by Diane Zinna
“It means ‘to come near, to come beside’—”
“Ture. Without ture. What is that? Smoke? Someone look it up.”
But they just kept throwing out their guesses, laughing, congratulating one another on being in this secret circle, where it didn’t matter if they were right, only that they’d been the types who studied it once.
Quietly, me, the paper-ruffler: “In that context, it means something more like ‘close but no cigar.’ ”
They all looked at the blackboard like the words were coming into focus. “Of course. From Erasmus’s Adagia,” one of the men said. It was likely not from the Adagia, but they all responded: of course, of course.
I felt Latin belonged to me. It was my middle-of-the-night language. I’d learned it on my own after my parents died, to distract myself, to fill the quiet in my head. To those professors, the sound of it, the syntax, the rhythms, were a distant memory, a friend they’d all known once. It seemed to me that was also how other people experienced grief. They would have an acute, complete understanding of it for days or weeks, whatever it took, and then it would be over, and their minds were washed out like split gourds and they just went on with their lives, went to their neighbors’ barbecues, chatted and laughed. I couldn’t fathom this, how people could so easily move on.
“How did you know that?” Dorothy Wisch asked me that day. She was the head of the international program. She’d never noticed me much before.
Looking back, I don’t think I was right—prope sine ture? Sometimes I would lie in bed worrying that I’d gotten it wrong, that everything good that came after that moment was based on a stupid mistranslation and I’d be found out, and the bubble would be popped. But it was a moment of magic. The next thing I knew, I was being encouraged to interview for part-time work as an adjunct, one precious class of my own, teaching comp. When I got it, I was so grateful for the chance, I told myself I’d never take it for granted. I was always early to department meetings, always looking to take on extra work. After the first set of student evaluations Dorothy Wisch received on me, she shook me by the shoulders and hugged me.
When my new colleagues heard how I’d gotten the position, they all smiled politely and asked the same questions: Where did you go to school again? You got the position in the international program just like that?
Yes, I thought. I know on the outside it all must have seemed so easy to them.
Though I was only an adjunct and skirting the place—one class, the outer rim of the Rose Walk, off-hours at the library—I felt I was finally living some semblance of the life I’d hoped for long ago. I would embrace whatever small part of it that could be mine.
I came to know the other adjuncts best by the bright concert flyers and lecture notices they tacked to the walls of our shared office. I’d try to start conversations. I’d ask them about their classes, but immediately their talk would turn to deconstruction or Derrida, recycled stuff from their grad school days, as though they wanted to prove that they should be teaching in the more academically prestigious English department, and not just giving comp lessons. I longed for a friend who loved teaching in the international program as much as I did. I once told one of the women how much I loved teaching, and she asked me, “Do you want someone to videotape your classes? Maybe then you could show everyone how it’s done.”
That was Hortence Ryan. She was a longtime adjunct who taught as many sections as they’d give her. She insisted on our calling her Tenny, a name that suggested youthfulness, though she was gray and slow, her thick legs a topography of dark veins. She wore sparkling hairpins, bright brooches placed just so, skirts that never wrinkled down the front. But the smiles that creased her face were more like a gritting of teeth. Her expressions of interest lifted her brows so high they became looks that asked, What are you doing? Why are you doing it?
At my first department meeting, she thought I was a student and told me I was in the wrong room.
But when she saw that Dorothy Wisch treated me like a friend, Tenny cleaved herself to me. She was the kind who aligned herself with people she thought could advance her. She got my mail for me from the department office, laughed when I laughed, was always lending me a pencil before I could reach into my bag for my own.
I felt she was taking me under her wing to smother me. “You laugh too fast at their jokes,” Tenny would say. “You write too much on their papers. How much could you possibly have to say?”
But I wouldn’t let her get to me; if the school was my new family, she was just a haughty aunt.
I told her that in Latin, Stella Maris means “Star of the Sea,” a term used in seafaring to denote the star that guided wayward sailors home. Over time the star was called the protector of travelers.
I asked her, “Isn’t that so apt for the students here?”
Tenny said, “Don’t tell them that, dear. You’ll be eaten alive.”
Part of me once thought that she and I could be friends. She was an eccentric, obsessed with the life of Emily Dickinson. I learned that on the day she swept into the adjunct office wearing a gauzy black gown with a clutch of fresh flowers in her too-low décolletage.
“It’s her death day tomorrow, you know,” she told me, seeming defensive. “Emily wanted to be buried with heliotrope. They put it in her casket. She held a bouquet in her folded hands. I always wear white on her birthday and black on her death day.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said. “Your students will remember the seasons. They’ll remember the name of that flower. Aren’t all our favorite teachers the ones who make things come alive?”
“Is that what you aim to be, Lauren? Their favorite?”
With Tenny, I grew careful not to share too much of what was going right.
I tried to stagger my office hours to work with my students in private, but it seemed no matter when I arrived, Tenny would be there, often sitting in my chair. She would fan herself, indicate the open window, say that she’d needed the breeze. The office had one window, which rose above my desk and framed the campus like a picture.
