Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

  Did the grounds people lay a trap for this unsuspecting professor? Of course not. But an act of inattention makes a party guilty. Is not one bolt out of place enough to explode the Challenger? I ask you, are there not sins of omission? Inaction is as much a crime as action. If the people of Copenhagen do not demand better grounds keeping we can expect to hear more where this came from.

  When I arrived in my office Friday, I found a bouquet of flowers waiting on my desk. The card read Get Well Soon and was signed The Grounds Committee. This was followed by four e-mails from the president for the Board for Student Rights, who wanted to know if I would come speak at a lecture on their weekend conference devoted to the Health Care Crisis on Campus.

  Everett encouraged me to milk the incident for all it was worth.

  “These are just flowers,” he said. “Think what you could get if you actually pressed charges. There’s money in litigation.”

  “ ‘The love of money is the root of all evil’,” I recited.

  “No, the root is evil,” he said. “Actually, I believe insidious was the word.”

  11

  February took its time. The clouds promised snow but delivered ice. The days blurred together like watercolor brushstrokes bleeding into one pale stain. Though I hated Ohio winters, I was a veteran. Zoë suffered from the lack of color; she dyed twin skunk streaks of fluorescent pink in her hair to compensate.

  Her mood as the month went on gave new meaning to the phrase under the weather. She hadn’t written a successful page in weeks, and as a result the energy that she usually channeled into writing had no outlet. She stayed up until five in the morning baking four dozen whole grain, almond raisin granola bars she never ate. She painted our kitchen yellow. She ran seven, eight, even ten miles a day, until her shins throbbed in protest. Michael recommended total rest. At night he played nurse, rotating Ziploc bags of ice from my ankle to her shins and back again.

  Though Eli, Zoë, and I spent almost every night together in the small apartment, I gravitated away from Zoë’s company and toward Eli’s as a plant naturally strains for sunlight, grateful that at least one of us remained immune to the ubiquitous gray.

  He was applying to artist residency programs on the coast, filling out applications that piled in disorderly stacks. He sometimes talked of moving out. Though the traffic of artists through our apartment had dwindled with the inclement weather, Kevin, the ever-shy sculptor, still appeared every now and again and lingered, a quiet shadow in the background of our busy days. The money he’d poured into his graduate thesis exhibition had left him struggling with rent payments. He lived in a loft over the Chinese restaurant on Main Street and had all the room we lacked. His kitchen consisted of a microwave, a coffee maker, and a hot plate set up on a folding table, his living room of a flower-print velvet couch and a halogen lamp arranged in the corner. He used the rest of the single open room for making and showing artwork.

  I told Eli I thought his moving in would be a good thing for both him and Kevin, inwardly surprised by the disappointment I felt at the prospect of his leaving. But it was only talk. There was always one or another reason why this weekend wasn’t ideal or the next weekend wouldn’t work. Every night he was in our living room, sitting at his desk preoccupied with another project.

  The desk was an old drafting table he’d found discarded on the curb and talked Zoë into helping him carry to our living room. In the last week he’d entertained himself by dissecting and reassembling into collage the twenty-five People magazines he’d bought by the crateful at the used bookstore.

  The collages were expertly detailed and unpredictably bizarre. They featured whimsical landscapes populated by strange little people, segmented celebrities reassembled into disproportionate figures. There was a young man and young woman holding hands against a hot-pink striped wallpaper backdrop. In the next a preacher atop a skyscraper-high pulpit shaking his red tight fist at the city grotesques shopping below. And (his favorite motif) an old man on a bicycle riding through blue skies and puff paint clouds.

  Since spraining my ankle I’d gained seven pounds. I blamed Michael, who felt personally responsible for my accident and apologized with ice cream. I accepted each gift with more resignation than appetite. Apparently, injury is the shortest route to love handles.

  Saturday he arrived with two pints of Ben & Jerry’s.

  “Scoot,” he demanded.

  I made room for him on the couch. He handed me the Chunky Monkey and a spoon. We took turns eating from the ice cream and the leftover oatmeal cookie crumbs Grandma had sent. His temples pulsed while he chewed. Ironic that the more muscle a man has, the more energy he seems to exert for even the slightest exercise.

  “Let me have a look at your ankle.” He rubbed his hands together to brush the cookie crumbs from his palms.

  “But I’m all mummified.”

  “I want to make sure it’s all right.”

  He sat on the hassock, facing me, his legs straddling mine. He propped my sprained ankle on his lap. Unlatching the Velcro that held the boot in place, he gently slid it from my foot.

  “Looks a lot better,” he murmured. “Are you still icing it?”

  I thought of my toes decorated in fondant and chocolate. I nodded. The slight pressure of his hands on the arch of my foot made me feel somehow undressed, a Victorian lady scandalized by her own exposed ankles.

  “So how’s Zoë holding up?” he asked.

  “She’s been icing her legs every night. I think she feels better. I don’t know, she hasn’t talked to me much.”

  He reached for the brace. “I mean how’s she holding up about her mom.”

  “What do you mean about her mom?”

  “She’s back on the drip.”

