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Why did this happen? Like everything, it starts with the parents. Because of Lydia's parents, because of her parents' parents. Because her mother disappeared a long time ago, and her father found her mother back home. Because her mother wanted most to be different, and her father wanted most to fit in, and both of those things were impossible.
In 1955, Marilyn was a freshman at Radcliffe College. She signed up for the course "Introduction to Physics." The counselor took a look at her class schedule and remained silent for a moment. He is a fat man, wearing a tweed suit and a dark red bow tie, with a dark gray hat on the table next to him. "Why did you take physics?" he asked. Marilyn sheepishly explained that she wanted to be a doctor. "Don't you want to be a nurse?" He chuckled, taking out Marilyn's high school transcript from his folder and studying it. "Well," he said, "I saw you got really good grades in your high school physics class." Marilyn got the highest score in the class, topped every test, and she loved physics. Yet counselors cannot know this. On the transcript, there is only one letter "A." Marilyn waited with bated breath, worried that the counselor would tell her that science was too difficult and that she would be better off choosing something else, like English or history. She had already thought of how to retort. However, the counselor finally said, "Well, why don't you try chemistry—if you think you can do it." Then he signed her course application and handed it in.
When she reported to the chemistry laboratory, Marilyn found that there were fifteen men in the room, and she was the only woman. Sometimes, the lecturer would smack his lips disdainfully and say, "Ms. Walker, please tie up your golden hair." Others would ask her, "Shall I help you light the alcohol lamp?" "I'll help you open that jar." ?" If she broke the beaker one day, three boys would rush over to her in class the next day and say, "Be careful, we'd better let us help." She soon realized that no matter what she said, they all liked it. Start with the word "Best": "It's better to let me pour out the acid for you." "Better stand back—it's going to explode." On the third day of class, she decided to make her point clear. . When they tried to hand over the test tubes, she said, "No, thank you," and then, suppressing a smile, she used a Bunsen burner to soften the glass test tubes as they watched, stretching the walls like taffy. They are transformed into conical dropper bottles. While her classmates occasionally spilled acid on their lab coats and even burned holes in their inner suits, she was able to hold the instrument steadily to measure the acid. The solution she prepared would never bubble and flow onto the experimental bench like a baking soda volcano erupting. Her experimental results were the most accurate and her experimental reports were the most complete. By the time of the midterm exam, she had already won first place in every test, and the lecturer had long since stopped smiling mockingly.
She has always liked to impress people in this way. In high school, she made a request to the principal: Change her home economics class to a handicraft class. It was 1952, and while researchers in Boston were preparing to develop a drug that would change women's lives forever—girls still had to wear skirts to school. In Virginia, her request would be considered radical because every high school sophomore girl was required to take home economics classes, and Marilyn's mother, Doris Walker, was the only home economics teacher at Patrick Henry High School. Marilyn hopes to take handicraft classes with high school sophomore boys. She points out that the hours of home economics and handicraft classes are the same, so her lesson plan will not be disrupted. The principal, Mr. Tolliver, knew her well; she had been at the top of her class since the sixth grade—outperforming the other boys and girls—and her mother had taught at the school for many years. So when Marilyn applied, the principal smiled and nodded, then shook her head.
"Sorry," he said, "we can't make exceptions for anyone, otherwise everyone will want to be special." Seeing the look on Marilyn's face, the principal stretched out his arm across the desk and patted her hand, " Some of the tools in the craft class may be difficult for you to use," he told her. "And, to be honest, Miss Walker, having a girl like you in the class might be a little confusing to the boys. They're distracted." She understood that he seemed to be complimenting her by saying this, but she also knew that it was not actually a compliment. However, she still smiled and thanked the principal. It was not a sincere smile because her dimples were not exposed at all.
So, she had no choice but to sit listlessly in the back row of the classroom, waiting to listen to her mother's "Welcome to Home Economics" speech that she had repeated countless times over the past twelve years. “Every young lady has a house to run,” the mother assured the students. At this time, Marilyn was playing with her fingers, and she thought to herself: It sounds like if you don't look at your house, it will run away. She looked at the other girls in her home economics class. Some were biting their nails, some had balled up sweaters, and some smelled like they had snuck a cigarette at lunch. She could see in the classroom across the hall, Mr. Landis, the crafts teacher, demonstrating how to use a hammer.
