She barely said a word as he drove her home, out of town, down into the valley, past the houses where chickens ran close to the road. She lived in a trailer. With her mother, he thought he heard her mutter as she quickly hopped out of the car. All he could say before she ran inside was thank you.
The next Monday he sat in a conference room in his department’s building. He scanned the room taking in the assortment of engineers, all male, and the addition of administrative types, men too. They sat around a broad table, some in suits, others in flannel shirts and blue jeans. He felt sleepy and grabbed at the coffee carafe as it made its way around the table. They were there to discuss strategies for getting more women to join the engineering program. Apparently, the administrative types had been working on the science and math departments too. He found it amusing, this group of men conferencing to decide the fate of women, in their best interests, of course.
He must have fallen asleep, because the guy next to him prodded him awake with a sharp jab to the ankle.
“What ideas have you thought about using in your freshman class, Professor Karpouzes?” the vice-provost asked.
“Ideas?”
“To attract female students and retain them.”
Was this a trick question, he wondered? “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“In our memo last week, we asked that you all reflect on methods you may already be employing, or could employ in the future, to attract and retain more female engineering majors. Did you give it some thought?”
No, he hadn’t. He was teaching two sections of lower-level fundamentals courses along with two graduate seminars on mathematical modeling. The number of engineering majors had expanded faster than the faculty, and everyone was feeling the strain. Someone had told him that all the physics majors had defected and were filling their classrooms now. He welcomed the fresh and inquiring minds, and they were what preoccupied him, not students outside his courses. Besides, as he figured it, getting more women into the program wasn’t a matter of doing something to attract them. It was more a question of stopping whatever was repelling them.
But he was tenure-track, and in a few years, his tenure bid would need approval from the provost’s office. So, he’d made up something about using more colored diagrams. The nodding heads surprised him, but they shouldn’t have, he thought.
He waited until Friday before driving back out to the restaurant. He enjoyed custom. It was after eight, and the parking lot had already thinned out. His head felt bloated with the remains of the week’s endless meetings. Plus he’d given tests in two of his classes, and streams of students, mostly male, had lined his hall. His heart raced with nervous energy, and he reminded himself that he needed to get back into an exercise routine. A colleague had offered to be a running partner, but the man bored him to death.
He waited in his Mazda Z and honked when she left the restaurant. She walked up to his door, as he rolled down the window.
“I’ve gotta drop the car off at my mom’s,” she told him. “She needs it tomorrow morning, early.”
“I’ll follow you,” he said.
Back at his place, she asked him for a drink.
She seemed more sure tonight, and he noticed that she put on lipstick, a bright coral shade too orange for her skin.
“I only have beer,” he told her.
“That’s okay.”
Stacks of tests to be graded and journal articles to read filled the seat of his patched-up leather armchair in the corner. But she chose to sit there, after carefully placing the tower of paper on the floor. He sprawled out on the sofa and rested his head on the arm, balancing the beer on his stomach between sips. She had chosen the isolated chair, and he knew that whatever would happen tonight would take some effort.
“How was your week?” she asked.
The question seemed to belong to a different couple sharing a beer in a different living room in some other time and place.
“Fine,” he answered.
She adjusted in her seat and rustled polyester against leather.
“Actually, not so fine. I had nothing but meetings all week and stupid ones at that.”
“Oh,” she said. And then after a moment, “Why?”
Her voice had dropped from its usual whiny pitch, and she spoke softly and steady.
“Tell me about them,” she said.
“You really want to hear about this stuff?” he turned and asked.
“Yes.”
She seemed genuinely interested, perched in her chair with her feet tucked beneath her. He relaxed back onto the sofa and began to talk.
“Well, we had one meeting that took a whole afternoon. The university wants more women engineers. What they really want is access to all the federal grant money funding women. And they think they can’t be a top research university unless they can produce women scientists and women mathematicians and women engineers. So, they’ve created all sorts of committees and strategies with elaborate sounding names and empty rhetoric. But no one has asked the female students yet why they don’t want to be engineers.”
“How ridiculous.”
He turned back to look at her, excited that she felt the same, and surprised that she had an opinion.
“Women engineers.” She laughed. “How ridiculous.” She reacted to the idea like he’d reacted to the meatballs she’d served, to their absurdity, to how out of place they seemed.
His excitement dropped, and he gave a low laugh. “Yes,” he said. How foolish of him, he thought. He had begun to view her as someone he could talk to, share things with, an equal. But her ignorance put a quick stop to that. He determined it was ignorance; he didn’t bother to ask why she thought a woman engineer was such a preposterous idea. Instead, he set his beer down and walked over to her chair. She looked up at him, asking for approval. So, he picked her up and carried her upstairs. She didn’t resist. They kept going like that for a couple months. He’d pick her up from work. She’d come back to his place. Sometimes, she’d stay with him later into the next day, and they’d sip coffee on his back porch. She would read the paper, and he would grade assignments or work on his latest scholarly article, “Spatial and Temporal Localized Wave Solutions.” One time she asked him what it meant. But he told her he didn’t want to bore her. And when they tired of each other, they’d drive to the neighboring city and catch a movie.
