35. Margot
MARGOT
The faculty vote is on a Tuesday.
The dissolution fails. Barely. Tess’s petition forced enough faculty senators to object that the Board withdrew the proposal to eliminate the department entirely. Comparative Literature will continue to exist.
But the budget is gutted. Two tenure-track positions cut. All adjunct lines eliminated. The department survives like a building survives a fire that took the roof and the interior walls. The facade is standing. The structure behind it is gone.
The administration will describe the outcome as a compromise. I will describe it as a controlled demolition presented as renovation.
I sit in the committee room after the vote. The room empties around me. Gerald pauses at my chair. He puts his hand on my shoulder, briefly, gently. It is the touch of someone who has known grief, yet abides with hope. He leaves. The room is empty.
My position is safe. Tenured, protected.
I am safe. My colleagues are not. The department I have spent years building is being hollowed out around me and the piece they are keeping is me, and the keeping feels less like salvation and more like being the last book on a shelf in a library that is closing.
Tess Okafor is in the hallway when I leave, with two other graduate students, and her face has the expression I recognize from the faculty meeting in October: the controlled fury from having asked the right question and received the wrong answer.
The petition she organized, three hundred signatures, the graduate student union letter, the undergraduate coalition, was entered into the record.
The record shows the petition. The outcome does not reflect it.
“Professor Voss,” Tess says. Her voice is steady. “We’re not done.”
“I know.”
“The restructuring can be challenged through the faculty senate. The adjunct terminations can be appealed through the union. We have a framework for—”
“I know.” I look at her, this woman who is twenty-six and who has more institutional courage than most of the tenured faculty I have worked with for fifteen years. “You’re doing more than you should have to.”
Tess looks at me for a moment. Then she nods. “Yes,” she says.
I walk home. The campus is green, March green, the aggressive, unreasonable green of the Pacific Northwest emerging from winter, every surface sprouting and budding and reaching with the urgency of a landscape that has been grey for five months and has decided to compensate all at once.
The beauty of it is almost offensive. The world does not stop being beautiful because the institution is failing.
The world does not coordinate its aesthetics with your grief.
I sit in my kitchen. Sophia told me to fix it with Priya days ago.
She told me not to wait until morning, and I waited until morning, and then the morning became the vote, and the vote became four days of the institution requiring every room in my head.
This is true. It is also true that the institution was a convenient place to put my attention while the harder thing waited.
The harder thing has waited long enough.
Tomorrow I will go to Lavender House before it opens and I will tell Bea, and Bea will make me a drink and say nothing useful, and the nothing will be exactly right. And then I will go to Priya’s house. Early. Before the armor assembles.
I will say: I stepped back. I shouldn’t have. I will say: I am still afraid. I will say: I am choosing you anyway.
I close my eyes. Tomorrow.
Millhaven at six in the morning is the town without the college in it. The waterfront trucks are already running. The bakery on Elm has its lights on. The campus is dark on the hill above, the buildings waiting.
I arrive at Lavender House at 6:15, before it opens. The sign is dark. The porch tables are stacked against the wall. The lavender hedge along the south side is beginning its spring push, the new growth bright green against the faded grey of last year’s stems, reaching.
The light is on in the windows above the shop, which means Bea is up for the day.
She has lived in that apartment for as long as she has owned the place, up the narrow back stairs.
I read the light as a small signal that Bea is where she always is, awake before the world, holding the morning open until the rest of us arrive.
I knock. A moment later Bea opens the door.
She is in an apron, hands dusted with flour.
The kitchen behind her is warm and lit and smells like everything good in the world, and for a moment I am fourteen years old and standing in my mother’s kitchen and the world is simple and the bread is rising and nothing has gone wrong yet.
She looks at my face. She steps aside.
The shop is dark except for the kitchen light spilling across the counter.
The La Marzocco is cold, not yet hissing, the machine at rest. The chairs are up on the tables.
The community board on the far wall is layered with flyers and announcements and photographs from over twenty years of this place being what it is.
The room without people in it is like a theater before the house opens; the set is dressed, the lights are low, and you can feel what it holds even when it’s empty.
