Bad Habits

by Amy Gentry

  I got an email response within twenty-four hours. I was in.

  * * *

  I saw at once which seat belonged to Bethany Ladd. At the head of the seminar table, a black tote bag hung from an empty chair. In front of it next to a mug of tea sat a single cruller, untouched.

  The students who had already arrived clustered around the opposite end of the table, leaving as much space as possible between them and the cruller. I set my stuff down next to Gwen—​she had also gotten in, of course—​and joined them in silent waiting.

  The clock ticked. The seats around the table filled. I felt pleasantly surprised when Connor came in, so late that he was forced to take one of the seats next to the Bethany-shaped absence at the head of the table. Five minutes passed, then ten, as we waited for someone to fill the final chair.

  Bethany strode through the doorway eleven minutes late carrying a stack of thick, stapled syllabi, dark red wedges of hair swinging forward past her cheeks like twin ax blades. She saw the cruller and dropped the papers with a thump, glancing around the table at us sharply. “No one has eaten the pastry.”

  Silence.

  “I brought this for you.” She didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular. “I don’t eat pastries.” She slid the cruller to Connor, who stared at it. “Go on,” she urged.

  Connor tentatively picked it up and took a bite.

  Bethany sighed as if at a loss for what to do next and took her seat. The room held its collective breath as her eyes traveled around the seminar table, brows invisible behind the red wall of her bangs.

  “First, some housekeeping. The course schedule is incorrect. This class meets on Mondays and Fridays, not Wednesdays.”

  My face reddened. I worked Friday lunches.

  She went on. “If you come here on Wednesday, you will have to teach yourself. Which might be for the best.” Nervous chuckles from around the table. “You, with the pastry.”

  Connor, still struggling with the dry cruller, coughed. Pastry flakes flew out of his mouth onto his fist.

  “Why don’t you begin. Who are you?”

  He swallowed strenuously. “Connor Yu.”

  There was a pause. “And?”

  “I’m a first-year.”

  “And?”

  He grinned hugely and spread his hands apologetically. “I’m just happy to be here.”

  A few students laughed, but the next student spoke up quickly. “Jordan Ash, ret-con dynamics and the sedentary sublime.”

  As students around the table continued to rattle off their increasingly baffling subjects of study (“Tim Barrett, seance theory”; “Evie Haglund, instantiation”), I wrestled internally with my schedule, trying to make it work. Derek had said I needed to hold down at least three shifts a week if I wanted to stay on the schedule. I didn’t have the seniority for dinner shifts, and I had classes the rest of the week. Fridays were nonnegotiable if I wanted to keep my job.

  I was sitting nearest the door. While all eyes were on a second-year studying dermatillomania in eighteenth-century Dublin, I quietly picked up my bag and left.

  * * *

  I didn’t have time to mourn Bethany’s class for long. I didn’t have time for anything.

  The readings for my other classes—​Diasporic Feminisms (Margaret Moss-Jones), The Futures of Art History (Rocky), and Economimesis (Grady Herschel)—​added up to almost a thousand pages a week, and I found them nearly impenetrable. The courses I had taken at Urbana College had prepared me for the idea of reading difficult theory, but not the actuality. I often lost track of who had assigned which article, because typically I had only the vaguest concept of the subject matter. I printed them out at ten cents a page, made notes, underlined important passages with red pen, and left them lying in dog-eared heaps around my bed every night just before falling asleep. Having quickly run out of binder clips, I kept them separate by stacking them at right angles to each other, a complicated game of Jenga that always ended when an accidental kick sent them sliding across the floor.

  My weekends went to Nona. Some Fridays, I’d fold up a few pages of an article and shove them into my apron to read in the wait station between slams. But between slams there was always silverware to roll, ice to haul, and side work to finish so I could leave the moment I got cut. After an iced tea spill left several pages of Deleuze sopping wet and unreadable—​though, hardly more so than before—​I gave up the practice. Anyway, I couldn’t risk getting caught. I had used up my goodwill with Derek when he caught on to my trick of always swapping for first cut so I could go home and study.

