Bodega | Rebecca Rebecca

She imagined him opening his mailbox. Which was a little hard to do, because she had no idea what his mailbox looked like, having mostly interacted with him over email, only going to class twice in person, just watching the lecture videos from home instead most of the time. How would he react?

She worried that she had maybe sent him too many emails about the class, asked too often for reading recommendations, and she made sure to say as much in every email, letting him know she didn’t want to take too much of his time and he didn’t need to respond if he was busy, but she really didn’t have anyone else to talk to about these things (she didn’t say that last part to him, just herself). He always did reply, and pointed her to such interesting things to read, but his emails were otherwise so terse that she could never tell if he was happy or annoyed to hear from her, really couldn’t tell what he might be thinking at all.

And this time she was extra worried that she might have gone too far. She had made it totally, totally clear that it was the passing misogyny of these philosophers they had read that she was angry about, and their obliviousness to women’s sexuality, not him. She loved the class! But he had assigned these readings—and she was so glad he had!—and might be defensive about that.

She again checked her email. Why wasn’t he writing back?

***

Dear Rebecca,

Thanks for the chocolate! Certainly unnecessary, given my meager efforts. For reasons completely out of your control, the package did cause me a moment of panic. I hope you enjoy this story.

I had a very good, but also overeager student in my night class last semester: a middle-aged woman who, by her own description, had spent the last two decades of her life raising her kids and running her household, with nothing in the way of intellectual outlets. She was gushingly positive about the class and how it had revived a dormant part of her. After the semester ended, she sent me a short dialogue she had written about civil disobedience between MLK, Thoreau, Socrates, and a self-important Alabaman philosophy professor—not terrible, so far as such things go, but such things are rarely good. I just sent her a short email in reply, not wanting to discourage her newfound interest, but also hoping her weekly, if not daily, emails would trickle off now that the class was finished. But then she mailed me a draft of a way too personal essay she was working on, which arrived at my office mailbox right around the same time as I got an email from her—so obviously sent a couple days after the hard copy—in which she realized that maybe she shouldn’t have sent the essay. I decided the best approach would be to not acknowledge the essay or last email at all.

Anyway, this student’s name is Rebecca. So when I got this package of chocolates and the accompanying note—“Thanks for all your help with the mail. Rebecca”—my first thought was: Help? Does she mean my faint praise of the dialogue and tactful ignoring of the essay? And then I thought: Wait, how does this overeager student know my home address? And then I kind of panicked for about three seconds. And then I remembered that I knew another Rebecca.

Best,
Michael

***

She laughed at this email, imagining his eyes dart from the note and box of chocolates up to the windows, and then to the locks on the inside of his front door. It was not so much his labored, too-artful telling of the anecdote that she found funny, but rather the idea that any student would think he was the right audience for a way too personal essay. This was someone who a mutual friend regularly joked might be a Replicant: “You’re in the desert and come upon a turtle trapped on its back. What do you do?” She had known him for over ten years—they had started grad. school on the same day and defended their dissertations a week apart seven years later, before she had been driven out of philosophy by the oblivious men at her first job and moved to Canada, where he forwarded her mail that had to be sent to a U.S. address—and she would never have given him anything more personal than a draft of an essay on Kant for comments. Man, did she not miss trying to understand what was going on in students’ heads, and their strange projections as to what was going on in hers.

117 – July 2022

By Ben Roth

Rebecca Rebecca