Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

No one, that was, except Gail Bronfman. At nine o’clock, she swallowed the dregs of her coffee, put the cup in the sink, sat down at the desk in the bedroom—the notes for her dissertation, spread over five white legal pads, neatly piled in its left-hand corner—and dialed the woman’s number, thinking, She won’t be there at nine o’clock on a Monday. I’ll leave a message . Instead, she was greeted with a chirpy “Hello-oh.”

“Gail,” she replied, attempting to sound confident and cheerful though the name stuck in her mouth. “It’s Beth Bernstein.” She rushed on before the woman could say anything. “I just arrived in New York and thought I’d just, um, call and check in with you. I was thinking maybe I could come in and talk to you sometime this week. I just, you know, feel awful about, about what happened and I’d love to be able to make it up to you. And also to explain it all to you, because I don’t know if you ever got the whole story. It was just”—she paused here, feeling she was, perhaps, going off in the wrong direction, focusing on the past, rather than the brilliant, happy future, in which she and Gail Bronfman swapped war stories in the faculty lounge—“a ridiculous situation. I know, also, that you would be such a great resource for me, for my dissertation, that we have some overlapping interests, and I’d love to work with you while I’m here, in whatever way I can.”

The woman said nothing. “I mean,” Beth continued on, “I hate to think that this stupid mix-up with my credits has damaged what could—I mean, has ruined—”

“ Beth ,” Gail Bronfman said finally, in a sharp voice, hitting hard the final digraph, “from what I understand, from what you yourself told me last month, there was no mix-up . It’s your responsibility to keep track of your credits. And you didn’t.”

It was Beth’s turn to remain silent. In all her ruminations on the subject, this particular explanation had not occurred to her. She’d viewed herself as the incontrovertible victim of a stupid bureaucratic glitch. Or, no, maybe not. Maybe, perhaps, possibly , deep down she’d known it was her fault, but hadn’t wanted to admit it.

“Now,” the woman continued, “you’re a bright girl and, from what we’ve heard, an excellent teacher. And we were all quite taken with your chapters.” These were the first two chapters of her dissertation. Beth’s heart began to boom below her ribs. It was all going to be okay. All would be forgiven. “We’d love to have you join us in the spring, but I just don’t know if it’s going to be possible. You put us in a very difficult situation. We had to scramble to find someone to fill your place. And he had to scramble to prepare for classes, but he’s working out very nicely. And as you might expect, we offered him the same contract we offered you, which runs through the spring semester.”

Tears popped into Beth’s eyes and a thickness overtook her throat. She would not, she knew, be able to speak. Mercifully, Gail Bronfman had more to say.

“We might be able to take you on as an adjunct, though you’d be teaching intro classes and the pay would be considerably less. And you’d have no benefits. But we won’t know until January.”

“That would be great,” cried Beth in a strangled voice. “Really, that would be fine. That would be great.”

“Okay,” said Gail Bronfman, her tone softening. “Well, we’ll keep in touch. You might also be able to pick up a composition class. I can put you in touch with Bob Deangelis, in the English department.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Beth, with perhaps too much passion. “Thank you. That would be wonderful.”

She hung up the phone, thinking, That went well. Everything will be fine. But slowly, as she wandered restlessly through the three rooms of her borrowed apartment, the sick dread returned. Adjuncts were the lowest of the low. She didn’t want to be an adjunct. And once you started adjuncting there was no way out. You were stuck in the adjunct lane forever , unless you published a book or did something spectacular, which you didn’t do, because you didn’t have any time or connections, because you were an adjunct , and had to teach way too many classes to make a living. And she had to have benefits. Her inhalers alone would cost hundreds per month.

But she had no other options. It was October, obviously too late to apply for full-time teaching jobs for the current year, unless, by some chance, someone was going on sabbatical or maternity leave in the spring. But that was a long shot. All she could do was try for jobs for the following fall—do the interview circuit at the PCA in March, just as she’d done the previous year—and beg the other city schools for some spring classes. Or, of course, she could finish up her research in the next three months, find a sub-subletter for the apartment, and go back to Milwaukee in January, but that seemed, somehow, impossible, her life there already a distant dream. “How did this happen,” she said aloud. “Oh my God.” Before her thoughts could go any further—toward self-pity or anxiety—she threw on her clothing from the day before, slipped her feet into her scuffed brown clogs, and ran down the four flights of stairs.

Breathless, she pushed through the lobby’s ornate glass door and walked around the corner to the closest commercial strip, a decrepit block consisting of a Laundromat, a wood-paneled pizzeria perpetually filled with teenage boys in puffy jackets, and a sporadically-in-business candy store, stocked with Necco Wafers, Mallo Cups, yellowed cellophane bags of circus peanuts, and assorted other off-brand sweets, all of which appeared to have been manufactured in some bygone era, before the advent of Hershey’s and M&M’s. Her friends had been right to warn her away from the neighborhood. Even the closest grocery store was blocks and blocks away, blocks that felt extraordinarily long when lugging home a half gallon of milk and a can of peeled plum tomatoes. She briefly contemplated the pizza place before settling on the candy store. Therein, she spent a happy few minutes poking at dusty cellophane packages of wax lips and thumbing through outdated copies of People , until a low, smoke-addled voice from the front of the shop interrupted her reverie. “Can I help you, miss?” Startled, Beth dropped her magazine back onto the rack and walked over to the counter, where a diminutive person—a dwarf, she realized, a dwarf —of indeterminate gender peered at her from behind thick corrective lenses. “Yes,” she found herself saying, “I’ll have a pack of Lucky Strike Lights,” though she didn’t smoke and never had, other than the occasional nervous puff at a party. And yet, as she walked the two blocks home she began confidently, instinctively, tapping the cigarette pack against her palm, before realizing why: Dave. She stopped dead at the corner of Forty-eighth Street and Thirtieth Avenue, where a fig tree had spilled overripe fruit over a row of parked cars. Fuck , she thought. Dave . For a few days now, she’d managed not to think about him in anything but abstract terms. Now, the full extent of his Dave-ness—the overwhelming reality of his existence, just miles away from her, in Brooklyn—hit her sickly. Would Emily or Sadie or Lil tell him that she’d gone out with Will? Possibly. Yes, very possibly, thinking that he should know that she wasn’t hung up on him, that she hadn’t come here because she was still in love with him, or, at least, that any lingering infatuation hadn’t contributed to her decision to move here, or that she hadn’t even been thinking, Hey , I’m moving to New York. Maybe Dave and I will get back together. But all of this, of course, was true, or sort of true. She didn’t know if she wanted him back, but she wanted him to want her back. And she wanted him to think of her as his and his alone, as the girl who’d loved him fully and purely four years earlier.