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  She clears her throat as I retrieve the bagel. There’s a large ring of cream cheese now on the carpet, which I try desperately to remove, first covertly with the sole of my shoe, then down on my knees with my damp napkin.

  “Rehearsing a bit of physical comedy, Ms. Bloom?” Westby asks dryly.

  “Um…yeah…heh, heh…as usual,” I stammer. The stain’s still evident, and I look from it to her apologetically.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says.

  As I make my exit, I can’t decide if her neutral tone was masking laughter or horror. Probably both.

  Before I know what’s happened, it’s the third week of school, and my initial panic has given way to a more relaxed sense of general terror. When I’m not dodging the police or enduring the snickers of witnesses to the Flying Bagel Incident, I’m faced with the daunting task of resurrecting the cold corpse of a play-development program. My first mission: find a student-written play worthy of the stage. The good news: I’m determined to put on a stellar debut. The bad news: I have no idea how to actually do this.

  I learn more details about my predecessor, a guy named Harlan Wolfe; he was fantastically charismatic and a total fake. Midway through spring quarter, when his official transcripts had still failed to materialize, they realized that his claim to fame—serving for ten years as artistic director of a huge avant-garde theater program in Berlin—was the product of his overactive, coke-addled imagination. He never even graduated from high school. The Festival of New Works he was feverishly directing had to be halted in its tracks; the students were understandably crushed.

  Most of this I learn from Mare, the dancer I met the first day. She’s been very friendly and supportive these three weeks, which surprises me a little; she’s the sort of woman I always want in my corner, but never seem to attract. I’m usually a magnet for the manic-depressive types. Mare’s low, husky voice full of wisdom and philosophical musings is the opposite of all the shrill, edgy girls I’ve hung out with over the years. She’s got these eyes that just do not belong in this century—striking, black, haunting. There’s a sadness to her, but she keeps that tucked away. Mostly what people see is the huge, joyful grin and the brown hands that are always in motion, as if she wants to sculpt whatever she’s telling you out of air and sunlight.

  It’s Wednesday, which means Thursday is just around the corner, and Friday I don’t teach, so Thursday’s really Friday, if you see what I mean. This puts me in a vaguely celebratory mood; I settle in after my morning class to sip coffee and read my e-mails. There’s always an insufferable pileup of stupid, pointless mass mailings about unions and new babies and pleas to save the women of Uzbekistan. The first week I read each of these obediently, but by now I delete recklessly until something catches my interest. Oh, God, here’s one; it’s from Westby, and the subject heading looks ominous.

  TO: Claudia Bloom

  FROM: Ruth Westby

  SUBJECT: Evaluating Your Teaching

  I sit there for a torturous minute, just staring at the subject heading like a rabbit hypnotized by the shotgun barrel; what could this mean? Has she been brooding over the Ralene Tippets incident or the cream cheese fiasco? Or maybe they’ve decided I’m not qualified, after all, like poor Harlan Wolfe. They got a call from my sophomore history teacher at Calistoga High, who felt a moral obligation to confess about finding me with Roddy Talbot in the home ec room. No, it’s not that, it’s even more serious; Scary Cop’s called her. “You see, Ms. Bloom, it says right here in the college hand-book, ‘Faculty members will be summarily dismissed if they steal a boyfriend’s bus, drive it cross-country, and incinerate it.’”

  Come on, Bloom, just read the damn thing.

  Evaluating Your Teaching.

  Always hated that word, Evaluate. Sounds so stiff and steely, like something only computers can accomplish; though where would be the fun in that? People add the guilt trips and the condescension that makes the whole process so much more human and grotesque.

  Read it.

  Oh, wait, look, here’s an e-mail from Ziv. I’ll open his first, just to see—well, he might be in crisis, after all. One can’t always put career before friendship, right? Then you end up a lonely old woman feeding pigeons half your jam sandwich and rambling on to yourself about the time you got the Teacher of the Year award.

  TO: Claudia Bloom

  FROM: Ziv Ackerman

  SUBJECT: Oh Yeah.

