Amelia Earhart, Where Are You When I Need You?

Of course I had heard my parents talking about my crazy aunt, nearly always in whispers behind closed doors. Aunt Clare was my mother’s sister and she was peculiar. Once, she’d gone to the drugstore wearing nothing but a raincoat and clogs. Another time she’d invited people to a party, then locked them out, yelling at them to go away and stop bothering her.

Clare lived alone in another city, and about once a month, my mother (her only relative, as Clare was my only relative, aside from my parents)—my mother phoned her. I would hear my mother say, “Clare?” in a special rising, extra-bright voice. “How are you?” “Do you need anything? … Money, or …”

Then she would listen for a long time, saying, “Uh huh … well … yes …” And, finally, she would say, “Don’t forget, if you need anything, Paul and I are right here.” And she would hang up the phone and fall into a chair with a sigh, saying, “Ah, well …”

I sensed my mother’s mingled shame and sorrow over her sister, but I had very little curiosity. Never having seen Clare—except when I was an infant, which I couldn’t remember—she didn’t seem real to me. If I felt anything about her, it was a sort of shallow pride. In exactly the same way I might announce to a friend that my father had a real World War II German pistol, or that my mother, a language teacher, was sometimes asked to interpret Spanish in court, I would say, “I have a crazy aunt.” Top that if you can.

Then one summer my father needed an operation that had to be performed at a famous clinic in Kansas. My mother was going with him and, for lack of any other place, I would board with my aunt for the three weeks my parents were to be gone.

Everything was arranged swiftly. Time was important for my father and so my parents saw me off on the bus to my aunt’s on the same day they flew to Kansas. “You’ll be all right, darling?” my mother said.

I hung out the window, nodding, feeling a little numb. This would be my first real separation from my parents.

“Don’t forget to practice your clarinet,” my mother urged. I nodded again. My parents were both teachers and we lived a calm, ordered life. They had spoken to me about keeping to a schedule (go to bed on time, rise at a reasonable hour), being responsible (wash your dishes, don’t make work for your Aunt Clare), and doing such things as writing them regularly and practicing the clarinet an hour every day.

The bus started. “Good-bye.” I stretched out my hand, still not able to believe in my father’s illness. He was so large, so robust, so healthy-looking with his square tortoiseshell glasses and his firm paunch beneath a green shirt. He waved to me—they both did, my mother throwing kisses—until the bus turned the corner.

My aunt met me at the bus station. Had she had a large sign on her chest with her name, CRAZY CLARE, painted on it, I would not have recognized her any more swiftly. As I stepped into the smoky station and looked around at the crowds milling between the doors, I saw her at once. A long-faced woman wearing a full orange skirt made of some crinkly papery material and a pink T-shirt with red letters: BURNING BUSH BANK CELEBRATES. On her feet, sneakers and white ankle socks. I stood frozen, clutching my suitcase, but she had spotted me.

“Phoebe? You look just like Sally.” I nodded mutely, and followed her out into the street. “It’s not a long walk. Do you mind?” I walked next to her, but not quite, a half-step behind, as if I really weren’t with her. She moved along briskly. I kept stealing glances. Her eyes were huge and dark, and her hair, with an astounding energy of its own, sprang out in sharp crackling curls all over her head. She had two or three combs stuck in here and there, but none seemed to have the least effect in keeping her hair tamed.

It was her eyes I kept returning to, somehow unlike the eyes of any adult I knew. They were full of a shimmering, moving light, and at the same time were so deeply black that I, at once, remembered a moment, long ago, when I had gazed into the long, secret depths of a well. I must have been very small. I remembered the beating of my heart as I stared into the thick, dark waters, and then my mother’s hands lifting me up, taking me away from the danger.

Clare lived in the attic apartment of an old wooden building on Greene Street. We went up three flights of roofed-over outside steps, past other people’s back porches. To my surprise, the apartment—three very small rooms—was furnished in a decorous, almost timid manner: a worn couch and two chairs facing each other in a perfect little square, the bed made up with a wrinkleless tufted spread, the Formica kitchen table holding only a red plastic napkin holder and a pair of glass salt and pepper shakers. I suppose I had thought I would step into some wild Halloween disorder.

