Amanda Maynard, Author of The Quixote by Carla Miriam Levy

Amanda cradles the book in both hands; she can hardly believe it’s here. She has lurked in McIntyre’s second-hand bookstore for weeks, hoping its musty shelves would offer up this prize, but never really expecting it—because who would want to get rid of a Dorothy Spanger novel? She pictures it crammed in a crate with yellowing paperbacks and discarded diet books, and holds it to her chest, as if to soothe it after an ordeal. It’s over now; you’re safe with me.  

She shows it to Adam when they meet the next day after school. “I don’t get why you’re so into those freaky murder books,” he says. They are walking toward Broadway Donuts, four blocks past the Starbucks where the other kids hang out, the kids who aren’t on scholarships.

“Dorothy Spanger’s books aren’t just about murder.” The name is rich on her tongue; she doesn’t often say it out loud. “I mean, if you really read her, there’s so much there. Guilt, repressed desire, obsession—”

“I know, I know.” Adam holds up his hands. “It’s just that the world is mean enough, isn’t it? Why don’t you read something that makes you laugh?”

Adam is her best friend, the only thing besides band practice that makes high school tolerable, but he doesn’t get it, and thinking of how to explain it to him makes her chest hurt. In the first Dorothy Spanger book she ever read, Tiverton’s Trial, the protagonist kills a friend who has grown cool toward him, and steps into the man’s life—he rents the apartment vacated by his friend’s death, interviews for his job, befriends his grieving mother. Amanda stayed up all night to read it, thrilled by the idea of wanting something so intensely that you destroy it and become it. After she finished it, she stared at the old photograph of Spanger on the back cover, and the dark eyes gazed gravely back at her with a kind of recognition.  

“There’s more to life than laughing,” she says, finally.   

*

The book is A Complex Hypothesis, the fourth book in the Matthew Tiverton series. Amanda hasn’t got her hands on the third one yet, but it doesn’t matter; this one is hers, and she won’t have to return it to the library when she finishes it. 

“If you covet them so much,” Adam asks her through a mouthful of chocolate glazed, “why wait for them to turn up at the bookstore? Why not just get them on Amazon or something?” 

“With what money?” Amanda says, carefully working the price sticker off the book’s cover. “And anyway, this is better. It’s like—like the universe conspiring to deliver it into my hands, you know?”

“The universe could use the Internet,” Adam says.

Amanda has avoided the Internet when it comes to Dorothy Spanger. She tried to look her up on Wikipedia once, but her gaze skittered off the words for fear of what she might find in them. It was like the time in sophomore year she and Adam first snuck a taste from her mother’s whiskey bottle; it was too sharp, too intense, alarming warmth mixed with the tang of danger. 

So while Amanda can recite the titles of Spanger’s books from memory, she knows very little about Dorothy Spanger the woman, just bland facts from the one-paragraph biographies on the back covers of her books: She was born in Chicago; she went to college at Barnard; she later moved to Europe, where she died. 

A chasm opens in Amanda as she considers that Dorothy Spanger no longer exists, that they will never meet, that someday Amanda will have read all her twenty-two novels and three collections of short stories and there will be nothing left.   

*

Amanda lets herself into the apartment. Her mother sprawls on the living room sofa with an arm flung across her eyes. Her other hand rests on the rim of a short glass of whiskey, balanced against her sternum. 

“I thought you were seeing Martin tonight.” Amanda can’t bring herself to sound surprised. 

“Well, I’m not. Where have you been?” 

“At the Brombergs’. Babysitting.” She tucks A Complex Hypothesis under her elbow like a football and trudges toward her mother. “I told you that.” 

“Did you?” 

“What happened to Martin?” A mostly empty whiskey bottle lies on its side on the carpet between the sofa and the coffee table, a damp patch extending from its mouth. Amanda stoops to grab the bottle. “I’ll get a dishtowel.”  

Her mother swings her legs to the floor, pivoting upright almost gracefully, keeping her glass perfectly level. She isn’t so drunk, Amanda thinks—this time. 

“Leave it, leave it,” her mother says, with an irritable wave of the hand that makes her bracelets jangle. “It’s bad enough you spent your Friday evening babysitting. You’re not going to clean the apartment too, are you?” 

