Tenure Track

by Victoria Bradley

  Not wanting to insult Gary, Jane suggested that perhaps Katherine’s request was more a reflection on the professors’ different personalities than their skills. Inwardly, she also felt gender played a role. From that first meeting, Katherine had sensed and trusted Jane’s maternal instincts to do what was right for someone else’s daughter, not just to shield the school from liability. Jane was to choose the mediator, but only that person, Mandy and Lewis would be present for the actual encounter. The mediator would summarize a report for all interested parties.

  By now it was almost Thanksgiving. Both Jane and Gary were hoping to set up the mediation before winter break, but with the drawn-out approval process and the busyness of finals, the meeting had to be postponed until January.

  In the midst of all this drama at the U., Dana’s basketball season began. Jane noticed that her daughter had been particularly pensive in the weeks leading up to the opening game—more sullen than usual, spending hours in her room or just working out. Mark initially chalked it up to senior year angst. When they noticed a dip in her grades, they began to worry that the pressure of trying for a basketball scholarship was getting to her. They threatened to cut back on her hoops time, though neither really wanted to do that, knowing how important the sport was to their daughter.

  For some reason, Dana acted as if she did not really want her parents to be at the opener, telling them that it would be a lame game against an inferior opponent. When that did not deter them from coming, she claimed their presence would make her extra nervous—not that that had ever bothered her before. On the morning of the game, Dana was slow to come down for breakfast. When Jane went to check on her, she was sitting on the bed, holding her right ankle.

  “I think I pulled something,” she grimaced. Jane suggested going to a doctor, but Dana refused, insisting she just needed to walk it off. She limped out the door oddly, giving her mother a suspicious moment’s pause.

  That evening, Jane was getting ready to leave the office for the game when she received an important phone call from Phyllis Smith, a professional family counselor and experienced mediator Gary had recommended to handle the Burns’ situation. Phyllis agreed to take the case, explaining that she first needed to interview both parties separately. By the time they were finished spelling out the parameters of the mediation process, the oxymoron of rush hour traffic was in full force, making it difficult to get anywhere in a hurry. Dana’s game had already started when Jane arrived at the high school gym.

  She looked around without seeing Mark anywhere in the stands. Finally, she spotted Dennis standing beside Chris and Duncan, all three wearing face paint in school colors, with Dana’s jersey number printed on their cheeks. Jane gave her son a quick hug, being careful not to smear his makeup on her clothes, and asked where his father was. “’Dunno,” the teenager replied. “He was sittin’ behind the bench, but he might of stepped out to get some food or talk to somebody since Dana’s not playin’.”

  Jane whipped around to see her daughter, the team’s best scorer, sitting on the bench wearing warm-ups. Dana was leaning forward, watching intently with her chin in one hand, elbow digging into her knee. Dennis played dumb. “Maybe her ankle’s still buggin’ her,” he suggested.

  The Borg Queen was not buying his ruse. If Dana was hurt seriously enough to stay out of the game, surely her ankle would be wrapped or sitting in ice. She had played hurt many times before, including once with a fractured arm not diagnosed until after the game ended. Her ankle would practically have to be broken with all the ligaments detached for her to sit out a game. Jane instructed the boys to come find her if Dana started playing, then left to seek out Mark.

  She caught up with her husband near the concession stand, talking with one of the other senior dads. She became more concerned as she approached his uncharacteristically stern face, with arms folded across his chest, listening intently to what the other man had to say. “Hey Bill!” Jane greeted, “Are you distracting my husband from the game?”

  “Oh, hi, Jane!” the man replied, looking somewhat uncomfortable. “Uh, I was just filling him in on the latest gossip. Hey, I’ll let you two talk. Good to see you!” He quickly scurried off to watch the rest of the game.

  Mark hung his head down, looking angry.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she apologized, thinking her tardiness might be the cause of his dark mood.

  “’Doesn’t matter anyway,” he snapped, “since Dana’s not even playing!”