“Are you hungry?” Clare said. We had hardly spoken on the walk from the bus station. “I bet you’re hungry.”

I shook my head and put down my suitcase and clarinet. My mother had packed me a lunch, but sheer terror of what lay ahead had destroyed my appetite.

“Well, then,” she said, sitting up very straight across from me at the kitchen table. “So you’re Phoebe, my baby niece.”

“Yes,” I said miserably. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It seemed impossible that I would find anything to ever say until the long, long three weeks of my stay were over.

I watched Clare carefully, waiting for her to make her craziness known. I sat on the edge of the chair, only my toes meeting the floor, ready for flight. I expected anything: At any moment might she not spring up and whirl around the room screeching in a language no one had ever heard? Or, eyes glittering, leap at me with the knife she had taken up to slice into a hunk of cheese?

“Umm, good,” she said, patting her belly. “Want some?”

Cautiously, I ate a bit of the cheese (afraid to keep saying no) and when, in a while, she said maybe I should go to bed, the trip must have been tiring, I rose with relief, my knees limp. Yes, she was right, I was exhausted.

Lying in the unfamiliar bed, clutching a sneaker as a weapon, and listening to the unfamiliar noises of the street far below, I longed with a hot, excruciating ache in my chest for my own room with its shelves full of books and model planes, its soft shaggy yellow rug, and the poster of Amelia Earhart in her flier’s cap, on the wall opposite my bed, where I could see her clear, brave flier’s eyes the moment I woke up.

I had often told myself to be brave like Amelia. Whenever something difficult faced me—a test, a dentist’s appointment, a fight with a friend—I whispered my secret words. Amelia Earhart … Amelia Earhart … In the last year or so I had become aware that, while I lived with my parents in a kind of calm sea of love and safety, the world at large was a different affair, a boiling ocean with scummy, white-capped waves. Still, it had had nothing to do with me. Until now. Suddenly, it seemed, I had been dumped into that ocean. Sink or swim.

I planned to stay awake and alert all night. No knowing what a crazy person would do. At every sound the hair on the back of my neck stiffened. Floors groaned, the walls rustled, and outside my room I heard Clare walking and muttering to herself. My hand was rigid on the sneaker. I still held it when I woke in the morning.

I lay in bed for a while, listening. The quiet disturbed me as much as the sounds of the night before. Tiptoeing, I cracked open the door and peeked into the kitchen. No Clare. My heart pounding, I shuffled silently across the cool linoleum to the living room. No Clare. She was gone. Or was she? I stared at a closed closet door. Was she hiding inside? That would certainly be a crazy thing to do.

Wiping my hands on my pajamas, I called, “Clare? Aunt Clare?” I knocked on the door. “Hiii!” I said in an extra-friendly way. “I’m up. You in there?” I waited a moment, then gripped the knob. “I’m going to open the door now,” I said in a loud, bright voice. “Okay? I’m going to open it. Ready or not,” I called coyly, and yanked the door open.

Hangers clanked in the draft. A raincoat and a hooded sweat shirt nodded peacefully. On the floor high rubber boots, red sneakers, and two pairs of scuffed oxfords were lined up in precise rows. An umbrella leaned against the wall.

Clare was definitely gone. But suddenly I had another disturbing idea. What if she had locked me in? I rushed to the front door. It was locked! I yanked at it, my hands slippery on the knob. Then, after a moment of panic and hard breathing, I saw a key on a nail. A little round tag attached to it said PHOEBE. I put it into the keyhole and unlocked the door. The hall was dim, the staircase shadowy. Was someone breathing quietly out there? Quickly, I locked myself in again.

“At least I know you’re not hiding in here, Aunt Clare,” I said. The sound of my own voice comforted me. “I’m hungry,” I said out loud, going into the kitchen. “What do you have to eat?”

Not much. A chunk of stale bologna, last night’s cheese, two black, overripe bananas that went to mush in my hands when I peeled them, a box of crackers, and a pot of cold congealed oatmeal. Well, I was hungry enough to eat anything, but crazy people stories were crackling in my head: razor blades in Halloween apples, poisoned milk, mice in soup.

I tackled one of the black bananas, broke the soft fruit into mushy chunks and, after smelling it, ate it cautiously with little motions of teeth and tongue, probing for poison, for splinters of metal. I finished off the second banana, then ate the crackers, pawing them out of the box and washing them down with water.