  Bloomie, my darling, I just have to tell you: roomie’s name is Attila. I’m not kidding. He’s hilarious, in a very deadpan, slightly stupid way, and you know I hate people who are smarter than me (present company excepted) so we get along swimmingly. When he tells people he’s from Transylvania, and they respond with the inevitable Texan vampire cracks, he reassures them solemnly that the people of his country only drink the blood of animals, not humans, and only occasionally, for health reasons. The funny part is, he’s not kidding. It’s a good thing you took Medea with you.

  So it’s working out quite well, so far. Of course, you know that you’re the princess of all roommates and that a hundred thousand Jude Law look-alikes could never replace you in a million years.

  How about you? How’s this married sex machine you so alluringly alluded to? And murderous wife? Sounds very cozy. And please, write immediately to clarify about the yurt. The OED said something about nomadic tribes of Mongolia. Surely you haven’t taken up with a married nomadic Mongolian, have you?

  “Want to get a bite to eat?” I look up and see Mare leaning against the doorway. She’s wearing her usual threadbare leotard and wide-legged cotton sweats. I don’t know how dancers manage to make such ratty old things look so sexy. Ever since Flashdance I’ve longed for that sort of grace, but on me it all looks insufferably frumpy.

  “I’d love to,” I say, springing up from my chair. “I’m famished.”

  Well, what? I can’t starve myself, can I? Westby’s hateful e-mail will still be here when I get back; if she is firing me, I may not have an appetite for days, so it’s essential that I fuel up on carbs now.

  As we’re walking the tree-lined trail to Porter College, I let the beauty of the afternoon take my mind off my imminent unemployment for a few minutes. UC Santa Cruz has a campus that inspires dreamy forgetfulness. It’s huge, nestled at the top of a hill, and most of it’s wild. There are acres of redwoods, wispy eucalyptus groves, yawning meadows of summer-blond grass where the hippies had legendary nude picnics “back in the day.” There are amazing views of the ocean at every turn—vistas that make you catch your breath and shake your head. We round the corner and are confronted with an in-your-face panorama of the Pacific. It’s like a Monet: a million dots, variations of blue, green, gray and white. A cluster of darkish rain clouds is moving our way, dragging a voluptuous shadow across the water.

  Inspired by a quick, bracing wind on my face, I take a deep breath and study Mare’s profile. “Suppose you got an e-mail from Westby with the heading ‘Evaluating Your Teaching’…what’d be your first reaction?”

  “Exhaustion. I hate those things. After you get tenure, you only have to do it like every six years or something, but in the beginning they put you through the wringer.”

  “So it’s like…standard procedure?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course.” She laughs. “Claudia, you look like I renounced the death sentence. Haven’t you ever been through it before?”

  “No. I never taught before I came here,” I say, feeling a bit shy.

  “That’s right. I keep forgetting. You seem like such a natural. Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure your students love you.”

  We order sandwiches at the Hungry Slug Café and look around for a table. As we survey the room, I recognize the woman I doused with coffee the first day; she’s sitting with the Costume Design professor, Esther Small. I’ve got very few names memorized at this point, but Esther’s the sort of woman you remember. She’s six feet tall, close to seventy years old, and she dresses like a twenty-two-year-old fas
hion slave from L.A.—tight jeans, platform shoes, suede jackets trimmed with mounds of fur. The two of them look up from their salads; they smile at Mare, but when they see me trailing a couple steps behind, their faces go blank and they pretend to be engrossed in conversation.

  “Did you see that?” I whisper.

  “What?”

  “Those women you said hi to—they hate me.”

  Mare laughs. “Claudia. You’re a little paranoid today….”

  “No, seriously. I spilled coffee on the little one weeks ago. She still hasn’t forgiven me. Every time I see her on campus, she gives me serious stink-eye.”

  “Monica?” Mare sighs. “She’s not an easy one to figure out. We’ve both been here ten years, and I still haven’t got a clue about what makes her tick. I hear she’s going through a divorce, so she’s probably not in the best mood.”

  “Is she faculty?”

  “Yeah—haven’t you met her yet? She’s in our department. She teaches Asian theater and that sort of thing. She’s really into Noh and Kabuki and—I don’t know—shadow puppets, or something.”

