“Kelly, let’s get you set up in the den,” Carol said. She has a lovely, clear voice, both concerned and yet authoritative. My chief fear for her in her chosen career of social work was that the overwhelming needs in our society would burn her out, leaving only a shell of concern. Making her a bureaucrat. But not yet.
For a second it looked like we were going to get away with separating the kids so I could leave in peace. No such luck. Molly, disliking calm in any form, slipped away from Mike’s grasp as he had been slowly, oh so slowly, tugging her toward the kitchen. She dashed over to Kelly and licked her hand.
“Oh, gross!” Kelly yelled, holding up her hand like she’d been scalded instead of licked.
The boys laughed heartily at this reaction, causing Kelly to yell, “You suck!” at them.
I opened my mouth to remonstrate, but Carol made shooing motions at me with her hands, looking for all the world like a young and very intelligent Aunt Bea from Mayberry. It was cowardly, but I ran for it.
Well, I ran as fast as I could wearing a full-length formal dress, a cape and red sequined Ferragamo heels. I rarely wore heels. At my height I hardly needed to add to it and I was not good at walking in them, let alone sprinting. I got out the door in record time, however, and then teetered down our brick walkway toward the sidewalk.
The screaming inside the house followed me. A couple walking by, white, conservatively dressed, middle-aged, probably prospective freshman parents, glanced up at the sound of the screaming and then shuddered. Was it just the screaming or was it also the color of my house? It was hard to tell from their quickly shuttered faces.
My old Victorian house is only two blocks from campus and when I bought it, it had been painted a drab gray that was peeling off in sections. After the kids, Giles, Carol and I had failed to do more than dab on about ten square feet of paint in several months of effort, I’d hired a professional painter and it was now red with yellow picking out the trim like the San Francisco “Painted Ladies.” This was designed as a deliberate insult to the constantly gray skies of Chicago. People noticed. From the windows of my study on the second floor, I often saw people stop and point. Well, it made it easy to give directions to my house since every other house in this row of tall, thin Victorians was either gray or brown. The kids liked it a lot. They said it was a cartoon house.
The passersby shuddered briefly and hurried on down the street. Small-town parents often looked shell-shocked after visiting Hyde Park. The recruitment office should keep them on campus.
Safely on the sidewalk in my stiletto heels, I took a couple of breaths from my diaphragm like the kids and my Tae Kwon Do instructor had us do in classes. It was supposed to increase your life force. God knows I needed to do that. My life force was running close to empty.
Despite my love of getting really dressed up, my schedule had made me want to back out of this mid-week reception thing. I really couldn’t spare the time. In addition to two kids, I worked in the Department of Philosophy and Religion as an instructor while I was supposed to be finishing my dissertation. I had cut a deal last semester to teach half-time, and I had thrown out my old dissertation and launched a new one.
Right out of college I had become a cop; that’s where I had met my future husband, Marco. But he’d been killed in a traffic stop that had gone hideously wrong, and there’d been suspicions of police misconduct in his death. I’d run as far and as fast as I could from police work. Philosophy and Religion had seemed far enough, but oddly my previous life kept catching up to me. Finally, I’d decided to quit running away from what I knew from police work, and I’d decided to dig deeply into the kinds of contradictions of power that were not only what policing was like, but it had turned out, what academic life was like as well. This had led me to work out an agreement to do some consulting for the campus police. I wasn’t really doing much of that, though, and I had made almost no progress on the dissertation re-write. In fact, right now I should probably be making notes and trying to write, not hobbling down the sidewalk swathed in sequins and satin.
I teetered along in the unaccustomed heels, vaguely registering the odd looks of passersby. You could wear nothing but a loincloth and a lot of tattoos on the campus, like the young man I’d seen escorted off the main quadrangle just last week, and not rate a second glance. But a formal length gown and cape stuck out like jeans on the Pope. That’s university culture.
University culture was not turning out to be what I expected when I chose it as a refuge from police work. It was much more violent than I had imagined. I’d sought academics like a wounded animal would seek a dark, narrow burrow as a safe, quiet place to lick its wounds, but I’d been quickly made aware that the burrow was nearly as bad as the Chicago streets. The university was ringed by urban poverty and a lot of the crime was petty theft. The surrounding poor saw the casual affluence of the whole place as both an insult to their existence and an easy target. And the students, faculty and staff were not exempt from the tendency to steal from and even inflict bodily harm on each other. In the Middle Ages in Europe, members of universities had been exempt from prosecution by civil authorities and some of that attitude still persisted. City cops were kept at arms length for crimes committed on campus, especially theft and sexual assault. The campus police had to walk a fine line between the see-nothing attitude of the administration and the outrage of the campus community when it was suddenly revealed that such and such a crime had been treated too lightly. Some administrators were trying to bridge the gap, but they were still too few.
As I turned the corner, I spotted the new guy who was selling StreetWise, the newspapers sold by the homeless or nearly homeless to work themselves out of poverty. Speaking of crime, his predecessor had just been murdered in an alley not far from campus. Jimmy Maddox, disabled veteran, recovering addict and full-time comedian, had been well-liked in Hyde Park. People were upset and angry over his death and what seemed to be the lack of police progress in the case.
By now I was approaching Jimmy’s old corner. I’d passed the guy who’d taken his place two weeks ago quite a few times on my way to and from work. I’d bought papers, but it occurred to me to stop and talk. I wanted to see if there’d been any developments in the Maddox investigation that weren’t in the Chicago papers. Since Jimmy had been one of their own, StreetWise had better updates. The paper came out twice a month and there’d be a new one today.
I’d read the new vendor’s bio in the last paper. He was 28, but seemed much younger. He was also so fair he was almost an albino. He had long, lanky hair pulled back from a thin, mousy face. His skinny limbs seemed tight, like he was wired. I had wondered, as I walked back and forth to campus, whether he was scared of his new job or if he was on something. Unlike Jimmy, this guy rarely spoke. But his mouse face was appealing, a kind of Disney mouse face.
I knew I had bills in my tiny evening bag and I approached him. The bio had included his name, Dwayne Moorehouse.
He was looking away from me down the block toward the campus. I spoke softly, sensing I might startle him.
“Dwayne, how’s it going tonight?”
His small head snapped around and he hunched his chin into his shirt, like the little turtle that, in a moment of insanity, I’d let the kids buy in a pet shop. The tiny thing had only lived a month and had rarely stuck its brown head out of the shell, much to the kids’ disappointment.
After a pause, his pale eyes glanced up at me.
“StreetWise?” he asked in almost a whisper.
“Hi, Dwayne. Yes. I’d like a paper. I read your bio in the last issue. Dwayne Moorehouse, right?”
A longer pause, then the turtle head popped out briefly for a nod, settled back in his shirt. A barely audible “yes” followed after another delay.
Gradually his shoulders relaxed a little but he was looking down. He seemed fascinated with my shoes. I decided rushing would spook him, so I just stood there. I slowly put out my hand.
“My name’s Kristin, glad to meet you.”