These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

After the faculty meetings were changed to a day and time when Zan had to pick up kids from school, his resulting failure to attend brought down on him admonitions concerning language in his contract. Matters reached critical mass the afternoon that Zan left Parker waiting two hours so the faculty could debate whether a bartender should be hired at thesis readings. Not prone to explosions, Zan exploded anyway and walked out. “Some of us,” was the last thing he heard one of the teachers say, “liked the department better before he came.”

The suspension of Zan’s contract began the Nordhocs’ recession fifteen months before the rest of the country’s, or before the rest of the country knew theirs had begun too. A series of media and entertainment-industry strikes sidelined Viv’s career as a photographer snapping pictures locally for alternative weekly newspapers, sometimes nationally for entertainment magazines, of politicians and singers including not only the new president several years before his election but, some two decades past his prime, the redhaired glam-rocker whose music Sheba loves and Viv loved as well in her youth (distinctly marking her as an oddball among the teenage tribes of the Midwest). “Was his hair red?” Sheba asks, on raptly hearing the account of this photoshoot from her mother.

“Not as red as it used to be,” says Viv.

“Was he nice?”

“He was very nice,” Viv assures the girl, “one of the nicest, actually. Very charming, gracious.”

“He said grace?” The girl is dumbfounded. Often Sheba likes to say grace at dinner — just to get attention, her brother is convinced. God’s, at least, if nobody else’s.