The Transformation Of Amy Lunaro: Chapter Thirteen. {fiction}
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Her first tactic at the Farmer’s Market was to hide behind the lady selling fresh egg rolls.
Until the woman said if she wasn’t buying she had to move, and she had way too nervous a stomach to eat Chinese food at 10 in the morning.
So then she slunk over to the girls selling yarn hats they’d spun from llama wool.
She watched Jack Fletcher at his stand from there, as she gently grazed her fingers over a soft pink hat that she might actually buy if she weren’t allergic to wool, for winter was coming and she had nothing warm to wear.
She stalked him like that for a while through the thin crowd of locals walking in the dusty parking lot of the market. Their dogs sniffed each other in greeting as they made their way across the sand lined with white tents sheltering local food and wares.
But everyone was a blur compared to him, he glowed like a god, and all the voices and dogs barking muffled in her mind as she tried to make out the words on his lips as he conversed with customers.
There was a cool morning breeze blowing but he wore just a thin grey t-shirt with holes in it; it looked so soft and worn she imagined he’d had it since he was a teenager. Then she imagined back to the boy in him and her heart started writing sonnets.
The wind blew his thick black hair in soft waves across his face and his strong masculine hands caressed so carefully the vegetables he’d raised from the earth himself.
She tremored watching him gently pass a bunch of carrots to a middle-aged woman in a white cotton sweater. He placed them atop the pile in her arms of his beets, broccoli and collards.
The woman blushed as he laid them breast level in her arms, then placed a hand on her shoulder in thanks. Keep that up and she’ll buy the whole stand, Amy thought.
As if he could hear her thoughts, he looked up across the market, directly into her eyes. Amy dropped the pink hat and looked away, toward nothing, toward anything else. But when she looked back up he was still staring at her. He waved a thick muscled arm.
She tentatively raised a hand. He waved her over to him. Amy shuffled across the lot, pulled to him like a magnet.
“Come back when you’ve got more arms,” he smiled to the woman in white.
Then he held out fresh squeezed orange juice in a shot-sized Dixie cup to Amy.
“It’s the Orange Juice Girl,” he said.
“Well, it’s Amy,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“I’m Jack,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
He smiled softly at her. “Welcome to the island, Amy. Here’s the best stuff in the world.”
She took it, and as she did so her fingers grazed his and an electrical current passed between them.
Her vagina leapt like a mummy from a crypt in a horror house. Back from the dead.
“Second chakra juice,” he said. She sipped from the cup gingerly, like a Princess at High Tea.
“What?” she asked.
He rubbed his lower belly with his large dirt-caked paw and his thin grey t-shirt rode up to reveal the marble carvings of his hip bones. She breathed in through her nose and her eyes got stuck right above his soft leather belt for a moment. But he seemed to like watching her watch him.
She looked back up into his eyes. He had long dark lashes that lent a vulnerability to his intense masculinity.
“You know, the seat of your sexuality,” he said slowly, his eyes searching hers, like some sort of dare game. She held his gaze. She dared.
“Your second chakra. Energy center. It’s orange,” he explained.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “That’s… that’s sort of German to me.” She couldn’t take it anymore. She had to look away. She felt he could win every game. She had a feeling that he always won.
“You don’t do Yoga?” he asked. Then he ran his eyes along her. “You have the body for it.”
That threw her right off her center. Did he like her? Were they being adults showing interest? She was still approaching adulthood, at 33 years old. She was a terrible flirt. She was a child more comfortable in fantasy. He had the confidence of an adult entirely comfortable with reality.
“No, I never have. I’ve been… running. I mean, I’m a runner. Well, I just started. I mean, I was on the couch for a long time, running from life.” Shut. Up. Amy.
He just stared at her, like now it was she who was speaking German.
She felt like Baby carrying a watermelon. Why was it, she wondered, that we were so cool around people who already loved us, but with the people we wanted to love us, we were absolute schmucks?
“Well, anyway,” he said. “Want to come to a class with me? I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Ten o’clock. There’s a good one down island.”
“Okay,” she stammered.
“You’re renting the Pearse’s place. On the cliff.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Jack,” a woman’s voice purred from behind her. “Any leeks?” Farmer groupies, she thought. A whole new ball game. She’d dealt with James’ groupies, who showed absolute loathing and contempt for her, and whom she loathed in return when he was on the road without her.
She never wanted to deal with groupies again.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, shuffling away in a daze, as if she’d been awoken from a lifelong nap.
She approached the road back to Leanne’s and folded the Dixie cup with her right hand, pushing it down into her jean pockets, wanting to keep it forever. She walked dream-like into the street until a car horn blared and she looked up, like Bambi in the lights.
“Yo, Yo, Amy!” It was Danny, waving coolly to her from the wheel of her monstrous grey truck. She pulled the beast up to the side of the road, in front of the post office.
“Get in. We’re going oystering.”