  “Yes, I noticed that,” she said. “Do you know what that’s about?”

  He still had his arms folded and now started rocking back and forth on his feet, as if to prevent himself from exploding. “Well, I intend to find out. Do you remember that keg party at Forest Green a couple of weeks ago? Well, according to Bill, his kid heard that Coach had informally suspended all of his players who were out there for one game. I don’t know if you noticed, but most of the usual starters are warming the bench. He’s got sophomores playing!”

  “But Dana left that party,” Jane protested, not adding what else she knew and suspected about that evening.

  “Apparently that doesn’t matter,” he railed. “I mean, the girl does the right thing and leaves when she realizes she’s in over her head, and she still gets in trouble. It’s not like she was arrested! I think we need to talk to the coach.”

  Jane appreciated Mark’s irritation, but disagreed with his solution. “Now, Mark, I don’t think that would help the situation. I wish Coach Gibson had informed the parents about this decision, but he has a lot of influence over these girls, so this might just get the message across better than we could.” She could not believe she was defending Coach’s influence, but she did not want to make things worse for Dana with an embarrassing parental tirade.

  Jane succeeded in taking Mark back into the gym to watch the second half of the Dana-less game with Dennis. As they entered the noisy enclave, they saw their son, standing almost nose-to-nose with another boy whom they recognized as classmate Mitchell Tighe. The two seemed to be having a heated exchange. As the parents approached, Chris and Duncan nudged the two other teens, leading Mitchell to turn and quickly head to the other side of the gym. Dennis now wore the same uncharacteristically angry expression that his father had displayed a few moments earlier. When pressed, however, he just said that Mitchell was doing some trash-talking and they both got a little out of control. This excuse seemed a little strange, since presumably both were rooting for the same team.

  Jane spent the rest of the game glancing between the three glum faces of her family members. For once, she was not the most serious of the four. Without their best players, the St. Luke’s girls were trounced 62-21. The entire team headed to the locker room hanging their heads in shame.

  Utilizing the divide-and-conquer technique honed from almost 18 years of raising twins, Jane offered to drive Dana home while Mark would take Dennis, grilling each along the way. Jane was convinced her children were still hiding something and she wanted to find out what it was.

  On the way home, Jane quizzed her daughter, carefully trying to sound concerned rather than critical. “So, why didn’t you get to play tonight?”

  “Oh, my ankle was hurtin’ too much,” she sighed unconvincingly.

  “You didn’t look like you were limping anymore. Do you need to wrap it or pack some ice on it?” Jane asked, feeding the lie.

  “No, no,” Dana protested. “I think it’ll be fine.”

  “It must hurt a lot, for you to sit out,” her mother noted. “You usually don’t let a little pain slow you down.”

  “Coach made me,” the girl explained. “He was just bein’ overly cautious. ‘Doesn’t want any of us to start out the season playin’ hurt.”

  “There must’ve been a lot of caution going around,” Jane muttered before deciding to stop this nonsense and show her hand. “You know, I heard a rumor that Coach was benching all the girls who were at that Forest Green keg party. Do you know anything about that?” Dana stared
out the window. “How did Coach know you had been there?”

  She shrugged. “He knows everything we do.”

  Jane shook her head. “Tell me the truth, Dana. How drunk were you that night?” Jane was losing patience with the silence from the passenger’s seat. “Answer me, Dana Elizabeth!”

  “Okay, I was totally wasted! I jumped outta window when Coach got there and cut my arm on a wire fence tryin’ to get outta the golf course. That’s where I was when I called Dennis.”

  Jane was very disappointed in her child for continuing to lie about the incident when she had been given the opportunity to come clean. “Why didn’t you just tell me that?” she asked, exasperated. “You know how I feel about lying. Is there anything else I need to know about that night?”

  “No,” Dana insisted, looking out the car window.

