"You're not Ed Hulver"

So, there was this guy. Kind of a warmed over activist or something.
Wouldn't surprise me if he got gassed more than once during the
Sixties, but didn't actually remember it, what with all the various
consciousness raising and lowering agents.

I guess he signed up to teach this particular class because he could
imagine, or had experienced, the clientele. I mean, Feminism and
Revolution -- not a big stretch. But I'm getting a bit ahead of
myself.

Most of the students that first day were people I knew, many from
the previous semester class on Language and Gender (L&G). And
something like half of them lived on our floor in the dorm. The
Powers That Be thought segregating upperclasswomen, we few, we happy
few, who were still in the dorms, from lesser beings (by class or
sex) would be a good idea.  OK, so I farkled the sentence, but you
catch my drift. This is not an essay for class, thanks. I concur,
by the way, but not, at all, for the reasons they imagined.

Well, sure, the place was quieter. Susan B Anthony Hall, than the
freshpersons' dorms. More fresh women, too, which was kinda the
point, from my perspective at least. The Susies made a nice tight
little society, pretty much self-contained, except for faculty
interactions of various kinds, and assorted other intrusions.

And Annie. She was certainly one reason I liked the place; a reason
the Powers That Be hadn't reckoned on. Or with. Neither had Dr. H.

It was an interesting class. Being a physics major, I got kinda
used to being in classes full of guys, with a decrepit grey-haired
man for a prof, usually with an airline ticket hanging out of the
pocket of his tweed jacket. And a few scorch marks, from pipes
carelessly left lit while being put away in those pockets. I'm
surprised more of them didn't maroon themselves in parts unknown,
by igniting their return tickets. And the eyes. Let 'em look, if
they have to; the campus is physically a pretty safe place. Pity
all the night lighting blotted out the stars, though.

It was, as I was saying, an interesting class. I have a suspicion
that Dr. H.  was partly feeling out for potential recruits for his
nefarious leftist schemes. Sometimes I thought he was so far out
on the left wing as to be around behind the Speaker, someplace in
the bleachers where some of the more violent advocates of change
could be found.

When you're an undergrad, things seem white and black, or, in our
case, shades of brown, and so his arguments were strangely attractive.
I figured out much later that he was just good at finding our
buttons, and manipulating them. But there's plenty of revolution
to be had, and plenty more arguably needed, some of it in places
where students actually in the class had come from. The thing about
foreign students is that more than domestic ones, they tend to live
in the dorms. As Annie put it once, a toilet has flushed in Susie
Hall every day for the past thirty years. A lot of the girls had
no place to go for holidays, so they let them stay.

I'm glad this isn't being graded; I seem to be writing around in
tight little circles. Or curls or something. Like the hair of perhaps
half of the students in F&R: curly and black. To match our eyes.

There was a day that spring. I got off to a late start; I often do
when I'm not in my own bed. Annie had been up late, and, um, had
her hands full, shall we say, so I slept in Jan's (the handfull's)
room, so that, um, like, y'know. So come morning I snuck quietly
into our room, and what I came away with was a sundress. Every
spring I would discover that this particular garment was rather
more, spring-like? than I might have liked. Hey, I was late, it was
clothing, problem solved.

Well, not so fast.

First stop, E&M. The physics prof seemed quite distracted from his
usual working out of differential equations and boundary conditions.
We were just getting to the interesting part of a development he'd
been working on for a week; the part where the smoke of theoretical
electricity and magnetism as encoded in Maxwell's equations suddenly
clears away and the prof stands back and says "Let there be light!",
having written the wave equation. Poor Prof. K. flubbed his one
good line.

The next class was F&R, predictably on the other side of campus.
So I'd usually hurry out of physics to make it to Dr. H.'s lecture
in time to get a seat up front. Being short sucks sometimes, and
sitting behind somebody else is one of those times. This particular
day, though, Prof K. wanted somebody to commiserate with over his
flubbed line.  One thing led to another, and I was quite uncomfortable
before I got him to back down. I think he was uncomfortable in a
different way, but hey, his sexuality is Not My Problem.

