“If I don’t get published in the right journals on the right topic in the right time frame, I’m never going to get tenure. And if I don’t get tenure, my ass is out on the street, you know what I’m saying? But it’s just not that easy—these academic things don’t make sense to people like your dad, but they’re really very important.”
“My dissertation and your tenure aren’t really the same thing, do you think?” Rachel suggested as he helped himself to a glass and a few cubes of ice (leaving one cube sliding helplessly around the tiled countertop until Rachel caught it and tossed it in the sink).
“You know what Dean Holcroft told me?” Myron continued, ignoring her question. “He said they’ll be looking for something next fall. What he’s saying is, if I don’t have an article written and published by next fall—that’s a little less than a year—then they’re going to deny me tenure. Can you believe that?” he demanded indignantly before pouring the cream soda.
“Sort of,” she admitted, but again, Myron didn’t seem to hear her—he was shaking his head at the injustice of it all. And while he waxed indignantly about an unfair system, there was a little thought in Rachel’s head that Myron had been a professor of history for years now, and he’d been struggling through the very same scholarly article about pre-colonial America for as long as she had known him. Once she even suggested he find a new topic, and he had all but taken her head off.
When Myron finished his impassioned speech about the communist basis for tenure, he returned to his sandwich, moved aside the groceries that were in his way, and settled in to finish it off.
As Rachel put some apples in the fruit bowl, she noticed her new phone beside it. She picked it up to check for messages.
“Hey, cool. Can I see that?” Myron asked when he saw her phone. She handed him the cell phone, continued putting groceries away. “This is really cool. Where did you get it?”
“New York. Mom got it for me. She wants instant access.”
“Now see, your mom understands you better than your dad, I think. She’s back in New York, right? Taking care of Aaron? He actually sounded pretty good on the answering machine.”
The comment gave Rachel pause, and she looked out over the kitchen sink to her unkempt lawn below. “He’s really sick,” she said honestly. “The chemo and radiation have made him weak.” So sick that all he could seem to do was lie around and think of ways to badger her after Mom had cajoled her into coming to New York to look after him while she went back to L.A. to take care of a few things. It had been okay at first, Rachel thought. Stressful, because Dad was always stressful—but not unbearable. In fact, Rachel was beginning to believe that she could handle the old man.
It didn’t get bad between them until he asked her how much her graduate teaching position was paying. “It’s not,” Rachel had answered truthfully. “The professor took a post at UCLA and I lost my internship.”
She could recall Dad on the couch, looking bone thin and exhausted and dumbfounded. “So . . . what are you doing for money?”
Rachel hated money. Which was sort of ironic, seeing as how she came from a family with loads of it. “I’m teaching a weaving class—”
“A what class?”
“A weaving class. You know, like tapestries and rugs and—”
“I know what the hell a weaving class is, Rachel. I just can’t believe that is your solution to replacing my money. You think weaving is going to pay your bills?”
Well no, she never thought it was going to pay her bills, particularly since she had waived the fee for half the class—hey, times were hard and people needed a break. And even though a few could pay, their fees did not add up to enough to pay her utility bill, which, in September, had swooped into her mailbox, demanding one hundred and fifty dollars that she did not have.
At any rate, the conversation had deteriorated from there, and Dad had reminded her for the umpteenth time that he was pulling all support for her school, because she had just turned thirty-one years old and was still in school and would never finish, and because she would never finish, she would never amount to anything, and because she would never amount to anything, she would have to rely on the likes of Byron Tidwell to provide for her, but hey, if she wanted to live under a bridge somewhere, that was okay.
Rachel would finish school, no matter if her father believed her or not. She was searching through what seemed like a haystack of hypotheses for a needle of a dissertation, and that was all she had left. And she wouldn’t rely on Myron, not Byron, for anything but friendship, but like it or not, Myron understood her and accepted who she was while her father wanted her to be someone else entirely— like her sisters, Rebecca and Robin. She was never going to be a Rebecca or a Robin. Which left the part about her never amounting to anything.
That was the part that had sent her, fists clenched around a Big Grab bag of potato chips, on a train back to Providence.
“Hey listen, I got something for you,” Myron said, pushing aside his empty plate. He got up, walked into the adjoining dining room where he’d dumped his stuff, and came back with a box.