Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [94]
Everett and I went to every end-of-the-year reading and graduate student presentation hosted by the English Department. We attended Middle-Class Morality, poems by Dr. Janine Madison’s creative writing class; Leslie Boyle’s dissertation presentation on Women’s Rhetorical Transformations of the Discourse of Domesticity; and Jennifer Donally’s Mirabel LeAnne Johnson’s Circus Feline: Renegotiating Models of the Other. We sat quietly through the presentations before slinking back to our office, stolen soda pops under either arm, one plastic plateful of hors d’oeuvres each.
Amidst end-of-year festivities, the English Department also hosted its annual undergraduate award ceremony. Ashley was the only student I had nominated. She won a $2,000 scholarship for her story about Natalie, which, for lack of inspiration, she ended up titling “Natalie.”
The assembly was held in the ballroom of the student commons building. They could call it a ballroom, but it more resembled a hotel lobby—wallpaper with cream and white stripes, a dizzying flowerprint carpet. Dr. Lindbergh, the presenter for the evening, wore a paisley silk blouse so like the curtain behind her, the competing patterns made my eyes cross. All those in attendance not receiving an award had nominated the winners, who were for the most part overdressed and self-conscious.
Ashley had been thrilled when I told her about her win, but she was positively white at the ceremony. She took her certificate and returned to her seat without once glancing up to acknowledge the applause.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her afterward.
“I don’t know.” She folded the corner of the certificate between her forefinger and thumb. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“What doesn’t feel right?”
“I feel like I made money off of something personal,” she explained. “Like I’m a sellout.”
“You didn’t write that story to make money,” I said. “You wrote it because you had to. Besides, this is an academic scholarship. What’s two thousand dollars to the cost of one year of school? It’s like getting two dollars really.”
“I guess.”
I took her out for dinner to celebrate. We ate at Dinah’s, the greasy spoon of Copenhagen, where the waitresses wore blue uniform skirts with white tennis shoes and every meal came with a blueberry muffin the size of a small cake. We managed to talk for half an hour about writing and books and school and grading.
When we hit a lull in our conversation she confessed,“So I stopped by your church the other day. I went to the service, actually.”
I debated telling her I’d seen her, but decided against it.
“It was kind of weird to be in a church,” she said. “I used to go all the time as a little girl, but it’s been a while.”
I smiled. “It can be a strange experience if you’re not used to it.”
“No, it wasn’t that weird. Well, sort of weird. But not too bad. I’m Episcopalian,” she stated, as if this explained everything. “I’ve been thinking about the things Pastor Maddock said. About eternity and life as meaningless without an afterlife. A depressing outlook.”
“He was posing a rhetorical question, though. Obviously he believes in eternal life and hopes we will consider it a possibility by asking us to imagine existence without it.”
“Well, yeah.” She pursed her lips. “I’m in this art history class. We’ve had to study all these paintings about hell.They’re totally gross: people being disemboweled and roasted on pits by demons.” She wrinkled her nose, as if hell were merely distasteful, a poor concept she could not approve of. “It’s all, like, really demented.”
I had seen pictures of the paintings Ashley was talking about, church ceilings depicting the damned in a wild assortment of creative agonies. Paintings commissioned to terrorize the poor into buying their relatives out of purgatory.
“A lot of those paintings were intended to educate an illiterate public,” I said. “They relied