Chapter 13: School Dazed

Liam

I MOPED AROUND a bit Friday evening. Meredith fairly ran from me. I supposed I might be feeling how Hana felt when I left her abruptly last weekend after a lovely kiss. It simply left me wanting more. I needed to get control of my feelings and not become fixated on Meredith. She’d warned me, but then she’d also been a willing participant. Girls were very confusing.

I hadn’t finished painting my room. The bookcases had been emptied and Erich helped me move them away from the wall where the door between my study and Meredith’s had been hidden all these years. I needed some physical labor to take my mind off things, so I checked with Herman, our caretaker, and he helped me gather paint and gear from the work shed. He offered to help me with my task, but I felt I’d already kept him too long on a Friday and encouraged him to go on about his weekend. This was a project I could do. I could repaint my study.

The mindless repetition of painting helped to calm me and free my mind from dwelling on a possible relationship with Meredith. I needed to pack my school things and be ready to move to the dormitory Sunday afternoon. Grandmother had already announced a family dinner for before Erich drove me to Elenchus.

I cleaned my paintbrushes and rolled the tarp before showering and heading for a peaceful night of sleep.

There was never enough time once a deadline was set. My project stretched on through Saturday as I decided the entire room needed a fresh coat of paint. Erich came in to help me paint the trim in the room and move the bookcases into their new locations. By then it took both of us to get suitable clothing, books, supplies, athletic gear, and my attitude packed for school. After a very pleasant meal with my parents and grandmother, he took me to Elenchus and helped move my things into the dormitory apartment I shared with Lonnie. There was already a party going on down the hall and the boisterous return to the hallowed halls of academia was more like a soccer match.

“So, are you doing Meredith yet?” Lonnie asked as soon as we were alone in the room.

“Geez, man! What kind of question is that? You know Meredith is my employee. I can’t just start doing her. And that’s a gross suggestion.” Sometimes Lonnie was a little hard to deal with. Nonetheless, he was my best friend and we’d been roommates for eight years.

“I looked it up. There’s nothing wrong with having a relationship with an employee as long as it is clear her employment is not dependent on it. You could transfer her and have her report to your grandmother to take care of you and then you’d be out of her chain of command. Everything would be fine.”

“No. What makes you think we’d have that kind of relationship?” I asked.

“My friend, were you so oblivious during your party a few weeks ago? You might not have intended it, but by the time we were roasting marshmallows, it was a couples’ party. You’d done quite an effective job of pairing everyone up. I wasn’t a problem, of course, because I had both hands full of Susan. And believe me, those are nice handfuls. You introduced Hana and Donnie and neither of them saw anyone else all afternoon. Karen was so upset that you wouldn’t pay attention to her that she practically seduced Roald right by the pool. I brought Rosemary to the party specifically because Meredith said she wanted you to meet more girls and she ended up all over Remy. Of course, Richard and Peggy Anne have had a little thing for each other since primary school. Wonder how that will go now that he’s back at the academy. My point is that everyone was paired up and you spent the day with Meredith. She was the only woman there you were interested in.”

“Not true!” I defended myself. “I took Hana out the very next weekend. And I can’t help it if I’m uninterested in girls as young as you go for. The rest of us were just re-establishing old friendships. That’s what the day was about.”

“Okay. I rest my case. If you can’t see the look in Meredith’s eyes when she sees you, you’ll be old and gray and still wondering what happened.” We finished our unpacking while talking about the new soccer season and who would be ready to move up and take our places as we matriculated to the University.

“Who wins?” Mr. Boyer strode around the class positing various scenarios in interpersonal relationships. “We have two people who each think they’ve been wronged. They have a confrontation. Who wins?”

“Doesn’t that depend on the definition of winning?” Roald Adams was a good friend and I was glad we were sharing this class. I could see him preparing to debate and shuffled through some of my notes. “I mean, is it getting the other person to apologize? Is it correcting some behavior? Is it replacing a precious object? We can’t really tell who wins until we know how each defines winning. Right now, you’ve set it up so that neither will win no matter what the outcome.”

