Amy Inspired (28 page)

“I’ll get dressed,” I said, angry that I hadn’t already.

We walked with a good foot of sidewalk between us. I hoped he would reach for my hand, a public gesture to redeem what I already knew had been a mistake, but he couldn’t even bring himself to meet my eyes. We mourned the damaged trees and said nothing of what had or hadn’t happened between us.

Thankfully, Kevin and Diedre were already at the restaurant when we arrived. Kevin smiled, offered me a croissant, and asked how we’d enjoyed the storm. I blushed severely.

Eli went to work straight from brunch. I was relieved to see him go.

I knew I’d lost him for good even before he told me he was moving out. It had been a stupid mistake, a thing that happened when good friends who liked each other well enough got a little lonely, got a little too close. I said these things to him after he’d announced he was leaving. As with Adam, I regretted that I hadn’t been the one to initiate the inevitable. Two days of careful politeness and outright misery; I should have kicked him out.

He knelt on the living room floor to pack his clothes. I remembered the first day we met, how thoughtlessly he’d tossed them onto the driveway. Now he took his time, wrapping his shirts into little cocoons he then tucked into his duffel bag in rows.

“Zoë can’t be gone for long,” he said.

“No, I’m sure she’ll be back by the end of the week.”

“You’ll call me if things get bad with her mom.”

“You’ll still be working with her,” I pointed out.

I showed him to the door, promising I would be back from class by four to help him move his desk and artwork. Back upstairs I leaned on the kitchen counter, dreading the day. I cringed as the Volkswagen revved to life.

Classes were terrible. I left my notes at the office and had to struggle blindly through my lessons. By the last class I gave up and made the students write in their journals. They lost interest quickly and whispered to one another, drew pictures in their notebooks. One fell asleep, but I didn’t have the energy to make a spectacle of him. I stared out the window and remembered the peculiar, pained expression that had flashed across Eli’s face when I told him he hadn’t hurt me, if that was what he was worried about. It was a revelation to me that I could lie so effortlessly; I had almost succeeded in deceiving myself.

I dismissed the students early and rushed home, but his things were already gone. I searched the apartment up and down for a note or an explanation. An apology. He’d left without so much as a drawing.

It took three days of phone calls to get ahold of my mother. After months of nonstop phone calls, my mother had abruptly stopped harassing me. We had only spoken briefly about the fight with Zoë (she was on my side, naturally) and the return of Fay’s cancer (it was in God’s hands, of course). I had been the one to hang up, impatient with her easy answers. Now I regretted being so rude. I was frustrated with myself, worried about Zoë, distraught about Eli. I needed to talk to her.

“Is everything okay?” she asked. “You sound terrible.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “But what about you? How are you? I haven’t heard from you.”

“I know, I know, I’m so sorry—I
have
been meaning to call, but things are so busy here. I’ve been working every day of the week, and I’ve got two new salesladies to train. Things are piling up like you wouldn’t believe.”

“You could have at least e-mailed me.”

“Oh, honey, I really am sorry. You sound bothered. Are you sure you’re doing all right?”

I updated her on school and tedious Copenhagen news. I had hoped to circle conversation toward Eli eventually, but Mom was only half listening, her eyes on the kitchen television or a newspaper. I changed the subject to one I knew she could carry. “How’s the wedding planning coming?”

“Oh, it’s madness. We’ve been trying to decide on a restaurant for the rehearsal dinner, but you know Brian and Marie—so indecisive. It takes me hours to get them to say what they really want. I keep telling them we have the money now, so we can do things nice, but Brian says he wants to have it at the Roadhouse Steak Pit. Honestly.”

As she continued to talk, I realized that this “we” she spoke of referred to her and Richard. It soon became apparent that he had offered Mom money for the rehearsal dinner and the various components of the wedding she had wedged herself into organizing.

“Are you sure you want him to help?” I asked.

“If I’m going to be indebted, it might as well be to someone I know.”

“That actually sounds like the worse kind of debt to be in.”

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she replied. “Richard and I are going away.”

“Oh?”

“Well, he has these frequent flyer miles adding up, and he’s practically won himself a free trip to Napa Valley. We’re going next week—it’s completely last minute. The house is an utter disaster. I have clothes all over the living room and in the kitchen, and I’ve been trying to get my mail forwarded to Grandma, but I don’t know if they’ll only do that for just seven days. Do they do that for seven days? I think they do.”

