I watched Ingvill now, slurping coffee out of her eco-friendly mug, pulling out a gray pencil eraser and a sorry notepad she had procured from the supply closet.
“I see that we’re all here,” said the chair. “So, to get right down to business: As some of you already know, we’ve been instructed to revise all our course offerings. Whether we are for or against this, the fact is that the College of Arts and Letters passed a resolution and now we need to follow up. Thus, there’s no point in discussing the merits of the revision. The only matter of business at this juncture is a practical consideration of how to organize our programs and which classes to cut. And this needs to be done quickly, preferably by the end of the semester.”
A sigh ran through the room, creating a vacuum that made my scalp tingle. I only had five minutes and they were running out.
Ingvill had managed to take a half page of notes in her notepad already. She was probably psychoanalyzing herself. In Ingvill’s universe there was only one person. The rest of us were props.
Peter raised his hand.
“May I remind you,” he said, “that the last course revision was only two years ago.”
“Yes, in a sense that’s correct,” the chair said.
“So . . .”
“So now we’re implementing a new one.”
Peter sniffed disapprovingly.
“What do we need to do?” Ingvill asked nervously.
“First of all, we need to increase the number of credits for our courses so that we’re better aligned with the rest of the Norwegian university system.”
“May I remind everyone,” Peter said again, “that two years ago we reduced the credit weighting for all the courses for that very reason?”
His voice quivered in indignation, and the chair began to quickly enumerate all the excellent reasons for the credit realignment. She came off sounding impartial, but it was no secret that she, along with many other members of the administration, would have preferred to have a university without any faculty members at all. They found us annoying, argumentative, overly neurotic, and generally useless. The dregs of the university system.
As I watched Ingvill, it occurred to me that you couldn’t really blame them. As the chair’s list grew steadily more complicated and elaborate, her face grew increasingly pinker and her thoughtful expression deepened. Eventually she looked completely flummoxed.
“But as I said, this meeting is just for informational purposes,” the chair concluded. “Now you know what needs to be done college-wide. The administration is asking that we take this back with us to the department and figure out where to make cuts and how to accomplish the restructuring.”
I turned on my cell phone to check the time. I could still make it. If only no one said anything now.
I held my breath.
“What will this mean for internationalization efforts?” Frank asked.
I saw Peter put his hand over his eyes and I wanted to thunk my head on the table. The chair smiled triumphantly. Everyone knows that internationalization is to the university what ecumenical is to the church. Whoever brought up this concept automatically got points for taking the conversation seriously, no matter what we were talking about, but whoever answered the question would also win brownie points for their familiarity with institutional priorities.
The chair responded with a long and unnecessarily detailed response about how many foreign students this reform might bring in, and Frank nodded attentively and took notes on the notepad he had brought. I glared at him. He was wearing some kind of a shark-tooth pendant on a leather cord that hung over the front of his sweater.
Who did he think he was fooling? I studied his scrawny arm, holding his pen, and thought how easily I could take him in a fight. Take ahold of that little head of his and bring my knee up into his face until his nose and forehead were bleeding.
He looked up and our eyes met. I looked away.
“If it’s good for internationalization, I’m all for it,” he told the chair. “After all, we have a duty to live up to the Bologna Process by helping to harmonize higher education throughout Europe. As you may know, I was recently selected to serve on the committee that will travel to Saint Petersburg to work specifically toward achieving some sort of bilateral cooperation.”
The chair seconded this with a nod while I rolled my eyes, even though I’d been specifically banned from doing just that.
“We don’t roll our eyes, no matter how dumb we think other people are,” the chair had informed me during our little chat. “And perhaps we might all benefit from giving a little thought to the possibility that we might not always be entirely infallible?”
“What are you trying to say?” I had asked.
“Excessive contact with students?”
“You heard that from Ingvill, too,” I hissed.
“No comment.”
“A student brushed my arm! And it was meant tongue in cheek!”
“That’s what you say. We have had instances of sexual harassment involving students here in the past, before my time. I have two years left now in my tenure as chair and I will not, I repeat not, have any of that under my watch. Is that clear?”
“Check,” I had muttered. “No sexual harassment.”
“You just rolled your eyes again!”
“Fine. No sexual harassment or eye rolling, even though the very idea of something like that is completely absurd. Have you seen what I look like these days? I haven’t shaved my armpits since last summer, and it’s not because I never wear anything sleeveless. I don’t have breasts anymore. I never wear foundation or mascara. I own only one lipstick, which I bought in 1997. I cut my own hair after a glass of wine. And I’m almost forty!”
She had studied me for a moment and then sighed.
“Just quit rolling your eyes so much, OK?”
Occasionally I was able to pull off an eye roll in my mind, but not always, not this time.
The room had grown quiet, and I peeked at the time again. Ingvill was reading through her eight pages of notes. Her mouse-tail braids dangled over the table.
“Couldn’t we just revert the courses back to the way they were before?” I asked in an attempt to wrap up the meeting. “Then the problem would be solved. The way they were before the last revision, I mean. We must still have all that information in the system somewhere or other, right?”
