32. Priya
PRIYA
Two weeks pass. This is not a problem of wanting. The wanting is constant. The wanting is not the issue. The issue is that we are two women in our forties with children and jobs and dogs and the universe has apparently decided to test whether love can survive scheduling.
Sophia gets a stomach bug. Three days home from school, which means three evenings Margot is on the couch with ginger ale.
The boys are on spring break, which means my house is loud and full and wonderful and absolutely not a place I can bring a woman whose sweater I want to remove.
Kali eats a sock, partially, and the vet visit takes an entire Wednesday afternoon that I narrate to Margot over email in four increasingly unhinged installments.
She responds to each one with the calm precision of a woman who has never had a dog eat a sock and who finds the concept both appalling and, I suspect, hilarious.
The research space continues. Tuesdays and Thursdays. The four feet. The also also. We are together and we are not alone together and I am going slowly out of my mind.
I learn the extent of the threat from June.
Not from Margot—from June, my colleague in conservation biology, who mentions it over coffee in the Whitman Hall break room on a Wednesday in mid-March with the casual assumption that I already know, because of course I know, because I am in a relationship with the woman whose department is being dismantled and the woman would have told me.
“The dissolution vote is next week,” June says.
She is stirring her coffee. “Full dissolution. They’re eliminating the department entirely, folding the remaining courses into English, redistributing the tenure lines into joint appointments that won’t report to anyone in the humanities.
All the adjunct lines gone across most of the humanities. Nadia got her notice last Friday.”
I set my mug down.
“Full dissolution.”
June looks at me. Her hand stops stirring.
“You didn’t know.”
“I knew the department was under threat. Everyone knows the department is under threat; Alan Marsh has been performing fiscal concern in faculty meetings since October. I helped build the enrollment data. I was in the room when the committee received the presentation.” I hear my own voice.
It is careful, and the careful is costing me something.
“I knew there were budget cuts coming. Position cuts. That’s partly what the project was for. ”
“Priya.” June sets the spoon down. “The budget cuts were the public story. Last week there was a confidential proposal sent to the affected department heads. Seven departments. Full consolidation into a single underfunded entity, all adjunct lines eliminated, the whole thing managed by someone from outside the humanities. They asked the department heads to keep it quiet while they finalized.” She pauses.
“Margot was one of the people who received that email.”
The sentence lands and I stand in it.
“The committee hearing on Tuesday isn’t about saving positions anymore.
It’s about whether Comparative Literature continues to exist as a department.
” June’s face changes. She has just realized she delivered information that was not hers to deliver.
“I’m sorry. I assumed you knew. Everyone on the faculty grapevine knows. The email leaked a few days ago.”
Everyone on the faculty grapevine knows.
Everyone except me. The person who sits four feet from Margot Voss every Tuesday and Thursday, who built the enrollment data with her, who presented the joint research to the committee, who has been inside her house and her bed and her kitchen and her daughter’s life.
Margot found out days ago. She has been sitting across from me in the research space since then, and she said nothing.
I walk to Lavender House. I need to process. The walk takes four minutes. The March air is cold and bright, the kind of early spring day that promises warmth and delivers wind.
Bea makes me something without asking, something new, something with ginger, something with heat. She sets it on the counter and she looks at me and she knows. Bea always knows.
“She didn’t tell you,” Bea says. It’s not a question.
“She didn’t tell me.”
Bea wipes the counter. The slow wipe. “She wouldn’t. She would rather carry the weight of an institutional crisis alone than be seen carrying it by someone she loves. This is not new information about Margot.”
“I know it’s not new information. I know she does this. I know the walls and I know the system.” I drink the ginger thing. It burns, pleasantly. “I thought the system had been revised.”
“The system has been revised, but not all the way.” Bea sets the cloth down. “Give her time.”
I sit with the drink and the understanding.
The understanding is this: Margot loves me.
Margot has let me into her bed and her daughter’s life and the places where her voice lives when the composure is gone.
Margot has given me the double trouble and the roar and the also also and every revision of the system she has made since September.
