by Amy Poeppel
We are very pleased to inform you that our wait list has finally moved, and we can now offer you a place in our 7th grade class. We know this news comes late, and we hope we can convince you to consider attending Hudson in the fall, in spite of whatever plans you may have made for your education next year. We are certain that at Hudson you will find the rigorous curriculum you’re seeking, as well as a strong community filled with new friends who share your interests and worldview.
The admissions committee was enormously impressed with every aspect of your application, and it is with great pleasure that we offer you the first-ever Blake Prize, an academic scholarship that extends beyond tuition to cover any other expenses you will incur every year that you will be a Hudson student. This scholarship includes full yearly tuition, weekly private music instruction, and the cost of any academic, artistic, or athletic summer programs in which you choose to participate. Based on your fine academic achievements and your outstanding attitude toward school, learning, and community, we can’t imagine a worthier student to be a Blake Prize recipient.
Please let us know if you will be able to accept our offer.
All the best,
Kate Pearson
“Doug!” Angela called. No answer. “Doug!” she tried again, louder this time. She put down the lamp she was carrying and tried to tuck her hair behind her ear. It was still too short to stay put. Why wasn’t he answering? She wandered into the kitchen and leaned out the back door: ah, there he was, holding a garden hose, filling up the plastic baby pool for Emily, while Grace sat on a picnic blanket watching them. Funny that there were so many objects that had no place in Angela’s life until now: garden hoses, picnic blankets, baby pools, and baby gates. “Suburban trappings,” her mother called them.
The day her parents arrived back on American soil and began unpacking their Austrian etchings and Peruvian textiles, Angela made a panicked call to tell them that Kate had just been shot in the line of duty. Some homecoming that was. They heard the story and were horrified. Their daughter was the victim of a crazed, gun-toting citizenry, of an elitist system that ostracizes the weak and favors the wealthy, that judges children using all the wrong metrics, that clearly drives well-intentioned, overachieving, misguided parents to complete madness. Angela was in the waiting room when they bumbled into the hospital, looking lost and jet-lagged, and on seeing them after such a long time, on feeling that Kate wasn’t her responsibility alone, on realizing that help, that family—in whatever form—had arrived at last, Angela, thirty-one-year-old mother of two, threw herself onto her parents and sobbed.
“Darling daughter,” her mother said. “Whatever did you do to your hair?”
More people arrived and waited for Kate to come out of surgery: Henry and Pat, Maureen and Albert, Doug, Chloe, and Jonathan. They were all somber and stunned, having never been so close to an act of violence. Angela went up to Henry, who looked down at the floor and said in the most avuncular way, “I’m so sorry I let this happen.” It was astounding to see this group of strangers, so devoted to her heroic little sister who, though wounded in the act, had ultimately succeeded in helping a pair of unyielding, unreasonable parents yield and accept reason.
A few weeks after the shooting, Angela hosted a multigenerational family dinner that she cooked in her new kitchen. The party of eight took their seats around the dining room table and got reacquainted. Angela’s daughters had mistakenly believed that their grandparents lived full-time inside a laptop screen, until that day when they met them in real life, back from the field, dressed in peculiar getups, and aged from travel. They brought gifts to the little girls, a menagerie of balsa wood animals from the Amazon and a team of Dala horses from Sweden that Angela lined up and down the center of the table in a parade.
Kate brought Jonathan, a brave move considering the cast of characters, but he didn’t seem put off by it, even after Kate, Doug, and Angela tricked him into playing a drinking game: take a shot every time their mother used a foreign word. He got bombed, and during dessert he stood up at the table and asked Kate if she would move in with him.
Angela was flabbergasted. Too soon! It was way, way too soon! Surely Kate knew better. She wouldn’t do something so rash and impulsive, just when she was finally putting her life back together.
She felt Doug sliding his arm across her shoulder, and she thought of the countless times he’d said to her, “You need to let go a little. She’s okay, Angela. You can let go.”
“When I said she should see a psychiatrist,” she whispered to him, “this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”
“Maybe this is even better,” he said.
“Alles Gute! Parabéns! Felicitaciones!” her parents declared, lifting their glasses.
Even if they weren’t perfect, even if they were different from Angela in almost every respect, they were present, and at least for Angela, the relief was palpable. She raised her glass as well and silently wished Kate a smooth trip and a clean landing.
She had choices: she could go upstairs to continue unpacking boxes in one of the bedrooms, go to the basement to put the wet laundry in the dryer, or go outside and get used to more new trappings in her suburban life—folding chairs and sun umbrellas. She got two beers out of the big side-by-side fridge and went outside to sit on the patio with her family.
Returning to the lab where she had struggled and failed to become a budding anthropologist felt stranger than Kate had imagined.
The graveyard. Even the smell of the place gave her a creepy flashback of missed deadlines, skull-crushing migraines, jagged pieces of bone, and impenetrable spreadsheets. Dr. Greene’s office door was open, and Kate stood up straight before she knocked.
“I don’t believe it,” he said.
“Sorry to barge in.”
