Baggage Read online

  “Those must be some earplugs.”

  “Indeed.”

  When she’s gone, I twist the cork off the corkscrew. Next door, Bobby’s voice takes on that ugly edge that suggests tonight’s main event will involve more fists than fingers. I can hear the girl, Katie, screaming back, and then something glass shatters against the floor. After all these fights, I wonder how and why they even keep anything glass over there.

  I didn’t lie to Jeannie. I do have earplugs I can count on. I bounce the freed cork in my palm. Here’s one. Time to get the other. I reach for another bottle of red.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I wake with a familiar jittery start. My lips feel like they’re burning and my teeth hurt. I clench my teeth hard when I’m drunk and it feels like all of my fillings have been rubbed against aluminum foil. I’m wearing only underwear. My shirt is balled up at the foot of the bed and I nearly fall on my face as one foot gets caught in it and the other slides out on a magazine I’ve dropped. This near pratfall wakes me up faster than I care for.

  It’s still dark outside. I don’t bother setting an alarm anymore. The sugar furnace that is my body blows a pretty shrill whistle when it needs attention, the alcohol burning hot enough to dry up every molecule of water in my system.

  The funny thing is, I don’t feel that bad. Maybe I’m just so used to feeling this way that it doesn’t throw me. Really, if this is the worst I ever wind up feeling for the rest of my life, I can live with it. At least I didn’t sleep in the tub again.

  But it seems that might have been an option. In the bathroom, I find my jeans and my bra puddled up near the drain and my necklace looped over the stopper. I must have spent a little time in here last night; I must have let my thoughts wander. Probably seeing Jeannie, I tell myself. And today is the day. It’s February 17. It’s understandable.

  Cold water, a cold chicken leg, and cold morning air chase off the worst of the lingering horrors as I make my way down the hill toward campus. My head is blessedly clean, scrubbed, and sanitized, with nothing more pressing than keeping my feet stomping one after another down the hill. I stop as I do every morning at that hairpin turn on Everly and see Eastern Allegheny College open up below me and beyond that, the town of Gilead, then head down the hill, across campus, and up to the Jenkins Building.

  The operative word is up. For a Midwesterner like me, the terrain of southern West Virginia took some getting used to. Everything is on a hill. Everything. These are old mountains; the folks who settled here liked being “a bit hard to reach” and so while Gilead proper might relax in its narrow stretch of bottomland, much of the town’s living space is carved into the clay of the mountains. Eastern Allegheny College is no exception.

  When I first walked the campus, it took my breath away. Literally. Everything was uphill—“both ways,” my guide had joked. Stately brick collegiate buildings bear a distinctive antebellum feel—this used to be Virginia, after all—but these buildings cling to the mountainside. They’re embedded, nestled, sometimes as deep as the second floor.

  What this means is that most buildings have entrances on multiple floors. Front door and back door mean different things when one opens up from the central green and the other opens to an expanse of mountains and clouds that could stop your heart with their beauty.

  I suppose I’m getting used to it. I don’t stop every single time I step outside. Now I just gawk and sigh maybe seven or eight times a day. I split my youth between central Missouri and central Illinois. I spent my married life in Nebraska. Safe to say I am a mountain newbie. A gawker. A convert. Definitely a convert.

  This is probably a large part of the reason my hangovers don’t kill me. I don’t have a car. I sold our car when I left Nebraska—too many bad memories, too many good ones. When I came for the interview, I was assured that the campus shuttle would run me to town whenever I needed. “Besides,” the secretary said with a helpful smile, “you can always rent a car at the airport.” She failed to mention that the closest airport was in Charleston, two hours away.

  So I walk everywhere and yes, it feels like it’s uphill most ways, but I like how that feels. I like the changes in my body, the new sturdiness of my legs, the expansion in my lungs.

  I think of Ronnie when I walk. My husband would have loved these hills. He would have begged me to put down my book and put on my boots and join him. He would have teased me that flannel was for hiking, not just pajamas, and I probably would have resisted, laughing but unmovable. I would have stayed with my book and let him tell me about his hike.

