“Anyway,” said John Greene, wriggling slightly with anxiety, “Provost Johnson and I were just talking about the possibility of expanding our offerings for the Department of Modern Languages. Language and cross-cultural competence have been declared key areas to target for improvement and expansion, and who better to lead the way than us, wouldn’t you say, Rowena?”

  “I would,” I said.

  “And while of course Spanish will always remain the backbone of our—or any—foreign language program, the LCTLs do hold a special place in our hearts, don’t they, Provost Johnson? I hope you’ve been getting good reports about our advanced pedagogical techniques and our general focus on student wellbeing.”

  “Yes,” said the Provost, flashing both of us another super-expensive smile.

  “And if you want to hear more about our LCTL program, get in person reports from the ground, so to speak, I’m sure Rowena would be glad to talk to you about it in more depth, wouldn’t you, Rowena? Because you had such good ideas for generating interest and drawing in students.”

  “I’m sure you did,” said the Provost. “Well, John, it’s been a pleasure. And...Rowena, was it? Is that an Ivanhoe reference?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well spotted!” said John Greene, wriggling slightly again, this time with apparent pleasure. “You know, I didn’t even think...but of course, you are an English scholar...Provost Johnson is our biggest champion in the college, I mean, the biggest supporter of the humanities in general, being a humanist himself, so no one recognizes the value of the so-called ‘soft skills’ more than he does...”

  “Yes,” said the Provost, cutting John Greene off with, I thought, the faintest hint of impatience that even his expensive suit and expensive tan and expensive corporate-academic veneer couldn’t quite quell. “And I hope that we can all continue to get the good word out there, convince people of the importance of the ‘soft skills.’ And Rowena? I’m sure the college really would be interested in hearing some of your good ideas. Now is the time to push the study of Russian. We’ve been supporting Arabic for the past decade, and rightly so, but we can’t neglect the development of area knowledge in Eurasia. I’d like to call a meeting with you and the other LCTL instructors to discuss practical opportunities to promote our critical need language offerings and how we might expand them, especially, as John mentioned, now that we have this new teaching space and have room to think about expanding our offerings, maybe create some permanent positions if the right circumstances and the right people should come together. John, is that meeting something you think you could set up?”

  “Of course, of course, if you recall, I suggested something similar last semester...”

  “Yes,” said the Provost, cutting him off again. “Have your department admin get in touch with my office then, and set up a time. Nice to meet you, Rowena.” He nodded to me but not to John Greene, and strode off with the air of a man on his way to a million-dollar budget meeting.

  “Well, that went well,” said John Greene. “I think you made a very good impression on Provost Johnson, Rowena, which is a great start to your time with us at TLASC. Provost Johnson is a person with ideas, a vision for the college, and he really is a friend of the humanities. He got his degree in English, like I said, British literature, I think, which is no doubt why he recognized your name right off the bat—are your parents academics? I don’t think you ever mentioned anything about it.”

  “No,” I said. “My mother is a doctor, and my father is a social worker.”

  “A doctor!” said John Greene, grasping at that happy word and skipping neatly over the much less happy sound of “social worker.” “What kind of medicine does she practice?”

  “Lots of things, but right now they both work at a non-profit addiction counseling service in Atlanta.”

  “Oh! Really? That must be...that’s very worthy of them.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is. Although she’s considering doing a stint with Doctors Without Borders.”

  “Really! You have...you must have quite the family history, Rowena! But didn’t you do a period of non-profit work yourself? That’s a wonderful experience to be able to draw upon for your teaching, don’t you find that to be the case? Although these days I’m afraid most parents are steering their children away from the non-profit sector into the, well, the for-profit sector. But it’s still possible to make a profitable career, haha, in the non-profit sector, wouldn’t you say?”

  “More or less,” I said. “I supported myself for years in one of the most expensive cities in the world doing it.”

  “One of the most expensive cities in the world?” said John Greene, looking lost.

  “Moscow,” I explained.

  “Oh! Somehow you just don’t think of Moscow as being, well, in the same class as London or Paris or Tokyo or New York, but I suppose it is, at least by some measures. Well, I really must go, Rowena. Linda will be in touch with you regarding the meeting with Provost Johnson. She knows your course schedule, so she’ll be able to set up a time that works for you.” He gave me a bright smile that was warmed largely by anxiety, and rushed off.

  I stopped in the department office on my way back to the adjunct office, to see if I could get a marker and give Linda a heads-up about the possible meeting with the Provost and, if the moment seemed propitious, to ask her how likely she thought it was to actually happen. But the only person who was there when I stuck my head in was an unfamiliar work-study on her first day, who didn’t know where the markers were and wasn’t authorized to disburse them in any case. So I decided to leave things up to fate, and, after discovering that now Emma was taking a nap in the adjunct office, packed up my things and went home.

  14

  The next morning I jogged out to True Grit again, where I ran into Jimmy and his friend, who introduced himself this time as Mike. They were both garbage men, they told me, and laughed when I told them that I thought the politically correct term was “sanitation worker.”

