Amy Inspired (26 page)

“That’s different.”

“Your work hasn’t moved on since graduate school.” She said it gently, but the kindness in her voice was condescending.

“You can’t just sit down and write a novel like it’s a nine-tofive job.”

“You can’t sit on the couch eating bon-bons and waiting for a story to hit you over the head either. You have to exercise talent if you want it to work for you.”

“So, what, you think I’m a waste of talent?”

“No.” She paused. “I think you’re a flirt, Amy. I think you’re a hypocrite.”

We were both surprised at what she’d said. I walked out, because I knew I would say something I’d regret if I stayed. I sat on my bed. Zoë slammed a cupboard door three times until the latch finally caught. Dishes rattled. I stood back up, paced, tripped on a T-shirt left in a pile on the floor. I tried kicking the shirt away with my sprained ankle, only to get it wrapped around the brace.

With the T-shirt still tangled on my foot, I crawled into bed and buried my face into my pillow. I didn’t know which was worse: that Zoë might actually believe I was a hypocrite or that she would say such a thing just to hurt me.

Eli was in the kitchen, carefully balancing his burnt toast on the windowsill to cool off. He wanted to know where Zoë was. He’d never seen dirty dishes left overnight; he feared imminent disaster.

“She left.” I poured myself a cup of coffee. I added three heaping tablespoons of sugar and a generous pour of cream.

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. Michael’s, I think.”

I took three gulps of the coffee, carried the rest to my room. Kneeling down, I pulled the stacks of manuscripts I kept in a box under the bed. I dumped its contents, loose-leaf paper, stapled manuscripts, the dozens of workshop critiques from friends I’d highlighted and annotated.

Eli came in the room. “What’s going on?”

“We fought.”

“About … ?”

“The article—the fact that I’m a frantic, compulsive overachiever. Everything.”

“The article?”

“You haven’t read it?”

I yanked the
UrbanStyle
magazine off my desk and tossed it at him.

“It’s about me,” I explained. “And it’s humiliating.”

He sat on my bed, opened to the article and read. I was reminded of what a terribly slow reader he was. Before he could turn to the last page, I closed the magazine shut on his hand.

“You get the idea.”

He opened the magazine again. He tapped the picture. “So this is you?”

I covered my eyes with my hands. “I alphabetize my checklists.”

“So.”

“I have a list of every book I’ve ever written.” “Not a big deal.”

I dropped my hands in my lap. “I have one of every boy I’ve ever kissed.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Written?”

I nodded.

“Well.” He set the magazine on my desk. “You’re conscientious of your commitments.”

“I’m neurotic.”

“Sure. But only a little. No more than is normal. Did you ever think maybe Zoë’s exorcising her own demons? She’s the one who keeps a daily page quota; she’s the one who runs five miles a day. She’s one of the most compulsive overachievers I’ve ever met. Maybe she sees something of herself in you and maybe she doesn’t like it. I really doubt she meant anything by this. She admires you.”

He picked up a sheet of paper from the floor. “Is this your stuff?”

“My stories. From grad school.” I piled a stack together. “Trash.”

“Why would you say that?”

“No one wants it. One rejection is okay. Twenty is understandable. But when you start counting the failures in months it’s time to get a clue.” I sat in my office chair, took a sheet of paper from the stack and folded it over on itself. “Do you know how many articles Zoë’s printed since she graduated? Five. And every time to a wider audience. I’ve never published a single story.”

“Publication’s overrated, Amy. It’s just words on a page. You should write for yourself, not for the critics.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s different for you. You make something and it can exist on its own and people can take it or leave it. But a story isn’t finished until someone reads it.”

“Why don’t you ‘publish’ it yourself then? Start a blog.”

I pressed the origami I had created onto my knee. “I don’t blog. I write fiction.”

“So make it a fiction blog: one story a week. ” The idea excited him. “Or you could publish serial chapters like they used to do with magazines. You could easily find an audience for that.”

“I’m not interested in propping my work up on my own possibly exaggerated opinion of myself.” I pinched the tip of my paper airplane to a point, flew it at Eli. “Editors exist for a reason.”

He caught the airplane, unfolded it in frustration. “There’s no magic to books, Amy.”

“But there is! I love the idea that someone else could for a moment live in a world I created, make it their own. I might have a mental picture of a character, but everyone else who reads the book will see that character a little different. If I invent and then publish an Annie Smith, I’ve created a hundred or a thousand Annie Smiths, each different from the other imagined, but all of them as real as a real person to the reader who falls in love with the story. How many people talk about Mr. Darcy or Scout or Jo March as real people they’ve known? And isn’t that magic? To make something real out of thin air?”

I was so caught up with my own argument it took me a moment to notice the peculiar way he was looking at me. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps he found me as exasperating and as fascinating as I found him.