Amanda shrugs and sets the bottle on the coffee table. “Suit yourself.” She retreats toward the hall that leads to her bedroom. 

“Wait,” her mother says, in a pleading way that stops Amanda short. Her mother pats the sofa next to her. “Talk to me a minute before you lock yourself in your room.”

Amanda squeezes the book. It is about a man who fixates on one of Tiverton’s murders after reading about in the paper. He collects clippings about the crime and pastes them lovingly into a scrapbook. “I’m tired, Mom. I just want to get into bed and read.”  

But her mother’s pout makes her relent and she drops to the sofa. 

“Let me look at you.” Her mother sets down the whiskey glass and takes Amanda by the shoulders, inspecting her. “No makeup?”

Her mother’s makeup, Amanda sees, is smeared around her eyes. “I was just babysitting.” 

Her mother frowns, releases her shoulders with a disappointed little shove. “I hoped you were on a date. Though I should know better, with the ratty clothes you wear, and your nose always in those books of yours.” She juts her chin at the book, still cradled over Amanda’s heart. “More Dorothy Spanger, I suppose?”

The man in the book has a wife who needles him about everything from the ties he chooses to the way he cuts his steak. She withers with migraine whenever he wants to be intimate with her. He tells himself he still loves her.

“Did you know that she was a lesbian?” her mother asks. 

Amanda looks at her sharply. 

“And terribly bitter. Bitter about everything in the world.”  

“How do you know?” 

“I’m older than you, darling—I remember things.” Her eyes gleam maliciously. “She was a notoriously awful person. She used to go on talk shows, but they stopped inviting her because she would show up drunk and say things too outrageous for television. She was famous for it.”

Amanda lets the book slide into her lap and stares at its cover. When the Brombergs got home, the man in the book was just beginning to daydream about murdering his awful wife. Tiverton was manipulating him, egging him on. He wanted to mold him in his image.

“But I suppose all of that is exactly what you like about her,” her mother says, stroking her hair. Amanda picks at her cuticles, fighting the impulse to recoil from her. “You like to think of yourself as a little different, don’t you, a little edgy? But do you see how it looks to everyone else? As long as you hold yourself apart, darling, no boys will ever take an interest.”  

“What I like about her—”   

“Really, Amanda,” her mother says over her, “I do hope someday you will find yourself a good man. Not a queer like that Adam Lopez, or a milquetoast like Martin—a real man. Like your father was.” 

Amanda remembers her father only in flashes, like snapshots she might have seen in a family album, if her mother kept family albums. A thick man, his torso like a tree trunk, his arms like great branches. She sees him standing at the barbecue, or bent over the guts of his car, shielded from the sun by the open hood. She sees him waving at them as he recedes at the airport, his desert camo fatigues disappearing into the roiling crowd of travelers.

But Martin plays chess with her. And he reads books. And when he’s around, her mother doesn’t drink so much. “I like Martin.”

“Oh—” The bracelets jangle again. “You would.”

*

She lays the book on her bedside table, with the two other Dorothy Spanger books she owns. She adjusts the books in their little stack—not too neatly aligned, but not too precarious. Just the right rakish angle. She sits on the bed and draws up her knees. The things her mother said ricochet in her brain. A notoriously awful person. Why must her mother trash-talk everything she loves? 

She reaches for her laptop and pulls up the Wikipedia page on Dorothy Spanger; this time she will make herself look. She is drawn first to the clean black-and-white photo of Spanger in her dark-eyed youth, confronting the camera with that serious gaze. Amanda nods at it, a solemn greeting. She approaches the text obliquely, grabbing a morsel and darting away like a startled animal to savor it. Dorothy Spanger made a living writing advertising copy before she sold her first novel. She had weird hobbies like snail breeding and taxidermy. Like Amanda, she had no siblings. She quarreled with her mother and with her publishers. She alienated her friends and grew reclusive and paranoid late in her life. And she was a lesbian.

Amanda looks again at the black-and-white portrait, then studies a grainy picture of Spanger as an old woman, her eyes screwed into a squint, her mouth an acerbic twist. What life passed between those two photographs?

