Chapter Six
All in One Place
The coffee kiosk was an aberration, inside the larger cafeteria and student center building but slightly removed from the rest of the food service area, just enough that it almost felt like a coffee shop and not an institutional food provider. The prices were just a little above what you’d pay for coffee from the machine inside the cafeteria proper, and they were definitely higher than the free stuff in the department break room; I didn’t join the line. Sasha wasn’t in sight, so I stood to one side, dripping quietly onto the industrial floor. Ordinarily I would have whipped out my phone, like every other person in line, checked email, twitter, something to use the spare moment in time, but now, though the involuntary impulse to reach for my pocket was still there, my conscious self remembered my decidedly dumb phone before I could follow through. The only way to use it to kill time was to pretend to take a call that didn’t exist, and the thought of doing something so 2005 nearly cringed me to death, to turn a phrase. So I simply stood quietly, vaguely watching the student workers sliding back and forth between the register and the espresso machines, back and forth, the hissing and grinding and cash drawer nearly rhythmic, nearly enough to induce me to doze on my feet.
And then someone tapped my shoulder, and I nearly jumped out of my soggy shoes.
“Katie!” Sasha said, her smoker’s breath faintly lingering in the air after my name. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, and on a day like this. All I did was walk across the quad and I am completely, utterly soaked. But I’m so glad to see you. You look so beautifully normal. It’s been such a bizarre semester already.”
“It has. Nice to see you too.”
“How are you holding up?” She reached over and took tight hold of my left hand. I let her.
She looked so kind. Maggie had loved her, praised her quick mind, and I had always tolerated her, found her one who routinely promised more than she could deliver out of what I assumed was a combination of enthusiasm and time-blindness. But now, for some reason, even with her fuchsia lipstick wandering onto one tooth and her overly-serious hazel-eyed gaze holding my own uncomfortably, a new affection mingled into the sadness that I could feel weighing me down more and more each moment. “I’m okay,” I said. “Been better, been worse. But I don’t have a whole lot of time, unfortunately, or I’d love to stay a little longer,” I added, and found to my slight surprise that I meant it. “So we should probably get down to it.”
“Drinks first,” she said, releasing me finally and walking up to the counter. “My treat. I love this place. One cappuccino, short pull, sir. What’ll you have?”
I scanned the menu, thrilled to order something more than a bag of tea without guilt. “Chai latte, soy milk, please.”
Sasha and the checkout kid finished up while I wandered over to the delivery area. There was a sign, hand written in green marker on computer paper, taped up by the milks and sugars, that read: “PLEASE DO NOT TAKE MORE THAN YOU NEED.”
“I love this place,” Sasha said again, joining me. “They’re the only facility on campus that actually has stevia packets.”
“I tried that once. Had a funny aftertaste.”
“Oh, it’s horrid. Nasty stuff. But light years better for you than the artificial kinds, and I can’t shake the sweet tooth.”
“What about actual sugar?”
“No, no,” she said, and heaved a sigh. “Not for me any longer. That love will have to remain unrequited.”
The girl behind the bar slid our drinks over to us, and as soon as she’d turned back to the espresso machine, Sasha dumped two stevia packets into her drink and then pocketed what looked like five more. “Now,” she said. “Where shall we sit?”
We situated ourselves at the only empty spot, a small round table for two by the exit.
“So Katie,” Sasha began, leaning forward and cupping her drink with both hands. The door opened and closed again as a student went through and a cold, wet snap of air blew past. “Christ, this wind is cold.”
I took a long sip of my chai and let it slightly scald my throat as it went down. There was too much nutmeg, and I had to hold back a sneeze as I looked around. “There’s nowhere else to move. I’m a little further from the door—do you want to switch seats?”
“No, no, I’ll be fine,” she said. “Appreciated, but no. You have time pressure, so let’s get down to it.”
“Sure.” I let my shoulders lower, just a touch. If this was actually going to be a focused work meeting, and not a muddle of feelings and hopes and aspirations, it might actually be a productive use of time.
For what it’s worth, I knew she must be grieving more than I was, and I knew that letting her feel like she was being helpful to me was a kind thing to do. I also knew that if we started getting down into the weeds of feelings and life and recent events, there was a good chance I’d cease to be able to hold it together. Everything was riding on me holding it together.
“What I want to know first is this: are you okay?”
