Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

  Chapter One: The Wograt Invasion

  Once, in the blackness of space, the human race was a people without a land. It had been taken from them by the Wograts.

  Wograts are hideous, ugly, and stupid. They have pig noses that stick out of their hair and usually stand between 6 or 9 feet tall. Their ears are hardly notisable since they are covered in hair. Their little black eyes get very large and red when they’re mad or in battle.

  If you were ever to meet a Wograt and if you, let’s say, shot off one of the two larger horns on it’s head, you probably wouldn’t live to see what the Wograt looked like without that horn. Wograts consider their horns their only pride and joy, exept for a capture or a prisoner. One Wograt named Barthogly-Nud, grew 3 horns. That’s why he is now the main leader of the Wograts. Some people say that his brain turned into another horn, because Barthogly Nud is not only considered (by Wograts) the greatest Wograt, but by humans is considered the dumbest.

  All Wograts think that they should be in charge of everything and everyone. Although the only races that they control are like small fish or little animals.

  The novel was written entirely in pencil. The graphite had begun to fade, the words blurring and softening the pages. I’d written to the very last page and then some, chapter four spilling over onto the cardboard backing of the notebook where I was forced to resort to pen. The novel ended where the cardboard ended. I couldn’t have been more than nine.

  I ran my hands affectionately over the manuscript, before setting the notebook aside and reaching for another. My penmanship had changed. I’d retrained the broad, fat loops of childhood stories into a self-conscious cursive scrawled in pen. Behind every pinched curl and carefully crafted sentence, the torment of being a freshman was raw on the page. In junior high, all my girlfriends traded dolls and dress-up clothes for bras and tampons. They took pride in their budding breasts and whispered complaints about their periods with martyrdom many women spend their adult lives exploiting. And the boys watched as they sunbathed, as their still narrow hips switched back and forth in hot pink bikinis, in silky sundresses.

  I was just as admiring of their beauty. I grew up, rather than out. My padded bra vexed me almost as much as my gangly height. I despised the Time of the Month, as my mother hygienically called it. Hormones roared in my body like too much alcohol in the blood, clouding my judgment, and puberty coiled my hair into tight ringlets so thick my ponytails snapped hair twisties. I fell in love with a new boy every semester, but only ever adored them from a distance. I worked hard, with hopes of studying chemistry in college, but I had no talent for science.

  Then toward the end of my sophomore year, our English teacher read one of my essays to the entire class, to my combined pleasure and mortification. I wasn’t particularly bright in other classes, so people forgave my talent for English. Within a week, fellow students were calling me for help with their papers, and I was invited to write editorials for the school newspaper. Both improved my social standing. Senior year I was voted Best Personality. I wore the title like an invisible badge into my twenties, when life kept me too busy to worry about being myself and I began to take having a personality for granted.

  A car door slammed outside. Grandma’s car sat in the drive below. I clicked off the desk lamp so she wouldn’t notice the light in the attic window. Before me, the last high school journal was open to an entry in which I had written:

  Things to Do Before Thirty

  See the Sistine Chapel

  Have own apartment

  Read all of Austen, Tolstoy, and Chekhov

  Complete first novel

  Skinny dip in ocean

  Wear size 6 jeans

  Publish (short story or novel, but preferably a novel)

  Find decent and, if at all possible, tall man to marry …

  “Find anything?” Mom’s voice called.

  “Hold on,” I said. I slipped the family photo from Texas into the notebook to mark my place.

  “Walk on the beams,” Mom demanded at the sound of my footfalls. “I don’t want you sending your foot through my ceiling!”

  There was something unabashedly territorial in the way she’d taken lately to referring to everything in the house with the possessive singular (“My ceiling!” “My kitchen!”), as if my brother and I had been intruders our eighteen respective years living in the house.

  She had taken my room. The attic would be next.

  “What on earth have you been doing?”

  I peered down at my mother. “I got distracted. Which boxes did you say you put them in?”

