At Amy’s house we sat on velvet-cushioned chairs and learned how to stitch lavender lace sachets for our underwear drawers. At my house we dug up worms for the end of my brothers’ fishing hooks. I guess in many ways we both needed each other. While my life provided Amy with roots in the richness of this good earth, she was offering me butterfly wings to soar above it all.
According to Amy, Paris was the nonnegotiable starting point for our flights of fancy. All a young woman like myself needed was to stroll under the Arch of Triumph or saunter past the Eiffel Tower with a well-groomed poodle on the end of a pink leather leash, and I would be transformed into a stunning debutante.
Amy was the one who could make all that happen for me. My part was to simply keep my promise to always be there for her.
“So?” Amy challenged me that night under the ruffled canopy. “Do you promise to go to Paris with me before we have babies and get married?”
“Okay, I’ll go to Paris with you. But, Amy, we have to be married first before we can have babies.” I lifted my feathery blond hair off my perspiring neck and added with an air of authority, “That’s how it works.”
“What do you mean? That’s how what works?”
“First you get married, and then a baby grows inside you.”
“You don’t have to be married for that to happen.”
“Yes, you do.”
Amy tilted her head and looked at me. “Lisa, you don’t know how it really happens, do you?”
“How what happens?”
“How a baby gets inside its mother.”
“Of course I know.”
“Okay, then tell me.”
“Well … it … actually nobody really knows how a baby gets in there. It’s a miracle. The miracle of life.”
Amy let out a low, “Ooh la la.”
“What?”
“Come here. Sit next to me, Lisa.”
“Why?”
“Because I have something to tell you, and if you don’t sit beside me and watch my face the whole time, you’re going to think I’m making this up.”
With her shoulders back and chin forward, my all-knowing friend revealed to me the specifics of one of life’s great mysteries. I believed every word. I had no reason to doubt that Amy would always tell me the truth.
As I look back, I don’t think I blamed my mother for avoiding the details that Amy so willingly gave me that night. As a matter of fact, I’ve always treasured that Amy was the one who told me the truth about where babies come from. Such stunning information is best delivered eye to eye, and that conversational style had never been one of my mother’s strong points.
I wondered how Amy knew so much. I remember thinking it might have something to do with the church she, her mother, and Grandmere attended faithfully every Sunday morning. They left the house wearing lace doilies on their heads, carrying strings of wooden beads, and walked the four blocks to St. Augustine’s with a peaceful solemnity.
Sometimes our family would drive past them on our way to the largest church in town. My mother would cluck her tongue, and my father would honk the horn and wave at them. I always wondered what kinds of secrets about the mysteries of life they were telling Amy inside that fancy church.
At our church, we got the gospel every Sunday, and it never seemed like extraordinary information to me. Amy said they lit candles at her church. We didn’t have mystifying things like that at our church. All we had was a baptismal tub with a drain in the floor behind the choir loft. Sometimes the drain would glug at unexpected times, and my brothers would make rude faces at each other and try not to laugh.
Our family always sat five rows back on the left. Each of us had our own Bible, and whenever Pastor Mason would step to the pulpit and say, “Open your Bibles with me to …” my brothers would vigorously compete to see who could be the first to find the right page.
One time Will turned the pages so fast he ripped 1 John right down the middle. My father leaned over and swatted him upside the head. I was so embarrassed I started to cry. My mother took me by the hand and led me to the restroom where I received a firm swat on the bottom for “acting up in church.”
After that I volunteered to help in the church nursery and discovered that no one thinks you’re acting up if you’re playing with the babies.
My church experience improved when I reached junior high because we had youth rallies and sports nights at which my brothers always dominated the playing field. Amy came with me all the time and told me how much better my church was than hers because we could play basketball in the parking lot and we had guitar music. Plus all of our songs were in English.
