The Sand Hill Review http

The Sand Hill Review http://www.sandhillreview.org 2008

Angel

Ingrid Satelmajer

The first time she spoke to me, I was in the hallway. Two minutes earlier, I had failed my Ph.D. qualifying exam. I now crouched next to the Coke machine outside the examination room, a pool of tears around my blubbering form.

I said “blubbering,” but it’s true that I was heavy as well, a full and solid mound. My sister’s incessant cooking had sustained me through my coursework, and I had grown softer and more round with every graduate seminar. While at first I fought the large portions she heaped on my plate, I since had slipped into a pattern of permission, acceptance, and desire. I now reached eagerly every night into steaming pans on the stove for second and third helpings.

Each graduate course linked to a dish that had helped me through my struggle. Apple strudel for Eighteenth-Century Oral Cultures; sour cherry sauce over noodles for Western Travel Fantasies; stuffed cabbage for Autobiographical Biographies.

My seminar were a testament to each semester’s progress. Clean front pages transmuted into chapters sticky and grainy with crumbs—textual recollections of attendant moments of shame. Sour cherry splatters on chapters 20 through 22 of Alice Goes to Tokyo on the evening after I had identified Japanese people as a “race” rather than an “ethnic group.” Cinnamon-laced pieces of apple in the entire final section of All Holler in the Pub, for which I had shouted out the opening lines of my class presentation. My classmates had stared fixedly at the table after my opening yelp. In texts from Autobiographical Biographies, a particularly anxiety-laden course, translucent cabbage fibers covered the margins of every page; the paper appeared as if made on some island where women press flowers and butterflies into damp sheets of pulp in their pursuit of becoming “independent economic communities.”

And then the gravy.

My sister made a delicious lemon egg gravy, just a minute away from solid, but always warm and pliable. She had cooked multiple batches every week during one semester that I had started with strength and resolve. The previous summer, sustained by an intense regime of sweaty jogs, I had chanted Emily Dickinson poems in anticipation of my impending qualifying exams. Not one classmate mentioned the two pounds lost, but I even looked briefly at the jeans rack in Kohl’s, my photographic memory filled with the precise angles at which I had once swiveled my hips in denim without elastic waistbands. Nineteenth-Century Americana had destroyed my resolve.

Two famous cliques from the program had staked out their positions on either side of the seminar table with quiet vengeance. Clique 1, peopled by pageant-quality students, their hair always thick and shiny and their toned hindquarters encased in tight-fitting pants, met every week for trendy “X Files” gatherings, their slim waists never giving a sign of the chic nacho platters they casually tossed together. They spoke theorojargon, loved literary criticism, hated primary texts, and they terrorized their classmates with their performance angst.

“Oh, God. I sucked.”

“Oh, God, Gottfried. You did not.”

“But nobody said anything about my presentation.”

“But, Gottfried, I’m saying something. And it was great. And really. And really if there were any problems at all, it was the assignment. Really. It wasn’t you. But really, you told us so much about manufactured whiteness—how it’s marked and, um, how it’s performed.”

The other group, Clique 2, though of similar theory-based sophistication, never talked like that. In fact, they didn’t talk with each other or anybody much at all. They were less a formally linked group than a set of students who were similarly intense and intent on protecting the environment, to the degree that it managed to sift in through the ventilators of our building.

“Speciest!” The leader once hissed at the student next to me. The mousy non-cliquist had acted with uncharacteristic resolve, squashing a tiny bug after watching it trail around the table for fifteen minutes. I saw tears forming at the corners of her downcast eyes as she pondered the full implications of the insult. Although I had not even wished an ill thought on that particular bug, I shook from the hissed intensity of the Clique 2 leader’s wrath. How many times had my own pencil eraser been poised above a febrile gnat, ready to edit it out of this world?

Then, just before we started reading the final text for Nineteenth Century Americana, a direct war had broken out between the two cliques. A Clique 1 had taken as a direct insult a critique by a Clique 2 on the applicability of European theoretical schools in the course.

“Bitch!”

