During the break, one of my students sees me splashing water on my face and swallowing more Advil and when she asks if I’m okay I hold on hard to the cold sink and nod and smile at her, fever spiking, my head cloudy, and don’t say anything.
* * *
That weekend, we go to some too-big, close-to-the-water Long Island house in which my husband built two months’ rent’s worth of walk-in closets.
* * *
We get invited to these things after he builds someone a custom closet or redoes their cabinets. The men who own these houses like to open a beer and sit with him as he works on weekends or in the evenings after they come home. They open beers and offer him one; often, he says yes and sticks around.
He went to the same type of college they did, studied the same types of grown-up good-job things. He hated going to the same place every day, had always, secretly, wanted to work with his hands. He’d go after work to a shop he rented and build for hours, just to calm his nerves, to make things, after hours of vagaries. He’d gone to college when no one before him in his family had gone to college and he felt at first that he had to prove something. Once the markets crashed, he had a reason, but also, he had an excuse. He could leave and not just not feel guilty but feel good.
Those greedy fucks, he’d mutter, listening to NPR, as the markets kept tumbling and then the banks were bailed out. He stood close to me—we’d just moved in together—rubbing his thumb along the fresh wear forming on his hands, his suits all dropped at Housing Works, so obviously relieved.
* * *
It’s a shorter ride on the Long Island Rail Road than my commute to work and we bring the children. My husband’s hoping to find his next job. We make small talk, sip too-sweet wine, and he flirts, is charming. I spend long stretches of time sitting fully clothed on the lids of toilets, or searching for or playing with the children, desperate for when he says we can go home.
He’s fitter than these other men, a little younger. He’s cooler; I never understood the purpose of words like “cool” until I met him. He makes their wives reach up too often to touch their faces or their hair when he is close to them. These men perform for him, say “fuck” too much and unbutton the top buttons of their dress shirts and pick at the labels of their beer bottles and make adolescent jokes.
Their wives linger in adjacent rooms, offering food and calling to the children. I imagine they have better sex the weeks or months he’s in their houses, the smell of him lingering in their halls and closets, a monkey wrench or small piece of wood left out.
They are, always, shocked to meet me—my short hair, my mussed-up, too-big clothes. My glasses and the way I use my hands too much when I talk. They look past me sometimes, thinking, maybe, This can’t be right; they must think: Her? She’s a professor, they mutter to one another, once we start talking, eyebrows raised and smiling, like the word “alleged” sits lodged in the backs of their throats. I nod and redden, try to explain the word “adjunct,” which is, perhaps, a cousin of “alleged.” I slip, quickly, from making jokes to making everyone uncomfortable. Except no health insurance, I say. Professor, I say, of failing to find a way to make a living wage.
* * *
Once, one of the husbands at one of these parties mistook me for the nanny, slipping me a twenty, saying, Thanks so much for taking such good care of the little ones. I did not give the money back.
I don’t tell them that, as of recently, I also teach high school. I don’t know why I don’t tell them. I don’t want to talk to them about what good, important work I’m doing. I think this might be even more demeaning than “alleged adjunct.”
They nudge their preadolescent children toward me as if proximity to an Ivy-League adjunct will result, five years from now, in stellar SAT scores. His teacher says, they whisper, that he might be gifted. She loves to write, they say, but the teacher resents her spirit, holds her back. I’m nice to them because I know I have to be and hate them for this, because, if I don’t say exactly what I know I should, they might decide they don’t want those cabinets or that walk-in closet or whatever other bullshit thing and we might not pay our rent.
* * *
I nurse our two-year-old on the couch because I know that they don’t like it, would prefer I go to one of the children’s rooms where it’s quiet, where I have some privacy. A nice woman comes to me with a blanket; I leave it in a pile on the couch.
I watch my husband, swarmed now by both men and women. I hear him laugh from far away. I see his perfect posture, the easy way he holds his beer, his hand wrapped around the label, his thumb flipped over the lip, the slight stubble on his chin and cheeks. Our girl stares up at me, suckling. Another woman sits next to me on the couch. She’s our age, a corporate lawyer. It’s always more jarring when they’re not older, they’re just rich.
You okay? she says. I’m fine, I say. I watch our four-year-old flit through the room with a pack of older kids.
They’re so beautiful, she says.
I nod.
She places her hand on her stomach and I wonder briefly if she’s pregnant.
We’ve been trying, she says.
I try to decide whether to ask more questions, whether to lean toward her like I would lean toward her had I not already decided to dislike her, to let her hold the two-year-old once she’s done nursing, just to have the memory of the weight of her in all the months until she has one of her own.
She says: You want some wine? I shake my head.
She grabs hold of my girl’s feet. Okay, she says. She looks at me a second time. Let me know, she says.
* * *
On the train ride home, both girls fall asleep and I start crying.
