“Oh, Provost Johnson!” Professor Hernandez had spotted him and came fluttering over in her flamenco gear. “Here to support the troops? How school-spirited of you! We’ve had so much interest in the Spanish booth! And Rowena was so enterprising to get that candy, don’t you think? I hope some students come to her booth and try it.”

  “Yes,” said Provost Johnson, giving her a similar look of masked impatience to the one he’d given John Greene.

  “I—all of us in the department—wanted to thank you, Provost, for your initiative to increase the number of classes available for language instructions. Three more classrooms in Angelo! Did you hear, Rowena? Well, how could you have: it was at a meeting just for permanent faculty. But we’re hoping to increase our language offerings by twenty-five, maybe fifty percent over the next couple of years, and hire some new people as well. Who knows: maybe we can create another Russian position! Maybe even a renewable lectureship!”

  “We’re certainly considering it very seriously,” said Provost Johnson. He gave me another intense look. “If we do, I sincerely hope that Rowena can apply.”

  “Um, thanks,” I said.

  “And we might be able to open up two—wasn’t it?—tenure-line appointments for Spanish! There’s so much interest in Spanish, you know! Oh, speaking of which, those students look like they’re heading my way.” Professor Hernandez rustled off in her flamenco dress.

  Provost Johnson permitted himself a tiny smile at her departing back. It wasn’t a very benevolent smile. “Thanks for the candy, Rowena,” he said. “And for whatever you’re doing for Madison, too. Whatever it is, keep up the good work. I look forward to our meeting in December.” He took another piece of candy, and, slipping it into his pocket, left.

  22

  Other than Provost Johnson, the only people to come to my booth during International Education Night, which was lightly attended all around, were a couple whom I strongly suspected of being stoned, who took handfuls of the candy and stumbled off, giggling madly when I tried to get them to take some brochures. Well, more candy for me. After buying it my total available funds had shrunk to $413, with almost a month until my next tiny paycheck, and the problem of buying my ticket to San Antonio growing ever more pressing, so I was seriously considering eating the candy as my main food source that weekend.

  Sober reflection the next day warned me what a diet consisting entirely of chocolate, even not very sweet Russian chocolate, would do to my blood sugar, so I took myself off to the dollar store down the street and tried to guess which of the items for sale there were actually edible, and which would have to be thrown out uneaten. Shopping at the dollar store was about all I could afford, but as with most experiences relating to poverty, it was more expensive than one might expect, as a lot of the food available at prices I could afford was already spoiled by the time I bought it.

  While there I ran into Darla, who was on the hunt for similarly low-priced edibles. At first she didn’t recognize me, and when she did, she couldn’t understand why I was there.

  “This is what I can afford,” I told her.

  “But you’re a professor!” she protested.

  “A lot of us make about the same as people on minimum wage,” I told her. “A lot of professors are on food stamps, or have to turn to other work like bagging groceries or becoming an escort to make ends meet.”

  “But you got them fancy degrees!”

  “I know,” I said. “But a lot of fancy degrees mainly cost money, not make money. My brother has a bachelor’s, my father has a master’s, my mother has an MD, and I have a PhD, and none of us make much money. My brother makes the most money, as an officer, but even officers don’t make a ton of money. My parents work in an addiction clinic in Atlanta, but even for doctors, treating homeless drug addicts doesn’t pay well at all.”

  “They should work at one o’ them places for rich people,” said Darla.

  “Maybe. But it’s not rich people who need them.” I thought of Madison, who could easily end up dead despite having a father who spent more on suits than I spent on food. “Well, rich people still need help. But poor people need it more.”

  “They’re doin’ the Lord’s work, child.” Darla patted my arm. From her it seemed just friendly, not creepy the way it would have from most of my colleagues. “And I’ll be prayin’ for you.”

  “Um, thanks.”

  “But not for that John Greene fellow. Is he poor?” She looked around theatrically. “I don’t see him here.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think he’s particularly poor.”

