The Mathematics of Change

Chapter One-1

Chapter One

What feminists had to downplay to make their point was that essential differences exist between men and women. While we should all be equal under the law, we are not all the same in actuality.

–Dr. Abigail Rosen, The F Word: Femininity in the New Century

Millerton, Ohio, had a certain stench about it. Not egg farm or landfill or even chocolate factory, but college town. Places like Millerton, home of Tilsen University, drew people together not naturally destined to interact, making an aromatic melting pot of school versus town, jock versus brain, science and humanities, silver spoons and charity cases.

Such a morass tended to spark one of two reactions: a sweeping embrace of the chaos or a grueling battle against it. Tilsen University fought the good fight. Though groups self-segregated as a general rule, that small nod toward order didn’t satisfy Tilsen. Up went wrought-iron gates between Millerton proper and the university, and even its manicured quad enforced a certain internal hierarchy within the school itself, with the purest humanities highest up the hill to the east and the most applied sciences farthest down the hill to the west. The trek from engineering to philosophy was daunting, to say the least, but close proximity flung people together time and again, and the whiff of those resulting combinations informed Millerton’s characteristic scent even more than the skunky haze of pot smoke wafting from dorm room windows.

At Tilsen, the opposites-attract axiom was practically a natural law, a rite of passage as universal as fraternal hazing or final exam all-nighters. It was a perverted gravitational force, a hot stone begging to be touched, a frozen flagpole in search of a tongue, and not only had it left in its wake uncountable broken hearts and wishes to forget, but it was perhaps the only explanation for best friends Mitch Mitchell and Carol Hollister.

Mitch had swum so many miles in lane four of Tilsen University’s Olympic-sized pool her name might as well have been lacquered across its starting block. While her way with the 500 free would have been merely serviceable in a Big Ten school, it was sought after at Tilsen and had financed half her undergraduate education while her mathematical prowess had taken care of the rest. She spent hours swimming laps over that fat black line to earn her keep, reaching, pulling, kicking her way through hundreds of thousands of meters. Even after months of twice-a-day workouts, of feeling the rhythm of her stroke in her arms at night, she loved it indecently. By now, at thirty-five, her shoulders had paid a steep price from all that repetitive motion, but didn’t everything important have an associated cost?

Ultimate success in swimming came down to who could best cheat the clinging drag of water—a mindset that played right into Mitch’s sweet spot, a lifelong obsession with friction in its many forms. Her three Tilsen diplomas stated, in an

Olde English font, that she’d studied mechanical engineering, but she’d really majored in friction. Friction was like leaky faucets or opened doors in air-conditioned rooms. It generated noise, ate up power, and produced heat, and Mitch had spent her graduate school years getting intimate with the most insidious types. At the time, if someone told her she rubbed them the wrong way, which wasn’t uncommon, Mitch thought about metal against metal, estimated coefficients and loss curves.

She could iterate endlessly over ways to mitigate mechanical friction: cooling, smoothing, buffering with air or water, greasing the proverbial wheels with any of the natural or synthetic lubricants on the market, but her knowledge ended at the boundary between machines and humans, leaving the exercise of reducing friction between people to Carol.

Carol Hollister summed up her solution to this in one word: booze. She was a recognized expert in the subject, a designation reaffirmed every year when Labor Day weekend slapped Millerton awake from its languid summer. For those three days, the last before students arrived, Tilsen became a party school. Each department participated in an unofficial competition for best kickoff event, which had led to the rise of lauded specialties like potato-chip-crusted corn dogs at the engineering party or the way the chemistry faculty rolled out canisters of liquid nitrogen and flash froze everything in sight.

The undisputed king of these events was the sociology-

sponsored shindig—due to a punch perfected by Carol, whose husband, Brian, headed the department. Conjecture had it that a single match taken to the cut-glass punch bowl could level the whole neighborhood. Needless to say, the party had gotten so popular it had engulfed most of the other soft-science departments and threatened to overflow the Hollisters’ spacious backyard.

During the Saturday lap swim of this Labor Day weekend, Mitch had the pool to herself except for a very pregnant woman drifting down lane one in a listless breaststroke. The luxury of such quiet water was hard to resist, but in deference to Carol’s annual call of party-preparation panic, Mitch stuck to a short set: twenty-five hundred meters in a mix of freestyle and backstroke with just enough butterfly thrown in to keep it interesting. Afterward, she kept her shower short then pulled on jeans and one of her dozen-odd Tilsen T-shirts before driving to Carol’s house in a quiet subdivision on the edge of town.

The atmosphere around the Hollister household was exuberant with the smell of cut grass, and Mitch wondered how many of the neighbors had been rudely awakened by the lawn mower this morning. The hedges along the front walk were trimmed to sharp right angles that bristled against Mitch’s outstretched palm. She let herself in the open front door and headed through the hall into the kitchen beyond.

Carol set down two trays of cupcakes on the stovetop with a clatter then closed the oven door with one foot. She pushed some curly, bright-red hair off her face with an oven-mitted hand and said, “You’re late.”

“Late? I thought people weren’t coming until one.”

At once, Carol was across the kitchen and in front of Mitch. She stretched up, put her nose to Mitch’s neck, and sniffed, a move full of accusation. “Mm-hmm. I thought you said you’d be by when you got up.”

“I figured the swim was implicit.”

Carol blew a protracted raspberry, one of the countless rude noises she’d picked up from her sons, James and Gordon.

Mitch said, “Do you want to argue or put me to work?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Carol directed Mitch to her usual station in the kitchen, the deep corner of countertop next to the refrigerator. A large serving platter waited there along with a pile of tomatoes, onions, and lettuce.