“Seven days is a long time,” I said.

“I know, I’ve never been on a vacation for more than three, and your father always insisted on going to old historical sites. He liked to see those cemeteries and war statues—Civil War this and that. I’m beginning to think I didn’t know myself then. I don’t know why a body in their right mind would want to walk around a lot of dead people and call it a vacation. If
I’m
going on vacation I’m going to enjoy myself. I know those men died for us, and don’t get me wrong, I
am
grateful and all, but if it’s my vacation I don’t want to be moping around thinking of a lot of men dying on some field for the slaves.”

“Where will you be staying?”

“The Meridian,” she answered. “They have a pool and a downstairs restaurant, where we can get free breakfast and pool towels.
And
they have AA discounts.”

“What, rewards for alcoholics?”

She missed the sarcasm entirely.

“Richard only drinks red wine, Amy. It’s good for his heart.”

Since Mom had started seeing Richard, I’d maintained a tedious picture of their weekend courtship. Saturday would be spent at Sam’s Club, buying bulk birdseed and making lunch of the sample stations. When he accompanied her to church, they would linger at the Sunday school donut table, nursing weak coffee and discussing the contemporary relevance of Habakkuk.

I had only just reconciled myself to the fact that my mother had a steady boyfriend while I didn’t; it was a testament to my selfishness that I’d never considered the possibility she and Richard might actually fall in love.

There was one benefit to living by myself again. Free from the tyranny of Zoë’s moods and from the constant awareness of Eli’s presence, I finally began to write.

The first story I finished was about a twenty-something sculptor who returns from her honeymoon to a one-bedroom apartment in the backwoods of Kentucky. This new life is four hours from her friends and studio in the city where they met. Her husband’s work mystifies her. While he’s explained what he does many times, she can never understand it, so she tells people he is in business management.

As soon as they return, he has to leave for a business trip. He unpacks his suitcase, only to replace swimwear with business suits. For an entire week the young bride is alone. She washes the honeymoon laundry, the slinky lace lingerie still smelling of perfume and lovemaking, the string bikini still saturated with Coppertone and sunshine.

She cleans. There is nothing else to do. She sweeps, mops, dusts. She burnishes the sink faucets with an old toothbrush. As she works, the acrylic nails she had glued to her fingers for the wedding begin to peel and chip. She never wore fake nails before meeting her husband. Before, her nails had always been dirty with clay and chipped at the edges. The acrylic nails tell her that she had sold out, that something she valued has been lost. Her husband comes home the following Sunday to find her at the sink, weeping and trying to rip the nails off her fingers.

The story ended abruptly. I had never been good at conclusions. Reading over the ten pages, I wondered if the symbolism was overwrought and the conversation between the man and wife melodramatic. I knew about loneliness; I could only imagine loneliness in marriage. Of all the disappointments in life, the failure of marriage wounded me most deeply.

I saved my story and slipped off to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I felt personally responsible for my loneliness. Zoë and Eli had both left because of me, because I’d flunked, on both counts, the principal rules of friendship.

“Maybe Zoë’s right,” I told the ceiling. “I spend more time planning my life than living it. I love the attention of men I can’t have. I really have no idea at all what I’m doing. I try so hard to be the kind of Christian I was raised to be, but I’m starting to wonder what that really looks like.”

I listened to the silence.

“Or if it matters at all.”

I didn’t know what woke me. The room was pitch black. As if from a bird’s-eye view I saw my body in a bed that stood in the middle of an empty room attached to an empty apartment. I mapped the trajectory to Eli, who slept blocks away. I flew over the town, past the cornfields and the checkered plots of farmland to the trafficked streets of the suburban fringe, to my mother, and farther into the busy city to my brother and then to Zoë in Chicago. My father was so far on the horizon he disappeared.

I had never been more painfully conscious of the fact that I slept alone, but the awareness of my solitude was followed by an equally profound awareness of an invisible Presence in the room, filling the corners, over my bed, protective and jealous. The knowledge that I was not completely alone comforted me, like the arms of a mother or the familiar nearness of a lover.

15

It has been my experience that when you ask God for help, He often responds by asking you to help someone else.