Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [112]
I could recall every nuance of that afternoon more clearly than I could remember a single thing I’d done last summer.
If you studied stories long enough, you almost started to believe in plot, to expect your life would progress in a sequential order of events fitted neatly on a straight and narrow timeline. But childhood was not some point in history several miles of black line behind. Childhood was the kernel around which my adult self had been collaged. To age was not to mature but to accumulate. Achievements, expectations, experiences, disappointments—badges applied thin and too early lacquered in place, a mishmash of cheap decoupage. But under the miscellany—the adult I had made of myself—the original self would not be suppressed; she was as close and immutable and necessary as the muscle beating resolutely within my chest. And she wanted the same thing, always. From some internal wellspring transmitted a desire pure and unrelenting, masking itself behind a hundred ambitions, but driven by the same desperate desire of a little girl climbing a tree for her father, hoping, for just one moment, that he’d notice and be proud.
I ripped the photograph from Austin in half, my mother and brother and me on one side, my father on the other. I ripped his half into halves. Burying my face in my hands, I wept, mourning the years I’d wasted trying to please him. I wept in hatred for every birthday he’d missed, every Christmas pageant he’d failed to show. I hated him for not coming and then I hated him when he came. Those few appearances grew shorter and only left me strung out on hope, waiting with bated breath for the next unexpected visit, my daily life colored with suspense. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I convinced myself that somewhere he was watching and that if only I did something grand enough, he would come.
The performance anxiety that so powerfully propelled my ambition also rendered each resulting accomplishment temporarily rewarding at best. I could always do better; I could always do more. Society was no help. I wanted to be Something, but the one person I most wanted to impress was as elusive and changing as the measures of success the world threw my way. Every failure hammered through my skull in resounding unison with my father’s condemnation: I was not good enough.
All my adult life I’d worked hard to forgive him for not being there for me, but I had never forgiven myself for my inability to make him stay.
The sun was up, the neighborhood waking. I wiped my face clean with the back of my sleeve, the warming air soft on my wet cheeks. A prayer welled up within me, a new kind of prayer. I was done begging God to forgive me for being too bitter, too needy, too egotistical, too tired. Repenting one day for being too much, the next for not being enough.
Now I clearly understood my real offense against heaven: the stubborn refusal to recognize that every failing I had—from the first—had been forgiven.
25
In summer Copenhagen slept. Natives reclaimed their rule. Parking spaces abounded. May melted into June, and June leisurely passed, an inner tube floating down a lazy river.
I graded ESL exams online;Wednesdays, I tutored at the campus writing center. But Zoë’s survival was my chief occupation. I set her alarm, I dressed her for work, and I practically force-fed her my best efforts at vegetarian home cooking. If she wouldn’t get out of bed, I’d call everyone on The Brewery phone list to find someone willing to cover her shift. And when she wept I sat with her until she was done, which seemed to offer some measure of comfort.
At first she did little more than sleep and cry and sleep again, the nights of naked grief punctuated by outbursts of irrational anger. She punched her fist in the wall after burning a plate of lasagna. She ranted for an entire hour one night about the idiocy of her father’s realtor. But slowly, visibly, Zoë was becoming Zoë again. In her second week home she gained color; in the third she gained weight.
In the fourth she came to breakfast a brunette. I stared