Chapter 2
That night I had a dream I was walking to campus.
I saw a house I didn’t recognize and then I realized: It was my childhood home, where I lived until the abrupt move my freshman year of high school.
How had the house transported itself from Florida to Ohio?
The door was cracked open and I walked in.
Everything looked exactly the same, nothing out of place.
Suddenly, a great storm erupted and a flood rushed through.
I raced, frantic, through the halls and rooms, looking for my parents.
The tides rose to my ankles, then calves, then thighs, until the swirling floodwaters produced a kind of vacuum effect and I found I couldn’t pull myself free.
The heavy scent of the water, earthy and acrid, filled my nose and throat.
I woke in a tangle of bedsheets, damp with sweat.
I pulled myself free and checked my alarm clock. Shit—already running late.
I didn’t teach on Wednesdays, but had to go in for the English Department’s monthly meeting.
(The life of the mind is mostly just meetings.) The week before we met, Susan would send out an agenda with a request for further items. An avalanche of proposals followed, most of which had nothing to do with our department: sexist rants about the clothing choices of female students, with suspect references to “rap music”; indignant demands that something be done about the noise from the Computer Sciences construction project; and convoluted plans for overhauling the campus recycling program especially urgent in this, the dawn of the Anthropocene.
Last year, after a spirited but unsuccessful campaign to have our meeting extended by an hour, one of our more senior colleagues, Mary Ackels, sent a desperate plea that we intervene in the “devastating tragedy of the Congo.” For emphasis, the email’s several thousand words were written in a wide range of colorful fonts in various sizes.
While Safie was impressed with Mary’s formatting skills, I remained unsure of what use the Congolese might find a bunch of semioticians and Mark Twain scholars in Ohio.
Each month, Susan relegated these addendums to a section of the agenda titled “Further Business.” We never got to this section before Susan adjourned us for the following month, when all those unaddressed items went missing and a new crop of hopefuls took their place.
We met in a conference room on the top floor of Walton Hall.
A bank of tall, mahogany-framed windows looked out across a densely wooded grove at the south end of campus.
The beautiful view depressed me. After a year staring out those windows watching the seasons change, I knew that the leaves of the great black ash trees, today crisp and resplendent, would soon enough fade, desiccate, and die.
I felt I was watching my own life pass me by, and I didn’t like the looks of it.
The assembled were talking in twos and threes or poking at their phones.
Susan sat at the front, arms folded across her middle, leaning back from the conversations around her.
I scanned the room. There was a seat next to Colin—ugh—and then I saw Safie waving me over and lifting that gigantic bag she brought everywhere from the seat beside her.
“You’re a good friend,” I said. “Why haven’t we started? Susan is such a stickler about time.”
“Hal hasn’t shown up yet.”
“Hal? I thought we were rid of him.”
“He’s giving a report on the trustees meeting. About the new health sciences school.”
Hal Smith, a colleague from the department, had just started a new appointment as dean of Humanities.
Hal imagined himself an iconoclast, a British Marxist still talking about May 1968 like he started it all.
When the promotion came through, he jokingly called himself a sellout for joining the managerial class, but he adjusted quickly to his new status, swapping his leather jacket and jeans for a suit and tie.
(His silver hair remained gelled into one sharp spike in front, a conspiratorial wink that said, I’m doing it all for the proletariat.) I’d run into Hal the week before.
Since the promotion, he had started speaking from the point of view of “the College”—as in “the College expects this” or “of course the College supports tenure track faculty, but …” etc.
, etc. I joked about it to Safie and she diagnosed him with institutionalitis.
“That’s when you lose the last of your soul and stop seeing yourself as separate from Sawyer,” she said. “It’s fatal.”
“What’s going on guys? Make some room.”
I looked up as Colin dragged his chair over to the other side of Safie.
He wedged in and then managed, somehow, to expand—all shoulders and elbows and youthfully worked-out muscles just going soft.
How do straight guys do that—rearrange space around themselves wherever they go?