  She wrapped her sweater tighter around her body, shuddering at the onslaught of winter air. “They should be in the one marked glasses.”

  In the far corner I found three sealed boxes marked kitchen-wares, Kitchen 2, and glasses. The one marked glasses contained elementary school papers, popsicle-stick Jesus puppets from Vacation Bible School, and shoe boxes plastered with construction paper hearts for Valentine’s Day card exchanges.

  “Did you find them?” she called.

  “It’s all junk.”

  “What?”

  I teetered back toward the hole in the floor. “The boxes are labeled wrong,” I said. “I don’t know how you’re going to find anything.”

  “Did you look in kitchen-wares?”

  “It’s just bowls.”

  “What are you nuts doing?” Grandma’s head appeared around the corner.

  “Mom wants glass globes.”

  “For the wedding,” Mom explained. “You know those flickery lights we saw on the Internet?”

  “Oh, those were lovely.”

  “I don’t think they’re up here,” I insisted.

  “You sound terrible,” Grandma said. “Pamela, tell her to get down from there before she comes through the ceiling.”

  To date I’d broken two windows, one vase, three glasses, and an antique chair at Grandma’s. Justifiably, she had no faith in my sense of balance.

  “You’d better get down,” Mom said, exasperated. “I could have sworn they were up there.”

  I was slow coming down the attic ladder. Grandma floated her hands to the right and left of my body to spot me. Mom had disappeared.

  “What’s the matter with her?” I asked.

  “She’s nervous,” Grandma said. She was wearing a bright purple and orange silk wraparound, a sort of sari-muumuu hybrid. Her earrings dangled flirtatiously over her shoulders. She winked. “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”

  Mr. Moore arrived at six, bearing meticulously wrapped presents and what appeared to be a giant blue diaper bag. He was a little shorter than I remembered, a stout man with a bushy pompadour of gray-white hair. His face seemed naked without the old matching mustache.

  “Amy.” He nodded his head in greeting.

  “Come on in,” I said.

  Mom was upstairs applying her lipstick for the third time since he’d called to say he was on his way. We stood in an uncomfortable silence until Brian came bounding up the stairs. “Richard!” he called. He’d been running on the basement treadmill and was naked from the waist up. His arm, more flesh than muscle, jostled as they shook hands. I wished he would put a shirt on.

  “How’s school?” Mr. Moore asked.

  “I’m getting by, getting by,” Brian said. He was panting. “One day at a time.” He took what I now learned was an insulated Crockpot (hot cider spiced with cinnamon sticks, a recipe from Sandra Lee) and directed Mr. Moore to the living room, talking with him like an old college roommate who’d come to rehash the golden days.

  “I didn’t know you could make drinks in a Crockpot.” I said it to be good-natured, but Grandma shot me a warning look.

  “Oh, you can make all sorts of goodies in those things,” she sang.

  All through dinner, Mom chattered so incessantly Mr. Moore never got a word in edgewise. This seemed to suit him perfectly. He ate slowly, methodically working his way through his plate of food. This proved a difficult task, as
Mom and Grandma alternately spooned a new heaping of mashed potatoes or beef or green beans onto his plate whenever its rose pattern became visible.

  “Richard, we need your help,” Mom said. The dinner dishes had been cleared. We worked slowly on our banana cream pie. “Amy has a boardee we’re trying to talk her out of.”

  “Boarder, not boardee,” I said.

  “Boarder.” Mom winked at Richard as if sharing a private joke with him. As if I weren’t sitting directly opposite her. She rested her chin coquettishly on her hands. “Some man who knows her roommate. You’ve simply got to help us talk her out of it.”

  He cleared his throat. Rumpled his napkin on the table. “Well, let’s see. I don’t know that I’d be much help with that.”

  “But we need a man’s judgment!” Mom declared. “Look at us: three women with only Brian to serve as the voice of reason.”

