Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

  I was so busy trying to absorb the story despite the awkward syntax and the atrocious metaphors that I was halfway through Lonnie’s story before it hit me. Turning back to page three, I reread the description of Roseanne:

  She was tall, taller than most women but not so tall as to be unattractive but rather she was elegant. She had a cascading flame of red curly hair that billowed on her back. Her eyes were like two discs of blue, cloudless sky. And oh! the shape of her face, her round head, so perfect. Rinaldi ached to touch her.

  Taller than most. Red curls. Blue eyes. He was describing me.

  “Hey.”

  Zoë stood at my table, wiping her wet hands on her work apron.

  “I have ten seconds.” She took a chair and propped her feet up on mine, her black-and-white-checkered Keds studded with dirtsmudged Hello Kitty stickers.

  “It’s busy here today,” I remarked.

  “It always is once the cold sets in.” She rubbed her eyes vigorously. Her nail polish had worn down to irregular blurbs of hot pink.

  “What’ve you been doing?”

  “Grading.”

  “What else,” she muttered, picking up Lonnie’s story and leafing through the pages. “I talked to Eli this morning.”

  I waited. “And?”

  “Do we have extra bedsheets? Towels?” Her voice trailed off and her brow furrowed as she read. “Amy, what is this?”

  “A student’s story.”

  I tried to take the story back from her, but she grabbed my wrist and held my arm over her head, turning in her chair to prevent me from reaching further.

  Aloud she read, “ ‘Besotted, he gazed longingly into the starry night sky, his loins on fire with love.’ ” She laughed. “I haven’t seen the word loins since Sunday school. This is genius.”

  “Zoë,” I warned. “Come on, he’s just a beginner.”

  “Oh, no. This is good.”

  I snatched the manuscript back. “You shouldn’t laugh.”

  “I don’t know how you read that stuff.”

  “What’s this about Eli?” I asked, hoping to reroute the conversation.

  “He just wanted to know if we had stuff to make up a bed. He had to throw all his sheets and pillows out.”

  “We have extras. We’ll just make up the futon—if he doesn’t mind.”

  “After what he’s been through, I’m sure he’d be happy to sleep on the kitchen floor.”

  I perched my pen over Lonnie’s manuscript, an indication that I needed to work.

  “I should let you get back to the lover’s loins.” Her manager walked in the room. She stood quickly, wiping my already clean table with a wet rag. “I told her I’d work a double shift today so I need you to be at the apartment when Eli gets there.”

  “He’s coming tonight?”

  “He’s coming now. He said he’d be here in an hour.”

  I glared at her. “Zoë, the apartment is a disaster—we don’t have anything for him to eat, our laundry is everywhere …”

  She pretended to restock the sugar packets at the next table. “He doesn’t care.”

  “I care.”

  “Throw the laundry under my bed, leave the dishes in the sink, and I’ll pick up something for dinner. Problems solved.” She smiled her best customer service smile, turned on her heel, and walked briskly away.

  He arrived in a green Volkswagen van that rattled so loud it was remarkable I didn’t hear him until he appeared in my doorway. He was three and a half hours late.

  “Sorry—I didn’t mean to scare you.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “The door was open. Zoë said to come on in.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he extended his hand. “I’m Eli.”

  I was taken aback by his appearance: He was the same man I’d seen at the poetry reading. He certainly wasn’t the man I was expecting. The Eli I knew from Zoë’s stories ran a gallery and a clothing drive, networked with artists, set commission, handled sales. He should have been shorter, heavier, dressed in khakis and a collared shirt, more like a thirty-year-old and less like a half-starved vagabond.

  I accepted his handshake. “Amy,” I said.

  “I remember—from the reading. We waved.”

  “I saw you with Zoë. I just assumed you were a friend from campus.”

  “I was only down for the night,” he explained. “Zoë meant to introduce us, but you disappeared with someone. A guy in glasses? Kind of balding on top?”

