Amalee

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

About the Author

Q&A with Dar Williams

Cook Up Some Breakfast Dessert

Room Re-do

Make Your Own Memory Book

A Sneak Peek at
Lights, Camera, Amalee

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Imagine six kids packed into a car, laughing and talking on their way to get pizza and root beer, planning to see a great movie afterward. Now imagine that five of those kids are actually forty-two years old, and they're still packed in that car, and the sixth passenger is eleven years old. That's me, Amalee Everly. The other five would be my dad and his four big, goofy friends.

And there I was, on a freezing night in early March, going to the movies with them.

They'd all gone to college together, and then they had vowed to continue having fun together, to hang out together, and to be there for each other forever, till death do they part. I don't know what they would have done if they'd all had kids, but only one of them did. That, of
course, was my dad, David, who was driving and smiling as each of them squoze in.

First stop was his oldest friend, Phyllis. He'd known her since he was six. Phyllis was tall and had a big smile that made me think of all the pictures of her and my dad from when they were kids. She would slide into the front seat and immediately swivel around to ask me about whatever I was studying, or drill me on a new word, which, I have to admit, I always liked. I loved new words. Tonight's word was illuminate, or “ih-LOOM-in-ate, ih-LOOOOOM-in-ate,” as Phyllis pronounced it, widening her large brown eyes. It means to shed light on something, like a floodlight
illuminates
the street “or, if a person wants more information, she can say, ‘illuminate me.' The same way she could say ‘enlighten me.' They both mean ‘show me the light.'”

So a person can be illuminated, too.

Carolyn jumped in next. “You're lucky I called the movie theater ahead of time,” she announced as she got in the backseat. “I had to reserve tickets, it was so popular. I
told you
this town needed more foreign films.” I groaned quietly. That was Carolyn — unsmiling, with her short red hair sticking out in all directions. She always had a lot of energy, but not cheerful energy. She was very serious, especially about her favorite topic (her
self) and she was a painter who often expressed disgust for a world that didn't care about art (especially her art).

We got to Joyce's house next, and, true to her nature, she hopped in beside me, black hair bouncing, a bright scarf spilling all over her coat. She moved into the car, gave me a hug that said, “I know you don't like to be hugged. This will be short,” squeezed Phyllis and my dad on the shoulder, and nodded to Carolyn, who practically had a
DON'T TOUCH ME
sign around her neck. Joyce was always looking out for people's feelings, because she was a therapist. After her round of hellos, Joyce quietly started straightening and retying her scarf, smiling and humming to herself.

Finally, John opened the door, and it was time for me to ride on someone's lap. He was mostly bald, very twinkly — this was the best description for his eyes and the way he laughed — and altogether pretty hefty.

It was crowded, it was pretty boring, and the worst thing was that we did this every single week. Every Friday I sat on a different lap, and a different person would complain about his or her life — except for my dad, who always drove and never complained.

This week I was on Joyce's lap. Her lap was actually the best one, because she would always sneak me breath mints. Her minty breath was the best in the car.

Tonight, as it turned out, it was John's turn to complain. He was the headwaiter at a fancy restaurant, but he wanted to be a chef.

“I swear I almost quit my job last night!” he said in his broad Georgia accent. He was always saying he was going to quit his job. But he never did.

“Really?” My dad sounded surprised, even though we'd already heard this on plenty of Fridays.

John wanted to have his own restaurant. So how far had he come in making his dream come true? Well, he was good at giving detailed reports about how awful his job was. “Oh, David!” he moaned, “the chef doesn't know how to cook! Customers keep sending their dinners back to the kitchen. Too cold, too soggy,
burnt.
And you know what else? Even when he gets it right, his food is plain. Just plain food that people could have made at home. Going to a restaurant should be special. People go there for birthdays and anniversaries. They need
special
food! They need
exciting
food! I left a wonderful linzer torte recipe for him, you know, with a few tips, just to get him excited about cooking again. He's such a mean-spirited, depressed, lazy cow! Do you know what he did?”

Phyllis chimed in. She had a terrible problem with talking. And talking, and talking. “John found the recipe
folded up at his headwaiter station,” she said now. “No comment and no thanks.”

“So you know what I'm going to do?” John asked. Then he answered himself. “I'm going to march into that bank on Monday, get a loan, and start
my own
restaurant. And the first dessert on the menu will be
my own
linzer torte.”

“Oh, John, that's a very healthy way to deal with your disappointment!” said Joyce. Being a therapist, she loved it when people said nice things about themselves or made big, bold plans for their future. She was very popular in this car on Fridays. “Using your anger as rocket fuel to start your own project. That is a great use of energy.”

