Lights, Camera, Amalee

by Dar Williams

  “Maybe it’s Frederick,” Dad suggested. We’d certainly heard a lot this spring about Frederick, a new friend of John’s who had his own restaurant in Woodstock. Dad winked at me.

  “Oh, please, he’s ten years younger than I am, first of all. Second, he’s totally into fitness, while I don’t fit into anything.” John laughed at his own joke.

  “What’s braising?” I asked.

  John spun around and looked at Dad, then me. “Did you know she was here?” he whispered.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Did you hear what I was talking about?” John asked.

  “Honey, I think John’s wondering if you knew he was gay,” Dad said. Then he and I started to laugh.

  “What?” John demanded, looking horrified. “Is being gay so funny? I knew I was gay when I was Ama’s age, and I can tell you how funny it was not in Georgia. Not funny for me, not funny for my parents, or my church …”

  Dad became serious. “I’m sorry, John,” he said. Then he explained, “Amalee has known you were gay for a while now, and when we met Frederick and saw how he appreciated good food as much as you did, we made bets about how long it would take for you to go out on your first date.”

  John looked over at me. “And you were in on this?”

  “I bet two dollars on Christmas,” I confessed.

  “Well, I never.” John put down his spatula for a moment and covered his eyes. He shook his head. “How times have changed.” Then he picked the spatula back up.

  “And the location has changed,” Dad pointed out. “And the friends.”

  “True, and I say hallelujah to that, can I have a witness?” John sprinkled some very wrinkly mushrooms on the eggs. “These mushrooms smelled so fresh, like rich dirt, like they’d just been picked in an enchanted forest. You just can’t believe that they’re from the same world as highways and airplanes and lawn mowers and all that … or are you going to say that’s Frederick, too?” He stopped himself, looking over at us with a smile. He flipped the pile of steaming eggs onto a big plate and brought them over. “Ama, tell me about this movie!” he said as he served our eggs and poured some coffee for himself and Dad. “How did you get this idea?”

  “Mr. Chapelle, my English teacher.”

  “I know Alex,” John said.

  “Well, he gave us an assignment to take a story off the page in some way, and it was actually really fun….” I caught my breath and realized that Kyle was not a part of this story. Maybe I wasn’t just doing this for him, after all.

  I told them about Curt’s opera about his mother and sister. I told them about my project, too.

  “This sounds great, Ama,” John said. “So you decided this movie would be another way to get the words off the page?”

  “Yes, after seeing Mr. Chapelle’s movie, it seemed like the best way. He made a movie about his son. Mr. Chapelle decided not to speak in the film, since he’s an English teacher and feels like he’s always getting up and explaining things, so he told the whole story without speaking.”

  “I’ll have to ask him about that,” John said, and Dad nodded.

  Yes, it was Mr. Chapelle, not Kyle, who had inspired my wanting to make a film. When my grandmother had talked about how we lose things forever and lose the things they could teach us, I’d thought about the animals that were already extinct. Sarah had started that idea by comparing my grandmother to a great auk, but I had always, for some reason, been interested in endangered species and how weird it was that humans would let a plant or animal disappear completely.

  The doorbell rang and Marin let herself in, lugging the books with frog pictures and the one with masks.

  “Hi,” she panted, putting a sheet of paper in front of me at the kitchen table. She had sketched frog heads with beautiful, bold colors.

  “Look at that. I am one pretty frog,” John murmured as he studied the pictures.

  “Do you like them?” she asked.

  “I can’t believe you did all this work,” I answered. “These are incredible.” John and Dad agreed.

  “Thanks,” Marin said. “I’m ready to start.”

  John insisted that she have some eggs first.

  “Protein sharpens your mind,” he explained. Marin raved about the eggs and even said how great the mushrooms tasted.

  “Enchanted, aren’t they?” John asked, and Marin nodded.