And my window also looked out upon the front steps of Bisson Hall, where Siri took her math class in the afternoons. I had a beautiful view of the blue-slate path that led from that building to my own, and of the willow trees that flanked it, expanding and contracting like sea anemones.
One day I saw Siri coming, carrying a little white bag with tissue paper poking out of the top. Behind me, Tenny was at her own desk, shaking the ice at the bottom of a soda cup.
When Siri came into the office—the way she always entered rooms, smiling: Hello, hej, is this okay?—I sensed the other teachers stop their work. My desk felt suddenly suspended, the air sucked into all their ears.
“I brought you something,” Siri said, setting the bag upon my desk. “A very small thank-you.”
I opened it.
It was a yellow bud vase, the shape of a lemon, its finish that of a lemon rind.
“They keep the international students rather separate,” she said. “I live on the international floor of my dorm. I feel like you are my first real American friend.”
She couldn’t stay. I watched out the window to see her walk away. “Lauren,” Tenny said. The little vase suddenly felt heavy as a paperweight, portentous as a bomb.
I looked up. Her mouth looked swollen on one side, and I could tell it was because she was sucking on an ice cube from her soda cup. Slowly she slit an envelope with a long-handled letter opener.
“What are you doing?” she said.
* * *
—
IT WAS A teaching day. I returned to my apartment full of joy from it, an exhausted, adrenaline joy, a heart-racing, no-one-to-share-it-with joy.
I walked Annie. After, when we were heading back up the stairs, I let her leash fall and watched from beneath as her little white feet climbed the open-backe
d steps. Inside, I flipped through the stations and saw a yogi on TV. I tried to do all the moves. Annie kept crawling beneath me when I was in downward-facing dog to lick my face. When I collapsed laughing on the floor, she snuffled around my hair and ears. I wondered how the laughing sounded to my neighbors through the walls.
Many immigrant families lived in my apartment complex, and groups of their children played in the road until dark. I could hear my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Vallapil, calling to her son and daughter to come inside. In the evenings, she would sometimes knock on my door and hand me a fragrant plate of food, put her hands up, smiling, and say, “Just try. You might not like it.” It was always delicious. I think she worried about my living alone. I gave her my extra key, and during the day her son, Ravi, would come in to feed my fish and walk Annie, but it was a comfort, really, to know that someone was thinking of me from time to time.
I knew her children’s bedtime from the sounds through my wall, their muffled voices after their TV was turned off, the sound of their bathtub filling with water, then draining out. I waited for the splish-splosh-whoosh of their mother starting the dishwasher, then the sound of her sliding open the patio door to sit by herself in the dark and wait for her husband to return home from work.
The walls in our apartment building were thin. My bed was next to the window, so at night I could look through the slats of my blinds and see the other three apartment buildings that bordered the grass courtyard and small playground. Sometimes I could see someone cooking in her kitchen or someone smiling to himself in the glow of a computer screen. Though I watched and listened, I didn’t really know why the young ROTC student in the window across the way was often taken away from his apartment by ambulance. I didn’t know why the woman downstairs didn’t say hello at the mailboxes anymore, like she used to. But what I did was imagine different stories for her in my head until I found one that helped me feel compassion for her, and when I did, and I was compelled to make her cookies, I did it, though she never really knew why.
In my loneliness, I had learned to string the smallest details into a story of how we were all very much the same: We all had dishwashers, and thin walls that nearly allowed conversation, and troubles that prevented us from ever slowing down, but we were all friends.
What did my neighbors think of me? Did they think of me at all? These were just-hanging-on years in every aspect of my life. The years of credit management. Of paying down debt. Of faraway friends breezing through for a visit and being surprised to see their old pictures on my refrigerator, commenting on my freezer full of vegetable potpies.
I visited all of the D.C. historic spots. I went to Mount Vernon and bought a box of flash cards in the gift shop that helped you learn the names of all the presidents and their VPs. There was a small black-box theater where they replayed George Washington’s death with animatronics, black ribbons tied to the ends of the empty pews. Upon leaving, I started to cry hysterically, and later I came to on a riverbank as a dinner cruise sailed past on the Potomac. I felt a police officer’s hand on my shoulder. He asked me if I had anywhere else I could go.
I always kept HGTV on. The calmness of the shows, the predictability, the excitement of choosing a new home, of decorating so that it is fresh, clean, and new. All night long. Did I ever sleep with all the lights out? My life was a back-and-forth, a blur, the comings and goings of work and classes and errands and then back to my apartment, where I’d turn on one of the home-buying shows and imagine my life in three other houses—one, two, or three?
Sometimes I was so tired I couldn’t remember the drive to and from campus. I’d come home exhausted and let Annie go pee on the balcony. Once the German shepherd downstairs attacked Annie and nearly killed her, a bite across her stomach that required twenty stitches. I think I remember that my downstairs neighbor gave me her old mountain bike after that as a way of apologizing. I think I remember that I brought it to pawn when I needed extra cash.
Nighttime. I was in my bed, and Annie lay in her bed across the room. There was a flash of light outside, and I worried that it was an ambulance coming for the ROTC boy again. I drew up the cord of my blinds. As soon as I did, another flash, green, right beside my window. Then suddenly there were a dozen watery-green balls of light in the courtyard. They bounced from the grass to the tops of the buildings, then off of the sides and down again.
