“Don’t worry, love,” says Eileen. She holds out an unsealed envelope.
Opening it, I find confirmation of the date for my tenure meeting, a week and a half hence.
“You had great chances already,” says Eileen, “and now with Jeff leaving and Joanne going part-time, they can’t afford to lose another prof.”
I tuck the letter into my pocket.
“It’ll be fine,” prods Eileen. Today she’s in earth-mother mode, and I’m failing to be sufficiently appreciative.
I’m about to turn for my office; instead, I linger. Eileen, it suddenly occurs to me, is not only the chief purveyor of departmental gossip, but the best gauge of public opinion. “Unless,” I say, “people still blame me for Elizabeth’s letter.”
She clucks her tongue. “Everyone knows Elizabeth wrote it. And no one could possibly blame you for that poor child’s troubles.”
Mother Earth lays it on thick, but this morning she does seem sincere.
“Word has it she’s gone completely loony,” she lilts. “I hear they’ve got her in some kind of lockup ward, and her mother’s waiting on her day and night.” She searches my face for a response. When I give none, she takes a draft of coffee from a YOU GO, GIRL mug on her desk. ”Now, tell it true, Tracy. Aren’t we having a wedding?”
I draw a deep breath. I see no point in dodging this one any longer. “It doesn’t look like there’s going to be one.” I meet Eileen’s gaze and don’t look away. “You probably want to know why. Things didn’t feel right. I couldn’t go so fast. I asked him to slow down. He walked.”
Eileen’s eyes widen. The effect, accentuated by her blue eyeliner, is startling. She looks genuinely concerned. For a full minute I think I’ve silenced her.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Tell me I’m stupid.”
Thoughtfully, Eileen balances a tape dispenser in her palm. “A girlfriend of mine did something like that. She never regretted it—though everybody said she was dumb for losing the guy . . .” Eileen sets down the tape. “I thought she was brave.”
I don’t know how to answer this. Eileen is watching me, for the first time, with what looks like respect.
I gesture at the clock. “Meeting,” I say.
In the faculty room most of the seats are already filled. I step past the empty chair by the right wall; Jeff is in Georgia, househunting with Richard. Steven Hilliard—present and accounted for as usual, his attendance now grimly accepted by the faculty—gives me a collegial wave. I make my way to a free seat, weaving past faces that hold more than the usual quotient of curiosity. Fortified by my exchange with Eileen, I am able to see beyond the inquisitive glances and understand that I’m a sideshow to the larger tensions animating the room. Elizabeth’s letter has palpably spooked this assembly, but there’s something more. Final grade sheets aren’t due for another few days, but Jeff has already submitted his; I detect his glittering farewell confetti of A’s hovering in the room. There is a jumpy excitement of the sort that animates a high school cafeteria just before a promised fistfight.
Anyone wandering into the room who hadn’t known Joanne six months ago would see only a somewhat bulky woman, shoulders rounded, face plump, pacing heavily while the others settle into chairs. Her colleagues greet her with a blank, preoccupied politeness, as though the change that’s overtaken Joanne these last months were invisible to them. Joanne, expert in sixteenth-century poets who took the measure of mortality in sonnets full of chilly graves, scans the gathering with thunderous disdain. Her colleagues’ gazes flee.
The fall term is all but over, exams winding down. This is the time when academics wrap up grading and pray to be left alone. But Joanne has been in high gear. She’s given up two of her classes for the coming term, yet if anything seems to have taken on more committee work. She’s been particularly solicitous of the junior faculty, taking them out for preholiday drinks: jokey, confiding, abruptly interested in their personal lives. It may look like friendship. More likely it’s empire expansion. I’ve played into it at the flurry of end-of-term meetings, gritting my teeth and voting Joanne’s side wherever doing so does not directly betray my principles. My hand was the first in the air for her grading-review proposal last Friday, and I voiced immediate and emphatic approval of her motion for the creation of a new fifteenth-century post, leaving the meeting trailing unacknowledged at the rear of her retinue. I’m not stupid. Surely some of the faculty—including any senior colleagues undecided on the question of my tenure—are still watching for confirmation that I meant every word Elizabeth penned.
Joanne, who hasn’t deigned to comment on my support, appears nonetheless mollified; at Tuesday’s meeting she even went so far as to second my nomination of Jesse Faden for the Admissions Committee.