My stomach gave what was quickly becoming a familiar twist. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“I know, I know. You don’t do feelings talk. You’re so much like Maggie that way. She’d always give me such a hard time for wanting to check in on people, especially when it had nothing to do with work, but the way I see it, you don’t teach with just part of yourself. You teach with your whole self, as a whole person, and I know that this must be hard for you. She was such a champion of yours, and such a force on campus.”
“Sasha,” I said, closing my eyes briefly to keep the quick tears that escaped my control from spilling over, “really, I’m fine. Or I need to be fine, so can we talk about something else?”
“Oh yes, of course. I’m never a person who pushes. I just wanted to make sure that you’re doing all right. You know all there is to know about what happened, don’t you? I’d hate for you to find out from other sources, and I’m already starting to notice that people with a bit of an agenda are stretching the truth here and there.”
Against my better judgment, I bit. “What do you mean by ‘all there is to know’? I know she slipped and fell and hit her head in the parking garage at night.”
“Just how it all took place. It hasn’t been discussed or released officially, and nor should it, but you have a right to know if anyone here does. And of course, people will talk. You are correct, according to the official story—it was an accident, she was alone, she fell, and she might have been there for some time before anything happened, because it was so late at night.” She paused to pull a battered tissue out of her sleeve. “I’m sorry. I get teary whenever I talk about it. The one thing that gives me comfort is that Maggie was such a person for memorizing. Poetry and Shakespearean scenes and all sorts of things like that. Because then we know that at least she wasn’t alone as she lay there, waiting, if she did lay there waiting. She had an entire library,” she tapped her left temple, “in her mind.”
I managed to bite my lip, focus on a small point of ink on the beaten round table, and nod. And then, though I knew I probably shouldn’t—I can smell a conspiracy theory coming from a mile away—I asked the question that she clearly hoped I would ask. “But what do you mean then, about stretching the truth? This seems pretty straightforward. Terrible,” and here I swallowed hard before I could continue, “but straightforward.” I didn’t know how it could be any more so, really. You slip, you fall, you smack your head on the concrete, and nobody comes to help you up. Boom. Dead.
Sasha shook her head and sipped her coffee, but she gave me a sidelong glance and half smile. “You know, I do try to be extra careful myself now. I’m not getting any younger, and they say that at least a third of us over sixty-five will have a serious fall during any given year. So it makes sense, and it’s a very real and present danger. But I can’t help but think.”
She stopped there, and we sat in silence for a moment.
“Can’t help but think what, exactly?” I finally said, taking my cue.
“It’s just a little too simple. They have cameras. She always wore the most sturdy, supportive walking shoes. It wasn’t that late, and she had her phone. And,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning in a little closer to me across the table, and here it was, I could see, this is what she’d been wanting me to pull out of her, “someone called campus police. Emergency service. Told them that they’d found someone who had had an accident. But from a payphone.”
“Okay?” I said. “Do we still have working payphones?” The answer to that question crystalized in my mind as I asked it and remembered two, no three, that still had dial tones the last time I’d picked them up to check, out of idle curiosity. One by the theater. One by the gym. One—and this must have been the one that whoever it was would have used, simply because none of the others was very close to the parking garage—by the science quad.
“They didn’t say which phone it was, but I believe there are several. They did say that it was a payphone, because they couldn’t call the person back, and by the time they’d scrambled to get the EMTs out there, she was gone.” Sasha closed her eyes, briefly.
I still wasn’t following completely. Or, rather, I suspected I was following, but it was so outlandish that I wanted Sasha to spell it out for me. “It’s a little strange that someone would use a payphone, but maybe their phone battery died. Maybe they forgot it at home?”
“Oh, that’s all completely possible, though you know how the students these days can be. Phones like an extra limb, more likely to forget their shoes, even in the rain.” She shuddered.
“But does this mean you think it was something other than an accident?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. But what I do think is that someone else was around, and who knows what happened? The very fact that they called points to either an accident or immediate regret, but since whoever it was used a payphone, there’s no way to find out.”
“Don’t we have cameras? Like, surveillance?”
She shrugged. “I gather they do have them, but only in certain locations, and they aren’t at all reliable. More a deterrent for those who know to look than anything else.”
I wanted to reach across the table and shake her, but instead I said, in my calmest voice, “I’m not sure what difference any of this makes, especially if there’s no way to know.”
“Oh, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I just find it so hard to not know, and it bothers me that there are pieces that don’t fit. Maybe it’s the curse of being an English teacher—we want the narrative neat and wrapped and delivered in a tidy package, and real life just doesn’t behave like that, no matter how much we’d like. But I would like to know what happened. If you hear anyone talking about it, please let me know. I’m not yet to the point of listening in at doors, but I’m not sure I won’t get there.
