Page 2 of Close Reading

My collaborator will be from Ecology and Environmental Science.

I close the laptop. I open it again. I reread the name.

Dr. Priya Anand.

I have met Dr. Anand exactly four times. Once at a new faculty reception five years ago, where she arrived late and laughed at something that was not a joke, and I found this either charming or irritating and declined at the time to determine which. Once at a committee meeting where she argued passionately for something I have since forgotten but where I noted that she gestures when she speaks, her deep brown hands moving through the air in a way that takes up more than her allocated share of the room. Once in Lavender House where she was holding court at the counter with Bea and someone else and I was leaving and we did not interact beyond a nod that I executed and she returned with a warmth I did not request. Once at last year’s commencement, where she was three rows behind me and I turned to look at the crowd and caught her laughing at something, her face bright above the academic robes, and the brightness drew my eye before I understood what I was looking at.

I know her work. Strong. I know her reputation. Warm. I know her department is not under threat, because ecology has the word science in it, and science, in the current funding landscape, is the acceptable face of the academy, the part the donors can point to when asked what they’re paying for. Comparative Literature does not have the word science in it. Comparative Literature has the words comparative and literature in it, and in the current landscape these might as well be Old French for please defund us at your earliest convenience.

I am going to be yoked to a scientist for the fall semester in a visible institutional performance of interdisciplinary cooperation, and the scientist is going to be Dr. Anand, who is warm where I am not, expansive where I am contained, and apparently incapable of arriving anywhere within a standard deviation of the agreed-upon time.

I close the laptop.

I fill the kettle. Set it to boil.

Outside the window that sticks in summer and leaks in winter, the September light falls across the quad, and Lavender House glows in its dusky purple. The new semester is beginning with the feeling of something I did not plan for arriving in a form I cannot control.

The kettle clicks off.

I make my tea.

I begin.

2

PRIYA

Iam seventeen minutes late to my own welcome-back meeting. An improvement over last year’s twenty-three, and I would like the record to reflect that the improvement is significant even if the result is still, technically, late.

The culprit this time is Kali, who found and partially consumed a tube of Ravi’s watercolor paint. Cerulean blue, confirmed by the evidence now decorating my kitchen floor, Kali’s collar, and the hem of the shirt I changed into after the first outfit got dog hair on it. That happened in the eleven seconds between putting on the shirt and reaching for my bag. Eleven seconds is the Kali coefficient, the maximum duration any garment can exist in my house without acquiring a fine golden dusting. Moti watched the entire cerulean incident from his bed, unmoved. He has seen everything and judged it all and taken no action; this is his approach to most things and which I find, depending on my mood, either profoundly philosophical or deeply unhelpful.

I called the vet from the car, pulling out of our neighborhood and onto the main road that runs through the center of Millhaven toward campus. The vet, who knows Kali very well by now, confirmed nontoxic. Kali will be fine. My floor will be blue for a week. This is fine. Everything is fine. The blue floor is actually an improvement over the previous floor situation, which was plain hardwood covered in a thin film of dog hair that I vacuum on a schedule I have described to my mother as “regular” and that is, in practice, “when I remember.”

I also have Ravi’s permission slip in my bag instead of my research notes. A discovery I will make when I reach for the notes and find instead a field trip consent form for the aquarium. I signed the permission slip at a red light this morning with a pen I found wedged between the seat and the console. The pen was Ravi’s. It had a cap shaped like a dinosaur. I will find my research notes later. They are in the house. They are probably under Kali. Most things in my house are eventually under Kali.

The meeting is in the department conference room on the second floor of Whitman Hall. The smell is a combination of new carpet they installed in July and coffee from a machine that should have been retired during the previous administration. The coffee tastes like fluorescent lighting feels, flat, institutional, nobody’s first choice but technically present. I slip in during Dr. Harmon’s opening remarks about fall enrollment numbers. He does not pause. He has worked with me for five years. My lateness is not an event. It is a weather pattern, atmospheric, predictable, planned around.

I find a seat next to June, who teaches conservation biology and has saved me the chair closest to the outlet because my laptop is always dying. It is dying now, nine percent, the amber warning light blinking with the resigned patience of a device that has been in this situation before. June slides her coffee toward me without looking. I accept it without comment. This is the foundation of a five-year professional friendship, and I would argue it is more efficient than most department communications.

The meeting covers enrollment, the new lab schedule, a budget line item that has been contested since before I arrived, and then, near the end, in the tone Dr. Harmon uses when he is about to assign something he knows will generate questions, the joint interdisciplinary initiative.

“The Dean’s office has requested a collaborative project between our department and Comparative Literature,” he says. “Environmental humanities. Visible, public-facing, designed to demonstrate institutional commitment to cross-disciplinary work in the current funding climate.”

He pauses. The pause is doing a lot of work. He has already decided who is going to do this and is giving the room a moment to catch up.

“Priya, I’d like you to take point on our end.”

I am not surprised. My research on mycorrhizal networks and ecological storytelling is the closest thing the department has to a natural bridge between hard science and humanistic inquiry. I am also the faculty member whose work is most easily translated into the language the administration wants to hear right now. My research photographs well. I photograph well, and I’m not going to finish that thought.

My work can be described at a donor dinner without anyone’s eyes glazing over. I have given the TED-talk-adjacent version at three university fundraisers, standing in front of projected images of root networks while people in business attire ate canapés and nodded, and each time I felt genuine pride in the work alongside a discomfort I have not fully examined. I don’t know how to reconcile these feelings. I carry them both, the way I carry Ravi’s dinosaur pens and my actual research notes in the same bag, and I let them coexist without resolution because resolution is not always available and I have learned to be okay with that.

“Who’s my counterpart in Comp Lit?” I ask.

“Dr. Voss.”

The name arrives and settles.

Dr. Margot Voss. I have a sense of her the way you have a sense of someone you’ve been in the same room with a dozen times and never actually spoken to. You know the shape of them without knowing the details. The blazers. The careful posture. How a room gets slightly more attentive when she’s in it. Margot Voss is tall, fat, and pale, self-possessed with dark hair and soft wide hips. She wears blazers that fit like they were tailored, because they probably were; the fit is too precise to be off-the-rack. I noticed this at commencement last year, three rows behind her, watching the way the academic regalia fell across her shoulders. She was the only person who made it look intentional rather than obligatory.