Ann Marie lifts her head just far enough off the desk to read Mac’s test answer again. He never would’ve done something like this to a venerable gray-haired professor, the kind that wears jeans with his tweed jacket and goes home at 6 o’clock to a wife and kids and a ketchup-drenched meatloaf dinner.
Ann Marie puts her head back down. She doesn’t know what to do. Should she write a stern note? Give him an F on the exam? It occurs to her that it’s even possible he’s violated some kind of school sexual harassment policy and that she’s required to write him up.
Even thinking about it exhausts Ann Marie.
And it’s not like she can seek the advice of the department chair. Or even her graduate mentor. She certainly can’t imagine saying the phrase “transliterated sex noises” aloud to describe the infraction, much less typing it into an email.
She’s one of three women teaching in the hard sciences at U of M. If it appears that she can’t handle a male student challenging her authority, it will make her look weak, incapable. It’s the kind of thing that comes up in tenure reviews.
Ann Marie squeezes her eyes shut until blue spots appear on the backs of her eyelids. “I’ll grade it tomorrow,” she thinks. And feeling a little ridiculous, a little like Scarlett O’Hara, she shoves Mac’s test to the bottom of the ungraded stack and dumps all of the tests into a canvas tote bag. She’s going home.
~~~
As she walks to her car, heavy tote bag of papers slung over her right arm, Ann Marie decides to order a pizza. What she’s really craving is a huge, foldable slice of pepperoni, dripping grease, from Skeeters. But they’ll be slammed, delivering all over campus late on a Friday night, so Ann Marie opts to dial Fontanelli’s: a gourmet, brick-oven place that’s a little pricier, out of reach for students.
She orders white pizza with pineapple and extra garlic.
It takes Ann Marie just minutes to drive home. Her rental house is practically around the corner from campus. When she’d moved in, her mother had been so proud, her friends so envious: “You could walk to your office! Come home for lunch even! A whole house all to yourself!”
Ann Marie had tried to get excited: tenure-track teaching position, a cute little bungalow all to herself. After the long years of grad school — scrimping and eating ramen and sharing a string of mediocre apartments with so many, many roommates — she had tried to feel gratified, content, proud of herself. But she had dreamed a very different dream: a cherry R&D job at a huge corporation. A similarly huge lab and a budget to match. She would’ve donned an austere white lab coat each morning and gone home each night to a sleek, chic high rise. Maybe there would’ve been a handsome young colleague…
Ann Marie pulls into her short driveway and the leathery leaves of mammoth rhododendron bushes brush her side mirrors. She really should hunt for some hedge clippers this weekend; maybe her landlord — a Professor Emeritus of English indefinitely studying some obscure text at the Bodleian — left some tools in the shed out back. As crappy as apartment living had been, at least there hadn’t been grounds maintenance.
Just as Ann Marie kills the engine, the pizza delivery guy pulls in behind her, his headlights dazzling in her rearview.
Climbing out of her own car, she hands him a few bills in exchange for the pie. The box is hot on the palm of her hand, and she can smell the garlic through the warm cardboard. Ann Marie can almost hear her mother: “I hope you’re not planning on kissing anyone later.” Yeah, right. Kissing. As if it’s not bad enough that her mother brings up Ann Marie’s age (31) and relationship status (chronically single) during their weekly phone call each Sunday, now her little jabs are invading Ann Marie’s own subconscious. Just what Ann Marie needs, one more reminder of how “frictionless” her life has become since she relocated to U of M this past summer.
“Thanks, Mom,” Ann Marie mutters as she unlocks and opens the front door. Inside, Ann Marie slides the pizza onto the kitchen counter and heads upstairs to change out of her oh-so-professorial navy cardigan and gray pencil skirt and into some real clothes. When she descends a few minutes later — hair up in a ponytail, wearing baggy pajama pants and a well-loved hoodie from her undergrad years — Ann Marie could almost be mistaken for one of her students.
In the kitchen, she retrieves a plate and one of her new wineglasses. She’d bought them for herself when she’d moved here, a gift to herself, but a kind of resignation, too. She’d gone to the mall, to the same swanky housewares section at Macy’s where she’d purchased so many wedding gifts for others and never anything for herself. She’d looked at all the wine glasses: cut crystal and etched glass, tall and willowy, squat and stemless. She’d read somewhere that thick wineglasses could obscure the taste of the wine, muddle the flavor. Finally Ann Marie had selected overpriced but beautiful balloon glasses, their delicate globes perched on tall, slender stems.
Ann Marie pulls two slices of warm pizza onto her plate and instead of pouring, tucks a mostly-full bottle of cab under one arm. She’s going to eat outside.
On her way to the door, she switches on the stereo. It’s set already set to her favorite 90s station, or as Ann Marie likes to think of it: 96.7 The Greatest Hits of Middle School. She flicks the light switch just inside the back door; outside the twinkle lights strung up in the pergola blink to life. The English Professor left them. The back patio is Ann Marie’s favorite thing about the house. Even now that the weather is turning chilly, she spends as much time out here as she can.
About Jenna B. Morgan
