The wind that would carry me away came in the form of a boyfriend who was leaving town for Washington, D.C. Going with him meant leaving an opportunity to continue on for a PhD. I worried I was making a mistake, but I was more afraid of being alone. I got a decent-paying job at Stella Maris’s library, which felt familiar and safe.
I was not unhappy. I’d always longed for the elegance of a pretty school like Stella Maris, its alcoves filled with art, bronze plaques fastened to the corners of white buildings, hedges cut into the shapes of animals. There was a lovely path on the west side of campus strung with one hundred rose plants, set in the ground by the graduating class during the school’s centennial summer. All in a line, equidistant from one another, each bearing a black and white laminated tag with its name: Sonja, Red Planet, Mr. Lincoln, Diana, Peace.
I would bring my dog, Annie, with me for walks along this beaded fringe of campus nearly every morning. In time I memorized the name of each plant. Country Music was neon pink with petals that looked like plastic. Tropicana was my favorite, with bursting orange flowers the size of my hand. Having their names inside me made it easier when that boyfriend moved on again in three months’ time.
Some people on campus knew me from the roses—I was the girl with the dog. Others knew me from the elegant library with its four white columns out front, its atrium of pink marble, its lonely reading rooms. Both places full of scent and color, both mine in ways that no one else seemed to want. The half mile of a Rose Walk morning was as compulsive and solitary as my movement through the library stacks. Just as I knew the names of all the plants, when someone came asking for a text, I knew exactly where it lived. I knew all the titles on the professors’ book lists and thought that if I wanted to, I had a road map to take every class on my own, late nights, knowing everything they knew, filling up all the space in my head.
I had gone from one school to another, like a girl who marries up and moves into her in-laws’ home. I liked to think that at some point Stella Maris could feel like a family. The older professors I worked for could be aunts and uncles. My co-workers like a group of siblings. They knew I was steady and dependable. But mostly, people kept to themselves.
I was soon able to take on the role of teaching assistant for extra money. The students were not standoffish like the professors. They let themselves feel. They read the assignments through the prisms of being young, bold, afraid—and my job let me talk back to them in their essay margins. I had been let inside. I loved it.
And I’d grown privy to the conversations of the professors. In the faculty lounge, seated with my grading, I felt almost invisible among them, and I heard the rumors of male teachers who had eyes for female students, and women who graded easy, too desperate to be liked. I learned the hierarchy of the school, the unspoken rules. It seemed they had a loyalty not to their work but to this place, this body of bronze plaques and rose gardens, and they sought to pluck out anyone who’d tarnish it with something as lowly as a need for connection.
I could have taken my grading to the library or done it at home. But I kept going back to the faculty lounge, simultaneously detesting their gossip and craving it. Listening. Invisible.
I was there one day, making my way through a high stack of essays, when some of the English professors started discussing a half-erased sentence of Latin on a rolling blackboard.
Prope sine ture.
I still recite the words like they bear magic. I sifted through the papers while people guessed at the translation. The clap-back academics, the too-loud-then-look-around laughers, so many degrees on their walls; Latin to them was a secret clubhouse language.
“It means ‘to come near, to come beside’—”
“Ture. Without ture. What is that? Smoke? Someone look it up.”
But they just kept throwing out their guesses, laughing, congratulating one another on being in this secret circle, where it didn’t matter if they were right, only that they’d been the types who studied it once.
Quietly, me, the paper-ruffler: “In that context, it means something more like ‘close but no cigar.’ ”
They all looked at the blackboard like the words were coming into focus. “Of course. From Erasmus’s Adagia,” one of the men said. It was likely not from the Adagia, but they all responded: of course, of course.
I felt Latin belonged to me. It was my middle-of-the-night language. I’d learned it on my own after my parents died, to distract myself, to fill the quiet in my head. To those professors, the sound of it, the syntax, the rhythms, were a distant memory, a friend they’d all known once. It seemed to me that was also how other people experienced grief. They would have an acute, complete understanding of it for days or weeks, whatever it took, and then it would be over, and their minds were washed out like split gourds and they just went on with their lives, went to their neighbors’ barbecues, chatted and laughed. I couldn’t fathom this, how people could so easily move on.
“How did you know that?” Dorothy Wisch asked me that day. She was the head of the international program. She’d never noticed me much before.
Looking back, I don’t think I was right—prope sine ture? Sometimes I would lie in bed worrying that I’d gotten it wrong, that everything good that came after that moment was based on a stupid mistranslation and I’d be found out, and the bubble would be popped. But it was a moment of magic. The next thing I knew, I was being encouraged to interview for part-time work as an adjunct, one precious class of my own, teaching comp. When I got it, I was so grateful for the chance, I told myself I’d never take it for granted. I was always early to department meetings, always looking to take on extra work. After the first set of student evaluations Dorothy Wisch received on me, she shook me by the shoulders and hugged me.
When my new colleagues heard how I’d gotten the position, they all smiled politely and asked the same questions: Where did you go to school again? You got the position in the international program just like that?
Yes, I thought. I know on the outside it all must have seemed so easy to them.
Though I was only an adjunct and skirting the place—one class, the outer rim of the Rose Walk, off-hours at the library—I felt I was finally living some semblance of the life I’d hoped for long ago. I would embrace whatever small part of it that could be mine.
I came to know the other adjuncts best by the bright concert flyers and lecture notices they tacked to the walls of our shared office. I’d try to start conversations. I’d ask them about their classes, but immediately their talk would turn to deconstruction or Derrida, recycled stuff from their grad school days, as though they wanted to prove that they should be teaching in the more academically prestigious English department, and not just giving comp lessons. I longed for a friend who loved teaching in the international program as much as I did. I once told one of the women how much I loved teaching, and she asked me, “Do you want someone to videotape your classes? Maybe then you could show everyone how it’s done.”