Campus confidential, p.14
Campus Confidential, page 14
“Women,” I said.
“Didn’t Kate say something about how you were a feminist scholar?” Alex lifted his head up from where it was propped on his arms folded behind his head, and looked at me intently. “Maybe you should be leading our revolution. You look like a revolutionary to me.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “And you can’t really be a feminist scholar in Slavic studies. It just isn’t done. God forbid that you might say something that suggests that Gogol or someone was sexist. Plus, everyone has to be a generalist, anyway. You have to be ready to teach all levels of the language, plus survey literature and culture courses, plus individual author courses, plus First Year Seminars, plus specialized courses for grad students.”
“Yeah.” Alex flung his head back down onto his folded arms and stared up at the ceiling. “Same in all the LCTLs, I think. You got any good prospects for next semester?”
“Not yet.” I was trying not to panic about it. This semester was already half over and I didn’t have anything lined up yet for next semester. I hadn’t even seen any jobs advertised for next semester. I tried to tell myself I would be okay with taking John up on his offer and spending the next semester hanging out rent-free and unemployed in his apartment at Camp Lejeune. That would totally not be a humiliating and boring experience. Maybe it would be a great opportunity for me and Masha to try out our backup plan of becoming strippers. Would anyone, even drunk Marines, pay money to watch 35-year-olds with permanent eye strain from poring over pre-Revolutionary texts shimmy off their clothes? And could I even shimmy?
“What do you think?” I asked Alex. “Could I make it as a stripper in a military town? My friend Masha and I keep talking about it. It started out as a joke, but it’s rapidly becoming a lot less funny.”
He lifted his head up to give me a brief piercing look, as his mind temporarily returned to where his body was. “Fuck yeah,” he said when he was done. “You’re way hotter than most of the strippers I’ve seen.” He paused for a moment, possibly from embarrassment, before asking, “Do you have a specific town in mind?”
“Jacksonville?”
“Like, Florida? Like, undergrads?” He looked aghast.
“No, Jacksonville, North Carolina.”
“Oh God! Not Marines! Have some self-respect, Rowena! At least hold out for sailors.” He paused for a moment, once again, I thought, from embarrassment, while contemplating the ceiling morosely. “Maybe I should join you,” he said once he’d recovered himself. “What do you think? Is there room in your act for an Arabist? Maybe you two could do some kind of act as those nesting dolls, and I could...dance around in nothing but a fez or something.”
He stared some more at the ceiling. “Hustling my ass sounds a lot less degrading right now than hanging around here waiting for them to convert my position to a full-time renewable lectureship. Have they been feeding you that line? Because they’ve been telling me since my first semester here that they’re really, really interested in expanding the Arabic program, and there’s definitely going to be money coming into the department for Arabic, and they’re definitely going to have a full-time, long-term position opening up any day now, and when they do, I would be welcome to apply to it. FUCK! I’d have to fight off about a hundred and fifty bright-eyed little grads, and people with two books to their names, and people who’d get down on their knees and suck John Greene’s dick just for the chance to interview for the job, and...whatever. They’re never going to do it anyway. They’ve been talking and talking about it, but it’s just a way to yank my chain, keep me compliant. Have they been feeding you that BS?”
“Some,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m not surprised. Of course, Russian already has a renewable lectureship, but...I’m surprised they didn’t cut it after what happened last semester.”
“What did happen last semester?” I asked. “I keep hearing hints, but I can’t figure out what really went on.”
Alex rolled up to sitting in a single lithe movement and looked straight at me. “Well, you know that kid—Brandy—killed himself, right?”
I nodded.
“And he said something about the Russian program in his notebook?”
“You mean it wasn’t an actual suicide note?”
Alex shrugged. “They’re saying it was, but from what I heard, it was just the last thing he wrote in his notebook. But it was about how he couldn’t take what those bitches in the Russian program were doing to him anymore, so it sure sounds like a suicide note.”
I nodded again.
“And you know he was gay, right? Not just gay, but, like, the president of the Student Lambda Club and stuff?”
I nodded a third time.
“So, the thing is, he was, like, dating a student of mine. You didn’t hear that from me. My student isn’t out. Only you know how it is: you’re the tiniest bit nice to these kids and they’re in your office, or in our case, following us around campus because we don’t have a private office, confessing all their sins and blurting out all their secrets, because they don’t have anyone else to talk to about it. They’re looking for an adult to talk to, someone they can trust, someone they respect, about stuff that they’re scared about and looking for help with, and they can’t go to their parents and they sure as shit can’t go to anyone with tenure or those motherfuckers in Student Wellness or whatever the fuck it’s called because, like I said, they’re looking for someone they respect. But me, and probably you too, well, we’ve been around, right? Were you ever in the service?”
“No,” I said. “My brother enlisted, but I took the other route. I spent several years working for an NGO in Moscow, observing elections and documenting human rights abuses, interviewing torture and hazing victims, stuff like that.”
“No shit?” He gave me another look of intense interest. “What made you quit?”
