Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [10]
She nods in at Rose and Bob, and they look at her askance, which is the peer-group look she’s used to. Male historians think she’s invading their territory, and should leave their spears, arrows, catapults, lances, swords, guns, planes, and bombs alone. They think she should be writing social history, such as who ate what when, or Life in the Feudal Family. Female historians, of whom there are not many, think the same thing but for different reasons. They think she ought to be studying birth; not death, and certainly not battle plans. Not routs and débâcles, not carnages, not slaughters. They think she’s letting women down.
On the whole she fares better with the men, if they can work their way past the awkward preliminaries; if they can avoid calling her “little lady,” or saying they weren’t expecting her to be so feminine, by which they mean short. Though only the most doddering ones do that any more.
If she weren’t so tiny, though, she’d never get away with it. If she were six feet tall and built like a blockhouse; if she had hips. Then she’d be threatening, then she’d be an Amazon. It’s the incongruity that grants her permission. A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown.
She unlocks her office door, then locks it behind her to disguise the fact that she’s in there. It’s not her office hours but the students take advantage. They can smell her out, like sniffer dogs; they’ll seize any opportunity to suck up to her or whine, or attempt to impress her, or foist upon her their versions of sulky defiance. I’m just a human being, Tony wants to say to them. But of course she isn’t. She’s a human being with power. There isn’t much of it, but it’s power all the same.
A month or so ago one of them – large, leather-jacketed, red-eyed, second-year undergraduate survey course – stuck a clasp knife into the middle of her desk.
“I need an A!” he shouted. Tony was both frightened by him and angry. Kill me and you won’t even pass! she wanted to shout back. But he might have been on something. Doped up or crazy, or both, or imitating those other berserk, professor-slaughtering students he’d seen on the news. Luckily it was only a knife.
“I appreciate your directness,” she said to him. “Now, why don’t you sit down, in that chair right over there, and we can discuss it?”
“Thank God for Psychiatric Services,” she said to Roz on the phone, after he’d left. “But what gets into them?”
“Listen, sweetie,” said Roz. “There’s just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they’ve got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time.”
Maybe it’s true, thinks Tony. Otherwise, where would sergeants come from?
Tony’s office is large, larger than it would be in a modern building, with the standard-issue scratched desk, the standard sawdusty bulletin board, the standard dust-laden venetian blinds. Generations of thumbtacks have woodwormed the pale green paint; leftover shards of cellophane tape glint here and there, like mica in a cave. Tony’s second-best word processor is on the desk – it’s so slow and outmoded she hardly cares if anyone steals it – and in her bookcase are a few dependable volumes, which she lends out to students sometimes: Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, a necessary chestnut; Liddell Hart; Churchill, of course; The Fatal Decisions; and, one of her own favourites, Keegan’s The Face of Battle.
On one wall there’s a bad reproduction of Benjamin West’s “The