by JoAnna Novak
“Larry. Hun. Elliot, Larry. Larry, El.”
I coughed. “Larry. I don’t know if I’m finishing that shot.”
Laughing, he walked over to my side of the island. I could smell him. He was the toast. Wholegrain. Dry. Char-slapped. He dumped the remainder of my shot in his drink.
I spun on my stool to face him. I had to look up to make eye contact.
“Is Lisa at school?” I didn’t know why I was whispering.
His eyes tracked something over my head. I tried imagining what he saw: the sliding doors, the sage-green curtains tied with turquoise ribbons and pinecones, the Breit’s backyard, the deck bogged down with snow, the annuals slumbering in the frozen garden, petals of dead mums, thorns from long-gone roses, the pioneer baby’s ghost beating its calico wings and shaking its bison moccasins, Lisa in a slip dress and her suede snow bunny boots, the furry pompons bouncing as she twerked her hips. The “Macarena” was stuck in my head now. Dammit. I saw Lisa wink and toss her blonde hair back; it rippled in the winter sun, whipping in tune to the song: “You all want me, you can’t have me … Ay! Ay!”
Mr. Breit put a hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t feel anything through my coat, but I knew he was touching me. I was like a book that had been ripped open. I stayed very still, trying not to breathe.
“Elliot. Did you know Michael Jordan retired two days ago?”
Stagey nodding.
“Okay. Good. Sweetie, it’s a dark day in Chicago. End of an era—and I don’t even wanna forecast what’s next for this shit stew of a city. Cops condemning dibs, all other vestiges of civilization with the ’90s winding down. So no more three-peats, no more Hummers. I’ll tell you. Following the Lewinsky business? It’s a bad sign. Apex of our nation’s problems? Not even. We’ve got ’em here, in spades and clubs and hearts and diamonds, the full deck of corruption. Jesse White appointing his own daughter to Accounts and Revenue, George Ryan with his perpetual psyching everyone out about that airport on the South Side, Daley’s publicist chump—Ahgh!” He clawed the back of his neck. How much Scotch was in his sludge? “What I’m telling you is, I’m sick of the buddy-buddy show. City of onions and cowards and cons, Capone’s Chicago, that’s still the story. Call those folks in Edinburgh. Forget Dolly the Sheep. Tell ’em to clone Mrs. O’Grady’s cow, and burn the 312 to the ground again.”
He paused, took a sip. The Scotch burbled in my stomach, rubber-banded my brain. Mr. Breit was making zero sense. Or, for the first time, I was drunk.
“What I’m trying to say is there’s enough corruption on my desk. Elliot. Egleston. Don’t lie to me about my daughter.”
His hand squeezed my shoulder.
“Lying about what?” I said, weakly. “I asked a question. Where’s Lisa? How can a question be—”
“Okay, not a lie. Christ, you and my wife. The fact-checkers. Men are from Mars, Women play semantic games. Jesus. Don’t be sly or go all coy or act innocent. Does one of those work for you?”
“Mr. Breit, I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. Suddenly, I felt scared. Trapped. His hand clamped my shoulder tighter. Crunch a bone, I wished. Just do it.
But he relaxed. I tried to speak slowly and calmly. “I’m legit looking for Lisa. I thought she’d be here. She wasn’t at school yesterday. I’m home today—”
“Doing what?”
I coughed. “Sick?”
He didn’t respond.
“Half-day?”
“This is what I’m talking about, Elliot. Lies. Don’t you have a father who’s told you never to tell a lie?”
“I’m not George Washington. My dad travels a lot.” I wriggled out from under his hand. I slid off the stool. Beneath me, the floor spun like a maelstrom. “It’s fine. If Lisa’s not here, and she’s not at school, it’s a mystery. So … whatever. Thanks for the drink?”
I shoved my hands in my pockets. I was trying not to cry. This was useless. A waste of time and calories. I began to leave the way we’d come, back through the living room. Then Larry started.
“You have my daughter in the hospital. In-patient redux. Congratu-fucking-lations. You have my wife furious, petrified, at wit’s end, terrified about my daughter, as her own mother is dying. Let me clarify: that’s dying. Deathbed. Life of struggles and Great Depression survivor meeting her maker. Not teen-girl necking with death hysterics.”
I turned, holding onto the black leather couch. “What are you talking about? What happened to Lisa? What’s going on?”