“No, it’s nice to see you. I heard about the incident,” he added quickly. “Come in, can I get you something? Sit, please.” He was wearing his usual black skinny jeans, T-shirt, and blazer. Dr. Greene was a brand, and the product was brains, hipness, and a ton of ego. The rumor, according to Kate’s parents, was that he had gone to the set of Good Morning America with an entourage; his stylist had brought, among other things, a nail buffer, bronzer, and a selection of breath mints. “Does it hurt?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Kate said, sitting across from him and setting her bag down.
“Frightening what you went through. What was it like?”
“Surreal.”
“I heard you grappled with that psychotic woman for the gun. Have you considered writing a book about it? People would eat that up.”
“It really wasn’t all that dramatic,” Kate explained. “And she wasn’t psychotic.”
“Too bad,” he said. The window behind him was open, letting in the sound of jackhammers and a view of ugly steel scaffolding. “Do you have a copy of my book?” he asked.
“Not yet, no.”
“Ah, allow me.” He went to his bookshelf and took a copy. “I’ll even sign it for you,” he said. “How are your parents? Have they retired yet?”
“No,” Kate said. “Never. I can’t even imagine.”
“Let’s sign a book for them, too, shall we? It’s always nice to have one that’s been autographed.” He sat at his desk and selected a pen. “And how are things with you, since you moved on from this house of horrors?”
“Something surprising happened when I was in the hospital, recovering: I couldn’t stop thinking about this place, about my experience here.”
“That’s nice to hear.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean that in a good way.”
“Ah. So you’re still sore that I had to give you the boot,” he asked, raising one eyebrow, “after all this time?”
“No, no, I’ve moved on. But I felt this need to come back here because I wanted to remember how it felt at the time, how disempowering it was to get judged so negatively. My new job is all about that, evaluating children and often rejecting them, and I wanted to be reminded firsthand o
f what the aftermath of that feels like.”
“Well, it’s an unpleasant business, but there’s no point deceiving people, is there?” He blew on the ink of his signature, snapped the book shut, and opened the next one. “The world is a tough, competitive place, and the sting of rejection is something one has to learn to live with, preferably with a modicum of dignity.”
“So how do you deal with it?” Kate asked. “What is it like for you?”
“What is what like?”
“Say, when you get a bad book review?”
“That’s different. Those terrible reviews? Those are nothing but bitter remarks made by jealous academics trying to take me down a notch because they can’t stand to see a colleague succeed. I don’t allow any of that to penetrate.”
“So you’ve never fantasized about bringing a gun into the offices of that reviewer who called your book ‘an epic waste of paper’? Or that woman who said, what was it again? That your book is ‘a misguided dung heap, with content so incongruous and immaterial, it can’t even be considered wrong.’ ”
Dr. Greene winced for a split second, but then quickly waved his hand around as if to shoo gnats away. “I don’t even read them. What could I possibly get out of it? No, I choose to focus on the good reviews, and fortunately for me, there are many, many more of those.” He pushed the two books toward her, all the way across the desk, and then stood up to close the window, muffling the sounds of construction.
“I see your point,” Kate said, “but I can still understand how a hurtful rejection like that could make one go completely berserk, out of despair and panic. And I know I went a little nuts when you gave me mine.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, sitting back at his desk.
“Oh, it’s okay,” she said, raising her hands up. “See? No gun.”
He smiled at her. “Yes, well, lucky for me.”
“I’m learning to place more value on the good things people say about me. But I still feel I need to process the bad ones somewhere in my mind. Don’t you believe there’s something to be learned from a harsh critique?”
“I’d say that depends on how much respect you have for the person who’s giving it.”
“Ah,” Kate said, leaning back in her chair and nodding. “Well, now that’s a very good point. You know, the other day I was remembering when you told me that, among other qualities, this field requires precision, intuition, and grit. You said to me, ‘Now you, dear, are careless with details, fail to have insight, and you give up too easily—you’re zero for three.’ ”
“I apologize if I was hard on you,” Dr. Greene said, “but I was relaying what I observed. At the time you agreed with me.”
“I don’t think either one of us knew me well enough to sum up my weaknesses in such a sweeping, unnuanced manner, but I did listen to everything you said. I have no regrets about leaving this field behind, and I can say with absolute certainty that my current boss would use much kinder words to describe me.”
“In that case I’m glad you’ve worked on improving yourself.”
“My current boss is approachable, supportive, and invested. Forgive me,” she said, “if I tell you that—as a supervisor—you were zero for three. I thought you should know.”
“Kate.” He got up again, walked around his desk, and leaned against it. Arms crossed, hair shaggy, gaze penetrating; he was doing a perfect imitation of his own book jacket photo. “It’s disappointing to see that you have a chip on your shoulder. Lots of people fail in this field; you’re not the only one.”
“That’s true.”
“Lots of people can’t cut it.”
“Like Sherman?”
“Well, Sherman,” Dr. Greene said, chuckling. “Adjuncting is the best someone like Sherman can do.”
“Meaning?”
“Let’s just say the job market is really tough these days.”
“I was wondering—how come you never brought Sherman along to conferences with you? It seemed like you kept him in obscurity.”
