Tenure Track

by Victoria Bradley

  Tonight her boy was once again in high-speed mode, quickly grabbing a bottled juice drink on his way out the door. Mark gave each woman a peck on the cheek and asked how their day was. Both replied with nonchalant shrugs, “Okay.”

  “Jinx!” Mark yelled.

  “Dad, that is so third grade,” Dana informed her father, shaking her head in the manner reserved just for teenaged girls towards their no-longer-cool dads.

  Mark smiled and gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. “Guess I’m just a third grader at heart.” He turned to Jane. “First day of History go well?”

  “History has no first day,” his wife deadpanned, not looking up from the newspaper. “It is infinite.”

  “I thought Math was Dad’s field!” Dennis chimed in.

  Melodramatically placing his hands across his heart, Mark swooned. “That’s why we’re so compatible. Our love is infinite!”

  “Ooh, smooth!” Dennis said as the two men high-fived one another. The women exchanged glances and rolled their eyes in unison. They were used to such lame attempts at humor by the “Straussmen” who seemed to think they were writing a modern sitcom, when their strained humor really tended more towards the vaudeville era.

  “Gotta go Dad.” Dennis ordered, giving his mother and sister each a peck on the cheek. Jane loved that the teenager still had no qualms about showing affection to his family, despite his penchant for sarcasm over sentimental words.

  Before letting him get out the door, Mark stopped the boy in his tracks, grabbed him by the shoulders, and proudly turned him to face his sister and mother. “Well, what do you think of my Eagle Scout? Does he look different?”

  Dennis rolled his eyes. “Dad, they’ve seen it before. It’s not like I lost my virginity or something.”

  “Dennis!” Jane scolded, as Dana laughed, sending health drink shooting up through her nose.

  “Whoa! Nose burn!” Dennis announced cheerfully.

  Dana grabbed a napkin and composed herself enough to spew her own comeback through a mouthful of smoothie. “You two look great. Like Geek and Geekier.”

  Dennis feigned offense. “Come on, Dad! Obviously there’s no respect around here for the Scouting Way.” He grabbed Mark’s arm to pull him out the door. Before being yanked all the way through the opening, Mark leaned in to tell his wife, “By the way, I left you something in the fridge. Tell me about your day later!” His voice trailed off as he was pulled towards the car.

  Jane and Dana both snickered and shook their heads in response to the men’s antics, communicating their common reactions telepathically. Just as Dennis was a carbon copy of Mark, Dana was in many ways a re-creation of Jane, though neither one would admit to the similarities.

  Dana looked much more like her mother, with straight, dusty brown hair and light brown eyes. She shared Dennis’s poor eyesight, but preferred contact lenses to glasses, and only wore enough makeup to properly accentuate her features. As a rough-and-tumble child, Dana had often dressed exactly like her brother. Even now, she rarely wore dresses or skirts unless absolutely necessary, preferring sportily stylish clothing that was practical and modestly flattering to her muscular physique. Dana’s disdain for more popular styles of girls’ clothing relieved her parents, who were a bit distressed by the skimpy attire and heavy makeup worn by many female undergrads. Yet mother and daughter still bickered over fashion issues, such as their ongoing disagreement about whether it was proper for a teenaged girl to work out in public clad only in running shorts and a sports bra.

  Such battles were exacerbated by their similar personalities. On the basketball court, Dana displayed the same calm detachment and even temperament that her mother did in the classroom. That similarity, however, often inhibited communication with one another. Neither witty banter nor loud screaming was in their nature. When they fought, each woman spelled out her differing views, then retreated into stony silence if the issue could not be resolved quickly. Lately though, Dana did not even bother expressing her opinions on anything to her mother.

  Silently partaking of separate meals, Jane finally broke the awkward silence with her daughter. “So how’s school going?”

  “Fine.”

  Obviously I need to be more specific.

  “Any tests this week?” she prodded.

  “Calculus. Dennis is gonna help me study. Oh, I do have some Lit homework for tomorrow. I’ll go finish it.” With that, Dana grabbed her drink and headed to her room.

