The Funhouse

“The only way I'm going to see much of this movie is if we set up a series of mirrors to reflect it onto the ceiling of the car.”
        “Liz, you're terrible,” Amy said.
        “Do you think I'm terrible?” Liz asked Richie.
        “I think you're terrific,” Richie said, daring to put an arm around her waist. He still seemed somewhat bashful, even if Liz had made him more than passingly familiar with sex and drugs.
        Liz looked at Amy. “See? He thinks I'm terrific, and he was the class genius, so what do you know about it?” Amy smiled in spite of herself.
        “Listen,” Liz said, “when you're ready to start living again, when you're sick and tired of playing Sister Purity, give me a call. I'll line someone up for you. We'll double-date.”
        Amy watched Liz and Richie as they walked outside and got into the yellow Celica. Liz drove. She pulled away from the curb with a torturous squeal of tires that made everyone in The Dive look toward the front windows.
        After Amy left The Dive at twenty minutes till seven, she didn't go straight home. She walked aimlessly for more than an hour, not really window-shopping in the stores she passed, not really noticing the houses she passed, not really enjoying the clean spring evening, just walking and thinking about the future.
        When she got home at eight o'clock, her father was in his workshop. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, leafing through a magazine, listening to a radio call-in program, and sucking on vodka and orange juice.
        “If you didn't have dinner at work,” Mama said, “there's some cold roast beef in the refrigerator.”
        “Thank you,” Amy said, abut I'm not hungry. I ate a big lunch.” 1-15
        “Suit yourself,” Mama said. She turned up the volume on the radio.
        Amy interpreted that as a sign of dismissal. She went upstairs.
        She spent an hour with Joey, playing fivehundred rummy, his favorite card game. The boy didn't seem himself. He hadn't been the old, effervescent Joey since Mama had made him get rid of his monster models and posters. Amy worked hard at making him laugh, and he did laugh, but his good humor seemed like a facade to her. He was tense underneath, and she hated to see him that way, but she couldn't figure out how to reach him and cheer him up.
        Later, in her room, she stood nude again in front of the full-length mirror. She appraised her body with a critical eye, trying to decide if she did, indeed, measure up to Liz. Her legs were long and quite well shaped. Her thighs were taut, the muscle tone in her whole body was very good. Her bottom was round and sort of perky, very firm. Her belly was not just flat but slightly concave. Her breasts weren't as large as Liz's, but they weren't small by any definition, and they were extremely well shaped, up-thrust, with large, dark nipples.
        It was definitely a body well designed for sex, for easily attracting and satisfying a man. The body of a courtesan? The body of, as Liz put it, an intimate companion? The legs and hips and buttocks and breasts of a whore? Was that what she had been born for? To sell herself? Was a future as a prostitute unavoidable? Was it some how her destiny to spend thousands of sweaty nights clutching total strangers in hotel rooms?
        Liz said she saw corruption in Amy's eyes. Mama said the same thing. To Mama, that corruption was a monstrous, evil thing that must be suppressed at all costs, but to Liz, it was nothing to be afraid of, something to be embraced. There couldn't be two people more different than Liz and Mama, yet they agreed on what was to be seen in Amy's eyes.
        Now Amy stared at her reflection in the mirror, peered into the windows of her soul, but although she looked very hard, she wasn't able to see anything more than the characterless surfaces of two dark and rather pretty eyes, she couldn't see either the rot of Hell or the grace of Heaven.
        She was lonely, frustrated, and terribly, terribly confused. She wanted to understand herself. More than anything she wanted to find the right role for herself in the world, so that for the first time in her life she would not feel tense and hopelessly out of place.
        If her hope of going to college and her dream of becoming an artist were unrealistic, then she didn't want to spend years struggling for what she was not meant to have. Her life had been too much of a struggle