Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [110]
I cleaned the apartment in a silent rage. I swept and mopped the hardwood floors, scoured the scum from the bathtub with scalding water, worked the dust motes and dried spaghetti sticks out from beneath the refrigerator. I needed to feel the hatred for my father in my arms. I wanted to feel it as a pain in my back. Standing on the bathtub ledge to clean the shower head, my hand on the curtain rod for balance, I slipped and fell, taking the shower curtain with me. I cussed at the curtain, threw it into the bathtub, and hobbled to my bed, my butt and thigh throbbing.
I slept fitfully, feverish with bizarre dreams. At four in the morning I gave up on sleep. In front of Zoë’s vanity mirror, I pulled down my pants to examine the purple bruise blooming across the back of my thigh.
“That’s going to be there a while,” I said.
As a child I’d sometimes wondered what it would be like if a body could survive even if it lost the ability to repair damaged tissue. What if every scratch, bruise, and abrasion remained, a permanent blemish, an unrelenting pain? The mental pictures I’d entertained were horrific: men and women zombies by the age of twenty, skin tattered as old clothes, broken limbs forever askew. Aging would be nothing more than a series of unfortunate, ever debilitating accidents and the fully grown adult a grotesque.
It was a silly horror I invented to flip my own switches, to set my pulse pounding quick with dread. I might not have been so casual with my fears had I known there was some legitimacy to the nightmare. For what were adults if not an accumulation of internal injuries still festering? What were our bitter memories if not wounds still bleeding?
I stared into the open fridge, then out the kitchen window, then at my laptop. And as I sat waiting for my laptop to give me an answer, the story began to write itself.
Linda wakes up one morning to find a form letter in the mail. It reads:
Dear Wife:
THANK YOU for your submission to Mr. Charles Andrew Plumb. We find, however, that you do not meet his current needs. We wish you the best of luck placing yourself elsewhere.
Sincerely,
The Proxies
Linda folds the letter and places it back in the envelope. She glances across the street. Her neighbor, Mrs. Alconbury, is pulling weeds with the same cool, calculated vigor with which she gossips at prayer meetings. She makes a visor of her hand and waves to Linda, who forces herself to smile while waving back.
Inside, Linda goes to her bedroom, locks the door, and lowers herself slowly to her knees. She pulls the shoe box from beneath the bed. She is forty-two. She has been stowing secrets under this bed since sixteen, but it’s getting harder on her body. Gingerly, she stands, sets the box on her dresser, and gently lifts its lid. She lays the new rejection on top of the others that have been tied together with white string.
Linda, maiden name Pendigrass, has been rejected twentyseven times: by three husbands, ten one-night stands, and fourteen boyfriends. Charles’s letter is her twenty-eighth. She keeps the form letters the men have sent in a manila envelope stashed under her bed. In a college-ruled notebook she painstakingly records the date each relationship began and the date each form letter arrived to terminate it. She prefers the delicate blue lines and skinny white spaces of the college-ruled paper. She has never been to college. Writing on college-ruled paper gives her a feeling of accomplishment.
Linda can recite the contents of each rejection. Her work was unsuitable, as were her dimpled thighs and deflated breasts. Or the grievances were confined to trivialities stored in secret against her: that she sometimes left her fingernail clippings on the bathroom sink or confused continents with nations. One