Peter made a hiccuping sound that could have been a laugh. The chair looked at him.
“Unfortunately we can’t do that, because we no longer have the resources that we used to,” she informed us.
“What does that mean?”
“For those who get to stay in the department, it means more work for the same or less pay,” Peter translated grimly, “and the rest would be reassigned elsewhere in the university.”
“Not necessarily,” the chair objected, which resulted in more hiccuping along with vigorous head shaking from Peter. “But as I said, we will need to cut a number of courses. At least three at the BA level and four at the MA level.”
“But . . . reassignment?” Ingvill asked breathlessly.
“We’re not talking about that now, but it’s widely known that they need more people in the preschool-teacher education program.”
A shock wave hit the room.
After that a debate broke out, which grew so heated that Peter and two other faculty members stormed out in anger. For her part, Ingvill leaned even farther over her notebook, jotting things down so violently it looked like her braids were having an epileptic seizure.
“I realize this isn’t easy, but if anyone has creative ideas for how we can accomplish this—in purely practical terms—that would be most welcome,” the chair encouraged.
I held up my hand.
“Yes?” she said with a hopeful expression.
“I have to go.”
“Now?”
“I have a . . . meeting at my daughter’s preschool.”
“You are aware that even in academia, we do have business hours, righ
t? And that this meeting is rather important for the evolution of our department moving forward?”
“Yes, sorry, but I have to go.”
I stood up with an apologetic smile, searching for any hint of approval or acceptance, but had to leave before there was any. That was what happened when you hung up a sign that said “Testing in Progress” on a Thursday.
3
It had been pouring since early that morning, and even at this hour the highway was a Middle Earth serpent of slow-moving vehicles. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and cursed the spineless bicyclists for deciding to drive the second a little precipitation started dripping from the sky. A song about fields of gold was playing as I pulled up in front of the preschool and turned off the radio.
“Mommy!” cried Alva when I finally entered the room where they kept the children whose parents weren’t on time for the annual pancake fiesta. Alva threw the half-dressed, one-armed Barbie doll she had been holding aside and asked, “Do we get to eat, too?”
“We’re going to buy some pancakes,” I told her.
“But are we going to have food?”
“Yes, pancakes.”
“And food?”
“And food.”
I took hold of her soft miniature hand and we walked into the common room, where three large tables had been set up in front of one of the windows. The tables were covered in trolls the kids had made by hand. Alva picked one with yellow and black hair, pink button eyes, and a white nose, and I handed her a ten-kroner coin to slip into the empty plastic ice cream container meant for the payments.
Listening to the clank of that coin filled me with such an intense feeling that I had mastered this whole parenting thing that I let Alva stuff herself full of pancakes and juice. I even let her go back for seconds. And thirds. To think of all those years I had forgotten to bring change to the annual troll and pancake sale, so that Ebba and Jenny had had to spend hours sitting in the forgotten children’s room without a single pancake. But today I had ten ten-kroner coins in my pocket. Third-time parent for the win!
“Are the pancakes the food?” Alva asked, her face plastered in strawberry jam.
“Yes, the pancakes are the food.”
“Haven’t you ever had pancakes before?” her teacher asked. She was making the rounds selling raffle tickets. She got our second to last ten-kroner coin.
Alva shook her head.
“We make other things,” I said quickly. “Cakes and bread and stuff like that, just not pancakes very often. We don’t have a griddle at home.”
The teacher blinked at Alva and said, “Well, it’s a good thing you got a chance to taste pancakes here at preschool then.”
I laughed sheepishly and watched the teacher hold out the raffle basket to other families. Many had turned out in force, with mothers, fathers, and grandparents. The very idea of trying to coordinate a large family showing like that caused a rushing sound in my head.
“Alva, honey, we have to get going,” I mumbled, running my hand over her back.
“Why?”
“We have to pick up Jenny and Ebba from their after-school club. Oh, and then we can show them your troll.”
Alva nodded. She carefully picked up the last pancake from her paper plate and ate it in small bites on our way out, to savor the culinary marvel as long as possible.
The cloakroom was empty except for Titus and his new Filipino au pair, whom his parents had recently hired so they could trade “quantity time for quality time.”
“Up until now,” Titus’s father had explained, “I’ve been a servant in my own home. I do the preschool drop-off, I make dinner, I work out, I clean the house. That’s not the kind of life I want. I want to spend quality time with my children, not stress out about stuff. So we’re getting an au pair.”
“That’s super,” I’d said. “Really. Neato.”
Now Titus was standing there chanting, “Pancakes, pancakes, pancakes, pancakes,” while the au pair slowly and patiently tried to put on his jacket, hat, and shoes.
My first instinct was to try to vacate the cloakroom as quickly as possible, but then I decided to be a mensch and contribute to the lives of others. It was Thursday after all.
“There’s a party today,” I explained to her, in Norwegian.
The au pair looked up, confused.
“What?” she said in English.
