by Claire Tacon
The union grieved but, in the end, the test of “financial exigency” was proved and my contract terminated. Even if I’d agreed to a transfer, they’d cut back in all the areas of my expertise. By the time the situation was resolved, it was too late to put out applications for the fall.
Richard must have pulled strings because I wouldn’t be an easy sell—I’m behind on publications and my focus is agricultural applications instead of pure science.
He shouldn’t have done it without consulting me. Still, I open the letter, relieved to have a job offer so soon, even just one or two sections of Intro to Soil Science.
The white of the envelope matches the rings where the table’s teal paint is chipped. This was Terrence’s first piece of furniture in Canada and as its use changed over the years, so did its colour. Since his wife’s death, it’s remained the same algae green that she picked out.
I skim through the text, then catch on the course code. My husband did pull strings. Three sections of Geology 101.
Richard registers my shocked expression, discreetly shakes his head. This isn’t the place.
Luke is going through a phase where he picks out all the peas from his roti and lines them up along the seam of the aluminium tray. Stephen reaches across the table fork-first to stab them, his elbow narrowly missing his drink. Both of them should know better but I don’t want to reprimand them again. At least they’re learning about symbiosis.
“Was that your friend in the kilt?” Stephen asks, corralling more of Luke’s veggie discards. “I bet he was pissed off with his parents.”
Terrence crosses his arms, straightens his spine and leans into the table towards his grandsons. In the fifteen years since he’s retired, Terrence hasn’t been able to shake his principal’s repository of gestures guaranteed to put adolescent cheekiness on ice. “There’s nothing wrong with a kilt. Next year you could wear the Nova Scotia tartan.”
“They wear kilts there?”
Terrence explains the origin of the province’s name.
Richard allows his father the didactic segue but it still cracks him up. “Never saw anyone in kilts when we went out. Ripped jeans and trucker hats, plenty.”
Stephen leans back in his chair, snickering as I glower.
“Come on, Ellie, you told me half the people you grew up with were hicks.”
“Some kids did Highland dancing.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Case closed.”
“Did you ever dance in Carnival?”
“What’s your point?”
I shouldn’t be so riled up. When we first got together, I used to entertain Richard with all the half-brained antics my friends got up to—barrelling down gravel roads then jacking the wheel and jerking the emergency brake to spin donuts, bashing in the pumpkin heads of the Kentville scarecrow displays at Halloween, hiding under blankets in the back of pickup trucks so the cops wouldn’t pull us over on the highway.
“Did I ever tell you that I went to Halifax on a teacher’s conference? Beautiful province.”
“Thank you, Terrence.”
“I’m sorry I called you a hick.” Richard wraps his fingers around mine. “But when we first started dating you were still drinking instant coffee with creamer.” He starts laughing again, so hard he has to pull his hand back and cover his stomach.
I’m fuming now, but it’s the boys’ night so I don’t let it show. “How’s the spice?”
Stephen burps and grins, sniffing the air in mock disgust.
By the time the boys are in bed, I’m pretty wound up. I strip next to the hamper, sliding my socks off with my big toe, then collapsing on the bed in my bra and underwear—an old pair from a Costco bulk purchase with sagging elastic. The only good thing about job hunting is that I’ll need new clothes.
Richard takes off his shirt and smells the armpits, evaluating whether he can wear it again. “Well?”
“It’s rocks for jocks.”
He’s down to his boxers now. Richard’s still got the muscular frame that he had when we met, but he’s stopped running and swimming in the past five years. The skin over top has gotten looser, like he’s very slowly starting to melt. “It’s a foot in the door.”
“It’s a dead end.”
He joins me on the bed and nudges me into him so my head rests on the pad of his chest. Richard is 6’1” and I’m 5’2” , so when I lie like this, my feet only touch his ankles. When we first got together, we measured my entire body against his arm-span. My head and heels met the bends of his elbows. We joked that we should have been ice skating pairs.
“Don’t you think it’d be fun to be back on the same campus?”
“When you were my age, you’d had tenure for two years.” I slide on top of him and prop myself up on my elbow so we can make eye contact.
“I thought you’d be happy about this. If it’s not what you want. . . .”
I bite my lip and consider not mentioning it, but then I do. “I keep wondering if I’d applied to that job at Western.” It was five years ago, long past the statute of limitations on marital complaints. Luke was so young. We decided it wasn’t feasible.
“You didn’t even like the hour commute.”
I know, I know.
At thirty-nine, I don’t have time to pour four more years into adjunct work, especially in a different field. “It’s been twenty years since I set foot in a geology classroom. When am I going to apply for jobs if I’m stuck doing prep?”
“I’ve probably got a syllabus and lecture notes.”
“I’m not asking for a cheat sheet.”
I push over to my side of the bed and grab my Sudoku book from the nightstand. Richard waits a few moments to see if I’ll start the discussion again then retrieves the new issue of Discover from the stack of magazines on the floor. I scratch a few numbers into the boxes but can’t concentrate. After ten minutes I realize that I’ve made an error somewhere and toss the book back in the drawer in frustration. The cover catches the side and falls to the floor. I bang the drawer back in place.