I didn’t dislike Colin, exactly. But if junior faculty got grades, he’d be a grade-grubber, volunteering for every task force and initiating service-learning trips.
His team-player attitude made the rest of us look bad.
“We’re just waiting on Hal,” I said.
Colin glanced to the front of the room. “Susan looks pissed.” It was no secret Susan had been gunning for the dean position.
She had spent two decades doing grunt work in the department, keeping things running, but, of course, in the end the promotion went to a man.
“I heard she filed a formal complaint about the search passing her over.”
“Maybe that’s why Hal is taking his sweet time getting here,” said Safie.
“Or maybe,” said Colin, “it’s because of his impending divorce.”
“What’s that now?” Safie raised an interested brow.
Colin’s grubbing ambitions meant he was well connected and thus a consistent source of gossip.
I still found him annoying, but Safie shifted the blame to me.
“Knowledge is power,” she said when I complained about him, “and you’re a dead end—you don’t talk to anybody. ” I couldn’t argue with that.
“I heard Elizabeth has moved out,” Colin said, leaning in.
Safie made a sound like hmmph. “Good for her. I wonder if Hal is up to his old tricks—” but before she could continue, Hal blustered into the room, a flurry of apologies about running late.
“You know how it is,” he announced to no one in particular, like we were all in on something.
“But the College”—I smirked and beside me, Safie snickered—“is very eager to catch you up on our plans for the year.”
Susan, arms still crossed, stood and announced, “Well, I guess we can finally start.”
The meeting droned on around me. I never paid attention at these things.
I figured if anything important came up, the news would find me.
My thoughts drifted to the previous night.
I was ticked off that Tyler had stood me up.
After all that anxiety about falling behind, he didn’t even show?
And when I checked my email there was nothing—no apology, no explanation.
I still hadn’t gotten any notification from the registrar’s office.
Maybe I’d make him sweat it out a little, say it was too late to sign up, as punishment for wasting my night.
But that was petty—he’s just a kid, and I was the one who offered to stay late.
I wondered what it was like to be at Sawyer on financial aid, surrounded by so much wealth.
It wasn’t all the students, of course, but I’d learned you couldn’t trust their accounts; the baseline was so high, kids whose families didn’t own multiple homes thought themselves poor.
I had found it overwhelming. My first semester, when I griped about a student in my Comp course to Safie, she replied, “Oh, the Saudi prince?” I laughed.
He was obviously wealthy, gaudily sporting an enormous wristwatch you could trade in for a car—a nice one, not like mine.
But Safie wasn’t kidding; he was an actual prince.
The student had done a miserable job with his final presentation.
He argued that the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia was good for the economy, as everyone just hired a private chauffeur.
“Everyone?” I asked. “Yes, of course. Every family has a driver.” He had no idea.
When I later explained his low grade, he tried to bribe me to reconsider.
He said I should let him know the next time I was in the Middle East—his family owned a chain of hotels and would set me up.
It was weird enough having royalty in your classroom—I don’t know if I could have handled living with them in the dorms.
When I was applying to college, I’d heard of Sawyer, of course, but why anyone would go to college in Ohio was beyond me.
From the limited vantage point of a state school in Florida, I couldn’t see how the world worked, the unmarked networks that run between places like this (Sawyer, Wesleyan, Brown, Smith) and funnel directly into New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles.
While in grad school at NYU, I became acquainted with the beneficiaries of these circuits for the first time, people in their mid-twenties already advancing in careers in arts administration and magazines and PR, worlds of work I had no clue how to enter.
(That’s the thing about being na?ve—you don’t know you are.)
I had gotten completely lost in these thoughts and was snapped out of it by an eruption of conversation and people standing to leave. The meeting had ended.
“Back with us?” Safie asked.
“What did I miss?”
“Honestly, not much.”
“I kind of like knowing what’s going on at my workplace,” Colin said.
“And that is just one of our many differences,” I said. “I want the minutiae of this job to occupy as little space in my brain as possible—I don’t have much to spare.”