Page 14 of Close Reading

It brings Miriam to mind, which surprises me. It was the first Thursday I came back to Lavender House, when Sophia was nearly three, the absence long enough that I had braced for the careful questions, the weight of being handled. Miriam was leaving when I arrived. She passed me in the doorway and put her hand on my shoulder without slowing down, without making anything of it. No hesitation. No performance of concern. Just her hand, certain and brief, and then she was gone.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

Gerald removes his hand. I thank him for coming and turn to leave.

I am walking toward the stairs when Priya falls into step beside me.

I did not see her approach. She was not in the meeting; the sciences were not invited. But she is here, in the hallway, beside me, and I did not register her arrival. I am always aware of who is approaching. That Priya bypassed this awareness means she has become familiar enough that my body does not categorize her as an approach. It categorizes her as a presence, already expected, already part of the room.

This is troubling.

Our pace has synchronized, her naturally quick stride slowed, mine maintained. Her shoulder is eight inches from mine.

“I heard about the meeting,” she says.

“It was what I expected.”

“I can pull the cross-departmental enrollment comparisons from institutional research. The ecological sciences data would give you a baseline for what healthy departmental numbers look like, in case anyone tries to argue yours aren’t.”

She is offering to help. She is offering to use her safe, funded, science-word department’s data to defend mine. The offer is practical and specific and she is making it while walking beside me with her shoulder eight inches from mine.

“That would be useful,” I say.

We cross the quad. The place on the path where it curves, where the old-growth trees throw their afternoon shadows. I do not stop. But I am aware of the place in a way I am not usually aware of it, and I am aware that Priya is beside me, and the combination produces a pressure in my chest I choose to attribute to the meeting.

At the split in the path she stops.

“For what it’s worth,” she says, “the paper we’re building for the initiative is already the strongest argument your department has. You just don’t know it yet because we’re building it as research, not as defense. But it’s both.”

She turns left. Toward the parking lot.

I turn right. Toward Lowell Hall. Toward my office and my kettle and my books and the quiet I chose because it was the only thing that felt safe.

I glance back.

I did not plan to do this. My body executed the motion without consulting me, which is not a thing my body does. I track her stride across the quad and something settles in my chest that I do not have a file for. I reach for a word. The English ones are wrong. Too small, or too large, or pointing in the wrong direction.

The word I find is my grandmother’s. Tęsknota. The Polish word for a longing that has no object you can name, a pull toward something you cannot identify or return to. She taught it to me when I was eight, sitting at her kitchen table, and I have carried it unused for thirty-five years because I have never needed it.

I need it now, apparently.

8

PRIYA

Thursday at Lavender House, first week of October, and the patio is in its last good stretch before the rain claims it for winter. The tables are still out—wrought iron, painted white, the paint chipping in places that Bea has touched up so many times the tables have the layered quality of an archaeological site, each coat of white a stratum representing a different year. By November most will be inside, and the patio will belong to the weather and the three or four regulars who drink their coffee in the rain as a matter of regional identity.

Inside, the room is doing what it does on a Thursday. Filling. I am at the counter waiting for my Calloway. Bea is humming at the machine. Gerald looks up from his scone.

“You’re in a good mood.”

“Bridge club last night. I took Janet for everything she had.” She finishes my drink. “Which was a sleeve of Oreos and bragging rights, but I intend to enjoy both.”

Marcus is at his table. The burgundy blazer. His chai is between us when I sit down, the steam rising in a curl that catches the morning light through the front window.

“You’re late,” he says.

“I am aware.”