It was really past time she should make the call, Carolyn Pierce thought, but the twins had been going through successive growth spurts. Being a new mother was more than a full-time job; being a student on top of that had been too much to ask. But, if she wanted her degree in '74, she would have to act soon.

Prof. Kindle answered his phone. She still knew when his office hours were.

"Professor? This is Carolyn Pierce."

"Yes, Mrs. Pierce. I was afraid that you had forgotten us." Forgotten him? She'd sent him a draft of her dissertation two weeks before going into the hospital.

"I hadn't forgotten you. I just couldn't cope with anything but the babies for the past month. Anyway, did you get my draft?" Bill had delivered it personally, but it was better to ask.

"Yes, and I had some suggestions." Of course, he had suggestions. The soup always tasted better to the advisor after he'd pissed in it. "Do you want to make an appointment to discuss it?"

"That's the thing. If you could come here for dinner Saturday, Bill, my husband, will be able to manage the boys. If that's not acceptable, I'll get a sitter for the time you want." Though sitters while high-school classes were in session were scarce as rubies, and twice as expensive.

"Are you inviting me to dinner? That is quite kind of you. What time?"

"Would six-thirty be convenient? We're used to eating around then, but that's merely a habit on Saturdays." Actually, the boys were used to eating before then, which made his coming then remarkably convenient.

"Six-thirty this Saturday. I'd be delighted."

She figured that Kindle deserved lamb chops. Bill drove her to the butcher's shop -- she wasn't going to depend on a butcher's department in a supermarket when her dissertation's acceptance might hang on the taste of the meal -- on Friday. He did what he could to give her time in the kitchen to do the cooking. Bill was being very cooperative.

The same couldn't have been said of his sons. They got their schedules off, and -- try as she might -- kept them off. She was nursing Paul when the bell rang. Bill answered it carrying John. He was hungry, too, and telling the world. Bill left Kindle in the living room to trade babies and burp and change Paul. Then he went back. She changed John -- for guys whose only talents were sleeping, eating, and eliminating, they sure could multitask -- before coming out to greet Kindle.

Wonder of wonders, the professor was human. He had Paul on his arm, quite safely, too. The head was tucked into the inside of his elbow as if he'd done this before. He was talking baby-talk. Paul had someone new to hold him and looked like he was listening. He'd look the same way if Kindle had delivered an economics lecture. She suspected that the gold-rimmed eyeglasses were Paul's real interest. She handed John to Bill and went to wash her hands.

When the kids were in their cradles with mobiles to amuse them, the adults sat down to dinner. Kindle asked about the children before discussing the dissertation. If he noticed the meal she'd taken such pains to prepare, he gave no indication. On the other hand, he sure had noticed the boys, and she'd taken even more pains with them -- and received much more pain from them.

"The details may seem niggling," Kindle said. "They are, in fact, niggling, but the audience for that dissertation, tiny as it is, will be very important to your future, and they will frown at any imprecision. The difference between absolute clarity, clarity for your professional peers, not for the general reader, who won't ever take the opportunity -- will never have the opportunity -- to read it, and enough clarity for them to understand what you meant even if you didn't quite say it, is the difference between their occasionally citing you when they need a particular fact and their referring to you as an exemplar of how the facts should be gathered and presented." German students were reported to applaud when one of their professors kept a single sentence going for more than a minute. Kindle was definitely teaching in the wrong country.

"You think these last changes will make it acceptable?"

"My dear, it's acceptable now. These last changes will make it exemplary." In the event, that she went through two more drafts before she presented it. It did, however, sail through the dissertation committee. All of the others were Kindle's juniors in the department. She got her degree in June. Bill got the day off; she expressed two bottles; her men sat in the audience and watched the -- interminably dull, when you think about it -- ceremony. Well, Bill watched when the boys weren't distracting him. They couldn't focus beyond a yard yet.

Bill had bought a camera before the birth. He already had enough snaps to fill an album. He insisted of taking a picture of her in her robe holding the twins. That was fine. She only insisted that the pictures of her breastfeeding were kept out of the album. He wanted to go further, though.

"You can keep the robe another few days, can't you?"

"Bachelor's robes are rented. I purchased the doctoral robe. We wear them again. Didn't you see all the faculty in the parade?"

"Great! Now, what I want to do is to get a real portrait-style photo of you in the robe with the twins. We can go to a studio where the guy will do it right."

"Why?"

"Because my snapshots are just that. We want a professional job."

"Why? I mean, not why the professional will do a better job than the amateur," -- although it would be convenient if he accepted that in economics, instead of thinking that his MBA training trumped her years of specialization -- "but why do you want the picture at all?" Where did he get that 'we' wanted it?