  Mr. Moore took advantage of this segue to defer to Brian, who managed to change the subject via some stealthy route. Soon he was telling the story of an ill-fated accident in the dissection room that involved a scalpel and Mr. Body’s testicle. Mr. Body was his cadaver. We’d heard the story before, but Mom and Grandma laughed riotously anyway, eager for Mr. Moore to find it funny.

  The laughing set the conversation back on a harmless track. Mr. Moore only joined in when pressed. He was reserved to the point of timidity, polite and neat. He was, in every way, the direct opposite of my father.

  When Mom stood to clear the dishes, Mr. Moore insisted on helping. The way she colored, you’d have thought he’d paid her the most extravagant compliment. As they walked to the kitchen, he placed his hand on the small of her back. The rest of the night I couldn’t help thinking of this tender gesture.

  6

  Christmas Eve we drove together to Grandma’s for the Karrow family Christmas. Mom’s older brother, Lynn, and younger sister, Patty, were already there when we arrived, along with their children and in some cases their children’s children. Now committed to join the madness, Marie was obliged to come. Mr. Moore was not and did not. He not only failed to be a Fundamentalist, he went so far as to be Catholic. While Grandma had accepted him, she suggested warming the family to him slowly. Grandma had always been faulted for her open-mindedness. She had liked Bill Clinton, thank you very much, and she did not think the New Ageism so vile. Really, meditation sounded very relaxing.

  At dinner I was placed next to Aunt Patty, who spent the entire hour recounting to me her caloric intake for the previous day, meal by meal. She had been on a diet since the mid-nineties. She ate no more than 1,200 calories a day on weekdays, then ate whatever she wanted from five o’clock Friday to noon Sunday. On the Aunt Patty Diet, all holidays counted as Saturdays. A decade of this self-prescribed regimen had succeeded in making her the largest of the Karrow women.

  “I’m happily satisfied,” she said at the end of dinner, “but not bloated.” She lifted her shirt to show me the elastic waistline of what appeared to be her oldest daughter’s recently retired maternity jeans.

  This conversation was topped only by Uncle Lynn’s misconception that I was dating a college professor, as opposed to working as one.

  “How’s the professor doing?” he asked.

  Assuming he meant me, I replied, “Getting by.”

  “You guys have any serious plans?”

  “Plans?” I asked, bewildered. “With who?”

  “This professor guy.”

  “I’m not seeing anyone, Uncle Lynn,” I explained, thinking briefly and not without chagrin of Adam. “I’m just teaching at the university.”

  “Pamela!” he called.

  “Lynn!” she said back. She was perched on the floor, playing with one of the babies. (It had not taken her long to find the nearest baby to hold.)

  “I thought you said Amy was dating a college prof?”

  Thankfully, she didn’t mention my ex-boyfriend. “No, she is a professor, Lynn.”

  He crossed his arms and leaned back to consider me in this new light. “College professor, really? That’s impressive.”

  “I’m adjunct slave labor, actually.” I darted back to accommodate the two-year-old that had bounded into my lap.

  “They take good care of you then? Dental? Vacations? The works?”

  I smiled meagerly. “It pays the rent.”

  “Get down, Lynn,” Uncle Lynn commanded, picking up his namesake from my lap.

  He had promised to open a trust fund for the first grandchild to bear his name. My cousin, Lauren, never cared for the name Lynn, but she had always been opportunistic. She was planning on a big family; she had names to spare.

  “That’s Lynn?” I asked.

  “I know. Seems like she was just born yesterday.” He nodded at Lauren. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they started working on numero quatro soon.”

  “They’re not wasting any time.”

  “It hits you. You’ll see. That biological clock is not some story. Won’t be long before Brian and Marie start to make announcements.”

  I studied my brother. He was sporting a Reese’s peanut butter cup shirt and snapping pictures of his own knee.

  As the recipient of student loans that more than covered his rent three times over, Brian was the most extravagant gift giver of the night. He bought each of the little girls a new collector Barbie, bought me a new DVD player, and bought Mom her first cell phone.

  She turned it in her hands, suspicious of its size. “It’s so tiny!”

