Amy Inspired (30 page)

So Friday when I checked my mailbox and found a manila envelope merely marked
Amy
I was more horrified than pleased. I picked it up with forefinger and thumb, threw it in my bag, and returned to my office to open it in the dark.

To my surprise, the envelope contained artwork, a delicate intaglio print of a young woman walking a narrow path through a forest, her gait sprightly despite the enormous white cast on her right foot, her hair billowing up in intricate curls, which mimicked the stylized patterns of the surrounding trees’ leaves. Eli had titled it,
Amy Takes a Break
.

On the back in pencil he had written:

It was my fault so please don’t punish yourself. Guard your ankles; beware of ice. ∼ELI

Between the office and home I read the note a dozen times, trying to tease meaning from between the lines. Did this count as an apology? And if so, was he just sorry for betraying Jillian or was he sorry it happened at all?

Distractedly, I put my key in the back door only to find it had already been unlocked. Someone had turned the kitchen light on. Zoë was sitting in the living room, waiting for me.

“Hey,” she said, standing. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. Balled-up Kleenex lay scattered on the coffee table. “I’m so sorry.”

I set the collage down on the kitchen table, my bag on the floor.

“No,” I said. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”

“It’s my mom.”

Something cold washed over my head.

“What happened?”

She began to sob. “They don’t think she’s going to make it.”

16

When Fay’s doctors stopped telling her what she wanted to hear, she went to another oncologist for a second opinion. With frightening conviction, he recommended she transfer to palliative care immediately and enjoy the weeks she had left with family and friends. Fay returned to her previous team of physicians; she returned—stubbornly—to chemotherapy.

Of course, in a fit of solidarity, Zoë shaved her head.

She e-mailed me a picture, her and her mother wearing colorful scarves wrapped about their heads.

I wrote back:

You know, you really are the most darling bald person. Like a Halle Berry. Like
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. A freckled Navy Seal.

Zoë had an aversion to cell phones that even rivaled Eli’s. We corresponded by e-mail. She wrote:

… no one who knew my mom would have thought she cared a great deal about appearances. She tanned easily but the sun imprinted her skin in irregular patterns, white lines at her arms and legs, a halo of her gardening T-shirts and high-rise shorts. her nails were always dirt-stained from potting and tending houseplants, and her hands were always dried out from hours washing dishes at the food pantry. she hated makeup. sometimes she’d dab a bit of Vaseline on her lips for shine and pinch her cheeks for color—that was it. but she LOVED her hair. i’d never noticed it before, but even in my earliest memories, she wouldn’t leave the house unless her hair was neatly braided and pinned. i didn’t recognize this as vanity because it was so unstylish. it was a good braid—thick as climbing rope—but a waste of hair, I thought. but she had to have it just so. not a strand out of place during her first chemo treatments, Dad and I went with her to buy her first wig. she hated that thing. said it looked nothing like her real hair. for a week, she refused to leave the house. she washed that wig, she tried ironing it into submission. no matter what she did, she couldn’t get it to braid like her hair did. Dad finally told her she was coming out with him. his new book was out and she was coming to his book signing, whether she liked it or not. of course, everyone praised the new look. The wig was more stylish than she’d ever been. from then on it was an obsession. she collected wigs like some women collect purses …

Zoë ranked the doctors according to attractiveness and availability, promising to give my number to anyone worthy of me. She praised the nurses’ kindness. She reported the conversations she and her dad had about the general state of things. Both were avowed pessimists, and the world provided no lack of things to criticize. They talked long into the night every night, distracting each other from the inevitability that as pessimists they were obliged to accept, but as family could not discuss.

I should have been grading papers. I should have been cleaning the bathroom or replying to e-mails. I should have been doing a lot of things, though I couldn’t remember which and by when. Since Zoë’s article, I hadn’t made a single checklist. Consequently, I missed one student conference, incurred ten late fees at the local library, and forgot to file a copy order for my creative writing students. But the student rescheduled, the late fees were paid, and the writing workshop benefited from one fewer reading on dialogue. We talked that day of symbolism instead.

I had stopped making lists, and there had been no insurmountable calamities. This was more a surprise than it should have been.

I spent a lot of time with Valerie, who was having difficulty recovering from Rachel’s birth. Since I didn’t work a typical nine-to-five, I was the only one of her friends available to help out during the day.

“You don’t know how glad we are for your help,” she said. “Jake especially. He worries too much when he’s gone.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Honestly.Without Zoë around I’d just end up home moping all day.”

Rachel farted.

“Are you making music back there?” Valerie asked, peering over her shoulder into the bassinet.