Now Joanne paces alongside the table. “I’d like to submit that we draft a departmental letter to the deans, requesting that student course recommendations no longer be distributed on the university’s dime unless first reviewed by a faculty member. It may be an uphill battle, but I believe it’s important to make an effort to institute this policy. I’ll draft the letter this week, and I hope for your support and cosignatures.”
No one with a stake in peaceable departmental relations will touch this one. Let Joanne tilt at her windmills.
“They meant well,” says Steven Hilliard.
Joanne whips to face him. “A damning praise if ever there was one! Undergraduates aren’t trustworthy, and you know it.”
“Well.” Steven chuckles, pointedly unfazed. He speaks so slowly he might be deliberately trying to infuriate her. “Most of us aren’t trustworthy, if you’re going to count honest mistakes as treason. The students who wrote your course description made a simple error. It wasn’t intentional.”
Joanne’s finger slices a broad arc in the air. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” She drops her hand. “Mark Twain. Look it up.”
Steve’s voice tightens. “You’re out of line.”
Even though I’m braced for it, Joanne’s fury is dreadful. Her voice is so loud it seems to leave a backwash of static in the still air. “I fail to see,” she says, “why a bunch of students who clearly have trouble respecting women in academia deserve your defense.” She stops, as though taking aim for her next blow.
Steven laughs and is silent.
The room is dead quiet. “All right, then,” says Joanne vaguely. Flushed, she thumbs her notes. Then, in a manner that brooks no challenge, she sweeps the agenda along to the difficulties with the bookstore’s new computer ordering system.
Outside the faculty room the assembly disperses. Halfway down the hall, the new Colonial Lit hire Elliott Harrell huddles with Joseph Yee, our resident anti-Marxist.
“Sometimes I hate feminists,” Joseph is saying as I pass.
My step falters. Elliott and Joseph watch me, amused. “No offense intended,” says Joseph.
Before I can continue on my way, Elliott says, “What do you think, Tracy? Were the students being sexist?”
I hesitate. From Elliott the question may be sincere. And I am tired: tired of letting the rumor mill speak for me, tired of feeling isolated within this faculty. I would like, just once, not to be misunderstood, caricatured, my ideas and beliefs slotted into dismissible categories. Even if the discussion is only about politics. “I don’t think this is about sexism,” I say softly. They move apart, making room for me. “That last zinger was just Joanne’s way of getting Steven to stand down. I think this is about Joanne’s other . . . stresses.”
They acknowledge this with nods. “Poor thing,” says Joseph briskly.
“Feminism,” I say carefully, “isn’t the issue here. It’s a shame she felt compelled to invoke it.”
“I see,” says Joseph, with the same tolerant smile he might level on a die-hard Marxist who insists that—setting aside its practice—there’s still a lot to be said for the theory of
Communism.
It’s almost hopeless: an aggressive woman who speaks her mind is everywhere assumed to be a feminist. Yet Joanne has just targeted the department’s most promising female graduate student. She offers friendship to female colleagues only if they’re well below her on the food chain, or vastly senior. She plays the men’s game harder than the men, admitting to no known relationships, no outside interests, taking no prisoners. It’s my belief that Joanne qualifies as an antifeminist.
I keep my meditations to myself. Elliott and Joseph may be free to dish on Joanne; I, for at least the next week and a half, am not.
Joseph glances at his watch; the two nod their goodbyes. As they depart for their offices, Joseph stage-whispers to Elliott. “Yeah. Maybe she’s not a feminist. She could just be a bitch.”
They disappear down the corridor, Joseph snickering.
I turn for my office and find Victoria in my path.
“How are you, Tracy?” Last week’s indignation is gone. In its place is a genuine if reserved concern.
We take a few steps together in the direction of our offices. “I was sorry to hear about your breakup,” she says. “But you surely have your reasons. I wish you well.”
“Thanks.”
“I recognize that your tenure review is also approaching. And you’re doubtless feeling taxed by this whole ordeal with Elizabeth . . . a difficult situation, and one that we’re all handling in good faith.”
I accept this recognition with a grateful nod.
