Covalent Bonds

by Trysh Thompson

  Eliza’s toes curled in her boots.

  “I believe I wrote that grammar knowledge was integral to good writing—though I admit essential has a certain pleasant ring of truth.” His accent was warm, teasing.

  She shifted in her boots, felt them keep her in her own body. She wasn’t going to apologize, she wouldn’t back down from the ideas she’d just espoused. Dr. Narang didn’t look like the type of man who’d respect that. Nor did she want to, anyway. She was a professor, same as he, and she needed to establish herself there, controversial beliefs and all.

  “Well,” she said, matching his smile, “a rigorous debate between faculty members is sure to be a lively addition to the department.”

  “Lively.” He paused, as if tasting the word. “I might use another adjective.”

  Stella laughed and clapped him on the back. “Oh, Kunal.” She began walking away, adding to Eliza, “See, you’re already shaking things up, Dr. Stein. Maybe in two months, you’ll have Kunal spouting poetry without noting all the independent clauses.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Unlikely.”

  “So you’re a grammarian,” she began as Dr. Tompkins left, “coming to hear about the wilder side of language.”

  “All words are wild, Dr. Stein. That’s why I like diagrams—it domesticates them.”

  She sniffed. “Some people don’t think you should put live things in cages.”

  “Maybe, but…” He took the empty plastic glass she held, tossed it in the trash, and grabbed a filled glass from the table for her. “… ethical concerns aside, don’t you agree that the more you learn about language, the more you can harness its power?”

  “I know plenty about language.” She took a neat sip of water from the cup he’d given her.

  “But don’t you see the value of learning the structure underlying our speech—your poems—so you can manipulate it?”

  “I can manipulate words just fine,” she said. “By taste and feel. By ear.”

  “Your words would be richer for it.”

  She shook her head and tipped back the rest of the water while she gathered her thoughts. She remembered a college class where the professor had drawn an elaborate diagram on the white board. The marks had grown along with her confusion and frustration, and soon she’d wound up simply staring out the window at the beautiful winter landscape. Snow and ice, frost, freedom—those were terms you could feel on your tongue, words that shouldn’t be shoved into any diagram.

  She tossed her cup in the trash. “Diagramming is English class for people who should’ve been math majors,” she said to Dr. Narang.

  Undeterred, he slowly shook his head. “What inept excuse for a teacher failed to teach you how to diagram a sentence?”

  She laughed to cover her embarrassment. “No one failed me.” She wouldn’t admit to failing anything. Not to this man, not so publicly in her new position.

  “No?” He stepped closer to her and paused. “You use a lot of references to the body when you speak. You talk about the senses.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind if I…” He offered his hand to her, his palm up, long fingers splayed out, and Eliza felt something grip her low in her belly.

  She didn’t know what he meant exactly, but she placed her hand cautiously atop his.

  He bowed over her arm, turning it with his warm fingers until her palm faced the ceiling. “I can show you how to feel a sentence. You see, the upper arm, it’s like the subject of a sentence, correct?” His hand stopped inches away from touching her upper arm. She looked up at his face to see him glancing at her with raised eyebrows, as if asking her permission.

  She laughed nervously. “Are you going to diagram my arm?”

  “Yes.” He gave her a Cheshire grin. “Is this your first time?”

  She bit back a giggle, a blush filling her cheeks. “Yes.”

  “I’ll be gentle, then.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He rested his palm lightly on her forearm. “The subject is the upper arm. It guides the action, it often comes first.”

  “An arm would look pretty funny if it didn’t.”

  “Hush.” His palm slid down to cup her elbow and she felt the strength of his hand. “But the action, the thing around which everything pivots, is the verb.”

  “The elbow.”

