Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

  “I’m glad you didn’t come to the funeral,” she said, spooning the spaghetti into a bowl. “The sanctuary was packed. They said we had over four hundred people at the visitation. The line to the cemetery was long enough for some political dignitary. I had to comfort people.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly, a newscaster giving her report. They dressed her mother in her favorite spring blouse. The bagpipers who played at the burial site performed beautifully. The people from her parents’ church were so kind.

  “Everyone’s been great. We have so much food. Food and flowers. I’m sick to death of flowers.”

  Thankfully, I hadn’t asked if she’d received mine. We sat together at the table while I ate. She pulled her legs up to her chest, tucking her knees inside her oversized T-shirt, which made a small hole in the upper left shoulder rip wider.

  “It’s hot,” she warned after I’d already burnt my tongue and spat the noodles back onto the plate.

  She shook her head. “I can’t take you anywhere.”

  I was to sleep in the spare room, the space they’d allocated for the flower arrangements. The odor of decaying blossoms was suffocating.

  “Sorry there’s not much room,” she said. “I told you: flowers.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  I found my arrangement on the center of the dresser. A small bunch of white lilies, and planted in the center—exactly as I had not requested—a silver balloon that read With Sympathy in blue cursive.

  In high school I read a book about a Jewish family that sat shiva to mourn the loss of their adult son. They covered the mirrors in black cloth, and they didn’t cook or clean or wash themselves. For seven days they had no business but grief. Visitors were to console the family, but were not to speak unless the family initiated conversation.

  There were no such clear guidelines for Christian grieving. In my eagerness to project the right spirit, I’d only packed dark clothes. I’d come prepared to sit, to listen, to cry. But Zoë, like her father, dealt with grief the same way she’d dealt with the cancer itself: She worked. When I got up at seven, Jerry had already left for the local paper where he worked as assistant editor. Zoë was in her parents’ bedroom, sorting labeled boxes.

  “Her clothes,” she explained. “She’d already boxed the summer ones.”

  She’d known.

  “Can I help at all?”

  We dismantled Fay’s closets for hours, Zoë all business. These pants were to go in this bag, and those shirts were to go in this pile. The jewelry would be auctioned; anything with stains we would rip for the ragbag. She was as ruthless as she was careless. One by one I folded and bagged and boxed the precious artifacts of a mother and a wife.

  “Zoë, don’t you want to keep some of these things?” I asked, hesitating to force yet another beautiful shawl into the already overstuffed bag of scarves and hats.

  “For what?” Zoë asked shortly.

  “You could keep a few for yourself,” I suggested gently. “Something to remember her by.”

  “Dad’s selling the house. He can’t afford this place, let alone storage for me to hoard junk for some sentimental whim.”

  Of course: the price tag for chronic disease. I finally connected the seemingly unrelated comments she’d been making about auctions, about the housing market, about the insufficiency of her father’s salary. He would live the rest of his life under the financial burden of his wife’s prolonged illness. I worked without saying another word.

  When I returned from carrying the last box to the car, I found Zoë sitting on her mother’s bed staring at a framed photograph of her parents. They were standing on a beach, Fay in a blue dress. Their wedding day.

  Zoë started when I stepped forward, as if caught doing something shameful. Then a change came over her expression; there was a glint of mischief in her eyes. “Want to see something?”

  She took me to her old bedroom. It was tidy, simple: a bed, a rug, an elegant oak dresser. On the dresser sat a glass canister of cotton balls and decorative bottles of cheap lotion.

  Beside the lotions sat a mannequin head.

  “The wig head, for the wig of the day,” Zoë explained. She opened the closet to reveal a shelf that housed several such mannequins. Each wore a wig of real human hair. Auburn, blond, short, long, curly, straight.

  “You weren’t kidding about it being an obsession,” I said.

  “Somewhere along the way, she gave up trying to look like Fay and enjoyed being a new Fay every day.”

  “What did your dad think?”

  “He put up with it.” She picked up the auburn wig, twirled her fingers through its curls. “She tried to pass the collection off as ironic, a purposeful exaggeration of women’s coping mechanisms.”

  This sounded like someone I knew: Zoë came by her flair for theatrics honestly.

  “I think deep down she was genuinely horrified by her appearance.” She carefully set the wig back in its place. “I guess every woman has her vanity.”

  “Vanity? Zoë, you really think it was vanity?”

  The disease took Fay’s breasts; it ravaged her skin and robbed her of her beautiful hair. A body was a machine that could function without a number of disposable parts, and as Christians we’d adopted the lofty belief that a person’s spirit could exist distinctly separate from this biological vehicle so susceptible to temptations and to breakdowns. But you couldn’t dismantle the body piece by piece and expect the spirit to escape unscathed. You couldn’t call it vanity, the loss of the breasts that had nursed your child, or even of the hair that had once seduced your husband.

  “I know—I know you’re right, I didn’t meant it,” she apologized, guilty for the careless comment. “It scares me, though, to realize that who I am is so inexorably linked to my body.”

  I rubbed my ankle, which now ached when the humidity changed. I’d always thought that was an old wives’ tale, the trick knee or arthritic elbow that could predict a coming storm.

