Amy Inspired (4 page)

The acclimation to graduate school wasn’t so much an adjustment as a kind of coming home. I loved the busyness of campus life, the undercurrent of ambition that kept the libraries afloat. At the university, students and professors alike were either having a party or doing work. Both were taken very seriously.

Leaving a good job for graduate school was the single most courageous thing I’d ever done, and for the first six weeks I lived in a state of barely suppressed hysteria of excitement and anxiety. Once school was under way, my route through campus fixed, and my circle of friends established, I lived a small life, anchored to my apartment by cycling deadlines and stacks of assigned novels. I wrote more or less regularly. I read constantly, while walking, eating, bathing. It was a happiness second only to the blissful memory of childhood summers spent home before my father left.

It was the longest and shortest two years of my life. I emerged from my thesis defense bleary, relieved, and clueless. All but three of the writers from my class left town after graduation. The rest fled to bigger, brighter lights. I wished them well, saw them off to Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh. Where did they get the energy? I was too physically exhausted to move and too emotionally spent to consider another career change. Two months before defending my thesis, I accepted a teaching position at the university. As a part-time teacher I was paid by the class, which meant no summer salary and no health benefits. It was not a terrible job, but sometimes in class, halfway through a lesson, I’d wake up from what felt like a suspended dream and become suddenly very aware of the twenty young faces staring back at me, waiting. During one such spell of wakefulness, I laughed so hard at the absurdity of the situation I couldn’t collect myself and had to dismiss class twenty minutes early.

I’d left a stable career to pursue my dream. One master’s degree and $10,000 later, I was back pushing paper. Only at a much smaller desk.

Zoë was my saving grace. We met while working the Thanksgiving food pantry at a small local church. It was my first semester of teaching. I’d been a more or less faithful member of Copenhagen Baptist since arriving in town, drawn to the little church by its charismatic leader, Pastor Maddock, a minister whose dual degrees in theology and literature colored his sermons with a writer’s love of metaphor and subtlety.

Zoë had lived in Copenhagen longer than I had, but had been systematically trying out every church within a fifty-mile radius since arriving. With her petite figure and colorful wardrobe, she could have passed for a high school student; I was shocked to find out that she had just graduated from the university. The church secretary used our shared love of writing to introduce us. Within ten minutes we were fighting about C. S. Lewis.

“Overrated,” she claimed.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “He takes spiritual concepts hackneyed out of all originality and makes them new again. You have to at least give him credit as a storyteller—what about the Narnia books?”

“Overrated,” she repeated. “You ask any Christian writer who their favorite author is, and I’ll bet they’ll say C. S. Lewis. He’ll at least be in the top five.”

“He’s popular because he’s good,” I countered.

“He’s got bandwagon appeal. He’s Christian trendy—like girls with nose rings.” When she crossed her arms, her plastic glitter bracelets jingled.

She made a point, she explained, of remaining indifferent to anything praised by the popular vote. This philosophy applied to movies. She hadn’t seen five of the recent blockbuster films
because
they were blockbusters.

I reverted back to C. S. Lewis. “So what if no one you knew liked him. What if everyone thought he was a joke. Then would you list him as one of your top five?”

“Maybe. But that doesn’t matter because I don’t think he’s good.”

“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion,” I said. I made no effort to conceal my annoyance.

A week later, while driving home from work, I saw Zoë winding around town perilously on an old-school banana-seat bike. It was below zero, the wind bullying the snow into huge drifts that covered the roads and clogged the sidewalks. She had three canvas bags full of groceries hanging from her handlebars. They caught like sails in the wind. She swayed dangerously in one direction, then the other.

Hearing my car approach, she maneuvered shakily to the curb. I pulled up beside her, lowering my window.

“You want a ride?” I asked.

She was wrapped in scarves and wore a beanie cap with earflaps. Her freckled cheeks were bright red from the cold.

“Where will I put my bike?”

“That’s my place.” I gestured up the block. “If you leave it there, I’ll take you the rest of the way home.”

She studied the road ahead, glanced back over her shoulder. “All right,” she said. “It is kind of freezing.”

I drove slowly so she could walk her bike in the trail left by my tire tracks. We chained the bike up to a tree behind my apartment and climbed back into the car, shaking the mounds of snow from our wet shoes.

“Which way?” I asked.

She stopped rubbing her chapped hands together long enough to point mutely to the right.

“Did you ride all the way up from Kroger?” I asked, eyeing the grocery bags at her feet.

She nodded. “It wasn’t bad there, but I thought I was going to die taking that hill back up.”

“Don’t you have a car?”

“I don’t believe in them,” she stated.

“How can you not believe in cars?”

“They are noxious, air-polluting machines of death.”

“Machine of death seems a bit harsh.”

“Have you ever
been
on I-75? Have you ever gone to the junkyard to see the mash of metal that snapped your friend’s leg clean through? Besides, I don’t need a car.”

“But what if you move?”

“I’m going back to the city eventually,” she explained. “You need a car more here than you do in the city.”

“What if you need to leave town?”

“I hitch rides.”

“So you believe in other people’s cars, just not yours,” I said.

“Let it rest on
their
consciences,” she replied.

She lived in a cramped studio apartment decorated with tie-dyed wall hangings and pots of overgrown Pothos vines. Clothes hung from the futon, the desk, the lamp. I couldn’t see the floor.

Before leaving, I wrote down my number. “Next time you need a ride, just call.”

“Do you always have paper with you?” she asked, nodding at the three-inch ringed notebook I’d pulled out of my purse.