  Mother and daughter sat in silence until reaching home. Dennis confessed nary a word to Mark, though Jane doubted her husband really pushed as much as he thought he did. After consulting together, the parents decided to ground both children for one week, just to reinforce their rules about deception.

  “I don’t know why you bother lying,” Jane chastised in meting out the punishments. “You know we always find out the truth eventually.”

  Jane knew she was being dishonest with her children. Sometimes the truth never came out. The human mind was capable of burying some pains so deep that even the participants could not accurately recall the events. She knew from reading myriad articles on the subject that memory is fluid. Some can be successfully repressed for life or until some traumatic event triggers their reemergence. Others are merely forgotten, slipping gently out of the crevices of nerve endings. Still others change over time, or as new experiences add layers of understanding to them.

  Jane had successfully hidden some of her most painful truths from those she loved, partly to protect them, but mainly to hide her own shame. Recent events brought them crashing back to the surface, so that once again, Jane found herself on the couch in the dark, trying to suppress the visions that refused to stay buried.

  Visions of how a lapse in judgment changed her own life.

  Burning from the sting of her new reputation among a certain sleazy cohort of undergraduate males, Jane had ended the semester of her affair eagerly counting the days until summer break. She planned to visit her parents for two weeks, then head to London for two months of research and relaxation. She hoped that by fall all the rumors would have subsided. Perry assured her that he was taking care of the campus hotline, though he never explained exactly how.

  Then her summer plans took a slight detour. On a day in early May, she was standing in front of her modern British history class, lecturing about social changes brought on by the post-war housing crisis, when she started feeling very queasy. She barely made it through class before rushing to the ladies’ room to vomit. Gripping the white porcelain goddess with shaky hands, she tried to think of what she had eaten the previous night that could have caused this feeling. By afternoon she felt better and tried to discount the nausea as the result of skipping breakfast that morning.

  When the same symptoms continued for several days, the dreaded realization hit that she had missed her last period. An appointment with a gynecologist confirmed the worst—approximately seven weeks gestation. Over the next few days she tried to go about her usual business, but her mind was clouded with fog.

  Of course, there was no way she was having the baby. It would create a lifetime connection between her and her ex-lover, who was hardly good parenting material. She felt ill-equipped to raise a child alone and was not emotionally strong enough to give it up for adoption. Any scenario that exposed the pregnancy would only lead to more gossip and humiliation, which she could not handle. No, she knew exactly what had to be done.

  As a political matter, she had always been pro-choice, but until that moment her position had been just an abstract philosophy. Although she suspected one or two acquaintances of having had the procedure, she could not say for sure that she had personally known anyone who had ever done it. It was not something discussed in polite company.

  She had already purchased a plane ticket to New York City with a rental car reserved to drive upstate; so she scheduled a slight detour, telling her parents that she would be staying in the city for a couple of days to visit an old college girlfriend. That was partially true. She did contact her old acquaintance, but it was for a medical appointment. The fellow alumnae, now a respected ob-gyn, could be trusted to protect her patient’s privacy. Jane felt more comfortable using a doctor she knew, plus she did not really want to have the procedure done near her home, lest anyone associated with the university find out.

  Jane completed the semester by fighting off her constant nausea with a steady ration of crackers and herbal tea, but nothing could settle her mind. She did not sleep well at night and during the day was a mass of confusion and nerves, far different from her normally calm disposition. She talked very little to other people, for fear the combination of hormones and stress would cause her to suddenly burst into tears. She even succeeded in avoiding Mark and Perry most of the time.

  The New York trip went just as planned. Her doctor and everyone on the clinic staff treated her with kindness rather than judgment. Still, she could not hide her shame at needing to be there at all. Although there was little physical pain, she cried silently throughout the procedure. As the doctor began her work, a middle-aged nurse dabbed Jane’s eyes and gentle squeezed her hand. Through her tears, Jane caught the surprising sight of an unusual cross dangling from the nurse’s neck with a flame emanating from it. Jane thought she had seen such a symbol before, but at that moment could not place it. The shiny cross became a form of salvation, giving Jane a focal point to detract from the procedure taking place on the lower part of her body.

