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But the demographics of university professorship are skewed against anything more than a mild acquaintance. Aging baby boomers occupy most of the tenured slots, and open faculty lines have a half-life close to Fermium-252. I’m the youngest professor by far in an aging department, and I feel it.
We’re an odd social mix. Half of my colleagues are old enough that the concept of a faculty wife was a part of the reality they grew up with. The generation that follows is mostly married to each other or other scientists who work up the hill. Their worst nightmare is what they call the nearly-insoluble two-body problem—the difficulty of finding two academic jobs in the same geographic location.
Then there’s my generation. Half my friends have cobbled together postdoc after postdoc, or collected adjunct positions into some shambling sense of security. Never mind finding two jobs in the same place; I know people, good people, smart people, people with PhDs from Harvard, who would kill for one job with health insurance.
I’m the lucky one, the one that gets held up as the shiny example of you, too, could achieve this. Except we all know that we can’t. The jobs just don’t exist.
You, too, can win the right to slowly lose touch with your friends. To gradually watch your life undergo an order-to-disorder transition while you scramble to keep on top of a shifting pile of sand.
Sometimes I think about my friend Lillian who went to work for industry. She leaves her job at Merck at five every night. Lucky bastard.
Not that working outside academia is any guarantee of a reasonable schedule. I have only to look at my own mother to see how industry work can turn out.
I am the lucky one. I know that. I’m lucky, and I’ll stay lucky as long as I don’t stop moving.
I shake my head. I don’t have time for maudlin thoughts or self-comparisons.
My phone dings, and I turn it over.
Quick question, Em says. Do you know anything about carcinogens, or should I ping someone else?
I know almost nothing about carcinogens. Still, I find myself replying. Chemical, radiation, or something else?
I’m looking for a chemical the government can put in the water, she says. Maybe a carcinogen. Maybe a mutagen. It feels kinda fake to just make up something like 1,3-trans-dimethyl-cyclohexane. If I do, someone will grab the MSDS and make me look like an idiot.
Yeah. Once we get into materials safety data sheets, we’re over my head. Not my thing, I tell her. You need a chemist.
But I’m reluctant to jump back into work. Maybe because I’m thinking of her. Maybe because the encounter with Eric left me feeling unmoored from my work. I know, quite literally, a hundred people who have the capability to be here, and some days, I’m still not sure why it’s me instead.
So I add this: Did you pull 1,3-trans-dimethyl-cyclohexane out of a hat, or does it have some special meaning?
Inside joke, she shoots back. I have a tattoo of 1,3-trans-dimethyl-cyclohexane. It started because—oh shit, sorry, can’t talk. I have a presentation to give in an hour. Dammit.
Em and I rarely talk about our day jobs. I suspect she’s somewhere in industry. She has to have figured that I’m in academia.
You ready?
No, she responds a few moments later. I can’t find my fuck-off shoes.
I blink at my phone.
You got me, I write, I know what fuck-me shoes are. What are fuck-off shoes?
My mind is already coming up with options: combat boots, maybe. Or thick-soled steel-toed trainers.
What she writes is this: Er, so. I make shoes.
I wasn’t expecting that.
Or, I mean, I decorate them. I buy old designer shoes at thrift stores and bling them up. Then I classify them by mood. Fuck-off shoes are the same concept as fuck-me shoes, but with one subtle distinction. Fuck-off shoes are kind of a combination “you wish you could get with this” + “look what I am, I’m not backing down” + “I’m killing it and you can’t stop me.”
Not steel-toed trainers, then.
There’s this guy I’ve known for a couple of years, she continues, and he hates me. Thinks I’m a freak and I do not belong. And we keep crossing paths. So I’m wearing the shoes to my presentation just for him.
Lucky guy.
I don’t want to examine that thought as it drifts through my head, and so I don’t.
Found them! Wanna see?
Sure, I say before I think better of it.
A minute later, she sends me a picture. My idle curiosity… Holy shit. Everything goes up in flames. I’m not an expert in women’s shoes. I wouldn’t know one designer from another.