  “It’s terrifying,” I agreed.

  Fay’s closets were empty. The chore Zoë had been dreading was over. In her relief, she grew talkative. We sat on the porch swing, her legs on my lap. I rubbed her feet with Luna Lady Peppermint Foot Lotion. The evening sunlight shot through our glasses, illuminating the amber tea. Across the street, three little boys were running around the lawn. The tallest wore a SpongeBob SquarePants bedsheet as a cape. Zoë watched their game intently.

  “I dumped Michael,” she said.

  “When was this?” I asked, surprised.

  “Before Mom’s operation. He wouldn’t come up to be with me. Said he had work.” She shook her head, muttered “jerk” with more spite than the word could carry.

  I rolled my knuckles in the arch of her foot. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t seem to matter at the time, all things considered.”

  The neighbor boys shot at each other with pretend ray guns. “You’re dead!” one shouted. “I killed you!”

  “How do you feel about it?” I asked.

  She shrugged. In the bright sunlight, her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, though I hadn’t seen her cry since arriving. “I can’t even care right now. I’m assuming it will hit me later.”

  “You’ll be over him so quickly you won’t know what happened.” I switched to her left foot, kneading it from the heel up.

  “I should never have gone out with him in the first place.”

  I rallied, “He was your Adam Palmer. As Adam was to Amy, Michael was to Zoë.”

  “And what is that?”

  I squeezed fresh lotion into my hand, thinking. “A good-looking diversion, but not the final destination.”

  “A vacation, but not home.”

  “Exactly.” I tried to remember Michael’s exact words. “You ‘had a nice run’ was how he said it.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Derision.” I smiled. “That’s the spirit.”

  Without warning she started
to cry. She lay down on the swing, crumpled into a ball like a child, her head in my lap. She sobbed until I feared she’d hyperventilate. I ran my fingers through her coarse hair, coaching her to breathe.

  She used her overly long shirtsleeve to wipe the snot and tears from her face.

  “Amy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wasn’t ready for this.”

  “I know.”

  I rocked the swing back and forth. There really wasn’t anything else to say.

  That night we slept together in the spare room. I waited until the lights were out, conversation stretching to its second hour, to tell her about Eli. It seemed wrong to call attention to the trivial melodrama of my own love life the week of her mother’s funeral, but all evening she had been so uncharacteristically transparent, so full of intimate confessions, that I felt inspired to reciprocate.

  She had been telling me how when she was a child they were always moving from one place to another, her parents never interested in settling down. How she’d learned not to get too attached.

  “I was fine on my own and I learned to be proud of it,” she said. “But I forget sometimes how lonely it was. Even now, this awful lonely feeling comes over me. Like no one knows me. That I’m unknowable. I live my life constantly preparing for that moment when a person I love will look at me and realize I’m a stranger.”

  She propped herself up on her elbow.

  “It’s like I prepare myself to be disappointed, or to be misunderstood. That’s what worked about Michael and me. He made me feel safe, because he never looked that deep. If that makes sense.”

  I told her it made sense.

  After a long pause I said, “Zoë, I think I’m in love with Eli.”

  It was the first time I’d heard her laugh in weeks. “Really,” she said.

  She was less entertained when I explained he was not only attracted to me but had acted on the feeling.

  “You think you’re attracted to him,” she repeated sarcastically when I’d confessed everything. “So that’s why he moved out.”

  “It was only the one night.”

  “Has he told Jillian?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  I begged her not to hate me.

  “Why would I hate you?”

  “Jillian is such a good friend. I guess I felt like betraying her was betraying you.”

  “So you made a mistake. You made it right. He moved out, anyway. And you haven’t seen him since? Then it’s up to him to make things right with Jillian. That’s not your responsibility.

  “I like Jillian,” she added. “Her various neuroses aside. But she’s not like you—we never had what you and I have.” She looped her arm through mine as she said this, an unselfconscious, automatic gesture. I realized Eli had been right about our friendship: She would never have hurt me wittingly.

  “Eli,” she mused. “I would never have thought Eli your type.”

  “Do I have a type?” I asked, more worried than curious. I was picturing youth pastors with crew cuts, who carried Palm Pilots on their belts and listened to early nineties’ Christian rock.

  “I suppose saying a person has a type flattens them unfairly.”

  Her own statement struck her as important. She was wired enough to elaborate, to take a little mental trip away from thinking another second about how to survive without her mother. She talked until I couldn’t stay awake, her voice even and analytical, her open eyes fixed on a thought she was determined to articulate. Something about her and Michael, about the fundamental flaw of their relationship, about the impossibility of loving someone wholly and sincerely.

  “You should write a book,” I murmured.

  “Based on the life of Zoë Walker?” she asked.

  “I hear memoirs are all the rage.”

  “All right.” She rolled over on her side. “But just remember you said that when you show up on page five.”

  The next afternoon Zoë packed me a Zoë lunch: hummus and cucumber on rye with two organic Jonathan apples and a bag of dried pineapples. In the driveway she kissed my cheek good-bye. She made me promise to write at least once a day.

