Tenure Track (5 page)

Seeing the bike reminded her that Mark and Dennis had a Scout meeting that night, so her venting about Lewis Burns would have to wait. Before closing the garage door, she glimpsed Dana being dropped off at the curb following volleyball practice. The teen was still wearing gym clothes, as her usual routine was to eat dinner, finish homework, then shoot hoops for at least an hour. No matter what the current sports season, she never stopped practicing her basketball skills.

Jane could never figure out how her daughter had become such a determined jock in a family of scholars. From the time she could talk, Dana had been drawn to sports, begging to take preschool gymnastics classes, followed by karate, softball, and co-ed soccer. At age 10 she discovered her true love on the basketball court, abetted by Mark and Jane’s combined height genes. Now, at age 17, she stood over six feet two inches tall, just slightly shorter than her three-minutes-older brother. Her jumping skills, honed from early training in frog leaps and flying sidekicks, produced a dynamic vertical leap and impressive slam dunk, which she hoped to parlay into a position on the championship team that lent credence to A.D. Doss’s dubious graduation statistics.

Much to her mother’s relief, so far Dana had played well enough to draw interest from some smaller colleges, but not well enough to garner attention from flagship scouts. With a B+ average at a rigorous private school, Dana was capable of being accepted into and succeeding academically at almost any smaller college. Jane preferred just about anything other than her daughter being sucked up into the university’s obsessive sports culture. Still, the mother outwardly tried her best to support the child’s interests. As the two women greeted one another, Jane politely asked about practice.

“
Coach thinks we’re still makin’ too many attack errors,” the teenager reported. “Hopefully we’ll get it together to beat High Point tomorrow.”

Jane had forgotten about the game. She made a mental note to push up her meeting with Lewis so that she could leave campus early the next day.

Dana threw her backpack onto the floor and immediately began rifling through the refrigerator. She was always famished upon returning home and often made her own meals, meticulously monitoring the contents of every calorie that entered her well-toned body. The kitchen counter was lined with various dietary supplements she hoped would give her that slight increase in flexibility, reach or speed necessary to push her game to the next level.

Dana pulled some fruit, skim milk, and yogurt out of the fridge and dumped it all into the blender, along with some kind of protein powder. She poured the concoction into a glass and grabbed the sports section of the local daily while Jane perused the headlines. Moments later Mark and Dennis passed through the kitchen on their way to the garage, both dressed in Scout uniforms.

The two men were so much alike that one would almost have thought they were the twins in the family. Jane’s son shared his father’s self-mocking humor, pride in being a “geek,” and love of nature. He even looked like Mark, with the potential to be much more handsome. Thanks to his lack of interest in contact sports and excellent orthodontics, Dennis still had a perfectly formed nose and straight teeth. Prescription medications had cleared up his once acne-covered skin, leaving only a few pockmarks to show for his condition. Jane hoped the scars would either fade or just make him more ruggedly handsome as he aged. She did wish he would do something about his hair. Dennis had his father’s once jet black tresses, but straight, like Jane’s. He currently wore a bowl cut that his mother despised, reminding her too much of the Three Stooges’ Moe.

Other than his hair, Jane had few complaints about her boy with the perfect grades and SAT scores, who was hoping to attend either Caltech or MIT. Mark and Jane secretly thought he might follow in their footsteps by going into academia. Dennis already dressed like a college professor, eschewing contact lenses for squared-off, dark-rimmed eyeglasses. His usual attire consisted of a white crew-necked T-shirt under a button-down long-sleeve shirt, usually with a tweed jacket in the winter. He actually liked wearing his formal-looking school uniform, arguing that the lack of variety boosted his efficiency by not wasting brain cells on fashion. Always the experimenter, he once tested himself to see how fast he could get completely ready for school in the morning, setting a record of 2.35 minutes, including a shower and a breakfast bagel consumed in the car.

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.”

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.