Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee

Author:Rebecca Lee [Lee, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9781616201739
Google: ci3rzLaB4CcC
Amazon: 1616201738
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

World Party

ONE

It was always this moment in the fall semester, toward the end, the days shorter and darker, the seedpods and leaves broken and beautifully spent across our campus, that I brought out my lecture on Ovid. You don’t have to do much with Ovid—just begin to read and every person in the room gets spoken to about the deepest matters in their life. My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms: The gods, who made the changes, will help me—or so I hope—with a poem that runs from the world’s beginning to our own days.

My period was Roman Antiquity, and this class was a survey course, so we had already run through Cleopatra, Caesar, and Virgil, now to Ovid. I usually ended with Jesus, when time itself cleaved in two, and the soul was united with God, infinity making its way into our battered little sphere of finity.

This was a late morning class, so even as I lectured, I was going over the afternoon in my mind: meet with Terrance in the faculty lounge, walk with him to committee meeting, and then get to World Party by five. World Party was a little banquet my son’s school put on for the students. It was a Quaker alternative to Halloween; all the children dressed up as characters from history or books or their own imagination, while the parents laid out food before them in a great banquet, the theme being that everyone, every last person, is invited to the banquet. My son, Teddy, was seven, so this would be our third World Party. I looked forward to it every year, despite the inevitable run-in with my ex-husband and his new family.

World Party always brought to mind a sermon I’d heard long ago, in Riverside Church in New York City. I was in my twenties at the time and the preacher kept repeating these words, for possibly two or three full minutes—You don’t think you’re invited to the banquet? Well, you are. You don’t think you’re invited to the banquet? It couldn’t be you. Well, you are.

Partway through my lecture, I heard some shouting and anxious merrymaking outside, but it didn’t occur to me that it was a serious crowd gathering, despite the jangly, exciting energy to it. In the early part of the century, when this university was being built, some intelligent and benevolent architect or planner had put the history building right on the quad, a vast, beautiful, ever-changing landscape that would be the home of the many protests down through the years. During the sixties this classroom was a theater overlooking an endless stream of protests, mostly against the war. And now, in the fall of 1981, there seemed to be a resurgence of protest activity—against sexism, against apartheid, against a cement plant being built on the edge of campus, against every single tree that was taken down to clear way for more buildings, and against various faculty members for their fascism or their communism or their support for Third-World dictators.

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