I scanned the courtyard. No one with a laser pointer. No one on the playground. All the other apartments were dark.
I wondered if they were balls of gas, and one splashed against my window like water. Maybe they were balloons, but one by one they hit the branches of a tree without popping. I saw them shimmering, saw the luminous outline of them.
I wasn’t afraid. I felt they were for me. It was like watching children playing. Tears were streaming down my face. Happy tears, my mother would have said.
After about a minute it was over.
I looked over at Annie, sleeping soundly in her puff bed.
There were moments of living there that I was not depressed. But I was depressed.
I wanted to tell someone what I’d just seen. And that I had memorized the names of all the roses. And taught myself Latin. That I knew the names of all the presidents and their VPs. That the teaching job made my life mean something again. Each pretty hard to believe. Each, said aloud, sounding crazy.
I kept HGTV on to make sure that the sadness didn’t creep in too hard. The stacks of frozen potpies for the days I didn’t leave my apartment, so I had food. The debt management, watching the other windows in the apartment complex—I was trying. The beautiful green lights bouncing that night. The downstairs neighbor, the balcony, the German shepherd, the bike.
The next day in class, Siri came in smiling, a look to ask, Hello, hej, is this okay?
“The strangest thing happened to me,” I said, a little breathless.
“Tell me,” she said.
THIS IS WHAT I wanted to tell her. Eighteen years old. I returned to the house of my childhood that was so empty, with all its things changed after the estate sale, all those strangers’ grubby finger pads touching and rejecting, touching and commenting, laughing, making small talk while the green and red grapes that my mother and I had bought the last time we went to the farmers’ market shriveled smaller and smaller in the refrigerator.
There was a funeral. I called the friends I thought would come. They were my first calls. My friend Dahlia—we grew up together—was the first person I phoned. She was at her college in upstate New York. She said she had a test, and she was so, so sorry. My friend Nicki from high school spent some time bitching about Dahlia with me, and it felt good for a few minutes, to hear her outrage that Dahlia would not see the gravity of this situation. “Dahlia has always been selfish,” she said. Then: Wait? You want me to come down there? She kept asking me why I had no family, and I kept answering her questions like I was supposed to explain myself. My parents were older. Their siblings were gone before I was born. No cousins? I have two. But I’ve never met them. Her silence blamed me for not knowing them. Where are your grandparents? As though I had simply forgotten all the many loving family members who would help me.
An ex-boyfriend, the one who took me to my high school prom, heard about the accident from his parents and phoned me late at night. “Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, sounding hurt. “You can count on me, Lo.” He called me Lo. A way to make fun of my Long Island accent, the one he’d shed first. “I’ll be there.” He didn’t come. Oh, my God, I’m sorry, they all said. But the distance. But why are you alone?
Two of my high school friends who now worked at nail salons and had their design samples glued to upside-down Styrofoam cups came with black manicures. Other people I knew from high school, my experience a mystery to them, all of them yet without an understanding of loss—they came, going through the motions. Their Italian parents prepared them before they arrived—go up t
wo at a time, you kneel at the caskets and pray, cross yourself as you walk away. They came in suits and dark clothes and stood in groups like they did in my high school’s hallways. I can see them so clearly, but there are times I cannot remember my mother’s voice, my father’s hands. They all took the laminated prayer cards emblazoned with pictures of outside-hearted Mary and Saint Jude. Did they still have them, somewhere in their homes? Or did they throw them away, my parents’ typeset names too eerie to keep, and then forgotten?
I still have the black dress I wore to my parents’ funeral. So many things could have happened to it in the years that passed. It hung in a cardboard wardrobe box, crushed against my mother’s old clothes, for years.
When my college boyfriend wanted to move to D.C., I thought maybe it was time for me to start over someplace new. Nighttime in the Salvation Army parking lot: The store was closed. I’d emptied my dank storage unit and was trying to find a place to leave the boxes. My mother’s suede coat, my father’s books, all those boxes labeled so carefully—I could not even look at them as I unloaded the car. We’d been in the empty parking lot for an hour as I tried to decide what to take, what to leave. My boyfriend was saying, Now, Lauren, if you want to come with me, let’s go, otherwise, I’ll be seeing you. The furniture they used to love—the old patio table we used to lie upon, staring at the stars. How did I even transport it to the Salvation Army parking lot? That table was what my eyes caught as the U-Haul hummed up the entrance ramp to the long, black highway. I saved the wardrobe box. That came.
When we got to D.C., the black dress looked so wrinkled. I had it cleaned four or five times but could not get it to lie right. I left it in plastic, pressed against the back of my boyfriend’s closet. When that relationship ended, I folded the dress over my arm and carried it to the apartment of another man, this one much older, where I didn’t have much reason to stay dressed, much less wear dresses. I remember telling him how I wanted, just once, to go someplace in my life where I could wear a ball gown. He took to calling me high-maintenance, nothing’s-ever-good-enough-for-you, snobby bitch, and when that relationship ended, he put all my clothes in a white garbage bag outside his door, the satiny collar of the black dress peeking through its neck.