“That’s just the point, though, isn’t it? In a situation like this, the optimum solution is that both win, not that both lose. You can’t win an argument, even if you defeat your opponent.” I loved getting into it with Roald.

“You both have excellent points. Roald has indicated an important piece of the puzzle. What constitutes winning for each of them? No peace can be negotiated unless both walk away feeling like they’ve won, as Liam has suggested.”

“Then how do we get to the point of discovering what winning means for each? Do people really go about finding what the other person wants or needs before they have a confrontation? I’d question whether either even know their own definition of winning.” I was puzzled regarding how people ever succeed in relationships. I didn’t even know what I wanted myself. Lonnie’s insistence that Meredith and I were a couple was absurd. Wasn’t it?

The discussion continued for more than an hour, the class periods being somewhat less defined at Elenchus than other schools, I was told. Students arriving for the next class simply sat in the back or stood against a wall to observe the debate. Even a couple of faculty members, including Mr. Peoples, with whom I had my next class, arrived and watched.

“Do we actually have two different scenarios here? If Roald and I have a falling out, we should both be aware enough of this dynamic to find out what the other really wants and then work together to resolve our difference. But if either or both of us do not have the tools or education to get to that point, we are automatically in a lose-lose situation. Is that what we’re ultimately coming down to?” I saw Roald nodding. Somehow, the two of us never had difficulty reaching a consensus. Mr. Boyer stopped in mid-stride as he paced the room and turned to stare directly at me.

“That is where you come in. You have the education. You have the skills. You need to practice this over and over so attempting to find what a person’s win is and how you can effectively give him that without another losing becomes an automatic response, even if that person does not have the education or tools to discover it himself. And you need to be available for those who cannot find a resolution to help them through to it, even if you are not personally involved in the conflict. I think we’ve carried on enough for today. Let’s get everyone to his next class and we’ll deal with another dilemma tomorrow.” Mr. Boyer motioned to us to leave and the boys who had entered took their seats. I was lost in thought. Mr. Peoples interrupted me and suggested we walk to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a ‘chat,’ which was his code for the next lesson.

“Tell me more about your employment experience,” Peoples said when we had coffee and sat in a corner of the dining room.

“Um ... I’m not sure how much I can divulge without slipping into proprietary company information,” I said. “It was a good experience, though sometimes shocking and emotionally draining.”

“I detected that key events were redacted from your report. Without describing events, tell me about the emotions that you experienced while fulfilling your responsibilities.” I figured that was a pretty safe area, so I collected my thoughts and tried to put them in words.

“I guess the first day was a mix of excitement and frustration. I was unhappy that I wasn’t working with my new assistant. I hardly knew what we were doing yet. So, I guess I was relieved at the same time. The excitement was because I was facing a new challenge. In fact, everything seemed to be a new challenge that month. Working with Meredith, analyzing operations at the factory, exploring what it means to be a Leader. And there was apprehension. I didn’t want to fail my father and mother. With limited guidance around what I was to accomplish, I wasn’t sure I knew what a standard of success was.”

“Enthusiasm makes any number of other emotions seem less important. Your report certainly exposes your enthusiasm.”

“I think that came partly from discovering Meredith and I actually had a project to work on together and it finally made sense to have an assistant. I remember feeling a sense of awe about the whole mechanics of the organization. Everyone had a part to play and missing any of those pieces would affect the performance of the whole. I think the impression of efficiency and performance is what made it so hard to discover the piece that was out of place. It wasn’t obstructing the process, but it wasn’t contributing to it, either.”

“How did you feel when you finally discovered the problem?”

“Wow! What a mixture. Of course, there was the elation of having made the discovery but it came with a sense of betrayal. The company came into the family from my grandfather, who founded it. My parents were never that enthused about the arms foundry because their other businesses are clothing and food related. But it was a family business and they didn’t want to just dissolve it and lose that legacy. Someone in the company had betrayed them all, including my grandfather and, by extension, me. That made me angry. I went for a long horseback ride with Meredith and talked it out so I could see the various possible permutations and pathways through the company the problem could have taken. She encouraged me to also look at what long-term damaging effects it could have.”

“I see. You weren’t concerned about the stock value?” Peoples asked.