“You wanna tell me how many of those pills Lisa was taking a day? When Kim’s driving her once, twice a week to this doctor, that group. Like we need another M.D.? Elliot Egleston, Dr. Feelgood with the Fen-Phen, everybody!” He slammed down his sludge. The ice jumped. “What’s the script? Two pills? Four?”
“Those were a Christmas present,” I said. “A joke.”
“A five-pound bag of funny. Good one, Ellen DeGeneres. When can we see you at Second City?”
“I didn’t tell Lisa she had to take them or anything, okay?” I sound insistent, whiny, like a child. Detestable. “She was the one who asked me to steal them from my mom. Don’t go blaming me for what she did. Lisa has a mind of her own. Okay? She does whatever she wants and she doesn’t listen to me or you or Mrs….” The tears shook out of me now, and they wouldn’t stop. “She doesn’t even want to talk to me.”
The room spun. Black leather, brown sludge, white snow, gold Scotch, sky blue fingernails, gray Berber. I sunk to the floor and leaned against the couch. Aloud, there were no excuses, no pretending everything was copacetic with my best friend. There was no best friend. I shoved my chin into my coat. I punched my ribs.
Larry’s toes were there first. He waved a white tissue embossed with seashells at me. I dabbed my eyes.
“That was zero to sixty,” he said. “I apologize. I’m stressed as hell.”
My heart wanted to shrug everything off, but I sat stiffly. Inside, I was all sloshy and frozen.
“Up you go.” He held out a hand. His fingers tapered into wide, rough-bedded nails. What did that mean for his penis?
I let him pull me up in one swift tug. It was like fifth grade, during Outdoor Ed, when we’d practiced trust falls in Wisconsin, in a meadow, surrounded by prairie grasses, a blessing, knowing someone had your weight.
I hung my head, trying to drain the tears from my eye sockets.
Larry put up my hood. I was looking at him, but, with the coyote fur I could only see his chest. He was like a giant teenage boy; his flannel had come off. “NO FEAR” said his T-shirt in red and black graffiti letters. I wanted a slogan like that, something to believe in.
We were both standing, but he was so much taller than me. Lisa was tall, too. He bent his head down and kissed the top of my hood. His lips rustled against my coat.
“I don’t think Lisa’d be hanging onto those pills if she didn’t want to be your friend, sweetie. Don’t cry. You’re at that age when shitty is the accepted currency.”
I nodded.
“Call her when she gets home. She’s at … well, she should be back in a week. Maybe don’t call. Her mom’s pretty pissed … at you. At everyone, for that matter. Not the best time to be a parent.”
“Thanks.” I wished the Scotch had suited me. I wished I were forty. That I could relax on the couch, talk politics with Mr. Breit. That he’d kiss me, my face, his mouth, his tongue. His chinstrap scratching my neck. “I’m sorry to barge, to barge in.”
“I invited you in, honey,” he said. “Let me drive you home?”
“Okay.”
I sniffed. I wanted him to say something conciliatory, sexy.
He passed me another tissue. “Blow your nose, would you, kiddo?”
I did. He opened his palm and I handed him my snot.
5 ·· ANNA
HELL IS CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST. PINIONS of pineapple and melon, bendable silver, Styrofoam plates, bran muffins the size of golf balls, awful American mini croissants. Silver vultures of Regul
ar, Decaf, and Hot Water. Orange pekoe tea, pastel rainbows of fake sugar.
I am seated behind Chalet DeGroot, who drifts like a jellyfish, stinging with simper, table to table. Now she’s small-talking Alicia Aurelio, the Dean’s Secretary, whose mulberry turtleneck is so tight the flesh above and below her bra line protrudes like a bolster. I have a mug of Regular. Every sip is a burnt reminder that I’m in Laughlin Banquet Hall, room awash in collegial blather: blond wood floors, a screen on stilts to accompany the overhead projector, fireplace of aubergine stone guarded by twin metal serpents, their two forked tongues the ledge on which balances a poker. The buffet—white-tableclothed, legs hidden beneath the shirring—abuts the back wall.
Noted: Location of exit (four bounding steps from coffee).
Queried: Location of Rot: unconfirmed.