  “I’m going to be frank with you, Mac,” he said, bushy eyebrows wrinkling his bald head. “This is why we don’t usually hire students. You’ll never make bank here cutting out early. And if you’re not interested in making bank, I’m not interested in you.”

  “I’m interested in making bank,” I assured him.

  In fact, I was desperate. Fixing the car had dropped my bank account down into the danger zone where a single mistake could set off a cascade of overdraft fees. I turned tables as quickly as I could and upsold furiously, but Derek was right. If I wanted to make real money, I had to start staying out my shifts. I was too tired after work to concentrate, anyway.

  To compensate, I began to wake up earlier and earlier during the week, trying to trick a few more minutes out of my brain when it was at its clearest. The gym opened early, so I started my days reading on an elliptical and then headed to the library to reread the bits I hadn’t understood the first time. On a good day, the reading left me buzzing with questions, but I quickly learned not to ask them in class. Classes weren’t for asking questions. They were smartness competitions, chances to attract the attention of the professor and earn a reputation among fellow students. Often, I left more confused than I’d gone in, my notebook full of copied-down phrases to regurgitate next time the subject came up in class. My willpower for the day all used up, I’d start walking toward the library and wind up in a student pub called the Parlor, where Gwen and Connor and I sat at a table pretending to read until we got too tipsy to pretend.

  Gwen’s study habits were a mystery to me. Graceful mornings of the kind we had shared during orientation lasted through the first week, and then vanished once classes were fully underway. Except for Rocky’s class, which we shared, we had opposite schedules. I left before she woke up in the mornings, and although we saw each other every day, we were hardly ever alone. When we went out with Connor, we spoke more to him than to each other, performing our friendship as a duet of good-natured needling. Even as we let fly jokes that were occasionally a bit too barbed—​as when I informed Connor how recently Gwen had lost her virginity, and he guffawed so loudly she had to let on how irritated she was or risk him blurting it out to the whole bar—​I told myself I was enjoying the new lack of exclusivity in our friendship. It felt like a natural maturation, something like the way long-married couples circulate at parties, so connected that they can risk a mild flirtation with someone else. We were having our fun side by side, and with Connor there was no danger of either of us pairing off and leaving the other in the cold.

  And it was cold. The oaks had lost all but the most tenacious of their leaves, temporarily painting the quad a darker shade of eggplant than I had anticipated. But it didn’t stay black for long. On Halloween, a freak snowstorm dumped two inches on the oily city streets, heralding a long and bitter winter. Coal dust from the coke ovens, invisible at other times, left odd powdery shadows on the blank sheets of white snow until the parade of boots stirred it into a gray sludge. The red, salted brick of the sidewalks slashed across the gray-scale quads like long, coagulated wounds, giving the campus roughly the same color scheme as my printouts marked in red pen. I had a recurring dream that I was trudging through campus only to find myself wading through some article, the words sticking to me like mud after a thaw. I’d wake up with my heart racing and read for hours in the middle of the night. As the weeks dragged by, the full weight of e
xhaustion came down on me like a hammer, and even my mornings grew foggy. I found myself lapsing into unintentional naps in the library.

  On Friday of the sixth week, I jerked awake from one of my library naps to the sound of someone saying, “What did I do wrong?”

  I opened my eyes.

  Bethany Ladd sat across the table from me.

  * * *

  Bethany looked younger up close, her eyes as round and childish as doll eyes, with pupils of startling purple-flecked hazel. She wore no makeup, and next to the fierce auburn of her immaculately straightened bob, her pale skin had a translucent cast. The curtain of bangs, formidably solid from a distance, had caught on her eyebrows and split, revealing a glimpse of worried forehead.

  “What did I do, Mac?” she repeated, a little impatiently. “You walked out of my class. Did I say something that offended you?” Her voice, like her face, was unexpectedly girlish and imploring.

  I rubbed my eyes. “What are you doing here?”

