femininitea

Rain from a sudden storm hammers against the huge windows of the classroom. Cate walks among the bent heads of twenty students. None of them has hair that is completely an actual hair color, as opposed to green, or blue. A few years ago, every one of them would have been wearing a hat. And none of them—she doesn’t know why not—ever turns the lights on. They work by the light of their desk lamps, like old accountants. “Can someone flip on the ceiling lights? Raven?” Fluorescents flicker to life and Cate turns her attention back to a student’s computer layout of today’s assignment—the office set for Glengarry Glen Ross.

“You have to keep checking against your drawings for scale. This would be a desk for Paul Bunyan. And his blue ox.”

The student, Dequan Chang, looks up, blinks a couple of times, then asks, “Who’s Paul Bunyan?”

Cate is grateful to have this adjunct job. She only has two courses a year—one grad and one undergrad section of set design. The school is prestigious. Georgia O’Keeffe went here. Claes Oldenburg. Elizabeth Murray. The architecture department has interesting faculty and attracts talented students. It plugs her into the design community. She could not live on the salary, but it does come with health insurance. It provides her with the closest thing to a financial floor she has ever had. A full-time, tenure-track position would make her totally solvent, but then she would have too little time to design sets, a chronic dilemma.

From class she rushes north, surfing a water-lashed Lake Shore Drive, happy she let her father talk her into all-wheel drive, nice and grippy. With cars, she takes his advice along with his family discount.

At a red light, she checks in the rearview to make sure her face doesn’t have any glue smears or patches of sawdust from the classroom. She circles around Andersonville, looking for a parking spot in the baritone thunder, branch-cracking lightning. She texts Maureen.

parking nightmare. b there soon.

Maureen looked so good in terms of early impressions. She came with so many features, like one of those knives that are also bottle openers and screwdrivers. She’s financially solvent. A little older than Cate. Hot in a restrained way, which is to say, hotter than unrestrained. The play they worked on together was about the last days of Marie Curie, as she pressed on with her science even as she weakened from radiation sickness. Cate loved that Maureen spent an entire day hunting down a particular shade of green rubber for Madame Curie’s lab apron. A professional perfectionist. Everything happened so quietly, a small collegial friendship that opened into an attraction. A lucky break for Cate. She’s not much good at making the first move. She’s a lot better at standing still and waiting for whomever to show up and make her desire half of a coincidence.