  I hated leaving her in that house. As I drove home, the burden of unfinished work compounded the depression I’d felt since arriving in Chicago. Final grades were due Monday, and I hadn’t even made it through half the essays I had to mark. At this point, it was hard to care. In light of the past week’s events, very little I’d ever worried about seemed that important.

  I tried to pray, but even the simplest prayer was impossible. Talking with Ashley about her sister’s death and then living two days beside Zoë’s grief had made me acutely aware of God in a way I’d never experienced before. This was a God silent and terrifyingly other, the unknowable force that knelt down to blow the dust in motion and then ascended back to His throne to watch the drama, the universe like a top set to the ground spinning. Particles blowing apart and cleaving, birthing suns, stitching babies, sprouting cancers. It was chance, the one missing gene; chance, the single cell that decided to stage a coup.

  The impact of the accident woke me from my daydream. I was in the right lane veering to the left when, from distraction or caffeine deficiency or pure negligence, I failed to check my blind spot. I felt the impact before I registered the shrieking scrape of metal on metal.

  The brief sideways collision knocked the driver’s side mirror clean off, but otherwise my car was unscathed. I pulled over. The other driver begged me to settle down, to please stop crying. He insisted his truck wasn’t worth the trouble. It was halfway to the junker already. When I saw the two-foot-long dent that had stripped the paint from his truck, I cried harder. On a scrap of paper I’d found in my purse, we exchanged information quickly. He sped off, leaving a cloud of exhaust in his wake.

  In the car, I set my trembling hands on the wheel and tried to make the world stand still.

  I bypassed the exit to Copenhagen and went straight home, certain I needed nothing more that moment than to feel my mother’s arms around me.

  I’d hoped for sympathy; I was given censure. She was angry that I hadn’t told her I was in Chicago. That I had been in an accident only confirmed every suspicion she had against highway driving.

  “Fortunately, his information is bogus,” she said, returning to the kitchen with the wrinkled scrap of paper I’d handed over to her at the door.

  She was dressed in a hot pink jumpsuit, her skin an orange tan and her hair frosted blond, an ensemble incandescent against our yellowing kitchen wallpaper.

  “This isn’t a real insurance company,” she said. “That’s probably why he was so eager to get out of there.”

  “If you’d have called the police, he would have lost his license,” Richard explained needlessly.

  Mom propped her hand on her hip. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t call the police,” she said.

  “I don’t know—I wasn’t thinking. Thirty years old, and I forget what to do in a state of emergency.”

  Richard made an admirable attempt to cheer me up: “I’m fiftyone, and I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.”

  “That’s reassuring.” I spun my coffee cup around and studied the rainbow on the front. Bubble letters read Virginia Beach or bust!

  “I’ve had worse with the old Dodge. It’ll be taken care of. ‘Don’t be anxious about anything,’ ” Mom recited, joining us at the table. “ ‘But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.’ ”

  “I think He has more to worry about than dented fenders,” I said.

  “If He has the hair on your head numbered, He has your fenders counted.”

  I gave her a look.

  “What?” she asked.

  She was too excited about Brian’s Big Day to share in my misery.

  The wedding was a week away and already our house was as bustling and chaotic as Zoë’s had been silent. Dresses hung in plastic, corsages chilled. There were rehears
als and scripts and props. Everyone had their part and seemed comfortable with their lines, while I stood mute at center stage, staring at the waiting darkness, hoping for a cue.

  22

  Mom’s church friends Sandy Baldwin and Mrs. Jenkins drove over the afternoon of the wedding rehearsal for a complimentary Luna home-spa treatment. I had been coerced into attending. To my mother’s endless distress I’d pulled two all-nighters to finish my grading. Lack of sleep was terrible for the complexion: She would not have her daughter wearing eye bags to her son’s wedding.

  I sat across from Grandma and to the right of Mrs. Jenkins, my third grade Sunday school teacher, who liked to take personal responsibility for the fact I’d turned out so well. I traded surreptitious glances with Grandma over the table while the women talked: I was still weightless from the first euphoria of summer vacation and had patience enough for the both of them.

  “I have eight grandchildren now,” Mrs. Jenkins answered to my polite query. “Seven by blood; the eighth from my Robert’s wife’s first marriage.” She dipped her hands in the warm wax Mom had mixed up in our old popcorn bowl. The old lady’s manicured red nails had terrified me as a child. Though her hands had wrinkled and shrunk with age, the pointed red nails had not changed. It gave me an almost physical jolt to see them.

  “It’s not a good situation. He’s nearly twenty now. Into all sorts of things that are of no benefit to anyone. But I guess every family has one of them.” When she lifted her hands, the wax gathered to a point at her fingertips. “Not my business.”

  “That’s why there are so many problems with the youth today,” Sandy said to me. Her expression was one of desperate concern. She was wearing cucumber slices on her eyes; the round whiteness of the cucumbers made her appear all the more alarmed.

  “These young children don’t have the Lord in their hearts,” Mrs.

  Jenkins said. “We need to make a great effort to teach them while they’re young.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Grandma. “We do right by some. What’s Lisa up to now? She was always a bright girl.”