  But now I’m flannel-clad and hiking to work. I try to see the hillsides the way Ronnie would have. It hasn’t really snowed yet, which I understand is practically unheard of for these mountains. It’s also very bad news for the neighboring ski resorts who are now forced to make their own powder. It’s bad news for me, too. From what I’m told, the snow in these mountains is epic, beautiful, changing the mood of campus in one blustery instant to that of a magical retreat. Instead, the lingering darkness and mud-soaking rains have made everyone grumpy and impatient.

  Fortunately, flannel and hiking boots are perfectly acceptable attire on campus, even for staff. Fashion and I have always been strangers. I suppose there is some irony in that. I’ve spent my life among artists—my mother sculpted, my father painted and crafted musical instruments, and my husband wrote poetry. All of them and their friends and colleagues swore an oath to seek beauty in all its forms; beauty tormented them all, chased them, haunted them. And yet not one of them gave a lesser shit how they looked. Or how they dressed their children. Or what their wife wore on their wedding day.

  I’m not an artist; I don’t see with their eyes or feel pursued by the same hungers. I am, at heart, lazy, and so I naturally ride the path of least resistance, choosing jeans over skirts, long, straight ponytails over stylish cuts. I used to tell Ronnie that the only things I wore on my face were moisturizer and sarcasm. He said he loved it.

  I don’t dwell on this anymore. I know where those thoughts lead. Those are the thoughts and anxieties of young girls and artists. I know this because that’s exactly who I spend my days working with.

  The gray mat outside the maintenance door squishes under my boots. It’s been soaking up rain on and off for a week but I’m careful to scrub my feet hard over its surface. Walter Voss, the head electrician and general hero of campus, lets me save a few steps and cut through the custodial offices that take up the basement of Jenkins Building, where my office is. Again, with the terrain, the “basement” is only half underground. The other half juts out from the tilted earth not far from the natural-gas station.

  I’m not supposed to come in this way. I’m supposed to take the steep cement steps to the left of the maintenance door that lead up to the north entrance on the first floor, just off the staff parking lot. My first week on campus, Walter Voss caught me red-handed—and red-footed. I had tracked mud into his workspace. He stopped me and pointed out the proper entrance for staff. I played dumb—a tactic I’m not proud of utilizing as often as I do—and confessed to being a clueless Midwesterner and newcomer to the campus. I alternated between staring vacantly at him and longingly at the elevator that would take me to my office on the second floor, until he relented and told me to always wipe my feet.

  “And keep your trap shut about using that door.”

  I like this shortcut, and not just for its efficiency. It makes me feel like an insider, like a member of a secret club. As far as I can tell, I’m the only non-maintenance person to use this path. Even Meredith uses the north entrance on the first floor.

  Meredith Michener, my supervisor and office mate. Early fifties, strawberry-blond hair that pops up in the craziest directions at the slightest provocation, a fashion sense that even I question—Meredith looks like she walked out of Central Casting’s call for “underpaid passion dragon.” Her banner reads “Not for profit. I do it for love!”


  Really, she has a banner over her desk with those words written in purple glitter.

  If I had been on the fence about taking the job (I wasn’t) or if I had the sort of qualifications that made employers fight over me (I don’t), Meredith Michener would have sealed the deal in my decision. As it was, she wound up being a happy perk of being able to keep a roof over my head.

  My title is Student Development Advocate. Meredith is Student Development Coordinator. Our offices are a floor above the English and Fine Arts Departments, whose students we serve. We have the kind of jobs anyone who works in a small private school is familiar with. Funding is limited; miles of red tape are spent for inches of real estate. Recruiting is challenging, so once a student signs up, the administration does all it can to keep them there.

