Amy Inspired (11 page)

“It’s fine, Mob,” I said. “Honest. Clean it later.”

“I’ll get in here early in the morning.” She kicked another box beneath the bed and shuffled loose mail on the filing cabinet into a neat stack.

“
Mob
.”

“Tomorrow!” she declared, raising two pointer fingers in the air and tiptoeing over the mess to escape down the hall.

Evicted as it were from my old room, I spent three days convalescing on the couch. Doped up and slack-jawed, I revisited old favorites:
Singin’ in the Rain, Alien, My Fair Lady, Spaceballs
.

Brian was on break as well. His arrival made things better. When Marie wasn’t on call for her ob/gyn rotation, she was sleeping, which meant I had my little brother all to myself.

The night he came home, Grandma joined us for dinner. Over dessert, Mom made her big announcement: She’d been promoted to Regional Director. In the two years she’d worked as a sales representative, she’d supplemented her income by working as a substitute at the local elementary school. Now, to her relief, she would never have to step foot in a classroom again.

We congratulated her on the promotion. Grandma wanted to know if this meant she’d be getting more free samples. Brian said he needed some wrinkle reducer. And I said no, I didn’t mind that she needed my old bedroom for an office (though it took considerable self-control to resist asking why she’d chosen my room over Brian’s, which was decidedly larger).

Brian and I pitched new products:

Mooning,
a perfume aphrodisiac

The
Moonwalk
foot bath

Crater Cream
for acne

Rover,
the battery-powered razor for women fighting that pesky mustache

Brian even invented a jingle:
“You’ll rave when this Rover shaves!”

“You all think it’s funny,” Mom said. “Mustaches on women is more a problem than you’d think. You remember Mrs. Priory from the supermarket? She looks like Uncle Lynn now.”

Grandma said, “Uncle Lynn looks like Hitler.”

After dinner I took a book to the living room. Brian came in to sit beside me.

“Just to warn you: Mom knows about your little live-in boyfriend.”

I dropped my book to my lap. “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. She brought it up.”

“
Brian
.”

“It’s not my fault you’ve lost all common sense.”

He took my foot and popped my toes, trying to irk me. He was always popping things. Knuckles, gum, bubble wrapping.

“Did you read those books I sent you?” I asked, kicking my foot free.

“I don’t have time to read, Amy.”

“You should make time. It’s good for you. Like exercise is good for you.”

“I’ll read this one.” He took the book from my hands.

“
Love in the Time of Cholera
,” he read. “That’s like titling a book,
Love in the Face of Massive Diarrhea
.”

His tastes had never been literary.

While Mom and Grandma finished their holiday shopping, Brian and I killed two days with PlayStation and managed five games of Monopoly. Laughing with my brother, I gained some perspective: Introductory composition was not purgatory, and thirty was not so old.

The day before Christmas Eve I was well enough to walk without experiencing vertigo, so Mom drafted me to search the attic for the elusive glass globes. Holding on to the low-hanging rafters, I stepped cautiously from beam to beam. The air smelled of wood and dust, an almost sickeningly sweet potpourri.

My mother never got rid of things; she simply reshuffled them, which gave her the illusion of cleaning house. When the closets filled to capacity, she used to make our father redistribute the clutter to the attic. When my father left, I took over the chore. The trapdoor opened from my closet ceiling; I’d always considered the attic an extension of my room and felt a kind of ownership over the mysterious, dark place. I carried boxes of old Tupperware, crates of used Matchbox cars, and bags of winter sweaters up the rickety ladder, frightened of the shadows lurking in the corner, determined to overcome my fear so I could enjoy the solitude such a private place afforded.

The attic had two gabled windows overlooking the front lawn. One was directly over my bedroom, providing a view identical to the one I saw from my dresser, but from higher elevation. I pushed an old desk against this window to create my secret office on the small square of weight-bearing floor, partitioning the space off from the rest of the room with a tall discarded bookcase placed three feet opposite the desk. For increased privacy, I braced dowel rods between the shelf and the wall on each side, hanging a shower curtain on one and Brian’s old Superman bedsheets on the other.

The attic was stifling in summer and unbearably cold in winter. I alternated a desk fan and space heater accordingly. In summers I sat in my church slip; in winters I wore long underwear. I considered the harsh conditions romantic. Writers were meant to suffer. In an age of electric light bulbs and jet printers, suffering was hard to come by.

For years, no one suspected my hideout, and even when my mother did find out, she didn’t tell me. Without ever speaking directly of the matter, we came in time to the quiet understanding that no one was to go into the attic without my permission. If she and Brian thought my behavior strange, they didn’t say.

From my window I tracked our neighbor, Mr. Matlon, who came and went from his house in the early hours of the morning. I imagined he was a spy. Also, I imagined the red blinking light of the radio tower was actually a beacon to help invisible aliens direct their course as they flew in the skies, watching over us like guardian angels. I wrote short stories and poems and began work on a novel. I cut people from magazines to use as characters in my plots. The door to the attic was my wardrobe into Narnia, my portal into the strange dreams of Wonderland.

