Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [7]
“What are you watching?” he asked, taking off his coat. He wore a blue muscle shirt ineffectual against the winter temperatures, though perfect for showing off the geometric perfection of his pectorals. Michael had been a medalist for the university swim team; what I’d seen of his body (and, Michael being an exhibitionist, I’d seen enough) was conspicuously hairless, though it had been two years since he’d competed.
“I don’t know,” I said testily. “You lost my remote.”
He laughed, pretending to be offended. “I lost it? Zoë winged it at me.” He looked at the TV, looked at me. “Why don’t you just get up and change the button over there?”
“Too much work,” I said over a mouthful of curry.
“La-zy.”
“You shouldn’t be watching that junk anyway,” Zoë said, tiptapping into the kitchen for her purse. I’d only seen her pick up the remote control once, and that was to hold her novel open while she ate.
“I have one vice.” I poked at the potatoes with my fork. “I’m going to enjoy it.”
I noticed Michael noticing Zoë’s legs. Her legs were beautiful, the product of rigorous work. She trained for a marathon every year, circling the indoor track when the weather prevented her from running on campus. She’d met Michael at the gym. He’d introduced himself, but Zoë had been the one to suggest dinner.
Before meeting Michael, Zoë went through men faster than she went through clothes. When they started dating, I’d assumed he was a fling, a diversion from the emotional exhaustion of seeing her mother through the latest round of cancer treatments. But the months passed, Fay stabilized, and Michael stayed. His inability to speak more than five minutes on any subject of substance wasn’t half as annoying as the fact that some primordial urge left me inexplicably tempted to flirt with him every time he came over.
He sat on the coffee table so that his back blocked my view of the television. I nudged him with my foot. He batted it away.
“We’ll be back late,” Zoë said.
“Adiós,” Michael added with a two-finger salute.
In the shower I stared at my thighs with a routine and vague disapproval. Facing the mirror, I twisted my wet hair into a bun at the nape of my neck, debating a haircut. I worried I was growing a mustache.
All my life I’d mocked commercials for wrinkle reducers and hair dye, believing that if I remained optimistic and ate more vegetables than chocolates, I would age gracefully and one day wake up a welldressed, fit woman of composure and grace. Studying my reflection, I knew I wasn’t miraculously going to be anything at thirty that I hadn’t struggled to become in my twenties. In other words, I was off to a very bad start.
2
When I gave up my predictable nine-to-five job to study writing, people were, by and large, bewildered.
“Oh, like for newspapers and such?”
“I didn’t know people still studied that.” (As if English were a dead language.)
“Can you make a living?”
And my personal favorite, “I was never any good at calligraphy,” from my mother’s best friend, Sandy Baldwin, who thought I was going to graduate school to perfect my cursive.
The acclimation to graduate school wasn’t so much an adjustment as a kind of coming home. I loved the busyness of campus life, the undercurrent of ambition that kept the libraries afloat. At the university, students and professors alike were either having a party or doing work. Both were taken very seriously.
Leaving a good job for graduate school was the single most courageous thing I’d ever done, and for the first six weeks I lived in a state of barely suppressed hysteria of excitement and anxiety. Once school was under way, my route through campus fixed, and my circle of friends established, I lived a small life, anchored to my apartment by cycling deadlines and stacks of assigned novels. I wrote more or less regularly. I read constantly, while walking, eating, bathing. It was a happiness second