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The Province of the Bearded Fathers

ON A BENCH IN THE SUN at the side of a playground in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Willow is tall, but heavyset, and her real name is Esther; she changed it way back in college and has felt silly about it almost ever since, but still secretly likes the sound. Janet is smaller and neater and has a Ph.D. Both of them eating ice cream sandwiches, licking grooves around the sides as the ice cream melts in the first real sun of summer, the first day actually uncomfortably hot. The nearest piece of playground equipment is the mouth of a tall twisting slide, an orange plastic tube which spirals down from the top of a wooden climbing structure. Periodically the slide shivers in the sunlight, then extrudes a child, down into the sand, to pick itself up and hurry away. Janet has a post-doc in the lab of someone so important that many people mistakenly assume he has already won a Nobel Prize; there is nothing which pleases him more than to hear this mistake made. Janet has just reported him to the university committee for sexual harassment, and wonders whether she has in one fell swoop ended her scientific career. She mentions this worry, yet again, to Willow, who is touchingly confident that someone as brilliant and talented as Janet will have no trouble at all finding a new lab to work in. But then Janet begins to think about what this would involve, the politics of switching, of explaining why she needs to switch, and the logistics, pure and simple, of interrupting everything she is doing and moving and starting something new. She looks almost desperately around the playground for something else to talk about, points out to Willow that two small boys, crouched in the shadow of the spiral slide, are trying to build an elephant trap. They have dug a large square pit and are roofing it over with twigs and grasses, which keep falling down into the hole. They have been friends since college, Willow and Janet. When the housing office first assigned them to be roommates, Janet was wary, wondering what they could possibly have been thought to have in common. Willow had so many friends, everyone on campus seemed to know her, and she knew, always, about every