Amy Inspired (2 page)

He cupped my hand in his. “I hope we’ll remain amicable? There’s a poetry reading tomorrow. Maybe we could go together?”

I pulled my hands away and clasped them between my legs, drawing my knees together as if to keep my fingers warm. “Actually, no. Everett asked me to go.”

“If you ever want to talk—if you ever need a second opinion for one of your stories. I still think ‘The Other Day’ has a lot of potential. It’s just that one scene that needs trimmed … Well. Just call me.”

“You know,” I said as he gathered his things. “For a novelist that was a rather clichéd break-up.”

“I have to go.”

I nodded. He squeezed my hand, a last apologetic gesture, and rushed for the door.

We’d met in the English Department library. I had been trying to noiselessly rip scraps of notebook paper to mark noteworthy pages in
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
. He’d walked over and handed me a small stack of bookmarks he had pulled from his briefcase. “Thought you might need these,” he’d whispered. The bookmarks were for his novel. Each featured a photograph of his smiling face.

At age twenty-nine, my own idealism beginning to fray around the edges, I kept faith in my mother’s sanguine outlook on life: It was still reflex to call home when I toed the edge of failure.

“Hi honey, how are you?” Her voice came tinny and distant through my old office phone. “I can’t talk long. The Baldwins are on their way over, and my curlers are going cold. We’re going to Applebee’s to spend those gift cards Uncle Lynn gave us for Easter.”

I had called with the intention of announcing the break-up with Adam, but at near-thirty you can’t just come out with that kind of news without warning. As preface I complained about grading. Scoring seventy-four college essays four times a semester had begun to seem impossible—and this was only paper two of the term.

“I’m so exhausted.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s too much.”

I stared out the window at the overcast November day. Behind me, my office mate Everett typed furiously, reaching blindly every five minutes for the mug of twenty-five-cent office coffee he kept at his elbow. The coffee cup sat next to a second nearly identical mug filled with tacks and paper clips. I was waiting for him to grab the wrong cup.

The English Department offices occupied the fourth floor of the Humanities Building, a gray stone structure that commanded the highest hill on campus. Our window overlooked a courtyard lined in summer with tulips that leaned toward the sun. The tulips had long since died, and overnight the ivy that grew along the building’s facade had shriveled around the windows, clinging in gnarled ropes. Central campus sprawled to the left, and across the lawn sidewalks clustered in crisscrossing pentagons made their way downhill toward the Fray and Fuhler Art Buildings, twin cement complexes as modern as the Humanities Building was old.

“Am I insane to be doing this?” I asked.

“Maybe you should get some help,” Mom replied without answering my question. “Why don’t you have Zoë grade some?”

“Zoë’s never graded an essay in her life. Besides, this is college composition, not algebra—everything’s subjective. I can’t just outsource grading.”

“I don’t think it’s such a terrible idea. You need to delegate. No one would know.”

I remembered how in the seventh grade when I couldn’t seem to stretch my report on President Lincoln from five pages to the required seven, she advised I enlarge the font and narrow the margins.

“Those kids don’t read your comments anyway,” she was saying. “You know they just throw the papers in the garbage as soon as they see their grade.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, Mom.”

Everett was gathering his things. With his arms full of loose-leaf papers, he waved briefly at me. I nodded my good-bye.

“Did you take a look at that guest list?” Mom asked, transitioning without warning into her latest favorite topic of discussion: my younger brother’s impending nuptials.
Nuptials.
The word sounded overtly sensual. Too similar to nude. Navel. Nubile.

“Marie didn’t put the McCormicks on there.”

I tapped the string of the window blind against the glass. “Alice and Jenny? They were my friends, not Brian’s. Why would he want them at his wedding?”

“Alice was over all the time when you kids were little. She was such a nice girl. I used to hope Brian and her would get together.”

“They were ten,” I replied. “Who’s officiating?”

“Pastor Patrick. Brian and Marie meet him once a month for premarital counseling. They have to meet on weekdays, which are so hard for Brian with his schedule, but weekends just won’t work for Pastor Patrick. He has his sermon to prepare and then Saturdays he bowls with some guys from town. They’re a real rough bunch— smoke like chimneys, but the pastor says it’s his ministry—something about ‘in the world but not of it.’ ”

Mom was a devoted member of the First Fundamentalist Church of God. She considered ties on Sunday tantamount to Scripture reading. At thirty-two, their new minister, Patrick Peterson, was the third youngest member of the congregation, and he’d been creating no end of turmoil since arriving. (“You should hear the songs we’re singing in church now,” Mom reported. “We have a guitar player and a drummist. It’s all very modern.”)

“So they’re sticking with Mr. Peterson?”

“Call him Pastor Patrick, honey. He prefers it.”

With a sigh I turned back to the window. Waves of cold emanated from the glass. On the benches below, a young girl in a red coat slapped her male companion on the arm, laughing. He pretended to be hurt before sweeping her up in his arms.

“I’m just glad they’re sticking to an all-American wedding. I was worried a while there that they would want some weird Indian religion, but really her parents are very normal.”

The couple in the courtyard began to kiss.

“I have to go, Mom.”

“Don’t worry about the papers. You’ll get them done. You always do. Tell Zoë hi for me.”

