Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [5]
The apartment was cozy with hardwood floors, built-in white bookshelves, and a kitchen so narrow it took considerable maneuvering for both of us to make breakfast in the morning. Kathryn’s property was situated one block from Main Street. It was a ten-minute walk to the coffee shop where Zoë worked, a fifteen-minute walk to the first edge of campus. Best of all, the roof of the adjoining shed constituted a porch off of our breakfast nook. From our vantage point on the roof we observed the comings and goings of college life. We watched packs of girls in high heels and low-cut blouses tripping their way home from weekend bar hops. We watched the numbered 5K runners pacing uniformly by like schools of fish. It was a little like having a private parade every day.
“There’s always so much going on!” my mother would exclaim. “It’s like living in The City, all these people all the time, and all of them so well dressed—even the young men.” And she would swell with pride and declare it was all so “fashionable,” her highest praise. She’d spent most of her professional life as a teacher, and still she thought I had a very glamorous job. No matter how many times I told her my title was Visiting Faculty or Adjunct, she insisted to everyone at church that I was a university professor: professor sounded better.
My mother had a peculiar way with language. She called her ob/ gyn a “genealogist” and thought a filibuster was a dust vacuum. My obsession with words evaded her. She considered language a common tool with which to get common things done, and she rather liked it when people laughed at her way of mixing things up.
I was never so amiable. As a child I struggled with my S’s and found bizarre ways to mix up my consonants. My mother’s friends loved my unintelligible blabber. They would ask me what I was doing in school or what I learned in Sunday school, and I would unwittingly prattle away. When I finally understood that they did this to amuse themselves, I clammed up.
I spent the first grade in speech therapy. Outside of speech class I refused to talk. Silently, I listened to my father as he explained he wasn’t going to be sleeping at home anymore. Silently, I listened to my mother weeping into her pillow every night for the first year after he left. And silently, I entertained my baby brother with Tinkertoys and Matchbox cars while she showered or cooked or mowed the lawn.
When free of the obligation to watch Brian, I preferred books to playmates. I spent recess sitting on the detention wall reading Nancy Drew mysteries and Anne of Green Gables. I kept a journal of vocabulary words to learn and quotes to memorize.
By the third grade my lisp was gone, the familiarity of my father’s presence leaving with it. The books stayed.
Zoë hollered for me the moment she heard the back door open.
“Amy? Is that you? Come here!”
“Hold on,” I said, throwing my bag to the floor and gratefully shaking off my winter coat.
“Amy!” Zoë yelled.
“Coming.”
She stood on tiptoe in the kitchen, patting her hand blindly among the vast array of spices in the top cupboard. Her blond hair was pulled into two short pigtails, uneven and coarse as broom bristles. She was wearing the same red-checkered apron she used when she painted furniture. When cooking, she preferred to wear aprons stained with a worker’s toil. It was her way of reclaiming the traditional symbol of the domesticated woman.
At the sight of me, she gave up her search for the elusive spice. “I have news!” She sang, pivoting her hips back and forth in a little