Page 1 of Close Reading

1

MARGOT

The first day of the fall semester feels the same every year, which is what I like about it.

September light in the Pacific Northwest arrives lower than mid-summer light, softer, the first concession toward the grey that will define the next six months. The grass is still wet at 7:40, the dew catching the slant before the sun burns it off. The old brick of Lowell Hall takes on a soft warmth in the early light. The evergreens will keep their color all winter while everything deciduous surrenders. The air smells of wet bark and damp stone and somewhere already, coffee. The custodial team has propped open the east doors to air the building before classes start.

I have been walking this path for twelve years.

I nod at Dr. Otieno from Political Science. I do not stop. I have never stopped on my way across the quad, and he has never expected me to, and this mutual understanding, arrived at silently, maintained for a decade, is the foundation of what I consider a perfectly functional collegial relationship. There are people in this world who believe that every greeting requires a conversation. Those people slow down everyone around them.

The path is muscle memory. Past the bench where Gerald Fitch sits in warmer months, reading glasses on their chain, his pale, pink-cheeked face earnest above the corduroy jacket with a pen in the breast pocket that has left a faint ink stain he has never noticed or has noticed and chosen to keep. He has been working on a monograph about marginal illustrations in medieval England for eleven years. He mentions it at every faculty gathering, certain each time that completion is imminent. It is not imminent. I am fond of Gerald in a way I do not fully understand. His presence on Ardmore’s campus is a structural comfort, a fixed point, and I would notice his absence the way you notice when a piece of furniture has been moved in a room you walk through every day.

Lavender House, just off campus, is visible from the midpoint of the quad. A hulking Victorian that feels like a hug and looks like a dollhouse one might receive for a ninth birthday. Dusky purple clapboard, the porch already set with its small tables, the sign in Bea’s handwriting: Lavender House in black on cream, that has been there long enough to disappear into the building itself. The lavender hedge along the south side of the porch is still holding its late-summer blooms, purple going to grey at the tips, and the smell carries across the quad on mornings with a gentle breeze. A warm rectangle of light in the front window means Bea is already there, as she always is, as she has been every morning for the 23 years she has owned the place. One of the constants I have organized my understanding of this campus around.

I do not go in. I have not been a morning regular in years. I used to, in those first months, when everything was new and I was raw and Bea made me a drink without asking. She let me sit in the corner and said nothing, and the nothing she said was the most useful thing anyone offered me that year. But that was a long time ago, and I have a system now. I go to my office. I make my tea. I begin. The system works. I see no reason to revise it.

Sophia came downstairs at 5:50 this morning while I was packing her lunch. An avocado and cheese sandwich, the bread cut on the diagonal because at thirteen she has decided this matters, has explained to me at length why the diagonal cut creates a superior bread-to-filling ratio at the first bite, has cited evidence, has used my own argumentative style against me with a precision I found both impressive and faintly threatening. An apple, carrots, a bag of pretzels, two cookies from the batch I made Sunday, and a note. Lunch notes for a thirteen-year-old are a genre with strict conventions. I have read extensively on the subject of what constitutes an appropriate degree of parental affection in written form and have concluded that a single sentence, dry, referencing an inside joke, is optimal. She will roll her eyes. She will keep it. I know this because I found ten of them in her desk drawer last month when I was looking for a stapler, lined up in a neat row, sorted by date in a system that I recognized immediately as a descendant of mine. I said nothing. Some findings are better left unpublished.

“Did you put the cookies in?”

“Two. From Sunday’s batch.”

“I wanted to make sure.”

“You could trust the established pattern.”

“Mom. It’s the first day.”

“The pattern holds on first days. It holds especially on first days.”

A pause. Then, gently, the way Sophia is gentle once she has worked you out and decided to spare you: “Have a good first day, Mom.”

“You too, Soph.”

She went back upstairs. I finished my tea. I put on the blazer I selected last night—navy, structured, the one with the pockets deep enough for my phone and a pen, neither of which I will need to retrieve during a lecture but both of which I need to know are there. The blazer fits as all my blazers do: precisely, because I have them tailored, because the difference between a blazer that fits and a blazer that almost fits is the difference between armor and a costume, and I stopped wearing costumes a long time ago. Hair up. Earrings in. Both of them, always both, a matched pair, because I learned once what it feels like to be missing one and I will not learn it again.

This is preparation, not anxiety, and the difference between them matters. I am 44 years old. I learned 12 years ago what happens when the preparation fails.

Lowell Hall. Third floor. The stairs were built when people expected buildings to last and staircases to be used: wide, solid, the kind of marble that develops a groove where generations of feet have worn the same path.

My office is the fourth door on the right. The door opens on a room I have made entirely mine.

Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three walls, organized in a system that is intuitive to me and apparently hieroglyphic to everyone else. It is thematic, chronological within theme, and cross-referenced by a secondary system involving the relative position of certain anchor texts whose placement I have not changed since my second year. Woolf beside Lorde beside Morrison beside Moraga is not random. It is a conversation these women are having across decades and traditions, and a bookshelf, properly arranged, is a form of scholarship that no one acknowledges and everyone benefits from.

The window sticks in summer and lets in cold air in winter. I have reported this annually. Facilities has responded annually with the institutional equivalent of a sympathetic nod followed by absolutely nothing. I have made my peace with the window. The category of things I am willing to place in that file is narrow and carefully curated.

The electric kettle on the windowsill is mine, brought from home in my third year when I understood that the department coffee maker was both a health hazard and an aesthetic crime. Earl Grey in the morning. Rooibos in the afternoon. The mugs are mine, both ceramic, both from Pat Levin’s pottery sold at Lavender House. One has a chip on the handle I should replace and will not because the chip has been there long enough to become a feature rather than a flaw. Pat made these mugs with hands that knew what they were doing, and the weight of them in my palm—heavy, warm, the glaze slightly rough where her thumb left a mark in the clay—is one of the small, reliable pleasures of my day.

The chair for students is positioned to suggest welcome and engineered to discourage lingering. I learned early that boundaries are not the opposite of warmth. They are what makes warmth possible.

I set my bag down. I open my laptop. Nineteen unread emails, fewer than usual. In my experience, the absence of small problems is the leading indicator of a large one.

The email from the Dean’s office is third from the top. Subject line: Interdisciplinary Initiative, Fall Semester. It arrived Friday at 4:47. The institutional hour for delivering news you hope no one will read until Monday, by which time the reaction window has been carefully narrowed by the weekend. I recognize the tactic. Friday afternoon delivery is the academic equivalent of a landlord slipping a rent increase under your door while you’re at work.

I open it.

The language is careful. “Innovative collaboration.” “Cross-disciplinary synergy.” “Institutional response to the current funding landscape.” I read it once for content and once for what it is not saying: that the humanities funding crisis has escalated enough that the administration needs a visible gesture, and has decided that gesture will involve my department and someone else’s, arranged into a joint initiative that will demonstrate Ardmore’s commitment to—I check the exact phrasing—“the integration of humanistic inquiry with empirical research methodologies.”