“Hmm. That didn’t really cross my mind until I was doing the analysis afterward. I suppose that if my father had started me off with a concern about profit instead of one of a vague unease, I would have seen that as a more prominent issue. As it was, I didn’t experience a concern for profit or even legality until I’d discovered the nature of the problem. Then I felt despair and sadness. I was glad I didn’t have to make the decisions regarding a path forward.”

“This should show you a certain short-sightedness in your approach. You let the way the problem was described to you influence how you searched for a solution and perhaps even what you discovered. When you approach a problem like this, it may be helpful to describe alternate problems before you start looking for resolution. It’s not unheard of, for example, for a small problem that can be easily discovered to hide the existence of a much larger problem. As you discovered in your debate with Roald this morning, in order to successfully negotiate resolutions to conflict, you need to discover what ‘winning’ really means. If you could give both parties everything they said they wanted, and one was still unhappy, what would you have missed?”

“That’s a tough question and one I’ll need to talk to Meredith about. I find that talking my way through things with her helps me clarify my direction.”

“You get along well with your assistant?”

“Yes. Better than I thought we would. We haven’t always had a cooperative relationship. But I value her insights and intelligence. She’s really cool. We can work side-by-side on a serious project one moment and switch gears to planning a party the next. And she’s fun to be around. Just lying on the grass for a picnic and talking is a high point of my life. And when ... um ... I mean ... she...” I was suddenly at a loss for words. I’d nearly said ‘when we kiss,’ but those were isolated instances and not a basis of our relationship. Still, I wouldn’t mind kissing her some more.

“A key element in having a successful relationship with your assistant is developing trust and not taking it for granted. In order to facilitate that, you should be aware of the same things you are aware of when investigating a problem at a company. Are there underlying problems that might be hiding a larger one? You may well develop a deeper relationship with your assistant than with your wife.”

Wife?

Meredith

SCHOOL WAS HECTIC from the start. I was used to the relaxed environment of Green Hill Women’s College. The University was far more intense. Of course, there were many more students, a wider area to cover in going to class, and classes with a hundred or more students in a lecture hall. I had orientation sessions to attend in addition to classes and was one of the older students in those sessions. It was more typical to begin college between eighteen and nineteen years old but I was a transfer student with two years completed and only a few credits needed for my baccalaureate. I could only imagine how confusing it would be for Liam when he began at mid-term. From our conversations, I detected Elenchus was not much different than Green Hill.

My dormitory room, once a quiet retreat where I could study and focus, was a horror. Hana and I had enjoyed separate bedrooms with a common area between us in our dormitory apartment. The room I was given at the University was scarcely bigger than my former bedroom and included two beds, two desks, two wardrobes, and shared a bath down the hall with a dozen other double rooms. I thought of my luxurious quarters at Buxton House and nearly wept.

Neither Liam nor I had time to spend the next weekend at Buxton House. It looked like we might not get back there for the month. We did meet for lunch on Saturday, but mostly we both described what getting back to school was like and how overwhelmed we were with classes and how exhausted we were from studying. Of course, Liam also had soccer practice and any free time was spent working with his team. Liam and Lonnie were ‘senior members’ of the team and were not eligible to play this year, but they worked with the younger boys every day.

We finished our lunch and went back to our job or studies. My focus for the afternoon included running to various real estate and rental agencies to pick up brochures and fliers on properties for rent or sale. Just returning to my dorm room was motivation to begin studying where and how to get living quarters as soon as possible.

I spent some time daydreaming over the next week. I’d come to believe our rooms at Buxton House were perfect, but part of that was having meals served to us and someone coming to our rooms to clean and tidy things. We had a swimming pool, horses, tennis courts—all things we would not have in a new home. I even imagined myself cooking and cleaning for us as part of my duties and recoiled from the image in horror. As a personal assistant, I had a great many responsibilities but cooking and cleaning were not among them! I would not become Liam’s maid and cook, even if we were to marry.

Where had that come from? I was certainly not hired to become his wife. Liam was a nice boy, sort of handsome, kind, wealthy, and ... And absolutely too young to even consider as a possible mate. I needed to introduce him to some other girls as soon as I could arrange to do so.