Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

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 debacles, not carriages, 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, professorslaughtering 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 vol~ umes, 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 Death of Wolfe,” a lugubrious picture in Tony’s opinion, Wolfe white as a codfish belly, with his eyes rolled piously upwards and many necrophiliac voyeurs in fancy dress grouped around him. Tony keeps it in her office as a reminder, both to herself and to her students, of the vainglory and martyrologizing to which those in her profession are occasionally prone. Beside him is Napoleon, thoughtfully crossing the Alps.

On the opposite wall she’s hung an amateurish pen-and-ink cartoon entitled “Wolfe Taking a Leak.” The general is shown turned away from the viewer, with only his weak-chinned profile showing. He’s wearing a peevish expression, and the balloon coming out of his mouth says, “Fuck These Buttons:” This cartoon was drawn by one of her students, two years ago, and was presented to her by the whole class at the end of term. As a rule her students are mostly men: not a lot of women find themselves deeply attracted to such courses as Late Medieval Tactical Blunders or Military History as Artefact, which is what her graduate courses are entitled, this time around.

As she’d unwrapped the package, they’d all eyed her to see how she’d respond to the word fuck. Men of their age seem to think that women of her age have never heard such words before. She finds this touching. She has to make a conscious effort to stop herself from calling her students “my boys.” If she doesn’t watch it, she’ll turn into a hearty, jocular den mother; or worse, a knowing, whimsical old biddy. She’ll start winking, and pinching cheeks.

The cartoon itself is in honour of her lecture on the technology of fly-front fastenings, which—she’s heard—has been dubbed “Tender Buttons,” and which usually attracts in overflow crowd. Writers on war—she begins—have tended to concentrate on the kings and the generals, on their decisions, on their strategy, and have overlooked more lowly, but equally important factors, which can, and have, put the actual soldiers—those on. the sharp edge—at risk. Disease-carrying lice and fleas, for instance. Faulty boots. Mud. Germs. Undershirts. And fly-front fastenings. The drawstring, the overlap, the buttoned flap, the zipper, have all played their part in military history through the ages; not to mention the kilt, for which, from a certain point of view, there is much to be said. Don’t laugh, she tells them. Instead, picture yourself on the battlefield, with nature calling, as it frequently does in times of stress. Now picture yourselves trying to undo these buttons. She holds up a sketch of the buttons in question, a nineteenth-century set that would surely have required at least ten fingers and ten minutes each.

Now picture a sniper. Less funny?

An army marches on its stomach, but also on its fly-front fastenings. Not that the zipper—although improving the speed of opening—has been entirely blameless. Why not? Use your heads—zippers get stuck. And they’re noisy! And men have developed the dangerous habit of striking matches on them. In the dark! You might as well set a flare.

Many have been the crimes committed—she continues—on helpless enlisted men by the designers of military clothing. How many British soldiers died needlessly because of the redness of their uniforms? And don’t think that sort of thoughtlessness went out with the nineteenth century. Mussolini’s criminal failure to provide shoes—shoes!—for his own troops was just one case in point. And, in Tony’s opinion, whoever dreamed up those nylon pants for North Korea should have been court-martialled. You could hear the legs whisking together a mile away. And the sleeping bags—they rustled too, and you couldn’t undo them easily from inside, and they froze shut! During night raids by the enemy, those men got butchered like kittens in a sack.

Murder by designer! She can get quite worked up about it. All of which, in a more sedate and footnoted form, will be good for at least one chapter of her book-in-progress: Deadly Vestments: A History of Inept Military Couture.

Charis says it’s bad for Tony to spend so much of her time on something as negative as war. She says it’s carcinogenic.

Tony searches through her accordion file for the class list, locates it under B, for Bureaucracy, and enters the grade for each paper in the little square provided. When she’s finished she drops the marked papers into the heavy manila envelope thumbtacked to the outside of her door, where the students can pick them up later today, as promised. Then she continues to the end of the hall, checks for mail in the squalid cubbyhole of a departmental office where there is sometimes a secretary, finds nothing but a renewal notice forJane’s Defence Weekly and her latest copy of Big Guns, and tucks both into her bag.