We’re in public, so he’s quiet. What I imagine he might be thinking is always worse than the thing he finally says out loud. We watch a drunk man slap his wife as she stumbles off the train.
He runs his fingers through his hair and rubs his hand down his neck and whispers at me. What the fuck, he says, is wrong?
I don’t know, I say. I rub a thumb over our daughters’ wrists and refuse to look at him.
He has hold of the handle of the stroller and I watch his knuckles tighten, his arm beneath his shirt get hard.
Those women, I say.
You just listen, he says. You just smile.
Don’t you hate them? I say. It’s all so …
They’re not really what I hate.
I’m just tired, I say.
You’re always tired.
I look down at our girls.
It’s just work, he says.
I look out the window.
The girls sleep.
* * *
When we get home they’re still asleep and we slip them somehow into their beds without their waking. My husband pulls me toward him, into the bathroom. He bends me over the cheap black fake-metal shelving unit I bought from Target when I first moved to New York and he enters me slowly, half apologetic, his hands on my shoulders and then on my waist. The top shelf of the shelving unit holds my few beauty products: mascara, witch hazel, lip balm; the glass moisturizer jar—it’s too expensive but my mother buys a jar for me once a year, at Christmas—falls, hard and heavy, on my head, but I stay still and don’t make any noise.
He leans down to kiss me when he’s finished, but I turn my head to grab a piece of toilet paper. I wipe myself and then I find our two-year-old, awake and hungry; she grasps at me, milk leaking from the breast she doesn’t drink from, the curve between my chest and stomach wet and sticky. I listen to him take a shower while she eats.
* * *
When you leave me, I say—the baby asleep on my chest and my skin still sticky—I say, you’ll find some girl who smiles and wears appropriate things. (He had to pull my wool cap off my head half an hour into the party.) She’ll be complacent, easy, a little doughy, I say. She’ll not be terrified of lipstick or that gunk I think I might need to start rubbing underneath my eyes. She’ll devote her whole self to you, I say. She’ll be inte
resting but never threatening. You’ll love her hard and often right up to the point that you’re disgusted by the person you’ve become.
We lie a long time, awake but not talking. He climbs down from the bed and takes the baby from me, brings her to her bed. I listen as he pours himself a glass of water. He climbs back up, separate from me. I listen as his eyes close and his breathing shifts and he falls asleep.
* * *
For our last session of my night class, I take my students out for drinks. This was common when I was a student in this program. It’s grad school and all the rules are loose and fluid. Students ply me with drinks and then say the things they have perhaps thought all semester but have not been able to say in class. Four of them have cried at office hours. I’m the least threatening of all of their professors, a bit more mom than not. I want to give them whatever it is they want for me to give them. But then sometimes what they want is not a thing that anyone could give.
My boss got drunk and tried to kiss me, whispers a girl, her words slurring, who writes often about a trauma she experienced the year she turned sixteen. I had to ride home in a cab with him and take him up to his apartment because I didn’t think he’d make it home and then he tried to kiss me and now I’m scared I’ll lose my job.
Do you think I’m dumb? asks a young girl who writes about death and, once, a strange, riveting piece about a slaughterhouse.
Of course not, I say, meaning it.
People think I’m dumb a lot, she says.
She’s blond and pretty, sweet-looking.
I never thought that you were dumb.
At some point, the name of the man my former student mentioned months ago comes up. He shouldn’t be a teacher, says one of my male students.
He’s disgusting, says another one.
He tells girls in office hours that he’s in an open marriage, says one girl.
He belittles women, says another.
He’s fucked up.
I’ve had two bourbons and am not sure what to say to all of this. No one has so far offered a specific accusation. I’m not sure how to answer. I’m not sure what’s allowed.
I’m sorry, I say. Has anyone said anything to anyone higher up?
One of the girls, who every class has lined eyes and lined lips and is much smarter than I thought she was when I first met her, says, Someone tried to report it to the heads of the department but they shut them down.
What do you mean? I say. What did they report?
I’m not sure, she says.
None of them is sure and none of them seems to have knowledge that’s firsthand, concrete, conclusive.
I’m sorry, you guys, I say. This sucks.
It’s revolting, says one of the men who is most vocal. He is older than the others. This shit should not still be going on.
* * *
I don’t call Melissa. I worry that she’ll think I’m being unreasonable. I worry that I ask too much, and I don’t want to ask for more that she can’t give. Instead, I wait two days and then I call a dean I know and trust, who helped me briefly when I was pregnant my last year of grad school and navigating how to keep my health insurance while not being on campus as much. She comes each semester during one of the two fifteen-minute faculty meetings to repeat the same phrases about university policy.
You have a duty to report, she tells us each semester. If you are a witness to or have knowledge of any of the following, she says, and then she lists them, knowing full well half the room has tuned her out, all the student grievances that we must contact her about.