  “The elbow.” He nodded. “It’s dynamic, it indicates movement, it begins the predicate.” He moved onto her bare forearm and Eliza felt the little hairs stand on end. “The predicate is the other part of the sentence, the second part of your arm. It’s controlled by the subject, but it’s very much its own, well, limb.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The hand—well, it’s maybe like the direct object of the sentence. Often near the end of the predicate, but a small, crucial part.” His fingertips grazed down her wrist until he gripped her fingers, turning her hand palm-down again.

  Her breath caught.

  “These fingers are like modifying words,” he continued. “Adjectives. I know you know words. Small things, but so very important to the whole arm, the whole sentence. They allow us to grasp things the way they’re intended. ‘Soft,’ for instance, in the sentence, ‘Dr. Stein’s hands are small and soft,’ would change the meaning of a sentence in a very real way. ‘Soft’ is one finger.” He touched her index finger lightly. “Small’ would be another. Or adverbs could be our sentence modifiers. Lively, shyly.” He touched the tip of each of her fingers as if counting them off.

  Eliza wasn’t sure what was happening, how this man had ended up touching her or why it was sending small seismic activity to all the nerve endings of her body.

  He looked up from her hand then. Shook himself, as if he realized what he’d done. He let her arm fall and cleared his throat. “Anyway, there is more than one way to learn diagramming, Dr. Stein. But do I think students should learn it? Of course I do.”

  She realized the room was almost empty. The cleaning crew would want to come in soon. She shouldn’t still be here. Shouldn’t be touching a colleague she just met. Shouldn’t be talking about diagramming.

  “Well,” Eliza said, trying to keep the breathlessness out of her voice. “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.”

  Monday morning, the day of her first class, Eliza woke before dawn.

  She dressed quickly, pulling on a pair of burgundy knee-highs and fastening them to the garter she wore under her long brown skirt. She buttoned up a burgundy blouse and even pushed her feet into her tall boots.

  She’d always needed to be fully dressed before she could write.

  As she sat, zipping up her left boot, she turned on her laptop and looked at the poem. The one she’d been working on for weeks. Since that first initial spark, she’d been stuck on it, the words of the thing barely smoldering anymore.

  She’d started it right after she moved in, the kindling of a stanza igniting in her head as she waited in line for a sandwich at a nearby deli. She’d had nothing in her pockets but ten dollars and the feeling of hope at starting this new chapter in her life.

  She’d borrowed a pen from someone at the restaurant, and had inked the starting words in blue on a napkin, the lines filling each side of the cloth until they terminated in the middle.

  It had hit her so fast, as it sometimes did, and she thought as she read the blue words, This one. This one could be not only her next poem but the start of her next published collection, the beating blue heart that would reverberate through the pages and mark a transformative work as she began this new chapter with the university. It had that kind of power.

  It was more personal too, the images recalling those early teen years spent hiding out in her room, stuck in a tight brace to straighten her spine, medicating with Emily Dickinson and Nikki Giovanni and Sharon Olds until she’d started writing her own crooked lines, breaking them, putting them back together whole.

  Then, after those first eight lines of the blue poem, it all stopped. Even those lines she’d penned, she somet
imes read again and considered, Was that really the precise phrase? The right line break?

  Like clockwork, the old fear had shown up. Maybe it’d all been a mistake, her poetry being published and now being hired by the university. Maybe they meant another Eliza Stein. Someone older, wiser, more self-assured. Better.

  The white screen seemed to blink back at her a moment, opaquely. The words weren’t coming, even crooked ones.

  She leaned over to zip her right boot. She still needed to feel held together, supported, especially today. It’s why she’d started wearing layers of tight clothing underneath after the brace came off—why she wore boots and the unnecessary garter as an adult. If her body held to the earth, her mind could be free to play with words.

  Even if the publishing and hiring hadn’t been a mistake, who’s to say it would keep going, her ability to write and publish like she’d had? She had started writing young, and she’d worked hard and gotten really lucky. But maybe there was only a certain amount of words and magic allotted to a person, and once you used all that, there was nothing left.

  She tapped the keyboard impatiently. Stopped. Looked at her fingers.