  There are distant alarm bells going off in my brain. Monica…where have I heard that name? “So she’s, um, getting divorced?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  I can feel the beginnings of nausea in the pit of my stomach. “What’s her last name?”

  “Parker,” she says before biting into her sandwich.

  “Par-ker?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Of course,” I whisper, and the blood goes out of my face.

  She looks up, still chewing. “What’s wrong? You’re all white. Are you sick?”

  “Oh, nothing. Or maybe—I don’t know—actually, I do feel a little sick,” I say, wrapping my sandwich back up.

  “I thought you were starving.”

  “I was, but…” My neck and face are starting to perspire. “Maybe something I had for breakfast didn’t go down right.”

  Or maybe it’s someone I went down on three weeks ago. Jesus, Claudia.

  Just then Monica and Esther get up to leave. Over Mare’s shoulder, I watch Monica in her pale-yellow, raw-silk pantsuit; she’s very pretty, in a petite, dark, hyperpolished sort of way. Very Nordstrom’s. She looks like the kind of woman who sorts her underwear into neat, color-coded stacks. She catches me watching her and shoots me a quick but withering glare, followed immediately by Esther glancing in my direction with pursed lips. She puts one hand on Monica’s back protectively and guides her toward the stairs as if she’s some sort of invalid.

  “Listen, Mare,” I say, “I’m going to head back to my office. I’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

  “Honey,” she says—she’s the only woman I’ve ever met besides waitresses in the Deep South who can pull this off, “you really do look ill. Maybe you should go home. Are you okay to drive?”

  “I’ve got another class to teach. No, I’ll be okay.”

  “You might have that flu that’s going around.”

  “I doubt it,” I say. “It’s just PMS or something.”

  I walk unsteadily back to my office, gripping my sandwich with a shaking hand.

  Parker. Goddammit, Clay.

  This is the second time he’s done this. When we met he was deliberately evasive about being married; now he’s failed to give me vital information about his wife—namely, that I work with her. I can picture him sitting there on his stool at the Owl Club.

  “That’s right. First day at school.” He was wearing such a smug little smile.

  “How did you know?” I asked, my skin even then prickling slightly with premonition.

  “I just do.”

  Yeah, you just did because it was your goddamn wife’s first day, too. What in the hell is he trying to do? Brand me with a scarlet letter?

  Get a hold of yourself, Claudia. Maybe you’re mistaken. Parker is a common name, after all. Here—just look at any phone book. Let’s see: Paoli, Paris, Parker…see. There must be sixty of them. My eyes scroll down the page. Lots and lots of them, even in a smallish town like this. It’s like Jones or Smith or—oh, God. There they are. Parker, Clay and Monica. I slam the phone book closed, drop it on the floor and collapse into my chair. “This is not happening. This is not happening,” I tell myself again and again, like someone reciting Hail Marys. “Not…happening…not…happening.”

  “Professor Bloom?”

  I spin around so quickly I nearly give myself whiplash. It takes me two seconds to recognize her. I haven’t seen her in two or three years, at least.

  “Oh, my God. Rosemarie. What are you doing here?” I jump up with delight and surprise, rushing toward her.

  “Checking in on you. From the looks of things, you could use a little checking.”

  “Come in, come in.” I tug at her hand, excited. “Look at you. You’ve lost so much weight.”

  She’s still got that rich olive complexion, the brown, impish eyes, still wearing the neo-hippie garb—a patchwork dress in jewel tones, a big denim bag with Grateful Dead and pot-leaf decals all over it. But she must have lost fifty pounds since the last time I saw her. Years ago she was thick and curvy, now she’s slender, almost willowy. We hug and her body feels insubstantial in my arms. “My little cousin. And jeez, you sure are little now.”

  “Yeah…I dropped a lot of pounds after…Jeff and I…did you know we split up?”

  “Oh. I heard about that.” Jeff is Rosemarie’s old boyfriend. They had a baby together about four years ago, but she died when she was only two. I heard from my mom that Rosemarie went a little crazy then. She was in an institution for six, seven months. Something like that.

