Amy Inspired (12 page)

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.