Richard keeps reading.
I feel foolish for throwing a tantrum.
He glances over out of the corner of his eye. “Are we friends again?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I need you to take a look at this.” He’s got an ingrown hair on his back hip that the waistband of his boxers has been irritating. It’s inflamed with a yellow head, the swelling about the size of a pencil eraser. He reaches around to scratch it, but I hold his hand back.
“Hold on.” I grab the peroxide and a Q-Tip from the bathroom, along with a hot facecloth. It drains easily, and the hair springs out as the disinfectant bubbles over the wound. “Surgery complete.”
“This wasn’t meant to start a fight.”
“It’s been a long week.”
“All I’m asking is that you think about it.” Richard turns out the light and we settle in under the sheets. As we’re cuddling, Richard gets an erection, just from the proximity. We kiss for a bit, and he pulls me in tight against him.
“What time do you have to get up tomorrow?”
“Six-thirty. If you want to sleep in, go ahead.”
“No, I should file my Guelph stuff, maybe put out some feelers.”
He brushes his lips against my earlobe. “I’ll see if I can steal you some chocolate croissants from the breakfast meeting.”
I laugh and push myself back on top of him.
“What are you trying to do to me?” he asks, running his hands down my sides and squeezing my ass.
We both turn, as if on cue, to the alarm clock, with its bleating red LED numbers. 11:12.
“Better not,” he says and I slide off. “Maybe tomorrow night after we drop the boys off?”
We kiss a bit more but without any fervour. It’s been this way a lot since Luke was born. My period came almost a week late last month but I knew there was no possibility that I could be pregnant.
In the end
, I masturbate quietly, trying not to wake Richard with the shaking.
Around three in the morning, Stephen knocks on our door. The spice has given him a stomach ache. He still shares a room with Luke so I find some TUMs for him and we go downstairs to wait for it to pass. He puts on an old Disney movie that he used to like and sprawls across my lap so I can rub his belly to get the gas moving.
His face and arms are already tanned from soccer and against his paler belly they look like the two parts of an acorn. As I massage his stomach I can feel how his shape’s changed this year, how he’s starting to build muscles on his skinny frame. Before, he was getting older in regular, manageable increments. Now, it’s only at moments like these that he still seems like a little kid. Sometimes I want to prop him in front of a camera like a plant in the hands of a time-lapse photographer just to see if I can capture the transformation.
Next fall will be new beginnings for both of us. For him, it’s high school, it’s progress—another move towards a natural conclusion. I find it hard to imagine myself just down the road from his classroom, clicking through a PowerPoint presentation for a few hundred first year geology students. I don’t know whether to be furious with Richard or grateful.
My husband is one of the only professors who is at the university Monday to Friday, eight-thirty to five-fifteen. When he’s not in class, he’s consulting with grad students, applying for grants, serving on one committee or another. He’s brought in more money over the past decade than three of the other professors combined. He’s also chaired the department for two of those years and served as graduate advisor for an additional four.
I find myself falling well short of Richard’s pace. I’ve always considered myself a hard worker, but by the end of the day I’m beat. Not by the teaching but by the drudgery of admin duties—the interminable departmental meetings about scheduling, the number of forms required to requisition a handful of stationery, the ceaseless stream of email from the listserv.
In our early years together, Richard talked a lot about the pressures of growing up black in a white city. Added to the grab bag of racism at school, there was the separate negotiation of being adopted into an extended Indo-Trinidadian family. Back in T&T, most of his relatives had had serious misgivings about anyone who looked like him. Everywhere he went outside of his immediate family was a racial minefield. A lot of people crumble under those circumstances, but to Richard it was a thrown gauntlet to not only equal but excel.
We used to dream that we’d be some kind of research power couple. We’d lie in bed, post-coital, and map out our joint domination of the field—he’d develop environmentally sound methods for mineral extraction and I’d spread the gospel of agroecology. In the past fifteen years, I’ve struggled to keep up my end of the bargain. It’s not hard to read the sessional appointment as Richard tipping his hand. It drives me crazy that he thinks I need some kind of leg-up.
Richard leaves for campus at seven thirty in the morning when I’m still exhausted from being up with Stephen. There’s no time for discussion. What there is is plenty of time during the day for me to stew, especially after dropping the boys off for their sleepovers. By three, pretty much everything is pissing me off—the smudges on the stairwell walls that we’ve been meaning to paint over for years, the three-day old dishes that Stephen still hasn’t loaded into the washer, the drink rings on the coffee table from Richard’s scotch glass.
He gets in at half-past four, earlier than I expect. Like yesterday, he’s ebullient. As soon as he’s in the door, he wraps his hands around my waist and tries to work his hands down into my jean pockets, like a teenager at a dance. I wriggle away after the compulsory peck.
If this were any other weekend that we found ourselves without the offspring for the evening, we’d open a bottle of red, maybe fool around, then watch a movie in our underwear. Richard’s already primed for this outcome. He drops his work things by the newel post and picks out a bottle from the rack in the hall closet. I swoop in to whisk the pile away to the upstairs office.
He waves me off the mission, leave them.
“I just tidied.”