  “I had a hard couple of years,” she says, reading my face. “But I’m okay now.”

  “Sure. You look great. Look at you.” She does a little spin. Rosemarie. I realize suddenly that I’ve missed her. “You look fantastic.”

  “I guess crazy kind of suits me,” she says, her eyes shining.

  “It always did.”

  “So,” she says, “Do you have time to hang out?”

  “Oh—oh, my God.” I say, looking at my watch. “I’m going to be late. I’ve got to teach in two minutes.”

  Her face falls. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “No. Don’t be silly. This class is over by three—want to meet me here?”

  “Yeah. Okay. What time is it?” Rosemarie never has worn a watch. I remember her patiently explaining when we were twelve that time didn’t exist, and she refused to pretend it did. She’s been true to that; I’ve waited for her so often, I stopped imagining it was possible for her to be anything but late. When she finally shows, she always wears such an innocent, childlike expression, and she’s so quick to recount her dreamy adventures. It would be maddening with anyone else, but somehow with my cousin it’s hard to stay angry for long.

  “It’s 1:30. Meet me here in an hour and a half.”

  “Right on,” she says. “I’ll go braid my dog.”

  Since I’m already running late, I don’t bother to follow up on this intriguing announcement. I run off to the theater, quickly lead them through some routine warm-ups, then distribute scenes I’ve selected for them to rehearse. Once they’re safely tucked into the various corners of the room, practicing their lines in stiff, unnatural voices, I sink down into one of the red velvet chairs and think about Rosemarie.

  When was the last time I saw her? God, it was when her baby, Jade, was still alive; we were at my Mom’s house in San Rafael. Aunt Jessie was there and she was stupid drunk on a bottle of my mother’s merlot; she kept trying to be cheerful in that sour, sloppy way she had. Rosemarie was still breastfeeding—Jade was just a tiny thing. I remember Aunt Jessie pulling the poor baby from Rose’s arms and dancing around with her in campy glee, twirling like some ridiculous pantomime of a happy grandmother, until she stumbled over an ottoman. Rosemarie swiped the baby back, shushing her furious cries with “It’s okay, honey. Your granny’s happy to see you, is a
ll.”

  Rosemarie was always so patient with her mother. I never could understand how she managed, when Aunt Jessie was so flaky. Every few months they moved someplace new; most of the time Rosemarie never even made it to the local school. They just bounced like a couple of pinballs from town to town. Aunt Jessie might hold down a job pouring coffee at a truck-stop diner or selling sunglasses in some mall—whatever she could find. She pumped gas in Hattiesburg for a month or two, delivered flowers in Pensacola. But then whatever man she’d taken up with would get too possessive or too lazy or too anything, and Aunt Jessie would stuff their ragtag bunch of belongings into their old, decrepit van and they’d drive until they ran out of gas. That was how they decided where to live next; when the van wouldn’t go any farther, it was time to get out and see the town. When the money ran out, it was time to get a job.

  I’d always loved Rosemarie. We were both only children, and we’d bonded like sisters. Even as toddlers we got along, as if there was a code of empathy in our blood. I felt sorry for her, getting dragged around by Aunt Jessie, never having much of a home, and at the same time I envied her amazingly placid, gypsy-ease with the road and everything it brought. Rosemarie was the kind of kid who could eat peanut butter from a spoon for dinner and a piece of gum for dessert without a word of complaint. She could talk to just about anyone, make friends with girls who had swimming pools and shiny blond hair or with men who lived in cardboard boxes—it was all the same to her. She liked people, period. And people liked her.

  “Um, Mrs. Bloom?”

  I resist the urge to look behind me for my mother.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m like so not into this today.” It’s Beach Barbie, the girl I bummed a tampon from at the Owl Club. Actually, her name’s Sarah, and she’s a real pain in the ass, but I like her. At first I was startled by the coincidence—running into her at the Owl Club, then having her in class—but I’m realizing quickly just how small this town is. My students bag my groceries, they cut my hair, they serve me burgers at the drive-thru. I felt the first pangs of claustrophobia when I went to get a bikini wax and discovered I was about to have my pubic hair yanked out by a girl I’d just a given a D to.