Chapter Six
Helene
“Why so gloomy?” Hilde asked me as I sat at her kitchen island.
Hilde was busily rinsing vegetables in the sink as Sienna and Brody made a mess of the living room. Sienna was three and had Hilde’s, mine too for that matter, auburn hair and blue eyes. But her cheeks were speckled with freckles, and she was the very epitome of a toddler. She could get in trouble faster than I could change my shoes, and I often questioned whether I would ever want to have children after spending a mere thirty minutes with her.
Brody, on the other hand, was the most laid-back five year old I’d ever met. His hair was redder like his father’s. Mark was Hilde’s high school sweetheart, and he was tall with reddish hair. Brody took after him in appearance and demeanor, and Brody was the only thing that actually saved my desire to have children someday after the thirty minutes with Sienna wrecked it.
“Mom, Sienna just put a fish stick in the register again,” came Brody’s tattling voice from the living room.
Hilde ignored it. “You going to answer me?” she asked me.
“Class tonight. I’m just…” Dreading seeing Kane again. “…too tired to deal with college students.” I hadn’t told Hilde anything about seeing Kane yet, much less that he’d decided to enroll in my class. But even if I were too, Hilde wouldn’t truly appreciate the impact it had on me. She’d never understood our friendship, and by the time things got … complicated when we were seniors in high school, Hilde was already two states away in college, busy living a life apart from Hazleton.
“Pretty sure you’re the one who accepted the job, honey. How’s the dissertation going?”
I groaned, lifting my coffee cup to my mouth. “Okay, I guess. I spend nearly all day working on the damn thing, and I’m never sure I’m on the right track. I mean, I’ve written over a hundred pages so far, and the last conversation I had with my DD she suggested I narrow my scope. Now, I’m searching for a way to not lose all the work I’ve already done but incorporate this narrower scope.”
“What does that mean?” Hilde asked as she lifted her handful of carrots from the colander and placed them on a cutting board.
“So, justice is a broad topic in philosophy. You can drill down to politics, to human rights, to theology, to law, to psychology even. And don’t get me started on the sub categories within each of those. My approach was too high level apparently, and I now have to decide what path to choose. And I don’t honestly know what path I want to choose.”
Hilde looked up from her chopping and gave me a sympathetic smile. “You’ll figure it out, sis. You always do.”
“Sure,” I said.
“What about your personal life? You figuring that out?” she asked. She always asked. Hilde didn’t like that I preferred to focus on my professional life more than my personal life, because she was the polar opposite. In fact, it was safer to say, Hilde thought my life was severely lacking because of this fact.
“I’m busy,” I replied, my eyebrows shooting up challengingly.
“Well what about that guy you were seeing in Philadelphia?”
I’d been avoiding this conversation for a reason. Shit. “He … broke up with me a month or so ago.”
Hilde stared wide eyed back at me. When she sighed, her shoulders slumped too. “Oh… Well, what happened?”
That was my limit. I might be willing to fess up about the break up, but rehashing the truth of why my relationship with Brian fell apart was simply not something I was willing to do thirty minutes before I needed to be in class. Hilde liked to fix things, including me. It was a trait she’d picked up from our mother, who lived far enough away now in Chicago that the meddling was tolerable. Didn’t mean my mother and Hilde didn’t spend exorbitant amounts of time on the phone analyzing why I was single. I could only imagine what would happen if I told Hilde that Brian had left me because I didn’t like to be touched. The amount of non-professional, completely untrained and untried psychology that would spew from her mouth after that would be enough to twist me up in my head for years. And don’t get me started on the emails and phone calls that would ensue from my mother—my father too once she twisted his arm into doing her dirty work for her. No thank you.
I stood from my chair, and I drained the last of my coffee. “Long distance relationships can be difficult.” I offered nothing more.
“Philly’s not that far away,” she muttered. “Well … that’s too bad. Mom will be sorry to hear that. She liked him.”
“She never even met him. She just liked the idea of him.”
“Well—”
“I better get going.”
Hilde stared at me for a moment before she turned toward the living room. “Come give your auntie Helene a hug and a kiss,” she hollered.
Little feet trampled from the living room into the adjoining kitchen and dining room.
“Why’s your sister covered in red and blue marker,” Hilde asked Brody.
“Cause she was coloring…”
“I see—” Hilde started to say.
“…on the walls,” Brody finished.
Hilde groaned. “I’m beyond caring at this point,” she remarked to me. “The house is going to have to be completely redone when this child finally stops destroying everything.
“Heen-Hee,” Sienna said as she lifted her arms up to me.
