The Transformation Of Amy Lunaro: Chapter Five. {fiction}
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At home she made an omelet, that thing she could make on a dime.
Growing up with a mother so often in the hospital or in bed recovering, there was takeout and delivery, there were donated casseroles, and there were a lot of omelets.
Breakfast for dinner wasn’t some fun novelty thing like in houses with safety and structure; no, it was pretty much omelets on the reg. Omelets, or, what one of her mother’s friends once called Prison Pasta.
One night during Amy’s freshman year, she had been sitting alone at the empty kitchen table, stabbing a plate of spiral noodles dusted in Kroger’s parmesan cheese, and her mother’s friend, a writer visiting from New York, as most of them were — writers from New York — had walked up to her and peered down into her dinner.
Before she had Amy, her mother had lived this romantic New York City writer’s life, and Amy felt she was the reason her mother had to give it all up and grow up, why they had to move to a small town and get realistic.
Amy likened growing up with dream deaths, with resentment and disappointment, so by all accounts, she hadn’t.
From that night in the kitchen, she only remembered the khaki pants of her mother’s writer friend, but not his face, and not his name. She mostly just remembered the lower halves of the adults in the house back then, a parade of faceless pants and skirts patting her on the head.
Mr. Khaki Pants had said, in a sort of snitty, apathetic way, “Oh you poor thing, sitting there alone eating your Prison Pasta.” Amy had looked down at the fare she so often ate, and suddenly realized she was supposed to feel sorry for herself.
Before that remark, she had felt sort of bachelorette-cool, at twelve years old, making her own rules and schedule and meals.
The term had stuck. She thought about it now, how apt it was. If prison was something that kept you from living your life, she had actually existed in a sort of prison of fear, of if and when her mother would die.
There was something terrible that happened to you when your worst fear came true. Something changed in you; you lived with baited breath, bracing for all the walls to fall down again. Or at least, Amy did.
Once Monica had said, “Don’t take this the wrong way” (which, Amy thought, was one of the worst ways to start a sentence, right up there with I hate to be the one to tell you this or You’re not going to like this).
“But,” she said, “it’s like, when your mother died, you did too.”
Amy felt the presence of the ghosts that lived within her, she felt like a walking ghost motel. Her mother, her abandoned career, her unwritten book and now her marriage haunting her, there was no more room at the inn within.
She was stirring the wet yolk in the pan with a wooden spatula, thinking about wearing a t-shirt that said No Vacancy. She looked down at her small freckled hand, it looked exactly like her mother’s. She dropped the spatula and she held her left hand with her right.
When she held her own hand, she held her mother’s hand. It felt so nice. It felt, whole. She was wishing she had held her mother’s hand during her descent a whole lot more when she heard the woman in grey, “Don’t apologize, that’s wasting more time. Just do something.”
Do something.
But what?
James had been the do-er. She loved to watch him do, before the resentment grew. He was a phenomenal creator. A prolific artist.
He would slip out of bed in the middle of the night into the guest room, like an entranced creature that felt called to walk off into the woods and die or give birth, and she’d hear him whispering and plucking at a new song in his chair where the moonlight fell through the window.
She marveled at his creativity; it was like a mysteriously granted gift. Where did it all come from? Why did some have it, and some didn’t?
While Amy was still working as a journalist, it could take her days of labor pains to find the right sentence that sang even mildly, that had any resonance at all, that didn’t land with a thud and slide down the wall like a piece of rubbery spaghetti.
While her writing could sometimes make her feel like a clumsy sculptor stabbing at marble with a butter knife, James was like the most skilled of miners, his lines slicing right down to the gold.
She ate her sad omelet in five forkfuls standing over the stove, and thought about Diane Lane eating her chicken breast over the sink at her rock bottom in Must Love Dogs, and then she turned to look in the mirror on the kitchen wall.
Her tired sad eyes, her frizzy brown hair, her broken out skin, her extra weight, the cushion she kept between herself and The Experience. She was no Diane Lane.
It was just three in the afternoon but she took a bottle of general store red wine into bed and clutched the remote for the television that hung on the opposite wall, despite the crashing and the calling of the waves outside. She wasn’t ready for the ocean yet.