The same insult hurled by both parties had spun our heads. And the teacher’s staunch policy of non-involvement—he refused to utter a word during the first half of each class period in service of our self-empowerment—meant we were left to our own devices. We sorted through the implications of the insults, we parsed the meaning of each escalating “Bitch,” until someone slipped in his conjugation of appropriate linking verbs, another student took it as an insult, and the entire classroom erupted into shrieks of “Bitch!” That night, my nerves completely shaken, I jostled my bowl of dumplings and gravy over the central chapter of the book so that its pages were covered in a sticky paste of yellow and cream. The weight and the warmth of the liquid mash seemed like a blanket wrapped around my soul and Hester Prynne’s. Oh, it was draped around her shoulders now, and for just this moment, no one could see that shameful letter. So I simply pressed on and finished the text. Later, I would rue the gravy.

One month into the following semester, Professor Woolman challenged me at my qualifying exam. “Chapter 13. The Scarlet Letter.” A request that seemed reasonable for a student with my reputed memory. And on such a basic text.

I stared back with sickly smiles, and he repeated his demands.

“Chapter 13! The Scarlet Letter!

I recalled only gravy as I covered my ears against his shouts.

Slumped in the hallway after the qualifying exam, I suffered my failure like Hester Prynne in full public view, my exam the best food for the departmental gossip that pooled in any corner where clusters of graduate students collected.

“Should we say something?”

“I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to me.” The Clique 1 student spoke in a hushed voice, but without regard for the pitch perfect acoustics of our tiled hallway. And then Angel stooped next to me.

She always wore high-heeled boots under tight jeans, so I knew it was she as soon as I saw her leather-encased feet. I lifted my head just as her face came down to my level, and while later I was embarrassed when I saw my blotchy face in the mirror, I couldn’t care less at this moment. She placed her hand on my shoulder and spoke in a low voice.

“Are you okay?”

Her makeup, I could see even in my distress, was perfect. I choked on my words.

“It’s going to be all right.” And she rubbed my back even as her friend clattered past.

So began our friendship, but even though Angel spent the next hour with me, I didn’t know at that point that it was friendship. It only felt like hope, but it tempered my grief to such an extent that when I arrived home that night, my sister didn’t realize how severe my failing was.

I had been living for two years in her house. Hulda’s husband, Gerde, had built a room for me in the corner of their basement, and so I had my own bathroom and my own entrance. The separate entrance offered promises, possibilities. Since I never used it, though, the gritty concrete steps filled with silt and leaves from the garden. My sister rushed out every downpour with a shovel, scooping up the debris so it wouldn’t clog the drain and cause a flood in the basement.

“Almost done!” she always shouted as the shovel scraped and grated. The rain muted any sound she made.

The rent was so cheap, it didn’t matter that I started each school year by dumping out the shoes that had accumulated soft layers of green mold from sitting in my corner closet through the humid summer months. And my sister, who knew nothing but harsh generosity—screaming even as she fed you—never complained about the cost of an extra person living in their house. She left me alone in my subterranean world, only entering it when she scraped off those back steps. She asked only that I complete a few chores, chief among them this task: empty regularly the small and ancient dehumidifier that shuddered its way through the damp basement air.

It’s fiiiiiine. It’s fiiiiine,” she told Gerde when he surfaced that night from silence to suggest once again that they replace it. “She takes care of it. Never a light—” Her index finger signaling the machine’s red full light; a nod in my direction. Then her final words on the subject, which always won the day. “Don’t you have something else for spending two hundred dollars?”

“I made a friend today,” I blurted out. I had been pulling my spoon through an oily pool of paprika in my goulash, breaking up the pool, watching it reform; breaking it, watching it reform.

“Good.” My sister again. “Maybe this friend can help you study for taking the test again?” She was not angry, but her work ethic was unrelenting.

“I mean, not a friend, but someone who I think might be interested in being my friend.” I couldn’t stop myself. “She said I was smart. She said she was certain the teachers thought so, too. She said my standards were high for myself, that everyone’s standards were high for me; and that was why I failed. And we walked together on the campus mall for an hour.”

