Heads of the Colored People(5)
THE NECESSARY CHANGES HAVE BEEN MADE
Though he had theretofore resisted the diminutive form of his name, in his new office, Randolph felt, for the first time, like a Randy.
If Randolph were truthful, he could admit that he began acting like a Randy months before Isabela and especially the week before the holiday. That Tuesday, after Isabela had wished him a tepid “Happy Thansgiving” and he was sure she was gone for the weekend, Randolph had picked up the little silver picture frame on her desk and spit-washed her face and meager breasts through the glass, swirling his index finger until she blurred into a mucoid uni-boob. He returned the frame, packed his things into two blue copy-paper boxes, and shuttled them to his new office, hoping his bonsai would survive the transition and the dark holiday. Even with the lamps he purchased, the room was dim, but he was determined to keep the fluorescents off. His new office sat at the back of a musty corner near the janitorial closet, but it was, he reassured himself, his musty corner. He drove home for the break pleased with his victory and the progress and restraint he showed in achieving it.
Before Isabela, DIY had been the subject of Randolph’s irritation, and before DIY, Crystal, before Crystal, Fatima, and before Fatima, Randolph’s mother, the Virgin Mary, and a girl who sneered at him in second grade.
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Before Isabela, when Randolph was first hired at Wilma Rudolph, an HBCU, the department chair, Carol, had introduced him to Dr. Ivan-Yorke, saying that he should meet with her at least twice during the semester so that she could provide a letter for his file. Other than the fact that Randolph and DIY were two of the only three black professors in the department, he wasn’t sure why he was assigned to Ivan-Yorke. She didn’t work in his specialization and hadn’t written anything of note in decades. Her eyes sat high on her head and deep in her face, which, because of its plumpness, reminded Randolph of gingerbread dough. Randolph had seen her the day of his interview limping down the narrow hallway in what he described later to his friend Reggie as some sort of funereal muumuu but which at the time struck him as a plain black dress.
“This is Dr. Randolph Green, a new assistant professor,” Carol had said, “from Preston.” Dr. Ivan-Yorke glared coolly down her square glasses before lifting her head slightly and gesturing for Randolph to examine the collection of office mugs displayed on her shelves. Randolph’s glance—for he was astute at times—picked up a DIY theme. One mug, lavender with white lettering, said, “Keep Calm and Do It Yourself.” Another said, “A Job Is Never Done until I’ve Done It.” Carol looked at him apologetically, laughing a little. “That’s right. I forgot to tell you that everyone here calls Dr. Ivan-Yorke ‘DIY.’ Her favorite saying is—”
“Do it yourself,” DIY interrupted, with one flaccid arm raised toward her collection.
“Ha,” Randolph forced.
“Come closer,” DIY whispered. “I’ve been here for over twenty years.”
There was no one in the hallway or the nearby offices. Randolph didn’t understand why she spoke so quietly.
“I’ve read some of your work,” DIY mouthed. “Why did you leave the prestigious Preston?”
“You know,” Randolph said. “Wanted to try something different.” He didn’t say what he told others: that he wanted a reprieve from performing his status as an antistereotype or that he needed a break from the beneficence of liberal guilt, all eyes on him, the expectations of smiling, gesturing women. He felt one of his migraines already. They started in the small indentation at the base of his head, where neck meets pituitary cavity. The veins constricted as though a nylon cable were forcing the blood up, up, and out of his forehead. Pressure flooded the ocular nerves, concentrating itself behind one eye or the flat bone around his temple. He saw no aura, only felt the violence of it all.
“You know how it is,” Randolph repeated.
“I don’t,” DIY said, turning back to her desk.
Carol and Randolph saw themselves out of the office.
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Randolph hadn’t wanted to share an office any more than he’d wanted to teach at a historically black university, but Wilma Rudolph was the only other university in the city and was the only one still looking for an advanced assistant professor in the late spring, and by then he’d have done anything to get away from Preston and what he and Reggie called its “tyranny of whiteness.” It turned out, to Randolph’s dismay, that while the students at Wil U were mostly black, the faculty was nearly as homogeneous as Preston’s, especially in the humanities. The school, he felt, was run almost entirely by women, and Randolph came to understand them as an unholy sisterhood of pseudofeminists, with DIY as their unofficial leader, Carol their henchwoman-in-training, and Isabela their likely successor. A black man, he told Reggie, was just as much a token there as on the other side of the city.
The consolation prize for the job was his double office with the most enviable windows in the building. The other nontenured faculty members were housed in two slums on the third and fourth floors of the building, sitting five or six people to spaces that should have been called carrels. But the two faculty members who’d shared the office previously had left on short notice, bequeathing to Randolph a large, well-lit space of his own. Until Isabela.
She was hired in late September, a month into the school year, after the department chair of Spanish and Portuguese received complaints from students that their class was unassigned to an instructor. A professor from the Spanish department walked into Randolph’s office with a woman at her side, gestured toward the partition and second desk, and told Isabela, “This will be yours,” before she introduced herself and Randolph’s new office mate. Isabela smiled in a way that most people, including Randolph, would perceive as warm, and asked his department.