"Because it puts together your successes of this year. You know, you academics think of the doctor's degree as one rung on the ladder. Doctor Smith is inferior to Assistant Professor Jones. But we think of it as a high point. Even if not, and I want the picture for my friends not for your fellow faculty, you aren't going to have a baby -- let alone twins -- the year you make full professor." She wasn't going to have a baby, let alone twins, ever again. But it was too early to discuss that. Anyway, you had to give Bill points for wanting a family portrait which didn't include him and focused on her accomplishments. Was a baby an accomplishment? Twin babies were more like a disaster. Well, getting a doctorate while bearing twins was an accomplishment.

They got the portrait done. Bill got a print for his office wall, and a larger print which he had framed and hung in their dining room.

Kindle invited himself over once more, this time in the middle of the afternoon. It really was more convenient than getting a sitter and going to his office, but you don't ask to come to someone else's house. Men, in particular, don't ask to visit married women when their husbands aren't home. On the other hand, Kindle might not have noticed that she was a woman. When he got there, he paid attention to both babies before getting down to business.

"Are you applying for a teaching job for this next year?"

"Definitely, but only in the Chicago area." She'd mailed applications to all the colleges -- even junior colleges -- within an hour's commute. Hell, she'd included the U of Chicago, and they might have turned up their noses at Kindle; they certainly weren't going to consider her.

"Including the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois?" Kindle was the only person who called Circle by its formal name except officials making official announcements. She nodded. "Because they are thinking of adding a regional-economics position. They wrote me for recommendations." That was, really, the way academic appointments worked. You applied all over, and the ones who weren't interested threw them away -- or filed them away, the effective difference was only the number of file cabinets that were required. The ones who were interested filed them away just as quickly and asked the network for names.

"Really, it is a matter of whether you're interested. They are only offering an instructor's appointment, but they will expect that instructor to teach one graduate class. That isn't fair. You, on the other hand, are the best regional-economics student to graduate this year -- these last two years -- from the department."

"Well, Professor, I don't really think I have the choice between being an assistant professor teaching graduate students or being an instructor teaching graduate students. Do you?" He shook his head. If someone else was looking for a new Ph. D. to teach regional economics, Kindle would know. "And I'd rather be an instructor teaching graduate students than an instructor teaching only undergraduates. When you were a new Ph. D., wouldn't you have preferred that?"

"Oh, yes."

"So, if you would recommend me, I would be quite grateful." They left it at that, and Kindle admired the sleeping babies again before taking his leave. She admired them, too. Asleep was definitely the twins' best state.

Circle responded to her application with a request for an interview. She engaged a babysitter and expressed two bottles; Bill left her the car. If she didn't knock their socks off in the interview, their impression was favorable enough to get her an offer. It was an offer she gladly accepted. She would teach one graduate course in regional economics and the rest undergraduate courses like the other instructors. She got the impression that this would be mostly, maybe all, freshman courses her first year. The regional economics would merely be another sort of introduction. They weren't interested in supporting a concentration, merely in that some of their students would have seen a course in regional economics before they walked out the door.

While that would make her lonely in one way, it might be a good career move in another way. She wouldn't have any colleagues to discuss her interests with. If she could keep publishing research, on the other hand, and if Circle decided to teach a concentration in regional economics later (and enough later), then maybe she would become the senior teacher in what was a sub-department. There was a narrow, highly problematic, path to becoming the Kindle of another university in a few more decades. Well, the part she could control was to keep researching.

The job, at least, had good health benefits. She would be working for the state, legally. Ironically, if she'd taken this job before they'd started the babies, she would have probably qualified for maternity leave fairly soon. She didn't ask. The only maternity leave she was interested in was a leave from being a mother, and that wouldn't come for another two decades.

Over the rest of the summer, she got the intro book she would be teaching, Bach, which she'd never read, and looked it over. (The department was perfectly happy to take her recommendation of Hoover, which she'd studied at Northwestern, for regional economics.) She found a woman to take care of the twins when she'd be gone. She bought a car. She weaned the boys, who were not happy about the process. They managed to add to her own unhappiness about the process. On the first day of class, she found herself in front of a roomful of strangers at 10:00 a.m.

"Good morning. I'm Doctor Pierce. I'm an instructor, and you don't call me 'professor.' This is Introduction to Economics. If you haven't signed up for that course, you're in the wrong room. It's a discussion section, and the lectures are later in the day. So, we're mostly going to deal with mechanics today. I'm going to call the roll slowly. When I call your name, please speak and raise your hand. If I mispronounce your name, it's polite to correct me. It's not polite to make comments. Now..."