Read Amy Inspired Online

Authors: Bethany Pierce

Tags: #Fiction, #Christian, #General, #Religious, #ebook, #book

Amy Inspired (10 page)

“Have fun with that,” he said, dumping the third crate of binders on my bed. “I left the other donuts in the kitchen.”

He’d stuffed the rolled up Cheetos bag between the two remaining chocolate cream-filled pastries.

Monday evening the flu moved to my head. Out of pity, Zoë temporarily lifted the two-square-per-use toilet paper rule she’d instituted as part of her personal Save the Earth Campaign. She even returned from work with two boxes of tissues infused with aloe, tossing them to me on the way out the door for her now twice a week stint at the gym: When she wasn’t running she was sweating at
Gavin’s Glutes and Abs
. She reminded me that I wouldn’t get so sick if I took the vitamin supplements she set out for me every morning. I would have taken pleasure in hating her, but they were very nice tissues.

When Eli knocked on my door I told him to come back later. “I haven’t brushed my teeth all day.”

“I don’t care,” he said.

“I haven’t brushed my hair either.”

He not only let himself in, he went so far as to sit on the corner of my bed.

“I brought something for you,” he said. From a paper bag he produced a bottle of NyQuil, a bag of cough drops, and a set of stickers.
Great Job!
they said.
You’re AWESOME!
I held them up questioningly.

“For your papers.” He poured NyQuil onto a spoon for me. “I wanted scratch and sniff, but I couldn’t find any.”

I dutifully drank the NyQuil. “I don’t think anybody’s going to do so
awesome
on their papers.”

“Then they can be for you. Didn’t you ever have a sticker collection?”

“No.”

“I thought all girls loved stickers. Stickers and ponies.”

He peeled a
GENIUS
ladybug and stuck it to my T-shirt just below my right shoulder. “And men who ride ponies.”

In spite of my headache, my fever, even my resentment at his presence, I laughed.

I graded in bed, essays fanned out to my left, grade book to my right. I drank NyQuil straight from the bottle. The syrup slid warm and viscous down my throat, the medicinal licorice flavor lingering in a film on my lips. Delirium set in. It was not unpleasant. The paper in front of me began to go fuzzy around the edges as I read the next student’s thesis statement.

Since the dawn of time there have always been forms of entertainment. And like most everything else, entertainment has been criticized since there existed a Being knowledgeable enough to know how to do it. In ancient times, Jesus was criticized by many of the people and even went so far as to crucify him by nailing him to a tree in front of all his fans. More recently, The Internet has been going through a criticism war right now on whether the Government should be able to sensor what people do there. What I would argue and will argue in this paper is that that is not advisable because it is a violation of our Free Speech.

Jesus had very fickle fans
, I wrote in the margin.

I giggled until I got the hiccups. After a fifth read through of the paragraph that proved no more illuminating than the first, I threw the paper to the floor, crawled down under my comforter, and decided to sleep until New Year’s.

I woke from NyQuil-sodden dreams to find my mother sitting at my bedside, her Chantilly perfume and vanilla lotion thick in the trapped bedroom air.

“Honey,” she said, cupping my face as she would a child’s. “You look
dreadful
.”

“I’b sick.”

“I know. That nice groundskeeper told me you were in bad shape.”

“The groundskeeper?”

“That young man with the ponytail out shoveling the driveway. He let me in.”

I squinted up at her, forcing my eyes to focus.

“He’s not a groundskeeper, Mob. That’s Zoë’s friend I was telling you about.”


That’s
Eli?” Her face went through a variety of contortions as she reformulated her previous impression of Eli. “Amy, you can’t possibly be serious about him.”

“I don’t even know him.” Rousing from my drugged stupor, I frowned. “Why are you here?”

“I had a Luna Landing in Columbus and was planning to do some Christmas shopping, so I thought, well, why not just come and pick you up to join me.” She went to the window, opened the blinds. “And it’s a good thing I did. You’re in absolutely no condition to drive home.”

I rolled over to avoid the sun. “I can dribe, Mob. I hab a cold. I’b dot paralyzed.”

“I’ll not have you driving under the influence.” She lifted the half-empty bottle of NyQuil as proof. “You can’t handle medications. Never could—your system is too sensitive.”

She went to the bathroom to throw the bottle out. Her voice carried from the hall. “Whenever I had to give you those little blue pills for your ear infections, I’d find you sleepwalking in the basement searching for your Cabbage Patch dolls in the pantry. And then there was the time with the wisdom teeth.”

She returned to the bedroom, her silver, sparkling Luna Lady makeup bag in hand. The front was emblazoned with the Luna emblem: black contours that suggested the figure of a woman holding a sphere in the crook of her robed elbow.

“What was that vile drug the dentist made you take? Viacon? You lay on the floor in the bathroom laughing so hard you couldn’t breathe. I thought you were having a mental breakdown. Here. I brought you something for your Rosacea.”

“I hab decided I hate by life,” I announced.


Hate
is such a strong word. How about some soup?”

I examined my mother’s Luna uniform: a pants suit with thick-set heels dyed a matching periwinkle. I still wasn’t sure if it was morning or afternoon. My mother’s schedule had been anything but routine since she’d become a salesperson.

As a Luna representative, it had been my mother’s duty to travel the tri-state with her toolbox of colors, painting women in wrinkle-reducing, sunray-blocking cosmetics while peddling Luna Lady philosophy:

A Luna Lady never forgets she is a celestial body.

A Luna Lady is like the moon, beautiful but inconspicuous, a reflection of the natural beauty shining around her.