  “Rocky told me you come here every morning.” I struggled to remember when I’d told Rocky about my schedule, but she went on. “I know it’s a hard class, but I can’t help it if I think it’s a good one.”

  “I—​I didn’t think you would notice.”

  “Of course, I noticed. I don’t get that many kiddie pageant alums in my class, you know.” She heaved a sigh as if the thought caused her considerable pain and folded her hands in front of her on the table, bracing herself, perhaps, for further disappointment. “I’m here to ask you to consider re-enrolling. The class needs you. It’s not a strong group.”

  This woke me up. I opened my mouth and closed it, racking my brain to think what I could possibly have done to earn this compliment. To the best of my knowledge, I had never uttered so much as a word in Bethany’s presence. I thought of Connor and Gwen and Jordan the ret-con specialist. Not a strong group.

  She waited for my answer.

  “I’m sorry, I should have explained. I have a conflict on Fridays. When you announced the schedule change, I knew it wasn’t going to work, and I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time.”

  “What could you possibly have on Fridays? Nobody schedules class on Fridays.” Her eyes narrowed in disbelief. “I had to apply for special permission to do it myself. You wouldn’t believe how long that took to approve. Hence the mistake in the catalog.”

  I weighed the pros and cons of revealing my illicit off-campus job to Bethany. She didn’t seem like the squealing type, but, then again, telling her wouldn’t help. What good would it do to spill my problems now?

  She noticed my hesitation.

  “It’s work-study, isn’t it? I’ve seen your aid package—​you can’t be surviving on that. No wonder you’re so tired.” Her voice dipped into a maternal register, but only for a moment. “Still, aren’t they supposed to let you schedule around classes? File for a new assignment. I’ll write a note to the work-study office and say Fridays are off-limits.”

  She was already moving to pull out her laptop, as if she intended to write the email this instant. I had to do something to stop her.

  “It’s not work-study. I wait tables at Nona, and I can’t take Fridays off. My manager already hates me.” I said it all in a rush. “I really wanted to take your class, and I could have if it was at the original time, but it isn’t, so I can’t.”

  “Well, actually it was the registrar that had the wrong information—”

  “I’d re-enroll if I could, but I can’t.” I sped up my words, seized by a strange foreboding that she could somehow make me. “I’d get fired. I really can’t get fired.”

  Noticing my distress, Bethany became distressed herself. “Ah, no, no, no, little beauty queen,” she said. “We don’t want to get you fired. And we won’t. We won’t do that at all.”

  I nodded mutely, relieved and a little embarrassed.

  “So, what we’ll do instead . . .” She paused between words, tracing the wood grain in the table while she thought it out. “What we’ll do instead is—​listen, when can you meet? When have you got a couple of extra hours?”

  I contemplated my reading schedule with horror. I was already worn down to the threads. Where would I fit in the hundreds of pages of readings Connor and Gwen complained about having to lug around for Bethany’s class?

  “Listen, I know you’re busy. The first-years always have a meltdown over the reading. You know you’re not supposed to do it all, don’t you?” She cocked an eyebrow at me. “You don’t know that. I can see by your face that you’re trying to do it all. That’s admirable, but stupid. Nobody expects you to do all the reading. Most of the first-years have figured that out by now. You’re a little slow, aren’t you?”

  Her tone was cordial, but I winced at the about-face from compliment to insult.

  “Come on. What are you doing that’s inessential? Probably going to the pub, right? That’s what all the first-years do. You can skip it once a week. Come to my office hours. How is Wednesday afternoon? Good? Wednesday afternoon at three. Oh, that’s right, you’re in Margaret’s class, aren’t you? How boring. What a slap in the face to me. Well, come to my office at four, then, after you’ve done your diasporas and feminisms and things, and we’ll talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “Independent study. Ethical negation.” And just like that, her face clamped shut, as if the conversation had driven her beyond her capacity to tolerate petty irritations. Before I could process what had just happened, she was on her feet, severe and stiff in her woolen cape as she had been in class, black tote bag dangling from her shoulder. “I’ll see you in my office, Wednesday, four p.m. sharp. I’ll file the paperwork to make it official. And, Mac?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She turned and stalked off, boot heels clicking. After she’d gone, the library was silent again except for the whir of desktop computers and the occasional librarian’s yawn.