I swooped her up in my arms, planting her on my hip. “You be a good little girl for your mama, and stop writing on the walls.” I kissed her cheek, and she squirmed in my arms, already anxious to get down and destroy something else.
I let her down to the floor, and she took off toward the living room again. I ruffled Brody’s hair and leaned down to kiss his forehead. “Bye, Brode-man.”
“Bye, Auntie Helene,” he said sweetly as he smiled up at me.
Hilde watched me for a moment, her hands distractedly fidgeting with carrots. “You sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’m fine.” I forced a smile to my mouth and walked out of the room.
* * * *
The slackers were glaring at me again as they set their papers on my desk. I smiled at them. Not a one was empty handed though, and I saw a sea of white textbooks on the second night of class. I flipped through the two chapters we were going to be covering, reviewing my sticky notes and the reminders I’d written in the margin, and just as the hour hand clicked to five, I stood up.
At that very moment, the door opened and Kane walked in. He carried his book in one hand and a pen tucked behind his right ear—nothing else. He walked toward the front of the classroom rather than toward the back where he’d sat the week before.
“Class, please open your books to—” But I made the mistake of looking at Kane as he sat at a vacant desk smack in the middle of the front row. My stomach knotted, and my hands became clammy so fast it was damn near shocking. He winked at me, and my lips parted as I stared at him. Students were watching me with furrowed brows as though concerned for my mental wellbeing, and I finally had to force my eyes away from Kane.
I cleared my throat, trying again. “As I was saying, please turn to the beginning of chapter one.”
Books opened, pages flipped, and all the while I forced my eyes to stay away from him. I waited until the pages stopped turning, and then I looked out at the group of students in front of me, taking a deep breath.
“In order to fully grasp any concept or school of knowledge, we start at the beginning.” I began walking slowly around to the front of the desk, my eyes moving around the room as I did. “In this case, our text begins with the earliest philosophical thinkers, who were, by all accounts, unaware of the very path they were forging. They were simply asking questions, and questions, arguments, and debate are at the very core of this study.” I stopped and leaned against the desk, sitting on the hard edge of the old wooden desktop. “We will review many works by those now considered great philosophers—Plato’s Republic all the way through Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. We’ll cover all the main canonical writings associated with Western ideology.” I reached beside me, fumbling with a pen distractedly and lifting it in my hands with little thought to anything but the words coming from my mouth. “A canon is, by all accounts, nothing more than a representation of a thing.” My hands fidgeted with the pen even as I gesticulated. It was my bad habit, and I could easily talk with my hands at the same time as I fidgeted with something nervously. “It is prejudice, it is incomplete, and therefore, we will expand our study beyond what is considered canonical to some of the lesser studied works along the way. Don’t worry,” I smirked at the young roguish boy who’d winked at me the week prior. “I’ll not ask you to buy any additional books. God only knows what response I’d get to that.”
The class sniggered in response to my jeer, and the boy smirked back at me seductively. I ignored it.
“Chapter one begins with an overview of some of the earliest men now considered philosophers. Many see the Republic as the advent of philosophy, but to be sure many philosophical thinkers came before Plato.” I pushed off the desk, walking slowly in front of the class. “For instance his very mentor Socrates for one. But even hundreds of years prior to that, we know of others. Thames, Laozi, Pythagoras. The problem with these earliest thinkers is that very little is known of them.” My fingers kept picking and fidgeting at the pen in my hand as I continued to walk. “In some cases their writings have survived but little else about their actual identity—in other words, credit is difficult to assign. In other cases, we know the man, but their writings, if ever they truly existed, are long lost and little remains but theory.” I stopped for a moment, taking in the eyes still studying me. Many, if not most, looked engaged. That was a good sign.
“But that’s not to say all is lost. There is a particular progression within philosophy that exists in nearly all fields of study—mathematics, biology, astronomy, the sciences in general. And that progression exists within the field of philosophy as well. This does, for those of us who’ve devoted our lives to the study, lend a particular validity to the field of philosophy.” My hand moved again, twisting the cap of the pen back and forth. “The progression is this: at its earliest, philosophy started with the simplest of questions. That’s not to say the questions were themselves simple to answer. Only that they were broad, sweeping, wide scoped. For instance, take the difference between these two common philosophical concepts that largely relate to the same topic on many levels. Number one: What is it to exist? Number two: A black man’s destiny is white. Would anyone care to tell me which concept arose earliest in the evolution of philosophy and which came later?”
I waited for a hand to rise as I stared out at the people in front of me. I could see some biting nervously on a nail, others were staring at their desktops, some didn’t seem to have a clue what I was asking, and one, seductive smirk boy, was lounged back staring at the ceiling.
“Anyone?” I asked. “Don’t make me start calling on people,” I threatened with a smile.
