Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [28]
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.
“It’s fine, Mob,” I said. “Honest. Clean it later.”
“I’ll get in here early in the morning.” She kicked another box beneath the bed and shuffled loose mail on the filing cabinet into a neat stack.
“Mob.”
“Tomorrow!” she declared, raising two pointer fingers in the air and tiptoeing over the mess to escape down the hall.
Evicted as it were from my old room, I spent three days convalescing on the couch. Doped up and slack-jawed, I revisited old favorites: Singin’ in the Rain, Alien, My Fair Lady, Spaceballs.
Brian was on break as well. His arrival made things better. When Marie wasn’t on call for her ob/gyn rotation, she was sleeping, which meant I had my little brother all to myself.
The night he came home, Grandma joined us for dinner. Over dessert, Mom made her big announcement: She’d been promoted to Regional Director. In the two years she’d worked as a sales representative, she’d supplemented her income by working as a substitute at the local elementary school. Now, to her relief, she would never have to step foot in a classroom again.
We congratulated her on the promotion. Grandma wanted to know if this meant she’d be getting more free samples. Brian said he needed some wrinkle reducer. And I said no, I didn’t mind that she needed my old bedroom for an office (though it took considerable self-control to resist asking why she’d chosen my room over Brian’s, which was decidedly larger).
Brian and I pitched new products:
Mooning, a perfume aphrodisiac
The Moonwalk foot bath
Crater Cream for acne
Rover, the battery-powered razor for women fighting that pesky mustache
Brian even invented a jingle: “You’ll rave when this Rover shaves!”
“You all think it’s funny,” Mom said. “Mustaches on women is more a problem than you’d think. You remember Mrs. Priory from the supermarket? She looks like Uncle Lynn now.”
Grandma said, “Uncle Lynn looks like Hitler.”
After dinner I took a book to the living room. Brian came in to sit beside me.
“Just to warn you: Mom knows about your little live-in boyfriend.”
I dropped my book to my lap. “What did you tell her?”
“Nothing. She brought it up.”
“Brian.”
“It’s not my fault you’ve lost all common sense.”
He took my foot and popped my toes, trying to irk me. He was always popping things. Knuckles, gum, bubble wrapping.
“Did you read those books I sent you?” I asked, kicking my foot free.
“I don’t have time to read, Amy.”
“You should make time. It’s good for you. Like exercise is good for you.”
“I’ll read this one.” He took the book from my hands.
“Love in the Time of Cholera,” he read. “That’s like titling a book, Love in the Face of Massive Diarrhea.”
His tastes had never been literary.
While Mom and Grandma finished their holiday shopping, Brian and I killed two days with PlayStation and managed five games of Monopoly. Laughing with my brother, I gained some perspective: Introductory composition was not purgatory, and thirty was not so old.
The day before Christmas Eve I was well enough to walk without experiencing vertigo, so Mom drafted me to search the attic for the elusive glass globes. Holding on to the low-hanging rafters, I stepped cautiously from beam to beam. The air smelled of wood and dust, an almost sickeningly sweet potpourri.
My mother never got rid of things; she simply reshuffled them, which gave her the illusion of cleaning house. When the closets filled to capacity, she used to make