I often stay late at work these days to meet with students, help with papers, but my coteacher comes to say he wants to meet with me to talk about relational concerns, and I say I can’t because my kids’ school just called and then I leave and go to a dark bar uptown and sip a raspberry-flavored gin drink and read my book before I have to teach.
In my night class, we read Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child. A student who sits off to the side of the table we all sit at, though there’s still room, and who has strangely dyed red hair, raises her hand and says, The main character is mansplaining Auschwitz to his wife, and I say, But she wasn’t there and is actively refusing to try to understand, and she says, Typical, and we move on.
* * *
On Thursdays the children go to sleep without me and it’s late and the subway’s mostly empty for the hour that I ride it. We filed, my husband says about the bankruptcy, and I’m still drunk, or maybe I’m hungover, from the drink before I taught and I do not want to talk so I kiss him and reach my hand underneath his shirt and we have sex on our loft bed. I hit my head and he says, Sorry, and then he comes and falls asleep and I stay up and read.
* * *
When we met I was in graduate school and he was still, for that first year, a person who wore suits. I had a small apartment uptown and he’d sneak out of work and I’d get out of class and we would fuck standing up against the hall wall by the entrance, me sometimes up on the kitchen counter, hands grasping the cheap vinyl. I would come and he would too and we’d both pull our pants back up and he’d go back to work and I’d go to the comp class I taught in the afternoon still smelling of him.
He’d last a full year at that job before he left to do custom carpentry for the sorts of people that he used to work with, hoping it’d be more one day, a store of handmade furniture from reclaimed wood. I was so proud then. We were eighties babies, born of plenty, cloistered by our whiteness and the places we were raised in—his parents didn’t have much money, neither had a college education, but we were both brought up to think that if we checked off certain boxes we’d be fine.
9/11 happened my second week of college; the financial crisis came the year after we met. It would be years before we understood the implications of these chasms; we weren’t formed enough to see them, were too safe to feel their first round of hits. We made so many choices based on what we thought the world was, what it wasn’t any longer, what we’d been told it was but what we finally understand that it had never been.
He worked for Lehman Brothers when the markets crashed and they went under—the sky was falling everywhere, except, of course, that he could just have found another job like that. He had this idea, we both did, that he did not want to be implicated any longer in the abstract mess of numbers on a screen and people’s lives all made or broken. We had principles or something, made up almost wholly out of things we knew we didn’t want to be or have a part in more than any concrete plans for what we’d be instead. I vaguely thought books were the answer, because they’d saved me and that seemed like something: to give them to other people, to expose them to them. He thought working with his hands. We were galvanized in this way, smug and stupid. It felt athletic and exciting, this misguided, blind self-righteousness.
Now, I think mostly he still likes what he does, except, of course, when work is slow or bills are due.
* * *
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.