I never visited Amy’s church because my parents forbade it. I never understood what they were afraid of. But then, I didn’t understand why Amy always ate fish sticks on Fridays, either. My mother was pleased whenever I said Amy was coming to a church activity with me. She didn’t know that Amy was coming because we had cuter boys at our church.
Amy’s first kiss was behind the closet door in the choir room with one of my brothers’ friends. She was thirteen. When she came and found me in the church kitchen, I was helping make popcorn for the youth event going on in the fellowship hall, which is where Amy was supposed to have been, hearing the gospel.
As soon as she told me, I grabbed her by the elbow, took her down the hallway, and said, “You listen to me, Amelie Jeanette DuPree. You are not going to get a bad reputation around here. Don’t you ever go off like that again and kiss any other boy at this church! Do you understand me?”
She was so mad at me she called her mother to come pick her up.
Two days later Amy walked over to my house with a bandanna on her head. She came up to my small bedroom that had pictures of kittens and horses pinned to the wall. We closed the door and whispered so no one would hear us.
“Promise me, Lisa! Promise me you won’t let me ruin my reputation,” she said tearfully.
“I promise, Amy.”
After that, Amy was sparing with her kisses, but she didn’t stop her systematic development of a new crush on each of the boys in our class. The longest crush was the one she had on Charlie Neusman. He never responded in kind, and I always thought that bothered her, even though she didn’t talk about it.
That’s the only explanation I could find for the way Amy acted after Charlie asked me to the prom. He was my first date. The prom was my first dance. It took three days of pleading and discussing before I could persuade my parents to let me go with Charlie.
When I told Amy, she said she was happy for me. The next day she turned strangely quiet. The remaining few weeks of our senior year played themselves out, and she stayed away, always giving me what sounded like reasonable excuses for her disassociation with me and everyone else in my family. I kept waiting for Amy’s tempo toward me to change the way the big mood ring she wore on her thumb changed every few hours.
Yet Amy didn’t change.
I finally asked if she still had a crush on Charlie or if she wished he had asked her to the prom instead, and she said no. I couldn’t think of any other reason she would be mad at me.
At graduation we hugged, and Amy whispered in my ear, “I’m sorry. I’ll never forget you, Lisa Marie.”
I thought it was a strange thing to say. What was even stranger was the way she couldn’t find time to get together and do things the way we did every summer. But we both had summer jobs that kept us busy, and soon Amy and I had drifted apart. She went to college in Kentucky. I stayed home and went to community college in Memphis.
We didn’t speak to each other for almost eight years.
Those were fumbling years for me. I went from being the small dot at the end of a long exclamation mark at our house to being a mere speck of a life that could easily be brushed away. I wanted to prove to the world that I was strong. I was woman. I roared! But no one was close enough to hear me.
That is, until Amy rolled back into my life, stretched out on a hospital bed with her abdomen rising u
nder the tight sheet like the dome of a package of Jiffy Pop popcorn.
My meeting up with Amy in the emergency room of a Cincinnati hospital is remarkable since she didn’t even live in Cincinnati. I’d only moved there a few months earlier. I was at the hospital that rainy October afternoon because Derrick, a potential new boyfriend, was under observation for slitting his wrist. (Yes, I knew how to pick ’em, back in the day.)
The wrist slitting was an accident. Derrick was at my apartment helping open the box of a new coffeemaker. I handed him my pocketknife, since he didn’t have one. He flipped open the blade without watching what he was doing, and the sharp tip caught the wrist on his other hand right on the artery. Blood gushed everywhere.
I wrapped his wrist in a dish towel, told him to press hard, and drove my Honda Civic like a race car to the hospital. Derrick wailed like a puppy. That’s when I knew our barely-begun relationship was doomed. My brothers would never let me stay with a man who: 1) didn’t carry a Swiss Army Knife at all times, and 2) didn’t know how to bleed silently.
Derrick received two stitches in his wrist and a glass of orange juice. A resident psychiatrist came behind the drawn curtain and asked Derrick if he had been depressed lately. Catching on to the assumption being made, I explained that the wrist slitting was an accident.