  On paper our jobs are coordinating opportunities for employment, external study, scholarships, and internships. In reality, the majority of my day is spent keeping the kids from dropping out of school, freaking out, and generally losing their shit. It’s the sort of thing their advisor is technically supposed to handle but they know that if they go through me or Meredith, issues are far less likely to wind up on their student record or be reflected in their grades. We’re like an unofficial administrative confessional.

  I love my job.

  I’ve been training for it my entire life.

  Jeannie hesitated to tell me about the opening. She’d seen it on the newsletter she still receives even though she left EAC for Penn State. She knew I was perfectly qualified for the job—I’d held a similar position at a community college in Chattam, Nebraska. There, the art had been a little less “fine,” the paperwork a little heavier, with far more state-funding pressure. But Ronnie had taught there and I had worked there, both of us doing what we could to help young artists beat their paths through the world.

  Jeannie thought maybe I should take a new direction in my career, but really, what else did I know? Jeannie and I are both the daughters of professors. Neither of us has ever had a job that wasn’t attached to a school in some way. This position specifically requested a familiarity with arts education; who would be more suited than I? Nobody on earth has more experience enduring the drama and anguish of young artists. I know the price art can exact from some souls; I also understand well the difference between the need for drama and the hunger for art. I can tell in one sitting which students pursue the demons and which are pursued.

  It’s fitting that today is Tuesday, or as the professors dub it, Doomsday. It’s the day students often receive their grades from the previous week as well as realize they are getting penalized for not completing the weekend work.

  My first semester working here, Tuesdays meant a long day. Meredith would keep the office open past posted hours. Since we returned from Christmas break, however, she has cut short our availability, sometimes even closing early. She makes up a different reason each week. She claims she hasn’t recovered from her holiday merrymaking, that her ears are too full of complaints, that all the stress gives her a rash.

  I don’t complain, and not because I don’t like the work, or am in any hurry to get home, but because when Meredith closes early, she always manages to pull together some sort of delicious treat from the secret stashes she’s set up. That chicken leg I grabbed for breakfast won’t hold me over for long and I’m hoping that Snack Tuesday will become a tradition.

  I don’t see her yet but the office is open so I know Meredith has beaten me here. For all I know, she could be hiding somewhere. The mountain of material that fills our workspace defies explanation. It’s not just file cabinets and paperwork. It’s Rubbermaid tubs and clear plastic snap bins full of god only knows what. Meredith stores yarn, paint cans, even a toaster oven still in the box. Christmas wrap and craft paper are rolled up together behind toolboxes and huge jugs of Elmer’s glue.

  “Well, we are with the Fine Arts Department,” she always says in defense.

  I refrain from telling her that’s not how art departments work or that it looks more like the craft corner for the criminally insane. I don’t have to keep track of it or sort it out. I just have to step around it, so I keep my mouth shut.

  Our building was built in the nineteenth century, upgraded not long after that. It retains all the wonderful qualities of old school craftsmanship—oak wainscoting, beveled-glass room dividers, wide-planked hardwood flooring. Unfortunately, it also retains its sixty-plus-year-old heating and cooling system. Even now, mid-February, you could brew tea on the radiator.

  I drop my coat on the rack between the door and a bank of file cabinets stacked with cartons of colored folders. I squeeze through an obstacle course of boxes and tubs. Meredith’s desk sits in the front of the office, surrounded by the majority of the clutter. My desk is at the far end of the room catty-corner to hers, sectioned off by the frosted-glass half-wall dividers that probably used to be frames in a door. For all I know, the doors are stashed away in here somewhere. As it is, with a little neck-craning, we can see each other when we want to. If we’re busy or want privacy, there are plenty of tubs and cabinets to hide behind.

  Nine a.m. The bells on the campus chapel ring, Meredith runs in right on cue, waving an insulated carafe of coffee in the air like the head of her enemy. Everything about her reads as motion—her hair, her drapey clothes, the constant flutter of her hands, the eruption of chaos within which she works. She calls to me in a sing-song tone.

