A Fighting Chance

I smiled at my students with a confident, wait-till-you-hear-this look. I figured he would give us some inside information about some giant study that Congress had commissioned or the reams of research his fellow professors had done.

No dice. Instead, Professor Riesenfeld (I couldn’t possibly call him “Stefan”) dismissed the question with something along the lines of, “Because everyone knows that.” Then he added an afterthought: “Vell, every expert knows that.”

I missed the barb. Even so, I probably should have shut up at that point. This was my first bankruptcy class, and he had thirty or more years of experience. I was trying out for a job, and he was a famous professor with a long list of honors. But I just couldn’t stop myself—I wanted to know.

“Uh, how does everyone know that?”

Now he was clearly irritated. He took a deep breath. Everyone just knew. That was it. According to the professor, at least, that had been the basis for the new law.

My God. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Professor Riesenfeld was a giant in the field, a man of deep learning and vast experience, and he really didn’t know what was happening on the ground. And if he didn’t know, then I figured no one else did, either.

How could anyone be sure that what had gone wrong in these families’ lives was the result of their own bad choices? Were they not willing to work hard? Were they wild spenders? Were they any different from me and from my family?

And there was one more question I’d never thought about before: What the heck was Congress doing passing laws if they didn’t actually know what was going on?

I don’t remember anything else Professor Riesenfeld said during the class that day. At the end, I thanked him for coming, and my students applauded politely. But I do remember that as he walked out of the classroom, my teeth hurt. Here I was, teaching the bankruptcy code to a classroom of future lawyers, yet I couldn’t answer the most obvious question: Why were these people broke?





Sore Points

The year of visiting ended, but we didn’t get the job offers we had been hoping for, so we packed up and moved back to Houston, where I started teaching again. Then, a year later, UT law school reconsidered and offered me a permanent job as a tenured professor. So we packed up a U-Haul yet again and moved back to Austin. This time Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Bee came too, and they settled in a duplex with Mother and Daddy on one side, Aunt Bee on the other. Buddy the Pekingese died, and Bonnie the cocker spaniel moved in. The kids switched schools for the fourth time in four years, and we added a golden retriever puppy named Trover to our family. Gradually, Bruce and the kids and I settled into Austin. Bruce coached soccer. Daddy helped me plant roses. Amelia joined the church youth group, Alex was an acolyte, and I was a substitute Sunday school teacher and a reliable source for chocolate-oatmeal bake-sale cookies. Jim was still in Houston, and the kids went to visit him from time to time.

We had a new house, with a sunny kitchen on the back. Over time, Bruce quietly took over most of the cooking, and I pitched in with what I did best—mostly cakes and pies, and the occasional pot of mac-and-cheese. I loved working alongside him, with music on the stereo and Trover sprawled out in front of the refrigerator and the kids thumping around upstairs. There were moments when the sun would slant in and Bruce would smile, and I would think my heart might burst with gratitude for all the good things that had come to me.

We might have stayed in Austin forever if not for one thing: Bruce didn’t land a permanent position at UT. Instead, he got a job at Washington University in St. Louis—also a terrific law school, but it was 825 miles away. Barely missing a beat, he set up a tiny apartment in St. Louis and began flying back and forth every week. He continued to coach Alex’s soccer team, and we all showed up to cheer on the junior high orchestra, listening hard to catch Amelia’s clarinet. We pieced together lives that were as nearly normal as possible, but everything turned on his making the connecting flight at the Dallas airport. Meanwhile, we kept job hunting, but finding two professorships in one city was tough.