It was tough to guess the professor’s age—anywhere between thirty and forty-five, Eve thought—though her face seemed a little older than her body. Even that was open to debate, however, because of the prodigious amount of makeup she wore, a thick, almost theatrical coat of expertly applied cosmetics that seemed more appropriate for a beauty pageant runway than a community college classroom. Eve realized that she’d been expecting someone a little more like her cousin Donna, a no-nonsense scholar who wore her graying hair in a thick braid and had a different North Face pullover for every day of the week.
Her fellow students were an impressively diverse bunch—half college kids, half older people (including a spry lady in her eighties), two black men (one of whom turned out to be Nigerian), one black woman, a Chinese immigrant man with an indecipherable accent, a young woman in a Muslim headscarf, one really cute undergraduate boy with a skateboard, and a butch woman in biker gear, complete with a black leather vest and a motorcycle helmet resting on the floor between her scuffed engineer boots. Eve was surprised to note that twelve of the twenty students were male, including a few middle-aged white guys who didn’t strike her as natural candidates for a class in which students would be required to “write autobiographically and analytically about their own problematic experiences on the gender spectrum, with special emphasis on the social construction of identity, the persistence of sexism in a ‘post-feminist’ culture, and the subversion of heteronormative discourse by LGBTQIA voices.” But this small mystery was cleared up as soon as they got started, when Professor Fairchild asked everyone to introduce themselves and talk about their reasons for enrolling in the class.
“My name’s Russ,” said the first guy to speak. He was wearing a Red Sox cap and a Bruins T-shirt that seemed to have been shrink-wrapped around his beer gut. “I was supposed to be in Briggsy’s class, but that got, uh . . . canceled, and this was the only other writing class in the time slot, so . . .”
“Poor Hal,” said Professor Fairchild, and several heads bobbed in melancholy assent. “He was such a nice person.”
There turned out to be three other transfers from the same class, “The Modern Coliseum: Sports in Contemporary Society,” which was apparently one of the most popular course offerings at ECC. It had been taught by Hal Briggs, a former sportswriter for the Herald, who had just died of a heart attack at a Labor Day barbecue, right in front of his wife, kids, and neighbors. Eve had seen his obituary in the newspaper.
“He was too young,” said Professor Fairchild. “Only forty-nine.”
“Were you there?” asked a bearded guy named Barry, who said he owned a sports bar in Waxford. “At the cookout?”
“No, thank God.” The professor twirled a lock of hair around her index finger, as if she were still in junior high. “Briggsy and I were just colleagues. We used to play in a faculty basketball league on Sunday mornings.” The memory made her smile. “He had the ugliest jump shot I ever saw.”
“Was that a coed league?” asked Dumell, the black guy with the worried expression.
“I’m glad you asked that,” said the professor. “That’s exactly the sort of assumption our class is going to examine throughout the semester. The way our preconceptions about gender condition our responses to the social world. But I think we need to unpack your question.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I’d like you to articulate the question behind your question. In other words, what are you really asking?”
“Okay. I get it.” Dumell nodded uncertainly. He looked a little more worried than before. “Uh, were there other ladies besides you on the team?”
Professor Fairchild had to give this some thought. “What if I told you that our players ranged widely across the gender spectrum? Would that be a satisfactory answer to your question?”
“I guess,” Dumell said. “But it’s kinda complicated, don’t you think?”
“I do,” said the professor. “And rightly so. Because there’s nothing simple about gender. Nothing natural. It’s an ideological minefield that we walk through every minute of every day. And that’s what this class is about. How to walk through the minefield without hurting anyone’s feelings or blowing yourself up.”
*
When class was dismissed, Eve headed out of the building with Barry, the bearded bar owner, tagging along beside her, totally uninvited. They’d been randomly paired off for an in-class exercise, and had spent the better part of the past hour exchanging “gender histories,” focusing, per the professor’s instructions, on moments of gender-related confusion, doubt, and/or shame.
“That was pretty intense,” he said. “I have ex-wives who don’t know me as well as you do.”
Eve didn’t say so, but she doubted Barry’s ex-wives would have complained about not knowing him well enough. He was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of guy, a blustery jerk who began his conversation by insisting that he’d never in his life experienced a single moment of confusion, doubt, or shame in relation to his gender identity. The story of Barry’s life, as narrated by Barry, read as follows: first he was a boy, and then he was a man. The path from Point A to Point B had been straight, self-explanatory, and fun to travel.
“I don’t get the point of all this navel-gazing,” he’d told her during the exercise. “I was born with a penis. End of story.”
Eve had tried to draw him out, asking if he’d ever wished he could get pregnant or breast-feed a child. Ted had once called the ability to bear children a female superpower—he was trying to cheer her up at a particularly bloated and trying moment in her third trimester—and the description had stuck with her through the years.
“It’s kind of a miracle,” she said. “Feeling that little person growing inside you, and then feeding it with your body when it comes out. I imagine most men would be at least a little jealous.”
Barry chuckled appreciatively, as if congratulating Eve on a good try.
“God bless the ladies,” he said. “And thank you for your service. I really don’t know how you do it.”
And then he’d launched into a long and needlessly graphic account of the toll that childbirth had taken on his first wife’s body—especially her breasts, which were never the same afterward, he was sorry to say. He’d hoped they would bounce back, so to speak—they were her finest attribute—but no such luck. At least he’d learned his lesson. When his second wife got pregnant, he persuaded her to bottle-feed, and it was a smart decision. The baby didn’t give a shit, and mama’s hooters—those were his actual words—remained miraculously perky. She did thicken a bit around the waist, but that wasn’t what caused the marriage to go south. They had bigger problems, most notably his affair with a twenty-five-year-old waitress who would soon become wife number three. With that one, he laid down the law—no fucking kids—and she was all right with that until she turned thirty, at which point she wasn’t anymore, and that was that.
“Jesus,” Eve wondered. “How many ex-wives are there?”