Any Day Now (16 page)

Sandy opened the door. “Sorry. Footsteps after dark.”

“Rip's got us spooked,” said Vonda. “You notice
he's
nowhere near these hallowed halls after five.”

“Indoor soccer night,” said Sandy.

“Foul,” said Vonda. She and Cookie had not spoken in a decade, tricky at department parties. Cookie always stood by her man and Vonda, after all, was always trying to trip him up. “Can you believe I left the whole swack of first-years' stories on my desk twice this week? You'd think I didn't want to read them.” She was a large woman with grey hair in an old Jane Fonda shag. “There's, I think, twenty-six, if everyone turned one in, which of course they didn't. At a half-hour apiece that means I'll be getting to bed somewhere around fifteen minutes before class starts tomorrow. Rip says he wants detailed, ‘thoughtful' analyses for each and every frigging thing the kids write. Just tell me: Did we write this badly?”

They laughed together and it was a nice sound, a nice feeling, to join in with someone on something.

Vonda left, and again Sandy closed her door, again reopened it. Danny and the folks would be sitting down to pork chops and Tater-Tots in the breakfast nook where her parents took all their meals now, the dining-room table covered with travel brochures and grocery flyers, the run-run of their lives. She'd have a yogurt when she got home, after reading — she thumbed through the remaining stack — two more, just two more. Beer and a grilled cheese while reading the newspaper. Then the last eight stories by 11:00, after which if she was still standing she'd bang out some notes for tomorrow's class. Unless she could set the alarm for 5:00 and finish the last couple then. She used to manage okay like this, but it hadn't been working lately. The alarm went off and she didn't care. The consequences — kids looking at her as if she were on drugs, which is what she sounded like without notes — lacked their former shame.

“I can't believe you're still here. And,” Foster looked up and down the hallway, “without anybody around to interrupt.”

“Foster,” was all she could say.

He came in, sitting on the same chair he'd nearly upturned two hours earlier.

“I didn't go home,” he said. “In between.”

“OK,” she said.

“Did you?” he asked. “Go home in between?”

“No, I've been here. Marking,” she said, pointing to the pile. “Lots of marking to do.”

“It must be hard,” he said.

“It's a lot of time,” she said. “In fact,” and she was amazed by the bitterness that came up like a squall, “when I teach, I don't write myself.”

“Oh,” he said. “No, I imagine it must be hard because there's such a dearth of talent out there. Or rather, in here, in this department.”

She couldn't touch this, though, of course, he was right. If she had even a couple of students in each class with that unteachable, wondrous thing — talent — it would make it easier. While her own writing sat like a garden in winter, she tended to the writing, most of it mediocre, of young people hankering after jobs on MTV.

“Foster, do you need something? Is there something you're not clear about?”

Foster had washed his lenses, or now that she looked more closely, one of the lenses. She focused on the eye she could see, a surprisingly blue eye with baby-thick lashes. Something red-orange sat, splat, on the front of his denim work shirt. He smelled. There were no windows to open either. Sixties design: Let's put in windows, then let's make sure no one can open them. The year she'd gone away to school — sophomore year at UCLA — six kids had jumped from dorm roofs. The windows didn't open, but those kids had found a way. Her roommate, Katie, had been standing in the parking lot when one landed from sixteen floors up. “Did he bounce?” the cops asked her. God, the things that come back. She needed to go home.

“It's about the profile,” said Foster.

“Your guy in Gaza,” said Sandy.

“I think he might be kind of hard to reach right now.”

“Even by e-mail?” Sandy hated e-mail interviews, but in Foster's case, he could do the whole bloody interview by e-mail. Let's get this kid on his way, Rip had said before leaving this afternoon.

“And as you can well imagine, Professor McCall, I'm having a bit of a hard time getting out to do interviews these days.”

She hated being called professor. It made what she did — standing up there week after week trying to impart something — seem like even more of a charade. And she sensed with certain students, like this one, who knew she didn't see herself as “professor,” that there was a nail in there somewhere.