  I was stunned. (And annoyed. On the drip. Only Michael could make chemotherapy sound like a street drug.)

  “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  He looked as surprised as I felt. “I just assumed you were the first to know.”

  When Zoë walked in the room my ankle was still on Michael’s lap. Her eyes flashed. I quickly put my foot down.

  “Was just checking for swelling,” Michael said.

  But I saw his ears go red.

  “I didn’t know Michael could be so sweet,” I said to Zoë.

  We were at the kitchen table. I was grading quizzes. Zoë was painting creek rocks. She had curious ways of dealing with writer’s block.

  “There’s a lot more to Michael than people give him credit for,” she said.

  I remembered how she’d once told me she would never be able to marry a man who wasn’t physically attractive. I’d assumed she was joking, but whenever I pointed out one of Michael’s particularly dense comments or dim-witted philosophies, she would always come back with, “I know—but he’s sooo good-looking.”

  I asked, “Do you think you’d be with him if he weren’t so handsome?”

  “A person can’t be responsible for good genes any more than responsible for bad ones. It’s such a double standard. Everyone says not to judge a person on their appearance, but they judge goodlooking people all the time. Nice body, handsome face, ipso facto: vapid meathead.”

  “Don’t get so defensive. I was just joking.”

  “No. You were serious.” She dabbed polka dots on the rock with a detail brush. “If you really got to know Michael you’d see him for what he is. All that macho stuff—he does that because that’s the way he thinks he’s supposed to be. That’s what people expect of him.”

  “The fact that he plays to people’s expectations shows just how self-conscious he is. He should be himself.”

  “We all play to people’s expectations, Amy.”

  “Not like he does.”

  “Really?” She twirled her brush in a Mason jar of water. “Why do you pray before all the meals you eat?”

  “Because it’s a gesture of gratitude.”

  “No,” she said. “You do it because people are watching. You rarely pray for your food at h
ome. You only do it in public.”

  I frowned. “So.”

  “So, it’s a performance.” She gathered blue on her newly cleaned brush. “You do it because you think that’s what makes people think you’re a good Christian.”

  Where was this coming from?

  “Zoë, I don’t do it to look like a good Christian,” I countered. “I do it to be a good Christian.”

  She groaned in frustration. “That’s my point. You try so hard to be a good Christian. It’s not about being good. It’s not about being Christian.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  She turned to face me. There was a streak of white paint on her eyebrow. I checked the temptation to laugh.

  “Everyone’s so obsessed with acting right and saying the right things and praying at the right times and in all the right ways. That’s all surface stuff; it has nothing to do with anything.”

  “Are you saying I’m a hypocrite because I don’t pray over all my meals?”

  “Actually, that’s a complete misinterpretation of what I’m saying.”

  “It would help if you would stop talking so abstractly.”

  “I’m not trying to be abstract—” Reaching across the table for the red paint, she’d accidentally tipped over her rinse water. She hastily set the jar aright and ran to the kitchen for something to clean up the mess.

  “We need some more napkins,” she said, trying to dab up the blue-stained water with the only two left.

  Automatically, I got up and clomped to the kitchen to add napkins to the pad of paper on the fridge.

  “What are you doing?” Zoë asked.

  “What?”

  I knew what, but I said it anyway.

  “Don’t write it down.”

  I wrote it down. She stormed off to her room.

  I waited for the clacking of the laptop keys to stop before knocking on her door. She was belly flat on her bed, earphones on.

  “Hey.”

  She hit pause on her iPod. “Hey.”

  I sat in her office chair. I twirled right and left.

  “Sorry about all that,” she said.

  “It’s all right.”

  She rolled over on her back, laying her arm over her forehead.

  “Is it the writing?” I asked.

  “Yes. Sort of.” She twisted the earphone cord around her forefinger.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your mom?” I asked.

  She didn’t even pause to think. “You didn’t ask.”

  “So I’m asking now.”

  She sat up. She set her iPod on her Starry Night nightstand. She’d painted the homage to Van Gogh so thick that the paint peaked in custard-soft tips. “She’s on a new chemo regimen and she’s reacting a lot worse than usual. It used to be she could get over the nausea after two or three days, but now she’s doubling over every time she takes a bite of a cracker.”

  “Is it a new drug?”

  Zoë shook her head. “She’s been on this before.”

  I waited for a further explanation. She didn’t offer one. Her silence was a slap in the face. I realized that she wasn’t annoyed with me and she wasn’t just being moody. She was angry.

  “I’m tired of feeling like you don’t take us very seriously,” she said. “And that hurts, you know? I know what you think of him.” It took me a moment to understand we were talking of Michael and not of her mother. “I know you write him off as some pretty boy toy. But he’s a good guy. And we’re not high school kids fooling around. We’re playing for keeps. I wish you’d respect that.”

  Whether it was my failure to inquire after her mother or my failure to stiff-arm Michael’s new, ridiculous flirtation, I’d taken her affection for granted and by virtue of my nonchalance, and without a single conscious intention to do so, I’d lost it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said without knowing for sure which offense I was apologizing for.