I brushed my teeth, dressed, made the bed, and wrote my parents a letter about how much fun the bus trip had been. “Aunt Clare is very—” I paused, then wrote “—unusual and interesting. This morning for breakfast I had sliced bananas and all the Ritz crackers I could eat, two of my favorite things!” I wrote large and filled an entire page, putting in lots of exclamation points so they’d know I was happy, and not worry.

I played my clarinet for a while; at home my father always put his hands over his ears when I hit a bad note, and groaned loudly.

I drifted around the apartment, breathing heavily. Not even noon yet. The air inside was dim, stuffy. Dust danced in the windows. Drifting past the tiny kitchen window, I saw a boy in red shorts down below in the backyard. He squatted, grabbed a set of barbells, and lifted. Squinting my eyes, I imagined I could see the sheen of sweat on his bare smooth chest. He had long legs.

“Yum yum, cutesy legs,” I said. It was strange watching him and knowing he didn’t know he was being watched. Once a girl friend and I had screamed at a strange boy, “You are sexy and adorable!” Then we had run away, laughing and gasping and hitting each other on the arms.

I was lying on the bed, wishing I were someplace else, when I heard noises in the hall. I sat up, grabbed a sneaker, then a book. My heart shoved up into my throat. Scuffling noises at the door. Door opening. Voices—one loud and nasty, one high and ironic. I slid my legs off the bed. Lock myself in? Confront them? Throw the book at one intruder and hit the other in the belly with my sneaker? Gulping, clutching sneaker and book, I shuffled toward the kitchen.

My aunt appeared, holding a grocery bag and talking to herself. “Just do that over again, will you, dear?” (The loud, nasty voice.) “Do it over? Why certainly, madam. Anything you say, madam.” (The high ironic voice.) “I hate to ask you this, dear …” “Oh, I know how you hate to ask me anything. You’re every inch consideration.” Over the top of the grocery bag her face worked: she scowled, twisted her lips, flared her nostrils scornfully. Expressions flashed, one after the other, like storm clouds across the sky.

She dumped the grocery bag on the table. She wore a T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was pulled back with a rubber band, but still sprang out of bounds.

“Hello, Aunt Clare,” I said.

She spun around. “Phoebe?” she said quickly.

I nodded. My heart was still jumping about in an irregular way.

“Three weeks,” she said, as if we were in the middle of a conversation. “Is that it? Three weeks?” And she made a grotesque face, like a child, screwing down her mouth and crinkling her forehead so that her eyes almost disappeared. And then she shut her eyes entirely, as if the thought of the three weeks with me frightened her beyond words.

Later, when we were eating the spaghetti she had fixed, she asked me if I liked my name. “Fee-bee,” she said on two notes, like a birdcall. “Do you like that name?”

No one had ever asked me. In fact I had often wished for a name like Jamie or Toby or Wendy. Or if it had to be something like Phoebe, why couldn’t it have been Amelia?

“Phoebe is a bird name,” Clare said. “Phoebe bird, Phoebe bird, Phoebe bird. Phoebe bird, what do you think of the name Clare?”

“Fine,” I muttered.

“Phoebe says Clare’s name is fine,” she mimicked. “Little liar!” Then she really frightened me by looking into my mind and saying, “What are you afraid of, Phoebe?”

“Nothing,” I said numbly.

“Liar,” she said again. “Liar, and dope,” she added calmly. She leaned so close to me that I closed my eyes so as not to fall into hers. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” she said. “Better look around and see what you really ought to be afraid of.”

“What?” I whispered. “What do you mean? What should I be afraid of?”

There was a half-smile, triumphant and knowing, on her face. “Everything,” she said. “Everything.”

The next morning, again Clare was gone before I was out of bed. And, again, I prowled the apartment, even to opening the closet door with many loud cheerful cries. Empty. “You’re acting crazy,” I told myself. And I decided I would not talk to myself, but the silence of the apartment weighed on me. Before long I was consulting myself about everything. “Cold spaghetti for breakfast? Oh, well, why not.” “Wonder if the boy in the red shorts is coming out again. Nope, not there yet.” “Check the kitchen window—oh, goody, there he is.”

