Lights, Camera, Amalee
Page 5
“Don’t answer before you know exactly how you are feeling,” she’d lecture him. “You’re a human, not a machine that spits out the word fine.” Even if Dad said he felt “content,” he didn’t have to pay a dollar. Just not “fine.”
“I feel …” he now repeated, looking at the clock. Then he dropped his shoulders and gave up. “I can’t believe she left that thing to you.” Now he went and stood over the empty bottle. “Don’t get me wrong — I’m thrilled that she gave you this money and excited about what you’re going to do with it. But it’s so strange for her, so out of character.” He shook his head. “I only went there a few times. She didn’t like me, you know.”
No, I didn’t know. I knew she didn’t like him after they got married, but I didn’t know she’d always disliked him. I sat completely still and hoped he would keep talking. His Sally stories reminded me of apple peels that you try to peel off in one long coil. If I interrupted or if he got distracted, he would change the subject, and I would only hear bits of information. It felt much better to get the long stories, the whole peel.
“I didn’t go to the college she wanted me to go to, and Sally didn’t, either. Sally was fun. She was smart, but she liked to have fun too much.” What did that mean? I didn’t ask. “Sally was great for me at first. I met her when I was hiking with Carolyn and Phyllis. We were hiking around, and we saw Sally and her friends. They asked where people went rock climbing. I pointed the way, and Phyllis said they would need the right equipment.”
I noted to myself that Phyllis had always been Phyllis!
“Sally said something like ‘How hard can it be to find a bunch of footholds and handholds?’ And Phyllis got really prickly and asked how hard could it be to fall off a ninety-degree incline? After Sally left, Phyllis was either so angry or so scared for her that she made us go rent some equipment to bring over to your mom and her friends. By the time we got there, Sally and her friends were at the top of this rock face … so now Phyllis felt angry and humiliated.” Dad started to laugh. “She was so angry! And Sally’s friends looked as if they would have liked some of the equipment that Phyllis had brought, but Sally kept saying, ‘I told you we’d be okay! I told you!’ Phyllis stomped off, and we returned the stuff to the rental place. As we were leaving, Sally came running up to us and said, ‘Don’t be mad!’ And she just draped her arms around our necks and kissed us both on the cheek and said, ‘Peace! Peace! Are we friends? Are we?’ I think Phyllis was even angrier, but I thought I was in love. And that’s how it started.”
I sat even more still, hoping that Dad would get lost in the story and keep going.
“It’s funny,” he said. “Now I teach kids who are that age. She was a certain type of person. You get one or two a year. They’re the kind of people who act like trusting kids. You feel protective of them. You wince when they talk to strangers. I remember how easy it was for Sally to throw her arms around people she didn’t know. And to climb up a cliff with no ropes or hooks or harness. Like a reckless, innocent child. I see those girls now. They are … in trouble. And then I see the nice, shy boys who try to protect them or even save them, and they … are in trouble, too.”
I couldn’t understand why the boys would be in trouble just for wanting to help, but Dad looked so upset when he was talking about it that I believed him. I could see him as one of those boys. He loved to help his friends. He must have really wanted to help Sally. And he must have been in misery when he couldn’t help her. From all the things I’d pieced together, that seemed to be how the story went.
Dad looked away from the bottle and turned to me. “So, you really want to do this movie? Really?”
Agh, back to my life! I said yes and tried to sound like a responsible person with a plan. Or so I hoped.
“Then I’m going to help you get your act together. I have an exercise for you.” He took me to his desk and cleared everything off except a few pieces of scrap paper.
“Make an outline,” he told me.
“Yes, Professor Everly,” I said.
“That’s right,” he answered. “I’ll be like an advisor. College students have shown me how easy it is to lose your way if you don’t get a good start. You’re taking on a big project here! You know how you did props and lights for Fiddler on the Roof at school this year? Imagine you’re doing props and lights and directing and writing.”