We was her and Greta, who sat in the wicker basket on the passenger seat with her long sleek nose out of the window, sucking in the fresh air.
“Scooch, Greta,” Danny instructed. Greta leapt into the backseat and Danny moved the basket to the floor for Amy, who climbed in with a groan. Danny wore an over-sized black sweatshirt over overalls and a big pair of yellow rubber boots.
“Nice boots,” Amy said.
“I’ve got an extra pair for you, city girl.”
“Thanks, I left mine at home.”
“I figured. But you do… you do look nice,” Danny said, looking Amy over as she pulled back onto South Road. “Did you do something different?”
“I brushed my hair.”
“Isn’t that amazing, what it can do?”
“Apparently,” Amy laughed.
“But it’s something else though…” Danny kept looking at her from the corner of her eye. “What else is it? I don’t think it’s physical. Did something happen? There’s something new inside of you.”
“Oh well,” Amy touched the folded paper cup in her pocket. “I might be hanging out with Jack tomorrow. Maybe it’s that.”
Danny’s foot came off the accelerator, and the truck slowed down around the curve; it was almost like she forgot she was driving for a second.
Then she came to.
“Well, that was quick. You manifest pretty well.”
“Mani-what?” Amy asked.
“You made that happen.”
“Well, he did, I think. One minute I was drinking his orange juice, and the next minute I was going to a Yoga class with him.”
“You ever done Yoga?”
“No.”
“He probably just wants to see what you look like in those pants.” Amy thought she saw her roll her eyes.
“Well, I don’t have those. Tomorrow’s outfit will be styled by Target’s loungewear department.”
Danny pulled onto a small dirt trail, and she drove them — bumping and twisting — all the way to the banks of a small sheltered pond that looked like a tiny patch of paradise, with tall green grass, tree branches falling into the water and herons proudly stalking the edges in stilts.
“Here we are.”
Danny and Greta jumped out into the sand. She slammed the door shut, but as it was her tendency, left the radio on.
Amy slid out after them and flicked her flats off into the sand. She scampered onto the hood of the truck and watched Danny wade into the water.
“You’re like a mermaid,” Amy called to Danny.
“I was, once,” Danny said.
The radio started playing Hungry Eyes from Dirty Dancing. Danny didn’t turn around, but said, “Turn that shit up.”
Amy rolled onto her stomach and reached through the window to press the Volume button on the steering wheel. Danny swayed to Eric Carmen in the water.
“Best. Movie.” Danny said.
“Best.” Amy said.
“Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”
“No. Body.” Amy said.
“You were in the corner for a while,” Danny said.
“I think so.”
Danny held a dripping scallop and moaned to it. “I look at you and I fannnntasize, you’re mine tonight…”
Amy laughed and it carried over the water. She sank back onto the window and crossed her ankles, the truck hood felt like it was made for reclining and watching people oyster.
She wanted to close her eyes and replay the scene of Jack asking her to Yoga, when Danny said, “Hey. Get in here. Grab Ray’s boots from the back.”
“But I’m comfortable. I don’t actually have to do this, do I?” Amy whined a bit.
“No. But do you always say No to things you don’t know how to do? How are you going to learn anything new?”
“Does everything you say have to be right?”
She slid off the truck and landed with a thud in the sand. She grabbed Ray’s gargantuan boots and pushed her feet in them. She waddled over to Danny.
“Quack, quack,” Danny said. She stood next to Danny as the water lapped gently at their rubber legs.
“Well, I said Yes to Yoga, didn’t I?”
“But that involved a black-haired Ryan Gosling. If he had offered you heroin, you probably would have done it. Wait, have you done heroin?”
“I’m proud to say I have not.”
“Mother Teresa.”
“I feel like a nun these days. I’m on a tea and Eckhart Tolle diet. I’ve been so good I think I’m gonna rob a bank or something if I don’t cut loose pretty soon.”
“Uh oh,” Danny said.
She pulled another dripping oyster up from the water and retrieved a knife from her pocket. She wedged the shellfish open.
“It’s super hot how you wield that knife. Like, a very sexy accessory. I should get a knife.”
“Please don’t,” Danny said. She looked up at Amy. “So this is what Ray and I were doing when he asked me to marry him.”
Amy looked around. “Right here?” A heron left the water in a graceful ascent. She could barely hear the flutter of its enormous white wings. It hardly made a sound, she had forgotten it was there. Beautiful things don’t ask for attention. She thought of her own proposal.
She had been late to meet James at dinner because she’d been out drinking with a friend. She’d shown up tipsy and blown the whole surprise, and he’d asked her when he was angry. She’d said Yes, apologizing, and crying, through what she wasn’t sure were happy or sad tears.
“Pretty beautiful,” Amy said.
“Look, I want to show you something,” Danny said. Amy studied the open oyster in Danny’s hand.