“But. You need space and time and all that. I understand. You’re so much like Magdalena in that way. I’ll stop.” She shook her head just a bit, tucked a flyaway piece of hair behind her ear, and sat up straighter. “Let’s get down to business. You got your application submitted on time, I’ll assume.”
I nodded. “Of course. But are things going to proceed on time, given what’s happened this week? I haven’t heard any update on her condition.”
“Oh, that!” Sasha brushed my concern away with a flick of the wrist. “You know how this department likes to exaggerate. I’m sure she’s fine, or if she isn’t yet, she will be soon, and it will turn out to have been nothing more than dehydration.”
“In this weather?”
“It doesn’t matter. Either she’ll return and rejoin the committee, or she won’t, and if she doesn’t, they’ll find somebody else. She was the outside diversity rep, not a member of the department with years’ worth of opinions. It’s the easiest position to replace.”
My eyebrows raised, involuntarily, just a hair. But she was right. And I didn’t want to admit it, or even appear to think it, but it was better for me that Aurelia was replaced. Aurelia was a lovely person, I had no reason to doubt. When it came to her students and her colleagues over in Sociology, her reputation was stellar. But her interactions with me had to date been completely centered on the lab situation.
What I hadn’t known, or hadn’t realized (or hadn’t been told, whether out of naiveté or by design) back when I’d agreed to take over the final push for the establishment of the writing lab was that the Latino/a Student Association had been fixated on that same space, for likely a similar amount of time, to be their student center. Aurelia was their faculty advisor, and she’d been ferocious in making their case to the administration, marching into each meeting with an prominent piece of Latina flair, usually a gorgeous, intricately woven shawl in reds and oranges, that I rarely saw her wear at any other time around campus. Essentially, she was making a statement, and she was making a statement about just whom the administration and student board would be denying should they choose to give the space to the writing lab.
They ultimately chose to give the space to the writing lab. It was a painful decision making process that was meeting-ed and minuted to death, and therefore made about a third longer than it needed to be. And we celebrated when it went our way, had a grand gala opening, plastered the campus with fliers, but we never ever mentioned who our competition had been. It wouldn’t have played well, we all knew, even though the lab was a sorely needed general ed resource that just about everyone on campus would eventually utilize on their path to a degree, a transfer, a job, a career—even those students whom Aurelia argued needed the space as fortification more than they needed the writing assistance. She may well have been right. But she wasn’t a writing teacher, and I was, and though it wasn’t my fight to start—wasn’t even a fight that I think I would have started on my own, I would have gone looking for dual-use space somewhere else on campus and sidestepped the competition completely, but the whole mess was already well underway by the time I showed up—it was mine to end. And given my position, even if someone had decided to make me the person who was ultimately responsible for shouldering out a crucial student group, I couldn’t afford to lose. Sometimes I wondered whether Maggie pulled the strings to get me that position. She was calculating like that, and while she could handle herself in a dispute, she avoided unnecessary conflict.
So. Aurelia may ultimately have respected me professionally. I don’t know. Part of our final agreement was that the space would be made available, given enough notice, to serve as an event room, whether for meetings or celebrations, and that the Latino/a Student Association would have first claim for five years, during which time we could hopefully all find another available space if there was any conflict. Professionally, I believed that we were fine. Personally, I hadn’t spoken to her since the final meeting, and I was not sorry to hear that I may well be able to continue that streak and still score a committee interview. Another thing to add to the list of my sins.
“So then the new person could be anyone,” I said to Sasha.
“Certainly. He or she cannot be from our department, however, so we can’t spend any time worrying about it. There are funding issues at stake with this position, so nobody who knows anything will slow things down, and our dean is not an idiot.”
“And you think I still have a reasonable chance at being considered.”
“Being considered! Katie, I wouldn’t be talking to you like this if I didn’t think you had a reasonable chance, whatever passes for one these days, of being my colleague in a year’s time.”
Hope surfaced. I pushed it back down and weighted it down with pragmatism. “There are at least three other people here, on this campus, with resumes like mine.”
“Look, I won’t talk you into it if you don’t want to do it, but reputation is at least as important as your resume, and you haven’t ruined yours.”
“Yet,” I said. “There’s a little time left. Don’t underestimate me.”
