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away from Lowell, you’d think it was in Hawaii.
    The phone rang again, and I eyed it warily. If it was Connie calling back, I was afraid I’d wind up saying yes. I didn’t even look at the phone readout for the number, but grabbed the keys and my bag and scooted out the door, letting it slam shut behind me. A long slow walk would give me time to put that check in the mail. If I walked very slowly and took an hour and a half to get to the other side of our compact campus, it would be time for a scheduled lunch meeting of the American Studies Department.
    What was I running from? Only the long shadow of my past.

Chapter 4
     
    Monday noon 10/5
     
    “Where’s Lone Wolf?” Clark McCutcheon asked. At the sound of my tenure rival’s name I choked on a bite of whole-wheat roll, then tried to cover my reaction by coughing into my napkin.
    Ten of us sat at the large round table in the Faculty Commons, the remains of lunch scattered around: pizza crusts, half consumed sushi, the congealed remains of arroz con pollo in a bowl. I picked at the few wilted lettuce leaves remaining in my Cobb salad. Fastidiously, Clark stacked his soup bowl on top of his hamburger plate, folded his paper napkin into a neat square, and beckoned to the student worker to clear his dishes. Then he wiped away the few crumbs in front of him and centered the salt and pepper shakers on the table. Rufus Jefferson, the chair of Comparative American Studies, had just called the monthly AmStuds faculty meeting to order.
    Since scholars can no longer agree on what it means to be “American,” the once seemingly unambiguous and unitary department name, American Studies, has been complicated. Comparative American Studies means, in effect, that we’re not just studying white folk anymore—which is, of course, a good thing, but makes for awkward language and administration. Sally Chenille was here for Women’s and Gender Studies (WAGS), Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies was represented by Tommy Lyndon, Whiteness Studies by McCutcheon, Ethnic Studies—which comprised Latino/a Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Russian Studies—by Ramona Yin. Fatima Narhudi had come for Arab-American Studies, Pablo Suarez for Borderland Studies. As for Native Studies, Joe was usually present, but today he seemed to have absented himself.
    In short, the crowd around the table looked exactly like America in the twenty-first century, black and white and brown, which is why I thought the department should go back to its former name, plain old American Studies. To assume that “American” still meant “white,” and that all whites are privileged and that therefore scholars had a political and moral obligation to oppose or complicate “American,” seemed to me to be an artifact of a previous century—at least a decade ago.
    “Where’s Lone Wolf?” Rufus echoed. He was dark-skinned and wore a devilish little goatee to compensate for his bald head, which gleamed in the overhead lights. “Who knows? But at least we can get some work done without having to draw pictographs.” He gave a dry little laugh which no one echoed.
    “Now, just a sec, Jefferson…” McCutcheon’s John-Wayne drawl gave the gravitas of an Old-West showdown to his response. “You of all people should know better than to resort to racial slurs.”
    Rufus’ eyes opened wide. “That was no slur. It was just a little joke. What’s the matter—white people don’t have a sense of humor?” Today he wore a gray wool suit and a denim dress shirt with a yellow tie striped in blue.
    McCutcheon’s height and his cowpoke’s denim jacket lent an air of the outdoor male to the indoor sport of academic one-upmanship. Another woman might have succumbed instantly to Clark’s broad shoulders, the rangy height, the perfectly proportioned features, the wide, amused mouth, mobile lips with smile lines around them, but there was something of the poseur about him. I’d been uneasy with Clark right