I promised I would and sent love to my brother. Hanging up, I pressed my forehead against the windowpane and closed my eyes, letting the cold numb my thoughts. I started back when the windowpane shuddered. A moment later a second rock pelted the glass. Peering down cautiously, I saw Everett standing on the sidewalk below, waving his arms frantically.

I unhinged the lock and shoved the ancient window up. “What?” I called.

A dozen students crossing the sidewalks below looked up in surprise.

“My briefcase—I left it!” he shouted.

I found the briefcase on the floor, leaning on the trash can. It was stained and studded with pins:
No Blood for Oil
and
Too Many Freaks Not Enough Circuses
.

“I’ll bring it down,” I called.

“No time!” He waved wildly, indicating I should throw it. His hands looked jittery even from four flights up. This was not unusual; Everett lived in a perpetual state of panic.

I gave the bag my best pitch. Midway through the air, the top latch sprang open. A dozen papers flew into the air and snapped in the wind like parachutes. They made their way floating to the ground.

I leaned out the window. “Sorry!”

Everett scrambled to gather the papers one by one, wiping them clean on his pant leg. Without a second glance up, he ran down the sidewalk. He had the awkward gait of a man not used to sitting in office chairs all day, more caffeine than blood in his veins: the run of kids who don’t get picked for softball teams.

I slouched in my chair, tapped the bobblehead Garfield with my pencil, and watched its mute smile nod up and down. A form letter lay on the scattered essays cluttering my desk. I picked it up, reread:

Dear Author,

Thank you for sending us your manuscript. After careful consideration we have decided that we will not be able to publish it.

Although we would like to send an individual response to everything, and particularly to those who request comment, the small size of our staff prevents us from doing so.

Sincerely,

THE EDITORS

The rejection was a week old, but I had yet to file it away. It had come with a coupon for a subscription to the magazine. I balled up the coupon and threw it at the wastebasket, missing by a foot.

I took the to-do pad Mom had given me for Christmas, a stack of carefully lined paper with the heading
To Do Today
typed cheerfully in blue. Beneath
buy milk, fruit, lunch stuff
;
organize student exemplary files
; and
finish grading 11:00 essays
, I wrote
new batch of submissions—mail Monday
.

I also tabulated the rejections in my blue binder. There were two columns: submissions on the left, rejections on the right. Finding
Exatrope
magazine, I recorded the date
November 7
opposite the date I’d mailed the story, placing a red check mark in the margin beside the magazine’s name for good measure.

Tapping my pencil along the titles, I counted the number of magazines that had sent this particular story back. I did this every time I received a rejection.

Twenty-seven. For
one
story.

When I quit my job at Millbury’s (the twenty-sixth best elementary school social studies textbook publishing house in the country) to pursue a life of writing, I had specific visions of my new life: Between scribbling works of literary genius I would attend art galleries and work in soup kitchens, walking busily from one matter of importance to another, curls billowing in the wind à la Carrie Bradshaw. I had not imagined pulling all-nighters grading student essays with thesis statements like “
In the Age before the Depression, America reeked benefits at the expense of the countries poor.

Dejectedly I gathered my things. I found the empty, flattened Cheetos bag stored in my pencil drawer. Everett and I had been passing it back and forth since May. At his desk I examined the photographs of his dog Karenina. The purebred Shih Tzu was the one thing Everett loved more than books. There were piles of books crowding his desk, leaning skyscrapers of his private world. I slid the Cheetos bag into page 341 of
The Brothers Karamazov
and clamped the novel shut.

Home was less than half an hour by foot, but it was too cold for a walk. I took the cement steps down the steep hill adjacent to the Humanities Building to catch the purple bus line. From my seat in the back I watched the campus pass by outside the window.

Copenhagen, population 4,569, was hidden in the cornfields of Ohio just seventy miles from Columbus. When I told my brother I was moving to Copenhagen he thought I meant Denmark. Copenhagen was not the only town guilty of borrowing its name. Ohio was full of them. There was London, Ohio, and Oxford, Ohio; there was Dresden, Sparta, Manchester, and Lebanon. It was as if many Ohio cities, like many Ohio residents, wanted to be somewhere else.

The bus followed campus two blocks before turning right toward downtown. Main Street had all the romantic essentials: cobblestone streets, window shops with candy cane-striped awnings, and gas stations that still chimed to alert the station manager of new customers. The locals lived peacefully, if not a little resentfully, beside the crowd of students that kept their town afloat on the expensive appetites of well-groomed consumers. When school was in session, the noise and color of youth obliterated any semblance of normal small-town life. The first week of class the students wiped the Wal-Mart shelves clean; college kids ran all shop cash registers; all downtown waitresses were younger than twenty-two; and frat boys outnumbered mothers at the grocery store on a Friday afternoon. We lived on a private planet populated entirely by the barely post-pubescent who plotted their dreams carefully on the black and white lines of academic Day Planners.

My housemate, Zoë, and I maintained a quiet bubble of existence amidst the general chaos. We lived above Kathryn Wilson, head of special collections at the university’s main library. She drove a golf cart instead of a car. For fun, she went to the local public library to read newspapers. Zoë and I rented the apartment above her garage, a building set back on the opposite end of her lawn. Some said that her son had killed himself in the room where Zoë slept, that she hadn’t stepped inside the apartment since for memory of his death. We chose to disregard this theory.