Oh look, those are shoes, is the extent of my usual commentary. Right now, all I can think is this: Holy Shit. Those are shoes.
Her shoes are arranged on a light hardwood floor. The cherry-red leather gleams in some warm overhead light. I can almost imagine her reflection in the surface. Maybe that dark blob is her phone.
Nothing says “fuck off” quite like red, strappy stilettos with three-inch heels. Twin stylized gold butterflies are wired to each buckle, and Swarovski crystals are affixed to the straps. It’s not enough bling to make them gaudy. Instead, it’s enough to glitter, to draw attention to their obvious femininity.
These are her take-no-prisoners shoes? No kidding. I would surrender. Gladly.
My mental image of Em always placed her firmly on the shy spectrum. I’ve imagined her with long, untamable hair that was the bane of her existence.
I know enough about the issues of women in STEM to be able to imagine exactly why some asshole man would think she was a freak who didn’t belong. I doubt she gets enough credit for her intelligence where she works. Vithika told me that she started talking to me because I didn’t interrupt her, and if there’s a shittier indictment of our profession, I don’t know it.
I can imagine Em taking off her usual sneakers and replacing them with those heels. They would be her quiet way of saying, I’m a woman, and you can’t ignore me. Fuck you; I do so belong.
I swallow hard. I can’t take my eyes off her shoes.
I know exactly why I like Em—and I’m all too aware how tame the word like is for how I feel. She’s funny, clever, and smart.
I’ve lived in Berkeley for three years. No matter how hard I work, no matter how good a job I do at staying in touch with distant friends, deep down I’m hungry for human contact. I should have held the line here. Drawn firmer boundaries. Not let this slip.
Because right now? I want to know more. I want to see Em in those shoes.
Fuck me.
She’s written more. In some way, my fuck-off shoes are about everything everyone ever told me. I wear them to remind myself that everyone who said that people like me couldn’t wear shoes like this was wrong. I am feminine. I am pretty. I can wear heels, and I don’t care if it makes me 6’2”. It’s a fuck off to the voices I heard all my childhood, telling me that I couldn’t.
I’ve never had so clear a picture of Em as a child. My mental image rearranges slightly. She’s no longer short; she’s tall, gawky, and ungainly. Teased by everyone around her. She had to dig deep inside herself for a validation that nobody gave her, and she found it anyway. She trots it out daily, because she never gets enough credit from the people around her.
Yep, I write slowly. Those sure are shoes.
I make myself face the truth. I like Em. I like her way too much. I haven’t met her. I don’t know her name. I’ve never seen her picture.
And I’m the lucky one, the one with the one-in-a-million opportunity that my best friends would kill to have. I’m the one with something to prove, and dammit, I am going to prove it.
Even if it means not asking more about the shoes.
Definitely shoes, I say again. And because I can’t help myself, I add this: Good luck on your presentation.
I go back to my work, but those shoes linger in my mind for far too long.
5
JAY
October
The moment I see who’s calling, my heart sinks. I know why she’s calling. I know what she wants. And I realize that I’ve fucked up. Again.
I pick up. “Hi, Mom.”
“Jay, you told me to call you in early October. Here we are.”
Crap.
It sounds terrible to say that I forget about my parents. I never really forget about my parents. Every time I think about them, I feel a tinge of guilt.
Which is why I tend to put my parents out of my mind as long as I can. They live an hour away when the traffic’s good, which means it’s more like three hours most of the time.
It’s October, and we haven’t seen each other since February.
“So,” my mother says, “we were saving this weekend for you to visit. How are things looking for you?”
To the uninitiated, my mother’s accent is hard to place. She was born in Thailand, moved to Hong Kong when she was nine, got her undergraduate degree from Oxford, a master’s from Stanford, and has worked at Cyclone Technologies ever since, a job that has taken her around the globe.
She sounds like a linear combination of British and American, with a liberal dose of swearing that is all her own.
Looking at my calendar is a total pretense. She can’t see me do it, and I already know what it will show.
