THERE’S BEEN A spring snowstorm and I’ve called in sick to my day job to attend a day of faculty development at the university.
It’s a long message, almost a minute. I see it when I’m exiting the train. I get coffee from the coffee cart, milk and two scoops of sugar. I climb the stairs, which have gone icy, up to campus. The hand that doesn’t hold my coffee clutches the cold rail. I take my left glove off to slide open my phone and listen to her voicemail. Her voice is shaky. She drives a convertible; I think I hear the wind around her in her car.
I just … she says. Maybe it’s the lawyer in me, she says.
The cardboard cup is thin, and bends, the plastic cover comes undone and drops of coffee fall onto my coat. I’ve misplaced my winter boots and my feet are numb inside my leather shoes.
I pass a colleague, then another. I smile at them, nodding.
I’ll do whatever you need me to, my mother says to my voicemail. I’ll come up there. She’s frantic. Her voice quavers. I worry, though, about you. I talked to your father about maybe calling someone. I want to make sure. She stops. I hear the wind and other cars driving past her. What’s most important, says my mother, is those little girls.
I grab hold of the railing of the steps that lead to our department office as I almost slip.
I don’t want you to lose your little girls, my mother says.
I’m standing in front of the building where we’re meant to be meeting.
Colleagues pass me. I climb the six flights of stairs up to the auditorium to avoid talking in the elevator as I listen to the message two more times. I know what this is because it’s happened once before this: they’ve suggested I’m not equipped to be a mother. She has. She has threatened to call authorities, to check in. This was just after I cut off contact. She has walked me through, via email and then in long voicemails on my phone and once my husband’s, the various ways a child might be taken from a parent if the parent is not properly equipped. I’ve thought before this that these threats were empty. They don’t, I tell myself, really think that my children should be taken from me. They just want me scared. Still, there is her voicemail here now and all the emails from two years ago that I have saved and pull up now on my phone.
Your little girls, my mother says, and I can see them, smell them, from this morning, sleep hair in their eyes and French-toast breath; I throw my coffee in a close-by trash can, worried I might throw it up.
* * *
I tap my pen through the first four hours of presentations. I slip my feet out of my shoes. I sit in back. I came in late and waved to my friends sitting together, walked up the steps to the last row so that no one would be behind me. They’ve brought in a guest lecturer to speak to us about arguments and Greeks. She’s corpulent, short-haired, almost funny. She picks at her sweater, to keep it from tugging at her middle, as she speaks. She rubs her hand along the back of her neck and leans her head back when she loses hold of her train of thought. She makes self-deprecating jokes about herself that it’s clear she only half believes.
Kronos, the speaker tells us, is time, chronology. Topos is, she says, a place, any shared allotment of space. She says we should tap into this idea when helping students learn. We should take them for walks, exploit their personal investment, explain to them their impact on community. Kairos is the sacred moment, the moment in which we learn or are introduced to an idea. She talks about how irrevocably our intellects attach themselves to time, knowledge that depends on where you are and whom you’re with. She talks about reason a posteriori, in terms of the consequence after the fact.
I walk out of the large room with its stadium stairs and I replay the message standing in the hall. My socks are neon green and I curl my toes in. I want to scream into the phone. I want to yell at her to keep the fuck away. My hands shake and I do not want to reenter the auditorium. I’ve left my bag and my computer. I’ve yet to sign the sign-in sheet.
When I get back inside, the word “stasis” is in all caps on the board. Beneath it, the speaker’s written “civil war.” In biology, she says, stasis is the moving of fluids back and forth. More hopeful definition, she says, then she laughs. Second century BCE. Hermagoras. These were, according to him, the different forms arguments took inside a court of law. Pre-lawyers, she says. Oft forgotten. Poor Hermagoras. She laughs. She’s taken off her sweater. The heat inside the room is stifling, thick. She wears a dark-blue short-sleeved shirt that pulls in places that suggest it was constructed for a man. She has a small vine tattoo that loops around her wrist, then spreads in thin intricate twists all up her arm. She wears glasses and pushes them up on her nose each time she writes on the board. She has a tiny speck of chalk on the left side of her cheek.
Five steps, she says, make up the basic stasis questions. One: fact or conjecture. Everything is arguable, she says, maybe most of all the facts. Two: definition. Definitions, she says, are logotropic; definitions can trope, confine, recapitulate a whole argument. Three is quality or value—what sort of act is being argued, what it’s worth. Four: cause or consequence. Five: procedure, proposal, policy—what should we do, she says, about whatever we’re arguing? How do we find a way to move on?
* * *
I go home and get our girls and somehow end up at my younger sister’s. I do not like my younger sister. I think sometimes I would like my younger sister if we had not, our whole lives, been in a not-quite-clearly-constituted fight over who deserved to make it out intact.
She doesn’t mean it, my sister says, on the too-hard loveseat my parents bought her. She never cut up their credit cards and now talks to them daily. They purchased and paid to renovate this apartment in Murray Hill. My girls laugh and play with a box of Q-tips that sits below my sister’s vanity. They break them, then stick them in each other’s noses.
For three years, most of college, my sister stopped eating almost completely and her bones began to turn to chalk and hair grew on her face, and I could still, now, loop my thumb and index finger around her wrists and they would meet.
You know how she is, my sister says. She’s just hurt, she says.
My husband calls my sister the apologist.
She’s not good at dealing with hurt, my sister says. Tell them that you’re sorry, she says. Let them think you think you’re wrong.
Before Dante gets on the boat in the Inferno, I tell my sister, there are cries of anguish from the uncommitted—the souls who took no sides, those concerned not with good or bad but with how to take care of themselves. These people, I tell my sister, were naked and futile. They were stung relentlessly by wasps, fed on by maggots, in a sort of spiritual stagnation, I say.
My sister looks at me, then at my girls, who have stopped with the Q-tips and are helping each other climb onto my sister’s bed. She leans toward me, whispers to me—when she was little she used to threaten them, she used to tell them that if they yelled at her, if they made her practice her piano or come home at a certain time, she said, if they did that then she might turn out like me—she says: Are you sure you’re okay?
* * *
What is she threatening? asks the Chilean writer at our now weekly coffee.
I tell her that my mother wants to remind me there is evidence. She could find proof. She could make a case—more than enough documentation of all my various diagnoses, prescriptions, and probations—against my right to be a mother to my children and there would not be shit that I could do.