Derrick, however, reviewed a variety of recent maladies for the psychiatrist, including a sore elbow, a ringing in his right ear, a popping sound in his ankle, and occasional swollen eyelids, which he thought might be the onset of lupus or mononucleosis. He couldn’t decide which one.
The straight-faced doctor ordered a round of tests, which surprised me. It must have been a slow day in the emergency ward. A nurse suggested I wait in the lobby. That’s when I saw Amy. Or, I should say, that’s when I heard Amy.
A hospital assistant was rolling a very pregnant dark-haired woman in a wheelchair past me and into the curtained area across from Derrick. The attendant helped her up onto the hospital bed, and she let out a long oooh-oooh-sounding groan.
I paused and turned to look at her again. When most people moan or groan, they use sounds such as owwww or ohhhh. Amy was the only person I’d ever heard groan as if she were slowly saying, “ooh la la.”
Waiting until the sheet was pulled taut over the woman’s middle and the head of the bed was elevated, I got a good look at the patient. My heart pounded.
“Amy?” I stepped closer to her bed.
She halfway opened her unmistakable brown eyes and squinted at me.
“Amy, it’s Lisa.”
“Lisa?” She tried to sit up and reach out her hand to me just as another contraction overtook her. “Lisa!”
I dashed to Amy’s side and grabbed her hand. She squeezed with a force I’d never felt in all our years of Red Rover, Red Rover.
“Don’t leave!” Amy cried breathlessly. “Don’t let go, Lisa.”
I promised her I wouldn’t leave; I wouldn’t let go. And I didn’t.
In between contractions Amy gave me one of her biggest, bravest smiles. “I can’t believe you’re here!”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I said. “What are you doing in Cincinnati? Last I heard you lived in Lexington.”
“We do. Mark’s brother is getting married tomorrow. We drove up for the wedding. Mark is at the airport picking up his parents.”
“And Mark is …” I was fishing for the answer I hoped would be evidence that she had followed the “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage” principle for her life.
“Mark is my husband.”
I smiled and adjusted her pillows.
“He’s a college professor, Lisa. Can you believe I married my college professor? We were almost a campus scandal.”
Somehow I knew that made the romance even more delicious in Amy’s mind. I looked forward to hearing all the details. At the moment another contraction was coming over her tense frame. With another “ooh,” a minute later she released her grip on my hand. Her eyes were still closed and her speech slow as she said, “Mark is shuttling relatives. All day. To the hotel. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
I stayed with Amy for the next contraction and then left long enough to try to place a call to their hotel and contact Mark. Since this was in the days before cell phones, I had no success in reaching him.
Four and a half hours later, Jeanette Marie Rafferty came into the world. She was five weeks before the due date but weighed seven pounds one ounce and had a full head of black hair. Nothing “preemie” looking about Jeanette!
Mark arrived breathless after Jeanette was rolled up in a pink blanket. The poor guy could barely speak. He had no idea Jeanette Marie had entered the world until after she squealed her first “voilá!” I watched the gentle giant of a man take the infant in his arms and look adoringly at his wife as tears puddled in his eyes.
Slipping out of the room to give them a moment in private, I, too, teared up. Clearly Amy had married a good man. Mark was nothing like my brothers, and for that I was thankful. I did notice, however, that he was not French.
And neither was Derrick.
I found Derrick watching TV and sipping 7UP from a straw. All the tests had come back clear. The doctor told Derrick he was going to be just fine. He slipped into the car holding his wrapped wrist and waited for me to close the door for him. That’s when I gave him my diagnosis for our relationship, which was not just fine. No surprise. Check another potential boyfriend off the list.
Over the weekend I visited Amy twice in her hospital room, each time armed with an outrageously large gift basket brimming with the cutest baby girl items I could find and a few treats for Amy. She was sleeping each time so I tiptoed out with my basket, wondering if I’d see her before they drove home.