  “I didn’t think so.” She looked around again, this time to see if anyone was listening to us, and then said, lowering her voice, “I knew he had to be rich, the way he was goin’ on like that! Well, you heard him! Sayin’ I’d gotten into his computer! I told him, I told him, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout computers! And it’s true! My niece, the one who lives in Atlanta, now she’s real smart with computers, and my grandbaby—I shown you pictures o’ my grandbaby yet?”

  I shook my head. Darla whipped out a battered and elderly but still serviceable smartphone, and showed me a picture of a smiling girl of about ten, posing for a professional picture in a lacy white dress.

  “She’s very pretty,” I said.

  “She sure is, ain’t she? And smart! Lord! That girl is so smart! The things she knows how to do with computers! We’re tryin’ to get together some money to get her one of her own, that’s why I’m shoppin’ here, you know; we’ve opened an account special for her and everythin’, but anyway, if anyone was to get into someone else’s computer it’d be her, but she knows better than that, she sure does! Ain’t no one in my family who’d go snoopin’ through someone else’s computer without permission, you better believe it!”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “‘Cause I’d smack the daylights out of ‘em just as soon as I found out, and as for what my mother’d do to ‘em...So when that John Greene came at me with his accusations, at first I didn’t know what to say, and then I was so mad, you know what I mean, I couldn’t say nothin’ at all, ‘cause I was afraid if I opened my mouth somethin’ downright unchristian would come out, and, well, he may not be a Christian, but I am!”

  “Sometimes that’s all you can do,” I said. “Hold onto your own principles, and not worry about how other people are breaking them.”

  “You said it, girl! Anyway, he kept goin’ on and on about how someone’d been breakin’ into his computer, he said he had proof, and he kept goin’ on about how he knew it was me makin’ those demands on him and how dare I, and he was goin’ to have me fired, but nothin’s come of it.” She snorted, but it was a snort that had a tinge of fear in it. “They just transferred me out o’ Dreme Hall to Angelo and that side o’ campus, and good riddance, I say. You and Kate and a few o’ the others over there was always nice to me, but some of those professors...”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Some of them aren’t very nice to anyone. I don’t think they know how to be. Um...do you know what kind of demands John Greene was talking about? Was someone trying to blackmail him?”

  She shrugged. “Sounds like it, don’t it? Makes you wonder what kind o’ nasty little secrets a man like that’d have, don’t it? Lord! I wouldn’t read his emails for nothing!” She shuddered at the thought of finding out John Greene’s intimate secrets, a distaste I shared.

  “Anyway, I’ll be prayin’ for you, baby girl,” she said, with another pat on my arm. “Prayin’ you get a job where you’ll be the rich one, and folks like him will be having to do what you say.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And, um, same here. Maybe if you were running things, there wouldn’t be so many problems.”

  She grinned. “You and me, baby girl, we’d sure set those folks to rights, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yeah, absolutely.”

  “You and me, baby girl...Jimmy!”

  I turned around. Mike and Jimmy were coming over, each pushing a shopping cart full of TV dinners.

  “Darla! And if it ain’t our favorite professor! What you doin’ here, baby girl? Why ain’t you in the nice stores ‘stead o’ hangin’ out with us garbage men?”

  “She shops here, same as us,” Darla informed them. “‘Cause they don’t pay her nothin’, do they, honey?”

  “Pretty much,” I agreed.

  There was a lengthy discussion of what the point was of getting a doctoral degree if you were still going to have to shop at the dollar store, I question I couldn’t really answer to either their or my satisfaction, and some talk of the annoying behavior of some of the other professors, and some gossip about the reason behind Darla’s transfer from cleaning Dreme Hall to cleaning Angelo Hall, and what those secrets could possibly be that someone had apparently extracted from John Greene’s computer—the speculation ranged from international spying to child porn—and the general agreement that education was overrated and it was the school of life that really taught you all you needed to know, and then Mike said his TV dinners were melting and he had to get out of there, so we all left.