Aunt Clare returned in the middle of the afternoon with groceries again. Since she was crazy, I believed she spent all that time buying food, and cautiously I asked if it was hard for her to make up her mind.

“Why?” she said, pouring a glass of milk.

“Well … because … uh … it takes quite a while,” I said delicately.

“It doesn’t take me any time at all to shop.” She pantomimed snatching cans and boxes off the shelves at a great rate. “But you have trouble making up your mind?” she said, as if sympathizing with a private nuttiness of mine that she didn’t share, but would try to understand.

This irritated me. “If you’re not shopping, where do you go in the morning?” I said, abandoning delicacy.

“To work.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.” She grabbed a broom and danced with it. “Everywhere and somewhere and nowhere and here and there and yonder and so forth,” she sang, dancing with the broom. “Get it?”

I shook my head and she sighed. “What do you do with a broom? Clean. Right? That’s the clue, Phoebe bird. I clean with brooms and mops and rags and buckets.”

“You clean what?”

“Houses.”

“Houses?”

“Now you’ve got it.” She narrowed her eyes, tapping her forehead with a single finger to tell me I was catching on fast.

“Why couldn’t you just say so in the first place?”

“Because it wouldn’t have been as much fun.” She stuck out her tongue at me.

Oh, God. She was so childish. Childish and crazy.

“Now why don’t you ask me if I like cleaning house, like your mother asks me all the time. ‘Clare, you could do something better with yourself,’” she said in an eerie imitation of my mother’s falsely cheerful once-a-month telephone voice. Her face twisted. “Cleaning houses is good. People leave me alone. They don’t know how to clean worth a shirt. Cleaning makes me strong.” Pushing up her sleeve, she showed me the muscles in her arm. “Feel it, go ahead, squeeze it,” she demanded. Then rolling down her sleeve, she said, “What about you? What do you do?”

“I go to school, Aunt Clare.”

“I know that! What else? What about the clarinet?”

Then I had to bring out my instrument, put it together, and let her try it. “Owww!” she cried at the sound she made. She laid the instrument in its velvet case. “I was never musical.” Then, leaning toward me as if I were about to tell her a spectacular story, she said, “What else, Phoebe? What else do you do?”

And I couldn’t resist whispering my secret dream, telling her about the thing I longed for and feared. “Someday, I’m going to be a pilot. I’m going to get my flier’s license.”

“Fly? A flier? Oh, Phoebe.” Her face opened, her huge dark eyes became even larger. “You’ll fly like a bird!” She flapped her arms. “Your name is just right, after all.”

That night she came into my room after I’d fallen asleep. I woke up—I must have sensed her staring at me—and saw her standing over my bed, a dark shadowy figure in the dim light from the kitchen. She wore a nightgown, and her hair, with that weird energy of its own, seemed to jump out in twists and snakes all over her head. Why was she staring at me? What was she thinking? Did she have a knife in her hand? Every horror movie I’d ever seen raced through my mind. Would my parents ever see me again? A thrill of pity for my helpless, lost-lamb self washed over me. I quivered beneath the sheet. “Amelia Earhart,” I whispered. “Amelia Ear-hart!” And I made myself say, “What do you want, Aunt Clare?”

She was startled, took a step backward, muttered something about pictures, and went out. After a while I fell asleep again. The next day I asked her why she had come into the room. “I just wanted to see you sleeping,” she said.

“I don’t like to be watched when I’m sleeping.”

“Oh. Okay,” she said reasonably.

Every day was the same as the day before. Hot, slow, dusty. I watched the weight lifter and carried on imaginary conversations.

Hello, down there.

Hello, up there.

My name is Phoebe and I’m a prisoner.

You mean that crazy woman?

Yes. She’s got me locked in this terrible attic place.

Good grief. Phoebe! What do you want me to do?

Could you possibly walk up the side of the building with your fantastic legs so we could get better acquainted?

Other conversations didn’t end so well.

Hello, Weight Lifter. You have nice legs and great pectorals.

Hello, girl-in-the-attic. What’s your name? Who are you?

Phoebe. I’m visiting my Aunt Clare. You’re cute.

You’re cute, too, Phoebe.