  “You can call it whatever you want,” Jimmy said, grinning and showing off his bad teeth. “It still stinks just the same.”

  I agreed to that, and then listened politely to the many complimentary things they had to say about my figure. It was technically offensive, but at least Mike and Jimmy were being open and upfront about their objectification instead of cloaking it in a veil of faux feminism. I smiled and told them I was glad to see them and agreed that yes, Atlanta was nicer than New Brunswick and its environs, and yes, I’d also been to Savannah, Charleston, and Charlotte, all of which were also very nice, and no, unfortunately I didn’t have time to join them for a cup of coffee this morning, but maybe some other time, because yes, I sure did miss grits, and then I ran back home, passing the elementary school that looked like a minimum security prison and the shabby police station and all the cash-for-gold and payday loan places on my way.

  I had to admit that, after seeing the neighborhood, the Pleasant Hill Apartment Complex was, just as it advertised itself to be, one of the nicest places in the area, difficult as that was for me to grasp. It wasn’t that Atlanta didn’t have bad neighborhoods, but even the bad neighborhoods in most Southern cities were newer and cleaner and more hopeful than even the good neighborhoods I’d seen so far in New Jersey.

  Thursday was a non-teaching day for me, so I stayed at home, doing odds and ends to avoid taking care of the things I really needed to take care of, like finishing my unpacking and facing up to those article revisions that I, like Kate, had promised myself I would finish before going back on the market this year.

  After a couple of hours of organizing my work email inbox and setting up folders for different topics, which took longer than it should have due to Cubmail’s extreme clunkiness, and arranging for a roommate and booking a room for the ASEEES conference in November, something I could do because I didn’t actually have to put money down for it, just give them my credit card number, and doing everything I could think of to do to prepare for Friday’s classes, and spending more time than I should have surfing The Wiki and the job sites in case something really great had popped up since the last time I had checked twelve hours earlier, I forced myself to open up the emails with the comments from Reviewer A and Reviewer B, and actually sit down and start on the revisions for my article.

  The good news was that Reviewer A’s comments were more or less positive and even in some cases slightly helpful, with only a little bit of arrogant condescension bleeding through. But Reviewer B (Reviewer B was the title given to the more negative reviewer in the peer review process) was, in true Reviewer B fashion, in a snit that suggested they had read the article in a huge hurry, been mortally offended by something, possibly that I hadn’t cited them, or possibly because just looking at someone else’s work on a topic in which they were supposed to be an expert sent them into a tizzy of fear and inadequacy, and wanted me to make significant changes to the thesis of the article, changes that would go in the opposite direction of what Reviewer A wanted and would also make the article some other, completely different, article. The editor had made a feeble attempt to provide some guidance that only muddied the waters further.

  I spent a while contemplating the myriad flaws of peer review and its basis on some kind of philosophical system that in no way resembled real life and actual human behavior, and some more time contemplating the nature of freedom and consent and how I couldn’t stand up for the cause of advancing the sum of human knowledge because I needed to get Reviewer B to give me the go-ahead in order to get the article published, and I needed to get the article published in order to have any chance of getting a job next year and feeding myself. Then I thought about the parallels between this situation and cases in which people “voluntarily” provide sexual favors in order to keep their jobs, and whether a job that was supposed to provide me with physical safety was worth this kind of aggravation and degradation, and whether this kind of aggravation and degradation might have some kind of serious long-term consequences to my health and safety, and the impossibility of pleasing either bullies or random strangers, especially when it came to subjective matters of taste, and then I decided screw it, I’d been sitting around making myself unhappy for half the day over an article about a set of poems written in 1923 by someone who’d hanged herself in 1941, and thus was entirely beyond my help in any concrete way.

  When I had written the article I had been fired with idealistic zeal to spread the word about “my” poet and get people to understand her poetry, and therefore, themselves, in a new and more enlightened light, or at least to sit back and go, “Wow, what great poems,” thus bringing a little joy into their lives, but the reality was that no one other than the reviewers was ever going to read the article anyway. So I should treat it as a means to an end, just a tool to help me achieve my real aims, which were...what? Oh, that’s right, a job with flexible hours and decent benefits, where the chances of being kidnapped or shot were low, so that Dima and I could get married and provide a safe and stable environment for his mother in her declining years. The flexible hours I had, sort of, but the rest was proving elusive. I did a “save as” of the article document, named it “draft 2,” and started implementing the vague, contradictory, and mean-spirited changes the reviewers wanted to the best of my ability.

  After a couple of hours of that fun and good times, my eyes were starting to water, and not just from frustration and rage, so I called it a day and went for a second run, this time, in a fit of self-destructive defiance against people who weren’t there and wouldn’t know about it, past True Grit and into the neighborhood where the streets were more holes than pavement, and grown men sat around on sagging porches in the middle of the workday.

