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“DONNIE AND I AREN’T getting married,” I said. “It’s over.”
“Aw, sweetie.” My father reached over and patted my shoulder awkwardly. “Are you okay?”
“Sure. I’m fine.”
“Well,” my mother said, “Brazilian men are very unreliable. Have you returned the ring?”
“No, I never got a ring. I couldn’t find anything I liked. I couldn’t see myself wearing a tri-color braided gold band with a heart-shaped diamond. Oh, that reminds me, I still have Donnie’s key. I have to return it.”
“You have this man’s key?”
“Mom, I never used it. It was just for emergencies. And I never gave him mine, don’t worry.”
As progressive as my mother was in some ways, she had some real old-world views. She would never congratulate a bride.
“Is this your first real fight?” my father asked.
I nodded.
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t give up yet.”
“If you get married, you’ll have to get used to disagreement,” my mother said. “You won’t be able to get your own way all the time.”
“As long as both of you are committed to working things out,” my father added.
And there was the rub. Donnie didn’t think there was anything to work out. As far as he was concerned, I just needed to grit my teeth and put up with Davison. The issue wasn’t simply Davison’s oafishness, although Davison was, indeed, an oaf. It was Donnie’s continual enabling and making excuses. It was like when someone had a badly behaved dog that jumped up on the guests and pooped all over the house. At some point you realized it wasn’t entirely the dog’s fault.
“Oh, and there’s something else you should probably know,” I said. “Melanie’s dead.”
The ringing silence at the dinner table made me wonder whether I should have broken the news a little less abruptly.
“Did you just say Melanie is dead?” my mother said, finally.
“Do you mean dead, as in she’s dead to me,” my father asked, “or really dead?”
I related the whole story, leaving off only the part about my having been arrested for murder. There was no need to bother my parents with those extra details.
“That’s terrible, sweet pea.” My father made a sad face, as if I were still six years old and grieving over my goldfish. “You must be really shaken up. So are you still coming with us?”
“A change of scenery would be good for you,” my mother said.
“Coming where? I thought you were staying here.”
“Well, we are planning to stay here tonight. Aren’t we, Sara?”
“Your guest room is so charming,” my mother added. “But this tiny house is far too small for three people. We can’t all share one bathroom.”
“We did last time you were here,” I said.
My parents exchanged a glance.
“And why come all the way here, if we’re only going to stay in one place?” My father said. “Why not enjoy all the beauty of the island?”
“There really isn’t anything to see in Mahina,” my mother clarified.
“We made reservations at the Kakahiakalani Resort. We should start out early tomorrow, so we can take our time and enjoy the drive.”
I liked the idea of getting out of town, away from my dead classmate and my even deader romance. But when I called Honey Akiona back later that night, she strongly advised (i.e. pretty much ordered) me to stick around.
So the next morning I dropped my parents off at the car rental hut and watched them head for the sunny side of the island without me. I drove home realizing I had the whole day in front of me, unbroken by social engagements or any other plans.
My to-do list consisted of only two items:
1) Search Melanie’s files for anything potentially helpful for my case.
2) Work on my conference paper.
I fixed a fresh cup of coffee, and then started up my computer. With great force of will I closed all of my browser windows and pulled up the data file for the conference paper Betty Jackson and I were scheduled to present next month.
I wistfully recalled my one of my father’s favorite sayings:
“The three best things about being a teacher are June, July and August.” But Dad was a high-school science teacher. The only professor I’d ever met who actually took summers off was Rodge Cowper, and I did not want to follow his example. “Dr. Rodge” taught our popular and undemanding Human Potential elective where he assigned no homework and gave no tests. He was late uploading his grades every semester, even though they were invariably all A’s. Rodge didn’t use all the extra time for research either; he hadn’t had a single publication since his promotion to associate.
I didn’t have tenure yet, so I had to publish to keep my job. And with my department chair duties, teaching load, and committee assignments, I couldn’t get it all done during the school year.
The autonomy was nice, though. I still worked about sixty hours a week during the summer, but I got to choose which sixty hours. My doctoral advisor had warned me that being a college professor would be like having homework every day for the rest of my life. He was right.
I fired up my new statistical software and ran a few t-tests and ANOVAs, two handy things I had learned from sitting in on Betty’s psychology stats course. Betty could have done the analysis herself in about two minutes, but she had encouraged me to have a go at it first.
My initial attitude toward statistical analysis had been like that of most humanists toward math-y things: the dazzled terror of apes around fire. But now I was kind of enjoying it. The simple certainty felt like a guilty pleasure. I could state whether, all else being equal, extroverted students earned higher grades in public speaking classes. I didn’t have to wrestle with the inherent problematicity of the classroom as an institution or discuss how the letter grading system reified hegemonic phallogocentrism.
I knew I should be examining Melanie’s files. Having one more conference presentation on my CV wasn’t going to be much help if I ended up as a permanent guest of the State. But I couldn’t bear to go back in and face Melanie’s writing. Maybe in a few minutes.
I glanced over the output on my computer screen. None of our pedagogical interventions seemed to have made a difference in students’ business communication grades. At least not according to the p-values. Gamified classroom versus flipped classroom versus lecture? No effect. Online lectures available versus not? No difference, possibly because most students didn’t even access the online lectures after the second week. Even introversion/extroversion didn’t predict anything. The introverts could fake their way through public speaking just fine. (I could have told you that.)
Social science research did have some built-in frustrations. Not only did ethical considerations and unimaginative human-subjects boards keep you from doing any really interesting experiments, but even with a completely kosher study, you couldn’t get all of the information you need.
Nothing on my spreadsheet told me which students genuinely did passing work and which ones squeaked by because the instructor felt sorry for them or didn’t want to see them in class again. Or which ones passed because they got someone else to write their papers for them (although maybe I could construct a proxy variable by looking at the difference between their in-class and out-of-class performance). I could try to get access to the assignments they turned in to our LMS. I would just have to ask for access—
Access. That gave me an idea.