little house and a lot of land in North County San Diego and watch it double in value in six months, a year tops.
“Bob” may have had a pile of money to begin with, but as soon as he invested it, the real-estate market went into free fall, and then they were stuck together in that crappy little house, and within two years of their marriage, “Bob” was gone. Nothing of him remained, in the house or anywhere else. She couldn’t remember what he looked like naked, or the sound of his voice, or a single thing he had ever said to her. Except, apparently, that silly Calvary joke. Four years later she got Alphonse from a local basset rescue. She had a more fulfilling and complex relationship with him than she ever had with “Bob.”
Sometimes, as now, as Alphonse lay sleeping on the rock, smacking his gums in reverie, she would cup and stroke his great forehead in her palm and sing, way under her breath, a nonsense song about a basset hound who was always around and belonged in the pound. A child’s song in a child’s voice, and while she sang it, and while she listened to herself sing it, she would feel herself thaw, just a little bit, enough for tears to begin way in the back of her throat, in plenty of time to stop them. Which she did. They stayed there until nightfall and then traipsed back downhill toward home.
As they came around the bend above her driveway, she heard a baritone voice sonorously intoning what sounded like a sermon. “Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! What a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet!”
It was, in fact, the sermon given at the Seaman’s Bethel in Moby Dick, and the voice was that of Orson Welles, issuing from a white SUV parked in front of her house, and in the driver’s seat was Edna Wentworth. “Edna!” Amy was absurdly glad to see her. Edna clicked off her CD player and leaned out the window. “Sorry to show up unannounced,” she said, “but you took your phone off the hook and we couldn’t get through to you.”
“I sent an e-mail—”
“Hate the things,” said Edna. “How are you?” Edna looked closely at Amy, with that expression of kindly curiosity, though nothing so intrusive as sympathy. Maine, Amy remembered, had been chock full of women like Edna—weathered, no-nonsense, competent as hell. Of course Edna drove an SUV. She probably changed her own oil.
“I’m just fine. Why don’t you come in?” The house was dusty and cluttered with soda cans and books, but she couldn’t be rude to Edna.
“You’ve had quite a fright,” said Edna, shaking off the invitation.
“Well, we all have.”
“You’re the one who found him.”
“Yes.” To her horror, Amy found herself, once again, on the verge of tears. “This is my dog, Alphonse,” she said.
“We’re planning to meet Friday night, at Carla’s house, at the usual time. Can you make it?”
“Look.” Amy knelt and stroked Alphonse, hiding her face until she could compose herself. “It makes no sense to go on meeting,” she said, rising. “Carla was right about that. I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that I needed—”
“Carla’s version was somewhat different,” said Edna. “We’ve been assuming that the reluctance was yours, not hers. In any event, it makes every sense to go on. We’re writing, every single one of us, and we’re learning from you. You’re a fine teacher.”
“But—”
“And we’ve got a cracking good mystery on our hands!” Edna started up the ignition.
“Edna! People could get hurt. One of us is already dead, for God’s sake. This isn’t a game.”
“Tell that to the Sniper,” said Edna, backing out into the street. At the bottom of the driveway, she called, “See you Friday, then?” and she was off.
Amy might have stood there, staring after Edna, for hours, but Alphonse was hungry and pulled her into the house. She filled his water bowl and fixed him a real meal of leftover ham and roast chicken. She put Peggy Lee on the stereo and began to pick up the living room. She dusted all the books on her shelves. By midnight, she was singing “Big Bad Bill” loud enough to wake the dead.
She was so game, she was ready to face her blog, which she’d avoided since being asked by some illiterate moron if she was “supposed to be funny.” This was what they called “flaming,” and rather than endure it she had been prepared to call it quits. But good old Edna had thickened her skin.
Go Away
Funny-Looking Words
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2007
prepuce
piebald
knothole
obnubilate
Novel Hybrids
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2007
The Martian Chronicles of Narnia
The Lion, the Witch, and Ylla K.
Gentle Ben Hur
Thrill to the heartwarming saga of a 600 lb. brown bear who befriends a lonely young boy, wins a chariot race, and witnesses the crucifixion of Christ.
Well, one out of two wasn’t bad, but she was definitely running dry. It was time for a new list. She glanced down at Kibbitzers, because sometimes they made some pretty decent suggestions, and there it was.
Amy had a number of competing reactions, all simultaneous, so that she had to tease them apart like a knot of lamp cords. The first was, Well, yes, I probably am. The second, When did we start using assy as an adjective, and where did asshat come from? And finally, Is Your Number One Fan the Sniper?
The third question came seemingly out of left field, and she couldn’t figure out why, since it should have occurred to her earlier, when he asked that impertinent question. It was certainly possible. The Sniper was a good mimic, so textspeak wouldn’t be a problem. Fan was a flamer, and so (in spades) was the Sniper. But the longer she stared at this phrase, the more she found herself liking it. It made her smile, and in a way that only the verbal constructs of the very young could do (and the Sniper never did). She used to keep a notebook, long since misplaced, devoted solely to overheard dialogue from children and teens. For instance, she loved the music in the various inflections of “dude,” from its use as a noun of direct address, to the expression of complex thoughts, from Hey, You! to What the hell did you do that for? to That was seriously cool to So sorry you just screwed up your entire life. She loved the fact that now they routinely told each other to “shut up” when the person being addressed hadn’t even said anything. And “asshat” was hilarious. On the one hand, it was appropriate to mourn the degradation of language, the shelving of all her lovely words, even the funny-looking ones; still, literate or no, the young took on the world fresh. The Sniper was anything but dewy. The Sniper wasn’t her Number One Fan.
Amy stared at the phrase some more and then doubt began to creep in. Maybe “the assiest asshat in assville” wasn’t as minty fresh as all that. Amy didn’t hang around with kids; for all she knew, everybody was saying it, and if that were the case, then it could have wafted up to the Sniper’s generation, whatever that was, like the noxious “bling.” After worrying at the question, she typed into the Google search box, and was immediately and wonderfully rewarded by a no-hit page containing the answering question
DO YOU MEAN THE EASIEST ASSHAT IN ASHVILLE?
Why yes, Amy said out loud. That’s exactly what I meant! and she shut down the computer and hit the sack. Frank Waasted was horribly dead, evil stalked her little group, and her life was a dark tunnel to nowhere, but there was joy in Ashville, where apparently resided the easiest of asshats. She drifted off composing a brand-new country and western song: “She’s the easiest asshat in Ashville, but I love her just the same.”