Shinelle L. Espaillat
Not Today
Kendra stepped through the automatic glass doors into the endless lobby. She moved to the side, so as not to block the tide of people flowing into the building, and pressed a hand against the unbalanced weight of her medicine ball belly. She stared at the wide miles of carpeted hallway that led, she knew, to more carpeted hallways, to escalators and conference rooms and throngs of people talking about writing. The baby kicked her bladder. She closed her eyes and let her head droop as her spine began to disintegrate. She could not take one more step. If she just stayed in that spot and let her body dissolve the way it wanted to, if she didn’t make her way to the room where she was scheduled to present, if she didn’t talk about writing, if she didn’t write—she could just mother her children, teach her classes, and be her husband’s wife, and maybe that would be fine. Maybe the world did not need her to create.
Somebody bumped her as they walked past, hard enough that her torso jolted sideways. The muscles in her lower back clenched. She considered gathering just enough strength to go back to the hotel. The pull of 300-thread count sheets and soft pillows was so strong, especially against humming nausea and the impending doom of a room full of expectations, that she almost whimpered. But the college had paid for this trip, the registration, and the hotel room with the tempting bed. They would not understand if she didn’t complete this session. Nobody else would, either. She thought about what her sister would say. Are you kidding me? Our ancestors gave birth in cotton fields and kept on picking, and you’re moaning about giving a little talk to a bunch of people who care about what you have to say. Heifer, please.
The baby stretched, elongated itself so that Kendra’s belly looked like a missile pointing toward the hallway. She shifted her tote bag to her right shoulder, stretched her back and began to walk, merging into the stream of attendees before her body could demand that she do otherwise. She was annoyed with herself. This wasn’t even her first conference. She could do this; she could get through this day. Mind over matter. Black girl magic. She would stop thinking in clichés as soon as she was done.
She had breathed in the air from a thousand strangers’ lungs by the time she found the right room. Despite the air conditioning, she felt damp sweat patches growing at the top and bottom of her belly, beneath each boob, at the back of her neck. Stop whining, she told herself, as she made her way to the table at the front. First panel of the day, and she was the first to arrive. Of the other panelists, she knew and respected two. The third was her nemesis, though neither of them would ever have acknowledged it. She waddled past the first chair, assuming the moderator would need it. She pulled her notes from her tote bag, then dropped her tired sack of body into the second chair just as the moderator and her nemesis walked into the room.
“Kendra! I can’t believe you beat us all here!” Andrew, the moderator, beamed at her as he clapped his laptop open and stood at the podium.
“Same.” Her nemesis slid into the first chair. They had not agreed on an order, which meant that now Lydia would speak first, which meant that whatever Kendra said had to be better. “Honestly, I’m surprised you made it at all. I thought pregnant women, I don’t know, slept all day, like vampires or something.” Lydia’s voice was rich and gilded, like Mae West, her smile gleaming with quiet venom. “Are you sick or something? I could hear you breathing from across the room.”
Kendra offered a smile in return, no less sharp for being less toothy. “How nice of you to care, Lydia.” She waited until Lydia was well-settled before giving a loud sniff and murmuring, so that only Lydia could hear. “You thought I was a vampire? Is that why you smell like garlic?”
Lydia pretended to laugh off the comment. But as the other panelists made their way to the table, Kendra saw her sneak a mint into her mouth, which was good, because her breath really did smell like garlic. If their relationship were different, or if they weren’t locked in a death battle over who would be the next department chair, Kendra might have covertly slipped her a mint when she sat down, without saying a word. She thought, for the millionth time, that it would have been great if the only two Black people in the department could get along with each other, but she had given up on that goal well before either of them made tenure.
The room began to fill, and Kendra’s nerves began to hum. It wasn’t just the standard public speaking anxiety, which she’d learned to tame but had never fully conquered. Part of the problem was the panel itself: Mid-Career Malaise: Maintaining The Work in The Midst of It All. She’d said yes when Andrew approached her, but it had startled her to learn that anyone considered her to be mid-career. When she examined her body of work—the two books, the handful of journal publications—she thought that if anything, she must still be emerging. If she were mid-career, then her accomplishments suddenly felt paltry. And there wasn’t so much time left to create a name for herself. She would never be like Audre Lorde or Nikki Giovanni; her poems would not become canon. Would it be worth it to keep muddling in mediocrity? To keep showing up to these conferences where most audience members had no idea who she was, to keep publishing books that earned warm, but not glowing, reviews?
Meanwhile, her daughters were at home. Kendra was missing the second-grade trip to the aquarium and the pre-school Welcome Spring! party. She knew that Coal would flip her braids and pretend not to care, that Toni would probably not remember the one time her mother missed a school party that meant next to nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it seemed to Kendra that she herself was perhaps missing the grand scheme.
