them.
WHEN I WAS ten years, old I knew I was never going to get married. Not only was I six inches taller than any boy in the fifth grade – except Matthew Finch, who was five ten and weighed ninety-eight pounds – but my IQ was as formidable as my height. It was sixty points higher than that of any of the boys – except the aforesaid Matthew Pinch. I topped him by only thirty points.
I know – this isn’t the right way to start a narrative, if I hope to command the sympathy of the reader. A narrator should at least
For several years my decision didn’t give me much pain. I wasn’t thinking seriously of marriage in the fifth grade. Then I reached adolescence, and the trouble began. I kept growing up, but I grew in another dimension besides height. The results were appalling. I won’t quote my final proportions; they call to mind one of those revolting Bunnies in
Mind you, I am still not bragging. I am not beautiful. I admire people who are slender and fine-boned and aesthetic-looking. The heroine of my adolescent daydreams had a heart-shaped face framed in clouds of smoky black hair. She was a tiny creature with an ivory complexion and a rosebud mouth. When she was enfolded in the hero’s brawny arms, her head only reached as high as his heart.
All my genes come from my father’s Scandinavian ancestors – big blond men with rosy cheeks and blazing blue eyes. They were about as aesthetic-looking as oxen. That’s what I felt like – a big, blond, blue-eyed cow.
The result of this was to make me painfully shy. I suppose that seems funny. Nobody expects a bouncing Brunhild to be self-conscious. But I was. The intelligent, sensitive, poetic boys were terrified of me; and the ones that weren’t terrified didn’t want to talk about poetry or Prescott. They didn’t want to talk at all. Rubbing my bruises, I became a confirmed misandrist. That attitude left me lots of time in which to study. I collected degrees the way some girls collect engagement rings. Then I got a job as a history instructor at a small Mid-western college which, in view of what is to follow, had better be nameless. It was there I met Tony. Tony teaches history too. He’s bright; very bright. He is also six feet five inches tall, and, except for his height, he rather resembles Keats in the later stages of consumption.
I met Tony on the occasion of the first departmental faculty meeting. I was late. Being late was a mistake; I hate walking the gauntlet of all those male eyes. There was one other woman present. She looked the way I wanted to look – thin, dark, and intellectual. I smiled hopefully at her and received a fishy stare in return. Most women take an instant dislike to me. I can’t say I don’t know why.
I spotted Tony amid the crowd because of his height. There were other things worth noticing – big brown eyes, broad shoulders, and black hair that flopped over his forehead and curled around his ears. His face was fine- boned and aesthetic-looking. At that moment, however, it had the same expression that was on all the other male faces, except that of Dr Bronson, the head of the department. He had interviewed me and had hired me in spite of my measurements. I’m not kidding; it is a common delusion, unshaken by resumes and grades, that a woman with my proportions cannot have anything in her head but air.
I sat down with an awkward thump in the nearest chair, and several men gulped audibly. Dear old Dr Bronson smiled his weary smile, brushed his silvery hair back from his intellectual forehead, and started the meeting.
It was the usual sort of meeting, with discussions of schedules and committees and so on. After it was over I headed for the door. Tony was there ahead of me.
I don’t remember how he got me out of the building and into the Campus Coffee Shoppe, but I have never denied he is a fairly smooth talker. I remember some of our conversation. I hadn’t encountered a technique quite like his before.
The first thing he said was, ‘Will you marry me?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘Haven’t you ever heard of love at first sight?’
‘I’ve heard of it. I don’t believe in it. And if I did, love and marriage don’t necessarily go together.
‘So beautiful and so cynical,’ said Tony sadly. ‘Doesn’t my honourable proposal restore your faith in my sex?’
‘It merely reinforces my impression that you are crazy.’
‘Look at it this way.’ Tony put his elbows on the table. The table wasn’t very clean, but neither were Tony’s elbows; I deduced that this pose was characteristic. ‘All my life I’ve been looking for my ideal woman. I’m pushing thirty, you know; I’ve had time to think about it. Beauty, brains, and a sense of humour, that’s what I want. Now I know you’re intelligent or old Bronson wouldn’t have hired you. He’s above the sins of the flesh, or thinks he is. You are obviously beautiful. Your sense of humour – ’
‘Ha,’ I said. ‘You deduced that from the twinkle in my eye, I suppose.’
Tony cocked his head and considered me seriously. A lock of black hair fell over his left eyebrow.
‘Is that a twinkle? It looks more like a cold, steely glint. No, I’m willing to take the sense of humour on trust.’
‘You’d be making a mistake. I am not amused. And even if I were amused, I wouldn’t marry you. I’m not going to marry anyone. Ever.’
‘If you prefer that arrangement,’ said Tony, with a shrug.
So it went, for most of the winter. The demoralizing thing about Tony was that he wasn’t kidding. He really did want to get married. That didn’t surprise me; any man with a grain of sense knows that marriage is the only way, these days, to acquire a full-time maid who works twenty-five hours a day, with no time off and no pay except room and board.
Naturally Tony wouldn’t admit to these motives. He kept babbling about love. He couldn’t help it. His background was hopelessly conventional. He came from a big jolly family out in the Bible Belt, with a fat jolly mother and a tall, thin jolly father – he showed me their pictures, which he kept on his desk. That shows you what he was like. He was crazy about his parents. He even liked his brothers and sisters, of whom there seemed to be an indeterminate number. He had a half-ashamed and inarticulate desire for children of his own. Oh, his ostensible motives were admirable – and his attractions were considerable. To say we were physically compatible is to put it mildly, but that wasn’t all; we had a hundred interests in common, from European history to basketball. (He had been the star of his high school team, and so had I.) He shared my passion for medieval sculpture, and he was crazy about old Marx Brothers movies. I couldn’t imagine finding anyone I liked better. But I didn’t weaken.
‘Why not?’ Tony demanded one day. It was a day in January or the beginning of February, and he was getting exasperated. ‘Damn it, why not? Are you down on marriage just because it’s out of fashion? I didn’t think you were so conventional!’
‘That has nothing to do with it. I’m not against marriage
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘What, the tape? It would save the wear and tear on my vocal cords. Now listen, Tony – ’ I put my elbows on the table, and then removed them; I was certainly not going to imitate his vulgar habits. ‘Your attitude is a perfect illustration of the reason why I don’t intend to marry. I state a point of view, and you attack it. You don’t listen, you don’t try to understand, you just say – ’
Tony said it.
‘Obscenities will get you nowhere,’ I said. ‘My feelings are a fact, not a personal delusion. They are valid for me. What business have you got trying to tell me how I ought to feel? You think you want an intellectual wife, who can discuss your work with you. But it wouldn’t last. After awhile you’d start expecting apple pie instead of articles, and then you’d want me to quit work, and if I got promoted and you didn’t, you would sulk, and then if we had a baby you wouldn’t get up in the middle of the night and change its dirty diapers – ’