Woo woo, want to get to know each other?

Sure, tell me all about yourself.

Well, my hero is Amelia Earhart.

Who’s she, a model?

A flier! Everyone knows Amelia Earhart!

Oh, yeah? You know you talk crazy, just like your coo-coo aunt.

A few times I went down into the street and wandered around. Where I lived, the neighborhood was just houses with green lawns and Tarviaed driveways. But on this street, one next to another were little factories, stores, big rambly dusty houses, and little houses painted pink and yellow that leaned to one side and had tiny yards in which flowers and bushes grew in every inch of space. There were kids around, but I didn’t know anybody.

One day Clare returned from work scowling and muttering to herself. “You,” she cried accusingly, and for an hour she followed me around, commenting on everything I did. “She’s opening the refrigerator.… She’s taking out a bowl. Cold potatoes in the bowl. Putting the bowl on the table … Now she’s eating from the bowl. She’s chewing, chewing, chewing … She’s going to the sink.…”

How furious I was with my parents! At that moment I hated them as passionately as I hated Clare. “Shut up,” I cried.

Then an even stranger thing happened as she followed me into the bathroom. “Just ignore Clare,” she advised me in a hasty whisper. And then, in the other voice, droning, ironic, “She’s washing her hands.… She’s rubbing them hard … putting on soap …”

Just ignore Clare.… As if she were two people, one caught in her obsessive detailing of my actions, the other an interested bystander full of helpful advice.

I’d always been aware of the strange people in the world, the ones I saw from the corner of my eyes. The old woman who patrolled the gutters for cigar butts. The man who barked like a seal from his front window. The two faceless old people who lived in a house so overgrown with vines you couldn’t see a single window from the street. But those people had nothing to do with me. I had never liked to even think about them, and so I didn’t.

But I couldn’t “just ignore” Clare. I was in her house, sleeping in her bed, eating at her table, and listening to her strange noises. My chest ached. My parents had abandoned me to this crazy woman! For the first time, tears filled my eyes. Oh, Amelia Earhart, where are you when I need you?

I wrote my mother impassioned letters—“Can you come for me sooner than three weeks?” “I can’t stand this anymore! If you leave me here, I’ll be crazy like her.” “She’s awful, she’s loony, and I hate her. Come for me right now!” Then I tore them up and wrote another letter. “How is Daddy? I think of you both all the time. I’m getting on okay with Aunt Clare. One thing you’ll be glad of, she doesn’t have a TV, so don’t worry, I’m not sitting around just watching the boob tube.”

A day or so later the landlady came knocking at Clare’s door for the rent. “I see you have a visitor, dear.” Mrs. Bidwell, fingering a stone necklace, stepped into the living room, looked carefully around and then coolly surveyed me from head to toe. Did she think I was crazy, too? She didn’t come close to either of us. My head grew hot and I knew, just knew, that in a moment I might do something awful and rude, burp loudly or make other inexcusable noises.

“That’s Phoebe,” Clare said. “My niece—Mrs. Bidwell.” Her voice was neither loud nor low, neither derisive nor apologetic. It was almost not a voice, but more the polite and right sounds and sentences that might come from a computer or a robot. And she stood like a robot, too, her arms stiffly at her sides.

“Must be nice for you to have company, dear,” Mrs. Bidwell said, looking into the kitchen, then the bedroom. What was she searching for?

“Yes, it’s nice for me to have company, Mrs. Bidwell. Here’s the rent money, Mrs. Bidwell.” Clare smoothed out the bills she took from the pocket of her orange Chinese-lantern skirt.

“All ready as usual. Your aunt is one of my very best tenants,” she said to me with a gracious smile. “So neat and clean.”

I smiled back like a robot. It was catching. Afraid to move, afraid anything I did, scratch my nose, scuffle my feet—anything at all—would look crazy to Mrs. Bidwell.

As soon as the door closed behind the landlady, Clare’s face went into high gear. Her eyes rolled, she smirked and grimaced. “If I tell you something, will you keep it a secret? She’s a snoop,” Clare whispered hotly in my ear. “When I’m not here, she comes up and snoops all over.”

“That’s terrible,” I whispered back.

“Don’t—tell—that—I—know.”