“I always have something nearby,” I replied. “In case I need to write something down.”

“I do the same thing.” Excitedly, she showed me the folded piece of blank paper tucked in her back pocket. “Just in case.”

She thought I kept the paper to write down story ideas. I had meant writing to-do lists.

“Remember,” I said on the way out the door. “Call anytime. I mean it.”

Despite my insistence, I hadn’t anticipated she would actually take me up on the offer. I quickly learned that Zoë is good at accepting invitations. From then on, she never hesitated to ask me for a ride to the English office (she liked to print her manuscripts at my expense) or a pit stop at the grocery. That winter we spent the better part of the post-Christmas blues at each other’s places reading through stacks of novels and drinking black coffee from her French press.

It was her idea that we combine rent. I hadn’t considered having a roommate, but my teaching salary did not stretch so far as I would have liked. I worried about losing my privacy, but my doubts were no match for her logic: It was ridiculous to keep separate places considering we had become inseparable.

When I renewed my lease in April, she moved in.

As housemates we got along well enough, for all intents and purposes. Zoë agreed to put my DVDs back in alphabetical order after viewing and to clean out the hair from the shower drain so long as I stopped using plastic bags at the grocery store and promised to wash the carcinogenic toxins off our fruits and vegetables. I updated her on all the eighties flicks she’d missed growing up with parents who discouraged the watching of television. In exchange, she taught me how to cook without refined sugar or meat (or “animal flesh” as she liked to call it).

She attended Copenhagen Baptist with me when she had Sundays off work. Afterward I listened passively to her diatribes against the Americanization of the Christian Church. Occasionally, she got her panties in a twist over one or another of the Baptists’ faults and transferred to the Methodist church on Hyde and Locust. I never worried. Eventually the Methodists would offend her too, and she’d come back to us.

I didn’t mind her bitterness with the church or her vegetarianism or her moods—all of which were frequently inconvenient. Ironically, the very thing I thought would make us most compatible was the one and only thing I resented her for: her writing. Zoë was prolific. Where it took me hours to produce single paragraphs of decent merit, she could kick out ten, twenty pages a night without getting up from her chair.

Nothing life threw at her could ruin her routine. She’d spent years on the edge of losing her mother, whose battle with metastatic breast cancer was epic. In fact, it had been a while since anyone considered it a battle. It was more a strategically won détente: Every few months Fay Walker went back to the front line and, against all odds, secured another cease-fire. This constant proximity to death had given Zoë a talent for living on the edge of terror. Anxiety only drove her back to the laptop, where typing calmed her worried thoughts. She was disciplined. Every morning before leaving the house she ran her five miles, ate her organic oatmeal with soy milk, and wrote her two-page minimum.

When I asked her where she discovered such a daily wealth of ideas, she said things came to her best when she was running. I had only ever used the word
marathon
to describe the five hours I spent on the couch watching
Lost
DVDs.

Zoë was unembarrassed about her work and preferred reading manuscripts aloud to me when they were finished. Her stuff was entertaining and articulate, though rarely as polished as I insisted it would be if revised. But she hated second drafts and rarely managed a third. The writing was good, that was all she wanted, and, above all, it was unfailingly
constant
. She didn’t believe in writer’s block: There was no excuse not to type.

Where Zoë believed in product, I believed in process. This meant she maintained a weekly page quota while I preferred lying in dandelion fields fishing stories out of blue skies.

This was exactly how I described our differences to Adam.

“That’s style,” he replied. “I asked you about your respective writing philosophies.”

“I’m not interested in philosophies of writing. I just want to write.”

“You’re going to use that line when you’re interviewing for future teaching positions?”

“I’m not going to teach forever. This is temporary.” I waved my hand at the library to indicate all of academia—its faculty boards, its failing copy machines, its endless grading.

“Temporary until what? Your big book advance?”

He winked. I scowled.

“You know, I did the math,” he said. “I spent two years on my novel. Let’s assume it was a full-time job and let’s assume a full-time employee is due compensation for forty hours of work each week. If you divide my royalties into a standard wage it comes to a little less than forty cents an hour. You need a job, Amy. And this is as good as it gets.”

I told him I didn’t care to borrow from his disillusionment. He told me that was fine, I would soon be given enough of my own. It was the first time I’d realized maybe I didn’t care so much for his company. That I was tired of growing tired of men and that something was wrong with me if I couldn’t stand to be with one for more than four months at a time.

Hoping for clues, I forced myself to remember every man I’d ever loved, a line of boys parading back to elementary school where I’d first felt that nauseating swell of hope and anxiety every time Bryan Holmes walked into the classroom. Holmes was the James Dean of the sixth grade and the notorious nemesis of Mrs. Mallarmy, meanest teacher in Rosewood Elementary. He wore pants on his hips, greased his hair with Vaseline, and sat in silent protest while the rest of us stood to pledge allegiance to the flag.

In the seventh grade Bryan moved away. I mourned his leaving for a week then replaced him with Luke Warden, son of First Fundamentalist missionaries. We stayed after church to help fold tracts for the youth group to leave on restaurant bathroom toilet paper dispensers. He insisted we not kiss as it would lead us down the road to temptation so we held sweating hands with discretion—we spread the Gospel with more passion. He hoped to win his entire lunch table to Christ by the end of the school year, by which time I’d moved a table over to better study the way Jimmy McCreight’s loose auburn curls fell over his forehead. Jimmy, the track star and homecoming king with whom I spoke twice, both times to invite him to church camp.