A Luna Lady lives in rhythm with that heavenly body’s monthly cycle.

It was feminine mystique with boysenberry lip gloss at fifteen bucks a pop, hardly the material for a First Fundamentalist. My mother enclosed a tea-stained scrap of paper quoting Proverbs 30:31 in each complimentary blush compact to redeem all business transactions of any of That New Ageism. I assured her I didn’t think her morals compromised; all that mattered to me was that she had finally found work she loved.

She made herself busy in the kitchen while I showered. Washing with Luna Bubble Grit was like using sand for soap. I came out of the shower scratchy and red.

“I feel sunburned.” I accepted the bowl of soup she’d heated.

Zoë was at the table already halfway through the bowl my mother had heated for her. “You look sunburned,” she confirmed.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work,” Mom said. “The exfoliating bubbles create microscopic abrasions on the skin that scrape off all the dead cells. When you wake up in the morning, you wake up to a whole new you!”

We argued about my holiday plans. She insisted I come home with her. I argued I could drive myself. As I threw up the tomato soup and crackers five minutes later, my argument did not prove convincing.

I lay in bed while she packed my suitcase. This consisted of her holding up blouses and pants from my closet to which I was to nod yes or no, an arrangement reminiscent of childhood when she helped me pick out my clothes for elementary school every morning while I lingered in bed as long as physically possible.

“How about this black jacket?” Mom asked.

“Old.”

“You have some nice sweaters.”

“Not from the top row. Those are going to Goodwill.”

She raked through the hangers. “You should wear that little pink blouse I bought you last year. The one with the little white buttons. ”

“Absolutely no blouses.”

“This?”

“No.”

“This?”

“Okay, that.”

Zoë sat at my desk chair watching our little operation. I eyed her suspiciously. I sometimes feared she was taking notes.

Growing up, Zoë had lived in NewYork City, D.C., and Chicago, where she graduated from high school. Her personal geographic bearings were far encompassing, the borders of Ohio proportionally insignificant. As if Zoë’s wanderlust hadn’t been enough, we now had Eli, who’d spent six weeks backpacking through Europe and an entire semester studying art history in Italy. I felt positively provincial sandwiched between this tête-à-tête of expatriates. Both my brother and I lived within an hour’s drive from home and were always visiting. I’d naively believed that if I were geographically close to my family we’d stay emotionally close. Our mutually single lifestyles had kept that illusion alive temporarily. Now Mom had Mr. Moore and her new career as a Luna Lady, Brian had Marie and his textbooks, and I had the feeling I’d missed something.

It wasn’t that I’d never dreamed of travel. I’d indulged fantasies of living a more exciting life in the city by applying to schools in Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago, but they all rejected me. Once settled in Copenhagen, I was resigned, happy with my small-town routine like a cat or a retiree. But now, watching my mother reorganize my underwear drawer while explaining that I wouldn’t get those fuzzy balls on my silk panties if I let them air out instead of putting them in the dryer, I wondered if the closeness of family wasn’t a little suffocating.

“I should warn you,” Mom said, taking the exit that led home.

I blew my nose. “Ward me what?”

“I’ve been doing some reorganizing.”

“In the house?”

“Well, yes. In your room, actually. Sally Linden called last week requesting an order for Luna Lady Bubble Gum Bubble Bath, and when I went over, she actually ordered a whole anti-aging facial set. Then she calls me a week later wanting to know if I’ll do a Luna party. Ten women came—that’s twice as many as usual. I’ve been so busy I don’t even have time to substitute teach anymore.”

“What does that have to do with my room?”

“It’s a mess. I meant to clean it, but I got so busy this week with the wedding. Marie wants to hang bulbs from trees at the reception— so we went to Internet for ideas.”

My mother always spoke of the Internet as though it were a being one should consult with deference and awe.

“I have just the bulbs she needs. The wedding planner wants her to rent them, but what they charge for every little thing is
outrageous
! So I tell her that I have these bulbs in the attic, and I was going to try to get them, but I can’t get up there without moving everything in your closet.”

“You went into the attic?”

“No,” she said, offended that I would suggest such a thing. “I wouldn’t go up there. I was waiting for you.”

It had snowed in my hometown the night before. Battery-powered candles lit each window of our house, casting slants of buttery light onto the square bushes, the square patch of lawn. Mom paid a man to manicure our bushes year-round. She took pride in appearances.

The aroma of cinnamon, the striped wallpaper, and the ticking of the kitchen clock were so familiar I felt as if I were a little girl again. The nostalgia was a reflex, a brief but pleasant emotion that took me by surprise every time.

Upstairs, the sentiment quickly vanished. Madame Luna had pitched camp in my bedroom. My bookshelves had been cleared, their contents relegated to cardboard boxes lined up on the floor. A filing station had supplanted my old nightstand, and deliveries bearing the Luna Lady emblem covered my bed. The bulletin board that used to hold pictures from high school and then from college now displayed work orders and invoices.

I was completely taken off guard; in all the years I’d been gone, my mother had never touched my room, except to vacuum the carpets and wash the sheets in preparation for my visits. I’d never asked her to leave my room alone, but I’d grown accustomed to it. For years my bedroom had been a carefully preserved shrine to my childhood and a reminder that my mother’s calendar revolved around my homecomings.

She set my suitcase in the doorway. “You can sleep in Brian’s room tonight if you want—I’ll have this stuff off your bed tomorrow.” Even as she spoke, she began to fuss, picking boxes off the bed and shoving them against the back wall.

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