  “I’ve started you on the same plan as Amy and I,” Brian explained. “Now you can call us for free.”

  “For free?”

  “Anytime, anywhere, and it won’t cost you a cent.”

  When he said it like that, it didn’t sound like such a good idea.

  Brian explained, “You only have one hundred minutes to use between nine and five on weekdays, but after five you can call anyone you want for free anyway. Or on weekends.”

  “Oh, I see.” Mom said, uncomprehending.

  “Does that make sense?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I thought with your converting the house line to business you could use another phone for personal use.”

  “But it’s so tiny! Lynn, look at this. Can you believe how tiny it is?”

  Uncle Lynn could not be impressed. He himself Facebooked.

  Before leaving that night, I helped Grandma clean the kitchen. She set me to work dividing the leftover cookies for everyone to take home. While I was busy lining a row of gingerbread men atop the peanut butter blossoms, she brought up what she perceived as the precarious state of Brian’s virginity. A First Fundamentalist Sunday school teacher raised during the Depression by men who kept pornographic magazines under every other couch cushion, she was an unpredictable mixture of wholesome innocence and bawdy street smarts. Conversation with her was like shaking the Magic 8-Ball: You never knew what maxim would pop up.

  “Do you know that Marie is staying over at his place a lot?” she said.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Do you think he’s all right?”

  “I’m sure they’re fine, Grandma. It’s a half hour drive from her apartment to his, and there’s a lot of ice and snow this time of year. And you know the sort of schedule they keep. He probably doesn’t want her driving on bad roads when she’s tired.”

  Grandma considered this. She didn’t believe Marie slept on the couch any more than I did. “He’s nearly twenty-five, the poor boy,” she said. “Men can’t help it. God made them the way they are. It’s not like us women have to do anything. We could just walk into a room and they’re ready to get it on.”

  I ripped a long sheet of aluminum foil across the silver razor teeth of the box rim. That Grandma forgave Brian’s behavior in advance bothered me. Why was a man’s impatience for sex biologically justified, while a woman’s virtue was a matter of course? I had yet to hear the church forgive a woman’s lust for being a mere matter of crossed wires and chemical misfires.


  By the time we left the house I was exhausted from the imaginative strain of making conversation with my family. I crawled into the backseat of my mother’s sedan and gratefully rested my forehead against the window.

  “See you at New Year’s! Love ya! Have a good night!” Mom shouted out her car window, cheerfully waving to Aunt Patty and Uncle Lynn. She slammed the door. She said with steel in her voice: “Amy, you cannot have a stranger living in your apartment.” She glared at me through the rearview mirror. “You call Zoë right now and you tell her that you want that man out of your house.”

  “Here we go,” Brian sighed.

  “It’s not a problem, Mom.”

  She explained that Aunt Patty had told her how in Cleveland, just this year, a young girl had been kidnapped from her home and chained up to the back of a van to be used as a sex slave at every truck stop between Detroit and Louisville.

  I didn’t tell her Eli had a van. I reminded her, instead, that Eli was a long-standing friend of Zoë’s and not a stranger.

  “Blood runs thicker than wine,” was her response.

  “First of all, Mom, that’s nowhere near the correct application of the phrase,” Brian said. “And secondly, that’s not even how the saying goes.”

  “What are you talking about,” Mom protested, acting indignant. “Everyone says that.”

  “No one says what you just said. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It does—it means you can’t just trust anyone.”

  Brian laughed. “What does comparing blood to wine have to do with trust? What does that mean? Better a brother than a drunkard? It’s like you’re speaking another language.”

  “Isn’t that the truth,” Mom muttered. She either agreed she spoke another language or thought it was better to have a brother instead of a drunkard. It didn’t matter; now she was being purposefully ridiculous and found her own act entertaining. I always took my mother’s exasperation seriously, but Brian knew how to disengage in just that way that made her laugh. Watching him interact with Mom was like watching a skilled ballplayer fool his opponent with a head fake.