“I won’t, dear,” I said, mimicking Mrs. Bidwell.

“You’re so sweet, dear,” Clare responded with a gracious Mrs. Bidwell smile.

“And so neat and clean.”

“The very best tenant,” Clare cackled, and for the first time we laughed together.

That afternoon we began our marathon Monopoly game. “You want to play?” Clare said. Why not? It was something to do. She sprawled on the living-room floor, white legs waving in the air. I sat cross-legged, tending the money. The set was old, Community Chest and Chance cards all softly worn. We played all afternoon and left the game to finish the next day. But the next day we were still at it, and the day after, as well.

Monopoly with Clare was like no other Monopoly game in the world. She was so excited the entire time. She bought and sold feverishly, collected rents, built hotels, mortgaged properties, and crowed every time she collected two hundred dollars at GO. Our games went on for hours, for days, we began to eat supper while we played, and played after supper, forgetting the dishes. Monopoly came to be the center, the highlight, of my day. As soon as she returned from work, Clare said, “Ready?” Her feet danced. If I was eating, or rinsing a dish, she pulled me impatiently. “Come on, Phoebebird.”

She was especially wild about the railroads. They were her favorite properties. If I had a railroad card, it drove her to passionate wheedling. “Let me buy the B and O from you, Phoebe. Phoebebird, Phoebebird, you can have anything of mine.”

“Why do you want the old Body Odor Railroad?”

“Phoebe. I’m offering you good money!”

“Well … I’ll think about it …” A moment later my Chance card told me to “Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.”

“You see! That’s what you get for being stingy!” Clare put her fingers in her mouth and whistled. Sulking, I made my token, the man on the horse, drag his feet. Which made her laugh, big easy guffaws. Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! And I joined her, whooping, too, a new laugh, loud, free, crude.

The life I was leading with Clare began to seem realer than my “other life.” I felt a loosening, loosening, as if I were a boat coming unmoored. It occurred to me that it didn’t matter what I did, what I said. After a lifetime of being lovingly watched and supervised, I could walk around naked, pick toejam in the living room, or, if it suited me, eat nothing all day but pumpkin ice cream on white bread.

I stopped playing my clarinet, got up later every day, sometimes didn’t bother getting out of my pajamas. I didn’t wash my hair, forgot to brush my teeth, and looked blankly at the letter I’d been writing my parents for days, wondering how to fill the page. They were so far away, so distant.

“Of course, I had a boyfriend once,” Clare said one afternoon as we played Monopoly. It was a habit of hers to start talking as if I knew what she had been thinking.

“Was he handsome?” I lay on the floor eating popcorn.

“Who?” Her hand hovered over Community Chest cards.

“Your boyfriend.”

“Oh, Egbert! Phoebe! I was pretty—” She flung her head back. “I had to have a handsome boyfriend, didn’t I? I called him Egbert Custard. Only he wasn’t custard.” She looked at me sideways. “He was very tasty.” And she laughed. Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Then, leaning across the board toward me: “After he went away, I used to say, ‘Egbert, come back.’ I’d talk to him. I’d tell him, ‘I won’t ask you all the time if you love me. I promise I won’t. Come back, please, you could give me a baby and we’ll be so happy.’”

Why had I never imagined Aunt Clare with a past any different from her present? Why had I thought of her only as “crazy”—as if that were a total definition of the shimmering, wavering, deep-water self that was Clare. “Didn’t he ever come back?” I wanted a happy-ever-after ending.

Clare shook her head. “Let’s not talk about it anymore!” But later that night she brought out a round, flowered tin box stuffed with photographs. “I’ll show you my pictures,” she said. “But you have to be careful. You hear me?”

“I won’t mess them up.”

“I don’t mean that, you goose. Pictures can hurt you.” She handed me a snapshot. “Be careful,” she warned again. I took the picture under the light. There was my mother—young, grinning, wearing a sweat shirt and holding a baseball bat jauntily over one shoulder. I stared, amazed. Next, a picture of Clare and my mother sitting on the hood of a car, their knees crossed, arms behind them, each wearing peasant blouses pushed down on young shining shoulders.

