Night We Met

A BRIGHT FULL MOON illuminated the night sky, bathing the campus below her open second-floor window in a sleek silver glow. Dorothy Wilbur, known as Dot to all her girlfriends in the dorm, sat cross-legged on the end of her bed. Her dark brown hair was freed of its typical ponytail and the length of it hung loosely down her back. She was wide-awake, her chin in her hands, gazing outside sightless and worrying. That was not something she'd been prone to do in the past. But she was older now, twenty-one candles on her last birthday cake, and the future was headed in her direction at a rapid pace. The decisions she made about it now were going to be critical. It was 1956 and Dot was in fall semester of her last year at State. She had excellent grades and a full scholarship. Tomorrow morning she'd write her first exam in Organic Chemistry class and she was pessimistic. Not about Chemistry. The sciences were more than just her major, they had always been her forte, her passion. It was what she been born to do. That's what she'd always thought. Until now. Until Dr. Falk. Until the evil Dr. Falk. She liked thinking of him that way. Like a mad genius in a science-fiction movie--evil, diabolical, villainous--he was the devil in a rumpled white lab coat. She suspected that in the anonymity of his office, he rubbed his hands together in eager anticipation of some dark deed and laughed in the maniacal manner preferred by the dastardly deranged doctorate. Falk was dean of the university's Department of Science and he was trying to ruin her life. "Miss Wilbur," he'd said that very afternoon in class, looking down at her over the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. "Young ladies who enjoy assaying weights and measures, should be coming up with recipes in a kitchen, not taking up valuable laboratory space at the university." She'd felt her cheeks heat up, both with anger and embarrassment. Every guy in the room was looking at her. And it was all guys in the room. "Is there a problem with my experiment, sir?" she'd asked him. He shook his head. "No, Miss Wilbur," he said. "It's very good work, but good work that will come to naught. Five years from now all the men in this room will be out in academia and industry expanding the frontiers of science. You'll be sitting in some suburban house surrounding by a troop of noisy, babbling children. The only thing you'll be expanding is the width of your backside." There was muffled laughter all around the room. She'd wanted to burst into tears and run from the room. That's what she wanted to do, but that's what they would expect. She'd managed to maintain her seat and held her chin high with difficulty. It wasn't as if she hadn't had practice. "Honey, boys like girls who are pretty and sweet," her father had told her. "You'll never catch a husband by being smarter than he is." Her teachers in high school felt much the same way. "So you're going to college," Mr. Peterson, the principal, had said when she'd asked him to write a letter of recommendation for her. "Lots of girls doing that these days. They say they're looking for a B.A. or a B.Sc., but most are just looking for an MRS." He'd chuckled at his own little joke. It was all Dot could do not to roll her eyes. Only her mother was on her side. "Go after what you're wanting, Dotty," she told her. "When I look back on my life, I spend more time regretting the things that I didn't do than the things that I did." Four years at college was a big ambition for a working-class girl like Dot. Her father was a laborer, spending his days shoveling scrap at a smelter. Her mother took in ironing. She was the oldest of four children and if her parents were going to pay for anyone's education, an unlikely scenario at best, she knew it would be her baby brother, Tom. Though at age ten, he'd yet to show any inclination toward schoolwork. But Dot had never given up hope. When she'dMorsi, Pamela is the author of 'Night We Met ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373837281 and ISBN 0373837283.