“There’s a party today. They’re collecting money for an orphanage in Colombia. The kids made trolls for us to buy. They cost ten kroner each. Do you know what trolls are?”
I made a troll face and said, “Waa ha ha!” but that just made the au pair jump and take a couple of steps back.
“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to scare you. But there’s also food. They have a little café today. They’re selling a kind of Norwegian pancake, too. They’re called lapper.”
“Oh, OK . . .”
The au pair continued dressing Titus, who was now chanting “café” instead of “pancakes” and tugging at the au pair’s thin hoodie.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Café. You should go, for his sake. Anything else would be selfish.”
She slowly turned around and stood there looking at me, in a way that felt almost accusatory. But I was just explaining how things worked, helping her be a good au pair. She should be thanking me, instead of giving me a look.
I made a point of sighing loudly, then picked Alva up and exited the cloakroom.
“I don’t like Titus,” Alva said as we walked outside. “He’s mean.”
“Maybe there’s a reason he’s mean,” I said.
4
By the time we parked at home, Alva was asleep and Ebba and Jenny were arguing. I had no idea what about. These spats usually started as statements and accusations but quickly descended into a kind of barking. Variations of sounds that grated on the bone structures in my cranium, continually weakening it and rendering it less impervious to diseases and madness.
The instant I released the child safety lock, they each immediately opened their doors and darted out because they both wanted to be the one to get the mail. I stayed in my seat and listened to Alva’s heavy breathing, staring at the wall of the carport until I eventually took a deep breath and turned to face the violins, sheet music, lunch boxes, wet swimsuits, gym bags, and the sleeping three-year-old.
I picked Alva up and pulled the pacifier out of her mouth. It was probably time for her to give it up, but I wasn’t up to starting that project.
“We’re home now, honey. You have to wake up.”
No reaction. Her head rested heavily against my shoulder and her breathing was deep and regular. Once we were inside I put her down on the floor and gently shook her.
“We’re home now, honey. You have to wake up.”
She opened her eyes a crack, but they immediately slid shut again. Her head lolled forward and her legs buckled under her. I shook her harder.
“Alva, you have to wake up. Otherwise you won’t be able to fall asleep at bedtime tonight. Alva!”
With a howl she twisted out of my arms and took a few wobbly steps. I followed her and tried to give her a hug, but then she kicked and howled even louder.
“Honey,” I said and kissed her on the cheek.
She whined quietly, “I want crackers and milk! And Diego!”
“Sure.”
I carried her to the sofa, smelling her soft hair and feeling a tug at my heart, as if a thin thread were being pulled through it.
“Lovely, lovely Alva,” I murmured and laid her down.
“Crackers.”
“Yup. Do you want a blanket?”
Alva nodded, and I covered her with a blanket and turned on the TV. I should have tried to get her started on something more active, get her to play with her sisters, get out the art supplies or beads. Or maybe something more gender neutral, like blocks. Instead I turned up the volume on the TV and headed for the kitchen.
A vague sense of frustration quivered in my chest.
&nb
sp; I should go for a jog. That would put my humors back into balance. Reduce the level of black bile. It had been a while now, over a week.
But I didn’t have it in me. My body felt weak, soft like jelly.
Which is why I chose instead to unload it all on Bjørnar as he stood over the cutting board later, his sleeves rolled up and with that wrinkle in his forehead that didn’t usually go away until late in the evening.
“I got so irritated,” I concluded, “both at the au pair, who clearly doesn’t care, and at Titus’s parents, who just renounced all responsibility for the whole preschool. Quantity time? What does that even mean? That’s what it’s like for everyone. That’s life! I know that it’s mostly their fault, but she could have shown a little interest, couldn’t she? I was just trying to help! I was being a mensch! And it’s her job to take care of the kid!”
“Don’t you think maybe she had other things to think about?” he asked calmly, walking over to the sink to rinse the brussels sprouts. He usually parboiled them, then sautéed them in sunflower oil and sprinkled them with sea salt. My mouth was watering at the thought.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, where did you say she was from again?”
It wasn’t because I didn’t follow the news. I considered myself a relatively well-informed person and I had seen countless TV images of cities, pulverized and destroyed by the inconceivable and gruesome forces of nature.
So it wasn’t that. I just hadn’t made the connection. The distance between the preschool and the natural disaster was so vast. They were like two satellites orbiting their own end of the galaxy.
Until now.
I thumped my fist against my head and pursed my lips.
“Doesn’t it embarrass you to be so self-absorbed?” Bjørnar asked.
“It didn’t occur to me that she was from the Philippines,” I mumbled.
“It might make sense to think a little before you speak.”
“But I live locally,” I protested. “If you start looking at life from a global perspective, I don’t know how you can bear it: natural disasters, war, poverty, human trafficking, pornography, and prostitution. The Western world’s exploitation of development-challenged countries. I can’t think about all that on a daily basis. I don’t have the bandwidth!”
The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter (The Ingrid Winter Misadventure Series) Page 2