Margaret's mornings had the precision of liturgy.
Alarm at 5:40. Not 5:30, not 5:45 — the extra ten minutes mattered, though she couldn't have said why. Coffee, black, in the blue mug that had survived every move since graduate school. Toast with butter, no jam. Standing at the kitchen window while the sky over Portland shifted from charcoal to pewter to the particular gray that locals called "Oregon silver" and that Margaret, privately, called "the color of not feeling anything."
She dressed in layers. She drove to campus in a twelve-year-old Subaru that smelled permanently of turpentine, though she hadn't opened a tube of paint since the studio. She parked in the same spot — third row, fourth from the left — and walked the same path to the Baxter Building, where Introduction to Drawing met in room 114 every Tuesday and Thursday at ten.
Room 114 had north-facing windows, good light, and exactly the kind of institutional ugliness that made Margaret feel safe. Twenty easels in four rows. A supply closet that smelled of graphite and gum erasers. A still life arrangement on the central table that she refreshed every two weeks — this week, a ceramic pitcher, three pears, and a folded cloth.
She taught drawing the way a surgeon explains sutures: technically, precisely, without sentimentality. Line weight. Negative space. The relationship between what you see and what you think you see. Her students, mostly freshmen fulfilling an arts requirement, appreciated her clarity and feared her critiques.
"You're drawing the idea of a pear," she told a student named Kevin, whose pear looked like every pear in every still life since Cézanne. "Look at this actual pear. See the bruise? The asymmetry? The place where the skin has dried and wrinkled?" She pointed with her pencil, not touching the drawing. She never touched their drawings. "Draw what's there, not what you expect to be there."
Kevin nodded the way students nod when they want you to stop talking.
Margaret returned to her desk and opened her laptop to the departmental email she'd been avoiding. Dr. Dao, it read, your new teaching assistant for Spring semester is Tomás Reyes (MFA-2). He'll start Thursday. Please coordinate directly.
She had not requested a teaching assistant. She did not want a teaching assistant. Teaching assistants asked questions and had opinions and took up space in the careful emptiness she had constructed.
She closed the laptop and looked at the still life. The pears were beginning to brown. By next week they'd be past their prime, soft and yielding, and she'd replace them with apples or oranges or whatever the campus market had on sale.
Fruit, at least, was simple. Fruit decayed on schedule. You could plan for it.
She gathered her things, turned off the lights, and walked back to the Subaru in the gray Portland rain, following her own footprints from the morning like a woman retracing a path through snow.
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