Problems With People: Stories Read online

  Soon Hamish was no longer in the building. She hadn’t seen him since. But now here he was, in his parka, with his dog, crossing the frozen grass in her direction, smiling, calling out her name, and interrupting, in his jovial way, her exercise regimen. Or, rather, not interrupting it, because she refused to stop, why should she stop, she didn’t want to exchange pleasantries or feign ignorance of his troubles, there were so few opportunities for getting her heart rate up and keeping it there. “Unbelievable!” said Hamish, when their paths converged. “It’s freezing!”

  She saw that he’d aged in a way common to Scotsmen—namely, he’d not only grown dangerously stouter but had distinctly more broken capillaries in his cheeks so that his face had a blue and dappled tint. His puffy parka, nearly fluorescent, made him look ample and segmented. His dog leash, maroon, had a woven print—stars—and his dog, though tiny, pulled against it, toward her legs, while Hamish, at the other end, resisted. “Pepper!” he snapped, looking delighted and proprietary. “Pepper! No! It’s a friend!” Then he bent, not without difficulty, scooped up Pepper, and pinned him or her beneath his billowy arm. “I’m sorry,” he said, with a gasp.

  “It’s fine,” she said, still walking.

  In the long-winded, unable-to-cut-to-the-chase way she recalled from their era as colleagues, Hamish explained that at Christmas he’d gone for two weeks to Kauai with his mother, two sisters, and six nieces and nephews, leaving Pepper in a dog-boarding facility he couldn’t recommend because Pepper, on his return, seemed unduly anxious, so that now some pieces of her careful training were undone, he was engaged in certain repetitions with Pepper of behavioral steps she’d succeeded with already, meanwhile he apologized again for this episode of lunging, and with that, Hamish put Pepper on the turf once more—delicately—stroked her neck, sighed, and said, pre-emptively, “Pepper, Pepper, Pehhhhhh-prrrrrr?”

  By what unhappy coincidence had she ended up here with dog and man? A circumstance Hamish could have handled—and that she wished he would have handled—by ignoring her, by pretending not to recognize her, which is how most people would have handled it, out of a basic feel for the propriety called for given the elements at hand—late Sunday afternoon, super-cold, a walk, they hardly knew each other.

  What should she say? She wanted him to leave. She wished he hadn’t shown up in the first place, or that, having shown up, he’d been sensitive enough to social norms not to accost her in this sustained way—Just get on with walking your Pepper, she thought, hurry up, Hamish, we’ll greet in passing and go opposite directions, you toward the play area, the footbridge, and the pond, me toward the Park Department mulch and compost heaps and the community-garden patches. “How have you been?” Hamish asked.

  Enough! she decided—more than enough! And didn’t she have an excuse to be brusque? Maybe more than one excuse? “The thing is,” she said, “as slow as I look, and I’m really sorry, but this is an exercise walk for me and I have to keep moving because I time myself, okay? I’m really, really sorry, Hamish.”

  He stopped; she stopped; Pepper, as ineffectually as before, attacked her legs, and Hamish, dragging the dog out of her range by its leash, said, with a knit unibrow, “I get it. Okay. Another time.”

  “Great,” she said. “Nice seeing you.” And went her way.