  “Oh, I came across a problem last night,” Marin said later as she brought her empty plate to the sink. “I know you wanted to have a really beautiful tree frog, and you thought that it was the same frog they make the poison darts with, but the really poisonous frog is the golden poison frog. It’s one of the most poisonous animals on the planet. So which one do you want, the really poisonous one or the really beautiful one?”

  Whoops. When the haze of embarrassment had passed, I understood that Marin wasn’t saying I’d been a fool. I realized she had just made something very clear to me: We needed both. We needed a beautiful frog and a frog that makes useful things for us. Each frog showed a different reason to protect a species. The bullfrog, I decided, would talk about food chains. The poison frog would talk about the important things we get from plants and animals. The two-headed frog would talk about how the pollution that affects them could be a sign of the pollution that affects us. But we needed a beautiful one, too. Yes! The beautiful one could stand for the fact that we love beautiful things and need to protect them. Then I felt sorry for unbeautiful animals. I realized we needed yet another frog. I’d call it Frog X. Frog X would be plain, unhelpful, and not part of any food chain that affects humans. We needed to protect Frog X just because. Because, because, because.

  Marin then showed me a picture of a frog whose poison is used for a painkiller. She said in case I didn’t want my medicine example to be a poison that’s used to kill other animals, I could go with the frog whose skin made medicine. It was called a phantasmal frog, and it looked like a red and white peppermint.

  I liked the golden frog better. “The tribe that uses the poison on darts to kill other animals —” I started.

  “The Chaco tribe,” Marin informed me.

  “Cool!” I said approvingly. “The Chaco tribe uses the poison darts to kill animals they’re going to eat. They don’t make those animals extinct, and they don’t kill the frogs in order to make the darts, right?”

  “Right,” Marin said. “I read about it. They wipe the darts on the frog’s skin, and that’s it. Gosh, imagine if you were in charge of doing that, and the frog jumped into your lap or something.”

  We both shuddered. “I want the golden poison frog,” I told Marin.

  “Yeah, I want it, too,” Marin agreed.

  Marin said she thought she could make more frogs without Carolyn’s help. I started ripping the newspaper and mixing the glue.

  As we constructed two frogs and painted five, I learned a lot about Marin. All I’d known about her family before was that they all had very dark brown straight hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. They seemed like they came out of the same fairy tale, like little royal shoemakers, even her parents. They were serious, but friendly and very polite. They even walked politely, and quickly. Marin now told me that her ten-year-old brother had already said he wanted to be “in finance,” and that her mother had been pleased that he wanted to join her “religion.” She was a banker. So was Marin’s dad. That made Marin, who was every art teacher’s favorite student, feel alone in her house. She said it wouldn’t be so bad if her mother wasn’t always mentioning that she herself was an artist whenever she decorated Christmas cookies or carved a jack-o’-lantern.

  “I feel like she’s saying, ‘See, Marin? I like art, too, but I don’t have to do it for a living! You can be a banker and still carve pumpkins.’”

  I hoped Marin was wrong about her family. Anyone could tell that she loved to paint and make things. She was unstoppable.

  “You are an artist,” I said. “And you’ll be an artist for a living. You love it and you’r
e great at it.”

  In fact, I kept on getting hypnotized while I watched Marin work. For the golden poison dart frog, she painted a green circle for the eye and a pointy black oval for the pupil, and then she dabbed on some darker green — “just to give it depth,” she said. Next she added a curved triangle with a greenish white to make it look reflective and then, with almost no effort, she drew a black circle around the eye and painted a line above it which brought out the squareness of the front of its head. He looked very angry and powerful, but then she painted a long line for his mouth that was slightly wavy and just a little goofy-looking, as if the frog was saying, Hey, I didn’t ask to have skin that could kill an antelope. Or, like, eighteen antelopes.

  Every line changed its personality. Then Marin took a sponge and blotted on a darker yellow paint than the one I had painted (I was allowed to do the first coat on each frog and that was it), and it went from a cartoony frog to a more realistic one. But it also looked like it belonged in an important ceremony, regal.