“Then we have something to celebrate.” My sister dished out a giant piece of my favorite cream torte. She certainly had made it in anticipation of my passing my exam. “Only one piece?” I held out my hand against the second, and a split moment later the house lights dimmed as the ancient dehumidifier shuddered into action below. Hulda’s determined grin, sent Gerde’s way, distracted her attempt to push a second piece on me. I hadn’t told her I was the only one that year to fail.

Angel never had spoken to me before that time in the hallway, but I already knew her habits, her ideas, and the tone of her voice when she was angry or excited.

We had taken Autobiographical Biographies together, an especially demanding course—that of the stuffed cabbage—and had sat at opposite ends of a seminar table in a room filled with shelves of bound dissertations.

My own traditional role in graduate courses was highly utilitarian. It had developed from the precision of my memory and my willingness to play a supporting role. As other students tossed out a variety of ambitious arguments, I provided the documentation, making no discrimination between opposing positions but simply interested in offering the best evidence possible for each claim.

Autobiographical Biographies moved from the premise that every biography contains traces of its writer’s own life, and we embarked on an intense series of critical analyses that began with James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. In learning of the course’s premise, in carting back the thick course volumes from the bookstores, I had harbored secret hopes for this class. The obscure nature of the course premise suited my skewed intellect; the voluminous tomes meant that few students, if any besides myself, would make it through the course reading list; and the lengthy reading assignments also meant it would be necessary, in a successful course, for there to be a student with a memory such as mine—one ready to recall precise page numbers of connecting textual evidence. I stared fondly at Hiller Price’s 2,000+ page biography of David Bowie and imagined the deft ease with which I might support my classmates’ arguments about the singer. To him who supports will come the prize, I muttered.

My hopes held even when I witnessed the healthy contingent of Clique 1 students on the first day of class. But it soon became clear that I was not prepared for the turn of events that played out that semester. Where the performance anxiety of Clique 1 students generally bullied others into attitudes of hero worship, this particular course unfortunately suffered from their displaced performance anxiety. They were anxious, I would learn later, about an original musical that they were writing, directing, and starring in—and clearly they were devoting far more time to their show tune rehearsals than to the course readings.

“I have a hard time with this Freudian line of thinking,” Gottfried would say at the beginning of class.

“Yeah. It seems so structuralist of us to be just talking about plot points in these biographies and tracing themes and tropes. Don’t you think?” This from Jay, who later played the role of the swashbuckling hero in their show. He had honey-colored skin and Fabio-fabulous hair. His smile charmed us all.

But I had no idea what he was saying. I couldn’t make the connection between Freudian and structuralist theories. As a result, I was unable to provide a single murmured quote or even page number.

“Oh—so you agree with Herman Kampf’s line of thinking on structuralism?” Gottfried.

“It’s not that I agree so much with his thinking; I do think, though, that his main premise—on the obstructionist nature of structuralism—is highly applicable hear. I mean, here.” Jay pointed to the ground.

A long period of silence settled in around the table when Jay started talking in typographical errors. No one could speak from fear of attack or self-exposure, even as every student frantically paged through copies of How General Washington Fucked Up and What That Has to Do with My Father.

Professor McLowell, as always, opted for an early break. Her own thick hair settled its weight on her shoulders, as she chatted up the Clique 1 students about the X Files. Then, Angel rescued us in the second half.

“Um, going back to the opening premise of the course.” She’d brought us back to the text, circling in on a specific passage with diplomatic verve. She always leaned back from the table when she spoke, her jean-clad legs crossed.

I started somewhat softly with the evidence, picking up the page numbers that Angel neglected as she continued. “Page 15,” I murmured. “Page 654.” Always quiet, I dropped into her pauses as the other students leafed through their books, following the argument as it developed. As she continued, my load grew heavier.

“There was a place,” she said, “the part about the father, where I thought the author suggested something quite similar.”

“Page 396. ‘The first time I ironed my father’s handkerchiefs, I discovered the bloody secret of his sinus infection.’”

By the end, as her argument swept into its conclusion. I took over the burden of her evidence completely, spending almost as much time speaking as she did. Our rhythm progressed perfectly. Her pauses naturally grew longer, and I murmured my way through them, fueled by a sense of teamwork, of perfect timing that instinctually existed between us. Angel and I never spoke directly to each other during these exchanges. To do so, the understanding seemed to be, would ruin the entire effect and would take away from our ability to engage in this way.