Joyce had almost a little girl's voice. Phyllis liked to call her “tenderhearted.” She cried whenever she saw something sad, beautiful, happy, or related to the autumn. “Oh, the fall!” she would say in her slightly munchkin voice. “Yellow leaves, yellow school buses! Kids walking to school.” And then we'd see the tears, and Phyllis would pull a tissue from the bottomless pocket of her sweater and talk a little too long about anything that would help Joyce quiet down. Joyce thought she was a bad therapist because she cried so much. She learned to get two boxes of tissues — one for her clients, one for herself.

John was very happy to hear Joyce's opinion.

“That's right, Joyce,” he said. “My anger gives me energy! Henri's unworthiness as a chef is the last straw!”

I couldn't stand it. I felt so cramped, so annoyed, and so sick of the same conversation every Friday.

“You always say it's the last straw, John,” I pointed out.

I felt Joyce's legs stiffen beneath me, even as she wiped her nose.

Phyllis said, “What do you mean, Amalee?”

I let it all out. “I mean that every week is the last straw! Every week we pretend that John is really going to start a restaurant.”

“And I'm sure he will, Amalee,” Joyce gasped.

“And I'm sure he
won't,
” I answered. I didn't mean to say it. I meant to say that John should just do what he said he was going to do. But instead, I felt like I'd just put a curse on him.

The silence that followed made it hard to breathe.

Carolyn spoke up from where she was wedged against the window. “Wow. That was mean.” As always, Carolyn didn't hesitate to tell us what she thought.

The car was silent again. Joyce sucked on her mint nervously. In her little bird voice she said, “Well, really …” But nothing after that.

“Amalee's right,” said John sadly. “I'm always saying
I'm going to do something, and then I don't. I'm unmotivated.
I'm
the lazy cow.”

“You are not!” Phyllis protested.

“John, you work harder than anyone I know,” said my dad.

I couldn't say a thing. I had no idea I could say something that would hurt a person so much. John sounded like a different person, as if he'd taken off a bright mask to show that he was just some really depressed guy underneath. I liked John. I'd always liked him. He annoyed me, too, but he'd always made it clear he would move a mountain for me if he had to. Now suddenly everyone was jumping in to defend him against what I'd just said.

Phyllis sprang into action. She was the big problem solver in the office at my school, where she worked. Now she was going to solve the big problem in this small car. “John,” she said, “what you need is a plan. You don't have to go and get a loan right away. You need to plan this out, step by step, put it all on a list and follow the list. Then you'll have a restaurant and everyone will be happy. You know why? Because you are a better chef than Henri. You have more imagination. Your food is more special.”

“A plan,” John said, moping. “If I gave you all the plans I'd written over the last ten years, you'd have a lifetime supply of toilet paper.”

“Oh, John!” cried Joyce.

“Do you need a tissue, Joyce?” asked Phyllis.

“Yes, thank you. Sorry.”

We got to the pizza place. The car stopped. Everyone sat for a moment before we got out. No more laughing. No more dreams and schemes, just a bunch of tired people at the end of a long, disappointing week. You didn't have to be an adult to know what that felt like. The only sound was four doors opening and four doors shutting.

So this Friday was different from other Fridays. Because I, the only real kid in the car, opened my big mouth and ruined it.

The movie, to make things worse, was in Swedish. We all squinted to read the subtitles. My dad left the theater a couple of times. “Where's he going?” I asked Carolyn. She was always good for a straight answer. (Unless it involved her paintings.)

“I think he's having those headaches again,” she whispered. He'd had some bad headaches, but I didn't know they were so bad he'd leave a movie so often. Then I realized I'd probably made them worse.

Since Carolyn hadn't said “Shhhhh,” I also asked, “By the way, who's that guy in the movie playing chess on the beach?”

“That's Death,” she said. Spooky.

I looked over at John. He was tapping his foot, not even watching the movie. Lost in his own lost thoughts.

I felt awful all over again.

The movie was long and depressing. Even Phyllis muttered to Joyce afterward that it was “endless.”

The trip home felt that way, too.

My dad spoke up after he'd dropped everyone off, waiting as they trudged through the snowbanks and up to their front doors. “Honey,” he said, “John is frustrated that he hasn't opened up his restaurant.”

“I know,” I told him.

“So what I'm trying to say is, you don't need to point it out to him,” he continued quietly. “You didn't do anything wrong. I know he sounds like a broken record, but we've got to let him do this in his own time.”

“I know.”

“I'm not mad, though.”

“Whatever,” I said, and looked out the window. He wasn't mad? I hadn't done anything wrong? What was he thinking? I had behaved terribly. Maybe this was his way of giving up on me. Trying to make me better had tired him out and now, with this headache, he was done. He didn't think I could behave any better than this.

