1yulSVC

And Not to Have is the Beginning of Desire
chair opposite his desk. Once she’s seated, he puts his fingertips together,
like a steeple, in front of his nose.
“Francoise, I’m sorry to tell you that we won’t be giving you a teaching
assistantship next year. If it were up to me, I’d give you another year
and simply say that your dissertation must be done by then, but the new
chair has implemented this policy. You’ve been here for eight years, including
the Masters, and it’s a university mandate—after six years in a Ph.D.
Humanities program, a candidate won’t be given additional aid.”
She turns to look out the window and tries to take a deep breath, but
the view becomes blurry with tears. She starts to cry, silently, into her hand.
Tears seep into her palm. She takes a breath. “I’ll have visa problems if
I’m not enrolled in school. I’ll have to go back to Canada, but I’ve been
here for years now. I don’t have any family there, I’ve nothing to go back
to.”
Cautiously, as if she were an unpredictable animal, he comes out from
behind his desk and hands her a tissue. She knows he will be entirely politically
correct; he cannot touch her, but she longs for him to place a hand
on her shoulder or make some small gesture of comfort. She blows her
nose.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “He won’t let me finish. He won’t approve the
proposal for my dissertation.”
“How long have you been working on the proposal”
“More than a year.”
He looks surprised and starts to say something, then draws his eyebrows
together. “Is there someone else who can direct Someone who
might be more in line with your thinking”
“Katherine won’t do it, because she won’t go against Otto. And if I’m
going to write on Twentieth Century poetry, and he’s not on my committee,
how will it look”
He looks at the wall above her head, as if trying to conjure a diplomatic
answer. “I do see the problem,” he says.
Francoise stares at the toes of her boots. She turned forty-three a week
ago. She will never finish her Ph.D., never get a real job, never publish
a book, never have the approval of the one person who matters most. This
morning her boots made her happy, and now they are just pathetic.
It was Marina’s idea to make impressions of our torsos. She’d gotten a
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