Chapter 3
Sloane no longer understood how to dress herself and yet she came to work anyway.
She vaguely recalled the sensation of caring what other people thought of her—about whether her waistline or the precision of her eyeliner had any bearing on her performance.
She had never technically known herself without the gripping fear of being judged.
Now, though, there was a window of less than five minutes with which to doubt herself.
Mothering was favorable that way, redistributing gravity so that it no longer mattered whether her black button-down was too harsh for her skin tone or unseasonable for the time of year or too oversized for her frame.
It did not have snot or milk stains that Sloane could see upon cursory inspection, which made it suitable.
She would later learn this confidence was in fact unearned.
She and Max had agreed it made the most sense for her to drop off Isla, given that Max had the earlier lecture.
This logistical element was considered more pressing than Sloane’s desire to die.
She had emotionally prepared herself for weeks in advance by imagining the worst-case scenarios: Isla screaming, Isla taking an enormous shit into Sloane’s open blouse, Isla toddling off with delight to finally be free of her.
All seemed equally plausible. Astoundingly, Sloane’s painstaking efforts to torment herself in prologue did not help the situation on the day.
Sloane didn’t know many other women in her same stage of motherhood; most of her peers were childless by choice and her high school and college friends (most of them gently estranged, a side effect of time and maturity) had much older children.
When Sloane scoured the internet for an applicable tribe, she’d been met with a variety of responses—the mothers who’d gone straight back to work were pleased she had finally given up the hopeless frivolity of day-to-day mothering and could no longer make them feel guilty over their own children forming substandard attachments; the mothers still at home queried whether this was really what was best for the child given that the early years were so tender; the mothers equally tormented by drop-offs suggested that at least Sloane was right there on campus and could easily drop by and visit, a privilege for which she ought to be grateful and, frankly, shut up.
Sloane did not want to say, but visiting would torment me and her, don’t you think?
Because even Sloane understood it was a sign of Good Motherhood to casually surveil even if it felt counterproductive to Isla’s engagement.
Though, even the daycare itself had been apologetic about their play-based curriculum, meaning that formal instruction for Sloane’s eighteen-month-old baby would be limited, and therefore much of the internet would purse their lips and say hmm.
Anyway, the teacher had been patient and sympathetic and reassuring, as if Sloane’s was not a complicated story at all, and Isla’s circumstances not so unusual.
It was soothing, and Sloane vibrated at a slightly lower frequency, feeling marginally less likely to die.
However, on the morning of the very first drop-off, a new teacher seemed frazzled to see her.
She repeated Isla’s name several times as if mentally referencing a section of a text she had once read in high school.
Sloane asked where Miss Jamie was, and this new woman said Miss Jamie didn’t work there in a way that suggested Miss Jamie had never worked there, and had in fact never existed, as with a ghost. Sloane realized she was dragging out the process of drop-off and this was unideal for Isla.
She went to kiss her daughter’s shock-white face and realized Isla was crying silently with fear, which was when Sloane understood that she was a monster.
Then she went to her office because just because a person is a monster doesn’t mean they don’t have bills to pay.
Because Sloane would be a mere adjunct, only blessed with employment at the University thanks to Max’s preeminence in the field and his arduous defense of her intellect, she was given one of the shared offices in the basement of the college of liberal arts, despite in fact belonging to the social sciences.
This wasn’t on its face a problem, given that when she and Max had been younger and Sloane had planned to stay at her previous SLAC where curriculum was more fluid and the necessity to publish more relaxed, she’d had the freedom to pursue scholarship any which way she chose, which could have easily involved literature or theology.
But now that she was here, there was a sense of captivity to it all, something that felt almost Faustian but without the promise of artistic glory.
The shared office had a chalkboard-style nameplate, so Sloane wrote Dr. Hartley on the top and left the bottom blank for whoever her officemate would be.
A single ribbon of string hung from the vent, unmoving.
There were two small IKEA bookcases, two tiny wastebaskets, a stain on the rug beneath the worn office chair that belonged to the slightly cleaner desk.
Sloane claimed it and set a framed copy of the previous year’s Christmas card photo on her desk, trying to breathe through the pain in her chest at the thought of Isla, who would be fine.
Probably. Isla would probably love the new teacher, Miss Lily, even more than she loved Sloane!
Eventually Isla would grow up and have thoughts and opinions and believe that Sloane was stupid.
Already Sloane was convinced that Isla was going to grow up with a flawed understanding of gender roles.
“Oh, my mother did all the cooking,” Isla would tell her friends.
“It’s just how things were at my house. She still called herself a feminist, though, it was honestly so sad,” and then Isla and her Gen Alpha friends would pull Sloane’s books (okay, book) off the shelves and cry with laughter.
Sloane wiped her eyes quickly and opened the document with the day’s lecture.
Then she went to class and delivered the lecture.
It was mostly fine and she only brought up Isla twice (she was certainly not going to be the kind of woman who was A MotherTM, noun, one who referenced nothing but her own motherhood; according to the internet, a Good Mother had many facets, including some modicum of a self).