  23

  The rest of the weekend was spent trying to figure out fresh ways to say “I would be delighted,” so that my cover letters wouldn’t sound quite so annoyingly repetitive to my own ears. I knew that most of the time no one would be reading my cover letters but me, which was sort of depressing, since I had put so much work into them, and sort of reassuring, since looking at them made me slightly queasy, like the way I imagined watching an unauthorized sex tape of myself would make me feel.

  After two hours of that fun, I ended up with an “I would welcome the opportunity” in the fourth paragraph in place of a second “I would be delighted,” which I decided was good enough, and I sent out the applications I should have sent out the previous week but that had gotten pushed aside in the press to get everything ready for International Education Night.

  After the September 30/October 1 deadline for some of the most competitive postdocs, October 15, which was now less than a week away, was the deadline for several of the first, biggest, tenure-track jobs, the jobs I certainly wasn’t going to get but that I might get an interview for, now that I had successfully defended and even had a visiting position in a school in the Mid-Atlantic, and an interview was an opportunity to network and make connections, in case they had, say, a two-year renewable position open up in the spring, and who knows, sometimes miracles did happen, so I had to submit these applications or I would feel like a failure who was letting myself and my PhD program down, just like I had to go to San Antonio on my own dime and give a talk to an empty room, because if I didn’t, I would be letting down the other people on my panel, and who knows, I might get one of these highly coveted November first-round interviews, and so this trip could change my life in some major, fundamental way for the better, if only I could scrape together the cash for it, and anyway, sitting at home was the kind of thing that losers did, those losers who wanted to find a job in a place where they could tolerate living and create something called “work-life balance” and maybe do something like have a family or at least the opportunity to go out on dates or just out to the movies from time to time.

  Thinking all that made me so mad I spent Sunday night tweaking my non-academic resume and then applying for a job as an editor at an academic press, which I was in no way qualified for and even if I were, I wouldn’t get, but at least it made me feel as if I were trying to find a job outside of academia, which I was, I just didn’t know what that job might be or how to convince people that I should be allowed to do it, let alone be paid money for it. People tended to hear things like “Russian” and “PhD” and shut down in shock before you could even get the rest out, but “NGO” and “Human Rights” didn’t go over much better.

  I even finished off my evening by doing a search for “Open Source Officer” and sifting through the results until I found the one I was looking for on the fourth page (they deliberately make it hard to find) and looking into the application procedure. But it was so time-consuming that even if I started it now, and even if I passed all the steps successfully, I wouldn’t start working for another year at least, so I tabled it for the moment and went back to hunting around on HERC and the JIL in case some miracle job for the spring had magically popped up. It hadn’t.

  24

  Monday morning I ran into a new cleaner in the women’s restroom in Dreme Hall. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her until she grabbed me by the sleeve and said in a heavy Russian accent, “You—Professor Khalli, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Shall we speak Russian?”

  Her previously dour face lit up, and she poured out a flood of enthusiastic and educated Russian, from which I gathered that she thought she knew me, or at least knew about me, and eventually realized that she was Ira’s mother.

  “Ira is a very good student,” I said, only somewhat mendaciously. “She speaks Russian very well.”

  “Yes, but her writing—so bad! She refused to learn when she was a little girl, and now she can’t write her own name! Well, now she can. Because you taught her. Why she had to learn from a professor and a foreigner and not from her own mother or grandmother, I don’t understand, but that’s young people for you. She wanted to learn from ‘a real professor,’ even though both I and my mother are doctors—medical doctors, you know, but still educated members of the intelligentsia, so she had to go to university and study with foreigners—you’re a foreigner, aren’t you? Your Russian is so good! Where did you learn?”

  “Russia, mainly.”

  “Oh, you lived there, did you? Where?”

