Eye to Eye Read Online Free PDF Page A

on the streets of Atlanta. I had been trying to find the newly opened Ikea, and wound up somehow driving twenty miles past it to Marietta, where I encountered a giant mechanical chicken the size of a three-story building—the “big chicken” of “you are officially outside the Atlanta city limits” fame. Knowing I was lost, I pulled into the parking lot of the Army-Navy surplus store, only to be greeted by a row of “Yankee, go home” bumper stickers, which I couldn’t help but take personally—and at the same time, I felt like gesturing at them and saying I WISH I COULD EVEN FIND MY STUPID HOME. A perfectly nice gentleman behind a counter of death stars gave me polite directions back into the city, and I tried hard not to sound like the displaced New Yorker that I am.
    The euphoria of the initial move had worn thin, and all of my excitement at having found a job was slowly being replaced by the thought that making new friends in one’s thirties was not as easy as doing so in one’s twenties. My next-door neighbor, a funky singleton of about my age, had mentioned drinks, but hadn’t followed through yet. I had gone to three coffee shops before I realized that one couldn’t simply sit at a coffee shop and expect to make friends—that smiling at strangers merely made one look deranged, not friendly. Ditto for the same behavior at power-yoga, my other attempt to be social. Although there were some nice-looking men, particularly one bald, black man who could have been Michael Jordan’s twin, whose downward dog was a thing to behold—but I digress. That, plus I am separated by the entire contiguous United States from my best friend of the past half-decade, and I am not one of those writers who enjoys ongoing solitude. Solitude makes me cut weird bangs, overpluck my eyebrows and eat too many Nutter Butters.
    Driving back from the outer edges of the city, the only thing that kept me from weeping in frustration at the glacial pace of traffic was the knowledge that Zach, my boyfriend of three years, was arriving in seventy-two hours to help transition me into my new life. So when I finally re-entered my apartment, the one spot of familiarity and comfort in Atlanta, I had moved past relief to gratefulness at the sight of Zach’s number on my caller ID. Zach, calling to tell me that “things had come up,” and he wasn’t going to be able to drive from Langsdale, Indiana, to Atlanta, Georgia. “We’ll talk later in the week,” he said. “I can tell you’re tired, and I don’t want to upset you more.”
    Image number three: this, today, August 29, the day before my debut at Atlanta state as Dr. Doris Weatherall. The “money shot” of the entire move was my entering the building that houses the English department to start a job where I am no longer grad-school-wastrel and Oprah-watcher Doris Weatherall, but fully bona fide assistant professor, Dr. Doris Weatherall, with attendant adult salary and health plan. In honor of my confirmed adulthood, I am wearing a Katherine Hepburn–worthy ensemble of grey tailored pants, white shirt and Pradalike naughty-conservative lace-up shoes with decidedly nonsensible heel. I moved up from Miss Clairol to the Aveda salon, and my hair is dyed a rich red-brown and cut in long layers that reach about an inch below my shoulder.
    I feel glamorous and professional.
    For about five minutes.
    The glamour wears off after I drop my books in my office and go back down the hall to my mailbox. On top of the various catalogs and beginning-of-school calendars sits a letter, with DORIS W. scrawled in serial-killer-like spidery writing across the front of the envelope. I open the envelope to see what looks like a hand-stamped logo of CLASSROOM in gigantic capital letters, with the middle of the letters slightly hollowed out to fit the word politics in small letters. Circled around the writing is a thick,