“But I don’t have to write any songs. And it’s probably only going to be about ten minutes long, so it’s not as hard as writing a musical!” I protested, but that was just to buy some time. I was starting to panic. Who wouldn’t?
“You sit and work on this for ninety minutes. That’s nine-zero minutes, not nineteen.”
I stared at the paper after Dad left. I wrote down the word Dinosaurs and thought about how I could start with a definition of extinction. The dictionary said extinction was “the death, destruction, or ceasing to exist of a species or family of organisms.” Five minutes later, I had crossed out everything I had written, and I was bored. I wrote Extinction and People. Forget the dinosaurs. What did Joyce say my movie was about? We need to save endangered species as a way to save ourselves, but also just because we should. Right?
But how would I show that as a movie?
Maybe I’d start with a sick child in bed being cured by a plant from a rain forest that had been saved from logging. Hadn’t I seen a movie like that? I thought of Phil Novick and me laughing about things we always saw in movies. I also thought of two girls I’d been not-really-friends with in the sixth grade, Ellen and Hallie. They had always been good at finding the most clever way to say a mean thing about a person. Now, in my head, they described the situation: So let’s get this straight. This is a movie that shows that you watch too much television and steal ideas from it. I’d stopped being friends with Ellen and Hallie — or maybe they’d stopped being friends with me — but they still visited my mind from time to time when I was wearing pants that felt too tight or I had an idea that felt stupid.
So no sick kid on the bed. But then I had no ideas. I looked at the clock. I’d been sitting there for forty minutes. Not even half the time.
“Dad!” I called. “Any chance …” I thought maybe hot milk would help me relax and stay focused.
Dad stepped into the room as if he’d been waiting outside the whole time. “Congratulations. You lasted longer than most college students sitting down to write a paper. Now come with me.”
“I’m not quitting,” I explained, following him out the back door.
“Amalee,” he said, as if he weren’t listening, even though I’d learned a long time ago that he heard and remembered absolutely everything, “this is all part of the exercise. It’s like the sound of one hand clapping.”
“Oh, Dad,” I groaned.
“According to some philosophies, if you listen for what one hand clapping would sound like, your mind opens up just in the attempt to think of the impossible.”
“I can’t understand what you’re saying or why you’re saying it,” I said. “You’re two for two.”
“Here’s the thing: I made you sit with an empty sheet of paper, trying to imagine something as impossible as hearing one hand clapping. I asked you to do something impossible.” He led me out the back door to look at the woods.
“Thanks for your confidence in me,” I murmured, looking at the wet trunks of the trees and seeing how green everything was after the rain.
“Oh, I have confidence in you, don’t worry about that,” Dad said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “But nobody can make an outline of a whole movie in one sitting. I was trying a writing trick on you. So now, take a breath.”
“Who, me?”
“Yeah, take a breath.” I took a breath. Dad said, “Just look and listen.” We stood for a few minutes.
“What’s that chirping sound?” I whispered. “Are those spring peepers?”
“Yeah. Remember those pajamas you had with frogs on them? You used to hop around in them and say you wer
e a spring peeper.”
After another minute, Dad added a suggestion. “One important thing is to respect whatever pops into your mind.”
The singing of the frogs was so dense, it sounded like a green curtain of sound hanging in the air of the woods. Frogs, frogs. My mind spun like the dial on a safe, trying to find the combination to open the door. There was something very beautiful about the frogs singing to us on a warm spring night. Like a Greek chorus, something we’d learned about in history. The Greek chorus was a part of ancient Greek plays. Even though it’s called a chorus, it doesn’t really sing. It’s a group of people who all speak at the same time to comment about what’s going on, talking about sad things and funny things and behavior that we all have but that gets us into big trouble inevitably, like the pride of a queen or the temper of a prince. And here were the frogs, in a world full of extinction, commenting to anyone who’d stop and listen. I suddenly remembered my grandmother telling me to watch and listen. This was spookily similar to what Dad was saying now. I kept listening. Some idea seemed to be at work here.
