Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

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.

  The apartment was cozy with hardwood floors, built-in white bookshelves, and a kitchen so narrow it took considerable maneuvering for both of us to make breakfast in the morning. Kathryn’s property was situated one block from Main Street. It was a ten-minute walk to the coffee shop where Zoë worked, a fifteen-minute walk to the first edge of campus. Best of all, the roof of the adjoining shed constituted a porch off of our breakfast nook. From our vantage point on the roof we observed the comings and goings of college life. We watched packs of girls in high heels and low-cut blouses tripping their way home from weekend bar hops. We watched the numbered 5K runners pacing uniformly by like schools of fish. It was a little like having a private parade every day.

  “There’s always so much going on!” my mother would exclaim. “It’s like living in The City, all these people all the time, and all of them so well dressed—even the young men.” And she would swell with pride and declare it was all so “fashionable,” her highest praise. She’d spent most of her professional life as a teacher, and still she thought I had a very glamorous job. No matter how many times I told her my title was Visiting Faculty or Adjunct, she insisted to everyone at church that I was a university professor: professor sounded better.

  My mother had a peculiar way with language. She called her ob/ gyn a “genealogist” and thought a filibuster was a dust vacuum. My obsession with words evaded her. She considered language a common tool with which to get common things done, and she rather liked it when people laughed at her way of mixing things up.

  I was never so amiable. As a child I struggled with my S’s and found bizarre ways to mix up my consonants. My mother’s friends loved my unintelligible blabber. They would ask me what I was doing in school or what I learned in Sunday school, and I would unwittingly prattle away. When I finally understood that they did this to amuse themselves, I clammed up.

  I spent the first grade in speech therapy. Outside of speech class I refused to talk. Silently, I listened to my father as he explained he wasn’t going to be sleeping at home anymore. Silently, I listened to my mother weeping into her pillow every night for the first year after he left. And silently, I entertained my baby brother with Tinkertoys and Matchbox cars while she showered or cooked or mowed the lawn.

  When free of the obligation to watch Brian, I preferred books to playmates. I spent recess sitting on the detention wall reading Nancy Drew mysteries and Anne of Green Gables. I kept a journal of vocabulary words to learn and quotes to memorize.

  By the third grade my lisp was gone, the familiarity of my father’s presence leaving with it. The books stayed.

  Zoë hollered for me the moment she heard the back door open.

  “Amy? Is that you? Come here!”

  “Hold on,” I said, throwing my bag to the floor and gratefully shaking off my winter coat.

  “Amy!” Zoë yelled.

  “Coming.”

  She stood on tiptoe in the kitchen, patting her hand blindly among the vast array of spices in the top cupboard. Her blond hair was pulled into two short pigtails, uneven and coarse as broom bristles. She was wearing the same red-checkered apron she used when she painted furniture. When cooking, she preferred to wear aprons stained with a worker’s toil. It was her way of reclaiming the traditional symbol of the domesticated woman.

  At the sight of me, she gave up her search for the elusive spice. “I have news!” She sang, pivoting her hips back and forth in a little two-step dance.

  “What is this?” I asked, lifting the lid off the skillet.

  “Curry with potatoes and tofu,” she answered. “Sit down.”

  “Can I try it?”

  “No, sit.”

  Placing her hands on my hips, she led me toward the table.

  “Okay.” Obediently, I sat. “What’s the big news?”

  She stood in front of me, hands behind her back. “Guess.”

  “You got a raise.”

  “No.”

  “Your parents are comin
g to visit.”

  “No.”

  “Youuu … are getting married.”

  “Um, no.” She rolled her eyes.

  I found this response annoying considering the uncensored schoolgirl manner in which she’d gone on lately about her boyfriend’s many admirable attributes. She’d told me twice in the last week that she and Michael were “getting serious.”

  “You’re leaving The Brewery.”

  “I love my job and you know it. You’re not even trying.”

  “I give up.”

  She pulled a magazine from behind her back and held it forward happily.

  “You bought an UrbanStyle magazine,” I stated, confused.

  “I’m going to be in the UrbanStyle magazine,” she announced.

  “You’re what?”

  “They bought my essay.”

  I let this sink in. “Zoë, that’s amazing.”

  “I know!” She squeezed her eyes shut and did a giddy hop. “I sent in that article—the one about career women in academia. They loved it, but said it wasn’t quite right for their reader base, so, whatever … that was that. But then they wrote me this week and said they had an opening in the March publication for general women’s interest and would I be interested in submitting another essay for the issue.” She flipped through the magazine, stretching its spine open to show me the spread where she would be featured. “It’ll be for this column—four pages with illustrations and everything.”

  I took the magazine from her. Zoë was always publishing articles in local papers and stories in online journals. But UrbanStyle was a national publication, a Bible-thick magazine shelved between O and Self. This magazine was a household name.

  “But you’ve never worked in the university,” I said. “How did you write a paper about women and academia?”