Manage the residence, she thought. Every day she would see her classmates wearing thimbles, awkwardly smacking the thread, then squinting to thread it into the eye of the needle. She recalled her mother changing her clothes before every meal, even though she didn't have to please her husband with her shiny skin and neat housecoats—her mother had only started teaching home economics after he left. Marilyn was only three years old at the time, and she still had some clear impressions of her father only in terms of touch and smell: when her father picked her up, his stubble pricked her cheek, and she had a smell of "Old Chili Peppers" after-shave. The strong smell of water penetrated her nostrils. She didn't remember how he left, but knew it happened. Everyone knows. Now, everyone seems to have more or less forgotten about it, so much so that new arrivals to the school district assume Mrs. Walker is a widow. Her mother herself never mentioned this. She still touched up her makeup after cooking and before eating, and applied lipstick before going downstairs to make breakfast. So it made sense to call it "managed housing," Marilyn thought, because, sometimes, houses really did run away. On a test in English class, she wrote, "Irony—the mockery of the contradiction between the expected and actual consequences of something." She got an "A."
Later, when using the sewing machine, Marilyn let the threads get knotted; she was destructive when cutting paper, and she cut randomly; the zippers she sewn would fall off the clothes; the pancake batter contained broken egg shells; when making sponge cakes, she should Put sugar but put salt. Once, she placed the iron bottom down on the ironing board, which burned the ironing board and the black smoke even triggered the fire alarm. At dinner that night, her mother finished chewing the potatoes, swallowed them, elegantly placed the knife and fork on the plate, and said:
"I know what you want to prove, but, believe me, if you keep doing this, I will let you down." Then she packed up the dishes and carried them to the sink.
Marilyn didn't go over to help as usual. She watched her mother put a frilly apron around her waist and fasten a button with her fingers. After washing the dishes, her mother rinsed her hands, applied some lotion on the counter, walked to the table, brushed Marilyn's hair away from her face, and kissed her forehead. Her hands smelled like lemon, her lips were dry and warm.
For the rest of her life, whenever Marilyn thought of her mother, this scene would be the first thing that came to mind. Draw a circle centered on her hometown of Charlottesville and with a radius of eighty miles, within which her mother had never traveled. She always wore gloves outdoors and would not let Marilyn go to school without preparing a hot breakfast for her daughter. After Marilyn's father left, she raised her daughter alone without speaking to her husband. After Marilyn won a scholarship to Radcliffe College, her mother hugged her for a long time and whispered to her: "You can't imagine how proud I am of you." She let go of her arms and looked directly into her daughter's eyes. Eyes, tucking her hair behind her ears, said, "You know, you're going to meet a lot of good Harvard men."
Her mother was right, but it bothered Marilyn for the rest of her life. She studied chemistry from scratch, majored in physics, and was ready to go to medical school. Every night, while her roommate pinned down his curlers and slathered on cold cream before going to bed, Marilyn was hard at work reading. When she was sleepy, she would drink strong tea, or imagine herself wearing a doctor's white coat, putting her hand on the forehead of a fever patient, and diagnosing them with a stethoscope to refresh herself. Being a doctor was the most distant career she could imagine from her mother's lifestyle. By home economics teacher standards, sewing a neat hem was an achievement, and washing beet juice off a shirt was cause for celebration. As a doctor, her job is to stop bleeding and relieve pain, repair skin and bones, and save lives. However, her mother's prediction was also correct - she met a man.
In September 1957, Marilyn was a junior in college. One day, she was sitting in the back row of a crowded lecture hall listening to a lecture. The weather in Cambridge is still humid and muggy, and everyone is looking forward to the cooler autumn days. The class was new that year—"Cowboys in American Culture"—and everyone wanted to take it. It is said that the after-school homework is to watch the film and television works "The Lone Ranger" and "The Red Dead Redemption". Marilyn took out a piece of loose-leaf paper from her folder. Just when she was busy with her head down, the classroom suddenly became as quiet as snow. She raised her eyes and saw the professor of this course approaching the podium, and she immediately understood the reason why everyone was quiet.
The course catalog lists the instructor's name as "James P. Lee." He looked like a senior, but no one knew him well. Marilyn grew up in Virginia, and the surname "Lee" reminded her of a certain type of man, such as Richard Henry Lee and Robert E. Lee, so she realized that she, like everyone else, thought this "James P. Lee" would wear a light brown jacket and speak in a drawl of a Southern accent. The person who put the lecture notes on the podium in front of them was very young and thin, but his age alone did not shock them so much. An Oriental, she thought. She had never seen an Oriental before. He was dressed like a funeral attendant, wearing a black suit, a tight black tie, and a dazzling white shirt. His hair was combed back and neatly divided into two parts, but there was a bunch of stubborn hair sticking up at the back, like an Indian chief's hair. Feathers on the head. When he spoke, he stretched out a hand to push back the lock of hair, and some students below laughed secretly.