  “That’s Everett. He likes to sit in the back for quick escape. He doesn’t do well at those things, for whatever reason. He’s a friend from the office.” I shut my mouth abruptly to keep from rambling.

  “Not a boyfriend?”

  “Oh—no, definitely not a boyfriend.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause. I considered his empty hands. Loops drawn with pen in tightly winding patterns stained the length of his fingers.

  “Where are your things?” I asked.

  From the screen door we considered the large duffel bag he’d abandoned on the driveway between his van and the porch. He eyed the bag menacingly as if it were a misbehaving pet awaiting punishment. He insisted I not let it in the house; he was burning it as soon as he’d rewashed all his clothes.

  He wanted to know where he could find a laundromat so he could treat his clothes before bringing them into our apartment. Bedbugs and their eggs traveled in suitcases. I could have given him directions and kept the rest of the afternoon to myself, but my mother had forever ingrained in me the utmost importance of being the gracious host. I was inclined to help.

  “You’re sure?” he asked. “You really don’t have to.”

  “They’re not in there, are they?”

  “They’re in the bag if anything,” he said. “But I want to wash the sheets for eggs.”

  He emptied the duffel bag of clothes directly onto the frozen driveway. Together we stuffed them all back into trash bags. His socks were worn at the soles, his jeans frayed, the fringe of each pant leg clotted with dirt. One by one I sifted through T-shirts that smelled of incense and turpentine. I also found a napkin on which someone had scribbled a phone number; a clipping torn from the newspaper in the shape of a heart; a Tupperware of buckeye nuts sporting drawn-on cartoon faces; and a tiny velvet string-pull bag that held two engraved silver rings.

  “Are these important?” I held up the little cloth bag.

  He tucked the jewelry in his back pocket, noticed the colorcoordinated piles I’d been making. “You don’t have to separate them.

  Just throw them in the bag.”

  “They’ll bleed.”

  “The bugs?”

  “The colors.”

  He shook his head. “We’re not washing them. We want heat— just heat.”

  I held up a black T-shirt that had been starched to the point of rigor mortis. “Not even fabric softener,” I stated.

  “Not even fabric softener,” he repeated. He crawled on his knees to grab the farthest of my piles, cramming it into the trash bag. “You know we’ll have to be best friends forever now.”

  “We will?”

  “You’ve touched all my underwear,” he said.

  That I blushed embarrassed me so much I blushed again.

  At the laundromat he pulled an old Mason jar full of coins from his knapsack. When the last load had been stuffed into the dryer, he took the shirt off his back and threw it in for good measure. The undershirt he wore underneath was his cleanest article of clothing. The white cotton blazed bright against his dark complexion. He was tall with the lean but strong arms of a young athlete. A tattoo covered his right arm, the intricate pattern cascading from his right shoulder to his elbow.

  We sat side by side on conjoined plastic chairs that lined the front window. To make conversation I asked about bedbugs. Companionably, he lifted his shirt to show me the damage. Red bumps rose in circles across his stomach and chest; some welts were large as quarters, others tiny as fleabites.

  “They say you know it
’s bedbugs if they bite in a circle.” He pointed to one particularly irritating ring. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner,” he explained, pointing to spot one, two, and three. Beneath the raw rings of irritated skin, his stomach was flat and strong. A single black line of hair trickled down his chest and pooled around his belly button.

  “Do they ooze?” I asked.

  “No.” He lowered his shirt. “Just itch to drive you crazy.”

  He caught me examining his tattoo. “You disapprove?”

  I snapped my eyes away from his arm. “Why would you say that?”

  “Zoë told me you come from a really religious background.”

  I found this an unfair indictment, considering Zoë had once said the same of him. I said, “Zoë says fish-oil tablets are a necessary element to a well-balanced diet.”

  He laughed.

  “I like your tattoo,” I went on. “I assume it means something?” The tone of the second comment canceled the approval I’d hoped the first would convey. I hated tattoos, but I flattered myself this dislike was an aesthetic preference rather than a religious conviction.

