Chapter 9

Mitchell once told me that when he was with his girlfriend Pam before me there was a period when she stayed with him and they weren’t getting along and he slept in the living room ceding his bedroom to her and a houseguest came for a weekend (or longer? I don’t know), making the living room unavailable to Mitchell, and Pam welcomed him to rejoin her in the bedroom but instead he chose to sleep on the floor next to the bed. The wood floorboards must have been hard. He didn’t tell me whether or not he was able to sleep.

Mitchell and Pam were still seeing each other when he and I first got together. I didn’t know and his finally telling me was what led to our separating a while to think over our involvement. During that separation, which lasted for months, the future was uncertain. We finally did reunite and by then Pam was out of the picture.

At night I thought of Tommy’s hands. Tommy the immigration cop who arrested me. Because sometimes he looked like he wanted to touch me.

We were talking about buying an oven before this happened, looking for one, measuring cost and quality. I argued that it’s more economical in the long run to spend more money and buy a good one, and Mitchell agreed. He talked about a professional model that caught his eye. It’s more than we need or can afford, but he gets something in his mind and reason goes out the door.

My friend Carmen here told me a phrase in Spanish, from an old song or something. I don’t remember the words in her language but it means, “When poverty comes in the door, love goes out the window.” Isn’t that sad?

Mitchell talked about an elevator he’d been in at another college he visited for an event. He’s afraid of elevators and said that the door of this one had an extension like an arm to prevent people from getting caught- it reached forward when a sensor detected someone in its path as it closed, someone half in and half out. Mitchell isn’t afraid of getting caught by the door but of being trapped inside an elevator and unable to escape. He has claustrophobia. I think a detention center would be hard for him. You try to forget confinement, think of other things. I keep a sort of diary- though without my phone or paper writing it down isn’t possible.

Mitchell went on and on about his job, not for the first time, described a scene in the boss’ office, he and a coworker named Becky there, on the desk the course outlines they and the rest of their colleagues were required to draw up and submit for review. Mitchell hates that and devotes as little time as possible to it. Becky, the coworker, a political activist, was talking to the boss, cheerfully, playing up to her some, Mitchell thought, and he glanced down at the course outline she’d brought, there on the desk beside them, and saw it was four pages long and thorough. No wonder she was cheerful, brimming with confidence, pride. Mitchell’s outline was a single page, rewrite of one he always used, only adjusted a little for whatever class he was teaching, making a fresh copy- in fact the page in front of them was a copy of a copy and looked it, a few generations gone. He hoped his boss Rachel would not look closely then and compare his work with that of his coworker. She apparently didn’t. It was Becky who noticed. She pointed to the list of grammar items that was part of the format they had to use and asked Mitchell about one.