  Zoë’s mom was violently ill. She couldn’t eat without agony. A sip of chicken soup left her in bed for hours. A bite of fish sent her retching in the toilet. Walking from the bathroom back to her bed required all the energy she had.

  As bad as Fay’s health was, it was Zoë’s appetite I worried about. She couldn’t eat a slice of fruit without feeling guilty that she could so readily enjoy a pleasure that had been robbed from her mother. For the first time I noticed the rings beneath her eyes, how her once tightest pants were now falling down at the waist.

  Eli offered to drive her home for the weekend, but she didn’t want to inconvenience anyone. She took the first available bus to Chicago.

  “You’ll be all right?” she asked as she tossed makeup from her vanity into her suitcase.

  “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

  “I mean you two. You’re not going to be weird about being left alone with him?” She eyed Eli as he walked by the open doorway. He was pacing. Jillian had called two hours ago and he was still on the phone, a new record.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  He glanced in the room and grimaced. I grimaced back. I’d never spoken to Jillian, but I imagined her voice shrill and piercing like the sound of his phone and its incessant ringing.

  Zoë called the next night. “Inflammation of the bowel,” she said. “I think it’s a tumor.”

  “Did they say ‘tumor’?” Eli asked, leaning unnecessarily toward the speaker on my phone.

  “They didn’t have to. What else could it be?”

  “What can they do?” I asked.

  “Surgery.”

  We only spoke for a few minutes. When I hung up, Eli ran his hand over his mouth. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. The fear in her voice had been unmistakable: She was terrified of what they might find if they opened her mother up.

  The only thing that cheered Zoë was the prospect of a party. Her UrbanStyle article was set to print the first of March, one day before my thirtieth birthday. Eli decided that as soon as she got back we should have one big party to celebrate both. The way Zoë beamed at the idea, I wished I’d thought of it.

  I tried to drum up excitement, for Zoë’s sake and in gratitude to Eli, but I wasn’t thrilled about turning thirty. I made my mother promise she wouldn’t do anything extravagant for my birthday. She mailed gifts anyway, a sunlamp to counteract my seasonal affective disorder and a Luna Lady Pro X1000 Hair Straightener. There was a note taped to the box:

  I know you have no luck with your hair, but this is a brand new, top of the line product and it works! You can see a demonstration on Internet! TRY IT!! It will make your hair smooth like Lindsay Johnson’s! Love XOXOX–Mom.

  “What is this, to iron your sleeves?” Eli asked. He clamped the flat iron on his shirt cuff.

  “To iron your hair,” I explained.

  “What’s wrong with your hair?”

  While I tried the Straightener, Eli sat on the bathtub ledge to watch with equal parts fascination and horror.

  “Will it go back?” he asked.

  “It’s not permanent,” I said. “You just wash your hair and it goes curly again.”

  I pressed the iron down on a plait of hair. There was a sizzling sound, like steaks on a griddle. Eli winced.

  “Can’t you burn your hair?”

  “Of course not,” I said, worried that I would.

  While I worked my way slowly from one side of my scalp to the other, he worked on talking me out of it. He said my hair reminded him of a Pre-Raphaelite muse. He also, for a fact, knew plenty of girls who worked hard to have hair half as wild as mine.

  This was the first time I’d heard the word wild applied to my hair in a positive way. Wild curls—“your father’s” my mother was fond of saying—were public enemy number one. We tried to cut, to dye, to perm, but you didn’t style curls like this. You could only bushwhack. I’d made my peace with it; for my mother, however, the sheer obstinacy of such hair was an affront. She was forever sending remedies in the wild hope that one day I would return
home looking less like the Bernadette Peters of Broadway and more like the Andie MacDowell of Four Weddings and a Funeral, a movie she loved, despite all the premarital sex. (Such was the power of Hugh Grant’s adorable bumbling.)

  Eli gave up and left me to the business of tormenting my hair into submission. The Straightener straightened, but the quality of the final result was questionable. I went to him for a verdict.

  He was in Zoë’s room, sitting at her vanity, her curling iron in hand and the entire left side of his beautiful black hair sprung into a bouncy Shirley Temple bob.

  “You’re a stupid man,” I said.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I think you look ridiculous.”

  He turned toward me slowly, careful not to upset the curling iron hot near his cheek, and informed me he wasn’t washing his until I washed mine. I said that was fine with me, because I didn’t believe him for a minute.

  When I saw him at The Brewery the next morning taking orders and serving coffee, his hair still wound in loose but persistent curls, I laughed loud enough to turn heads. Everett was at the bar working his way through a stack of books and a bottomless mug. He looked from my hair to Eli’s.

  “What is this?” he asked, exasperated. “Performance art?”

  From the other end of the counter, Eli winked.

  That night I washed my hair. I Googled Pre-Raphaelite.

  The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood comprised a group of nineteenth century English poets, painters, and critics who believed the art of their day was polluted by academic standards. There was mention of the compositions of Raphael, the purposeful mimicry of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand the essays I’d found. I took, like Eli, to studying the pictures.