She smiled at that. “Yes, I know, you’re a very talented young lady and I’m sure you could work up a scandal or get the wrong person upset. But you haven’t done that up till now, and that’s valuable. But if you aren’t up for it, you aren’t up for it. And if that’s the case, I’m not going to tell you to do it for Maggie or anything like that. There’s an entire world out there,” she finished, waving a hand over a shoulder vaguely. “There’s plenty you could do, even if no one here believes that in his heart of hearts.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. “Because plenty of other people are happy to tell me to do it for Maggie.”
“Who everyone else? Be specific. Give me names. Who’s talking?” She pulled out a pad of paper and a pen.
“Names.”
“Please. I want to know what we’re dealing with.” She tapped the end of the pen on the table.
I hadn’t seen this savvy side of Sasha before, and it was a little unnerving. Usually, at least in my experience, she’d still be looking for a writing implement at this point. “Lucy Alvarez, for starters, and—“
“Lucy. Ah.” She nodded. “No, you don’t have to worry about Lucy. That’s probably why she’s being so encouraging.”
“Really?” I asked. “That, I mean—really? She has to be competition. She’s done everything right.”
Sasha shrugged. “You’re operating as though this is a fair process. It’s the exact opposite of fair.”
“This is very political of you.”
“And that doesn’t seem like me?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s not, usually. But very few people get here through dumb luck. Maggie must have told you that. If she didn’t think you understood this basic premise of academia, even being what it is at our level, there would have been no way she’d have liked you as much as she did.”
“Liking me doesn’t necessarily equate to thinking that I’d be a good candidate for tenure track.”
“Maybe not for some people. But for Maggie, yes. And the one thing I’ll tell you that I know is that she would want me to help you. So I’m going to do it. That is, if you’re still going to do it. You are, correct?” Her voice pitched up, just a touch.
I held her gaze for a moment, and then I nodded. “Of course I am.”
“There it is! That’s the attitude I want to see. You’ve got to go into this like you own it. You have a shot.”
“Even without Maggie here?”
“Even without Maggie here.”
“I need you to be honest with me. I’ve already been through a round of being the designated second choice, and I literally do not have the time or money to do that again.” Or the soul. I think another round like the one I went through when we were together might actually push what remained of my soul completely through the cheese-grater that is the academic hiring process. On the plus side, there wasn’t a whole lot left.
“I’m absolutely certain. I can’t promise you anything—I’m not on the committee, for starters, and if I were I most definitely would not be sitting here talking to you like this—but I can do everything else in my power to help. You just have to—”
Her watched beeped. She paused to look down. “Oh, Katie, I’m sorry. I have to be somewhere else, and I almost completely forgot. At least, I think I have to be somewhere else.” She pulled out a day planner and began to flip through it quickly. “I know I would have made a note in here if I set an alarm…”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry. I have to run to lab myself. But we’ll be in touch?” I asked, a bit more tentatively than I’d ever asked her anything before.
“Yes, we’ll be in touch. Send me your materials, your application and whatever you propose to use as a teaching demo. We’ll start there.”
“I will,” I said, standing and slinging my bag back over my shoulder. “I’ll send them over tonight.”
*
By the time I was done with my afternoon class, my lab shift, and my administrative tasks (and I did, in the end, complete a full forty-five minutes of the thankless task out of guilt), it was already a little after five o’clock. The rain had passed, and dusk enveloped the quad, the outdoor lights were beginning to reluctantly flicker into life, and I heard a forlorn quack or two from the direction of the fountain as the ducks called it a night. There were still students here and there, but they walked through quickly, most likely in search of dinner off campus, chatting quietly in groups of two or three, or solo with headphones in.
I didn’t have any easy way to get dinner while remaining on campus; that was going to have to be okay, because Harvey had put Maggie’s course materials in my mailbox, and I needed to go grab them to review before the class itself started, at seven. For me, with all the campus kiosks closed, it was going to have to be the best that vending machines had to offer. I pondered the relative nutritional value of a Snickers vs. a Clif Bar as I opened the mailroom door. Sam had always insisted on the latter, but I’d once checked the sugar count, and whew. Maybe it was fine to just own the caramel that came with the peanuts.
The mailroom was empty save for one middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed red beard whom I’d never seen before, making copies and tapping a pen on the edge of the machine, over and over, just slightly faster than the clock’s second hand. He didn’t look up when I walked in.
