Amy Inspired (25 page)

“Write about what?” I asked.

“Haven’t you read it?” she asked.

“No, we just got it today.Why?”

“Well, you might not be having much luck as an author, but I think you may have found work as a muse.”

No luck as an author. It surprised me how abrasive the woman could be.

“It’s good.” She handed me the magazine and began skirting her way around me to return to the party. “Something every woman should read.”

I flipped back to the first page of Zoë’s essay. In boldface the heading read:
Making a List, Checking It Twice
. Beneath ran a subtitle:
Getting to the Bottom of the Modern Woman’s Obsession
.

Under the two-page heading, a woman sat at a white desk in a white room. Thousands of identical yellow sticky notes plastered the walls, the chair, the nondescript desk—even the woman. She sat at a table with her legs primly pressed together, her back straight, and her eyes staring upward at the enormous pile of chores littered about her head. In her left hand she held a smartphone and in the right a red pen poised over the Franklin Day Planner lying open on the desk.

At the bottom of the page, the article began:

A few weeks ago, while scavenging for a working pen (an abnormally rare commodity in an apartment of aspiring authors), I found a rather telling scrap of paper beside my housemate’s computer. Or, I should say, several rather telling scraps of paper. In piles around her desk, hung from the bulletin board over her bed, lining her computer screen in sticky notes were to-do lists. Not one, but many.

These to-do lists were categorized in various ways, the chores organized by location, by day, or by priority. For example, there was one list of things to do while in the downtown area (drop off laundry, buy stamps, pick up library books) and another for things to do by 5:00. She had taken pains to carve out ten-minute slots for eating and even a twenty-minute slot for showering.

My housemate is a textbook addict of multitasking productivity: the belief that the worth of one’s life can be measured in the efficiency with which one completes the highest number of chores. But is this any real way to live? Are we killing ourselves with our need to be productive?

My friends and co-workers keep checklists. So did my mother—until the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Standing before my housemate’s extensive collage of chores, and thinking of these women I know who’ve struggled in one way or another with the same compulsion, I began to wonder if it’s possible that in spending our days in the systematic elimination of perceived obligations, we are actually missing out on living itself… .

“Do you have more ice?” Everett asked. He held two empty cups in his hands. “Rations low.”

“Up there.” I gestured toward the freezer absentmindedly, excusing myself through the crowd to my bedroom. I locked the door and turned to page 223, where the article went on to explain that checklists were symptomatic of a woman’s need to feel productive. It then delved into a brief lesson on history, tracking the evolution of the Franklin Day Planner to the present-day smartphone, detailing how digital calendars had only increased the dependence on a false sense of productivity.

Throughout the essay Zoë used “we” and “our,” lumping all women, career-driven and homemaker alike, into one homogeneous, guilt-tripped class of multitasking do-gooders. Despite her best efforts to maintain a consistently plural and sympathetic voice, I did not hear “we” in my head as I read. I heard “you.”
You,
Amy Gallagher, are killing yourself with your need to Get Things Done
.
You
, my poor Ms. Gallagher, believe your life’s worth can be measured by the efficiency with which you complete the greatest number of chores
.

Though I was more or less aware of this compulsion, I’ve never considered how visible it was. I kept grocery lists tacked to the fridge; people to e-mail lists stuck to my computer screen;
Books to Read
and
Books Read
piled in ratty notebooks on the living room shelves. And she didn’t even know about the lists from childhood:
Potential Careers
,
Boys Kissed
,
Stories Written
,
Things to Do Before Thirty
.

I forced myself to read to the conclusion:

The opportunities we have today are still somewhat new for the female sex (and I am grateful for them. God bless the 14th Amendment, the tampon, and Title IX!). It seems, however, that the knowledge of all these opportunities leaves us feeling as though our independence and self-sufficiency are precarious. We are always striving to be the best at home, at school, and at work, trying to prove we can do it all. Sooner or later we have to admit that “it all” is too tall an order.

I’m not trying to depreciate the value of hard work. But I am a firm believer in “all good things in moderation.” We must learn when to put the lists away—when to stop and watch a sunset, enjoy a bubble bath, laugh with a friend, take a walk without the need for a destination.

The first thing my mother did on getting her breast cancer diagnosis was burn her Day Planner. Has she missed appointments? Yes. Has she bowed out of more than one potentially career propelling opportunity? Yes. Has she lived every day as fully as possible? Most definitely yes. Her cancer has come back in sundry and vile ways, but every time it does, she’s prepared with an arsenal of freshly lived memories to give her strength and to remind her that life is worth fighting for. Watching her struggle for even the smallest pleasures the healthy take for granted, I’ve learned the hard way that life is too short and the world too varied to fit into carefully drafted rows of check-boxes.

So at the risk of being trite, I say: Ladies, burn the checklist, and smell the roses.

I was insulted by the unrelenting optimism of women’s magazines, by the willing suspension of self-respect required to read such nonsense. I stared at the photograph of the young woman and her sticky notes. It was one thing to see your weaknesses brought to light by a loving friend, but to be exposed in a national publication? I was so angry my hands trembled. It was ten minutes before I trusted myself enough to the party.

“There she is! Miss America,” Everett sang. He put his arm around me. “We were just going to cut the cake without you.”

“I had to go to the bathroom,” I said.

He patted me on the back. “Well, we hope it all came out okay.”