  She thought back to the previous night with Dr. Kunal Narang. The way his long fingers had touched her elbow and wrist and the tips of her fingers in a way that was as electrifying as starting that poem had been.

  Fingers are like modifying words… She looked at her poem and wiggled each finger as she found the modifiers. Tilted. Strong.

  “Adjectives.” Exhaling, she rolled her eyes and closed her laptop.

  The first day went smoothly. It was much like her graduate school teaching assistantships, though nice to have complete control over the syllabus. She had her own spacious office, and in Poetry 101 she spotted the freshman Kevin she’d met at her talk, and then a girl with brown hair dyed with a violet streak came up to her after class to shake her hand.

  “Hello.” She smiled at the girl, who seemed nervous.

  “I just wanted to say I’m such a big fan. I’ve read all three of your collections, like, twenty times each.”

  Eliza laughed. “That’s probably about nineteen more times than I’ve even read them. I’m always terrified I’ve used the wrong word somewhere.”

  The girl beamed. “Well, I think you’re brilliant."

  Maybe she could fit in here. Maybe it wasn’t a mistake after all.

  The following day she passed Dr. Narang in the hallway after leaving her Tuesday class. He didn’t notice her, absorbed as he was by something he was reading, his dark head bowed over a page, his steps long and loose.

  On Thursday, she saw him again, emerging from the class three doors down. They must have been teaching the same Tuesday and Thursday time slot. He was looking down again at a book, and because she wanted to neutralize the weirdness of their first meeting, she spoke to him as he walked by.

  “Hello, Dr. Narang.”

  His head popped up. “Dr. Stein. Good morning. How are you settling in?” He shifted a heavy canvas bag on his shoulder.

  “Fine, of course,” she said, hoping the smile she gave was confident and not at all indicating she’d been thinking about his fingers. “The students are very… lively.”

  He smiled.

  Later that day, she found a photocopy of an article on her office desk, crisp and warm, smelling like it’d just come from the Xerox machine. It was from The New Yorker, dated five years ago. “On the Importance of Diagramming” was the title, a small picture of Dr. Narang at the top.

  He’d left a little yellow note attached.

  Content to mine for your next university lecture. –KN

  Her laughter rang out in the office. She guessed this is what had caused the change in his expression at her talk and the way he’d behaved after. He meant to make her a project! Convince her she was wrong, make her see the value of doing—even teaching—sentence diagramming.

  She wouldn’t fall for it, wouldn’t bend under his tenure or views or warm fingers. She made a photocopy of the photocopy, highlighted in yellow the article subtitles, and at her next break fashioned those into a haiku.

  Then, when she located his office—down the hall from hers—she found it empty and put the haiku on his desk. No note included.

  She’d looked him up the day after her talk. Beyond his article in The New Yorker, he’d written scores of articles on grammar, and, moreover, had published a grammar textbook—a textbook universities across the country used in their curriculum. He was an honest-to-God grammarian.

  She’d remind him that what the world needed was more poetry.

  She didn’t have to wait long for his response. When she reached her office early Friday, she discovered he’d made a copy of her haiku and diagrammed it entirely, putting the words and phrases onto branching lines, the whole thing looking like a tree fallen sideways. Words felled.

  She shook her head slowly. Words failed her again.

  August ticked into September, and Homecoming came and went, with cooler weather and a flurry of white banners strung across campus. With parties Eliza heard continuing late into the night, and bleary-eyed, hungover students slouched over desks the following mornings, trying to stay awake during critiques. They smelled like beer and bubblegum, and many wrote bitter love poems in the wake of those nights. Even Kate, who was fast becoming her favorite student, and a handful from Kevin, the most prolific student in her class, who’d apparently been jilted by some gorgeous-but-narcissistic rugby player.

  Her own poem still wasn’t coming, not even a syllable, but she loved nurturing her students, many of whom showed great promise in their writing. Her days were long and full, her nights spent grading and planning and reading until she nodded off in the armchair of her small apartment.