I don’t know if Professor Li heard the students’ snickering, but he was not interrupted anyway. "Good afternoon," he said. Marilyn realized she was holding her breath as he wrote his name on the blackboard. From the looks on her classmates' faces, she could tell what they were thinking. Is this our professor? This little man, no more than five feet nine inches tall, not even American, was going to tell them about the history of cowboys? However, when she looked at him again, Marilyn noticed that his neck was slender and his cheeks were smooth. He looked like a little boy wearing adult clothes. She closed her eyes and prayed that the class would go smoothly. The silence in the classroom is still spreading, like the surface of an expanding bubble that may burst at any time. The person behind her suddenly handed her a stack of mimeographed handouts, and she jumped in fright.
Marilyn passed the lecture notes to others, and then Professor Li spoke again.
"The image of the cowboy," he said, "appeared much earlier than we thought." There was no accent in his English, which made Marilyn relieved, and her heart slowly dropped. She wanted to know where he was from, because she had heard that Chinese people always speak English like this: "so solly, no washee." Did he grow up in the United States? After less than ten minutes, the students started making small movements and whispering. Marilyn glanced at the bullet points she had jotted down, such as "Multiple evolutions at various stages in American history" and "A sharp divide between social rebels and quintessential American values." She browsed the lecture notes again and found that she had to read ten books, take a midterm exam, and write three papers. However, other students did not care about these. A girl sitting at the edge of the classroom put the book under her arm and sneaked away. Outside the door, the two girls in the row next to him followed closely behind. Then, the number of people in the classroom gradually decreased, and someone would leave every minute or two. A boy in the first row even walked directly across the podium and walked away in a swagger. The last to leave were the three boys in the back row. They whispered to each other and snickered as they moved out against the entire row of empty seats. Their thighs hit the armrests, making a low "bang", "bang" and "bang" sound. As soon as the door closed, Marilyn heard cheers of "Yeah-yeah-" coming from outside. The sound was so loud that it drowned out the sound of the lecture. Now, there are only nine students left in the classroom. Although they are all focused on their laptops, their cheeks and auricles are obviously red. Marilyn felt her face was burning. She didn't dare to look at Professor Li. She could only stare at her notes and put one hand on her forehead, as if to block the sun.
When she finally peeked towards the podium again, she found Professor Li looking around the entire room calmly, as if nothing had happened. When she heard the echo of his speech coming from the almost empty classroom, he seemed unconcerned. Five minutes before the end of get out of class, he ended the lecture and said, "I will stay in the office until three in the afternoon." Then he looked straight ahead, staring at a non-existent horizon in the distance for a few seconds. Mary Lin shifted uncomfortably in her seat, as if he was staring directly at her.
Professor Li packed up his lecture notes and left the classroom. At this moment, Marilyn felt a tingling sensation on the back of her neck. It was this feeling that drove her to Professor Li's office. The office area of the History Department is as quiet as a library, with a chill in the air and a small amount of fine dust. Professor Li was sitting at his desk, leaning his head against the wall, reading that morning's Harvard newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. His head was no longer so obvious, and the bunch at the back stood up again.
"Professor Li, my name is Marilyn Walker. I was in your class just now...?" Her tone rose involuntarily, and she said the last sentence like a question. She thought, I must sound like a teenage girl, a boring, stupid, superficial little girl.
"Is something wrong?" He didn't look up, and Marilyn fiddled with the top button of her sweater.
"I just wanted to ask," she said, "if you think I can keep up with the class."
He still didn't look up: "Are you a history major?"
"No, I'm a physics major."
"Senior?"
"No, junior year. I'm getting ready to go to medical school. So history—it's not relevant to my major."
"Okay," he said, "Honestly, since you chose this course, there won't be any problem." He half-closed the newspaper, revealing the mug underneath, took a sip of the coffee in the cup, and opened it again newspaper. Marilyn pouted, knowing that the other man wanted to end the conversation and drive her back into the hallway without disturbing him again. However, she always had a purpose for coming here, even though she was not sure what the purpose was, so she raised her chin, pulled up a chair and sat down in front of his table.
"Was history your favorite subject when you were studying?"
"Miss Walker," he finally raised his eyelids, "why haven't you left yet?" Looking at him only a table away, she once again found that he was so young, maybe not a few years older than her, maybe three years in a row. Not even ten years old, she thought. His palms were broad and his fingers were long and ringless.