Then, near the top of the page, a date catches Amanda’s eye. She looks again, then slams the laptop shut. Warmth spreads from low in her belly outward to all her limbs.

She and Dorothy Spanger have the same birthday. 

Spanger was born on November 17, 1928. She died in October 2002, just one month before Amanda was born.  

Amanda snatches up her phone and starts typing a message to Adam. But the ticking rhythm of the letters slows, then drags, then stops altogether. She can hear Adam’s laughing voice in her mind. You’re such a weirdo. Who cares if you have the same birthday?

She deletes the half-composed message and sets the phone aside. 

*

She tells him anyway, the next day when they are shopping at Goodwill. And she was right; he laughs. “Is this Miss Holmes all over again?”

“That was different,” she says into the rack of men’s pants. Amanda loved Miss Holmes; she knew it was love by the way her heartbeat smoothed out on the days of Miss Holmes’s ninth-grade Latin class. Miss Holmes, with her funky purple tunics and chunky jewelry, her always laughing eyes, once told her that amanda was a gerundive form meaning she who ought to be loved. “It’s a name that suits you,” Miss Holmes said, with a crinkling smile that left Amanda limp with happiness.

But the other kids somehow divined what she felt, and it went into the hopper with everything else that made her weird—her dumpy corduroys, her dead father, her love for books and Latin and chess. “Hey, are you a lezzie for Miss Holmes?” Derek Gordon, the boy with the chipped front tooth, jabbed at her in the lunchroom as she studied the fifth declension, while the girls who always congealed around him snorted behind hands with sparkling nails. “Do you wish you were a man? A-man-duh?” 

“Hey,” Adam says in the donut shop, ducking his head to look into her face. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” 

Adam never picked on her about Miss Holmes. She finds a weak smile for him. “I know.” 

But he’s not completely wrong. Back then, on Tuesdays—when she didn’t have Latin class—she woke up with a hollow feeling that shoved her around all day. It was more than hunger; it corroded her from the inside, and she felt as fragile as an empty robin’s egg, longing for Tuesday to end so she could see Miss Holmes again. 

With Dorothy Spanger, it’s like every day is Tuesday. 

They are shopping for pants for Adam, who said he needed something new to wear. But he’s been distracted by his phone the whole time, leaving Amanda free to think about Dorothy Spanger. After she read the Wikipedia page the night before, she found a clip on YouTube, a TV interview from the 1980s, and she made herself watch it, though her eyes stung at seeing Spanger there alive and speaking. Amanda didn’t understand the things she talked about—Central America, the military-industrial complex, the CIA. But she could hear the acid in the way she spit out her words, see it in the angry lines around her mouth. 

Bitter about everything in the world. So what if she was bitter? She had good reason to be. It couldn’t have been easy to be her, to look and act and think so differently from the way everyone expected of her, to be treated like a circus act on television instead of like the genius she was. Amanda’s mother doesn’t know the first thing about it. 

But Amanda doesn’t know either, and she longs to. What did Dorothy Spanger write in her diaries? Did she get pushed around in school? What made her want to be a writer? How did she come up with so many intense ideas? When did she have her first girlfriend?

“Hey.” Adam looks up from his phone.  “Tiverton’s Trial is playing at the Triplex. Wanna go see it?”

“I don’t think so,” she says, thumbing through the rack. The night before, when she was on YouTube, the movie trailer popped up, and she purposefully avoided watching it. 

“Isn’t it based on one of those creeptastic books you love so much? Dorothy Spanker?” 

“Spanger,” Amanda says. She knows he’s teasing her, but she can’t stop herself from correcting him. 

“It’s her stuff, right? You love her.”

That’s exactly why she doesn’t want to see it. What if they don’t get it right? Matthew Tiverton was Spanger’s favorite protagonist—she said so in the TV interview. Maybe she would have hated the way the movie turned out. Maybe they waited until she was dead to make it so they could cast some actor she didn’t like, or twist it in some way she never would have agreed to.

“Movies are never as good as books,” she finally says. 

Adam stuffs the phone into his pocket. “All right. NBD.” 

A stripe of pale brown catches her eye in the rack. Something clicks in her mind, like a charger plugged into a phone. She yanks the pants from the rack. 