And Margot is still, in the part of her that was built on the quad twelve years ago, managing alone. It hurts.
The response to the funding crisis is not only Margot’s. Tess Okafor is at the center of it.
I should not be surprised by this but I am—surprised by the speed and the specificity of what she has assembled.
Tess has organized a student petition with three hundred signatures, a letter from the graduate student union, and a coalition of undergraduate organizations whose members have never previously agreed on anything and who have, under the pressure of the crisis, discovered that the thing they agree on is that the humanities matter.
She has done this from a position of zero institutional power—a second-year PhD candidate, no tenure, no vote, no formal standing in the administrative process—and the lack of is, I am beginning to understand, the source of her effectiveness.
She has nothing to protect. The people with tenure have their positions to consider, their relationships with the administration to maintain, their long-term institutional survival to weigh against the short-term cost of speaking.
Tess has none of this. Tess has a dissertation on sanctuary movements and an instinct for collective action and the specific, focused fury of someone who has been watching institutions fail the people they claim to serve and who has decided that watching is no longer sufficient.
I see her at Lavender House later in the day, in an organizing meeting, held at a table near the back with a laptop and a stack of printouts and three other graduate students.
Tess is talking about the petition—the logistics, the timeline, the committee members who need to receive it before the vote. She is organized and precise and slightly exhausted: she has been doing the work of ten people and has not yet learned to ask for help. Her bag is on the chair beside her.
I watch them for a moment—Tess organizing, the other graduate students contributing, the group of them at a table doing the work that needs to be done—and I think about Margot, who is somewhere on campus right now building her defense alone, and I think about the difference between alone and together, and I think about the wall.
I walk to campus and cut through the dining hall. The late lunch service has wound down. The room is mostly empty, the long wooden tables scarred and heavy, the kind of institutional furniture that accumulates decades without anyone deciding to replace it.
Claudette Williams, the head of campus dining services, is at one of the tables near the window with the campus paper and a pen, working the crossword.
Her office is behind the kitchen, but Claudette takes her afternoon break out here.
She told me once that she spent twenty-two years making the dining hall work and she’s going to enjoy sitting in it.
She’s tall and Black, with a shaved head and enormous earrings, soft through the arms and middle. She looks up when I come through.
“Dr. Anand. Sit down or keep moving?”
“Keep moving.”
“Smart. I’ve got ten minutes of quiet left and I intend to use them.” She says this warmly and gives me a smile. She goes back to the crossword. “Fourteen across is wrong. I know it’s wrong. I’m leaving it.”
I go to the research space.
Margot is there. She is at her desk. The lamp is on. She looks up when I enter and her face— her face says I am managing this, but I can see through because I have been seeing through it for six months.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The question is direct. I do not approach from the side, I do not build a scaffold around the question, I do not find the indirect route. I ask.
She is quiet for a moment, choosing her words, genuinely searching for the sentence that is honest.
“I got the email 10 days or so after we— the kitchen floor,” she says.
“I had just said I love you for the first time in twelve years. And then my department was going to be eliminated and I couldn’t— I couldn’t put those two things next to each other.
So I didn’t.” A pause. “I was going to tell you. I was trying to figure out how.”
“When?”
She does not answer. I take a breath.
She looks at me. The composed face cracks, not dramatically, not the kitchen floor collapse, but a fissure, a line in the surface through which I can see the thing underneath.
The thing underneath is not anger and is not pride.
The thing underneath is fear. She is afraid.
She is afraid of losing her department, of being seen losing it.
“I know,” I say. “I know why. And I need you to know that knowing why does not make it okay.”
I leave in sadness, which is different and harder than anger.
Anger has energy. Anger has direction. Sadness has weight, and the weight sits in my chest as I walk across campus to my car.
I do not doubt her. I do not doubt us. I doubt whether the system can revise fast enough to hold what we are building.
I drive home. Kali meets me at the door. The house is warm. The boys are watching TV. Helen is playing a game on her phone. The drawings are on the refrigerator. The household calendar is on the wall. The life I built is here.
The woman I love is across campus, alone at her desk, not asking me for help.