When he found a more comfortable place to lie down on his mother’s bed, I began gathering my things. I’d left a water-flossing gun in the middle bathroom, a sweater under his bedside table, and six bags of Pirate’s Booty in a kitchen cupboard because the Ottaways don’t believe in snacking. I’d already Ubered my suitcase and bookcase to Red Hook and I was surprised to realize there wasn’t anything else of mine anywhere. Mishti still has my colander. I guess I haven’t really lived anywhere in a long time, maybe since Kansas.
He was still on his mother’s bed when I returned. Seeing him there, spread out over the poppy and marigold duvet, I had a Pavlovian instinct to give him head. It would have been easy, these were the khakis I knew well with the two little buttons, and beneath them his absolutely fine dick, a dick I would have been happy to babysit, or feed, forever, as if it were a well-behaved cat.
“Joan is rather something,” Tom said just then, terrifying me because I couldn’t tell how he’d connected the dots between his dick and you, a dot path I’ve traced countless times.
I bought myself about forty seconds of recovery time by going to get my backpack from his room. When I came back, he’d sat up on the bed and I began packing the floss gun and its various wires.
“How would you feel if I described you as rather something?” I said instead of saying anything.
“How could you? It’s exactly what I’m not.”
“So it’s a compliment?”
“She’s magnificent.”
“How would you feel if I described you as magnificent?”
“How could you not? It’s exactly what I am.”
“You think Joan sees you that way?”
“Can Joan see? Sometimes I think she and Homer exist in trans-time mutual blindness where they can only see each other and no other idiots.”
I felt a little nauseated because I could tell he was going to know you very well.
“She even hates Mishti, number one non-idiot.”
“I heard. Mishti has never been hated before.”
“I haven’t either,” Tom said, as if asking himself whether that could be true.
“I hate you,” I said reassuringly.
“Ah,” he said, reassured.
“You’re not even in Joan’s department, she’s hosting you—”
“What do you care? I need a little botany for the Netherlandish analysis.”
“I’m saying you’re her guest, you’re not even doing the problem sets, you’re a pain in her side, so leave her alone”—did he know I was begging?—“attention makes her angry and you aren’t her type.”
“Hey, have you seen Mishti’s new type?” He was suddenly jolly.
“The Earl of Argentina?”
“A specimen!” Tom made himself snort. I admired the way Tom admired other paragons with such innocent and unenvious glee. “He gives me goosebumps.”
“But what does he give Mishti?”
“Also goosebumps.”
The floss gun, sweater, and snacks filled my backpack to the drawstrings. I tightened them and buckled the top. I was, rather cleanly, ready to leave the snow globe.
“I’m going to make Joan like me,” he declared, staring into the eyes of a porcelain basset hound that lay mournfully across his mother’s mantel. “People like me, that’s all I’ve ever had.”
“And you had a great girlfriend, for a while.”
“But I don’t anymore, and you don’t even go to this school anymore either, which is fine, because you monopolized Joan anyway. Rest in peace, Rachel Simons.”
“Make Mishti like you.”
“I’m a lost cause with Mishti—look at me, I can’t even multiply fractions. Carlo can do the spreadsheets.”
“The spreadsheets? What do you know about Carlo’s spreadsheets?”
“He came to pick her up from class yesterday and he was, like, holding them.”
“Holding spreadsheets?”
“Joan just missed him but I bet she would have found him, if not her, rather impressive.”
“Stop saying rather. You’re all hanging out now?”
“You could have tackled Rachel, peed on her thallium, and thwarted this woeful destiny—”
I thanked Tom for letting me get my things and buzzed the call bell for Frankie. I could always rely on Frankie to receive my distress signals and the light starting rising at once from L through 2 3 4. I watched the numbers light up and go dark. Tom hadn’t bothered to walk me out and he hollered something from Veronica’s room I couldn’t hear—I caught the word old. The 10 glowed and faded. My guardian cherub peeled back the rusting grate and welcomed me into his chariot.
OAKS
The park felt weirdly extra wide that afternoon and who knew a water flosser could be so heavy but I came to see you right away because hearing your name in Tom’s mouth had totaled me.
You were locking up your office. I took your keys out of your hand and walked in. I don’t know why I wanted to start with you mad.
“I have somewhere to be.”
“I don’t!”
“Nell why don’t you do something, work on something again—your original note on phylogenesis was inane enough I could have sent it to Bioinformatics. I guess I could still send it to Bioinformatics.”
“Trees are boring.”
“If you publish something now, you stand a chance at reapplying somewhere else. Barry won’t have ruined you completely.”
You forced me to say the name, “Barry?”
“Well, no, not just Barry. That would have been uncomfortable. Barry and the whole committee. Mendelson. Thompson. Peterson. The club of sons. They’ve made your life difficult, but how couldn’t they? At least you hung on to your life.”
I replayed their whale tones, their groaning, Be-gone. I hadn’t been able to see through my helmet visor. I hadn’t recognized Barry among the sons. I hadn’t seen this particular facet of his previously incomprehensible power. It didn’t seem plausible, it didn’t even seem possible that a rational institution would assign him such a consequential appointment. “Barry is on the disciplinary committee?”