  What do you do after such an encounter? After walking another 1.6 miles with a falling feeling of social remorse? And having lied about timing yourself? You go home and Google “Hamish McAdam.” Which is what she did, and got, in order, a Hamish McAdam who lived in New Zealand, Hamish McAdamses with Facebook pages, a Hamish McAdam in Canada, a young Hamish McAdam who played lacrosse, and eventually, on page two, there was the Hamish McAdam she knew but wished she didn’t. He had a photography Web site, which she didn’t go to just yet, opting instead for a look at him in Google Images—in the third row, a picture of a flabby, sunburned Hamish sitting on the edge of a deck lounger beside a pool with a drink and a newspaper on the little table beside him, and behind him were those jacarandas? She realized, A, that it didn’t matter if they were jacarandas, and B, that she felt really bad for having blown him off. She’d been mean, which was ironic, because she wasn’t mean, she moved through the world trying not to be mean, mainly because it was better in the moral sense, but also because it was easier. Making a big deal about things, taking a stand, getting emotional, getting assertive, insisting, reacting, making someone else’s problem your problem—she felt she was good at avoiding all of that, but this time, with Hamish, she’d slipped and, without meaning to, basically just blown it when it came to a social encounter. What to do? There was nothing to do except to relearn a lesson she wished she didn’t have to relearn but had already relearned a number of times: never do anything that might make you feel bad. That was all. So simple and obvious. She let it sink in. She was hungry now—walking made her hungry—but still felt bad about Hamish McAdam, bad enough that leaving her laptop didn’t make sense yet, she could still take a look at his Web site, at the photography he did, maybe that would yield something, hopefully some sort of confirmation that in fact she was not a bad human being—except maybe first she should start a carbonara and boil water for some farfalle, interweaving that with looking at the photographs Hamish took. Except that she’d made a deal with herself not to multitask, a deal she found herself breaking not only often but even daily, even hourly, even minute by minute. It was only when she realized it—that she was multitasking again—that she found herself able, briefly, to do one thing at a time, but then it was back to fiddling with her Web page on one side of the screen while building a spreadsheet on the other, or talking on the phone while Googling, which reminded her of something: that she should call or e-mail, who would be best, Les Gross, Dane Snow, John Herringer, all three? Guess what? I ran into Hamish McAdam in the park, he’s gained fifteen pounds and has a lapdog! No. She wouldn’t write that. Anyway, here was his Web site, a little on the cheap side—not tacky, just threadbare, not embarrassing, just bare-bones—bare-bones such that, in a stretch, you could decide that it was the product of an intentional minimalism instead of—this was probably what it really was—lack of funds. No audio, no video, links to four galleries, Home, News, About, Contact, and the photos themselves, divided into portfolios—The Natural World, Portraits, Projects, Fine Art, Candid Lifestyle. She looked under Candid Lifestyle. Kids leaping through a sprinkler.

  News? That seemed laughable. How could there be news about Hamish McAdam, other than old news—that he’d lost his teaching job because of whatever it was with a student? She clicked on News. Bare but for the italicized announcement that Hamish’s show, “Feedback,” was “on view” at the Nash Gallery. She knew the Nash Gallery. A hole in the wall. Time to start the carbonara, but not before forwarding this page to Les Gross, Dane Snow, Gail North, and John Herringer—almost the entire Social Studies Department—along with the message Ran into Hamish M. Check it out. Feedback?

  In the morning she woke with less guilt in her system. Only after she had been awake for ten minutes did she even remember that she’d blown off Hamish. Night had laid the matter under a little. Night had intervened. Good, she thought. Let more time pass. Was it really that big of a deal?

  Downstairs, she noticed something that had escaped her all weekend. Her husband, who had been raised in a mildly Presbyterian family of, actually, atheists and agnostics—except for a sister who’d married an Egyptian and, via that, become Baha’i—had left a messy heap of bicycle-riding things by the garage door. There were his lobster gloves, Windstopper, winter biking shoes, and thermal bib tights. The gear, on the floor, left like that while he was gone in Los Altos, irritated her, but also made her miss his coffee. He did a very patient pour-over. He was also good at scones, adding small touches such as lemon rind or gingered plum. Gear on the floor was irresponsible, but she decided not to talk to him about it. She ate toast, drank French press, checked e-mail, checked news, checked messages, and pondered her Web page, the assignments th
ere, the questions to be answered, the readings, the dates for quizzes and tests, the dates papers were due, she was in the middle of that when a schedule reminder popped up—a reminder that today was, for her, an observation day, meaning that an administrator was going to sit in on one of her classes for the purpose of what she knew to be a perfunctory evaluation of her merits as a teacher, perfunctory because she’d been a teacher for twenty-three years and had a track record, so that today’s visit was really just a matter of one of two vice-principals, or maybe the principal, Mark Mitchell—“Marky Mark,” as her students had branded him, though some called him Eminem instead—sitting at the back of her room for fifty minutes, afterward writing up something complimentary and approving and putting it in her file, but not before giving her a copy at a meeting that would last no more than ten minutes and cover other things, who knew what, there was always one crisis or another in the building and often more than one. Right now it was pain over budget cuts, because no one wanted to be told they were deserving of the ax first, if, as was presently the case, the ax had to fall. She and whichever administrator would talk about hurt feelings in the building, not about her teaching. If it was Mark, the meeting would be uncomfortable because she’d openly disdained him almost from day one; if it was … But then her mind went back to the fact that she’d blown off Hamish in the park.

  It was indeed Mark. She always thought of him as clueless—he gave off an aura of conspicuous cluelessness—even while he said all of the right things about everybody and about the social-studies curriculum. He summarized for her, sometimes, books he was reading—most recently one on social media and bullying. Before that on adolescent girls as intellectually undervalued; before that on how American society had, as he put it, “turned” on its children. Did he believe America had turned on its children? Probably not. Probably he thought she believed it. Now here he was in the back of her room, wearing a V-necked sweater with a hefty twill, greeting students by nodding at them—raised chin—and sitting, she felt, with over-the-top rectitude.

