Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [46]
Still drunk at dawn, she left her mother the nicest note she could and drove back to college. Instead of showing up for the graduation ceremony, she put on the peach skirt and the white lace blouse and got a job in a safe place.
What Else Can I Do?
Elizabeth had been sitting on her knees in the cookbook section, reading recipes for things like syllabub and poor mans tarts. She had been the assistant manager at Spivey’s Bookstore for the last three years, mostly because she would not become the manager. She didn’t become the manager, she didn’t become a teacher or a lawyer. No one ever suggested interior decorating or medicine or government, and Elizabeth did wonder, after each encouraging remark, what it was that made people think she should teach or litigate. It was probably not her interpersonal skills or her fine analytic mind. It was probably some sort of prematurely shriveled self-righteous obstinacy that people associated with their third-grade teacher or with a particularly vicious district attorney.
Elizabeth knew that the bad things that had happened to her were no worse than other people’s bad things; they were pretty small potatoes, in fact, compared to terminal cancer, death by famine, incest, quadriplegic paralysis. Nevertheless, whatever effort life required, whatever responsibility for joy was necessary to make it appear, Elizabeth didn’t have it. She was not drippingly miserable, she was not an affront to society. She paid her bills. She didn’t smell or piss on other people’s lawns. She suffered from the opposite of “phantom limb” syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not.
She thought about Max, but she didn’t write. She thought about Huddie when sweat trickled down her neck, when she heard the slap of sneakers on blacktop, when she woke up and when she couldn’t sleep. She stopped speaking to her mother, but not so her mother noticed. She didn’t look for ways to improve herself. She didn’t arrange to have her mail forwarded when she moved. She had been in her latest apartment for six months and hadn’t cleaned it. She couldn’t, really; she didn’t own a broom or a mop or even a bottle of Windex anymore, and she knew what Margaret would say about that. It’s a bad sign.
Every Friday, Elizabeth put out two cartons of juice and a bag of half-price bagels for the two crazy men who came through Spivey’s back alley every afternoon, and Peter, her boss, who loved her, watched and thought, Feed me. They will always be hungry.
Cupid and Psyche were Elizabeth’s favorite people. Socially mismatched, badly dressed, unprepared for the climate and the place in the way that marks the truly poor and the truly crazy, the two men spent most of their days by the concrete city fountain, a grey grim wedding cake of previous municipal good times, now barely trickling even in July and August, not even damp in spring and fall. The younger man, blond and slim, looked normal at a distance. Elizabeth had once come closer, pretending to catch a bus, and saw that he had a twenty-foot normal zone. Closer than that, you saw the heels run down to nothing on laceless wingtips, the pink plastic belt on the designer jeans, and the missing splotch of material on the right shoulder of his light blue button-down shirt. You saw his face, the features misaligned because no linked thoughts or feelings molded them. The older man was an obvious social problem, barely welcome at Dunkin’ Donuts and only briefly, and only when the afternoon-shift manager felt good. He bought a dozen doughnuts at a time, never squeezing or sniffing for freshness, just struggling with the coins and crumpled bills stuffed in the back pocket of his organically spattered black pants, as