Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

  “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.

  Things Zoë believes in: Things Zoë doesn’t believe in:

  Jesus Writer’s block

  Global warming Third drafts

  Recycling Cars

  Cycling Cable television

  Ghosts Standardized testing

  Vitamin supple
ments Christian romance novels

  Birthdays Door-to-door evangelism

  Marriage Trickle-down economics

  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.

  High school was similarly unsuccessful. First came Aaron Borke, chess club captain, talented swing dancer, homecoming date, and my first kiss. Then Charlie Smith, who led prayer around the flagpole every fall and spent the rest of the year in a state of borderline hedonism for which he would repent the following year back at the flagpole.

  Twelfth grade was Seth Rieder, aspiring musician who was forever endearing for claiming that I had the knees of a supermodel, yet forever disappointing for liking breasts better. He stayed with Tiffanie Lewis who had breasts.

  My college love affairs comprised a disappointing succession of altogether unattainable men: Leonard Brown, professor of literature, freshman year; Lawrence Green, roommate’s boyfriend, sophomore year; Barry Jones, philosophy major and gay, junior year. After graduation, there was Dylan Jones, lead singer of the church band and my cubicle neighbor with whom I flirted for eight months, dated for six. I spent my twenty-fourth year of life in love, my twenty-fifth recovering from the break-up.

  And then Adam Palmer, a relationship doomed from the start, made impossible due to problems of faith—in other words I had one, he didn’t.

  Of all the men I’d loved, I had relationships with four. That was an average of one relationship for every four years (if you only counted the court-able decades). Adam was the first I’d dated who neither believed in God nor made a front of being interested that I did. What had inspired me to think a relationship with a man who held every one of my beliefs in contempt could possibly be healthy?

  Adam had been intriguing, his swagger a welcome change from the exhausting self-deprecation Dylan mistook for humility. And Adam made no attempt to hide his attraction or to keep his hands at bay. At first, it was exciting to be touched so boldly by a man who had none of the reservations that tortured the Christians I’d dated. I tripped along breathlessly, mistaking his flair for rhetoric for superior intellect and his sexual advances for romance. I ignored the growing conviction that I’d stepped out of line and suppressed the guilt in favor of the pleasure, a pleasure that grew more fleeting as Adam became more insistent.

  At night, lying in bed alone, I relived the embarrassment of telling Adam I was a virgin, a fact I had revealed while standing in my panties and bra in the middle of his living room five seconds away from the worst mistake of my life. I told him I couldn’t; he put his pants back on. This had only been two weeks ago.

  I hadn’t told Zoë. She only spoke cryptically of her own experience—or inexperience. While she and Michael did not sleep over at each other’s places by rule, I had no idea what they did when alone. Sex for Marriage was our mantra, but Zoë tended to have more lenient interpretations of just about any belief we shared. She was the daughter of a travel writer and a nurse who had met through the Peace Corps. The Walkers listened to NPR; they voted Democratic; they were open-minded. I was the product of a culture that considered the phrase “open-minded” anathema.

  My childhood was carefully policed by the powerful mandates of the First Fundamentalist Church of God, which discouraged fraternizing with nonbelievers. I had to save a boy before I could date him and even then there was little fun to be had without sinning, so I placated my hormones with fantasies and fueled my hopes with novels. I ascribed to the True Love Waits campaign without any real dilemma, having confused scriptural mandates with my own outrageous expectations: I believed God was the Divine Author and my life the story of an ultimate romance.

  I quit the First Fundamentalist Church of God soon after attending college, exhausted by its stringent legalism. Leaving behind the church that had raised me was hardly a novel thing to do (it was, in fact, the one stab at independence I had most in common with my smattering of freshmen friends) and it was hardly difficult. But forsaking Christ himself was impossible. The basic precepts of the faith defined my life as the skeleton gives the body definition: I could as soon function apart from Christianity as sever muscle from bone and retain shape.

  Particulars of its moral code, however, had grown increasingly tiresome. While I couldn’t make love where I didn’t feel love, chastity for its own sake had become pure drudgery. It had been fairly noble to champion virginity when I was sixteen, but the closer I got to thirty the more I began to worry. The more I felt like a baby-maker with a ticking egg timer.

  3

  Once I got around to telling them, everyone was kind about the break-up with Adam. Zoë said he didn’t deserve me. Mom recited her usual litany of animal kingdom analogies: There were other fish in the sea; you had to kiss a lot of toads to find your prince; don’t throw your pearls to swine. Valerie Powell came bursting into my office the next afternoon breathless and sweating. “He broke up with you?”

  “In the cafeteria,” Everett said from his desk without bothering to turn away from his computer.

  Valerie was the only other woman from our graduate workshop who stayed in Copenhagen after finishing the program. While our friends moved on to finish Ph.D.s or write their novels in mountain cabins, Valerie promptly went about the business of getting pregnant. By escaping academia when she had the chance, she lived a sane and unhurried life. She was also a practiced gossip.

  “Well what are we all doing here then?” She grabbed my coat of
f the filing cabinet. “You need to talk and I need carbohydrates.”

  Ten minutes later, we sat crowded into a Donut Shoppe booth, Valerie listening attentively to my now-detailed list of Adam’s inadequacies, and Everett who had invited himself along, interrupting to volunteer examples I’d forgotten.

  “He broke up with me in the cafeteria of the student commons,” I said for the third time. It had become the refrain of the story.

  “It’s sick,” she muttered.

  “And he had the nerve to be totally calm about it.”

  “Jerk.”

  “Not even an affectation of grief,” Everett added.

  “You want me to kill him for you?” Valerie asked. “Because I could do it.” She gave a wave of her arm over her very pregnant belly, inviting us to examine her late-term physical prowess. She once confessed to me that she’d spent all of junior high peeing in short, quick bursts, having heard at summer camp that doing so toughened your uterine walls for the birth process.

  I was grateful that Valerie was back in my life. She and I had been close in graduate school, our friendship the direct result of similar schedules and shared workloads. Once we’d graduated, we’d lost the common complaints that bound us together: There were no more thesis abstracts to belabor or deadlines to dread. We spent a year disbanded, living less than five miles apart but rarely seeing each other outside of a random run-in at the farmer’s market or the library video aisle.

  Valerie was the one who rallied us back together for a book club. We invited neighbors and acquaintances, informing them we would be reading serious novels by serious novelists: Gravity’s Rainbow and War and Peace and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When no one else joined the club, we lost no time defecting from the booklist we’d prescribed in favor of more indulgent forays into Jane Austen and the Brontës. We had every intention of rereading the novels, but the majority of our meetings consisted of watching the film adaptations of books we’d already read.

  Valerie finished a second raspberry-cream donut. At this point in her pregnancy she couldn’t wear her collection of handmade silver rings on her swollen fingers and her usually curly hair had gone straight. “Hormones,” she’d reply when people asked about the new do. I found the transformation exotic. She had the darker complexion of her Puerto Rican father and the voluptuous figure of her American mother. She was zaftig, thick-lipped and thick-thighed; on her, pregnancy seemed a natural shape.