Bea makes me something. I don’t see what. I hear the kettle, the pour, the clink of a spoon. She sets it in front of me. Tea, not coffee. She knows.
She sits on the stool beside the La Marzocco. She does not talk. I drink the tea. The quiet between us is the quiet of two people who have known each other long enough that quiet has become a language.
“I’m going to go to her,” I say.
“I know, honey.”
“I’ve been a fool.”
“For a while, yes.”
“You could have said something.”
“You wouldn’t have heard it.”
True.
“Bea.”
“Mmhm.”
“Thank you. For twelve years. For the trees. For the tray.”
Bea takes a slow breath. Her hands are still. The flour dusts the counter between us. The kitchen light catches the grey in her hair that was not there twelve years ago when she stood in the old-growth trees and watched my life come apart.
She reaches across the counter and puts her hand over mine, briefly, firmly. She has been holding space for twelve years and is, in this moment, releasing some of it. Bea will never release all of it. The holding is who she is.
“Go,” she says. “She’s been waiting.”
I go. The overnight rain has stopped. The streets are dark and wet and the air has that post-rain clarity—clean, sharp, the kind of morning where every surface catches the light.
The evergreens along the campus road are almost black against the pale sky, their green so deep it has gone past green into something else, and the contrast—the dark trees, the washed streets, the sky brightening from the east—makes the morning look like the first morning. Like everything has been rinsed.
The wall was built for a specific threat. The threat is gone. The system did not get the memo.
This is, I am told, how nervous systems work.
They are not responsive to logic. They are responsive to repetition, and I have been repeating the same crossing for twelve years.
The body has learned the lesson so completely that it does not know how to unlearn it.
It only knows how to choose differently. One morning at a time. One crossing.
This is a different crossing.
I get in my car. I drive to Priya’s house. The street is quiet.
The dogs alert immediately. Kali’s bark, the full-body alert, the alarm that is simultaneously a greeting because Kali does not distinguish between intruders and guests. Moti, confused, reluctant, the single bark of a dog who objects to the waking on philosophical grounds.
Priya opens the door.
She is standing in her doorway at 7:00 in the morning wearing a sweater and sleep in her eyes and the sight of her stops me, and I am done pretending otherwise.
“The dissolution,” I say. “I knew before you did. Not long, a few days. But I knew, and I sat across from you in the research space and I said nothing. Because saying it would have meant letting you see that I was losing something I couldn’t save, and that is the thing the wall is built to prevent. ”
She leans against the doorframe. Kali pushes past her legs and presses her nose into my hand.
“I should have told you. Before you heard it from June. I should have told you and instead I did the thing I do, which is carry it alone and call the carrying strength when it’s really just the wall.”
She looks at me for a long time.
“Come inside,” she says.
I follow her in. The kitchen is to the left. The chai stain is still faintly there, near the cabinet.
She makes coffee. French press. She moves through her kitchen without looking, reaching for mugs from memory. She does not speak while the coffee steeps. I stand in the doorway and I wait.
She hands me a mug. Leans against the counter.
“I need to talk about the kitchen floor,” she says.
Not the department. Not the vote. The kitchen floor.
“Okay,” I say.
“I was—” She stops. Starts again. “That night. The chai and the double trouble and you crying and the— all of it. I was so in it, Margot. I was so completely in that moment with you. Holding you. Putting my hands back on you after you told me about Lyra. The sex and the laughing and the I love you— I was just—” She sets the mug down.
Picks it up. “I was open. All the way. No part of me was anywhere else.”
“I know.”
“And I thought you were too. I thought— she’s here.
Finally. All of her. The wall is down. This is what it looks like when Margot Voss lets someone all the way in.
And then I find out from June that you were carrying this enormous thing without telling me.
And I realize— okay, the wall wasn’t down, not all the way.
I was open and you were—” She makes the contracting gesture.
“Part of you was still in there. Behind the wall. Managing.”
The sentence sits between us.
“That’s what hurts,” she says. “Not the department. We need to talk about that too. But that’s not—” She shakes her head.