  “Let me know if you need any help,” Jane offered, as if talking to the wall.

  Opening the refrigerator in search of sustenance, Jane found a poured glass of her favorite chardonnay with a Post-it note attached: “Congratulations on surviving your first day, Madame Chair.” He didn’t know the half of it.

  Mark had signed it with a smiley face, followed by three x’s and o’s. “P.S. Happy Meetingversary.” Jane smiled. Today marked exactly 32 years since she had met her husband. Sipping the much-appreciated wine, she recalled that moment vividly.

  Jane was 28 years old when she met 32 year-old Mark Straussman. She had just arrived at the state flagship after toiling for three years at a small Deep South college still resisting the Civil Rights movement. Desperate to escape that backwards environment, she had toiled endlessly to publish a body of work that helped secure a tenure-track position at the flagship U. farther west—a job that also offered the opportunity to make history herself. Jane was hired to not only teach British history, but to also begin a cross-disciplinary program in Women’s Studies. Gerda Lerner was proud. Jane’s hiring, as well as the creation of Women’s Studies, was part of a larger push by a new President to enhance the school’s liberal arts offerings and diversify the faculty.

  Many conservative faculty members resented the coming of such changes. To her surprise, Jane found many of her new colleagues to be just as resistant to change as the blatant racists she had encountered in her previous job. Most were savvy enough to couch racial language in more vague terms, but felt little need to hide their sexism or homophobia, creating what in more politically-correct times would be called “a hostile work environment.” At the time, it was just what she was willing to put up with to break into the old white boys’ club, with old being the key term.

  Not surprisingly, most faculty divisions over the changing campus came along generational lines, as Jane quickly realized upon stepping into her first fall mixer for new faculty. Walking into that banquet hall, she was struck by the obvious divide between older male professors, many of whom had earned their Ph.D.s courtesy of the post-World War II G.I. Bill, and younger, Vietnam-era Baby Boomers. Many men of the older generation wore the same style of crew cut, white shirt and dark tie uniform they had been donning for 20 years. The younger faculty sported the fashion trends of their generation: men in leisure suits with open-necked collars, some in blue jeans, with long hair, beards or mustaches. She noticed more than a few of the older men looking askance at some of these younger, hipper professors. The handful of younger female faculty tended to dress more professionally than their male counterparts, with power pantsuits common. On the day of the mixer, Jane herself was adorned in a chic Liz Claiborne dress, her long brown hair pulled into a stylish updo with trendy flipped-back bangs.

  Before Jane ever had the opportunity to seek out her female peers, she was accosted by Henry Gould, who had not yet earned his notorious nickname. Slender, with thick wavy hair and a clean-shaven face, Henry was slightly better looking and much neater than he would become in his later years, when his unkempt attire often rendered him indistinguishable from the homeless who milled about on the campus periphery. Back then, Jane could have understood his physical appeal to some female students, were it not for his unchanged arrogance and misogyny. Within moments of introducing himself, the already tipsy Henry bragged that he had just earned tenure and that he hoped this Women’s Studies “experiment” would not “wind up sullying the university by attracting a bunch of ugly bra-burners and Nazi dykes.”

&nbs
p; Jane pretended he was joking. She laughed loudly, both to make it clear that she wasn’t one of those “overly sensitive” females, and also to prevent her one hand not holding a drink from slapping his smug, sexist face.

  Henry was at the mixer with his first wife, a mousy little woman whom he proudly introduced to Jane as his college sweetheart. Perhaps thinking the women would want to share girl talk, or just looking for a way to ditch the wife, Henry quickly abandoned the two of them to get another drink. Jane awkwardly tried to make small talk, but it was soon clear that she had little in common with the shy housewife who used the social hour as a rare chance to leave her two small children with a neighbor and visit with adults. Jane never forgot the puzzled look in the eyes of Mrs. Gould the First, like a zoo-raised animal suddenly released back into the wild.