  “It means something.”

  He stood up to check on one of the dryers. I took this as my cue to leave the subject alone.

  The moment Zoë saw us pull into the driveway, she bolted from the front door to throw her arms around Eli. She leapt into his arms and wrapped her feet around his waist. Eli set her back down on the ground as effortlessly as he might a child.

  She’d made a homemade dinner to celebrate his arrival. We ate whole wheat pasta tossed with organic dried tomatoes, and fresh, sparsely shaved Parmesan; whole grain toasted baguette; and bowls of arugula lightly spritzed with lemon and vinegar and olive oil. Zoë fussed over Eli the entire meal. How was his drive? How were his bites? Did he have to catch the bugs himself? Were they as disgusting as the pictures on the Internet? How was Jillian?

  Jillian was fine, wonderful: she was in Germany studying painting until May. Her schedule was unconventional. They spoke when they could.

  “Don’t worry.” Zoë slapped his knee. “Amy and I’ll keep you company.”

  I had been entirely invisible up to this point. Eli made a rather obvious attempt to divert the conversation my way.

  “Zoë says you’re a writer.” He leaned back so Zoë could clear his plate and glass away. “You’re writing a book?”

  “I’m lucky to write five pages.”

  “I’d love to read some of it.”

  “Amy doesn’t like talking about her work,” Zoë explained from the kitchen.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a private world, up there in my head,” I said. “Talking about it with other people is like having a stranger come into your house and help themselves to your food, start rooting through your underwear drawer.” I realized too late that this was a poor analogy considering the circumstances of our initial meeting.

  Eli was not offended. “I promise not to go through your underwear drawer.” He lifted his coffee to his lips. “Figuratively or literally.”

  This was the second time underwear had figured into our day’s conversation.

  Zoë set a cup of fat-free tofu pudding in front of each of us. Eli stuck his spoon in the center of the colorless, gelatinous mound. It stood upright on its own.

  “You’re banned from my panty drawer,” I said to him, “but you can certainly eat all the food you want.”

  Later I wondered why I’d said “panty” instead of underwear, panty being such a frilly, flirtatious kind of word.

  Arguably, Eli was attractive, with a face that belonged to someone younger than his thirty-two. Dressed more conservatively, his long hair trimmed and pulled back, you might notice the defined structure of his cheekbones; in the right circles, his narrow face and his deepset eyes might be considered vogue, even beautiful. But you didn’t immediately notice beauty. Too many other superficialities demanded your attention. His clothes were secondhand, well-matched but often stained with paint or plaster. He wore heavy jewelry, silver rings on his fingers and frayed hemp on his wrists and neck. Most distinct of all was the tattoo, a Celtic circular pattern that wound from shoulder to just below his elbow in dark green ink.

  From his dress you could draw immediate conclusions that he made no effort to dispel: In high school he’d been a pothead; he’d grown up a kid who rode his skateboard on curbsides until the local police banned him from the harmless sport, and then he persisted anyway, with that air of martyrdom only an adolescent can achieve; he would have had parents with money who provoked a hatred of materialism almost as strong as his hatred of the government. He did not wear deodorant because he didn’t believe in masking the body’s natural functions with modern hygiene, which was really just another facade people put up. His girlfriend wore ankle-length dresses and did not shave her legs.

  Not that any of this was true. He didn’t talk about himself, so there wasn’t a lot to go on.

  During the last week of school he tried not to be an intrusion, and in return I tried not to notice that he was. He did little to upset the apartment. His furniture—what he’d salvaged of it—was in storage. Aside from his duffel bag, he’d brought one extra pair of shoes and the military khaki green knapsack he carried on his shoulder wherever he went. He only ate the food we expressly made for him. He kept his bathroom things in a Kroger bag stuffed under the futon.

  “You know there are some students on campus talking about opening a gallery,” Zoë said. She was holding up the bottom of her mattress while I blasted it with Lysol. Every night since Eli had arrived, Zoë had scoured the Columbus craigslist for job openings and I’d scoured the mattresses for bedbugs. “I also saw an ad for lawn maintenance.”