“That’s a big load to bear,” she says. We’ve reached Victoria’s office. She reaches for the doorknob. “But you’re going to be fine. Just lie low and do what you’re doing.” She hesitates, hand on the knob. “Steven tells me there’s a new book in the works. Something brash, he said. He was vague on details.”
I can’t refuse Victoria—even when she’s too genteel to ask directly for information. “It’s about happy endings as possible acts of resistance in American literature. A different kind of truth-telling in the face of a prevailing cultural trope of tragedy.”
She’s silent for a bit. “Are you certain you want to take that on?”
“Yes.”
She looks askance at my sharpness. “It’s an awfully big thesis.” She pauses. “Of course, theses used to be bigger, in my generation.”
I know what she means: the academic bandwidth has shrunk over the past decades, with minutiae gradually elevated over sweeping concepts. It’s a relief to be standing in the hall with Victoria, speaking not of loss or of madness but of books. A profound sense of sanity warms me. I tell her about Tolstoy, and the arc of my argument.
When I’ve finished she says nothing, only frowns with concentration. There is no rushing Victoria’s thoughts. Her dignified, stodgy consideration makes me feel safe.
“I disagree,” she says. She twists the knob, and her office door opens silently. She gazes into its quiet confines. “Our stories are tragic because we are. Happy endings aren’t acts of resistance to cultural imperatives. They’re simply exceptions—and not always believable ones—to the overarching human rule.”
Victoria’s desk telephone rings. She smiles briefly and closes her door.
The hospital room is barren. It takes me a moment to realize the barrenness is the absence of books. I’ve so rarely seen Elizabeth without books. The walls are free of shelves, there is no desk, no backpack loaded with tomes, and the tabletop on which Elizabeth’s meal tray rests is free of papery clutter.
On the windowsill is the room’s only patch of color—the ivy plant Mary bought in the hospital store last week while I lingered, making unnecessary offers of assistance, mysteriously incapable of returning to my apartment. Drinking in the spectacle of Elizabeth bearing her head high in the presence of her questioners: a martyr going to the scaffolding, her faith intact. Mary, fluent in the routine of hospital admission, shepherded Elizabeth smoothly between interviews with nurses and doctors . . . only once turning to me, as I numbly repeated my offer of help, with a look that sized me up—my blouse and wool slacks, my overstuffed briefcase, my uneasy expression—and found me lacking.
Now Mary sits in the corner. She nods when I greet her, then turns back to Elizabeth, whom she watches with a calm I cannot fathom.
Dressed in a shapeless T-shirt and sweatpants, Elizabeth floats on the wide hospital bed beside the window: a captive animal carelessly docketed in the wrong artificial habitat. A television, its gray eye blank, floats mute on its perch near the ceiling.
Seating myself, I think of Dickinson. This is the Hour of Lead.
Elizabeth stares through the pane. Watching her motionless form, I’m unfathomably attracted, unfathomably repelled.
Slowly, she turns to me. “What’s happening?” she asks.
Of the possible answers to this question I choose the simplest. “The department is calming down.”
“They put me on probation.” Elizabeth’s eyes linger on my shoes. In the last week she’s gained color. Her movements are less agitated, yet there’s a dullness to every gesture, as though body and thoughts drag chains. The effects of medication. Or, perhaps, loss. “Joanne left a phone message. She says if I write a letter of apology she’ll consider dropping the issue, so it won’t have to go before any committee that might terminate my degree candidacy.” She’s silent. Even her breathing seems to stop. Then she stirs again. “My mother won’t let me write the letter yet. She says it’s too early to think of anything but my health.” Without warning she looks directly into my eyes. Then away to the window, stranding me.
She’s made no mention of alien voices or literary revelation, leaving me to guess that her visitors have receded further under the drizzle of medication. Yet she herself seems, if anything, more remote than before. The offense I feel at this makes no sense: as though her breakdown were a deliberate betrayal of some unspoken trust between us. I want to shake her frail frame until she wakes.
Instead, chiding myself, I manage a kindness. “It’s okay,” I say. “We’ll find a solution.”
A nurse comes in to change the bed. Elizabeth, roused, proceeds to the ward’s day room. I follow her. She settles on the sofa.
“Anything good?” I say, gesturing at a stack of colorful magazines on the coffee table as I lower myself into an armchair.
