Free Grub by Elise Blackwell

ledger. Eddie didn’t know what it was to clean coffee grounds off the floor every week because another off-brand trash bag had split at the seams. While his parents read Consumer Reports before purchasing a television that would work well for years, her mother spent twice as much making lay-away payments on several cheap sets that never showed clear pictures. Amanda remembered the smell of her mother’s house as the smell of petty aspirations, failure, and emotional stinginess. Because Eddie didn’t understand what she was afraid of, he couldn’t save her from it. He had no conception of how far they could fall.
    When the obvious solution struck Amanda, it came with the energy to enact it. Instead of badgering Eddie about his excuse of a career without any indication that he himself was interested in that career—and against evidence that he thought she actually enjoyed nagging him—she should launch her own. After all, she’d been one of the best writers in the workshop.
    Unlike Eddie, Amanda had not spent her childhood imagining other lives and scribbling stories and fantasizing about the writing life. She’d read what was necessary to be a good student, knowing that a scholarship was her one-way ticket the hell out of Wilkes-Barre. She’d planned, from an early age, to attend law school, marry a fellow student, and practice law part-time while running a perfect household filled with quality things that worked like they were supposed to and were under warranty in case they did not.
    After a torrid affair with the English professor who helped her pronounce her ‘G’s—and motivated partly by anger that he’d heard her drop them in the first place—Amanda had started a novel about a beautiful twenty-year-old woman having a torrid affair with her Henry-Higgins-like history professor. For reasons Amanda could no longer reconstruct, she’d sent off thirty pages of He Should Have Listened , together with the application form to the Iowa MFA program, while she was studying for her LSAT s. When she’d opened the letter offering her the program’s most prestigious fellowship, she’d laughed out loud.
    She had performed well enough in workshop, mainly because she was a sharp critic and possibly also—she knew this—because her professors were male. When Amanda looked in the mirror, she saw the tall and crooked girl she’d been at Wilkes-Barre Junior High School. But she knew that men saw something else; repeated experience had allowed her to trust the fact that she was beautiful even though she couldn’t see it herself.
    In Iowa, she’d set aside her misguided novel to write her thesis: a series of short stories about attractive young women and the men they dated. She’d flirted with both Eddie and Jackson, but she’d been strict with herself. Until word broke about the sale of Eddie’s novel, she’d carefully followed her most important Iowa rule: never date a writer. Then, caught up in the excitement of her friend’s success, she’d wavered. She was young enough that she thought it meant something that they were both left-handed and gazed at the world with green eyes.
    They’d graduated, married modestly in the backyard where Eddie had made mud pies and learned to catch, moved to New York, basked in the glowing reviews. She clapped louder than anyone when Eddie read at the CIA bar with none other than Jonathan Warbury.
    One of her mistakes, she realized now, was that she had trusted Eddie’s talent over her own. She’d quit writing not because she wasn’t good at it but because she thought she had little to say and that a writer needed something to say. Eddie had never discouraged this decision. Now that she had decided to write again, she still didn’t have much to say to the world. But she no longer believed that having something to say was necessary.
    And so that Sunday, alone in the apartment she feared losing, she found herself pondering what she could write that people might want to read.