Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [9]
I drove slowly so she could walk her bike in the trail left by my tire tracks. We chained the bike up to a tree behind my apartment and climbed back into the car, shaking the mounds of snow from our wet shoes.
“Which way?” I asked.
She stopped rubbing her chapped hands together long enough to point mutely to the right.
“Did you ride all the way up from Kroger?” I asked, eyeing the grocery bags at her feet.
She nodded. “It wasn’t bad there, but I thought I was going to die taking that hill back up.”
“Don’t you have a car?”
“I don’t believe in them,” she stated.
“How can you not believe in cars?”
“They are noxious, air-polluting machines of death.”
“Machine of death seems a bit harsh.”
“Have you ever been on I-75? Have you ever gone to the junkyard to see the mash of metal that snapped your friend’s leg clean through? Besides, I don’t need a car.”
“But what if you move?”
“I’m going back to the city eventually,” she explained. “You need a car more here than you do in the city.”
“What if you need to leave town?”
“I hitch rides.”
“So you believe in other people’s cars, just not yours,” I said.
“Let it rest on their consciences,” she replied.
She lived in a cramped studio apartment decorated with tie-dyed wall hangings and pots of overgrown Pothos vines. Clothes hung from the futon, the desk, the lamp. I couldn’t see the floor.
Before leaving, I wrote down my number. “Next time you need a ride, just call.”
“Do you always have paper with you?” she asked, nodding at the three-inch ringed notebook I’d pulled out of my purse.
“I always have something nearby,” I replied. “In case I need to write something down.”
“I do the same thing.” Excitedly, she showed me the folded piece of blank paper tucked in her back pocket. “Just in case.”
She thought I kept the paper to write down story ideas. I had meant writing to-do lists.
“Remember,” I said on the way out the door. “Call anytime. I mean it.”
Despite my insistence, I hadn’t anticipated she would actually take me up on the offer. I quickly learned that Zoë is good at accepting invitations. From then on, she never hesitated to ask me for a ride to the English office (she liked to print her manuscripts at my expense) or a pit stop at the grocery. That winter we spent the better part of the post-Christmas blues at each other’s places reading through stacks of novels and drinking black coffee from her French press.
It was her idea that we combine rent. I hadn’t considered having a roommate, but my teaching salary did not stretch so far as I would have liked. I worried about losing my privacy, but my doubts were no match for her logic: It was ridiculous to keep separate places considering we had become inseparable.
When I renewed my lease in April, she moved in.
As housemates we got along well enough, for all intents and purposes. Zoë agreed to put my DVDs back in alphabetical order after viewing and to clean out the hair from the shower drain so long as I stopped using plastic bags at the grocery store and promised to wash the carcinogenic toxins off our fruits and vegetables. I updated her on all the eighties flicks she’d missed growing up with parents who discouraged the watching of television. In exchange, she taught me how to cook without refined sugar or meat (or “animal flesh” as she liked to call it).
She attended Copenhagen Baptist with me when she had Sundays off work. Afterward I listened passively to her diatribes against the Americanization of the Christian Church. Occasionally, she got her panties in a twist over one or another of the Baptists’ faults and transferred to the Methodist church on Hyde and Locust. I never worried. Eventually the Methodists would offend her too, and she’d come back to us.
I didn’t mind her bitterness with the church or her vegetarianism or her moods—all of which were frequently inconvenient. Ironically, the very thing I thought would make us most compatible was the one and only thing I resented her for: her writing. Zoë was prolific. Where it took me hours to produce single paragraphs of decent merit, she could kick