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“And now you’re following in your father’s footsteps,” she says. “Right? Just like you’ve always wanted?”
I take a massive bite of salad so I don’t have to answer her. Is a nepo-baby contract instructor really “following in her father’s footsteps”? By the time my mom and dad were my age, they owned the farmhouse they still live in. Dad was tenure tracked in his mid-thirties and already one of the most celebrated medieval historians in the US, maybe even the world.
And it’s not like I can blame my parents’ fortuitous fate at being born boomers, right place, right time to be able to afford homes rather than avocado toasts. Look at Cally. She has this huge home, a beautiful home. She’s starting a family. She runs a lucrative business. She has her life together while I’m a thirty-year-old woman who still looks for the adult in emergency situations. Who can’t afford to live anywhere but in her parents’ extra apartment. Whose greatest achievement in the past month was keeping her sneakers clean since she can’t afford to buy new ones.
“What about you?” I ask, practicing some of Jesse’s well-honed deflection. I need some more time to sit with this uncomfortable emotion before I let it spiral into a full-blown panic attack on my old friend’s pool deck. “Do you keep in touch with anyone else from high school?”
Cally is part of a Mommy-and-Me group with other moms and former alumni of our school. “You could come, if you wanted to,” she says in that tone that makes the token offer clear. “We have a book club, and, um, a holiday cookie exchange. The husbands get together to watch Steelers’ games, although...” She waves her hand in my direction. “That wouldn’t be much interest to you, would it?”
Before I can clarify whether she thinks that because I am neither a Steelers fan nor a wife, the baby, Libby, wakes up from her nap. Cally brings her down and I pull out the gift I brought: a picture book I loved as a child, about space and stars. It’s made of board and Libby immediately pats it with her chubby, dimpled hand, like one would a dog; I take this as a job well done.
Cally feeds the baby, apologizing at first when she almost flashes her nipple at me, but soon she’s talking like there isn’t a small person attached to her boob. Due to my recent interest in human lactation, I want desperately to ask her if I can watch but don’t know how to do it without sounding invasive. And I certainly won’t stare and make her uncomfortable. But it’s this, trying not to catch a glimpse of my friend’s nipple while simultaneously being curious about the mechanics of breastfeeding and what it feels like in real life and why she decided to breastfeed instead of use formula, that makes me realize how different our lives are.
By the time I’m ready to leave, a glass food storage container filled with leftover salad in hand and vague assurances that we’ll “do this again sometime,” I’m ready to put my panic spiral to rest. It’s not that there’s something wrong with me or her. We’re just different. At different places in our lives. Like that old saying: some friends stay with you for a season, some for a lifetime. Maybe Cally was a season friend. We have nothing in common anymore, unless she randomly becomes interested in the inner workings of gender and witchcraft or I want to start a design business. And that’s OK. I need to find my people. I just wish I knew where they were.
I love campus in the summer. The lush, green lawns where undergrads lounge and throw discs, take lunchtime in the quad surrounded by ivy-covered buildings and a few 1980s replacements. And trees, so many trees, leaves full, some trunks so thick I can’t get my arms around them. Trees older than this institution, than this town.
And now so many of them are destroyed.
The storm wrought havoc on my campus. The school’s social media department reported that some buildings still don’t have power, though I won’t know if mine does until I get there. Metal siding was ripped off the library; blasphemous. And a window broke—luckily no one was hurt—in the med school, which is fine since that building is named after a morally questionable white man and I have to assume the damage was karmic.
The wind tore up Dad’s garden, and almost washed out our driveway, which makes it easier to get off the self-pity train I’ve found myself on since my date with Jesse. It was silly and unfair to hinge my hopes on him, and I was clearly making beer-fluenced decisions. Plus, worrying about storm damage and meeting up with Cally was a great distraction.
I gasp as I turn the corner to the lesser-used back door of the history department’s building. “You’re OK,” I squeal. My canvas knapsack bangs against my back as I run to my tree, my Keds slipping slightly on the still-wet paving stones. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” I’m out of breath from this fifty-foot run but I’ll worry about my cardiovascular endurance later.
The tree isn’t as tall as the others. But she’s hardy and stable and has a perfect climbing nook—not that I’ve climbed her before. That’s where I draw the line. Her leaves reach well above my second-story office window, and I watched them change from green to red this past fall, watched them bud earlier this spring; now she’s green again. A few of her branches litter the ground beneath her canopy. I don’t know if she’s in a well-protected location or if we just got lucky, but my favorite tree has made it through the storm.