Now I sat down at the old desk, my knees bumping against the edge of the tabletop. It had always been too short for my long legs. The items on the desk were still carefully arranged in preparation for a night’s hard work. Sheets of paper were stacked at my right. The pencils in the plastic Disneyland cup were sharpened, the pens capped. To my pleasure, the reading lamp clicked to life.

A family photograph sat on the left corner of the desk. We were on summer vacation in Austin, Texas, for one of Dad’s business trips. Though he was only in his mid-thirties, his hair was turning white. In the photo he’s standing beside Mom, who holds one-year-old Brian propped on her waist. I am between them, a spindly six-year-old in a flower-print jumper, hair a fringe of friz around my face, overbite smile proud. Dad has one hand around my mother’s waist, the other resting protectively on my shoulder. It was this protective gesture that made the photograph one of my favorites; I liked the way he spread his broad arms to encompass all three of us. He left one year later.

My parents’ separation had been abrupt and final: My father was home and then he was not. He stayed at a Motel 6 for a month, then moved into an old house in Cleveland. Brian and I spent every other weekend with him until my freshman year of high school, when he moved to Atlanta to live with his then-girlfriend, Linda. He appeared at holidays and at our high school graduations, his life tethered to ours by a thin bloodline.

As the years passed, I absorbed information about his life the way I took bad news about foreign countries: with a stirring of abstract sympathy but with no real concern. Linda got pregnant. They married; they bought a house; they divorced. Over the years he changed houses, jobs, and girlfriends with alarming frequency. Now he was living near the beach with a pharmacist named Penny, who rode a Harley and volunteered as an EMT for the county. She drove everywhere with a portable siren in the back seat of her jeep.

I popped the Austin picture from its frame and held it up to the lamp. It was one of the few photos of my father I’d managed to salvage. My mother was a revisionist. Under the guise of scrapbooking projects, she had systematically removed him from our family photo albums. By the time I realized what was happening, he had been erased from our documented family history.

Turning, I ran my fingers along the notebook bindings lined along the bookshelf. They came to rest on the smallest of the journals, a ratty notebook with its spiral spine undone and sharp at top and bottom. I had used an eraser to etch the title
Space Adventure
into the purple ink of the notebook cover.

Chapter One: The Wograt Invasion

Once, in the blackness of space, the human race was a people without a land. It had been taken from them by the Wograts.

Wograts are hideous, ugly, and stupid. They have pig noses that stick out of their hair and usually stand between 6 or 9 feet tall. Their ears are hardly notisable since they are covered in hair. Their little black eyes get very large and red when they’re mad or in battle.

If you were ever to meet a Wograt and if you, let’s say, shot off one of the two larger horns on it’s head, you probably wouldn’t live to see what the Wograt looked like without that horn. Wograts consider their horns their only pride and joy, exept for a capture or a prisoner. One Wograt named Barthogly-Nud, grew 3 horns. That’s why he is now the main leader of the Wograts. Some people say that his brain turned into another horn, because Barthogly Nud is not only considered (by Wograts) the greatest Wograt, but by humans is considered the dumbest.

All Wograts think that they should be in charge of everything and everyone. Although the only races that they control are like small fish or little animals.

The novel was written entirely in pencil. The graphite had begun to fade, the words blurring and softening the pages. I’d written to the very last page and then some, chapter four spilling over onto the cardboard backing of the notebook where I was forced to resort to pen. The novel ended where the cardboard ended. I couldn’t have been more than nine.

I ran my hands affectionately over the manuscript, before setting the notebook aside and reaching for another. My penmanship had changed. I’d retrained the broad, fat loops of childhood stories into a self-conscious cursive scrawled in pen. Behind every pinched curl and carefully crafted sentence, the torment of being a freshman was raw on the page. In junior high, all my girlfriends traded dolls and dress-up clothes for bras and tampons. They took pride in their budding breasts and whispered complaints about their periods with martyrdom many women spend their adult lives exploiting. And the boys watched as they sunbathed, as their still narrow hips switched back and forth in hot pink bikinis, in silky sundresses.

I was just as admiring of their beauty. I grew up, rather than out. My padded bra vexed me almost as much as my gangly height. I despised the Time of the Month, as my mother hygienically called it. Hormones roared in my body like too much alcohol in the blood, clouding my judgment, and puberty coiled my hair into tight ringlets so thick my ponytails snapped hair twisties. I fell in love with a new boy every semester, but only ever adored them from a distance. I worked hard, with hopes of studying chemistry in college, but I had no talent for science.

Then toward the end of my sophomore year, our English teacher read one of my essays to the entire class, to my combined pleasure and mortification. I wasn’t particularly bright in other classes, so people forgave my talent for English. Within a week, fellow students were calling me for help with their papers, and I was invited to write editorials for the school newspaper. Both improved my social standing. Senior year I was voted Best Personality. I wore the title like an invisible badge into my twenties, when life kept me too busy to worry about being myself and I began to take having a personality for granted.

A car door slammed outside. Grandma’s car sat in the drive below. I clicked off the desk lamp so she wouldn’t notice the light in the attic window. Before me, the last high school journal was open to an entry in which I had written:

Things to Do Before Thirty

See the Sistine Chapel