What had I heard about frogs? They were amphibians, so they were especially sensitive to the environment. Because they lived both on the land and in the water, the land and water both needed to be clean for them to survive. And then I thought about the tree frog I’d heard about whose skin was useful, because it was so poisonous that there were tribes who put it on the darts they used to hunt big animals. And there was a story about some kids in Minnesota who went on a school trip to a lake or a pond and found mutant frogs. Their discovery was the reason that all these studies started to happen, because what happened to the frogs was probably happening to humans, too.
Dad said that any idea that felt random but still wouldn’t go away could be the key to everything. What could be sillier than the fate of the Earth sung to us by a Greek chorus of frogs? But the more I thought about it, frogs could tell the story of endangered species better than anyone.
I brushed past Dad to go inside.
“I’ve got to call Carolyn,” I told him. “I’ve got an idea.”
“I got you some chicken wire,” Carolyn said, walking up our driveway the next day with the roll of wire fencing and a pair of clippers.
I had done what she’d told me to do after I’d shared my idea with her. I had laid out about ten newspapers and ripped up another twenty or so into two- or three-inch-wide strips. I’d also cut the top off an empty milk jug and filled it with a glue-and-water mixture.
“How big are these frog masks you want to make?” Carolyn asked as she inspected my preparations. I also had some pictures of frogs I’d printed out from Dad’s computer.
“They should fit over someone’s head,” I told her.
“Whose head? Your age? Older?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
Instead of throwing up her hands and leaving, Carolyn made a surprising suggestion.
“John told me he wants to be in the movie. How about him?” she asked. I had an image of John dressed all in green with the big mask on his head. He had to be a frog. But what if the other frogs were my age?
“He can be a bullfrog,” I said.
Carolyn nodded without smiling. “Excellent choice for John. That would suit him. How many of these things do you want to make?”
“Three or four.”
“You may want to call a couple of friends. This could take a while. Who’s good at this kind of thing?”
I thought of my friend Marin. I hadn’t seen her much during the year, but she’d helped make the sets for Fiddler on the Roof. When she and I had slept over at Sarah’s, she’d sketched Sarah’s little sister, Julie, and it was beautiful.
I called Sarah and Marin, and they both came over wearing old shorts and T-shirts, as I’d instructed. I looked up the street and decided I didn’t have an excuse to call Kyle. He was a soccer player, not an artist.
Carolyn helped us mold the first frog head. She had brought a book that showed frog masks from an island in the Pacific called Bali, and she had a book of animal masks from Mexico, too. Carolyn helped change the shape so our masks could fit over a whole head and still let a person breathe.
“We want to be frogs.” Marin spoke for herself and Sarah when Carolyn asked who they thought should be the other frogs. Sarah nodded and laughed as she wrung the extra glue out of a newspaper strip.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I need to tell you, though, that one of the frogs will have two heads. It’s the frog that warns us about the pollution that affects them and could hurt us.” I waited for Marin and Sarah to tell me that my idea was too gross, and that I was gross for even thinking it. In my mind, Ellen and Hallie were shaking their heads in disgust.
“Can I be that one?” Sarah asked. “I mean, unless you really want to be that one, Marin.”
Marin shrugged. “That’s okay. What’s the other one?”
“You didn’t tell me one of them had two heads,” Carolyn muttered as she rifled through the pages of the mask book. “Let’s see if there’s something we can work with here. Do you want two whole heads side by side, or one head coming out where the ear hole should be?”