  Dr. Narang was never reading when he passed her on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he always greeted her first.

  “Dr. Stein,” he’d say, a twinkle in his eye.

  “Dr. Narang,” she’d reply crisply, a warning note in her voice, letting him knowing she was on to his game and she wasn’t having it.

  It just made him smile more.

  September disintegrated into October, and along with the surprise at the semester rolling by so quickly, the schedule for the next term came out. Day by day, Eliza felt a little surer about her place at the university, her opinions and teaching authority being respected and right.

  Then after her poetry class one Tuesday in late October, Eliza saw Kate lingering after all the other students had gone, tucking her purple hair nervously behind one ear. Something was the matter.

  “Do you want to come to my office for a bit?” Eliza asked, concerned.

  “No, it’s just…” The girl’s shoulders were hunched like a turtle’s. “I just wanted to tell you that, I know we’d talked about me taking Poetry 102 after this…”

  “Yes, I’m looking forward to seeing where your work goes.” Eliza smiled. “I’ve seen so much growth in you this semester, and it’s not even Halloween.”

  “That’s the thing.” The girl straightened up marginally. “I’ve been talking to my advisor and he thinks it would really improve my craft if I took Sentence Power.”

  “What?”

  “Sentence Power. Dr. Narang teaches it. My advisor, she says the students who’ve taken it, you can really see a difference in their writing—”

  “Oh. Dr. Narang.” Eliza pressed her lips together.

  “I’m really sorry,” the girl stammered, obviously seeing the disappointment Eliza was trying to hide. “I’m sure I can fit Poetry 102 into my schedule next year…”

  By Thursday morning, Eliza was fuming. Not at Kate, who’d simply followed her advisor’s recommendations, but at Dr. Narang and his grammar Kool-Aid and the way the entire English faculty seemed to be drinking it.

  She discovered where he taught Grammar 101 that afternoon. Peeking through the window into his class, she saw him standing in front of a lecture hall full of students.

  She waited until his b
ack was turned before she tiptoed quietly inside the classroom. Then she slipped into the back row, hunching down in a seat.

  She wanted to call him on it, to his face—but she also wanted to see what it was that was so appealing about a class where you learned to identify transitive and intransitive verbs. She was teaching during his Sentence Power class that semester, so introductory Grammar would have to do.

  Dr. Narang, not noticing her, had just written a sentence on the board in black, and he was in the middle of dissecting it in red, the crimson marks looking to Eliza like so much blood.

  “You see, here we have, ‘Robbing the bank is what crazy monkeys love to do.’ We’ve just established that ‘is what crazy monkeys love to do’ is our predicate, but what’s our subject here? Look carefully.”

  He turned around to face the class and Eliza scooted lower.

  He wore an untucked yellow shirt over gray slacks. A little tuft of black hair stuck up on his head as his eyes ran excitedly over the class.

  “‘Robbing the bank,’” a voice from the front piped in.

  “Excellent, excellent.” He whirled around to the board and put a red line underneath the phrase. “This is what we call a gerund. It’s a form of a verb—robbing—that is functioning as a noun.”

  He was loose and energized, all six foot-something of him, relaxed and wired at once. And more excited than any man should be about verb forms.

  “What if I said, ‘Creating gerunds is a fun party trick.’ What would the gerund be in that sentence?”

  “‘Creating gerunds.’”

  “Brilliant!”

  And passionate. That much was clear. After another underline, he faced the class again, still not noticing her, so caught up in the verb form and why it was functioning as a noun and other things Eliza had never found a quarter as scintillating.

  Dr. Narang paused. “Now, who’s not with us so far?”

  The class was silent.

  “Come on then, don’t be shy. If we don’t all understand, we’ll find ourselves in two weeks staring at each other, not knowing what to say. Who’s confused by this?”

  Five hands raised in the air.