The Robber Bride Read Online Free Page B

particular allies and is therefore suspected by all.
    Especially by Rose. Tony continues to resent the fact that, two years ago, Rose accused one of Tony’s graduate courses of being Eurocentric.
    “Of course it’s Eurocentric!” Tony said. “What do you expect in a course called Merovingian Siege Strategy?”
    “I think,” said Rose Pimlott, attempting to salvage her position,“that you might teach the course from the point of view of the victims. Instead of marginalizing them.”
    “Which victims?” said Tony. “They were all victims! They took turns! Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That’s the whole point about war!”
    What Dr. Rose Pimlott knows about war you could stick in your ear. But her ignorance is willed: mainly she just wants war to get out of her way and stop being such a nuisance. “Why do you like it?” she said to Tony recently, wrinkling her nose as if talking about snot or farts: something minor and disgusting, and best concealed.
    “Do you ask AIDS researchers why they like AIDS ?” said Tony. “War is there . It’s not going away soon. It’s not that I like it. I want to see why so many other people like it. I want to see how it works.” But Rose Pimlott would rather not look, she’d rather let others dig up the mass graves. She might break a nail.
    Tony considers telling Rose that Laura Secord, whose portrait on the old chocolate boxes that bore her name had turned out, under X-ray, to be that of a man in a dress, really had been a man in a dress. No woman, she would tell Rose, could possibly have shown such aggressiveness, or – if you like – such courage. That would stick Rose on the horns of a dilemma! She’d have to maintain that women could be just as good at war as men were, and therefore just as bad, or else that they were all by nature lily-livered sissies. Tony is filled with curiosity to see which way Rose would jump. But there isn’t time today.
    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 sheought 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