This time, my mailbox was not empty. I was more relieved than I expected to find the usual start-of-the-semester detritus, the half sheets on neon pink paper advertising financial aid workshops, the theater’s tri-fold of semester offerings, a letter from the division chair encouraging us all to keep our printing output to a minimum, given funding issues. My eyes rolled involuntarily at that one. And there was a thick, battered, hatch-marked manila envelope, the kind that was theoretically used again and again for interdepartmental mail, with a line of recipients and senders written almost to the bottom. The final entry, at least at that point, noted that the sender was one H. Zeilig and the recipient, me.
I scooped it up and added it to my pile, then took a quick peek around the corner at Jess’s desk, though since the red-bearded man had left, there had been no sound I hadn’t made myself. Her desk was clear, her monitor off, her chair pushed in.
I missed Sam in that moment. It was one of those weird chunks of time when I’d call him, just to chat about the day, just to see what he was doing for dinner without me. He used to answer on the first or second ring, like he’d been waiting for me, and I could picture where he’d be—on the couch, watching some random game, with Kierkegaard kneading at his sweatshirt arm. Sometimes he’d crack open a beer when I called, and I could hear the release of the carbonation and the clink of the bottle cap when he dropped it onto our glass coffee table.
But the last half year we’d been together, I reminded myself, he often hadn’t answered at all, texting me instead that he was out for a ride, or with friends, or to see a movie. When I finally made it home, K would be loud and annoyed and hungry, well past the kneading-with-a-human-on-the-couch phase, since no one had yet come home to feed him. So who you really miss, I told myself, just under my breath, is Sam-of-the-past. And he’s not taking phone calls.
It helped to know that, a little bit. Still didn’t make it stop hurting.
If I did try to call him now, I found myself wondering, would he pick up? It’d be an unknown number, and I was sure he’d be answering those these days, just in case. I knew he must have called my old number hundreds of times by now; Sam was not one to take kindly to unfinished business. I knew that eventually, I’d have to reach out, if only to make sure my name wasn’t on any bills. (It wasn’t, but asking would be the adult thing to do.) It just couldn’t be until the interviews were over.
It couldn’t be until I had a victory in hand.
Which is why it was so important that I made it as close to impossible as I could for him to find me on his own terms. Once he did, once we talked, no matter how he felt or what he said, or how I felt or what I said, I would be out of commission for at least a week. I couldn’t afford that. If I were to ask for a cooling-off period, a couple weeks or so of solitude, he’d never be able to understand why I needed it, much less refrain from arguing with me about it, which would kill the entire point, and I’d still be out of commission right when I most needed to be on my game.
Sam was, in some ways, a creature of habit, and I was counting on that not having changed, even though so much (including things he hadn’t shared) apparently had. He went to work at the same time every morning, usually to the office in the city and not down here in Silicon Valley; he came home at the same time, when it wasn’t crunch time, every night. Or left the office, even if he didn’t come home. Some men, I’d be worried about them tracking me down, hanging out on campus in the middle of the day until I walked by. Sam, I couldn’t picture him both upending his own day, nor compromising his own pride, especially when I was the one who had upped and left without any explanation. This was the only reason I wasn’t walking around in a disguise all day, hood up, sunglasses on, umbrella held as low as possible.
That said, a part of me did worry that he would try to find me if it occurred to him that I might be teaching at night.
And so while I missed past-Sam, I also had no desire to put myself in any sort of public campus place where present-Sam might be able to find me. Just in case. I stood in the middle of the mailroom, the fluorescent lights lightly flickering, until it occurred to me; I did have a private place to go. Charles had offered use of his office, had told me where to find the key. There was no way that he’d be working there at this time of night, and I could put my things down and just breathe. I shrugged my bag a little higher up on my shoulder and walked the walk of righteous people who have a destination.
The faculty offices where Charles had been assigned space were in a non-descript building within the general English quad, one long hallway down the middle and two rows of offices, one to either side. That night, as I opened the door, the smell of must slipped in under my nose and made it itch. I stopped at the entrance and banged my feet off, as though that would help the moisture problem that wouldn’t completely dissipate until the hundred-degree-plus days of deep, dry summer.
The hallway was dim, lit only by the emergency bulb in the corner that never went out. The entire building was silent, all tenured and tenure-track faculty long gone home. That was good, I realized as I scanned the doors until I found Charles’ name, for more than one reason. I didn’t have to talk to anyone, first off, and second off, no one saw me balancing on the sole wooden chair, a rickety creation that was likely older than me, running my hand along the dusty doorframe, trying to keep my balance, as my fingers sought the jagged metal edge of a key. I nearly fell just before I found it, the seat of the chair wobbling underneath my boots, forcing me into a maneuver that felt vaguely reminiscent of being six and learning to hula hoop. But I finally reached it. It was nearly in the center of the door, and I took advantage of the empty hallway to swear at Charles for forgetting that not everyone is six feet tall.