  “It’s December.”

  “True.” She dropped the mattress and frowned. “Yeah, why would somebody post that?”

  “Lift,” I commanded. She lifted the other side of the mattress. I fumigated.

  She said, “I wonder if Kathryn has any openings at the library.”

  I waved my hand in front of my face trying to dispel the antiseptic fog. “You’re not telling the landlady, of all people, about Eli.”

  “Yeah. She wouldn’t be too thrilled about the idea of someone living with us.”

  She said this as if it were news. Already we were making Eli park four blocks away so the sight of the old Volkswagen wouldn’t rouse suspicion. At that moment I realized two things: (1) Eli was not just between apartments, he was broke; (2) Eli was going to be staying for a very long time.

  “Zoë.”

  “Oh, sorry—lift.” She lifted the mattress. I pushed it back down.

  “What do you mean living with us?”

  She feigned innocence. “I didn’t mean anything. I mean he’s living with us until he finds a new place.”

  “You said Christmas break. You said he just needed a place for the holiday.”

  “I know what I said, but it’s just that everything’s gotten a little more complicated.”

  “What about Michael,” I countered. “What does he think?”

  “Michael? Why would he care? It’s not like I’m attracted to Eli.” She frowned. “That would be so clichéd, to be in love with Eli. Everybody’s in love with Eli.”

  We heard the front door open and shut. The subject was closed.

  I found Eli in the kitchen, investigating Zoë’s latest bulgur wheat soup experiment.

  “Is it food?” he asked.

  “It’s edible,” I said. “It’s nutritious.”

  Tentatively, he lifted a spoonful to his mouth. The phone number written on the back of his hand was two days old. The ink had begun to fade, but I was willing to wager that the 9 and the 3 and the first letters of the owner’s name—CAL—might last to the weekend.

  Considering the fact that he’d spent the last four weeks as live bait, I hadn’t minded his unkempt appearance at first; I’d begun to wonder, however, whether he hadn’t been wearing the same variation of two outfits since arriving
. Or maybe it was his scent that alarmed me, an odor pungent but seductive, like upturned, sun-baked earth.

  “I want to meet this Eli.” I held the phone an inch from my ear; Brian had my mother’s volume. He was five years younger than me but insisted on acting like a big brother. “Are you charging him rent?”

  “No, we’re not charging him rent,” I said. “I thought he was just visiting for the weekend.”

  “You need a timeline. A plan for eviction. You don’t just let people come live with you. What if your landlord finds out?”

  “She won’t find out. You’re starting to sound like Mom.”

  I hadn’t meant to talk about Eli and I certainly hadn’t meant to jeopardize my brother’s good mood. He and Marie were registering for wedding gifts. “Amebuger!” he’d shouted into the phone when he picked up. “Vacuum cleaner with or without the central dust segregator?”

  Direct contact with my brother had become a rare thing since he started medical school. When he wasn’t in lecture, he was in the library. I couldn’t remember the last time we hadn’t held a conversation in whispers.

  “How’s Marie doing?” I asked to change the subject.

  He asked her. “She says she’s surviving, how are you? She’s still in family med, so her schedule is good. She’d be better if Mom wasn’t driving her crazy.”

  “Wedding stuff?”

  “You’d think napkin anagrams were the be-all end-all.”

  “Monograms,” I corrected.

  “Whatever. She’s making Marie nuts.”

  We discussed their honeymoon plans and our mother’s relative insanity with all things wedding. When the conversation hit a lull, I worried the button on my blouse.

  “Brian,” I began, tentative. “I told the chair of the department I would teach again next semester.”

  There was a pause.

  “So no planned escapes from Copenhagen?”

  “I don’t have the money—or the prospects. Do you think it’s a mistake to stay?”

  “A mistake? They pay you, right? And you get to write your stories, right? Sounds like a good setup to me.”