Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [34]
By the time we left the house I was exhausted from the imaginative strain of making conversation with my family. I crawled into the backseat of my mother’s sedan and gratefully rested my forehead against the window.
“See you at New Year’s! Love ya! Have a good night!” Mom shouted out her car window, cheerfully waving to Aunt Patty and Uncle Lynn. She slammed the door. She said with steel in her voice: “Amy, you cannot have a stranger living in your apartment.” She glared at me through the rearview mirror. “You call Zoë right now and you tell her that you want that man out of your house.”
“Here we go,” Brian sighed.
“It’s not a problem, Mom.”
She explained that Aunt Patty had told her how in Cleveland, just this year, a young girl had been kidnapped from her home and chained up to the back of a van to be used as a sex slave at every truck stop between Detroit and Louisville.
I didn’t tell her Eli had a van. I reminded her, instead, that Eli was a long-standing friend of Zoë’s and not a stranger.
“Blood runs thicker than wine,” was her response.
“First of all, Mom, that’s nowhere near the correct application of the phrase,” Brian said. “And secondly, that’s not even how the saying goes.”
“What are you talking about,” Mom protested, acting indignant. “Everyone says that.”
“No one says what you just said. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It does—it means you can’t just trust anyone.”
Brian laughed. “What does comparing blood to wine have to do with trust? What does that mean? Better a brother than a drunkard? It’s like you’re speaking another language.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” Mom muttered. She either agreed she spoke another language or thought it was better to have a brother instead of a drunkard. It didn’t matter; now she was being purposefully ridiculous and found her own act entertaining. I always took my mother’s exasperation seriously, but Brian knew how to disengage in just that way that made her laugh. Watching him interact with Mom was like watching a skilled ballplayer fool his opponent with a head fake.
At home, I took inventory of my old bedroom now that Mom had cleaned. The walls were still pink but for irregular squares of white where the tape from posters had ripped away the surface layer of paint. A crate of Barbie dolls crowded the door. They were, suspiciously, naked. I picked up a Ken doll, considered his hairless, shining perfection. Disturbing that Ken came with underwear drawn directly onto his plastic body while Barbie went commando. Another of society’s provisions for the male sex drive: permanent underwear, impenetrable, to keep Ken’s desires in check.
I reached to place the crate of Barbies with the other dolls that crowded the uppermost ledge of my white bookshelf. The shelf beneath housed boxes brimming with the remaining clutter of my growing up. The one beneath that held two crates of novels. The juxtaposition of childhood play objects and my high school library struck me as emblematic. Dolls to novels: from one romp of imagination to another.
I pulled a heavy sweatshirt on over my pajamas and put on an extra pair of socks before lacing up my tennis shoes. With the flashlight I’d stolen from the kitchen junk drawer clenched between my teeth, I climbed the closet ladder back to the attic and my secret office.
By the watery light of the desk lamp I finished Love in the Time of Massive Diarrhea, systematically chewing the flavor out of the pack of cinnamon gum Mom had put in my Christmas stocking. It was late when I closed the last page. I set the book aside, massaged my jaw. Across the way I could see the neighbor’s television playing in the otherwise dark living room. The commercials flashed on the TV screen, the Christmas lights on the tree beside it chasing one another around the four walls. Together they cast a spinning kaleidoscope of color on the snow where a plastic Rudolph and plastic Santa worshiped a plastic Jesus. Mr. Matlon had passed away while I was in college. I resented the current owners for the garish display they