“Basically I got to a position where the only way I could advance was by becoming a better fundraiser than I wanted to become. It didn’t pay very much and I thought I needed something a little more remunerative and stable, and I thought going into higher education would provide that.”
“Yeah, same here, pretty much. Why didn’t anyone tell us?”
We both shared a moment of silence for our youthful naivety.
“Anyway,” said Alex, shaking himself out of his depressing musings on the follies of youth. “We’ve done stuff that’s cool. Or that sounds cool, anyway. These kids, they don’t want to be professors, or most of them don’t, and rightly so, but they love thinking about being in the service, or doing some idealistic shit in Russia or somewhere dangerous, somewhere things actually happen, they love thinking about that as they get their little degrees in accounting or business management or whatever and go on to their lives that they don’t want and are so boring and meaningless they’re probably going to drink themselves to death or something just to get out of it, and anyway...when they’ve got secrets to tell, bad stuff, shit that’s really real for once in their super-boring little lives, they’re going to come to us, aren’t they?”
“Um, yeah,” I agreed. “I guess so, sometimes.”
“So, anyway, my student-who-isn’t-out-except-to-me came to me and told me he was seeing this Brandy kid on the sly and he didn’t know what to do, Brandy was pressuring him to come out publicly. My kid’s in the sports program, so...I mean, the college says a lot of shit about supporting their gay athletes, but we both know how much that means, right? So anyway, Brandy was coming down on him really hard”—Alex paused to snort at his double entendre—“to come out, and my kid was saying no, no, his teammates’d kill him, his parents would kill him, and Brandy was threatening to make some of their texts and emails public if he didn’t come out, and I told him that wasn’t how someone who cared about you treated you, you know what I mean? I mean, I know gay rights were important to this Brandy kid, and that’s cool as far as it goes, but you don’t blackmail your boyfriend, right? Especially when it might literally get him killed. I mean, my kid was genuinely scared, the real deal. For once in his life something real was happening, and he was finding out what we all find out, which is that real trouble isn’t nearly as much fun as we think it’s going to be. His dad is, like, a bit mafia, or more than a bit, and maybe would have actually killed him if he stepped out of the upper-middle-class line his dad had drawn for him.
“So anyway, yeah, this Brandy was basically blackmailing him, and my kid was genuinely thinking about running away or killing himself or something, and I was like, ‘Oh shit, they do not pay me enough to deal with this shit, but no one else is going to help this kid if I don’t, so here we go, let’s try and get together after class man, you want me try to talk some sense into this Brandy kid, threaten him back, or what?’ I mean, I’m basically a wimp and I know it, although I do climb a mean wall when I get the chance, but as soon as you say something like, ‘ex-Navy, active duty deployment in the Middle East,’ even I can get some respect. Little as I deserve it. I mean, I sure as hell am no Chris Kyle. But whatever. That’s the first thing that everyone thinks of now, so sometimes it works out for me.”
“And so did you? Threaten him?”
“Nah.” Alex shook his head. “It never came to that. My kid came to me the day before we were supposed to meet with Brandy and told me it had all been straightened out. Brandy had apologized to him, told him someone was blackmailing him and it was a shitty thing to do, he saw that now, and he could really use a friend, really use someone to stand by him and watch his back now, because some bad shit might be about to come out, and he was really sorry for even thinking about doing to his boyfriend what people were doing to him, yada yada yada, and then...they found him two days later. Actually, it was my student who found him.”
“Poor kid,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s still well and truly fucked in the head. I thought he was going to drop out or at least take a semester off, but he couldn’t tell his parents why he needed to do that, so...he sits in the back of class and snivels when he thinks no one can see him.”
“Poor thing.”
“Yeah. Hey, you want to talk to him?” Alex eyed me speculatively. “You might be better at it than me.”
“Um, okay. If you think it would be helpful.”
“I’ll ask him, okay? After break. Because you’re, like, an expert at talking to people who’ve had bad shit happen to them, right?”
“Um,” I said. “Not really. But I’m happy to talk to him if you think it would help.”
“Why not? I really am worried about him. I’ll be in touch after break, all right?”
“All right,” I agreed. “Have a good break.”
“Ha!” said Alex, and, jumping to his feet with athletic lightness, gathered up his three bags of supplies and took off with a surprisingly springy step.
27
Five job applications in four days later, and fall break was over. When I looked at my spreadsheet, I had the warm glow of knowing I was at least a couple of weeks ahead of desperate last-minute scrambles to get applications in by the deadline. So, with the ASEEES convention less than a month away, I really needed to take a week off from applying for jobs and write the paper I was supposed to present there.
If, of course, I could afford to go. Despite grocery shopping at the dollar store and only eating in the evenings—that dissertation weight was definitely gone, to the point that if I could have afforded it, I should have bought a new pair of pants, or at least started eating lunch again—my total available funds, including what was left on my credit card limit, were down to below $300. I would get my next paycheck at the end of October, only a week away, but most of it would get sucked up by rent and health insurance, and the tiny dregs that were left would have to go to food and gas.