No one blinked. No one got grossed out. Sarah wanted to be that frog. Sarah always surprised me. She was very pretty. She had reddish-brown hair that she said was “auburn.” I loved this, because it sounded like oak leaves burning in the autumn, which really was the color of her hair. She wasn’t skinny or fat — she just looked strong. She’d played the lead, a popular fifteen-year-old, in Bye Bye Birdie in the sixth grade, and she’d played Golde, a much older woman, in Fiddler on the Roof in seventh grade, and she seemed to like being Golde much better. She actually dyed big gray streaks into her hair a couple of weeks before the show. She also spent a long time talking with her grandma about coming over from Poland in the 1940s. She returned with perfect imitations of an older woman sighing, wringing her hands, and looking up and shaking her head at the sky. Every once in a while, she’d clutch her hip and say, “From my fall” — in her grandmother’s voice, with her grandmother’s shrug.
When she played Golde, she became a version of her grandmother. The audience loved every minute of it, and so did she.
I could never do that. I felt like I spent all my time trying to be pretty. To be un-pretty on purpose felt terrifying! And now Sarah wanted to be a frog with two heads. What would Kyle think? He’d probably think she was cool for not caring what other people thought. I felt a little envious of her bravery.
By the end of the afternoon, we had three papier-mâché masks: a big one for John, a small one for Marin, and a bigger one for Sarah that had two heads. Marin would be the tiny, colorful rain forest frog with the poisonous skin.
Marin said she would come the next day to paint the heads. I told her she could do anything she wanted. I trusted her. Carolyn didn’t say anything. I could tell she was letting us run the show ourselves.
Dad got home from work and nodded at the unpainted heads. “Very nice!” he said. “But what’s that?”
“That’s the frog with two heads,” Sarah explained, adding proudly, “that’s mine.”
I thanked Carolyn for her help.
“I wanted to do more,” she admitted, “but this is your thing, I know.” She took the almost-dry bullfrog head to fit it on John, promising to return it that night.
Dad took Marin, Sarah, and me out for pizza and then dropped them at home. Afterward, he surprised me by driving me up to Kingston, where we bought a great digital video camera, a tripod, a light reflector, headphones, and the microphone Phil had recommended. Phil said he would lend me another good one, too. The receipt said that the whole bill was one thousand two hundred fifty-eight dollars. In my head, I explained to my grandmother that this was what I really wanted to do, and I silently thanked her as I paid.
We came home to a message from John: “I can’t wait to be a bullfrog. Does that mean I get to sing? Oh, please, oh, please?”
Marin was coming over at ten. I’d just spent over a thousand dollars on a camera and equipment. What had I gotten myself into?
I had a picture of myself as a filmmaking scientist that Kyle would think was really great. That was it. Wait — was that it? Was that the only reason I was doing this? I knew I wasn’t like Sarah, who loved playing bizarre roles for the sake of playing them. I was afraid I was the opposite, a girl who did something just because I wanted a boy to like me.
The doorbell rang, and I heard the door open. It wasn’t Marin.
“Ringie dingie, ringie dingie!” John sang from the hall.
And then I heard Dad greeting him, saying, “You shouldn’t have!”
John answered, “How could I resist? Look at this broccoli!”
I sighed. Well, at least I had something to do to forget my sorry state of mind. I could go to the kitchen and let the world revolve around John’s broccoli instead of Kyle.
The kitchen table looked like a full-grown garden. Besides the broccoli, which was a beautiful deep bluish-green, there was a big bundle of asparagus, a box with six baskets of strawberries, a huge bag of snowpeas, and a few heads of lettuce.
John was at our stove, pouring a bowlful of eggs into a frying pan.
“Frederick said he’d drop off my bags at the restaurant so I could come here. You should have seen what we got! I swear, that farmer’s market is one of the best in the country. Even the yolks of these eggs are … did you see them, David? Is it me or are these the brightest orange yolks you’ve ever seen? And the asparagus — it’s so tender! It’s almost a shame to cook it. I’m going to braise it and serve it with some of these gorgeous fingerling potatoes and this wonderful steak that is so easy to cook, it practically does all the work for me. What is it that has made the Hudson Valley the Garden of Eden this year?”