“But I have an idea,” said Foster, and smiled, not sardonically, not dementedly, almost nicely.

“Tell me,” said Sandy, already swooshing together papers from the desk. She was a getaway queen.

“I want to interview you.”

In education workshops they told you to be prepared for anything. But if he'd pulled down his pants and mooned her — here's what I think of your passive, pacifist, do-good notions — she would have been less surprised.

“You keep telling us to write about what we're interested in, right? And what we know about, right?”

“That's one of the things I want people to do.”

“I'm going to write about my brain disorder.”

The new term for mental illness — she'd read it lately. But it missed something, both compassion and accountability. Implied, too, was the idea that a brain could be
reordered.
She looked at Foster, tried to see inside his skull, tried to decipher the patterns. Something was spinning… Whee! Rollerblades! Some were upturned, wheels spinning in the air; others careened into walls at car speeds; some nonchalantly glided toward a corner. Welcome to my brain. Because it was still her brain trying to picture his brain.

“OK,” she said, trying to slow things down so she could think. “But why do you have to talk to me?”

“You're kind of an expert,” said Foster.

“Because of my sister and nephew?”

“Don't forget your ex-husband,” said Foster, and Sandy knew she was going to regret this day, this week, this entire semester. And why stop there?

“Foster,” she said. “I think you're probably going too far.”

Foster nodded and opened the surprisingly pristine file he'd laid on her desk when he first came in. It was one of those expensive, plastic attachés shaped like a huge envelope and which came in hot, translucent colours — this one was aqua. Sandy connected them to design students or young ad-agency types. She could see manila file folders, precisely aligned, inside.

“I'm sorry to do this to you, Sandy,” he said, and for a moment she didn't know what he would pull out of there.

It was a sheet of paper. Foster read: “A student enrolled at this university is entitled to the full support of university faculty in the completion of his or her assignments.” He slipped the paper back inside its folder.

“So,” he said. “Full support. If I need something — and really, Sandy, I'm asking for fifteen minutes, thirty, tops, forty-five if you have a lot to say — to help in the completion of an assignment, then it's your job to give it to me.”

She breathed in as deeply as fury would allow, and on the out breath the phone, an office phone she'd never heard ring in her entire university career, rang.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Take your time,” said Foster. “It's your time.”

“Sandy.” It was Rip with a wall of kid sound behind him: TV, shrieks, dishwasher. “She knows.”

“Shit.” It was as specific as she could get with Foster watching her. He leaned back in the chair and opened his eyes wider. He grinned.

“Someone from the department called her. She won't tell me who. Then she searched my desk downstairs and came up with, you know, a receipt.”

“Is she there?”

“Off at her game. She's imagining me as the ball every time she kicks it or butts it off her head. That's what she said when she ran out of here.”

Foster examined his nails, chomped on a cuticle.

“She told me she wants to bust this little team up, that we're heading for opposite goal posts.” His voice was
so
not cool.

“Did you tell her” — she looked up at Foster who was wiping his glasses on his shirt — “that this isn't that dire, that, you know, we're not…”

“I told her it was strictly a dalliance. But she's so hurt. I never thought she'd be so hurt. She's such a tough…”

“Cookie,” said Sandy.

“I just wish I knew who ratted. Somebody's out to get me. You think it was Vonda?”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not, tell me why not?”

“Because she complains about you to me the way she always has.” Foster looked at her. She wasn't being cryptic enough. This kid would
run
with news like this. Go, bureaucrats!

“Really? Like what?”

“Your general approach to the profession.” She had to get back at him.
Dalliance.

“We'll deal with that,” he said. There was a really long pause. “I told you we needed to be more prudent.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Oh, well,” he said, and hung up.

“Intra-departmental crisis?” asked Foster, looking rejuvenated.

She shook her head, tried to breathe. “Not that big.”

