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The Threshold
- Ohio University Press
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187 thethreshold ■ Rosellen Brown She had never had any difficulty admitting her desperation to marry. Possibly it was the disparity between her immaterial profession—she was a philosopher, a full professor, whose daily work involved defining reality, challenging it, asking it impertinent questions like “How do I know what I know?” and “Are we born good?”—and her ordinary, recognizable need to be loved that made her friends feel helpless about “fixing her up with” someone. That phrase trivialized the matter, and everyone they knew seemed equally trivial. Did she really need what they needed? Would their plebian lives satisfy someone who asked such rarefied questions? Anyway, they insisted, there were no even mildly passable men—read exceptionally intelligent men not on the prowl for youth and/or beauty—who were not spoken for. Della herself appeared all too material, a paradox that might also have been an impediment to meeting likely suitors. She was large—not fat, her mother had always stipulated back when her point of view counted. Rather, she was high-waisted, solid, even her face a large, flat, uninflected surface no matter what surged behind it, like a Kabuki mask. This gave her an altogether inaccurate look of self-sufficiency that some might have found off-putting. One of her early suitors told her he could never relax with a woman who looked like she could lift him more easily than he could lift her. There wasn’t much she could do about any of that but she did try. She curled her thick, dark hair to soften the way it lay against her full cheeks, although there was always something a bit incongruous about the girlishness of the effect. She forced herself, when she remembered, to look animated, and in mixed company cultivated a voice far more ethereal than, with her broad shoulders and size ten shoes, she seemed likely to possess. Occasionally she faced the disconnect between internal and external, but what could she do but the best she could? Tomakemattersworse,latelyallthenewhiresinherdepartmenthadbeenwomen: they were closing the female professorial gap, and at her expense. The younger women, 188 ■ Rosellen Brown all of them, had everything: not only the job that had defined her for thirty years, behind whose demands and intricacies she could hide, but, cheerful and stylish, they had husbands, children, houses, second houses! They had in-laws about whom they complained, and shared with each other the arcane problems of city families, like the dearth of preschool openings and the escalating cost of household help. They claimed to be harried, but at the dinner table, on their pillows, they were not alone with their challenges. All that without distracting them from the rigors of the tenure track and the rewards that lay beyond. They pretended sympathy for Della’s singleness, or perhaps they even felt it, but no one lifted a finger, no one made a move to help. When the boundless horizon of Internet dating first spread itself before her, Della sprinted toward it gratefully. But after a dozen or so frustrating encounters that left her more discouraged than ever—a waste of time, an insult to her standards and her dignity, all those leftovers and nonreaders who ignored every salient thing she’d confided about the things she liked and the things she couldn’t abide—I do not like sports, she had written, only to be invited to a day of skiing. I am a lifelong Democrat, she had written, only to find herself recruited to help spatter the world with reactionary mud—the sprint became a trudge. Each Sunday evening, after a day of lonely museum-going or a movie with one of her married friends to which she had to invite herself and then see a film chosen by a six-year-old, she sat down to her computer grim as a test taker to assess the current pickings and submit to being passed over by a multitude. By now she had learned to translate: “inventory associate” meant stockroom clerk. “Para”-anything was an underachiever who didn’t dare to be the thing itself. “Entrepreneur” could mean anything or nothing. Entrepreneur of exactly what? Duke of what kingdom? If she applied any of the philosophical categories in which she routinely dwelled, she could reduce them all to rubble, the reality enhancers to liars, the euphemism mongers to pathetic losers. She hated the snob she became as soon as she began this riffle through the bottomless catalog of impossible...