Page 61 of Close Reading

I walk to Lavender House. I need to process. The walk takes four minutes. The March air is cold and bright, the kind of early spring day that promises warmth and delivers wind.

Bea makes me something without asking, something new, something with ginger, something with heat. She sets it on the counter and she looks at me and she knows. Bea always knows.

“She didn’t tell you,” Bea says. It’s not a question.

“She didn’t tell me.”

Bea wipes the counter. The slow wipe. “She wouldn’t. She would rather carry the weight of an institutional crisis alone than be seen carrying it by someone she loves. This is not new information about Margot.”

“I know it’s not new information. I know she does this. I know the walls and I know the system.” I drink the ginger thing. It burns, pleasantly. “I thought the system had been revised.”

“The system has been revised, but not all the way.” Bea sets the cloth down. “Give her time.”

I sit with the drink and the understanding. The understanding is this: Margot loves me. Margot has let me into her bed and her daughter’s life and the places where her voice lives when the composure is gone. Margot has given me the double trouble and the roar and the also also and every revision of the system she has made since September. And Margot is still, in the part of her that was built on the quad twelve years ago, managing alone. It hurts.

The response to the funding crisis is not only Margot’s. Tess Okafor is at the center of it.

I should not be surprised by this but I am—surprised by the speed and the specificity of what she has assembled. Tess has organized a student petition with three hundred signatures, a letter from the graduate student union, and a coalition of undergraduate organizations whose members have never previously agreed on anything and who have, under the pressure of the crisis, discovered that the thing they agree on is that the humanities matter.

She has done this from a position of zero institutional power—a second-year PhD candidate, no tenure, no vote, no formal standing in the administrative process—and the lack of is, I am beginning to understand, the source of her effectiveness. She has nothing to protect. The people with tenure have their positions to consider, their relationships with the administration to maintain, their long-term institutional survival to weigh against the short-term cost of speaking. Tess has none of this. Tess has a dissertation on sanctuary movements and an instinct for collective action and the specific, focused fury of someone who has been watching institutions fail the people they claim to serve and who has decided that watching is no longer sufficient.

I see her at Lavender House later in the day, in an organizing meeting, held at a table near the back with a laptop and a stack of printouts and three other graduate students.

Tess is talking about the petition—the logistics, the timeline, the committee members who need to receive it before the vote. She is organized and precise and slightly exhausted: she has been doing the work of ten people and has not yet learned to ask for help. Her bag is on the chair beside her.

I watch them for a moment—Tess organizing, the other graduate students contributing, the group of them at a table doing the work that needs to be done—and I think about Margot, who is somewhere on campus right now building her defense alone, and I think about the difference between alone and together, and I think about the wall.

I walk to campus and cut through the dining hall. The late lunch service has wound down. The room is mostly empty, the long wooden tables scarred and heavy, the kind of institutional furniture that accumulates decades without anyone deciding to replace it.

Claudette Williams, the head of campus dining services, is at one of the tables near the window with the campus paper and a pen, working the crossword. Her office is behind the kitchen, but Claudette takes her afternoon break out here. She told me once that she spent twenty-two years making the dining hall work and she’s going to enjoy sitting in it.

She’s tall and Black, with a shaved head and enormous earrings, soft through the arms and middle. She looks up when I come through.

“Dr. Anand. Sit down or keep moving?”

“Keep moving.”

“Smart. I’ve got ten minutes of quiet left and I intend to use them.” She says this warmly and gives me a smile. She goes back to the crossword. “Fourteen across is wrong. I know it’s wrong. I’m leaving it.”

I go to the research space.

Margot is there. She is at her desk. The lamp is on. She looks up when I enter and her face— her face says I am managing this, but I can see through because I have been seeing through it for six months.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

The question is direct. I do not approach from the side, I do not build a scaffold around the question, I do not find the indirect route. I ask.

She is quiet for a moment, choosing her words, genuinely searching for the sentence that is honest.

“I got the email 10 days or so after we— the kitchen floor,” she says. “I had just said I love you for the first time in twelve years. And then my department was going to be eliminated and I couldn’t— I couldn’t put those two things next to each other. So I didn’t.” A pause. “I was going to tell you. I was trying to figure out how.”

“When?”

She does not answer. I take a breath.

She looks at me. The composed face cracks, not dramatically, not the kitchen floor collapse, but a fissure, a line in the surface through which I can see the thing underneath. The thing underneath is not anger and is not pride. The thing underneath is fear. She is afraid. She is afraid of losing her department, of being seen losing it.

“I know,” I say. “I know why. And I need you to know that knowing why does not make it okay.”