  She performed—not that it mattered. She asked: Is affirmative action good or bad? What is the ethical basis for it? What—exactly—did federal law say about it? How did it relate to the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Is affirmative action constitutionally legitimate? When discussion flagged, she read, aloud, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Then she asked whether affirmative action should be a federal or a state matter. What did students think about state initiatives prohibiting affirmative-action programs? Constitutional or not? If so, on what basis? What about quotas—what did they think of quotas? Specifically quotas for entrance to universities? A student wanted to know what the difference was between a university and a college. She let Mark answer that, because he wanted to—she let him be a font of that sort of knowledge. Then she steered things back. Weigh two goods, she said, not a good and a bad. One good was greater diversity in classrooms, the other an equal playing field. One good was repair of the damages of history, the other a rigorous fairness in the moment. She assigned Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—read by tomorrow—and a brief essay, due Friday: Should institutions of higher learning be allowed to use race as a factor in determining admissions? Why or why not? The bell rang.

  At the beginning of lunch, she checked messages and e-mail. Gail had replied to all about Hamish: Thanks for sending, viewed with interest. So had Les Gross: Très avant-garde. And so had John Herringer: Hamish!

  She forgot about Hamish. Or thought about him with a less intense regret. Her husband came home. No exercise, he said, while in Los Altos, except for twenty minutes in a hotel gym. He went for a bike ride, she for a walk. Walking engaged something neuronal, she thought, because while she was doing it her regret increased again. But only temporarily. She and her husband did their weekly face-time with their daughter in Bolivia, he stiffly, she with bemusement. They both felt she didn’t know what she was doing. They talked about her while putting dinner together. The two girls were different, though both were filled with social purpose. The older more deliberate, the younger more rash. The older calmer, the younger more passionate. And the older more likely to get married and have children. The younger might end up so dedicated to her work that she would never return from … was it “the developing world”? Her husband had no problem with the phrase, but herself, she’d never liked it.

  She checked e-mail. DMW. For years they’d passed this code back and forth—she, Les Gross, Dane Snow, John Herringer, Gail North—and now Sarah Holger, new to the department: DMW, Department Meeting Wednesday, meaning drinks after work on short notice. Usually just a glass of wine somewhere, often in the living room of someone’s home, but sometimes in a restaurant or a wine bar. Every December, on the Wednesday before Winter Break, the Social Studies Department tippled together festively, and every June, on the last Wednesday of the school year, it celebrated with wine. Then there were the DMWs when, without an excuse, some of them drank too much, including her, because she didn’t want to seem superior to her colleagues. For that reason, she sometimes drank three or four Wednesday glasses of wine, even though they gave her a headache.

  Les Gross drove. They convened—a first—at Sarah Holger’s loft. She found out, there, that Sarah was twenty-seven. They met Sarah’s dog. They were offered a choice of playlists, which led to a discussion of iTunes Radio, and then a demonstration of iTunes Radio, everyone choosing, together—by consensus—urban humming stereo. Sarah served kale chips in an acacia-wood bowl and, because people were curious, Jell-O shots. They were undrinkable—again by consensus—but Sarah had wine on hand as well. Something in all of this made her decide to go for it. There were amalgamating factors: Sarah had a magnum left over from the holiday season that, once opened, needed to be emptied; Les Gross was driving; she’d taken a longer walk than usual the day before; for the moment—however ephemeral—she was less behind than she usually felt; and finally, she hadn’t yet shown the new kid—Sarah—this side of herself. “Sure,” she said, whenever Sarah poised the magnum. “Why not?”

  Near-universal kudos for Sarah’s part of town—gentrified without losing all of its rough edges, fun without feeling like a theme park for whites—followed by Sarah’s mirthful scoffing about it: after all, every three minutes a lanky, lone white guy could be relied on to walk into Bakery X for a pastry and some face time with a hand-held device after having navigated, as if preoccupied, around an idealist with a clipboard. “It’s all good,” said Sarah—generalized mockery. She was dating a Sri Lankan woman who worked in the mayor’s office. There was some actual business—curriculum-review scheduling—that was quickly dispatched before Department Meeting Wednesday ended with a flurry of sarcastic Mark Mitchell comments. That was their way. They meant nothing by it. Most of the time they were relatively serious. None of them, she believed, only went through the motions. Les, maybe, to some extent—Les struggled openly with burnout.

  They were in the car again, she and Les, a block away, before, in her fog, she realized that, somehow, they’d forgotten about Hamish. “Hey!” she said. “We didn’t rag on Hamish!”