This held true even the one time that I questioned her argument. Her thesis, I thought, ignored some significant contradictory evidence in Chapters 3 and 187. I directed my comments to our professor.

“Yes, yes,” she waved me off and then motioned for Angel to continue.

I didn’t mind. I hadn’t wanted to listen to myself in that role either. I dropped back into my supporting murmurs almost immediately.

On the day our friendship began—on the day I failed the qualifying exam—Angel ushered me from our department’s hallways as soon as I could stand again. The department long ago had abandoned wood-paneled walls, upholstered window seats, narrow hallways, and built-in bookshelves, trading in for the clean-scrubbed efficiency of a modern office building. If Angel hadn’t stopped for me, I would have been carted off that night by the office cleaning staff, taken away with the other unsightly heaps of trash that sometimes collected in the otherwise barren halls. Or, at best, recycled. Clique 2 students staked out positions by the department’s trashcans. They worked in shifts, holding their T.A. office hours there, ready to inflict Eco-shame on anyone who tried to toss out a recyclable in the wrong bin. “There’s a better place for that,” they’d motion, without smile, at the plastic water bottle any unwitting freshman held poised above a garbage can.

Angel guided me out to the campus mall—an open space I sometimes had gazed out on from the windows of the library.

“I just need— I just need to drop this off, if that’s okay? And then we can sit and visit.” As if she had planned an elaborate social gathering for us rather than simply stumbled on my broken pieces.

“Well, I guess I have to say, I found that class was weird.” My thoughts, since she’d asked, on Autobiographical Biographies.

“Did you? You were so brilliant. All of that evidence.”

“There was something—there was something, I think, about the classroom dynamics, maybe.” I didn’t know how closely her own alliances ran with Clique 1. She only just had been walking with one in the hallway.

“Those students. Right?” She jumped to the answer quickly. “They huddle together. So high school.”

“Maybe—I think there was maybe something about the way it ended that bothered me.”

Then I told her a story, a part of which she already knew. How I had joined up with Shaun, another student who subsisted outside the nourishing centers of the cliques, and proposed during one of the breaks a group editing session. This part Angel knew—our general announcement, our expressed hope that people would be interested in sharing their final seminar papers, and the offer Shaun closed with: “Hey, um, feel free to bring food, too. We’ll make it fun.”

Then the classroom break chatter that started after a frozen pause.

“I liked Scully’s taupe suit better.”

“Oh! But she wore it with those heels!”

And the day of the session itself.

“I couldn’t come,” Angel broke in at this point.

“I know. You told Shaun. I understand. But you were the only one who said anything.”

I had brought to the study session a tray of my sister’s elaborate kartoffel cookies—shaped like potatoes, but with a sweet and buttery center.

“They probably didn’t come because they were all obsessed with that musical. They thought they were on the slow road to success with this program.”

“Their lack of preparation for the course.”

“They were spending all of their time on other things.”

“The way they fixated on theoretical schools instead of the texts.”

“They had rewritten it as a sort of Theoretical Masters X Files, with Derrida playing the role of Scully.”

“That’s why they were so caught up in all those details about Scully’s clothes.”

When no one showed up for the paper editing session, Shaun and I had nibbled on the entire tray of kartoffel cookies as we read each other’s papers. Only now did I remember how the faint notes of an unfamiliar tune had carried down the tiled hallway to where we sat.

I had no expectations beyond the day I spent with Angel on the mall.

Summer break started soon after, and the hallways of our department emptied out. Or, at least, the people left. It was a peculiar fact of that building that, empty as it became during those months, trash always continued to accumulate somehow. Even after classes were over, the trash piled up in the department’s hallways so that our school year starts always were signaled by the housekeeping staff carting out immense bags of debris to the dumpster.

Since I was lucky enough to live in my sister’s basement, I faced another summer employment-free, a fact that I hid with painful self-consciousness, fearful that it would mark me as politically or socially regressive among fellow students.