She wasn’t ready for the feel of its air on her skin and the crunch of a million perfect seashells, each a tiny little masterpiece, beneath her bare feet. The cries of children and the naps of lovers.
She had once loved the ocean. All her favorite memories had been at its shore, this shore, specifically. But she wasn’t ready to feel all that it asked her to feel again. Everything she tried to bury seemed to rise with the waves.
She pressed the remote. On television, Baby Boom, starring Diane Keaton, was on.
Not only was this the movie she and her mother shared as a favorite, it was what she had watched for weeks after her mother had died, and the film itself became like a time capsule, she could crawl in it and stop time and still be in bed with her mother, watching the neat, safe storyline tie up with a golden, giddy bow, a happily ever after.
The familiar opening credits began to roll, there was the swarm of white-sneakered power-walkers, the introductory voice-over, and she felt a smile creep on her lips. Those muscles had almost forgotten how, they were stiff from underuse.
80’s movies penned by Nora Ephron and Nancy Myers were home to her. They were the middle where she and her mother met. Private Benjamin, Overboard, When Harry Met Sally, Heartburn. If she were to believe in signs, Baby Boom playing on the television sure felt like one.
Here, the Universe seemed to say, chucking a bone in her direction. She took it in, hungrily, starved for comfort.
Diane’s character, J.C. Wiatt, newly single and newly a mother, was at the edge of her old life and falling into the ocean of their new one. She was just making her way out of New York in a wooden Winnebago for the red and gold country of Vermont when Amy passed out beneath the home sewn comforter and thick hushing of the waves.
The Next Day.
Amy was in sweatpants and her mother’s green cotton sweater, pumping hot coffee into a white paper cup at Al’s, when she saw the white-haired woman again.
Her heart raced; she realized she was hungry for more of the woman’s wisdom, even just another one-liner from her — she would take whatever she could get. And despite her PTSD-like fear of intimacy, she was beginning to long for human contact.
So Amy just sort of lingered around the woman, like a shadow, like a hungry cat in an alley nearly weaving in between her feet until the woman almost tripped over her, until the woman had no choice but to acknowledge her.
“Oh,” she said to Amy.
Amy smiled limply. There was a time she hadn’t been so invisible, such a ghost. There was a time she woke up every morning with a VIP wristband still laced on her arm. There was a time she was on red carpets in designer dresses and red-bottomed Manolos.
There was a time she was recognized in the street. Fuck, there was a time she signed autographs. These days she was surprised when her reflection showed up in mirrors, and then even more surprised — no, heartbroken — at the bloated sad stranger in that reflection.
These days, she was used to halfhearted Ohs.
“How are those decisions coming?” the woman asked Amy while she examined a carton of coconut water in her strong wrinkled hand.
“Um,” said Amy. “Not so great.”
Then the woman muttered something to the coconut water about a racket, and put the carton back on the shelf. “Well, you sure can pick a bottle of wine fast.”
Amy looked down at her combat boots. Touche, she thought.
She looked at Amy now, peering at her pores. “You drinking any real wata?” Her accent was so thick it could crack an oyster. “I mean the shit without the sugah?” She pressed. “Most people never do. Looks like you haven’t had any in about 14 years.” Amy winced.
“I should, more,” she agreed. She both hated this woman and loved her at once for her authenticity. She was entranced by her. This woman could see her. Amy was longing to be seen, beneath the story of who she was now, to who she was before, and to maybe who she could become.
“Mmmhmm,” said the woman. “Yep,” she nodded. She was so sure of herself. She was so… confident. It seemed to come from deep within. From a place that needed no external validation.
“What kind of shipwreck are you crawling out of?” she asked Amy.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s how people end up here,” she said, fumbling with her change purse, counting dollar bills. “They’re crawling out of some fucking disaster. They call you wash-ashores. By the time you get here from the mainland, you’re barely breathing. Ask most of the women here. They came here to heal. It might as well be called Heartbreak Island.”
“I…,” Amy was startled by the accuracy. This woman sliced right through the bullshit. Amy felt starved for something real. She was hungry for what this woman had to say. Her words fed Amy, nourished her. Every word… meant something.
She looked inside of her to explain herself, but realized she didn’t need to, she was standing just to the left of the tabloids.
