Eye to Eye (8 page)

“I'm sorry that I sounded so curt in the hallway,” she states. “It's been a crazy month for reasons I don't want to bore you with, and I've been overtaxing myself trying to make my postcolonial literature class perfect, the syllabus at any rate. I had a rough time of it last year. You'd think that the complaints coming from the students would be beneath notice, but I spend more time in meetings defending my teaching last spring than I did teaching. It creates a mean environment. I don't want you to feel like the department is poison your first weeks here. We should have a drink once things calm down and talk about Atlanta. I'm doing a nonfiction essay class this semester, as well, so I can pick your brain about that.”

“Great. I understand. It was a little creepy getting that letter in the mail my first day. But I have only good memories of how encouraging your were last year during my campus visit. You had longer hair then, no?”

“Impossible to keep long hair in the Atlanta summer, but my partner likes it.”

“Partner” is academic speak for any and all of the following: husband, wife, lover, boyfriend, girlfriend, live-in help, fellow writer. So, while in the real world “partner” signals “alternative lifestyle,” in academia, it simply means that said person is fluent in the über-PC parlance of the day. Now I have to play the pronoun game.

“My ex-boyfriend,” I say, calling Zach an “ex” out loud for the very first time, “wouldn't have noticed if I'd shaved my head. Or he would have been really utilitarian about it—less money on shampoo and no hairballs in the shower.”

Asa groaned.

“David, my partner, he's finishing his sociology dissertation at Emory. We try to keep fighting to a minimum, since he now meditates an hour every day before approaching the keyboard. It's probably good. It keeps me from complaining about the Paige Prentisses of my day.”

“Omigod,” I say. “Is she, like, the well-dressed spawn of Satan?”

“Worse.” Asa moves from the doorway and sits where Paige had sat only moments before. “She heads the Concerned Conservatives, and even once suggested they not allow anyone in who wasn't Christian, but they didn't want to not appeal to the Hitler youth of all faiths. Don't let her fool you with that accent and posturing. The double-C's are a hundred percent behind that bill of rights for students. They even had an article about Atlanta State in the
Chronicle.
It's like they want to go back to the days when you couldn't even read
Huck Finn
or
Catcher in the Rye.
Don't even think of assigning Carol Churchill. I had parents coming into my office over that one. Parents. Is this high school or a liberal arts education? It's Big Brother all over again. Or in Paige's particular instance, little sister.”

I put my hands to my ears in genuine disgust.

“I thought this would be better than Indiana. Politically speaking. And when did Christian become synonymous with conservative? As an occasionally practicing Catholic, I resent that.”

Asa tucks her right leg underneath her left thigh in a yogalike posture.

“Don't worry about getting lumped in,” Asa says. “I talked to Paige about it once and she's quite sure that the Catholics are Mary-worshippers headed straight for hell. She just doesn't think it's polite to say so. This was when I tried talking to Paige. She loved that I was a lapsed Episcopalian. She seemed to think that she'd get brownie points in heaven for talking to me about Jesus. Of course, since I received my official letter of complaint, we don't talk about much of anything anymore. Believe you me, there's nothing terrifically spiritual about the double-C's. And nothing Christian about Paige Prentiss.”

“I have her in two of my classes. Just had her in American lit, and I saw that she's in my advanced poetry workshop tomorrow.”

Asa makes as though a cold shiver is running through her body. “I can loan you cyanide.”

“The worst thing,” I say, “is that her poetry does
not,
in fact, suck. I got a few poems in advance for the first day, and hers were among the best. They're not
about
anything, but they don't suck.”

Spoken by a woman who writes about her shoes, I think, hoping Asa isn't thinking the same.

“In my opinion,” Asa mimics, her speech decidedly more clipped, “if it's not
about
anything, then it sucks. Period.”

The words of a true post-colonialist. Asa pronounces
sucks
as if she found it in the dictionary for uneducated Neanderthals, right after
booby
and
neato.
I make a mental note: tone down the casual lingo while at work. I'm no longer going to be forgiven the fact that I can discuss Freud and Lacan in late-eighties Valley-speak. Ronnie and I used to discuss literary theory Romy and Michelle style. “Like, how totally demented is Freud with his clearly misogynist, totally un-self-reflexive hysteria horseshit? Tony Soprano has more self-awareness. And before I go off on his repressed blow-job mania, did you check out those shoes on Zappos?” No, that will no longer fly in my professorial incarnation. Asa has ever so gently, every so placidly, let me know that use of the word
sucks,
on the job, is clearly not cute, not postmodern, and definitely not “academic.”

 

The next two weeks of school are lonely but uneventful. Asa does little more than say “howdy” in the hall, and Toni has twice promised an evening out trolling for single men, but has had deadlines come up each time. Her parrot, though, has branched out in his imitations to add to his repertoire an emphysema-like cough that he evidently picked up “in the crack house.” I have looked longingly at a number of ads for dogs, but haven't been able to commit. Besides, none of the classifieds have yet to seduce me with, “rarely barks, housetrained, has a taste for birds.” And like a total idiot, while I have committed good amounts of my time to watching television, I always have an ear out for the phone, half hoping that Zach will call and tell me that he made a mistake, that he's moving to Atlanta, and that my fears of dying alone have all been as silly as grown women in miniskirts and leggings.

The sad truth: yesterday I saw a thirty-five-year-old in black leggings and a jeans skirt cut just below the ass, and my phone has not been dancing off the hook.

