
Best not to dwell on it now. Best to pick up the pieces and go on to something else. She was good at
that, she thought ruefully. It seemed like all her life she was picking up the pieces and going on to
something else.
She slipped out of her clothes, removed her glasses, grabbed some towels, and went in to take a
shower. The mirror on the shower wall reflected her back to herself with no illusions. She stepped very
close to the glass so that she could see it clearly, her vision without the glasses being perfectly clear for
only a foot or so in front of her, then stared at the reflection as if it were someone else, someone she
hardly knew.
Her black hair was cut very short, in a boyish cut; it was easy to wash and easy to manage, and it had
fewer gray hairs to pluck that way. Her face was a basic oval shape with brown eyes, thin lashes, a
somewhat too large nose, and a mouth maybe a bit too wide, but not much. Not an unattractive face,
neither cute nor beautiful, but with matu-rity creeping into its features, hardening them a bit—or was that
her imagination?
Average. That’s what she was: average. Not a bad figure but no bathing beauty type, either. Breasts a
little too small, hips too wide. With the right clothes she could be very at-tractive, but this way,
unadorned, her body would win no prizes, no envious gazes, no second looks. She looked like a million
other women.Generic, that’s me, she thought glumly.Iought to have a little black bar code tattooed
on my forehead.
That was the trouble, really, in academia as well. Therewere women at the top of most scientific
disciplines, in-cluding hers, none of whom would have any problems be-ing wooed from one major chair
to another, writing their own tickets their own way, but they were very few in number because the deck
was still stacked. Those women were the geniuses, the intellects who could not be denied. As “attractive”
was to “knockout,” so “smart” was to “bril-liant.” Intellectually, she knew that the vast majority of
peo-ple, male or female, could not have attained a doctorate in a field like hers, but it just wasn’tquite
enough. Enough to finally teach at a great university, but only as “Instructor in the Physical
Sciences”—not just Physics 101, which was bad enough, but, God help her, “Introduction to the
Sci-ences for Humanities Students”—and a lowly assistant on research projects whose grants and
control were held by middle-aged male professors.
The shower helped a little, but not much, since it left time for more brooding. Was it the fates that struck
her where she was, or was it rather lapses in herself? Was she demanding too much of a guy and maybe
too much of her-self? With people starving around the world and the work-ing poor standing with their
families in soup kitchen lines, did she have any right to complain about a dead-end life if it was such a
comfortable, yuppified dead end? Was she be-ing just daddy’s spoiled little girl, in a situation many
would envy, depressed because she couldn’t have it all?
A line from one of her undergraduate seminars came to her, fairly or not, and tried to give her some relief
from those hard questions. The professor had been a leading feminist and sociologist, and she’d said,
“It’s not tough enough being a woman in this day and age, we also have to be saddled with some
kind of constant guilt trip, too.”
She was, she knew, at a crisis point in her own life, no matter how miserable other lives might be. She
was at an age when biological clocks ticked loudly, at an age when ease of career change was fading fast
with each passing page on the calendar, when any move that could be made had to be made or the status
quo would become unbreak-able. At some point in nearly everybody’s life there came the time when one
came to a cliff’s edge and saw a mon-strous gap between oneself and the other side, a side that was