Much to Brittany’s dismay, things began to unravel soon after Tony returned.
“What do you mean you don’t want to do architecture anymore?” Brittany wailed. “I thought you always wanted to be one, you told me so!” Brittany felt betrayed.
“No, I told you my father always wanted me to be an architect like him. I wanted to do something a little more intellectual.”
“But what about our plans?” Things suddenly felt insensible and Brittany sat down, rather hard, on her dining room chair. “I feel dizzy,” she moaned, “I think I’m going to be sick.” She rubbed her temples.
“No, you’re not. You’re just exaggerating like you always have.”
Something had happened to Tony during his trip, something unanticipated. He had become more assertive. His desires were now clearly carved in high relief, whereas before they were mere pencil sketches. Even Tony’s features had acquired an angularity. Brittany wasn’t at all certain she could reign in this newfound, almost animalistic assurance Tony now possessed.
“Can’t we talk about it? Why a Ph.D.? Can’t you do it later?”
“Brittany,” Tony chided with some exasperation, “I told you that I’ve already applied.”
“What do you mean? How can you have? You were in China, for God’s sake, how could you mail your applications from there?”
“They do have post offices in China, Brittany. It’s not a backwater. Besides, I didn’t have to mail anything, I just applied online. It’s a done deal. In fact, I’ve already accepted one of the offers I’ve received.”
“What??!”
First he had derailed their plans for a romantic twosome in Ireland, say, or at least somewhere in Europe and now he was proposing to move to some squat little college town in goodness-knew-where? This was intolerable.
“Why are you being so selfish? I thought when you came back, we were going to get our lives back in order,” she wailed. “I thought we were going to get back to normal.”
“No, Brittany, that’s what you thought. I kept telling you I’d changed my mind.”
“I thought you were just being stubborn and, well, that you’d get over it when you got back.”
“Well, as you can see, I haven’t gotten ‘over it.’ I’m going to graduate school. In medieval Chinese drama. But,” and here, Tony began to grin a little, “I did accept at a school nearby.”
Brittany looked up quickly. “Really? You did?”
“Yes, Brittany, I did.”
*
Brittany was now resolved to affiancing herself to a graduate student. Not a med student, not an MBA or even law student, but simply a “grad student.” It was a difficult burden, not simply because she perceived an almost immediate decline in earning potential, but the prestige involved lessened with each passing year. The formula was quite simple: prestige associated with graduate school was inversely proportional to one’s age, so that as he grew older, people became less impressed and tolerant of him. They instead began viewing him, and by extension, her, as a leech off society.
With some determination, she outlined a fast-track program for her fiancé, involving a maximum of six years from the beginning of his master’s degree to the completion and defense of his dissertation. After all, this was the average for English literature doctoral students. Unfortunately, for those in the know, this is a singularly unrealistic goal: East Asian studies takes an average of two years longer than those humanities degrees involving Romance languages. And this is the crux of the issue: the languages. For The latest popular theory of Korean linguistic roots had it falling into the Altaic family: nothing in common with the East Asian languages. Those who know Chinese will groan over re-learning logographs assigned arbitrarily new meanings in Japanese. For those interested in Buddhism, an additional burden of Sanskrit adds yet another two years at the minimum. Needless to say, Tony’s graduate student career was going to occupy at least 30% more time than Brittany had planned.
This realization was not to come until much later, however. In truth, this reality did not descend into Brittany’s consciousness until three years after they were married, five years into Tony’s graduate education. Brittany had attained modest success as an insurance actuary: she had consistently taken, and passed, the actuarial exams which increased her salary, and she was making a comfortable income. That is, if she were single and living in a suburb. Instead, she and Tony were ensconced in a small apartment, situated in a densely populated urban zone between the posh neighborhood immediately surrounding campus and the slums on its periphery. The screen door was a rusting metal security gate that regularly deposited flecks of steel onto their linoleum floor. This cost exactly two-thirds of Brittany’s take-home pay.
What’s more, Tony was not making much additional money. Gainful extracurricular employment as a graduate student often results in fallen academic status. This further results in being considered last in line for the too few fellowships in a department that accepts more students than it can responsibly fund.
Instead, at the end of each academic year, there is a mad scrambling for the too few TA-ships that are available, with the hopes burning in every student’s breast that she or he will be graced with a job that demands on average thirty hours of work per week teaching, grading and lesson-planning while they are paid for only twenty. This is because the professors are too preoccupied with writing to actually teach. What’s more, although the wage is based on a twenty-hour work week, it’s paid as a salary. Thus the exploitation goes unfettered and unchecked. In the real world, Tony’s wage would qualify him for welfare, food stamps, even Section 8 housing.
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