  “Mostly in Moscow.”

  Ira’s mother sighed. “Moscow! I miss Moscow so much!”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “My family are real Muscovites, you know, from even before the Revolution, an intellectual family from the intelligentsia, but we thought we could do better in America after the fall of the Soviet Union, so...and it’s true, you can do well for yourself here, but you have to have connections, money, things we didn’t have. I used to be a doctor, work in a polyclinic, and now I clean toilets. Of course, doctors in Russia don’t make a lot of money, not like your doctors here. But I have to get my certificate to practice medicine here, and that costs money, money we don’t have because it’s all going to Ira’s education. You know who’s done well for themselves?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “That Danila’s family. You know? He’s in your class with my Ira. From”—her nose wrinkled—“Odessa. Well, what do you expect? We all know what kind of people come from Odessa, don’t we? Criminals. Even their Jews are criminals, not doctors like they are in Moscow. Anyway, that Danila—you know what his father does?” She folded her arms over her impressive bosom. “Mafia, that’s what. Of course, I shouldn’t complain. He got me the job here. And he helped Ira get in, and helped her get a scholarship because I work here. He’s a clever one, that Vova. He got in with the Italians as soon as he arrived here—you’re not Italian, are you, sweetheart?”

  “No. Not Italian at all.”

  “What kind of a name is Khalli anyway? Is it Central Asian? Middle Eastern?” She squinted at me. “You don’t look like an Arab or a Tatar, although you do have lovely dark hair.”

  “It’s British,” I told her. “My family is from the British Isles. I look Celtic. Kind of ‘Black Irish.’”

  “The Irish aren’t black. Although they sort of are, aren’t they?”

  “That’s a complicated question,” I said, in my best academic-evading-a-complicated-question voice. “But a lot of people from there have dark hair and pale skin, like me.”

  “So not Russian at all?”

  “No, unfortunately not. But I did live there for a while.”

  “Of course you did, darling. You’re practically one of us, now, aren’t you?” She squinted at me again. “You don’t have any Italian heritage, do you?”

  “None at all.”

  “Good! Those Italians, they’re all mafiosi, worse than Odessans...you know who is Italian?”

  “Who?”

  “That student of yours! Mak-ken-zi.” She sounded out the name carefully.

  “Mackenzie? Well, yes, I suppose she is of Italian heritage.”

  “No, not just of Italian heritage! Her father is mafioso!”

  “Um,” I said, trying to imagine Mackenzie as the daughter of a don or a godfather.

  “He is!” Ira’s mother insisted. “He’s in business with Danila’s father!”

  “Um...what kind of business?”

  “Construction. And you know what that means!”

  “Not everyone who does construction is a criminal,” I said.

  Ira’s mother gave me a look as if I were too stupid to be allowed outside unsupervised. “They are in New Jersey!”

  “Well...maybe you’re right. There certainly is a lot of crime and corruption here.”

  “I know! We came to America to get away from corruption, and what did we find here? More corruption! Of course,” she said reflectively, “maybe it’s from all the immigrants.”

  My tongue struggled between the instinct, drilled into it by years amongst liberal intellectuals, to insist that immigrants weren’t criminals, and the knowledge, drilled into it by years of personal observation, that in fact many immigrants were criminals, in part because it was impossible to survive as an immigrant without breaking some law or other, often accidentally. I’d certainly broken plenty of my own when I’d been living abroad.

  “It can be hard to be an immigrant,” I said as a compromise.

  “Especially when the natives are so corrupt themselves!” said Ira’s mother. “Did you know that that Mak-ken-zi’s father—”

  Hay-hair woman, whose name I could never remember, came into the bathroom.

  “Excuse me,” said Ira’s mother to me in Russian, and “Sorri,” to hay-hair in English, before pushing her cart out of the restroom, giving me a significant wink and not looking hay-hair professor in the eye as she did so.

 

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