“I can’t read.”
I bend nearer. “What do you mean?”
“The words get inside my eyes, but they just”—her hand makes a slow eddy in the air—“swim.”
“You can’t read even a little bit?”
She sighs.
“Do you need me to read to you?” I glance at the magazines. The covers advertise recipes and home décor advice.
“My mother will.” She fingers a small stain on her T-shirt. Her voice is loose with trepidation. “I leave this place in a few days. My mother says she’ll stay with me.”
In the day room are two other patients, neither of whom acknowledges our presence. Both are middle-aged women. One drifts aimlessly about the room’s circumference, trailing fingertips along the flocked wallpaper. The other sits in a rocking chair with eyes closed, perfectly motionless.
“What about the letter of apology?” Elizabeth asks with abrupt energy. “I have to write it.”
Speaking these words in a place designated for healing seems hypocritical, yet I’d also be failing Elizabeth if I didn’t give her the truth. “It may be important,” I say, “to make some gesture to Joanne as soon as you feel well enough. I’ve got something bad to report, Elizabeth. Joanne is ill. Word has spread only recently. I think it’s going to affect your chances for forgiveness. People who know are very protective of her.”
“Oh, I know she’s sick,” Elizabeth says absently.
“You know?”
“She told me. Months ago. Even before she told Victoria. It was our secret.” Elizabeth’s smile goes in two directions at once, pride and pain welded in the tight curve of her lips. “She’s known about my problems, too. I told her about the t
ime in college when I zoomed and then crashed and was in a hospital. She had asked me about the year I took off from academia, and I didn’t want to lie. I trust her.”
Elizabeth’s voice flickers: these last words are a question. I don’t answer it. An unfamiliar sensation floods me so powerfully I can hardly sit. It is the potent, pure understanding of a forest animal smelling smoke: Joanne knew. There are only two things that need to be done in response to this woman. Sound the alarm, and run until the forest is a memory. I can shun Joanne Miller and survive. I don’t need her approval for my own happiness or productivity. I don’t even need her vote—I feel suddenly sure of this—to make tenure. But there behind me, a dim speck on a smoky horizon of trees, is Elizabeth. Standing right in the fire’s path.
“I’m worried about Joanne,” she says.
I don’t open my mouth.
“Is she all right?”
“For now,” I say stiffly.
“Did you tell her? About Melville and Dickinson? About them talking to me?”
“No.” My voice is clipped. “I didn’t give details. But the department knows you’re not well, Elizabeth.” An understatement. Only yesterday I overheard one of the grad students refer, with a not quite apologetic snicker, to “the wacko in the stacks.”
“Thanks for not telling,” Elizabeth says. “People wouldn’t understand.” For several minutes, she picks meticulously at knobs of lint on her sweatpants, collecting the tiny navy balls into her fists like a precious harvest of seeds. Gradually the speed of her picking slows. She watches them come to rest on her thighs: open, senseless hands, spilling nubs of fabric. “Except you,” she says.
Now it’s my turn to look away.
Mary steps into the room and settles next to Elizabeth.
Checking her daughter into this hospital last week, Mary seemed all-capable. Her short gray hair and plain speech and her determination to safeguard her daughter’s dreams answered a stubborn, unspoken hunger in me, and I was riveted. Yet now Mary asks me nothing about Elizabeth’s precarious departmental situation, or Joanne’s demands, or the ways I might help. She only picks up a magazine and begins to read aloud. It is an article about fall styles, and she enunciates each description of color and line as though it were of importance. As though she hadn’t just hurtled across the country to answer a distress call. As though her daughter, her brilliant scholar of a daughter, were not seated beside her with flattened hair and rumpled clothing, in immediate danger of losing everything she’s worked for over the past five years. Mary’s seeming lack of concern confounds me. I can’t say what, precisely, I need her to do. Only that the contrast between the mother I witnessed last week and the one I see now shocks me. I sit a long time, past the hour when I ought to be back in my office grading papers. Parched for something—a word, a gesture. For Mary to rip off her civilian costume and transform into the hero Elizabeth so needs—I so need—her to be. Instead I watch her sit on the sofa, reading her daughter fashion magazines with an unfathomable passivity. I leave tightlipped, freighted with an inexplicable, titanic anger.
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