my avowals that solitude is my preferred and natural state, that I would rather hide alone in my study making drawings than have to interact with clients, contractors, or any people other than Jesse, I do become more alive than usual, more peppy and performance-high, when I stand up in front of the students. It helps that the room is dark when I speak, the faces of the students obscured.
Today, when I finish my lecture, I turn on the lights and pack up my things. As the students disperse, Leo strolls into the room from the hallway — he retreats to his office when I come in to speak — and thanks me. “How did it go?” he says. “Did the students hang on to your every word, as usual?”
“Actually, the room felt a little sleepy today. As if some of these kids were having trouble seeing the relevance of old houses to their careers as the next Frank Gehry.”
“Were there any difficult questions?”
“No. Why?”
“I have a few feisty students this term, a few who like to question long-held principles simply because they are long-held. One young woman reminds me of you, years ago. But if Autumn didn’t make her presence felt today, well and good.”
“Your student’s name is Autumn?”
“Yes, as in the current season.”
“And you say it with such a straight face.”
“I learned long ago not to question or remark on anyone’s name. Down that path lies accusations of prejudice.”
“Also fallen leaves. Big piles of wet, slippery ones, I imagine.”
His smile is uncertain. What the hell am I talking about? He says, “Do you have time for lunch at the faculty club?”
“I don’t, I’m afraid. I have to drop something off at my son’s school.”
“Until next week, then. Oh, and you can expect an invitation in the mail to a small party in my honour that’s being held in a few weeks’ time. I’ve won some kind of award, it seems.”
“You have? Congratulations. Which one?”
He names a prestigious lifetime achievement award given by the national architects’ association, I congratulate him, and I promise to attend the party, whenever it is.
Public speaking makes me hungry, but I have no time to stop for food; I race home, throw Jesse’s bag into the car, and drive up to Westdale. It’s 12:04 when I find a parking spot in front, turn off the car, and try to pick out Jesse’s black sweatshirt among the lunchtime hordes that flow on and around the sidewalk and lawn in front of the school.
In the grey light of the overcast day, the Westdale student body glows far less than it did at the dance. Many of the faces that pass by my car window are pale and acne-ridden, and some are badly in need of a shave. Several boys who look to be Jesse’s age are smoking cigarettes with all the mannerisms of veteran smokers.
A Goth girl in dark makeup, clothes, and hair trudges past on six-inch-high platform shoes. How much time does it take to layer on her look each morning, how much effort to make her angry/sad, I’m-different-damn-you style statement? As much time and effort is probably required to turn two ordinary, fresh-faced girls into the pink-lipsticked, whorish, dyed blondes who walk by next, in shrunken jackets worn open to reveal their low-cut tops, and jeans so tight the seams must leave deep, detailed imprints on their legs.
How happy I am not to be young at this moment, how relieved to have found my weird loner place in life, to be cloistered away in my late middle age.
Jesse looms up beside the car, opens the passenger door, reaches for his bag, says, “Hey, Em, thanks a million. Gotta run.” Behind him is Sylvia’s son, Ben, someone I didn’t think Jesse lunched with. Ben says hi, Jesse closes the door, and they turn away and walk up the street, are swallowed by the pale and pimply masses. Leaving me to shake off the cloying mist of teen angst that has seeped inside the car and drive home.
After lunch and a nap, I sit down at my desk with my tea and square of chocolate, turn on my computer, and open an email from a name I don’t recognize — a Thomas Denby. I am about to delete it until I realize that this person is not selling prescription drugs or counterfeit Rolex watches. He knows me.
The message reads:
Dear Ms. Harada,
I’m looking for the Emily Harada who worked on rescue archeology excavations in Earith, Cambridgeshire, and North Cave, Yorkshire, during the summer of 1975. Are you by chance that person? I obtained your email address from a website about Canadian architects, but no picture or age was given there, so I’m rather taking a shot in the dark.
If you are that Emily Harada, or if you know how to reach her, please advise. I lived in Manchester thirty years ago, but am now an urban planner in Leeds and am on a committee charged with organizing a diggers’ reunion in Earith in a few weeks’ time.
Yours truly,
Thomas Denby
I am that Emily Harada, and at the age of twenty I had the good fortune to get a summer job in England. A childhood friend of my mother’s lived in London and knew someone who knew someone who helped arrange for me to be a “subsistence volunteer” on a rescue archeology dig, which meant that for four weeks I slept in a tent pitched in a field in the fens of Cambridgeshire, used a chemical toilet, and bathed only on Saturdays, when we bused into town and paid fifty pence to use the public baths.
With my dig mates, I spent nine-hour days in the blazing sun wielding pickaxe, wheelbarrow, and trowel, digging up the remains of a Roman villa that had been unearthed by a backhoe at a gravel quarry. (The pit men stood by, waiting for our crew to finish excavating and recording the site, so that they could, er, quarry on.) In the evenings, we walked for half an hour across pastures, over stiles, and down country roads to the village and its one pub.
I did not think that doing menial labour — ditch-digging, basically — for pennies per hour under primitive living conditions was debilitating, depressing work. I was young and on my first trip abroad — I thought I was living a heady adventure.
My fellow subsistence volunteers were a mix of English and Irish and Scottish students who devoted their summers to the rescue excavation circuit. The dig director was a graduate student from the London Institute of Archeology, a lanky man named Clive, long of leg and charm, a gifted gabber with twinkly eyes, handsome smile lines around his mouth, and defined biceps revealed for my viewing pleasure when he occasionally dropped his supervisory clipboard to shovel dirt alongside the volunteers.
I developed a mad crush on Clive within about a day of meeting him, uncaring that he had a young wife at home and a roving eye that did not rove over me. Such was my devotion that soon before the dig ended, when he mentioned during a tea break that he was driving up to Yorkshire next to do a quick survey of a late Neolithic hut circle site that had come to light when a farmer plowed his field, and did anyone want to join him, he could take and pay three diggers for a few days, I shouted out yes before he’d completed his sentence, like an overeager game show contestant jumping the buzzer.
A smelly but cheery young teenager named Tom, from Manchester, who relished the outdoorsy, camping aspect of archeology, also signed on. So did an Oxford student named Mary, a milkmaidish girl — busty and apple-cheeked and sweet of countenance. Neither a maker nor appreciator of acerbic remarks was she, and therefore, to me, not friend material.