  “Good morning. It’s Tuesday. I’m having my first hot flash of the morning and they’re already coming up the stairs. Brace yourself. Midterm exam schedules have been posted.”

  And just like that, my day is underway, my office is crowded, and the last traces of my hangover are hammered away in the soothing and reassuring and paper-working of Eastern Allegheny College’s contribution to the world.

  At one o’clock, Meredith tapes a sign on the door alerting the students that even advocates need to eat lunch and that their troubles must keep for thirty minutes. She makes a show of turning the old bolt, locking us inside—or rather, locking the students out—and throwing her back against the door.

  “It’s a bad time of year for grandmas,” she says darkly. “I had three.”

  “Surprisingly, I am dead-grandma-free so far.” It’s a weekly tally we keep, a number that shoots up sharply anytime exams are scheduled. What dead grandmas lack in originality, they make up for in sheer volume when it comes to excuses. I glance down at the notes on my blotter. “I have a new one, though—a dead goat. Sounded like a drunk hunter gone mad. I didn’t look too closely at the picture. I’m not much for gore.”

  Studying me, Meredith cocks one brow.

  “What?” An old anxiety rumbles deep in my gut—not rising, just reminding me.

  Meredith clucks her tongue. “Nothing. It’s just that with all your black hair and black clothes, you could pull off a Goth thing. We could add an occult flavor to our counseling.”

  I put my feet up on my desk and give a thoughtful nod. “True, but do we want to encourage blood sacrifices? I mean, they’re already killing their grandmas left and right.”

  Someone knocks on the door. I laugh at Meredith’s expression of rage. The frosted glass on the door only reveals a tall shape.

  “Read the sign!” Meredith yells. “It’s our lunch break.”

  “Let me in. It’s my lunch break as well.”

  I roll my eyes at Meredith’s look of comically bright surprise. We both recognize the voice. With an exaggerated fluttering of her eyelashes, she clutches her hands over her heart. “I’m rushing to the door as quickly as I can!”

  Ellis Trachtenberg graces her with a cool nod as she waves him into the office. He only has eyes for me, which gives Meredith plenty of opportunity to pantomime swooning behind him, fanning herself. I hope it looks like I’m smiling, not laughing.

  “I come bearing gifts.” He holds up a paper-wrapped book. �
�Well, a gift.”

  What can I say? Thanks? You shouldn’t have? I don’t trust myself to make those words sound sincere, although I mean them, especially the last one. He really shouldn’t have brought me a gift. I don’t want it.

  Ellis Trachtenberg is very, very attractive. Late-forties, tall—six-two, maybe taller. Slender with broad shoulders, dark brown hair graying just-so into that shade that should be trademarked “Naughty Professor.” He’s even got a large, slightly hooked nose, which is something I’ve always loved in a man. He’s smart, too. Teaches art criticism, theory, history. He’s written several academic books, he spearheads the lecture series for the college, and he even has a popular blog on art in the modern world.

  Twice divorced, he’s something of a rarity in college life—a handsome, available professor who does not sleep with his students. That’s the rumor, at least, although I heard some folks in the Bursar’s Office suspect he’s just so good in bed, he convinces the girls (or boys) to keep their mouths shut. I don’t think that’s true. For one thing, that’s almost impossible to do. For another, Ellis strikes me as an incredibly ethical man, perhaps even moral.

  That’s just one of the reasons I would never consider dating him.

  He doesn’t come on too strong, but he has been coming on steadily. On the high road. We’ve met at staff mixers, lectures, student art shows. He likes to ask me questions about art and politics. He leads with his brain and plays down his looks and he acts like he would do the same with any woman he desired—he would choose her for her mind.

  It’s kind of a shame. If he just wanted to fuck me, I might let that happen. But Ellis Trachtenberg wants to know what I’m thinking; he wants to discuss how I feel, what I want, what I fear. He wants to really see me, in that way he wants to see art. He wants in my head and that is one place I will never let him be. Bed, yes. Head, no.