  I murmured, “Amazing …”

  Marin said, “Thanks.” And she kept painting.

  Marin broke one spell of silent concentration late on Sunday morning by saying, “So … your dad raised you, and Carolyn is his friend, and so is John from the restaurant, and Phyllis from school.”

  “That’s right,” I answered. “And they’re also friends with Joyce, who’s a therapist. She works with teenagers.”

  “I see. And I know your mom died,” she continued quietly. “Is that hard for you?”

  “No. My dad was already raising me when she died. I mean, I feel sorry for her. She was kind of wild. I mean, she liked to do crazy things, like she was probably just driving too fast when she died. She was unlucky.”

  “So you know a lot about her?” Marin asked, continuing to paint the red-eyed frog’s famous bulging red-orange eye.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. I went through the short list in my head of what I knew about her. It felt funny to admit out loud to Marin how little I knew.

  “Do you ask questions about her?”

  “I think I want to,” I answered. “But I don’t want everyone thinking that I miss her. I don’t want them to smother me and give me sad looks and get all serious about it.”

  “But you can tell them that, right? You can tell them you’re just curious.”

  “It’s so weird that you’re talking about this,” I said. “After my grandmother died, she left me this huge bottle of coins, but inside the bottle there was something really interesting. There were receipts for the last, like, forty years.”

  “Huh.” Marin made a little grunt as she painted another frog’s eye.

  I started telling her what the receipts said, and how they gave me little pictures of my mom. Marin was giving me her full attention now. She really looked interested.

  “That’s stuff most people don’t know about their mothers who are alive!” she pointed out. “I don’t know if my mom had sparkly barrettes.”

  “Well, the picture I have of my mom is that she has long, wavy hair and likes wearing sparkly stuff. But she’s also a tomboy.”

  “Why a tomboy?”

  “Because there was a receipt for boys’ athletic socks and a basketball and a baseball cap,” I said.

  “Maybe it was for her …”

  I stopped Marin and said, “She was an only child. She didn’t have a brother.”

  “Oh.” Marin pointed out that maybe she was just interested in sports but not a tomboy. True.

  “And there was one from nineteen eighty-three for rubber bands for her braces, so I know she had braces.”

  “I don’t know if either of my parents had braces,” Marin pondered. “This is so cool. You know, your dad’s friends are so nice. They would let you know more about her if you asked. They wouldn’t think it was weird, I bet. You have these pictures, but they could tell you all the other stuff. You should totally ask. That’s what I think, I mean.” She looked embarrassed that maybe she’d said too much.

  “Oh, I might!” I answered, trying to let her know I wasn’t angry at her suggestion. I was just a little lost in thought. She was right, actually.

  Just before Marin left on Sunday evening, Carolyn came by to see the masks.

  “Wow,” she said, unsmilingly focused on every detail. “You really lucked out, Amalee. This girl’s got talent.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Marin answered shyly, since Carolyn wasn’t actually talking to her.

  Carolyn looked straight at her now.

  “Is this what you want to do? When you grow up, I mean.”

  “Yes. Absolutely,” Marin answered.

  “It’s hard to make money,” Carolyn warned.

  “I can teach,” Marin began quietly. “Or I can do graphic art. I’m already working with computers.”

  “You’ve thought about this,” Carolyn observed. She raised her eyebrow, a sign of respect.

  “Just as long as I don’t have to combine painting with banking,” Marin said, which confused Carolyn, but not me.

  As Marin was leaving, I handed her an envelope I’d gotten from my desk. In it was a ten, and two twenty-dollar bills.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Your payment,” I said. “Fifty dollars.” And before she could interrupt, I added, “Your work is valuable. It’s worth money to me. You have to take it.”

  “Fifty dollars!” Marin gasped. “But it was fun!”

  “Aren’t we supposed to like our jobs?”

  We both paused to imagine our different guidance counselors encouraging us to like our jobs. “My first paid work,” Marin whispered. “That’s really nice, Amalee.” She left, holding the envelope away from her body a bit.

