They talked about how the world was getting worse.
Nathan and Yakov agreed to disagree about whether the wind turbines were terrible for birds. Trump had made the claim a few months ago–or was it already half a year ago now?–in a rather unpresidential debate with Biden.
TERRIBLE FOR THE BIRDS BY WILLIAM TAMPLIN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 125
“You produce a lot, produce produce produce, and then you cut cut cut cut cut cut,” Yakov was explaining to his wife Mary’s friends, who were still PhD students, trailing off on “cut” like a lawn sprinkler.
Van, a damp dish towel slung over his shoulder, tiptoed over to the breakfast table, positioned himself behind Yakov, and raised two interrogative eyebrows at his girlfriend June: Did she want to finish her pancakes, or...?
They’d all taken the ferry out two days ago. And now, on the first Sunday in May on Circle Island, six current, former, and questioning academics, all pushing 30, mostly in pajamas, hovered over their breakfast at Dwarves’ Den, Van’s family’s old manse cum timeshare. Dwarves’ Den? Van’s grandsire had been a paratrooper in the Battle of the Bulge, and after the war he collected little garden gnomes, Gartenzwerge, that he’d seen so many of outside cottages in rural Germany.
They picked at a breakfast of edamame omelets and ginger-studded rice milk pancakes as Yakov lectured them on how he finished grad school.
No-one responded to Yakov’s asseveration about producing scholarship. His didacticism had begun to get the better of them.
June stared at her still-half-finished breakfast, studded with the little emerald edamames, repurposed from hors d’oeuvres the night before. Her boyfriend, Vandiver Biddleston, who went by Van, or sometimes Skittles, bent back over the breakfast dishes. He was her dutiful, strong white man. And he was excused from Yakov’s increasingly insistent lecture-sermon on how they should all be writing their dissertations, like he had, and getting a job, like he hadn’t.
Rumor had it Yakov worked for the CIA, although no-one had any proof. But if he did, would they? That’s the thing about not knowing. Whatever Yakov did, he hadn’t gotten a job since he finished his PhD in modern Amharic literature and philosophy two years ago.
The eyes of Mamadu and Nathan, boyfriend and boyfriend, met briefly over the stack of pancakes, which had cooled considerably.
Before a therapeutic few seconds of silence were allowed to ensue, to sweep them naturally into the next phase of spontaneous group activity or conversation that the long weekend on Circle Island brought them, Mary cut in using her back-room-of-the-deli conversational patter and asked everyone and no-one and herself, “Want to go walking on the other part in the island, of the island, to the other side of the island, I mean? Ha ha!” She had trouble with prepositions, an effect perhaps of too much editing. But instead of bowling them all over, it revived them, restoring hope to their second hungover morning of the weekend, delaying the despair of what they, as graduate students in Boston, called finishing: getting a job, moving away, settling down, moving again, settling again, like peddlers on the move, sure in their trade and their feet. Actually, Mary’s dissertation was on Ashkenazi Jewish peddlers across Latin America and the Middle East, in the late 19th century, compared.
June stood up, picked up her over-large phone (checking it), kicked back her chair with the backs of her knees, and thrust her pelvis to just above the varnished mahogany slab of the dining table to wedge her phone in her back pocket. The sunlight streaming through the A-frame window of Dwarves’ Den made her black half-Korean hair gleam gold, and her nose flared like a bull’s to exhale with taurine resolution. Was she ready to go?