He raises an eyebrow but lets it slide. He brings over two of our nice goblets and pours almost to the lip. He motions for me to sit down then fishes around in his briefcase, almost spilling his wine over the papers he extracts.
It’s the contract.
“Cheers.” He holds his glass up, his eyes all expectation. He’s sincere, so sincere that I second-guess my bristling.
I lick Shiraz off my lips and try to make the question sound casual. “So why did you keep all this a secret?”
“Are you upset that I did?”
“A little.”
He settles into the loveseat and tells me that he’s not the only one excited to have me in the department. “I ran into Leila and she’s looking forward to catching up.”
I haven’t seen Leila Johnston since I stopped going to Richard’s departmental Christmas parties. She’s married to the Dean of Arts. When we first met she gave me a limp handshake and said, “You’re the one at Guelph, no?” Her face pinched in a condescending smile, as though she could still smell the manure on my shoes.
“You’re not excited at all are you?”
“I wanted time to think things through.”
“You don’t want to be out of the game.”
Am I supposed to bring my catcher’s mitt?
“Do you want me to put out feelers for a spousal appointment?” There it is again. The leg-up. He looks over at me the way he does with Luke when he’s on his last attempt to placate.
“I’m not looking for a hand-out.” I testily retreat to the kitchen. The pots clank satisfyingly against the wire tines as I load them into the dishwasher. If I hadn’t taken those years off with the boys. It’s easy to draft a laundry list of complaints—the commute, being stuck in Toronto because Richard has tenure, years of being the fallback when Richard’s meetings run late. Reaching down, I misjudge the distance and knock one plate against another, nearly breaking it.
Richard strolls in and hands me his wine glass as I’m filling the detergent compartment.
“It’s crystal. We wash it by hand.”
He winces, exaggerating the recoil from my snap.
I hold out my hand to take the stem.
“Don’t worry, I’ll do it.” Richard slouches against the countertop and reaches over to stroke my arm. “You’re a better teacher than Steeves. It’s not your fault there was a major funding shortfall.”
The mention of his name starts me boiling. Steeves was the one recent hire who wasn’t laid off. His end-of-year evaluations were the lowest in the department but he’s developing software to analyse GM crop yields, which means he’s fist-deep in industry pockets.
“But if you’re serious about tenure,” Richard continues, “don’t kid yourself about reconsidering your research.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“There are projects you tackle before you get tenure and some you save for after. There’s no money in shit on a field.” Richard tries to win me over with my own joke. I’ve spent the past two years examining which method of applying poultry manure results in optimum nitrogen fixation. “Take the courses. It’ll buy you time to think.”
I jerk the dishwasher lock and the machine lurches into action. Perhaps Richard could give me an itemized list of projects to tackle in the geology department while I’m sharing an office and teaching frosh. “You had no right to apply for them without asking me.”
Richard cows his head and rubs the vein of salt and pepper around his crown. “My intentions were benign. You needed a job. The position came up.”
“Do they know you didn’t ask me?”
“I didn’t think it would play out this way. Trust me, I’m sorry.”
My back is pressed against the cabinetry with the same kinetic expectation as a swimmer on the blocks, every muscle primed to lunge. It’s not that I don’t trust the apology—it’s
a bona fide concession. It’s the rationale for his secrecy that’s cutting. Either he didn’t want to get my hopes up because he wasn’t convinced they’d give me the sections or he knew I wouldn’t apply but thought it was the best offer I’d get. “I could have had a lot more options if you’d been willing to move.”
“Where?”
“Halifax.”
He waves away the suggestion. “What about the boys?”
“Toronto isn’t the only school district in the country. I went to a rural school. I got a PhD.”
“Along with how many of your classmates?” Richard’s knuckles clench the lip of the countertop then suddenly release, his hands falling limply to his thighs. “You’ll have two weeks this summer to convince me that Canning is a sophisticated metropolitan area.”
“Whenever something comes up with your work—”
“Don’t break out the women’s lib.” Richard’s speech gets quieter as his fury mounts, the words super-articulated but barely audible—a signal to wake the fuck up and pay attention. “I’m not some chauvinist asshole.”
“You make me feel like a failure.”
“I’m not going to apologize to make you feel better. I’ve worked too damn hard for that.”
I stalk down to the basement and get busy organizing the remains of my Guelph office. There’s an entire box full of soil—twenty-four varieties collected in yoghurt containers, each identified by strips of punch label. Silty Clay Loam, Humic Podzol, Grey Luvisol. I shove them into the crawl space among the seventy-eight others I’ve accumulated, next to the boxes of old dishes, baby clothes and diplomas—things our family has outgrown but failed to shed.
Richard’s kidding himself if he thinks he can finish the basement this summer with so much junk down here. I cull a garbage bag full of paper recycling from some of my older Guelph files—assignments that never got picked up, departmental memos. Some are over four years old and I don’t know why I kept them in the first place. The growl of the shredder filters out the television sounds from upstairs. Richard’s watching some crappy talent search. After an hour, I’ve got two bags ready for Goodwill and another pile of shredding. It hasn’t made a dent. Cleaning this place out could take the whole summer.