“How long will it be?”
“A week, a month, three months, I don’t know.”
“How are you feeling?” I rubbed my finger against the fraying edge of our laminate countertop that I’d wanted to replace for years.
“I thought you didn’t want to know anything about it.”
“You can tell me or not, I was just asking.” I pinched one of the tattered plastic threads to pull it free.
John brushed my hand away from the counter. “Don’t pick at that,” he said, and walked loudly out of the kitchen.
He stopped at the bench on the back porch to tie his wing tips. I followed him and put a hand on his shoulder. I wanted to say something about Cynthia and what I saw the other night, but I was too ashamed to admit I had been following him.
“Will you text me when the day is over?” I asked instead. “I don’t know when I’ll be home.”
“Neither do I,” he said, annoyed, and then, maybe because he felt some twang about the institution of our marriage, his brow softened and fell over his eyes. He looked old and battered. “I’ll let you know when we’re out.”
He finished tying his laces with a yank, stood and grasped me in an awkward side hug, planted a hard kiss on the top of my head, and walked away.
I moved through the grocery store with swift precision. Seasonal fruit, grapes, bananas, lemons and limes, herbs, carrots, lettuce, tomato, avocado, garlic, onion. Good cheese, good crackers, good bread, bacon, sausage, a roasted chicken, tubs of premade salad and slaw, nuts, chocolate, large bottles of sparkling water, coffee. Eggs, milk, yogurt, popcorn, vinegar, olive oil, butter, flour, sugar. Most of it went into freezer bags, lined with ice packs. It would all need to keep until later in the afternoon.
The Women in American Literature course, my final class before the study break, was inspired and energetic, the conversation lively. We discussed selections from Mrs. Spring Fragrance, a work I was sure they wouldn’t have encountered in high school （it was always better when they hadn’t previously been exposed）， a collection of short stories written by Sui Sin Far from 1912 that explored American expectations of assimilation. After class I returned briefly to my office to drop off notes. Edwina stood at my door, waiting for me.
It was petulant and foolish, but I still couldn’t help acting like a bit of a spurned lover with her. She had received several emails from me over the past two weeks, either directly or as part of a group, and hadn’t responded to any of them. I greeted her distantly and let her follow me into my office rather than invite her in. She sat on the edge of the chair across from my desk, which I stood behind and neatened, with what I knew was obnoxious and demonstrative officiousness.
“I know this is last-minute,” she said, “but I wondered if you wanted to grab that coffee.”
“Oh no, I can’t!” I said, rapping papers against the hard surface. I was acting like a phony, I could tell I was disappointing her.
“Okay,” she said, and looked down at her hands like she wanted to cry. “Well, I wanted you to know that I got an interview with the film company, so thank you.”
I immediately regretted my coldness and stopped what I was doing, letting my voice drop into a sincere place, low in my chest. “I’m so glad,” I said. “I didn’t do anything, just told the truth about you.”
At that her face twisted into a pained grimace and she started to cry, tears flowing so freely they dropped onto the lap of her jeans.
“What is it?” I asked. I was used to students crying in my office, but Edwina wasn’t the type to break down. “Edwina, are you all right?” I closed my office door, pulled a chair, and sat down beside her.
“It’s so stupid,” she said. “I’m embarrassed.”
“But you want to talk about it, otherwise you wouldn’t have come—please tell me.”
She took a moment to get her breath under control. “I—I got an F on my first memoir-writing assignment from Professor Tong.”
“She’s not a professor, she’s an adjunct.”
“Well, she—I got an F. Look at this. I’ve never gotten an F in my entire life. I’ve never even gotten a D. The last time I got a C was on a test in high school precalc.” She pulled the paper out of her satchel as she spoke and thrust it in my face.
I didn’t register the contents of Edwina’s paper. All I saw, scrawled diagonally across the front of the double-spaced typed words, was “THIS IS A LIE.” I looked at the next page and it was the same. I wanted to laugh but looked at Edwina’s face and swallowed it. God, I loved Cynthia.
“Why does she hate me?” Edwina asked, pleading. “We, like, bonded when she came. We went out for lunch and she gave me her number and said to text her anytime and—I don’t know, I was really excited.” So Cynthia had been trying to woo her after all. Was it purposeful? Or merely shared good taste? As teachers we all want our favorites to favorite us in return.
“Oh, Edwina,” I said. “She doesn’t hate you at all. I bet she wrote the same thing on every paper. And if she didn’t, you should take it as a compliment.”
“Why?”
“She’s a firebrand, she wants to shake you up. She wants to make you go deeper, write from a more honest place.”
Edwina shook her head. “Everything I said was honest.”
“Not factually honest, emotionally honest. You’re a good judge of character. Think. She’s trying to disrupt you is all.”
“Should I drop the class? I want to go straight to a master’s program. I don’t want to fail—”
“No,” I said, though if I wanted to maintain primacy in Edwina’s affection, I knew I might be arguing against my best interests. “I mean, you could, if you didn’t enjoy it. Haven’t you ever had this kind of teacher?”
“Never,” she said. “Maybe I had teachers who said they were strict graders, but I could always handle that.”
“She just wants to get to you, believe me. I think you should stay. She wants you to prove her wrong. Think of it as a fun challenge. Trust me, by the end of the semester she’ll be in love with you. I promise.”
Edwina sighed, looked down at her paper, and placed it neatly back into her folder. She sat for a while, seeming to deliberate, and then without meeting my eyes she said, “John’s trial started today, didn’t it.”
It was the first time she had ever mentioned it directly and I found myself nervous as I realized she did, in fact, have opinions about it. “It’s a dismissal hearing, not a trial, but yes.”
She continued to look away. “Well, whatever you want, I hope that’s what you get.”
“What would you like to have happen?” I asked her. Edwina was so level, not inclined to melodrama or whipped-up outrage. Erudite and inclined to please, she always formally engaged with the literature in my classes. I thought of her as a rarity among her peers, someone who preferred succeeding to nursing wounds.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with me,” she said. Her face was tense and she was breathing hard out of her nose.
“Why not?” I asked. “You’re in this department—you can have an opinion. Everybody else does.”