“Those are uggo,” Adam says. “Too baggy. I want something that shows off dat ass.” He points exaggeratedly at his own rear. 

“I’ll try them, then,” Amanda says, and flees to the try-on room before he can say anything about it. 

In the YouTube clip, Dorothy Spanger had on pants like these—a man’s cut, baggy on her and cuffed at the ankle. Amanda smiles at herself in the try-on room’s pitted mirror, then shakes her shoulders and tries to arrange her face more like Spanger’s wry smirk from the interview. Spanger wore the trousers with a crisp white button-front shirt, Amanda remembers—it shouldn’t be hard to find one like it on the racks. And she has the money from the Brombergs to pay for it all. 

When she steps out of the try-on room, Adam looks at her like he doesn’t recognize her. It feels good. 

*

Amanda stands in front of the full-length mirror on the door to her mother’s closet. Her mother has gone to dinner with Martin and won’t be home for another hour at least. 

“Have you ever just—wanted to be someone else?” she asked Adam as they left Goodwill. 

“Nah,” Adam said. “I’m awesome. You’re awesome. It’s the rest of the world that sucks. Your mom and my dad, especially.”  

Now, in her mother’s room, Amanda frowns at the mirror. With a belt, and with the cuffs rolled, the trousers fit her well enough. The shirt is smooth and white, correctly featureless. But there’s something missing. Shoes? She goes to her room and puts on the oxfords that she usually saves for band concerts. In the bathroom she wets her hair and parts it on the side, lets it fall over one eye. She returns to her mother’s room. 

“Tiverton’s Trial wasn’t meant to be a movie,” she says into the mirror, trying to pitch her voice like Dorothy’s, low and with a little rasp in it—from smoking, Amanda guesses, since she’s got a cigarette in every photograph. “In the books, everything is filtered through Tiverton’s brain—through his warped reality. A movie can’t capture that.”

There’s still something off. She eyes herself up and down. 

In some of the pictures Amanda has seen, Dorothy has a sort of kerchief tied around her neck, tucked into the open collar of her shirt. An ascot, it’s called. Where can she get an ascot?

Amanda hauls open the closet door. The odor of her mother’s eau de toilette assaults her, stronger than if her mother was there. She reaches through it to the plastic box of her mother’s silk scarves, rummaging for something that isn’t pink or teal or covered in flowers. She finds a satisfying forest green one, wraps it around her neck, fusses with it until it billows the right amount at the base of her throat.

Now it’s almost perfect. But the hair is not right, and the not-rightness bothers her like an itch. Dorothy wore her hair in a blunt chin-length style, but Amanda’s falls softly past her shoulders. And it’s too light, too mousy, compared to Dorothy’s authoritative chestnut brown. She can fix the length, next time she gets her hair cut. For the color, she’ll get some dye from the drugstore and—

“Amanda?” 

Amanda whirls around. Her mother looms in the doorway. 

“Oh—Mom. I thought you were out.” 

“I’m back. Obviously.” She gestures down to Amanda’s shoes and up to her neck. “What is all this?” 

“I was just—” Amanda’s face goes hot. “Trying a new look, I guess.” 

Her mother peers at her. “Is that my scarf?” 

 “Yeah.”  

“Well, put it back. Your father gave me that scarf.” 

Her mother says that about a lot of things, anything she doesn’t want Amanda to touch or thinks Amanda is being careless with. Your father gave it to me. Amanda never knows whether it’s true.

“Did you patch it up with Martin?”

“Martin and I are fine,” her mother snaps. “Not that it’s any of your business.” 

The dark flash in her mother’s eyes makes Amanda sorry she asked. She tugs the scarf off her neck. The tang of perfume lingers as though she splashed it on herself deliberately. It makes her vaguely sick. 

“For Christ’s sake, Amanda,” her mother says, snatching the scarf from her hands. Her eyes flash and Amanda smells the sour funk of whiskey behind the eau de toilette. “What are you even doing in my things?” 

“I’m sorry.” Amanda feels herself shrinking, feels her mother towering over her. Her mother shoves past her, cramming the scarf back into the box it came from, not even folding it. 