Sloane did repeatedly forget words and names and lose her place in her train of thought, which again had been happening since she’d gotten pregnant.
“Can I just say, I find it so refreshing to hear you talk,” said a stunning freshman named Dalil Serrano whose hair was gleaming and whose perineum was intact and who would probably grow up to sit on the Supreme Court or something.
“I have ADHD and I swear, something about the way you lecture tickles my brain.”
Sloane did not have ADHD that she knew of.
What Sloane did have was an arresting anxiety about her daughter and a body that had sacrificed its personal brain cells to the craft of Isla’s perfection.
But she was flattered in a way, because it was at least a compliment, and so she said thank you, and felt very online.
She returned to her office, noting the presence of a second person who had come and gone.
She checked her watch—an hour until she could go get Isla.
Luckily she had more work than she could possibly complete in an hour.
She had more work than she could complete in three lifetimes, most of which existed only ephemerally, in theory.
The work of becoming more inherently valuable, such that she might deserve job security or even, dare she say it, some presumption of competency that was not derived from her husband’s accolades.
“Dr. Hartley?”
A voice startled Sloane because it sounded, at first, like it had come from somewhere inside her imagination.
Like she’d dropped off into a pornographic fantasy.
She shook herself awake, although she had definitely been awake and actively working, and because she no longer had the time or energy for an inner life. “Yes?”
The man at the door introduced himself by a name that instantly disappeared into the ether, adding, “I’m sorry I’m late.
” A youngish man, maybe mid- or late-twenties—not an undergraduate student, that much was clear—stood there with …
with shoulders. With shoulders and a jaw and a chin and that hair.
It was almost impossible to take him in all at once without squinting. He sort of … gleamed.
“The office at the college didn’t get in touch with me until about an hour ago—anyway.” The man at the door cut himself off with a droll flap of one hand. “The point is, I’m glad I caught you.”
He had a dimple. Just one dimple. This made everything substantially worse in some horrifying, Gothic way.
“Oh, hi,” said Sloane, and trailed off, which perhaps made her seem like she was stupid or geriatrically confused, neither of which would be entirely off base for a professor in this department.
“I’m your TA,” added the youngish man charitably, who was most likely a doctoral student, Sloane concluded. “I’m in my third year in quantitative soc.”
“Who’s your advisor?” asked Sloane, faintly impressed she was still forming words.
“Burns.”
“Oh, brutal.”
“Yeah.” Her new TA laughed and swept a hand through his raven hair as he took the seat opposite hers at her desk. She had the vague sensation of wanting to witness him on horseback. “I don’t sleep much.”
Her phone buzzed on her desk. It was Max, asking if the daycare had sent any pictures of Isla. Max, who also possessed shoulders and a jaw and a generationally attractive respect for feminism.
Sloane recalled a conversation with her aunt from just after she’d gotten pregnant with Isla, about who would do the housework if Sloane planned to continue working full-time.
“Oh, Max does the laundry and most of the cleaning,” Sloane had said with a shrug, and later shared a conspiratorial laugh with Max about her aunt’s look of dismay, reflecting the foolish gender roles of yore.
Thusly Sloane remembered her position of authority in the situation, and not a moment too soon.
“Well, there’s not much I’ll need you to do for me,” she offered in apology to the TA whose name she’d already forgotten.
She had actually requested a TA for a different, more advanced course that she had not, ultimately, been assigned.
This class on sociological methods was a stats class wearing a cardigan, or whatever bureaucrats wore to work.
“I’ll need some grading, maybe, and you can sit in on the course and the final projects, maybe deliver a lecture or two.
” Sloane was conscious, in her SLAC-y way, of the value of teaching; of the need to provide practical experience; of the desire to not reject a student who was probably in desperate need of a paycheck.
She herself had gone to a SLAC that paid its grad students well, even admirably, rewarding their ability to wear many different hats, but this University felt the value of their degree was reaped later, by design, like how artists necessarily had to starve.
“I’ll do whatever you need me to do,” her TA said.
Sloane noticed again the presence of shoulders. His mouth.
Then her phone alarm went off. “Oh god,” said Sloane, feeling as if someone in the room had started screaming.
“How disruptive. I’m so sorry.” It was her alarm to pick up Isla, and she felt a thrill of relief, both at the reminder that she would soon hold her daughter in her arms again and the realization that even a man this handsome could not actually drive her to madness.
“Could you email me your contact information, and I’ll get you in the cloud drive with the syllabus? ”
“Absolutely.” Her TA stood up and slung one strap of a backpack over his shoulder, reaching out his free hand for hers. “Excited to work with you this semester.”
His hand was warm and strong and his forearm was muscular and he smelled like fresh linen and a previous life.
Sloane had the brief, overpowering sensation to pull the taut skin of his wrist to her lips—to brush them gently along the inner lining of his arm until she felt him shiver.
It was humiliating to feel this way, but only a little.
At the same time that a hot flush reached Sloane’s cheek, she realized she had yet to see the string tied to the vent move at all. Instead, it hung limply, forgotten, like the reflexes belonging to a form of existence she’d set down somewhere and lost.