Heads of the Colored People(9)
In fact, Randolph would call his problem one of duality, twoness, though not in the purely DuBoisian sense, but in the sense that he was of two minds about most things, and very few of those things converged. He maintained two social media pages, one for colleagues and one for old friends who knew him when. Both included the phrase “it’s complicated” under his name. Reggie would say that the tyranny of whiteness both emasculated him and expected him to adopt hypermasculinity. Randolph could find no nonbinary position on the continuum. He could only flip-flop.
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Randolph didn’t tell Reggie about his sandwich or the raisins, but he told him that the migraines were getting worse, even with the dose of amitriptyline he’d been prescribed. Reggie said, “Those headaches will go away once you stop feeling like you have to be some kind of standard, once you just let it all out. The problem is once you do that, you won’t have a job. For me it’s nosebleeds. I call ’em my monthly cycle. The pressure has to come out some kind of way.”
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On a Tuesday, while Isabela and the lights were out, Randolph sneaked over, again, to her side of the office. She had apparently hidden the trail mix, because it was not in sight. In the silver-framed picture on her desk, she hugged her toddler nephew and wore a red cocktail dress. Randolph fingered the floral-print cup that held her collection of number 2 pencils, most of them yellow and sheathed in those soft cushions that slide over the top. He pulled the sheath off one of the pencils and squished it around in his hand. The pencils were freshly sharpened, the goldenrod, brown, and black contrasting attractively. Randolph took a sheet of Isabela’s scratch paper, then used each pencil in succession, dulling the lead by pressing hard as he drew little spirals, each stroke of the pencil a little ecstasy. He hid the blackened paper in his messenger bag and removed any dust or traces of broken points that had landed on the desk and rearranged the pencils as he remembered them. He didn’t want to be the next blip on the text-alert system. Alert: robbery and assault in office of nontenure-track female faculty member. Suspect: tall black male, generally thought handsome, accused of keeping the lights off in a suggestive manner, eating fourteen yogurt-covered raisins, and breaking a desk lamp and eleven pencils.
He returned to his own desk, locking up the blackened scratch paper, his lunch, and all his office supplies. He noted the spot where the blue edge of his bonsai’s pot lined up with the silver crack in the file cabinet.
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The Monday before Thanksgiving, Randolph arranged a mentoring meeting with DIY, hoping to feel her out about the potential for a new office. He planned to discuss his upcoming annual review and then to casually bring up the situation with Isabela. He knocked and stepped into the office carefully, but she whispered, “Just have a seat. You don’t need all that false formality with me. How is your semester going?”
“It’s okay, an adjustment.”
She watched Randolph’s face too carefully, for too long, before she said, “You don’t like that office mate, do you?”
Randolph laughed, debating whether he should tell her the truth, unsure what she would do with it. “I just don’t want to make her uncomfortable,” he started, and felt compelled to apologize for this dishonesty, “but actually she’s making me uncomfortable.” DIY didn’t stir. He looked away from her eyes; their cloudiness reminded him of marbles you might trade away. “You’re a woman,” he began again, feeling like a liar, for her femaleness seemed, to him, buried far beneath the nest of thinning hair, the severe black clothes. “I don’t want it to look bad, you know, like I’m doing some kind of exercise in male domination.” He chuckled.
DIY made a pfff noise with her mouth and leaned back before she leaned in. She took deep inhalations from the back of her throat and exhaled the words without parting her teeth. “That’s your problem,” she said. “You’re afraid of the light.”
He started to speak, but she gave him a withering look.
“You think you’re too good for this school. It’s obvious to me. You don’t want to be exposed, so you overcorrect in some places, but it all comes out somewhere else.”
“I don’t think I follow,” Randolph said, the word “overcorrect” pinching his ego.
“That’s one of your other problems.” She paused her rebuke for a moment before trying again, “There’s this saying in law, ‘mutatis mutandis,’ ‘the necessary changes have been made.’ It doesn’t apply to you.”
“And how exactly is this relevant?” The veiled hints and analogies were too much for Randolph’s migraine.
“Sometimes the problem is the environment; sometimes you are the environment. In your case, you think you’re making changes, but you take the problem with you, like you did exchanging your old job for this one.” She gestured with one hand for him to leave.
Randolph left the meeting furious with DIY, though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. He asked Carol about the new office that day, and though it looked like another demotion of sorts, it represented, for him, a battle he won, growing a pair.
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As he walked out of a faculty meeting one wintery afternoon, Randy paused near the adjunct who’d moved in with Isabela, a skinny guy with adult acne. “How do you like the new office?”
“It’s good,” he said. “Nice windows.”