2. Priya
PRIYA
Iam seventeen minutes late to my own welcome-back meeting. An improvement over last year’s twenty-three, and I would like the record to reflect that the improvement is significant even if the result is still, technically, late.
The culprit this time is Kali, who found and partially consumed a tube of Ravi’s watercolor paint.
Cerulean blue, confirmed by the evidence now decorating my kitchen floor, Kali’s collar, and the hem of the shirt I changed into after the first outfit got dog hair on it.
That happened in the eleven seconds between putting on the shirt and reaching for my bag.
Eleven seconds is the Kali coefficient, the maximum duration any garment can exist in my house without acquiring a fine golden dusting.
Moti watched the entire cerulean incident from his bed, unmoved.
He has seen everything and judged it all and taken no action; this is his approach to most things and which I find, depending on my mood, either profoundly philosophical or deeply unhelpful.
I called the vet from the car, pulling out of our neighborhood and onto the main road that runs through the center of Millhaven toward campus.
The vet, who knows Kali very well by now, confirmed nontoxic.
Kali will be fine. My floor will be blue for a week.
This is fine. Everything is fine. The blue floor is actually an improvement over the previous floor situation, which was plain hardwood covered in a thin film of dog hair that I vacuum on a schedule I have described to my mother as “regular” and that is, in practice, “when I remember.”
I also have Ravi’s permission slip in my bag instead of my research notes.
A discovery I will make when I reach for the notes and find instead a field trip consent form for the aquarium.
I signed the permission slip at a red light this morning with a pen I found wedged between the seat and the console.
The pen was Ravi’s. It had a cap shaped like a dinosaur.
I will find my research notes later. They are in the house.
They are probably under Kali. Most things in my house are eventually under Kali.
The meeting is in the department conference room on the second floor of Whitman Hall.
The smell is a combination of new carpet they installed in July and coffee from a machine that should have been retired during the previous administration.
The coffee tastes like fluorescent lighting feels, flat, institutional, nobody’s first choice but technically present.
I slip in during Dr. Harmon’s opening remarks about fall enrollment numbers.
He does not pause. He has worked with me for five years.
My lateness is not an event. It is a weather pattern, atmospheric, predictable, planned around.
I find a seat next to June, who teaches conservation biology and has saved me the chair closest to the outlet because my laptop is always dying.
It is dying now, nine percent, the amber warning light blinking with the resigned patience of a device that has been in this situation before.
June slides her coffee toward me without looking.
I accept it without comment. This is the foundation of a five-year professional friendship, and I would argue it is more efficient than most department communications.
The meeting covers enrollment, the new lab schedule, a budget line item that has been contested since before I arrived, and then, near the end, in the tone Dr. Harmon uses when he is about to assign something he knows will generate questions, the joint interdisciplinary initiative.
“The Dean’s office has requested a collaborative project between our department and Comparative Literature,” he says. “Environmental humanities. Visible, public-facing, designed to demonstrate institutional commitment to cross-disciplinary work in the current funding climate.”
He pauses. The pause is doing a lot of work. He has already decided who is going to do this and is giving the room a moment to catch up.
“Priya, I’d like you to take point on our end.”
I am not surprised. My research on mycorrhizal networks and ecological storytelling is the closest thing the department has to a natural bridge between hard science and humanistic inquiry.
I am also the faculty member whose work is most easily translated into the language the administration wants to hear right now.
My research photographs well. I photograph well, and I’m not going to finish that thought.
My work can be described at a donor dinner without anyone’s eyes glazing over.
I have given the TED-talk-adjacent version at three university fundraisers, standing in front of projected images of root networks while people in business attire ate canapés and nodded, and each time I felt genuine pride in the work alongside a discomfort I have not fully examined.
I don’t know how to reconcile these feelings.
I carry them both, the way I carry Ravi’s dinosaur pens and my actual research notes in the same bag, and I let them coexist without resolution because resolution is not always available and I have learned to be okay with that.
“Who’s my counterpart in Comp Lit?” I ask.
“Dr. Voss.”
The name arrives and settles.
Dr. Margot Voss. I have a sense of her the way you have a sense of someone you’ve been in the same room with a dozen times and never actually spoken to.
You know the shape of them without knowing the details.
The blazers. The careful posture. How a room gets slightly more attentive when she’s in it.
Margot Voss is tall, fat, and pale, self-possessed with dark hair and soft wide hips.
She wears blazers that fit like they were tailored, because they probably were; the fit is too precise to be off-the-rack.
I noticed this at commencement last year, three rows behind her, watching the way the academic regalia fell across her shoulders.
She was the only person who made it look intentional rather than obligatory.
I have heard her speak at length only once.
A colloquium two years ago on silence as rhetorical strategy in women’s literature.
She made silence sound like the most dangerous weapon in the English language, and she delivered the entire lecture as though she were proving it.
Her voice, when she spoke, was low and measured and had the quality of something refined over years.
I sat in the back and listened and found myself leaning forward in my chair in a way I was not conscious of until the lecture ended and I realized my coffee had gone cold because I had forgotten to drink it.
I have never forgotten to drink coffee in my life. I have forgotten many things: car keys, research notes, my own children’s school schedules. But I have never forgotten coffee.
I know she is private. I know she has a daughter.
I know Bea speaks of her with a tenderness Bea reserves for people she has decided to protect—not everyone, and not lightly—and this tells me something I don’t yet have the context to interpret.
Bea’s protectiveness is a signal. It means there is something to protect, something that happened, something that made the protection necessary.
I know her department is the one under threat.
After the meeting I walk to Lavender House because it is Thursday and Thursday mornings at Lavender House are non-negotiable. The walk takes four minutes from Whitman Hall. Three if I’m not carrying a bag full of misplaced permission slips and a laptop whose battery life is a prayer.
The smell hits before the door does. Coffee, always, and underneath it something with cardamom. Bea baked this morning. Bea is in a good mood.
She looks up from the La Marzocco, the espresso machine she found at a restaurant auction twelve years ago, refurbished herself with the help of a YouTube tutorial, and has treated ever since with the devotion most people reserve for living things.
Fat and soft behind the counter, her dark hair flecked with silver and cut short and gently textured around her face, her body moves through the small space with practiced ease; she has been the center of this room for twenty years and has arranged every surface to fit her.
She has already started my drink. It’s a Calloway, made from espresso, oat milk, and a half-pump of lavender syrup she makes herself from the hedge outside.
The drink is named after a dog. Bea’s first dog, a retriever mix named Calloway, who used to sleep under the counter in the early years.
Calloway has been gone for six years. The drink remains.
This is how Lavender House works. Things endure past their origins, and no one needs to explain why.
She sets it on the counter as I reach for my wallet. Her rich brown hands, creased with age, wave the wallet away.
“Thank you.” I take the cup. “Kali ate paint.”
“What color?”
“Cerulean.”
“Pretty.” Bea wipes the counter. “She’ll be fine.”
“The vet confirmed.”
“I wasn’t asking the vet. I was telling you.” This is Bea in her fullest form, a woman who has been right about dogs, people, and coffee for decades and has stopped pretending any of these require different skill sets.
Marcus, slim and meticulously groomed as always—he shaves his head every morning—is at his usual table with his laptop open to something he minimizes when I sit down.
He is wearing a blazer the color of burnt sienna over a burgundy turtleneck, his dark brown face warm against the fabric.
His shoes are cognac, buffed to a shine I associate with a man who considers his appearance a daily argument he intends to win.
He teaches Sociology and he dresses like he teaches Style.