Kane’s hand rose, and as I looked at him, he glanced at my hands. I inhaled deeply as I walked toward him, twisting the cap quickly, pulling it off and pushing it back on. I was nervous, and the poor pen was paying the price. I was nearly afraid to hear his voice—as though it might affect me in some way I wasn’t prepared for.
“Yes, Mr. Thorson.”
He studied the pen in my hand for a moment as I cranked against the cap.
“Both topics relate to being,” he responded. “Being on a core level that is. But the first relates to humanity in general. The second relates to a subset of humanity that impacts the existence of only some. The broader of the questions came first. The question of what it is to be.” His eyebrows shot up as he watched me.
“Yes,” I said.
But before the word was even fully out of my mouth, the pen dropped from my hand rolling toward the place where Kane’s feet were stretched out in front of his desk. Students around him craned their necks to see what had happened, and as I quickly took the couple steps toward him and leaned over to pick up the pen, he just as quickly stood and reached down for it too. He managed to pick it up first, and as I stood back up slowly, moving in tandem with his body, he reached for my hand, placing the pen on my palm.
“Your hands are covered in ink,” he said quietly even as his fingers ran gently over mine.
I looked down, and my fingertips were blue. Fuck. When I glanced back at his eyes, he was studying me calmly.
“Oh…” I breathed out as I glanced around for a moment. I walked back to the desk, setting the pen down and trying to ignore the blue. When I turned around, I finally continued. “You’re correct. The broader question came first.”
I paused for a moment, refusing to look at my hands again. “In some sense it’s similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy as you may have studied in your general psych and sociology courses. It’s the same concept if nothing else. You must satisfy the basic questions before moving onto the more detailed. And therein lies the importance of starting from the beginning, the ancient world, before we progress in time to the more contemporary arguments.”
I paused, again looking out at the students in front of me. They watched me, waiting for me to continue. And I did. For another forty minutes I lectured over the first chapter, and when I broke the class for a fifteen minute break, I had to pee, my throat was getting hoarse, and my heels were rubbing blisters into the sides of my feet—and let’s not forget the blue fingertips.
I walked from the room and down the hall to the small lounge area. I used the restroom, and when I was standing in front of the mirror vigorously scrubbing the blue from my hands, I stared at myself. I was wearing a tailored hip length black suit jacket, but I’d paired it with boot cut jeans and a worn gray V-neck T-shirt with a faded out University of Pennsylvania crest on the bust. It was likely wrong to wear my Alma matter’s logo at its rival’s campus, but given some of the ridiculous if not crude T-shirts I saw around this place, I’d decided I didn’t care. The T-shirt hung loosely and casually on my frame, peeking out from under the lower hem of my jacket by an inch or two. My heels had a pointy toe, and they hurt like hell, but I liked the look. Sadly it all left me feeling pathetic.
I’d felt like a shmuck the week before dressed in a full suit, my hair perfectly in place. Feeling like a shmuck because I was overdressed was not typical in the least for me. I was allowed to dress as I liked for an evening class, and since I’d started TAing a few years back, I’d always chosen to look professional because my age otherwise showed through. And yet, for the first time since teaching a class, I felt like a fucking dork.
It was him.
He’d always made casual look good, and he still did. For some reason that made me feel pathetic and immature. I wanted to look casual right along with him as though I could stay in control of myself if we were on the same level—even if that level was his. I ran my hands through my hair, gathering it at the back of my head and twisting it into a messy bun that I fixed in place with a hair tie from my pocket. A younger woman from the class walked in on me as I was staring blankly at myself.
“I like your jacket with the T-shirt underneath. Very cool,” she commented with a smile.
“Thanks.” I cleared my throat as I headed toward the door.
“You must be really smart,” the girl commented again.
I stopped, turning toward her.
“I mean … you can tell. Just the way you talk—”
“I worked very hard in school.”
The girl shrugged. “I should probably do more of that,” she said jokingly as she pulled the stall door open.
I nodded slowly. “I guess it’s all a matter of priorities.” I stared at her for a moment and then tried and failed at a smile. When I turned and walked out, it was with an awkward nod of my head.
I sucked back water from the water fountain in the hallway on my way back to the classroom, and as I angled my head to the side and slurped as quietly as I could, I gazed down the hall, my eyes catching on Kane. He was lounging easily against one of the wide window sills speaking with a blonde gal from the class. The girl couldn’t have been more than a sophomore at most, and while I could only see half of her face from the angle she was standing to me, it was clear she was flirting with Kane.
