Cheryl J. Fish

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CRUSHED

I’ve developed another hard crush. This time it’s on the new hire, strolling down the hall. Tall, youthful, and goateed with puppy-dog eyes, he stops me in front of my office. “What should I do when a student doesn’t show up for weeks?” he asks. When I speak to the new hire my heart palpitates. I pass his office a lot. He researches film noir adapted from novels like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, applying French psychoanalysis. I imagine him in black and white, offering a cigarette.
It hasn’t been that long since my crush on CR, the children’s lit specialist. We made private jokes at department meetings, chairs knocking against each other, poking fun at committee reports like kindergarteners sticking out their tongues. When we met to take a walk on a day neither of us taught, I envisioned a flirtatious form of freeze tag. Then in his southern drawl, CR said “I’m engaged to a male model. Sorry if I confused y’all.” I could have poured cold water over my head.
The new hire also mentions a fiancée. They do not live together so I assume he is not that into her. He writes emails with exclamation points that read like newspaper headlines and says how much he enjoys our talks. He wants to know what to do if a student leaves the country.
At the department meeting, I wear a shortish skirt and plan to sit with the new hire. He gets there early, and chooses the back row near other new hires chatting like men in back rooms.
I do not feel guilty about these crushes, only despondent. Others found love among our colleagues. A chair of Modern Languages married the drama department’s full-length play director. A sociologist fell for an accounting instructor at a foundation reception, even if the odds were stacked against them.
My most vexed obsession: a crush on a divorced lecturer, G., who called himself “a lean, cool mess.” Despite his gambling habit, a son who he said hated him, and a heart condition, G. caused a stir when he strode down the hallway in tight jeans. He’d slam the door when students came to see him, and they stayed inside his office a long time. When the department printer broke down, G. blamed it on an adjunct who printed multiple copies of class handouts instead of taking them to Repro Services. “There’s no fucking paper in the feeder.” His voice echoed down the department silencing even the secretary on a personal phone call.

I often bumped into G. at the neighborhood farmer’s market and asked after his son, a young man who barely spoke to him. “I can’t worry anymore,” said G. “I love him the best I can.” I came close to asking G out. One day at the market he touched my shoulder. “Would you care for half my salad greens?” he said. “Take some cilantro, and blueberries too.” He carefully divided his purchase and we strolled side-by-side.

G. died suddenly a few months later, at the start of fall semester. It shocked and terrified everyone. I wept on-and-off for weeks. At his memorial women came out of the woodwork, men too. Former lovers, including a young tutor from the Writing Center, those in his card game, an invitation-only soiree I never knew about. People who played basketball with him, friends from childhood. The surgeon who repaired G’s shoulder remarked on how G.’s desire to finish his doctoral thesis gnawed at him even though he didn’t need it as a tenured instructor. I could hear G. speak in his Brooklyn accent: “I messed up my marriage and fatherhood. The least I can do is finish the book.” The surgeon said that G. spent more time lately in the library than at the race track, and that he was happy to announce that G.’s adviser approved his final draft, so at least G. died with his Ph.D.

A photo of him, casual yet semi-pissed off, is pinned over my desk. After the memorial, I realized my connection to G. was not all that special. I had access to a mere fraction of G’s personality and desires.

I am grading essays when the new hire bursts into my office wearing a dark suit and a fedora. “Can you explain this rubric,” he asks, holding a dense graphic sheet before my eyes. The new hire looks tired; he reeks of rotten eggs. After I answer his questions and send him off, I gaze up at G.’s glorious smirk. “I’ll quit being an idiot about him,” I say. “You don’t need to remind me.”

Cheryl J. Fish is a poet, fiction writer and environmental humanities scholar. Her debut novel, Off the Yoga Mat, was published by Livingston Press/UWA in Oct. 2022. She is the author of The Sauna Is Full of Maids, poems and photographs celebrating Finnish sauna culture, travel, and friendships, and Crater & Tower, poems reflecting on trauma and ecology after the Mount St. Helens Volcanic eruption and the terrorist attack of 9/11. Fish has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, and is a co-editor with Farah Griffin of A Stranger In the Village: Two Centuries Of African-American Travel Literature and she is the author of the study Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives. Fish’s poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Maintenant, Terrain, Mom Egg Review, New American Writing, Reed, Postcard poems, Santa Monica Review, About Place Journal, ISLE and Poetics for the More-than-Human-World. Her short fiction has appeared in Cheap Pop, Iron Horse Literary Review, Liars League, Spank the Carp, Boog City, and KGB Bar Lit. She is a creative writing editor of the journal Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, professor of English at BMCC/City University of New York, and docent lecturer at University of Helsinki.

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