It didn’t help that pregnancy was so much harder this time. She never said as much, not even to her husband. Her pregnancy with Coal had been marked by the events of September 11th, and with Toni, she’d had to have an emergency C-section. If she could survive all of that, how could she complain about a little third-term nausea and exhaustion? She pulled out a bottle of ginger ale and took a sip.
“9am ginger ale? Some kind of pregnancy craving, I guess.” Lydia offered a child-free chuckle. Kendra said nothing, but slid her tin of mints toward Lydia.
Andrew began the session, thanking the audience for joining them so early in the morning. There was polite laughter, and the audience seemed to lean toward him, ready to absorb whatever wisdom he was about to share. He was equal parts authoritative and self-effacing, and even though he did nothing but ask questions, every time he spoke, Kendra noticed most of the audience nodding in agreement and approval, or else stroking their chins as though they had never thought to ponder what he’d asked them to ponder.
She clenched her back teeth against the tendrils of nausea unfurling in her belly. She hid her discomfort behind a professional smile as she listened to Lydia say insightful, thought-provoking things about the task of crafting narratives that reflected society’s virtues and ills, about staying relevant—with a quick side-eye at Kendra—while life kept lifing. It was all good, but if Kendra could keep it together, she knew her own speech would be better. She rested her hand on the spot where her baby had extended a foot. Sweat ran in rivulets down her back, dripped down her temples into her ears. She realized there was no way she would make it; she would have to leave the panel and find a ladies’ room, and Lydia would never let her or anyone else in the department forget it. She pushed her chair back, bracing her hands against the table so she could stand. But then the room tilted, and her belly heaved like the ocean in a storm. She clamped her lips shut as tightly as she could, made it halfway to her feet before the morning toast, tea, and the two sips of ginger ale erupted with such force that her throat felt torn asunder.
A split-second vacuum of silence, into which the entire room’s collective horror gathered itself, preceded a series of gasps and mini-shrieks and chair scrapings as a tornado of chaos whirled around Kendra. She heard people calling for a doctor. One panelist raced off, presumably to get some help. One panelist used a tissue to dab ineffectually at Kendra’s mouth. Andrew’s voice on the microphone called for calm and a few moments of patience, promised a return to the panel once they got this all sorted. Kendra, still half-hunched and dry-heaving, palms still braced against the table, heard the smugness in Lydia’s silence. She didn’t have to laugh or wield a sharp insult. Her victory was likely complete.
Kendra stared down at her hands, partially bathed in stomach acid. She was too dehydrated to cry. She could see a future paving itself before her: no one would ask her to join any panels for the next few years. Lydia would win the vote for department chair, once she went back and told everyone how Kendra had sullied the school’s name with her episode, and once she got her claws into the position, she would never relinquish it. She would push her favorites into spotlighted committee work and navigate Kendra toward thankless, tail-chasing tasks. She would launch an insidious campaign, spreading rumors about Kendra’s diminishing competence and cachet. She would downplay any future publications and awards. She couldn’t get Kendra fired, but she would make life miserable enough for Kendra to consider resigning. Kendra would be faced with the choice of quitting and trying to start over again somewhere new or of toiling in obscurity in the job that paid the bills until she withered into retirement. And given that here she was, muddling through mid-career malaise as a poet, she imagined younger, hipper artists emerging past her until she disappeared altogether.
She curled her fingers into fists. The panelist who’d left the room flew toward her with a ream of heavy-grade paper towels. Andrew’s voice returned to the microphone, assuring everyone that the situation was under control.
“We’ll let Kendra make her way out before we get back to it.” He gave her a sympathetic smile. “Feel better.”
“But I do, actually.” She took control of the paper towels, used them to sop up the mess as she grinned up at Andrew. “It’s like poetry, you know. Sometimes it explodes out of you, whether you will it or no, and you ride the force of it until you see the shape it takes.” She finished drying her hands and popped one of her mints into her mouth. “I think this is going to take the shape of redefining mid-career malaise.”
Most of the audience gave an appreciative chuckle. Andrew looked askance at first, but his expression morphed into pleasure when she plumped down in her chair, folded her hands before her and gave an emphatic nod.
“Well. Now that Kendra has embodied the definition of persistence for us, let’s carry on, shall we?” The audience clapped. Kendra settled back and gave her talk from memory, as her vomit-dowsed notes were gone with the towels, and considered how she would incorporate Canada Dry into her next poem.
Shinelle L. Espaillat
Shinelle L. Espaillat is a writer whose work has appeared in midnight & indigo, Pleiades Magazine, Torch Literary Arts, Tahoma Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Minerva Rising, Ghost Parachute, among others, as well as in the collections Ghost Parachute: 105 Flash Fiction Stories, Shale: Extreme Fiction for Extreme Conditions, and How Higher Education Feels: Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching. Her stories have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, and she has been supported by Kimbilio and Baldwin for the Arts fellowships. She holds an M.A. in English-Creative Writing from Temple University. She teaches at Westchester Community College in NY.