Merry-Go-Round

About the Book

Amy Lansing is a 44-year-old English teacher in Ricotta, a small town in western Iowa. It is a town of about 900 which is losing population and downtown businesses and whose school is threatened with a merger into a neighboring school in Vernon.

Amy is married to Joe Lansing, owner of the local lumber and hardware store. Businesses such as Joe's store are threatened not only by the shrinking population but by a suffering farm economy in the wake of a series of drought years.

The marriage has cooled since the death of a disabled child six years before the beginning of the story.  Guilt has been as much a part of Amy's response as grief during the ensuing years since little Joey's death, partly because of the disability itself and partly because she was not at home at the time that Joey apparently fell down the basement stairs.

Amy finds some consolation in her frustrations at home with an appreciation for the writing efforts of a favorite student, Chuck Saler. The relationship goes awry when she comes to realize that Chuck is physically attracted to her, a fact which is made even more tenuous when she realizes there is a mutual attraction, an attraction to which she dare not respond.

Amy's father, Martin Ricotta, is living with Amy and Joe since the death of his wife Grace a year previously. He senses the estrangement between his daughter and her husband and attempts to intervene, setting up his own marriage as a model.

Finding only frustration at home and at school, Amy turns for solace to the president of the Vernon school board, David Ringgold, who is encouraging the Ricotta board to vote for a merger. In his efforts to woo her, Ringgold makes an offer to move part of his business operation into Ricotta's empty building through the development committee of which Joe Lansing is chairman.

A confusion of guilt and anger leads Amy to make an effort to change Chuck's father's mind about sending him to college, get sexual release in the arms of David Ringgold, and vow to leave Joe as soon as school is over.

None of the efforts work out as planned but in the process Amy learns the origin of Joe's antagonism to her is rooted in part in his own guilt..

The rains come, Chuck finds solace in the arms of a fellow student, Martin admits to his own bungling in his marriage to Grace, David is sent back to his wife, and Joe and Amy try once again with their relationship renewed now that the communication barrier has been lowered.

"We may try, but we really never understand one another, do we?" Amy says to David at one point. "Just sometimes we reach out. And sometimes we connect. Mostly, I suppose, we don't."

About the Author

Doris Bingham was raised in Nebraska. She was section editor at the Globe-Times, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for fourteen years and was co-owner of the Dunlap Reporter in Iowa. She works today at the News-Times in York, Nebraska. She is author of a paperback original published in 1981 called "Lovers and Liars."