“You made life hell for her.”
“You’re the one who told the dean I drove her away.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, I suppose, who said what.”
The heck it didn’t.
“The result was we lost a great researcher because of you.” Hendrix shifted in her chair and aligned the red pen precisely along the edge of the dissertation she’d been reading. Or at least I thought the pile of papers thick enough to be a dissertation.
“Your behavior and that of Professors Mendoza and Wilson, that’s what made Rosa leave,” I said.
“Lea has a chance at a good career here if you leave her alone.” She glared at me, eyes narrowed with intent. “I’ll stop you from harming this one.”
Old resentment flared. “When Rosa had her exit interview with the dean, she didn’t mention my name.”
“Of course, she didn’t. She’s too professional to sling mud, but we all know what you’re like.”
She hadn’t gotten over those three graduate students who had deserted her and asked me to chair their dissertations. Via the grapevine, I’d heard that Hendrix considered their decisions my betrayal. Emotion again. People think emotionally, and they don’t see facts. If she made herself more approachable to the students, maybe smiled at them once in a while, they would respond in a positive manner and not desert her; but no, Hendrix preferred cold disdain as inspiration.
And, to be frank, in the past that demeanor had worked to her advantage. But times had changed because she and others like her had been so successful in fighting to bring professors and students of color to this university. White males had once dominated Stratton College, but no longer. We had more women than men now and more women and graduate students of color than Caucasians. And younger professors of color like Lea wanted to work here because we valued their capabilities and ideas.
All of that happened because of social justice efforts from warriors like Hendrix. Yet the fight had left her wounded. Slinging slights, insults, and hatred—the very missiles that had once been directed her way—she refused to see that her glamour of faded splendors obscured reality. She’d spent forty years fighting discrimination, and the warrior hung onto past glories and insults.
I should have understood what I now observed, for I studied this stuff, the flawed decision-making dependent on heuristics and biases that no longer worked in a changing environment, but I didn’t. “I made a mistake when I left Rosa Gonzales to your care,” I said.
My regret left me feeling disappointed in myself.
Hendrix thought I had admitted wrongdoing. I could see it in her smile, and I knew she’d be at Ash’s desk within the hour, sharing that confession. So be it. I could handle Ash, but I wouldn’t let her hurt Lea. Women like Lea were the future of this college, of this university. I stepped closer to the desk, stopping when my thighs touched its edge. She settled deeper into her chair, her brown eyes wide because she had to tilt her head back to stare up at me looming over her desk. Her jowls fell back from the clean line of her jaw.
“Lea will be working with me on that chapter for Professor English’s seminal book on neuroscience.”
“But I’ve invited her—”
“Yes, you have, and I hope you’ll not withdraw that invitation. To do so would send the message that you were—how did you put it?—‘making her life hell,’ and I’m sure you don’t want to do that. Book chapters don’t count for much in this place. You made sure of that when you were on my tenure and promotion committee, but two book chapters in such a prestigious publication will. If we work together for Lea’s benefit, she’ll be more successful than we are.”
“How dare you imply that Lea doesn’t have my support?” She stood up. “I always support students of color. She has the talent and potential you never had. We should never have given you tenure. You’re the one who is an affront to the institution, to this college. We have too many like you roaming these halls.”
I had turned to go, but now reconsidered. “What do you mean like me?”
“Your research methods are shoddy, your experiments can’t be replicated, and this department doesn’t need more theory about civilization collapse. We’re the laughingstock of academe because of you.”
Because I didn’t trust myself around her any longer, I turned away again. Five years ago, she and Alvarez would have won if Ash hadn’t listened to the university lawyers and to reason and given me tenure. She’d made my life hell during that time for no other reason than she could. I’d once thought she and I could be friends because we had so much in common, both of us older white females who as young women had aspired to be more than what society at that time deemed appropriate. I’d been wrong.
She called out just as I was about to quit the room: “And leave that ratty ol’ bear in your office next time you roam the halls. This isn’t a confinement center for the mentally ill.”
Anyone in the hall could have heard her, I realized as my firm steps faltered. Hobbled by a new and unsettling suspicion, I looked down. Brown Bear dangled by one paw from my clenched left hand.
Closing the door of my office behind me, I leaned against it and considered Brown Bear. Then I hugged Robbie’s old teddy bear close to my chest before I set him on the table and turned away, trying to forget I’d made a fool of myself holding a stuffed teddy bear while walking through the building. What had I been thinking? How many of my colleagues had seen my odd behavior? What must they be thinking?
I glanced at Brown Bear. He hadn’t moved except to slump a bit. Poor thing. I reached out to stroke his fur, just the tip of one finger, but that was enough to soothe me again.
Think of something different.
Not Hendrix.
Sunlight. Sunlight was good.
Focus on how that splotch of light drapes itself across the high-backed ergonomic chair at the desk, as if the sunshine is prepared to take dictation. Your eighty-page vita resides somewhere inside that computer.
