That was Hortence Ryan. She was a longtime adjunct who taught as many sections as they’d give her. She insisted on our calling her Tenny, a name that suggested youthfulness, though she was gray and slow, her thick legs a topography of dark veins. She wore sparkling hairpins, bright brooches placed just so, skirts that never wrinkled down the front. But the smiles that creased her face were more like a gritting of teeth. Her expressions of interest lifted her brows so high they became looks that asked, What are you doing? Why are you doing it?
At my first department meeting, she thought I was a student and told me I was in the wrong room.
But when she saw that Dorothy Wisch treated me like a friend, Tenny cleaved herself to me. She was the kind who aligned herself with people she thought could advance her. She got my mail for me from the department office, laughed when I laughed, was always lending me a pencil before I could reach into my bag for my own.
I felt she was taking me under her wing to smother me. “You laugh too fast at their jokes,” Tenny would say. “You write too much on their papers. How much could you possibly have to say?”
But I wouldn’t let her get to me; if the school was my new family, she was just a haughty aunt.
I told her that in Latin, Stella Maris means “Star of the Sea,” a term used in seafaring to denote the star that guided wayward sailors home. Over time the star was called the protector of travelers.
I asked her, “Isn’t that so apt for the students here?”
Tenny said, “Don’t tell them that, dear. You’ll be eaten alive.”
Part of me once thought that she and I could be friends. She was an eccentric, obsessed with the life of Emily Dickinson. I learned that on the day she swept into the adjunct office wearing a gauzy black gown with a clutch of fresh flowers in her too-low décolletage.
“It’s her death day tomorrow, you know,” she told me, seeming defensive. “Emily wanted to be buried with heliotrope. They put it in her casket. She held a bouquet in her folded hands. I always wear white on her birthday and black on her death day.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said. “Your students will remember the seasons. They’ll remember the name of that flower. Aren’t all our favorite teachers the ones who make things come alive?”
“Is that what you aim to be, Lauren? Their favorite?”
With Tenny, I grew careful not to share too much of what was going right.
I tried to stagger my office hours to work with my students in private, but it seemed no matter when I arrived, Tenny would be there, often sitting in my chair. She would fan herself, indicate the open window, say that she’d needed the breeze. The office had one window, which rose above my desk and framed the campus like a picture.
And my window also looked out upon the front steps of Bisson Hall, where Siri took her math class in the afternoons. I had a beautiful view of the blue-slate path that led from that building to my own, and of the willow trees that flanked it, expanding and contracting like sea anemones.
One day I saw Siri coming, carrying a little white bag with tissue paper poking out of the top. Behind me, Tenny was at her own desk, shaking the ice at the bottom of a soda cup.
When Siri came into the office—the way she always entered rooms, smiling: Hello, hej, is this okay?—I sensed the other teachers stop their work. My desk felt suddenly suspended, the air sucked into all their ears.
“I brought you something,” Siri said, setting the bag upon my desk. “A very small thank-you.”
I opened it.
It was a yellow bud vase, the shape of a lemon, its finish that of a lemon rind.
“They keep the international students rather separate,” she said. “I live on the international floor of my dorm. I feel like you are my first real American friend.”
She couldn’t stay. I watched out the window to see her walk away. “Lauren,” Tenny said. The little vase suddenly felt heavy as a paperweight, portentous as a bomb.
I looked up. Her mouth looked swollen on one side, and I could tell it was because she was sucking on an ice cube from her soda cup. Slowly she slit an envelope with a long-handled letter opener.
“What are you doing?” she said.
* * *
—
IT WAS A teaching day. I returned to my apartment full of joy from it, an exhausted, adrenaline joy, a heart-racing, no-one-to-share-it-with joy.
I walked Annie. After, when we were heading back up the stairs, I let her leash fall and watched from beneath as her little white feet climbed the open-backed steps. Inside, I flipped through the stations and saw a yogi on TV. I tried to do all the moves. Annie kept crawling beneath me when I was in downward-facing dog to lick my face. When I collapsed laughing on the floor, she snuffled around my hair and ears. I wondered how the laughing sounded to my neighbors through the walls.
Many immigrant families lived in my apartment complex, and groups of their children played in the road until dark. I could hear my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Vallapil, calling to her son and daughter to come inside. In the evenings, she would sometimes knock on my door and hand me a fragrant plate of food, put her hands up, smiling, and say, “Just try. You might not like it.” It was always delicious. I think she worried about my living alone. I gave her my extra key, and during the day her son, Ravi, would come in to feed my fish and walk Annie, but it was a comfort, really, to know that someone was thinking of me from time to time.
I knew her children’s bedtime from the sounds through my wall, their muffled voices after their TV was turned off, the sound of their bathtub filling with water, then draining out. I waited for the splish-splosh-whoosh of their mother starting the dishwasher, then the sound of her sliding open the patio door to sit by herself in the dark and wait for her husband to return home from work.
The walls in our apartment building were thin. My bed was next to the window, so at night I could look through the slats of my blinds and see the other three apartment buildings that bordered the grass courtyard and small playground. Sometimes I could see someone cooking in her kitchen or someone smiling to himself in the glow of a computer screen. Though I watched and listened, I didn’t really know why the young ROTC student in the window across the way was often taken away from his apartment by ambulance. I didn’t know why the woman downstairs didn’t say hello at the mailboxes anymore, like she used to. But what I did was imagine different stories for her in my head until I found one that helped me feel compassion for her, and when I did, and I was compelled to make her cookies, I did it, though she never really knew why.
In my loneliness, I had learned to string the smallest details into a story of how we were all very much the same: We all had dishwashers, and thin walls that nearly allowed conversation, and troubles that prevented us from ever slowing down, but we were all friends.