“And get out of that crazy outfit,” her mother says. She slams the closet door and Amanda jumps. “You look like a dyke. Is that what you want? To look like a dyke?” 

*

Sitting at the end of her bed, hugging her knees, she thinks about the word dyke—the ugly vowel, the hard consonant like a hammer strike. People must have called Dorothy that, and worse. Maybe Dorothy’s own mother did. Dorothy and her mother were always at odds—they even had physical fights.

A memory yawns in Amanda’s mind: an argument, her mother shrieking at her. If you love that Miss Holmes so much, why don’t you go and suck her titties? 

Amanda gets up off the bed, watching herself in the mirror, imagining the ascot there around her neck. She ducks her head and lets her hair fall over one eye. 

“Now see here, Mother—” 

She remembers her mother coming at her, grabbing a hairbrush from the dresser. She feels the infinite sting of the bristles where they struck her face. It hasn’t happened since then, not since Martin, but the blood rushes into her smarting cheek like it’s happening all over again. 

“Don’t you dare—”

Dorothy would not have let her mother hit her. Dorothy would have hit her back. Amanda pantomimes wrenching the brush from her mother’s hand, heaving blow after backhand blow, angling lower as her mother sinks to the floor, begs her to stop. Please, Amanda, I’m sorry!

Amanda drops the imaginary hairbrush, panting. She climbs onto the bed and gropes for A Complex Hypothesis, with the man who spins fantasies about killing his wife. Did Dorothy ever dream of killing her mother? She tries to read, but her eyes sting. She presses her thumbs against her eyelids until purple crenellations shimmer across the black vault of her visual field. When she opens her eyes, the pages are bright and blurry. After a few seconds, the words begin to resolve, the letters aligning in tidy rows. 

But the words aren’t Dorothy’s. They are words of Amanda’s own, a story about a girl and her mother. A girl who fought back.

She closes the book, sets it aside carefully at the periphery of her vision. She reaches for her laptop, hesitates. Martin gave her a leather-bound journal last November—for her birthday, which was Dorothy’s birthday. Was that the kind of notebook Dorothy would have used, in the 1940s, writing her first stories? 

She finds the journal on her desk, buried under some old homework sheets. The paper is pleasantly rough, ruled with fine lines that will suit her cramped handwriting. She uncaps a pen and begins to write.  

*

“Have you ever read Borges?” Amanda asks Adam as they walk from band practice to Broadway Donuts. It’s a chilly, grey day, and Amanda wears the hood of her sweatshirt up.  

“Borges?”

“The writer—Jorge Luis Borges.”

“I know who Borges is,” Adam says. 

Amanda shoves her hands into her hoodie pocket and yawns. She was up late every night this week, working on the story. She finally finished it last night, but it wasn’t right. It wasn’t enough. She needs to make her own story more like Dorothy’s. “I bet Martin has read him.”

“Your mom’s boyfriend?”

“Yeah.” 

“Why do you care?”

Inside the hoodie pocket, Amanda picks at her cuticles. “Well, he was a big influence on Dorothy. Spanger,” she adds quickly. “Borges was, I mean.”  

“So you want to read it now too?” He laughs. “In the original Spanish, right?”

She read more about Dorothy while working on the story—articles, book reviews, a profile written after Dorothy’s death by someone who had access to her journals. She learned about Dorothy’s love for Borges and the way he messed around with perception and reality. And she found another TV interview, one in which Dorothy seemed drunk and went off on a rant about publishers trying to cheat her.

After that, Amanda didn’t watch any more interviews. TV people goaded Dorothy into being terrible because they thought it was entertaining. They weren’t interested in the real Dorothy, the Dorothy she loved.  

They pass a corner store. Amanda’s head turns as though caught on something. “Hang on,” she says, patting her jeans pockets. “I need to buy some cigarettes.”

“Since when do you smoke?” Adam follows her inside. 

Amanda almost loses her nerve at the array of cigarettes behind the counter. So many kinds! Which would Dorothy have smoked? Something rugged, Amanda thinks—something masculine. 

“A pack of Marlboros,” she says to the man behind the counter. “Please.” 

The man looks up from his newspaper and studies her out the side of his eye. He’s going to ask for ID. She pushes back her hood, hoping she’ll look less like a kid. He takes down a pack and slides it across the counter with a matchbook. 

