Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [77]
“Where will you be staying?”
“The Meridian,” she answered. “They have a pool and a downstairs restaurant, where we can get free breakfast and pool towels. And they have AA discounts.”
“What, rewards for alcoholics?”
She missed the sarcasm entirely.
“Richard only drinks red wine, Amy. It’s good for his heart.”
Since Mom had started seeing Richard, I’d maintained a tedious picture of their weekend courtship. Saturday would be spent at Sam’s Club, buying bulk birdseed and making lunch of the sample stations. When he accompanied her to church, they would linger at the Sunday school donut table, nursing weak coffee and discussing the contemporary relevance of Habakkuk.
I had only just reconciled myself to the fact that my mother had a steady boyfriend while I didn’t; it was a testament to my selfishness that I’d never considered the possibility she and Richard might actually fall in love.
There was one benefit to living by myself again. Free from the tyranny of Zoë’s moods and from the constant awareness of Eli’s presence, I finally began to write.
The first story I finished was about a twenty-something sculptor who returns from her honeymoon to a one-bedroom apartment in the backwoods of Kentucky. This new life is four hours from her friends and studio in the city where they met. Her husband’s work mystifies her. While he’s explained what he does many times, she can never understand it, so she tells people he is in business management.
As soon as they return, he has to leave for a business trip. He unpacks his suitcase, only to replace swimwear with business suits. For an entire week the young bride is alone. She washes the honeymoon laundry, the slinky lace lingerie still smelling of perfume and lovemaking, the string bikini still saturated with Coppertone and sunshine.
She cleans. There is nothing else to do. She sweeps, mops, dusts. She burnishes the sink faucets with an old toothbrush. As she works, the acrylic nails she had glued to her fingers for the wedding begin to peel and chip. She never wore fake nails before meeting her husband. Before, her nails had always been dirty with clay and chipped at the edges. The acrylic nails tell her that she had sold out, that something she valued has been lost. Her husband comes home the following Sunday to find her at the sink, weeping and trying to rip the nails off her fingers.
The story ended abruptly. I had never been good at conclusions. Reading over the ten pages, I wondered if the symbolism was overwrought and the conversation between the man and wife melodramatic. I knew about loneliness; I could only imagine loneliness in marriage. Of all the disappointments in life, the failure of marriage wounded me most deeply.
I saved my story and slipped off to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I felt personally responsible for my loneliness. Zoë and Eli had both left because of me, because I’d flunked, on both counts, the principal rules of friendship.
“Maybe Zoë’s right,” I told the ceiling. “I spend more time planning my life than living it. I love the attention of men I can’t have. I really have no idea at all what I’m doing. I try so hard to be the kind of Christian I was raised to be, but I’m starting to wonder what that really looks like.”
I listened to the silence.
“Or if it matters at all.”
I didn’t know what woke me. The room was pitch black. As if from a bird’s-eye view I saw my body in a bed that stood in the middle of an empty room attached to an empty apartment. I mapped the trajectory to Eli,