I came back to myself. I noticed the diplomas of the three degrees I held hung on the wall above the silent machine. The PhD certificate with my name on it hung above the work station. I had graduated from the University of Illinois, a prestigious school, with that final degree in psychology. Numerous awards sat on the deep window sill. More hung on the wall to the other side of the window. My eyes touched each award.
Data. Look at all the data that says she’s the one who’s crazy. Connect those dots, not her scorn. So what if I’d carried a teddy bear through the office? The cesspool of Hendrix’s disdain faded as I took stock of who I’d become. I wasn’t an affront to this college. On the contrary, my output surpassed Hendrix’s, and she’d been here thirty years longer than my measly ten and a half years.
The library shelves. Look there. Along the wall. Opposite the computer. The floor-to-ceiling bookcases contained at least five books with my name etched on the spines. The last two had achieved best-seller status. None of the professors in my department, including Hendrix, could match my accomplishments. My books, articles, co-authored chapters—all evidence of something different from her perceptions.
I pulled out that ergonomic chair in front of the computer, set Brown Bear on the desktop, uh oh, I’d picked him up once again and carried him around with realizing what I was doing. My thoughts as confused and slow as my movements, I sat down, my eyes on the bear, fearing what I didn’t want to admit.
I wished I’d never brought Brown Bear to North Carolina. I’d found him in my father’s house the day I closed and locked the door on that life. I couldn’t leave him because he didn’t deserve to molder away in a cold, empty farmhouse that the mice invaded every fall. Robbie had loved Brown Bear, but then he’d given him up. Something had happened—what I didn’t know, nor did I know why—but Robbie had given him up, and the bear had been forgotten until I found him that morning I’d left the farm.
I should have left him there. The chair back was warm from the sunlight. After a while, I spun it around so that I could look
out the window and forget the confusion I felt, but the fear, the need to know why I was disintegrating, wouldn’t leave me alone.
Two weeks ago, at the faculty meeting, the dean had declared that online learning was the new direction of the college, and he’d used my MOOC as an illustration of what the future held for us all. That praise hadn’t endeared me to Hendrix. But he was right, the students liked online learning. They didn’t need to drive to campus. They could work on lessons at home in their pajamas at three in the morning if they wished without anyone being the wiser.
The internet could serve more students than did limited seating for two hundred in an auditorium, without the cost and upkeep of drafty old buildings that needed sustained expensive maintenance. The university liked limitless web enrollment which translated to more money in the university’s coffers with minimal expenses.
The acquisition of money and protection of money drove universities, which meant more endowments, more grants, higher tuition and fees, hiring more and more adjuncts and professors of practice rather than tenure-track folks like myself. In other words, not letting associate professors except those who were stellar apply for full professorships kept costs down. What made the whole thing funnier than my father’s suspenders was that professors supplied the energy that kept the lights on.
We hadn’t done ourselves any favors. Our very ubiquity worked against us and, until the lights went off, we were our own worst enemies.
I was the future Hendrix dreaded. That’s why she’d attacked me. Psychology had a term for this: transference. She would harm me so my notoriety couldn’t illuminate her shortcomings.
I’d been indulging in transference myself. How had I’d gotten Brown Bear off that top shelf? More importantly, why had I carried him around?
What had I been doing before I went for that walk up and down the stairs where I met Lea?
The dissertation. I’d been reading a student’s dissertation. I looked over the smooth expanse of my desk to the round table beyond. I’d left my chair pushed back away from the table. Instead of fretting about Hendrix and Brown Bear, I should finish editing that dissertation.
Remembering the texture of the silk against my bare feet had me standing up again, going over to the table, slipping off my shoes and digging my toes into the plushness of the Persian carpet, with its threads of turquoise, aqua, and Santorini blue. They were soothing colors, and I’d spent hours tracing the pattern of those threads as I thought my way through complexity. I thought I’d picked up my red pen. But when I looked up from the rug, sunlight no longer doused the chair, and the red pen hadn’t been moved.
Lost again.
The afternoon had waned, and I still sat at the table, my toes buried in the plushness of silk while my hands stroked Brown Bear. I hadn’t picked up the pen. I hadn’t marked a single sentence on the dissertation. I had brought Brown Bear with me to the table, and I’d been sitting there petting him for at least an hour. An hour doing nothing. An hour I couldn’t remember.
I would put him down now.
I would.
Instead, I fussed with his ribbon, the smooth, scarlet ribbon with the frayed edges that felt like silk against my fingertips as I arranged those smooth bits of fray around his neck. Shaking again, for a different reason, I clasped my hands together to stop that reaction. And when my mouth wouldn’t stop quivering, I pressed my fists against my lips to hold myself together.
Maybe Ash was right about how stressed I was. I could relax for a bit, take my time with reshaping TRI, go away for a while and veg. All these people pulling at me, that’s what was wrong with me. If I could just go away and forget about all of them, forget that Ellen might be dying, forget that the Raindrops were mad, forget that Asher loved his dead wife more than me.
But I couldn’t do that. My dad always said to face what I feared.
I put Brown Bear down and went to my desk. The afternoon sun may have gone, but the chair was still warm. I pulled a piece of paper toward me, picked up another red pen, and started writing down the odd things I’d been doing.