  Ironically, it was while trying to find a graceful way to extricate herself from Mrs. Gould the First that Jane spotted her own future husband. Mark was hard to miss, looking like a stale leftover from the Chicago Seven: frizzy black hair down to his shoulders, John Lennon glasses and a Fu Manchu mustache with about a day’s growth of beard over the rest of his face. He wore bell-bottom blue jeans and a long-sleeved tie-dyed shirt—a style at least a decade out of date. When Jane first saw this spectacle from across the room, she thought it looked very unprofessional. Even accounting for modern fashion, most professors still expected to be able to distinguish faculty from students.

  She was a bit taken aback when Mark caught her staring at his attire. As his kind eyes met hers from across the room, his face broke into a wide grin. She tried to look away, but he soon sauntered by with an unknown drink in hand. “Hi,” he said, extending his free palm to Mrs. Gould the First as if genuinely glad to meet her. “Mark Straussman, Math Department.” Whether from shyness or fear of talking to a man other than her husband, Mrs. Gould bashfully excused herself to find Henry.

  “So . . . You one of the new profs?” Mark chirped to Jane, rocking back and forth on workman’s boots.

  “Yes,” she responded, trying to look uninterested.

  “New Yorker?” he shouted gleefully upon hearing her accent, as if discovering a long-lost cousin. “Me too! Brooklyn born and bred!” She could have guessed his origins just by the thick accent and loud voice that reflected every negative stereotype the upstate Episcopalian held of Brooklyn Jews.

  Despite her own biases, she was not quite sure what to make of the gangly mathematician. Even beneath all that hair, she could tell that Mark was not particularly handsome. He had slightly bucked teeth, severely pockmarked skin, a very bent nose caused by a freak shot putt accident and a thin, wiry frame from years of running. He described how he became obsessed with running as a teenager, when track was an “uncool” sport, and long before jogging became a hot exercise fad. She discovered this information by half-heartedly asking what he was drinking. He told her water, then went on to explain that he didn’t drink alcohol, launching into a detailed description of the strict “runner’s diet” he followed.

  “I tried being a vegetarian for a month, until meat cravings hit so hard I pigged out on a bucket of fried chicken ‘til I puked. Still got the chicken legs, though,” he said, looking down at his skinny lower appendages. “I think it was God’s punishment for breaking kosher.” Jane laughed in a genuine manner, unlike her faux guffawing at Henry Gould’s inappropriate comments. Her response only encouraged her companion.

  “Now that running’s popular,” he lamented, “I may have to give it up. It’d ruin my nerd image to do anything hip and trendy.”

  Jane snickered again. Mark’s self-deprecating humor was refreshing in a room full of pompous academics trying to impress one another. Wondering if he could take as well as he gave, she asked slyly, “So, are you one of those draft-dodgers who got a Ph.D. just to avoid military service?”

  His face morphed into a mischievous bug-eyed grin. “Forward, aren’t ya? Actually, I did alternate service before grad school.” She felt appropriately chided as he explained that he had served in the Peace Corps between college at CUNY and graduate school at Chicago. Aaah, so maybe there was a connection to the Chicago Seven!

  Before she could ask more about his experiences, they were interrupted by a rather short man with blow-dyed, carefully feathered blonde hair, moustache and a hip outfit better suited for a disco floor than a lecture hall. The little man went straight to Jane. “Excuse me, but are you Jane Roardan? Perry Waters. I’m new in the History Department, too” He pumped her hand up and down excitedly, as if meeting a celebrity. “Oh, I love your work!”

  Perry’s specialty was Colonial America, but he was quite familiar with the emerging field of Women’s History and had actually read Jane’s book. Fresh out of grad school, the ruddy-faced Midwesterner looked much younger than his 25 years, more like an undergrad than a professor. He seemed very nice, if perhaps a little too star-struck and eager-to-please, a fawning manner developed from a lifetime of pretending to be what others wanted him to be. Several times during their conversation, Perry pointedly mentioned his fiancé, who was finishing nursing school.

  As fellow students of the British Empire, Perry and Jane quickly bonded over their shared Anglophilia, enjoying an exchange of Royal Family gossip. “So, do you think Prince Charles is ever going to settle down?” Perry quizzed, before moving on to rumors about History Department faculty. “T.L. Potter, Pulitzer winner of 1958—senile. Tony Bryce, the outgoing Chair—alcoholic.” Nodding towards Henry Gould, now rejoined by his wife, Perry advised in a low voice, “And never go into his office with the door shut.”