“Do you mind if I make an observation, Sandy?”

“Could I stop you, Foster?”

“You're a basically good person in a basically nasty world and an even nastier institution. At some point you had big ideas, grand ideas, even revolutionary ideas, but then the world got hold of you. It shook you and broke you and punished you for those ideas.”

“Foster, you could be talking about anyone I know over the age of forty-five. It's called adulthood.”

“It sucks.”

“It does.” They sat in silence, almost companionable.

“Was your ex completely bonkers?”

“Is this your interview? You know, Foster, I never said I would agree to this. My colleagues” — what a jerky word — “might have some problems with this.”

“Complete support,” he said. “I'm entitled. It says.”

“Even if that support costs me more time, energy and sanity than I want to spend? Maybe even more than I have to spend? I have rights, too, you know.”

“Sandy, Sandy,” Foster leaned back, grinning. And in that moment she saw him for who he really was — torpedo all those fine leftist principles and the shrink's best guess. Foster was that old oppressor: an articulate, self-interested, blinkered male.

The realization made her snort. And this made him glare.

“You'd better not be laughing at me,” Foster said.

“Shoot,” she said, and looked at her watch. It was 6:15. She'd give him till 6:30.

“OK, then. Tell me, please, about your first experience
beside
this illness. That's how you put it, isn't it? ‘I don't know what it's like to live inside this disease, but I know what it's like to live beside it.'”

She resisted the impulse to critique his interviewing tone. “We were really young,” she said. “Steve was almost twenty-two. I was a year younger. He'd already had some incidents, you could say.”

“Incidents?” asked Foster.

“Foster, if you're not going to take notes, I'm not doing this.”

“It's here.” He tapped his temple.

She shook her head.

Foster slowly drew a legal pad from his plastic attaché and put it on the desk.

She waited. He wrote down three words, one per yellow line. “Young” she read upside down.

“My ex began hallucinating his junior year at UCLA. Student Health prescribed Stelazine and Thorazine. This was the year before we met.”

“Thorazine?” Foster's blue eye bulged. “You're kidding.”

“It was 1970,” said Sandy. And there it was: The Year in Pictures: Vietnam, Kent State, Cambodia, LBJ. Who
wouldn't
need drugs? She'd been caught plagiarizing in a Shakespeare class, but had been spared dismissal because they'd
all
been let off the hook that spring. Thirty-three thousand UCLA students had been unleashed on the misguided world so they could demonstrate their hopeful little hearts out. Most, of course, stayed home and got stoned. Steve at least was stoned on a prescription.

“What do you mean it was 1970? Could you elucidate, please?”

“Doctors prescribed some really druggy drugs back then, Foster. My ex wasn't even diagnosed as bipolar, just a disturbed, delusional kid. The student health docs figured the drugs would suppress his weirdness so he'd somehow be able to get back to class.” Sandy was talking perkily at him, but her mind had gotten stuck on that photo, that famous photo of the girl on her knees with the shot-dead boy, the girl's hair flying backward as if she'd skidded into home. The girl hadn't even been a student at Kent State, just passing through.

“I guess we're pretty lucky now,” Foster said. “Drug-wise.”

He'd opened the door wide enough for her to shimmy in. “I know my sis has been on everything under the sun…lithium…Neurontin…I for get the names.” Long pause while Foster stared her down. “What are you taking? If I may ask? I mean, what seems to help?” I mean, I mean.

“None of your fucking business,” said Foster and stood up. She didn't like the way he looked from this angle. Too big. Not funny.

“I'm trying to help,” said Sandy.
Don't threaten, don't shout, don't criticize, don't bait.
Early on in her sister's illness, the whole family, desperate to educate themselves, had taken a workshop called Managing the Crises of Your Loved One.

“Oh, please,” Foster said. “Spare me.”

“I'm trying to help,” Sandy repeated.
Avoid direct, continuous eye contact or touching. Don't block the doorway.