America's Museum

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• America's Museum
• Chase Culler (bio)

The email came to me in the basement of what I then called my life: unemployed, twenty-three years old, still living too close to campus. Looking to travel the globe? Become a Program Advisor for Stoddard's pre-college tours.

My parents were thrilled to hear their eldest would travel Europe. Really any job would do; it helped that this one was glamorous. Lately I had begun calling home for money, not understanding the ruckus it caused. My father said he wished I lived closer, probably so he could place both his lumpy hands on my shoulders and sigh. College had duped me into believing I was like everyone else, meaning I had forgotten I was lower-middle-class with parents who didn't travel. My mother had terrible agoraphobia and had only flown once, to a skincare conference in Atlanta she'd spent in the convention center bathroom. She bought a travel book of UNESCO sites from a bargain store for $3.99 and said I had to sign the ones I had visited by Christmastime.

I knew the job must suck doorknobs from the way the ladies in the Stoddard study-abroad office doted on me. Did I smoke? No. [End Page 445] Did I drink? Only socially. Did I use drugs? I couldn't afford them. Did I have sex with random women? No, and they didn't need to know I had sex with random men. Did I have a passport? That part was flexible. I was offered the job immediately. Seventeen kids, seventeen years old; seven boys (thank God only seven) and ten girls for seven weeks abroad. As my passport documentation changed hands, I spent weeks in the office folding itineraries, annotating a schedule with little stars for our dinners and asterisks for lunches.

Turns out I had signed up for a nunnery. No drinking, no smoking, no strangers on our floors. The kids needed me sober, but all the time? Yes. I also had to control the budget, wield the credit cards, make museum appointments and meal reservations, and pull emergency cash from ATMs. I laminated cards for students with allergies to nuts, seeds, fruit, latex. I printed out the phrase fish and vegetables okay in ten languages, which was how I became an international citizen.

The office ladies explained I'd be assigned a professor, but I never once saw him on campus. He was a philosophy guy named Gareth Sorensen. I'd never taken a class with him, or even heard of him, which concerned me. Philosophy resided on the top floor of the humanities building where it beheld all of campus from its great, thoughtful promontory; Gareth was up there somewhere watching me from his office. I emailed him and he never got back to me, and when I discussed this later with Study Abroad, they laughed in my face. Gareth Sorensen has worked on this program for a decade, they said. He had a new companion each summer, mixing up their name with the ones before it. The ladies spoke of him darkly. Don't expect him to learn your students either, Edna laughed—I'd learned her name on day one—as a buoy of gum bobbed on her tongue. And sure as hell don't let him handle the money. [End Page 446]

_______

Later, when I recalled Gareth Sorensen, that lovely mess of a person I once knew, I remembered our bus ride to London.

I hadn't slept well on the plane. My flight to Stansted had blindfolded and spun me round and as a result, I was five minutes late to meet the bus. I waited in line at Tesco for a sandwich I ditched in the queue, but it didn't matter. When I mentioned to Gareth what had happened, he split his turkey BLT and passed a half of it across the aisle. There he was, in black jeans and a black Izod shirt, with gray hair and a slightly grayer beard. He offered tales of summers past as we fetched students from across terminals in Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton—so many airports I could barely...