Amy Inspired (13 page)

“Do you know that Marie is staying over at his place a lot?” she said.

“I didn’t know.”

“Do you think he’s all right?”

“I’m sure they’re fine, Grandma. It’s a half hour drive from her apartment to his, and there’s a lot of ice and snow this time of year. And you know the sort of schedule they keep. He probably doesn’t want her driving on bad roads when she’s tired.”

Grandma considered this. She didn’t believe Marie slept on the couch any more than I did. “He’s nearly twenty-five, the poor boy,” she said. “Men can’t help it. God made them the way they are. It’s not like us women have to do anything. We could just walk into a room and they’re ready to get it on.”

I ripped a long sheet of aluminum foil across the silver razor teeth of the box rim. That Grandma forgave Brian’s behavior in advance bothered me. Why was a man’s impatience for sex biologically justified, while a woman’s virtue was a matter of course? I had yet to hear the church forgive a woman’s lust for being a mere matter of crossed wires and chemical misfires.

By the time we left the house I was exhausted from the imaginative strain of making conversation with my family. I crawled into the backseat of my mother’s sedan and gratefully rested my forehead against the window.

“See you at New Year’s! Love ya! Have a good night!” Mom shouted out her car window, cheerfully waving to Aunt Patty and Uncle Lynn. She slammed the door. She said with steel in her voice: “Amy, you cannot have a stranger living in your apartment.” She glared at me through the rearview mirror. “You call Zoë right now and you tell her that you want that man out of your house.”

“Here we go,” Brian sighed.

“It’s not a problem, Mom.”

She explained that Aunt Patty had told her how in Cleveland, just this year, a young girl had been kidnapped from her home and chained up to the back of a van to be used as a sex slave at every truck stop between Detroit and Louisville.

I didn’t tell her Eli had a van. I reminded her, instead, that Eli was a long-standing friend of Zoë’s and not a stranger.

“Blood runs thicker than wine,” was her response.

“First of all, Mom, that’s nowhere near the correct application of the phrase,” Brian said. “And secondly, that’s not even how the saying goes.”

“What are you talking about,” Mom protested, acting indignant. “Everyone says that.”

“No one says what you just said. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It does—it means you can’t just trust anyone.”

Brian laughed. “What does comparing blood to wine have to do with trust? What does that mean? Better a brother than a drunkard? It’s like you’re speaking another language.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Mom muttered. She either agreed she spoke another language or thought it was better to have a brother instead of a drunkard. It didn’t matter; now she was being purposefully ridiculous and found her own act entertaining. I always took my mother’s exasperation seriously, but Brian knew how to disengage in just that way that made her laugh. Watching him interact with Mom was like watching a skilled ballplayer fool his opponent with a head fake.

At home, I took inventory of my old bedroom now that Mom had cleaned. The walls were still pink but for irregular squares of white where the tape from posters had ripped away the surface layer of paint. A crate of Barbie dolls crowded the door. They were, suspiciously, naked. I picked up a Ken doll, considered his hairless, shining perfection. Disturbing that Ken came with underwear drawn directly onto his plastic body while Barbie went commando. Another of society’s provisions for the male sex drive: permanent underwear, impenetrable, to keep Ken’s desires in check.

I reached to place the crate of Barbies with the other dolls that crowded the uppermost ledge of my white bookshelf. The shelf beneath housed boxes brimming with the remaining clutter of my growing up. The one beneath that held two crates of novels. The juxtaposition of childhood play objects and my high school library struck me as emblematic. Dolls to novels: from one romp of imagination to another.

I pulled a heavy sweatshirt on over my pajamas and put on an extra pair of socks before lacing up my tennis shoes. With the flashlight I’d stolen from the kitchen junk drawer clenched between my teeth, I climbed the closet ladder back to the attic and my secret office.

By the watery light of the desk lamp I finished
Love in the Time of Massive Diarrhea
, systematically chewing the flavor out of the pack of cinnamon gum Mom had put in my Christmas stocking. It was late when I closed the last page. I set the book aside, massaged my jaw. Across the way I could see the neighbor’s television playing in the otherwise dark living room. The commercials flashed on the TV screen, the Christmas lights on the tree beside it chasing one another around the four walls. Together they cast a spinning kaleidoscope of color on the snow where a plastic Rudolph and plastic Santa worshiped a plastic Jesus. Mr. Matlon had passed away while I was in college. I resented the current owners for the garish display they had made of the old man’s house, a reminder that life went on without me in places that I’d once felt I owned.

Without any real purpose, I reread the
Things to Do Before Thirty
list. My progress had not been good. I had read all of Austen’s novels, but found it unsettling that I’d assigned her name to a list as if she was or could ever have been a chore. No, had not yet skinny-dipped in the ocean.Yes, had kept my own apartment, which had been nice while it lasted, but I was too broke to live alone, much less tour Rome. I didn’t care to take further stock of the remaining ambitions.

