A Fighting Chance

A lot of people might think that two young law professors would be drawn together because they wanted to talk about law all the time. Nope: I fell in love with Bruce because he had great legs. Really. The weather was hot, and people were wearing knit shirts and shorts. I spotted Bruce on the first morning. He was sitting in the row in front of me, with his chair turned sideways and his legs stretched out. Bruce is six feet three inches, most of that in his legs. Those legs seemed a mile long. Through college and part of graduate school, he had spent his summers teaching tennis. He was gorgeous.

By lunch on that first day, I’d found out who he was and what he had done before becoming a professor. I bounced up to him and cheerfully asked if he would give me tennis lessons. Long after our first meeting, Bruce admitted that he was appalled. “I was sick of giving lessons, especially to beginners. I wanted to teach legal history—not how to hit a tennis ball.” But he was polite, so I set up a time to meet him on the courts after that day’s last session, never noticing his lack of enthusiasm.

Mixed in with the tennis lesson, I learned all the basics: Bruce had both a law degree and a PhD in history, and his specialty was legal history, law in the age of the American Revolution. He was Yankee to the bone, the descendant of tough, quiet, hardworking people who had lived and died in Massachusetts for generations. Like me, he had gone to college on a mix of scholarships, loans, and part-time jobs. It didn’t take me long to figure out that we were very different people. If I was a hard-charging, go-to-the-mat-for-whatever-you-believe kind of professor, he was more of a scholarly, camping-out-in-the-archives-poring-over-an-old-legal-manuscript kind. I asked him if he’d give me another tennis lesson the following day.

Years later, over a great deal of beer, Bruce confessed that I wasn’t just pretty bad at tennis, I was terrible. I was his Worst Student Ever. I hit balls everywhere: over fences, over hedges, over buildings. Once I had a weapon in my hand, I gave it everything I had.

But Bruce loved me anyway. And when I proposed to him, he said yes.

Bruce tells his own version of how he fell in love with me, but I figure the details don’t really matter. I was completely crazy about him, and I still am. Even though I’m sure I’m hard to live with, he says he is crazy about me, too—he just says it more quietly than I do.

We faced only one problem back then: getting married made no sense at all. Bruce was a single guy finishing his second year as a junior professor at the University of Connecticut Law School. I had all the things that weren’t on his to-do list—two children, a red station wagon, and an extended family of Okies who popped in and out of my kitchen every single day. I loved what I had built, and I had no plans to leave Houston—ever.

Soon after we met, Bruce came to visit me in Houston. One morning, we went to the grocery store together. I stood beside him as he gazed at a big display of fresh strawberries.

“We can get those if you want,” I said.

He smiled, and as he picked up a couple of cartons, he said he was thinking about his mother and how embarrassed she was whenever she borrowed money from him to pay for groceries. “We didn’t eat things like fresh strawberries.”

I knew we would be bound to each other forever.

In short order, I had my thirty-first birthday, bought a white cotton sundress that could double as a wedding gown, and married Bruce Mann. I kept Jim’s last name because I thought it would help make life a little easier for the kids.

In an act of recklessness that still startles me a little, Bruce left his job at the University of Connecticut. He moved to Houston to build a family with the children and me (and Mother, Daddy, Aunt Bee, and Buddy the Pekingese). Fortunately, the University of Houston gave him a one-year temporary job. But UH also made it clear they didn’t plan to keep him on, so we started our married life with a big problem. Bruce could stay in Houston and end his career before it ever really started, or I could give up my teaching job and my life in Houston and follow him somewhere else.

Our first year together was tough, but not because of the usual challenges faced by new families. I knew I wanted to build a future with him, even if it meant upending everything I’d built in Houston. So from the first day, we were desperately looking for teaching jobs that would keep us in the same city. For months we got no bites at all, not even nibbles. Then lightning struck. We were both invited to teach the following academic year at the University of Texas at Austin. This wasn’t just any law school; it was one of the best law schools in the country. UT made it clear that for both of us, this would be a “visit,” a sort of nail-biting, year-long tryout for a permanent job, but we didn’t care. It was the big time—and a chance to be together.

We were alive for one more year, with Bruce teaching legal history and property classes while I taught courses about money and finance. We sold the house in Houston, loaded a U-Haul with our stuff, packed up the kids, and rented a house in Austin. Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Bee would stand by, waiting 160 miles away in Houston to see if we got lucky as we all anxiously hoped for the best—two steady jobs in the same city.