Page 62 of Close Reading

I leave in sadness, which is different and harder than anger. Anger has energy. Anger has direction. Sadness has weight, and the weight sits in my chest as I walk across campus to my car. I do not doubt her. I do not doubt us. I doubt whether the system can revise fast enough to hold what we are building.

I drive home. Kali meets me at the door. The house is warm. The boys are watching TV. Helen is playing a game on her phone. The drawings are on the refrigerator. The household calendar is on the wall. The life I built is here.

The woman I love is across campus, alone at her desk, not asking me for help.

33

MARGOT

Priya leaves, and the leaving is not the slamming of a door but the careful closing of one. And that is worse because the carefulness means she is being deliberate. She leaves, without anger, with the weight of something I put there.

I go home. Sophia is in her room doing homework. I can hear the faint sound of music through her door, the playlist she listens to while she studies, and the normalcy of the sound is both a comfort and an accusation. The normalcy says: your daughter is fine, your house is ordered, your life continues. The accusation says: that is the problem—the capacity to maintain normalcy while the person you love walks out of a room carrying a sadness you gave her.

I go to the kitchen. I open the cabinet above the mugs.

Three lint rollers on the shelf. The lint rollers that represent the system expanding, the system accommodating, the twelve-year fortress opening its gates to admit dog hair and chaos and a woman who arrives late to everything and who has rearranged my life more completely than any force I have encountered since the force that demolished it.

I close the cabinet. I go to the couch. I sit with the knowledge that I have damaged something I have been building by doing the thing I have always done: carry the heavy thing alone.

The vote is next week. The dissolution may happen. The institution will do what the institution will do. I have spent twelve years learning what institutions do, and the learning has not made me better at preventing it. It has made me better at carrying the weight of it alone. This is what I am good at—carrying. Containment. The management of loss.

Sophia appears in the kitchen doorway. She is holding a glass of water and wearing the expression she wears when she has been listening to the quality of the house’s silence and has determined that the silence is the wrong kind.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I’m fine.”

She looks at me. The look lasts three seconds.

“You’re not fine,” she says. She does not say it confrontationally. She says it the same way she said I like it when the house is loud—simply, without push, a statement of observed fact.

“I did something wrong,” I say.

Sophia sits on the couch beside me.

“With Dr. Anand?”

“With Priya. Yes.”

Sophia is quiet for a moment. Then she puts her head on my shoulder. The gesture is simple and complete. She has said what she came to say, and now she offers the only thing she has, which is her presence, her body beside mine, her head on my shoulder.

“You should fix it,” she says.

“I know.”

“Now.”

“It’s 9:00 at night.”

“Mom.” The devastating gentleness. “It’s not going to be better in the morning.”

She lifts her head. She takes her water. She goes back to her room. Her door closes with the careful click of a child who has delivered a sentence and is leaving the sentence in the room to do its work.

I do not call Priya tonight. Sophia is right, but the fixing requires more than a phone call. It requires me to do something I have not done in twelve years, which is walk toward the thing I am afraid of rather than building a wall between myself and the thing.

The vote is Tuesday. The outcome will be what the outcome will be.

The thing I need to fix is older than the vote, and deeper than the institution. The fixing is a practice. The fixing is the daily, ongoing, never finished work of choosing the open window over the sealed room, and I have been doing this work since September, imperfectly, incrementally, with setbacks and revisions and the particular stubbornness of a system that does not want to be revised, and I am going to continue.