“Here! Look at this one!” Clare was excited. A young man with sideburns, soft eyes, clasping a trumpet in his arms. “Egbert! Sweet Egbert!” Then another of Clare and my mother, and another, and another. Where was Crazy Clare in these old photos? Were her eyes a little shadowed? Her smile not quite so frank as my mother’s? Did she hang back a bit more than necessary? I studied the faded pictures, hunting for clues to Clare and, yes, to myself.

My mother. My aunt. The words seemed mysterious, full of meaning. My heart pounded strangely. And a strange thought occurred to me—could not Clare have as easily been my mother as my mother?

I picked up another picture—the two sisters, one standing on each side of a slight man with a small dark mustache. My grandfather. He had died when I was an infant. “What was he like?” I said. “Grandpa—was he wonderful?”

Clare’s eyes darkened, became that bottomless well. “He didn’t like me.” She snatched the picture from me, then scooped up all the pictures and shoved them into the tin box. “Why did you make me take them out?” she said accusingly.

“I didn’t. That’s crazy,” I said.

Clare backed away from me, her long face closing down, collapsing.

“Aunt Clare, I didn’t mean—”

She threw up her arms. “Go away.”

“It was just—”

“You said it.” Turning, she pressed forehead and palms against the wall and stood there, rocking.

“Aunt Clare, come on.”

“Go away.”

“You want to play Monopoly?” No answer. “I’ll sell you the B and O Railroad.” No answer. “Let’s sing some songs.” (We had done that the night before, and I had taught her all my old camp songs.) No answer. “Clare, please,” I said desperately.

“Go away, Phoebe.” Dull voice, drowned in grief. I wanted to beat myself in the face for my stupid mistake.

“Clare, Aunt Clare—I’m sorry.” So I was. Sorry for having hurt her; sorry for being thoughtless; and, not least of all, sorry for loving her and yet, somewhere inside me, still—still!—being afraid of her craziness.

I had seen her rigid and controlled with Mrs. Bid-well. With me she had finally trusted enough to let down the barriers—whoop with laughter and show me her pranky, unlatched self. Head to head, we had played Monopoly like two kids, or two adults—maybe just like two equals. Clare and Phoebe.

How mean of me, then, to tremble as I gingerly put my arms around her. To feel a frightened pounding in my stomach at the weight of her against my arms. There was not an ounce of the “dangerous maniac” in my Aunt Clare. There was not an ounce of nastiness or violence. She was odd—oh, yes, she was eccentric, she was not like anyone else in the world. But “crazy”? I no longer even knew what the word meant. The next day I made up with Clare. Two days later I was on my way home.

For a while everything seemed strange. I thought about Clare endlessly. My parents, neighbors, friends—all seemed so tight, squeezed-up, and dull. I had become accustomed to the Crazy Clare world where feelings showed on faces, adults said things like “liar” and “dope,” danced when they were happy, and stood in corners in their despair.

A few times I began letters to her. “I miss playing Monopoly with you.” “Be sure to give my regards to dear Mrs. Bidwell.” “I have a new song to teach you.” But my real life was taking me over. Friends. Music. School. My parents, my own room, movies and TV, and learning to play tennis. Friday nights were for washing hair, Sunday afternoons for rides in the country in our Willys Jeep.

My mother still called my aunt once a month. Oddly, Clare never asked to speak to me, nor I to her. Well, it really wasn’t odd about me. I felt guilty, remembering my fear of touching her, my fear of her. And she—had she sensed that fear? Had she not forgotten my calling her crazy?

A year has passed. I hardly think of Clare at all anymore. Only, sometimes, I see a face that reminds me of her—it’s the eyes, I think. And when it happens, all at once I’m overcome with longing to visit her, to lie on the floor and play Monopoly in my pajamas, to hear Clare whoop with laughter.

But then I think of those dark little attic rooms, and I remember how she stood with her face to the wall, and how she followed me around one day. Now she’s opening the refrigerator … taking out the potatoes … chewing them, chewing, chewing … And I’m frightened. Yes, that’s the truth.

Still, when I look into Amelia’s brave flier’s eyes, my heart marches, and I know that it doesn’t matter about being frightened. It really doesn’t matter. Being frightened is not the point. Not the point, at all. “Amelia Earhart, Amelia Earhart,” I whisper, and then I know that someday I will go back to see Clare, just as I will, someday, fly.