“Did you sharpen the knife?” Mitch asked.

“Did I sharpen the knife? Pshaw. When did I ever ask you to wield a dull knife in this kitchen?”

“The last time I was here, I would have done less damage to that tomato with a spoon.”

“Yes,” Carol drew out the word. “I sharpened the knife. Believe me, this is one area where your anality is a virtue—you make the condiments look like they were catered.”

Mitch got slicing while Carol popped in and out of the kitchen around vacuuming, zipping to the store for bags of ice, filling coolers with the party’s lesser beverages, yelling at James—her older son—to get off his butt and bring up the folding chairs from the basement. She was a freckled blur while Mitch smiled and worked, a little high on the satisfaction of producing so many slices of uniform thickness. Carol’s kitchen was good for small pleasures like these.

Carol finally settled at the sink to wash more produce for Mitch. “This party will be the death of me.”

“Where’s Brian?”

“Outdoor readiness.” Not a trivial task given the size of the backyard and the crowd they were expecting. Carol turned off the water and shook a colander full of broccoli. “I don’t know why I even serve this. Who eats broccoli with everything else that’s available? Well, maybe she …”

Mitch used the front of her T-shirt to wipe away onion-induced tears. “Maybe she?”

Before Carol answered, she piled the washed broccoli in a clear space by Mitch’s elbow. “Have I told you about Dr. Rosen?”

“I don’t think so, but it’s hard to keep track of all the PhDs in this town.”

“Oh, you’d remember.” Carol leaned against the counter close to Mitch. “She’s the department trophy this year—this decade, the way Joe Obermann is drooling over her. He used words like ‘monumental,’ ‘triumph,’ and, of course, ‘endowments.’”

The academic holy grail. It wasn’t all about money and reputation, just mostly. “The dean’s happy, huh? What about Brian? Is he all worked up too, or is she competition?”

“He says she’s average at best.”

There was a point around here somewhere, but it might be a long time coming. “Something doesn’t compute,” Mitch said, specifically to make Carol smile, which she did before giving Mitch a playful shove and sailing back into motion again.

Mitch started in on the broccoli, raising her voice to carry over running water. “Did they poach her from Harvard or something?”

“No, she was just at City College in New York.”

“But Tilsen pursued her?”

Brian asked, “Who did Tilsen pursue?” He walked through the sliding patio door, his tanned arms dotted with cut grass and dirt.

“Dr. Rosen.” Carol pulled the colander from the sink, set it on the counter, and moved aside to let Brian wash his hands.

“Pursuit puts it mildly. She passed our tenure review in two weeks, which has to be a new record. In a case like this, I’d usually blame our overactive diversity initiative—”

“She’s a lesbian,” Carol said. “A smart, beautiful, popular lesbian.”

Brian said, “The only kind of lesbian that does any good.”

Mitch put down her knife and exchanged a sour look with Carol, who shrugged. Mitch knew she should shrug too, but she didn’t have the same peacekeeping incentive—instead of going into business with her graduate school adviser like Mitch, Carol had married hers. When Brian came out with broad statements like these, ones dripping with the weight of his sociological experience, the familial-grade animosity that lurked between him and Mitch flared up into the more vitriolic version that often arose between hard and soft scientists. She said, “Says the incredibly useful straight, white male.”

“You know what I mean. This time the diversity was a footnote.” He dried his hands on a blue-striped kitchen towel. “There’s a book.”

Carol said, “A popular book.”

“What’s it about?”

“How girly girls are going to take over now that feminists have paved the way,” Carol said. “It’s called The F Word: Femininity in the New Century.”

Mitch tried not to laugh but failed. “Ah. She’s marquee value. How long until Tilsen starts pumping her for the follow-up then punishing her when it isn’t as successful?”

Brian put hands to hips and frowned. “How do you live with such pessimism?”

“Ninety percent of engineering is preparing for the worst, which seems like realism to me,” Mitch said. She continued to carve out bite-sized florets in case this guest of honor were watching her figure and went crazy on the crudités.

Instead of responding to that, Brian said, “I thought James was going to get the chairs from the basement.”

Carol said, “And I thought raising boys was supposed to be easy.”

James was fourteen to the marrow of his bones. When he sighed in the new rolled-eyed way of his, Mitch was hard-pressed to keep a straight face and was thankful her role in his life included essentially no disciplinary duties. Carol and Brian were complementary in many ways, not the least of which being their general approach to parenting. While Carol preferred the full-frontal attack, Brian went in for the element of surprise, and he put a finger to his lips before creeping from the kitchen toward the stairway leading up to the bedrooms.

Carol put the cauliflower back in the sink, turned on the water, and said, “Maybe you should ask her out.”

“Ask who out?”

“Dr. Rosen. I’ve seen her author photo, and she’s at least as hot as that ex of yours, besides being twice as smart. I mean, Mitch, not only does the woman have a doctorate, but she’s got tresses. Honest-to-God dark, curly tresses.”

Mitch laughed and kept chopping. “I doubt your Dr. Rosen and I are compatible.”

“Compatibility is overrated. No one thought you and the ex were compatible.”

“Her name’s Kim, and we weren’t.”

Carol dumped the cauliflower next to Mitch and pinched her through her T-shirt. “You know what I mean. I lost a bet with Brian over that. Fifty bucks. I gave you guys three months, tops, and you went and lasted over a year.”

“Such faith. You got off cheap.”

Carol laid her hand on Mitch’s forearm, not moving until Mitch stopped her knife work. “You know I only joke because you’re not heartbroken. Are you heartbroken?”

“No,” Mitch said to the broccoli battlefield in front of her. Carol took her by the jaw and pulled her face around so they were blue eye to blue eye.