“The hurt is that I was lying on the kitchen floor in the most open moment of my life and you weren’t all the way there with me, and I didn’t know.
I didn’t feel it. I thought we were in the same place and we weren’t. ”
My eyes burn. The burning surprises me. I came here prepared for her anger, for her hurt, for the conversation about the department. I did not come prepared for her to describe the kitchen floor as the most open moment of her life and to tell me that she was alone in it.
“That night was real,” I say. My voice is not steady. “Priya. The kitchen floor was real. All of it. The wall was down. When I was on that floor with you, when I said I love you— the wall was down. That was me. All of me. I need you to know that.”
“Then how—”
“It came back up.” The words come out rough.
I am crying. “The email came. And the fear came back. And I put it back on— the wall, the managing, all of it, not because the kitchen floor wasn’t real.
Because the real is the thing that scares me most. The more open I am with you, the more the reflex tells me to close.
Close now. Before she sees the part that isn’t enough. ”
She is quiet.
“I don’t want the wall,” I say. I wipe my face with the back of my hand.
The gesture is graceless and I do not care.
“I want you. I want you so much my stomach hurts with it. I want the kitchen floor every day. I want to stay open. I just— the wall comes back up and I don’t always feel it happening.
It’s like breathing. I don’t decide to breathe. ”
“I know,” she says softly.
She is looking at me. Her eyes are bright and damp. The steadiness she has been maintaining through this conversation is fraying at the edges.
“I was so in love with you that night,” she says. “On the floor. The chai everywhere and you crying and the— God, your body— I was just—” Her voice catches. “I was just yours. Completely. And I thought you were mine.”
“I was.”
“And then you weren’t.”
“I was. I am. The wall coming back up doesn’t mean—”
“It means I was in the brave rooms.” She says it quietly, not as an accusation, but as a realization arriving as she speaks it.
“The wall was down on the kitchen floor. I believe that. But it went back up after, and I didn’t feel it happen because from where I was standing everything looked the same.
You were brave with me in bed and brave with me on the floor and brave when you said I love you.
The wall was still standing in the room where you were afraid.
And I was in the brave rooms believing I was in all the rooms.”
I set the mug down. The sentences I was building collapse. She has read me better than I have read myself.
“Yes,” I say. “That is exactly what happened.”
She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“God. Okay.” A breath. “I need— I can’t be the only one who’s open.
I can’t be lying on a kitchen floor with my whole heart out and not know that you’re—” She waves a hand.
“Somewhere else. I need to know you’re with me.
Even when you’re scared. Especially when you’re scared. ”
“The wall is— it’s older than us. When I’m afraid I take over. I manage. I become the one in charge so I’m never the one being held. It looks like competence. It’s not.”
“I know that.”
“I want to show you my scared parts. The parts that don’t know how to let you hold them yet.”
“Yet,” she says. Her eyes are wet now. The tears are here, running down her face, and she is not wiping them away.
I cross the kitchen. I have been standing in the doorway this entire conversation, holding my mug, holding my ground, holding the distance. I came to say hard things and did not want it closed until they were said. The things have been said.
I stand in front of her. I reach up and wipe the tear from her cheek with my thumb.
“I love you,” I say. “Priya.” My voice is soft and I am blinking back tears. “I want you in all the rooms.”
She catches my hand against her face. Holds it there. Closes her eyes.
“I love you too,” she says. Into my palm. “All of it. The wall and the woman behind it.” Her voice is rough and steady at the same time. “But I’m going to push sometimes. And the pushing is me reaching for the part you don’t want to give me.”
“I know.”
“You have to let me.”
“I will.”
“Even when every instinct says take control.”
“Even then.”
“Good.” She opens her eyes. Turns her face into my palm and kisses it. “The dogs come with me everywhere. Including your house.”
“I have three lint rollers.”
“I know.”
She pulls me in. I let her hold me. I do not reach for the wheel. I do not manage the embrace. I stand in her kitchen and let her arms be the structure, and the structure holds.
Kali sighs from her bed. The coffee gets cold. The light moves.
We stay.