“I don’t buy into some bourgeois notion of ‘leisure time,’” Gottfried had announced in class on the first day I’d started at the program. I still recalled the conversation over a year later

“Yeah. Like ‘free time’ among the aristocracy. Give me Marx. Get rid of the privileged summer break. What are we? Some Euro whores with summer cottages?” That had been Jay.

“Except don’t you think Marx takes us back too much?” We had been introducing ourselves to each other in turn by saying what we had done over the summer, but Gottfried and Jay now were engaged fully in this aside. “I mean, I’m all for third-wave professionalism. Get those ten-year-olds out of the swimming pools and behind some lawnmowers!”

The introductions had resumed soon after with the mousy student—yet to be branded a “speciest”—stumbling over her explanation that while she had spent much of the summer reading in preparation for graduate school, she had worked two jobs during the previous school year so that she could afford the luxury. And in fact had worked every other summer since the age of twelve at various janitorial and manufacturing jobs.

I had seen her pull up that morning in a rusty, fifteen-year-old Honda Civic, whereas Gottfried’s best friend, Brenita, had remote locked with one click a shiny new Nissan Maxima. But any defense would have been pointless, as I later heard from Gottfried’s own mouth.

“Girl, that’s some car! Leasing? Use their tools! Go bankrupt in the best! I won’t be some capitalist whore giving into their power structure by ‘economizing.’”

I couldn’t even imagine what he would have said about the used books that lined my basement room.

When Gerde had constructed the room for me, his final touch had been shelves: pale, freshly cut wood, with cutouts only for the head of my bed and one dresser. My seminar books filled up several wooden planks, their spines radiating the anxiety that marked their pages. But most of the space was taken by other books—a full 973 titles that summer, by my count—all bought at used book stores and library sales for the lowest price possible—.25, .50, .75, never more than 1.50. In building a library, I had haunted book sales with a large cardboard box ever since the announcement I had heard at the end of one event: “We want to get this over, folks! One dollar for one box! One dollar for one box!” I had no container with me and had grabbed the last empty box from the stack resting by the librarians; now I considered it my talisman and never walked into a sale without that box.

Many of the books had brittle, yellow-tan paper; in the worst cases, they were held together by only the faintest traces of binding glue or a rubber band. But it little mattered to me if they fell into twenty pieces after my first reading. “Why not toss them?” my sister once asked, coming in through the basement door in the middle of a storm. Her hair clung in thick and sopping strands to her forehead, and the light in her eyes matched the gleam from the shovel she had been using to scrape the steps. I was lying on my bed, one of her handmade afghans cocooned around my body, my eyes fixated on the bookshelves—a favorite attitude of mine. How to explain that these books were my dreams and my solace? That I lay there so often remembering where they had taken me, wondering how they would deliver on their promises?

I hadn’t even needed to answer her. When I looked up at her, she walked over to the bed and pushed back my overlong bangs with her wet hand.

“Smart girl,” she said. “You will do something so good with them. You will do something great.”

But that year, as summer commenced and I faced the shame of my failure, I felt

no comfort in the prospect of three months in that room. I dodged my classmates’ end-of-year inquiries about summer plans with my technically truthful reply of, “I’ll be working.” I knew exactly where I’d be.

Angel didn’t back off when she called soon after classes were out.

“Working where?”

“Well, I’ve got lots of studying to do.”

“Yeah—I’m off for the summer too.”

She didn’t care about her privilege, she felt no shame, and, what’s more, she kept returning to me—with phone calls, with scheduled dates to “do stuff.” Two weeks in, I could see the months spreading out before us, both of us armed with empty cardboard boxes, caught up in a team-driven effort to snatch books from under the noses of the greediest of our competitors. We would return to my sister’s house in the end to feast on celebratory strudel sundaes and bowls of iced goulash.

Nothing like that ever happened. But there were hour-long phone conversations, where we rehashed shared movies or where Angel fed me from her vast store of gossip about our department. And then the highlight of the entire summer: the start of our final month off before the new school year. Angel had proposed that we go shopping and, my mind filled with worn book bindings and goulash, I climbed into her car that late summer morning, my empty cardboard box in hand. The air had collected humidity to a breaking point that oppressed, the heat had been building for weeks, and as we drove off, the rain started falling in vast sheets that filled the roads almost instantly with standing water. When Angel pulled into the parking lot at Hecht’s, I realized my mistake—laughed, “I knew I brought this for a reason,” and held my box over our heads as we ran through the driving rain to the store entrance.

