The lights give me migraines at permanent half-mast as I sail around this word-slicked static sea, my cashmere scarf catching noise breezes, slicing through the eddies of student energy that collect in doorways, lineups for coffee, women’s bathrooms. Or is it washrooms here? My ship’s not wrecked yet, although quite a few of the others definitely are. At the prow rides the appearance I am obsessed with, my figurehead, the painted-on performance of femininity. I am very good with makeup, a complicated art form. And clothes. As soon as I could afford the habit of taking my clothes to a tailor for alterations, my self-presentation underwent a paradigm shift. You wouldn’t want to hand in your first draft of an essay, right? You’d rather edit it. This, too, is about what we communicate.
Still, the only thing people remark on is that I look too young to be a professor.
“Thank you! Youth is indeed my highest ambition,” they never seem to notice that I do not say. Is that really garbage? It is an important question. The problem is supposed to be that we say “yes” when we should say “no,” but in many ways we have the opposite problem. Blazoned across all four bins is one big word: SUSTAINABILITY. Soothed by the size of it, we can feel vaguely good about ourselves without asking what it is that we sustain.
Nothing on this campus is old. No sixteenth-century cloisters for undergraduates to vomit in. Everything that’s old here has been stolen. And it’s not concrete. Land, art. Maybe souls, I don’t know. Nothing of mine. There’s a deep past here but I don’t speak its language. Don’t belong to it. We that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long.
The first day of my first term here, I thought about throwing all my Deb notebooks into the “Paper” bin. They are paper, and that’s where paper goes. Still, I couldn’t do it. The collection stopped growing after I graduated, but it followed me everywhere. I still knew it was incomplete, but I did not know what else I could ever add. So the pile became a relic. Ossified. Dead weight.
—
The week I arrived at UW there was an “orientation” event that new faculty were supposed to go to. We were traipsed about all over the campus in awkward pockets of enforced polite interaction, floating around lecture halls and sports facilities like so much clingy pondweed. Big clumps up front, and long tails of stragglers with their minds on their lunches and their eyes on their phones. The occasional loss, when someone actually wanted to stop and inspect the gym lockers, or see how the AV facilities were operated.
At one point we were all herded into a catacomb of dingy, bookish-smelling basement corridors under a brick library. (Why, seriously, do they bring new faculty down here in their first week? To kill off any lingering optimism in our spirits?) It smelled of cheap disinfectant that reminded me of the hospital where my mother lived until I was six. I thought of that other institution and its denizens: all the nurses, and the sad women, and me. How the organism itself must have survived, although I could not understand it at the time: muscle contractions squeezing us all along its corridors like sausage stuffing, absorbing what it could use, ejecting the rest. All of us on this tour were now ingested by a new beast, funnelled along its lower intestines. Would we nourish it? Keep it alive? Were we toxic to its poor insides? Or infectious? Could it catch what ailed us? Were we even going the right way?
Back outside, the dry skin of this brick dragon crackled in the September sun.
—
I started teaching, repeating course materials I had used elsewhere, repackaging the knowledge in suitably sized parcels for the local tastes, regurgitating them into a new set of bored mouths. Over the years, as anonymous student satisfaction surveys became the primary measure of a teacher’s quality, it became important to make lectures easy and attendance optional, then hand out very high grades at the end of the course. Ideally, you should also be likeable, male, youngish, tall, white, and good-looking. These were the standards of pedagogic excellence as captured by the surveys.
Once, an unhappy camper complained on his survey that I was “a schitzoid [sic] bitch” because I was “nice” in class and yet I gave him a failing grade. First let me talk with this philosopher.—What is the cause of thunder? I explained that his work had not met the course requirements, so he complained about me higher up the food chain until his grade was changed to one that he liked. Universities hate bother. I learned my lesson. I learned many lessons being a teacher. Next time it happened I just changed the offending grade myself. Quicker and easier.
I made myself a home in a very respectable Seattle neighbourhood, and furnished it with pieces from nearby vintage shops, of which there were several, and not the cheap kind. Old wooden chests of drawers that shuddered when you tried to open them, dark cupboards that smelled of sweet pipe smoke and bitter chocolate, heavy velvet door curtains, scruffily framed prints of Henner’s Liseuse and Quast’s Soldiers Gambling with Dice. It felt comfortably vague, after the glare of campus, to retreat into these soft chiaroscuro evenings.
At the weekends I generally got out of town so as not to court the expectation that I’d make myself available for meetings and additional work. The expectation persisted, but it was easier to ignore. I liked the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, and the skies even more. Best of all were the days when low cloud lay in big clumps around the base