  Carolyn asked if I wanted to talk with the owner of her nursery about endangered plants.

  “I’d love that,” I said.

  She left when my dad came home from the dinner he’d had with some of his students. He liked to eat dinner with them every month or so, just to get them used to talking about philosophy and big ideas in a casual, social way.

  I told him that since he’d done such a great job finding a movie camera whiz, I was wondering if he could help me find a person to talk with about endangered species, maybe someone at a zoo or an aquarium.

  “An aquarium,” Dad said. “Yes, I know someone at an aquarium. It’s in Boston, but it’s worth the trip.”

  “Could I take a train or bus there?”

  “I could drive you there, but … we can work out the details if it comes to that.” Dad went to his room and reemerged with a phone and a piece of scrap paper. He called information.

  The next day, I called Henry Jeffers, a young biology professor who’d quit teaching to work for the aquarium a few years ago. I left a message on his voice mail and he called back a few minutes before I went to visit the nursery where Carolyn worked.

  “Amalee,” he said in a quiet, even voice, “this is Henry Jeffers returning your call.”

  “Thank you,” I said, pressing my ear to the phone to hear him. “I don’t know if you heard my message. I’m sorry I wasn’t more specific. It’s just that I’m making this movie, and I have five different reasons we should care about endangered species, narrated by five different frogs. That’s as far as I’ve gotten, so I’m not sure what specific information I’m asking about, specifically.”

  There was a horrible silence on the end of the line. I shouldn’t have said that to anyone but my diary or God. I felt so unprofessional.

  “Well …” he started. Was he disappointed? “… If you want to know about endangered species, I think you’ve called the right place.”

  “Really? I was thinking if you could show me an example of something like the importance of food chains …” I rambled.

  “How about an actual endangered species?”

  “You have an animal from an endangered species there?”

  “Yes, a very famous sea turtle named Myrtle, and she’s very old. I am happy to introduce
her to anyone who cares about her story. And she has some buddies here, too. Other endangered sea turtles.”

  Five minutes later, with my heart skipping beats, face flushed, and hands shaking, I finished writing down all the information. I would come out to Boston, to the New England Aquarium to meet a green turtle named Myrtle, as well as other sea turtles that the people at the aquarium were rehabilitating. Myrtle weighed seven hundred pounds and was over fifty years old. She had been at the aquarium since its beginning, longer than most of the staff.

  As I pedaled past Kyle’s house on my way to the plant nursery, I realized that I was more excited about old Myrtle than I was about him. No, not true. I was still more interested in Kyle. Where was he today?

  I parked my bike at the store where Carolyn worked. On the way in, I took a very small pad of paper out of my pocket and checked the name Carolyn had given me.

  “Is Betsy here?” I asked the girl at the cash register.

  “Sure,” she said. “She’s restocking stuff at the back of the store. There she is.”

  I went back and saw Betsy, and I knew I liked her immediately. Her arms looked as strong and freckly as Carolyn’s, except they were heavier and twenty years older. She had a white ponytail, a loose purple tank top, and a wristful of woven bracelets with little beads in them.

  “Betsy?” I asked.

  She grunted a yes as she heaved a bag of dirt onto its pile.

  “I know Carolyn. I’m Amalee.”

  “AMA-lee.” She groaned as she hoisted another bag. “Yes. Nice to meetcha.”

  “Do you think I can ask you some questions, and in exchange I can help you lift these?” I asked, nodding toward the wheelbarrow full of topsoil and mulch bags.

  “Nah. Heavy lifting’s good for me. But you can keep me company, and then I can show you some neat plants.

  Carolyn said you’re making a film about endangered species.”

  “Yeah,” I said, flipping open the notepad.

  “You have questions for me? Shoot,” she said. “I go to Ecuador every winter. Have been for eighteen years. I have seen species of plants that I think would have been extinct if they hadn’t been brought back in captivity by friends of mine. It’s amazing to see how fragile we are, as Sting says.”