“Not just the disciplinary committee. He’s on the higher boards. Several of them. The Estlins created this campus—they’ll always control it. He’s the current crown prince. Why do you think people love him?”
“Why do you love him?”
“Are you my therapist?”
“Are you still my adviser?”
“Expelled students don’t have advisers.”
“Are you?”
“Do something. Then I’ll decide.”
“I’m doing, I’m doing, but it’s super scary stuff that could kill me so I’d like a little supervision.”
“Oak trees are safe.”
You rolled up your window shade, even though you were leaving the office and had somewhere to be, only to remind me how safe trees are. I saw you, for the first time, not as your individual self but as an accessory to the throne. I knew you would one day ascend to full power and that I would one day be hanged.
“Thank you for advising an expelled student who scares herself,” I said robotically even though it was the deepest feeling in my body. I thought of Tom and Mishti, loyal subjects whom Barry had spared. “I hear you love all of my friends.”
“You have friends?”
“I’m salty and plain so the pretty ones chew on me.”
“Oh, Mishti.”
“You think she’s pretty!”
“She thinks she’s pretty.”
“She is. She does. And Tom.”
“Who’s Tom?”
“Ringlets.”
“He couldn’t bear to look up at me. He covered his face with his hair.”
“I’d just broken up with him, he’ll recover.”
You looked a little ala
rmed and you moved Deren Eaton’s book from your desk to a shelf for no reason. I took this as unbelievable flattery.
“I didn’t realize you dated.”
“I can have secrets.”
“He has very nice hair.”
“You have very nice hair.”
The three snakes in your braid thanked me.
“Leave my office.”
“Very well.”
“Nell—” you said, almost kindly, as I turned your knob. “Get anything done.”
I closed the door. Joan, my nose, Kallas. The line of your name looked like a horizon I’d approached, a threatening and unnatural arrival that meant I’d soon fall off the edge of the earth. I blew a little dust out from the lower curve of your J. I got that good and done.
BOOGERS
These days what I really like to do is to lie on the floor shirted and pantsless and relieve one or other nostril of a really good boog. I leave all boogers on the windowsill. In the morning I wipe them up. They look so different dry—less lovable, easier to discard. My little trash can is full of them. Mishti says Nell is forgetting herself but I say I’ve got world-class boogs.
Don’t worry Joan I check myself. I check myself and I wreck myself. Sometimes I make tortellini and even if I make only half the bag, call it 1.5 portions, I pour it steaming into my bowl and I look at it and think: nobody in the whole world deserves this much tortellini. I love it so much, it doesn’t need any topping, each tortellinus is a self-sufficient packet of perfect food. I love best the unforgivably dank tricolor frozen kind, manufactured by mass brands that put ammonium bicarbonate and cracker meal into the ricotta stuffing, tortellini that is probably unhygienic even while it is frozen. I can’t believe I get to eat it.
Same trouble with a box of Kraft spirals and cheese. A whole box feels like the ideal portion size to my body but my mind knows it’s supposed to feed five or whatever children and to hog it is unconscionable sin. It’s okay, I use the empty box as one brick in my temple wall. I don’t mean my body as temple, we know my body to be a rectangle with rounded corners, I mean the temple I am building to worship life.
One time in the cafeteria I heard you telling Barry to stop eating and even though Barry is fat and even though I understand your point and even though I have eaten as I’ve said more tortellini in my thirty-one years than any creature has ever merited in the history of the universe it was almost enough to cure me of loving you. Unfortunately, only almost.
I’m sorry I’ve become such a laziness, Joan. Your husband got me in big trouble and now I feel cosmically shy. But if I can just speed up this binding process by a minor increment we’ll have made major progress and I’ll redeem our rejected lab and Barry will have nothing on me and the many sons will turn back into little boys and Rachel will rest and we will all be able to suffer and heal and suffer and heal and suffer and heal whenever, whenever we need to. Neutrality will be our new pet drug.
UPAS
Hard to say why the mulberry’s Chinese cousin was such a huge hit with British nineteenth-century naturalists—the upas tree, their absolute staple nightmare. Joan what if every time Tom referred to you as “magnificent” I referred to you as “this ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless upas, this all-blasting tree”? That’s Byron.
Jane Eyre tiptoed around “an upas-tree: that demon’s vicinage.”
Darwin’s grandpa Erasmus dubbed it “the hydra-tree of death.”
“She’s a female upas tree,” P. G. Wodehouse wrote about you. “It’s not safe to come near her.”
The problem with upas sap for my purposes is that it works too fast. No “Euphorbia” jokes here, the species Latin is straight toxicaria. The Chinese call it “Seven Up Eight Down Nine Death” because of how many steps you can take before it kills you: seven uphill, eight downhill, or nine on level ground. I’m not interested in that kind of immediacy. We need to stand a chance.
there stands an awesome Upas Tree
lone watchman of a lifeless land.
