Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [100]
“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