a huge trash cart, but Mrs. Forster hasn’t been able to tell me whether I can chuck everything away. Some of it is old essays.” Since Tim and Erin are both dumbly staring at me, I add, “I’m in E-four-twenty-nine, next to this…elderly gentleman. Bushy white hair, a little—um—mad?”
“They put her into Corvin’s cabinet?” Erin casts an incredulous glance at Tim, who rolls his eyes.
“You’ve met the department ghost, Anna. Andrew Corvin. He turned seventy shortly after I came here, but he refuses to let go, and they haven’t the heart to take official action against him. We thought he would retreat licking his wounds when Elizabeth Mayfield made him give up his office on the first floor and relegated him to the fourth. No such luck. He sits there like an ancient crone on a treasure and won’t budge.”
“So it is Corvin’s hoard, in my office? He was really upset when he found me trying to straighten up in it.”
“He has keys to doors even maintenance doesn’t have keys to. He’s been here longer than anyone else. That’s why they defer to him.”
“Plus, Hornberger is holding his wing over him,” Erin adds. “Did you speak to Elizabeth about him?”
“I tried, but that day she wanted to introduce me to Giles Cleveland, so we never got around to Corvin.”
“Ah, you’ve met Giles!” Tim’s face lights up like that of an infant shown its favorite rattle. “It’s a good thing he’s back. Is Giles going to mentor you?”
“I believe so.”
“You can come to me, too, any time, Anna,” Erin says quickly. “You really must ask for help if you run up against a problem. I can tell you’re the type who wants to do everything by herself, be independent. That’s cool, but there comes a point at which it is less than efficient. I only realized that when I had Deidre. Some things you just can’t do on your own.”
I love it when women tell me they only really discovered what’s what in life after they had children. Very helpful, that.
Most of the people I meet these days I meet through Tim Blundell. All of them are in that familiar pre-semester scramble, but everyone welcomes me with a word of advice about the library services, the uncooperative Xerox machine, or the cafeteria food (I’m told to call the Observatory cafeteria “The Eatery” to avoid looking like a greenhorn).
The rings around Tim’s eyes, however, are due not only to the start of the semester. He has handed in his tenure file to be assessed, aye or nay, for tenure and promotion. After years of hard work and strenuously-maintained conformity, he has taken the dive off the ten-meter platform, performed his twists and somersaults, tried not to make too much of a splash upon entering the water, and is now waiting for the jury to decide whether he will be placed or not. It is a nerve-wracking time, and I attribute some of his bitchiness to it.
New Faculty Orientation, as Giles Cleveland predicted, is tortuous. New assistant professors and adjuncts clutch their notebooks and diligently follow the endless series of presentations on equity, diversity, honor codes, benefits, the campus topography, and “How to Write a Syllabus.”
“I know how to write a syllabus,” groans the woman next to me behind the curtain of her long braids. “I wouldn’t have gotten this job if I didn’t, would I?”
“I wish they’d just give us a six-inch folder with info to take home,” I murmur back. “I won’t remember a quarter of this by tomorrow.”
She looks up and smiles, evidently relieved that we “chime.”
“Everyone else is so keen,” she sighs over a muffin and coffee later on. “I mean, I know this stuff is important, but I just want to get on with it. Meet the students. Teach.”
“What do you teach?”
“Black Atlantic Cultural Studies, mainly. Identity theory, race and gender. You?”
“Where—which department? Sociology? Politics?”
“No, English. Why—are you?”
We hail each other as long-lost friends and bond over the confession that Elizabeth Mayfield makes us shake in our shoes. Her name is Yvonne Roberts; she is ten years older than me, divorced with two kids, and has more energy than just about anyone I have ever met.
“Do you think students here will be very different than the ones you’re used to?” she asks. “Bound to be, aren’t they?”
“You think? Top American colleges are peopled by middle-class American nineteen-year-olds—how different from each other can they be?”
“You gotta keep ’em on their toes.” Yvonne grins, while the next speaker is clearing