Kane smiled at the young woman, and it was just as flirtatious as the look that was returned to him. When his eyes moved past the woman and down the hall, his attention caught on me and he suddenly stood up straighter. I sucked in a gasp of air. Sadly the gasp came as water was still flowing into my mouth, and I instantly choked, sputtering water as I stood upright and tried to breathe.
Kane’s eyes never left me as my humiliation played out for him, and when I managed to recover myself enough, a quick glance in his direction proved he was still watching and the young woman was too. His composure looked tense, and as I looked around hastily for an embarrassment escape hatch to appear, he placed his hand on the woman’s arm and pulled her away toward the classroom, either not wanting to see me recover from this or simply wanting to give me privacy to do so.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath as I looked up and down the hallway. I was alone now, two minutes after it would have benefited me most to have some privacy. I sighed, shook my head, and started toward the lecture hall. My heels clicked on the hard floor as I walked, and the blisters felt wet and burning hot—as though they’d broken open and the leather of my shoes was rubbing directly on fresh open skin. It was an oddly accurate metaphor for how it felt being around Kane again. He abraded my being in some way I was ill-equipped to handle.
I paused outside the door, inhaling slowly and then letting it out in one long sigh. When I walked back in, I cleared my throat and launched in to chapter two without ever looking up at the class. Of course I only managed to avoid Kane’s eyes for about ten minutes, and when I made the mistake of glancing at him, his elbow was rested casually on the sidearm of his desk, his hand to his mouth as his middle finger grazed back and forth over his lower lip. The way his head was cocked to the side made me think he felt bad for me, sad, embarrassed for me even.
I forced my attention to move away and continued my lecture until I’d covered everything there was to cover from Thales to Zeno, and when I pulled the stack of quizzes from my briefcase, the room erupted in groans. I unclipped the paperclip from the stack, and I walked along the front row, handing a portion out to each student there to pass back. When I handed a stack to Kane, he glanced up at me and took the stack, refusing to break eye contact until I’d moved on.
“You have until the end of the class period to complete this. It shouldn’t take you the full forty-five minutes, but you have it if you need it. There are three short answer and one long answer. Support your argument well, and you’ll get credit. Fail to support, and you won’t. You’re free to leave when finished.”
I sat in the desk chair, and I leaned back and waited. It was fifteen minutes later when the first student stood and walked up to my desk. He handed me the quiz, and as I glanced down it was to see that it was half blank. He was already walking away by the time I glanced back up. My money was on him dropping before the following week.
Quiz after quiz was turned in after that, and I collected them in my briefcase one after another. Bathroom girl who thought she needed to work harder at school turned her quiz in, her handwriting large and bubbly.
“Thank you,” I said as I accepted the pages. I glanced down, taking in her name and trying to be kinder than I’d managed in the restroom. “Abby.” I smiled.
Her natural smile widened instantly. “Thanks, Professor Hess.” And then she walked out.
There were only five students left at that point, and when hallway flirt girl finished, she turned her quiz in and then walked close to Kane’s desk, placing a small slip of paper on his desktop. He glanced up, glanced at the paper, and then glanced back up again. He watched the girl walk from the room, and when his focus shifted back it caught on me. He stared for a moment, but then he glanced back down to his desktop, pocketing the paper quickly.
My heart pounded, and a desperate ache in my chest clenched tight around it. Three more quizzes were turned in, and then it was just us. His pen had been still for many long minutes, and I knew he was waiting to be alone with me. He stood, walking toward the desk, and when he set the quiz down, his fingers paused still touching the paper.
“She’s a little young for you don’t you think?” The question from my own mouth reeked of jealousy, and I hated the tone of my voice. This was a man who’d left my life long ago of his own will and choosing. He didn’t deserve jealousy that in all truth confused me. Kane had never been my boyfriend. Friend, yes. Best friend, perhaps. And while he’d touched me and done things to me only a lover should, he’d not stuck around long enough afterward to help me sort any of it out. He sure as hell hadn’t stuck around long enough to be anything more than a long forgotten memory. Sadly, I had a very good memory.
“She apparently doesn’t think so.”
My focus snapped to his eyes, and his nostrils flared as his jaw tightened. He crossed his arms defensively, but he looked guilty.
“I don’t need your judgment. I’m not a kid anymore. And even if I was, you were never my girlfriend.” He stared at me, his expression tight and challenging. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m the person I once was. You’ll only be disappointed when you realize I’m not.”
“That’s really unfortunate,” I said as I snapped the latch on my briefcase closed. “Because I really liked that boy. He was good, he was smart, he was caring, he was respectful.”
He finally scoffed. “No I wasn’t, remember?” he muttered.
“You were to me,” I responded, and then I grabbed my briefcase and walked out. My cheeks burned, but I forced my gate to remain steady and unhurried.