  “You don’t have to experience a thing to write about it. I watched you.”

  She had taken a bite of curry and was fanning her open mouth so that it sounded more like I wa oo. She preferred foods that could make her sweat.

  “And I talked to some women on campus.” She stuffed a piece of bread in her mouth to soak up the heat. “It was all informal— just a random conversation here and there. It was incredibly easy to write, actually.” She tapped the spoon against the corner of the skillet and dropped it into the sink. “I have to get dressed. Michael’s on his way over to celebrate.”

  I drew myself up from the chair slowly, feeling my mood sink as her excitement increased. That she was commissioned the same week I was rejected: The irony was almost literary.

  I followed Zoë to her bedroom, resolving to tell her about Adam later. I leaned on the doorframe while she dressed.

  “How was class today?” she asked.

  “All right,” I said. “They weren’t very interested.”

  “Nothing unusual.” She pulled her sweatshirt over her head and stepped out of her pants.

  Her underwear was cut like a boy’s. The word Touchdown! ran across the butt in green glitter. She had a narrow waist and small breasts neatly tucked into her matching green bra. Her freckles tapered as they ran the length of her body so that her shoulders were speckled but her stomach and legs were fair, flawless. Tonight she chose a pleated wool skirt with a pink T-shirt, knee socks, and plastic yellow barrettes shaped like ribbons. Zoë had the body of an athlete and the fashion sense of a five-year-old.

  “When’s Meatball coming over?” I asked.

  “He’s on his way now.” She held a pair of boots up for my inspection. “Do you think these are okay?”

  “To be honest, I think they’re a little excessive.”

  “Is that possible? Doesn’t the very word excessive demand that a thing not be little at all?” She reconsidered the boots, now on her feet. “I don’t know. I think they look good.”

  “They’re very noticeable.”

  “Good.” She pointed to the pimple on her chin. “I need face diversion.”

  I was on the couch eating a bowl of curry watching television when Michael arrived, the smell of his cologne preceding him up the stairs. He stared at the screen: an infomercial for a hands-off can opener.

  “What are you watching?” he asked, taking off his coat. He wore a blue muscle shirt ineffectual against the winter temperatures, though perfect for showing off the geometric perfection of his pectorals. Michael had been a medalist for the university swim team; what I’d seen of his body (and, Michael being an exhibitionist, I’d seen enough) was conspicuously hairless, though it had been two years since he’d competed.

  “I don’t know,” I said testily. “You lost my remote.”

  He laughed, pretending to be offended. “I lost it? Zoë winged it at me.” He looked at the TV, looked at me. “Why don’t you just get up and change the button over there?”

  “Too much work,” I said over a mouthful of curry.

  “La-zy.”

  “You shouldn’t be watching that junk anyway,” Zoë said, tiptapping into the kitchen for her purse. I’d only seen her pick up the remote control once, and that was to hold her novel open while she ate.

  “I have one vice.” I poked at the potatoes with my fork. “I’m going to enjoy it.”

  I noticed Michael noticing Zoë’s legs. Her legs were beautiful, the product of rigorous work. She trained for a marathon every year, circling the indoor track when the weather prevented her from running on campus. She’d met Michael at the gym. He’d introduced himself, but Zoë had been the one to suggest dinner.

  Before meeting Michael, Zoë went through men faster than she went through clothes. When they started dating, I’d assumed he was a fling, a diversion from the emotional exhaustion of seeing her mother through the latest round of cancer treatments. But the months passed, Fay stabilized, and Michael stayed. His inability to speak more than five minutes on any subject of substance wasn’t half as annoying as the fact that some primordial urge left me inexplicably tempted to flirt with him every time he came over.

  He sat on the coffee table so that his back blocked my view of the television. I nudged him with my foot. He batted it away.

  “We’ll be back late,” Zoë said.

  “Adiós,” Michael added with a two-finger salute.

  In the shower I stared at my thighs with a routine and vague disapproval. Facing the mirror, I twisted my wet hair into a bun at the nape of my neck, debating a haircut. I worried I was growing a mustache.

  All my life I’d mocked commercials for wrinkle reducers and hair dye, believing that if I remained optimistic and ate more vegetables than chocolates, I would age gracefully and one day wake up a welldressed, fit woman of composure and grace. Studying my reflection, I knew I wasn’t miraculously going to be anything at thirty that I hadn’t struggled to become in my twenties. In other words, I was off to a very bad start.

  2

  When I gave up my predictable nine-to-five job to study writing, people were, by and large, bewildered.

  “Oh, like for newspapers and such?”

  “I didn’t know people still studied that.” (As if English were a dead language.)

  “Can you make a living?”

  And my personal favorite, “I was never any good at calligraphy,” from my mother’s best friend, Sandy Baldwin, who thought I was going to graduate school to perfect my cursive.

  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 r
egularly. 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.