  After it was all over, the nurse wheeled the patient into a recovery room to rest. Jane stared at the ceiling while more tears ran down her face. As the kindly nurse checked her patient’s pulse, Jane spoke up. “What kind of cross is that?”

  “This? It’s a cross and flame, symbol of Methodism,” the nurse replied with a gentle smile.

  Ahh, the Methodists. Of course. That’s where I’ve seen that. I think the flame has something to do with Pentecost. Jane complimented the nurse on its beauty and asked bluntly, “So, the Methodists haven’t kicked you out for working here?”

  “No,” assured the nurse, without elaborating. There was no condemnation in this woman’s eyes, only compassion as she gently took care of her patient. For a split second, it was as if Jane was looking into the eyes of Christ himself.

  Jane took a taxi back to her hotel, where she remained holed up for days, just sleeping, watching television, ordering room service and occasionally thumbing through the standard-issue Gideon Bible. As a devout young Episcopalian, Jane had once loved reading the Bible. In a different era, she might even have become a priest. Like many young people, she had stopped going to church when she went to college; too many late Saturday nights to make it to Sunday morning services, as well as the general questioning of all authoritative institutions that comes with academic life. Yet despite her distance from the church, she never stopped believing.

  But with belief came guilt. Never in her life had she felt like such a complete sinner. Lying in the hotel room recovering from what some would consider a mortal sin, she found herself praying for the first time in years. She prayed for forgiveness, for comfort, and for mercy. One night, an answer seemed to come. Lying in the darkness, she recalled a Biblical story in which Jesus dealt with an adulterous woman. Flipping through the New Testament, she found the passage: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” There is hope for forgiveness.

  Those thoughts remained with her as she visited her unsuspecting family and traveled to Britain. In her spare time from research, she read more of the Bible, as well as current works on feminist theology. Inspired by the kind nurse with the cross, she also started readi
ng about Methodism, which historically was closely related to her own Episcopal faith. She visited Methodist founder John Wesley’s London church and stood on the spot where he had his Aldersgate experience, a spiritual awakening that led him to seek a different method for converting souls to the Anglican Church.

  After returning home that summer, she settled into a liberal Methodist congregation populated largely by members of the university community. There she found the comforting aspects of her traditional church upbringing, combined with a modern and open-minded perspective focused on constantly improving oneself to become closer to God.

  She found through her faith journey that improvement did not come easily. Despite years of striving, she could never feel completely forgiven for getting rid of that unborn child. As she and Mark struggled with infertility, she often wondered if their difficulties were somehow part of God’s punishment for what she had done. She resisted adopting a baby, partly because of her desire to make up for the sacrificed child and partly because she did not want a constant reminder of the path not chosen. For many years Jane quietly prayed for God to give her one more chance at motherhood. When the ultrasound revealed twins, it felt like an answer: God will give me two children to atone for the one I sacrificed. The day the twins were born, Jane finally felt washed of her secret sin.

  But forgiveness did not entirely wipe out the painful memories. There were moments, like this one sitting in the dark, when the grief overcame her. Gripping her child’s blanket, she cried to herself once more over the path not chosen.

  That very same night, halfway across the country, Lewis Burns was facing his own buried history. Ten months had passed since the heated telephone conversation that led Lewis to become a permanent cell-phone user. He knew, given their common profession, that he probably could not avoid Laura forever, but he was hoping for a reprieve of at least a year or two before they crossed paths. Yet there she was, listed as a panelist at a San Diego conference where Lewis was also presenting. He had seriously debated canceling his appearance after seeing her name in the program, but he needed the presentation on his vitae. We should be civil enough to attend the same gathering, he reassured himself. With hundreds of people there, we might not even run into one another.