“He said I was like this. That he had to peel open my hard shell, and it took him a long time, but he was patient. And that nothing has ever been more worth it.”
“That’s romantic.”
“And then look what he found.” Danny produced a tiny pearl.
“Me,” she said. “Deep past my shell and through all the gore. He said I was a beautiful mystery, that every day he felt himself walking deeper into — getting closer to — my heart.”
“Holy shit,” Amy said. “Ray’s a poet.”
“He can be. I guess I just wanted to say, don’t, don’t give him the pearl of you right away. Is all.”
“Who? Jack? We’re just going to Yoga.”
“Anyone, Amy.”
“Well, maybe I don’t have a pearl.”
“Everyone has a pearl, Amy. It’s your heart. Protect it. Not just anyone deserves it.”
She held Amy’s palm open and placed the pearl in there, then she closed her hand around Amy’s fist.
“We want to earn things. It’s how we’re made. It’s human nature. And we only care for the things we work for. If it comes too easy… we don’t care for it.”
“I didn’t think you had a tough shell,” Amy said. “Like I didn’t have to pry you open.”
Danny kept watching the water, but said, “No. I opened right up to you. Some people we’re just drawn to and it’s a mystery, at first, why. But I think we’re drawn to everyone for a reason.
Think of all the billions of people in the world, that you just walk by everyday, the ones you’ll never meet. But then think of the ones you do actually cross paths with. They always have something to teach you, and maybe, you them.”
The wind picked up and she looked into Danny’s eyes. This relationship to a woman felt different from ones she had before. She wasn’t jealous or intimidated by Danny, and she certainly didn’t feel Danny wanted her to be small and un-threatening. In fact, she felt Danny wanted her to be bigger.
She trusted Danny, and in that trust, she felt herself soften.
“Thank you,” she said to Danny.
“I’m just saying it’s okay to be a mystery. To let others be one. To let life be one. You don’t have to give it all away right away.”
A darkness covered the pond.
Amy was shivering. “So, is it a mystery how long we are going to be out here? I kind of feel that oystering is like math class. Like I’m never going to use it, so I can’t pay attention.”
Danny rolled her eyes but you could tell she was endeared by Amy, who felt her real personality emerging, like it was safe to come out and play.
“So what you’re saying is that, we’re like buried treasure,” Amy said, resigning herself to this lesson in the water. “And only worthy of heroes.”
“Yes,” Danny said. “We are. Men with big hearts who stand for something bigger than themselves. Is there anything more mythically, epically exciting than the hunt for buried treasure?”
Amy shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You’re like the holy grail, Amy. You’re worthy of slaying dragons for. You’re the Great Grail Quest. You’re what myths and legends are written about. You’re worthy of an epic adventure. Let them take it to get to you.
You have to go on one to find yourself, why wouldn’t they have to do the same to find you? You have to guard yourself a bit, to make sure they are worthy. “
“I don’t know. I wish my life was an epic adventure. Only a week ago it was a choice between ‘Criminal Minds’ or ‘Law and Order’.”
“Your life starts to happen when you choose it. You just have to choose this life, Amy.”
“Have you chosen yours?”
“A long fucking time ago. And I never looked back. Looking back makes you crazy.”
“I’ve noticed,” Amy said. “If looking back makes you crazy, then I should probably be locked up.”
“You kind of are. I mean you’ve locked yourself up. Your past locks you up in a prison. Only the present moment frees you. Choosing your life means choosing every moment, as if you did choose it. Because you did, actually.”
“Geez, you’re so fucking deep, even standing in shallow water.”
“And if you chose this life, this isn’t so bad, is it?” Danny asked her.
Amy looked around.
“No, no it isn’t.”
Amy thought a minute. “It’s a beautiful story, about you and Ray, but I don’t get it. Are you asking me to be like you?”
“No, not at all, Amy. I’m saying, be you. Totally you and true to you.”
“Ugh,” Amy let out a cry over the water. “I’m so frustrated! Everyone keeps telling me that, to be me. James and Leanne and now you. It’s easy to tell someone that when you know you are. I don’t.”
“Amy.” Danny put a calm hand on the back of Amy’s neck. It was cold from the water. At first she bristled, then she softened into Danny’s touch.
“Everyone deeply knows who they are. It’s about undressing from who you are not. You, most of us, had to be someone else for a very long time. Why don’t you spend the winter letting that all go? Try not to get… distracted from that. It will be the most worthy time you ever spend.
Most people never stop to do it, they don’t have the chance.”
Then she took her hand from Amy’s neck and pushed her finger deep into the sludge of the oyster. “It’s about removing all this shit. To get to your truth.”
She touched the hand Amy held the pearl in.
“To get to the pearl of you.”
She took off her sweatshirt and wrapped it around Amy’s shivering shoulders.
“Okay,” Amy said.
Then Danny said…
“I just want for you, a life that’s true.”
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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