And if by some miracle I could scrape together a couple of hundred dollars extra, they should really, really be spent on getting my car looked at. Second gear was almost nonexistent by this point, involving some pretty comical (to onlookers) moments at intersections as I revved up the engine as much as I dared in first, slammed it into second with a nasty grinding noise—when, that is, I didn’t stall out—and then sprinted into the safety of third. So basically my transmission was not long for this world, and even if I could afford to get it looked at, I almost certainly couldn’t afford to get it fixed.
I was contemplating the shame of pulling out of a conference at the last minute, when, two days before Halloween, an email showed up in both my personal and TLASC inboxes, inviting me to an interview. For a tenure-track job, one of the ones I had been so certain I didn’t have a chance at. At ASEEES. Which was in San Antonio.
I reread the email. There was no mention of any option of doing the interview via Skype. I was of course within my rights to request a Skype interview, but, but...if you were invited to an interview for a tenure-track job at a conference, you forked out the $1,000-2,000 and damn well went, or gave up and resigned yourself to a career at the local supermarket. Which right now was sounding pretty good.
No, no, no, you can’t quit now, I told myself, and emailed back, saying I would be delighted to interview with the search committee, and that other than my two panels, one as presenter and one as chair, Thursday afternoon, I would be entirely at the committee’s disposal.
I got back an email within an hour from the department admin, telling me I had been scheduled for 9:00am Friday morning. Well, at least I wouldn’t have to sit around all day fretting about it. I emailed promptly back confirming the appointment and saying how much I looked forward to speaking to the search committee. Then I stared at my phone in indecision, wondering which of my relatives to call and beg for money.
Just as I was composing a Skype text to John, saying I was sorry to bother him when I knew he must have a million things to do, what with the imminent withdrawal from Camp Leatherneck, but I really, really needed money, my phone rang, startling me. I so rarely got actual phone calls.
“Hello, Grandma,” I said.
“Darling! Rowena! How are you? How’s the new job? We’re all so proud of you, darling. I just can’t believe we have a real professor in the family! I was just telling all the ladies in my book club about it. Of course, we always knew you were a smart one; it was just a matter of time. I was so worried when you went off to Russia for that awful job, but then you came back, and now you’re doing what you’ve always been meant to do!”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, so busy, darling. We’ve decorated the house and the front garden for Halloween, of course, and it’s just so delightfully spooky! I wish you could come see it, but we’ll have to take it down before you come for Thanksgiving.”
“Um,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it to Thanksgiving.”
“Oh, but darling...”
“I’ll only have a couple of days off, so I won’t have time to drive down. And my car is having trouble, anyway. It wouldn’t be safe.”
“Well, why don’t you get it fixed?”
“I will when I can.”
“Of course, of course, I’m sure you’re so busy, with your new job as a professor...but why don’t you just fly down, darling? You could fly down to Atlanta, your parents could pick you up, and you could all drive over to Macon together.”
“I can’t afford to fly,” I said. “Actually, I can’t afford to drive, either.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
“But darling,” said my grandmother, once she’d recovered enough to speak. “You’re not a grad student any more. You’re a professor.”
“Yes, but I’m even poorer as a professor than I was as a grad student.”
“But you’re teaching more!”
“Yes, but I get paid less per credit hour, and I don’t get health insurance anymore. I can’t afford to come to Macon for Thanksgiving. I can barely afford to buy groceries. Actually, I can’t really afford even to do that.”
“Oh. Oh. Well, do you have any better job prospects?”
“Actually, I was just invited to a first-round interview for a tenure-track job.”
“Darling! That’s wonderful. When is this interview?”
“The week before Thanksgiving. In San Antonio.”
“Oh. Well, are they flying you down there themselves?”
“No. I’m supposed to fly myself down.”
“But...darling...can you afford it?”
“No,” I said. “Actually, I was literally writing to John for money when you called.”
“Oh.” There was such a long pause at the other end of the line that I thought we’d gotten cut off. “Well,” said my grandmother, just as I was about to start the “can you hear me” routine, “what if I gave you the money, darling? As an early Christmas present.”
“It would be a lot of money,” I warned her. “At least a thousand dollars.”
“Two thousand dollars, darling, so that you could fly straight back down to Atlanta for Thanksgiving.”
“Um,” I said. “Okay.”
“Are you crying, darling?”
“Maybe a little bit.”
“Darling, we have to get you away from that place. New Jersey! Is it as bad as it is on TV?”
“Not in the same way,” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve like Madison. “But it’s not very nice, either.”
“Darling, I’m not surprised at all, to be honest. I was so glad when you got the job because it was a job, and your mother was telling me how competitive it is right now, but...New Jersey? It’s so far away. Where’s this job you’re interviewing for?”
“Charlotte,” I told her.
“North Carolina?” asked my grandmother, perking up.
“Yep.”
“Oh darling, that’s much better. Charlotte’s a lovely city, and you could drive down to visit us on weekends. Is it a good job? A good school?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Better than where I am now, at least. It’s a little concerning that they’ve just shut down the PhD program at Chapel Hill, so everyone’s surprised that they’re hiring in Charlotte, but it would at least be a job. If it turns into anything.”