“Is this okay? Do you mind?” Angel gestured at the racks of clothing around us. “I just need to get a few things.”

I’d already made my decision when I hoisted that box over our heads. Now I took the sodden cardboard, dripping wet in my hands, and shoved it into the trash can that stood by the parking ticket validation machine.

Still, what felt at first like my sacrifice, my moment of homage to Angel and her power, initiated nothing less than a month filled with reward.

One day, by my count, she tried on fifty-four different skirts. But somehow, even then, she never neglected me. I poured out monologues about my inadequacies to her open ears. She listened carefully, even when caught up in the delicate problem of how to distinguish the subtle variations between fifteen slightly different pairs of black pants.

The location of these confessions served me well. I was far beyond my dream of non-elasticized waistbands, clothing long had moved past being a real and purchasable object for me, and so the articles that surrounded me became beautiful and holy as icons of Angel’s world. Every wall display set up to celebrate back-to-school shopping—pleated skirts, crisp white oxfords—signified minor altars; the mannequins rose up as holy statues, Jesus and the saints in the modern landscape. And the rhythm of the rituals we established—my arms piled high with rejected or prospective piles while Angel murmured, “I’m listening” behind a dressing room door—prompted a fully realized tale of my own life.

It was Autobiography as Autobiography, or Autobiography as Biography, because Angel took all of my peculiar details—the mold, the bookshelves, the repeated call for “Chapter 13!”, the joy and shame always attendant with steaming pots of stuffed cabbage—and normalized them with the steady presence of her interest and acceptance.

Every night, when she dropped me off at the curb outside my sister’s house, I slipped quietly down those back steps to the separate entrance, and I slid into bed full of dreams where fluorescent lights reflected off freshly buffed floors. The smell of cabbage always lingered in the air, but I didn’t make a move.

I realized my error on the first day in a month when I didn’t have somewhere to go. The week had ended with an unusual set of triumphs. Angel’s new pair of eggplant colored corduroys—not brown; she had pursued, we discovered, the wrong color. Two pairs of black leather slides with heels that offered the same effect as her customary boots. Two pairs of jeans and—here, the biggest surprise of all—a jean skirt. I myself had engineered that final coup, steering Angel away from the racks of white skirts, and making my case with a voice I had lost long ago when I welcomed elasticized waists into my own closet.

“You can wear whatever color underwear you want with it. And look how flattering the waistband is on your hips.”

At home that Saturday morning, I lay in bed for the first time in months, switched on the tiny bedside lamp that I always used to read and stared at the light the lamp cast off on the side wall. It cast a steady glow on my subterranean life, the separate sections of the lamp’s leaden shade projecting the light in broken pieces onto the backs of my neglected books. My sister’s kitchen work always kept up a quiet pounding in the background—the kitchen was right above my room—and I waited for the smells of Saturday morning breakfast to drift down through the ceiling vents.

Everyone has a particular talent. My sister rolls out her strudel dough so thin that Gerde once laid out all of the place settings for dinner on top of it. And not just thin. The dough was so strong that when she discovered the three plates, three cups; the three forks, knives, spoons; the three napkins—all three settings on top of her strudel dough—my sister simply had taken the sheet of dough by an edge and had shaken the whole thing off. Two of the plastic cups had cracked before they rolled into a corner. But the round sheet of dough—she held on as she shook the whole of the settings off—stayed intact even as it billowed out.

Ever since that had happened, Hulda had taken to making her strudel dough early on Saturday mornings, before anyone could set dishes on top, and I always could hear her feet as she shuffled around the table, pulling and stretching the dough. But that Saturday morning, the first quiet time I had spent at home in so long, something unnerving came through—a too soon cessation of the shuffling, the grating sound of a chair as my sister pulled it out and settled her full weight on it, and then the harsh and low sound of sobs choking out from her throat.