Why the urgency to achieve my life’s goals before thirty anyway?

And why was marriage at the end, as if globe-trotting served only as prelude to romance?

My mother had always instructed me to live life before settling down, settling down requiring a seismic shift in one’s energy, from adventure to nurture. The fault in her admonition was the assumption that meeting a man marked the end of the journey. I grew up thinking the single life was the rising action and marriage the climax. Every writer knows climax is followed by dénouement: in other words, it’s all downhill after the wedding

Maybe I would never marry or have children. For the very first time, this future struck me as entirely plausible, if not inevitable. Many women lived alone. I was no more entitled to marriage than the next person. Maybe I belonged to the world of the celibate saint, granted a life of solitude and free to explore the inner world of my imagination while inspiring young minds to greater intellectual and spiritual heights in introductory composition. I thought of my students and was overcome with a feeling of affection. It was very easy to like them when they were miles away.

Yes. To serve the students was my mission, and writing my love.

I thought vaguely of Adam, but didn’t dwell on him. He was like any other of my endless infatuations: the product of too much romanticism stirred by restlessness and indulged to remedy boredom. So much for real men. Men in books were so much more fun.

I picked up a pen; I began to write.

7

“What
are
you doing?” Zoë asked.

I had wedged myself behind my bedroom dresser and was attempting to unscrew the television cable cord.

“I’ve made a New Year’s resolution,” I said. “No more television.”

“None?”

“None.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

I stood triumphant, the dismembered cable in my hand.

Zoë gave me a disbelieving frown. “What will you do with yourself?”

I lifted the television from its stand and toddled toward the hall closet. “Stop wasting my life,” I managed.

“You’re really getting rid of it.”

“Yes, Zoë. I’m serious.”

“Then can I have it?”

“I thought you didn’t watch TV.”

“I like watching the news,” she said defensively.

We swiped a spot clear on her desk and set the television on top.

“Turn it to the right.” She bounded to her bed. Sitting crosslegged, she made a window frame of her forefingers and thumbs. She squinted an eye at the screen. “Perfectamundo. Thank you, dear.”

“Enjoy.”

I spent my first week back in Copenhagen dedicating the hours typically spent on television to writing. I’d hoped for a short story and instead found myself experimenting with the relativity of time. Thirty minutes in front of
Friends
is no time at all. Thirty minutes in front of a blank laptop screen lasts approximately four hours and six minutes.

Zoë was enthralled by my new diligence. If she found me writing, she wrote too. Though we both had laptops and were mobile, we remained in our separate rooms for some semblance of privacy. Through her open door I could hear her typing, which meant she could hear that I was not.

I resorted to copying out old stories from my
Great American Short Stories
collection. An author once told me she copied one of Chekhov’s stories every morning so she could feel what it was like to write the story of a master.

Zoë came to check on me around ten. “How’s it going?” she asked.

“Fine.” I smiled.

“I brought cookies. A midnight snack.”

The “cookies” were made with honey, whole grain, and raisins. Dense as stones, both before and after digestion.

“Thanks.”

The next night was the same, and every night that week. I typed, she typed, and at some point she came into my room uninvited to check up on my progress.

How was it going?

Did I want something to eat?

Did I need something to drink?

Fine, no, no.

Friday night she appeared with a printed manuscript. “Can I read you what I have?” She proceeded to read without waiting for a reply.

“It’s good,” I said when she finished half an hour later.

“That’s all? It’s good? I mean, is the dialogue real? Does the premise seem too outlandish? I feel like Mrs. Sander’s motivation is unrealistic.”

I chewed the end of my pencil. “No. It’s working.”

She twirled her hair around her finger and leaned her head back to peer up at me, still sitting on the floor. Today her nails were lacquered in shiny polish the color of orange soda. On her forefinger she wore a plastic ring mottled with glitter and large as a bottle cap. “What did you write?”

I snapped my laptop closed. “Nothing.”

“Let me see.”

“No—please—Zoë, it’s not very good.”

She took the computer from me and read: “ ‘The hills across the valley of the Ebo were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads.’ Well. It’s good. But the syntax is repetitive—all the unnecessary expletives are distracting—‘there was’ and ‘there were’—all over the page.”

“Good. It’s Hemingway.” I held up the
Great American Short Stories
I’d concealed beneath my leg.

“Oh. Well, he was a pig anyway.” She got up to sit in my lap. “Maybe it’s not a writing day today.”

“I thought you said there’s no such thing as writer’s block.”

“You’re beginning to make me a believer.”