“Fine,” I managed. Though it wasn’t fine. Giles, a math Ph.D. candidate, who had emigrated from Senegal, did all the cooking and he took it very personally when someone didn’t eat what he had prepared.
Fortunately, my twin boys ate anything. At nearly seven-years-old they were approaching 4 ½ feet tall and climbing. I bought shoes nearly once a month.
The boys had heard the door and they came running down the hall with Molly, our Golden Retriever. Molly likes Kelly, God knows why, and she proceeded to jump up on her, wiggling with joy. Kelly swore and pushed Molly down roughly. Molly yiked, more in disbelief than in actual hurt, I thought, but Mike, my oldest by a few minutes, was hugely offended.
“Hey!” he yelled, grabbing for Molly’s collar and pulling her into a hug. He looked up at Kelly like she was Eichmann in his glass booth on trial for war crimes.
“Yeah, watch out, you stupid, clumsy ox,” contributed Sam, my less diplomatic son.
“Who’re you calling an ox, you toad!” was Kelly’s scintillating rebuttal. “And get that creature away from me!”
Kelly aimed a half-hearted kick in Molly and Mike’s direction.
“That’s enough!” I stepped between the would-be combatants and then turned to Kelly.
“You don’t want to be here. All right, you’ve made that sufficiently clear. Take your book bag off my floor and go into the den. Close the door. Stay there.”
I turned to Mike and Sam.
“Take Molly into the kitchen, and then go upstairs and do your spelling.”
Having divided, but having no illusions I had conquered, I called down the hall to Carol that Kelly had arrived. I didn’t include Giles in my announcement. A dedicated pacifist, Giles just hated conflict. His soft brown eyes, magnified by his horn-rimmed glasses, take on the look of a deer caught in the headlights whenever there is yelling. At the sound of Kelly’s loud and angry voice, I’d heard the rapid flap, flap, flap of his flip-flops as he had hurried upstairs.
Carol came down our long, narrow center hallway, her short, rounded figure topped by a mop of hair cut exactly in a bowl shape. Giles’s culinary skills at work, I always assumed. She looks like she was born swaddled by L.L. Bean. I believe everyone from Maine is required to wear corduroy clothing, and Carol is no exception. As she came down the hall toward us, her friendly, freckled face was calm, but her hazel eyes were assessing the situation.
“Kelly, let’s get you set up in the den,” Carol said. She has a lovely, clear voice, both concerned and yet authoritative. My chief fear for her in her chosen career of social work was that the overwhelming needs in our society would burn her out, leaving only a shell of concern. Making her a bureaucrat. But not yet.
For a second it looked like we were going to get away with separating the kids so I could leave in peace. No such luck. Molly, disliking calm in any form, slipped away from Mike’s grasp as he had been slowly, oh so slowly, tugging her toward the kitchen. She dashed over to Kelly and licked her hand.
“Oh, gross!” Kelly yelled, holding up her hand like she’d been scalded instead of licked.
The boys laughed heartily at this reaction, causing Kelly to yell, “You suck!” at them.
I opened my mouth to remonstrate, but Carol made shooing motions at me with her hands, looking for all the world like a young and very intelligent Aunt Bea from Mayberry. It was cowardly, but I ran for it.
Well, I ran as fast as I could wearing a full-length formal dress, a cape and red sequined Ferragamo heels. I rarely wore heels. At my height I hardly needed to add to it and I was not good at walking in them, let alone sprinting. I got out the door in record time, however, and then teetered down our brick walkway toward the sidewalk.
The screaming inside the house followed me. A couple walking by, white, conservatively dressed, middle-aged, probably prospective freshman parents, glanced up at the sound of the screaming and then shuddered. Was it just the screaming or was it also the color of my house? It was hard to tell from their quickly shuttered faces.
My old Victorian house is only two blocks from campus and when I bought it, it had been painted a drab gray that was peeling off in sections. After the kids, Giles, Carol and I had failed to do more than dab on about ten square feet of paint in several months of effort, I’d hired a professional painter and it was now red with yellow picking out the trim like the San Francisco “Painted Ladies.” This was designed as a deliberate insult to the constantly gray skies of Chicago. People noticed. From the windows of my study on the second floor, I often saw people stop and point. Well, it made it easy to give directions to my house since every other house in this row of tall, thin Victorians was either gray or brown. The kids liked it a lot. They said it was a cartoon house.
The passersby shuddered briefly and hurried on down the street. Small-town parents often looked shell-shocked after visiting Hyde Park. The recruitment office should keep them on campus.
Safely on the sidewalk in my stiletto heels, I took a couple of breaths from my diaphragm like the kids and my Tae Kwon Do instructor had us do in classes. It was supposed to increase your life force. God knows I needed to do that. My life force was running close to empty.
Despite my love of getting really dressed up, my schedule had made me want to back out of this mid-week reception thing. I really couldn’t spare the time. In addition to two kids, I worked in the Department of Philosophy and Religion as an instructor while I was supposed to be finishing my dissertation. I had cut a deal last semester to teach half-time, and I had thrown out my old dissertation and launched a new one.
Right out of college I had become a cop; that’s where I had met my future husband, Marco. But he’d been killed in a traffic stop that had gone hideously wrong, and there’d been suspicions of police misconduct in his death. I’d run as far and as fast as I could from police work. Philosophy and Religion had seemed far enough, but oddly my previous life kept catching up to me. Finally, I’d decided to quit running away from what I knew from police work, and I’d decided to dig deeply into the kinds of contradictions of power that were not only what policing was like, but it had turned out, what academic life was like as well. This had led me to work out an agreement to do some consulting for the campus police. I wasn’t really doing much of that, though, and I had made almost no progress on the dissertation re-write. In fact, right now I should probably be making notes and trying to write, not hobbling down the sidewalk swathed in sequins and satin.
I teetered along in the unaccustomed heels, vaguely registering the odd looks of passersby. You could wear nothing but a loincloth and a lot of tattoos on the campus, like the young man I’d seen escorted off the main quadrangle just last week, and not rate a second glance. But a formal length gown and cape stuck out like jeans on the Pope. That’s university culture.
University culture was not turning out to be what I expected when I chose it as a refuge from police work. It was much more violent than I had imagined. I’d sought academics like a wounded animal would seek a dark, narrow burrow as a safe, quiet place to lick its wounds, but I’d been quickly made aware that the burrow was nearly as bad as the Chicago streets. The university was ringed by urban poverty and a lot of the crime was petty theft. The surrounding poor saw the casual affluence of the whole place as both an insult to their existence and an easy target. And the students, faculty and staff were not exempt from the tendency to steal from and even inflict bodily harm on each other. In the Middle Ages in Europe, members of universities had been exempt from prosecution by civil authorities and some of