As I rolled out of bed to investigate and attend to her grief, I noticed my surroundings in a way that I hadn’t for weeks. The damp carpet under my bare feet. The total silence of the house, with the exception of Hulda’s deep and racking sobs. A red light in the far corner of the basement that caught the edge of my vision as, listening to my sister, heart pounding in my chest, I ascended the stairs that led up to the kitchen. And then my frantic shoves against the door that, swollen with moisture, refused to give until Hulda, also pulling with all of her strength on the other side, helped me wrest it free from the doorframe that it more than filled.

The task had quieted her sobs, but I saw the scene of her grief as soon as I fell into the kitchen. On the round kitchen table, its marbled white vinyl top the best stage for all of Hulda’s culinary efforts, lumpy masses of damp dough stuck to the surface. The too thick sheet had adhered to the table, had stuck to her wooden rolling stick with gluey intimacy; it had pulled apart, had torn, had smeared and bleared. And Hulda was weeping the tears of a child who can’t figure out why her customary motions now fail.

“Almost done,” she was choking. “Almost done.”

She was weeping in a kitchen that showed how failure leads to failure—the pasty dough had brought her to a flour canister where, with clenched and failed hands, she had jerked open the lid until its contents had flown all over the kitchen. A fine mist now covered most of the cupboard fronts.

I walked over to where she leaned against the counter, held her damp and sticky form for a moment, then left without a word, padding down to the basement, heading straight for that red light, and pulling out the long-full bucket from the dehumidifier so I could dump it in the laundry room sink. Then I stepped into my room so I could take in my own damage.

Every book that I touched felt moist and pliable. Every paperback that I picked up hung limp in my hands, and the smell the books emitted, now disturbed, hung heavy with mildew and mold. Every last one was ruined, the entire collection transformed to a soggy mass that, once dry, would turn each book into hard and unyielding waves and ripples. I could toss the 374 that I already had read, that I knew with every inch and crevice of my body and mind, but there were so many more that would be wasted—utterly, entirely wasted.

I had to wait until Monday, the first day of classes, to drive over to the department.

There was no need for a resignation letter. I took care of all that over the phone—simply canceled my registration and received a full refund for the coming semester, so I could walk out of the department without a single word of comfort or protest from any faculty member.

Not that any of them were around.

I had shown up early before class, before the office staff arrived, before anyone else was there except for the cleaning staff, which let me in behind them when I smiled and said “please.” They looked puzzled at first, but they seemed grateful when I started hauling out one bag of trash after another, clearing up the halls, and loading it all into the back of Gerde’s truck.

I had bag after bag of paper—notes discarded, too many handouts photocopied, drafts of papers, graded essays. I even found, like some pocket of ancient dust unearthed, piles of blue-inked mimeographs, all of which had somehow collected in drifts in one third-floor corner over the summer. I did get a few curious looks in the parking lot, but it all was clean paper, ready to be added to my piles of books.

I had called Angel about my plans over the weekend, had invited her to join in the defection, but while she had said, “Oh, you’re brilliant. That’s great. That’s wonderful,” I could hear the coldness in her voice, and she hung up as soon as possible. “Byyyyye.” She drew the word out as long as it could go.

Hulda thinks we can sell what we construct. We have uncles, she reminds me, who peddle cars in California. There were trained tailors, she tells me, from whom we descended.

“Two who could—snip”—she motions with her fingers—“make like this”—her hands delineating a neat line by her waist—“and everybody was happy.”

She has a pan for soaking the strips, and she calls me her bird as I take the moist paper to the forms. James Weldon Johnson next to Amy Lowell next to payroll deduction memos next to the ragged edges students tear off before they hand in their papers.

I don’t really know how you would describe the dolls’ shapes, but Hulda marvels daily.

“Beautiful,” she says. And, “Like a bird you are so fast.”

With every bookshelf that I clear, we fill the open space with their tiny forms. And Gerde is constructing the sign we plan to hang out front: Advice Free. Papier maché dolls, $10 each.

Hester is much larger, but we consider her a separate matter altogether—six feet tall, her form taking shape as the first layer of paper delineates the reaches of her body. A set of wings rising out from her shoulders.

I haven’t read a book for weeks, and the bags of paper have started to collapse, to turn in on themselves.

It feels good to be useful again.