excerpt
“Just close your eyes and think of something else,” he told her.
Paul’s a good buddy, she thought, and he stuck with me through all of the Michael years. She realized she was already thinking of Michael in the past tense and wondered if that was a sign of healing. The last time she had been on a plane she and Michael had flown to California for their first wedding anniversary. That had been just one year ago.
As instructed, she shut out the sight of the storm clouds and retreated into her thoughts. She wondered for about the fifth time why Paul had not been selected to assist Chopyk in leading this Soviet Union trip. It meant prestige and academic advancement. Paul was at least as well educated as she was with all the same qualifications: experience as a teaching assistant and going for his Ph.D. Besides, he was a man and the department favoured men in positions of authority. The graduate women often got no farther up the tenure track than lecturer. Jennifer was a loose cannon; she knew that was her reputation around the department. She was not one to toe the party line—or to sleep with the chairman to improve her grades.
Could it be, as her women’s lib friend had told her, it was because she would accept less money for the job? Just the cost of the trip and a small daily stipend—that was all she was receiving. Paul would have held out for a real salary, she thought uncomfortably. But she had to take this trip. It was ridiculous to think she could continue as a University of Vancouver graduate student in Russian Literature without actual exposure to the Russia of today—the Soviet Union. The department had been trying to organize this language immersion tour, a first for any Canadian university, for years. It was time to damn the expense and go.
This plan had seemed pretty clear until a warm day in May when the departmental chairman, Dr. Hoefert, summoned her to a meeting at Professor Chopyk’s office, and he had hinted to her on the phone that he might have some good news regarding the language tour. It turned out that she had been summoned not so much to Chopyk’s office as to his adjacent waiting room. She spent three quarters of an hour glued to a sticky orange vinyl chair, feeling her hair frizzing wildly in the humidity of the overheated building, one foot bobbing in time to the tapping of the secretary’s typewriter.
Occasionally, Chopyk and Hoefert had glanced through the glass panel as if to determine that she was still there. At first she mentally railed at professors who expected papers to be turned in on time but couldn’t be bothered being punctual for appointments…
Manolis Aligizakis 