pout, pushing out my lower lip. “Can’t I keep it a little, to look at and smell?”
He snorts and pulls his mouth to one side. I think I have made Larry the janitor grin.
“Anna?” Tessa appears in the doorless frame of my office door. “Are you coming to hear Giles talk about Raleigh?”
There is a series of pre-lunchtime events in the university book store, and although I know I shouldn’t, I am longing to see Giles. He doesn’t want me, but I know that the sight of him will calm me down.
“You bet! Will you run ahead and keep me a seat?”
Ten minutes later I shunt the men out of my office, push the bike into a corner, lock the door, and gallop down the stairs.
The contrast between the fourth floor and the rest of the building, not to mention the rest of the campus, is surreal. It is warm enough for people to sit in shirts and sweaters on the steps of the stately entrance to the Observatory, on the lawns, and the low brick walls that mark off plots all over campus. This is probably the happiest day of the academic year for the largest proportion of students, and I can’t help but smile at the sight of all these smiling people—nostalgically, because it is now a decade since I was part of this kind of happiness.
On my way to the book store I am stopped by Ross Maher, the football-playing hunk in my Gen Ed class, who in the first session didn’t have the guts to say that Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 1 was about masturbation. You can usually tell parents who did not go to college themselves and for whom it is a big deal to send their child to a place like Ardrossan. Mr. and Mrs. Maher are forthright, unaffected people, and there is no way I will snub them by hurrying off. They tell me that Ross says I am the teacher who first taught him to read properly.
“That’s what you say, isn’t it, Ross? Read properly!” his mom ribs him, and Ross grins in that endearing way only well-brought-up nineteen-year-olds have.
“Mom! You’re embarrassing Professor Lieberman!”
We all laugh, and I protest, “Not at all, tell me more! I can assure you that freshman professors feel as insecure sometimes as freshman students!” This is exactly the right thing to say, and they are very pleased with me when I allow no doubt at all that the Plovers will thrash the Lynxes and wish Ross the best of success in tomorrow’s game.
A group of people seem to have been watching us from the other side of the street. I cross, assuming that they have been admiring the view, but a stentorian male voice addresses me.
“Professor Lieberman? One moment, please!”
Frank Harrison, one of the triumvirate that runs the Harrison family’s business, needs no college deans or department chairs to convey his considered opinion about his daughter’s professors. How, he wants to know, did I intend to respond to the fact that a large portion of the students I was teaching this semester found the material disturbing and my manner abrasive and intimidating?
He is a big man in a brown blazer and a white-and-orange tie who made sure to position me in such a way that he has the sun in his back and I have to squint up at him; the oldest trick in the book.
“Well, sir, intimidating is a very subjective term, isn’t it? Some people might experience your behavior right now as intimidating.”
There is no way I can stand up to this man. He is literally standing on his own turf, in front of the Harrison laboratory of biochemistry. His family has probably been coming to Ardrossan since it was founded, rising in the world as the university rose in it. I don’t believe for a second that Madeline, who has linked arms with her mother and her older sister like girl football players in cashmere, has felt intimidated by me. I will believe, however, that she has felt pissed off and bored.
“Sir, I’m sure you are aware that since Madeline is of age, I am not allowed to discuss her academic concerns with anyone but herself. If she feels unable to appreciate my class, she may say so at the end of the semester in her evaluation of the course. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I wish you an enjoyable weekend.”
All the seats in the book store are already taken when I squeeze in.