No bird flies near, no tiger creeps;
alone the whirlwind, wild and black
Pushkin. If a Russian thinks it’s too bleak—the point is that I am the creeping tiger. I want in on the whirlwind. Let me in, tree, you were supposed to be safe. I can’t believe you rolled up your window shade for me. That was a little sweetness in you, and they haven’t installed an ID scanner in the Schermerhorn Extension. I’m going to come to your class.
PEDICULARIS
Your question: What is the relationship between pollen and pistil in Pedicularis’s floral evolution?
My question: What is the relationship between ricin and charcoal in a castor detoxification?
A genus of perennial green-root parasite plants. Broomrape family.
1983, Plitmann and Levin, Society for the Study of Evolution.
Plitmann working out of Jerusalem and Levin in Texas. “Different kinds of cowboys,” your only joke of class. Everyone too nervous to giggle.
The activated charcoal mainly expels the ricin via vomiting. It’s superficial that way, not a binding, just a purging. Rachel wouldn’t be entirely satisfied. She’d fling grave mud at me. What kind of RIP is that.
“The multitude of floral architectures within angiosperms are complex adaptations (or adaptive strategies) insuring the transfer of pollen from a plant to another of the same species, the subsequent growth of the pollen tube in the style, and the fertilization of the ovule.”
Nobody even giggled when Hans couldn’t read “ovule” out loud.
Kugler, 1970; Frankel and Galun, 1977; Faegri and Van der Pijl, 1979; Cruden and Miller-Ward, 1981.
MAPLES
After class Barry couldn’t seem to decide which impulse was stronger: to touch Mishti’s breast or to give Carlo one decisive fingernail scratch across the face that would mar him for a couple of months. He decided to make a comment about Mishti’s molecular chemistry textbook.
“Molecular chemistry!” is what he came up with.
Carlo was wrapping Mishti’s giant shawl around her and he had to make three laps before it stopped.
Barry is hugely excited that Mishti can do chemistry. I think it relieves him of an anxiety he houses about his own inability to do anything at all.
I stood holding this notebook in silence on the grass like a scarecrow.
“You’re here?” Mishti said as if I’d brought her bad news.
“I’ve been hiding in the back.”
Tom joined us. “Joan saw you.”
“I thought Joan doesn’t see.”
“She saw you,” he sulked, “I saw her see you.”
“I’m Barry,” Barry told Tom.
We were all standing in a circle and, if prompted, Barry would have hopped in the middle to dance.
“Carlo,” Carlo shook Barry’s hand.
Barry looked overwhelmed by so many members of his least favorite sex. He had presented himself to Tom and not to Carlo because Tom is as threatening as a wheat stalk. Carlo is as threatening as a six-foot-five dagger sheathed in velvet.
“I’m in the business school,” Carlo went on, “and you’re in Housing, is that right?”
I silently applauded his research and his insult.
“Director of the First Year Area.”
Joan if you had been there would you have supplied the word Associate?
Carlo asked, “And the dean is Mendelson?”
My applause thinned and I started to hear Carlo’s gears clicking. I couldn’t guess why or how the MBA candidate had identified the undergraduate houser, even if his attitude suited me. I couldn’t guess what he wanted with this Mendelson, who had apparently stood next to Barry and expelled me. There was no clear path leading from any of them to Carlo. Mishti had only come to your class twice. Your marriage to Barry is thankfully not widely reported. Carlo had only been dating Mishti a
couple months. We were all essentially strangers. I thought of Carlo’s spreadsheets, his format of choice, all the order and intention and menace that format contained.
“He is indeed,” said Barry.
Tom: “Pun intended.”
I had forgotten Tom was standing there, the wind had been blowing through him.
Mishti: “What are you talking about?”
Tom: “Sorry I thought he said in-dean.”
Barry glowed. Mishti Singh had come to his defense.
“You’re a clown,” Mishti said to Tom, peeling Barry a grape.
Carlo said, “I love Mendelson.” He brushed the pompadour off his forehead and focused. “He’s going to fix Luxor’s hiring freeze and open the whole thing up.”
“Come by and meet him,” Barry said, peeling Carlo a grape.
Carlo knew better than to say anything more. He’d gotten what he’d come for. His completely satisfied hair fell over his forehead again and stayed there, rustling a little when the wind blew. It was suddenly easy to picture him standing in the disciplinary committee horseshoe.
I looked to Tom for some familiarity, some family. His cloud eyes had narrowed and he’d been bothered. Mishti was looking at him too, still irritated. She was significantly enlarged and padded by her shawl and her little head emerged from it like a seal head from the sea. She’d recently cut her hair short, chin-length. The sharp edges of the front layers made her face look especially heart shaped.
Barry took over, now proud and comfortable. It was incredible to me that he could bear my company without guilt, but only compassionate people feel guilt. He asked Carlo, “What brings you to our side of campus?”
“My Mishti,” Carlo said.
Mishti’s soul purred under her padding. I became a silent and irretrievable turnip. Barry didn’t want to process the fact of Mishti’s unavailability so he turned to Tom.
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