Without letting myself think much harder about it, I wrap my arms around her trunk. It’s rough and cool against my cheek, my shirt snagging on a whorl in the bark, and although I won’t, I feel like Icouldcry with relief that this tree, this one constant, a small piece of joy in my day is still here. I squeeze her a little tighter.
“I’ll bring George for lunch this week,” I whisper. George is a friend. I think I could call him that. And before I met him, I spent a lot of lunches under this tree, in the fall, before it got too cold to sit on the ground. The tree doesn’t answer—thank god—but a breeze rustles the leaves, like a soft sigh, and I decide it’s for me.
A sharp laugh, the kind that sounds like it’s at someone else’s expense, cuts through the small courtyard. I straighten like my tree has been lit on fire. I’d recognize that laugh anywhere. Audrey. Other voices accompany hers. Frank, most likely, and Leo, who share teaching responsibilities for a first-year seminar. The early modernists were already well-established friends when I arrived and apparently, they don’t have space in their lives for anyone else. They’re the reason I dyed my hair back to blond from purple. According to Leo, I looked too much like a Smurf. Which doesn’t even make any sense. Smurfs are blue.
It takes the echo of Audrey’s voice between our building and the art history wing for me to realize that they’re coming this way, into my courtyard.
And I’m still standing here with my arms around my tree. Like an absolutely unhinged person.
The double doors that lead to the stairwell that always smells like garbage are behind me, but by the sound of their voices I won’t make it there before they’re here and I absolutely cannot see them today, at least not right now. Not when I’m still tender about this past weekend, and earlier today, and the fate of the campus vegetation.
I look at the tree, at the pathway their footsteps clap down, at the doors behind me. “I hope there aren’t any birds in here,” I mutter as I hitch my foot as far up the tree as I can and grip two low limbs. I haven’t climbed a tree since I was a kid, but it seems to be a lot like riding a bike in that I remember the general mechanics of it but still feel pretty unstable now that I’m up here.
Once I’m safely in the axis of the limbs, I wrap my thighs around the larger one and start scooching my way farther up. There’s no way I’m going to let them see my Keds hanging down below the leaf line. I feel like Curious George. Ifeelridiculous, but I’m in it. I’m a part of this now. I freeze as they round the corner into the courtyard, clinging to the bark, a death grip on one branch and my foot tucked so tightly between another I might not get that shoe back. I cling there as they chat about the upcoming internal conference, a sort of training event for the grad students to cut their teeth on presenting and discussion and critique.
My chest is tight, my hands sweating so much I need to readjust my grip. I feel like I did at Cally’s, on the edge of a spiral. If my officemate, Jay, looked out the window right now, he’d be able to see the back of my head. Audrey, Frank, and Leo are below me, following the pathway to the double doors. They slow as Frank kicks a branch out of the way, and I squeeze my thighs and fingertips into the tree. I shut my eyes and imagine I’m as invisible as I’ve felt in this department since I got here. The bang of the door against the wall scares me, my heart jumping, but then it shuts and the courtyard is quiet.
They’re gone. They’re blessedly gone, and I did it. I avoided Audrey’s suspicious stares and Leo’s passive-aggressive digs about my father being a professor emeritus in the department, as if I was only hired because of him. I won’t have to endure Frank boasting, again, about the article that was accepted intoEarly Modernist Quarterlywhile mine was not. I won’t have to hear any more digs about my failed pitch for a new class.
I avoided them...
By hiding in a tree.
I, Eloise Alice Banks, Ph fucking D, climbed a maple tree less than forty-eight hours after a thunderstorm just to avoid interaction with colleagues with whom I’d very much like to be friends even if they don’t want to be friends with me. I can’t catch my breath and maybe I am a little bit allergic to this tree. My skin is hot, so hot and itchy, but I can’t release my death grip to relieve it or else I’ll fall.
A screeching sound makes me jump out of my skin and for a terrible moment, I brace for the impact of a mother bird’s talons in my hair because I’ve disturbed her nest, even though it sounds more like a window opening than a bird attacking.
“Lulu?” Jay’s voice comes from behind me.
Aw, hell. I wish I could go back to this morning, when my biggest problem was how Cally owns her home and I pay bare minimum rent to my mom and dad.