So provincial, a fifty-something man had whispered to me at one of these meetings a few months ago, as this dean explained that one could not date a student while she was in one’s class. This guy scrolled through Facebook on his phone and shook his head as she told us undergrads were always, regardless of the circumstances, off limits.
They’re not children, he added, and I sat still, my hands held in my lap.
* * *
First, I write this dean an email asking if she has time to meet with me. I tell her I have something I need help with. She gives me a couple of times that work for me to come in or talk on the phone. I skip out of work in the middle of the day to meet with her.
We make small talk. I make an off-handed joke about wanting to start a commune upstate because New York is too expensive, and she shows me a video on her phone of a plain-faced older woman with long, gray hair who built her own house and farm and what seems to be an anticapitalist self-help YouTube empire about the advantages of going off the grid.
So, what’s up? the dean asks after she turns off the third video; she turns her phone screen down on her desk. In this last video, the woman spent most of the time in conversation with her cows.
What’s going on? she says.
I’m tearing up but both of us ignore this.
I trust you, I say. I feel like I should say something, I say. But I have no firsthand knowledge; I have no evidence, no facts.
Okay, she says.
I start with the student in my office. I say the man’s name and tell her about my students that last class. I’m embarrassed suddenly as I tell her we’d been drinking, wondering how this might be dealt with later on.
I think they tell me, I say, because I’m this weird space of I have no power but am still technically in a position of authority. What they’re saying, I say, there’s nothing tangible, and yet …
I try to explain to her that I’m crying partially because I’m scared to be the person who is in here, that also I don’t wholly understand why I am crying. That partially it’s because of how common and how pedestrian everything I tell her sounds.
What do you mean, common? she says.
The whole place is systemically icky, often, if you are a woman is not a reasonable or rational thing to say to someone. The whole world is, sort of, so who cares. Ickiness and a low-grade, sometimes destabilizing discomfort are not substantive allegations and I, daughter of lawyers, know this, and yet, now that I’m here, I want to say this too.
I don’t, I say, know many women who took many classes with male professors after their first year. There were maybe four male professors we knew we could trust. I know at least three women who slept with the professors whose classes they took. I know one woman got her short story sent to a fancy publication by her married professor after that.
She looks at me. I’ve said this all out loud.
This was consensual, I say.
Do you believe that? she says.
No, I say. But I’m not them.
It’s literature, I say. Art, I say. Sex and beauty are a part of it. Let’s get— I say. I just wanted you to know the stuff I heard about this guy. I didn’t want to not say anything in case there are more things later on.
I feel awful and ungrateful.
There are some really wonderful professors up here, I say. I name some of them. This place has done so much for me, I say.
Can you come back next week? she says.
She has to go and I have to get back to work for an afternoon meeting about nothing.
Sure, I say.
Before I leave, she looks like she might grab hold of my arm but doesn’t. It’s okay, she says. It’s good to cry.
I wipe my nose with my sleeve and then I’m embarrassed.
I nod.
I know, I say. I shake my head and laugh.
At work, my eyes are puffy but no one says a thing about it. I’m done teaching for the day and, briefly, Kayla comes into the empty classroom where I’ve hidden to work and tells me about her day. A lot of girls don’t like her and there’ve been rumors spread about her, a litany of Facebook posts that she took screenshots of and the assistant principal had to ask the girls to take them down.
Stupid jealous bitches, she says. She picks at her fingers.
It feels worth saying that she’s beautiful. Lips and eyes and cheekbones. Perfect, dark-brown skin. She wears a wrap around her hair this day and positions and t
hen repositions it as she talks and looks past me toward the door.
They need to just take care of their own selves, she says.
I nod.
I want to tell her not to endanger herself, to stay steady. I feel completely ill equipped and don’t think anger in this instance is an out-of-hand response. But she’s been suspended twice this year for fighting and if she’s suspended one more time, she’ll get kicked out.
You have to take care of yourself, I say.
* * *
Two days later I get an email from the office for equality and affirmative action at the university asking if I have time to come in. I google the woman who sent the email and find out she’s a lawyer. When I left the dean’s office, I had been under the impression that nothing would happen until we spoke again. I email back quickly and give this woman dates and times when I can sneak out of work and come up to see her. Tomorrow morning, then, she confirms.
I draft an email to Melissa but don’t send it. I don’t want to bother her with more of other people’s worry. I figure I can always find her afterward.
I think, my whole run, about how to dress for this meeting. I wear all black, pants and long-sleeved shirt, afraid somehow to show any skin. I’m nervous waiting for her to come out of her office when it’s time for our meeting. She doesn’t come out. Instead, she stays seated at her desk and the receptionist tells me it’s my turn to go in.
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