  * * *

  The Bethany who invited me into her office when I knocked that Wednesday at 4 p.m. was neither girlish nor gruff, but so close to ordinary I could almost believe I’d imagined the exchange Friday morning.

  Except that I hadn’t, because here I was.

  “Mac, come on in. I’m so glad you remembered.” As if it had been a casual invitation, mentioned in passing.

  Bethany’s office was a bright white box, the bookshelves lining one wall nearly empty, with only a few objects scattered here and there. They were ordinary objects—​a stapler, a bud vase—​but somehow they all looked slightly larger than normal, so that, like the rustic tools hanging in the farmhouse, their objecthood made an impression. In any other setting, I wouldn’t have wondered whether the tape dispenser on the second shelf was a functional tape dispenser or a Tape Dispenser, the piece of pottery a mug or some sort of ironic commentary on the platonic ideal of a Mug.

  Bethany, wearing a black sweater and leather pants tucked into her knee-high boots, sat in a rolling chair behind her desk. Her window was choked with ivy, gray and skeletal, and a gargoyle with a skullcap of snow jutted at an odd angle outside. A mug of tea steamed on the desk in front of her, and as she spoke she dunked the bag rhythmically, a comfortingly ordinary motion.

  “Close it behind you, will you? Not all the way.” I obediently cracked the door. “Now come have a seat.”

  The only place to sit was a love seat arranged at a ninety-degree angle to her desk, a woven throw folded and draped over one arm, so that it looked a bit like the therapy couch I’d seen in Gwen’s mom’s office. I wondered if anyone ever used the throw, if they asked before draping it over them, and if they folded it afterward or left it for her to fold.

  “I haven’t read Ethical Negation,” I blurted, as if I’d been in the interrogation chair for hours.

  “Don’t bother,” she said lightly. She turned her chair, which, in the style of everything else in the office, was an ordinary desk chair but also a Chair. “I’m working on something that will render it comp
letely obsolete: radical negation. As a matter of fact, I was hoping the class would help me think it through, but I’ve plied them with readings, to no avail. As I said, it’s not a strong class.”

  It had never before occurred to me that professors assigned readings based on their own needs, not their students’. I paused to grapple with this disorienting thought.

  “Not to say they’re not smart!” she went on. “They’re extremely intelligent. All my students are. Well, most of them. All except one, really.”

  My mind spun out trying to remember every face in the room and guess which one she was talking about. Could it be me? Did I even count as her student yet? But before I could figure it out, she was on to the next thing.

  “Your friend with the hair—​you know, what’s her name, Gwen. She’s the smartest student I’ve ever taught.”

  “Gwen’s smart,” I parroted numbly, recognizing something that made sense at last, even though it made my heart sink a little.

  “Brilliant,” Bethany agreed. “But not strong. Not like you, Beauty Queen. None of them are strong. I can feel the strength coming off you in waves, and that’s what I want for the book. I don’t want smart. I want strong.”

  “Oh.”

  She didn’t want smart. She wanted me.

  “You’re smart, too, BQ,” she said with a little laugh. Still recovering from her last remark, it took me a moment to understand the acronym: BQ, for Beauty Queen. “I wouldn’t have pushed so hard for your acceptance into the Program if you weren’t. Oh, yes, I was on the admissions committee, and I fought for you. It was a very contentious application, with a lot of opposition.”

  “Uh, thank you.” The whiplash of compliments and insults had left me so confused, I could think of nothing else to say.

  “Mac, do you know what the Joyner is?”

  “Sure,” I said, retreating to easy falsehood. Six weeks of classes with people who already knew everything had replaced my instinct to ask for explanations of what I didn’t know with an automatic nod to show that I did, accompanied by a thoughtful expression, as if I were puzzling over which bit of knowledge about the thing I knew nothing about would be most relevant to the current discussion.