I saw my reflection in the window. Short brown hair just a little bit longer than a boy's, which is what I asked for. Carolyn always insisted on cutting my hair, and she would always end by saying, “It didn't turn out the way I
wanted it to, but it doesn't look horrible.” For all I knew, it looked ridiculous. I looked at my little blue eyes and little mouth. I'd always liked my eyes, because when I was about eight, I realized that I could make them look unusually serious. But when I smiled, I looked like a very friendly person.

Not that I'd smiled a lot this year, or that I'd been friendly.

I added tonight's disaster to the pile of things that weren't going right in my life. I hated school. I didn't have one thing to look forward to. Not a single human being. I didn't mind what we were studying, even, but I was in middle school now, which meant less colors, less friendliness, and more meanness. And there was another problem. I was meaner, too. Or I felt meaner.

I thought of the time a couple weeks before winter vacation when Ellen Walken, on her eleventh birthday, was talking with me and Hally Masters about going skiing. She had told me she was going to ski on a difficult slope, something with the word “diamond” in it. Frances Perry, a nice kid who never said a bad word to anyone, and who seemed a little lonely, suddenly jumped into the conversation. We were in the cafeteria. “Me, too!” she said. “We go skiing, and my ski class is going to go on that slope this year!”

All she was saying was
I have something in common with you, or someone, or anyone.
Nothing else.

Ellen looked insulted that Frances had cut into our conversation. “What state do you ski in?” she asked slowly.

“What state?” Frances asked, frowning.

“What state — of the
United
States — do you ski in?” Ellen repeated, as if each word were its own sentence.

“Oh, uh, the state of New York,” Frances almost whispered, as if this were a trick question. And it was, in a way.

“State of New York, as in Catskill Mountains, where the black-diamond course is basically a big hill?” Ellen accused.

“Yeah, it's the Catskill Mountains. Where is your ski place?” Frances asked.

“Utah. Rocky Mountains,” Ellen said, pronouncing it “YOU-taw, RRROCK-y mountains.”

That's when I should have stopped being friends with her. That's when I should have said, “So basically, you ski far away enough that no one can tell if you're lying.” But I only came up with that while I was brushing my teeth that night. At the time, I did something worse. I felt myself nodding my head, as if to comment that the Rocky Mountains were, in fact, definitely bigger.

Frances looked burned, because she was. I had stood
by and watched, and I'd gone along with Ellen. She was so hard to please. But I always felt like I was only one step away from winning her over completely. Making her like me. And making Hally like me, too.

In fifth grade, I had lots of friends. Now, in sixth grade, they all ended up in other classrooms, and I had two new friends maybe, Ellen and Hally. We were seated together at the beginning of school, and for some reason they liked me.

They were smarter than the other kids, or they acted that way. Ellen would ask me questions about the news. Did I know the name of the president? The vice president?

I wanted to impress them, so I asked Phyllis about the government. She knew everything and tried to fit in a complete explanation over one dinner at our house. This was one time when I didn't mind her talking and talking.

When I went to school the next day, I knew all the answers to what Ellen had asked, plus all the other information Phyllis had packed into my head. I guess I was showing off when I asked, “Do you know who the Secretary of the Interior is? And what her job is?”

Ellen didn't answer, saying, “Everybody knows that. How many Senators are there?”

That's when I realized that Ellen liked smart people,
but not
too
smart. So I said, “One hundred or fifty. I can't remember.”

“It's a hundred.” She rolled her eyes. “Two for every state.”

I think Hally was the smartest of us. She had the nicest clothes and a soft voice. Whenever she spoke, she said something very interesting. I admired Hally, and I found myself wanting to impress her.

Ellen made fun of everyone, while Hally would say one thing every once in a while, like, “Alex shouldn't wear those pants with that sweater. She has often been a careless dresser.” She used the English language in a strange way. With her blond hair around her face, I couldn't help thinking of her as a little intelligent fairy, not quite from the human world.

All the teachers liked Ellen and Hally. I thought these two girls were good for me. They made me think more and learn about things like the government. They told me when my clothes matched.

The only problem was, none of the other kids wanted to be around us.

Actually, I guess
we
didn't want to be around
them,
either.

One girl was particularly annoying: Lenore Nielson. I
had been friends with her since third grade, but I never liked her. She was bossy and basically just loud. She used to explain that I had to be her friend. Once you were a friend, she said, you had to stay loyal, even if you didn't like your friend at all. I felt like she was threatening me, but when she'd invited me to movie after movie, sleepover after sleepover, I always said yes. What if she was right? I never wanted to be a bad friend, even to a mean friend like Lenore.

But then things changed. When I started being friends with Ellen and Hally, I discovered that I could turn my back on Lenore just like they did, and Lenore would actually go away. I never had to say anything mean. I could just say nothing. It was such a relief! After years of hearing her boast about her grades, whine about her younger brothers, and create complicated games where I had to follow everything she said, she was gone.