Chalet DeGroot is my colleague, proof that our profession doesn’t privilege the privileged. Chalet is workaday; her eyeballs swell like olives afloat in a tired gin martini shaken for someone sated by Zima’s; her nose is piggy. She is a mysterious deep sea species who gets genuinely excited to flap her gills about Comp Rhet. She wears a lot of coral—a maternity blouse billows over her puffer fish stomach but clings like seaweed to her breasts. She is the same as all my female colleagues, flaunting her condition with JC Penney pregnancy portraits magneted to the faculty lounge fridge and offhand remarks—thirty-eight weeks, she mentions now, at 11:27, three minutes before the forum on writing and mental health begins.
I can’t tell if Alicia is eating it up or annoyed. She has a Cheshire grin on her face. She’s sketching a pair of fuck-me stilettos on a legal pad with a hot-pink (Fruit Punch) smelly marker, keeping notes for the Dean in absentia.
Chalet kisses Alicia on the cheek and half jogs to the podium. “Two minutes,” she announces, waving her hands like a Bollywood dancer, her upper arms jiggling. “Seats, everyone!”
“How’s it going, Anna?” says Alicia, craning her neck. Her tone is lizardy, suspicious, though I’ve worked in the department for ten years, and she’s the one who has slicked her hair back tighter over time. Dandruff rests on the gelled black strands. A mite of mini muffin is stuck in her brown lip gloss. “How’s your semester?”
“Same, same.” I beam in on a mole under her left eye to avoid her scalp. I nod toward her plate. “They did a good job with this, the food. It’s a nice spread.”
“Aren’t you gonna eat? At least, hey, make a plate, take it home.”
“My brother’s a pastry chef. My family’s spoiled—”
“How do you stay so thin with a brother who works in a bakery!? I’d be a truck and a half. You’re so skinny.”
If I ever become an administrator, I will outlaw refreshments at public, professional, and social campus events. Well, I ensure that roughly one-third of my daily calories are eradicated by purging or distance-running, so that keeps me in the shape you see. Or: Well, actually, Alicia, you should see my daughter. Or: Well, truly, I’m not thin, you’re just chubby. Or: Well, my mother was weight-conscious and after she died my father prime-ribbed himself to an early death, so food’s never really compelled me. Instead, I shrug.
“Should be starting soon,” Alicia says. She crosses her legs at the knee and waggles a mauve suede pump, the toe stained white with salt. Then she leans in. “Pretty out-there topic for ProDev, at least in my opinion, that’s what I think.”
(Revision: Hell is continental breakfast and chitchat.)
“Mmm.” I open my notebook, shopping for something to occupy my attention. After yoga, after I’d felt viscid in my body, after I’d showered in the locker room with rosemary mint hippie soap, after I’d stopped for a dry skim cappuccino to foster comity in my morning, I sulked in my office. Dinked on AOL. Skimmed student essays, trying to iron out Barbara’s knotty blue cursive, fixating on Rot. I’d drafted nothing.
“The creatures of idleness/are pure speculation,” writes Paul Violi, whose book I eventually took off my shelf. My eyes played connect-the-dots with lines: “cold coffee” “nope” “lick my watch.” I emailed Rolf: “El’s home sick. Hope you’re well. Miss you. A.” Waited for Rot, wrote Rot: “I want you please want me I’ll take you.” Wished for coke (idle creature), waited more. Until 8:59, and Setting Measurable Outcomes had already begun by the time I stomped to Building 9, my boiled wool coat shouldered with snow.
Nothing in my notebook is legible; I stare concertedly and try to make sense. The room gets louder before it quiets. Coats unzip, rustle their nylon, sigh their weight over the backs of chairs. Tables fill. Mine, too: a woman with cornrows I recognize from professional development events over the years, (maybe the math department?), sits down across from me, with a plate of pineapple. I almost smile.
“All right!” Chalet says. I wonder why it’s just now dawning on me, after all the years we’ve been colleagues, that she was cheerleader. “Thank you everyone, so much, for attending COCC’s first forum on Writing and Mental Health, especially on such a cruddy day. Ick, right! El Nino all over again. I know it’s not easy for all of us to get bundled up on a Friday—” She pats her stomach. “But I hope you’ll find these activities, these slides, and this conversation very worth your while. Yours—your whiles. Sorry—preggers brain! Anyhow, to begin, let’s do an exercise. On your table you’ll find handouts, enough for everyone. Now this, here’s an essay—it’s anonymous—but it’s authentic, meaning I took this from one of our Composition classrooms. What I want you all to do is read over this, not worrying about grammar or anything—if you can, I know it’s hard.” (Pause for chuckles.) “But take a peek—see if it raises any red flags, you know, concerns about the student-writer. And note when those flags go up. Whatever color flags, actually. Orange or yellow. Okay? Two to three minutes then.”