He led me to the kitchen, where everyone had gathered around the cake that read
Happy B and P Day!
beneath a haze of lit and quickly melting blue-white candles.

Zoë stood at the center of the circle, a birthday hat on her head. Valerie held the glowing sheet cake, beckoning me to help blow out the candles before the wax ruined the icing. Eli and Amber and Lynn were not in the room.

“Hurry!” Zoë cried, strapping a paper birthday hat on my head; it sat lopsided on my curls.

“On three!” she said and took my hand. “One, two—”

Together we shot out all thirty of the flickering lights.

“That was not a bad party,” Zoë said.

It was nearly three in the morning and we were alone. At some point in the evening, long before everyone else had begun the mass exodus, Eli had left without saying where he was going or when he was coming back. He hadn’t spoken to me the rest of the night. It mortified me to think he’d read the article.

Zoë had been in the living room for the last two hours, lying on the floor with her feet propped on the couch, lazily talking to Everett, the last of our guests. I’d left them alone when it became obvious the three Red Bulls he’d had were not going to wear off anytime soon. In my room, I’d listened to their occasional bursts of laughter, irate with Zoë and annoyed with Everett for delaying my opportunity to let her know.

I was sitting in bed reading when she came in.

“I will be full until Thursday.” She threw herself long-ways across my bed, setting her head in my lap. “Everett is hilarious. Have you heard his theory on
Sixteen Candles
and adolescent rite of passage?”

Her spontaneous kindness, a stark departure from her general attitude toward me in the last week, only made me angrier.

Peering up, she caught my expression and stopped. “What’s wrong?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Something the matter?”

“You wrote about me,” I said.

“What?”

“You used me,” I repeated. “In your article.” I picked up the magazine and read the first paragraph aloud. Her back stiffened. “You wrote this about me. And, to be honest, I don’t exactly appreciate it.”

Zoë sat up. Staring at the bedspread, she said with carefully checked frustration, “I don’t understand what the problem is.”

“You can’t just write about your friends in national magazines and not expect them to be upset!”

“I didn’t write
about
you. I was inspired by you. There’s a difference.”

“You’ve humiliated me in front of everyone we know.”

She laughed disbelievingly. “No one we know is going to read that stupid magazine. It’s
UrbanStyle
!”

“Oh, really?” I counted on my hand: “What about Valerie, Eli, Everett. This article’s made you a local celebrity.”

She stood up. “You’re totally overreacting.”

I followed her to the living room, where she began stacking plastic cups from the coffee table and smashing them down into the wastebasket.

“I want to talk about this,” I insisted.

She raised her eyebrows, passing me for a second round through the living room for the paper plates. “So talk.”

“Did you have to use me as a case study? Couldn’t you have dug up something more profound from your own life? Why me?”

She smashed the paper plates down in the trash can, then threw up her hands. “I don’t know! Why do writers ever do what they do? It just came to me. It’s not like I sat down with the intention of publicly humiliating my roommate and best friend.”

I was surprised to hear her say “best friend.” It made me think of elementary school.

She stepped into the trash can, pushing the discarded plates and cups and napkins down with her glitter-bedecked sneakers. “Writing doesn’t work that way, and you know it.” She stomped her foot on the ground to shake off the debris. “You sit down, you start to write, and things from life just creep in. It’s not on purpose. And it’s not like I used your name or anything.”

“
My housemate
,” I repeated. “Great cover. How many of those do you have again?”

“You know, I really thought you were different from this,” she said. “I thought living with another writer would be good for me.” She marched past me, stacking the bowls beside the couches. “You’ll have to forgive me, but I had all these crazy ideas that we would be sitting around talking about books and ideas. That we would be up late, editing each other’s work, brainstorming characters, throwing ideas back and forth—and
sharing
them. It’s not like there’s a copyright on creativity. I say something, you use it; you say something, I use it. That’s the way it works.”

She threw the dishes into the sink.

“Let’s not go there,” I said. I felt her anger snowballing, gathering debris from every minor disagreement and artistic difference. “That’s not what we’re talking about.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.” She threw the cake pan into the sink over the other dishes, sprayed it with a zigzag of dish soap. “I don’t see how everything between us has to be a competition.”

“When have I ever competed with you?”

“I stand up for you, you know,” she went on. “I praise your work; I tell people what a good teacher you are; I practically make you out to be a saint. And then you go and you act like a schoolgirl around Michael.”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” I muttered. “I have only ever been friendly with Michael.”

“It would be courteous for you to work on being a little
less
friendly.”

“You think I want to be with Michael?” I laughed. “Michael. Who thinks New England is a country.”

I turned my back and wiped down the counter. Zoë dropped the pans in the sink one at a time, louder with each pan.

“What I don’t understand,” she said as if we hadn’t paused at all, “is how you make all these resolutions but never get around to fulfilling them. That’s what your lists are. Unfulfilled resolutions.”

“Name one.”

“Writing,” she answered immediately. “You move the television and promise you’re going to devote yourself to writing, but you spend more time pitching fits about writer’s block than fighting it. If you spent half the time at your laptop you spend complaining to your mom and brother about teaching, you’d have an epic novel by now.”

“I write.”

“When?”

“When I get the inspiration.”

“When is that?”

“I can’t schedule inspiration,” I said. “There’s something you failed to mention in your little article: I never make checklists for writing.”

We locked eyes.

“Except to catalogue rejections for stories you know aren’t good anymore.”

I really hated her for those two seconds.