This Was Not the Plan by Daphne Uviller

Author:Daphne Uviller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press

FIFTEEN

Sylvia was bored, which was a sin. She had no one to meet, no friends to catch up with, not even an errand to run. And as David Ketchum had so kindly pointed out, nothing to write, no work to do. He didn't know she had no gigs to turn down. She had multiplying emails to tend to, the eternal modern albatross, but even those were nonessential.

Linden College had felt small by the end of her sophomore year, and it hadn't grown any bigger in the decades since she'd graduated. After the first two weeks visiting old haunts—the stuffy seminar room where she'd been introduced to Brecht and Shange, the beer-scented staircase where she'd had uncomfortable vertical sex for the sole purpose of adding to her quiver of collegiate experiences—and marveling at the intrusion of modernity—green-roofed, glass-walled triumphs of ecologically sound architecture crammed in between the stoic stone behemoths—she'd run out of things to do. She tried to read, but she was anxious, out of step with the rest of the world. She should have been at the height of productivity, connectivity. What the hell was she doing squirreled away in some leathery library? Without the chaos of the city to camouflage nothing-to-do-ness, Sylvia became painfully aware of how nonessential she'd become. Nonessential personnel.

Four weeks into her inglorious stint as a professor, she was dutifully paging through her backlog of New Yorkers in the coffee bar located in the new science building—a corporeal rebuke to the humanities—when her phone rang. Home. Thank God. She hurried to answer.

“Mommy?”

Her children's voices were so high, and even higher on the phone, that Sylvia could rarely identify the caller in two syllables. And if she erred, great offense was taken.

“Sweetie!” she bluffed. “What's up?”

“Nathaniel's sneaking screen time.”

“Leah, please don't call me just to tattle.”

“I'm not.”

“Is what you're telling me going to get your brother into or out of trouble?” This neat distinction, so satisfying to adults, rarely elicited the desired outcome.

“Nathaniel's brain cells will rot!”

“So you're saying you're getting him out of trouble by saving his brain.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me how school was.”

“Seneca's sister got tongs.”

Sylvia set down her coffee mug and blocked her free ear. “Say that again?”

“Seneca's sister got tongs,” Leah repeated in her croaky voice. “And her parents won't let her wear them.”

“Hang on,” Sylvia said. “You don't wear tongs.”

“Well, Seneca's sister does. And they stick up out of her pants so her parents won't let her wear them.”

Sylvia coughed back a laugh.

“Sweetie, I think you mean ‘thong.' It's a kind of underwear.” She thought for a moment about how to explain it. “It's a kind of underwear you need tongs to get off, actually.”

“Really?” said Leah, and Sylvia sensed an avalanche of misinformation ready to pound Mrs. Hartford's first-grade class tomorrow.

“No, I'm kidding!” She hurried to explain. “It's just that the words sound alike—thong and tong—and tongs are…never mind. It's a complicated joke.”

It hit Sylvia then that she was essential personnel to Leah and Nathaniel. There were teachers to enforce the learning

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