Once I’d made it back to the ground, regained my sliver of dignity, and brushed my hands off on my skirt, I picked my bag back up, did a quick check to make sure I was still alone, and slid the key into the lock.
Charles’s office smelled like coffee and photocopy machine, the sources of which were both evident as soon as I switched on the light. There was a prohibitively-complicated looking coffee device, all glass and chrome, set up on a tray in the corner of the room, on top of a filing cabinet. Copy paper box lids of freshly printed syllabi and other random documents took up most of the real estate on the desk. Every other available surface was covered with books, course readers, or other random stacks of paper, despite the fact that Charles taught perhaps more online courses than any other tenured or tenure-track faculty member that I knew of. Not for the first time, it struck me that while the Actual Professors, the ones who rated offices, never seemed to have enough room to contain their teaching detritus, we adjuncts somehow managed to fit every last bit of our required materials into the trunks of our cars. “We should hold workshops,” I muttered to myself as I sat down on the surprisingly empty desk chair and slid my bag onto the floor.
For about five minutes, I just sat there. I just sat there and breathed in and out, listened to the ticking of a clock from the hallway, and thought about how once, faced with this brief moment of free time, I would have taken out my phone and scrolled twitter or something like that. Instead, I sat there and let my eyes run along the shelves and stacks.
Letting someone else into an office is an intensely personal thing. I knew Charles as well as I knew most any of my colleagues, which is to say I knew how he presented himself in meetings and on email chains, I knew about some of the organizations that he was involved with, I knew what several other people thought of him, for better and worse, and I had the general idea that his students liked him well enough. A lot of what I saw simply confirmed these bits of knowledge—stacks of books for what I assumed was his Post-Colonial Literature course, an email sign up list from a recent Black Student Union event, fliers for a visiting poet’s reading put on by our tiny, interdisciplinary, Asian-American studies program. He’d left a gym bag in the back corner, basketball shoes and workout clothes half spilling out.
Some of what I could make out from where I sat, however, was a little more revelatory. I wasn’t actually planning to snoop beyond what I could see out on the surfaces of his space. But when I saw Maggie’s handwriting on a piece of paper at the corner of his desk, I didn’t think. I just snatched it up and began to drink in her words.
Charles,
Unfortunately, this is now at a point where the official version of the grievance needs to be filed with your tenure committee. I am disinclined to think that it will ultimately impact the results one way or the other, but if a lawyer, god forbid, does get involved, we need to have a pristine paper trail. The most recent paperwork is below; please sign to indicate receipt and get this back to me, ideally before the end of the semester. Once I have that, I can file with the rest of the committee.
Best,
Magdalena
I raised my eyebrows. Students filed complaints all the time; it was part and parcel of being a teacher. But very, very few ended up in a formal review process, like this one apparently had. Her note had been sitting on top of several other sheets of paper, stapled together. I rolled the chair closer, not actually touching anything else but reading as much as I could.
It was a receipt-of-grievance form, a student grievance, the kind that I had never actually received but knew in theory that I could—that I would, if I taught long enough. A lot of them were bullshit to hear the department talk, pissed off students who hadn’t gotten the grade that they’d wanted and had no experience accepting a no. This one, though…I scanned what was visible from where I sat. “Student indicates an ongoing pattern of discrimination over the course of a semester…student reports feeling singled out due to his race and gender…requests formal review procedure.”
I knew that it was probably nothing. Charles was a solid instructor. He pushed some buttons, especially with some of the old guard, in our department, but I’d never seen him be discriminatory. We’d all had those students, anyway, boys (who were almost always white) who thought they were already men, already expecting their place in the world to open up and be laid out before them. They were the quickest to anger, and the more frightening when they did. There was just too much of a chance that the powers that be would listen just a bit more closely. And if Maggie wasn’t just mentioning a lawyer as a one-off…
There was no way that allowing that report to proceed to his tenure committee, of which I knew Maggie had been chair, would be a good thing. There was also no reason, given the bureaucracy of the department and college at large, to think that the complaint would make its way to the appropriate people now, now that Maggie was gone, if Charles just…didn’t sign it.