“So?” the woman asked, her moccasin-ed foot beginning to tap to an impatient beat.
Amy sort of tilted her head to the right toward the magazine rack.
“What is ‘that’?” the woman asked, mimicking Amy’s head tilt. “What does ‘this’ (tilting her head) mean?”
“Um,” Amy stumbled. This woman didn’t want to play charades at ten a.m. in the general store with a stranger. Understood. “Yes. You could say I’m currently in a disaster. Trying to… crawl my way out.”
Finally the woman’s eyes grazed over the gossips, and stopped.
“You sure look a lot like the girl in the nightgown with the wine-stained teeth being left for that 90-pound bag of legs and hair.”
“That’s me,” Amy said. “Not the legs and hair. I’m… Wine Teeth. And, that’s a dress.”
“Don’t look like one,” the woman said. She looked Amy once over again with a low whistle.
“You doing any healing?”
Again Amy asked, “What do you mean?”
“Right. Thought as much. Here’s my card.” Card sounded like Cahd.
“I live on Lotus Street, near the church. Come by tomorrow, around three.”
Amy stared at her, frozen for a moment.
“Unless you got something better to do,” the woman said, raising an eyebrow. For a moment, the card seemed to be frozen in the air. There was a time when Amy had welcomed a challenge. She took the card. It had just three words on it.
“LEANNE GRACE. Healer.”
Amy looked back up at Leanne, who was looking over Amy’s wicker basket of wine and Bronner’s lavender soap.
“You might want to add a brush to your loot,” she said.
Amy put a hand to her mussed hair, self-consciously.
“And some fruit. Get ya-self some fruit.” Then she turned her back to Amy and walked up to the register.
“Hiya Sandra,” Leanne said to the counter girl. “How’s the back?”
*****
At home, Amy sliced open the pizza box and then leaned her belly against the porcelain sink, staring out at the ocean while the cheese and bread bubbled in the oven. The sea seemed to change color every few minutes, like it had its very own emotions, its own story, its own joy, its own pain.
By the time the sun sank into it, Amy felt like she had watched an entire soap opera. Suddenly a familiar voice broke her trance. Her whole body seized, her cells cried out in recognition. She caught her breath and was jolted away from the Story of the Ocean.
It was James’ new single on the radio. There would have been a time she had heard it in its every stage, from the skeleton to the full flesh. There would have been a time she had helped with lyrics and stood on the sides of the video set.
But she hadn’t heard a single chord of this, and she couldn’t. His songs were like landmines she hoped to avoid for the rest of her life’s terrain. She rushed across the kitchen to shut it off. And then her hands shook as she fumbled in the utensils drawer for the wine opener.
She wasn’t hungry anymore. She turned off the oven but just let the pizza stay in there.
She closed the curtains and returned to bed with her wine.
She turned on the television, desperate for its company, desperate for another voice to drown out the sound of James’ that was still echoing in the cabin, as if he had been there for a moment, then gone, forever, which was what exactly what had happened.
By some grace, Baby Boom was on the local channel again. Amy whispered Thank You to no one in particular.
Diane’s character, J.C., was having her final breakdown in front of the frozen well — she was absolutely at the end of her rope. A scene that was once funny was now too familiar. J.C.’s foray to Vermont had failed — she had romanticized it, and now she just wanted to go home again.
But home no longer existed, it had vanished, the bridge had crumbled behind her. J.C. had given up her apartment, lost her job, and been left by her lover. And now she had a baby and a house with a mortgage.
Life had bolted her to her big yellow house in the country so she couldn’t run. She had to stay. In all her unknown, in all her discomfort.
But the good news for Diane Keaton was she was about to end up on Sam Shepard’s veterinarian table.
Amy wondered if that had anything to do with real life, that as soon as you finally hit your final wall, and totally gave up, and totally stopped trying, and stopped doing everything you used to do, that not only wasn’t working, was making everything so much worse, and you just — surrendered — that that was when things finally began to change.
Amy wondered, “What came after the death of hope?”
This is an ongoing series from a forthcoming fiction novel by Sarah Durham Wilson of DOITGIRL.
Tune in weekly for the next chapter in ‘The Transformation of Amy Lunaro’.
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