The math professor slides me a facedown essay. I flip it over.
It’s short, only two pages. The same font as all college documents. No name, no department code, no section number. Vaguely I remember a call for papers.
WHAT DRIVES ME
Everyone lives with motivation. Sometimes, that’s the clearest thing in life: the goals you set for yourself (or the goals other people set for you). I have been told that, through visualizing what I want, success will be my only option. Clarity will guide my every move, each of those moves will be working in service of some motivation. But what I want is ephemeral: as soon as I have it, the script changes. I’m a thrillist, an adrenaline-junky. I want the high, the next high, the next next. No, not necessarily drugs. I’m looking for whatever’s deleterious enough to destroy me.
Stomachs don’t gulp—or they shouldn’t—but mine does, like it’s forcing down a wad of croissant. Of all the passive-aggressive stunts: brandishing my own mistake in front of me, in the company of a hundred teachers? Tar and feather me, Chalet. Make an outcast of me. Tell faculty, and administration via Alicia Auerelio, who will surely convolute this message, that I have put a student at risk. I fucked up. Dammed the proper channels.
Of course, I could be paranoid. She could have acquired this essay a hundred ways. Seized it from a recycling bin, a duplicate in the writing center, a stock paper. Schizo much, Anna? Rot could be the problem, the plagiarist, a thief, a cheat.
I wait to become the target of narrowed eyes, but everyone’s head is bent, studying the paper. Pages turn. The math professor draws a big bracket around a paragraph. Chalet has projected the essay on screen and, in blue overhead marker, written, “Forum Notes.”
The tap on my shoulder almost makes me jump.
“Sorry to startle you,” Glenn Decklin whispers. His campus security uniform parka smells like pretzels. 7UP. A good-time guy at a billiards hall. Men almost my father. “You have a moment?”
Chalet bolts her mouth and lifts her eyebrows in my direction: if I were in her classroom, I’d abhor her. Thank god we’ve never been paired for observations. Alicia’s head tips. She’s listening to Glenn, her black bun jutting over the chair.
I grab my tote and jacket
, follow Glenn into the hallway.
“Yeah, sorry, but I’ve got a student outside your office—217, Building 13, right? Looks like he’s writing the next J. Peterman catalog.”
“Ha.”
He cringes. “But anyhow. Says he has an appointment with you. Something about a rec? I can mic the custodian, tell him you’re here.”
“No, I’m there,” I say, my heart trilling.
“Snow’s wicked right now. You sure? Want a lift?”
This is the power of desire. Suddenly, I’m no longer a professor, in a black blouse and a black cardigan and a black skirt. I’m seventeen, twenty-one, shredded jeans, blushing knees, skin softer than pudding. I feel effervescent. Flirty.
“You’re too kind. What do I owe you?”
“A big salad? The witchy woman dance at next year’s holiday party?”
“You’re crossing the line between man and … okay, not bum,” I say. “That was lame too. I didn’t sleep. Try me next week.”
Outside, the sky is ominous, the color of the dull side of aluminum foil. The snow is higher than the heel of my boots. I leave a trail of exclamation points all the way to the curb, where Glenn’s campus golf cart, shielded in all-weather plastic like the popemobile, waits to taxi me across the quad.
··
On the floor, cross-legged, in that enormous bright green coat, the pink lift tag no one’s bothered to snip, Rot looks gangly and scarlet-mouthed, like a pouty child. He shuts a soft navy notebook. I remind myself he can buy cigarettes. Pornographic videos. Lotto tickets. He can vote. He can gamble, with our nation, with himself, with me.
“You have something of mine?” Rot says, getting to his feet.
I sniff. “Doubtful.”
“Anna, don’t parent me.”
What the hell, I think. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Mommy and her mistakes.
“I don’t have it … here. Can you stop by on Tuesday? I’m sor—”
“You dig in?”
I smile.
“Yessss.” He sounds pleased with himself. “I love that.”