It’s 5:20 and I’m running late. I’ve stayed up late rereading Marguerite Duras, The Lover: Very early in my life it was too late. A man in his sixties gives himself a quiet, thoughtful pep talk as he climbs the steepest hill on the south side of the park at a jog as I sprint by.
You’re not doing enough “I” speak, says my supervisor as we sit with the twenty-four-year-old to talk about his relational concerns. He says I am condescending to him. Which is not wrong. I tried to talk to him about the fact that the kids hate him without telling him that the kids hate him, and now I hate him too.
I try to explain this. I try to say as carefully, as diplomatically, as I can that I have absolutely said the wrong things in trying to talk to him, that I should have never put him on the spot and asked him his age in front of other colleagues, but that the kids are turning on him, he treats them like they’re preschoolers, and that’s not good for anyone.
You need to focus on how you’re responsible, what you’ve done in each of these situations, says my supervisor. She is twenty-seven. I hear you talking too much about what he has done.
She calls us both by our names often, because it was in a book she read about how to interact with people and mediate conflict between colleagues. I know this because she has it with her and it’s covered in yellow and pink Post-its.
I teach another class and then I get my bag and coat and walk downtown until I hit a CVS, where I buy a large box of the sour neon gummy worms that I stopped eating when I was pregnant the first time and afraid of anything that might be processed or chemically enhanced getting through to the baby, and then I kept not eating them because I was nursing, and then pregnant again, and then never outside the house without our children when I was not at work. I’m still nursing, but I buy them and open the bag on the sidewalk as I walk to a movie theater I remember from when I used to be a waitress seven blocks away. There are so many streets like this, where I have been so many different people. If anyone were to ask me why I can’t leave even as this city is too hard for not-rich people, I would say it’s because I’m too afraid of what would happen to all these different people somewhere else. This is the place where I was formed, long after forming should have happened; it’s the place where no one was looking and I felt allowed.
It’s what I imagine home would feel like if the home that I was born into had felt safe.
We have one credit card that somehow inexplicably still works, though all the others have been canceled, and I buy a ticket to a movie on it and I sit and watch a story about other people’s lives in the dark in the middle of the day.
On my train ride home, I get an email from a former student at the university where I teach my night class. She’s twenty-something, young and anxious. I remember she wore crop tops in winter and wide-legged pants; she had long blond hair. In class, she used to work her hair into tiny braids, then chew on them, letting them fall out of her mouth wet when she raised her hand to speak. She spooned one large tub of yogurt into her mouth with a white plastic spoon in the first hour of every class, and the bright white skin of her bare arms and shoulders would splotch red when she talked.
hey! says her email, no capital letters and hardly any punctuation. wondering if i could pop by your office hours sometime next week. The way she piles phrase on top of phrase without saying why she wants to meet makes me worry for her.
I’m up there Thursdays, I type, though I’m an adjunct and do not have an office. Let’s find a time, I say.
It’s Sasha’s birthday, I say to my husband on the weekend. We have one day a week together, since he works on Sundays, and we pack snacks and a change of underwear for both the children and we go into the city, to the Whitney, also on the magic credit card. The kids make paintings that look like the paintings that are hanging and then we walk around until the two-year-old starts crying on the floor because we won’t let her touch the painted birds even though they are her favorite color, purple, and we go home.
You should call her, says my husband.
He used to make a face every time I said her name. But now he starts to cook dinner, gets a beer out of the refrigerator, tells the children they have to clean up their Legos before they can use the iPad, makes me a second drink.
Why not? he says now.
I guess, I say.
Did she call you on your birthday? he says.
Mommy, says our four-year-old, who’s Sasha?
I text her and she says thanks right away and sends me an emoji.
I hate emojis. As if, all of a sudden, we have agreed that words don’t work.
Sorry I missed yours, she says.
I wait a week. On the day that I watch the kids alone and my husband works, I let them watch TV in the back room, even though we try mostly not to let them watch TV, and they eat granola bars and chips for lunch. I only vaguely, in the background, imagine my husband asking what protein they’ve had so far today. I read my book most of the morning: The Time of the Doves, Mercè Rodoreda—the