  No one bothered me other than a few remarks on the bright blueness of my shoes and the fitness of my legs, though, so after running three miles and briefly considering and then rejecting the notion of running all the way to campus and back, mainly because I didn’t want to spend any more time than I could help on campus, I turned around and ran home and told myself I had made many important and meaningful accomplishments today, and made the world a better place for all concerned. When I said so to Fevronia, she hissed and took a swipe at me.

  15

  Friday dawned bright and clear and with a hint of pleasant coolness, and I set off for my classes with a certain cautious optimism that today would be less of a fiasco than Wednesday had been.

  My optimism took a blow when I showed up for my first class and discovered that the door was locked, but then Kate came racing back from, she told me, a desperate bathroom break, to let me in.

  “Everything’s working today!” she said, smiling like the despair of Wednesday had been banished completely. “I was able to put up a PowerPoint no problem!”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah, they take so long to make, it makes it twice as bad when they don’t work, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “But once you make them once, you don’t have to make them again, so that’s good. If you’re teaching the same thing, that is. I guess you’re having to make all new lesson plans and materials, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve used this textbook before,” I told her. “So I have some stuff prepared. I don’t use a lot of PowerPoint, though.”

  Kate gave me a look as if I had unsettled her world view, and dashed off. I spent the next 50 minutes riding herd over Danila and Vitya, who went on another marker-stealing mission and then couldn’t recover from the high, dealing with Ira’s arrogant insecurity—she went into a big pout when she found out that Riva had moved up to 201, but that I didn’t recommend it for her—and convincing the others to say anything at all. So a pretty typical 101 class.

  When I showed up at the adjunct office, Kate, Emma, and Alex were already all there and had taken up all the chairs and desk space. Alex stood up and offered me his chair, and Emma and Kate said with a minimum of enthusiasm that they could clear a place for me on the desk, but I said no, I was fine, I would go sit—I scrambled to come up with a good place to sit, since the quad outside Dreme was a no-sitting zone—in The Caff and do my prep and grading there.

  This was a good plan, or as good a plan as I could come up with on short notice, but The Caff was, it turned out, suffering from one of its periodic bee invasions, which apparently was a thing, so there was no bee-free place to sit outside, and all the inside tables were filled.

  I carried on to the library, where I discovered that the Starbucks was full, as was The Bear Cave. I finally found a free desk in the basement, only to find out that I couldn’t log onto the faculty and staff wifi. This necessitated another trip to The Bear Cave, where, after a half-hour wait for my number to be called, the tongue-tied Jason told me, still unable to look me in the face, that they had been having intermittent wifi outages all day and that was probably what the problem was, unless maybe it was because I wouldn’t be officially in the system until September 1 and that had overridden the illegal override he and Madison had given me, but the problem would probably resolve itself in a few days, and if I still couldn’t log in next week to come back and see them.

  By then it was time to go teach 201, so I lugged my currently useless laptop and all my other stuff off to the annex of Dreme.

  This time I got there before the previous instructor had left, and she, after my students had vouched for me as a TLASC faculty member and not a random stranger who had wandered in off the street and was teaching Intermediate Russian just for fun, let me in, so I counted that as a win.

  The rest was not so victorious, as the room was barely big enough for the fourteen of us. In fact, a more accurate description would be “too small.” Although it was technically designed for fourteen, as the occupancy notice at the door stated, in fact there were only twelve chairs. Which for the first few minutes of class was okay, since Madison wasn’t there, but she showed up at the 1:10 mark.

  “Oh,” she said, looking around and seeing the chair shortage. “BYOC again, I see. Last semester this room was always Bring Your Own Chair too. Maybe I’ll just sit on the floor.”

  “You’ll have a hard time taking notes on the floor,” I said. “And there’s no room anyway.” That was true: even with just twelve chairs the room was so jammed full with a giant table I couldn’t walk around it, but was hemmed into one small corner by the chalkboard, which only had a tiny nub of squeaky green chalk that made marks almost too faint to read on the green board.

  “I’ll go get a chair,” offered Adam Adam’s Apple gallantly. “I think I saw some down the hall.” He set off with a wistful look at Riva, who looked wistfully back before giving the most vicious side-eye a nice girl like her could give to Madison, who had flopped down on Adam’s vacated chair and, complaining loudly about how tired she was, laid her head down on the table.

  “If you’re not feeling well, Madison, you should go home,” I said loudly, to make up for the fact that I was trapped on the far side of the room and would only be able to make it over to her by sliding across the top of the too-big table, exotic dancer style.

  “I’m fine, Professor H,” she mumbled into her folded arms.

  “If you’re fine enough to be here, you’re fine enough to sit up,” I said, even more loudly. “If you’re not fine enough to sit up, you’re not fine enough to be here.”

  She sat up slowly. The circles around her eyes were so dark that at first I thought she had been punched in the face. She yawned and sniffled, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Sorry I’m late, Professor H,” she said.

  “How do you say that in Russian?”

  She shrugged and mumbled something.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “I said,” she said, with another jaw-cracking yawn, “Brandy would know. He was always late, and Professor C was always making him apologize for it.”

 

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