I find work teaching Introduction to Women’s Studies, writing SUFFRAGE on the board to bored and sometimes bemused and occasionally bitter faces. (Why does the idea always feel like a death?) I am reminded of my lack of a terminal degree. Male professors with no interest in the subject teach women’s literature instead. I am told, rather abruptly by the head of the English department here, that I am not qualified to teach literature. Always our moves seem like sudden, frantic escapes, not properly considering the next because we are so anxious to remove ourselves from the former.) (I was so panicky all the time where we last lived, on 18th Street in Chicago, a man murdered on our street the week we moved out, children playing calmly near his chalk outline. Virginia Woolf prescribed the bucolic of the country. My office is the apartment’s solarium framed by light and windows. Vivien(ne)’s line added to “The Waste Land,” should be delivered in your best imitation Cockney screech: What you get married for if you don’t want children. Backyards littered with all the paraphrenalia of childhood, as Esther Greenwood observes with a shudder in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The adjacent building and ours are the only apartment complexes on our rather suburban street. We move in sight unseen (this has become a habit for us). We live in a squat Victorian building near the university. The wife will just have to find something, of course. The position is tenure-tracked (which in the rules of marital chess trumps a fairly satisfying slate of adjunct work back home in Chicago-King takes Queen). John has been hired to curate and organize a small collection of rare books at the university here, the centerpiece of which was the gift of a rubber industrialist, who owned much of the book collectors’ canon-a few Shakespeare folios, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, two first editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Heroines by kate zambreno