I literally ran into Annie during the rush to F&R.  What with being
my roomie for a while, and, um, stuff, she recognized the tear
running down my nose for what it was.  So despite having someplace
to go, and despite having had a handful of Jan the previous overnight,
she dropped everything and insisted on coming with me, as a kind
of moral support or something.

We were late. Dr. H. didn't like people being late. He didn't mind
auditors, if there were enough chairs, and on this particular day,
there were. I think a bunch of people were out Frolicking in the
Sunshine or something. I remember it being a really nice day. Since I
was late and flustered, he picked on me. He's one of those lecturers
who tries to draw like half of his points out of audience participation.
Which works well if people are willing to talk, or if he can get
them angry enough.  But, um, even the Susies were beginning to
notice that, under the long grey curly hair and tweed, there was a
seriously cute guy. So they were getting shy.

I opened my mouth. Serious mistake. I tried protesting that he was
picking on me, but he wouldn't have it. Everybody is responsible
for all the answers. "Besides, Ms Cohen," he said with what I suppose
must be a twinkle in his eye, "You're like a scab, you're so
pickable."

Annie boiled over. "Ed," she said, violating his unwritten rule
against using his first name, "May I call you Ed?"

His mouth opened. His face got a shade or two redder. His mouth
closed, unused.

"I wouldn't expect someone like you to understand this," Annie
continued, standing up, all four feet eleven of her, and beginning
to walk along the side of the classroom, toward the front. "But
Rachel is one of my favorite people, and she's already having a bad
day. These things can be kind of contagious, you know?  And I'd
hate for someone to try to scratch your other eye out today."

Sure enough, Dr. H. had a scratch on one side of his face, and a
splodge of blood on collar and jacket to match.

But he was harder to flummox than that. I was trying to shrink into
the floorboards, and, I think, in the process, I managed to compromise
what there was of my sundress in the general direction of the podium.
Dr. H.  was unsure whether to ogle at me, or to address the more
immediate threat of a petite harpie closing on him.

People who think they understand things tend to stereotype lesbians
of the more aggressive varieties as large people. Bull dykes, for
example.  And those with gender issues who grow up to be men of
significant character. Annie was tiny and thin. She had the tattoo,
the short haircut, and tended to dress in leathers and boots. Today,
in a multi-colored T-shirt, with some of the colors of the rainbow
long since faded out. But she also had The Eye.

Things came to a kind of balance, Annie looking up at Dr. H. from
perhaps ten feet away; he looking down at her, carefully avoiding
her eye.

It seemed to me to be an unstable equilibrium, so I intervened in
the direction of nobody getting physically injured.

"Um, Annie?" No sound.

I found my voice at last.

"Um, Annie? It's OK, really it is."

There was a flicker of doubt across Annie's face. Dr. H. flinched
slightly.

"He's not harassing me, just teasing. It's OK. He's a lesbian."

Both combatants turned to look at me, each with an eyebrow raised.
The class tittered.

"Besides," I told her, "Yours is bigger than his, any day."

This seemed to break the spell. They examined the fit of each other's
jeans.  "And you'd know that, how, exactly?" they said together.

"Trust me," I said, trying to be enigmatic.

It seemed there wasn't going to be anything further to learn that
day, so I retrieved Annie's hand and walked her toward the door.

"Oh," she said, turning back to the classroom. "Thought you'd like
to know that I did some searching, and you're not Ed Hulver, Ed.
He disappeared under mysterious circumstances in Munich a few years
back.  But I'm sure there's a reason you'd want to use his name and
his record."

Ed's otherwise ruddy face faded.

"See you around, Ed," said Annie. She made a point of kissing me
in the doorway on our way out.

We didn't see Ed around, though. The History department chair took
over, and the class was seriously boring after that. This was a guy
who thought teaching within a stone's throw of Susie Hall was enough
feminism for a lifetime.

Annie dropped out after our junior year, and I never heard from her
again. The Susies graduated in their turn, most of them married and
raised kids, all their ardent revolutionary feminist spirit sublimated
to the biological clock.

I've since learned a few things from the hard science side of the
campuses where I've studied. Enough to put some of Ed Hulver's
crackpot ideas into motion. If Ed he be. But I'm not going to do
it. Not anymore. Annie and Ed helped unbutton me, you see, so I'm
not really susceptible to the kind of manipulation he used.