Help Yourself by Curtis Sittenfeld

Author:Curtis Sittenfeld [Sittenfeld, Curtis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473585584
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2020-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Show Don’t Tell

At some point, a rich old man named Ryland W. Peaslee had made an enormous donation to the program, and this was why not only the second-year fellowships he’d endowed but also the people who received them were called Peaslees. You’d say, ‘He’s a Peaslee,’ or ‘She’s a Peaslee.’ Each year, four were granted. There were other kinds of fellowships, but none of them provided as much money – eighty-eight hundred dollars – as the Peaslees. Plus, with all the others, you still had to teach undergrads.

Our professors and the program administrators were cagey about the exact date when we’d receive the letters specifying our second-year funding, but a rumor was going around that it would be on a Monday in mid-March, which meant that, instead of sitting at my desk, I spent most of a morning and an early afternoon standing at the front window of my apartment, scanning the street for the mailman. For lunch, I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and yogurt – Monday nights after seminar were when I drank the most, and therefore when life seemed the most charged with flirtatious possibility, so I liked to eat light on those days – then I brushed my teeth, took a shower, and got dressed. It was still only two o’clock. Seminar started at four, and my apartment was a ten-minute walk from campus. I lived on the second floor of a small, crappy Dutch Colonial, on the same street as a bunch of sororities and the co-op, where I occasionally splurged on an organic pineapple, which I’d eat in its entirety. I was weirdly adept at cutting a pineapple, and doing so made me feel like a splendid tropical queen with no one to witness my splendor. It was 1998, and I was twenty-five.

I was so worked up about the funding letter that I decided to pack my bag and wait outside for the mailman, even though the temperature wasn’t much above freezing. I sat in the mint-green steel chair on the front stoop, opened the paperback novel I was in the middle of, and proceeded to read not more than a few sentences. Graduate school was the part of my life when I had the most free time and the fewest obligations, when I discussed fiction the most and read it the least. But it was hard to focus when you were, like a pupa, in the process of becoming yourself.

My downstairs neighbor, Lorraine, emerged from her apartment while I was sitting on the stoop, a lit cigarette in her hand; presumably, she’d heard my door open and close and thought that I had left. We made eye contact, and I smirked – involuntarily, if that mitigates things, which it probably doesn’t. She started to speak, but I held up my palm, standing as I did so, and shook my head. Then I pulled my bag onto my shoulder and began walking toward campus.

Lorraine was in her early fifties, and she had moved

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