“I was as supportive of Sherman as I am of any of my grad students.” He leaned in toward her. “But there are some people you simply can’t have as the ‘face’ of your department. Sherman, and you can’t deny this, is eccentric and even embarrassing. He hath the tendency to maketh people uncomfortable.”
“Did you put that in his letter of recommendation?”
“No, of course not. I also didn’t mention that he often wears bow ties with his T-shirts.”
“I’ve read hundreds of letters of recommendation this year,” Kate told him, “and I know now how important they are in helping make a case for a candidate. So I’m only wondering, given that, let’s be honest, you don’t really like Sherman personally and given how incredibly busy you’ve been with promoting your book, if maybe, just maybe, you rushed it? Maybe, inadvertently, you sent off a lame, generic, half-assed letter that didn’t adequately highlight Sherman’s strengths.”
“I think I’ve been in academia long enough to know how to write a recommendation, and I certainly wouldn’t sabotage anyone.”
“You’re right,” Kate said, shaking her head, “of course not. I owe you an apology. I’m upset about Sherman’s situation, and I’m sorry for trying to put it on you.”
“You’re clearly emotional,” Dr. Greene told her.
“Is that what it is?” Kate asked. “Maybe so. I just didn’t want to believe that a best-selling author, top mind in his field, highly respected member of the anthropological community, could write a strong letter of support for an outstanding candidate, and yet be completely ignored like that.”
Dr. Greene took a deep breath. “They simply didn’t offer him the job. It happens.”
“Of course, but that’s pretty rude, isn’t it? Insulting? The opinion of a professor of your standing should be worth something.” She got up to go. “My parents are not going to understand this.”
“Why?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they call up their friends at KU to find out themselves what the hell happened there.”
“Your parents know Sherman?”
“They met in Berlin last fall and were so impressed with him. I mean, talk about high praise: my father wrote me, calling him brilliant, passionate, and charming, and he said that ‘Herr Doctor Gregson’ will chair a department by thirty-five. And then my mother called his recent paper a game changer in terms of data analysis methodology. They love him. They’ll definitely want to get to the bottom of why he couldn’t land a tenure-track job anywhere.”
“But there’s no point second-guessing these things,” Dr. Greene said.
“As if I could stop them,” she said, laughing. “Well, it was good to see you again, Dr. Greene.” She picked up her bag and shook his hand. “And if I can make a suggestion: I’d take a good, hard look at all your negative reviews. See if there’s anything to learn from them, anything at all. You might be surprised by what you find out.”
“What would I possibly find out?”
She walked out of the office, leaving the signed books on his desk.
To: KU Search Committee
From: Jordan Greene
Re: Applicant for Assistant Professor Position, Department of Anthropology
* * *
I am attaching a letter in support of the application of Dr. Sherman Gregson, my former graduate student. I believe our department secretary may have inadvertently sent you an incomplete draft of a letter intended for someone else. I ask that you please read the attached recommendation and reconsider Sherman for your tenure-track position.
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Dr. Jordan Greene
Professor of Biological Anthropology
Author of This Little Piggy Went to Market: How Grocery Stores Are Making Us Fat and Why Grazing Will Make Us Fit (available on Amazon, iBooks, Google Play, and at bookstores everywhere)
Hudson was closed for the summer, and Kate was surprised at
how different it felt without the students and teachers filling up all the rooms, giving the place life. In the classrooms, chairs were placed upside down on desks, and the hallways were empty and dark. Starting tomorrow, Kate would be gone as well, taking her four-week paid summer vacation, during which she would move downstairs one floor, keeping Stella close by while distancing herself from the couch she’d relied on for far too long.
Her office felt like a second home now, and she spent her last day there organizing and getting prepared for the upcoming season. She shredded hundreds of pages of messy interview notes, threw out dozens of thank-you letters, and wiped down her computer screen. She stripped her bulletin board, and using four thumbtacks, she posted, directly in the center, a large, bright, and slightly warped watercolor of cheerful, idealized skyscrapers lined up on a wide city street. A yellow cab and traffic light were in the foreground, along with a cat wearing a conspicuous collar, loudly indicating that he or she belonged to someone. Written on the back of the picture, now out of sight, were the words “Here is a picture for your office. I hope you will look at it sometimes when you are at work. Yours truly, Claudia.” Kate stepped back to get a better view.
In the early afternoon, when she saw she had nothing left to do, she walked out of her office, closed the door behind her, and locked it.
Pat was in Henry’s office, unpacking a lunch he’d brought him. Maureen was right: June was so easy. There was time to do all kinds of frivolous and enjoyable things: Maureen had false eyelashes on, Kate had caught up on full seasons of Scandal and Downton Abbey, and Pat and Henry were having lunch together for the third time that week.
Pat had brought tabbouleh salad, kale salad, and chickpea salad. Looking thoroughly depressed, Henry was using a plastic fork to pick through the chickpeas and tomatoes to find the minuscule pieces of goat cheese. “Did you bring any potato salad?” he asked.
“Mayonnaise is not on your diet,” Pat said, “and kale is a power food. Try it.” He looked up and saw Kate standing in the doorway. “Look!” he exclaimed, getting up to hug her. “It’s your guardian angel, Henry.”