The baby let loose again. Valerie and I laughed.

I tickled Rachel’s taut baby belly. “What do you feed this child?” I asked.

“Just one hundred percent Grade A breast milk,” Valerie said. “She has my eyes and her father’s indigestion.”

Valerie and Jake were the kind of couple who made you believe in marriage. They were kind to each other in public, getting each other drinks and taking each other’s coats, doing all the little favors people normally reserve for first dates. He was a logical, quiet man, very reserved. She talked enough for the both of them. Their home was practical but artistic, an extension of their respective personalities. Abstract paintings hung in the living room and bedroom. They were the kind of abstractions that calm, not agitate.

“Are you still mad at her?” Valerie asked. Aside from the new baby, Zoë’s unpredictable moods had been our most frequented topic of conversation.

“Of course not. How could I be? All this time I thought she was upset with me and she was waiting for the doctors to give her mother a death sentence.”

“But she didn’t have to take it out on you.”

I set my tea bag on a spoon, twisted the string around the pocket of leaves. “I want to be supportive, but she’s so bent on her independence, she won’t let me.”

“She has to let her guard down first,” Valerie said. “It’s hard to love a person who won’t let you.”

Valerie considered Zoë judgmental and difficult. Which she was. Somehow this didn’t make me miss her less.

Valerie lifted Rachel from her bassinet. “I heard Eli’s living with Kevin.”

“He moved out last week.”

“That has to be a relief, both of them finally out of your hair. I know you missed having that apartment to yourself.”

I sipped my already lukewarm tea and agreed, yes, a relief.

After dinner I went for a walk. I didn’t need to be anywhere. I just needed to move.

The sidewalks were laced with salt. The smallest tree limbs overhead had frozen, their new spring buds encased in ice like beads in glass. When the wind blew, the branches clattered as if the forest were giving a hand of applause.

I walked to campus and up the hill that led to the Humanities Building. I hadn’t left with any intention of visiting the studios, but found myself walking toward the front entrance of the Fuhler Art Building and stepping inside. A few students sat on the floor at the end of the hallway, drinking coffee from heavy handmade mugs. An open office door cast light on the tile. Otherwise, the building was relatively empty, abandoned for the weekend. Dust covered the floors, and the hallway stank of strange chemicals. Cafeterias aside, there were two campus buildings identifiable by smell alone: those devoted to the sciences and those devoted to the arts.

I walked the second and first floors, taking time to patiently consider the prints and clay sculptures displayed behind glass cases. In the basement, I followed the sound of music to the single lit studio. Two long tables covered in canvas ran parallel in the center of the room. Throwing wheels lined the tables in place of chairs. Behind the tables, shelves of stacked bowls and cups ran the length of the back wall. Most of the objects were still the wet gray or red of unfired clay. On the tallest rows sat mysteriously bagged shapes resembling sculptures of human busts. They oversaw the activity of the room with their haunting, silent presence.

Eli sauntered in from the adjoining classroom, whistling and carrying a slab of gray, wet clay in his equally gray, wet hands. He held the lump in both open palms, his elbows pressed into his hips for balance. Kicking a stool into place with his foot, he straddled an already dirtied wheel at the head of the table and, with more force than I had expected, smashed the ball of wet earth onto its center. He pumped the floor pedal, and the wheel began to spin.

With his elbows anchored on his knees, he pressed his hands firmly around the clay. It resisted, its irregular surface jostling his hands and his arms. He let his hands ride the dimpled contours of the clay, layers of silt slipping slick between his fingers. When he had caught the rhythm of the wheel, he leaned forward and braced his hands, every muscle in his upper arms tensing. The clay fell instantly into form.

He began to work the now-cylindrical tower of clay, forcing it flat into a disk, then up into a towering cone, higher and higher. Just when I began to guess what he was making, he pressed the materials down again into a nondescript pile of spinning earth. The appearance of concentration on his face was misleading. He wasn’t working: He was playing, content as a kid in a summer sandbox, his pant legs rolled up, his toes exposed in flip-flops. I loved him for his naked toes, for such a small and harmless rebellion. Let the rain freeze; he would have his private summer.

Without interrupting him, I walked quietly down the hallway, up the stairs, and back toward home. It was no good pretending: I’d wanted this man from the moment he stepped unwelcome into my living room, carrying everything he owned on his back. I loved him for every seeming defiance—the tattoo, the jewelry, the untamed wanderlust. Near him I began to believe I could share in his lightness, walk freely in and out of the constructs of my religion, my fears, and my habits, as if they were rooms I could quit with a few confident steps.

17

Eli came to my office the very next day.