So that was my life. Ellen, Hally, and I were envied and — I realized more and more — feared. People watched us out of the corners of their eyes, and walked by quickly.

By October, I could see that I was really changing. My brain felt sharper. I put my clothes out the night before school, and I made sure I had what I needed for class. I tried not to let any old stupid thing come out of my
mouth. I tried to be more like Hally. Ellen talked a lot, but she was clever.

I actually liked everything we were learning about, especially new words and history. I felt like I could be smart around them, and we could challenge each other. Phyllis called this kind of thing “sharpening your wits” and said it was why she liked hanging out with Mr. Spiro, the librarian.

The strange thing was, the teachers liked Ellen and Hally, but they didn't seem to like me as much.

I mean, our music teacher, Ms. Bernstein, was a hippie, so she liked everyone. Mrs. Donaldson, the math teacher, didn't really like anyone. Mr. Hankel, the science teacher, called me a “swell kid” once. But there was also Ms. Severance, the English and social studies teacher. I thought she was brilliant, but she liked Hally and Ellen much better than me, which didn't seem fair.

Once Hally turned to Ellen and said, “She should wear bigger earrings, to compensate for her long face.”

Ellen said, “And she also wears that sweater, like, every day. I hope she washes it!”

Ms. Severance wore that sweater a couple of times a week. I knew because I loved it. It was a soft mossy green with buttons that looked like shells. And she wore little earrings that sparkled when she turned toward the win
dow. There was nothing wrong with that. I didn't notice her long face until Hally pointed it out.

I said nothing, and that's when I knew I was like the other kids, too afraid to speak up.

Finally, the day before winter vacation, I saw a note that Hally wrote to Ellen. It said, “She could use a professional haircut: a salon.” There was an arrow underneath the words. I closed my eyes and figured out that, yes, the arrow had been pointed at me.

So I felt uncomfortable around my friends for a good reason. They made fun of me, too. Under Hally's writing, Ellen wrote, “Is she a boy or girl???”

I showed the note to Ellen and she said, “You took a piece of paper off the dirty floor, uncrumpled it, and read a personal note between me and Hally? It wasn't about you. And it was PRIVATE.”

From then on, when she and Hally passed notes, they wrote
PRIVATE
on them in big letters. There were no more sleepovers, and no more laughing together.

On a good day, I said one thing that made them smile.

After vacation, I asked Frances if she'd had a good time skiing, but by this time she expected the trick question she'd gotten from Ellen. She said, “What do you care?” I couldn't blame her, but it made me feel like walking poison when it came to friends.

 

My dad's friends, on the other hand, all wanted to be my friends, but that was because they loved my dad. Why was I so bad at making my own friends?

Dad always said he was lucky to have the friends he did. He talked about how they helped him be a single dad and how they convinced him to keep me when he wasn't so sure he should.

When my dad was in his twenties, he lived with his girlfriend, my mother, because of me, their daughter. The story goes that they met at a restaurant where they worked. Then they had me. They got different shifts, hers at night and his during the day. They hardly saw each other, but they didn't have to get baby-sitters.

My mother, Sally, was unhappy. I knew this because Carolyn once said, “We all know Sal had that baby to make her parents angry.”

Lovely. My mom had me as revenge.

My dad and his other friends all jumped in and said, “Noooo, noooo, she loved you sooooo much.”

But if my mom was unhappy, the next part of the story made more sense.

One day she said, “I thought I could do this, but I can't.”

“This” was me. She couldn't handle it. Me. And so she left.

Dad met with his friends. “This kid deserves a stable environment,” he said, and they said, “Yes!”

And he said, “So I should put her up for adoption,” and his friends said, “No!”

They told my dad that he could raise me, because they would help. Apparently, it ended with John saying, “David, this will be an adventure!”

Well, I liked that story, because I liked the ending. I loved my dad. He was nice to everyone, including me. He taught philosophy at the State University of New York, New Paltz, or SUNY New Paltz, and he would have students over for holiday parties in December. They liked my dad, too.

He and I always spoke sympathetically about my mother, as if she were a friend who had never figured out what she wanted. She died in a car accident soon after she left. Poor Sally. I really did feel sorry for her.

I looked over now at my dad driving and wanted to get back into a conversation. I was sick of feeling so quiet and frowning all the time. I asked about his headache.

“It's not good,” Dad admitted. “It's in the back of my head and neck.”

“I know those,” I said. “It feels like a robot has you in its pincer?”

Dad laughed. “That's exactly what kind of headache it is.”

And that's what a great dad he was. I knew he had to be mad at me for what I'd said to John, but he still laughed. And unlike Ellen or Hally or Lenore, he never called me “crazy.” None of his friends did, either. Of course, that's because they were all pretty crazy themselves.

But they had helped raise me. In some ways, I'd grown up with five parents. Sometimes I thought I had only one, but he was a very, very good one.