• Body hijacking, noticeable only because I know I didn’t consciously move myself on that ladder.
• Standing on the ladder, looking at dots of paint on the beau-tyberry bush. (Mind hijacked)
• Papers swirling like swamp magnolia flowers falling to pine straw.
• Stroking Brown Bear.
• Pattern fascination with Persian silk rug.
Putting the pen down and studying the words, I realized I’d forgotten something.
• Pattern fascination with lights and darks in Lea’s hair.
I read and reread what I’d written.
My conclusion?
The data are inconclusive.
Carrying a teddy bear? A little unusual for a woman in her sixties, but with all the pressures of work and Ellen’s illness, plus the farm and the Raindrops, that too could be rationalized as normal, soothing, comforting behavior. And I hadn’t seen patterns in the rug, I’d noted the colors. To test that assumption, I glanced over at the rug. Nothing unusual engaged my mind, not even the blue that reminded me of Santorini’s caldera.
No pattern repeated into obsession.
I looked at the list, ignored the line that read pattern fascination with lights and darks in Lea’s hair because I couldn’t fathom why that had happened. We’d worked together for a year now, and I had never been interested in her hair. Still, wasn’t that a pattern? Even now I wanted to trace it, find how it worked, how the light blended into the dark and then glinted again through that darkness.
Crumpling the paper up, I tossed the mess into the wastebasket. This had been a weird day, and I should go home and get a good night’s rest. I gathered my things and walked away, then paused at the door, something nagging at my brain that said you forgot me, and with my hand on the doorknob, I turned around.
Brown Bear sat on my desk.
Leaving him sitting alone in the dark didn’t seem like a kind thing to do. Maybe if I put him back on the top shelf where I’d found him earlier, that would be better. He’d be safe there.
That anxiety taken care of, I went home.
Around two that morning the sheets rustled as I stretched and came awake because my mind had another rationalization for me. I lay still in my bed because I knew if I moved, the thought would disintegrate.
Everyone experiences little slips—hesitations, forgetting words, forgetting keys—as they age. The episodes, as Ash called them, were nothing to worry about. Just overwork. Stress. I hadn’t committed a crime, hadn’t murdered anyone although Hendrix had made me feel as if I had. Things would be better tomorrow after I had a good night’s sleep.
But what about that impulse to touch Lea’s hair? That thought kept me up for a while until I snuggled Brown Bear close, turned on my side, and closed my eyes.
FOUR
SUNDAY EVENING FOUND ME lost in the minutiae of returning emails from colleagues and students in my doctoral classes. The rain had started an hour ago. When the plant beside my desk shivered, I convinced myself what I’d seen from the corner of my eye wasn’t real. Then the plant shivered again. I touched the leaf. Wet. My eyes went to the ceiling. A droplet of water there . . . falling . . . and the leaf shivered again.
Classy opened the door into the living room just as the plant shivered yet again. From the street, a car engine revved and then faded as her boyfriend, Sandy, drove away.
“Hope you hire that handyman who did the repairs last month,” she said, looking at the quivering plant. “He looked good in a tool belt.”
“Nice night?”
“We met Bill and Ellen for drinks.”
“What did you do?” I asked, my attention returning to the emails I was reading.
“Talked.” She smiled, and in that moment, in that light, she looked young again, dressed in black tights and a shapeless turquoise top that slouched off one shoulder. Her bra strap was black lace. Sexy, even for Classy. “About your inheritance, what yo
u should do with the Raindrops, Ellen’s cancer, and how grateful she is Bill and Sandy are friends.”
“I don’t believe the cancer is back. That would be too cruel,” I said. “And TRI will survive, Classy. We’ll just do things differently.” I typed a response to one email. “In a way, our jobs will be easier.”
She walked over and sat down in the easy chair next to my computer desk. “Then let me lighten your burden a little more.”
“TRI is not a burden.” Why did she have to make this difficult? “We’re not making enough progress. The problems are bigger, people are still impoverished, and we’re running out of time. If problems get too complex, they snowball and then everyone is crushed as they run to get out of the way.”
“Dart, look.” She held out her hand between me and the computer screen and wiggled the third finger of her left hand.
The diamond was small, but the facets twinkled in the dim living room lights. All my fears of marriage as a trap for women rose in resistance. “But you said. . . .”
“Doesn’t matter what a woman says if the right man comes along, and Sandy is the right man for me.”
“It’s just so sudden.”
She laughed. They’d been dating for six years.
“Be happy for me, Dart. Ellen and Bill are.”
“Classy,” I sighed and looked down at the keyboard. “You’re compounding all your problems if you marry him.”
“Don’t ruin my evening. I’ve had such a good time.”
She wasn’t thinking this through. “Sandy’s younger than you are, but his health is worse than yours. And yours is bad enough. You can’t climb up on the bar at Zack’s anymore.” She’d done that more than once in the time I’d known her, climbed up on the bar and danced, all the men looking at her and she didn’t care.
“With me cooking for him and taking long walks together, we’ll get his health and my flexibility back.”
Bring the Rain Page 5