On Monday she was discharged from the hospital, and Mark insisted they stay at the hotel a few more days before driving home. I took the afternoon off of work and arrived at the hotel, toting my oversized gift basket and feeling strangely shy.
Did I overdo the presents? Would a simple boxed sleeper set have been a better way to go? Maybe I should have bought Amy a single bottle of lotion instead of the six-piece home spa set.
Too late to change my mind. Mark opened the hotel room door with his daughter cradled in his free arm. Amy called to me from the bed, “Lisa, you came!”
I gave her the audaciously brimming basket of gifts and confessed to my clandestine hospital visits. Amy gave me a scolding for not waking her on my visits, but her hands already had untied the bow, and she was pulling out all the fun gifts.
Her favorite was a stuffed giraffe with a polka-dotted bow around its neck. She practically squealed when she found the extravagant spa set of lotion and bath oils for her. In a way I felt as if I’d finally made up for the birthday when her only gift from me had been a Bible.
My mother was the one who insisted I give Amy a Bible for her twelfth birthday, which Amy graciously thanked me for when she opened it. All the other girls at the party gave Amy gifts like Bonne Bell frosted lip gloss and Jean Naté cologne.
I was so embarrassed that I announced in front of everyone I had another present for Amy at home, but I’d forgotten to bring it. The guilt of my lie made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t keep down the piece of strawberry cake and Neapolitan ice cream, which I urped up in the bathroom. I left Amy’s party in quiet humiliation.
The next day I confessed my lie to Amy, and she said, “I know.”
“Aren’t you mad?”
“No, why would I be mad?”
“Because I just told you. I lied. I don’t have another present for you. All I gave you was a Bible.”
“I know. I always wanted my own Bible. It’s even more special because it came from you. Everyone else gave me stuff I’m going to use up. You gave me something I’m going to keep for the rest of my life.”
I was absolved that day and immediately stopped punishing myself.
Standing by Amy’s hotel bed now, watchi
ng her delight in all the gifts for her and Jeanette, made me feel absolved once again.
Jeanette began to squirm in her daddy’s arms. I couldn’t take my eyes off the beautiful infant.
“May I hold her?” I asked eagerly.
Mark handed off his precious cargo and reached for the list of baby supplies Amy had prepared for him. “You sure you’ll be okay if I go to the store?”
“Of course!” She looked up at me with a bright smile. “We’re going to be fine.”
I took Amy’s words to heart, as if she were uttering a blessing for the next season of our friendship. We were going to be fine. I just knew it. I also dearly hoped that, after all my moves and job changes, things were about to be fine for me in every way. If nothing else, I’d have Amy to stand beside me while I tried to put together the pieces of my erratic life. That possibility brought me great comfort.
Mark slipped out the door as I rocked the baby back and forth.
“Lisa, I love all these gifts.” Amy arranged them on the bed for further viewing. “I haven’t even had a baby shower yet! It’s supposed to be this Friday. Won’t they be surprised when I show up with a baby! These are the first presents anyone has given us. Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome. I was worried that maybe I overdid it.”
“Are you kidding? Overdoing it with gifts? Never! Look how cute this is!” She held up a bib that was trimmed with yellow ducklings. “Thank you again. Really. Thank you for being at the hospital on Friday and for coming today.”
“I honestly didn’t have much to do with the hospital encounter.”
“I know.” Amy put down the bib and looked at me with her huge eyes. “God did that, didn’t He? Just for us. You promised to be there for me when my first baby was born, remember? I think God heard that promise. There’s no other explanation.”
I didn’t have another explanation so I nodded and agreed with Amy that something mysterious and larger than us was at work. It had been several years since I’d been to church, so I didn’t think God was paying much attention to me. I certainly hadn’t been paying much attention to Him. I wanted to wait until I knew He would be proud of me before I showed Him the report card of my life. Sadly, a few too many semesters had passed, and I still didn’t feel as if I had done anything worthy of His watchful eye.