Outside, she peels the plastic off the pack. The cigarettes smell earthy and sweet. 

“You can at least give me one,” Adam says. 

She hands him a cigarette and takes one for herself, lighting them both with the matchbook. It’s not the first time she’s smoked a cigarette, but it’s the first time she has enjoyed it—the taste makes her feel strong, as though the words that come from her mouth from now on will gather force from the smoke. She holds the cigarette between two fingers, not daintily at the fingertips, but securely near the knuckle—how Dorothy held her cigarettes. She thinks of her trousers and shirt, folded carefully in her bottom drawer, and wishes she were brave enough to wear them to school today—to hell with what her mother has to say about it.

Adam squints at her. “Did you do something to your hair? It looks darker.” 

Her hand goes to her hair. “Do you like it? I used a rinse I got at Duane Reade.”

“What’s got into you lately? The cigarettes, the hair—” He shakes his head, his lips parted, like he doesn’t know what to say. “Borges, Mandy? Don’t you think you’re taking this Spanger thing a little too far?”

Adam’s voice is gentle—he’s not making fun of her this time—but it makes Amanda feel very distant from him, as though they walk on either side of a vast chasm. 

“I know you really like her books, but—”

“What?” She hates that Adam is asking her about this. She resolves to talk less about Dorothy, to mention her only one out of every ten times she thinks about her—or never. She will keep her close, all to herself.

“It doesn’t seem healthy, Mandy. I looked her up, you know. She wasn’t a healthy person.”

“She was—she wasn’t—” Amanda looks away. Down the street, a woman with hair in frantic curls that remind her of Miss Holmes drops something, bends to pick it up, hurries off. When Miss Holmes got married and left the school, Amanda felt scooped out; the Latin conjugations bounced around in her head when she tried to study, all the pleasure gone out of them. 

Dorothy won’t let her down that way. 

*

“Are you sure you’re not feeling well enough for school today?” Amanda’s mother has opened the door without knocking. Amanda sinks deeper under the blanket. 

“I said I wasn’t.” 

“Female trouble?” Her mother stands tying a scarf around her neck. Amanda panics for a moment before she sees that it’s not the forest green one. “I’ve got to leave for work, you know. I can’t stay here and baby you.” 

“I’ll be fine. I think I have a low fever.” 

Her mother waves a dismissive hand. “You rest up, then. I’ll see you tonight.”

Under the blanket, Amanda clutches Tiverton’s Trial to her chest. 

When she hears the apartment door close behind her mother, Amanda counts to a hundred and one, picturing snails in an imaginary terrarium by her window. Then she springs up and retrieves the trousers and the white shirt from the bottom dresser drawer.

As she is tying on her band shoes, her phone buzzes. 

Can’t wait any more – heading to school 

Where da hell are u

It’s the third text from Adam in the last half hour. She ignores this one, too. 

The green scarf still smells of her mother’s perfume, but she ties it determinedly around her neck. She straightens the part in her darkened hair, combs it down across the side of her face. She gazes at herself in her mother’s mirror, narrowing her eyes in grim approval. 

When she steps out of the apartment building she feels taller, smarter. She tucks the leather-bound notebook under her arm, lights one of the Marlboros, starts up the street. The oxfords make a satisfying clack on the pavement, much better than sneakers. Her stride slows, lengthens into a strut. 

As she opens the door to Broadway Donuts, a girl a little older than her comes out, a college student probably, with flames of red hair licking the shoulders of her leather jacket. Amanda holds the door, gallantly. As the girl passes by, Amanda ducks her head and smiles at her through the curtain of hair. 

The girl looks startled, slows for a step, smiles back. Something surges in Amanda.

She steps to the counter, her gaze trailing after the girl. “Double espresso,” she says. 

“Double espresso.” The guy in the green apron punches his console. “Got a name for the order?”

She pauses for a heartbeat. Her lips slide into a smirk.  

“My name is Dorothy.”

* * *

Carla Miriam Levy has been a physicist, a lawyer, a film critic, and a technical writer. Her published work includes essays on Indian film in Outlook Magazine and fiction in GNU Journal and Cagibi.