  “Man, I don’t think the Math nerds are nearly as scandalous as you History guys,” Mark commented, feeling a bit left out of their shoptalk.

  Having exhausted his trove of information on other professors, Perry gleaned details about his two companions. His guileless lack of inhibition about asking personal questions proved useful, as Mark and Jane probably learned much more about one another than they ever would have if left to their own devices. Perry seemed to have already obtained quite a bit of information about Jane, bragging to Mark about her sharp mind and close ties with Gerda Lerner, about whom he was dying to dish. Perry’s gushing admiration embarrassed Jane a bit, but amused Mark.

  Jane had her chance to be riveted when Perry turned his attention to Mark’s past. It seemed the mathematician had missed his true calling, as his life had been inextricably linked to several major historical events. He explained to the two intrigued historians how his mother, a Ukrainian Jew, had survived Stalinist-caused famines only to spend years one step ahead of Nazi death squads, fighting first with the Jewish resistance, then with the Red Army. “Fascinating!” Perry beamed, pressing for more details. Mark’s father was a fifth-generation New Yorker who met his mother in Germany during the waning days of the Allied Liberation. “A war bride! How romantic!” Perry chimed.

  Mark talked about his middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood, years of Hebrew school and even his bar mitzvah. Perry guffawed approvingly at the details. “Mazel Tov!” he shouted, raising his glass. “I have no idea what that means, but it’s the only Jewish phrase I know.”

  As Mark digressed into mini-Yiddish lessons for Dr. Waters, Jane tried to redirect the conversation back to his story by informing Perry that the Math professor had also been in the Peace Corps. As expected, Perry started quizzing him for anecdotes. Mark declared somewhat melodramatically, “Aah, I went overseas an idealistic Kennedy youth and returned a radical. Well, more like a voyeur of radicals.”

  Perry seemed a bit disappointed to discover that Mark had not been among the anti-war protesters beaten by Chicago police on national television. “No, I was proudly cowering at home, writing proofs and shouting ‘Right on, Man!’ into the TV,” Mark claimed with a pumped fist. “But I did know several people who were there. Abbie Hoffman was a jerk, though! Bogarted all the good drugs.”

  Before Perry could tuck away this piece of potentially salacious information, Jane burst his bubble
by pointing out that Dr. Straussman seemed too much of a health nut to have ever put illegal substances into his body. “Oh, phooey!” the diminutive man expressed. “Well, I bet it’s true of Abbie, anyway.”

  Mark leaned in. “Well, I never met him personally, but I know people who did, and they swear it’s true.”

  “Good enough!” Perry exclaimed triumphantly. Jane shook her head as the two gentlemen egged each other on.

  “I was at Chicago’s first Earth Day celebration!” Mark volleyed. “Does that count as activism?”

  “Aaah, a nature lover!” Perry lobbed.

  “Card-carrying member of the Sierra Club,” Mark admitted satisfactorily.

  “You Communist!” Perry chided. “Oh, we’d better watch our step with this one, Janey or we’ll be marked as Pinkos, too.”

  “Don’t let Mama Straussman hear you say that,” Mark replied, explaining that his naturalized mother was a vehement anti-Communist who thought Nixon’s overtures to the Soviets were worse than his actions in Watergate. Thus the conversation segued into the latest Cold War developments and myriad other topics that seemed to last for hours. On that day, none of the three Baby Boomers would have predicted the Cold War’s peaceful end. Then again, they could not have imagined much that would transpire over the next 32 years, including how intertwined their lives would become.

  That simple cocktail conversation planted seeds of a surrogate family. The youthful Perry was like an abandoned puppy begging to be loved. Almost against her will, Jane felt a maternal urge to protect the diminutive man who revealed very little about his own life while quizzing them extensively on theirs. She adopted him on the spot. Not until the birth of the twins did Dr. Waters relinquish his role as first son, finally maturing into more of a quirky uncle.