Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [12]
Particulars of its moral code, however, had grown increasingly tiresome. While I couldn’t make love where I didn’t feel love, chastity for its own sake had become pure drudgery. It had been fairly noble to champion virginity when I was sixteen, but the closer I got to thirty the more I began to worry. The more I felt like a baby-maker with a ticking egg timer.
3
Once I got around to telling them, everyone was kind about the break-up with Adam. Zoë said he didn’t deserve me. Mom recited her usual litany of animal kingdom analogies: There were other fish in the sea; you had to kiss a lot of toads to find your prince; don’t throw your pearls to swine. Valerie Powell came bursting into my office the next afternoon breathless and sweating. “He broke up with you?”
“In the cafeteria,” Everett said from his desk without bothering to turn away from his computer.
Valerie was the only other woman from our graduate workshop who stayed in Copenhagen after finishing the program. While our friends moved on to finish Ph.D.s or write their novels in mountain cabins, Valerie promptly went about the business of getting pregnant. By escaping academia when she had the chance, she lived a sane and unhurried life. She was also a practiced gossip.
“Well what are we all doing here then?” She grabbed my coat off the filing cabinet. “You need to talk and I need carbohydrates.”
Ten minutes later, we sat crowded into a Donut Shoppe booth, Valerie listening attentively to my now-detailed list of Adam’s inadequacies, and Everett who had invited himself along, interrupting to volunteer examples I’d forgotten.
“He broke up with me in the cafeteria of the student commons,” I said for the third time. It had become the refrain of the story.
“It’s sick,” she muttered.
“And he had the nerve to be totally calm about it.”
“Jerk.”
“Not even an affectation of grief,” Everett added.
“You want me to kill him for you?” Valerie asked. “Because I could do it.” She gave a wave of her arm over her very pregnant belly, inviting us to examine her late-term physical prowess. She once confessed to me that she’d spent all of junior high peeing in short, quick bursts, having heard at summer camp that doing so toughened your uterine walls for the birth process.
I was grateful that Valerie was back in my life. She and I had been close in graduate school, our friendship the direct result of similar schedules and shared workloads. Once we’d graduated, we’d lost the common complaints that bound us together: There were no more thesis abstracts to belabor or deadlines to dread. We spent a year disbanded, living less than five miles apart but rarely seeing each other outside of a random run-in at the farmer’s market or the library video aisle.
Valerie was the one who rallied us back together for a book club. We invited neighbors and acquaintances, informing them we would be reading serious novels by serious novelists: Gravity’s Rainbow and War and Peace and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When no one else joined the club, we lost no time defecting from the booklist we’d prescribed in favor of more indulgent forays into Jane Austen and the Brontës. We had every intention of rereading the novels, but the majority of our meetings consisted of watching the film adaptations of books we’d already read.
Valerie finished a second raspberry-cream donut. At this point in her pregnancy she couldn’t wear her collection of handmade silver rings on her swollen fingers and her usually curly hair had gone straight. “Hormones,” she’d reply when people asked about the new do. I found the transformation exotic. She