“It’s the only childhood magic I still believe in,” I confessed softly.

“Fine,” he said, but the strain in his voice had gone. He waved the now-crinkled sheet of paper in the air. “Can I have the rest of this one?”

I shrugged. “Take them all.”

To my surprise, he did.

As the morning passed, so did my sense of victimization. What Eli had said made a kind of sense: Zoë
was
the one who kept a writing schedule and a workout regimen that were nearly militaristic. Even if I tried to stay angry, I found it too exhausting. I had grown up in a home where misunderstandings dissolved into laughter almost of their own accord, my brother too good-natured to fight and my mother too easily distracted to remember an offense.

Zoë was of prouder Appalachian stock, the kind that carried grudges through generations, sparking family feuds fueled by moonshine and loaded hunting rifles.

“I’m going back to Chicago,” she said when she returned to the apartment that night.

“How long will you be gone?” I asked.

She walked right past me, calling for Eli.

He opened the bathroom door. He was toweling his wet hair.

“
You can have my room,” she said. “I won’t be needing it for a while.”

“Where are you sleeping?” he asked.

“I’m going back to Chicago. You can sleep on my bed. But”— she pointed at his chest—“you’d better wash the sheets before I come back.”

“When are you coming back?”

“When I find a new apartment.”

I rolled my eyes.

She stood in her closet and threw clothes into an open suitcase on the floor. Michael, who had come with her, watched from the living room. He’d left his coat on. He seemed both uncomfortably hot and embarrassed, regarding Zoë’s temper with the amused forbearance of a married man who had learned it was better to side with his wife despite the eccentricities of her so-called logic. I wondered if he knew he was one of the things we’d fought over. No doubt it would give him pleasure.

She was in and out in half an hour. She slammed the door behind her.

Eli was taken off guard by the entire spectacle.

I actually found myself defending her behavior: “She gets irrational when her mother’s sick.”

Worriedly, he stood at the living room window and watched as she walked resolutely away from us.

13

After a month of stomping around, one part human and one part Clydesdale, I was finally given permission to shed the cumbersome air cast. Eli drove me to the doctor’s office and sat in the waiting room reading
Highlights
while I had my last examination.

“You’ll have some residual pain,” the physician said. He was the third I had seen throughout this ordeal. I couldn’t even remember his name. “But for all intents and purposes, you’re back on two feet.” He smiled. He couldn’t resist the pun.

On the way home we bought a sleeve of Toll House easy-bake cookie dough to celebrate. I had the very best intentions of baking the cookies. Instead, I put a dozen in the oven and ate the rest of the dough raw while watching
Sense and Sensibility
—a fitting film, I explained to Eli, because the spraining of an ankle served as major plot point in the romance between the beautiful Marianne and the dashing rogue Willoughby.

Eli sat on the floor, his back to the couch on which I was rather unceremoniously camped with the cookie dough to my left and my liberated ankle enjoying its perch on the armrest. As Edward Ferrars began to fall, in an ever so endearing and awkward way, for Elinor Dashwood, it occurred to me that I’d seen this movie at least eight times and wasn’t tired of it. But then I’d always had talent for repetition. As a little girl I played Amy Grant’s “Thy Word” until Mom threatened to donate my Fisher-Price tape player to the church poor box. I read favorite books until I could recite them from memory. In one year I watched
Return of the Jedi
one hundred and twentythree times. Writing turned my childhood love of repetition into a professional skill. When working on a story I could envision the same scene and the same characters a dozen times, perfecting or changing a minor detail with each replay.

My fantasies of men were similarly nuanced and rerun. In my mind’s library of catalogued romances lived men famous, men ordinary, boys I knew, and boys I watched from a distance. The conversations I had with these men, the kisses and otherwise we shared in dark rooms, comprised a collection of ideas taken from cinema, from magazines, and from the novels I’d read burrowed beneath my bedroom blankets, cheeks flushed with vicarious excitement.

I knew better than to expect much from love, from romance. But to expect and to fantasize are not the same thing.

I watched Eli trying to watch the movie, studied the line of his profile, the concentration furrowing his brow. We hadn’t been acting any differently than we had when Zoë was around; he only ever treated me with the friendly detachment of a roommate. When he moved to the couch to sit beside me, I knew better than to expect him to take me in the crook of his arm or to even notice that I was wearing perfume. I never wear perfume.

He fought sleep. His head bowed lower and lower as his eyes grew heavier, until, gently, his cheek came to rest against my shoulder. My breath caught. I closed my eyes, wondered if his lips would taste as spiced as the scent of his skin.

The credits rolled. I turned the volume up to startle him awake. He was only a little bewildered to find the ending had made me cry.