Instead, I have worked on my relationship with Southern food, probably the one thing about the South that couldn't possibly be overrated. On my drive home from the campus, I've taken to detouring from my usual route to make a pit stop at the OK Café, home of the best macaroni and cheese I have yet to find in Atlanta. So far as I can tell, the standout thing about Atlanta is the food. Midwesterners, I have now decided, are fat for no good reason whatsoever. Southerners, however, have a point. Between the ten kinds of greens around town, the fried chicken, the red velvet cake, the banana bread pudding, the shrimp and grits, the turkey meat loaf with mushroom gravy, all washed down with the omnipresent calorie bomb, sweet tea, you could pack on ten pounds without batting an eye. And with no one to witness my demise, I'm on my own mini-mission to reach size twelve by the end of fall term.

At the loft, alone, again, I sit down to watch an exciting evening of reality television, bowl of macaroni in hand,
Us Weekly
in lap, nice glass of chardonnay at my side. If this is how one slides into defeated middle-age, then let the games begin. Here is the problem with my brain: in terms of word association, middle-age begets old, which begets barren and hagged out, which begets why didn't Zach love me, which begets no one will ever love me, which begets time to eat a little crap for the team, which begets me reaching for the telephone, telling myself that I don't
really
care, that I'm just really bored and dialing Zach's number in that half-conscious-but-determined state of I-know-I-shouldn't-do-this crossed with what-the-hell-here-goes-nothing. I've successfully ignored his silence, trying to make him believe that I'm out having a grand old time in Atlanta, rather than Hoovering macaroni and developing a semi-intimate relationship with my television and conversational skills with the ghost-parrot through the wall.

“Doris?” he says, picking up the phone on the seventh ring. Only Zach would resist owning an answering machine well into the twenty-first century. “Lemme turn the music down.” I hear the latest Elvis Costello blaring, then fading, in the background. And then, to my horror, the dull murmur of a woman's voice growing from faint to audible. “Zach, you want to put these away?” Not a voice that I recognize.

“Who's that?” I ask. Drunk and defensive.

“You remember Samantha? I think I told you about her.”

No bells are ringing.

“From my composition class?”

“You mean your
student
Samantha?” I ask, properly disdainful.

“I mean my
ex-
student Samantha. She gave me a lift to the grocery store.”

“And now she's inside helping you unpack your groceries? Cute.” This is definitely the day for hating how I sound, but I can't stop myself. “What is she? Twelve?”

“C'mon Doris, she's only doing me a favor.” Then he remembers something. “It's not like we're still dating. I assume you're not sitting at home pining for me in Atlanta. I took that for granted from the deafening ring of my phone.”

He's got to be kidding. Not calling one's ex is standard operating procedure for those possibly getting back together—dating nymphets barely past Humbert Humbertdom is not.

“So you
are
dating her. Pervert. Remember what we said about students? Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

Zach exhales like he's smoking a cigarette.

Then he inhales like he's smoking a cigarette.

“Are you smoking?”

“Maybe.”

“Zach!” He quit two years ago. Secretly though I'm pleased that he must be depressed, doing the male equivalent of macaroni binges and Lifetime movie marathons. Or, I correct myself, trying to look cool for his no-doubt nicotine-addled waif of an ex-student.

“So is this just some late-night fault-finding mission?”

My phone beeps. I'm putting together a biting rejoinder, but first I click over to hear Ronnie's voice. Ronnie, who, after listening to a call-waiting-shortened summary, tells me, “GET OFF THE PHONE WITH HIM NOW BEFORE YOU MAKE A COMPLETE ASS OF YOURSELF.”

Zach is none too happy to rid himself of my carb-fueled hysteria.

“Ronnie,” I exclaim, “My friend! My real, nonacquaintance, nonacademic friend. Come to save me from myself.”

“Don't drink and dial, Doris. That's the oldest one in the book.”

“You think they can teach that to the parrot? So that I can knock on the wall and he can yell back ‘put it down, beeatch.' You know, train him to fly out of the cage like Batman and knock the phone out of my hand when he catches booze on my breath?”

Ronnie laughs. “You'd have one knocked up telephone.”

“Not funny!” I swing my legs over the arm of my chair. “What's shaking in Hellay? Can I expect to see Earl on the big screen anytime soon?”

“Nooooo. But you can expect to see me in print.”

I almost drop my chardonnay.

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?”

“I hope so,” she says. “I'm still hoping it wasn't a prank call. Not sure I'll even believe it until I have a signed contract in front of me, but it looks like my novel is going to come out sometime next spring from Burning Spear Press. I spoke to the editor yesterday, called me out of the blue, and after a whole stack of rejections, there you have it. Out of nowhere.”

“Next spring! That's like turbo-publishing! Are you going to be rich? Okay, and forgive me my poet's ignorance, but what exactly is Burning Spear Press? One of those lefty presses out of Cambridge or San Fran?”

Ronnie sounds excited, if disbelieving.

“I don't know. I've been meaning to look it up, just haven't had the chance.”

“Don't remind me about your neo-Ludditism. I know from the weekly posts I receive. It's like being friends with a missionary.”

“So I haven't really been able to check them out properly because my laptop is acting up again, I only know that they're a black press.”

Chardonnay glass in one hand, I move to my kitchen counter and sign on to the Internet.

“Luckily, my friend. I now have wireless. I've gone from the Flintstones to the Jetsons in two short months. All the computer techies at Langsdale would be very impressed. And have I said congratulations? CONGRATULATIONS!”

I know how hard Ronnie has worked for this, how we used to sit around at Langsdale and fantasize about how our first books would look. Probably the same way I imagined other women sat around and fantasized about future children or husbands. I wanted something kitschy but literate, appropriate for the title of my collection,
Man Trouble in the Nuclear Age.
The cover I got was close, a woman next to an oven, pulling out a tray of cookies, smiling, but in the window behind her you could see a mushroom cloud bellowing. Very literal, my publishers. And Ronnie had always wanted something closer to the old
Catcher in the Rye
covers, plain with white or black letters, allowing the fiction to speak for itself. And here she was, only months away from seeing that dream come true.